Nutrition as Cure: Reviving the Medicinal Wisdom of Food

Once upon a time, medicine to treat illness did not come from a doctor receiving kickbacks from Big Pharma or a massive chain grocery store; instead, it came directly from the soil beneath our feet. Wholesome and nutritious meats, broths, herbs, spices, fruits, and such weren’t just dinner—they were prescriptions. Ancient physicians knew this well: Ayurveda in India mapped diets to body types, Chinese medicine balanced yin and yang with roots and teas, and Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, gave the simplest medical directive of all time: “Let food be thy medicine.” Yet, fast forward to today, and here in the United States, we see a society ravaged and overtaken by chronic disease, with most medical schools providing less than twenty hours of nutrition training across four years. Thankfully, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recognizes the problem and intends to fix it.

Indeed, for centuries, the food table was the apothecary. Garlic lowered blood pressure before it became a profit-generating capsule. Bitter herbs detoxed the liver before being bottled as supplements. Our meals were the frontline of our healthcare. Then the Industrial Revolution rewrote the script. Wholesome and nutritious foods were hauled away and processed in factories, only to emerge stripped of nutritional value and instead dressed up and disguised with sugar, salt, artificial preservatives, artificial flavors, and GMOs, to name a few. Meanwhile, medicine moved into Big Pharma’s lucrative labs, where single compounds were isolated, synthesized, and patented. Instead of seeing a carrot for what it is—a symphony of synergistic nutrients—it was reduced to “vitamin A” and sold as a pill. The fact that doctors aren’t trained in the root causes of disease only added to the conundrum. Why? Because they became symptom managers, not healers.

Sure, while often necessary, antibiotics, anesthesia, and certain other drugs were certainly a somewhat positive result of the manipulated shift by the Industrial Revolution. However, the overall damage is more significant than any good that may have resulted, as the shift also secured chronic illness as a billion-dollar business model. In other words, the chronic disease epidemic became the cash cow. Think about it—why encourage prevention through diet when lifelong prescriptions for diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol promise guaranteed returns? It is no secret that Big Pharma thrives on customers, not cures, and the toxic American diet of ultraprocessed foods is an easy accomplice.

This gross reality must change before it’s too late. And, thank God, change is in the air. Last week, Kennedy made waves when he announced he was pushing for doctors to receive more education about nutrition. He announced that a team within HHS would target “the woeful lack of nutrition education in medicine” by making it a greater part of pre-med and medical school curricula, medical licensing exams, residency training, board certification, and doctors’ continuing education. Kennedy’s announcement is undoubtedly a significant step in the right direction and long overdue.

I’m leading a team at @HHSGov, along with @EDSecMcMahon, targeting the woeful lack of nutrition education in medicine. We can reverse the chronic disease epidemic simply by changing our diets and lifestyles, but to do that, we need nutrition to be a basic part of every doctor’s… pic.twitter.com/GFOYE5RuYm

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 27, 2025

By championing the importance of nutrition while highlighting the fact that regulators and curricula may often prioritize the interests of Big Pharma over public health, RFK Jr. is implicitly challenging the dominance of Big Pharma’s artificial approaches in America’s healthcare. Without question, a nutrition-centered approach to healthcare threatens no one—except the industries profiting from chronic illness.

Reconnecting medicine to prevention, rather than intervention, while emphasizing the power of food as medicine, positions nutrition as a core component of good health. With that in mind, meal choices become part of the prescription, thereby empowering patients seeking a healthy life to take control of the foods they eat. In an OpEd in the WSJ published on August 27, 2025, while pointing out that nutrition, fueled by poor diets, is the root cause of the long-running chronic disease crisis in America—with little help from the medical profession to fix the problem—Kennedy wrote:

“Accrediting bodies and medical organizations look the other way, declining to set clear requirements. We train physicians to wield the latest surgical tools, but not to guide patients on how to stay out of the operating room in the first place. We know that when applied properly, nutrition counseling can prevent and even reverse chronic disease.”

Our society has long needed a cultural alignment with a post-industrial, holistic vision of health as its primary focus. RFK Jr.’s push aligns with the visible rise of functional medicine, integrative health, regenerative agriculture, and ancestral health paradigms that are present in each of us. Indeed, Kennedy’s advocacy for nutrition in medicine is not a fringe idea, by any means. It echoes voices across political lines in favor of root-cause healing over profit-driven symptom suppression. Ultimately, it is a much-needed return to common sense that invites medicine to remember its roots, empowers doctors to heal more holistically, and affirms that what we eat is inextricably linked to who we become.