Several years ago I attended a seminar in which the physician speaking held up a book and made the following comment, “Get this book. If you don’t have children, get it and read it for yourself!”
So convincing was her comment, I was afraid not to go out and buy it immediately. She was right. The book is Disease-Proof Your Child by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D. If I were queen, I would make it required reading for every one of us, parent or not.
Dr. Fuhrman, a father of four, specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. In a world filled with chronic diseases, an epidemic of obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, there is no greater time to stop and take note of what Dr. Fuhrman can teach us.
Dr. John Kelly, M.D., M.O.H., president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine summarizes the book in a nutshell: “If the health principles so convincingly and warmly presented in this text were to be adopted by our children and their families, the reduction of disease and suffering would exceed any ‘medical’ advance one can conceive of.”
The book will turn your head when you see how Dr. Fuhrman helps children with recurrent medical problems recover their health with nutritional interventions. Backed up by a multitude of scientific studies, Dr. Fuhrman explains how eating particular foods (and avoiding others) can have a dramatic effect on reducing the occurrence of illnesses like asthma, ear infections, and allergies.
Wish I had had Dr. Fuhrman’s book when my children were babies. One of my children had chronic ear infections and was on antibiotics continuously his entire first year of life, and periodically thereafter. Now in his adult life, he is extremely susceptible to strep, and suffers from multiple bouts of strep infection on an annual basis. In fact, he just called me this morning. I knew from the sound of his voice what he was about to tell me. Tell me it wasn’t due to his nutrition and drinking ampicillin continuously those early years of his life?
Dr. Fuhrman clearly explains how eating right in childhood is the most powerful weapon against developing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders in the future.
Hormone imbalance begins not in our 40s and 50s but in our youth. Dr. Fuhrman explains, “High daily fat and animal food consumption in childhood assures unnaturally high levels of hormone promoters that raise our children’s blood level of estrogen and testosterone, induce an earlier maturity, and initiate changes that promote adult cancers.”
Dr. Fuhrman points out the obvious, “Americans eat only 5% of calories from fruits, vegetables, beans, and unprocessed nuts and seeds, the foods that contain the necessary nutrients to maintain normal health. Americans eat about 50% of calories from processed foods such as oil, sugar, and white flower products.”
Remember the story I told last week of the day care ‘breakfast” consisting of a cup of sweetened cereal or a white piece of bread slathered in butter, cinnamon and sugar? Now consider Dr. Fuhrman’s explanation, “No matter how many vitamins or minerals are added to the power bar or breakfast cereal, it still does not contain the unique combination of thousands of delicate phytonutrients found in a strawberry or a piece of lettuce.”
Tomorrow I want to get into the topic of milk, something I mentioned in one of my articles last week. Perhaps you will be as stunned as I was when you hear what’s in our milk, the liquid that we push onto our kids thinking that we are doing a good thing.
