How “Innocent” Wheat Is Ruining Your Health by Drs. Vikki & Richard Petersen, D.C., C.C.N.

Gluten plays a role in more diseases than you can imagine

Food that enters the intestine goes through a complex digestive process. It must be broken down to molecules that can pass through the intestinal wall. The intestine is also a major part of the immune system, producing antibodies that destroy harmful bacteria entering the digestive tract.

But some foods we ingest contain proteins that the body does not recognize, and so the intestine mounts an immune response. One common protein that is relatively new to our species and abundant in our food supply is gluten found in wheat, rye, and barley.

For those of us who are sensitive to gluten, this immune response begins to inflame and damage the intestinal tract causing what is known as “leaky gut syndrome.” Gaps in the intestine then allow uninvited molecules into the bloodstream. As the body mounts a defense against these intruders, it often mistakes its own tissues as the same foreign bodies. And thus many develop autoimmune diseases. Additionally, the body’s ability to absorb nutrients is compromised, resulting in malnutrition.

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This book provides a comprehensive explanation of gluten sensitivity and how it contributes to diseases such as celiac, ADD, ADHD, arthritis, diabetes, IBS, fatigue, sleep disturbances, thyroid disorders, osteoporosis, malnutrition, depression, fibromyalgia, obesity and many other unexplained symptoms–both physical and mental.

The book emphasizes finding the cause of your illness and eliminating it, as opposed to the common practice of drugging the symptoms while the underlying disease state progresses. I wish this book could be mandatory reading in medical schools.

The authors teach when and how gluten sensitivity testing should be done, and they provide numerous case studies of patients they have treated who have renewed their vigor, improved their mood, lost weight, and reversed many chronic diseases.

I highly recommend The Gluten Effect for anyone suffering from autoimmune diseases, general fatigue, or unexplained illnesses, aches or pains. The information could completely change your life.

Buy The Gluten Effect.

The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol by Mary G. Enig

Comprehensive reference book for understanding dietary fats

The paradigm under which most of us live teaches that fats from animals and tropical nuts are unhealthy because they’re saturated, and that we need to consume mostly polyunsaturates from plants, such as corn, soybean, and canola. We are taught that saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries and cause heart disease and obesity.

And yet, despite lowering animal fat, increasing vegetable oil consumption, declining full-fat packaged products and choosing low-fat or fat-free options, our heart disease mortality statistics continue to climb and we are growing fatter. Really fatter. Who knew that excessive carbs in the bloodstream are turned into–saturated fats! How’s it working so far?

Ancel Keys, a researcher in the 1950s, claimed that saturated fats were causing heart disease (by cherry picking data, it turns out, but here we are stuck with his bad science), but then he also condemned saturated vegetable oils. Here’s the rub: saturated fats make for fluffy pastries and full-bodied cookies and pies and mouthwatering breads and all the various faux foods wrapped in plastic that titillate our taste buds. Have you ever tried making a pie crust with corn oil? That’s why our mothers and grandmothers used lard and tallow. But dear granny wasn’t dropping dead of heart disease at 50, was she?

The vegetable oil industry countered by boasting that they would only partially hydrogenate their oils to reduce saturated fat, a practice they were already doing. This would provide the rigidity needed to hold up baked goods and spreads. Then they began a long campaign against saturated animal fats. Choose margarine over butter!

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But partial hydrogenation changes the molecular structure of naturally occurring fats, creating unnatural fats and worse: trans fats. And these fats are incorporated into our living cells, causing structural and communication problems and interfering with our body’s ability to “turn off” inflammation.

Additionally, unsaturated fats are highly unstable, meaning they go bad easily, in both our cupboards and our bodies. The refining process of plants oils removes the antioxidants (namely vitamin E) that keep them from going bad. Synthetics are added in their place. You end up with a devitalized, nonnutritious, unstable oil with remnants of carcinogenic solvents (hexane) and chemical preservatives used in the refining, deodorizing, and bleaching process just so a packaged product will last months on the shelf. Bleck!

The many membranes in the 60 trillion or so cells that comprise our bodies are made from fatty acids, so the quality of our cells is determined by the quality of the fats we ingest. After reading this book, you’ll understand:

• Saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats
• Short-, medium-, and long-chain fatty acids
• Essential fatty acids and proper ratio in the human dietary
• The role of omega 3 and omega 6 fats
• The structure of triglycerides
• The role of cholesterol
• How fats are absorbed and metabolized
• The dangers of partial hydrogenation and trans fats
• The different fats and oils available to the human dietary
• Which fats to use for various cooking and baking applications
• Care of fats and oils in the kitchen
• The history of fats and oils, their refinement and industrial applications
• How to read labels
• And more

Think about this: For over two million years the majority of fats our ancestors consumed came from animals. It is only in the past hundred years that we began consuming refined and hydrogenated plant fats, and these are predominantly in processed–not whole–foods. And we are experiencing an epidemic of autoimmune diseases: heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, ADD, multiple sclerosis, you name it. We’ve been had by the lousy soybean, corn and rapeseed industries!

I borrowed my copy from the library and have read it twice, but I will be ordering a copy of my own. This is an incredibly valuable reference book to which I will often return for advice and further understanding. Highly recommended for all health seekers.

Buy Know Your Fats.

The Revolutionary DIET-FREE Way to Totally Transform Your Body by Jon Gabriel

Excellent advice for those wishing to make major dietary and body changes

The Gabriel Method isn’t just another weight loss book about “thinking yourself thin.” It’s a fantastic compilation of advice that covers the mental, spiritual and physical aspects of body identity and nutrition. And it’s all very simply presented and easy to execute.

I’ve done my share in the past 30+ years of losing weight by dieting and gaining it back. The current advice to cut calories and exercise just hasn’t worked well for us. At some point you have to realize that what you’re doing isn’t working. I finally gave up on dieting, and in the past two years I’ve lost over 30 pounds.

Gabriel offers so many wonderful suggestions that include eating grass-fed meat and living fruits and vegetables; drinking water; consuming omega 3s; exercising like our ancestors; eating earlier in the day rather than later; chewing food; conscious eating; the role of enzymes and bacteria; and spending time in nature and in the sun. He discusses how the body uses fat cells to safely store toxins and how drugs and other items ingested affect our bodies.

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Equally important to diet is understanding how our thoughts affect our body image and possible psychological reasons as to why we are fat, such as using fat as a barrier to intimacy or control by others, or consuming foods as replacements for love or security. No weight loss can be sustained without addressing these emotional factors.

Gabriel also discusses the role of physiology and the reptilian brain inherited from our ancestors that controls the level of fat we retain based on inherent survival needs–the classic fight, flight or freeze.

And the icing on the cake is the New Thought use of the mind to change physical reality, popularly known as manifesting. Visualization of the desired body and faith in its eventual manifestation not only affects reality but prompts different choices. If you’re sitting in front of the TV getting depressed thinking you’ll always be a fat slug, you’ll be much more inclined to eat a bag of potato chips in resignation than if you’re looking at a picture imagining you’re thin and active. Using our mind to imagine our future is a powerful tool for change.

Forget low-calorie diets, shakes, pills and procedures, and get to the root of your weight problem by following the advice in this book. Highly recommended.

Buy The Gabriel Method.

By Paul A. Stitt

Nutrition and atruism not found in the center aisles of your grocery store

Paul Stitt, a biochemist working for Tenneco with a desire to end world hunger, sets out to create an economically feasible process whereby protein from bacteria can be grown on natural gas. Tenneco was happy to advertise this altruistic effort as they raised the price of their gas.

After a little over a year of 14 to 16-hour workdays, Stitt and his team succeeded in producing protein for 11 cents a pound. Stitt writes: “A plant covering one square mile could produce enough protein to feed 10 million people!” His reward? On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve his project was terminated and the staff fired. It seems there’s more profit in advertising altruistic efforts than in actually executing them.

Next stop: Quaker Oats Company where Stitt was eventually fired and blackballed by the food industry because he was more interested in creating nutritional food than in corporate sales and profit. With nowhere to go and a burning desire to feed people, he invested everything he had in a bakery and successfully produced nutritionally dense bread products made from whole grains and flax seeds.

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In this informative and well-written book you’ll get an insider’s view of the unethical practices, greed, and disregard for human life and health by the food industry. You’ll also learn some of the ways that inferior nutrition leads to disease.

Stitt writes about the various projects he worked on at the food companies and their unethical practices to create cheap, tasty, nutritionally depleted food that will encourage you to eat more. You’ll learn that New and Improved doesn’t mean the company improved the quality of the food, but that they found a means of shaving a few cents off in production by substituting cheaper materials.

It’s a sad commentary on food politics to learn that pet food is fed to animals to determine its nutritional adequacy but human food is not fed to anyone because tests might show it to be harmful to health.

Stitt includes advice for improving your health (some of which I find outdated) and a chapter of recipes. Be advised, though, that he is heavily biased toward grains and plant nutrition. But his advice to eat whole foods and avoid processed foods is sound.

I wish everybody who shopped the center aisles could read this book.

Buy Beating the Food Giants.

A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease by Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

How fasting helps reversal of chronic, degenerative diseases

When you’re suffering from a chronic, degenerative disease, and the doctors you trust are recommending drugs or surgery, it’s hard to believe that simply going without food could be of any lasting benefit. This is also compounded by ridicule in medical circles and the media, which mistake fasting for starvation and label it quackery.

This book provides an excellent introduction into the natural hygiene (see History of Natural Hygiene and Principles of Natural Hygiene) view of health through healthy living. Fuhrman explains how health is maintained, how disease occurs, the role of diet, and the physiological effects of fasting. Fuhrman has a solid grounding in natural hygiene as well as knowledge of diagnostics and pathology.

If you are new to fasting and suffer from a chronic, degenerative disease, this is the book you need to read to understand how fasting can help you return to health and how proper eating can help you not only remain healthy but rejuvenate your body, increase your energy and improve your mental functioning.

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Several chapters are devoted to explaining how diseases occur and how fasting can reverse headaches, hypoglycemia, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, overweight and other chronic conditions. But fasting isn’t a quick fix. Lifestyle changes must follow to prevent recreating the same diseases.

What this book is not is a detailed treatment of how to conduct or break fasts. The information given is superficial with the caveat that those wishing to fast over three days should do so under the supervision of a qualified fasting practitioner.

I also do not any longer endorse the vegan dietary model, and Fuhrman is definitely pro-vegan. While I agree that diets high in feedlot beef, confined poultry treated with antibiotics, and farm-raised fish are detrimental, I’ve come to believe that healthy alternatives (e.g., wild game, grassfed beef) are healthful foods to which our species is biologically adapted (see The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat or NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body for alternative views). If you are a vegetarian or vegan, then Fuhrman’s your guy.

If you’re looking for a book on fasting itself, I highly recommend The Science and Fine Art of Fasting or Fasting for Renewal of Life, both written by Herbert Shelton. As a young, injured man, Furhman fasted under the supervision of Shelton and was so inspired by what he witnessed at Shelton’s school that he later became a doctor. We can thank Shelton that fasting hasn’t been completely buried by the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical cartel, and we can thank Fuhrman for carrying the torch.

Despite these shortcomings, I still think this is an excellent book that offers hope and a path for those who are ready to take control over their health. We need more doctors like Furhman.

Buy Fasting and Eating for Health.

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The Hygienic System: Volume III by Herbert Shelton

Everything you wanted to know about fasting for health

Herbert Shelton wrote 40 books over his 60-year career in health education and “natural hygiene.” He supervised over 30,000 fasts of chronically ill and terminal patients, losing only three. Shelton’s teachings on fasting inspired Ghandi as well as such popular authors as Fuhrman, the Diamonds, Mercola and Graham. Harvey and Marilyn Diamond said of Shelton: “A man of astounding intelligence and understanding, Dr. Herbert Shelton was the greatest health oracle of the 20th century.”

One of the key tenets of natural hygiene is toxemia + enervation = disease and that symptoms of disease are remedial efforts by the body to return to balance. For example, a fever is instituted by the body to speed metabolic action and kill germs. It is a healing event that should be allowed to run its course, not a dreaded enemy to be suppressed.

The best action to take when first becoming ill is to stop eating and rest, which goes contrary to the prevailing advice to take a drug, eat to keep up your strength, and keep on going. When you fast, you are not starving your body of nutrition, because it obtains all the nutrition it needs from its own tissues. But in doing so, the not inconsiderable amount of energy that would have been spent in digestion is now spent in repair of tissues and elimination of toxins.

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Long fasts of up to three months followed by healthy living practices can (but not always) reverse chronic degenerative diseases such as arthritis, heart disease, colitis, migraines, mental illness, even cancer. (See also Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease.)

This book will teach you most of what you need to know to conduct a fast of any length. The chapters are:

1. Definition of fasting
2. Fasting among the lower animals
3. Fasting in man
4. Bill-of-fare for the sick
5. Autolysis
6. Fasting is not starving
7. Chemical and organic changes during fasting
8. Repair of organs and tissues during fasting
9. The influence of fasting on growth and regeneration
10. Changes in the fundamental functions while fasting
11. The mind and special senses during a fast
12. Secretions and excretions
13. Bowel action during fasting
14. Fasting and sex
15. Rejuvenescence through fasting
16. Gain and loss of strength while fasting
17. Gain and loss of weight during fasting
18. Fasting does not induce deficiency “disease”
19. Death in the fast
20. Objections of the fast
21. Does fasting cure disease?
22. The rationale of fasting
23. The length of the fast
24. Hunger and appetite
25. Contra-indications of fasting
26. Fasting in special periods and conditions of life
27. Symptomatology of the fast
28. Progress of the fast
29. Hygiene of the fast
30. Breaking the fast
31. Gaining weight after the fast
32. Living after the fast
33. Fasting in health
34. Fasting in acute disease
35. Fasting in chronic disease
36. Fasting in drug addiction
37. Fasting versus eliminating diets
References

This is the fasting portion only of what was originally published as Fasting and Sunbathing (The Hygienic System, Vol 3) (paperback reprint) or (hardcover). A newer title by Shelton is Fasting for Renewal of Life. It appears to cover much of the same information but in a more condensed, less technical form.

Buy The Science and Fine Art of Fasting.