KEY POINTS:
After suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome for six years, Roy Colquhoun was heavily drugged, depressed and bedridden when his son James Colquhoun showed him some footage he'd shot with wife - fellow Australian nutritional consultant Laurentine ten Bosch for their film Food Matters.
While there are many strands to this radical appraisal of our current state of health - based on interviews with nutrition and natural-healing experts around the world - the heart of its message is that good food, not drugs, should be our medicine.
This was news to Roy, whose raft of medications were causing "horrific side-effects", including sweats, diarrhoea, rashes, weight gain and depression - which were snowballing into suicidal thoughts.
After seeing the film's footage, Roy was so affected that he immediately ditched all the drugs and began a mega vitamin-and-nutrient programme and a predominantly raw-food diet. He's now completely well.
Says James: "He called me on the 17th of this month and said, 'It's one year to this day since you showed me that film and I've got my life back'."
Chatting during the Auckland leg of a global promotional tour for Food Matters, James wants to convince more of us to take Roy's life-changing approach to nutrition - or at least watch the film and think about it.
The evidence certainly stacks up for the film's core argument that a lifestyle based on optimal nutrition and vitamins is vital to keeping you well - especially given that poor soil, nutritionally depleted foods and chemical additives mean even "healthy" Western diets are deficient. More controversially, the film argues that nutritional-and-vitamin therapy can not only prevent but also arrest and reverse chronic conditions including depression, obesity, alcoholism, heart disease, dementia and cancer.
The most extreme claim is that huge intravenous doses of vitamin C can cure even terminal cancer. Although some studies support this thesis, the jury's still out.
But certainly, as the film argues, many alternative therapies can be more effective, more economical and less harmful than conventional medical treatments. Take the Western world's number one killer, cardiovascular disease.
"That's $80 billion of bypass surgery happening every year in America with something that can be reversed by diet and lifestyle changes," says James, who was startled to discover that most cardiologists do not prescribe good nutrition and, even more disturbingly, that most medical doctors receive little or no nutritional training.
"Doctors are fantastically well-equipped at diagnostics and things like A&E, critical trauma, pain management, infant survival, but they're not great at treating chronic illnesses which are predominantly caused by dietary and lifestyle habits," says James.
If you're set on seeing a doctor, James suggests an "integrated practitioner" who's on top of both medical and nutritional studies and can decipher whether lifestyle changes or drugs are the best approach.
"Rather than just masking the symptoms with a pill for every ill, we need to address the underlying causes of these illnesses with scientifically viable solutions for curing disease naturally. Generally medications are over-prescribed and over-subscribed."
The most shocking thing he came across in his research was the sheer amount of people, 106,000, who die each year because of "normally expected" (not wrongly-prescribed or wrongly-ingested) adverse drug reactions.
"I found it very disturbing that this information wasn't more widely known," James says.
Arguing that pharmaceutical companies are involved in the regulation of their own industry, fund doctors' postgraduate training and only report positive trials, the film also sets about uncovering the half-trillion-dollar worldwide "sickness industry".
Says James: "There is no conspiracy theory, it's just a matter of economics. There's no reason for a drug company to trial whether organic vegetable juice helps cure disease, because they can't patent organic vegetable juice and make exclusive profits."
Forget deprivation diets: this food-focused approach is all about expanding rather than restricting the range of food you eat.
"Instead of saying 'don't eat this or that', start by drinking water first thing in the morning then having a superfood smoothie or vegetable juice, and add salads to each meal," James advises.
As your immune system reacts to even lightly cooked food as toxic, ensure half your food is raw. As well as vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds and herbs, raw-food expert David Wolfe advocates superfoods which are extraordinarily rich in vitamins and minerals, including Goji berries, ginger, kelp, wheatgrass, raw honey and cacao beans: all protein-rich, undamaged by heat and easily digestible.
Yes, the radiant-looking couple follow their own dietary advice.
Since he overhauled his diet, James' health has improved "big-time" and his acid-reflux problem has disappeared, meaning there's no need to take symptom-masking medication any more. Does he ever pop a pill, even the odd aspirin? "No. If I have a headache I drink some water."
And there's definitely been a few headaches during the duo's switch from maritime-industry careers to nutrition then to film-making. Food Matters has occupied the pair since they graduated in May 2007 as nutritional consultants from the Global College of Natural Medicine.
Profoundly affected by what they learned, they decided to bring this information to the world in an accessible, entertaining format.
The film was entirely funded by the couple's savings ($200,000). They didn't want to sign over rights or potentially alter content so they chose not to release the film via traditional cinema means. Instead, you can buy the DVD or watch it in pay-per-view form on the internet. And it's proving seriously popular, with more than 50,000 viewers from Tel Aviv to Thailand in the three months following its May 2008 launch.
If people take away just one thing from this film, James would like that to be "personal responsibility for seeking out quality information about how to maintain and improve their health".
See foodmatters.tv
