Let food be your first medicine. Hippocrates, the so-called “father of modern medicine” was not the only one who can be quoted with it. Food is know to be medicine since many centuries. Already 2500 years back, humans cultivated crops for medicinal purpose. We have evidence about it from ancient Egyptian cultures and others. In traditional Eastern medicine systems even today, it is an integral part of natural science, like Ayurveda, or Chinese medicine.

But never before has the food situation of human population around planet earth been worth. On the northern hemisphere, where food is usually available in abundance, people have got careless about their diets of fast food and processed food, neglecting intake of fresh vegetables and fruits. As a result, civilisation diseases like obesity, high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke made it, together with cancer, on the top of diseases. They pushed away infectious disease from the first place, leaving Africans and most people on the souther hemisphere alone with problems like malaria and tuberculosis. Malnutrition and famine due to food scarcity here weaken the immune system and increase vulnerability towards infectious disease, as has been the case in European medieval ages.

Changing our staple food would solve these health problems, same for humans in the northern hemisphere, overeating meat, fat, sugar and white flour, same as for humans living in the southern hemisphere who are suffering from underconsumption of protein rich staple foods like whole grains and legumes.

On top, our decisions what to consume shapes our food system. Animal husbandry and huge monocultures, using glyphosate to enhance crops are exploiting since long soils, destroy biodiversity, and are risk factors for the development of newborn infectious agents like the avian influenza H5N1, which might spread from birds to humans. What we have been through during COVID-19 pandemic also is in a row with our violation of our food system.

We might eventually want to learn from past and present times and change our diets towards a healthy, plant-based version, preferring fresh and locally grown food articles from sustainable agriculture and organic farming. With these decisions we contribute to transforming food systems which support individual health as well as planetary health. We would support a food system that reduces global famine, malnutrition, civilisation diseases and at the same time enhance biodiversity, reduce erosion and restore the top soil layer, which has an enormous capacity for storing greenhouse gases.

Amplifying food as our first medicine has the capacity of healing ourselves and our planet, mother earth. Let’s start today and learn more about it! Please follow my blog for more information.