Constipation is more than a troublesome condition. It is an insidious drain on the health of millions of people.
As bowel transit time is increased, the doo doo becomes hardened and difficult to pass due to dehydration.
The body slowly reabsorbs the fluid content in the feces and along with it many soluble toxins.
This “autobulkification” is the reason people are suffering from constipation have coated tongues, foul breath, lack of energy, and difficulty in thinking. These poisons affect every area of the body.
Fiber deficiency and constipation are associated with diverticulitis, appendicitis, and colon cancer.
The small, hardened doo doo is very difficult for the normal intestinal peristaltic actions to deal with effectively.
With the lack of bulk added by fiber in the diet, the intestine resembles a tube of toothpaste that is almost empty. The same difficulty you have in getting out that last bit of toothpaste is exactly the problem your intestine has.
The peristaltic contractions are more forceful but less effective and tend to create small out-pockets or diverticuli in the intestinal walls.
Associated with both diverticulosis and constipation is a change in the normal bacterial flora. As a result, bile acids normally found in the doo doo and excreted are altered by prolonged exposure to these abnormal bacteria, and become carcinogenic. So, now you can see the cause-and-effect relationship behind low-fiber diets and colon cancer.
Most people habitually use laxatives to regulate bowel movements when constipation is a chronic problem as it causes a strong intestinal action due to the irritant qualities of the laxative. The unfortunate aftereffect, however, is that the bowel reacts to this unusual stimulation by becoming less active just after each use. What results is two to three days when no further bowel movement has occurred, a second dose of laxative is used, and on and on for years, even decades.
Enemas have a similar effect and laxatives, which contain mineral oil, only cause the bowels to become over stimulated and weakened, but actually rob the body of all fat-soluble vitamins.
Bear in mind that constipation can have early beginnings. The normal breastfed kid will have a bowel movement about 20 minutes after the start of a feed. It’s a hard lesson to learn especially if the infant is fed without a diaper on.
Over time, as solid foods are introduced, that bowel action, which is a true physiological reflex, becomes less sensitive and can affected by the type of foods consumed.
When a mother learns about this, foods like bananas are used to harden the doo doo and slow the transit time, or they use prunes and papayas to soften the doo doo and encourage a bowel movement.
When the kid is finally weaned and nightmare alley is introduced (cow’s milk), the bowel movements become less regular and harder to regulate. Then, when the kid is toilet trained, less attention is placed on regularity and constipation is just around the corner.
Unless the kid is weaned to proper foods like whole grains, fruit and raw vegetables, the early years can set the stage for a life of constipation problems.
Also, in early childhood, with the parents on hectic schedules, the essential call of nature can be habitually ignored or postponed. This then causes the body to stop sending messages to the brain until it has no other choice, due to bowel overload, to take a dump.
So, what’s regularity? Unfortunately, it varies with the individual. I remember doing radio shows and asking people to call in anonymously and tell me how often they go doo doo. I suddenly found out that once a week was normal for many. But the consistency of the bowel movement is somehow more important that how many times a day or week one goes.
If the bowels move once or twice a day and the stool is hard or difficult to pass, that’s constipation, no matter how regular the person is. Then will lead to “loaded bowel syndrome”, where nearly the entire transverse and descending colon are filled with hard doo doo.
Another useful index in bowel transit time, or the time it takes for food to pass through the body. In diets composed of unrefined cereals, fruits, and plenty of raw vegetables, the transit time is usually 12 hours or so.
On a refined diet this could extend to 24, 48, or 72 hours or longer. I had a man call in and tell he would have a bowel movement once every two weeks. Good grief! Another tidbit that many people are clueless about is that it takes about five to seven days for flesh to pass out of the body. Since the nature of a dead body is to rot, where do you think all those rotting poisons are proliferating in those five to seven days? Cancer, arthritis, and heart disease, anyone?
Yes, there are other factors that play a role in constipation besides diet. Lack of exercise removes the mechanical action of the muscles on the intestinal contents, slowing down bowel action. This also reduces normal circulation throughout the digestive tract. Eating while under stress paralyzes all digestive functions, including peristaltic action. But, and there’s always a but, diet and diet alone is the most prominent cause as well as the cure for constipation.
So, if the main cause of constipation is a fiber-deficient diet, then both prevention and cure must lie in an unrefined high-fiber diet.
If constipation is habitual and of long duration, the weakened bowels have to strengthened first and reeducated. even before a high-fiber diet will stimulate regularity.
To improve intestinal actions, specific short cleansing fasts or mono diets with herbal aids, and chiropractic adjustments should be undertaken.
In the case of long-standing constipation, a good 3-day fruit juice fast with nightly enemas is good, especially where the habitual use of laxatives or enemas are the main contributing factor to intestinal weakness. Depending upon the severity of the case, colonics will be beneficial. After the fast, a 3-day apple mono diet should follow. This would consist of four to five meals of raw apples with apple juice between the meals.
What I told the “once-every-two-week” guy to do was to soak a combination of figs, prunes, and raisins overnight. In the morning I told him to drink the water and add some non-fat plain yoghurt to the fruit, add some bran, and eat it all. So, the following week he called in on my show again and revealed his progress. On the first day, nothing happened. On the second day he had so much gas nobody wanted to be near him. On the third day he said he had to flush the toilet three times. He then told me he went vegetarian and had a bowel movement with soft doo doo after each meal.
Aloha!
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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!
