9 Ways to Skip the Pharmacy and Use Superfoods As Your Medicine

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Upgrade Your Genes; Downsize Your Jeans

Allow me to explain how I use nutrigenomics to reverse diabesity, the continuum of abnormal biology that ranges from mild insulin resistance to full-blown diabetes.

As I mentioned before, food is information. If you want to turn off the genes that lead to diabesity and turn on the genes that lead to health, the key becomes the quality and type of food you eat, not necessarily the number of calories you consume or the ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrate in your diet. You need to put your genes on a diet.

As David Ludwig, one of the leading obesity researchers at Harvard Medical School, said, “Molecular pathways involved in hormone action [like insulin resistance] have been the target of a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical research effort. However, many of these pathways may normally be under dietary regulation. The results of the present study [on nutrigenomics] emphasize the age-old wisdom to ‘use food as medicine’—in this case, for the targeted prevention and treatment of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.”

Shifting from a nutrient-poor diet to a nutrient-rich diet abundant in plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans and whole grains improves the expression of hundreds of genes that control insulin function and obesity.

To use just one example, the vast array of colors in vegetables represents over 25,000 beneficial chemicals.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate over 800 varieties of plant foods. Today, we don’t even consume a fraction of that amount. We need to make an extra effort to eat many different foods to get the full range of benefits. Remember: eat the rainbow!

An optimal diet to prevent and treat diabesity also includes healthy fats such as olive oil, nuts, avocados, and omega-3 fats, along with modest amounts of lean animal protein. This is commonly known as a Mediterranean diet. It is a diet of whole, real, fresh food that has been prepared in a kitchen, not a factory.

This way of eating has been shown to prevent and even reverse diabesity. It has broad-ranging benefits for our health, and beneficially affects our entire physiology, reducing inflammation, boosting detoxification, balancing hormones and providing powerful antioxidant protection—all things that fix the underlying causes of disease.

Even with a perfect diet, the combination of our depleted soils, the storage and transportation of our food, genetic alterations of traditional heirloom species, and the increased stress and nutritional demands resulting from a toxic environment make it impossible for us to get the vitamins and minerals we need solely from the foods we eat. The evidence shows that we cannot get away from the need for nutritional supplements.

That’s why you need a full complement of vitamins and minerals, and you may need to individually correct specific deficiencies, including deficiencies in chromium, biotin, vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, alpha lipoic acid, and omega-3 fats.

You can find all these nutrients in individual supplements, but I recommend a blood sugar-balancing formulation as well as fish oil soft gels to simplify your nutrient intake.