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Asthma Can Often Be Controlled With Proper Nutrition
By Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Asthma is an inflammatory disorder of the lungs that has skyrocketed in incidence and mortality worldwide in recent years, doubling within the last 30 years in children. Suffering and deaths continue to rise in spite of declines in air pollution. An amazing 16 percent of children develop asthma, according to a 2001 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I've written before about the dramatic effect a nutritional diet can have on a child's asthma. Jonathan, another patient of mine, serves as another example.

Jonathan is an eight-year-old third grader who had developed asthma when he started first grade two years earlier. He was seen by his pediatrician and given a nebulizer, and later inhaled steroids, to deal with recurrent episodes of wheezing and the inability to exercise without fatigue and breathing difficulties.

Jonathan was an excellent student and was keenly interested in learning how what he ate affected his health and his breathing problem. At the initial visit to my office, Jonathan was instructed on using a spacer with an inhaler and was taken off his three times a day nebulizer treatments. I told him his recovery hinged on the amount of green vegetables he was capable of eating. He was more than cooperative. This eight-year-old said to me, "I will eat dirt if you can fix my breathing." So I said, "How about if I give you great-tasting real food to fix your asthma. You can be a lot better within a year." Jonathan is now in fourth grade. It took about eight months until he no longer required any medication.

He is now the picture of health and uses no inhalers or other asthma medications.

This anecdotal case is not the same thing as a double-blind study, but when you consider the overwhelming evidence in the scientific literature and then apply that knowledge to real kids with medical difficulties, you see lots of great kids who have made impressive recoveries from their allergies and asthma after a year or two of nutritional intervention.

The story of Jonathan (not his real name) is from �Disease-Proof Your Child� by Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

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