The Hippocrates Health Institute Demonstrates How Food Can Be Used
as Medicine
December 01, 2013
Story at-a-glance
-
The Hippocrates Health Institute offers residential programs
lasting anywhere from one to three weeks, sometimes even
longer. This allows you to learn, absorb, and implement a
new set of lifestyle strategies at a deep and lasting level
-
Four powerful nutritional approaches taught there are:
shifting from burning carbs to burning fat for fuel; eating
raw foods (especially sprouts); avoiding sugar; including
fruit; lowering the overall animal-protein content in your
diet
-
Sprouts are powerhouses of nutrition. Depending on the seed,
they are anywhere from 10 to 30 times more nutritious than
the best organic vegetables you can grow in the best organic
soil in your yard
-
Through hybridization, and now genetic modification, fruits
contain at least 30 times more fructose, on an average,
compared to their predecessors. As a result, this
all-natural food needs to be used carefully
By Dr. Mercola
The Hippocrates Health Institute, situated in southern
Florida, is one of the world's oldest complementary health
centers. Dr. Brian Clement got started with the organization in
1975, and assumed directorship in 1980.
He’s also the author of a three-volume series of academic
books called, Food Is Medicine: The Scientific Evidence,
reflecting on the work done at the Institute over the past
six decades, combined with the empirical evidence coming out of
research institutions such as Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge,
Princeton, and Stanford.
Dr. Clement is the medical director of the Hippocrates Health
Institute. They offer residential programs lasting anywhere from
one to three weeks, sometimes even longer. This allows you to
learn, absorb, and help implement a new set of lifestyle
strategies at a deep and lasting level.
The Institute was founded by a woman named Anne Wigmore who,
in 1952, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Her doctors
told her she had about three months left to live.
“Well, thank goodness for her history,” Dr.
Clement says. “In Europe, her grandmother was a village
doctor. She saw her grandma, a natural doctor who used herbs
and plants. She adopted that, healed herself, and reversed
her cancer.”
Upon her return to Boston, Massachusetts, Wigmore decided to
share her experience and help others who were suffering
debilitating and lethal diseases. And so the Hippocrates Health
Institute was born in Boston in 1956.
Today, six decades in business, the Institute is at the
cutting edge in terms of using food and other lifestyle
strategies as medicine. When Dr. Clement first joined the staff,
he was sent off to Europe.
“I spent three years there, bringing back the message
of plant-based raw food diets and ran the original living
food center called Humlegaarden – which was started more
than 100 years ago in Denmark by Dr. Kristine Nolfi, who had
reversed breast cancer with raw food... I came back in 1980
and assumed the directorship,” he says.
What You Can Learn at the Hippocrates Health Institute
Presently, about half of the Institute’s patients are
interested in disease prevention. The other half are quite ill.
People come from all over the world to learn how to improve and
regain their health at this spa-style health retreat. As I said
earlier, I had a chance to personally visit the Institute for a
week, and it was truly a wonderful experience.
One of the things I was particularly impressed with is the
focus on raw foods, specifically sprouts.
I usually eat six to eight ounces of sunflower seed sprouts a
day. Four truly powerful nutritional approaches taught at the
institute are:
- Intermittent fasting and shifting from burning carbs to
burning fat as your primary fuel
- Eating live, raw foods, including lots of sprouts
- Avoiding sugars, refined foods, and processed foods.
They also advise avoiding all fruit juices and minimizing
fruit initially
- Shifting from poor quality protein to high-quality
protein
With respects to the latter, Dr. Clement explains:
“... [E]ach and every one of those four aspects are
clinically researched here, and we’ve established concrete
empirical evidence on how they work, biochemically, in your
body, [and] high-protein diets are major culprits.
What we have seen recently, after 60 years and
working with hundreds of thousands of people, is that when
we reduce the amount of protein... and minimize the
breakdown effect or digestion effect that your body requires
to take this very dense nutrition and split it to amino
acids, there’s health balance.
Our colleagues in Europe have added another
dimension... glycation [and]
advanced glycation end products (AGEs). In Germany, they
showed us that proteins, when bonding with sugars, actually
created another structure.
This structure is such an oddity, an enigma to the
human biochemistry, that the immune system doesn’t know what
to do with it. It runs rampant, actually causing cell death,
producing free radicals.
When we bond high-protein diets, certainly
high-animal protein diets (although this could happen in
high-soybean diets) and sugars (not only white sugar and red
beet but agave syrup and way too many soy proteins), you end
up killing cells and creating free radicals. That’s what
glycation and AGE’s does.”
Sprouts—Powerhouses of Nutrition
In 1992, Johns Hopkins researched natural ways to squelch
cancer. A diet high in cruciferous vegetables was identified as
a factor that lowered the incidence. Additional research
identified
broccoli as having some of the most potent anti-cancer
activity. Since then, when they finally looked into sprouted
broccoli seeds, researchers discovered that the phytochemical in
the sprouts killed cancer dozens of times more
effectively than mature broccoli!
The reason why they teach that
sprouts are a core food at the Institute is because sprouts,
depending on the variety, are anywhere from 10 to 30 times more
nutritious than the best organic vegetables you can grow in the
best organic soil in your yard.
Sunflower seed and pea sprouts tend to top the list, in terms
of their nutritional profile, each being typically about 30
times more nutritious than organic vegetables. While you can
sprout a variety of different beans, nuts, seeds and grains,
sprouts in general have the following beneficial attributes:
- Support for cell regeneration
- Powerful sources of antioxidants, minerals, vitamins and
enzymes that protect against free radical damage
- Alkalinizing effect on your body, which is thought to
protect against disease, including cancer (as many tumors
are acidic)
- Abundantly rich in oxygen, which can also help protect
against abnormal cell growth, viruses and bacteria that
cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment
Phytonutrients, found in raw foods such as sprouts, are key
for reversing disease with food. This is such a common-sense
approach to health, yet the vision of so many people has been
clouded by modern day living.
“I’ll never forget Ann Wigmore... This woman was
purely heart and instinct. That’s why she was correct almost
always,” Dr. Clement says. “I was frustrating her
because I was young and insecure and was, in a way,
challenging her [to explain]: “How does this reverse
disease?”
She got frustrated one day and took a little organic
sunflower seed, and said, “Don’t you realize if we put this
to the ground, in seven weeks, it will be 12 to 15 feet-tall
with thousands of seeds on it? That sunflower plant is going
to be facing the east in the morning and facing the west at
night. Now, don’t you think the power of the sunflower is
that you’re taking hundreds and thousands of these, by
eating them, and that juicing them is going to be good for
you?”
It’s the light force in the food that is even more
important than the nutrients and the proteins... It
is so overwhelmingly obvious that, whatever food choices you
make, eat large amounts of green, fresh food.”
Sprouts may in fact be one of the most obvious solutions to
worldwide malnutrition and hunger due to poverty. They’re
inexpensive and simple to grow, in virtually any climate when
grown indoors, and can provide up to 30 times more nutrients
than even organically grown vegetables! With barely any money at
all, you can eat the healthiest of diets, year-round. Keeping
seeds for sprouting is easy. Seeds are relatively simple to
store and last for a long time. You also have to store FAR less
food if you’re using seeds, as they don’t take up much space. I
think it’s just a marvelous preparation strategy.
The Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
One of the things I teach is that, for most people, it’s far
healthier to
skip breakfast. Omitting breakfast, as part of an
intermittent fasting schedule, can have a number of phenomenal
health benefits, from improving your insulin sensitivity to
shifting your body into burning more fat instead of sugar for
fuel. This will help you painlessly lose weight without being
hungry as you will now finally have the ability to burn fat. The
Hippocrates Institute has also more or less eliminated
breakfast, serving only raw
vegetable juices in
the morning. This is basically intermittent fasting, even though
it’s not being taught as that in the program.
Intermittent fasting, also known as “scheduled eating,” does
not necessarily mean abstaining from all food for extended
periods of time. Rather it refers to limiting your eating to a
narrow window of time each day. Ideally, you’ll want to limit
your eating to a window of about 6-8 hours, say from noon until
6 or 8 pm each day, which means you’re fasting daily for 16-18
hours. This is enough to get your body to shift into fat-burning
mode.
This is a gradual process. Typically you start by not eating
anything for three hours prior to going to sleep. This will give
you a head start to the fasting process so if you sleep for 8
hours you’ve already fasted for 11 hours when you awake. The
next step is to wait as long as you can before you start your
first meal or “break” your fast. You can gradually extend the
time that you have your first meal by 15 to 30 minutes a day.
After several weeks you will be having your first meal at lunch.
Typically, the more your body uses carbs as its primary fuel
rather than fat, the longer this will take. Once you shift to
fat burning mode, modern research has confirmed some of the
benefits to be:
- Normalizing your insulin sensitivity, which is key for
optimal health as insulin resistance is a primary
contributing factor to nearly all chronic disease, from
diabetes to heart disease and even cancer
- Normalizing ghrelin levels, also known as "the hunger
hormone"
- Promoting human growth hormone (HGH) production, which
plays an important part in health, fitness and slowing the
aging process
- Lowering triglyceride levels
- Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical damage
Juice Your Vegetables Without Adding Fruit
The Hippocrates Institute also provides and promotes raw
vegetable juicing—but not the juicing of fruits. The
reasons for this are manifold. According to Dr. Clement:
“Seventy-five percent of raw food eaters today are
sugar addicts trading white sugar for agave syrup; trading
cakes for three mangoes or watermelons. You’re still a sugar
addict... We’ve done empirical research on that. For 35
years, [sugar, including fruit] has been restricted here at
Hippocrates in people with cancer.”
If you have cancer and are in treatment, the Institute will
tell you to eliminate all sugar, fruit juices and most fruit
initially. Fruit juice is clearly worse than eating the whole
fruit, since you’re then getting a high dose of fructose all at
once, without any of the fiber. But even excessive whole fruit
can be a problem for the vast majority of people today,
especially if you’re struggling with your weight, insulin
resistance, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease or
cancer.
Large amounts of fructose, especially for someone who’s
insulin- and/or leptin-resistant, is not a good idea. Dr.
Clement, however, believes that most people, with the exception
of athletes, should avoid fruit.
Remember, this is his position, not mine. I am just
presenting it so you can evaluate it for yourself. Personally I
believe that if you are fat adapted, fruit can be beneficial,
especially if consumed before or after a workout where the sugar
is consumed as a fuel and does not increase glycogen stores. His
argument probably makes more sense for those who are insulin
and/or leptin resistant, which happens to be the vast majority
of the population.
Why Large Amounts of Fruit Are Not Recommended
Some 30 years ago, Dr. Clement met a fruit cultivation
specialist who informed him about some nutritional facts that
few people ever consider. Eighty-five percent of the fruit
available today did not exist 100 years ago. Fruit has been
thoroughly changed through hybridization practices to increase
sweetness, and therein lies the problem... and the answer to why
it’s probably unwise for most people to eat a diet high in
fruit.
For example, the honeybell orange, which is quite sweet, was
spliced together about 35 years ago, mixing grapefruit with
tangerine. And the popular Red Delicious apple? It’s now 50
times higher in fructose than the original apple, which was
more sour than a crab apple!
“Here’s where we saw it: the average fruit today
through hybridization has a minimum of 30 times more sugar
on an average,” Dr. Clement says, and this is why one
of humankind’s original foods is no longer appropriate in
large quantities...
Our forefathers also didn’t eat processed sugar, which was
primarily reserved for the aristocracy. Increasing sugar
consumption over the past four or five generations has resulted
in disturbed pancreatic functioning in most people. The human
pancreas simply doesn’t know how to process sugars properly
anymore, due to being overloaded.
“Now we have massive sugars from what I considered to
be the original food of man. What could be more perfect? You
eat a fruit, you spit it out, and the seed grows another
tree. But now it is quite an altered fruit. Added to this,
your pancreas doesn’t work well. So, now you have a problem.
When we can get people off the addictive pattern of sugar
and we can get them onto plant-based foods without the
high-sugar content with enough glucose in it to sustain fuel
of the cell, they don’t age prematurely and it works,”
he says.
“I would rather have a mango than a green lettuce,
because it tastes better. But a green lettuce supplies
glucose for my cell without supplying additional amounts
that become blood sugar, which not only creates blood sugar
swings but feeds every known disease to man and create free
radicals. That’s the answer... Definitively, I say that the
only people who can eat – not should eat– dried fruit and a
lot of bananas are people who are major athletes.”
Unripe Fruit Creates Acidity, and Most Commercially Available
Fruit is Unripe...
Another interesting aspect relating to the consumption of
fruit is the fact that often the fruit available at your local
grocery store is not ripe, and unripe fruit, according to Dr.
Clement, creates acidity in your body. (Ripe fruit is alkaline.)
Sure, the fruit you buy may look ripe, but we actually
have a vastly erroneous concept of how fruit ripens.
As it turns out, you cannot commercially process ripe fruit.
If you were to pack ripe oranges in Florida, for example, and
ship them to another state, they’d be rotten in about a week.
Hence the fruit is picked months before it’s ripe. If
you’re like most people, you probably think that once a fruit
turns color and softens, it’s ripening. But this is not
accurate.
Dr. Clement explains that in order for a fruit to optimally
ripen, it must remain attached to the branch on the tree or
bush. Nutrients are continuously fed to the fruit while on the
tree. The veins that feed the fruit come from the roots, which
in turn extract nutrients from the soil and beneficial soil
bacteria. Add to that the UV rays from the sun, causing
photosynthesis to occur throughout the plant. Once you pluck the
fruit, it’s no longer receiving nutrients, and the ripening
process stops. Hence the nutritional value of the fruit is
compromised.
“We tell people that up to 15 percent of your diet
can be ripe organic fruit, even if you’re
not an athlete. But once we get beyond the 15 percent, 20
percent it starts to spill over and put sugar in the blood,”
Dr. Clement says.
If Eating Fruit, Consider this Food Combining Principle
I recently interviewed
Wayne Pickering, better known as “The Mango Man.” He eats
plenty of fruit, but appears to be quite healthy. He is a strong
proponent of
food combining. Food combination takes into account the area
and complexity of digestion of each food, to ensure it goes
through your entire digestive system with ease. One of the core
principles of food combining according to Dr. Pickering is that
you should not combine fruit with vegetables, as this inhibits
proper digestion. So, if you’re going to eat fruit, seek to eat
it by itself, and not in combination with other foods—especially
not starches. Dr. Clement agrees with this approach, saying:
“Yes, this is something I have adopted... [W]e’ve had
so many times, when people have gotten on the food
combining, they’ve eliminated gastrointestinal problems;
diverticulosis, diverticulitis, overweight, nausea, and
headaches. It has a lot to do with this [principle].”
Juice, Don’t Blend, Your Veggies
Last but not least, with regards to juicing Dr. Clement makes
a very interesting and important distinction. Chopping and
blending your veggies with a high speed blender should not be
confused with juicing as it does NOT provide you with the same
health benefits as juicing. Remarkably, blending your veggies
using a blender can kill up to 90 percent of the nutrients in 90
seconds, primarily due to oxidation, according to Dr. Clement.
He explains:
“I had a colleague at the University of Miami set up
a 29-dollar blender. He had his Vitamix. We measured the
nutritional levels in several ounces of food. We put that
food in the blenders. We knew what the numbers were. We
blended it for 90 seconds. About 15 years ago, we found out
that 90 percent of the nutrients (we were looking at
vitamins A, E, C; the basic five nutrients at the top) are
killed in 90 seconds of blending with a high-speed blender.”
Furthermore, when you drink—opposed to chew—the blended
vegetables, your body does not produce the enzymes required for
digestion of the pulp. Eighty percent of carbohydrates are
digested in your mouth when you chew. Without the
enzymes to break down the carbohydrates, your blended veggies
begin to ferment in your intestinal tract. If the food you eat
is not digesting properly, not only can painful gas, heart burn,
acid reflux and other stomach problems arise, but your body will
also be deprived of critical nutrients, which defeats the whole
purpose of juicing in the first place.
More Information
Tens of thousands of people have already visited the
Hippocrates Health Institute, and if you're interested in their
services, check out their website at
www.hippocratesinst.org. You can also call them at
561-623-1002. The Institute is open seven days a week.
© Copyright 1997-2013 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/12/01/food-medicine-hippocrates-health-institute.aspx
|