Have you noticed how much effort it takes these days to stay healthy? When I was a little kid diabetes was a rare almost unheard of disease. We all knew about heart attacks, but nobody my parents or their parents knew had had one. Cancer was not even a word that was in the common language. Medical doctors were something you avoided going to unless you were in an accident and needed stitching up. Maybe we were just medically ignorant, but medicine simply was not a part of our daily lifestyle. Aspirin, cough medicine, iodine, calamine lotion, and a laxative pretty much made up the whole medicine chest.
I am not trying to sound like an old fogy on purpose, but health was promoted by lifestyle back then. Everyone “knew” starch made you fat, sunshine was the best remedy, and meat and potatoes was the all-American meal. People didn’t go somewhere to exercise, because everyday life was full of exercise. As kids, playing outside all day till the sun went down was the 
norm. Our family was not in the early adopter category – we didn’t get our first television until I was in 4th grade. Yep, up in Colfax we could count on getting two of the three regular channels back then. Public television couldn’t quite reach all the way up to the foothills.
Another observation: old people just got old and cranky. They didn’t forget who you were and they weren’t on a pile of medications – medicinal beverages occasionally – but not a list of prescription meds. They were generally healthy until they went into decline and died.
What has happened? Something is seriously wrong with the system. It seems the more we have learned, the sicker we have become. Now half the population is headed for diabetes. You are expected to have cancer at least once. Cardiovascular problems are the norm. And huge portions of us are expected to have some form of dementia before we expire. The average 65-year-old in America today is on 10 prescription medications. Medicine cabinets now come in the triple-wide size normally, and the overflow fills up the top two or three drawers in the nightstand on either side of the bed.
I am fairly certain that some part of this picture is the consequence of the advertising world teaming up with drug makers to produce a profit stream of epic proportions. I have long viewed most medications as primarily a way to siphon off the disposable income from the population. Massive advertising budgets are employed to convince us that we not only have a right to be comfortable at all times, but that we should be able to do anything we want without having to use common sense or suffer consequences. As a kid, I was taught pain was a normal part of existence – you lived with it. As you got older there was more of it, but you were ok. If things you did in your life created pain, you learned to either not do that thing or develop the skills to do it without creating pain.
Another observation: people simply did not eat as much as they do today. Food was not as plentiful. In my family part of that was probably because my dad was a depression era child and both my folks readily 
remembered the rationing of food during the WW2. As much as we loved them, sugary treats like cookies, pies, and cakes were at best a once a week occurrence. Desert was not a normal part of the meal.
So what does this rant have to do with taking out the trash? Well, a couple years ago I came across a very interesting study on a large group of senior citizens stuck in a residential care facility. Every meal was prepared for them and they were essentially trapped and had to eat whatever they were given – like is true in most “old age homes”. Well around this time a number of studies were coming out about the life-lengthening effects of calorie restriction. Some researcher decided to try this out on these senior citizens. In proper research fashion, the group was split in two with the two halves made to be as much the same as possible medically. The first half continued eating as they always had as a control group. The other half was put on an intermittent calorie restriction schedule. They were limited to 500 calories of food every other day and had a normal amount of food the rest of the time.
The results were amazing. Within three to four months the test population of seniors stopped needing 80 to 90 % of their medications. Their memories cleared up. Their weight began to normalize. Their physical skills improved – walkers no longer needed and the like. And their general sense of well being and happiness went way up. The control group, of course, stayed the same as always.
What happened? The researchers theorized, which has since been confirmed with numerous other studies, that by being on a partial fast every other day, these seniors were “taking out their trash”. The body fills up with metabolic waste – trash – just as a normal part of living. The liver is supposed to remove this metabolic trash each night while we sleep. When we eat, the liver uses its resources to process the food for about eight hours. When it is done with food it can turn its resources over to removing waste. But we are overloaded with a ton of poisons and trash in our food, air, and water that overload our liver’s ability to remove the waste so it builds up in the body and creates inflammation and disease.
By putting these old folks on a 500 calorie diet every other day, they were giving their livers 3 to 4 times more time to “take out the trash” each week than they normally did. As their livers started to catch up with getting rid of the trash, their health improved. At only 500 calories for the day, the liver stays in “clean out” mode all day long – not just the 4 to 6 hours it has between when it finishes processing dinner and we dump breakfast onto the body.
I have written about intermittent fasting in the past in which you skip breakfast to give the liver more time to process trash. I have gotten excellent feedback from many of you about how well this has worked for you. But over the last several months I have been focusing on SIBO and gut inflammation and what foods would support healing of the gut. I got the idea a couple weeks ago to combine the two ideas – intermittent fasting and a gut regulation diet to produce a serious combo protocol for both.
Ellen and I have been doing the 500 calorie restricted diet on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to boost clearing out metabolic trash. In this case the key design is to kick Ellen’s glial cells in the brain to clean out the remains of the dead brain tissue left over from her stroke. On the three 500 calorie days we eat a vegetable stew made up with the vegetables that work well for promoting gut repair and decreasing negative bacterial overgrowth. That means mostly carrots, zucchini, bok choy and the like, plus a little turkey breast. (If you are vegetarian simply replace the turkey with organic non-GMO sprouted tofu or tempeh.) I will make my recipe available next week. We eat this stew for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
The other little step we have included is on the days we eat normally we have a light dinner consisting of just some almond-coconut milk yogurt I make at home with 
the probiotics that I would normally take in capsule form for healing the gut. This way I get at least 10 times as much probiotic, and we are letting the liver get a head start on cleaning up for the day. The only exception is our Tuesday nights when our friends come over for dinner. With this mix of people we have to try to figure out how to cook Paleo Vegetarian. That is a challenge!
I will let you know what I think of this new protocol after a few months. If it is as miraculous as I hope it is, I will feature it again in the newsletter. If not, then it will disappear into obscurity as many of my other experiments have. In case you have not noticed, I like experimenting – usually on my own body. So until then –