Eating Your Way to Health, Happiness and Wellbeing

HJ: I can tell you this with utmost certainty: there is no quicker way to health than the adoption of a diet of whole, organic, unrefined foods and there is no quicker way to disease and malaise than the lack thereof.  The role of whole foods in health is greatly underestimated by the current medical establishment, although this is changing quite rapidly.  The powers that be are aware of this fact, which is why they have fought tooth and nail over the last century to devitalize our foods into nutritionless, genetically modified matter that serves little purpose than to keep us in an addicted, chemicalized stupor.

Many rebel against the establishment through political actions or other outward manifestations of intention, however, the truly subversive individuals will instead rebel by changing themselves and their diet as this is not only the path to higher health, but lays a solid foundation for higher consciousness as well.  While a healthy diet is not the determining factor in the achievement in higher levels of consciousness, I speak from experience when I say that it greatly and profoundly facilitates the process.  I believe this has to do with learning to treat the body/mind/self with respect and learning how to tune into subtle levels of awareness.  Additionally, you are happier, more motivated and have greater energy levels when healthy and these greatly enhance your efforts towards any goal.

– Truth

Eating Our Way In and Out of Our Symptoms

Dr. Colleen Huber | Waking Times

Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. ~Hippocrates

We truly live at a strange crossroads in human history.

Over the last few decades, the human species has been hypnotized by the temptations offered by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The 1950s ushered in the “better living through chemicals” age. And we believed, and we bought and swallowed and injected and are still consuming them in massive amounts, and, most recklessly, injecting such chemicals as ethyl mercury, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), aluminum and formaldehyde into our babies as part of vaccines, without any prior safety testing.

But now with massive chronic disease plaguing our most industrialized populations, autism closely following children’s shots, and more pathology coincident with concentrated chemicals, we are beginning to wake up from our long post-World War II slumber. Now begins the next era when synthetic chemicals are starting to be seen as, however useful in many applications, best kept at a distance from our bodies, homes, public spaces and wilderness.

The old era of unthinking reliance on a synthetic existence is showing severe disadvantages, just as the urgency to forge new relationships with nature is becoming apparent. Plants and other whole foods are coming into their own new era as naturopathic physicians and other well-informed health practitioners rely on them for their central role in healing.

Big Surprise

Within our lifetimes, whole food will eclipse pharmaceuticals in medical practice, as the general public awakens to its far superior healing capacity. But the allopathic profession will be the slowest to catch on, just as most physicians of the early 20th century refused to believe that absence of certain nutrients could bring on such horrible diseases as scurvy, pellagra and beriberi.

Then as now, allopaths were eager to lay blame for these diseases on microbes, until — surprise, surprise — limes cured the “limey” British sailors of their scurvy, and we saw that Vitamin B3 prevented pellagra, while Vitamin B1 prevented beriberi and Vitamin D prevented rickets.

As usual, allopathy corrects itself long after the natural physicians are already healing patients. In fact, evidence now shows that even bubonic plague, which allopathy still attributes to bacteria known as Yersinia pestis, was more likely to strike those with low Vitamin C intakes.

But what would possess a person to think that food could possibly be medicine?

The first clue is the structure of our intestines. Whatever comes into the mouth later travels through more than 20 feet of efficient tubing that extracts certain molecules from the food we eat, then converts them to one common molecule, Acetyl Co-A, from which the building blocks of the body are then made:

Protein
Glucose
Healthy fats

The intestines are great little machines, but not omnipotent. That is, they can convert food molecules to Acetyl Co-A, because food has familiar and malleable combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. But it cannot do that with bizarre substances of which the body is unfamiliar, such as petrochemical products and synthetic substances used in pharmaceuticals.

The body has no experience with many of these substances, has little clue what to do with them, and often excretes them, which may explain why placebos so often equal or surpass drugs in clinical trials. More often, though, as the body tries to either detoxify or wall off the offending invader drug, it creates new metabolites, which have multiple pharmaceutical effects, some of which may be quite harmful.

The Efficient Eating Machine

Food, on the other hand, is right at home in the body, since our species has always processed it, and we have become quite efficient eating machines as a result. Therefore, we easily break down ingested protein to its component amino acids.

In turn, these get rearranged into the proteins that our genes tell us to make, all of the busy construction that takes place in the womb, and for the rest of us: Replacement of lost skin and membrane cells, slightly longer fingernails, hair, scabs over wounds, etc.

Carbohydrates and dietary fat get broken down to Acetyl Co-A and rearranged to form the molecules our body needs to function, because this is how our bodies have been handling things for all of our existence as a species. How would the body be able to do that from a pharmaceutical?  It can’t. It’s like trying to make your car run on orange juice.

Except for the last century, in our industrialized society, both humans and animals have almost exclusively relied on plants for their medicine. In fact, it’s noticeable that wild animals still seek plants that are appropriate treatments for whatever illness may be present. Even without access to our pharmaceuticals, animals observed in the wild are still free of chronic disease, even when living all the way to their maximum lifespan.

Our veterinary and zoo populations, on the other hand, present a very different picture: cancers, heart disease and epilepsy are seen quite commonly among people’s well-loved pets that are subject to a highly processed diet as well as synthetic pharmaceuticals by their well-intentioned owners — that’s us — and the pet food industry.

Whether we were created or evolved, we have been so intimately connected to plants for all of our existence as a species that we cannot live without them. We connect with plants and exchange with plants down to our very cells and our smallest molecules.

That is why they heal us like nothing else can. Our historical reliance on plants has been an integral part of every human society. Plants and humans resonate on levels that are still beyond our comprehension, including biochemical and physiological levels, and some would say aesthetic and emotional as well.

How humans and plants could so closely have shared this Earth, one with the other, and not had complementary, multi-faceted relationships with each other? Hippocrates said, “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.” Medicine is what you get when the most appropriate plant is given to an ill person. The plant kingdom does play the major role of all foods in this wonderfully beneficial relationship for us.

[smartads]

Quality Whole Foods: The Currency of Life

Whether you believe in creation, or evolution or are undecided, most of us would agree that our bodies (that is our anatomy and biochemistry, our metabolism of food) is substantially the same as that of our recent ancestors. What happens when we substitute factory chemicals such as synthetic food and pharmaceuticals for water and the many different nutrients that our cells and our children’s cells and internal organs need simply to function well?

In fact, the very sad consequences of the latest generations’ food and medication choices is becoming more apparent everyday as we are now seeing chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease become epidemic in our society.

The United States has the worst health status (life expectancy and infant mortality) of any industrialized nation, yet we spend the most money on healthcare and take the most pharmaceuticals. Why are Americans getting sicker and sicker while medicating ourselves more and more?

Forget what you ate until today. What you eat from now on is vitally important to your continued well-being.

Until just a few generations ago, our ancestors were wonderfully fit and healthy compared with present-day generations. The majority lived good, active, healthy lives and ultimately died peacefully in their sleep.  Today, that is a rarity. Whereas chronic disease, chronic pain and prolonged end-of-life care were practically unheard of for our ancestors, such results are becoming much more the expected outcome for us.

What single difference between these two centuries affects our bodies the strongest?

The overwhelmingly different factor in our lives is the refined, processed, chemical products that we eat, that our ancestors simply did not eat. If our species, for better or worse, whether created, evolved or in-between, performs best on whole foods (vegetables, fruits, meats, etc.), then we can understand that putting synthetic liquid or solid wastes in the body will simply trash our most valuable possession: our own good health.

About the Author

Dr. Colleen Huber, NMD, is a Naturopathic Medical Doctor and Primary Care Physician currently practicing in Tempe, Arizona. Dr. Huber focuses on herbal medicine, nutrition, intravenous therapies, environmental medicine and acupuncture. She received her Naturopathic Medical degree from Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. Dr. Huber is the author of Choose Your Foods Like Your Life Depends on Them.

This article is featured as part of a partnership with AllThingsHealing.com.

All Things Healing (allthingshealing.com) is an online portal and community dedicated to informing and educating people across the globe about alternative healing of mind, body, spirit and the planet at large. We are committed to bringing together a worldwide community of individuals and organizations who are working to heal themselves, each other, and the world. We offer 39 healing categories, 80 plus editors who are experts in their fields, a forum for each category, and an extensive “Find Practitioners” listing. Our Costa Rica Learning Center and Spiritual Retreat is coming soon. Join us!

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2 total comments on this postSubmit yours
  1. This is such an important article, and so very true, especially for us Westerners.
    I especially want to comment on our children’s health, specifically regarding autism. I have a very good friend, our kids the same age, had the same pediatrician. When my oldest and her middle child were about 2 years old, we started noticing the symptoms of autism with her son. I can tell you from watching her struggles over the years: when you see your child as a completely healthy infant and toddler, and all of a sudden he loses all sense of social skills, and basically introverts, you wonder (ie: scream and cry) how and why. My friend made it her mission to find out why her son developed autism, and she came to the same conclusion as this article, after years of research: vaccinations. The majority of vaccines we give to our kids are from ages of 6 month to 2 years. And yes, Dr. Huber is correct…we don’t ask questions, we just assume that what we are told to inject in our kids is best for them. However, just know that those shots are only guidelines given by the government…you can refuse to give them to your kids. It’s interesting that 20 years ago, autism was virtually nonexistent, and today, 1 out of 100 kids is autistic (this ranging from mild auspergers and similar motor skill and sensory syndromes). Makes you wonder why that is…
    I see my friend’s son making leaps and bounds in his treatment, but he will never be “normal”. Guess how much they pay out of pocket every month to make sure he receives the best treatment…which includes a gluten free diet, AVA therapy at home and doctor’s visits – $6000 per month. This is because health insurance doesn’t cover autism. My friend is fortunate that they have the means to treat their son, but most don’t. The majority of these children end up in the school system, and the teachers just aren’t trained or equipped to work with these children. So they get lost in the system. It’s an atrocity.
    On the flip end, we also have millions of children that are not introverted, but too “active”, being ADD and ADHD..yes, to them, we give pharmaceutical chemical drugs to band-aid the “problem” – the most common being “stimulants”, basically the medical version of meth…
    It’s crazy people, yes????

  2. Wise man said, that there was a time when we ceased our connection to the universe. Now finding our way back, we also find that the origins of our physical body where plant/earth/mineral based. The bibel said that god took the earth and blew life into it. This blowing of life into the earth was our journey onto gaia. There we forgot about ourselves and our roots and became entangled in a kind of darkness throughout the ages. But now we find our way back to our origins and our original connections, like our true relations to nature, to mineralkingdom, plantkingdom and animalkingdom. Our disconnectedness and all the symptoms that came with it that we went trough might cease for the coming generations if we keep up educationg ourselves alltogether like the writer of this marvellous article did!
    Thank You!

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