Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (49 page)

After eight weeks, the study required them to return to their previous way of eating to compare the effects of the new diet versus the old. By that time, many of the research subjects did not want to change back. They asked, “Do I really have to return to my old way of eating? Can I keep at least some of the new diet?” The foods they had once loved were quickly forgotten when they found a healthier way to eat. Focusing on the short term makes change easier.

The chapters in this book have been separated into six major sections. We begin with conditions related to poor circulation, including back pain and chest pain. We focus on how to use foods and other factors to restore blood flow and also look at some surprising benefits that certain foods have, apart from their effect on circulation.

In the second section, we see how food sensitivities can trigger migraines and other headaches, arthritis, digestive problems, and fibromyalgia. Again, food sensitivities are not the whole story, and we will also look at how certain foods can help reduce inflammation and other aspects of relieving pain. We will then see how hormones influence menstrual pain, breast pain, and cancer pain, and how foods can affect them. Finally, we will look at metabolic and immune problems, including carpal tunnel syndrome, diabetic pains, herpes sores, shingles, sickle-cell anemia, and kidney stones.

As you will see, these sections overlap considerably. Improving circulation is not only important for your back and your heart; it also helps alleviate diabetic nerve pain. Likewise, information on balancing your hormones that is central to menstrual pain is also important for migraines, arthritis, and carpal tunnel syndrome. You can start anywhere in this book, and each chapter can be read separately. If something from another chapter is important for you to know, I will refer you to it.

We will finish off with sections on exercise, rest, and sleep, and recipes that put the principles of this book to work. Along the way, we will take a look at why it is that certain foods that should be perfectly healthy can cause problems for so many of us.

Let me encourage you to look at all the chapters in this book, beyond whatever symptoms may be of concern right now. The principles for restoring blood flow and using foods to balance hormones, in particular, are critically important for many aspects of how we feel, not to mention how long we live. Also, you may have friends or loved ones who could benefit from the information presented here.

For maximal benefit, please follow the instructions in each chapter as carefully as you would a doctor’s prescription. It does not take long to feel the wonderful effects that foods can provide. I hope you enjoy your exploration of the power of foods and wish you the very best of health.

B
iologically speaking, pain is not a localized event. It is a series of reactions, starting at the site of injury. When someone steps on your toe, your joints flare up, or a migraine kicks in, the injured area then sends a signal through the nervous system to your brain. Only when your brain receives and interprets the signal do you feel any pain. If the injured area or the nerves become inflamed, the damage and pain can intensify.

We can tackle pain at any one of four major links in the chain: the initial injury, the inflammatory response, the pain message traveling through the nerves, and even the brain’s perception of pain. In the chapters that follow, we will use each of these strategies, depending on the type of pain you have.

Pain, of course, is an essential part of life. If you could not feel a burn when you touched a hot stove or a bee sting when a swarm surrounded you, a small injury could become a much bigger one. Pain is a danger signal that lets you take quick action. But when pain does not stop, we need to find a way to shut it off.

For many kinds of pain, we aim to stop the local injury. If you have chest pain, for example, your priority is not to keep the nerves from carrying a pain message or to prevent your brain from receiving it. Your goal is to avoid a heart attack or at least limit the damage. Sometimes this requires emergency care, and doctors have many high-tech ways to dissolve clots and crush plaques. As we will see in
Chapter 2
, food and lifestyle changes can, over the long run, rival the power of drugs or surgery in restoring circulation and preventing heart damage.

The same holds true for migraines, sore joints, kidney stones, pains in the digestive tract, and herpes sores, among many other kinds of pain. In each case, diet changes or supplements can help protect against the assault on your tissues. Researchers have also tested how diet affects cancer, with the aim of reducing the risk of painful recurrences.

Foods can not only help prevent these injuries; they can also help shape your body’s response. When your joints ache, for example, the pain, stiffness, and even the joint damage itself are caused by an inflammatory response that has gotten out of control. As we will see in
Chapter 5
, inflammation is controlled by natural compounds called prostaglandins, and their chemical relatives, all of which are made from traces of fat that have been stored inside your cells. Some fats tend to fan the flames of inflammation, while others cool them down, and you can tip the balance one way or the other every time you put food on your plate.

Likewise, migraines and menstrual cramps are not caused by trauma. Rather, the chemicals in your body that control pain and inflammation are acting up and need to be brought into better balance. As we will see, sex hormones play a role in these conditions, and possibly in some forms of arthritis, too. Foods have a major influence over the concentration of these hormones in your blood and how active they are.

The goal in each of these situations is not to influence your brain’s ability to feel pain, but to stop the damage itself.

No matter how much irritation or injury there may be to any part of your body, you feel nothing until the pain message reaches your brain. Pain is carried in fine nerve fibers that lead to the spinal cord, where they connect to other nerve cells leading straight to the brain.

Some strategies for reducing pain focus on the nerves themselves. One example comes from diabetes. Sometimes people who have had this illness for several years develop pains in their legs and feet. This is due either to a toxic effect in the nerves that occurs when blood sugar builds up, or to poor circulation in the tiny blood vessels that nourish the nerves. For most patients, these nerve problems and poor circulation worsen gradually over time. However, recent research shows that a combination of foods and exercises lowers blood sugar, improves circulation, and relieves pain decisively and quickly in most patients.

Likewise, the nerve symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome have been treated successfully with vitamin B
₆
, which probably works both on the nerves themselves and in the brain.

Hot chili peppers contain a remarkable substance called
capsaicin
, which is what gives peppers their zing. But more importantly, in the right dose, it blocks the nerves’ ability to transmit pain messages. Specifically, it depletes a chemical called substance P, which is the chemical messenger that lets one pain nerve carry its message to another nerve. Capsaicin is the active ingredient in pain ointments that are used for arthritis, shingles, and postmastectomy pain.

By the way, although pain nerves are very fine and rather slow to conduct messages—the country roads of the nervous system—sensory messages of touch and pressure travel in large nerves that carry messages much faster, which is why you know you stubbed your toe or bumped your knee a fraction of a second before the pain actually kicks in.

Your body makes natural painkillers, called
enkephalins
(meaning literally “in the head”) and
endorphins
(as in “endogenous morphine”). Enkephalins are made in the adrenals, small glands that sit on top of your kidneys. Endorphins are made in the pituitary gland at the base of your brain. They really do act like morphine. Their principal site of action is within the brain and nerves themselves, and they also travel in your bloodstream.

The active hallucinations that are sometimes reported after near-death experiences have been attributed to endorphins and enkephalins released after trauma and shock.

To manipulate these natural painkillers, we turn to exercise. As we will see in chapter 16, researchers have tested pain tolerance in athletes. A six-mile run stimulates endorphin release that is roughly equivalent to ten milligrams of morphine, and you can take advantage of endorphins well before you can go this distance.

The amino acid
tryptophan
has been used to reduce pain. In the brain, it produces
serotonin
, a brain chemical that influences pain sensitivity, moods, and sleep. Tryptophan was popular in the United States until a manufacturing contaminant in some batches caused a rare blood disorder, and it was pulled off the market. However, high-carbohydrate foods increase tryptophan concentration in the blood safely and reliably, and they do the same in your brain. For some people, high-carbohydrate foods have a mild antidepressant effect. They can also induce sleep and sometimes reduce pain.

Painkilling drugs, heat, and massage have been around for a long time, and they are helpful in many applications. Acupuncture, long used in Asia, has shaken off the initial skepticism with which it was greeted by Western medicine and has proven its worth. Chiropractic had a harder battle, but has likewise established its role in certain aspects of pain management.

Foods and judiciously chosen nutrient supplements also give us new ways to stop local tissue injury, reduce pain impulses within nerves, and even limit the brain’s perception of pain. The remainder of this book details the application of these principles to specific kinds of pain.