4Choose your foods like your life depends on them makes you to start taking food seriously. You examine the relationship between the food you eat and the symptoms you manifest.

This book gives you a challenge along with redemption: Forget everything you ate until today, and start over. The choice is between a set of foods that will nourish you and enhance your longevity on the one hand and the foods that tear you down subtly and gradually on the other.

More importantly, that choice is always in front of you. You can turn around bad habits, bad choices and the resulting bad symptoms at any time. Do it now, because you're better off preserving the health you have than letting it deteriorate. Do it now, because living longer and healthier sure beats the other alternatives.

Excerpt from the chapter Food as Medicine: We eat our way into our symptoms, and we can eat our way back out:

"Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food." - HippocratesWe live at a strange crossroads in history. Over the last few decades, the human species has been hypnotized by the temptations offered by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The 1950's ushered in the "better living through chemicals" age. And we believed, and we bought and swallowed and injected and are still consuming them in massive amounts, and, most recklessly, injecting such chemicals as ethylene glycol (antifreeze), aluminum and formaldehyde into our babies as part of vaccines, without any prior safety testing.

But now with massive chronic disease plaguing our most industrialized populations, autism closely following children's shots, and more pathology coincident with concentrated chemicals, we are beginning to wake up from our long post-World War II slumber. Now begins the next era when synthetic chemicals are starting to be seen as, however useful in many applications, best kept at a distance from our bodies, our homes, public spaces and wilderness.

The old era of unthinking reliance on a synthetic existence is showing severe disadvantages, just as the urgency to forge new relationships with nature is becoming apparent. Plants and other whole foods are coming into their own new era as naturopathic physicians and other well-informed health practitioners rely on them for their central role in healing. Within our lifetimes, natural substances will eclipse pharmaceuticals in medical practice, as the general public awakens to its far superior healing capacity.

But the pharmaceutical industry will be the slowest to catch on, just as most physicians and druggists of the early 20th century refused to believe that absence of certain nutrients could bring on such horrible diseases as scurvy, pellagra and beriberi. Then as now, allopaths were eager to lay blame for these diseases on microbes, until . . . oops! limes cured the "limey" British sailors of their scurvy, and we saw that Vitamin B3 prevented pellagra, while Vitamin B1 prevented beriberi and Vitamin D prevented rickets. As usual, conventional medicine corrects itself long after the natural physicians are already healing patients. In fact, evidence now shows that even bubonic plague, which allopathy still attributes exclusively to bacteria known as Yersinia pestis, was more likely to strike those with low Vitamin C intakes and those who did not eat garlic.

What would possess a person to think that food could possibly be medicine? Our first clue is the structure of our intestines. Whatever comes into the mouth later travels through miles of efficient tubing that extracts certain molecules from the food we eat, then converts them to one common molecule, Acetyl Co-A, from which the building blocks of the body are then made: protein, glucose and (healthy-type) fats. The intestines are great little machines, but not omnipotent. That is, they can convert food molecules to Acetyl Co-A, because food has familiar and malleable combinations of carbon,