Here is an excellent video introduction on the subject of grains. It goes way beyond Gluten and really explains the nuts and bolts and root causes of symptoms we all generally tolerate until they begin to get worse and that usually long before 70.

I also recommend reading the article.

Bottom Line

• eating grass-fed organic beef is better than eating feedlot beef
• eating too much beef is dangerous to your health no matter what the source
• supporting the beef industry in long term has serious and inescapable implications to our environment and our legacy for our children

First we need to understand the difference between regular beef, grass-fed beef, and grass-fed organic.

• regular beef – raised in feedlots – this is 95% of the beef on the market. 100 cows stand knew deep in their own excrement in a patch about the size of a basketball court in conditions so toxic they must be injected or fed antibiotics – fed growth hormones and GMO corn and grains for the 12 months it takes them to grow from 80 pounds to 1200 pounds and then slaughtered at age 14-16 months using horrendous and inhumane methods you could not watch and approve under any circumstances. It takes about 16 pounds of corn or grain to realize 1 pound of beef.
• grass-fed beef – raised at least part of their life on the open range but unless they are specified “100% grass-fed” or “grass-finished” then they could still be partly raised as described above. When 100% grass-fed they would take 2-3 years to reach their full size but might still be fed on fields sprayed with herbicides, pesticides, and even antibiotics and growth hormones may still be used.
• grass-fed organic beef – raised on the open range for 100% of their life-span free of herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics.

So knowing now what is actually the desired product you find that it costs too much. Why is that? Because the regular beef and some of the grass-fed beef finished on feed lots are 90% subsidized by the US government – aka OUR TAXES.

And raising this much beef no matter who we do it with eventually (and read not very long from now) ruins our water system, depletes our soil, and burns off our ozone layer. It is one of the largest contributors to these problems. footnote

So why do we care? Let our kids worry about it.

We care because as long as we keep eating beef we’re going to die from the toxic impact it will have on our bodies – we’ll become a burden on our families and our society. And it’s getting worse every year.

The call to action here is (1) eat 20% less beef, and (2) eat grass-fed organic beef whenever you do eat beef.

Now I’m over 71 years old so I’m not going to change what i do lightly.

But I think things have changed. What I mean is, when we were 30, you could eat vegetables and be comfortable that you’d be eating something that was good for you or at least wouldn’t kill you. And the same with beef or chicken or bread – you never had to worry about what you were eating because you knew that everyone was in the same boat and very smart farmers and ranchers were doing their best to give you the best food they could produce. After all, they ate it themselves.

But today, ranchers don’t necessarily eat their own beef, farmers don’t necessarily eat their own crops -it’s a different world.

99% of the US acreage for farming – about 950M acres – is used to produce our food supply and the food supply for our farm animals. 80% of that crop uses genetically modified seeds that are bred to be resistant to pesticides and herbicides. And those “GMO”s have already been proven to harm humans in many different ways.

Meanwhile we’re spraying pesticides and herbicides that are known to cause cancer and many other bad things, on all our crops and it’s getting into our water supply.

Deaths from cancer are increasing at an alarming rate – a pandemic rate along with neurological diseases such as MS, ADHD, Dementia, and Alzheimers.

If you’ve been eating non-organic for 50 years, you might say well too late for me. But it’s not. You could have a fairly healthy life and not become a burden to your family. Being in be all day long is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Starting an organic diet right now can still restore and reverse most of the symptoms that tell you there’s a problem. You think getting fatter is about you eating too much? It’s not. It’s a disease that comes from our food supply – and so is cancer and every other thing you think is just poor eating habits. Well, truth is, it is poor eating habits – we’re eating things that are no longer good for you or even safe.

It has been scientifically proven that significant changes in diet and lifestyle can stop and even reverse type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and many other chronic diseases and even aging. Dr. Ornish does an excellent job of summarizing the case for these changes.

And yet most people reading this will wait until they encounter an event that either takes you to the grave or takes you to the hospital. At that point there will be a massive change in your health and a massive intervention to save you – ie. aortic stent, bypass, etc.

So it’s good to look carefully at the reasons why you would take action before that happens and why you would not.

Most people I speak to in the 50+ range say that they’re too old to change their ways – meaning diet, exercise, lifestyle kinds of changes. I’m not sure why anyone who could have 40-50 good years left would say that but that’s what they say.

We resist change of course because we don’t perceive the value of change to be worth it. That means that the items listed on the left of the above table are not highly urgent to the person asked to make the changes.

The only person who can make those items on the left more urgent and powerful is you. I’m clear that unless you do, making massive changes in diet and lifestyle as is advocated by this website won’t happen. Even if you believe you don’t have anything urgent to do, you need to consider the burden that having no reason to change will place on your family.

So perhaps we need to rewrite this table..

I can’t say much for negative motivation. I would much rather pull myself up by my bootstraps and pull together a good reason to keep trying and keep changing.

How about you?

A man hiking alone falls off a one thousand foot cliff and as he falls he grasps a root growing from the shear face of the cliff. As he hangs, he begins to shout, “HELP, HELP ME!!!” and suddenly the clouds part, a light shines down on him from the open clouds, and a booming voice says, “I will help you, simply let go of the root.” The  man thinks for a while and then yells, “Is there anyone else up there who can help me?”

Why when there is so much evidence that disease is curable, preventable, and reversible, would a person continue to accept what they believe to be their fate?

Disease is just as much psychology as it is physiology. If we accept our “fate” then we generally close our ears to anything that sounds like a solution. We believe that having hope when there is none, is more painful than dying.

And if we are told that if we keep eating what we’re eating, we might keep eating it in moderation as if we wished to trade a few years for a meal we shouldn’t eat.

And in some ways we seem to think that living another 30 years disabled, crippled, and dependent on others is the same as living a vibrant, healthy, 30 years where others depend on us.

If we looked into the future and knew that our mild obesity would turn to diabetes, and eventually Alzheimers, would we continue on that path if we really believed it? Naturally, Alzheimers disease psychology is only useful before you become disabled and unable to think.

And the psychology of obesity only allows for solutions before you have developed diabetes and early onset dementia.

Even if we were to realize in our 50s and 60s where the road leads that we’re on, would we really believe it was preventable? Do we believe that we could make a change and turn things around?

Once diabetes sets in, research has shown that IQ begins to decline. The same is true of diabetes. These conditions lead to measurable brain shrinkage.

Do we believe that what we have to do would be too dramatic?

Take a walk once a day for 20 minutes?

Stand up and walk around every half hour?

Stop eating grains, sugar, and packaged foods?

Eat more green vegetables?

Drink more water?

Do these things sound like a world-ending sacrifice?

“But I can’t change.” Does anyone really believe that? Is that an excuse you can use to explain to your children why you’ll be leaving them early?

Or perhaps life is so difficult and stressful that we just decide to give it up and seek the peacefulness of death?

There may be a combination of things that we face all at once – not able to sleep well, in pain all the time, not getting help from our loved ones, not wanting to be a burden, no fun left in life, and facing criticism from our friends and loved ones (mostly unspoken) about why we refuse to take better care of ourselves, eat less, exercise more, and take better care of our appearance. How hard could it be?

As we get older, we fall out of the mainstream and people start to walk around us because we’re moving too slow and talk around us because we’re thinking too slow. The message from the outside world is – you’re done. You’re no longer useful.

Of course psychologists would tell us those thoughts are simply things we make up in our own mind – ways of talking to ourselves that isn’t true unless we make it so. And we know they’re right but we don’t seem to be able to see things any other way.

The thing that really differentiates us as we get older from our children and grand children is the ability to dream, to imagine something better, to think about how things would be if it all worked out great. When we see our children hitting 40 and 50, and we hear them talking about their discouragement with life we stop and wish we could do something to talk them into keeping hope, keeping the faith, looking for the good. Nothing worse than seeing someone who still have 50 good years left saying that it’s over for them. Talking about things they regret not doing or things they regret doing, when they still have 40-50 years left to redo it all.

And it’s especially difficult to listen to children who believe they can’t make a difference in the world and want to give up.

But why do we have such a hard time listening to that from others and entertaining it in ourselves?

I intended to be an inspiration to my family and friends. If I give up now just because I don’t think I’ve done that or don’t think I can, then chances are I never will be an inspiration. Why would I give up so easily when there are many generations at stake and if I give up I’ll simply be a semi-blank spot on the wall who did nothing in particular to remember him by?

Perhaps the psychology of disease is simply giving up our beliefs that we can truly make a difference. When we give up, there is a biochemistry that takes place in our body – it weakens our immune system, makes it harder to digest our food, shuts down the production of new cells including brain cells, and gives our body permission to just continue converting sugar to fat until we can’t function any longer.

For those of you who do not know what Functional Medicine or a Functional Medicine Doctor is, here is a message from the Chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine that might help explain. I believe you need to know about this growing discipline that treats causes not symptoms.

If you want to get help finding functional medicine doctors, functional medicine practitioners, or sometimes called integrative medicine doctors, please visit this link.

Scientists and doctors sometimes refer to your intestinal track as “your gut” and it generally refers to all of the bacteria and micro-organisms residing in your colon, your lower intestines, and youstomach. These are really the bacteria that digest your food into molecules small enough to become nutrients for your blood and hormones for your body.

Recent discoveries have shed more light on the Gut or more scientifically the Micro-Biome. It appears that perhaps 70% of your immune system resides in your Gut. And the hormones that activate your pancreas, liver, and more are produced in your Gut. And therefore it would appear that what you eat has everything to do with the signals (hormones) you send to your other organs – you heart, pancreas, brain, liver, and more.

One such signal or “pathway” is when you feed your gut a whole lot of sugar (fruit, bread – yes, baked goods turn to sugar in your blood faster than sugar, soda pop, etc.) – more than it needs or can use. Once it begins work on digesting that, it can’t handle it all and it moves it into your blood stream causing your pancreas to send out insulin in order to dispose of it. The body definitely needs to get sugar or glucose out of your bloodstream because the longer it remains there the more damage it does to the walls of your blood vessels and that in turns puts out the call for more cholesterol – the body’s repair mechanism for damaged blood vessels. If you’re running a marathon insulin brings glucose to the muscles where it is burned for energy. If you are sitting in front of the TV or your desk, the muscles don’t need it so it begins to deposit it into your fat cells.

Of course the real “science” behind these discoveries is saying that the next level down is that what you eat activates your genes and depending on what you eat will determine how your body reacts to the genes that activated – we generally think that diseases like obesity or diabetes are passed on through the genes but the scientists would argue that we all have the same genes to start with and which one expresses their characteristics is a matter of our habitual diets and of course our environment.

As an example, eat more good fats in your diet and your genes will express the right hormones to encourage neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells to replace the old ones. Eat the wrong foods, high in carbohydrates like sugar, grains, pasta, etc. and you discourage neurogenesis. And hello Dementia and Alzheimers.

The most important takeaway for this article is that “food is medicine” and we need to start thinking about what we eat as the key to healing ourselves and preventing many of the diseases we could suffer in the future.

Here is the book I love for the more thorough explanation of how this works.