Wholefood Diets

The wholefood movement grew out of the belief that eating food in as near a state to the original will do you more good. You will experience more energy and live a longer more healthy life. The idea is that hunter gatherers went about collecting berries, nuts and seeds in season, and killing animals for food only occasionally. Sweet foods like honey were a highly prized treat that made the risk of climbing trees, or roping down cliffs a risk worth taking. Farmers came into hunter gatherer territories and had to justify taking their land. Inuit, Athabaskan, Nisga, Masai and other Aboriginal tribal communities have had to justify their existence in the face of colonisation. Read the book by Hugh Brody called "The Other side of Eden", if you want a fuller story. 

For 16 years I worked in the wholefood industry. the obvious escapes many people's attention. For instance, food comes from soil, animals, bushes or trees. We used to visit apricot farmers in Turkey. I asked them why organic unsulphured apricots contained more stones and grit than sulphured apricots. They said that they dried them on the soil instead of cotton sheets to absorb the heat from the ground. We encouraged them to change their practice to avoid harming our customers. So what was the industry like 20 years ago? You would be surprised. Our immune systems were stronger simply because we were less protected from insects and vermin. Cashew nuts looked grubby and nibbled simply because they were grubby and nibbled. Sesame seeds had tiny insect droppings in them simply because the growing countries harboured an awful lot of cockroaches. Moist figs and apricots smelt fermented and crawled with mites simply because they were fermenting and crawling with mites. Mites themselves don't cause much harm. It is what they leave behind that causes the stomach upsets. Nuts went mouldy simply because mould spores were already present. Nuts sometimes tasted off because they were off. Here are some tips for choosing wholefoods:

Remember that most of the farmers have only one crop a year. Think of the part of the world were they are grown. Find out when they were harvested, add two months and you will probably be buying new crop nuts, seeds or fruit.

Avoid sales: special offers, two for one, they are probably selling off last year's stock. 

Buy your Christmas fruit as late as possible. The retailers will sell off older stock first.

Look carefully at the colour. For instance light and dark walnuts might be a mixture of this year's and last year's crop.

Slipped or Bulging Disc

I run manual handling courses. The participants look together at the causes of back pain. Here are some of their comments: Back pain is caused by poor posture, lifting things badly, twisting, over-stretching, badly designed beds or soft chairs, wrong shoes, body shape - for instance a long back, musculoskeletal diseases, osteoporosis, type of job, stress, depression, pregnancy, overweight, falling, accidents. All of these comments are valid but the groups never mention the most common story that people with back pain are told - the slipped disc. The story is that some of the gel from the disc or cushion between your vertebrae  is pressing on a spinal nerve and causing pain that radiates through the back and across the back of your pelvis. In my experience only about 1 in 100 people who come to see with severe back pain suffer from this condition. 

The bulging disc does not particularly lead to back pain. More commonly it affects the buttocks, back or outside of your leg or calf muscles. It might cause numbness to a big toe. If you lose feeling when you go to the toilet, or lose bladder control you must go to hospital as a medical emergency.

Bulging discs are not the cause of back pain. they are the result of a long series of events that start with the list that the manual handling course people rightly point out. To live with the story of a herniated disc is to take health out of your control. It is important to remember that you are responsible for your weight, your fitness, your posture, the way you do your job, sports, hobbies, your choices of diet. Just about everything in your life can come back under your control.