When Is Stress Good and When Is it a Disease?

Xenohormesis is the acquiring of protection from everyday stress by eating plants that have been stressed by harsh environments. Plants that are eaten by bugs are stressed. The roots thrive in soil full of fungus, bacteria, bugs, and viruses. Also, a large amount of ultraviolet light is trying to burn the plants. As the plants defend themselves, they make antioxidants, antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and natural pesticides. These substances are quite useful to us who have to live in the same stressful world. Eating the plants in a less processed way gives us this same protection from the poisonous world we also live in. The Balance of Fire Some foods develop defensive poisons to ward off animals who tried to eat them. Our ancestors continued to eat the plants. Their bodies developed detoxification chemical factories in their livers. The acute stress of eating the plant brought out mechanisms to handle the chronic stress of eating it all the time. These same detoxification pathways now help us detoxify the numerous plastic and chemical poisons in our lives. One group of plants in particular called the Brassica family, or cruciferous vegetables, have glucosinolates and sulforaphanes. These chemicals rev up the detoxification pathways that prevent cancer from poisonous chemicals in our lives. So eating them no longer poisons humans, but helps us be healthier. This plant family consists of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, and cabbage. The Antioxidant AgonyHow We Rust from Within We burn oxygen deep in our bodies and create an oxidative crisis. The free radical oxygen damages our mitochondrial DNA. We need antioxidants to neutralize it and guess where we get them from? Plants. But dead plants do not lie. They are unappealing to eat, and they

simply do not have any antioxidants to help us. When they were living, they were happy. If they are happy when we eat them, our bodies will be happy and not rust from the inside. Root Out the Bad Root Magic Roots live in the most toxic world imaginable. Soil is aerated by fungal filaments, or hyphae, holding the dirt clods apart so air, water, and other nutrients like dead bugs and dead plant material can penetrate the soil. There are many viruses, bacteria, and toxins in dirt. How do the roots stay healthy in this mess? They make antioxidants, antifungals, antibacterials, antivirals, and anti-parasite nutraceuticals to fend off the constant attack. They have a lot of vitamins to help them stay healthy. If we eat living roots, we eat this protection. Cooking destroys a lot of this living medicine. Make Meals Last The body snatchers have invaded your body. Now you have the munchies and cannot stop eating. You just ate thirty minutes ago and are back in the refrigerator for more. The munchies control your eating habits. You may not realize it, but you are living in a snackaholic nation. People get all hyped up about 100 calorie snack bags that make you think you are not eating a lot of extra calories per day. If we multiply 365 times 100, we get 36,500 extra calories per year. This is about 10 lbs of fat a year in weight gain. So the important question is: Why do we get the munchies and how do we control them? The only way to control the cravings is to make each meal last as long as possible. There are, for starters, at least 12 ways to do this. Fractured Food Groups

Like Shrek, the Disney cartoon with its fractured fairy tales told so wonderfully, our basic food groups are now so fractured that they are comically tragic. Everything in them is altered chemically and nutritionally from the original foods we used to eat. This is evidenced by the immigration of Asians to the U.S. They were found to move to Asian communities, and purchase and prepare the same foods they had eaten in their original countries. However, they were not as healthy as the relatives they left behind. They often gained weight and developed heart disease. It was found that the traditional foods they had eaten in their home countries were modified or fractured in the U.S. from the original foods they had eaten previously. Feasting on Fermentation We are not cows. We do not have four stomachs to digest food properly. Yet the modern food industry and Big Agra, the modern food crop industry, assume we are. We are fed the same foodstuffs that are fed to cattle and hogs to fatten them up. Corn, high fructose corn syrup, and grains of every kind are in virtually everything we eat. A recent mass spectrometry test of all the edible products in a grocery store revealed corns presence in 95% of the foods sold there. It is found in nearly all the meat and boxed food. How can we not imagine that eating this modern food will not make us fat in the same way that it does the cattle and hogs we consume? But more and more I see another health disaster that is a direct consequence of the consumption of these foods. Gastric distress, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, and Chrons disease of the intestine are natural consequences of putting four-stomach-foods into a single, overwhelmed gastrointestinal tract. For these reasons, it is important to understand how a cow digests grain in order to understand how foreign these foods are to the human body. Shangri La versus Sugar Shack

I bit into the reddest apple I had ever seen. But my teeth did not go very far. It was like diamond. I bit harder and felt my enamel scrap off of my teeth. It was a sugar petrified apple. When we eat sugar, we are doing the same thing to the insides of our body. Sugar makes our arteries harden with calcium plaques. Caramelization is the process of attaching sugar to protein. The color changes from white to orange brown. When we eat sugar, we are caramelizing all our proteins. Hemoglobin A1c is a sugarized blood protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen when not full of carbon monoxide from smoking. The level of hemoglobin A1c goes up the higher the average blood sugars go. It is kind of like caramelizing ourselves from the inside. Who Wants to Eat Like a Caveman? Who wants to eat like a caveman? Who wants to spend most of the time gathering and preparing food like the other two-thirds of the world does for subsistence living? In other words, there are no grocery stores or fast food places. There is only what you grow, capture, or share. Americans like the luxury of spending very little time obtaining or preparing their food. We like it fast and we like it hot. We like it on our doorstep in thirty minutes or we get it free. Since most of the food is old and rancid anyway, we have grown accustomed to it being loaded with artificial flavors, salt, and sugar to make it taste better. We like to eat lots of it. The old advertisement, Wheres the beef? introduced super sizing with a bang. Fortunately for the food producers wallet, the same flavor enhancing chemicals also made the food addictive. Salt Has Lost its Savor The same salinity and supposedly the same trace minerals exist in our body fluids as they do in the ocean. Since we have gotten away from eating real sea salt harvested from clay ponds at the oceans edge, we are losing these trace minerals. Our modern salt is far removed from our

ancestors salt. The salt has lost its savor and is good for nothing. It actually comes from the chemical industry which bleaches sea salt adding excess chloride to the mixture in order to remove the trace minerals that make real sea salt brown. They refine it further in a 1200 degree furnace that creates unnaturally hard salt. It takes eight of our precious body water molecules to crack the diamond like crystal created in fires of Mount Doom. Too Much of a Good Thing Can Kill You In the U.S., we are now experiencing diseases of overnutrition. It used to be in Renaissance England that only the kings and their court had enough money to buy meat in large quantities. They ate meat like there was no tomorrow. This was before the modern age where meat is loaded with hormones, antibiotics, antiviral pours, pesticides, deworming agents, and herbicides. You would think that the royalty would be the healthiest people in the realm. But they were not. They had all of our modern diseases while their subjects did not. They had acne, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, infertility, obesity and heart disease. Homeostasis In life, there is an urgent need for order and balance. There are many opposites all competing every millisecond for dominance. The balance determines our health. With too much salt, we bloat with water retention, get hypertension, and lose potassium. With too little salt and we lose water and get low blood pressure, get light headed, pass out, our blood thickens, we experience foggy thinking, and our 3000 enzymes stop functioning well from dehydration.

Too much phenylalanine (in the form of diet soft drinks aspartame) interferes with tryptophan absorption. Tryptophan is necessary for formation of serotonin: our good feelings hormone. We get depressed. If we have a diet drink with a meal, we do not get the tryptophan surge after the meal which makes us feel happy and satisfied or satiated. Our bodys think we did not get enough tryptophan which is critical for well being. So we crave even more food and are never satisfied while gulping even more of our 128 ounce diet drink and eating even more food. So the weight loss diet sweetener causes ravenous eating and even more weight gain than if we had had nothing. Too little phenylalanine causes fatigue.i

Toxic Trans Fat: The True Frankenstein Food We swim in an ocean of trans fat. It is found practically everywhere clogging up our arteries and brain. Despite new labeling laws, we do not know which foods contain it because the government has watered down the labeling requirements under intense pressure from large food lobbyists. We find it in cakes, cookies, pies, muffins, nearly all fast food products, french fries, sandwiches, frozen dinners, salad dressings, margarine, and even specialty ice creams. It is found in 40% of all the foods in a supermarket.ii For decades it was promoted as the better alternative to animal fat such as butter, lard, and fatty meats. Yet numerous studies have shown that it causes more heart and health problems than any of the animal fats. It causes the good cholesterol to go down and the bad cholesterol to go up.iii Microwave Madness or Nuke em Puke em

Microwaves destroy the quality of protein by ripping it into amino acid segments that are not natural. Certain essential amino acids are destroyed by microwaves and excessive cooking and we become deficient in them. This leads to nutritional diseases which drive us to doctors who do not correct the underlying nutritional deficiency but give us a symptom relief medical treatment that has side effects we mistake for new diseases. An example of how microwaves destroy proteins is found in tryptophan, which is an essential amino acid found in food. From it we make serotonin and melatonin. These hormones make us happy and help us sleep very well. Without them we get depressed and cannot sleep. Tryptophan is very sensitive to heat. So microwave heat destroys it and makes the food that has it less helpful in keeping our levels up. Precooked microwave meals already have lower tryptophan levels because of the precooking. Microwaves just add to the tryptophan destruction already present. Exercise Your Dark Cloud Away Our bodies are genetically wired for lots of exercise. That is how our ancestors were able to survive all these centuries doing subsistence farming and living off of the land. When each mouthful of food cost a lot of work to obtain, it was hard to get fat, lazy, and sad over it. We have to invent more ways to exercise. Cleaning the house is one way to exercise. Planting a garden is another. Climbing stairs instead of taking the elevator is a healthy habit. We are all dancers inside. Our bodies love to move and twist and pump blood into dusty corners where life is dying like vascular dementia in the aging. In China, all people over sixty-five have to get out for morning exercises in the town square. There is no better way to prevent disease. Infuriating Inflammation

This inflammation is part of the healing response. It brings needed nutrients in larger quantities to the injured site so it can repair itself. A smashed computer does not repair itself and does not swell either. But all too often, the healing response is seen as a disease in itself. We rush in with powerful medicines to block the swelling and delay the healing, never treating the underlying cause of the swelling or curing the problem. The industry has become quite the expert at this because it makes money for the many drug manufacturers that make the anti-inflammatory drugs. The true disease cures are never mentioned because we would be using some more natural remedy in the place of these drugs and the stock market would collapse. By being one of the few nations that allows drug manufacturers to advertise to the public, we have created a monster of misinformation. The public is made aware through advertising of the many treatments for symptoms but never the cures for the underlying diseases. Xenoestrogens: benzene, DDT, pesticides, herbicides, and plasticizers (phallates) in our food, water, air. These are often in higher concentrations (parts per billion) than our own estrogen hormones which are in parts per trillion. They also bind more strongly to the estrogen receptors and cause more estrogenic activity (cell division and cancer) than our own estrogens. Food has phytoestrogens which are plant derived estrogens that can stimulate our own estrogen receptors. If our own estrogen levels are too high, they lower estrogen activity in our body by occupying the estrogen receptors with weaker estrogenic activity preventing our stronger estrogens from getting to the receptors.

Rogers, Sherry A. No More Heartburn Kensington Books, New York, NY 2000. pp 34-35. Hobbs, SH Get the Trans Fat Out, p xi, 7 iii Hobbs, SH Get the Trans Fat Out, p 7
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