Healthy
Living / Nutritional Healing. The Wellsville Diet emphasizes providing the body
with its natural foods, in as natural a state as
possible, to maintain abundant health. Just like bugs don't attack truly
healthy plants or trees, a truly healthy
person will not provide "germs" an atmosphere in which they can
thrive and wreak havoc on the body. To the extent a person is already afflicted
with disease or sickness before they go on the Wellsville Diet, it should be
noted that the body is
self-healing and that healing takes place either by removing the cause of the
disease so that the body can heal itself, or, in the case of a deficiency
problem, by providing the body with proper nutrition so that it meets its
nutritional requirements. With years of mainstream
and alternative medicine pushing "magic bullets" and miracle drugs,
most people believe their problems come from outside of them and the solution
to their problem lies in some substance that is going to make their problems
vanish. The Wellsville Diet emphasizes that healing comes from within and there
are no magic substances outside of the body that will provide a
"cure" for anything.
Raw
vegetable and fruit juices. The Wellsville Diet recognizes certain
deficiencies in our modern produce that can be overcome by drinking the juice
of fresh vegetables and fruit. Since much of our farm lands are depleted of
minerals, the produce growing on this land is lacking in minerals. By juicing
organic vegetables and fruit, it is possible to not only increase the volume
of vegetables or fruit eaten at one sitting, thus increasing the intake of
vitamins and minerals, but to put these vitamins and minerals into a more
readily digestible form. It should be
emphasized that the benefits of raw vegetable and fruit juices come only when
taken in their fresh, raw state. All canned or bottled vegetable and fruit
juices have been pasteurized and are devoid of life and should be strictly
avoided on the Wellsville Diet.
Water. The Wellsville Diet places
a strong emphasis on drinking either pure,
distilled water
or a high quality bottled water. While chloride added to
public water may have helped eliminate certain diseases in times past, it is a
culprit in the mire of degenerative diseases we have fallen into today. Furthermore,
the addition of fluoride, an
industrial-waste byproduct, to our water supply has only added to our problems. The
dead, inorganic chemicals added to water to kill germs continue to kill life
after they enter the human body. Not only are these chemicals not useable by
the human body, but they force the body to waste vital energy in their
elimination, diverting energy in the process that could be better utilized in
bodily repair and normal maintenance.
Regular
exercise.
The
Wellsville Diet takes into account that there are more factors than diet that
influence health. Outside of diet,
nothing is more important than daily exercise to achieve radiant
health. Ideally, the exercise portion of
the program should alternate strength training with cardio training, and
include a stretching regime, as well.
Working from the principle that any exercise is better than none,
however, at the very minimum a daily walk or a simple stretching
routine will be a step in the right direction.
Exercise lifts the spirits and helps deal with stress better than any
man-made drug.
Weight
Control. It has been proven that
being overweight is just as much a detriment to health as smoking. Extra weight burdens the body and leads to
high blood pressure, clogged arteries, and a host of other health problems. In
addition, weight carried around the waist can push on the intestinal tract and
actually hamper proper digestion of food.
In an age where our foods contain less vitamins and minerals than in
times past, getting the most nutrition out of the food we do eat is critical to
good health. With the diet and exercise
portion of the Wellsville Diet, weight control
should come naturally. Weight control falls only below diet and exercise as a critical step toward
radiant health.
The
elimination of unhealthy products. Since the body is self-healing, disease is
eliminated by removing the
cause of disease.
The majority of our modern degenerative diseases are unknown in third world
countries where diets do not contain the processed, devitalized foods and
sugars, unhealthy fats, high amounts of animal protein and dairy that we
consume on a daily basis in America. The Wellsville Diet maintains that if one
eliminates these foods and other unhealthy products, reduces exposure to environmental toxins, and gets plenty of
exercise, fresh air and sunshine, the body will heal itself of disease.
Alcohol and tobacco are also to be eliminated if sickness and disease
are to be avoided. While most people
know of the dangers of smoking, many people underestimate the toll the continued inhalation of multiple toxins
directly into the body takes on the body both physically and mentally.
To compound matters, while eating unhealthy only effects the person eating
unhealthy, smoking is a danger to family and friends in close contact with the
smoker.
Alcohol is a
concentrated sugar that is very hard for the body to metabolize. In excess amounts it damages the liver,
contributes to degeneration of the kidneys and causes bladder problems. Even in moderation, the toll it takes in
bodily energy to metabolize it should not be underestimated. Because of the
soil conditions of our farm lands, staying mineralized in today's world is
harder than ever. Do you really want to waste vital energy, enzymes and
minerals to metabolize something that your body had no nutritional need for to
begin with?
Spiritual
and emotional health. The Wellsville Diet acknowledges that we were created and did
not evolve. And while we may have been
created in the image of our Creator, we are, until redeemed, in a fallen state
of sin, which effects us not only physically but mentally as well. In addition, our bodies are only temporary
and no amount of health is worth spending an eternity away from our Creator. In this regards, nothing should be considered
less important than a personal relationship and saving faith in Jesus Christ,
because it is only through His redemption that true happiness is possible.
The cornerstone
of the Wellsville Diet is based on God's original
diet,
Genesis 1:29: Then God said, "Behold, I
have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the
earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for
you."
The Wellsville
Diet, while being vegan-leaning in practice, acknowledges that God does permit
the eating of animal products and is designed to be more flexible than other
popular raw-food diets or natural hygiene programs.
Understanding Sickness
The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable
minds, such as now rule in the medical profession.
-- Florence
Nightingale
The Two Paths
Many in the
raw-food or alternative medicine communities would divide medicine into two
main categories. Down one path, you could trace what has developed into our
modern medical system back to Louis
Pasteur, who helped propagate the Germ
Theory of disease. Down the other path, you would find those
that teach the way to avoid sickness is to have a
healthy body.
While it is
pretty obvious which direction the world has taken, it should be noted that
several books have been written showing credible evidence that the alternate
theory of Pasteur's time period was actually the correct theory. One book, The
Curse of Louis Pasteur, by Nancy Appleton, PhD, is worth reading. It shows in detail the differences between
Pasteur and those who repudiated his Germ Theory of disease. Chief among these
people were Antoine Béchamp, who was an occasional assistant to Pasteur.
What Pasteur taught, basically, was
that blood is sterile and that invading germs from outside our bodies are
responsible for human sickness and disease.
What this theory lacked in scientific proof was more than made up for in
the fact that people were absolved of any responsibility for their illness, and
this was popular both with doctors, their patients, and drug companies. This
fact, combined with Pasteur's apparent success with vaccines and Alexander
Fleming's discovery of antibiotics, launched a multi-billion dollar industry
the equivalent of a house built on sand.
What Béchamp and others taught, in general,
was that the human body is full of
bacteria,
and that this bacteria was neither good nor bad, but
able to adjust and change according to the conditions it was growing in — the
human body. If the body was
not properly maintained, bacteria could change into fungus or other destructive
forms.To
this effect, Béchamp proclaimed, "disease is born
of us and in us."
This theory would
later be proven when science developed the tools to do so. In 1913, Royal
Rife (1888-1971) developed the
Universal Microscope, which was
tremendously more powerful than the microscopes of the day, and allowed the viewing of live material, unlike traditional
microscopes at the time. Through his invention Rife demonstrated that by
altering the food supply and environment, normal intestinal bacteria could be
converted into typhoid germs, and that it was possible to reverse the process
and convert them back into normal intestinal bacteria.
Incidentally, while
definitely anecdotal, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) also noted that disease
was a factor of the condition of the host, not the result of invading germs. In
her book, Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote:
Is it not living
in a continual mistake, to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate
entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as
conditions like a dirty or clean condition, and just as much under our own
control; or rather as the reactions . . . against the conditions in which we
have placed ourselves? I was brought up by scientific men and ignorant women
distinctly to believe that smallpox was a thing of which there was once a
specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself in a perpetual chain of
descent, just as much as that there was a first dog (or a first pair of dogs)
and that smallpox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin
without there having been a parent dog.
Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose smallpox
growing up in the first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded
wards, where it would not by any possibility have been 'caught' but must have
begun. Nay, more, I have seen diseases
begin, grow up and pass into one another. New dogs do not pass into cats. I have seen, for
instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up, and with a
little more, typhoid fever, and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same
ward or hut. For diseases, as all
experience shows, are adjectives, not noun
substantives. . . The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak,
uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific
diseases; there are specific disease conditions."
If Florence Nightingale
is right, and it is a continual mistake to look upon disease as a separate
entity, then how much more so is it to not view conventional medicine in the
same light? Change in this area will be
difficult, however, because from everyone's earliest moment until his dying
day, we are inundated with the message that sickness is out of his
control; that for every ailment, there is something in a pill, a bottle, or an
injection to remedy it; that if there is no magic substance to remedy the
situation, a surgeon can remove the problem from our body, with the result that
almost everyone now feels that the solution to any problem they face lies
outside of their body. Want to lose weight? Take a pill. Want to wake up? Drink
a beverage. Can't sleep? Take a pill. Feeling blue? Take a pill.
And to complicate
matters almost to the point of despair, the
medical Establishment has teamed up with government to use the force of
coercion to ensure that the Germ Theory is advanced — and drug company profit
maintained — by the establishment of a medical monopoly. It is sad that in America, a country that
prides itself on being free, that many people are forced to leave the country to
undergo alternative treatments for diseases.
The
Symptoms Are The Cure
Since it has been
demonstrated that disease
is the reflection of the state of health of the body, or lack thereof, and not
that of invading germs, it should be noted that what most
people consider to be sickness or disease, is in fact the body attempting to
heal itself. God created our bodies to be self
healing. It is no small irony that what
meets today's definition of sickness or disease, is actually the body
attempting to do what it was designed by God to do.
If
a person has not been taking care of his or her body and has the conditions
favorable for normal bacteria to turn into "bad" germs and flourish,
at some point the body will
raise its temperature
to a point that kills off the problem germs and brings the situation back under
its control. But how many people see fever as the sickness and feel that they have solved the
problem if they take a pill that stops
the fever? Almost
everyone. And the sad part is
that by overriding the body's defense mechanisms, people leave themselves open
to more severe sickness in the future.
At every point,
if something is wrong with the body, what people see as sickness is actually
the body's cure. And some of these symptoms are critical to proper
healing. The beginning of healing for
any wound is swelling. Swelling is a
must for healing,
yet the
first thing a doctor will do for an injury is to prescribe something to keep
the swelling down. If something hurts, pain medication is prescribed to
cover up the pain, but pain is the body's way to let you know something is
wrong.
If the problem is
bacterial in nature, antibiotics are prescribed. But once again, the problem
was part of the cure. When given the
conditions that let normal bacteria turn into "bad" bacteria or
germs, what is actually happening is the body attempting to heal and repair itself. Bacteria, or what we consider "bad" bacteria, is
scavenger-like in nature, which means that, like scavenger birds only feed off
of dead animals, this bacteria only feeds off of dead or decaying matter in the
body. It is there to clean out the body, just like scavenger birds are there to
clean up the environment. Once the
bacteria accomplish the clean up of the dead or decaying matter in the body, it
will die off,
because this bacteria cannot live in an environment of health and life. If
antibiotics are used to kill off the bacteria, it leaves the body with the
waste material it was trying to get rid of, and without removing this
condition, a recurrence of the problem, or worse, in the future is almost
certain. (It should be noted that a bacterial overgrowth does give off toxins,
and that, given the condition of the individual, under certain extreme circumstances, it may be appropriate to stop the
overgrowth.)
Dr. Robert
Mendelsohn noted this in his book, How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of
Your Doctor, that the unnecessary use of antibiotics may actually work to
stop an infection, but will then leave the person susceptible to multiple
infections until the body develops its own resistance to the bacteria (or more
correctly, the conditions that allowed the bad bacteria to thrive in the first
place are removed):
Your Doctor
almost certainly won't tell you that, although the use of penicillin may
shorten the course of the strep symptoms by three or four days, it may also
cause recurrences of the infection all winter long. Antibiotics,
while knocking out the strep bacilli, also prevent the development of the
antibodies that are the body's natural defense against the disease. If the strep infection
is not treated, but allowed to run its course, the body will produce antibodies
to fight it that can continue to protect the child against reinfection during
the remainder of the winter season.
What Mendelsohn —
like so many medical doctors — failed to note, however, is that bacteria in the
body is completely normal, and antibiotics
indiscriminately kill off all bacteria, whether normal or "bad." A person with a poor diet and poor health and
in need of antibiotics for one reason or another is already set up for
having yeast and fungal problems, because yeast and fungus are what normal
bacteria degenerate into as health deteriorates. Having the conditions for disease in your
body and then indiscriminately killing off all bacteria is a recipe for
disaster.
Antibiotics were
developed to be used in situations of life and death, which is certainly not
the way they are being used at this time. When antibiotics are used for
non-life threatening illnesses, it may very well appear that they solve the
problem, but in reality, all they do is buy someone some time; any
appearance of health in these instances is illusionary at best.
Contagious
Disease
If disease and
illness is seen in its true state, a lack of health and not the consequences of
"invading" germs, then how are contagious diseases possible?
Everybody knows of outbreaks of certain illnesses like flu and how it seems to go in cycles or "make the
rounds." Everybody has heard of
outbreaks of certain illnesses on a cruise ship or in an office building, and,
if asked, would probably respond that germs or viruses were the culprits
involved in causing the illness.
There are some in
the raw-food communities that claim there are no such things as contagious
disease and that all sickness is the result of poor health and not that of
invading germs. Since it is rather hard to deny certain patterns of illness, it
should be noted that there are circumstances where sickness does come from
outside the body, but sickness from these sources still relies more on the
state of your body when it comes into contact with it than it does from being
"invaded." Nancy Appleton,
PhD, wrote of the two main ways to contract an infectious disease in The
Curse of Louis Pasteur:
It is possible to
get an infectious disease in one of either two ways. The first is through a
toxic terrain, where the body's own cells have [changed] from healthy to
unhealthy bacteria. The second is through exposure to someone else who is
ill. If a sickness lingers for days with
sneezes, a cough and runny nose, or if it develops into something more serious,
you know you have a compromised immune system.
While there are
no guarantees with life, a person who changes his diet and lifestyle to a
Wellsville Diet-type of program or other raw food program that provides at
least 75% of its food in a raw, uncooked state — and includes getting plenty of
fresh air, exercise, sunshine, etc. — will find
he gets sick about 90% less than when on the SAD diet (Standard American Diet).
And if sickness does occur, as Nancy Appleton pointed out, it will be very
mild and short lived. A person who has
made the correct diet and lifestyle changes may find that an illness that
incapacitates a SAD-diet eating family member or friend for days or more,
may only cause a little extra fatigue or other very mild symptoms that
last about a day, if it does anything at all. There are numerous testimonies
from those on raw-food diets who say they have gone many years without any
illness whatsoever.
Dr. Edward Howell
wrote in, Enzyme Nutrition, "An African watering hole supplies
drinking water to hundreds of animals, and although it is dirty and carries
dozens of questionable and possibly carcinogenic chemicals, none
of them become ill from it. The
animals are protected by their superb body chemistry and maintained by a raw diet
from which no enzyme nutrients have been removed."
The reason that
the animals do not become sick from drinking questionable water is because they are so healthy from eating their
normal diets that their bodies do not provide an environment for the bad germs
to live and flourish in.
The mere fact
that so many people on Wellsville Diet-type programs report a major decrease in
routine illnesses and even the reversal of chronic disease should be an
indication that it is much closer to the proper diet for humans than either the
SAD diet or other fad diets, especially those diets very high in cooked animal
products.
A Special Word About Colds
Dr. Norman Walker, considered to be the Father of Juicing, and who lived to
be between 110 and 118 years old (sources vary) following a predominantly
raw-food diet, wrote of the common cold in, Fresh Vegetables and Fruit
Juices:
Think this over when you "catch a cold."
The waste matter
in the system, if not eliminated, builds up fermentation and heat in the body
in the natural course of events. When such fermentation has reached a
sufficiently toxic state, Nature becomes worried about our neglect to keep the
body clean within, and gives us a warning in the form
of mucous elimination which has been labeled "a cold." It is just as simple as that, and we have
seen it demonstrated over and over and over again, that if the warning is
ignored and disregarded, more serious conditions develop, conditions which are
so well-known that a list of them covers a medical encyclopedia.
Never curse a
cold which has caught up with you.
Rather be thankful for the timely warning, and do something about
it. No drug was ever known to cure a
cold without the development of eventual afflictions of a more serious nature,
rarely attributed to such drugs.
To put it
briefly, a cold is the result of the
secretion of too much accumulated waste, and insufficient and improper
elimination. The Colon is the recipient of all this corruption.
Toxins spread throughout the body generating unhealthy mucus in the sinus
cavities. Excessive waste matter is the contributing factor in the generation
of mucus. The result — A COLD
True to form, our
bodies were created by God to be self-healing. And once again, we have the cure
to a problem being seen as sickness.
When eating an improper diet, the body tries to
eliminate the many toxins generated by such a diet as quickly as possible. But doing so requires a lot energy, which is
already taxed from an improper diet to begin with. Eventually the body becomes overwhelmed, allowing a
buildup of waste and toxins in the body. At some point, the body rallies to clean itself out,
with the result being, as Dr. Walker pointed out, what we label a cold.
In times past,
"catching" a cold meant getting lots of fluids and bed rest. Now there are countless medications designed
to cover up the symptoms of the cold and allow a person to carry out his normal
daily routine. And the symptoms that are seen as illness are nothing more than
the body's attempt to heal itself. The principle here is the same as with
taking antibiotics to rid the body of a bacterial overgrowth, the symptoms may
be stopped, but doing so allows the conditions to remain that caused the problem
to begin with. A person who has stopped his symptoms may feel that he is now
"well," but just as with antibiotics, this
appearance is illusionary at best.
Once again, a
person who covers up his symptoms with man-made drugs sets himself up for the
same problem, or worse, in the future. And there are always risks from taking
the drugs themselves, as all drugs have
side effects.
Several years ago
many cold and flu medicines containing the drug phenylpropanolamine were pulled
from the shelf by the FDA because the drug can cause the heart to race and lead
to a stroke. But just because phenylpropanolamine has been removed from these
chemical concoctions does not mean that they are safe now, because there are
many other questionable ingredients in them, whose harmful effects will not be
known for years. Keep taking them and
you could aid the FDA in finding the next drug to pull from the shelf — after
you have a stroke or worse.
Catching a cold
should not be seen as a bad experience, but rather, as a cleaning experience
that will leave you better off health wise.
If
colds are coming frequently, it is a sure indication that diet and lifestyle
change are needed.
The Three Theories of Healing
There are only three basic
theories for true healing:
1) The problem was caused by an environmental problem
— toxins, radiation, smoking, etc. — and the
environmental problem is removed, allowing the body to heal.
2) The problem is caused by a nutritional deficiency
— scurvy or pellagra, for example — and the diet is improved to the point where
all the body's nutritional requirements are met, allowing the body to heal.
3) The problem is repaired by the body using its
metabolic enzymes.
The
body has 2 types of enzymes: metabolic and digestive.
Metabolic enzymes are used by the
body to help repair normal wear and tear in the body.
Approximately
80% of the body's energy is used up in the digestion of food, however. An overworked,
stressed body or an improper diet — one high in cooked animal products, overly cooked
and devitalized, processed foods, excess sugar, etc. — can interfere with
the body's ability to create metabolic enzymes,
reducing the body's ability to heal itself.
Fasting, caloric
restriction,
or a change in diet can allow the
body to divert the energy normally used in digesting food into energy used to
produce the metabolic enzymes used in bodily maintenance and repair.
These three
methods are the body's only course for true healing, and ultimately, any
healing is going to be done by the body with metabolic enzymes. Dr. Edward
Howell, in his book on enzymes, Enzyme Nutrition, wrote,
"The old saying that nature will cure really
refers to metabolic enzyme activity, because there is no other mechanism in the
body to cure anything."
It is for this
reason that it is no accident that fasting is one
of the oldest healing techniques known to man, or that caloric
restriction is one of the only scientifically proven methods of increasing
longevity.
It should be
emphasized, however, that even though ultimately healing will done through the
body's metabolic enzyme process, a proper diet is still a requirement
to give the body the materials it needs to repair and heal itself. While it is wrong to look outside the body
for healing substances, ensuring that the body meets all its nutritional
requirements is still an essential part of both the healing process and in the
normal everyday maintenance of a healthy body. The 5th Century BC physician
Hippocrates — considered by many to be the father of modern medicine —
correctly said, "Your food shall be your medicine" and "Your
medicine shall be your food."
Of course, there
are other factors in health and healing, such as getting the proper amount of
sleep, getting plenty of exercise, fresh air and sunshine, and clean water,
among others. But it should be kept in
mind that ultimately it is the body that is healing itself and not some magic
substance from outside the body.
A proper
understanding of this should make the error of man-made drugs abundantly
clear. No drug — especially a
petroleum-based one, which most drugs are — will cure any disease,
it will only cover up the symptoms. In
fact, one of the reasons chemicals work to cover up symptoms is because the
body has to devote resources into handling the chemical that has been ingested,
taking resources away from the body's healing attempt that caused the symptoms
the drug was taken for! It
may be an oversimplification, but this actually works in a manner similar to
the cartoons where a person has a headache and someone takes a hammer and
smashes the person's toe in order to take his mind off of his headache.
It is crucial to
note that almost all drugs are toxic to some degree, even drugs as simple as
aspirin. In masking the symptoms that the drug was taken for, the toxic
substances cause problems in other parts of the body. Read a physicians desk reference — every drug
has a list of side effects. Many doctors
will prescribe one drug for one symptom and another drug for the side effects
of the first drug. And when the patient becomes depressed from all of the
man-made toxins in his or her system, the doctor will prescribe an
anti-depressant!
Is it any wonder
the Germ Theory of disease was pushed instead of the correct theory? A doctor makes his or her money from
seeing patients repeatedly, not from healing patients. How convenient to set up
a system which depends on a drug for each symptom, which not only doesn't solve
the problem but creates new ones, requiring more office visits. It is a scam
that would be criminal in any other industry, but the god-like status of
doctors here in America
keeps anyone from asking too many questions!
The
Road To Nowhere
Well we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
-- The Talking
Heads
The Road To Nowhere
Three Legs of Metabolic Activity (
uncompleted section)
Vaccines
"The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in
the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass
immunization."
That statement was not made by an unknown person posting on an Internet message
forum or written by a so-called "quack" involved with alternative
medicine, but by the award-winning Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D., who was a
practicing pediatrician for nearly thirty years, who also held positions such
as director of Project Head Start's Medical Consultation Service, chairman of
the Medical Licensing Committee for the State of Illinois, and associate
professor of Preventive Medicine and Community Health in the School of Medicine
of the University of Illinois.
In his book How To Raise A Healthy Child In Spite of Your
Doctor, Dr. Mendelsohn asked that readers keep an open mind as he
"attacked the 'bread and butter' of pediatric practice," the
equivalent, according to Dr. Mendelsohn, of a priest's denying the
infallibility of the pope. He then went on to outline his core arguments against vaccination:
·
There
is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited
with eliminating any childhood disease.
·
It
is commonly believed that the Salk vaccine was responsible for halting the
polio epidemics that plagued American children in the 1940s and 1950s. If so,
why did the epidemics also end in Europe,
where polio vaccine was not so extensively used?
·
There
are significant risks associated with every immunization and numerous
contraindications that may make it dangerous for the shots to be given to
children.
·
While
the myriad short-term hazards of most immunizations are known (but rarely
explained), no one knows the long-term consequences of injecting foreign
proteins into the body of your child.
·
There
is a growing suspicion that immunization against relatively harmless childhood
diseases may be responsible for the dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases since
mass inoculations were introduced.
As Dr. Mendelsohn
pointed out, routine vaccinations are the bread and butter of a pediatric
practice, and because of that, doctors continue to defend them to the death;
"the question parents should be asking," he wrote, "is: Whose
Death?"
At the end of the
year 2000, there were approximately 40 vaccines mandated in the AMA's (American
Pediatric Association) schedule, some of which are scheduled to be administered
shortly after the baby is pulled from the womb (and some of these are for
diseases only a sexually promiscuous adult or an intravenous drug user should
have to worry about). The production of the most common vaccines involves many
things that would make most adults recoil in horror if they knew more about
it, yet we regularly inject these concoctions straight into the veins of babies
and children — totally bypassing the normal route germs or viruses would use to
enter the human body.
Some of the ingredients in vaccines include: neomycin, sorbitol, hydrolyzed gelatin, aluminum
phosphate, formaldehyde, ammonium sulfate, washed sheep red blood cells,
glycerol, sodium chloride, gentamicin sulfate, polymyxin, betapropiolactone,
aluminum hydroxide, phenoxy-ethanol (antifreeze), polysorbate 20, streptomycin,
polymyxin B, calf serum, and thimerosal (supposedly to be reduced or eliminated in
vaccines as a precautionary measure, since thimerosal contains mercury).
And the mediums used to culture the germs or
viruses include:
human diploid cells from human aborted
fetal tissue, porcine (pig) pancreatic hydrolysate of casein, chick embryos,
embryonic fluid from chicken eggs, cells cultivated from monkey kidney cells,
and fetal rhesus monkey lung cells.
Considering what
exactly is in them, it is not hard to understand why vaccines have been linked to:
SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which
causes an estimated 8,000 to 10,500 deaths each year, and autism, which has increased three-fold over an twenty-five year period. Vaccines have also been linked
to the ever-increasing rise of autoimmune
diseases in children
such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple
sclerosis, lupus, asthma, and even to cancer and leukemia.
Interestingly, a
recent study concluded that there was no link between autism and vaccines. In
writing a reply to this study, Dr. Randall Neustaedter, author of the Vaccine
Guide, commented that autism did not exist before vaccines and further noted that many parents had seen their children develop autism
days, even hours, after they receive a vaccine.
These comments are supported
by research from the Pfeiffer Treatment Center in Naperville, Illinois,
a nonprofit research and treatment organization that focuses on the nutritional
and toxic metal components of behavioral disorders. The Pfeiffer Treatment
Center, which has treated
over 12,000 patients, recently discovered that most autism-spectrum patients exhibit evidence of abnormal functioning of the metallothionein protein (MT), and many
of the classic features of autism can be explained by this dysfunction. The
Center believes that autism results from a genetic defect in MT functioning
followed by an environmental insult. Clare Kron,
explained the connection between the MT defect and vaccines in a letter to Alternative
Medicine magazine:
Many classic
symptoms of autism may be explained by an
MT defect in infancy, including GI tract problems, heightened sensitivity
to toxic metals, and abnormal behaviors. A total of 499 of the 503 autism
patients surveyed exhibited evidence of this metal-metabolism disorder, with
blood samples indicating severely elevated copper/zinc ratios.
The study
concluded that two elements were necessary for the onset of autism: first, the
defective MT, and second, an "environmental
insult," such as exposure to toxic metals or another toxic substance.
Since MT is
directly involved in neuronal development and maturation of the brain and GI
tract, the timing of exposure to environmental insults is critical. By age
three, these systems may have sufficiently matured so that such toxins can no
longer provoke autism. Pfeiffer therefore recommends delaying immunization,
with or without thimerosal, until three years of age.
Ironically, some
doctors feel that normal childhood illnesses are part of the way in which the
immune system becomes fully developed. Commenting on an article from the Lancet,
Michael Dye, author of Vaccinations, Deceptions & Tragedy wrote:
The fact that the
normal progression of measles was halted by the vaccination appears to have
prevented the body from destroying the measles virus. This destruction of the
virus takes place in the "spots" for which measles is known, but when
the vaccine prevents the spots and fever from occurring, the measles virus is
not destroyed, and stays in the body through adulthood.
The Lancet
article in question, titled "Measles
Virus Infection Without Rash in Childhood Is Related to Disease in Adult
Life," found that of those who tested positive for the measles virus
but had the rash suppressed by vaccines, a good portion went on to develop such
autoimmune diseases as sebacious skin disease, degenerative disease of the bone
and cartridge, cancer, skin cancers, and cases of multiple sclerosis.
Vaccines
represent the pinnacle of arrogance in our medical, scientific, and political
communities. God created our bodies with immune systems that work if given the
right environment in which to do so. Every attempt man makes to improve upon
God falls short. That vaccines do not work should come as no surprise to
anyone. What is extremely painful here is that so many children have died — in
some cases more so than would have died from the diseases certain vaccines were
supposed to prevent — from what is the modern day medical equivalent of the
Tower of Babel.
Dr. Mendelsohn,
M.D., asked the question, "Have we traded mumps and measles for cancer and
leukemia?" Sadly, it appears the answer is yes.
Baby Formulas
For all the
uncertainties surrounding the human diet, that babies
are supposed to drink milk is one of the few things almost everyone can agree
on. That this milk should be breast milk should also be a given, but
unfortunately it isn't. Although most literature put out by formula
manufacturers starts out by saying that breast milk is best, up to seventy percent of American babies receive
baby formula.
And of those that are breastfed, the duration for doing so is often much
shorter now than at any point in history.
Most commercial
baby formulas are either cow milk or soy based. While improvements in
manufacturing have made formula more closely resemble breast milk, the end
result is still a far inferior product. The oils used — usually a blend of oils
— often contain some heavily processed oils, such as soy oil.
Beth Montgomery
wrote in, Introducing Living Foods to Your Child: Guidebook for Babies
through Two Years:
Have you ever looked
at the ingredients on the back of a formula can? The ingredients of a major
name brand, lacto-free formula, are: #1 Corn
Syrup #2 Oils (several different types). Ingredients are listed
by order of quantity. The highest quantity ingredient in the formula is corn
syrup, only to be followed by oil!
Now you know
those vitamins and minerals we parents buy the formula for? We buy the promise
that our babies are being given balanced nutrition. The label lists them
directly after the corn syrup and oil, but only after the statement:
"contains less than 2% of the following."
Do you realize
this means that 98% of the
infant formula
that costs $10 a can is SUGAR and
OIL???
Less than 2% of the formula is vitamins and minerals. These vitamins aren't
even in their natural form. They are synthetic and sprayed into powder. We pay
dearly with both our pocketbooks and our children's health.
When children are
weaned off of formula and they are eating only one or two different foods,
pediatricians will usually tell you not to worry about supplements. although your child is not getting a balanced diet,
supplements for babies less than one year old are not advised. I was told there
is actually no dosing information for children under a year old. Now, I ask you
this, if there is no dosing information available, how do the formula
manufacturers know the right amounts of minerals and vitamins to add to the
formula?
Also, how can I
be doing damage if I give my baby living, whole foods rather than processed
sugar and oil sprayed with vitamins? I have confronted my doctor's office with
these questions and when I stated that formula can't be good for my child
because of the ingredients, they could only tell me that my baby was healthy
because he was in the top percentage for his weight. Hereby my
"ding-dong" argument was formed. If 95% of what I ate was Hostess
Ding-Dongs sprayed with vitamins, I too would at least be in the top percentile
for weight, but would it mean I was healthy? Take your children's health into
your own hands. Feed them living-foods.
It must be
understood that the sugar and oils in breast
milk come
in an living, organic form, which also includes living enzymes, vitamins, hormones, and antibodies tailored to meet the needs of a human baby. The
sugar and oils in baby formula are heavily processed and devitalized, and if
the formula is cow milk based, any hormones that manage to survive the
processing are hormones meant for a baby calf. Furthermore, if the baby formula
is soy based, soy is one of the most heavily processed foods in the human diet,
often containing traces of harsh chemicals used to make soy — which is not
suitable as food for humans in its unprocessed form — edible and which also has
naturally occurring, powerful phyto-estrogens, which can impair thyroid function
and even affect sexual development.
It has been known
for years that bottle-fed
babies are sick more often than breastfed babies and have a higher mortality
rate. In
addition, more recently, it has been demonstrated that due to the human body's
developing antibodies to foreign proteins in cow's milk, the risk of diabetes
in children increases greatly, especially in children who may be predisposed to
diabetes. The reason this happens is not totally clear yet, but scientists
speculate that the baby's immune system creates antibodies when exposed to
foreign insulin in cow's milk, and these antibodies play a role in an
autoimmune response that turns the baby's immune system against the cells in
the pancreas gland which produce insulin — leading to Type 1 diabetes.
Cow's milk may
also contribute to diabetes because it is also a factor in obesity — a known
risk factor for diabetes. Recent studies at the University
of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian
University, in which
32,200 Scottish children were monitored, found that those breastfed during
infancy were thirty percent less likely to become obese as children. While
again, the reasons for this are not yet fully known, one reason may be that
many baby formulas contain corn syrup or sugar for the carbohydrate, which may
lead the child to favor sugary foods. Another reason may be that cow's milk
contains a growth hormone identical to a human's growth hormone — only the
hormone in cow's milk is designed to turn a baby calf into a 700-pound-plus
cow.
Humans are the
only species that drinks the milk of another species and the only species that
continues to drink milk after weaning. Given that many of the reasons people
drink milk — calcium for instance — are actually negated by the pasteurization
process, which renders many of the nutrients in milk much less absorbable by
the human body, the problems that make cow's milk unsuitable for adults, such
as lactose intolerance, also holds true for children. Even if somehow cow's
milk could be demonstrated to be the good food it is portrayed to be by those
who profit from selling it, there are still the issues of the way the cows that
produce much of our milk are raised: the improper foods they are fed, the
antibiotics they are given because their living conditions and food make them
sick, and the hormones they are given to increase milk production — all of
which effect the quality of or actually show up in the cow's milk.
Many mothers are
just not given all the facts on this issue. And of those that are presented the
true facts, many will reason that bottle feeding "just can't be that
bad," because, after all, either they or other family members were bottle
fed, and they "turned out just fine." It must be kept in mind
that bottle feeding, on the scale it is happening here in America, is a
relatively new development in human history and all the consequences may not be
known for many more years. As it stands now, the federal government is issuing
warnings that adult-onset diabetes is reaching epidemic proportions in increasingly
younger Americans, and it could be years before the role, if any, bottle
feeding is playing in that epidemic is firmly established.
If the known
facts are not enough to deter someone from bottle feeding, then the unknown
should also be considered. The fact is that God created the perfect food for
babies, and it is human folly to think we can duplicate it. Fifty years-plus
after bottle feeding came in vogue, with all of our technology and know-how,
scientist are still discovering vital components of breast milk that are
missing from baby formula, and it will be many more years before some of them
will be approved to be incorporated into baby formula, if at all, and other
elements — the living components — are irreproducible by science. And with each
new discovery, little is mentioned of all the children who were deprived of
those vital elements during one of the most critical developmental phases of
their lives.
Coffee, Tea, Colas and
Soft Drinks
Start asking
around and you will find that many people will admit to drinking very little
plain old water. You will even find people that will admit to never drinking
any water whatsoever. We are so used to drinking coffee, tea, colas and soft
drinks that it is very common to hear people say they don't even like the way
water tastes.
Americans, in
general, are a nation of people who feel they "need something" in
order to keep them going. Many start the day with coffee, or worse, a soft
drink. Breaks and meals throughout the day are usually always accompanied by
tea or soft drinks. By the end of the day, people are so hyped-up on sugar and
caffeine that many turn to alcohol to "relax," and it is not uncommon
for these people to take over-the-counter sleep aids or Tylenol PM just so they
are able to go to sleep at night. Before long a vicious cycle of chemically
induced ups and downs is started that takes a huge toll on physical and mental
health.
While you will
run across a study here or there that suggests caffeine is beneficial to the
human body, caffeine is something a person wants to avoid. In fact, any
substance that causes withdrawal symptoms when a person stops ingesting it,
should be crossed off the list of items you want to allow into your body.
Caffeine combined with sugar is an especially noxious combination.
Very few adults
would eat seven teaspoons of sugar at one sitting; however, that is just what
they are doing with each can of Coke or Pepsi and many other canned drinks.
A can of Coke has
39 grams of sugar and a can of Pepsi has 41 grams of sugar. That is about seven
teaspoons (or 13 lumps) of sugar per can! And that is just the amount found in
a 12-ounce can of cola. Soft drink manufactures are moving to plastic bottles
that come in 16 - 20-ounce bottles or more. Keep in mind, this is just taking
into account the large amount of sugar, usually in the form of corn syrup, as
soft drinks also contain a host of other ingredients that should be avoided
such as, caramel, citric acid, corn starch, potassium chloride, potassium
phosphate, and salt; not to mention artificial sweeteners such as saccharin or
Aspartame, which are actually worse for you than the sugar.
As the nation
moves into an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, the real winners are the soft
drink companies, who enrich themselves at our children's expense; the doctors,
who line their pockets with the money of those who have made themselves sick on
these unnatural, devitalized foods; and the drug companies, who manufacture
drugs to keep our children, hopped-up on sugar, caffeine and other processed
foods, under control.
Grains and Flours
With the
exception of vegetable oils, few items in the American diet embody such idyllic
notion of health as grains. For the average person who makes a conscious effort
to start eating "healthy," invariably this means cutting down on meat
and animal products and to increase the amount of grains consumed, usually in
the form of cereals, pastas, flours and rice. For those who become vegetarian,
this often means eating large quantities of grains, rice and other heavily
processed foods, such as soy, but there is a problem with grains..
The problem with
grains is multifaceted. It isn't just that these foods are often heavily
processed because if that were the case, a person could just purchase a grain
mill and organic whole grains to overcome these problems. To understand the
real problems with grains, it must be approached from a "paleo" or
hunter-gather point of view.
"Paleo diets," sometimes described as "caveman diets," approach diet from a pre-technology point of
view.They eliminate anything from the diet that would have to be farmed, opting
instead for foods that a person could gather in the wild, gather using a
minimum of tools, and eat with a minimum of cooking or processing. With few exceptions, paleo diets usually
adopt a godless worldview which is based on evolution. However, if a person envisioned the foods
eaten by an explorer as he traveled across an untamed wilderness, he would have
a basic understanding of paleo diets without having to adopt its worldview.
Those who
advocate so-called paleo diets maintain that the shift to an agricultural-based
society brought with it the beginnings of modern disease. Ray Audette, the author of Neanderthin,
noted, "The skeletons of Neolithic farmers show the effects of poor
nutrition. They died much younger, were shorter, and had many more cavities, as
well as fewer teeth, than their immediate hunter-gatherer ancestors. These same
remains also show the first evidence of obesity in humans." Speaking of
the same early farmers, Loren Cordain, Ph.D., wrote in The Paleo Diet, "They also had
more osteoporoses, rickets, and other bone mineral disorders, thanks to cereal-based diets. For the first time,
humans were plagued with vitamin- and mineral-deficiency diseases —
scurvy, beriberi, pellagra,
vitamin A and zinc deficiencies,
and iron-deficiency anemia."
The important
thing to note is that these diseases
developed in early agriculture-based societies in
which the grains being eaten were minimally processed whole grains which had
seen very little if any crossbreeding or hybridization and were grown on fresh
farmland.
If these foods
caused problems, contrast that with our modern
grains which have been highly crossbred, hybridized, and now genetically
modified and grown on over-farmed land whose mineral-deficient soil would not
be able to grow food without the aid of fertilizer. And, as if that alone were
not enough, the little nutrition that is in these foods — and again, even in
their ideal state they caused problems for humans attempting to live off of
them — is mostly discarded in the processing, leaving foods containing large
percentages of nothing but sugars and starches.
In an article
entitled, "Stabilized Rice Bran," which was featured in Alternative
Medicine magazine, Betty Kamen, Ph.D., made some interesting observations
on cereal grains in our diets:
The trend in our
diet over the years has been toward large-scale elimination of dietary
nutrients and trace elements. This is a practice that has accelerated dramatically
in the last century, especially in recent decades. Much of our food has been
stripped down to a few macronutrients such as sugar and starch, while the
complex array of micronutrients is being discarded.
Our bodies have
never adapted to this slow but devastating change in the quality of our food.
Compared with the diet of any healthy animal living in the wild, the human diet
is "abnormal and exotic, driven by style and economics," as the
director of a British cancer research institute recently remarked. And looking
at the diets of our ancient ancestors, the food we consume is a sorry trade-off
for quantity versus quality.
In the same
article Mrs. Kamen described the processing of rice: About 65% of the rice
nutrients are in the bran, the seed coat (or polish) covering the white
interior kernel. During the milling process, the hull or outer covering of the
rice grain, is first removed, and then the bran coat
is removed in a step called polishing the rice. She went on to point out that
the rice germ, also containing more nutrition than the starches and sugars left
in processed white rice, is also discarded. And if you thought brown rice —
which is brown because a thin layer of the bran is left on the rice — overcomes
the problems of white rice, Mrs. Kamen noted that the milling process was
damaging enough to the bran that the enzyme lipase was released into the bran.
As Mrs. Kamen stated, "Consequently, almost all brown rice contains rancid
oils to some degree. The absolute
nutritional superiority of brown rice is therefore questionable."
Wheat grains suffer the same fate, if not worse. Wheat flour also has the
bran — which, like rice, has the highest percentage of the nutrition and
vitamins of the grain — removed as well as the germ, leaving nothing but the
white starchy endosperm, which is ground into white flour and then, in the
majority of cases, bleached with chlorine, a potent toxin. To improve the
baking consistency of this flour, it is then treated with other chemicals, such
as aluminum chloride, calcium propionate, nitrogen dioxide, potassium iodate,
etc. Ross Hume Hall, Ph.D., in an article entitled, "Enriched White Bread
Really?" commented that the "highly refined wheat product has been
stripped of 11 known vitamins, half a dozen nutritionally significant minerals,
as well as the essential fatty acids." The flour, stripped of natural
vitamins, then has niacin, riboflavin, thiamin and the mineral iron added back
to it, in the form of cheap vitamins that are of questionable use by the body, so
that it can be labeled, "enriched."
Like rice and
wheat, corn also suffers from the
modern production methods and processing. Cornmeal, which shouldn't be confused
with corn flour, is milled yellow corn which has been shelled, dehulled and
degermed to give it the longest shelf-life possible. Because much of its
nutrition is lost in this processing, cheap vitamins — thiamin, riboflavin, and
niacin and one mineral, iron — are added back to it so that it too may be
labeled "enriched."
Corn is the
second largest crop in America
and probably one of the most hybridized and genetically modified crops. Gary Null, an author, consumer
advocate, and investigative reporter wrote of the dangers of hybridized corn in
a piece entitled, "The Hidden Hazard of Hybrids":
In order to breed
corn that would produce more food per acre, scientists created hybrid
varieties. One of the reasons hybrids are able to produce more is because they
are sterile; energy normally allocated to reproduction is redirected toward
growth. But some feel that this unnatural manipulation has also made hybrids
nutritionally inferior plants.
Studies have
revealed that hybrid corn varieties are
less nutritious than their un-hybridized counterparts. In one comparison of
open-pollinated (non-hybrid) corn and hybrid corn, the open-pollinated variety
had 75% more crude protein, 875% more copper, 345% more iron, and 205% more
manganese. Similar differences were noted for calcium, magnesium, zinc and
sodium. Another study found that hybrid corn was unable to absorb cobalt and
other trace minerals from the soil.
While hybrids may
produce more bushels per acre, open-pollinated corn will out-produce hybrids in
terms of nutrients per acre. And nutrients, after all, are what food is all
about. However, farmers make their profits on volume, not nutrient quality.
Hybrid corn is also more susceptible to certain insect pests, which insures
brisk sales of toxic pesticides and keeps chemical companies happy. (Based on excerpts from Spectrum Magazine and information
from Acres USA, March 1998).
In many cases
even if a product has a less processed form of grain in it, the other
ingredients aren't something a person would eat if he had a full understanding
of them. Look at the ingredients in any popular whole-grain bread product. They
are full of hydrogenated vegetable oils,
salt, processed sugars and a
long list of chemical preservatives. Also, even grains that appear to be
unprocessed may indeed be processed.
Virtually all oat products are steamed to extend the shelf-life of oat-containing
food products because oat grains contain oils that will destabilize and turn
rancid very quickly if they are not deactivated by steaming.
Even modern
production and harvesting has affected the quality of the grains in negative
ways that most people would not even consider.
Seeds and grains contain substances called enzyme inhibitors which keep them from germinating and growing
until the conditions are right. In Enzyme Nutrition, by Dr. Edward
Howell, Howell described the old methods of harvesting which allowed the
grains, sheaved and shocked, to stand in the field for several weeks exposed to
the weather, allowing a degree of germination and at least partial elimination
of the enzyme inhibitors. Modern production eliminates this time in the field,
thus leaving all the enzyme inhibitors intact. While certainly the human body
can digest foods containing enzyme inhibitors, to do so requires harder work by
the pancreas because the enzyme inhibitors can actually inhibit digestive
enzymes as they attempt to digest foods with the
enzyme inhibitors intact.
Another drawback with grains is that they are acid forming in the body and also
rank moderate to high on the glycemic
index,
which is a measure of the rate at which a food spikes blood sugar. In a Los Angeles Times article entitled
"Rethinking Our Daily Bread," the author, Patricia King offered
evidence that eating a diet high in foods that rate high on the glycemic index
raised the body's levels of insulin, which she termed the "hunger hormone."
Patricia King wrote:
In a 1999 study
published in the American Academy of Pediatrics medical journal Pediatrics, Dr.
David Ludwig, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School
and director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston, found that
obese children downed 38% more calories after a moderate-glycemic meal of
steel-cut oats than they did after a vegetable omelet and fruit meal designed
to keep blood sugar levels low.
When the meal
contained high-glycemic, refined, instant oatmeal, the obese children ate a
whopping 83% more. All of the meals contained the same number of calories.
"From a hormonal standpoint, all calories are not alike," says
Ludwig.
It is interesting
that two different groups that claim to eat diets which reduce or eliminate
many of our modern degenerative diseases, so-called paleo
diets and raw-food vegan diets,
both eliminate grains,
and this certainly could be one of the common denominators behind the reversal
of sickness for those that adhere to either of the diets. When you consider the
sheer volume of highly refined and heavily processed grains, devoid of any real
nutrition and high in calories, present in the American diet, it isn't hard to
understand why people get well when they eliminate them from their diet.
Contemplate for a
minute the number of pre-packaged snack foods that are either wheat or corn
flour based and contain either a cheap trans-fat containing hydrogenated
vegetable oil or are deep fried in one. A recent report on diabetes projected
that 1 in 3 people born in the year 2000 are expected to develop diabetes in
their lives. Ironically, many of these people thought they were eating healthy
by following contemporary dietary recommendations.
Sugar
(uncompleted section)
Salt
The American Heart
Association states that the average American consumes about 6 to 18 grams of
salt daily, or roughly one to three teaspoonfuls per day. That means that some
Americans eat close to 15 pounds of salt per year. Yet the same organization
states that we need only about 200 mg to 500 mg each day,
or about Ľ teaspoon daily.
The largest
percentage of salt in the diet, approximately 85% of salt consumption, comes
from prepackaged foods and snacks. The reason is that the base ingredients of
these foods have been so heavily refined, "enriched" with cheap
vitamins and minerals, and drenched in chemical preservatives designed to give
them the longest shelf-life possible, that few people would eat these products
without the large volume of salt added to them for taste or to enhance the
taste.
Excess salt
intake can lead to cardiovascular disease, which includes high blood pressure,
coronary heart disease (heart attack and chest pain), stroke, and congestive
heart failure. One AHA report stated that cardiovascular disease kills more
Americans than the next seven causes combined — including cancer.
While some salt
intake is necessary for life, too much salt is poisonous to life. Salt is used
to preserve and cure foods — ham and fish for example — because it kills life
in the food as well as inhibits microbial growth, keeping the foods from
decomposing. Rest assured, salt's ability to kill
cells and microbes does not stop simply because it is ingested into the human
body. If the salt has not been heat treated, while it may eventually be broken
down by the body into a form it can use, when it initially enters the body it
has a negative effect on living matter in the body in the same manner as
chlorinated water or antibiotics, especially in the excessive amounts it is
being consumed by most Americans. In doses of 1.5 to 3 grams per kilogram of
body weight, salt can be lethal for humans, and there have been reports of
babies and small children being killed by accidental salt poisoning.
Probably the
biggest problem with salt, in the form of normal table salt, is that it is an
inorganic source of sodium (table salt is sodium chloride, a compound formed
when sodium and chlorine bond together). To understand this, it must be
understood that any vitamin or mineral will be most useable by the human body
when it comes from a food. Humans could not use ground up rocks as a source of
nutrition, even though this would contain minerals in abundance. However,
humans can live on food which has been allowed to grow on soil containing
ground up rocks, with the foods assimilating the minerals from the rock dust
into a living, organic form easily used by the human body.
To understand the
inorganic nature of salt, it would be similar to comparing the iron in spinach
to an iron supplement that consists of tiny shavings off of a piece of iron.
One is from a living, organic source with a long history of use as a food and
its iron would be easily assimilated and used by the the human body, and the
other is nothing more than a ground up rock and would be much more difficult
for the body to use, if it can use it at all. Indeed, while vitamins and
minerals from foods are rarely toxic even in large doses, vitamins and minerals
from inorganic sources are often toxic if the dosage is increased only slightly
above normal levels.
It must be
understood that normal table salt is much closer to being a ground up rock than
it is an organic mineral coming from a food source. And to compound matters,
like most staples of the SAD diet, salt is processed and refined so that it
will pour freely and doesn't cake together in the salt shaker under humid
conditions. The processing involves kiln firing the salt at up to 1200 degrees
F. and adding other inorganic substances, again of questionable use by the
body, such as potassium iodide, dextrose, and calcium silicate.
The high temperatures salt is subjected to changes it chemically so
that new compounds are formed in it and it becomes insoluble in water. With the
salt now being insoluble in water, it is not only unusable by the body but the
body must expend its energy trying to expel the substance from the body. It is
also worth noting that unprocessed sea salt can contains up to 84 trace
minerals, admittedly in an inorganic form, but it is plausible that some of
these trace minerals could be used by the body. David Wolfe, a prominent figure
in the raw food movement, maintains that kiln-firing salts "causes all the
trace minerals to oxidize and evaporate right off."
Interestingly,
while the body is more than capable of expelling excess inorganic salt that it
can't use, excess salt or a breakdown in the body's ability to expel the salt
can cause it to store the salt in the body. While the body normally uses salt
to regulate the amount of water in it — salt retains water and potassium makes
the body lose water — excess salt in the body can lead to excess water in the
body. Victoria BidWell, in The Salt Conspiracy, wrote, "One ounce
of ingested salt holds three quarts of water — or 6 pounds of excess bodily
water and fluids — in suspension. Consider. . .an
ounce of salt in the body will seize and hold three quarts of water! This means. . .salt holds 96 times its weight in water!"
Excess salt in
the diet causes problems because the extra water it holds in the body creates a
burden on the heart and cardiovascular system. Some of the salt-related
conditions that are caused by water retention in the body are, edema
(accumulation of fluid beneath the skin), anasarca (severe, generalized edema),
and high blood pressure. Victoria BidWell, again in The Salt Conspiracy,
explained the immediate benefits of withholding excess salt from the body:
Hygienic theory
explains that the human body stores in the less vital tissues the waste and
poisons it lacks energy to expel. Since these poisons cannot, in a state of
on-going enervation, be excreted, they are deposited in those tissues in which
they would do least harm: connective tissues, fatty tissues, subcutaneous
tissues.
That this theory
is indeed truth is demonstrated without fail when a swelled, fleshy Sufferer
from The Salty, SAD Diet undertakes a fast. Within 2 to 3 days, he loses as
much as 10 to 20 pounds, most of which is water weight. Even if he does not
have the wherewithal to fast and simply goes 100% on The Salt-Free Ideal Diet
for 5 days (!) — his swelling is greatly
reduced. The Sufferers of edema, obesity, and/or anasarca — without exception —
find immediate, joyful relief by turning to Hygiene.
Probably some of
the confusion about salt comes from the fact that sodium is needed by the body.
A reader may ask, "How could salt be a 'poison' when it is required by the
body?" However, it is both the amount and type of salt being ingested by
Americans that cause the problems. The sodium issue is so important for those
on the journey to health that it will be addressed again in a later chapter
with suggestions on how to meet the body's needs in a healthy way.
Meat and Animal Products
America is a protein-centered
nation. Foods high in protein are marketed as healthful based on the fact that
they are high in protein. Most health food stores have shelves devoted to
high-protein drinks and shakes. Weight-lifting magazines are inundated with
advertisements for high-protein drinks and foods, with the not-so-subtle
marketing message that protein in the diet is directly transformed into muscle
on the body.
However, the
actual protein requirements for humans are quite modest and most Americans eat
far in excess of the body's actual requirements. Protein in excess, however, is
acidifying for the body and it has been shown repeatedly that when our country
is compared to populations from countries that eat less protein, especially
protein from animal products, those populations have far less degenerative
disease than found in the American population.
David Wolfe, pointed out in The Sunfood Diet, an
informative paragraph from Morris Krok's Diet, Health, and Living On Air
that explains some of the danger of protein:
"In the
metabolism of fats, sugars, and starches, the waste which is left behind is
carbon dioxide and water. This however is not the case with protein, which leaves as its
end-products uric acid and urea, which, if retained in the
system, are very harmful. Thus not only is protein not well utilized for bodily
heat, but it is also a potential danger to the health of the liver and kidneys,
and because of this, is the greatest factor in acidifying the entire membranous
tract."
Since the human
body requires protein, the body, when properly functioning, is equipped to
handle uric acid and urea. The problems begin to emerge, however, when the body
is not functioning properly or the levels of protein are in such high amounts
that the body can't properly eliminate the uric acid created when it is broken
down by the body. Dr. Norman Walker explained this in Fresh Vegetable and
Fruit Juices:
Physiologically,
the eating of meat increases the acidity of the body. In the processes
of digestion and the breaking down of the meat into its original amino acids, a
vast amount of uric acid is
generated in the body. If the body could eliminate this immediately, it might
do only little harm. But what actually happens is that the muscles absorb
enormous amounts of this uric acid, and in the course of time they are
saturated with it. Eventually this acid forms into crystals with sharp needlelike points which cause the pain and
discomfort known as rheumatism, neuritis, sciatica, nephritis (Bright's
disease) or some diseases of the liver.
To further
complicate matters, it is estimated that between 75% to 85% of all exposure to toxins
from food sources come from
eating animal products. This happens in part because foods grown for animal
consumption are often allowed many times the level of pesticides than foods
destined for human consumption are allowed, and animals that eat these foods
concentrate the toxins in their bodies. Because humans are at the top of the food chain and, at least for
Americans, eat a large percentage of daily calories from foods composed of
animal products, we are exposed to a large amount of toxins through these
foods.
Also, animals, like humans, encase toxins in fat that can't be
eliminated through normal channels to help isolate them. This makes foods high
in fat, such as butter and milk a potentially dangerous source of
toxin exposure. The book Diet for a Poisoned Planet by David Steinman, broke foods down into three categories of
toxin/pesticide contamination based on colors: Green Light (safe), Yellow Light
(caution), and Red Light (danger). Red Light or potentially harmful high-fat
foods include butter, cheese, ice cream, and whole milk. Steinman remarked of
butter:
Among the
approximately 76 million Americans who eat butter regularly, the risk of cancer
— which I worked out using a standard cancer risk assessment formula —
translated into as many as seventy-one excess cancer cases a year in one
million persons; we should expect roughly 5,400 Americans alive today to get
cancer from the pesticides lodged in butter.
Another important
issue with animal products is the fact that the majority of farm raised animals are not allowed to eat the foods they would
normally eat in the wild. This directly affects the nutrition of the
animals as food for humans. For example,
the main reason given by most for eating fish is to obtain the beneficial
omega-3 fatty acids fish provide. However, farm-raised
fish are usually fed grain,
which is not something fish would eat in the wild. This practice significantly
decreases the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in the fish.
Similarly, cows fed on grain, when compared to
grass-fed-only cows, also have a marked decrease in the amount of omega-3 fatty
acids, as well as a similar reduction in conjugated linoleic acid (CLA),
vitamin E, and selenium. And Americans would be fortunate if the only unnatural
food being fed to cattle were grains, despite the problems generated by this
practice. Modern factory-farming methods, however, have given rise to any
number of perversions of diet for animals destined for our food chain. For
instance, for many years cattle that were sick, diseased, or which had died from unknown
causes, called downer cows, were ground up and fed back to other cattle
in the form of what were described as high-protein feeds.
Howard Lyman, the
former rancher who was sued along with Oprah Winfrey for remarks made on
Oprah's program on Mad Cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE),
made some telling remarks about BSE and "downer" cows in Mad
Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat when he
wrote:
I couldn't help
but wonder if BSE, or something very much like it, might already be present in
the United States.
There had never been (and still has never been) any confirmed cases of BSE in
the United States.
But every year about a hundred thousand cows in this country die mysteriously
of what is known as Downer Cow Syndrome. These cows — like the steers in
Marsh's experiment — look fine one day and drop over dead the next. I saw this
happen many times on my operation in Montana,
far more often in the feedlot cattle than in the grass-fed breeding cows. Since
slaughterhouses don't accept animals unless they arrive alive and ambulatory, I
would typically — like other feedlot operators — sell my downer cows to the
renderer. And so they were undoubtedly coming back to my feedlot and others in
the form of feed.
Due to concerns
that Mad Cow disease was being spread by feeding cattle to cattle, the practice
was eventually banned. However, the regulations in place are often lightly
enforced and repercussions for breaking this prohibition are almost nonexistent.
And while feeding cattle to cattle has been banned, it is still legal to feed
downer cows to hogs and other farm animals. Chickens are also routinely fed
cow's blood, which is sprayed onto their food to add protein to it.
Animals are also
subjected to living conditions which also affect their quality and nutrition.
As Rev. George Malkmus pointed out in Why Christians Get Sick:
Chickens that lay
eggs sold in the market usually never see the light of day. These animals are
raised in wire cages where they can hardly move, so that all energy will go
into egg production. Their food and water is brought to them automatically by
conveyor. Various chemical substances, including antibiotics are added to feed
and water.
This is certainly
far removed from the back yard flock our ancestors kept, which were able to eat
greens, bugs, worms as well as having sunlight and a rooster, each adding
nutrition to the egg.
The full
repercussions of the horrors of factory farming may not ever fully be known.
For one, the medical and scientific community rarely makes a connection between
diet and disease, and if the connection is made, the powerful agribusinesses'
investment in well-placed government officials usually maintains enough damage
control to keep the general public feeling safe and eating their products. For
years the British government denied that Mad Cow disease posed any threat to
human health. It was only after people started dying from the disease were they
finally forced to admit the connection between Mad Cow disease and its human
counterpart, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
If any lesson is
to be learned from all of this, it is that consumers cannot wait to find out
that what they are eating isn't safe because it can easily be seen that no
government agency is going to step in and tell everyone the truth about the
foods we eat on a daily basis. The solution is to admit to ourselves that our
foods are no longer safe and take matters into our own hands.
Dairy (uncompleted
section)
Vegetable Oils And Other Fats
Dr. Edward Howell
summarized the problem of free fats and oils perfectly in one sentence:
"Any
isolated, purified, skeletonized food material must be expected to have adverse, far-reaching
effects on the health of living organisms."
While the
processing of foods into oils places the rendered product into the same
category as devitalized sugar and flour, what is unique about oil, however,
unlike sugar or flour, is that there is often an extra message of health
attached to it. For over fifty years now people have been told by the media,
doctors and various government agencies that replacing animal fat with a
vegetable oil would help prevent heart disease.
This health-based
message stemmed originally from research on cholesterol done in the mid-fifties
by a Russian researcher named David Kritchevsky, which became known as the
lipid hypothesis. With very little other research, the American Heart
Association, almost immediately, began to warn of the dangers of high
cholesterol, high fat diets and recommending the use of vegetable oils in the
place of butter and other animal fats.
What is
interesting is that at the same time the push to change to vegetable oils was
growing stronger, research was already showing that
the new oils contained a virtually new, highly undesirable type of fat which
would eventually turn out to be more dangerous to the human body than the
saturated fats it was replacing. This fat was called trans fat, a type of fat which occurs naturally in very small amounts in
animal fats but is contained in much larger quantities in the highly processed
oils coming to market. Additionally, the chemical makeup of the naturally
occurring trans fat is different from the chemical
makeup of the trans fat in the new oils.
In The Oiling
of America, a paper by Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. and Sally Fallon, they
noted,
"...
most of the trans isomers in modern hydrogenated fats are new to the human
physiology and by the early 1970’s a number of researchers had expressed
concern about their presence in the American diet, noting that their increasing
use had paralleled the increase in both heart disease and cancer."
But even though
it was known almost immediately, from very limited research, that saturated
fats were supposedly harmful to human health, it would take almost half a
century for the research into the dangers of trans fats to affect government
dietary guidelines (due in part to heavy lobbying
from the edible oil industry and insiders from the edible oil industry who took
key positions in the Food and Drug Administration and blocked attempts to warn of the dangers trans fats
posed).
It was not until
1999 that the government mandated that the amount of trans
fats in food products be labeled. And
this was done despite heavy lobbying from groups such as the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA),
which not only initially fought the labeling requirement
altogether, but later lobbied strongly against the FDA-proposed footnote
statement to the Nutrition Fact box, which advised consumers to "reduce their trans fat consumption as much as
possible"
Although most
people would understand vegetable oils are processed and refined oils, few
people grasp just how highly processed these oils are. Tim O'Shea, a chiropractor and clinical
nutritionist in San Jose, California, wrote in an article in
Alternative Medicine magazine, the
processes soy oil goes through on its way to becoming margarine:
The first step in
soy processing is high-temperature cooking to try and get rid of the phytic
acid. High temperatures denature the
natural enzymes of the soybean. Without
enzymes, any plant becomes a devitalized food, very difficult to digest in the
human tract. Remember that enzymes, vitamins and minerals are three legs of the
tripod of metabolic activity. Take away any one and the other two cannot
function properly.
After cooking,
soy oil is removed by one of two paths: pressing or solvent extraction. Soybean
oil is rarely cold-pressed, as many claim, but is usually subjected to heat,
which produces destructive free radicals.
An easier method of oil extraction is by the use of solvents. Several
are used in soybean oil processing. Hexane, a petroleum distillate, is the
standard chemical used. Traces of this
toxic solvent may be left behind in the finished products, both in the oil and
in the protein isolate.
The next step in
the refining process is degumming, the removal of residual fiber, or gum, from
the oil.
The problem is
that valuable trace minerals like calcium, copper, magnesium and iron, as well as
chlorophyll, are removed as well.
Next, the refined
oil is mixed with sodium hydroxide (which is what drain cleaners are made of)
at a temperature of 167°F. The purpose of this step is to remove any remaining
free fatty acids.
To remove extra
pigments and make the oil completely clear, bleaching is accomplished by more
high heat, followed by filtering. Other free radicals called peroxides are thus
introduced.
Deodorizing is
then thought to be necessary to destroy any natural aromatics. This process
uses extreme heat, up to 518°F, which destroys whatever vitality and
antioxidants the oils might have left. The oil is thus rendered absolutely
tasteless, colorless and odorless. It is now devoid of any useful vitamin,
mineral, enzyme or nutrient content whatsoever.
And even though
it has undergone extreme high temperatures at several steps, as long as no
external heat was added during the actual pressing step, the oil can still be
sold as "cold-pressed."
As if no further
biological indignity could have been levied against the lifeless processed oil,
researchers in the 1930s at Dupont figured out a way to harden the oil into a
perfectly engineered non-food: margarine. They found out that if they subjected
the refined oil to yet another round of high temperatures up to 410°F — and
also forced hydrogen gas in the presence of an aluminum catalyst through the
oil, they could produce a substance with the desired spreadability and
shelf-life. That's what hydrogenated margarine means. And at least 80% of the
margarine made in the U.S.
comes from refined soybean oil.
In understanding
the process that turns soy into oil and margarine, it is easier to understand
why processed oils have far-reaching effects on the health of living organisms.
Look at the ingredients of most junk foods. Many contain either soy or canola
oil. The heavy processing of these two oils brings the trans
fat level of soy oil up to a 40% trans fats level and up to a 50% level for canola oil.
If heavily
processed oils were the only bad ingredient in the Standard American Diet, it
would be bad enough — many in the alternative health field claim vegetable oils
to be the worst "food" in American's diets — but keep in mind how
many food items contain vegetable oils, devitalized corn or wheat flour, and
processed sugar, salt, and a long list of chemical preservatives ... and, of
the food items left over that don't contain vegetable oils, many of these end
up being fried in a vegetable oil.
Interestingly
enough, both Christians and non-Christians alike will often, at least
initially, blame God, Satan, or other outside factors if they become sick,
never giving the man-made, non-foods they have been ingesting any credit
whatsoever.
Fast Foods, Convenience Foods
Stop for a minute
and think about all the nutritionally-void foods you have read about up until
this point — the processed sugars, processed grains, trans
fats, excessive salt, etc. Nothing embodies these foods like fast foods and
convenience foods, many of which contain large amounts of calories and very little
if any actual nutrition in them.
If the hazards of
some of these foods were pointed out to the manufacturer or producer, the
response would be that it was not meant to be the sole source of nutrition but
merely part of a balanced diet or that it was meant only to be enjoyed
occasionally.
But what happens
when everything a person eats on a daily basis is made up of these
foods? Bill Phillips, author of the very successful book, Body for Life,
said in an interview with Outside magazine:
It's like we're
living on Temptation
Island. My house is only
a few miles from my office, and I pass eight fast-food places on the way to
work. There's a multibillion-dollar industry out there that's banking on the
fact that you won't be able to resist.
We're eating and
eating and eating, but we're starving, because we aren't getting the nutrients
we need. Think of Golden. It used to be a mining town. The first settlers came
here and they'd dig through mountains of dirt to find one little scrap of gold.
That's what our bodies do. Out of all the junk we're putting in it, we're
asking our body to go through and find the gold it needs to fuel our metabolism
and our mind and our muscles.
With
heavily-processed foods available at every turn, it is no surprise that over
half of Americans are overweight with 27% of those being obese, bringing with
it all the associated health risks of being overweight — increased risk of
diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.
And sadly, with
clever marketing slogans
Vitamins And Supplements
With all the
problems of the SAD diet (Standard American Diet), few
would place vitamins and supplements very high on the list of potential
troublemakers for Americans. And indeed, with the quality of food in America, some
supplementation for those on the SAD diet is probably preferential to not
supplementing.
The problems
arise because many people think they can eat a poor diet, supplemented with
vitamins, and still be healthy. No doubt, this is due in large part to the
marketing message behind vitamins and supplements, which not so subtly informs
consumers they can do exactly that.
Interestingly,
the over-processing and devitalization of our foods is used as justification
for the need to supplement our diets in the first place. Yet, if one carries
this train of thought through to its logical conclusion, vitamins and
supplements are also heavily processed nutrients which have been isolated and
concentrated, devoid of any resemblance to any food in its natural state.
Far from
nutrients found in whole foods, some synthetic vitamins are industrial
byproducts and others are actually, ironically, byproducts of the food
devitalization process itself. For instance, one of the Cargill Corporation's
more valuable raw materials is a soybean distillate — described by the company
itself as a "black, ugly, stinking ooze" — which is rich in tocopherols or natural vitamin E. As it turns out,
the material, a waste product Cargill gave away or burned for years, comes from
the deodorizing process of refining soybeans and is sold as vitamin E..
Part of the
allure of vitamins and supplements comes from the fact that American consumers
have been conditioned from cradle to grave to believe that the answer to any
problem lies in some magic substance that only needs to be purchased and consumed
to make the problem vanish virtually overnight. The supplement industry, which
is a 23-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with vitamins, herbs and minerals
occupying 9.8 billion of that market, has learned to capitalize on this and
manipulates consumers in much the same way as drug companies. In fact, some
vitamins are manufactured either by drug companies or through companies which
drug companies bought out.
And part of the
problem here is that, as the line between vitamins and drugs blurs in consumers
minds, the vitamins themselves are products of the same type of mentality that
led to the development of drugs as we know them. At one time certain herbs were
known to confer special medical qualities that made them beneficial for someone
with a certain condition. The medical and scientific communities sought to
isolate the beneficial elements of herbs and incorporate them into an
easily-marketable pill or supplement. James Bailey, L.Ac.,
an herb columnist, touched on this and its consequences in an article in Yoga
Journal:
Most Western
consumers now view herbs and pharmaceutical medication in the same way: each
herb, like a drug, remedying a specific condition — for example, St. John's wort for
depression, gingko for memory loss, Echinacea for colds, and senna for
constipation. ...
For example, the
herb kava kava has been in the news lately for its potential liver toxicity.
When used the traditional way, kava causes no harm to the liver. In the South
Pacific, where the herb is indigenous, only the root of the plant is used.
Profit-based pharmaceutical companies, however, have discovered what they think
to be the "active ingredient" of the plant, kavalactones, found both
in the root and in higher concentration in the stems of the plant. To maximize
profits the stems are being mined for kavalactones for the manufacturing of the
highly potentized nutriceutical kava products.
So why have
Pacific islanders only been using the root and not using the stem? Because more
is not always better, and may even be toxic. While a small dose of root-sourced
kavalactone can serve to reduce stress and anxiety, high concentrations from
the stems of the plant can cause a cascade of unwanted side effects.
The same attitude
that leads to problems with vitamins and supplements also permeates the food
industry, which seeks to "enrich" devitalized, processed foods with
vitamins and minerals to make them more appealing to health-conscious consumers
. . . and increase their profits in the process. Michael Pollan, author of The
Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, wrote regarding this
issue in an New York Times Magazine article,
"Selling unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods is a fool's game,
especially since the price of agricultural commodities tends to fall over time,
and one company's apples are hard to distinguish from any other's. The best way
to do this has always been by ''adding value'' to cheap raw materials --
usually in the form of convenience or fortification."
But just as every
attempt to improve on the things God gave us fails, just as baby formula or
highly-processed vegetable oils falls short, fortification or
"enrichment" of devitalized foods also fall short. Keep in mind that
with these processed foods, there is an element that cannot be duplicated in a
food processing plant or laboratory — the living components. Michael Pollan
went on to write in the same article:
It is not at all
clear that the ''healthy'' ingredients we're isolating function in isolation
the same way they do in whole foods. Already we're finding that beta carotene
extracted from carrots, or lycopene from tomatoes, don't work nearly as well,
if at all, outside the context of a carrot or a tomato. Even in the pages of Food
Technology [a trade magazine for food scientists], you now find
nutritionists cautioning the industry that ''a single-nutrient approach is too
simplistic.''
Foods, it
appears, are more than the sum of their chemical parts, and treating them as
collections of nutrients to be mixed and matched, rather than as the complex
biological systems they are, simply may not work.
Our goal should
be then, not to eat a poor diet and rely on supplements that may or may not
work to keep us healthy, but to eat a diet rich in vitamins and minerals the
way God gave them to us, in living, whole foods. And if we feel that some
supplementation is necessary, it should be viewed as just that,
supplementation, not what we rely on to keep us healthy. Supplements taken
should be researched diligently and only those of the highest quality should be
consumed.
One important
thing to note: while it is clear that there may be problems with vitamins and
supplements, with the condition of our soil, the quality of our produce, and
the environmental pollution we face on a daily basis, this is an option that
should remain available for those that feel they must supplement. There is a
move underway by our federal government to limit consumers' access to vitamins
by regulation, with some suggesting that supplements with certain levels of
vitamins and minerals in them be available only by prescription. This should be
resisted fully by Americans.
While vitamins
may not be all consumers think they are, they are a far cry from prescription
drugs, which kill more than 100,000 Americans and seriously injure an
additional 2.1 million every year, and this is not even taking into account
prescribing errors or drug abuse! (Based on a study by Dr. Bruce H. Pomeranz,
principal investigator and a neuroscience professor at the University of Toronto,
who analyzed 39 studies of hospital patients from 1966 to 1996.)
Fasting
Fasting is one of
the oldest known treatments for ailments. It was mentioned both in the Bible as
well as in literature predating the Bible by thousands of years. It was used in
eastern medicines, such as Ayurvedic medicine, the ancient Hindu science of
health and medicine, as well as early western medicine. Early proponents of
fasting include Hippocrates, Galen, and Paracelsus, and the reasons given
include its benefits to the body, mind and soul. Many who fast claim to reach
spiritual highs or heightened clarity in thinking, or, in the words of Plato,
"I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency."
In modern times,
fasting has been used extensively by early Natural Hygienists such as Sylvester
Graham, Herbert Shelton, who founded the How-to-Live magazine in 1928,
and T.C. Fry, all of whom used fasting as the cornerstone of their healing
programs.
Indeed, because
fasting was known to greatly improve or eliminate such problems as anxiety,
asthma, arthritis, depression, allergies, headaches, heart disease, diabetes,
high cholesterol, digestive disorders, mental illness, obesity and a long list
of other ailments, it was the perfect vehicle for those who championed a
health-based, drug-free approach to health, such as the early Natural
Hygienist.
The principle
behind fasting is simple: because up to 80% of the body's energy is used up in
digestion, a fast allows energy normally devoted to digestion to be diverted
into metabolic repair and healing. In addition, the extra energy is also used
to eliminate toxins that our body, overburdened by our modern diets, is unable
to eliminate, leaving them in the body to cause problems at a later date.
Fasting is by far
the fastest way to detoxify your body, but because of that, the fasting
experience will be different for different individuals, and it will also vary
depending on the diet of the person fasting and his condition of health, or
lack thereof. Because both humans and animals encase toxins that they cannot
rid through normal channels in fat, fasting, which will force the body to burn
stored fat, will release toxins at an accelerated pace. Symptoms of a rapid
detox can mimic those of the cold or flu, and may include fatigue, muscle
soreness, and mild nausea.
Changing diets to
include whole, unprocessed foods, including lots of raw fruits and vegetables
and their juices, getting plenty of exercise, fresh air and sunshine, and
drinking pure water will also help to detoxify the body, only at a slower rate.
Because of this, it may be wise to initiate a change in diet and lifestyle and wait
a reasonable time period after doing so before embarking on your first fast.
This route may also be a better alternative for someone who is too weak to
fast, is undernourished, or whose body is in the last stages of a serious
disease, like cancer, which may make extended fasting unwise, if not
impossible.
The frequency and
duration of fasts vary, but it is generally accepted that, like exercise, any
fasting is better than no fasting. Paul Bragg, a Life Extensionist Specialist
known for his robust health and strong muscular appearance, wrote the very
inspiring, The Miracle Of Fasting, in which he
outlined his personal fasting program:
My daughter
Patricia and I are very sincere and faithful to our fasting program. We know what
it has done for us, for the members of our family, for our friends and for
millions of Bragg health-conscious students around the world. Our Bragg fasting
program calls for 4 longer fasts a year, along with a weekly 24 to 36 hour
fast. Fasting helps cleanse and keep your body healthy. These cleansing fasts
will help you live a longer, healthier and more vital life! So, my calendar
calls for an early January fast. Sometimes this fast only lasts 7 days, it may
run 8 days, it may run 9 days, and it may extend the full 10 days. At the
beginning of each year I mark the days that I am going to fast for 7 to 10
days. You may wonder why I say 7 to 10 days. Sometimes I fast only 7 days
because I feel that in that time I have accomplished the necessary house cleaning
of my body. Be flexible on dates if you feel a cold coming on. Colds call for
an earlier start to your fast to help cleanse out the mucus toxins. Colds
indicate your body needs detoxifying and a good cleansing. A cold is Mother
Nature forcing you to fast!
A fast of 3 days
or longer should be conducted under ideal conditions. You should be able to
rest any time you feel the toxins passing out of your body. During this time
you might feel some discomfort. You should rest and relax quietly until the
poisons have passed out of your body. It's best to be at peace and alone when
possible. This brief period of discomfort will leave as soon as the loosened
toxins have passed out through your kidneys, lungs, skin, etc.
During longer
fasts don't tell others you're fasting. Why not? During a fast you must keep in
mind only positive thoughts of the cleansing and the renewing miracles
happening in your body. Often others are ignorant and uninformed about fasting
and project negative thoughts.
Interestingly,
Paul Bragg thrived on his fasting program and lived life to the fullest while
doing so. Sadly, his life was cut short in his nineties in a tragic accident in
which he drowned after being knocked unconscious in the water while either
water skiing or surfboarding (sources vary). It is also worth noting that Jack
LaLanne, also known for his robust health and daring feats of strength
throughout his life, such as celebrating his seventieth birthday with a
mile-long swim, in which he towed 70 rowboats filled with 70 people, was a
student of Paul Bragg.
While everyone
may not feel it necessary to fast on a weekly basis or for seven to ten days at
a time, two to four fasts of a two to three day
duration a year, accompanied by twenty-four-hour fasts throughout the year, at
the individual's discretion, would be of great benefit to most Americans.
There are a few
important items for those who have never fasted. It is generally considered
best to start out with a few short fasts before undertaking a long fast if you
have never fasted before. Also, a person who is generally healthy should be
able to fast safely for a week or more, but someone with a health problem may
want to find a professional to supervise even a short fast. And there are
certain conditions, such as diabetes, gallbladder problems, thyroid
dysfunction, and kidney problems, where fasting is not recommended or should
under no circumstances be undertaken without first consulting with a
professional with experience in fasting.
Since the
invention on the juicer, juice fasting has become quite popular and many people
use the word fast to mean a juice fast. It should be kept in mind that juice
fasting is a relatively new event in fasting history and that for most of
history, fasting meant water fasting. When the term fasting is used by Paul
Bragg and others, it should be taken to mean water fasting.
This isn't to say
that juice fasting doesn't have its place. It is generally recommend that
someone who fasts to gradually decrease the heavy foods they eat and gravitate
toward lighter foods and fresh vegetable and fruit juices as they head into the
fast and reverse this process as they break the fast. In these instances fresh
juice may be very beneficial.
It should be kept
in mind, however, that part of the benefit of fasting comes from the body going
into ketosis while on the fast. Ketosis means that the body, deprived of
carbohydrates, turns to stored body fat to burn for its energy (which also
releases ketones into the body in the process, thus the term ketosis). Since
toxins are stored in body fat, it is important that the body metabolizes some
of its fat for energy in order to rid the body of toxins.
A person who
juice fasts is more correctly going on a juice diet, which may be very
beneficial from time to time in its own right because nutrition is obtained in
an easily digested form that does free up energy normally used in digestion,
while still providing the body with vitamins and minerals. But regardless,
fresh vegetable or fruit juice is still food, it has just been separated from
its fiber, so a person who claims to be "juice fasting" is still
eating and not doing a fast in the traditional sense of the term.
As a person moves
from sickness into health, even though a person may experience fatigue during a
fast, few things will provide the exhilaration and feelings of wellness that
fasting will provide. It should be stressed, though, that too much of anything, no matter how beneficial in normal amounts,
can be detrimental to your health in abnormal quantities, and there are no
exceptions to this rule for fasting.
While it may be
entertaining to read about individuals who supposedly go for months on end or
even for a full year without eating, this isn't something that should be
seriously considered. Several prominent figures in the raw-food movement,
including Rev. George Malkmus and Dr. Norman Walker, are (or were) firmly
against extended fasting.
There is also an segment of people who are quite cultist about fasting and
elevate its abilities to mythical proportions. A person should keep a level
head and understand the limitations of fasting. Even major proponents of
fasting such as Hebert Shelton admitted it had limitations. Dr. Edward Howell,
while noting in Enzyme Nutrition that fasting would be of great benefit
to cancer patients in theory, fully acknowledged the limitations of fasting and
had the foresight to take the individual's condition into account:
Earlier in this
volume I explained that it is necessary to drastically tame down overly rich
digestive enzyme secretions so that metabolic enzyme potency can be increased
to an effective level. A complete fast reduces digestive enzyme secretion to a
trickle in several days. This would enable the enzyme potential to effectively
remodel any area involved in defective metabolism. But the victims of terminal
cancer are poor candidates for a fast long enough to be effective.
As Dr. Norman
Walker pointed out in Pure and Simple Natural Weight Control, a person
who has eaten three meals a day, averages one thousand meals a year, and a
person who is forty years old has consumed over 40,000
meals in their lifetime. Dr. Walker wrote:
Consider the
number of years you have lived and how long it has taken you to get into the
condition that you find yourself today. You did not get into this condition
suddenly, overnight. No, indeed! You are today the sum total of the food you
have eaten all your life, and of the lack of care and
attention which you should have given to your body every day of your existence.
The fact that
diseases that took years and many thousands of improper meals to develop can
begin to diminish within months after a diet and lifestyle change and can begin
to improve with even short fasts, points out the true miracle of the body God
created for us and its resiliency. But with all the factors of age, diet, and
other factors, such as drugs, alcohol, physical injury, etc., while some
diseases may improve dramatically, some degree of damage done to the body may
be irreversible even with a program such as the Wellsville Diet accompanied
with fasting.
A reader who
feels that he or she is "too far gone," though, should not despair.
Dr. Norman Walker nursed himself back to health from near death in his
mid-forties to early-fifties and went on to live to be 110 to 118 years old (sources
vary). Even though there are other factors involved, the greatest cause of
sickness is diet related, and when you remove the cause of sickness, the body
will heal.
Cancer
The Trophoblast Thesis Of Cancer
"In 1902,
John Beard, a professor of embryology at the Universiy of Edinburgh in
Scotland, authored a paper published in the British medical journal Lancet
in which he stated there were no differences between cancer cells and certain
pre-embryonic cells that were normal to the early stages of pregnancy," G.
Edward Griffin wrote in World Without Cancer." He went on to write,
"In technical terms, these normal cells are called trophoblasts. Extensive
research had led Professor Beard to the conclusion that cancer and trophoblast
are, in fact, one and the same." As Edward Griffin points out, this theory
became known as the "trophoblast thesis of cancer."
World Without
Cancer,
by G. Edward Griffin, marshals the evidence that cancer is a deficiency disease
— like scurvy or pellagra — and mainly focuses on an essential food compound,
known as nitrilosides or vitamin B-17, found in great abundance in the wild,
but which has been virtually eliminated from our modern diet. Some foods
containing significant amounts of vitamin B-17 are wild blackberries, elderberries,
macadamia nuts, apricot seeds, apple seeds, and mung sprouts. The nutrient can
also be concentrated into a vitamin and is available in both pill form and as
an injectable.
Vitamin B-17,
also known as Laetrile, and its use in the treatment
of cancer have been extremely controversial since its inception. But something
interesting about World Without Cancer that is often overlooked is that
using nitrilosides is in fact a second line of defense for the body in its
fight against cancer — a battle it wages frequently since "cancer"
cells are not "foreign invaders" attacking the body, but rather part
of the normal healing process. The first line of defense against cancer is
pancreatic enzymes.
The trophoblast
thesis championed by John Beard maintains that, as the body is damaged by
everyday wear, aging, improper diet, contact with substances known to damage
the body, such as tobacco or toxic chemicals, etc., the body begins to heal
itself with cells, to some extent, made up of trophoblast cells. Under normal conditions,
when the healing is complete, the immune system "turns off" the
trophoblast cells and stops what would otherwise be an overgrowth of these
cells — a condition we would label cancer — by the use of pancreatic enzymes.
G. Edward Griffin
insightfully saw that cancer, rather than being an invasion of mutated cells,
was more correctly an "over-healing" situation in the body (while
even he admitted that describing it as such might be an oversimplification).
This is one reason why cancer so easily evades the immune system, which would
under normal conditions kill off anything foreign to the body fairly quickly.
Edward Griffin wrote:
One of the
characteristics of the trophoblast is that it is surrounded by a thin protein
coating that carries a negative electrostatic charge. In technical terms this
is called the pericellular sialomucin coat. The white blood cells also
carry a negative charge. And, since like polarities repel
each other, the trophoblast is well protected. The blocking factor is
nothing more than a cellular electrostatic field. . . .
Part of nature's
solution to this problem, as pointed out by Professor Beard in 1905, is found
in ten or more pancreatic enzymes, of which trypsin and chymotrypsin are
especially important in trophoblast destruction. These enzymes exist in their inactive
form (as zymogens) in the pancreas gland. Only after they reach the small
intestine are they converted to their active form. When these are absorbed into
the blood stream and reach the trophoblast, they digest the negatively-charged
protein coat. The cancer then is exposed to the attack of the white cells and
it dies.
Like Laetrile,
the trophoblast theory of cancer is not without some controversy. In 1990,
Laetrile-researcher Robert Bradford stated that modern science had proven the
trophoblast theory incorrect. But Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D., director of the The
Moss Reports for cancer patients, wrote a paper entitled, "Trophoblast
from the Past: New Discoveries Breathe Life into an Old Theory" in which
he described two separate researchers who independently came to support the
trophoblast theory based on their own research.
The first
scientist Moss wrote of, Valentin I. Govallo, MD, Ph.D, director of the
Laboratory of Immunology in Moscow,
noticed the links between cancer and pregnancy and began developing and testing
treatments based on the similarities. His initial work revolved around
stimulating the immune system, but this approach was abandoned because of the
treatment's high failure rate due to the tumor's ability to "block"
the immune system, just as professor Beard had discovered in his own research
on trophoblast cells.
Govallo's second
approach, as noted by Moss, used human chorionic villi, described as a
"placental extract to immunize the patient against the fetus-like
cancer," in what Govallo termed as his
"immuno-embryo-therapy." The treatment, unlike his first
attempt, was very successful and had a 77.1% five-year-plus survival rate for
patients with advanced cases of cancer. Govallo admitted, again as noted by
Moss, that he did not fully even understand why his treatment was working so
well.
The second
researcher Moss wrote of, Dr. M. Rigdon Lentz, spent years studying cancer's
ability to block the immune system and developed a machine called an
UltraPheresis machine, which filters the "blocking factors" out of a
cancer patients blood in a manner similar to a kidney
dialysis machine. In the initial trials, the cancer tumors dissolved so rapidly
that it was fatal to the patients. Ralph Moss wrote:
Lentz's published
results contain many revelations about the ultimate power of the immune system,
once it is deblocked, to destroy tumors. One of the most startling facts is
that the first three of Lentz's terminally ill patients who died in the initial
clinical trial had tumor lysis syndrome: dead cancer cells and debris that can
overwhelm the liver and kidneys (J Biol Response Mod 8:511-527, 1989).
Autopsies of these patients showed that "all measurable disease" had
been destroyed due to "massive hemorrhagic and coagulative necrosis."
Lentz learned that one must proceed slowly in harnessing such explosive
anti-cancer reactions.
Speaking of
Robert Bradford's comments that modern science had "undermined the
trophoblastic thesis" Moss wrote, "Bradford
raised many technical objections to the Beardian thesis. And indeed many
questions need to be answered before this theory can be accepted as fact."
But, interestingly, while the trophoblast theory of cancer may not be fully
understood, those who have taken this approach in fighting cancer, even
unknowingly, as the two researchers Moss wrote of, have had startling results
far in excess of conventional, "science-approved" approaches in which
the theories behind them are fully understood.
The Body's First Line of Defense Against Cancer
As mentioned
earlier, ten or more pancreatic enzymes, of which trypsin and chymotrypsin are
especially important in the body's fight against cancer. These enzymes make up
the body's first line of defense against cancer. Imagine if your house is
protected by its first line of defense, a tactical pump-shotgun with a laser
sight, and for a backup you have placed a baseball bat in a strategic location.
In the case of a break-in, which would be the more effective line of defense? The first line of defense, of course. Could that baseball
bat still come in handy? You bet it could.
But modern man's
diet takes a heavy toll on the pancreatic enzymes. Remember, it is estimated
that up to 80 percent of the body's energy is used up in digestion, with
heavily processed foods and cooked animal products, the very foods making up
the bulk of the American diet, placing an unusually hard burden on the
pancreas.
Philip E. Binzel,
Jr., M.D., a medical doctor who fought for the use of vitamin B-17 and
nutrition in treating cancer, explained in Alive And
Well, One Doctor's Experience with Nutrition in the Treatment of Cancer
Patients the mechanisms of the body's first line of defense:
What causes a
breakdown in that defense mechanism? Suppose you have an individual who is
eating large quantities of animal protein. It takes large amounts of the
enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin to digest animal protein. It is possible that
this individual is using up all, or almost all, of his trypsin and chymotrypsin
for digestive purposes. There is nothing left over for the rest of the body.
Thus, this individual has lost his first line of defense against cancer.
The skeptic might
point out that attempts to duplicate John Beard's success with fighting cancer
by the use of supplemental pancreatic enzymes were unsuccessful when other
researchers tried to duplicate his research. Beard's response to this criticism
was that the enzymes of the time were not strong enough and the dosage
prescribed too low to be effective. Indeed, pancreatic enzyme supplements
usually come from animal sources, which do not work as well as enzymes produced
by a human's pancreas. This approach also suffers from the "pill
mentality" which afflicts both the medical and scientific communities, as
well the general public, and develops when scientists believe they can isolate
beneficial components and concentrate them into pill or injectable form, having
them work in isolation despite the fact that nutrients rarely, if ever appear
this way in nature.
Remember from the
chapter in this book "Understanding Sickness," enzymes are the body's
only course for true healing, and ultimately, any healing is going to be done
by the body with metabolic enzymes. Dr. Edward Howell, in his book Enzyme
Nutrition wrote, "The old saying that nature will cure really refers
to metabolic enzyme activity, because there is no other mechanism in the body
to cure anything."
The human
pancreas produces both digestive and metabolic enzymes; however, if
overburdened with a poor diet, it will divert more of its enzyme potential into
manufacturing digestive enzymes, at the expense of the rest of the body, which
needs metabolic enzymes for repair and healing. A better approach than relying
on supplemental pancreatic enzymes, collected in the slaughterhouse from animal
sources, would be to adopt measures which free up the pancreas to manufacture
more metabolic enzymes than digestive enzymes.
Beneficial
measures that will ease the burden of digestion on the pancreas include:
eliminating cooked and pasteurized animal products; eating smaller, lighter
meals; fasting; eating foods in their natural, raw state; and juicing fresh
vegetables and fruits, which allows for them to be transformed into a form
which is easily and quickly digested. In addition, some supplemental enzymes
may be beneficial, also, and preferably the enzymes should be from vegetarian
or vegan sources, rather than from animal sources. But again, these enzymes
should be seen as supplementation to the above measures, not a shortcut to
avoid the above measures.
The Body's Second Line of Defense Against Cancer
While most of World
Without Cancer and Alive And Well touch
only briefly on the body's first line of defense against cancer, both describe
the body's second line of defense against cancer, nitrilosides or vitamin B-17,
in detail. The vitamin deficiency theory of cancer was developed in the early
1950s by Dr. Ernest T. Krebs Jr., and his father of the same name, with a
concentrated pill or injectable form of vitamin B-17.
The vitamin
deficiency theory of cancer, as described by Edward Griffin and Dr. Binzel,
states that there is a nutritional component to the cancer puzzle that serves
as a backup to the pancreatic enzymes that make up the body's first line of
defense against cancer. This theory is based on a compound in certain foods
that contain cyanide and benzaldehyde bonded together in a manner that makes it
harmless to the body under normal conditions but which is deadly to cancer. And
the reason it is so deadly is because cancer contains an "unlocking"
mechanism that causes the compound of cyanide and benzaldehyde to separate and
become toxic, killing the cancer cell which "unlocked" the poison in
the process. Dr. Binzel described the body's second line of defense against
cancer in Alive and Well:
Dr. Krebs et
al. found that the body has a second line of defense against this disease.
This second line of defense is formed by a group of substances known as
nitrilosides. The cancer cell has an enzyme, beta-glucosidase, which, when it
comes in contact with nitrilosides, converts those nitrilosides into two
molecules of glucose, one molecule of benzaldehyde and one molecule of hydrogen
cyanide. Originally, it was thought that only the hydrogen cyanide was toxic to
the cancer cell. Recent evidence has shown that, while the hydrogen cyanide may
exert some toxic effect, it is the benzaldehyde that is extremely toxic to the
cancer cell.
What is so
significant about this is that this is a target-specific reaction. Within the
body, the cancer cell and only the cancer cell contains the enzyme
beta-glucosidase. Thus, the benzaldehyde and the hydrogen cyanide can be formed
in the presence of the cancer cell, and only the cancer cell. Thus, they
are toxic to the cancer cell and only the cancer cell. The normal cell contains
the enzyme, rhodanese, which converts the nitrilosides into food.
This deficiency
view of cancer maintains that many staple foods for Americans once contained
fair amounts of nitrilosides but that these were eliminated as the diet changed
to foods which had virtually no nitrilosides. For example, millet, which
contains a medium amount of nitrilosides, was once the main grain used in
bread, but was replaced by wheat, which contains no nitriolosides. Also,
crossbreeding and domestication of plants reduces the amount of nitrilosides in
the them. For example, domestic blackberries are a low
source of nitrilosides but wild blackberries are a high source of nitrilosides
or vitamin B-17. As mentioned earlier, some foods that still contain
medium to high amounts of vitamin B-17 are wild blackberries, elderberries,
macadamia nuts, apricot seeds, apple seeds, and mung sprouts, and this is
certainly not an exhaustive list, as there are many more foods that contain
nitrilosides, even though modern farming techniques have greatly reduced the
amount of nitrilosides in the American diet as a whole.
Occasionally, an
alarming warning is given that apple or apricot seeds contain cyanide and are
toxic, but rest assured, while having a higher quantity of nitrilosides, they
are as harmless as blackberries and macadamia nuts, which contains the exact
same cyanide-containing compound that apple or apricot seeds contain. Remember,
the cyanide is only released at the cancer cell, and as pointed out by Dr.
Binzel, at any other point in the body, the enzyme rhodanese converts the
nitrilosides into food.
Remember from the
chapter "Understanding Sickness," one of the causes of problems in
the body is nutritional deficiencies and the only way deficiency diseases —
scurvy or pellagra, for example — are corrected is to improve the diet to the
point where all the body's nutritional requirements are met, which allows the
body to heal. Approaching cancer from a deficiency standpoint is logical, since
there is a successful medical history of curing major diseases by bringing diet
up to meet the body's nutritional requirements (as well as a history of science
denying that nutritional connection right up until it became painfully
obvious).
While
concentrated vitamin B-17 in its pill or injectable form, also known as
Laetrile, is an isolated, purified, skeletonized food nutrient, it is a vitamin
which does appear to concentrate well and maintain both its health benefits and
its safety, probably in part because it is an actual derivative of apricots
seeds, versus being a synthetic vitamin like many of today's cheap vitamins. In
general, any nutrient obtained in its natural state will be safer and better
utilized by the body. However, Laetrile may certainly be an acceptable, safe
approach in advanced cancer situations, when time is of the essence.
Dr. Binzel, who
treated his patients with a combination of a cooked-food vegetarian diet and
supplemental vitamin B-17, described an 87.3% two- to four-year-plus survival
rate for those who suffered from primary cancer and an
70.4% two- to four-year-plus survival rate for those patients whose cancer had
metastasized. As Dr. Binzel put it, "If you consider only those patients
who have survived five years or more, this means that my results were 287%
better than those reported by the American Cancer Society for the treatment of metastatic
cancer by "orthodox" methods alone. Metastatic means that the
cancer has spread from its location of origin to other areas of the body.
The Total Nutritional Approach to Cancer
It should be
pointed out that many people have successfully used a diet low in animal
protein and high in fresh vegetables and fruits to heal themselves from cancer
and go on to live normal lives. These people have unknowingly stumbled on to
what John Beard discovered as early as 1902 and Dr. Ernest Krebs discovered in
the early 1950s.
Dr. Philip E.
Binzel, Jr., for example, used a cooked-food vegetarian diet in conjunction
with vitamin B-17 to obtain the excellent survival rates of the patients he
wrote of in Alive And Well. Others who have
successfully used diet as a treatment for cancer are Dr. Lorraine Day, M.D.,
who used a predominately raw food, vegan diet to heal herself of breast cancer,
and Rev. George Malkmus, who healed himself nutritionally of colon cancer he
was diagnosed with in 1976, going on to found the popular Hallelujah Dietsm
program, which claims to heal many diseases, including cancer, using
nutrition and some supplementation.
It is unclear if
everyone involved in a nutritional approach to cancer even fully understood how
changing diets to a more natural diet invariably increased the amount of
nitrilosides consumed as well increasing a number of other vitamins and
minerals missing from our normal diets of highly processed foods and cooked
animal products. The diet change also eased the burden on the pancreas from
manufacturing digestive enzymes, allowing it to divert more of its energy
toward doing metabolic repair and healing. One person who did fully understand
the enzyme process as it relates to both diet and cancer was Dr. Edward Howell.
Dr. Howell wrote
in Enzyme Nutrition, "How many ailments afflict the human race? One hundred? Five hundred? One thousand? Are we more expert in breeding disease than are
wild animals? Can you name even one species of wild animal afflicted with a
hundred diseases? Fifty? Twenty-five?
Or even one?" Edward Griffin also noticed this fact as it relates to
cancer when he wrote, "It is significant that one seldom finds cancer in
the carcasses of wild animals killed in the hunt. These creatures contract the
disease only when they are domesticated by man and forced to eat the foods he
provides or the scraps from his table."
It is worth noting
that animals in the wild get a diet naturally high in nitriolosides and which
contains no cooked or processed foods. This means that animals get more living
foods with enzymes — the living components of food — intact. The lack of
processed foods, combined with the higher enzyme content of their food, makes
for easily digested foods which are kind to the animals' pancreases. Dr. Edward
Howell, in Enzyme Nutrition, wrote of research by both himself and
others that documented the size of the pancreas in domestic animals and their
wild counterparts. In all cases, the pancreas of the wild animal was smaller
than the pancreas of the domestic animal — an indicator that the domestic
animal's pancreas had to work much harder to produce digestive enzymes for the
unnatural, cooked and processed foods fed to them by man.
People who adopt
a predominately raw-food diet take advantage of the body's first and second
lines of defense against cancer. And not only do they increase the nitrilosides
in their diet but also a host of other vitamins and minerals and other
nutrients that have anti-cancer properties. For example, researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley,
recently found that a chemical produced when digesting such greens as broccoli
and kale can stifle the growth of human prostate cancer cells. Discoveries like
these take place on an almost daily basis, but diet is still relegated by
medical doctors to being a cancer preventative, not a treatment.
Those familiar
with the three theories of healing, discussed in the chapter
"Understanding Sickness," would understand why the nutritional
approach to cancer would be the best approach. The two main ways in which
chronic diseases have been stopped are either through metabolic enzyme
activity, brought about by giving the pancreas a break from digestion so that
it can divert its energy into doing bodily repair (one of the reasons fasting
is one of the oldest known treatments for disease), or by meeting a nutritional
requirement, which is the way vitamin deficiency diseases such as pellagra,
scurvy, beriberi, rickets, and other diseases have been stopped.
Those who have
survived cancer by changing to a diet low in meats and other cooked animal
products and high in fresh vegetables and fruits, fresh vegetable and fruit
juices, plenty of pure water, and changing their lifestyle to include exercise,
fresh air, and sunshine, have unknowingly applied the body's first line of
defense, as well as its second line of defense against cancer. Since this
approach does use natural, safe healing methods, proven by time and history, it
is small wonder that many have obtained excellent results by using this
approach.
Contrast this
with the conventional approach to cancer. Throughout history, no chronic
disease has ever been cured by the use of chemicals, surgery, or chemotherapy
and radiating the body. Edward Griffin noted this when he wrote, "Most
research projects are preoccupied with exotic and toxic drugs or machines that
deliver death rays to selected parts of the body. There is no counterpart for
any this in nature, and it is small wonder that progress has been
disappointing."
Other Important Information about Cancer
There are a
couple of more important issues about cancer. One is the misconception that
things "cause" cancer. While it is clear that some things cause harm
to the human body, such as smoking, it should be kept in mind that it is the
healing process gone awry that allows cancer to form. If the body's first and
second lines of defense against cancer are working properly, cancer tumors
would be impossible to form (this does not mean that damage to the body may not
cause problems — it just will not cause cancer). Dr. Edward Howell wrote of
this fact in Enzyme Nutrition:
One after another
the chemicals making up the formulas of commonly advertised remedies are being
accused of causing cancer as a result of testing on laboratory rats and mice.
Other chemical compounds used around the home have been tested and found to be
carcinogenic (cancer-causing) and banned from the market. Cancer researchers
feel they are serving society and doing their duty by this sort of detective
work. But from what you have learned by studying this book, you know they are
merely pointing at stimulating factors of cancer, and not the one basic cause.
If the body chemistry is not afflicted by the basic cause, the hundreds of
stimulating causes will be ineffective in causing cancer.
Those familiar
with the three theories of healing, discussed in the chapter
"Understanding Sickness," would remember that one of the healing
methods was to remove any external problem — toxins,
radiation, smoking, etc. — that could be damaging the body, allowing it
to heal itself. While known or unknown "carcinogens" may not cause
cancer in the sense we have been led to believe, bodily repair is an energy
intensive process. Certainly someone does not want to knowingly damage his
body, but someone with cancer certainly wants to avoid anything damaging to a
body with a malfunctioning repair system, as well as waste energy needlessly
with unnecessary repair.
One other
important issue with cancer is that, since it is actually a problem with the
healing process itself, any potential treatment should
focus on the body's defense mechanisms and not the cancer or tumor. A body
stressed with cancer attempts to seal it off, forming a lump or a tumor in the
process. While it may be appropriate to remove a tumor in some cases, remember
it is there because the body's healing process has gone awry. Cutting out a
tumor surgically may give the patient some piece of mind, but the surgical
process creates a massive trauma to the body which itself must be healed. . .in a body that is already having trouble with the
healing process. Dr. Binzel wrote of this in Alive And
Well:
From the time
that cancer was first diagnosed (some three hundred to five hundred years ago)
to the present, most members of the medical profession have treated this
disease using the theory that the tumor is the disease. This theory said that,
if you can remove the tumor or destroy the tumor, you will cure the disease.
Drs. Krebs, Burk, Nieper, and others said in essence, "Wrong!"
These men had seen thousands of cancer patients die. They realized that ninety-five
per cent of these patients had their tumors treated with surgery, and/or
radiation, and/or chemotherapy. It was obvious to them that, if removing the
tumor or destroying the tumor cured the disease, ninety-five percent of these
people would be alive and well. It was, therefore, equally obvious to them that
removing the tumor or destroying the tumor did not cure the disease. This
meant, of course, that the tumor was not the cause of the disease but
was merely a symptom of the disease.
Dr. Binzel, in a
later chapter, outlined the times in which he was concerned about removing
tumors:
·
If
the tumor, because of its size or position, is interfering with some vital
function, you have to deal with the tumor by whatever means are best available.
·
If
the tumor, because of its size or position, is causing pain, you have to deal
with the tumor by whatever means are available.
·
If
the presence of the tumor presents a psychological problem for the patient,
have it removed.
Regarding this
same issue, Edward Griffin commented, "Orthodox medicine, on the other
hand, is totally focused on the tumor. To most oncologists, the tumor is the
cancer. If they remove it surgically or burn it away, they happily announce to
the patient: "Good news. We got it all!" And indeed, no matter what
condition the cancer patient is left in, no matter how poor the quality of life
from that point on, no matter how horrific the treatment, and even if the
patient dies shortly thereafter, as long as the tumor has been shrunken by use
of poison or radiation, or surgically removed, the treatment is considered a
success.
One last item of
importance with cancer is the attitude and determination of the cancer patient.
Remember, cancer is the end result of a process that took many years of a body
being stressed out by improper meals and unhealthy living. In our fast-paced
nation we expect doctors to cure our problems almost instantly, but a problem
such as cancer that took many years to develop is going to take time for a full
recovery. During the time of regaining health, attitude is extremely important.
As Dr. Edward Howell points out, "Even in terminal cancer patients whose
tissues have been abused and damaged, the desire to forge ahead can make the
difference between success and failure."
Summary