BASIC CHOICES WE MAKE

There are fundamental choices we make, usually without realizing we’re making them. These choices greatly affect our longer term susceptibility and options downstream as well as our longevity in a healthy body. Pharmaceuticals can help you with longevity in an unhealthy body but mostly we would prefer longevity in a healthy body.

For instance, we can choose to wait until we get an illness and then act – use medications to reduce the symptoms like nasal spray, cold pills, etc.

We can seek to prepare for illness like taking a flu shot thinking that this will prepare us in advance to fight off the flu virus.

Many of these choices allow us to avoid learning in more depth how our body works and how prepared we are to naturally avoid illness.

One choice we make without knowing it is the choice to believe that the body must get ill in the first place. We accept the word and believe the advertising of companies who are interested in selling us medications, shots, and other products on a continuous “womb to tomb” basis. These companies pay for writers who write articles that support certain views that drug manufacturing companies use to support sales of products. They pay doctors to say things like “doctor recommended.” Don’t you think its odd that there are doctors who recommend almost anything?

It’s easy to believe that illness is a natural part of being human because we’re surrounded by choices that damage and depress our immune system. For instance, every time we eat factory-farmed beef in a hamburger we ingest a little bit of antibiotic that was used to prevent the animal from getting an illness because of the conditions at the factory farm including what they feed the animal. These antibiotics are a part of what has lead to our antibiotic crisis where most people do not respond to any antibiotic which they really need it. Meanwhile antibiotics in general always kill off good gut bacteria leading to digestive issues and depressed immune systems.

And every time we take a medication like a flu shot or antibiotic, the resultant killing off of our gut bacteria damages our immune system which is located in our gut and activated by our good gut bacteria.

Eating dairy products from cows used in factory farming also damages our immune system. And eating grains grown in fields using Roundup or Glyphosate, the strongest antibiotic in the world, can reduce our immune system to nothing which is why many people develop symptoms telling them that their gut and immune system are malfunctioning – skin problems, joint problems, headaches, weight problems, food craving problems, brain fog, and more.

Doesn’t it seem odd that all the “science” that has produced newer farming methods (GMOs, etc.) and newer methods for raising farm animals (factory farming) have not produced any impact studies or scientific information about the effects of these methods on humans?

Over half the antibiotics sold in the US every year are sold to dairies and ranches for us on food animals.

In addition, most crops in the US for corn, soy, wheat, and other grains are used for factory farms – that’s correct if you surmised that we spray these crops once or even twice with glyphosate and then feed them to our food animals and then they end up back on our plate or in our glass as the world’s most powerful antibiotic.

And all that might not make sense unless you knew that the same companies who do that are the ones who are also selling us drugs to combat the many symptoms and diseases caused by our food.

THINKING DEFENSIVELY

I would like my immune system to be ready. I want to be able to repel everything that comes my way. The immune system relies on a healthy gut bacterial environment. I can build that up by doing certain things and avoiding others.

• Avoid factory-farmed beef, chicken, pork, and fish – if you must eat meat, eat 4oz per day or less and eat only pasture-raised, 100% grass-fed beef, pasture raised chicken and pork as well, and fish that is caught in very small sizes (12″ or less) that are wild-caught. Even the best caught fish are dangerous because we have toxins from factory farming running into our waters along with Glyphosate that is water-soluble and gos everywhere – just look at an aerial map of the Gulf of Mexico’s algae bloom where the Mississippi dumps into that water. The runoff of the Mississippi river kills everything – fish, plant life, and more. Only certain kinds of algae thrive in that “toxic soup.” https://dissolve.com/video/Algal-blooms-Gulf-Mexico-coast-satellite-royalty-free-stock-video-footage/001-D30-40-027
• Avoid fruits or vegetables not grown organically – and you don’t have to see a USDA organic sticker – if you visit a ranch or farm you can speak to the farmers and figure out if they spray chemicals or use synthetic fertilizers – you can generally find these more easily if you have a farmer’s market near you. Many farmers will “make a deal” with you and for a certain reasonable amount per month they will give you 1-2 boxes of food per month.
• Avoid heavy metals and chlorine. Drink filtered water. Not everyone can afford to install a whole-house filter and that’s a given, but many can afford a small filter that sits on your sink and filters a pitcher at a time solely for drinking water. Most public water unfortunately has chlorine and many other toxic chemicals that you just want to eliminate from your diet. Depending on the location you may also get a dose of heavy metals which will build up over time and cause neurological issues. And taking a closer look at cleaning products, cosmetics, deodorants, and makeup. These all have ingredients that are known to be highly toxic and manufacturers just rely on your ignorance to keep selling their product.
• Avoid vaccinations. Vaccines don’t have to do the same 10 years of safety testing as other pharmaceuticals. Perhaps there’s an underlying belief that vaccines need to get into the market fast, to save lives. That’s certainly the prevailing story – support by scientific facts or not, you decide. But rather than “tickling” your immune system and taking a risk that heavy metals and other toxins will be shoved into your blood stream, building a stronger immune system is a much better way to prepare for the flu. Besides, modern vaccines for the flu have a less than 10% success rate at hitting the right virus. Think of it this way – Prevnar 14 has to try to guess among a hundred flu strains and picks 14. What are the chances these will hit the right strains? 14 out of 100+ – not very good odds, and statistically this proves out. As well, some people becomes carriers for the live virus in the vaccine and then just infect others without anyone even suspecting it. A good argument for why people who have been vaccinated for flu should be the ones wearing the surgical masks for 2 weeks after vaccination.
• Avoid Foods You Obviously Shouldn’t Eat – look, there are things that you probably already know are bad for you. You just underestimate how bad. For instance, vegetable oils used for cooking like corn oil, canola oil, safflower oil, and more are all high in Omega 6 and extremely damaging to the body not just from their Glyphosate content, but even worse from your body’s reaction to them. Unless you cooked it yourself in high quality (not fake) olive oil, or coconut oil, or avocado oil, you just need to avoid things cooked in oil. And packaged foods are just your worst choice because no matter what they say on the label, manufacturers are going to include things they know are bad for you but they need them as fillers, preservatives, or to make it taste better. There are hundreds of these ingredients – too many to list – and so best advice is to look carefully, educate yourself, or better still cook what you eat raw and fresh because packaged foods cannot be trusted. It is not uncommon for people to have inflammation generated by one or more common ingredients in packaged foods. Best way for you to find out is to eliminate packaged foods for a month and then if you get results, backtrack and add certain items one at a time until you discover an item that increases your inflammation.

LEARN TO RECOGNIZE SYMPTOMS

Learn to recognize when something you’re eating and getting from your environment is affecting you.

The skin – the largest organ in the body and most of us think that it “misbehaves” all by itself without provocation. And that’s almost never true. The skin is just our signaling system for when we are reacting to something that we are mildly and severely allergic to.

Inflammation is a normal bodily immune system reaction that occurs when we cut ourselves or injure ourselves. An arm or leg get bruised, inflammation is the response as the immune system produces more elements to help the body fight off the infection or condition causing pain or discomfort. This reaction is normally fairly short and certainly doesn’t occur over long periods of time unless something is wrong.

If inflammation does continue, it is usually because the body is reacting to continuing doses of something it recognizes as not friendly and sometimes that’s in our food.

Some of the symptoms we can use to recognize inflammation besides skin issues are joint pain including finger, toes, or knees and elbows. Stiff muscles in back or limbs can also be a sign. Sometimes when back muscles tighten up and we move around it causes bones to be moved out of places which results in more pain and almost seems to point to bones as being the root causes of the pains when really the initial cause was inflammation caused by a food allergy.

Headaches often go along with other symptoms.

As the immune system is mainly based in the gut, you could easily expect that gut issues including pain, diarrhea, constipation, heart burn, indigestion, gas and bloating, and more were first and foremost indicators of inflammation.

Examples of food allergies where we are mildly but not seriously allergic (in most cases this is the real cause) are wheat and other grains – many people have a mild to allergic reaction to these – as well as dairy products – most people also have mild to more severe reactions – and off course anything refined which is especially true of sugar from any source.

Almost everyone on the planet has some level of inflammatory reaction to sugar and we have just learned to “live with it” but make no mistake, the human body which was designed a very long time ago and has changed very little, was not designed to ingest sugar and carbohydrates. Making the major part of our diet about these invites constant and ongoing inflammation.

None of these symptoms are normal and none are necessary. And none go without long term consequences whether you’re currently young or old.

TALKING TO PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC DISEASE

The upshot of inflammation is a general category called “Chronic Disease” – this encompasses everything that isn’t the result of a traumatic accident or a virus. Although the early symptoms of chronic inflammation were described above, the later symptoms are diabetes, heart disease, dementia, Alzheimers, Multiple Sclerosis,  cancer, fiber myalgia, obesity, and about 200+ more.

Not all chronic disease comes from food of course. But more generally we could say that most come from “environmental factors” – that is, things we eat, are exposed to, use on our hands or body, or breath in – so “environmental” is everything.

What is it like to speak to someone who has and is committed to chronic disease?

“We’ve done some testing and we believe that dairy products are the source of your inflammation and obesity – we notice your skin is always red and somewhat swollen.”

“Does that include ice cream?”

“Well  yes, anything that comes from a cow or a dairy – anything made with milk.”

“OK well I just don’t know if I can do that. I eat a lot everyday and in the past with other diets I’ve cut out 2-3 meals and still not lost weight. So I don’t see how not eating ice cream is going to help.”

“Take a look at this case study of a woman about your same age who had an allergy to dairy products. She quit eating any dairy for 3 weeks and lost 40lbs with no other dietary changes.”

“I’ve seen a lot of studies like that before. It seems like they always worked for that person but not for me.”

People who are obese have beliefs that were created by doctors and other experts who re-enforced that obesity requires that you eat less and exercise more. An entire diet industry is built around this idea and many of the “challenges” require exercise and dieting in outrageous proportions.

So regardless of the symptoms, we find that there is a mental element to the issue of chronic disease – many times the person has had the condition for so long that they have decided the cause and what won’t work already and they are committed to that belief.

To say to a patient, “just stop eating dairy products” is just a bigger gap than it appears. Many people belief in their condition and its permanence. It can’t be as easy as stopping eating dairy, or wheat, or something else. It just can’t be that easy. Someone would have told me that before now. And besides, I love ice cream.

So the mental state required is a commitment that, “I will do whatever it takes to find the cause of this problem.” It’s a mental state that agrees to look anew at possible scientific explanations with more dignity. Our bodies only fo things because we are out of balance and we can find that balance by finding the source of inflammation. Sometimes those conditions are more permanent but often they are not. Looking for the cause of inflammation is often fruitful because it opens a new avenue for investigation.

And often the body gives us feedback almost immediately – a reduction in skin conditions, a lessening of indigestion, a reduction in joint pain – sometimes just small subtle changes can tell us we’re on the right road.

SUMMARY

The symptoms of inflammation are not random – they follow a pattern because the body generates inflammation for a reason. Look for that pattern and the root causes and you’re on the right track.