Wheat Belly is #1!!!

Congratulations to “Wheat Belly” for being the #1 selling book on the New York Times book list today.  Dr. William Davis wrote this excellent and informative book detailing the problems with wheat consumption.  Anyone who cares about their health should read it.

Flouride in our Water?

For anyone who has not had the pleasure (sarcasm here) of listening to me talk about the detrimental effects of fluoride in our tap water check out this article.  There are also links to other pages that are interesting, especially the one about where the fluoride in our water actually comes from.  It also mentions a study where kids in high fluoride areas had lower IQs than kids in areas with lower fluoride.  Do we really want that stuff in our water?  Here is the link.  

                                http://www.naturalnews.com/036680_fluoride_bottled_water_children.html

What Do You Have to Lose? Well, Some Health Problems!

For most people the idea of giving up wheat sounds impossible.  After all what would we do without bread, cookies, bagels, pies, doughnuts and other baked goods?  But if you had evidence that something you routinely put into your mouth was damaging your body and causing your middle to expand as well as potentially causing numerous other seemingly unrelated health problems why wouldn’t you cut it out of your diet?  In the case of wheat what do you really have to lose?  A few weeks without wheat wouldn’t really be the end of the world and if your energy level rose, you shed a few pounds and other problems you were having just sort of cleared up wouldn’t that alone be worth it let alone the long term health benefits of giving up one of the most toxic things people consume?  In the end if you decided that wheat is for you and you would rather go back to that life you always could, right? Why not see what cutting wheat out of your diet does for health?   

The Vicious Cycle of Chronic Inflammation

Wheat is a primary contributor to the inflammation process which leads to many chronic diseases.  Inflammation is a natural reaction of the body, such as when you sprain an ankle and it swells up and becomes painful to keep you from doing further damage.  It is when the process goes on and on due to constant insults to the body that inflammation becomes a contributor to other problems. Think of eating wheat as getting up the next day after an ankle injury and going out and spraining it again as it is trying to heal.  Then do it again the next day.  Keep it up for a year or so.  What is the condition of that ankle after repeatedly injuring the ligaments, tendons and muscles?  It will be weak, inflamed and prone to re-injury because it never gets the chance to fully heal.  When certain proteins in wheat, primarily gluten and lectin, are consumed they have an inflammatory effect on the lining of the digestive tract.  Over time as this lining is worn away by the constant re-injury of the tissue of the digestive tract from contact with these proteins we start to see a host of chronic conditions develop. That is the reason some people take years to develop certain health problems and then have a tough time healing from them.  Constant re-injury from wheat proteins leading to chronic inflammation of tissues, leading to chronic disease.

Book Review: Empty Harvest: Understanding the Link Between Our Food, Our Immunity and our Planet

This book is excellent for people looking to dig deeper into how things are really working on this planet.  It was written by Dr. Bernard Jensen and Mark Anderson and although it is a bit older the message is still as true (in fact maybe even more true) today as when it was published.  This book covers a lot of ground but the part I found to be the most interesting was the information about our "empty harvest."  Today's modern agricultural practices produce food that is basically devoid of nutrients.  The topsoil, which is nutrient rich and nurtures the plants as they grow, has been eroded and degraded to such a state that the foods we eat today have only a fraction of the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients they did 100 years ago. 

It was very sad for me to read that, despite knowing this is occurring, our solution to this dilemma is to continue doing what we are doing and just add artificial fertilizer to the basically sterile soil.  The problem is that this practice does nothing to revitalize the soil or stop the erosion that one day will render even the most fabled land in America useless by turning it more or less into a dessert. 

The authors also underscore the importance of working with the land rather than using it was we will.  They liken the human body to the earth in that each has an immune system, a circulatory system, waste elimination abilities and the ability to be overwhelmed by practices that are ultimately self-destructive. 

It also brings up other important issues such as water fluoridation.  I did not know that numerous studies have shown the extremely detrimental effects of water fluoridation with sodium fluoride on human health and yet we add this toxic chemical to our water for reasons that are basically not founded on science and are based squarely on the almighty dollar.  This basically amounts to information suppression and is something people would likely not stand for if they knew the extent of the problem.  Given the recent admission of GlaxoSmithKline (Pharma Giant) to paying out bribes, paying doctors to push other doctors to prescribe certain medications and marketing drugs for unapproved purposes as well as other reports of other companies falsifying date and suppressing negative results of drug trials I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.  After reading this book you won’t be able to sit by and watch the world work the way it does without getting angry.   Rattle your cage and give this one a read!

Big Pharma Is Not Your Friend

 

Take a look at this article I just read from the Economic Times.  It tells us that in the past four  years big pharma companies have paid out a whopping  $13 billion in fines for a variety of offenses including marketing drugs for uses they are not approved for, offering doctor kickbacks (bribes) for prescribing the drug, fraud and others.  Read this article and tell me these companies are really interested in preserving your health.  

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/healthcare/biotech/pharmaceuticals/unfair-practices-pharma-cos-glaxosmithkline-pfizer-johnson-johnson-and-others-fined-13-bn-in-4-years/articleshow/14987245.cms

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th movies are about a deranged killer called Jason who scared me to death when I was a little boy.  In hindsight maybe Jason just has a wheat addiction and that is what makes him so irritable that campers having fun really gets him mad?  How could wheat have this affect on someone? Well, chances are it won't be that dramatic but wheat does contain a protein called a gliadin.  This protein does something most foods don't do.  It interacts in your brain with the same receptor sites that opiates do.  (Opiates=Morphine, Heroin, etc...) Think about that... eating wheat can have a similar effect as using hard drugs. 

Wheat "users" do not get the same pain killing high but the addictive response is still there.  That is why people sometimes have withdrawl like symptoms when they first stop eating wheat.  It can be that powerfull.  Wheat is also a powerfull appetite stimulator which of course could explain why wheat has found its way into almost all processed foods.  It's like the drug dealer is dishing out breakfast cereals, protein bars, whole grain breads, or really almost anything found in the middle aisles at the supermarket.  And like the drug dealer, they know you will be back for more sooner or later. 

REFUSE/RESIST

When you eat a large load of carbohydrate... think breakfast cereal, pasta, bread, etc... your body releases insulin to remove the glucose (sugar) from your blood.  Not only are large doses of glucose in the blood toxic to your beta cells which produce the insulin but over time other cells develope insulin resistance.  Once this happens your cells require more insulin to move the same amount of glucose into the cells to provide energy.  Net effect is your blood sugar stays higher longer.  Over time this leads to diabetes.  And people say high carbohydrate diets are good for us.  I personally dont see how this can be the case given the effect that excess carbohydrates have on blood sugar and the negative effects on health high blood sugar have.  A little common sense would tell us that lower carbohydrate diets would lead to healthier people provided the foods consumed in place of the breads, cookies, pastas, etc... are healthy whole foods that provide real nutrients.

Eating 2 slices of whole wheat toast causes a greater rise in blood sugar than 2 tbs of pure sugar. 
The reason you are hungry within 2 hours of breakfast?  After the initial rapid rise in blood sugar the rapid crash in blood sugar makes you need to eat to avoid feeling sick.

Up and Running!!

First posts are always boring.  So is this one.