Beware the deadly broccoli
Create a life that supports you to thrive
In my last two post I covered the first steps towards true health:
Accept responsibility for your own health
Empower the innate healing potential within you
Next up, step 3:
Create a life that supports you to thrive
We are connected to all of life: the air we breathe, the food we ingest, the toxins we absorb, the wind on our skin, the sun on our face, and the ‘vibes’ we feel from others.
The health programme I offer is flexible to the needs of the person, but it always, always, always starts with supporting people to develop a lifestyle that helps them to thrive. This alone is usually all that’s needed to bring someone into health.
That’s because many of the barriers to healing include aspects of our lifestyles such as a mouldy bedroom (been there, done that!), processed foods, light pollution or relational conflicts.
The six pillars I help people address are sleep, movement, nutrition, relaxation, detoxification and relationships. This approach is rapidly developing as a new speciality called ‘lifestyle medicine’, which I received board certification in 2021.
When you get symptoms, this can be a call from your body for change.
The tricky bit can be knowing which change to make. There is absolutely no shortage of advice out there telling you to avoid fat… but eat more healthy fat… and definitely avoid eggs, but eat some organic eggs, and make sure you always wake at 5am… but don’t be driven by productivity.
As someone who readily posts dietary advice on social media, I appreciate I'm at risk of being labelled hypocritical here! Nutrition is one of the most hotly debated areas.
I think it’s tragic that my grandmother suffered several decades of butter-deprivation, opting for ‘heart-healthy, low-cholesterol’ margarine, only to later find out her substitute is also linked with heart disease1
Oh and don’t get me started on broccoli, all that advice to ‘eat your greens’! Well now we know the stuff is filled with thiocyanates, which can cause you to gain weight and lose your hair and mess up your thyroid, not to mention all that fibre causing monstrous amounts of gas…..
….Ok, hold it right there!
Find me one food that hasn’t been demonised.
Broccoli is the most “healthy” food I can think of, yet a quick google search for ‘broccoli dangers’ led me to the above information. How did you feel reading it?
Are we not living in enough conflict and fear already… the potential for global war, a warming planet, viruses lurking on every doorknob…
The number of people with orthorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterised by a damaging obsession with healthy eating, seems to be rising at an alarming rate. It's tricky to know the exact prevalence, as it's not yet a formalised diagnosis, but the rise is reflected in the increasing research on the subject2
So how do I balance this with my clinical experience of how, time and time again, cutting out certain food groups can lead to miraculous changes in people’s health?
People suffering with ‘incurable’ conditions most of their life frequently come to live normal lives again after a few simple dietary changes.
As the availability of health information continues to exponentially increase, we all need to get better and better at discerning its utility, and personal suitability.
If you’re the one living with a particular health condition, you’re in the best position to know what you need. By all means I can suggest to you options, but no one else can tell you exactly what’s best thing for you and how you will respond.
You need to ‘become the scientist’, becoming curious yourself about health information and how certain habits influence your personal wellbeing.
Yesterday I was reading the work of Mark Horowitz, a psychiatrist who turned to online discussion groups for support stopping his antidepressants; it was only through his personal health experience that he realised what he’d been taught by his predecessors wasn’t working for everyone.
“It was also something that I had not been taught about at medical school or in psychiatry training. I soon learnt by reading the academic literature available that the psychiatrists and academics at the institution I had studied at and others like them around the world had little helpful to say about withdrawal effects from antidepressants” - Dr Horowitz
This also rings true for me; my personal experience of being unwell no doubt gave me invaluable insights into what’s actually needed when it comes to healing.
So what advice can we trust?
Should we follow our doctor’s advice? Follow the person who’s been there? Follow a guru? Follow the science? Follow the influencers? Follow our hearts?
How to discern what you really need
I’m personally a big fan of the little-know, oft-misunderstood, Ken Wilber. His work integrates all fields of study into a single framework of understanding (‘Integral Theory’ or ‘A Theory of Everything’).
As a doctor of Integrative Medicine, it’s perhaps not surprising that I’m a fan of someone who argues that good healthcare must integrate the best of all available healing modalities3. It’s even the inspiration for the name of this blog!
“…an integral model is inclusive of both conventional and alternative approaches, but always with a sense of discernment for what is true for the needs of your patient” - Schlitz, 2008
I believe this integration will form the basis of medicine 3.0 - a system where all dimensions of healing (i..e mind, body, emotions, spirit), at all levels (i.e. atomic, sub-cellular, interpersonal, cosmological) are addressed.
Wilber argues that there’s a grain of truth in everything.
“No one is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time” - K. Wilber
If we look back at the history of medicine, it’s clear there’s a lot we didn’t have a good grasp of; but if we dismiss it all as absurdity, we should really accept that our current knowledge and understanding must be absurd too. I don’t think this is helpful, and I think Ken would back me on that.
Take phrenology as an example, the process of feeling bumps in someone's skull to determine their psychological traits. Sounds legit right? Well, I’ve got to break it to you, it turns out brain studies haven’t found any good evidence for this.
I’ve heard many people claim it’s therefore a load of nonsense; but don’t be so quick to throw the baby out with the bath water!
This theory was amongst the earliest to predict that certain areas of the brain have particular functions, which is now well established; we now know the mind does a lot more than psychological functions, such as facilitating language and ‘motor’ (movement) skills, but the grain of truth was there!
This resembles my argument in my last post, that nothing in the body is strictly ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I also believe it would serve us well to avoid labelling any research finding or lifestyle change as good or bad, right or wrong.
Research can give us a lot to go off, but we can’t fully rely on it for every decision we make. There’s no randomised controlled trial to tell us whether jumping out a plane without a parachute is a good idea!
We’re also more than just bodies; we have personal preferences and values.
Now you might say, if there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with smoking itself, how come it can double the risk of death and disease4?
And what about those who enjoy a lifetime of pleasure from smoking and get away relatively unscathed? Can we say their decision was ‘right’?
It starts with learning to recognise both sides of the coin; for example, both the cost of engaging in a certain lifestyle habit, as well as the potential pleasure.
Certain habits have a particularly strong way of locking us into blind, repetitive dependence. We lose presence in the action; it becomes automatic, compulsive and disconnected from our body's messages. Heroin, alcohol, high-sugar foods, television, purchasing, gambling, scrolling and overworking are just a few of the common culprits that can draw us in. That doesn’t make them inherently bad.
Working in A&E I regularly prescribed ‘heroin’, diamorphine hydrochloride, with little adverse effects (or little a strong laxative couldn’t solve!). If you’ve had your leg run over, trust me, no matter how ‘bad’ you previously perceived heroin to be, it’s going in the ‘good’ box… or more likely the ‘bloody great’ box.
None of the people I gave this drug to had an on-going desire to keep taking it after their pain was better. It’s like the happy rats study: rats provided with happy lives don’t destroy themselves with heroin, whereas those in dull cages do5.
Recognising the costs requires both our rational discernment and consideration of the scientific knowledge-base, as well as our intuition. The latter can take a bit of practice; it’s not something we’re taught in school (or at least I wasn’t); read this piece for some simple ways to do this.
Many ancient healing traditions recognise the importance of balance in health; this includes harmony between both the masculine (i.e. ‘yang’, the force of action) and the feminine (‘yin’, the force of receptivity).
Yin and yang are ideally balanced within every one of us
You’ll find examples of this harmony throughout nature; such as the yang of summer and daytime, and the yin of winter and night.
These rhythms also occur within our own bodies, for example, if you have periods, the yang of mid-cycle energy, compared to the yin of menstruation. For men, testosterone peaks in the morning, causing a more ‘yang’ state characterised by energy, drive and ambition; in the evening, as it lowers, it’s time to chill with a beer, or to harness their increased creative powers.
Are you more yin or yang? How might you balance these?
Generally our society tends to overvalue yang traits, such as structure, competition and rational thought. However, the power of intuition and ‘inner knowing’, a yin characteristic, has tremendous power to cut through the overwhelm of health information and pin-point exactly what action is going to best support our health.
To harness this power, the first step is to switch out of ‘automatic-pilot’ mode.
Have you ever found yourself munching down a chunk of cheese from the fridge without any real awareness of how you got there? I know I have. Another more classic example of the automatic-pilot is when you drive to work without remembering any of your journey there.
A good way to come out of this is to focus attention on the breath or sensations in the body. From there, simply ask yourself:
How will this action serve me (and others) right now?
What’s the best action I can take right now?
Listen for any changes in bodily sensations, a hunch, an image in the mind's eye, or even an inner voice. This is your intuition talking to you. Learn to trust it. Meditation, creative activities and time in nature can help you develop this awareness.
Once you’ve made a choice to either do an action or not, don’t look back.
By which I mean, hold the intention to release guilt if you decide to do it, or release the feeling of deprivation if you decide not to. Do it with full presence and awareness. You can always do something to counterbalance the perceived ‘negative effects’.
Living this way embodies a great amount of self-care and respect, it’s an act of love.
I’m going to share with you my secret of how I consistently get such great results in my work: love is the basis for all I do, it’s even the intention behind this article.
But don’t blindly trust me on this! What does your intuition tell you?
Love is the deepest source of all permanent healing
Developing a sense of self-love can help you utilise your intuition. Without it, a deeper part of you can be driven towards damaging behaviours in order to ‘punish’ yourself, often stemming from a belief that you're not worthy of care.
Now if anything can be labelled ‘false’, it’s that we’re unworthy (perhaps the grain of truth it holds is that most of us do believe it to some extent, and whatever we believe, we tend to become - whether it’s true or not).
You are inherently worthy of love and care. Nothing you do or have done can change that. There’s a part of you within that knows this to be true - seek it out and nurture it.
When it comes to lifestyle change, there no one-size-fits-all approach. This is the same for pharmaceutical drugs - did you know the number needed to treat (NNT), which is the number of people that need to take the drug in order for one of them to see the desired effect, is commonly in the 5 to 10 range? This means for every 5 people taking it, only one will get the desired effect!
Thankfully precision medicine and genetic testing is turning this around, but in the meantime I believe you’ve got what it takes to make decisions about which lifestyle changes will serve you best.
In my next post I’m going to share with you some of my favourite lifestyle tips from each of my six lifestyle pillars; these have worked wonders for me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll have the same effects for you.
However, by using a balance of both your analytical knowledge and intuition, perhaps you’ll decide to give some of them a go too.
Stay tuned :)
Pimpin, L., Wu, J.H., Haskelberg, H., Del Gobbo, L. and Mozaffarian, D., 2016. Is butter back? A systematic review and meta-analysis of butter consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and total mortality. PLoS one, 11(6), p.e0158118.
McComb, Sarah E.; Mills, Jennifer S. (2019). Orthorexia nervosa: A review of psychosocial risk factors. Appetite, 140(), 50–75.
Schlitz, M.M., 2008. The integral model: Answering the call for whole systems health care. The Permanente Journal, 12(2), p.61.
Mucha, L., Stephenson, J., Morandi, N. and Dirani, R., 2006. Meta-analysis of disease risk associated with smoking, by gender & intensity of smoking. Gender medicine, 3(4), pp.279-291
Alexander, B.K., Beyerstein, B.L., Hadaway, P.F. and Coambs, R.B., 1981. Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 15(4), pp.571-576.