Last weekend I attended the 2010 International Congress of Natural Medicine. It was an impressive 3 day event with some of the top scientists & doctors of Natural Medicine – experts who are studying what is now termed “Functional Medicine” and are presenting the  latest in cutting-edge scientific research into the effects of foods and herbs on our biochemistry & micro-biology.

Personally I like to use a vegetarian, mainly raw food diet alongside other lifestyle and emotional processing & healing techniques, and feel that in many cases there is no need to delve into the depths of biochemistry but to simply allow nature and ourselves to be our greatest healers.

But the weekend was so inspiring for me, to tune in again to the complexity, yet incredible harmony, that exists within our bodies, and we are only just scratching the surface of this amazing field.  We are really starting to grasp the true effects of different foods and herbs on our cellular health & function, our hormones, neurotransmitters and genes. This can only bring deeper understanding to how we can use food to modulate different processes within the body to achieve healing outcomes.  I was impressed that even though incredibly complex science was being presented, it was always bought back to using food as our medicine.

I found myself wishing that some of the people who are still opposed to natural medicine were in the room that weekend.  I would love to see them debate with any of the speakers at the congress to see how far they get in dismissing the evidence that what we do really works.

The overall message was Functional Medicine – treatments that work on the underlying dysfunctions within the body and correct them using lifestyle modification, food, herbs and supplements – as being the way of the future. There is no competition really, when we know the truth about orthodox pharmaceutical approaches that are based on fraudulent studies done by their own in-house scientists that focus on covering up symptoms rather than treating the causative factors. At best, this approach only treats the ‘numbers’ (in the pathology) but the patient is still sick underneath. At worst it has caused enormous damage to millions of people’s health, and slowly people are waking up to this and demanding something better.

Curing can be thought of as an alleviation of a symptom. Healing is returning the whole system to balance. Functional Medicine is aimed at returning the healing to medicine.

As topics were explored such as……..

-          Reversing chronic illness with Lifestyle Medicine

-          Insulin Resistance, Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes & Obesity

-          Healthy Brain Aging & Cognition

-          Healthy Fat Loss therapies

-          Neuroendocrine dysfunction as a driver of chronic disease

-          Strategies for managing Cardiovascular risk

-          Acne Vulgaris as a disease of Western Civilisation

-          The science of detoxification & heavy metal removal

-          Emerging research & clinical applications of Vitamin D

-          Dietary triggers & management of Autoimmunity

-          Reducing Biological Ageing: The Nutritional connection

…..the common threads became very clear – there seems to be a discordance between our contemporary diets and the Paleolithic-type diets (no grains or processed foods) to which evolutionary forces adapted our core metabolism and physiology over millions of years of human evolution. In other words we have not evolved to tolerate our current diets.   There is increasing evidence to suggest that our modern-day high carbohydrate, high-glycaemic diets are associated with weight gain, cardiovascular risk, altzeimers disease, osteoporosis, acne vulgaris, auto-immunity & increased stress & aging.

Recent studies estimate that more than half of all Australian women (52%) & two-thirds of men (67%) are overweight or obese. 25% of Australian children are overweight or obese. What many people don’t realize is that a person can look fairly slim but be obese due to a body composition change where there is reduced skeletal muscle and increased fat. And these changes can lead to a vast array of metabolic diseases including the ones mentioned above.

Driven home over the course of the weekend was the importance of that check-up with a Functional or Naturopathic Medicine practitioner every 1-3 months to keep you on track. If you start to make certain little changes in your diet & lifestyle now you are preventing a potential heart attack 10 or 20 years from now.

Here is a simple way of looking at it:

Basically we want to get rid of the stuff (toxins, fat, etc) that is blocking your bodies innate healing ability:

1/ Stop putting bad stuff in!

2/ Detox & eliminate the bad stuff (this can also relate to our error beliefs & unresolved emotions)

3/ Start putting the good stuff back in (nutrition, truth & love)

And I will continue to take the latest scientific research & break it down to simple & practical holistic medicine and continue to share that knowledge with you.