Heck, even you snickered when that wisest voice of all, Mom's, boasted of the curative powers of homemade chicken soup or nagged you to eat more vegetables.
Not the statisticians. After all, the numbers they report are some frightening food for thought: Four of the ten leading causes of death in the United States-heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes-are linked to the way we eat. Diet also is increasingly being implicated as the cause of or a contributing factor to scores of other ailments, from acne to arthritis, from hair loss to hearing loss, from premenstrual syndrome to postnasal drip.
The experts aren't laughing, either. "What's really tragic about this is that we were so busy learning how to fix broken arms, deliver babies and do all of those 'doctor' things in medical school that we considered nutrition to be boring," says Michael A. Klaper, M.D., a nutritional medicine specialist in Pompano Beach, Florida, and director of the Institute of Nutritional Education and Research, an organization based in Manhattan Beach, California, that teaches doctors about nutrition and its relationship to disease. "But after we get into practice, we spend most of the day treating people with diseases that have huge nutritional components that have long been essentially ignored. I frequently get calls from doctors across the country saying that their patients are asking questions about nutrition and its role in their conditions and they don¡¯t know what to tell them."
