Looking at my latest lab tests, I began to realize the “system” behind what my doctor is doing with the help of my lab and my insurance company.

My doctor is looking for lab results that allow him to prescribe a medication. The lab just tested my cholesterol, triglycerides, and A1C at my doctor’s request. These are all standard tests covered by Medicare and ordered as standard from the lab.

Now what you have to understand is that these tests show symptoms. There is an underlying cause for these numbers increasing year after year and as they do, the doctor is going to prescribe me something to treat my symptoms.

The next thing I’m going to hear is that I should begin taking Statins – Lipitor, Crestor, etc. Now after I take this for a number of years, I’ll begin to develop pain and inflammation and we will have to add other drugs to counteract the longer term affects of the Statins.

But make no mistake, the Statin only treated the symptom – it treated high cholesterol by lowering cholesterol.

Meanwhile let’s say that hypothetically I have a longstanding food allergy to milk or to grains – but we didn’t test for any allergies – those would be causes of the problem, not symptoms, and the insurance company and my doctor and most labs aren’t setup for that.

Do you think this scenario is far-fetched? Do you disagree with my characterization of lab tests as simply testing for symptoms? There has been a lot of time and money spent for many years conditioning us to believe the healthcare dogma. I really believe that even our traditional doctors believe in it. They test, and prescribe. My insurance doctor still advises me to “eat less and exercise more.” That pretty much sums it up. Traditional medicine still thinks that overweight and metabolic syndrome symptoms come from poor discipline and eating bad foods.

As time goes on, there are more and more functional medicine doctors springing up around the country – these are doctors who will run tests to check for root causes of problems and won’t assume that they know something just because you have the symptoms.

It’s like this – if you had your foot on the gas peddle of your car and you had it all the way to the floor, but the car was slowly losing speed and slowing down, and you looked at your speedometer and saw it going slower and slower, would you assume the problem was the speedometer? Should we prescribe a Statin for the speedometer to see if it gets better?

I’m starting my first cleanse today. Some people think of this as a “weight loss cleanse” or a “colon cleanse” but I’m mainly doing it as a detoxifier to try to release some of the heavy metals in my system (I’ve been collecting for a while because I’m 71 years old).

Because there are six bottles for one day, the ingredients include many of the recommended things for this type of cleanse.

I got this from a local juice bar called “Nekter Juice Bar” and the only issue I have with this so far is the amount of sugar in the bottles – the sugar comes from natural sources like beets, apples, etc. but still when you remove the pulp you’re getting very bio-available pure fructose that can metabolize and get into your blood stream very quickly so nothing different from drinking a coke – these are on average about 20g of sugar per bottle.

They conveniently number the bottles 1-6 and of course the ingredients are slightly different for each one. There are no added contents other than fruits and vegetables. I am told, but cannot verify that the sources are all local farming and organic non-GMO.

As you can see, this first one has the ingredients generally associated with what is called, “Green Drink.”

You generally do not eat during the cleanse but just stick to your bottles and in my experience it takes me about 2 hours to finish one and I haven’t been hungry yet but they say to drink lots of additional water in between (in between what? I’m drowning in liquid and bouncing off the walls from the sugar high – I normally try to stick to 5-10g of sugar per day and then only embedded in the foods I eat – I never add sugar or drink sodas or fruit juice at all.

This next one is a challenge – it’s loaded with lemon juice and cayenne pepper – 
very spicy and tangy with Turmeric – a very healthy root from the ginger family.

Everyone raves about Agave – a cactus derivative – and about Agave syrup and nectar but it’s just another form of sugar – you know, “organic sugar” – the hype that people use to get you to buy stuff! But I doubt you could drink this without it because the lemon and cayenne are super intense.

This next one is still fairly tart with lemon – seems to be the common ingredient recommended for cleanses – lemon and ginger – and this one has some beet in it so it’s very red.

Parsley and Spinach are said to bind to heavy metals and allow them to be extracted through your waste product.

And this one has coconut charcoal, a substance that is supposed to attract and bind certain types of heavy metals.

This one goes back to the basic ‘Green Drink’ with one added ingredient Swiss Chard.

Now this is the “dessert drink” – it has cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla and almonds – sounds good huh?

Once I get past this cleanse I will update with overall results to this post.

Update

OK it’s two days later and I will give you a quick update on the aftermath. It actually took me two days or 1 ½ days to finish. I just couldn’t finish the 5th bottle until the next morning. The 6th bottle went down pretty quick – it’s like the “dessert” of the 6 bottles but has fats and protein to kind of get you back up and running.

Some people report being hungry during their cleanse but I really didn’t get hungry at all. I felt I was loaded with liquid and I just didn’t get hungry.

Some people report feeling a lot more energy. I can’t say I felt that although I didn’t run out of energy during the day and I didn’t seem to have anything I would call an insulin spike where I felt an energy high and then a low – I was pretty even all day.

Now if I was a 30 year-old person (and assuming obese as I am) it might have affected me different. For instance, someone who is used to chugging down lots of processed foods, carbs, and sugar all day, this 120g of sugar might be a significant improvement and cause them to seriously crave sugar or carbs. Someone who normally consumed 400g of sugar/carbs is going to have a different reaction than I am but I only consume in total about 40g of carbs per day and perhaps sugar is a quarter of that – I don’t add sugar and I don’t eat fruit and I don’t eat grains of any kind. So I realize that this cleanse regimen might really be a lot more challenging for someone used to eating processed foods.

The actually “back-end” didn’t hit until today when I passed perhaps the largest bowel movement I’ve had in many months or even years. It was a very smelly and loose movement that was clearly created by the mass of vegetables and fruits in the cleanse. The smell was encouraging because it told me that the cleanse was moving out toxins otherwise what I drank would not produce that kind of smell. (sorry about the graphic nature of the post)

Now I’m back on normal foods and although I eat whole foods and organic exclusively, I do eat grass fed beef and pork, and eggs, and organic cage-free chicken and I’m noticing those are creeping up to maybe 30-40% of my meals and I don’t feel as good at that level. I’m going to expand my raw vegetables. I ate an all-raw salad as my first meal and it felt very natural with no problems.

I believe I’m going to try this one more day next week and see how that goes. I did lose 4lbs for the day and 2 more today when I had my first bowel movement.

Funny what you remember when you get to be 70.

I remember walking 5 miles to school in the 8th grade and then playing tag on the school grounds and being the fastest runner in the group.

Later I remember high school track and running the hurdles and the hundred yard dash.

In the air force, I remember walking down the beach from Biloxi Mississippi to Gulfport – it was about 13 miles one way in the sand barefoot and I did it every day. It was really hard to keep weight on in those days. I weight 135 pounds and ate anything and everything I wanted.

Up until I was 50, I didn’t notice that there was anything I couldn’t eat. As we became a little more affluent, we ate in restaurants more often and the food choices got more extravagant and the food portions larger and larger.

I just steadily gained weight every year until one day, after feeling very tired at work, I fell asleep driving home and totaled my car (nobody involved but me thank God) and I walked away OK but got tested for sleep apnea and found that I had it. And of course that’s another contributor to stress and weight gain – and there is a lot of undiagnosed apnea going around as more and more people gain weight.

By the time I realized I was overweight, I was really overweight – well over 200 pounds. The doctor told me I was classified as obese.

For 10 years I followed the low-fat, high carb diet that everyone seemed to prescribe and of course more and more of my meals became processed and packaged foods. And I got hungrier and hungrier and heavier and heavier.

But it took a diagnosis of metabolic syndrome to finally wake me up and start me looking for deeper knowledge than what my doctors and advisors were giving me.

I have learned some important lessons the hard way.

Whole Foods

There are lots of choices for foods and most of them are processed and packaged foods that are no good for me. Even if they seem to have healthy ingredients, chances are the processing, temperatures, and chemicals have reduced the effectiveness of nutrients to almost nothing.

Whole Foods are foods that come directly out of the ground or directly from a ranch or farm.

It doesn’t matter what it says on the label, if you’re reading a label you’re probably not getting whole food.

Organic Foods

Even Whole Foods now have a whole host of new problems. Some foods that come off a farm are infested with Genetically Modified Organisms and some foods carry insecticides and hormones that were used in the farming process and aren’t fit to eat.

USDA Organic Certification provides some assurances but even with that, there are ways that farmers collaborate with the FDA to show you the seal and then give you something else. Buying from small local farmers where you can inspect their practices is the best practice even if they are too small to get the USDA certification you’re better off.

Carbohydrates and Sugar

These foods are not what our bodies were designed to eat. They weren’t even part of our diet until much later in human evolution. As hunter-gatherers, we rarely had access to foods with carbohydrates and therefore our insulin always remained in control and our blood sugar levels were never a danger.

Today, everything placed in front of us and packaged at the super-market is high in carbohydrates. This is what the food industry wants us to buy. It’s also what’s killing us. Just like cows were not designed to eat grains and corn, we were not designed to eat carbohydrates.

Inflammation

This is a condition that occurs when you’re body is in pain or needs to defend itself. You can tell you have inflammation but you become so accustomed to the symptoms that you either ignore them and call them “old age” or you take Advil or Motrin or Lyrica, or something else, just to hold down the effects of inflammation rather than seek out the real root cause and eliminate it.

When your fingers and joints hurt, that’s inflammation. And there are whole variety of different symptoms that signal inflammation. When you’re eating something or being exposed to something that your body has even a mild dislike for, you’ll have inflammation constantly. Fat is not just a layer of tissue, it’s an organ that can produce inflammation all on its own. The fatter you get the more inflammation you produce.

And inflammation damages organs – it’s just a matter of which organ is weakest – the brain, the liver, the kidneys, and pancreas. Any number of symptoms derive from inflammation’s affects on our organs over a longer period of time.

But doctors and scientists have already proven that they can stop inflammation and heal the diseases caused by it using foods that are good from you and that you were intended to eat.

I you’d like to learn the science behind Gluen intolerance and sensitivity, this is a great presentation.

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