More Details on the Plant Based Nutrition Program in Sri Lanka

Real Food, Real Medicine: RMF Delivers Ivy League Plant Based Nutrition Education to Sri Lanka’s Cancer Institute and Pakistan’s Leading Hospitals. 

Perhaps Dr. Dean Ornish put it best when he said “In short they are starting to live like us and die like us.” In his article The Globalization of Illness/The Globalization of Wellness.

This is the case in nearly every developing country and certainly in transitional economies where urbanization, modernization are well underway – complete with all the trappings of the western lifestyle – stress, pollution, compromised health, obesity – more affectionately known as “progress”. If ever there were an “elephant in the living room” this is it.

So obvious is the correlation between lifestyle choices associated with economic development and diseases of affluence (cancer diabetes, heart disease) that even the WHO has had to acknowledge it. Just visit their website – check out their very recent reports and a new web structure and you can search countries by these ‘modern diseases,” They’ve made it easy to see that we are voluntarily killing ourselves world wide.

Here are some links to get you started:

South East Asian Region:

http://www.searo.who.int/en/Section1174/Section1459_10496.htm –  Preventing Chronic Disease – A Vital Investment – (mind you this is on a WHO website!!!) 

http://cancer.iaea.org/ – Main focus Cancer in Developing Countries – Dr. Karunarathne (at NCI Sri Lanka)  has been part of these summits (Sri Lanka is a featured homepage article) Sadly however, all the focus is on chemo and surgical approaches

Dr. Karunarathne’s Letter – A Plea for Prevention: – This started it all for us when we were learning about the NCI – just after we returned last year – we were curious about the medical community’s receptivity to plant based – raw food etc and the I found this…. http://cancer.iaea.org/doctor.asp?id=10

Some great resources as well – new section on the website – much of this has been rolled out in the past two months.  

Without bantering you to boredom any longer about the stats, – (they are out their in plain view – just take a look at the $1.5 trillion the US will spend on these three disease alone this year), I’d like to share with you a program we’ve introduced to shave about 20 years off the learning curve for Pakistan and Sri Lanka doctors about the correlation between diet and health, a topic not addressed in Medical School – until now.

Through the generous support of scholarships provided by the T. Colin Campbell Foundation, www.nutritionstudies.org, Real Medicine has been able to provide access to leading edge information and research about Plant Based Nutrition as it pertains to healing and preventing chronic diseases of affluence.   Delivered through Cornell University’s  Ivy League Web Based Learning Institution – eCornell, Dr. Campbell’s 50 years of nutritional research is reaching half way around the world – and evening the playing field when it comes to addressing these conditions.

Where curative measures of costly and fall far short of addressing the issues, the solution needs to come through education and empowerment of the medical community to education the public about the benefits of whole plant based foods, especially in countries like Sri Lanka where fruits and vegetables grow in such abundance or in Africa where the lure of progress leads sadly to the abandonment of their land, its bounty and the true wealth and health it can provide.

Dr. Campbell’s course has been well received by our RMF counterparts in these countries who have just completed the first of three modules. Our overall program intent is to provide access to members of the leading medical colleges, hospitals and health ministries, conduct clinical trials and provide support for better public health education and sustainable organic agriculture.  

Here are some helpful links from the World Health Organization:

The first link discusses childhood obesity and the public health. www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/en/index.html

Here you can learn more about chronic diseases and health promotion. www.who.int/chp/en/index.html

You can also see the risk factors of chronic disease. http://www.who.int/infobase/report.aspx?rid=126