Today I watched this really inspiring and thought provoking movie. I highly recommend getting this movie and watching it with friends and family! Here is a recap of the movie:
Ancient Wisdom
Back in the days of ancient philosophers, Hippocrates wrote that we should "Let they Food be thy Medicine." However, today's doctors receive little, if any training in nutrition. They work on a every pill for every ill. But isn't the modern medicine of tomorrow an increase in healthy nutrition? As one nutritionist put it, "you are what you eat".
How old is your food?
Everyday, food travels an average of 15000 miles before we get it. So by the time we get it and eat it, it is at least 5 days to a week old. Many of the nutrients from the foods have been lost by that time, and in order to make it last this long with out spoiling we put every kind of -icide on our plants and into our soil. Fertilizer is mainly made up of N, P, and K, but the soil requires about 52 different minerals… not just the three in fertilizers. When the soil is deficient, the plants are too! So bugs and disease can affect the plants so much more. The companies then go to chemicals to get rid of bugs and disease. Therefore, even when you buy vegetarian foods commercially, we are still eating deficient, toxic foods.
Raw Foods and Super Foods
Many times, cooking the foods changes the chemical makeup and will cause leukocytosis to activate, which is when white blood cells fighting the food as if it were a disease. If 51% of your foods were raw, you would have no leukocytosis; however, if most of it is cooked foods, your body will undergo the process.
Once cooked, 50% of protein is destroyed in a food . But many foods are super foods, where they contain more amounts of protein and vitamins raw than anything else in nature, like the Cocoa bean. We, today, have a lot of our priorities backwards. We would rather spend more on a car or on rent, then on the best food ever. Since we eat a very deficient diet, we can never make up for the deficiency from yesterday.
Supplements and Doctor Training
Today dietary vitamins are widely used, however we are told that vitamins are bad for us. Interestingly, in the last 23 years, only 10 people have been supposedly killed by overdoses on vitamins.
Its interesting that when you go to a doctor or to the hospital, that they are not really interested in your diet. Furthermore, less that 6% of the doctors in U.S. have received nutritional training. When leaving a hospital, 26% of patients are more nutritionally deficient than when they first came in. In the 1940s, doctors were prescribing high doses of vitamins to patients to help with the common cold. Yet many medical educations do not even touch on vitamins as medicine.
Vitamins and Supplements have many good nutritional benefits. Vitamin E is good for heart disease, healing burns, epilepsy; Vitamin C is an anti-toxin, antihistamine, antiviral, depression, etc. The deficiency of any one nutrient can cause many different adverse effects. While we have this idea of one drug = one disease, it is not true with nutrition.
The Body's Own Healing Mechanism
Vitamins enable the body to heal itself by enabling the body's own healing mechanisms. Not one cell of the body is made out of a drug and cutting into the body doesn't really make it better, therefore we can heal the body better by putting the vitamins back into it to take away the deficiency. While the RDA gives us the amount that is needed by the average person in the general public to make up for the deficiency of nutrients in our bodies, we are not all average. Many things and stressors can make the deficiency of some nutrients even further than the average person. It is important for us to recognize these deficiencies and treat them, the root cause of our medical issues, rather than continuing to take pharmaceuticals to treat our symptoms.
Heart Disease
When one Doctor put his cardiovascular patients on a vegetarian diet, the were able to stop or reverse their disease. 1/2 of all deaths are from cardiovascular disease. Then half of these don't even know until they die. The only way to win is not to play… to change your eating, drinking, and lifestyle habits. So why is this not recommended by doctors then? First of all… thy may not have researched it. Secondly… it is not profitable for drug companies that give doctors lots of money.
While only 10 people have died "because" of vitamins in the last 23 years, over 10,000 people die by adverse drug effects in the U.K. each year. In the U.S. over 106,000 people die from pharmaceutical drug effects each year, not counting overdoses and misuses. That’s over 2 million deaths in 23 years! Therefore, when treating diseases, "when in doubt, nutrition first".
Drug Money
All of the studies that regulate different kinds of drugs are paid for by the drug companies. Most medical journals are supported by drug companies. Therefore, many medical journals that talk about nutrition being a cure are black listed by many medical indexes. While drugs are necessary, there is a point where too much of a good thing is a bad thing. We have tried to come up with a pill for every ache and pain, but not everything can be cured by a single pill. Eating well and being healthy can help prevent, stop, and reverse many of our diseases though. So why don't we have nutrition as available treatments? According to the movie, "there is no money in health… it makes a lot of sense but it does not make a lot of dollars". For the drug companies, in order to have a license to market a drug, it only has to be more effective than a placebo in 2 trials. It doesn't matter how many trials it was less effective in.
Drugs are good when they just need short term, lifesaving drugs; but not for the long-term.
Depression and Mental Illness
Dr. Hoffer prescribed niacin to Bill W to help with depression. Bill then went to his alcohol anonymous group to see how niacin would help them on their depression and found that it helped! Many times, the medications prescribed and used for depression cause the depressive effects to worsen. When working with a suicidally depressed woman who was on all kinds of depression medication, her nutritionist tried giving her more than 11,000 mg of niacin. The woman ended up getting back to normal and interacting with her family normally again. However, when they told their psychiatrist about it, the psychiatrist suggested that it was unhealthy to be on so much niacin. So the family took her off and she went back to her depressed state. It is interesting to note that there are 0 deaths per year due to niacin. This is incredibly low compared to the number of depressed individuals on depression meds that commit suicide.
Detoxification and Weight Loss
Drugs today are toxic to our bodies. Including mercury filling that are put into our teeth. It is critical for us to consume foods that help us to detoxify the body. You cant get the nutrients into the body if the space is filled up by toxins. What do you do to help detoxify? Drink lots of water. Especially before starting your day, and before eating your meals. Toxicity is moved out of your body through your bowels. This can further lead to incredible weight loss by getting rid of the toxins in your cells.
Cancer
Cancer is one of the biggest diseases in today's world. The problem is that the medicine and radiation we use to cure it are actually cancer causing agents. The Gerson Theory says that vitamins and organic foods can help to reverse cancer. In fact, by just giving terminally ill cancer patients vitamins, the cure rate is at about 50%!
According to the doctors and professors on the movie, "a normal healthy body cannot and will not develop cancer". Prof John Beard wrote that cancer occurs because a healing mechanism is turned off. According to today's doctors, the meaning of the term survival has been changed. It is no longer about being able to life out the rest of your life, but actually about making it the next 5 years before dying. This five years or more survival rate has been the same for over twenty years.
The cancer industry is a 200 billion dollar industry. What would happen to it if people started recovering from cancer and the industry no longer had money in it? In most countries, it is illegal to treat cancer with nutritional therapies. The only means they can use are surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. However, by restricting cancer research and cancer treatment to surgery, radiation, chemotherapy; we are doing a disservice by not looking into nutrition. We need to do everything we can to build the body up and not break it down. That means building the immune system with nutrients, taking vitamins to help the body fight. Take for example Colon Cancer, by eating a diet with fiber in it and staying away from processed foods, chemicals in the foods that aggravate the colon.
Japan has the society with the least amount of cancer, mostly because of their diet. It is high in seafood, vegetables, and green tea. If you take a Japanese woman with no breast cancer and transplant her into the American society, her chances of getting the disease go way up. 30% of females in America are at risk for breast cancer. In Japan, less than 1% are at risk.
If you put Vitamin C into the body intravenously, that will kill cancer cells. With vitamin C, there are no harms done to normal body cells, just cancer cells. The patient does not have any side effects besides feeling thirsty and a little woozy at incredibly high levels.
A Whole New Paradigm
So why doesn't the medical world do this? Since doctors are paid a lot by pharmaceutical companies, the government knows only what the pharmaceutical companies tell them, why would they even look into vitamins. It doesn't happen because we don't ask for it. And they won't until we do. If you go to your doctor and ask for advice on vitamins, it is a lot like going to a French Restaurant and ordering a Chinese dish. They don't know how to make it, what it is, and you're not going to get it. We are trying to get people all on health care, but wouldn't it be better to teach them how to be healthy? Education instead of medication.
A Better Alternative
If we change our food choices, we will change the agriculture of our farms and the way we interact with our planet. If we want to get rid of diseases like cancer, go to the societies that do not have the problems in order to learn from them. However, the best doctor in the world, and the best nutritionist in the world is you. The reason most people don't do this is because they have to take responsibility for themselves, for their successes and for their failures. But there is no magic bullet treatment that will cure cancer. Instead there is a lifestyle change that will prevent, arrest, and even reverse these diseases, so long as you choose to commit to it.
For more information on the movie go to www.foodmatters.tv. You Can also find information for how to make changes in your own life.
Exercise: Not only am I still not working out today, but it is also my usual resting day. So I suggest just getting fifteen to twenty minutes of stretching in either when you wake up or before you sleep. It's nice just to keep your muscles and tendons nice and loose even on your days off.
Eat: "Go for Whole Grains". According to Cooking Light, "research has shown that eating just 2 1/2 servings of whole grains per day is enough to lower your risk for heart disease. And it appears that greater whole-grain intake is associated with less obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol." Interestingly enough, all grains start out as whole grains. However, they only remain so if, after processing, they contain all three of the components of whole grains: the germ, the endosperm, and the bran. The bran part of the grains contains most of the fiber, while the endosperm and germ contain the other phytonutrients, or the other beneficial chemicals found in plant foods.
Relax: Today I went to my cousin's birthday dinner and got to hang out with my Aunt, Uncle, and cousins. It's always nice to hang out with family. And better yet, my brother was home from college so I was able to spend some time hanging out with him! We ate some DELICOUS dinner and dessert, and then just enjoyed watching and cracking up to the movie Grown Ups.
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