This is the third in our series on health priorities. Before we get started I want to talk a little about change. All of us have survived to this point by developing the various skills we have today. We have practiced them thousands of times. These skills include our eating and food selection skills. These are now burned into our brain pathways as the “right way” to do things for a lot of reasons other than health. Our food is used for a lot of things other than simple nutrition and consequently many of our choices may not be serving us well for our health…in fact they may well be making us sick. But changing these burned in habits requires several things. Number one is to make changes a little bit at a time. Number two is to feel what other things we use food for and find replacements for those needs . The number one reason people use food for non-food reasons is because they feel unfulfilled in various areas of their life. Food fills in those empty feelings with more pleasant feelings. If you try to change all your food coping mechanisms overnight to create a healthy diet, you will crash and burn because of all the other unmet needs having no way to feel better. So patience is needed and the creativity to find new coping methods while gradually learning how to actually get those feeling needs met. (See articles on Gracework and Heartflow for help in this area.)
With this understanding I am starting a health challenge in each newsletter. (Thanks Gypsy for the idea.) Think of this as the Platinum Club Membership for this newsletter. To belong you simply engage the health lifestyle upgrade suggested in each issue. In this way you will have a guided gradual process for improving your health at a reasonable rate over the course of the year. These health priority issues will discuss several dozen lifestyle changes – way too much to do all at once. This way we can all start with just one little change to our lives every 2 weeks that we get used to before the next change comes along. If you are ahead of the game and already have a letter’s change in place, then congratulations on your good choices in the past. Over the course of the year we will total a couple dozen changes which will add up to huge changes in our health and well being. So lets begin:
Health Challenge Number 1: Replace your seed oils with healthier fats and oils like Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Butter, Avocado Oil, Macadamia Nut Oil, or Almond Oil.
Now to continue with our Health Priorities article:
Poison number three: the convenience poisons. What the heck are convenience poisons? These are all the poisons that we have created to make our food more convenient. Preservatives, coloring agents, texturizers, emulsifiers, extenders, modifiers, conditioners, antibiotics, xenoestrogens, growth hormones, plastics, artificial flavors, neuro-excitotoxins, and so on. Under the simple heading on the label that says natural and artificial flavors you can have up to 500 different chemicals that have been blended together for that product to produce its unique taste. These things are all foreign to our bodies and become a part of the toxic burden on our health. If we have good health our liver and kidneys can detoxify and eliminate most of these in small quantities. Again, the real issue is how much of this stuff do we put into our systems. If we are not healthy our ability to get rid of these poisons becomes compromised – which only makes our health even worse. Some people can drink and smoke and still live to the age of 103 because they have super livers and kidneys. But most of us do not have super livers and kidneys. Consequently these poisons build up in our systems year after year compromising our health more and more each year.
So what can we do? Eat fewer and fewer of these chemicals until you can get it down to almost zero. That means letting go of the convenience and start eating fresh foods. Fresh and alive is the way our body likes its food. This means more work and more time, but good health does require work and time. We recently started a focus group of patients from the office to explore exactly this issue – how to get more healthy fresh foods into our diets with the least amount of time and effort. We were all in agreement that the main reason we didn’t always eat well was because we were “too busy”. So we are looking for simple ways around this situation. If you have any good ideas in this arena please email me at david@fairoakshealth.com and I will share the ideas with our group. Eventually we hope to put together our results and publish them in this newsletter.
Poison number four: Overeating Throughout history getting enough food to stay alive was the main concern of 99% of the people. It still is the main concern of almost two thirds of the planet today. But we in this country have the opposite problem. We have food abundance and overeating is killing us. When we eat more than we can use, our body stores the excess as fat. Fat produces inflammation by making various hormones and chemicals. The actual process of storing the excess food produces stress hormones (cortisol), which destroys our health over time. Can we overeat at Thanksgiving and survive? Of course. Can we do that day after day and year after year? No we can’t. Is this a concern for everyone? No, we all know people who can eat and eat and eat and never gain an ounce. This is not a concern for those people. But if you are one of those people for whom just smelling food is enough to put on 5 pounds, then this is a critical concern. You must simply eat less.
This is easier said than done because most of our excess eating is not about physical hunger, but about a lack of satisfaction in our lives. When we encounter something in our life that leaves us unsatisfied (like relationships, work, self, etc…) we go for the satisfaction that food gives us. Unfortunately this coping tactic is killing us. The alternative is to develop better skills for participating with life in a way that produces more satisfaction in each area of our lives. This is why I created Gracework and Heartflow – to train you into these new skills of creating satisfaction in your lives.
Overeating is intimately tied to our personal digestive capacity. What this means is just how much food can our system process properly? This capacity goes down each year as we age. This involves three primary components – proper acid production in our stomach, enough of the right enzymes produced and secreted by our pancreas and salivary glands, and sufficient bile produced by our liver. You must have extremely strong hydrochloric acid produced by your stomach to be able to digest your proteins and absorb your minerals. This acid Begins losing strength after the age of 40 (mother nature’s way of saying to us that we have finished having kids now so we are no longer needed). As this acid gets weaker one consequence is the acid reflux problem so many people have. Strong acid is needed to signal the valve at the top of the stomach to close tightly. If there is not enough acid the valve stays slightly open and the weaker acid washes up into the esophagus and burns it. Taking medicines to stop acid production will take the symptom away but are not addressing the real problem. On medication you now can not digest your proteins properly or absorb your minerals well. Within a few years this starts showing up as osteoporosis, weak muscles, flabby skin, and a host of other disorders. To remedy this problem you must supplement your natural acid production with acid tablets whenever you eat proteins. I use HClprozyme myself – the one I carry in the office.
Enzymes are the workhorses of your body. They do a zillion things. Their job is to either pull things apart or to hook things together to manufacture everything your body needs. There are thousands of kinds of enzymes in your body. The ones we are concerned with here are the ones responsible for breaking down your food into basic chemicals your body can use. Your supply of enzymes decreases with age also. All foods have natural enzymes in them while they are fresh and raw. This is why the fresher and more raw your foods are the healthier they are generally. These enzymes in food can replace a lot of the enzymes we are lacking in our digestive tract as we age. But heat destroys enzymes as well as exposure to the air over time. If you eat a primarily cooked food diet you probably need to add enzymes to your diet.
Bile is a special fluid produced by your liver that is needed to be able to digest fats. It breaks the fat down into tiny globules small enough to be absorbed by your intestine. If your liver is congested or not functioning well (or if you have had your gallbladder removed) you might need to add bile salts to your meal if it contains a lot of fat.
As you can see, the more food you eat, the more strain there is on these systems to produce enough digestive “juices” (HCl, enzymes, and bile) to deal with the load of food. If you eat more than your system has the “juice” to deal with, the undigested food moves into your gut where bacteria start to break it down and make it rot. As this happens, dozens of poisonous byproducts of the bacterial action are released and absorbed into your blood stream. This is called auto-toxemia. You literally poison your self from the inside when you eat too much. This is bad and can really make you feel poorly. So eating too much is a poison in many ways.
Poison number five: Drugs Why is this in the “how to eat right” section, because in our society today pills have become food in our minds. We put them in our mouths and swallow them with the expectation that they will somehow nourish us and make us ok. It would be nice if I could just say to everyone “Just say no to drugs” and have that work. We all know drugs are bad for us, but we use them anyway.
Now I am not talking about just the obvious illegal drugs. The much bigger problem is prescription drugs. They are poisonous. A few of them may be necessary for some people to fight diseases that have progressed too far to treat any other way. But most of the drugs we take (both legal and illegal) are really because we don’t want to take the responsibility to change our lifestyle into a healthy one. People don’t want to hear “change your diet and exercise” from a doctor, they want a pill. The word pharmacology, the modern study of drugs, comes from the Greek word pharmakon, which means poison. The original use of drugs was the study of how to use small doses of poison to fight disease with. This makes sense when you see disease as an enemy to be fought. It doesn’t make sense when you see that disease is simply dis-ease or distress in your body because it is out of balance. If you are seeking health and balance then using poison does not make sense. Poisons kill the dis-ease by killing some function of the body part that is distressed. This is not a good idea.
So why do we use drugs? Once again the answer is convenience. Drugs are simpler, faster, easier ways to eliminate the pain (physical or emotional) caused by the imbalance in our lives. Taking responsibility for being healthy physically and emotionally is a lot of hard work. Being able to ignore the pain is easier…but it catches up with us. Eventually the body gets so far out of balance nothing works anymore and you are too far gone to rebuild health. I have had patients in my office taking up to 17 prescription drugs daily. The person who dies of natural causes is a rarity these days. Most people experience death by drugs.
If you have read this far in these articles then you must have some desire to have a healthy life. A healthy life means taking charge of making yourself healthy through a healthy lifestyle and through growing up emotionally. This is not an easy task, but one well worth it. Health rule number five is to gradually eliminate the using of drugs, legal or illegal, to change how we feel physically or emotionally . Do not dump your drugs tomorrow. Some drugs can be dangerous to go off of quickly. The idea is to improve your health so that you don’t need the drugs to survive and find natural supportive things that replace the ultimate purpose of the drugs. Some of you may have systems so damaged that some drug use will have to stay – for example anyone who has had their thyroid gland removed will have to use thyroid medication for the rest of their life. New life skills have to be learned and practiced enough for them to work well for you before you are ready to eliminate any drug crutches holding you up.