Finding The Food

Channel 4 has been running a programme called “The Food Hospital”. It takes a number of varied cases of people suffering from a number of different conditions. They have all reached a serious level of ill health and the purpose is to try to deal with their illnesses by means of careful diet control rather than medication.

It is refreshing to see something that goes for the causes rather than the effects. Many illnesses are more difficult to deal with in this way but even some of those can be made less difficult by care with the diet.

One matter that did strike me was that in some cases to help clear and rest the system a liquid diet was given for a few days to be augmented and later replaced by recommended foods. Sometimes this was done to identify any food that might be a trigger for an outbreak of the illness.

The liquids in question were carefully prepared concoctions designed to ensure enough of the vital nutrients and vitamins necessary to health and to help rebalance the body intakes of these. So if these are easily and readily available, how is it that in so many hospitals and care homes actual malnutrition is occurring so often?

Clearly some of these, which are easily assimilated with other basic healthy foods could mean that there is never any need for malnourishment. It also means care over hydration levels as well but to have patients going nowhere suffering dehydration is astonishing.

Beyond that much of the discussion and analysis with patients was about body chemistry and how to deal with the different issues arising. With quite a number of illnesses covered overall a good deal of complicated chemistry is involved.

Which lead to the curious feature of a programme whose essence is the chemistry of the body in relation to food ignoring totally and never mentioning other forms of chemical impact on the body. Yet in many cases clearly the people involved must have been experiencing other types of chemical impact.

Why should this be? Perhaps there are two basic reasons. One is that the firms producing personal and household chemicals could well have created enough trouble for the programme makers to make the message about food lost.

Another is that as this is commercial TV and with so much of its vital advertising revenue coming from the marketing and production of these products it would be far too risky to the finances to suggest in the programme that these could be a factor in a number of the illnesses.

So at one stage in the viewing when a major advertisement feature came up for a personal product it was odd to see being pushed as desirable one that makes my stomach turn whenever I encounter it. What was ironic was that it appeared after the specialists were dealing with a patient with chronic inflammation of the gut.

You win some you lose some…………