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Oct. 3, 2012, 9:20 a.m.

Carole Hungerford might be a GP, but she is not a fan of the way the business of medicine works. Not even close. ''Mainstream medicine is run by the drug companies. Doctors are driven by the pharmaceutical industry,'' she says. ''There's a renegade group of us where we try to understand that good health isn't about how many clever pills the drug manufacturers can make for us.''

Hungerford acknowledges the importance of medicine, but her focus is on putting things right before people need it, and that starts with the soil in which we grow food. She is keynote speaker at a seminar for GPs, Are You What You Eat? being held at the Mulloon Creek Natural Farm near Bungendore on October 6, a setting chosen to match the theme of the event - the link between soil, food and health. The public is invited to the dinner that night prepared by Janet Jeffs, when the speakers will hold a question and answer session.

Hungerford believes mineral and vitamin deficiencies play a key role in many health problems. She points to pre-eclampsia in pregnancy, a dangerous spike in blood pressure, which she suggests is linked to magnesium deficiency. Australian soils are low in magnesium and Hungerford recommends magnesium to pregnant women, and to patients with high blood pressure, preeclampsia, anxiety disorders, and chronic fatigue syndrome. ''A healthy woman on a good diet shouldn't be getting eclampsia.''

Selenium is also missing from Australian soils, and Hungerford refers to a study by Professor of oncology at Flinders University Graeme Young suggesting selenium supplementation could dramatically cut the risk of bowel cancer. Hungerford says such findings never get the funding necessary for large randomised controlled trials, because ''no drug company is going to fund a study on something so cheap and that they can't make money out of''.

''Mainstream medicine is run by the drug companies and it's only the drug companies that seem to be able to find the money to get the mega trials,'' she says.

Hungerford, who has GP practices in Sydney and Bathurst, where her husband runs an organic farm, and is author of Good Health in the 21st Century: A family doctor's unconventional guide, is vocal on the need to improve the health of soils. In the meantime, she takes supplements - selenium, zinc, fish oil, magnesium, vitamin D (she believes more people die of vitamin D deficiency by a factor of 10 than of melanoma), and a multi vitamin. ''If we don't clean up our act, clean up our environment and start eating clean foods, we're stuffed,'' she says. ''If you need any evidence at all that we've got something badly wrong in our paradigm, the sperm count of men is falling at a geometrical rate; it is scary.''

The conference is organised by the Mulloon Institute, whose general manager, Elisabetta Faenza, says GPs fall into two camps - those who think diet has a minimal impact and those who are convinced of its importance. She too, stresses that ''you can't fix a car accident with diet'' and medical intervention is one of the hallmarks of increased longevity, but she says many chronic conditions are less successfully treated with medicine. Diet and lifestyle more generally have an important role, she says, in arthritis, type 2 diabetes, autism, asthma, heart disease and cancer.

Many of the speakers agree that health people start with healthy soil. But while Hungerford turns to supplements where soil is deficient, Faenza says unless the body recognises a supplement as food, it is little use. ''If our food was better we wouldn't need to supplement, we are designed to get nutrients from food and sunshine and water,'' she says.

You could do a lot worse than look at what your ancestors ate. Not your grandparents. Much further back. Professor Neil Mann, head of food science at RMIT, studies the hunter-gatherer diet before agriculture about 10,000 years ago, which began the switch from wild, foraged plants and meat, to grains.

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Diet and disease: what's the link? Save

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Home » Diet » Diet and disease: what's the link? Save