During the last lunch at the restaurant, while you read the Times, your body was reading the potatoes: was there rain ? too many chemicals ? enough sun ? ...
December 12th 2022
Written by: Sayer Ji, GreenMedInfo
Eating Dates Produces Powerful Health Benefits, Religion and Science
Agree
Since biblical times, dates were to believed to possess profound healing
properties, but only now is science catching up to confirm our distant ancestors
knew exactly what they were talking about.
If you go by the Nutrition Facts panel of an ordinary package of dates,
they look more like sugar bombs than a healthy snack. But are they really as
nutritionally vapid as these label claims make them seem ?
Not by a long shot.
When we apply the complementary lenses of modern scientific
investigation and ancient wisdom, dates begin to look like both a holy- and a
super-food of immense value.
Here's a neat example.
From the Koran to Clinical Trials: Dates for Better Birthing
In the Koran, the central holy book of Islam, Allah instructs the Virgin
Mary to consume dates when she gives birth to Jesus.[1] And so, not
surprisingly, dates are commonly referred to within the Islamic tradition as
beneficial to pregnant women. We might chalk this up as
"pre-scientific" magical thinking without basis in medical fact, were
it not for a remarkable human clinical study that confirmed their value in
pregnancy...
Published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2011 and
titled, "The effect of late pregnancy consumption of date fruit on labour
and delivery", researchers set out to investigate the effect of date fruit
consumption on labor parameters and birth outcomes. Over the course of 11 months
at Jordan University of Science and Technology, two groups of women were
enrolled in a prospective study where 69 women consumed six date fruits per day
for 4 weeks prior to their estimated date of delivery, versus 45 women who
consumed none. These women were matched so there was no significant difference
in gestational age, age and parity (the number of times a woman has brought a
pregnancy to viable gestational age) between the two groups.
The results of the date intervention were reported as follows:
Improved Cervical Dilation: "The women who consumed date fruit had
significantly higher mean cervical dilatation upon admission compared with the
non-date fruit consumers (3.52 cm vs 2.02 cm, p < 0.0005)."
Less Damage to Membranes: "[The intervention group had] a
significantly higher proportion of intact membranes (83% vs 60%,
p = 0.007)."
More Natural (Spontaneous) Labor: "Spontaneous labour occurred in
96% of those who consumed dates, compared with 79% women in the non-date fruit
consumers (p = 0.024)."
Less Drugs Required: "Use of prostin/oxytocin was significantly
lower in women who consumed dates (28%), compared with the non-date fruit
consumers (47%) (p = 0.036)."
Shorter Labor: "The mean latent phase of the first stage of labour
was shorter in women who consumed date fruit compared with the non-date fruit
consumers (510 min vs 906 min, p = 0.044)."
The researchers concluded:
"It is concluded that the consumption of date fruit in the last 4
weeks before labour significantly reduced the need for induction and
augmentation of labour, and produced a more favourable, but non-significant,
delivery outcome. The results warrant a randomised controlled trial."[2]
Thanks to research like this we can see how the mythological and
scientific ways of understanding now converge and confirm one another. I
believe that rather than contradict and/or negate one another, the mythos and
logos are beginning to assume a far more productive complementary relationship
as we move into a new era of understanding where the profane and sacred are
perceived as intimately entwined in our direct experience. The field of
nutrition, as you can see, is no exception.
Dates Contain Nourishing Information
Dates, of course, are in the palm tree family, and along with coconut
and red palm, are some of the oldest cultivated plants known in the historical
record; in fact, they are so old we don't know where they first originated.
They have provided life-sustaining nutrition in regions that are often sparse
in edible resources, and are increasingly being researched as a powerful
medicinal food that could reduce much suffering in malnourished and disease
prone populations, especially in underdeveloped countries.
Even while scientific analysis of dates are beginning to reveal that
they are actually densely packed with a wide range of minerals, vitamins, amino
acids and fatty acids, it should be emphasized that they are not just sources
of energy and material building blocks for our body. We must acknowledge that
they are also sources of biologically valuable (perhaps indispensably so)
information. We can not analytically decompose a food into the minerals,
vitamins, and macronutrients (e.g. lipids, fats, and protein), that we believe
are responsible for its nourishing and life-sustaining properties, without
losing quite a lot in the process. Foods contains hundreds, if not thousands,
of physiologically important biomolecules, together which modulate the
expression of thousands of genes in our body, as well as affecting our
microbiome. In fact, our microbiome works on the foods we ingest, and together
produce an intermediary layer of biomolecules known as the metabolome, many of
which may be indispensable to our health.
This is why when we say food is medicine, we are not simply using a
metaphor. We now know that food is capable, on a molecular level, of positively
modulating a wide range of biological pathways simultaneously, in a manner that
drugs simply can not replicate. In fact, I believe food contains an immense, if
not infinite, amount of information which our bodies draw from to realize
optimal gene expression, especially in times of stress or imbalance. Looking at
it granularly, I believe food contains discrete units or packets of gene-regulatory
energy and information. This can be inferred by the way curcumin, for instance,
which is only one of hundreds of biomolecules found in the spice turmeric, is
capable of modulating over 2,000 genes simultaneously within a cancer cell
line, with a positive end result. Both the specificity and broadness through
which these food compounds are capable of correcting imbalances is simply
astounding and speaks to an intelligence within certain plants of particular
food and medicinal purpose that can not be exhaustively explained through terms
and methods of the reductionistic sciences that still form the backbone of our
understanding of conventional nutrition.
So if my theory holds true, and dates, which are a food type (namely,
fruit) we co-evolved with for quite some time, are more than just a package of
mainly simple carbohydrate (half fructose/half glucose) and mineral quantities
of alphabetic vitamins and minerals, but also possess gene-regulatory energy
and information, shouldn't it perform a number of therapeutic effects? Indeed,
the research now bears testimony to exactly this fact.
I took the liberty of doing a cursory meta-analysis of the extant
research on dates available through the National Library of Medicine's
biomedical database MEDLINE, accessible of course through the google-like
search engine pubmed.gov. And to my pleasant surprise the research on dates as
a whole (including the fruit, pollen and seed extract) reveals approximately 19
specific beneficial modes of action, and a preventive and/or therapeutic role
in about 40 different health conditions.
Consider for a moment that most of the blockbuster drugs on the
marketplace only have one therapeutic mode of action and one condition they are
approved to treat. Additionally, there are on average 75 adverse health effects
for each drug. The fact that it is classified and sold as a food and not a drug
should not delude us into thinking it is not as powerful as a pharmaceutical.
In fact, it should be clear that foods are actually far more powerful in
affecting root cause resolution of health conditions by nourishing us deeply,
nutritionally, and again, informationally (literally: to put form into).
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