Healthy bodies: Part Five

We have talked about the mess our food system is in. We have talked about supporting our bodies with proper nutrients. Today I want to talk about ‘Quit Poisoning’. There are two parts to ‘Quit Poisoning’. The first is to quit adding toxins to our bodies. The second is to learn to help our bodies start getting rid of the toxins that are already there. Both are important if we are going to be truly healthy people.

Stop putting toxins in.

Toxins come from more than just the pesticides on our food. Sometimes they come from the food itself, and sometimes they come from other sources.

Food

Last week we talked about adding nutritional foods to your diet before you eat your regular food. When this happens most of us automatically cut back on the things we know aren’t good for us. But do we really know what isn’t good for us? Here is a brief summary of the things that should be eliminated from your diet if you truly want to improve your health.

Fake Foods.

Another fake food many of us have in our diets is soft drinks. These beverages are made of artificial flavors, artificial colors, high fructose corn syrup or even worse artificial sweeteners, and carbonated water. Could you pick any of these out of the garden? Could you take plants or animals and make these ingredients in your kitchen? Some Americans are getting more calories every day from soft drinks than they are from food. They are not getting any vitamins or minerals in the process.

Process

What about processed foods? Are they real or fake?

Let’s take a prepackaged noodle meal as an example. When I was growing up there was a brand that everything you needed for your meal was in the box. All you needed to add was water and your meat. One of the flavors it came in was ‘Cheeseburger Macaroni’. This was basically macaroni and cheese that you added ground meat to, but as a kid we thought it was the greatest. In order to make the noodles the manufacturer (key word) had taken white flour and made dough out of it. Then they had heated and dried that dough to form dry noodles. The key point here is that in order for it to last in that paper box the manufacturer had to take out all the enzymes. The job of enzymes is to digest food. The food industry calls this spoilage. It shortens shelf life. Because they used white flour there were no fiber, vitamins and minerals in it either. They tried to make up for this by putting chemicals that under a microscope look like vitamins, but your body doesn’t recognize them as vitamins. Let’s take the cheese sauce. Did they use cheese? Not really. You see cheese has milk, water, enzymes, and good bacteria in it that makes it cheese. Even if they had started out with real cheese in order to turn it into a powder that fit into their little foil packet they had to take out the water. In the process they killed the enzymes and bacteria, this makes it last longer. There may have been a few milk solids left, but who knows? Now days they have chemicals that taste more like ‘real cheese’, doesn’t spoil, and is a lot cheaper to produce. If you were a big factory which one would you put in your package? But you say you added your own meat to that package, so there was some food value in it. Where did that meat come from? Did it come from an animal you had raised yourself on wholesome foods and without antibiotics or hormones? Did it come from the local butcher, who swears that the animal was raised as a family pet with only the best food? Or did it come from the supermarket, with unknown origins and raising habits? It has been documented for decades that meat producers (not traditional farmers) have been feeding animals food full of pesticides, animal parts, antibiotics, and hormones in order to get the ‘best’ meat to the market. Best for them means the most weight in the least amount of time at the least expense. So how real was a dinner of ‘Cheeseburger Macaroni’?

How about that cake or pie at the end of the meal? How real is that? Some are better than others. If you make it from scratch, using ‘real’ ingredients you are way ahead of the curve. If you use white flour and white sugar you have avoided some of the chemical additives, but you still don’t have any nutrition in it. If you use a real fruit filling instead of something out of a can you are a step up, but by baking that fruit filling you have killed the enzymes and some of the vitamins.

By now many of you are saying ‘but what am I supposed to eat?’ Go back to last week’s article. Incorporate more of the raw fruits and vegetables into your meals. They make great between meal snacks as well. If you want meat make sure you know where it came from and how it was raised. Avoid any meat that was given antibiotics or hormones. Eat foods as close to raw as you can. The longer you eat raw foods the easier they will be to digest. In the mean time don’t forget your Plant Enzymes. These help replace the plant enzymes that were supposed to be in the plants in the plants in the first place. Always eat the freshest fruits and vegetables you can find. If you can’t grow your own then remember to take your Complete Vitamins Plus and Metabolic Complete to make up for the nutrients time has stolen.

Other Sources of Toxins

Did you know your skin and your lungs are sponges? They absorb everything that touches them. When you breathe in gas fumes they go directly into your lungs and from there into your blood stream. When you put chemicals such as perfumes and hand lotions on your skin they get absorbed and go directly into the fluid that surrounds your cells. From there they are picked up by either the lymph system or the blood stream. What about the bathroom cleaner you use? What about that chemical air ‘cleaner’. They all enter your body. Your body then has to stop fighting bacteria, viruses and aging and fight instead these chemicals it has been exposed to. This puts a huge strain on your immune system.

I can almost hear someone saying ‘but I have been using that product for years and never felt any different.’ There are two things here. The first is that you don’t normally feel your immune system working. Occasionally you will get a fever, but that isn’t very often. The second thing is that if your immune system can’t handle these chemicals it will sometimes ‘hide’ them before they can do any damage. This is where some of the fat cells come in. The body will surround these chemicals with fat and tuck them away in a fat cell. It is kind of like you putting the stack of magazines in a spare room when company comes. This is one reason when we diet and lose weight we sometimes feel terrible. Those chemicals are being let loose and the body has to finally deal with them.

Next week we will look at the third part of our trilogy ‘detoxify’. We will see what we can do to get rid of the toxins that have already accumulated in our bodies.