7 Dominos of Disease - Part 2
DOMINO #1 – REFINED, PROCESSED & PASTEURIZED FOODS
Processed foods have been around for centuries. The type of refined, processed and pasteurized foods we are referring to that make up a majority of what's on the supermarket shelves did not exist 100 years ago. Back then a majority of people still lived on farms and ate their own fresh grown foods, baked their own fresh bread from milled grains, drank their own milk from healthy goats and dairy cows, ate their own eggs from free range chickens, and ate their own meat taken from their livestock or swapped with their neighbor.
As the industrial age kicked into high gear more and more people left the farm and moved into cities. This necessitated more "shelf-stable" products that could be shipped around the country without going bad in a short period of time.
This led to the introduction of refined white bread, processed breakfast cereals, refined flours, white rice, white sugar and a slew of other refined foods that directly contribute this nation's ill-health. Over time, eating enough of them will put you in a nice white tomb. Despite a century of evidence showing their ill effects on human health, studies indicate that they still make up roughly 30% of the average person's total carbohydrate intake each day. Approximately 90% of the average American's household food budget is spent on refined, processed foods, the majority of which are filled with additives and stripped of nutrients.
Everyone has heard the term "refined", but not everyone understands what it really entails. In a nutshell, a refined food is one that has gone through a processing method which strips it bare of almost all its nutrients. Why is this done? Because it extends shelf life! Take wheat, for example. Wheat is the most abundantly used grain in the world and is the main ingredient in bread, pasta, cereals, pastries, and a wide array of boxed products. If you took your own fresh wheat seeds and milled them into flour and baked your own bread with that mix, the bread would get stale within 24-48 hours. That doesn't work when you need a bread product on a store shelf for weeks or months at a time. Refining removes most of the natural oils, minerals, vitamins and other beneficial compounds so you are essentially left with a dead product.
What happens next is truly pathetic. In an effort to bring this dead product back to life, they take a combination of synthetically produced vitamins and inorganic minerals, which, by the way, are all produced by pharmaceutical companies, and add it back to the mix. This is what is known as "fortification" or "enrichment". Almost all grain products have been refined in some way or another.
Without mentioning specific company names, there are videos posted on YouTube of fast food left sitting around for over a year and the product still looks almost the same as it did the day it was bought. The same is true for some of the name brand white breads still sold widely throughout supermarkets.
POTTENGER CAT STUDY LINKS "PROCESSED FOODS" TO A
DRASTIC INCREASE IN DEGENERATIVE DISEASES
The following information below is a synopsis of the Pottenger Cat Study posted on Wikipedia's website:
Francis M. Pottenger, Jr. (1901–1967) was the son of Francis M. Pottenger, Sr., the physician who co-founded the Pottenger Sanatorium for treatment of tuberculosis in Monrovia, California. He completed his residency at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1930 and became a full-time assistant at the Sanatorium. From 1932 to 1942, he also conducted what became known as the Pottenger Cat Study.
One particular question that Pottenger addressed in his study had to do with nutrients destroyed by heat and available only in raw foods. Pottenger conducted studies involving approximately 900 cats over a period of ten years, with three generations of cats being studied.
Meat study
In one study, one group of cats was fed a diet of two-thirds raw meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil while the second group was fed a diet of two-thirds cooked meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil. The cats fed the all-raw diet were healthy while the cats fed the cooked meat diet developed various health problems.
In one study, one group of cats was fed a diet of two-thirds raw meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil while the second group was fed a diet of two-thirds cooked meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil. The cats fed the all-raw diet were healthy while the cats fed the cooked meat diet developed various health problems.
- By the end of the first generation the cats started to develop degenerative diseases and became quite lazy.
- By the end of the second generation, the cats had developed degenerative diseases by mid-life and started losing their coordination.
- By the end of the third generation the cats had developed degenerative diseases very early in life and some were born blind and weak and had a much shorter life span. Many of the third generation cats couldn't even produce offspring. There was an abundance of parasites and vermin while skin diseases and allergies increased from an incidence of five percent in normal cats to over 90 percent in the third generation of deficient cats. Kittens of the third generation did not survive six months. Bones became soft and pliable and the cats suffered from adverse personality changes. Males became docile while females became more aggressive.
The cats suffered from most of the degenerative diseases encountered in human medicine and died out totally by the fourth generation.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Pottenger,_Jr.#Meat_study
While this study was conducted many decades ago under less scientific precision than is available today, and done with cats which are not the most ideal animals to use to investigate human disease processes, there is still a lot of truth to take away from what Pottenger observed. Researchers have since learned that one of the main reasons why these cats all became diseased on this diet was due to the amino acid taurine being destroyed by heat. Today cats eat a diet of cooked meat and don't exhibit diseases in a similar manner which Pottenger observed because taurine is added to their food.
Why are we referencing this study, you ask? When we examine the amount of processed foods a large percentage of the population consumes on a daily basis we find the epitome of what would be referred to as dead foods. These are foods that yield little to no nutritional value whatsoever, and the ones that have any nutrition in them are not present in a way that nature put them there.
Take wheat, for example. Stripping wheat of all of its vital nutritional properties so you can have a product that won't spoil on the shelf sooner (i.e. Bread) and then artificially adding back into that mix a blend of synthetically produced vitamins, and minerals manufactured by pharmaceutical companies does not fortify the body. The biggest deficiencies that a majority of the population is exhibiting today are mineral deficiencies.
The refining of whole wheat into bleached, white flour removes 91% of the essential mineral chromium, and refining of raw sugar into white sugar removes 98% of the chromium. That's just the chromium. It's also missing magnesium, calcium, selenium, silica, potassium, zinc, and many other important trace minerals and nutrients. Government figures indicate that 20% of the American diet consists of refined, white flour. When you add the estimated sugar consumption into the mix that takes it up to over 30% of the "standard American diet". The fact is those figures may be even higher, especially those living on fixed income or dependent upon the government for food stamps and food aid. People in these situations may be consuming close to 100% of a diet that is entirely processed and refined that is devoid of almost any beneficial nutritional value at the cellular level whatsoever.
Both meat and dairy products were used in the Pottenger study. Unless a person is consuming meat from organically raised animals they are most likely eating "Factory Farmed" animals that are raised in a very unhealthy environment. This subject is a topic for an entirely different article but to summarize, these animals are a source of many health problems for the person who consumes them regularly. Take chickens, for example. There is a big difference between a chicken raised on a small farm by a loving family that grazes out in the sun on a fertile field versus a factory raised chicken that is stuck in a packed cage with other chickens its whole life, has its beak cut off, never sees the light of the day but is instead raised under a controlled lighting situation in a massive warehouse, forced to eat a specific diet and treated with large amounts of hormones and antibiotics.
There's a big difference between a dairy cow raised to pasture on grass in a fertile field where the milk is consumed in a raw natural state that hasn't been pasteurized, and where the animal hasn't been overdosed with antibiotics versus a "Factory Farmed" dairy cow that is packed into confined pens, shot up with a genetically engineered hormone to produce more milk faster, fed a diet of genetically engineered grains where the milk is then pasteurized to kill off all the beneficial bacteria and enzymes that may be there. Pasteurization of dairy products began in the 1920's, and by 1950, it was commonplace. The biggest problem with pasteurization is that it kills the enzymes in the foods. This even goes for organic sources of pasteurized dairy products.
How does all of this relate to the Pottenger study? Simple! When Pottenger fed cats a diet that was missing vital minerals, amino acids, enzymes and other important nutrients the result was a catastrophic breakdown in health. As Pottenger observed, by the fourth generation there was almost no hope.
The younger generation of people living in North America today is in that fourth generation from when all of these drastic changes began happening to our food supply through refining, processing and pasteurizing a majority of foods and dairy products. This is just one of a number of reasons why type II diabetes went from being fairly uncommon back in the 1930's and 40's to being an epidemic today, especially with children. The simple validation of the Pottenger study is to look at all the government generated health charts for the major diseases of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer. Every single one of them shows an upward trajectory that begins sometime around the 1930's and 40's. Is that a coincidence? No! Anyone who looks at the facts and applies simple logic can figure out the connection.
HOW REFINED, PROCESSED FOODS CAUSE ACIDITY & pH IMBALANCES
Many "so-called" medical experts will proclaim that the science of pH is quackery and that there is nothing a person can do to raise or lower their pH outside of radical medical intervention. The simplest and easiest way to test a person's pH is to check their saliva. It can be done by anyone using litmus paper. Ranges will be anywhere from the low 5's to low to mid 7's depending upon the person's state of health. What you will notice is that almost anyone with a health challenge will show up acidic and most that are healthy will show slightly alkaline ranges.
The medical experts will state that saliva has nothing to do with blood or tissue pH. That is true on the surface, but you must look far deeper than the surface. The fact is saliva levels will tell you what is happening internally. The reason why pH is dismissed is because your blood pH will maintain a constant pH of approximately 7.365 just as your body will maintain a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees. There's a reason why the Bible says, "the life of the flesh is in the blood" (Lev. 17:11). Any deviation up or down with blood pH will lead to death rather quickly if not corrected. Here's what happens in the body, and this is what so many miss when it comes to consuming a steady diet of acid foods and beverages.
Let's take a can of soda. Most soda has a pH value of 2.5. Based on the pH scale, each number up or down from neutral, which is 7, is 10 times stronger than the previous number. If you take 7 as the neutral number it means that 6 pH would be 10 times more acidic than neutral, 5 would be 100 times more acidic, 4 would be 1,000 times more acidic, 3 would be 10,000 times more acidic and 2 would be 100,000 times more acidic. That means that a can of soda with a pH value of 2.5 is 50,000 times more acidic than neutral pH. If you were to take a can of soda, and IV it into your blood, it would kill you. Why? Because there would not be enough alkaline minerals present to buffer the acid.
When you drink soda, and it doesn't matter whether it's regular or diet, your body has a little more time to compensate and neutralize the acid so it won't make it to the blood. It does this by using the alkaline mineral reserves that are in your body. So you drink the soda and your body knows that it needs calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium to help buffer the acids. Do this one time or on occasion and it's not a big deal. Do it day in and day out, year after year and your body will be in shambles.
Have you ever heard that soda rots your teeth and bones and turns them into a sponge? Do you know why? It's because your body has exhausted its alkaline mineral reserves trying to buffer all the toxic acids you've put into it from all the years of poor dietary habits. Since you aren't giving your body enough alkaline minerals from diet or supplementation it has nowhere else to turn but to itself. In a sense, your body is committing suicide to survive. Your body will pull these minerals from your bones, teeth, joints and tissues and bring them into the blood to neutralize all the acids you are taking in regularly. Remember, your blood will do everything it has to in order to maintain that tight pH range. Unfortunately, it will basically destroy itself in the process to keep the blood at a normal pH range. Your body will beg, borrow and steal everything it needs from every area of the body in order to maintain this critical blood pH level. That's why you can tell from saliva what is happening internally. If your saliva runs acidic on a regular basis it is a warning signal that your body is in a mineral stealing mode to buffer acid. It is a sign of cellular hydration and oxygenation problems, as well.
Every disease known to man has at its roots an underlying mineral deficiency. Without adequate minerals – vitamins and enzymes are useless. When the body becomes overwhelmed with acids and can no longer neutralize them because it has used up its mineral reserves, it starts to dump the acids in the weak links or dead zones. Generally the outer extremities like the fingers, toes, and joints will show the first signs of acid overload. At the cell level, acids will coat the cells and suffocate them and shut down nutritional uptake. Complete avoidance of all refined, processed and pasteurized foods and beverages is one of the most important things you can do to avoid becoming another disease statistic.
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