Brent Kearney

On Friday evening, I attended a talk on health and nutrition by Dr. Mitra Ray. Here is what I got out of it:

Dr. Ray earned her Ph.D. from Stanford Medical School, where she studied cellular physiology and biochemistry. From her personal experiences, she became motivated by an intense desire to understand health and disease, and now promotes a perspective that contradicts the approach of modern medicine. As opposed to “Health Care”, she says that modern medicine is closer to “Sick Care”. Dr. Ray details her perspective in her book, From Here to Longevity.

The problem with the modern medical approach, driven by the pharmaceutical industry, is that it tends to treat the symptoms of illness rather than the causes. It works against our genetics, in an effort to suppress the expression of our “bad genes”. A much more effective approach, she argues, is to help promote the expression of our “good genes” through healthy diet and lifestyle choices.

She argues that a central cause of illness of all sorts is the weakening of our cellular DNA by excessive free radicals in our bodies. These free radicals can be minimized by maintaining a healthy PH balance in our blood, achieved by a diet high in alkaline foods, namely, fruits and vegetables. Without this balance, our cells break down, and we effectively age faster. Studies of our DNA have shown that we should be able to live 120 years. Age 60 should be considered half way , but today it is considered near the end. Children are now dying from heart disease.

The health sciences have been too focused on vitamins and minerals, ignoring hundreds of thousands of other nutrients in fruits and vegetables. These other nutrients are collectively referred to as phytonutrients. Dr. Ray argues that phytonutrients are equally as important to our health as the common vitamins and minerals. It is for this reason that vitamin supplements are probably ineffective — they lack the companion nutrients that the body needs to absorb and make use of them. The only good source of phytonutrients is fruits and vegetables.

These are some tips that I picked up during the talk:

• Eliminate bread and pasta from your diet. According to Dr. Ray, our bodies have a natural reaction to stop eating when we’ve had enough food, but this reaction does not occur when we eat bread or pasta. This is why we tend to over-eat pizza, but we never over-eat broccoli. We haven’t evolved the same feeding shut-off mechanism for breads, but millions of years of evolution has given us this capability for fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, the benefits from grains and breads, such as dietary fiber, can be found in greater abundance in fresh vegetables anyways.

  Bread and pasta also cause a spike in your blood-sugar level, which stimulates the production of insulin. The result is that you’ll experience an energy crash, and also likely the carbohydrate from the bread or pasta will get converted to fat.

• Don’t eat for 3 or 4 hours before bed time. Eating late meals reduces the quality of your sleep. Sleep is essential for your bodies regeneration and repair of its cells. If you are digesting food, you won’t be regenerating. Dr. Ray actually claimed that your body can do only one thing at a time: digest or regenerate. I doubt that its so black-and-white, but I can imagine that less energy would go to regeneration if its being used on digestion.

• Fruit and vegetables should be your main staple. Dairy products, meats and other foods should be consumed in moderation.

• Use food supplements instead of vitamin pills. Supplementation is a good idea, because fruit and vegetables today have diminished concentrations of nutrients over a few decades ago. This is probably due to the overuse of soil and/or pesticides and/or genetic modifications to the plants themselves.

  Vitamin supplements have unnaturally high doses of vitamins, stripped of the phytonutrients that your body needs. They can actually be toxic to your body, and most of them will pass right through you. Dr. Ray actively promotes a food supplement product called “Juice+”, which she sells via MLM. Personally, I recommend Greens+, which you can order online from various sources or pick up at your local health-food store.

  Dr. Ray also advocated the use of Omega3 fatty acid supplements.

• Waistline measurement is the most effective indicator of overall health. Make a fist, and take a look at it. That is approximately the size of your stomach; your meal portions should never exceed this volume. Waistline body fat indicates that you are eating too much, not exercising enough, or both.

  Dr. Ray didn’t distinguish between men and women here though, which I think is a mistake. Men tend to accumulate fat on the waistline first, women, the hips. Either way, the point is that excess body fat, when there is no famine around the corner, is an indication that you’re doing something unhealthy.

• Look into Yoga. It is one of the healthiest forms of exercise that you can find.

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