Never Be Sick Again (9 page)

Though painful to acknowledge, disease sufferers invariably (if unknowingly) have made poor choices leading to illness. In the case of sick children, the parents have made the poor choices.

We are not taught that we have the ability to and, in fact, need to consistently make meaningful choices about our health. Instead, when we become sick we look to something outside of ourselves to explain our “misfortune.” We look for some obvious circumstance that can explain why we are sick. Do these excuses sound familiar? “I walked outside in the cold air and . . .” or “So and so was coughing and sneezing near me at work and . . .” or “Everybody at little Ricky's school is sick, it's no wonder that . . .” or “Obesity runs in my family . . .” We are accustomed to ill health as something that mysteriously lands on us. We fail to see our own role regarding its development. When invited to consider illness as the result of our poor choices, usually we reject such a notion.
By placing the blame
for sickness on excuses, we relieve ourselves of responsibility.

However, accepting responsibility for our health can be enormously empowering. The overall competence of cells— determined by relative levels of deficiency and toxicity—are the sole determinants of health. Learn how to embrace health and avoid illness by educating yourself in how to make healthful choices that lower your levels of deficiency and toxicity and promote your cellular health.

In Which Direction Is Your Health Moving?

Some of the time we are sick, and most of the time we are well. This variability in our individual health is almost exclusively the result of the choices we make. In this fluctuation, sickness is not the absolute opposite of health. Health and sickness are not fixed concepts and they cannot be defined in black-and-white terms. Instead, consider your health as a constantly changing continuum. Consider the balance between sickness and health as a scale, with optimal health at one end, and death at the other. Somewhere in between is a diagnosable disease. As life progresses, your position on the scale shifts, moving back and forth all the time. At any time, it is worthwhile to ask: Where am I on this scale? In which direction on this scale am I moving?

The Health and Performance Scale shown on the next page is simple but effective, serving to illustrate the relationship between sickness and health. In considering this diagram, remember our definitions of health and disease. Optimal health (on the far right) is that theoretical state in which every cell is functioning optimally and you are absolutely as healthy as your genetic capacity allows. This condition is called
homeostasis
—when the body is perfectly in balance and continually is fine-tuning itself to maintain that balance. Very few Americans are at this end of the scale, but we should strive toward this goal. Between optimal health and death is diagnosable disease. In this state, cellular malfunction is occurring on such a large scale that the symptoms of a medically defined disease are produced. On the far left of the scale is death—where all cells have ceased to function.

The Health and Performance Scale

©2002
Beyond Health

Tragically, more than three out of four Americans have medically significant cellular malfunction—a diagnosable disease of some kind. The overwhelming majority of us are somewhere between diagnosable disease and death!

Think about your personal health equation, your position on this Health and Performance Scale. Do you have a diagnosable disease? If so, you are located between disease and death. Even without having a diagnosable disease, your health may be far from optimal. Fortunately, your position on this continuum is not static; it can change depending on your choices.

No matter your age or your current state of health, you have the power to change the direction in which you are going and how rapidly you move on the Health and Performance Scale. I learned this firsthand, in making powerful life-saving choices, after it was declared a medical certainty that I would die. I learned it again years later, after witnessing the illness and extraordinary recovery of an elderly woman.

A family called me to ask for help with their bedridden and senile mother. This woman was ninety-four years old and unable to get out of bed; sometimes she recognized her family and knew where she was, at other times she did not. Her children loved her very much and did not want to place her in a nursing home, yet the burden of her care had become too much for them. With nowhere else to turn, they asked if there was anything I could recommend. My reply was, “Probably not.” Given the woman's debilitated condition, I assumed that her health had deteriorated beyond repair. At a certain point, enough cellular machinery has been damaged that sufficient repairs can no longer be made. Though I was pessimistic about the likelihood of any improvement, the family asked for my advice anyway. In retrospect, I found out that I still had a lot to learn about the capacity of the human body to heal itself.

I started out by recommending some specific vitamin supplements to help supply certain key nutrients to her cells. When I asked what she was eating, the first item they mentioned was milk. After years of study, I had come to realize that cow's milk is not an appropriate food for any human being. For someone in her condition, cow's milk was almost certainly putting a toxic load on her already struggling body. I recommended that they stop feeding her milk. As I hung up the phone, I doubted that these suggestions would have much of an impact or that I would ever hear from them again. Two weeks later the phone rang with gleeful reports of her “miraculous” improvement. She was getting out of bed, going to the bathroom and getting dressed—all by herself. She was walking around the house and having rational conversations with her family. A miracle? No, just a movement of her health equation in the right direction. By addressing her cellular deficiency and toxicity, this woman's body began once again to repair and regulate itself. Indeed, I have learned that almost anyone can alter his or her health equation in a positive direction.

Sickness never happens without a cause. The cause is usually our own ignorance of or disregard for our personal health equations. So how can you avoid getting sick? Simple. Make the kind of health-conscious life choices that optimize your personal health equation. We live in a fast-paced society that has created an environment and adopted diets, lifestyles and behaviors that do not support human health. If we want to be healthy, we have to make choices that significantly deviate from the diet and lifestyle of the average American. Eating a “normal” diet and living a “normal” life are virtually guaranteed to make you sick. To prevent this from happening, you must be proactive. As Joseph D. Beasley, M.D., said in
The Kellogg Report,
“In the long run, individuals cannot be better than their biology—as affected by their nutrition, ecology, and lifestyle.”

The key to never having to be sick again is the ability to choose between the things that are healthy and the things that are not. This sounds simple, but accurate information about what is healthy is hard to come by. Next, let's look at a definition and an overview of each of the six pathways between health and disease and explain how knowledge of them can lead to better decisions about health.

The Six Pathways Between
Health and Disease

Having read this far, has your perspective on health and disease changed? Are you becoming accustomed to the theory of one disease and two causes? You have learned that if your cells malfunction to the degree that they interfere with your body's ability to balance and regulate itself, you are diseased.

Whether you are suffering from the flu, cancer, diabetes, depression or something else, cellular malfunction is always the essence of the problem.

The tool that I developed to help myself make better choices is the six pathways. As demonstrated, your personal health equation is always in flux; depending on the choices you make, you will move either in the direction of optimal health or in the direction of disease and death. This movement occurs along the six pathways. These six pathways are like six different roads; each spans the distance between health and disease. Depending on the choices made along each pathway, you are moving toward one or the other. The six pathways concept provides a framework through which informed, logical, health-enhancing choices can be made.

The pathways are:

• Nutrition

• Toxin

• Psychological

• Physical

• Genetic

• Medical

A holistic approach to health requires attention to all of these pathways. Consistent movement in the wrong direction along any of them can lead to cellular malfunction, breakdown of self-regulation and diagnosable disease. Continuous movement in the right direction leads to optimal health and performance.

By learning about the six pathways, you can have a clear understanding of the different ways that health can be influenced. You will be empowered to mitigate the negative effects of modern living, thus taking charge of your personal health.

Pathway Number One: Nutrition

What is America's leading cause of disease?
Malnutrition.
We think of ourselves as so well fed that the idea that we are suffering from malnutrition is difficult for most Americans to grasp. When we hear the word “malnourished,” we recall television images of starving children. Although Americans are rarely undernourished to this extent, we are malnourished, and in fact it is our leading cause of disease. The typical diet, what most Americans eat, simply does not supply sufficient nutrients. No wonder that we suffer from the one disease in its various forms.

The nutrition pathway is about the relationship between the nutritional content of your diet and your health. Obtaining proper nutritional intake on a daily basis is important because nutrients act as a team. A shortage of even one nutrient will decrease the effectiveness of all the others. Nutritional status affects our entire being, including moods and emotions, the ability to learn and remember, physical performance and resistance to disease. Cells and tissues thrive when provided with an environment rich in nutrients such as water, oxygen, vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates and essential fatty acids, while deficiency causes disease and shortens life.

To some degree, almost all Americans are overfed but undernourished. Virtually everything that we eat today, unless we make special choices, is nutritionally inferior to the foods that our ancestors were eating as recently as a few generations ago. Not only have we fundamentally changed what we eat; we have changed how our food is grown, processed, transported, stored, treated and prepared. These changes cause our foods to be nutritionally deficient—the primary cause of our modern epidemic of chronic disease. In addition, our crops usually retain toxic residues from pesticides and other agricultural chemicals, and some are even ripened with artificial chemicals. Both nutritionally deficient and chemically toxic, our modern food supply promotes disease.

Pathway Number Two: Toxin

Toxins interfere with normal cell function, thereby causing malfunctions. Most people know that toxins are dangerous, but what are toxins, and how do toxins damage our cells?

We are exposed to toxins in various ways: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the clothes we wear and the food we eat. In our modern world, we are exposed to these environmental toxins all day, every day. Toxins in our environment can impose an undue external burden on us, while poor digestion, lack of exercise, and negative thoughts and emotions can increase our toxic loads internally.

Our bodies do have the ability to detoxify, but our detoxification mechanisms require essential nutrients to function properly. Inadequate nutrition deprives the body of the raw materials necessary to detoxify, so toxic levels build and negatively affect cellular health. In our society, toxic overload is having a bigger effect than it should, because our deficient diets do not supply the nutrients necessary to operate and maintain our detoxification mechanisms. Not only is our toxic load the highest in history, but our ability to process and eliminate these toxins is impaired.

Because we know that excessive toxic exposure causes disease, learning about the toxin pathway can teach us which substances are toxic, how toxic they are, where they are, how they get there and how we can minimize our exposures to them. The toxin pathway provides insight into the toxic aspects of our daily lives—in our food supply, water supply, homes and personal products (including many soaps, shampoos and toothpastes). Fortunately, healthful alternatives are available. Toxic exposure is a fact of life, and the body is designed to deal with it. Our problem is toxic overload, i.e., when the toxic input exceeds our ability to process it. Understanding this pathway can help us to reduce toxic exposure to manageable levels by teaching us to recognize and avoid toxins in our daily lives.