THE STORY OF MODERN HEALTH
A lot of the diseases affecting humans today can be attributed to living in an environment that our bodies are not yet prepared to face. Chronic diseases are the real killer in the world today. Statistics by the CDC show that more than 70 percent of all deaths in the U.S. are due to chronic diseases with more than half of that attributed to heart diseases and cancer. More and more people are becoming exposed at an early age. In the last decade alone, the world has witnessed childhood cases of type II diabetes grow more than 10 times. The one common denominator in all this is our diet.
A Case Study for Diabetes
Ronnie Sampson used to have very severe headaches and a loss of appetite. It was diagnosed as neuro-sarcoidosis. He was put under prednisone (steroids) treatment which remarkably eliminated his symptoms within a couple of weeks. He also gained 30 to 40 pounds within the same period. He later came to learn that he had developed diabetes.
Sampson and his wife decided to try natural approaches and the first thing they did was gardening. Eating food that they grew and controlled seemed like a logical place to start. He notes that his blood sugar has been normal for about two years. Hasn’t taken medication for diabetes for two years.
Does that mean the diabetes is reversible after all? That’s the growing consensus. However, it contradicts what mainstream medicine has been saying for decades – which understandably makes sense given the underlying monetary motive in making synthetic drugs.
There is a striking lack of initiative on the part of Modern Western Medicine to promote non-drug and non-surgical interventions to address health-related epidemics that are developing today. Take for instance the diabetes epidemic and other nutrition-based epidemics. Dr. Terry Shintani – who is now a Professor at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine – was shocked to find that he was the only Doctor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School’s Nutrition Program. We are talking about a globally-renowned, revered, first-rate institution. It’s quite telling of modern mainstream medicine.
Cholesterol: Are Drugs Really Necessary?
Do synthetic drugs that are produced by the big pharmaceutical industry really work? There is no doubt that some of them are actually helpful. However, we also know that they come with a ton of side effects ranging from mild to severe. Dr. Shintani says some of his patients have shown remarkable improvements. For example, some have dropped cholesterol levels as much as 50 points in less than two weeks after using neither non-drug nor non-surgical treatments.
One can only wonder why medics like to push Statin drugs to treat the overproduction of cholesterol. These are drugs that have actually been linked to a host of side effects from, memory loss to muscle and liver damage. There are even legal cases of manufacturers being accused of making drugs that cause diabetes. Is it oblivion on the part of doctors? Is it greed on the part of pharmaceutical industries? Is it complacency on the part of the government(s)? Whatever it is, it reeks and it shows.
The real medicine for our bodies is not found in a single vitamin, mineral, probiotic, nor macronutrient; rather in the complex interactions between the foods and the soil, they grow in and or bodies. So, pharmaceutical scientists can’t just extract or synthetically produce one aspect of food in concentrated amounts, put in a tablet, and call it healthy. That’s not how it works. The world is not linear. We need to stop thinking that we can resolve complex health issues using linear concepts.
Farming Is A Double-Edged Sword
Genetic modification has enabled farmers to use herbicides such as RoundUp to kill everything on the farm, including bacteria, except the actual crops. This makes farming practices convenient. It saves time and saves costs. But is killing the soil’s microbiome a good idea? If it kills bacteria in the soil and goes into your food, wouldn’t it destroy the gut’s microbiome with just as much ease? Let’s not forget that the World Health Organization (WHO) has listed chemicals such as Glyphosate contained in the herbicide, RoundUp, as potentially cancer-causing. When all is said and done, you can’t really draw that many differences between herbicides or pesticides and antibiotics.
Professor Miguel Altieri, an agroecologist at the University of California, Berkley notes that “The average food we eat travels about 1,500 miles”. It’s a very fragile system with severe implications on transportation, energy, and greenhouse gases.
Professor Pablo Tittonell, a farming systems ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands says that feeding a single person in the developed world requires 12 barrels of annually. This is more than double the peak oil production in the world which is under 5 barrels per person annually. This is nowhere near sustainable.
There Is a Solution: Natural Farming
Korean Natural Farming is a technique created by Han-Kyu Cho, popularly known as “Master Cho”. He believes in using natural materials and processes to add nutrients, and origin of nutrient, so to speak, directly into the soil and our food, eventually. They are simple instructions that don’t have any form of chemicals or synthetic products and can be practiced by any farmer by simply cultivating indigenous microorganisms (IMOs) in the soil. IMOs are agricultural probiotics made using the materials from that land and then fermenting it and putting it back into that land where it can help the plants, soil, and fungi within the soil to thrive.
It’s a natural process free of chemical or synthetic interference. It creates a healthy foundation that gives the farm and plants a much longer lifecycle than you would get in a typical large scale commercial farming plot. The idea is that if you take care of the soil, the plants will take care of themselves.
Conclusion
Using natural farming techniques is essentially emancipating oneself from the over-reliance of synthetic, chemically-filled products that are shipped thousands of miles from labs by using natural microbes and probiotics. Multiple scientific investigations have established that a lack of good bacteria in the human body is linked to a higher risk of obesity and diabetes. The human microbiome – the bacterial environment present in us – consists of more than 100 trillion cells. They are responsible for practically everything in our bodies; from diet processing to drug response and disease resistance. New scientific research has shifted focus to investigating how the microbiome interacts with diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease. Could this be the key to reversing modern health epidemics? Only time will tell.
REFERENCES
- Dr. Daphne Miller, Clinical Professor, University of California San Francisco, and Research Scientist, University of California Berkeley School of Public Health
- Dr. Emeran Mayer, Director, UCLA Center for the Neurobiology of Stress
- Dr. Terry Shintani, Professor University of Hawaii School of Medicine
- Prof. Pablo Tittonell, Farming System Ecologist, Wageningen University the Netherlands
- Prof. Koon-Hui Wang, Plant Pathologist, University of Hawaii
- Prof. Eshel Ben Jacob, Biophysicist, Tel Aviv University, Israel
- Prof. Rob Knight, Microbiologist and Director, Knight Lab, University of California, San Diego
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