"Food Is Medicine" Is Right. It's Also Becoming a Trap.
"Food is medicine" is one of the truest phrases in modern health conversation, and one of the most overused. It's true in the sense that matters most: what you eat consistently, over years, has more influence on chronic disease risk than almost anything a prescription pad can offer after the fact. That's a big part of why I wrote this book in the first place — because I don't think most people were ever given the real picture of why they were getting sicker, just a longer list of pills to manage it once they were.
But I want to name something honestly, because I think it matters: there's a version of "food is medicine" that's healthy, and a version that quietly turns eating into a constant, anxious diagnostic exercise. The first version asks, "does this pattern of eating support how I want to feel and function?" The second version treats every bite as a referendum — inflammatory or anti-inflammatory, clean or toxic, healing or harming — until food stops being food and becomes a daily performance review.
I don't think that second version is actually where health lives. Chronic stress about eating "correctly" is its own physiological burden. And a movement that started as a corrective to bad institutional advice can, if it's not careful, curdle into a new kind of rigidity — just with different rules and a different set of gatekeepers.
This is exactly why We're Not Sick, We're Being Sold isn't a meal plan or a list of foods to fear. I say this outright in the book: I'm not a nutritionist, and I'm not telling you what to eat. What I am asking you to do is notice how much of the advice you've absorbed — from doctors, from influencers, from decades of shifting government guidelines — was shaped by something other than your actual health. Once you can see that clearly, you're in a much better position to build a relationship with food that's grounded and sustainable, rather than swinging from one set of external rules to another. The book's practical section is built around that same balance — practical enough to act on, without turning eating into a second job.
If any of this — food, eating, or body image — has become a source of real distress rather than useful information, that's worth bringing to a doctor or therapist directly; this post is meant as food-for-thought, not guidance for that.