Never Be Sick Again (43 page)

Sleep Difficulties

Sleep is critical to health, but few of us sleep an adequate amount, and a growing number of people suffer from various sleep disorders, such as disturbed sleep patterns and insomnia. Much of the time sleep problems are symptoms that the hormones and chemicals the body uses to cope with stress are being depleted. The physical consequences of inadequate sleep have a negative effect on health and performance.

Healthy people like the Hunzas went to bed when it got dark and woke up with the sun. Try to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning, even on weekends. Giving the body adequate and regular rest is important to maintaining good health.

Susceptibility to Infection

Colds and flu are not just inconveniences; they are alarm bells telling us that all is not well. While seen as a minor illness, each cold does permanent damage to the body, causing us to age prematurely. Yet millions of Americans suffer four to six colds per year, sometimes taking weeks to resolve. Healthy people do not get infections, and, if they do, they recover from them very quickly. You may recall that the healthy Hunzas never suffered from colds, and that the 133-year-old man in Vilcabamba had suffered only several colds in 133 years, not several in one year as many of us do. A cold or flu that lingers is further proof of widespread cellular malfunction.
If people
around you are sick, worry about strengthening your own
immunity, not about hiding from germs.
Building immunity is a long-term project; reacting in an emergency situation when you feel sickness coming on is something else. Here are ideas of how to accomplish both:

To prevent colds, take plenty of vitamin C (4,000 to 6,000 mg/day). If you are sick already, take vitamin C to bowel tolerance, which means taking it up to the point where you begin getting excessive gas or diarrhea and then backing off. Bowel tolerance will differ depending on who you are and what your state of health is. If I feel a cold coming on, I put 3,000 mg of vitamin C in a glass of water and drink it down every thirty to sixty minutes. In a matter of hours, the cold will be gone. B-vitamins are important, as are zinc and high-quality cod liver oil. Olive leaf extract can also be helpful; it is a powerful natural antibiotic. And, of course, avoid damaging your immunity with sugar, white flour, poor digestion, prescription drugs or anything that you are allergic to.

Weight Problems

Some people think being overweight is more of a fashion concern than a serious disease. Many people attribute weight problems to “genetics,” saying that such problems run in their family. The truth is that being overweight is a sign that cells are malfunctioning. Often, an addiction to sugar is part of the problem, and this problem needs to be treated like any other addiction. Proper diet and lifestyle changes that improve cellular health are virtually guaranteed to solve weight problems. Overweight patients need to heal their cells, just like cancer patients and heart disease patients. Worse, weight problems are frequently the prelude to more serious chronic diseases.

Mood, Thought or Behavioral Problems

The ability to think quickly and clearly—to concentrate, learn and remember—are the benefits of healthy cells and a healthy body. A problem with any of these indicates deficiency and toxicity at the cellular level, usually the result of inappropriate diets, environmental toxins, lack of exercise and unresolved stress. Brain cells function normally when they have all the nutrition they need and do not have toxins that interfere with them.

The person who flies off the handle with little provocation is often seen as having a particular personality type. The same for those who have problems getting along with others or working out conflicts in a calm and rational manner. Most of the time, however, these problems point back to the same two causes of disease: deficiency and toxicity. We are currently experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of depression, learning disabilities, violent behavior and other types of mental disease. Many of these “mental” problems actually result from the fact that the function of our brains and nervous systems has never been more compromised. Worse, physicians usually try to “solve” these problems by giving those afflicted toxic, mind-altering chemicals.

Building a Better You

Now that you have a sense of your state of health and have perhaps identified some early warning signs of disease, start to build the foundation of a new lifestyle:

• Keep a food diary for a week, writing down everything you eat and drink. How much of your diet is eaten raw? Do you buy truly fresh, organic vegetables and fruits? Is the meat you eat treated with antibiotics and hormones? Do sugar, white flour, dairy products and processed oils bog down your diet? Do you combine the wrong foods together at a meal? Is the food you buy genetically modified?

• Keep track of the amount and kind of exercise, movement, or other physical stimulation (saunas, etc.) you participate in during the week.

• Consider the products you use on your body: Are the ingredients in your deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, makeup and skin cream natural and nontoxic?

• Take a look at the products you use to clean your house. Consider, too, the furnishings, including your rugs. List the sources of emissions within your house, including your carpets, furnace, hot-water heater and stove.

• Consider the ways in which social connections, work and community involvement nurture you, or fail to do so.

• Take stock of the stress in your life.

• Think about the doctors you visit, the treatments or tests that you approve of, the medicines that you take. Are they doing you more harm than good? Are your doctors and your medical treatments addressing all your pathways to health, or is their focus narrow and incomplete?

• Do you take vitamins or other supplements consistently, and are they of high quality? Do they contain cheap, ineffective ingredients such as carbonates and oxides, or toxins such as artificial colors?

Each of these choices is part of an ongoing process of promoting— or antagonizing—your health. Keep track of all six pathways and do your best along each of them, all the time. Doing a great job for a week and then forgetting about it is pointless. Track the process—there is no endgame, no checkmate to seek—there is only process.
Either you are going
about the process of getting well and staying well, or you are
going about the process of getting sicker.
Keep trying new things until you discover what works for you.

After you have identified some of the problems in your lifestyle—ways in which your body is becoming deficient or ways in which toxins threaten you—begin today to make changes.

• Make sure at least some and preferably most of your diet is eaten raw. Buy at least some organic fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as organically produced meat. Cut down or eliminate the Big Four: sugar, white flour, dairy products and processed oils.

• Practice tips for proper food combining and effective food preparation methods to ensure you are getting the best nutrition from the food that you buy.

• Begin taking high-quality nutritional supplements.

• Make exercise and movement a part of every day.

• Nurture your social and family connections. Make a plan and then make a concerted effort to make it happen.

• Identify the drugs you take (medical or recreational), and begin to imagine how well you might function without them.

A Radical Shift in Perspective

As you consider your lifestyle and identify the areas that must change, take a close look at your overall perspective on health and disease. Health is something we all want, yet so few of us give it serious thought until we get sick. That approach does not work. The practical new system for choosing health presented in this book is different from typical approaches. This new way to “see” health and disease is so simple it empowers the individual to take charge. That empowerment can help to end our current epidemic of chronic and degenerative disease, dramatically improving the health of our people.

As I have told you, one of the first people whose perspective I helped change was my brother, diagnosed in 1991 with advanced prostate cancer. The specialist who made the diagnosis informed him that the tumor was so large and so widespread that surgery was not an option. My brother was told that there were no traditional medical treatment options available for his advanced stage of tumor. “Modern medicine” had nothing to offer, and my brother felt he was doomed. He eventually found a caring physician who was willing to operate, despite the poor odds. The surgery was a success, with limitations, as the surgeon was unable to remove all of the cancer, and biopsies indicated cancer had spread throughout my brother's body. His life expectancy was estimated between six months and three years, and no one in his condition had been known to live beyond five years.

As I am writing this chapter, eleven years have passed since my brother's surgery. He is living a high-quality life. How did he do it? First, he had to change his perspective. The existing belief system said he should have died a long time ago. Rather than accept his cancer as a death sentence, my brother took on the challenge of restoring normal function to his cells. The new understanding of one disease says disease has only two causes—deficiency and toxicity—and that addressing those causes along the six pathways can heal virtually all disease.

My brother's recovery came as the result of radical changes in diet and the addition of vitamin supplements, essential fatty acids and frozen shark cartilage—not chemotherapy and radiation. Conventional cancer treatments do nothing to reverse the underlying causes of cancer (abnormal cell chemistry), and they do devastating damage to the body.

The most important steps you can take to change your perspective about health, and thereby reduce morbidity and mortality, is to shift your view from one side of these equations to the other. That is, reconsider the differences between

• Disease care versus health care

• Diagnosing symptoms versus preventing disease

• Treating symptoms versus restoring health

• Relying on doctors versus relying on yourself

• Eating make-believe food versus eating real food

• Germs causing infection versus compromised immune systems

• Toxic versus nontoxic living

• An active life versus sedentary sickness

Let us take a closer look at each of these shifts in perspective.

Disease Care Versus Health Care

Existing medical practice is not about health care; it is about disease care. Modern medicine is based on the belief that you are healthy until you have a diagnosable disease, after which the task is to give the disease a name (diagnose) and then suppress (treat) its symptoms. This perspective waits for disease to happen; makes no attempt to measure health in its initial decline; ignores the effects of nutrition, toxins and behavior; and gives little or no recognition to the body's self-healing abilities. The patient is not empowered, and the personal and monetary costs are enormous. Modern medicine excels at treating emergencies and trauma, and in doing surgery, but does poorly at preventing or healing disease because it is almost totally unequipped to diagnose and treat the two causes.

The new perspective on health presented in this book is based not on waiting for disease to happen, but, rather, actively working to prevent disease. If disease does occur, then we must look for the true cause and restore health by addressing that root cause. This approach recognizes the body as self-regulating and self-healing, and seeks to optimize health by helping the body to function as it is designed to do. This approach incorporates all we have learned about the effects of nutrition, toxicity and behavior. The underlying inspiration is that health is a choice and that almost all disease is preventable.

Diagnosing Symptoms Versus Preventing Disease

The process of diagnosing a patient rests on waiting for illness to strike and then matching the symptoms to a so-called disease, thus giving that group of symptoms a category and a name. This activity can be very expensive and time consuming, and is often hazardous to the patient. Yet, what does it achieve? Does this tell us what caused the problem or how to fix it? Not very often. Because only one disease exists, spending a lot of time, money and resources to give a group of symptoms any one of thousands of meaningless names is not a productive activity.

Because of its focus on diagnosing and treating disease after it occurs, modern medicine has paralyzed itself, which is why it cannot reverse our epidemic of chronic disease. We cannot continue to perceive disease as something that strikes like a bolt of lightning; people in good health do not become ill. The only way to reduce disease is to promote health and thereby prevent disease in the first place.

Treating Symptoms Versus Restoring Health

The best way to deal with any problem—in business, personal lives, engineering, etc.—is to identify the cause, address the cause and solve the problem. Unfortunately, modern medicine does not focus on identifying the cause.

Traditional medicine suppresses symptoms, usually by poisoning patients with toxic drugs, removing essential body parts or exposing the patient to cancer-causing radiation— sometimes, all three tactics. Meanwhile, diseases remain chronic, and disease-care costs continue to escalate to unsustainable levels.
Diseases are healed with nutrients and the
removal of toxins, not with drugs and surgical scalpels.