“Now we depart from health in just the proportion to which we have allowed our alkalies to be dissipated by introduction of acid-forming food in too great amount.. It may seem strange to say that all disease is the same thing, no matter what its myriad modes of expression, but it is verily so.”

William Howard Hay, M.D.

“The countless names of illnesses do not really matter. What does matter is that they all come from the same root cause.. too much tissue acid waste in the body!”

Theodore A. Baroody, N.D., D.C., Ph.D.

We’re talking about the “Acid / alkaline pH balance diet” – a most persistent and damaging myth.

Even though this simplistic grand unification theory of disease is downright ludicrous, there still are websites peddling all kinds of tests, books, diets and supplements “to maintian proper pH balance”. They persuade their readership to waste money on “essential” supplements (usually through profitable affiliate links), and spread paranoia about certain foods that is totally unwarranted -  claiming earthly bliss as long as one’s pH is “balanced”. Are they on to something, in spite of their wild claims? Let’s look at the hard, published and peer-reviewed clinical evidence, published prior to the publications of the books of the two doctors mentioned above. The following is a study into the effects of a meat-only diet. Two former polar explorers ate nothing but meat, fat and bone marrow for an entire year. 80% of the calories they consumed came from (fully saturated) animal fat. The study mentions that this diet is extremely acid-forming, and notes that the acidity of the urine in the test subjects increased very substantially. An account of this period by one of the (ethnically white European) participants in the study can be read here: Part 1 and Part 2. He ate nothing but fat, bone marrow, fish and meat for five years out of ten and enjoyed excellent health. Especially the first PDF is a worthwhile read.

Observed health effects of an all-meat diet (meat/fish, fat & bone marrow):

• Both men went slightly down in weight
• Kidney function remained normal
• No clinical vitamin deficiencies observed
• No damage to the cardiovascular system
• One man had no raise in blood pressure, the other had a significant reduction in blood pressure
• Clinical observations and laboratory studies gave no evidence that any ill effects had occured from the prolonged use of the exclusive meat diet
• The extremely acid-forming meat-only diet made them lose Calcium through feces and urine, but no rarefaction of the digital bones was found in X-rays. The conclusion was that there was no evidence that the loss of Calcium was in any way serious, even though their intake of Calcium was three to nine times below the RDA for men their size.

Note: Relatively primitive methods were used to determine this, and with those methods it was impossible to detect slight bone loss or slight vitamin deficiencies. In my opinion, modest daily Calcium supplementation of at most a gram daily could fully reverse their negative Calcium balance, especially because saturated fats are beneficial to Calcium uptake.

From “The Fat of the Land”:

“One serious fear of the group of scientists conducting our Russell Sage trials at first seemed to be realized—the measured pan of our diet for the year turned out low in calcium. This was not demonstrated by any tests upon Andersen or me, and certainly no one could have proved it by asking us or looking at us, for we felt better and looked healthier than our average for the year immediately previous. The calcium deficiency appeared solely through the analyses of the chemists.”

“When a doctor looks for a calcium deficiency, he studies bones. The thing to do, then, was to examine the skeletons of people who had died at a reasonably high age after living from infancy upon an exclusive meat diet. Such skeletons are those of Eskimos who died before European influences came in. The American Meat Institute was induced to make a subsidiary appropriation to the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, where Dr. Earnest A. Hooton, Professor of Physical Anthropology, undertook a thoroughgoing research on the calcium problem in relation to the Museum’s collection of skeletons of meat eaters. Dr. Hooton reported no sign of calcium deficiency. On the contrary, there was every indication that the meat eaters had been liberally, or at least adequately, supplied. They had suffered from calcium deficiency no more in a lifetime than we had in our short year.”

What is especially interesting to note is that, according to the book, many Inuit, in spite of the Cree derogatory term “Eskimo (eaters of raw meat)” hardly ever ate raw meat, or the vegetable contents of  intestines, or bones. The northernmost Inuit never ate any food of vegetable origin and no Inuit ever ate more than 5% food of vegetable origin. It is a persistent but erroneous myth that a meat-only diet would be eventually bad for us – as much as the opposite myth – that a vegetarian diet would be unhealthy in the long run. Fact is, people can do very well without fruit, nuts and vegetables and even table salt, and Inuit were the living proof for that. The problem with our diets today is that they contain to much garbage. Empty calories, processed “food” devoid of vitamins and minerals, and trans-fats. Contrary to popular belief, saturated fats are healthy. It’s the trans-fats that kill. Trans fats are so dangerous that the EU parliament is considering making them illegal. The only thing that would interfere with that are the multinational “food” corporations, who would have to use slightly more expensive ingredients. But I digress. “What about the long-term damage done by such a diet,” you may wonder. One of the best “dietary reads” is this book “The Fat of the Land” by Vilhjalmur Stefansson who died when he was 83 years old. For many years he lived with the Eskimo’s (the PC term is “Inuit”) and ate nothing but meat/fish products in an essentially zero-carb diet.

A fascinating read and most highly recommended.

This is a recent picture of Owsley Stanley, 75 years old, born on January 19, 1935. The picture on the right is him at age 65. According to Wikipedia, since 1956, he has eaten little else but meat, eggs, butter and cheese. He himself says that he is a zero-carber since at least 1959. Besides that he has lead a sometimes unhealthy lifestyle: LSD use, hardrock band tours with excessive passive smoking and years in prison for running a narcotics lab. Nevertheless, he credits his diet for surviving an advanced cancer tumor. He is now a healthy and still attractive man, pushing eighty. He says he feels as young as he did in his late thirties. He’s been on his “acid-producing” diet for almost sixty years. Intriguingly, he was the world’s biggest “acid” (LSD) producer, whilst also being on the most “acid-producing” diet! You can read more about his dietary philosopy here.

However, the Okinawans are a testimony that one can grow very old on a mainly vegetarian diet – as long as it is low in calories. The most important factor in a healthy diet is the avoidance of large portions of high-GI food as well as overdosing on diary products. Excessive consumption of diary products (outside of the herdsman diet) are the main cause of Osteoporosis – I will write an article about that later. Of coure, seven billion people can’t all be on a meat-diet: It would destroy the world in terms of greenhouse gas production, soil erosion and fuel required to grow food for all those animals. Fertilizer is made of oil. We “eat” oil. Neither would it be pleasant to the animals. This article is not to prove that a meat-only diet is superior to a normal or vegetarian diet. This article is to disprove the “Alkaline / acid pH balance” nonsense.

Doesn’t acid-forming food lower the blood’s pH?

No it doesn’t, or you would die rather quickly. Deviations of the blood plasma pH from its normal value of 7.4 by ±0.1 and more are very serious conditions known as acidosis and alkalosis. Urine/saliva pH tests as administered by quacks of various denominations are hogwash. Don’t get suckered into yet another diet scam.

No, my “weight loss system” has nothing to do with a specific diet and nothing to do with exercise. Because to successfully reach your goal of losing weight and not gain it back, you need permanent motivation. Dietary details and physical programs are secondary to willpower. With sufficient willpower, you can achieve anything humanly possible. The solution to weight loss is not the perfect diet or ideal exercise schedule, but willpower. I know that much of the below advice is controversial, but I stand by it and will offer arguments at the end of this article.

1. Set the goal to lose all excess weight, plan to become slim. Do not set a specific weight, your goal is rather to become “totally slim and good looking”. The goal of becoming really lean in one single stretch of calorie restriction is essential for lasting success.

2. Contemplate the disadvantages of your fatness.

3. Visualize the benefits of your future slimness.

4. Prepare yourself for the hardships involved in calorie restriction.

5. Don’t talk too much (or not at all) about your resolve.

6. Stock up on highly-nutritious foods and realize that they will be able to keep you healthy while being low in calories.

7. If possible, force yourself into a situation where you are low on food, such as a week-long trek with rations in a backpack, or locking yourself up in a winter cabin low on supplies for a month.

8. Right after waking up, while still lying in bed look critically at your body and force yourself to notice fat deposits. Evoke revulsion at the flabs and bulges. Say out loud that you’re repulsively fat.

9. After getting up, re-hydrating yourself and possibly relieving yourself, step on the scale and write down your weight. Measure your fat with a caliper and write down the layer thickness. Then calculate your lean weight and body fat percentage.

10. Now you should have a different look at your body in the mirror: Notice improvement with a week ago and compliment yourself with your efforts. Visualize how you will look when all excess fat will be gone and vow you’ll stay the course until that goal has been reached. Realize that you have been strong, and that you can keep on being strong.

11. Practice walking away from the fridge. Walk to it when you still can resist the hunger, open it, look at the food there and close it again and walk away with the resolve to ignore the hunger.

12. Wait as long as you can stand with your first meal. Try to wait at least two, three hours after getting up.

13. If regular exercise is not part of your usual routine, do not engage in any kind of extra exercise than you usually do. If that means no exercise whatsoever, so be it. Willpower is a finite resource and it should be focused on the main goal and not spread out over multiple goals. Besides, you will be hungry after exercise and it will be nearly impossible to avoid eating more calories than you burnt.

14. When you feel hungry, remind yourself that the stronger the hunger, the better it is because hunger is the feeling of fat burning away. Only strong hunger should become the signal to eat a small meal. Portion and eat it with discipline.

15. Distract your attention from hunger by making unsweetened tea, for example. Any food that contributes nearly no calories can be used for this purpose, but make sure this will not persuade you to eat “real” food prematurely.

16. Wait as long as you can stand with the next meal, and the next, etc.

17. You are only allowed four or five small meals a day, so take the last one in such a way that hunger does not prevent you from sleeping.

18. Do not avoid fatty food, instead avoid making carbohydrates the bulk of your caloric intake.

19. Try to be as busy as possible with many different jobs. The more you have on your mind, the least the hunger will bother you.

20. Visualize what you will do when you’ll get hungry. Our Neocortex allows us to plan future actions. You can “program” yourself to do something else than eating when hungry. You can also try self-hypnosis before falling asleep at night.

21. Never think too much about your hunger. Don’t dwell on it. Don’t discuss it. Restrict your calories and focus on other things.

22. When you have “sinned”, do not let it demoralize you but rather let it be a warning to strengthen your self discipline. Try to think about something else than food :-)

Notes

[1] When you start your journey of losing weight, it is essential that you keep rapidly going until you are slim. No other outcome is acceptable. Your goal is to restrict your caloric intake until all visible fat is gone. Use a caliper to measure and calculate your body fat percentage and don’t stop until you are slim! There is not even a need to exercise heavily, or exercise at all. It is hard not to over-eat after exercise. Many people simply do not want to make the time to do it. You can lose a lot of weight by simply eating much less. Of course you can’t afford, nutritionally speaking, to eat junk food when you eat little. It all has to be high-quality protein and fats. Very little of your caloric intake should consist of carbohydrates for several reasons.

All food is metabolized into simpler chemicals and when excessive carbohydrate intake raises the insulin level and this gets above a critical threshold, fat is deposited. Under influence of this hormone, those chemicals get assembled into lipids. Doctors and fellow nutritionists tell us that because fat contains more energy per gram than carbohydrates, fat makes you fatter than carbs. Sounds reasonable, no? No. Fat contains more calories than carbohydrates and protein only when you burn it in a calorimeter, not when you eat it. People are more complex than calorimeters. There are lots of myths told about fat vs. carbs, such as that the body has to do “effort” to turn carbs into fat, etc. Human evolution moved at a snail’s pace the past 100 000 years and our metabolism hasn’t adapted to the agricultural age, which started between 12000 and 4000 years ago. Implying that a normal human diet consists mainly of fish and game, supplemented with berries, nuts, honey, grubs and roots. Most of the year this means mainly fat and protein. People are biologically-proven omnivores and archeologists say we have been hunters and fishermen through the ages.

Over millions of years, the body has evolved into an efficient system. When we splurge on fat and protein, we do not gain weight because as long as game is plentiful, we need to be lean to hunt it successfully. A surplus can be turned to pemmican so we do not need to store it as debilitating body fat. In autumn, when berries are abundant, we do not need to waste energy hunting, as we live of pemmican and collect the abundant, vitamin-rich berries. The body stores the excess “autumn carbs” as winter fat, when any kind of food is hard to come by. A perfect system, unless you mess it up by inventing agriculture – constantly fooling it into thinking it’s autumn by over-eating rice, potatoes, bread and pasta.

Back to my main point: If you stop your calorie restriction program half-way, you could gain it all back because after all that effort, you will still be fat! It would be a disaster to go from fat to slim and then back to fat again, but going from fat to a bit less fat and then back to fat again doesn’t seem such a disaster. The Russians won from Hitler because they sacrificed millions of their own to save their Motherland. It was their land. When you “conquer” your goal of being totally slim, you are in the position of the Russians in WW2. Losing the Fatherland is no option. In fact your position would be comparable to a people who once had a fatherland, then lost it due to conquest, then regained it through battle. They would rather die than to give it up ever again. You see why it is so important to set your goal as high as it can possibly be? Because you’re setting yourself up for failure when you put the bar half-way. It’s much easier to give up the struggle after losing a lot of weight when you’re still too fat to show yourself in a bikini. Because when you give up at that stage, you are not giving up slimness, merely a lesser fatness.

[2, 8] Overweight people are being told to accept their condition, to “feel beautiful”. As if that will solve anything except perhaps delaying the onset of depression. In my opinion the opposite is necessary: In order to constantly summon the willpower to drastically alter your lifestyle or at least rigorously restrict your intake of calories, you HAVE to be constantly aware of your obesity in all its gory details. The first challenge we face is the willpower to start losing weight. Remembering past failures and realizing the sacrifices involved, we tend to not even use the scale anymore and simply ignore the fact that we are fat. Why torment yourself, right? After all why dwell on the flab? Well, that’s exactly what you should do if you want to get rid of it. When you are still in bed in the morning, look down on that belly and grab that flab. Visualize the lard! The first step in solving an issue – any issue – is confronting it. If you are not painfully aware that you are fat, you can never stay the course. I have no illusions that my suggestion will work miracles though. Basic instincts are usually stronger than willpower. The older you get, the fewer calories you need. But your body tries to gain weight because it instinctively knows that when you’re old, you can’t hunt anymore or you can’t raise the offspring of hunters anymore, so you need to fatten up for the years you have left in the tribe.

[7] An important trick in the arsenal: Forced power of habit. The power of habit is strong, and you only need about three weeks to form a habit – including eating much less than you burn in a day. Hunger is not just caused by a dip in blood sugar – its main cause is an empty stomach. If you eat less than you are used to, your stomach literally shrinks and you will be satisfied sooner and hungry later. After at most one months, you have gotten used to the hunger feeling and associate it with “burning the fat” – a good thing. Hunger is good: The goal is hunger. Unfortunately, our willpower is too weak and we are not able to restrict our intake of calories for three weeks. If we would be forced to eat very little (but healthily) during that period, the remainder of our journey towards our ideal weight would be much easier, due to the power of habit. I know a man who found a clever solution to this problem. It was tough, it cost money but it was very effective. He took a month off in winter and moved into a rental apartment, literally in the middle of nowhere, in another country. It was four miles to the nearest village with a shop. He did not have a car at his disposal and there was no public transport available. He used the time to work on his laptop, and every couple of days he walked to the shop, bringing only the food he could carry in a plastic bag. As it was cold, windy and a long walk, these factors helped him in his resolve of eating very little. After a month he took a flight home, having lost only ten pounds but having gotten used to eating little and ignoring the hunger – made easier by the “shrunk” stomach. He had invested so much effort into forcing a behavior change that it helped him stay the course.

[5, 21] Do not talk too much about your weight loss plan. People will make unintended unsupportive remarks and when you fail, you’ll fail publicly, inflicting a double-whammy on your self-confidence.

[9] Do weigh yourself every day at the same time, under the same circumstances. Progress will boost your confidence, and a stall will increase your resolve. Use a caliper to measure body fat percentage and lean body mass, because your goal is to decrease your weight by decreasing losing fat, not muscle. It is nearly impossible to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously, except when using anabolic steroids.

Get more dubious but sometimes effective “mental” weight loss tips here. Sadly, it’s a “Pro-Ana” site, a site to help people with Anorexia Nervosa to lose weight! However ironically, these tips come straight from the experts so they can be very effective. Some of the advice is downright dangerous in the extreme. And I disagree with (the argued scientific basis of) some of the advice – tip 75 for example. I am not endorsing any weight loss tips to anyone suffering from this potentially lethal illness. By the way: There may be a cure for Anorexia Nervosa.

It is estimated that at least one in six people are non-Celiac gluten intolerant. Common symptoms are bloating, gas and/or abdominal pain, diarrhea or constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, hard to flush bulky, fatty stools, bloating after meals or waking up bloated, itchy skin rash or eczema, discolored teeth or loss of enamel, aching joints, fatigue, canker sores, mood swings, anxiety, depression, poor appetite, weight loss or weight gain, ringing in your ears, headaches or migraines, muscle weakness, low sex drive, poor concentration and/or memory problems, infertility and/or irregular menstrual cycles. Long term, more serious consequences of gluten exposure in sensitive individuals can be degenerative organ damage, autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis and cancer.

Wheat, barley, rye and oats contain toxic chemicals produced by the plant itself. These wheat-poisons have evolved to help the plant with its own reproduction and survival, at the expense of the animal that eats its seed.

Conservative estimates say that one in seven people have some form of gluten intolerance. Most do not have Celiac disease, and many are asymptomatic, meaning they do not have clear Celiac-like symptoms. The astonishing and worrying fact is that roughly 80% of Western people’s immune systems react to gluten with the production of IgM and IgG antibodies in what is called the “innate immune response”. The innate immune system predates, evolution-wise, the antibody-producing “adaptive immune system” and nonspecifically defends against pathogens.

Gliadin is now (“controversially”) known as a toxic wheat glycoprotein, used by the plant to make gluten. In a study published in GUT in 2007 a group of researchers asked themselves the question: “Is gliadin really safe for non-Coeliac individuals?”. To test the hypothesis that an innate immune response to gliadin is common in patients with Celiac disease and without Celiac disease, intestinal biopsy cultures were taken from both groups and challenged with crude gliadin, the gliadin synthetic 19-mer (19 amino acid long gliadin peptide) and 33-mer deamidated peptides. Results showed that all patients with or without Celiac disease when challenged with the various forms of gliadin produced an interleukin-15-mediated response. The researchers concluded: “The data obtained in this pilot study supports the hypothesis that gluten elicits its harmful effect, throughout an IL15 innate immune response, on ALL individuals.”

There can be only one reason why a substance triggers an immune response: It was useful in evolutionary terms, meaning that without the response, the tribe without that response produced less children than the tribe with the response. Usually the reason for that is that the adult members in the tribe without the response die before they manage to fully procreate and raise their offspring. Hence, when your immune system responds to a substance by producing antibodies, this is a serious sign that this substance likely is bad for you. Bread-eaters are unaware that everybody is gluten-intolerant in one way or another – even when there are no noticeable signs, and that gluten are suspected to play a key role in the cause of certain cancers, autoimmune diseases and age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s.

Let me count the ways how “bread is bad”: In some birds as well as Celiac patients, the wheat toxins trigger such a violent inflammatory response in the intestines, that the wheat grain survives the gastrointestinal tract undigested. The benefit to the wheat plant is that its seed ends up viable, in a clot of bird feces – about the most advantageous position to be in, for successful germination. Why does the bird voluntarily subject itself to such a perhaps painful experience? Could it be that it likes the natural opioids the wheat produces? And perhaps those opioids in bread and pasta are the reason why we consider the consumption of these foods to be non-negotiable as a “quality of life” issue?

“Gluten” comes from the Latin. The word “glue” is derived from that same Latin root. “Gluten” means “glues”. Indeed, gluten-based glues are a veritable staple of the glue industry. What gives gluten its adhesive and difficult-to-digest qualities are the high levels of disulfide bonds it contains. These same sulfur-to-sulfur bonds are found in hair, nails and vulcanized rubber. The first third of the small intestine is where vitamins and minerals are absorbed by the millions of tiny outgrowths called Villi. The villi greatly increase the surface area of the intestine, so that nutrients can be absorbed in just a few feet of intestinal tract. The slimy gluten however coat the villi as an oil spill would coat a field of sea anemones. Best case, the villi can’t absorb the water-soluble vitamins and minerals they should absorb. Worst case, the villi become inflamed and disappear completely. Up to ten million Americans have (mostly undiagnosed) Celiac disease, another thirty million are gluten sensitive, and yet the FDA has put gluten on the GRAS-list (“Generally Recognized As Safe”). Therefore, ketchup and ice cream with added gluten does not need to mention gluten content. Less than 0.1 grams of gluten can cause severe problems in a Celiac patient.

A person – any person – who eats bread or pasta on a daily basis constantly has his or her small intestine coated with slimy, inflammatory gluten-glue, and serious vitamin- and mineral deficiencies are the result. These deficiencies usually take many decades to express themselves as Osteoporosis, Diabetes and certain forms of cancer. Societies such as Japan with a traditionally gluten-free diet have very much lower occurrences of a wide variety of diseases, in spite of the fact that these people usually eat a lot of fish, polluted with everything from PCB’s to heavy metals.

It turns out that Celiac disease is not a disease at all, but a well-functioning early warning system. In addition to the innate immune response to wheat that we all have, Celiacs have an additional, genetically determined, adaptive response. Whereas non-Celiacs go on consuming wheat and develop cancer, MS and a plethora of other very serious illnesses, Celiacs simply avoid gluten and stay healthy. Celiacs don’t have a faulty immune system, non-Celiacs do. When people started to eat wheat as a matter of increasing necessity, only those with genetically suppressed adaptive responses to gluten remained alive to procreate. But those individuals only have debilitated immune systems. They are not at all impervious to gluten’s damaging properties.

It’s not just the gluten that are bad for you. Wheat is a veritable bio-weapon. Chemical warfare is wheat’s middle name. Toxic oxalates, lectins and phytates, insidious trypsin- and alpha-amalyase inhibitors, and endocrine disrupters such as estrogens. Wheat grains are unwholesome indeed. Not even cows can digest them without the risk of severe intestinal problems and liver abcesses.

“But European humanity has been been eating bread since time immemorial!” you may say, incredulously. Well, no. From archeological evidence we know that bread was invented at most 14 thousand years ago. Most estimations say between 10 000 and 12 000 years. And most Western societies were introduced to bread many millennia later. That is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Humans have been genetically unchanged for the past 200 000 years. We are genetically still mainly hunter-gatherers and sandwiches and spaghetti are not part of such a diet. Bread is the product of the age of agriculture, which directly spawned the industrial revolution. Humans did not have time to adapt to the slow-acting poisons in wheat. Wheat is a monocotyledonous (one-leafed) grass, something humans, nay, mammals have never eaten in their entire evolutionary history. No wonder they have no defence against its phyto-chemical toxins.

Wheat Germ Agglutinin (WGA) is glycoprotein classified as a lectin and is known to play a causative role in kidney disease, such as IgA nephropathy. In the article: “Do dietary lectins cause disease?”, allergist David L J Freed points out that WGA binds to “glomerular capillary walls, mesangial cells and tubules of human kidney and (in rodents) binds IgA and induces IgA mesangial deposits,” indicating that wheat consumption may lead to kidney damage in susceptible individuals.

And sure enough, there is research that shows that wheat can indeed cause kidney cancer. A study from the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan Italy published in 2007 in the International Journal of Cancer looked at bread consumption and the risk of malignant kidney tumors. They found that those who consumed the most bread had a 94% higher risk of developing kidney cancer compared to those who consumed the least bread. Given the inherently toxic effect that WGA obviously has on kidney function, it is possible that in certain genetically predisposed individuals the body – in its innate intelligence – has to choose between continuing to allow damage to the kidneys (or possibly other organs) until kidney failure and rapid death result, or launch an autoimmune attack on the villi to prevent the absorption of the offending substance which results in a prolonged though relatively malnourished life.

The real culprit is of course the wheat, not the “inferior genes”. Because wheat is not food for humans. It is toxic in a wide variety of ways, and only suitable to be used for the production of industrial glues.  The fact that you don’t notice anything untoward when eating gluten doesn’t mean nothing bad is going on in your body. Why isn’t this a widely known fact? One reason is that PhD’s never see any patients and MD’s never do any fundamental research, and there is little cross-pollination between disciplines. Besides – proclaiming that macaroni kills people by rotting their organs is not exactly beneficial to one’s scientific career. Fact is, we haven’t identified half of the all the bad stuff wheat contains yet. Many years of selective breeding has increased wheat’s genome to more than 5 times larger genetic size than the human genome!  Common bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), for instance, has so far almost 24,000 proteins catalogued. One single “bad” protein can wreak havoc anywhere in the body, over the years. Big Agrobusiness, like the tobacco industry, are of course already aware of the health problems their product causes, and are feverishly completing their Wheat Genome Project, to aid them in identifying the main disease-causing part of the wheat DNA so that they can remove them. This will avoid a looming legal liability and add Celiac patients and gluten-intolerants to their market. There is much more to explain about the damaging, sick-making properties of wheat, but that has to wait for another time. Wheat causes damage to the intestines. Wheat causes intestinal permeability. Wheat has pharmacologically active properties such as estrogens that are detrimental to health. Wheat causes damage to many organs in the body, including the brain. Wheat contains high concentrations of excitotoxins such as aspartates and glutamates.

]]> http://owndoc.com/diet/bread-our-daily-poison-gluten-sensitivity-mistaken-candida/feed/ 0 http://owndoc.com/diet/diet-alternative-medicine-cures-candida/ http://owndoc.com/diet/diet-alternative-medicine-cures-candida/#comments Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:08:56 +0000 Administrator http://www.owndoc.com/?p=895 This is a true, inspirational story about a man who decided to forego surgery, chemo and radiation against his cancer and he beat the odds and lived. I do not intend to persuade people to do the same. Quite a few cancer patients have died because they chose alternative medicine instead of traditional medicine. Then again, perhaps the opposite happened in some cases as well. Hopefully there soon will be more effective cancer treatments available that do not paralyze the immune system – because it’s the immune system that attacks tumor cells. All I want to do is to show that lifestyle, alternative medicine and diet can be a powerful combination, that it can sometimes even stop cancer in its tracks, at least for a decade. This is not an appeal to reject traditional medical treatment, this is an appeal to use common sense, read the available traditional medical literature as well as (even anecdotal) trial data on unorthodox treatment methods and at least not to ignore excercise, diet and alternative medicine when faced with seemingly insurmountable health problems.

This implies that if you were downwind of the Lower Manhattan/Brooklyn area on 9/11 and have since aquired this disease, that chances are that here’s the culprit. Asbestos fibres cause cancer because they resemble little sabers, splinters that are just the right size to puncture a cell and sever its DNA strands. The human body lacks a mechanism to get rid of these contaminants. There is no acceptable maximum asbestos exposure dose. Any and all exposure to asbestos can cause cancer. The main factors determining whether you’ll develop Mesothelioma after having breathed or ingested asbestos fibres are genetics and dosage. The higher the dose, the sooner Mesothelioma develops, especially when you lack the genes that protect you against this form of cancer. There have been many cases where Mesothelioma was diagnosed 40 years after exposure to asbestos, and there is no evidence that 40 years is the limit.

The White House, NSC, EPA, FEMA, OSHA and the City lied

People like George Tabb started to suffer from respiratory problems. The city of Manhattan and the EPA never warned him about the likelihood his appartment was contaminated with asbestos. They did not test for asbestos exposure. He had to arrange for independent testing – which found 555 times more asbestos inside the building than the maximum exposure limit. The city disputes this – we will see why:

In 2004, the Sierra Club reported that the US government deliberately misinformed the public about the dangers of asbestos in the air by asking the EPA to lie about this danger – to which the EPA complied. EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley admitted this in a statement issued August 21, 2003, saying that the White House told the National Security Council to tell the EPA to remove their warnings and to simply state that all was OK.

Even when federal employees were falling ill with very severe respiratory syndromes, the federal government refused to disclose the truth. Workers often did not wear face masks because the federal government said the air was safe to breathe.

The OSHA refused to enforce worker safety standards at Ground Zero. It lied, claiming it had no authority in national emergencies. It kept refusing to ensure that mask swere worn long after the risk of cancer became apparent to many agencies and OSHA’s own staff.

The EPA, FEMA, and New York City’s health department were partners in crime by telling families that they could clean up the asbestos dust themselves with wet rags. They also told residents not to bother wearing safety masks, saying this was totally unneccesary. Chinatown suffered perhaps the most severe particulate pollution – but the city declined to offer free asbestos testing and cleanup – something they did offer to other parts of Lower Manhattan.

This is Paul Kraus, ten years after having been diagnosed with Peritoneal Mesothelioma.

The most remarkable aspect of his recovery is that he declined any form of conventional cancer treatment. He received neither surgery, chemotherapy nor radiation. Paul was diagnosed with Mesothelioma at the end of June, 1997. A laparoscopy reveiled widespread metastases. Paul’s cancer – abdominal Mesothelioma – is perhaps the hardest form of asbestos-related cancers to treat.

Paul never was exposed to high levels of asbestos. He worked as a highschool teacher in Australia, but, 35 years before his diagnosis with Peritoneal Mesothelioma, he had a student job in a factory where he was exposed to saw dust from asbestos fiber sheets that were processed nearby. It looks like Paul’s immune system was weakened by stress and the trauma from relatively minor injuries and that that caused his tumor to appear and grow. This shows the danger of being exposed to even very moderate amounts of asbestos fibres.

Paul was told that even with all the treatments modern science had to offer, his chances of survival were very slim. Because he was feeling quite well at the time and cancer therapy would severely diminish his quality of life, he decided to go the alternative route and drastically alter his lifestyle. He started to focus on a healthy diet and took several glasses of pressed vegetable juices a day. He learned to meditate and using visualisation. He became a vegetarian and cut out sugar. He ate a lot of raw food and fibre. Paul started to exercise, and took vitamin and mineral supplements. He also took courses of intravenous vitamin C and Ozone. The vitamin C he took orally was in the form of Calcium Ascorbate. He thinks the intravenous Ozone / vit. C therapy was very important to fight the cancer. He also took other vitamins and minerals. Nobel-prize winner Linus Pauling found in his research that Vitamin C can cure cancer, when used in very large doses. We are ambivalent towards Ozone-treatment, because Oxygen is a powerful free radical, and as such a potent carcinogen.

Paul Kraus used his friend’s Internet connection to do months of research into how he could boost his immune system to fight his cancer. He also had a holistic doctor that recommended him the Ozone treatment. Paul, at over sixty, still has cancer but it is stable and he feels fine. Due to his improved lifestyle, he is on maintenance therapy only and does not take IV treatments any more.

Surely, as an expert in the field of nutrition, I would be able to comment on their list of supplements, advise on better ones and come with an impressive list of guidelines for an anti-Candida diet? I am well aware that wherever you go on the Internet, such advice is plentyful – dispensed by casual forum participants, nutritionists, supplement pushers and armchair doctors.

I don’t believe that any of the currently available “anti-Candida” supplements are worth their price. I consider the great majority to be absolutely useless, and some even dangerous. There are exceptions, and I will talk about those later. First I want to address diet.

I have already written on how there is a lot of misunderstanding about what food to avoid in my general Candida information and article on mushrooms and Candida. I also gave a recipe for homemade probiotic yogurt.

Here comes my dietary advice for Candida sufferers: Keep your blood sugar level as low and even as possible - of course without starving yourself or depriving yourself of essential nutrients. This rule should be religiously followed by Candida patients (it’s also very healthy for others). For the rest you can eat anything agreeable to you, as long as you get sufficient essential nutrients and are not poisoning yourself with environmental pollutants in your food (no daily tuna!).

The key here is “sufficient essential nutrients”. Candida sufferers don’t get enough of them. I know that for a fact, because it’s simply impossible that modern man gets enough essential nutrients – because the soil has been severely depleted since modern agriculture started. Micronutrient-poor soil results in veggies with only half the original amount of vitamins and minerals. Nothing is more important to maintain a healthy immune system than good sleep and the avoidance of stress and environmental pollutants. Immediately after that come vitamins and minerals. It is essential to first spend your money on the proper vitamins and minerals in the proper dose and in their optimal formulation. Because your food can’t contain enough of them, unless you have access to a home garden. The food we buy in the supermarket or the greengrocers’ looks nice, but is woefully nutrient-deficient due to soil depletion and modern farming methods.

I forgot to explain how to keep the blood sugar level low and stable: Eat 6 to 7 small meals during the day and avoid large amounts of food with a high GI (Glycemic Index). It might surprise you that there are potatoes with a higher GI than table sugar – as can be found in Hilary Ross’ GI table (PDF). Control your intake of low-quality carbs and Candida won’t be able to benefit from a sugar rush. The lower the number in the second column, the better.

Back to the vitamins and minerals. Mundane, I know, but you can’t get around them. “Vitamin” means “essential to life”. They’re even more essential to people with a potentially lethal infection. Candida kills people with impaired immune systems. You need to get rid of it before old age. An immune system that battles Candida needs greater quantities of certain vitamins and minerals. These nutrients are essentially cheap because they can’t be patented. Hence their marginalization in the commercial sphere. The vitamins we need to supplement are the first five of the alphabet: A, B complex, C, D and E. The minerals (elements, actually – to be more specific: Metals) we need are Iron, Selenium and Zinc. These metals are essential to a proper functioning immune system. Choose formulations with a high biological availability, such as picolinates. Don’t take fancy schmantzy vitamins – stick to cheap brands with a good reputation. Forget about RDA ‘s (recommended daily amounts) – read up on what you really need and don’t be fooled into buying pills that only have a few times RDA. The fearmongering on how dangerous vitamins are when overdosed even a little bit is Big Pharma FUD, intended to shove Codex Alimentarius down our collective throats. Don’t overdo the vitamin A when you’re pregnant, don’t go crazy on the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D & E) because they’re harmful in extreme doses and are cumulative, but don’t believe that RDA baloney either. They do not pertain to sick people or people who genetically need higher doses. Remember: RDA’s have been established to prevent vitamin deficiencies in average, healthy people, not to achieve optimal health in non-average, sick people. Google the double-Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling and his research on vitamin C if you want to learn how vitamins can even cure cancer in some cases.

These are some supplements that help the immune system work better:

• Andrographis
• Astralagus root
• Elderberry
• Ginseng

..only bother with those when you’re on the best possible diet, and taking the best vitamin and mineral supplements.

It may be controversial, but I do not think that many anti-Candida remedies help much. There may be a few exceptions for certain Candidases, such as colloidal silver for intestinal Candida. A fresh, living yogurt or kefir is very, very good, if you can digest diary. I base my low opinion on the myriad of expensive “anti-Candida” supplements on the simple fact that I receive several emails a day from people who tell me that they tried XYZ and when I ask them about its efficacy, they usually say they didn’t notice any improvement. Candida is so hard to kill, that the only way it can be conquered is by helping your own immune system. Antifungal medicines greatly help, but in the end, your immune system has to prevent it from coming back. Mycelial Candida can never be eradicated 100%.

Take those capsules of probiotic cultures you have bought (ThreeLac, 5Lac etc.) and add them to a pint of any store bought organic whole milk “pro-biotic” yoghurt or kefir drink. verify that it is not pasteurized and that the label mentions “live active cultures”. Only use glass or stainless containers. Metals and plastics seem to harm the bacteria. Take care not to use fluoridated of chlorinated water with any living lactobacillus cultures.

Heat up two quarts of heavy cream (containing less lactose than whole milk) to 80°C / 180 °F for a couple of minutes to destroy any undesirable bacteria.

As an alternative, you can also use skim milk, powdered milk, whole milk, regular homogenized milk and even some types of soy milk – just as long as there are enough milk sugars or added sugars to feed the good lactobacteria.

Then let it cool to room temperature. Thoroughly stir in the store-bought probiotic yoghurt and the probiotic supplements.

Pour the mixture into a sealable container and close it off. Keep the yoghurt mix lukewarm at around 44 °C / 112 °F for at least 12 to 48 hours – in a large thermos for example. For best results, start incubating your brew at room temperature and increase the temperature gradually to 44 °C / 112 °F. This procedure is of course a lot easier with a yoghurt-making machine.

The kefir/yoghurt becomes “alive” after 6 – 12 hours, but remember: The longer you wait and let the yoghurt mature, the more lactose is eaten up by the bacteria and the more probiotics have been generated. Conversely, the longer you wait and let the mixture “brew”, the sourer and more acidic it becomes. Let your lactose-tolerance level and taste decide.

Save some as “starter” culture for your next batch.

After a few “generations” of yoghurt making, Lactobacillus Bulgaricus always likes to dominate the culture, so when making a probiotic yoghurt, make a fresh batch every couple of “generations” with a new starter mixture.

These beneficial bacteria can be used in your home-made kefir/yoghurt:

B. breve, B. longum, L. acidophilus, L. bulgaricus, L. casei, L. plantarum, L. rhamnosus, S. boulardii, S. thermophilus.