FOOD MATTERS

Our nutritional health is now recognized as a vital factor in determining whether we can prevent and reverse heart disease. With so much research supporting the role food has in preventing heart disease, a consortium of world leaders in nutritional medicine have been asked what they would do if they were suffering from a heart condition. The common factors in each of their recommendations helps to simplify what we can do ourselves, to keep heart disease at arm’s length.

Prof Ian Brighthope MD, MBBS suggests that people:

· Adopt an Anti-inflammatory Diet (Scandinavian or Mediterranean Diet): Fish and vegetables, high intake of fish oils, olive oil, garlic and onions, complex carbohydrates, reducing animal fats (apart from fish).

· Stop smoking

· Exercise more regularly

· Reduce the intake of refined carbohydrates like white flour products and sugar.

· Reduce alcohol consumption

· Reduce stress

Patrick Holford is one of Britain’s leading nutrition experts. Patrick is a pioneer in new approaches to health and nutrition, specializing in the field of mental health. This is what he would do to avoid high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attacks and strokes:

· Good fats

· Balance your blood sugar

· Good intake of vitamins and minerals

· Reduce stress levels

Dr Dan Rogers is a trained Medical Doctor and Naturopath. He has been treating pa-

tients using integrative medicine since the late 1970′s with noted success in treating patients that have been deemed “incurable” by medical practitioners or hospitals. He recommends what we need to do is:

· treat the root cause of heart disease. By changing the internal biochemistry we will cure the disease

· almost all disease are improved by changes in diet and lifestyle. Improving the internal bio-chemistry of the body will develop healthy cells

David Wolfe is a leading authority on Raw Food and Superfoods. His recommended steps to better health are:

· Drink 12 to 16 ounces of fresh vegetable juice everyday.

· Add super foods (foods with an extraordinary high level of vitamins, minerals, co-factors, enzymes and special chemicals) to your diet

The common ground from these experts is that the true causes of disease are:

• Nutrition

• Stress

• Lack of Exercise

• Pollution

Food is good enough to keep you alive but apparently not good enough to fix you when you are sick. Nutritional supplements are necessary because the foods most of us eat are grown in mineral-depleted soils. There is evidence that increased intake of certain nutrients reduces the incidence of Heart Disease, Cancer and stroke.

The good word from these nutritional authorities is simple.

‘You’ll live longer and healthier if you exercise, have a good diet and supplement.’

Natural and powerful defenses in a normal human body make cancer impossible; a normal healthy body cannot and will not develop cancer. With a diet of healthy, rich organic food these diseases can be reversed.  Charlotte Gerson, daughter of Dr Max Gerson and founder of the Gerson Institute says nutrition alone is not the solution; we also need to remove the poisons.

All chronic diseases are the result of a dual problem, namley deficiency and toxicity. Let’s look at deficiency. One of the major problems is what we do to the soil. Our basic foods are grown in soils that are mineral deficient. Most commercial fertilizers contain 3 minerals; potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous however the soil requires approximately 52 different minerals to restore it to its natural state. These additional minerals have not existed in farmed soils in US since 1923 which means that we are missing rich minerals such as magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, etc. in the foods that we are eating.

What about the toxicity in our food? Plants have their own defense against diseases, pests and fungus. When soil is deficient, however, plants are also weak and deficient and are more easily attacked by pests and fungus. Farmers combat this by treating their crops with toxic pesticides and herbicides.

Even if we eat only commercial vegetarian food we eat deficient, toxic food because with all this pesticide and fertilizer, our food is deficient and toxic.

We then need to consider the additional harm caused by food processing and added chemicals. Some 10,000 chemicals are approved by FDA as being safe as a food additive. When one is detected as harmful it is replaced, and the replacement is usually worse.  We are now facing a situation where our nutrition-deficient food has added toxins from pesticides and herbicides, and also has added chemicals due to food processing.

Dr Ian Brightthorpe M.D. states that our depleted soils lead to depleted nutrition, which leads to depleted health. He also relates the problem of cancer to depleted soils, agricultural systems, nutrients drawn out of soil and farming soils becoming deserts. Nearly every food available in shops has been processed and nutrients have deteriorated. While we feel we are eating a well balanced diet, we are actually deficient. Additives such as salt, sugars, fats, colors and preservatives damage the body’s communication system and causes massive damage to cells. He agrees that to turn soil back into functional soil we need to put the nutrients back.

To restore food to its nutritional and healing state, natural waste materials from this food, such as compost, must be put back into the soil. From this we can grow nutrient rich foods and when we consume this food in its fresh state we are restoring the natural and powerful defenses in our body that will make cancer impossible.

Most of us don’t know how many people are actually dying at the hand of the very system that is supposed to save us. What is even more astonishing is that the information about these travesties is completely hidden and not talked about.

Highlighted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and reverberated in the upcoming documentary film Food Matters, is one of the best articles documenting the tragedy of the conventional medical paradigm.

The author is Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and she describes how the US health care system may be contributing to our poor health.

These are deaths per year:

- 12,000 — unnecessary surgery
- 7,000 — medication errors in hospitals
- 20,000 — other errors in hospitals
- 80,000 — infections in hospitals
- 106,000 — non-error, negative effects of drugs

These total to 225,000 deaths per year from modern medicine!

Add to this the number of deaths from Heart Disease and Cancer each year and the truth is out.

- 652,486 Heart disease
- 553,888 Cancer
- 225,000 Modern Medicine

Modern Medicine is now the third leading cause of death in America!

What we are experiencing now is a crisis of health care and looking to the economics of the industry is not going to solve a thing. The fact of the matter is that we need a whole new paradigm, we need to be looking at all the ways we can boost health through nutritional therapy and other alternatives approaches which are less toxic, less invasive, more effective, more safer and significantly cheaper. The 30 or 40 million people who are without health care insurance in America right now is getting some attention, as it rightly should. However is the answer giving them access to a system that doesn’t really work. Or do they need education rather than medication?

Every person reading this right now realizes that at some level they wish to help their families lives, their children’s lives and the life of the planet. And if this is our decision we need to be looking at our food choices very closely and this is exactly what the new film Food Matters delves into. If you’re after an answer to a significant health challenge or wish to protect yourself and your family from becoming customers of the ‘sickness industry’ then check out the trailer to the upcoming documentary film Food Matters.

Sources:

Death Statistics: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
Modern Medicine Statistics: Journal American Medical Association July 26, 2000;284(4):483-5

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