From a Standing Start

I saw a surprising documentary recently that has made me think a bit more about food. Fat,Sick, & nearly dead is a documentary by Australian Joe Cross, and his experiment with change in diet and lifestyle. Joe suffers from chronic urticaria, a disease that causes painful rashes and blisters to appear on his skin. Considering himself to already have one foot in the grave, and been on steroids and other medications for years, Joe decided to completely stop the typical western diet he had been living on, in favor of fresh juices for sixty days. The documentary covers Joes trip across America, with a juicer hooked up to a car battery in his boot. The end result was that Joe lost a massive amount of weight and cured himself of urticaria. To to prove that his case wasn’t a fluke, a truck driver he met on his travels took on the same process and also cured himself of urticaria, and dropped more than 200 pounds of weight.

While Joe’s experiment was extreme, its results should not be that surprising. Several years ago I saw another documentary by American Morgan Spurlock who undertook to eat a MacDonalds meal three times per day for 30 days. His documentary was called Supersize me, after the infamous McDonalds meal size option. Morgan Spurlock started from the opposite position to Joe Cross; he was fit, healthy and a good weight. At the end of his thirty day stint, he was 25 pounds heavier, he had severe liver dsyfunction and mood swings that were tied to his cravings for more McDonalds food. His physicians likened his symptoms to those of a binge alcoholic.

Both documentaries pose a very interesting question about what we eat and its effect on our health. We’ve been hearing that fruit and vegetables are good for our health from a very young age, and indeed our health experts tell us that we need at least five portions of fruit and vegetables per day. Eliminating them and eating whatever processed and convenience food is to hand, has a negative effect on our health. The Supersize me documentary showed this by speeding up the process that would normally take many years. According to the expert opinion that Mr Spurlock sought out as part of his experiment he was advised that during his thirty days he consumed about eight years of the allowed volume of fast food.

I don’t think that there are many of us who would argue against the effects of fast food/junk food. But there has to be a corresponding cause/effect for a healthy diet comprised of fruit, veg and unprocessed foods. Maybe that is why it was so unsprisinging that Joe Cross managed to cure himself by improving his diet. I have read somewhere that the increased incidence of depression ( and worse, suicide) could possibly be linked to our diet, including processed meats which have traces of hormones, and other additives, the effects of which have never fully been examined.

Speaking for myself I can see a lot more fruit and veg making an appearance in my diet from now on.