Preface to The Adaptation Diet
When I started my practice in integrative medicine in 1978, there was no organized teaching about the impact that nutrition had on well-being and very little understanding of the connection between diet and disease. There were no roadmaps on how to practice nutritional medicine—the field was wide open for physicians like myself to find a way to use diet to make a difference in people’s lives. Over the years, practicing this new type of medicine has brought its share of challenges but also incredible satisfaction and excitement.One of the keys to practicing nutritional medicine was the physician’s willingness to suggest to people that they make significant dietary changes and utilize non-pharmaceutical approaches including herbs, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals to help them recover from illness. Most importantly, the careful observation of the effect of these therapies and the feedback from my patients taught me what was useful and effective. Whenever I found significant improvement in symptoms like fatigue, joint and muscle pain, digestion, allergies, arthritis, headaches, or other conditions either diagnosed or mysterious, I took notice. I wanted to understand why people got better, even if medical research could not explain these beneficial effects and traditional medical therapies were of little use.
In the 1980s, the field of psychoneuroimmunolgy revolutionized the understanding of the mind body connection. Studies showed that beliefs and attitudes are directly linked to chronic medical conditions like heart disease and cancer. This new information made me more aware of the impact that stress can have on health. I began to research how diet and nutrients can impact the function of the brain and the hormonal system, which control the production of stress hormones.
Recent breakthroughs further clarified the changes that can occur in the midbrain, the area of the brain that directly controls stress-hormone secretions. Concepts such as allostasis and allostatic load helped to explain why so many people have trouble recovering their health after stressful experiences and prolonged poor dietary habits. These ideas helped me to appreciate the widespread effect of stress on my patients’ symptoms and led me to focus on methods to improve adaptation. I realized that adaptation and reduction of the damage from stress were not just about triggers such as emotional and social situations, but the subtle biochemical stress of poor diets and unhealthy lifestyles. This new information further refined my approach with patients and led to the information in this book.
The Adaptation Diet is the result of working with thousands of patients over the past thirty years, a culmination of what I have learned about regaining adaptation and preventing disease. Especially in today’s stressful climate, everyone needs to reduce stress in the areas that they can control.