Never Be Sick Again (44 page)

Relying on Doctors Versus Relying on Yourself

Most people wait until they get sick, then go to a doctor and hope to get well. I did this when I was ill, only to discover that my physicians had no idea how to make me well. This practice negates our own responsibility for health. Do we really think we can eat an unhealthful diet and live an unhealthful lifestyle and that our doctor will make us well after we have worked so hard to make ourselves sick?

Health and disease are choices. We, as a society and as individuals, are the ones making those choices. Today, health is compromised at so many levels. If we want to improve our health, prevent or reverse disease, and extend life, we have to make special choices in order to compensate. We cannot rely on physicians to “fix” us after we have spent decades making ourselves sick—almost all physicians are stuck in the old disease-care paradigm and have no idea how to restore cells to health.

The responsibility for health is ours, and we must teach this to our children so they and their children can claim their birthright to lifelong good health. We must also ask our governments and society at large to make changes. Why do we allow soft drink and candy vending machines into our schools? Why is it that medical insurance covers failed traditional treatments but does not cover alternative treatments that are safer and more effective? Why do we allow our government to subsidize the dairy and sugar industries? Why do we allow genetically modified foods to be sold without labeling and without adequate testing for safety? Why do we continue to allow the use of fluoride in our drinking water? Why do we continue to allow dentists to put mercury in people's mouths? All of us need to address these questions and many others.

Eating Make-Believe Food Versus
Eating Real Food

Until I educated myself, I used to think that what I purchased at the supermarket was real food. What a surprise to find little or no real food in a supermarket. Imagine the public outcry if someone had announced to us that they were going to drastically lower the nutritional content of our food. Yet, this is exactly what has happened. Where is the outcry? We are all eating nutritionally deprived, toxic, make-believe foods that have been proven incapable of supporting healthy life in either animals or humans.

Throughout this book we have looked at the history of the human diet and environment and how dramatically these have changed, especially in the last century. Our cells are designed with specific nutritional needs that are no longer satisfied by typical modern diets and lifestyles. To achieve optimal health, we must acquire daily all the nutrients for which we have genetic requirements. Scientist Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate, wrote that modern diets are incapable of supplying optimal nutrient quantities, even if we make good food choices. According to eminent scientist Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D., up to 80 percent of the U.S. population suffers from malnutrition. Most of us now suffer from “affluent malnutrition,” caused by an expensive diet rich in calories (from sugar and white flour) and poor in nutrients. Because the food supply is unhealthful, and has been for several generations, we are now seeing entire populations where no real perspective of “health” exists. Disease has become the norm, so we view ourselves as healthy.

Entire populations are now suffering from diseases that are unquestionably related to nutritional deficiency, yet we do not label them as such. This is because we seldom encounter obvious deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra or beriberi, so malnutrition is not perceived as a major contributor to disease— but it is!

Deficiency in modern diets creates a host of problems including: diminished overall competence and resistance to infection, premature aging, colds and flu, acne, tooth decay, mental illness, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, kidney disease, lung disease, autoimmune disease, anemia, diabetes, allergies, birth defects, alcoholism, learning disabilities, violent behavior and more. Although these problems carry different disease labels, they are all the result of sick cells. Which body parts get sick does not matter, because the way to prevent disease or restore health is always the same. Give your cells what they need, protect them from what they don't need.

Nearly all supermarket fruits and vegetables have been grown in depleted soils and are deficient in nutrients and high in toxic contaminants. These substandard foods are often harvested before ripening so they can be shipped and stored without spoilage. Foods are often chemically enhanced to increase shelf life. A huge part of our diet has been processed and packaged, removing what little nutrition ever existed.

Does anyone really think that a donut made of white flour and sugar and soaked in rancid oils is real food? Real food is organic, fresh, raw, unprocessed and mainly plant-based. White flour, sugar, milk, ice cream and coffee are not real foods, nor are conventionally grown and prematurely harvested tomatoes, oranges and bananas, not to mention old, waxed apples and cucumbers. To prevent disease or to restore health, we must stop eating the make-believe and go back to what our healthy ancestors ate: real food.

Germs Versus the True Cause of Disease

The popular misconception is that microorganisms (germs) cause infections. But to be a true cause, the microorganisms would have to produce the same effect all the time, which is not the case. Not everyone who is exposed to a particular organism gets sick, and not everyone who gets sick does so to the same degree. In truth, whether or not someone develops an infection depends on the balance between several factors, namely the virulence of the organisms, the number of organisms and, most importantly, their state of immunity. We live in a sea of microorganisms, but they do not make us sick until we alter the natural balance between them and us. Our normal coexistence with germs rather than a germ-free environment ensures our health.

When we eat sugar and nutrient-deficient diets, expose ourselves to toxins, lose sleep, fail to exercise and fail to adapt to stress, our immunity becomes depressed and we open the door to infection. Then we blame the germ, when really we are to blame. Rather than being obsessed with germs and rushing for flu shots and antibacterial soaps, optimizing our immunity would be a far better approach. The perspective that germs cause disease is so ingrained in us, many have difficulty making the shift to the new way of thinking; but to avoid infection, we must do exactly that. People such as the Hunzas lived into their hundreds without ever having as much as a cold, not because they took flu shots but because they were healthy and their immune systems were strong. In truth, only sick people get sick. The problem is we spend decades making ourselves sick, all the while thinking we are healthy.

Toxic Versus Nontoxic Living

Imagine what would happen if someone announced that they were planning to poison our food, our homes, our workplaces or, for that matter, the entire planet? We would be outraged. Yet that has happened and few are outraged. We are constantly told that small amounts of toxins are safe. Yet chronic disease is rampant because these small amounts of toxins, when added together, are disabling our detoxification systems, exceeding our capacity to detoxify them, and bioac-cumulating in our tissues to disease-causing levels.

Some toxins, such as estrogenic chemicals from pesticides, plastic bottles and canned foods, are not safe even in amounts so small they cannot be measured by the usual techniques. Every day we eat food, breathe air and use products containing these and other harmful toxins. Some exposure is virtually unavoidable, but most exposure is a choice. We have to start making different everyday choices about what we put on and in our bodies and what we expose ourselves to in the workplace. What we eat, wear and bring into our homes—and the personal care products that we use—are under our direct control. We need to change our perspective that small amounts of toxins are safe; we need to recognize that small amounts of toxins can build up in our bodies over time. Most Americans are now accumulating hundreds of man-made chemicals in their bodies, and yet we wonder why we get sick.

An Active Life Versus Sedentary Sickness

Human genes evolved at a time when a high level of physical activity was the norm. All through the course of evolution, man had to be physically active in order to survive. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were nomadic peoples who were always on the move, always foraging for food or drink. Because of the way we evolved, the human body actually requires a high level of physical activity in order to function normally. Until fairly recently this activity requirement was met by leading a normal lifestyle and producing life's necessities. From prehistoric times up until the last century, people spent the vast majority of their physical energy—hard, daily labor—just trying to produce food, shelter and clothing. Today we are the most sedentary people in history. To achieve health, we must change our perspective that we can be both sedentary and healthy. Fortunately, for all you couch potatoes out there, a simple way is available to address this problem: rebounding. See appendix C for more information.

The Future Is Now

After bringing myself back from the brink of death and restoring my health, and after more than sixteen years of study and experimentation, I have concluded that the only way our society will stop its slide into declining health is to change our beliefs about health and disease. The next major advance in health care will be driven by those people who accept personal responsibility for their health, educate themselves and make choices that move their personal health equations away from disease and toward health.

When a large number of people look at something in the same way, we call that system of belief a paradigm. Paradigms become accepted wisdom, and we interpret our lives and make our decisions according to that conventional thinking. I ask you to reconsider accepted wisdom and conventional thinking about health, disease and medicine. Reconsider whether the beliefs that guide your life are effective in solving your problems. Reconsider whether the decisions you make about your health—from foods to drugs to doctors—bring you health and happiness. Reconsider whether you are missing out on tremendous opportunities to be well and to live a longer, more vigorous life than you ever imagined.

Today, most of us, and almost all of our physicians, are living in a cave of confusion and misunderstanding. The medical establishment wins honors, praise and prizes for its descriptions of diseases and how to manage symptoms. Yet this health paradigm—this distorted way of viewing health— is not solving our problems.

If we are taught that thousands of diseases exist, then of course we must go to doctors for all our health problems; only the doctor has the education to deal with all the different diseases and their treatments. The new perspective I offer you is that there is only one disease; health is then easier to understand, and the power to get healthy and to stay healthy lies within yourself. Aside from medical emergencies, which are indeed matters for trained professionals, maintaining your health is a matter of preventing deficiency and toxicity and requires little or no outside assistance.

We like to think of ourselves as so technologically advanced, so smart, so sophisticated . . . able to invent computers, land on the moon and build space stations. Yet people we consider primitive lived much longer and healthier lives than we do. By optimizing their six pathways and minimizing the two causes of disease, these populations showed us that the potential for human health is extraordinary. These people did not suffer from the chronic and degenerative diseases that are the norm in our society; in fact they rarely, if ever, suffered from the common cold.

A massive misconception in America is that most of us are healthy. In reality, most of us are sick. You don't have to look sick to be sick. We are living proof that it is entirely possible to achieve normal growth rates and have a healthy appearance while being undernourished and in a state of compromised health. Our unprecedented epidemic of chronic and degenerative disease is clearly the result of eating a diet consisting of adulterated and devitalized foods; exposure to the lethal effects of polluted air, water and food; and exposure to manmade electromagnetic radiation. Yet, as a society, we have failed to come to grips with this reality, partially because we are still stuck in the obsolete medical paradigm of the “germs and genes theory” of disease, and partially because powerful economic incentives exist to maintain the status quo.

Do we think we can continue to eat nutritionally deficient diets, diets rich in make-believe foods made from sugar, white flour and processed oils, diets that will not even sustain healthy life in rats, and still be healthy? Can we continue to live sedentary lifestyles when we know that physical activity is absolutely essential to health? Can we continue to use products that poison us with toxins that bioaccumulate in our tissues and cause cellular malfunction? Can we support wellness without learning stress-management techniques? Can we continue to live and work in ways that deprive us of healthy, full-spectrum light and adequate sleep?

Chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, allergies and osteoporosis are entirely preventable. By learning and universally applying the concepts of one disease, two causes and six pathways, our society could eliminate today's epidemic of chronic disease. We must teach everyone, including our schoolchildren, how to understand and take personal responsibility for the two causes of disease and how to form the positive habits that will result in lifelong good health. Health is a choice. Disease is the result of poor choices, and almost all diseases are preventable.