By Helen Nielsen
Robert Moore obtained his degree in Pharmacy from the University of Utah in 1965. He spent 41 years applying his knowledge of ailments and remedies appropriate toward their amelioration prescribed by medical doctors who were bound by the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” But Moore, who grew up with the spirit of inquiry so prevalent in the “Intermountain West” also knew Hippocrates had another key piece of health advice: “Let food be thy medicine.”
Upon his retirement he and his wife Happy purchased a 200,000 square foot farmstead in Vista, California and today, at their Carmi Vista Family Farm stand at the Vista Farmers Market, each Saturday morning in front of the County Courthouse on Melrose Drive they share that knowledge with their customers.
Theirs is one of the many farm stands displaying an “informational poster” outlining to the market patrons exactly how the healthy, nutritious Real Food they sell helps the customers strengthen their bodies, build overall vitality, and builds the patron’s immune system which is key to fighting off the host of illnesses afflicting contemporary Americans.
Eating seasonal Real Food, locally grown in a sustainable and healthy manner where freshness and the nutritional quality are not sacrificed to industrial farming techniques is not only a key to our customers continued good health, says Moore, but it is the key to helping them follow a diet which will both perpetuate their good health and keep them from having all those “underlying health conditions” we hear so much about as the news broadcasts the latest numbers of hospitalizations, and deaths due to the Coronavirus we now call Covid-19.
While the posters at the farmers market focus on how eating real food, and abandoning the SAD (Standard American Diet) of Fast, Junk and Processed “food” will help boost a person’s immune system, Moore is quick to point out that “too much of a good thing is not good either.”
He is referring to the fact that while eating Real Food will help you build up your immune system, the immune system itself can be triggered by other stimuli and become so exaggerate and “over active” it can harm, even destroy some of your body’s organs.
Most people have heard the term “auto-immune disease” says the retired pharmacist, now farmer. That is an overactive immune system that mistakenly attacks your own organs. We all have heard the news stories about how a few people who have received one of the several new Covid-19 vaccines have had a “reaction” to it. That reaction happens to people with certain allergies. In them the vaccine triggers a hyper and potentially harmful response by their immune system. The key is to avoid putting inputs into your body which can trigger these unwanted immune system reactions. Those unwanted triggers are created by what you eat or drink, the quality of the air you breathe and what you put on your skin.
Here again comes our admonition that you should only eat Real Food, free of the chemicals, preservatives, artificial coloring, added sugar, and ultra-processing which removes the nutritional value of what was grown or raised and destroys the fiber so important to the health of your digestive system says now Farmer Moore.
With regard to the bad-air born undesirable stimulation of your immune system, beyond moving to San Diego or some mountain community where the air is much cleaner, you can easily avoid personally harming yourself by avoiding smoking, second hand smoke and vaping. Applying chemicals and other artificial compounds to your skin is the final source of unwanted triggers to your immune system. At the Vista Farmers Market there is “Health Fair” the 3rd Saturday of every month where natural skin cleansing and enhancement products are presented. As a pharmacist, Moore’s only skin recommendation would be Vitamin D which your body normally would get from the sun, but the tradeoff with sun avoidance due to the potential to cause skin cancer warrens a vitamin D boost.
With 80% of your immune system housed in your gut, Moore encourages consuming the healthy nutritious fruits and veggies he and others sell as being the key to having that healthy microbiome so desired. Again consuming natural organic sources of Real Food products is the best way to deliver the Prebiotic and Probiotics the “good bacteria” in your gut desire. Think of the “Pre”biotics as things like the natural fiber in the healthy farmers market foods – that’s the fiber which commercial food processing strips out. The “Pro”biotics are the host of nutrients those “good bugs” thrives on, and they are all available at the market.
As to how you will know if your immune system is vibrant, balanced and ready to react to and reject unwanted illnesses and infections? It can be a simple as gauging the reaction to a mosquito bite or the frequency with which you get, or better yet do not get other coronaviruses such as the common cold. If your bite heals quickly, your system is strong. If it remains red and infected for a long period, you likely are not.
In general, you will know simply by how you feel over all. And if, in addition to supplementing your healthy food supply at the farmers market you garden on your own, in addition to the $25 in value from the return from the fresh fruits and vegetables for every $1 you invent in your own garden, you will get the added benefit of the exercise that gardening provides – with exercise being another function which boosts overall immune system health.
Notwithstanding everyone’s desire to be rid of Covid-19 and any variants it may spawn, the factual prognosis is that this and other viruses will be with us for quite some time. The enormity of this problem is quite real thus taking advantage of the availability of the Real Food at the farmers market becomes all the more important.
Dr. Robert Lustig, at the Univ. of California, San Francisco Medical School, is the founder of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition and Chief Science Officer at “Eat REAL” the Public Health nonprofit whose current focus is on bringing Eat REAL certifications to schools and raising awareness on the value of real food. In an October Eat REAL Covid-19 and Nutrition Alert, he summarized the magnitude of the strong correlations between COVID-19 complications and processed food-related disease.
Dr. Lustig points out that only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy; therefore COVID-19 is particularly dangerous in the United States, and particularly in low-income and vulnerable populations. Metabolic conditions, the majority of which are linked to the long-term consumption of processed food, put people at higher risk for COVID-19 complications and death.
In the October Eat REAL and Covid 19 Nutrition Alert (available on line at EatREAL.org – Alerts and Insights) Dr. Lustig summarizes this Covid-19 / processed food correlation.
1. Processed food-related disease is the leading cause of early death and decreased healthspan.
2. Processed food-related disease is an underlying condition of the majority of COVID-19 deaths.
3. Processed food spikes insulin and blood glucose levels, as well as inflammation, which alters the immune response and increases the risk of a more severe COVID-19 infection.
4. Chronic metabolic disease, of which obesity is a key marker, is a primary risk factor for COVID-19 complications and deaths. Today, 30% of Americans are obese, and 60% are overweight, and 88% are metabolically ill.
5. Good nutrition action is a critical tool in the fight against COVID-19, by improving metabolic health.
6. Processed foods (e.g., those with hidden sugars and refined carbohydrates, fast food meals, etc.) put Americans at higher risk for metabolic disease (obesity, heart disease, diabetes), and COVID-19 complications.
7. Consuming real foods, such as intact vegetables, whole fruit, whole grains over processed grains, as well as non-processed animal products, improves the health of Americans, and reduces the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 infection.
As a pharmacists, Robert Moore also notes that while America is the only large industrialized country which permits the advertising of prescription medicine on television directly to the general public, he joins the ranks of those, such as Dr. Lustig in suggesting that there is no time-honored substitute for eating, and raising whenever possible, real food to perpetuate personal good health and beating back both those “underlying health conditions” and the host of infections, chronic illnesses, plus the germs and viruses that can harm us.
Hippocrates was correct, concludes Moore, when he said “Let Food be thy Medicine.”
