I just attended a conference with over 40 speakers on this topic. Actually the main focus of the conference was centered around fat but most speakers centered their talks arounds the impact of autoimmune diseases on the human body.

What is Autoimmune and Why is it Important?

Autoimmune refers to a condition where the body’s immune system attacks the body. Generally it attacks specific organs as shown in the graphic above. In fact, it really attacks all organs and what shows up is the weakest link. Generally your genetic makeup determines which organ will be the weakest link – it varies from person to person and that’s why autoimmune has so many faces. It can show up in many people as Hashimotos because the immune system has been attacking the Thyroid for years.

Many of these symptoms don’t show up for 5-7 years. Of course if your doctor knew the right tests to administer and if insurance would pay for them, these conditions could be detected many years before they actually started producing symptoms.

With autoimmune, tests will show widespread attacks or anti-bodies for many organs years before one or more start to fail.

Symptoms

There are as many symptoms as there are organs in the body. Suddenly it’s harder to keep your weight down and you find you’re eating more and craving things you didn’t used to eat. So you start increasing weight. You may become aware that you’re fatigued more often and don’t have the energy you did and you might think that is aging but it isn’t.

Your doctor might tell you your blood sugar is up – your triglycerides – a measure of how much unused sugar you have floating around in your blood. You might be diagnosed as pre-diabetic or having metabolic syndrome – a short list of factors that point to early-stage diabetes.

But again the symptoms can vary and they generally come on fairly slowly over time. Your skin might start to become blemished or you might have more indigestion more often, you might have problems with sleeping, or any number of things pointing to a change in your metabolism – your doctor will say it’s just aging but that’s because he doesn’t believe the human body was made to care for itself for a much longer period than most doctors believe in.

In fact, if you want to get a better description of the symptoms just watch the drug commercials on television. The pharmaceutical industry will provide a variety of drugs that suppress the immune system. They won’t cure the problem that caused these symptoms because that would result in selling you a lot fewer drugs so they’ll sell you drugs that suppress or compromise your immune system and temporarily prevent it from attacking your suffering organ, or anything else for that matter. When you hear the mandatory warnings note that they always have to do with telling your doctor if you have certain symptoms already that would require an immune response to infection, etc.

The Underlying Cause

Meanwhile as the medical establishment prescribes insulin, or Synthroid, or a variety of other medications that only mask the symptoms and while the drug companies make an ever-increasing array of drugs and educate doctors in how to diagnose and prescribe, the real underlying cause remains hidden because there is not a lot of money in curing people permanently.

Make no mistake, autoimmune has already been proven to be reversible and curable. It’s already a fact but nobody selling, dispensing, or prescribing drugs is going to tell you that.

For over 20 years, functional medicine doctors have been diagnosing and treating the various forms of autoimmune. It has only been in the past 5 years that these doctors and the many researchers have begun to realize that there is one root cause for all of the chronic diseases that have only shown up in the past 40 years.

Chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimers, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, cancer, and more…

…have as their underlying cause, chronic inflammation. Explained in more detail in several posts on this website, inflammation is the root cause of triggering the autoimmune response and a part of a downward spiral where cause and effect feed each other until it is difficult to determine whether inflammation caused autoimmune or vice versa.

Inflammation occurs for a variety of reasons but it generally refers to the triggering of the bodies immune system to fight off a perceived infection. When you have a cut it is normal for the body to use temporary inflammation to cure the cut. But that response comes and goes fairly quickly. A normal state in the body would be that no immune response or antibodies are triggered day to day because they are not needed.

But when the body perceives a threat it generates the immune response and the body is continually in a state of inflammation. That inflammation and immune response in turn causes all sorts of “risk factors” like high cholesterol, blood pressure, high blood sugar, and more.

But what is the most common cause of chronic inflammation? What if instead of developing a drug to fight the symptoms we just kept asking the question, “Why is there inflammation?” – this is what functional medicine does – it keeps asking “Why” until it gets to the root cause of the problem.

And the root cause it surprising because it’s gluten.

Just Because Everyone Doesn’t Have Symptoms Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Hurting Them

The most important discovery for this century is that ALL HUMANS, and most animals, are  not designed to eat wheat, barley, rye, or any derivative thereof.

I’M NOT SAYING SOME PEOPLE, OR ONLY THOSE PEOPLE WHO ARE ALLERGIC TO WHEAT – I AM SAYING THAT NO HUMAN BEING WAS DESIGNED TO EAT WHEAT.

Why? Because wheat and other foods derived from grasses erode and damage the gut OF ALL HUMAN BEINGS.

Sure, cows have a different digestive system and their stomachs are designed to eat grasses, but humans are not cows and eating wheat slowly but surely damages and erodes the gut until sooner or later we develop a “leaky gut” – a gut that has been eroded to the point where undigested food particles start to slip through the cracks and into the blood stream. When this starts to happen then various foods that we eat often begin to bind to proteins and cells in the body that belong to various organs and then new combined proteins are now seen by the body’s immune system as “the enemy” and then eating more of that food just continually triggers the immune response – inflammation.

AGAIN, HUMAN BEINGS WERE NOT DESIGNED TO EAT WHEAT.

Dr. Osborne provides detailed insight into this issue in his book “NO GRAIN NO PAIN” but what I’m giving you in this post is the bottom line of listening to dozens of speakers – doctors who have cured patients permanently of their autoimmune diseases and researchers who have proven without a shadow of doubt what the underlying cause is.

If you eat grains – bread, pastries, any kind of refined flour, granola, granola bars, it doesn’t matter what form it takes, and any of the thousands of packaged food items that also contain wheat or gluten, then 5-7 years down the road, and sometimes longer, you’re going to start to notice the symptoms of autoimmune.

And you’ll no doubt think it is aging and your doctor will agree with you unless he or she is a doctor of functional medicine in which case they’re schedule you for a number of tests and then systematically find the root cause issue.

But while you are waiting, they’ll tell you to stop eating wheat.

Consequences of Labelling Wheat a NON-STARTER

I don’t mean to trivialize the realization that humans cannot eat wheat. Our entire agricultural system is built around wheat because it’s easy and cheap to grow, it’s a significant source of calories and protein, and if everyone in America stopped eating wheat tomorrow our entire economy would collapse.

But it’s also a significant source of toxins over and above it’s basic mismatch with the human digestive system.

GMO wheat crops dominate our food system. These are seeds genetically modified to withstand the effects of RoundUP – the product from Monsanto that now has been discovered to not only contain Glyphosate, a potent insecticide, but also some hidden petroleum distillates that were not listed as “active ingredients” but most certainly are and to boot at 10X more dangerous than the Glyphosate. GMO plants absorb RoundUP like a sponge and have been found in our entire water system, in human urine samples, and even in organic crops due to overspray and ground water contamination.

And besides our basic reaction to wheat, all of those ingredients mentioned in RoundUP are toxic hormone disrupters that not only cause inflammation but also disrupt the basic metabolic responses of the body.

So WHEAT IS A NON-STARTER FOR MORE THAN ONE REASON.

Will Eliminating Wheat Solve All My Problems?

We live in a complex environment with complex intake of nutrition and exposure to toxins. You might also be allergic to other common foods because “leaky gut syndrome” opens the doors for you to become allergic to more than just wheat. Wheat is an automatic, but leaky gut might also make you allergic to dairy products – something most of us eat frequently and therefore stand more chance of creating antibodies and an immune response. So we have to get off wheat for 30 days or more to begin to repair the damage and in the meantime there may be other contributors.

Aside from wheat when we’re older and we’ve had a steady diet of fish for instance, we might have a buildup of mercury from eating the wrong fish and that can contribute to our inflammation as well.

So testing is important to help us understand what elements are contributing to inflammation.

As well, there are many environmental contributors of toxins that we might be sensitive to. Chemicals we use in the home, garden, garage, and people spraying in local fields, contribute greatly to our home environment, a place where we spend at least ⅓ of our time. The #1 recommendation among those who study and analyze the source of toxins at home is to get a HEPA filter and clean your home air as much as possible so that you can sleep and live at least part of the time without exposure to toxins that will trigger inflammation.

Of course if you’re going to address inflammation then you have to get serious about sugar and carbohydrates in general. Sugar, soft drinks, and too much fruit (fructose) and packaged foods with high fructose corn syrup are sources of inflammation above and beyond most anything else you ingest. Grains including refined flours are converted to sugar in your body very quickly and so have the same value as sugar in producing chronic inflammation. Your body sees blood sugar as the enemy and quickly generates cholesterol to fix the problem. That cholesterol of course attaches itself to your arteries and the story is clear from there.

Most people who completely eliminate all sources of sugar and grains from their diet report immediate drops in blood pressure and reduction or elimination of many of symptoms associated with autoimmune and inflammation.

And don’t underestimate the effects of caffeine. Not only does it activate your adrenals but most coffee beans come with a toxic mold content that will definitely trigger inflammation.

At the end of the day, eliminating a lot of things for 30 days or more is the best test you can use. If you feel better, and you most likely will, then you can decide whether feeling good and being healthy is more important to you than eating what you want.

Thank about it…

• diabetes in America is growing so rapidly that healthcare and government are concerned about how we will pay for it
• heart disease and cancer are growing at an alarming rate
• obesity and even childhood obesity are growing also at an alarming rate

We can’t ignore these “big picture” issues that we may have escaped for now, but may discover shortly to be a major factor in our own personal health.

There is a silent and deadly disease that causes diabetes, heart disease, ALS, Alzheimers, dementia, MS, obesity, and many more chronic diseases. It’s auto-immune disease. You’ll be amazed at how many people around you already have it or will develop it shortly.

You should register and watch the free video series today. click here.

Dear Grand Dad or Mom:

I wanted to give you this letter while you still have a chance of reading and understanding it.

I don’t appreciate what you did to us – your grandchildren.

First, you completely ignored everyone who told you to stop eating junk food and toxic food, and kept eating high carbohydrate foods with flour and sugar, and lots of bad chemicals until your brain started to malfunction and then you couldn’t make good decisions anymore and you still ignored all of the research and medical advice saying you were too old to change.

Second, you completely ignored your responsibility to be healthy and happy for your children and grandchildren so we wouldn’t have to take care of you as you got older. Do you really think we like having you in a bed in our house with breathing machines and IVs so that our parents have to take care of you day and night just to keep you alive? And all of this because you were too stubborn to just listen to what everyone was telling you?

Third, you were too old and too tired even at 50 years old to play with us and take us places. What do you think your job is anyway?

We just don’t see how you could possibly do this. Everyone even in your time knew that eating refined foods of any kind was bad for you. You ate sugar and the glucose gave you brain fog and then Alzheimers. You ate flour and the carbs deteriorated your gut and made your immune system malfunction so that you always had the flu or a cold, or some kind of illness. What, did you think these things were random or just came with getting older? And then finally you ate until you had type 2 diabetes and then instead of stopping, you took insulin – how silly can you get?

Now you’re so obese that you can hardly move and still you’re not listening to anyone. Obesity is a disease caused by leptin and insulin resistance and that’s caused by eating all the packaged foods and junk you eat. Why didn’t you care enough to stop eating all that junk so you could be well and spend time with us?

Don’t you like us?

Look, Grandpa, you’re only 50 and we know you think it’s over, but it’s not. Get your head out of your ##### and wakeup and smell the coffee.

Read this blog.

If you suffer from heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, or any of the other chronic non-contagious diseases including metabolic syndrome which sort of encompasses them all, you should study and learn more about the ketonic diet. It’s not just a weight loss diet but it can have that side effect. It’s actually a get healthy diet.

What’s Ketonic?

It turns out the body wasn’t made to burn glucose – it’s the sugar we convert when we eat carbs like sugar, fructose from fruit, starches, and grains. Our body was actually made to burn ketones – a special molecule created in the liver from eating healthy fats.

What’s Different About a Ketonic Diet?

A ketonic diet requires less carbs and more healthy fat. Sources like avocado, coconut, olives and olive oil are examples of healthy fat but there are many other sources.

Carbs cause inflammation and inflammation affects all of the systems in the body creating a multitude of slowly progressing illnesses depending on the organ affected first.

Carbs were never a natural part of the human diet until the last hundred years where refined and packaged foods became more prevalent.

Tracking Your Carbs is Essential

You can use strips to test your urine for ketosis and you can easily track you foods for net carbs using the online. Cronometer.

You place yourself in nutritional ketosis by focusing your eating on reducing carbs and taking yourself on packaged foods, and flour, and sugar is a good start.

Sometimes when you’re ill and suffering, it’s hard to step way back and look at the bigger picture, but research shows that those who do tend to heal themselves outside the normal medical models. This alone demonstrates a relationship between consciousness and health.

What is Consciousness?

The simplest of definitions is that it’s a state of being awake and aware of our surroundings. Taken a little deeper, it’s the awareness and perception of something. For example, when we’re AWARE of a pain, then we feel it, but when for some reason we’re not aware of a pain, then we don’t feel it. Our awareness and perception of a thing makes it real.

Sometimes we just know something is going to happen – intuition, insight, hunch or whatever the source, when you’re aware or perceive something is going to happen it seems to have a much higher probability of happening in fact.

I’ve noticed that when I have something painful, if I focus on the pain it gets worse and if I focus on something else, it gets better.

I’ve had tinnitus for years and read extensively from people who have suffered and even some who’ve committed suicide to end their suffering. But early on a very wise tinnitus sufferer shared with me that he had learned to control his tinnitus by placing his mental focus – his consciousness – elsewhere. It took me a while but today I don’t hear the ringing unless I think about it. Otherwise it is absolutely absent from my day to day activities.

Awareness and perception are a tool at our command that gives us great power if we direct it and provides great suffering if we do not.

Affects of Consciousness

Over 7 years ago, Dr. Masuro Emoto demonstrated the effect of consciousness on water. The crystal at the opening of this article demonstrates the impact of the thought of gratefulness and the phrase “Thank you” on water.

As our bodies are 98% water, it seems to be a scientific fact that our thoughts, emotions, and consciousness affect our entire body.

Thoughts are often fleeting and not sustained. Emotions can last a little longer but are rarely experienced day in and day out. But consciousness is the background of thinking and emotions that is with us silently and continuously.

“Positive Thinking” generally doesn’t pass the test because it is shallow and superficial – it is something we do to counteract something we feel is influencing our lives – something we are conscious of and suffer from it’s ill effects. So generally our underlying consciousness of the problem is much more powerful and long lasting as compared to a short burst of positive thinking.

Dr. Emotos scientific experiments really leave absolutely not doubt that our general consciousness deeply impacts our body and its chemistry. It is the closest explanation for self-fulfilling prophecy that has ever been presented by the scientific community.

And science has already taken us further in helping us to understand that our bodies do not end at our skin. We are in fact energy beings and we are a part of a measurable field that connects us to a much greater field that what we can physically observe that ends at our skin.

Examples of Consciousness

Fear – Einstein once said he thought the most important question was “Is it safe?” – and perhaps you would agree because if the answer is “yes” then you’ll go about your life trusting and opening yourself to experiences and risks that you might not have experienced had your answer been “no.” A “no” answer to the question means that you’re live your life with a background of fear and distrust – you’ll establish defenses against perceived threats and put more energy and effort in to ensuring the safety of yourself and family. (a person who answer this question “no” would now be saying, “And what’s wrong with that?)

Optimism – a truly optimistic person seeing obstacles and setbacks as opportunities. They see the positive in everything and feel grateful for challenges to exercise their coping skills. Their optimism isn’t just an occasional event, but rather a state of mind and the background against which all things are judged.

Old and Sick – I’m just old and sick and that’s what happens when you get older – nothing I can do about that – I’m helpless – I’ve eaten poorly all my life and it’s too late to start now. I’m just going to have to hobble around until I die because that’s what my parents and friends have all done. The body wears out. I can feel it.

Gratefulness – a grateful person lives their life saying “thank you.” They don’t take things for granted or feel entitled. Many grateful people attribute their good fortune to God and don’t complain when things are tough.

Absence of Abundance – there was a time when we felt like everything was ours and anything we wanted was provided. The older we got, the less we felt that way. As we became adults, most of us were more conscious of what we wanted and didn’t have. We began to relate to the world in terms of what we needed and didn’t have. Without really realizing it, our consciousness became about lack and that became the background against which we lived our lives – striving to get what we didn’t have but needed. There are certain cultures that try to shield their people from the images and exposure to all the things that other cultures have. The purpose is clearly to allow the people to live their lives inside a consciousness not built around a lack of abundance.

Limitations – again we were born with an unlimited consciousness and then proceeded a 10-20 year period in which we learned about our limitations. We became believers in limitation although we hear stories almost weekly of people in all walks of life who refused to believe in limits or limitations. Those who have walked on fire know how tenuous is the definition of limitation. It definitely exists within our minds but not our energy bodies. To say that we didn’t live our lives inside a constant awareness or consciousness of our limitations would be foolish. We see this in almost every endeavor we make. Great leaders challenge us by making unreasonable demands. And sometimes our performance surprises even us.

Consciousness as Context

A context is the bottle in which we hold the water. Context is a point of view that organizes everything else.

So if we live in a consciousness of fear, we organize everything else we see based on that perception and we see things consistent with it and we don’t see things that are inconsistent.

The Heisenberg Principle, a very important discovery from Quantum Physics tells us that we basically see what we look for. When we look for particles to behave like particles, they do. When we look for them to behave like waves or energy, they do. This gives way to a theory of the universe sometimes called “uncertainty” or the idea that the observer (us) has a bearing on what shows up not only at a sub-atomic level and at the level of the world we know and function within.

So in the world of quantum physics, the world performs within a context that we create and we create that context from a variety of interactions of our consciousness of things being a certain way.

Energy Beings

One of the greatest discoveries of the last few decades, is the revelation that what we consider to be empty space – because we can’t see anything in that space – is actually filled with an enormous energy field.

Our bodies are one type of energy – water – that is very pliable – it has proven to be heavily at the whim of our consciousness – our state of mind – and we generally think about our body as ending at our skin, however, although that might be true as a physical reality of what we perceive through our eyes, it’s definitely not true based on what we measure.

We have this growing body of phenomena – things we can’t explain that don’t seem to follow the physical laws – and can be explained if we integrate the energy field and uncertainty principle into our thinking. We mostly can’t even see things that occur and are outside our understanding of how our world works and the limitations of our body and reality.

If I wanted to limit and hold bound a being with unlimited capability and energy, I would simply convince them that they were limited and let them create their own cage in which to live.

Consciousness Creates

Holding a view of any of the examples of consciousness continuously will make that condition occur in your life. Holding a consciousness of illness and aging will create that context and attract things to create and expand your aging and illness.

The secret is to realize that you can either continue to create the consciousness that is making you ill, or choose a different picture and create that. It takes a tremendous amount of focus and courage to create an imagine and feeling that the current facts do not support. The fear of disappointment is a strong motivator and a lack of belief in how things actual work in the energy universe is a hard thing to overcome.

That’s why a lot of people call it faith. It’s creating a reality that doesn’t seem to exist and has no support based on the current facts.

Why should I condition by whole body – my 98% water body that responds to every thought, every emotion, good or bad, to something that doesn’t currently appear real? What if I just waste my time and in the end disappoint myself?

Isn’t that the best prison you could ever imagine or build for the ultimate energy being?

But people who focus on a strong image of health get healthier. And those that focus on a strong image of abundance get more abundant.

The reason it’s so uncommon is because it’s uncommon. That is, it’s uncommon for people to have the courage to believe the opposite of what their schools, their jobs, and their parents and friends have taught them all their lives. It appears to be a complete departure from the truth.

“if you keep saying something long enough it becomes the truth. And the truth sounds like a lie.” – Werner Eehard

But why can’t we turn that around? Keep saying the truth long enough  until it becomes the truth and what we consider to be the truth today becomes the lie?

Consciousness and Chronic Illness

We have a growing worldwide epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, auto-immune disease, Alzheimers, dementia, and neurological disorders like MS, Fibromyalgia, and more. We also have thousands of doctors world wide who are curing these illnesses. What keeps us from seeing what’s already possible for illness we consider to be aging?

What is the truth that sounds like a lie?

Seems to me that an important part of promoting health over 70 is going to be a better understanding of our food sources and how we’re being duped by the food industry.

The larger players in our food industry have already picked up on that trend towards organic and natural foods and they’re relying on the idea that they can dupe us by using clever labeling practices to make sure think we’re getting what we want while we’re not.

As an example, we all think we know what USDA Organic means but a lack of strong regulation and rules with lots of loop holes might surprise you as to the difference in what you think you’re getting and what’s really on your plate at higher costs.

Here is a video worth watching about the differences in four different food industries. It’s called “Unbroken Ground” – I recommend that the 25 minutes watching will be well-spent.

I’ll be focusing a number of my articles in future on our food supply and the labelling tricks that are being utilized to fool us into thinking we’re getting what we want.

Eating broccoli or broccoli sprouts can have tremendous health benefits and also help reduce your risk for cancer.

Research shows this cruciferous veggie (in the same family as Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and more) may reduce your risk for many common diseases, including but not limited to:

• Arthritis
• Cancer – Including Fatty Liver and Liver Cancer
• High blood pressure and heart disease
• Kidney disease
• Diabetes

Broccoli Ingredients

• Fiber, which helps nourish your gut microbiome and strengthen your immune function.

• Sulforaphane, a naturally occurring organic sulfur compound shown to have potent anti-cancer activity.

Studies have shown sulforaphane causes apoptosis (programmed cell death) in colon, prostate, breast and tobacco-induced lung cancer cells. Three servings of broccoli per week may reduce your risk of prostate cancer by more than 60 percent.

Sulforaphane encourages production of enzymes that protect your blood vessels, and reduces the number of molecules that cause cell damage — known as reactive oxygen species (ROS) — by as much as 73 percent.

Sulforaphane is both an immune stimulant and an anti-inflammatory.

Sulforaphane also helps raise testosterone levels, inhibits the retention of body fat, helps detox carcinogens, blocks certain enzymes linked to joint destruction and helps protect your muscles against exercise-induced damage.

Please note that frozen broccoli has diminished ability to produce sulforaphane as the enzyme myrosinase, which converts glucoraphanin to sulforaphane, is quickly destroyed during the blanching process.

• Glucoraphanin, a glucosinolate precursor of sulforaphane that also influences the process of carcinogenesis and mutagenesis. Compared to mature broccoli, broccoli sprouts can contain up to 20 times more glucoraphanin.

• Phenolic compounds, including flavonoids and phenolic acids, which have a potent ability to eliminate damaging free radicals and quell inflammation, resulting in a lower risk for diseases such as asthma, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

One of the ways phenolic compounds slow the encroachment of disease is by defending against infection, most dramatically by zapping ROS linked to atherosclerosis and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

• Diindolylmethane (DIM). Your body produces DIM when it breaks down cruciferous vegetables. Like many other broccoli compounds, DIM has shown multiple potential benefits, including boosting your immune system and helping to prevent or treat cancer.

Lightly Steam Broccoli

To get the ultimate benefit from Broccoli, follow these tips:

When you eat raw mature broccoli, you only get about 12 percent of the total sulforaphane content theoretically available based on the parent compound. You can increase this amount and really maximize the cancer-fighting power of broccoli by preparing it properly.

Steaming your broccoli for three to four minutes is ideal. Do not go past five minutes.

Steaming your broccoli spears for three to four minutes will optimize the sulforaphane content by eliminating epithiospecifier protein — a heat-sensitive sulfur-grabbing protein that inactivates sulforaphane — while still retaining the enzyme myrosinase, which converts glucoraphanin to sulforaphane. Without it, you cannot get any sulforaphane.

Boiling or microwaving your broccoli is NOT recommended, as it will destroy a majority of the myrosinase. If you want to boil your broccoli, blanch it in boiling water for no more than 20 to 30 seconds, then immerse it in cold water to stop the cooking process.

Maximize Sulforaphane Content

Research shows that sulforaphane content can be further optimized by adding a myrosinase-containing food to it.

Foods containing this important enzyme include:

• Mustard seed
• Daikon radishes
• Wasabi
• Arugula
• Cole slaw

Summary

Try to get 2-3 helpings of this important food everyday. It has plenty of fiber so will help you feel full and you can change up the flavor by steaming it with the various whole foods above.

If you’ve been reading this blog very long, you’ve probably already become familiar with the role of inflammation in chronic disease. It’s the ultimate cause of everything that happens to us over time including diabetes 2, heart disease, obesity, Alzheimers, MS, and more.

And it turns out the #1 root cause of inflammation in older folks is dental issues including root canals, mercury or amalgam fillings, gum infections, and all other such related ailments.

It’s not the dentists fault. They’re doing everything that technology has given them to work with. But I do think they blame themselves in some way – how else can you explain that the suicide rate for dentists is higher than any other profession?

So if you have any of these dental issues, I recommend you seriously consider what it would take to permanently solve them. If you have a root canal, have that tooth removed whether you can afford a bridge or not, it’s not about cosmetics, it’s about survival and living a life worth living. And if you have mercury fillings, start getting quotes on removal. The consequences as we get older are just too serious to ignore.

And if you just have bad teeth and gums, it’s time to start worrying about more than just your bad looks and bad breath – those bacteria you’re collecting in your mouth can put you into the hospital.

Chronic illness is at an all time high, and people are scrambling to find the answer to health problems like autoimmune disease, diabetes, pain, chronic fatigue, anxiety, poor immune function, cancers, symptoms of multiple sclerosis and other neurological disorders, Alzheimers, dementia, and more.

People are suffering from joint pain, headaches, indigestion, sleep difficulties, sinus problems, skin rashes and irritation, hair loss, obesity, foggy thinking, and many more symptoms that everyone tried to ignore but really should not.

We seem to have the idea that the human body just gets old and wears out. But all of the research tells us that’s not what’s happening. Our bodies are made to renew themselves. We have a mechanism that creates new cells, yes, even brain cells – replaces them all within a matter of months. We have a mechanism that can remove bad cells, yes, even cancer cells, and can heal our body when it is functioning correctly.

The Lie

But what we’re “bought into” is the lie that our body gets old and worn out and we need to take things to get better. The typical story is that your body gets old and worn out and you need to take supplements to make up for nutrients or hormones, or things that your body no longer produces. Nobody who is selling a pharmaceutical or supplement is going to tell you that if you just stopped eating or drinking something you currently consume regularly, your body would begin to recover and heal itself. There’s no profit in telling you that and you need to think twice when you’re accepting advice or even paid research where the people paying are also trying to sell you a cure.

The Truth

The truth is that the only reason we need those things is that the people who sell them – chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies, supplement companies, all want to sell you their products.

Once farmer put it quite wisely – he said, “The companies that sell us our seeds also make pharmaceuticals (drugs) and don’t you think they’ve had a conversation that goes something like ‘if we put something in our seeds that makes you feel bad, then we can sell you drugs that make you feel better.?'”

I think that’s a very reasonable assumption and given the profit motivation and the prevailing behavior of these companies, I think it’s better than 90% likely that conversation has happened more than once.

Did you know what farmers know that are forced to buy seeds from the chemical companies? if they don’t buy seeds from those companies, a black van full of ex-military private security folks show up on their doorstep and ask them why they’re not purchasing GMO seeds. Do you think that’s not true? Ask any midwestern farmer or what the variety of videos now available on Youtube – the evidence is already out there for this massive coercion of farmers.

Bending Your Mind

So what’s called for is just a slight bending of the mind – a single thought like, “Maybe everything I’m being told isn’t really true.” And with that thought some reading and investigation – the information is readily available – it’s out there if you look for it. The answers are everywhere.

Inflammation is the Culprit

If you read my prior article on this site then you know about this already, but let’s just review the key points because understanding this is EVERYTHING.

• Inflammation is a chronic cause of all of the symptoms you can feel and think are normal aging.
• Inflammation is not natural nor is it necessary.
• Inflammation is caused by eating, drinking, or breathing or exposure to things that you body doesn’t like.
• You know when you’re suffering from inflammation when your joints hurt, your head hurts, you stomach hurts, your muscles hurt, your vision blurs, you thinking gets foggy, or you start developing the hold list of chronic diseases I listed at the start of this article.
• The warning signs are the minor aches and pains which if ignored turn into the chronic diseases which are much worse.

Your Doctor

Unfortunately unless your doctor has been trained in functional/integrative medicine, he’s bought into the same lie. He believes like you that your body is just going to get older and there’s nothing you can do except medicate, medicate, medicate. His job, as he has been trained, is to identify your disease, and then prescribe the right drug or procedure. It’s not his fault but he’s not really trained to find the real cause and treat that.

Normally the correct treatment for what you have is 180 degrees away from what your doctor has said. He will always tell you to add things – take a drug or a medicine, take a supplement, and of course the old standby – GET MORE EXERCISE, EAT LESS.

Against All Odds

You’re in a tough situation. In order to get better you have to disagree, even if silently, with everyone around you. You have to develop a belief and evidence that drugs and traditional advice will make you worse not better.

Now I’m not saying you need to disregard or go against medical advice. There are times like when you have Type 2 Diabetes that your condition is such that you have to follow your prescribed treatment plan until you don’t need to anymore.

But once you identify the root cause and begin to treat that, your body will know when you no longer need insulin or whatever it is you’re taking to mask your symptoms.

Getting to the Root Cause

Now the fastest way to get to a root cause if money is not an object is to select a functional medicine doctor and go see him or her. They will employ tests that will look for the root cause and will never prescribe anything until they know what is underneath your symptoms.

If you’re obese and diabetic, they look underneath that and find the underlying cause.

If you can’t afford that or even one of the over-the-counter tests then the next best approach is to start making “lifestyle changes.”

Lifestyle Changes

What’s meant by “lifestyle change”? it refers to things you consider to be normal and natural parts of your life like eating bread or drinking coke. Lifestyle changes are changes you currently believe to involve activities that couldn’t possibly be causing you to age and to malfunction.

When it comes to getting older, experiencing pain, and chronic diseases, you have to decide that you don’t believe those are in fact a part of getting old and commit yourself to finding out if there’s a better state of being than getting old and sick, becoming a burden to your family, and living for another 10-20 years in pain.

Can you get up enough motivation to at least test your lifestyle to see if you give up things that something about your health changes?

Most people have to wait until the situation gets dire – a heart attack, a stroke, a failure in the liver, pancreas, or adrenals. Are you the type that has to wait that long to wake up and smell the coffee?

If not, then you’ll need to make some massive changes rather quickly to find out if anything you eat and drink or use is the problem. Your approach is to eliminate the things that statistically almost always cause problems for most people. You’re not being very scientific, you’re just going to operate on the clinical experience when functional medicine doctors treat other patients with your illness.

Here’s your plan – for 4 weeks…

• Remove all sugar from your diet – don’t use sugar in cooking, don’t take a litter in your coffee, don’t eat any fruit besides berries occasionally.
• Remove all grains from your diet – that includes any kind of bread, cereal, muffin, bagel, and not even whole grains. That includes rice, millet, barley, Quinoa, and anything that remotely resembles any of those.
• Remove all dairy from your diet and that includes cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, and anything else made from milk or dairy of any kind.
• Remove all GMO from your diet and that will include anything made from corn or soy because those are the two crops that contain GMO throughout 90% of our fields.

Believe it or not, that still leaves a lot of things you can eat but after 4 weeks you will know whether any of these is causing the problem. If not, you can transition to your next phase of testing but the chances are better than 80% that you’ll find your symptoms changing just based on this list alone. Once you do, you can put things back in to your diet until you find the one or two things causing the problem. Generally your reaction will be greater and more pronounced when you introduce it back than when you took if off your list before.

Here are some extra tips on foods that might help you get there faster…

• At each meal, try to eat mostly vegetables – steamed broccoli will fill you up so you don’t have to eat as much meat. Make your plate “mostly vegetables”
• When it’s beef, try to find “grass fed” beef and eat less of it.
• When it’s fish, try to find “wild caught” and salmon is probably your best choices because of the Omega 3.
• Eat salads and use virgin olive oil and vinegar as your dressing.
• Don’t cook with vegetable oils or any bulk oils – safflower corn oil, sunflower, peanut oil, etc. If you have to use oil, find some coconut, avocado, or olive oil and cook on low heat.
• When it’s chicken, try to find some cage free organic chicken and eat less at each meal and more vegetables.

Using this second list will give your body more to work with and eliminate some other possible sources of inflammation more quickly.

The idea is to make some “radical” lifestyle changes quickly in order to see if anything changes. Once you feel the changes, you motivation to keep moving forward will be a lot greater.

Remember, “In order for things to change for you, you have to change.”