Everywhere you look, everywhere you read, there are countless advertisements for internal health improvements.
To fix your bloating or your irritable bowel syndrome or your constipation, or your heartburn or your acid reflux or the countless other problems with you gut and your digestive system, take Mylanta or Maalox or Reglan, or Nexium, or Omeprazole, or tons of other names you can’t really pronounce.
And don’t worry if those “cure-alls” create rashes or hives or itching or difficulty breathing, or loss of appetite or muscle weakness or swelling of the mouth, lips, face and tongue or nausea or diarrhea or vomiting or slow reflexes or dizziness or confusion or depression, or agitation or a choking feeling or the hundreds of other symptoms not listed here. “Don’t worry, we have other pills to relieve those symptoms as well”.
More than 100 million Americans have digestive problems and two of the top five selling drugs in America are for digestive problems and they cost us billions and billions of dollars.
Ok, what’s the safe remedy for digestive problems?
It’s the health of your gut that determines what nutrients are absorbed and what toxins, allergens and microbes are kept out. In fact, the health of your gut is directly linked to the health of your whole body.
In essence, intestinal health is defined as the optimal digestion, absorption and assimilation of food.
Basically, you have bugs in your digestive tract that have a mind of their own and their job is to create an internal conglomerate that helps to digest food, regulate hormones, excrete toxins, and produce vitamins and other healing compounds to keep you healthy.
But, and there’s always a but, the ecosystem must be comprised of friendly bacteria to keep you healthy. The good guys are the lactobacillus or bifidobacteria and the bad guys are the parasites and yeasts.
But wait, there’s more: in your gut there is a one cell-thick layer that protects your entire immune system and the rest of your body.
When that protective layer gets damaged you develop allergies despite being able to digest the foods perfectly well. Then the immune system becomes overactive and introduces your body to inflammation.
It should be obvious that the gut needs to be in a condition to separate the good molecules from the bad ones to protect the immune system to its fullest capacity.
What’s cool is that the gut has a brain of its own (the enteric nervous system) that is actually wired to brain above your ears and messages travel back and forth between the two brains. When those messages are compromised so is your health.
So, what happens to all the toxins produced by your metabolism that the liver has to work overtime to deal with? All those symptoms and more listed above manifest and create more problems in your body that you can imagine.
As if that’s not enough of a nightmare, the gut has to breakdown all the food you eat into their individual components, separate the vitamins and minerals and filter them across the one cell-thick layer so it can enter your bloodstream and nourish your body.
Fixing your gut is understanding what puts it out of balance in the first place. One word does that- DIET.
The SAD (Standard American Diet), with its low-fiber, high-sugar, high-dairy, high-flesh, processed to death, excess protein eggs, high-calorie food causes all the wrong bacteria and yeast to flourish, damaging the intestinal ecosystem.
The over abundance of meds and “fixers” like acid blockers, anti-inflammatory meds, antibiotics, steroids and hormones (bovine growth hormones in over cooked and nutrient depleted in dairy) damage the gut or not let it do its job.
This assault brings about low-grade infections, gut imbalances, yeast overgrowth, and parasites. Then we add mercury through dental fillings and fish, suffer from sulfur, zinc and magnesium deficiencies and worry ourselves to death making us nothing more than stressed out zombies trying to solve our problems with more drugs, more acid-blocking meds, aspirins and whatever we are led to believe will reverse our condition. Yet is does nothing more than making us worse.
What to do, what to do?
*Switch to or at least eat way more of a plant-based diet to get more fiber, more nutrients and more body-friendly foods.
*Get rid of the foods that are high allergies like gluten, dairy, yeast, GMOs (soy, corn, all canola), and addictive sugar.
*Rebuild your immune system with reputable super foods and bee pollen, which contain amino acids to help build leans muscles, improve skin and hair, support brain function, improve mood and reduce cravings; antioxidants to help reduce oxidative damage from free radicals, promote heart health, support joint health and keep your brain healthy; phytonutrients to help alkalinize the body and promote detoxification for health and vitality; adaptogen herbs that help protect the body from stress, supports the immune system and helps balance the endocrine system; and digestive enzymes that help the body break down foods and increase absorption of nutrients.
In closing, research has shown vegans have stronger gut protective health benefits by their flora allowing for better absorption of vitamins and minerals.
Life is full of choices so choose them wisely.
Aloha!
Sources:
www.everydayhealth.com
www.verywell.com
www.dherbs.com
Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.
After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.
I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.
So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".
Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.
But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.
But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.
So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.
Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.
My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.
Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.
The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.
For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
