Healing with Nature

Sleep is a very popular activity in the world. Humans sleep on average about 1/3 of their life. We usually sleep a lot as a baby. A baby has a lot of organs and brain cells that are brand new that need to grow and become more like those of an adult. These changes require huge amounts of energy. Energy is supplied to the body by our digestive tract from the components in food. When there is sufficient energy coming in through the digestive tract we can use this energy for the millions of activities our body must do on a daily basis. If the energy that we use to aquire this energy is too high because digestion uses the most energy of all of the body functions then we will feel sleepy.

This is normal because the brain is the second highest user of energy in the body and it shuts off when we need energy for other purposes. The best thing to do when we feel this sleepiness is to give into the feeling and sleep. Babies know nothing about the stresses of our modern life and do not fight the urge to sleep. Adults who for example have to study for tomorrow’s mid term will fight this urge and try to stay awake.

Some people will take stimulants such as coffee, tea, caffeine pills, chocolate, or even drugs to get over this feeling. What happens when someone doesn’t allow their body to go to sleep and do it’s work? It is like starting a project like paving a road and mid way through the paving the work suddenly stops. What do you think that road will be like? Probably it will be half paved and half unpaved. Would you like to drive over that road in your new car? Probably not.

The body is only half done on it’s healing and internal activities and it needs to shut down for some heavy duty work. The coffee you drank stopped the whole project and it is only half way through. Do you think it is healthy to stop the body from completing it’s work? Probably there are toxins or other issues in the body which were to be removed and possibly new cells needed to be created to help the liver function. Now the wonderful cup of java is responsible for stopping these important tasks and you stay awake.

Leaving the toxins in the body is not a good idea. These toxins can lead to worse problems in the future. One of the theories of the evolution of cancer is that the body was unable to remove a toxin and instead it built a wall of cells around it to prevent it from getting into other organs of the body. This wall of cells and the toxin are shut off from the oxygen and blood flow. When tissues are shut off from oxygen they must get nutrition in some way and this is usually anaerobically.

This means that the cells use sugars instead of oxygen to get energy. Cancer cells do exactly this and therefore this is one plausible theory. I do not wish to alarm anyone but I am saying that possibly cancer can be helped or even caused by avoiding the call from nature when we need to sleep. Sure there are times when for example we are on a freeway driving and this sleep urge comes to us. The best solution at that time is not to drink coffee but to pull over to the side of the road (if it can be done safely) and sleep. Your body will then be able to get it’s spring cleaning all done and you will be much more refreshed when you wake up.

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We all hear it in the news on a regular basis that we need to exercise to be healthy. Most of the population hear this, think about it then go home to watch TV. Humans arrived on this planet many years before there were automobiles, buses, airplanes, subways and the like. They had one and only means of transport which was via their feet. In fact the terrain was not always as friendly as it is today, there were active volcanoes, changing water currents, many kinds of toxic vegetation, and a lot of animals who could kill or at least cause some serious injuries to a person. All this and the requirement to keep fed. The majority of the food supply came from the vast number of natural trees that bear fruit.

 The fruit trees needed to be found then the fruit needed to be gathered and eaten. With all of this hard work humans got their share of physical activities. There were probably few if any humans who can afford to be a couch potato in those days. If you didn’t go out and get the food you would starve. Staying away from predators was also a requirement for survival as there were no weapons to defend yourself from an approaching tiger. The only way to avoid being his next meal was to run or climb high into a tree.

This created a natural method of staying in top physical shape. Obesity was not an issue at all. In modern times with all the conveniences of life such as grocery stores where food can be purchased and few if any predators to be found there is little if any need to be active. Our activity level is totally a factor of our own lifestyle decisions. Scientific studies have shown that the human body functions best when it gets enough physical exercise. The food eaten is better absorbed into the body when there is a need created by physical activities.

Hormones and other factors that are created in the body are regulated in a healthier manner when the body is getting enough physical activities. All of our muscles and blood vessels require exercise to be performing at peak levels. Nerves and brain activity are also greatly improved by activities. Blood sugar and fat storage are at much healthier levels when we exercise. In fact almost every organ and system in our body is improved by activity.

The sedentary life is just an unhealthy way to spend our time here on earth. The best activity program is one that is part of a regular enjoyable and easy to continue sport or game. Examples are tennis, basketball, walking, swimming, vollyball, yoga, or any activity that will motivate you to continue the activity regularly. If the activity is seen as a chore or similar to going to work because we feel we have to do it, then it is prone to be discontinued. Every individual needs to find the activity and the level that they personally find enjoyable and will continue.

For some it is simply a mid day walk around the block, for others it is a 30 mile run or a 100 mile bike ride. It is all up to the individual but the body must get a regular supply of activity to stay at peak health.

Start your physical program now. We all know what kinds of activities we enjoy. Even if you only spend 15 minutes walking around the house a day, that is still an activity that is helping your health. There is no need to win competitions or take up wrestling. A steady and regular schedule of daily activities is what is the most important to your health. If the simple health facts that are discussed on this blog are followed your health will improve and your daily life will be a more rewarding experience.

Ahh the sun. What would we do without the sun? Well there would be no we without the sun. The energy of the sun is responsible for all of life on earth. It gives energy to the smallest algae to the largest of the whales, from the smallest single celled organisms to the greatest elephants, it allows plants to create their own food through photosynthesis. There are many people who believe that the sun is a necessary evil.

I often see these people walking down the street with a magazine covering their head, or even worse they are driving their car and holding a book, magazine or newspaper over their face. If they happen to be unlucky and get into an auto accident I am sure the blame will be put right on them as they can not see where they are going nor can they manipulate the car with one hand holding a newspaper. Surely they must believe that the solar rays on their face will cause disease or do some sort of damage to their beautiful skin.

Dematologists create a feeling of panic when it comes to the sun. They warn us about the evils of the very light that brought life to this planet. They carry on how too much skin exposure to the sun will cause the skin to wrinkle, to sag, to burn, to become cancerous. The large multi-national corporations were quick to jump on this bandwagon with their line of sun blocks, sun creams, sun lotions and potions, sun tan oils, sun tan accelerator, sun tan this and sun tan that. They even received the endorsement of those dematologists for their great products.

Now you can purchase waterproof sunscreens, sunscreens for babies, waterproof sunscreens for babies, sunscreens for teenagers, sunscreens that have a perfume smell, sunscreens that are colored (red, green, blue, etc.), sunscreens that do not even require the sun to get tanned, there are sunscreens for people with different skin types such as oily skin, dry skin, light skin, dark skin, olive skin. Virtually every segment of the market has a sunscreen that is targeted at it. There are brands that are meant for the generation Xers, there are brands that are meant for the wealthy, the middle class, the poor. There are sun guages that are printed in the newspaper warning how little time in the sun will lead to a sunburn.

It seems like society is obsessed with the sun and how it affects our skin.

What about sunglasses? Sunglasses are more than a protection for your eyes from the sun but they are a ‘must have’ fashion statement. There are sunglasses available in every price range imaginable. Even songwriters have gotten in on the fray with songs like “Cheap Sunglasses” and “Sunglasses at Night”. There are sunglasses available for every sport and every lifestyle imaginable. They come in every frame style and lens color and new styles are coming out on a daily basis.

The only issue is whether we really need sunglasses. Do we need sunglasses and sunscreens? Most people will answer this question in the affirmative. This is so probably because they have a pair of sunglasses and use sunscreens. The usual answer to a question like this is: I’m still alive and I use sunglasses and sunscreen so what possibly can be wrong with them? A lot!

First I will cover sunscreens. Through the years sunscreen manufacturers have been changing the active and inactive ingredients in their products depending on the latest study’s findings. Back in the 80’s they were putting a chemical called PABA in sunscreen. Doctors and the media would shout out from everywhere that you must use sunscreen with PABA in it and it must have an SPF factor of 15 or more. The SPF factor was some scale probably invented by the industry conglomerates to sell more product, it stands for sun protection factor or some such thing. It is supposed to measure the time you can safely stay in the sun without burning as a multiplication factor.

For example if the newspaper shows that you can safely spend 10 minutes in the sun without a sunscreen then the sunscreen will protect you for 15 times this amount. This is probably a bunch of marketing lies if you ask me but it is what these products are supposed to do. Move forward to the 90’s and new studies come out implicating PABA as a human carcinogen. Suddenly these same dermatologists who were just 10 years earlier endorsing this wondeful product are now warning people to stay clear of any product that contains PABA.

What about the millions who used PABA based products in the 80’s? Why didn’t the study results of the 90’s get published in the 80’s? Move forwards again to the 00’s and yet again all of the chemicals that replaced PABA in the 90’s are suspect at best and many are known to be human carcinogens. On top of that the number of people diagnosed with skin cancer is actually higher now than it was in the 80’s. This can possibly be due to more people aware of the symptoms and checking them with their dematologists but the rate is at least as high overall.

Another fact is that many of these people diagnosed with skin cancer use sunscreens regularly. I am not saying that these sunscreens are actually causing cancer or not but they surely are not stopping it. Actually the people who get a moderate amount of solar radiation on naked skin (without sunscreens) as often as possible (if not every day nearly every day) have the lowest cancer rates of all. These people are also consuming a very healthy diet as well (one that is either all raw vegan or close to it).

You see the cause of skin cancer is not the sun at all but the toxins that accumulate in the body by eating a diet that is loaded with preservatives and cooked foods. The body in it’s efforts to remain in a healthy state will try to eliminate as much toxin as possible through it’s conduits of elimination. Most of the toxins are removed through the lungs, the next organ that removes a lot of toxins is the skin, then the urine, feces and other body parts.

When there is an accumulation of toxins that can not be removed by the lungs the body uses the skin to remove them. This is through evaporation of perspiration. In order for the body to remove these toxins they must be brought out to the under surface of the skin so that the evaporation can occur. Toxins at the skin surface plus exposure to chemicals such as the ones in sunscreen are what is causing the majority of the cases of skin cancer and the poor sun that gave us life is getting the blame. Exposure to the sun when the skin is full of toxins will increase the chances of getting cancer, this is true but the fault is not of the sun, it is the fault of the consumer of toxic foods and chemicals like alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

In fact people who eat a healthy natural diet and who get at least 15 to 30 minutes of direct sun exposure without sunscreens or clothes cover per day get a vital nutrient, vitamin D. Vitamin D is actually a cancer preventative, it is an essential nutrient for our body to function normally. The richest and most useable form of vitamin D is the one made by our body when our skin is exposed to the sun. This goes for our eyes as well, if they are covered by sunglasses we will miss out on some of the best vitamin supplements money can’t buy.

Of course if someone who eats a clean healthy raw vegan diet with extremely sensitive white skin spends 16 hours a day in the dessert sun without having any protection or suntan they will get skin damage. As always too much of a good thing is not always good. If you must spend more than a couple of hours in a hot sun then I suggest using clothes to cover exposed body parts, otherwise do not be afraid of the sun, the sun is our friend. 

What the majority of people who live in western countries eat is known by many names. One of the most common names is SAD which is an abbreviation of Standard American Diet. This diet has become more and more processed and further and further away from the natural foods that have brought humans to exist on this planet.

To make this clearer, if you take a tree that is brimming with ripe exotic fruit such as a mango tree and pick one of the ripe mangoes, this is as close to nature as we can get, if you pick the same mango and then freeze it, dry it, dice it, extract the sugar, extract the fiber, recombine the sugar with some man made chemical that preserves food add some other products that might come from other plants or animals and then package it to sell, it will then be a processed food.

The vast majority of calories that the SAD provides is from these kinds of processed foods. Once the food goes through the first process it already has lost most of the original nutrients that it had as a raw ripe fruit right off of the vine or tree. The more processes it goes through the more nutrients that the human body can use are lost. These foods will fill our stomach but will not give the body much of anything to use to continue it’s functions in life. We see the results every day in the USA.

Over 75% of the population is over weight by medical standards and a full 35% of the population is considered obese. When a person is determined to be obese they are in a very high risk group for many chronic and acute diseases. Insurance companies are well aware of these statistics and charge obese people accordingly. Health insurance rates for obese people are in the order of 4 to 10 times as much as a normal weight person. The causes of this epidemic of eating processed and unhealthy food are easy to find.

The availability of unhealthy food is pervasive, every corner of every city, town or village has a restaurant selling everything from pizza to tacos or the favorite of the USA, hamburgers and fries. The grocery stores are not much of a help as they see the population’s favorites are these highly processed foods so they jump on the bandwagon with the same foods but uncooked, either in frozen pre-prepared versions or the raw ingredients to make these same unhealthy foods at home.

Life today with the high cost of buying and owning a home, sending the children to college, buying the latest in gadgets and electronic contraptions, owning the top brand automobiles and feeding the family is expensive. In order to make ends meet most families need to have two wage earners who work full time outside the home. This leaves little time to prepare healthy meals, or at least this is the message that the fast food restaurants want to convey.

They make everything so fast and convenient for the consumer so that they can go in, eat and be back to work in a few minutes. Health is an afterthought and since most of the customers of these convenient restaurants have been eating toxic food for a long time, they do not even feel the serious complications this is causing them. It is just like a drug addict who has to take larger and larger doses of his favorite drug to get the high that he used to get with a lot less.

The body has a way of removing some of the most offending substances from the body quite efficiently, in many cases it will not remove some of these toxins but it will store them in cells and retain water to dilute the toxin. People are so used to feeling sick all the time that they do not even notice that they are poisoning themselves with these toxins.

A great article related to this is: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4778305/ . Is it any surprise that the CEO of McDonald’s died of a heart attack and the one who took over from him has colon cancer? He died of the disease in 2005 at a young 44 years of age: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1322456/posts .

What is a normal diet? http://www.NewsTarget.com/019417.html 

In France the word for bread is pain, they do not pronounce it the same as we do in English but it is very appropriate for what it does to our digestive system. Bread in most cases is made of wheat. It is made from grinding the seeds of a wheat plant into a powder that we call flour. This flour is mixed with water to make what we call a dough.

If you have ever seen raw dough it is more like a glue than it is a food. This dough is heated in ovens to create the bread that we know (and should not love). There are many chemicals in the seeds of wheat, some are to protect the seed after it is mature and leaves the plant to go make another plant. Some are to give the new seedling food and nourishment for it’s new start on life. These are excellent foods for a young growing wheat plant but unfortunately they are not the best for the human digestive system.

The main culprit in the wheat grain is a chemical that we call gluten. Gluten is a plant protein that is made up of gliadin and glutenin. These two proteins are responsible for a large number of allergies and it is widely known that celiac disease is caused by them as well. When celiac sufferers remove gluten from their diet they are relieved of all of their symptoms. Gluten is also responsible for many problems such as ADHD, behavior problems in children, depression,  and others.

The grain itself is not an ideal food for our digestive system and therefore often is not well digested. When grains are left in the digestive tract not completely digested they will ultimately ferment. Anything that ferments will create products such as alcohol, acetic acid and gas. These will cause discomfort at the very least and in many cases these can cause disease from thyroid problems to even cancers. Grains also can be addictive, there are chemicals in them that are opioids to our body.

Opioids are similar to the factors in drugs like opium, codeine, morphine, and heroine that cause us to crave them, they are the addictive substances. Bread is also heated to high temperature in ovens and this causes the ingredients to change and react with the oxygen in the air to create many chemicals. One of these chemicals is acrylamide which is a known human carcinogen.

Some people believe that eating breads that are made with whole grains are healthy, this is all relative because bread is an unhealthy food to start with so changing the wheat from processed wheat to a whole grain wheat is not going to change that fact. In my opinion many digestive diseases such as ulcerative colitis, crohn’s disease, IBS, and possibly colon cancer can begin from the consumption of bread. There is no scientific evidence to prove these but this is based on my own experiences. I know when I cut bread out of my diet I felt much better and my digestion improved.

Other grains such as oats, kamut, amaranth, spelt, rye, barley, rice, and others are often used to replace wheat. Some of these still contain gluten and thus should be avoided but even the ones that do not contain gluten still are not the best foods for our digestive system. They all will not get digested properly and will then be able to get into our gut without being fully digested.

This will cause fermentation, which leads to the waste products of alcohol and acetic acid which are both poisonous. These poisons and large quantities of gas are the results of improper digestion of grains. Of course the same reasoning applies to all foods that are made of these ingredients such as crackers, muffins, cakes, cereals, granolas, doughnuts and most any baked products.

Have you ever tried a food and immediately spit it out because it had an awful taste? Maybe some time later you tried this same food and it didn’t taste good but it wasn’t as awful as the first time. Then you tried it again, possibly with something on it like cheese, peanut butter, salt, lemon, or something else and it tasted really good. Once you got used to the taste you even tried it alone and you started to like the taste. This is how our taste buds get used to unhealthy food.

Our taste buds are pre-programmed to give us a warning when there is something that can cause our body damage coming in. Sometimes we will ignore this warning and accept the taste becuase of peer pressure or some cultural tradition. For example when we are a teenager and all of our buddies are drinking alcohol, especially beer, we will try a sip. It taste putrid to us. This is because alcohol is one of the strongest toxins known. It kills life in every form.

Alcohol kills viruses, bacteria, fungus, mold, algae, plants, fish, reptiles, mammals, and most everything in between. It is a dangerous toxin and our taste buds appropriately will tell us to reject the food by sending us a signal that it taste bad. Instead of spitting out the alcohol or beer we swallow because we do not want to look like a prude in front of our buddies. The initial taste is supposed to tell us that the food is not good for us and we are supposed to learn this and leave the food alone.

This unfortunately is disobeyed by our cognitive mind because of peer pressure. We go ahead and continue to consume the retched tasting food because we want to fit in with the crowd. Lo and behold after drinking the toxin several times we get used to the taste and do not even get the desire to spit it out. We override the safety feature that our body has naturally built in. This often leads to the consumption of vast amounts of poisons which over time cause disease and even death. The same goes for many other toxins that people consume on a regular basis. 

There are many toxic foods that people eat to stimulate the body and create a pleasurable sensation. Foods that fit into this category are spices such as white pepper, black pepper, hot peppers such as jalapeno, habanero, chili and all the other relatives, garlic, onions, radishes, vinegar, alcohol, chocolate, caffeine and all caffeine containing foods. This is not a complete list but most of these foods when eaten in the raw state by a young baby for example will be immediately spit out due to the bad taste.

Babies have not had the peer pressure or cultural forced learning that adults have had and react the way the body was designed to react to toxic food. Another reason why these foods are often eaten by people is because they become addictive. The human brain will cause us to crave the stimulation and pleasure that these toxic irritants cause to our nerves. We do not realise that in the long term these foods are slowly causing disease and in many cases death (especially when the food is alcohol). The rush of chemicals that get released from our brains is so intense that we completely forget about the initial bad taste that these foods had when we first tasted them. The behavioral pattern is very similar to the drug addict’s addiction to recreational drugs.

There is such an intense rush of pleasure for a very short period of time that we forget how we will feel in the long term. In some cases it is the next day, the next week, or even years later. Do not fool yourself with these inaccuarate addictive feelings when you eat toxic foods. They are an unfortunate flaw in the body’s safety mechanisms to avoid toxins.

The best way to find out what is toxic and what is not is to clean your body. This can be by fasting on water, juices, or fruit, or by just changing to a clean whole foods diet that excludes these toxins for a number of weeks. Then just try to experiment and taste just a small amount of one of these toxins. You will probably notice a very different sensation this time, and not a pleasurable rush as you used to feel. This time with a clean body and no addictive toxins in your blood your body’s defense mechanisms will tell you immediately that the food is not to be eaten. You might feel a headache, your pulse might quicken, you might become nauseous, your heart might pound, or you might even feel faint. Once you are back to this state your body is back to working as it was designed to work, to reject toxins and protect your health.