17 Steps to Better Health
1. Do not eat sugar or high-sugar containing foods.
High sugar in your diet will stimulate micro-organisms in the gut and in your intestinal tract. It will over stimulate the growth potential for fungal and yeast infections. Diets that are high in sugar are feeding the bad remnants in our system. And when you feed the bad, those bad organisms give off toxic metabolites. Then your body has to deal with it and handle it. Therefore, it taxes and compromises your immune system.
Therefore, in this category, the foods we should all be avoiding include carbonated drinks, cookies, biscuits, dried fruits, and any food that has added sugars to it. We strongly recommend that you use Stevia as a natural sweetener.
2. Do not consume caffeine
Having a cup of coffee or two occasionally is not a major problem. It's when folks have 5-6 or 8-9 cups of coffee a day that they are asking for trouble.
The main reason is with adrenals...with caffeine, you are abnormally stimulating the adrenals. You are driving the adrenals to increase output and you are causing your adrenals to work harder than they are already working. And for the average American, who doesn't sleep well, doesn't eat real well, and doesn't get enough exercise, your adrenals don't need more stress loaded on them. Caffeine is absolutely going to be an antagonist to your adrenal system.
3. Reduce or eliminate cow milk and cow milk products
Dairy products are problematic because the pasteurization and homogenization process is changing the molecular structure. There are a lot of implications to cardio vascular health and not because of the fat content alone. But because of how the molecular structure of the proteins has been changed.
Another reason is that dairy products are very allergy inducing. And you don't have to have a full-blown allergy to a dairy based product. Dairy products, cow dairy in particular, is fifth on the list of foods most antagonistic to the system. So, what that really is saying to me is it has a great potential to compromise your immune system. If you potentially have an immune response, and you are drinking 4-5 glasses of milk, or you are consuming ice cream on a regular basis, you are antagonizing your immune system.
4. Reduce starch intake
Starches are simple carbohydrates. That would include white flours, processed refined baked goods, cookies, and very heavy simple white starchy foods.
Not included here are the complex carbohydrates, the type of carbohydrates found in fruits and so on.
Focus on reducing the amount of starch. Why? Because a simple starch is very quickly converted to sugar. Why do you need to reduce your sugar intake? Because it compromises your immune system. A study showed that if you give an individual a sugar bolus, the equivalent of 2 donuts, it compromises your system for the next four hours; it reduces your lymphocyte production, your immune system production, by 30%. 30% is a staggering overwhelming number!
5. Increase intake of vegetables
When you increase your intake of vegetables, especially when you eat all the colors, the green, the red, the yellow, what you are doing is increasing the nutrient intake. The level of vitamins and minerals that are bio-available to you are increased. Therefore you've got an inherent health promoting benefit right there by increasing the quality of the nutrients that you are taking in.
Second, you are adding soluble fiber that actually aids in the movement of pathogenic (that means, disease inducing) types of bacteria and fungus from your intestinal track.
6. Increase intake of dietary fiber
Dietary fiber helps to remove a lot of the toxic remnants, harmful bacteria. Especially when the dietary fiber comes from vegetables, and especially those coming from the cruciferous family. What happens is you will increase the excretion of excess hormone type metabolites in your gut that you may be receiving from foods (low level hormones in foods, etc)? By increasing the amount of dietary fiber, the number of bowel movements will increase and the efficacy of your bowel movements also increases. The more toxic remnants that you can remove from the intestinal track, the more you lower the overall load on your system.
7. Eat small amounts every 1 1/2 to 2 hours
In other words, grazing. Have vegetables, fruits and nuts at your disposal so that you can consume them over a regular period of time. If you have intestinal health problems and you go for long periods of time with nothing in your stomach, you are allowing the gastric acid secretions to work on the lining of the stomach. By eating small amounts, you are not over taxing your digestive processes.
You lower the load in digestive difficulties by eating smaller, more frequent, health promoting types of foods.
8. Reduce intake of cured or canned foods
Nitrates and cured foods are difficult on your intestinal track. They have been proven to be carcinogenic. We're not saying that these foods do not taste good. They do. But the fact of the matter is, they are carcinogenic.
9. Eliminate alcohol and tobacco
Alcohol irritates the lining of the stomach. Tobacco robs your system of oxygen - the ability of your red blood cells to carry oxygen. That results in a reduction of muscular function efficiency in feeding your extremities. Add to that high blood pressure, heart disease, and inducement of arterier cardiovascular types of diseases.
Alcohol, and particularly wine and hard alcohol, contains a lot of sugar. And we've already talked about sugar. Beer contains a lot of yeast. And if you have a fungal or yeast problem and you drink beer, you are making the problem worse.
10. Increase water intake
Water is critical. Water will improve your detoxication pathways. It will help to carry nutrients more efficiently to your cells. It has the ability to act almost as an energizer.
Water also helps hunger. A study was done on how your body recognizes its sensation to hunger. When you do not have adequate hydration, the glucose and the nutrients do not get to the brain efficiently. The brain is a highly energy dependent organ in the body and when it senses that it is not receiving adequate nutrients, it will put out the signal for more food. Drinking more water does not help you lose weight because it fills you up; it helps because it makes sure that what you are consuming is carried to where it needs to go. Therefore, even though indirectly, it helps to curb your appetite because of the brain response.
Purified water is nature's natural cleanser.
11. At a minimum, take a good bio-available Multi-vitamin and CoQ-10
A good mult-vitamin is necessary because you need the B Complexes, you need the energy transport, it aids in cellular efficiency in elimination of toxins, and it improves the viability of the cellular structures. The B's are also very important to your liver. The lipotropic agents, such as mathiameine and cystine (which are amino acids), will aid and encourage and stimulate liver detoxification. Magnesium is important to detox pathways and to liver function. A good multi-vitamin along with maybe some of the good oils that we often talk about, flax oil or Triple EFA, are very important to health enhancement.
CoQ-10 improves cellular oxygenation and cellular function.
12. Add the minerals not present in the Multi-Vitamin
Selenium, especially, is one of these. Selenium, amazingly, is a helpful for reducing the potential for cancer risk. Bio-available selenomethameine has been shown to raise glutothione. When you raise glutothione, you raise your overall immune properties. Remember, though, if you take a good bio-available multi-vitamin, you don't need to do anything specific in this area.
13. Make sure you are eating enough fish or taking essential fatty acids
Essential fats are absolutely key to mobilization, utilization and reducing inflammatory states. Especially the fish oils because of the omega 3 content.
Transfatty acids and/or foods that are rich in omega 6 or omega 9 actually feed the wrong pathway. They are actually pro-inflammatory. They encourage inflammation. We want to reduce inflammatory states.
14. Take a ProBiotics with at least 3 billion live cultures in the right proportions
and form
At least 80% of the people we work with have some need of reinhancement in this area. The need comes from our eating habits, our antibiotic exposure. There's something about cleaning up the gut, and restoring and reinocculating with the right types. The bifidol bacterium, the lacto basilio ascidophilus, the brevium, the prenarium. These are all key, very key. A good healthy gut should have at least 2 kilo of bacteria floral remnants because they aid your digestion, they aid in your immune function. Your stomach has everything to do with your immune system.
Having a good healthy gut does not guarantee that you will never get sick, but it does put your body in the base position to be as healthy from an immune standpoint as you possibly can.
15. When necessary, take a supplement of natural digestive aids
If you are not digesting well, you are not receiving all the nutrients and you are opening yourself up for the potential for allergen induction over a long period of time. Undigested food remnants in your intestinal track, the potential for developing food allergies at some point in time increases many times over.
16. When necessary, add an immunemodulator in a natural remedy to your diet
An immunemodulator is anything from something as simple as Echinacea and goldenseal to cholesterum extracts all the way up preps. that we use with our patients. Depending on where you are, an immunemodulator could definitely be a part of the program for you.
17. When necessary, take an antifungal medication or a natural yeast and fungal controlling remedy
If you have a tremendous amount of yeast or fungal overgrowth, it will produce a toxic metabolites that will compromise your immune system.
To actually gain the support of a traditional medical practitioner, you will need to do a stool culture or a toxic metabolite screen and prove you have overgrowth. If you don't want to do that, you can do a lot of good natural intestinal cleansers such as Pau Diarko or Cat's Claw. We offer our product, Bowel Support.
In many cases, it's not always about cleaning up and reinocculating with good, but modulating the immune system or supporting it are just as important as cleaning up. A strong host environment is when you have a good solid immune function and you are not being compromised, you should not be nearly as susceptible to fungus, yeast and bacterial overgrowth.
You want to cleanup and reduce the amount of stress and when you have done that successfully, you then need to stimulate the innate God-given abilities that your immune system has so that you do not become a hospitable host. You don't want these things setting up camp.
In Summary:
As Tiger Woods says, "When I make a mistake, I learn how to recover." When we are looking at our health, that key word, "recovery" is a key point. We know we've made mistakes. We know we used to smoke. We used to drink. We used to do other things that drove us to the point where we are today.
Improving your health is a process. Do not be discouraged. If you enhance yourself by following these 17 steps, you should see a major change in the way you feel, the way your body is processing, bowel function, mental clarity, etc.
It is a process. It needs to be a change in the way of life. And just because of the way life is, you are not going to do this 100% of the time, all the time. No. Because we don't live in a bubble. We don't live in a plastic world. That's reality. But, we have seen where people have made the commitment to make the dietary changes along with the correct targeted nutrient supplementation and they have seen astounding results. It comes down to a matter of discipline and commitment. You need to ask God to help you, to give you the strength and the wisdom to turn away from the foods that are bad for you.
The dietary changes are the foundation to these steps helping you.
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For more information, or if you think you need Len & Joe's help in achieving the level of health you desire, call 1-877-275-7743 to schedule a consultation with Len or Joe.
Copyright(c) 2004 Ask the Pharmacist Group. All rights reserved.
