Awakin Call

When Dr. Akil Palanisamy recounts his recovery from a debilitating illness during medical school, he says it began with two words: "bone broth." In hindsight, this may not sound so surprising, because Akil (or "Dr. Akil," as his patients know him) has been a doctor, author, and educator at the forefront of the food-as-medicine movement for the past 20 years. Dr. Akil has been described by leading integrative doctor Mark Hyman as "a unique triple threat in the field," combining expertise in functional medicine, Ayurveda, and the Paleo diet and ancestral lifestyles. At the time that bone broth was given to him as a "prescription," however, Dr. Akil was a vegetarian. He had renounced meat a few years earlier "for ethical, environmental, and spiritual reasons" and had become an active member of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society while in medical school there, having completed his undergraduate work at Harvard. The Ayurvedic practitioner he had sought out for his ailment -- because conventional medicine and phys