American animal nutritionist Jerry Brunetti, who overcame a diagnosis of incurable cancer, firmly believes that food is the best medicine.
The trick is getting the right food. Mr Brunetti believes creating that food is an emerging opportunity for farmers.
Mr Brunetti told the recent RCS 20th Anniversary conference that 40 years since United States president Richard Nixon declared the so-called war on cancer, billions of dollars in research have comprehensively failed to halt the toll the disease is taking on people and health budgets.
He attributed much of the rising incidence of cancer to chemicals - a view shared by the US President’s Cancer Panel, which in its 2010 report noted that the US is awash in more than 80,000 registered chemicals, “few of which have been tested for safety”.
The Cancer Panel noted that many of those chemicals are used in food production (including synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, the molecules of which can become carcinogenic during digestion). However, the Panel did not report on food as a cancer preventative or a cure.
Mr Brunetti believes food can be both - but it depends on the food, and the health of the environment in which it is produced.
He is a living testament to his own advice: in 1999 he was diagnosed with a form of lymphoma thought to be effectively incurable.
Doctors treated him as “the same cookie-cutter two-legged tumor as everyone else in the hallway getting chemotherapy”, he said, and so he walked away from mainstream medicine. He was warned that he might have only six months to live without chemotherapy.
Instead, he began looking at how he could lift the functioning of his immune system so it could do the work of eradicating the cancer.
“The cancer conundrum is the same as the agriculture conundrum,” he told the RCS conference.
“Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of one type of cell at the expense of the remainder of the cells that make up the human body. Agriculture today has become the misappropriation of land for the exponential increase of one species at the expense of the remainder of the ecosystem.”
He credits his own recovery from cancer to “a holistic path of nutrition, detoxification and immune modulation”, but says because people and their diseases are different, everyone must find their own path to health.
Since 1979, Mr Brunetti has worked as an animal nutritionist, and more recently as a consultant to golf courses and landscapers, using the principle that good nutrition to support intrinsic health in soils, plants and animals is a better way of tackling disease than intervening after a problem has appeared.
When he began to study the human food chain, he was appalled at how denatured American food had become - beginning with run-down farm soils treated with NPK but not with any of the other elements that support healthy life.
At the same time, Mr Brunetti became intrigued at how research was confirming the benefits of pharmaceuticals in unadulterated food.
Using that research to create toxin-free “nutrient dense food” is the future of farming, and of health, Mr Brunetti believes.
“I think it’s up to the food producers to take the work done by the food researchers and attach it to their produce,” he said.
“You don’t have to prove that these compounds are valuable; that’s already medically documented. You just have to prove that you have them in your food.”
Establishing that proof, and then marketing it, remains a challenge.
Less than one per cent of the US population currently considers nutrient density in food when it is purchasing. “If we can get that figure to 10pc, we’ll have something that’s permanent.
“There are ways of tying food as medicine with food as good environmental stewardship. Growing food in a holistic manner means that people not only get medicinal benefits, but the farming practices that are used to get that nutrition means that you have cleaner water, less toxins in the environment, more habitat for wildlife.”
Bringing about that change will require considerable consumer education - a job that Mr Brunetti believes should be supported by the medical professions.
“There is so much opportunity to get good news out there. What farmers really need, and what they haven’t had in a long time, is optimism--based on reality and good science.”
“They have some really good opportunities in these dire times.”
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