Eat To Heal

Today, four years later and 15kg lighter, I am on a reduced dose of hypertension medication, off statins and blood thinners, and no longer pre-diabetic. The game changer was having the good fortune of finding myself a wonderful nutritional and functional medicine practitioner who essentially reversed my health disorders through dietary and lifestyle changes, and plant-based supplements.

Dinah Doong, the founder and owner of Vitamed Wellness, has been practicing nutritional and functional medicine for over 10 years. Her interest in the subject began in 2006 after it facilitated her own recovery from a life-threatening health crisis. Convinced of its efficacy, she enrolled and earned a professional diploma from the Plaskett Nutritional Medicine College in the UK. In 2012 she received her licence to practise from the Association of Nutritional and Functional Medicine of Practitioners (ANFMP) Malaysia, and founded Vitamed Wellness. Subsequently, Doong earned a master’s degree in complementary medicine from the University College of Yayasan Pahang and currently holds a fellowship in integrative cancer therapies from the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. When I interviewed her for this article, Doong made it very clear she was not a nutritionist but a nutritional and functional medicine practitioner.

“That means I help people to reverse their health disorders through dietary and lifestyle change and prescribe nutraceuticals for those conditions,” she explains.

“The dietary plan for each person is very individualised. If a client has liver cirrhosis, then I will prescribe a strict low-sugar diet with no sweet fruits, no alcohol and no high trans food. If a client has high iron, which is very damaging to his organs, I advocate abstaining from all high-iron foods. For a diabetic, I would focus on helping the client sleep well, remove all stressors and eliminate processed and high-carb foods.

“For some, the turnaround is very dramatic, immediate almost, but it can also be slow. The important thing is that all progress is carefully monitored and all recommendations I make are evidence-based.”

For centuries, Asian cultures have recognised the role of diet in health and the treatment of bodily ailments, so it is interesting that “food as medicine” is only now beginning to be taken seriously in the West to treat chronic disease.

For instance, low-carb diets that are high in fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, nuts and seeds, lean protein, and low-fat dairy build stronger immune systems, ensure safer pregnancy and childbirth, lower the risk of getting diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and promote longevity. Research has also shown that carotenoids — antioxidants naturally found in some vegetables and fruits — can improve the metabolites of people with liver disease.

Admittedly, doctors that I have spoken to regarding food as medicine have been either indifferent or ambivalent about it. And it’s not difficult to see why because the food as medicine approach to health management challenges the construct of conventional medicine, which relies on technological advancements to manage health and treat disease with pharmaceutical drugs.

However, our views on health, ageing and longevity have also been confronted by huge challenges in the last few years, especially with climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. And so today, we find ourselves asking ourselves not just how we want to live, but how we might be able to postpone dying.

An extreme case is Bryan Johnson, 46, which TIME magazine describes as a “centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die”. During that time, he has spent more than US$4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age”. That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his member to monitor night-time erections.

Crazy, you say? Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with ageing. Elite athletes employ therapies, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to “recovery sleepwear”, to keep their bodies young. But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s also about turning his whole body over to an anti-ageing algorithm with the belief that it will keep him alive indefinitely.

Anyway, in my last WhatsApp chat with Doong, I expressed my hope that people would at least see diet and plant supplements as a credible, safer and better alternative to drugs and surgery, and she lamented, “It’s a bit difficult to change the mindset of people in general.”

My response: “You changed mine.”