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Green Blessings ...
with Susun Weed

Top Ten Worst Diet and Healthcare Choices
& Ten Better Choices # 5

5. Functional medicine "considers the complex web of interactions in the patient's history, physiology, and lifestyle. . . . The unique genetic makeup of each patient . . . along with both internal (mind, body, and spirit) and external (physical and social environment) factors that affect total functioning." "Functional medicine uses the latest laboratory testing and other diagnostic techniques; and prescribes combinations of drug and/or botanical medicines, supplements, therapeutic diets, detoxification programs, and stress-management techniques." While this sounds great, even a little like the Wise Woman approach, it isn't. After talking with people who practice and use functional medicine, I believe it to be the latest incarnation of the Heroic Tradition. Functional medical practitioners tend to find toxins and parasites. This allows them to prescribe an "individual" program of detoxification, complete with juice fasts, raw food, cleanses, and supplements. Herbs are not used to nourish but as faux drugs and food is seen as potentially dangerous. The ideas behind functional medicine can do grave damage to the human being; they are based on mis-assumptions and outright lies.

How does the body work?
You do not need to detoxify – no matter how many "toxins" you think you have encountered. Because your intestines, liver, and kidneys, as well as your lungs and skin, do it – every minute of every day – so long as they are well fed. Fasting, even a juice fast, impairs their ability to do their work, resulting in more toxins in the blood, not less.

Medical opinion – which I agree with – states: "Fasting deprives the body of the raw materials — sufficient calories, proteins, vitamins and minerals — needed to make the antibodies and enzymes that remove toxins." "Fasting is contraindicated for people with eating disorders or impaired immune systems, elderly persons, children, or pregnant women." In short, only people who can stand to be flooded with toxins should fast!

It is true that calorie restriction will produce feelings of happiness, even euphoria, due to brain chemicals that are produced when the body believes it is starving. Nonetheless, it is not a way to improve health. Eating improves health! Eating well-cooked greens and drinking nourishing herbal infusions provides us with lots of detoxifying phytochemicals such as indoles, isothiocyanates, dithiolthiones, and limonoids; these are not found in quantity in raw foods or juices. In fact, fasting or sweating or eating non-nutritive raw foods/juices instead of nourishing cooked food actually causes the body to take toxins out of storage (where they are harmless) and dump them into the blood stream (where they do damage).

Instead: There is no better, safer way to remove heavy metals and radioactivity than by eating kelp seaweeds. I have seen lead levels in children slashed in a few weeks by daily ingestion of a small amount of bladderwrack or kelp, including kombu, nereocystis, and wakame.

Learn More: My book Healing Wise contains lots of info on seaweed and its ability to detoxify a wide range of problematic substances.
http://www.naturalnews.com/026885_natural_zeolite_heavy_metals.html (for people)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960852496000727 (for water)

Instead: For chronic problems or any diagnosis that scares you, drink nourishing herbal infusions daily and look for someone who practices Precision Medicine. This new medical approach looks at your genes, your environment, and your lifestyle before suggesting treatment. Rather than focusing on treatments and drugs that work well for most people, Precision Medicine offers target drugs and combination therapies "delivered at the right dose to the right patient." There is a million-patient Precision Medicine Initiative spreading the word.

Learn More:
https://ncats.nih.gov
www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/precision-medicine
www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus (search for Precision Medicine)
www.clinicaltrials.gov


Top Ten Worst Diet and Healthcare Choices
& Ten Better Choices # 4

4. Following a Vegan Diet
How does the body work? Our bodies are adept at making do with what we feed them, but there are certain critical nutrients that we cannot make. These limiting nutrients must be ingested. Limiting nutrients – including omega3 fatty acids, heme, vitamin B12, minerals (such as calcium, iron, zinc), and amino acids –are found abundantly in foods of animal origin, but are impossible or difficult to utilize from the plants in a vegan diet. In fact, fortified foods (like nutritional yeast) or supplements (like spirulina or B12) are required just to maintain health when on a vegan diet. This alone tells us that a vegan diet is not capable of sustaining life, and, in fact, can ruin your health.

I would need to write a book to go into all the problems, misinformation, and ignorance that is put out in support of vegan diets. The vast majority of people fare very poorly on a diet lacking in dairy and meat, and no one benefits from a diet missing fish. The health benefits of vegan diets are grossly overstated, and the very real problems hushed up. Let's look at one of the major problems associated with lack of meat in the diet.

What is heme and why do we need to eat meat to get it? Heme, a component of blood, makes blood red. Heme – as iron protoporphyrinis – is the key part of hemoglobin. Heme allows blood to carry oxygen to our cells. We cannot create our own heme; we cannot take a heme supplement; no plant contains heme. We must ingest the muscles, organs, or blood of other animals to get life-maintaining heme. We can get iron from non-animal sources, but not heme. Because heme is critical to life, it is conserved in the body when supplies are low. When heme is conserved, the peripheral circulation shuts down, and the hands and feet become ice cold. (Ever notices how cold the hands of vegans are? Eventually, all major systems are adversely impacted due to lack of heme.

Most vegans claim to love animals. I doubt it. When humans love something, they want to be close to it, they want to be one with it, they want it in their bodies. Vegans don't want to be intimate with animals; they refuse to have them in their lives or their bodies; I cannot construe that as love. It is hateful and hate-filled. When we consume lovingly-raised animals, we support small farms that use animal manure to raise organic crops. Eating animals that are loved, and the eggs and milk they give, is one of the most spiritual ways I have found to be intimate with and express love for animals.

Instead: Eat a plant-based diet with lots of cooked, frozen, dried, and fermented vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans. Include fish at least once a week. Eat a quart of yogurt a week. Eat red meat at least once a year. Support people who love animals by eating only the best animal products and by being willing to pay more for those products. Visit an organic farm that raises animals as well as produce and learn about manure, compost and soil fertility. Get to know your food from the ground up.

Learn More: http://www.beyondveg.com/


Down There: Sexual and Reproductive Health the Wise Woman Way

Publication date: June 21, 2011

Author: Susun S. Weed

Simple, successful, strategies cover the entire range of options -- from mainstream to radical -- to help you choose the best, and the safest, ways to optimize sexual and reproductive health.
Foreword: Aviva Romm, MD, midwife, 484 pages, Index, illustrations

Retails for $29.95

 

  

 

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