By now, I hope you recognize this as one more example of the reductionist paradigm at work, even when it's couched in natural and alternative terms. As we saw in chapter ten, one of the major problems with modern medicine is its reliance on isolated, unnatural chemical pharmaceuticals as the primary tool in the war against disease. But the medical profession isn't the only player in the health-care system that has embraced this element of reductionism. The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed "active ingredients" from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs, supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they're derived or synthesized. T. Colin Campbell
Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one...
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Clarence Darrow
Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that...
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Unknown
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
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J.r.r. Tolkien
We believe that religions are basically the same…they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.
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Steve Turner
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
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Leo Tolstoy
More Quotes By T. Colin Campbell
I have heard one doctor call high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets “make-yourself-sick” diets, and I think that’s an appropriate moniker. You can also lose weight by undergoing chemotherapy or starting a heroin addiction, but I wouldn’t recommend those, either.
Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them.
With industry's sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don't realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just...
This is also the case with our disease-care system: it focuses on treating symptoms as if they were root causes, and as a result, it tends to choose interventions that completely ignore the true root causes and thus make it highly likely that symptoms will...
We don't need to know the effects of single agents on health, because this is not the way that nature works. Nutrition has a wholistic effect on health; one that we consistently miss and misinterpret when we focus on isolated nutrients.
