Eating for Health Model
 

Dr. Ed Bauman
Director of Bauman College
This model, and the copy that describes it, was developed by Dr. Ed Bauman, Director of Bauman College and author of the first Holistic Health Handbook in 1978. Ed is not only a great teacher and a gifted practitioner; he is also a friend and mentor. Thank you Ed, and now, Ed speaks….

The Joy of Conscious Eating

The process of changing from the non-nutritive, disease promoting foods to a highly nutritive, health promoting foods begins with expressing a commitment to change and generating support from family and friends. The next step is to find a good place to buy healthy foods, either at a natural food store or local farmer's market. Step three is learning to prepare the Eating for Health style meals. Finally, and the toughest to let go, is what to reach for instead of your favorite convenience food.

Many times when we eat for pleasure rather than for health, our inner child is calling out for love. We equate sugar, flour, milk and cookies with love, which it is not. We reach for the quick fix - a café latte perhaps - for failing blood sugar (tired, mentally dull, sluggish) rather than plan for stable, well-timed, nutrient rich meals that are based upon fresh vegetables, high quality protein, whole grains, legumes and seeds, and cold water fish, free range poultry or organic eggs.

You will notice that when you are more deliberate in choosing what and how to eat, a new level of stability and consistency will emerge.

Eating for Health

Nutrition is the foundation of our wellbeing. Every cell in your body is made of the food you eat. When people recover from a disease, train as an athlete, or simply shift to a healthy lifestyle, good dietary habits form an important part of any plan for positive change. A healthy eating plan improves the outcome of all other therapeutics -- whether exercise, bodywork, pharmaceuticals or surgery. By the same token, a poor diet can undermine the most sophisticated treatments and the best efforts.

The Standard American Diet (SAD)

Many of us have been raised on the Standard American diet that caters to desires for the taste of fat, sugar and salt. This diet is characterized by heavy consumption of refined foods which are high in artificial or damaged fats, artificial sweeteners and flavorings, and low in micronutrients and fiber. As the years have gone by the store shelving for sodas and snack foods have expanded to multiple aisles. Schoolchildren in the U.K. are spending more than 1.3 billion pounds, the equivalent to 2.5 billion dollars, on snack foods each year. One out of every two meals eaten in the U.S is eaten in a fast food restaurant. Chemical additives, preservatives, artificial coloring agents, pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics are quietly entering our bodies through the foods we eat.

As the quality of our food has diminished, so has our quality of life. We may be living longer than our ancestors but illness and injury come sooner in life, and last longer. Obesity has skyrocketed. Nearly two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight, and 30.5% are obese. The U.K is not far behind with 25% of men obese, and 20% of women. . 12.5% of American children between the ages of 6 and 17 are overweight leading to a dramatic increase in kids with type 2 diabetes, once considered an adult disease. Obesity is second only to smoking as a cause for death in the U.S. and has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility , and strokes. We try diet after diet to lose weight. A poll done in the UK estimates that one in four British adults is trying to lose weight most of the time. Despite the various diet fads, the trend continues in an alarming direction. In the U.S. between 1991 and 2001, the Centers for Disease Control recorded a 61 percent increase in obesity. Today, an estimated 108 million adults are overweight.

Arthritis and chronic joint symptoms affect nearly 70 million Americans, or about one of every three adults, making it the number one disease and cause of disability in the United States. As the population ages, those with painful joints will increase dramatically. Cardiovascular disease is still the number one cause of death for both men and women in the U.S. and one out of every 5 men and women have some form of it now. Diabetes is the 6th leading cause of death and affects 18.2 million Americans. There is a new diet and lifestyle related health condition called 'metabolic syndrome' characterized by a combination of abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure and high fasting glucose.

Increasing numbers of children demonstrate learning difficulties and behavior problems. According to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 1.6 million elementary school-aged children have been diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In a national survey, the parents of 7 percent of children 6-11 years of age reported ever being told by a doctor or health professional that their child had ADHD. Meanwhile, at the University of Southern California researchers studying 1,000 children concluded that poor nutrition leads to bad behavior.
Rather than explore diet and lifestyle, these children are frequently targets for lifetime medication with unknown side effects.

To cope with stress and poor health consumers buy billions of dollars worth of over the counter and prescription medicines each year in a trend that spirals upward. According to IMS Health, a market research organization that studies healthcare trends, pharmaceutical sales in major world markets were $179 billion for the fiscal year ending March 1998. Of that, U.S. sales accounted for $68.7 billion. Five years later, in 2003, IMS reported that world-wide pharmaceutical sales had climbed to $466 billion, while in America sales had increased to $230 billion. Despite the enormous amounts of money spent, drugs have not addressed the cause of our problems, nor provided a viable solution to the lifestyle trends that are devastating our health.

Natural foods and healing systems have emerged against this backdrop of bad foods and poor health. Consumers want optimal health and they want to eat better. Their demands have dramatically expanded the market for organic foods and vitamin supplements. In the U.S., sales of organically grown foods have grown consistently by over 20% annually over the past decade. The retails sales for 2001 were over $9 billion, and are projected to reach about $20 billion by 2005. While this represents about one percent of total U.S. food sales, it shows that health conscious consumers are growing in numbers. According to a survey of 25,000 American adults in 2001, 69% expressed the belief that taking vitamins and mineral supplements is an extremely important factor in maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Concurrent with these trends is the increased demand for holistically oriented health and fitness professionals to advise others on natural diets. "The market for alternative medicine is vast and growing, [despite] the low rates of insurance coverage for these services," notes David Eisenberg of the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He and colleagues at the Harvard Medical School surveyed 2,055 adults by telephone and compared use of alternative therapies with 1,539 adults surveyed in 1990. They found that visits to alternative-medicine practitioners jumped 47 percent and money spent on their services rose 45 percent in just seven years. In that same time period, there was a 130% increase in use of high dose vitamins. In 2002 a larger government study of 31,000 people revealed that 36% of U.S. adults use some form of complementary and alternative medicine that is not currently considered to be part of conventional medicine. When health-targeted prayer was included, that number increased to 62%.