Food As Medicine

Many alternative practitioners prescribe one diet for everyone. The Gonzalez Protocol® diverges from this trend, believing that there is no one “perfect” diet for all humans, and the prescribed diets, depending on the individual patient’s metabolism, can range from a largely vegetarian diet to a diet emphasizing fatty red meat.

Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez believed that food is medicine because Nature is our Friend and not the Enemy. One of the core principles of The Gonzalez Protocol® is that by nourishing your body with natural foods and supplements, your body can heal itself when in autonomic balance. Dr. Gonzalez explained that our autonomic nervous system and its two branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic, run our bodies. Depending on the food that we ingest into our bodies, we can change our autonomic balance for better or for worse. Dr. Gonzalez believed that the diseases we fear most such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, are not the inevitable cost of being human but are largely the result of poor food choices in our lives.

Food is fuel and as Dr. Gonzalez explains in his award-winning book Nutrition and The Autonomic Nervous System “without the right fuel, the human engine, the autonomic nervous system, isn’t going to work efficiently, and disease is going to occur”.

“As long as we put the right fuel into our bodies by eating the right food for our metabolic type, the autonomic system will be in balance, both branches and the associated organs and glands will function efficiently, the body will work beautifully, and our health will be ideal. However, with the wrong fuel, the autonomic system will go out of balance, it will function less efficiently, the organs and glands will not work well together and disease follows.”

If we consume foods suitable for another metabolic type not our own, we can get sick. For example, if a sympathetic dominant eats red meat two or three times a day or a parasympathetic dominant becomes a vegetarian, then autonomic imbalance will only worsen. Our bodies will have excess amounts of those nutrients that support the strong system and further suppress the weaker system.

Dr. Gonzalez understood that people feel best when they provide the right fuel for their bodies, that is, the right food, and feel less well when they eat the wrong foods, take in the wrong fuel. He often said, “It is a simple thought, but in practice it works. If you crave certain types of foods, you most likely need it – our brains know what we should be eating, after all it has our best interests at heart, it’s the experts that confuse and confound.”

In his experience, most alternative cancer practitioners recommend one diet for everyone, regardless of the tumor type, in a kind of “one size fits all” approach. Usually this proposed ideal turns out to be just another variation on the same vegetarian theme, with animal protein and animal fat demonized as the true enemy of all cancer patients and of life in general. However, Dr. Gonzalez thought quite differently, believing that each of us is unique not only in height, weight and shoe size, but also in terms of dietary and nutritional needs. He relied on not one but several diets, ranging from the nearly purely vegetarian to mostly red meat, with the fat, throughout the day. His mentor, Dr. William Donald Kelley, spent years of his professional life insisting that one size doesn’t fit all, that each of us is biochemically and nutritionally unique and each of us requires a diet designed for our specific metabolic needs

The Gonzalez Protocol® determines your metabolic type and produces a customized nutritional protocol of diet and supplements to balance your autonomic nervous system and enable your body to heal. While the concept is simple, the execution is complex as every protocol is individualized to the patient. The Nicholas Gonzalez Foundation has recently educated doctors around the world in how to design these individual protocols.

You can read more about what diet is best for you here. If after reading about the full protocol, you realize that this is more than you were looking for, consider taking the Gonzalez Metabolic Type Test. It is an online self-test where you can learn your Gonzalez Metabolic Type and receive a detailed diet and nutritional plan.

Dr. Gonzalez also believed in the healing power of drinking lots of good, clean water. Here is a link to one of the last articles he wrote about “Water, Energy and the Perils of Dehydration”.