Food and Healing by Annemarie Colbin
Food and Healing by Annemarie Colbin
This is a thought-provoking book about how our diet affects our daily life from emotional, physical and spiritual perspectives. I found a lot of myself in Annemarie. She was Dutch but lived in South America for most of her childhood and adolescence. Then she moved to America. She was married to a middle eastern man at one point and has studied a lot of eastern cultures – Japanese, Chinese, Indian, etc. as well as “primitive”cultures, both for spiritual reasons and to find out about food. She has an open-minded, eclectic view of the world which is beneficial in our global village society.
Colbin knocks down the “Standard American Diet” of refined white flour and sugar, canned and frozen foods, etc. But she doesn’t stop there. She uncovers the problems with the recommended American diet (4 food groups and 5 a day, etc.) as well as Weight-Watchers and Jenny Craig type programs, high-protein diets like the Atkins diet, strict vegetarianism (or veganism), and many others. She takes an approach that improves on macrobiotics (eating for long living as promoated by George Oshawa including these ideas:
-Our body needs balance in the types of foods we eat. Not only nutrients, but hot and cold, spicy and sour, etc. When our diet is off-balance we have physical or emotional problems, as well as cravings for weird or not so healthy things.
-Taking vitamin supplements may actually help to make us off-balance by supplying nutrients in forms that we cannot assimilate, or that our body doesn’t understand (like receiving vitamin A without the fiber that we would normally get with food may lead to the munchies).
-We can naturally be more healthy by listening to our body, eating foods that make sense for our lifestyle, and foods that are alive (irradiation, freezing, canning, overcooking, etc. can kill the food and the nutrients and energy that dwell in them.
Colbin has a lot of ideas that seem a little radical. The FDA tells us we need 2-3 servings of milk daily or we won’t be getting everything we need. Colbin says that the reason so many people have milk allergies (and lactose intolerance) is that we are not only NOT baby cows, but all organisms are made to reject their own mother’s milk by the time they are to be weaned. Also, products from animals’ reproductive systems (milk, eggs) may cause problems to women who eat them. Colbin suggests ridding or severely limiting these products (that’s a hard one for me, I love cheese and milk!).
But a lot of her recommendations make sense. Any diet carried to extremes will eventually make you sick. The food we eat affects our energy, emotions, and mood, not just our physical bodies or weight.
I’ve gone through a change in my thinking about food in the past few months, and Colbin’s book takes that change a step further. We must take responsibility for what we eat and not assume that we are eating right because a doctor or book say it’s correct or ok. We must listen to our bodies and become educated about our food, eating only things which are food. Once again, I’m not ready to follow everything she says, but her suggestions make sense and are definitely worth a read.
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