Article by Barbara Cornell.
Syndicated from Barbara Cornell’s personal blog.
I’ve been a life-long sufferer of allergies and extreme insomnia, and assumed they were inescapable consequences of my genes but a livable compromise considering longevity came with the package, every woman in my family for as far back as the eye could see had a red nose and sneezing, lurked around all night when decent people were asleep, and lived to 100 years old. But I did fight the allergies for a while even so. I tried every antihistamine and sleeping potion known to man, I tried the shots, I tried the bee pollen, I tried the pills, the creams, the potions.
Eventually, at about 30 years old I declared, «I will not be pushed around by my heredity!» and adopted the ignore-them-and-they’ll-go-away method of dealing with allergies and insomnia.
Which didn’t work.
I asked several doctors if my diet could contribute, and finally gave up seeking useful information when a doctor told me (I quote — loosely),
«What you eat has nothing to do with your medical conditions, here, swallow this chemical.»
And so, about 10 years ago, I decided that western medicine had nothing to offer in the way of relief, eastern homeopathy had nothing better. I would figure it out for myself.
The first thing I did was discard everything that came from the pharmaceutical- and food manufacturing-lobbied FDA and began to explore the logic of food, reading everything I could get my hands on by people who had educations, experience and nothing to gain from pleasing Dow Chemical and the corn lobby. A few simple truths, which should have been obvious but you will never hear them from a food manufacturer, emerged.
1) The closer a food is to the way it appears in nature, the better it is for you. Your mind may have «evolved» beyond the farm, but your body has not. It doesn’t know what to do with all those chemical food substitutes you put into it, and so it either stores them in your fat cells (to be dumped back en-masse into your blood if you lose weight), sloughs them off through your excrement (and fails to extract whatever nutrition there may have been available thereby starving your cells) or floats them around like a bad debt to see who will claim them (ie: free radicals, particles with unpaired electrons that bond with other particles in your body and leave damaged cells that replicate in the same damaged condition, also knows as «cancer».) Even things that are labeled «healthy» may not be, for example «decaffeinated» coffee has the caffeine removed by chemicals, creating a so-called «healthy» alternative which is actually more unhealthy than the natural caffeinated beverage.
2) Extreme reliance on any single food to the exclusion of others is not sustainable (think Ireland and the potato famine.) An examination of food labels (and a basic understanding of what those words mean) show an overwhelming reliance on corn and wheat. Nearly all processed foods are made almost entirely of either corn or wheat, and not merely natural corn and wheat, over-processed all-nutrition-extracted corn and wheat.
3) Fat is not bad, in fact fat is absolutely essential to healthy living. The worship at the altar of the «low fat diet» which was foisted on us in the 1980’s by the USDA in conjunction with the AMA, is one of the most dangerous ideas ever perpetrated on mankind. I’ve actually seen doctors recommend eating margarine instead of butter because «it has less fat.» Almost all processed fats are extracted via extreme heat or chemical wash, which damages them, creating free radicals. If you have to choose between something created by God and squeezed directly out of a cow’s udder or something manufactured Frankenstein-style in the bowels of Dow Chemical, it seems pretty obvious which your body prefers.
Eating fat does not cause you to be fat. Fat stores are created by insulin, the production of which is triggered by the presence of glucose, glucose is created more quickly by carbohydrates than fat.
I’ve actually seen low-fat baby formula and have with my own ears heard a doctor tell me that I should feed a toddler skim milk rather than whole milk. Your baby’s brain grows more in the first two years of life than in the rest of his life combined. The human brain is comprised of approximately the following:
78% water
12% lipids (ie: FAT)
8% protein
1% carbohydrate
1% salt and other biochemicals.
You have to wonder what kind of FDA prepared Kool-Aid you’d have to drink to believe that denying fat to your baby is a good idea.
4) Eating cholesterol does not cause high blood cholesterol levels. Your body needs cholesterol to survive (it is what your body uses to repair your blood vessels), your body will find it or create it, and if it perceives it is being starved of it, it will hoard it. Compare the blood cholesterol level of someone who eats chemical egg substitutes (ie: Egg Beaters) and someone who eats real, whole eggs straight from a chicken’s buttocks.
I was allergy and insomnia free and was in better health for the several years when I observed a strict all-natural diet balanced with healthy fats, natural carbs and home-grown or wild hunted proteins. Since I’ve fallen off that wagon, I suffer.
Time to get back on it.
RASSKAZIVATS 