Francis: We have a booklet, Food for People Living with HIV, which is applicable everywhere in the world. It has recipes, it has a vitamin and mineral chart, it gives the kinds of herbs and spices that can be used as therapies -- what's cooling, what's heating, remedies that can be used to treat sores.
What vitamin and mineral supplements do you include?
Francis: We call it ZACES; that's an acronym that we developed to help people remember the vitamins and minerals. It's zinc, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium. We call this the infection fighting, immune boosting combination. We recommend that all our patients take supplements of these. Even an adequate food intake is not enough to deal with the level of immune suppression that happens in HIV disease. We give them diet sheets, and recommend that the supplements be taken in a balance.
For the vitamin A, could they use beta-carotene instead? I am reluctant to suggest vitamin A, because people might take too much.
Francis: We have a problem getting beta-carotene, because it is very expensive for us. So we recommend that they take vitamin A. It really works -- especially when it is supplemented with 20 mg of zinc daily, which is very cheap for us to get.
is the mission of your organization (The Centre, in Harare, Zimbabwe)?
Francis: Our mission, basically, is to teach long-term survival techniques to people living with the virus, based on nutrition and a holistic approach.
I urge people to look more to nutrition as an adjunct to therapy, or as an alternative to therapy. It's amazing the resuscitation that we see -- people who come in and they are terminally ill, and you put them onto an adequate nutrition regime and give them vitamin supplements, and it's like Lazarus, it's like the way people describe what happened with the antiretrovirals. We have seen people recover completely just from getting their nutrition intake adequate, and getting help on coming to terms with and managing their disease.
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