Professional Documents
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7 Big Pharma Myths Debunked 1
7 Big Pharma Myths Debunked 1
Antony Sammeroff
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“Treason doth never prosper: what is the reason?
Why, for if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
- John Harlington
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Legal Disclaimer
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Contents
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1. Pharmaceutical Medicine has Made Us Much
Healthier.
So, while it’s true that no one would rightly trade the
living conditions we enjoy today for those our
predecessors had to put up with, that is largely due to the
availability of better nutrition and hygiene, housing with
ventilation, indoor heating, garbage collection, cleaner
water and food, and sanitary sewage systems.
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In the 19th century, people’s housing – as well as the
conditions they worked in improved dramatically. Most
of the basic conveniences we take for granted today, like
an indoor toilet that flushes and clean running water
through the faucet, were not widely available in the first
half of the 20th century. In fact, in the 1950s half of the
people still didn’t have a washing machine, refrigerator,
or central heating yet. Before the internal combustion
engine, city streets were lined with horse dung. People
lived several to a room, sharing disease. The average
living space per person in America doubled as recently as
between 1973 and 2014. Cleaner drinking water was
responsible for nearly half of the total mortality
reduction in the 20th century, and nearly two-thirds of
the child mortality reduction.3
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2. Pharmaceutical Medicine is Responsible for
the Disappearance of diseases like Polio,
Tuberculosis, Pneumonia, Whooping Cough
and Measles.
The mainstream doctors would like to take credit for the
disappearance of conditions like polio, cholera, rickets,
tuberculosis, scurvy and leprosy, and this account of
things certainly continues to help pharmaceutical
companies sell drugs, but in actual fact all these diseases
disappeared due to better nutrition, cleaner water and
food, and modern sewage systems that were more
hygienic and sanitary.
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3. Pharmaceutical Medicine is Effective,
and with just a little more funding, Pharma will
save us from chronic disease.
This sells the lie that all Big Pharma needs is a few more
years and a lot more funding to finally crack the cure to
your disease. The sad truth is, if that was going to happen
it probably would have happened by now. Americans are
already spending four trillion a year
($4,000,000,000,000) on mainstream medicine, and
what are they getting for it?
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More kids are being diagnosed with ADD, ADHD,
insomnia, bad skin, acne, dandruff and other conditions.
We have obesity epidemics. The number of smokers has
fallen but the number addicted to sugar, caffeine,
additives and other stimulants continues to soar. Not to
mention the tremendous rise in addictions to
prescription medications. America, we are told, is in the
midst of an opioid crisis.
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medical research – much of it taken from the taxpayer -
mainstream, allopathic medical science has not been able
to cure a single one of the major degenerative, metabolic,
or autoimmune disease that are most likely to affect the
average person during their lifetime on earth. In fact, all
of them have all become more common.
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Some people depend on medicine. Type I diabetics need
insulin. If you have your thyroid removed, you need to
have the hormones it produces replaced. Epinephrine is
necessary to save lives from anaphylactic reactions. So
far as I know, no one has yet found a way to treat epilepsy
holistically, and so those who suffer with it are left with
precious little choice but to take mainstream treatments
and accept their side-effects. Some conditions, like
Parkinson’s, cause extreme suffering and can only be
managed with drugs, although I am led to believe that
earlier intervention can stop them from developing in the
first place.
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4. Pharmaceutical Medicine is Safe.
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Other examples of widely accepted medical treatments
that have been discredited and frequently harmful
include routine episiotomy, brain bypass surgery for
patients with warning signs of stroke, and hormone
replacement therapy to prevent a second heart attack in
women, radical mastectomy – the removal of the entire
breast and underlying chest muscle of women with
breast cancer (studies would finally show that a
lumpectomy with radiation was just as effective while far
less traumatic).
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research grants from the manufacturer. The NIH and FDA
continued to support long after it was known to cause
fatal liver toxicity. And the drug didn’t even offer any
advantage over existing diabetes drugs. One doctor,
Robert I. Misbin, was threatened with Dismissal for
providing a copy of a letter to members on Congress from
a group of colleagues at the FDA expressing concern
about the FDA’s failure to withdraw the drug. 8
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Let’s be clear about this. All the treatments in
mainstream medicine have negative side-effects. Many of
them are dangerous, and often they cause harm or death.
What’s more, when mainstream treatments cause harm
to their patients, rather than be penalized for it, the
medical industry is actually rewarded with more money
for treating side effects. If people later develop cancer
because they had one too many CT scans, no one will be
able to trace it do the medical radiation they received,
they will not be compensated, and even if they were – it
wouldn’t bring their health back!
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5. Pharmaceutical Medicine is Scientific.
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- Tinker with the doses when comparing two drugs
to one another, so that the desired drug comes out
top in trials.
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The vast majority of people are at risk of harm in their
lifetime from mainstream medicine, but the good folks
over at Skeptic’s Magazine just keep chasing after
chiropractors and acupuncturists. That is a shame,
because we actually need critical minds to expose bad
science in medicine so we can make it better.
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that “only 10-20% of the medical procedures used today
have been subjected to randomized clinical trials – the
most conclusive method of determining if a procedure is
medically effective.”
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The editors of The New England Journal of Medicine and
The Lancet both resigned in disgust, claiming that at least
70% of the articles in their journal were trash and biased
towards the corporate health care industry bodies that
funded the research. Richard Smith, who was the editor
of The British Medical Journal for 25 years said: “Major
medical journals are just an extension of the marketing
departments of major drug companies.” Richard Horton
of The Lancet wrote, “Journals have developed into
information laundering operations for the
pharmaceutical industry.” Journals want to avoid
alienating their advertisers. They often reject studies that
demonstrate existing treatments are less safe than
originally realized if the manufacturers of those drugs
advertise in their pages.
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The odds are five times greater that new products will be
supported by commercially sponsored studies than by
studies with non-commercial sponsorship.11 Editors of
the most respected journals have warned that they
cannot protect readers from pro-industry bias in the
scientific articles they publish.
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appeared to offer no significant advantage over other
diabetes drugs.
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A study in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that as many
as 42% of U.S. Medicare patients were subjected to
procedures providing little if any medical benefit, costing
the tax-payer up to $8.5 billion.
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6. Pharmaceutical Medicine Treats Disease.
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You’ve been doing all the right things. You’ve seen all the
right specialists, took all the meds you’ve been
prescribed, exactly when you’ve been told to take them:
Statins for your cholesterol, ACEs for your blood
pressure, NSAIDS for your pain and inflammation, you’ve
done everything the doctor told you to, and you wonder
why nothing is working. You start to wonder why life is
so unfair and you can’t just have a normal body that
doesn’t keep breaking down on you and throwing up
symptoms no matter what you do. The doctor just comes
in to mitigate your symptoms while you deteriorate with
expensive pharmaceutical drugs. My teacher Gary
Tunsky (1960-2019) used to call this David Copperfield
Medicine, after the famous stage magician. It’s the illusion
that you’re getting better when you’re actually getting
worse. He said it would be like going to the mechanic
because a red light went off in your car to tell you there
was something wrong, and he just snipped the wire to the
light and said, “There you go, all fixed! That’ll be 300
bucks please!”
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Why do people with more inflammation end up with
more cancer? Why do people who have fibromyalgia as
often as not have lupus? Why do people with Parkinson’s
disease often get dementia in the advanced stages? Why
do more than a third of them get depression and anxiety?
Why do they get sensory, sleep, and emotional problems?
It’s because these aren’t actually different diseases but
the cascading consequences of the same underlying
disease growing more severe. The patient first got ill with
something minor long before it progressed to a severe
condition like Parkinson’s. Because that wasn’t treated
properly, the underlying cellular condition of the patient
got worse, and this manifested in more symptoms which,
collectively, the doctors refer to as “Parkinson’s Disease.”
But the doctors still don’t know how to treat the
underlying cause, so it continues to get worse and worse,
until the poor individual has suffered so much nerve-
damage that they start tremoring, experiencing rigidity,
loss of balance, and finally can’t even walk unaided.
Eventually they need around-the-clock nursing care and
may experience hallucinations and delusions. It’s an
unspeakably tragic – and the more so, because so often it
could have been prevented with the correct care.
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When you understand that health is on a spectrum you
think of things differently. You think of preventing
disease and attending to the underlying causes of disease
when they arise, rather than just popping pills or rubbing
on creams to make the symptoms go away.
Now that you know what’s going in, will you approach
the dis-ease differently? Will you act to prevent it rather
than react after the fact?
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7. Pharmaceutical Medicine is Better than
Alternatives otherwise Alternatives would be
more popular.
In 1995 Duke University Medical Center instituted a
program to prevent congestive heart failure, which was
the most common diagnosis leading to hospitalization
among the elderly. Nurses would call heart failure
patients at home to check on their breathing and make
sure they were taking the right medication properly.
Nutritionists helped patients improve their diets.
Doctors shared information about them and came up
with new ways to improve care. The number of hospital
admissions for congestive heart failure at Duke declined,
and patients who were admitted spent less time at the
hospital, bringing the costs down for in insurers by 37%.
One would think with such astonishing results to boast
programs like these would have become commonplace in
the two and a half decades since. But they haven’t. And
under the current system they won’t. Because as a
consequence of the program Duke lost money.13
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If there are more effective treatments for cancer and
heart disease outside the realm of pharmaceuticals and
surgery, but they have not come to light or been
discovered, then it’s because of factors relating to
mainstream medicine.
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Why? Probably because there are no patents on vitamins,
so pharma cannot charge monopoly prices on them.
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Pharma stands to lose billions or even trillions a year on
drug sales if alternative treatments come to light. There
is a tremendous financial incentive to keep things exactly
as they are. They have the money to be the major source
of funding for colleges, Continuing Medical Education
programs, and even political campaigns. The FDA, CDC,
NIH, AMA and WHO all list big pharma as major sources
of funding.
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If someone, getting into government, really wanted to do
something to improve people’s health and longevity, they
could go to the areas of the country where living
conditions are worst, where health outcomes are poor
and everyone is on government-provided healthcare,
take 10% of the money they are currently spending on
that and invest it in improving the quality of the worst
housing. The program would likely pay for itself in the
drop-off in health visits. Especially if you are picking low
hanging fruit like eliminating mould in houses where big
families are breathing it in.
14Flynn, S. M. (2019) “The Cure That Works: How to Have the World's Best
Healthcare - At a Quarter of the Price” Regnery Publishing, p179-181
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I’m picking on Medicare right now because we’re talking
about how the government props up quack treatments
that wouldn’t survive the market if people weren’t forced
at gunpoint to pay for them through the tax system. I’m
giving insurers a pass. You’d think at least private
insurers would want to keep care costs down so they
could offer competitive premiums, but actually they get a
kickback-ahem-sorry, I mean administration fee, when
they pay out, called a reimbursement. The more they pay
out the more they can claim back.
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People are much less stupid when it comes to spending
their own money than other people’s. They tend to shop
around for the best service at the best price. When it
comes to healthcare, they don’t undergo unnecessary
treatments so readily, and tend to buy generic drugs
rather than expensive brands. So, if rather than pay Big
Pharma and Big Medical for people’s treatments – which
basically amounts to corporate welfare, vouchers were
issued into a Health Savings Account for people to shop
around for healthcare wherever they wanted, there
would be a lot less corruption. People would research the
best value treatments and where to get them – including
flying abroad where you can sometimes get top notch
surgery for a fraction of the price. The cost of healthcare
would drop dramatically while the quality improved
dramatically because when companies have to compete
for your money, they find ways to root out inefficiencies
and offer a comparable service to their competitors. Best
practices emerge and tend to become more-or-less
ubiquitous. That’s why all “elective” (non-essential)
medical procedures have followed the same pattern as
LASIK. Cosmetic surgery, IVF treatments, contact lenses,
dental veneers and tooth whitening have all become more
available to more people at lower prices from better
experienced, better trained practitioners while healthcare
just goes up in price in while people get sicker and sicker.
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The HSA could be spent on gym classes or a personal
trainer. Consumer Advice Agencies would meet the
demand for good information on risks and benefits of
different treatments, as well as their comparative safety
profiles. Their job would be to collect and analyze all the
data then inform consumers and medical professionals
with reports to help them make good decisions according
to the individual circumstances and values of the patient.
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8. Healthcare Shouldn’t Cost an Arm and a Leg!
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Americans are now paying $4 trillion a year on
healthcare, but the dirty secret is – most healthcare is
that it isn’t actually that expensive to provide. I believe if
I was the dictator of healthcare in America, I could slash
that figure down to $1 trillion and make everyone better
off at the same time – except of course those profiteering
from the system that exists right now! But, in my opinion,
even they would be better off spiritually, if not financially,
due to my reforms. For what does it profit a man to gain
the whole world but lose his soul? You are making
people sick and poor!
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system, burdensome rules, and outright fraud. Here are
some of the main causes of waste: Unnecessary tests
($200-800bn.) Fraud ($58.5-$83.9 billion),
overtreatment ($75.7-$101.2 billion), failure to
coordinate care ($27.2-$78.2 billion). And the
administrative complexity of the system ($265.6
billion.)16 Enough money to remedy world hunger.
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Concierge services now exist where instead of incurring
a per-visit charge, customers pay a subscription fee, like
a gym membership. Subscription can range from $500 to
$5000 a year and may vary according to age.
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Medibid, launched in 2010, offers an online marketplace
where people seeking medical care can bid for
procedures ranging from tummy tucks to hip
replacements from high quality services providers. It has
experienced huge growth because Americans are
worrying about rising cost of healthcare.
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You can also consider boycotting the costly American
system for some medical tourism. Hyman and Silver
report, “A hysterectomy is likely to cost $32,000 in the
United States but can be had for only $4000 in Thailand.
A kidney transplant goes for $150,000 here at home but
costs on $25,000 in the Philippines. An American couple
can expect to spend about $20,000 for a round of in vitro
fertilization here but can get the same service in Israel for
only $3,500.” Again, pressure from competition abroad
would force domestic providers to drive costs down.
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9. To attain knowledge, add things every day. To
attain wisdom, remove things every day.
You can’t easily fill a bath while the water is draining; and
filling your basement with food for the winter while you
have a rat infestation will only make it worse.
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supplement or start adding some superfood to their diet.
What they don’t want to do is eliminate. Eliminate bad
foods. Eliminate their bad habits. Eliminate stress
factors. Fast or go on a liquid diet to give their digestive
system a couple days rest to clear itself out. You see,
people used to get sick because they were too poor to eat
well. Now they get sick because they’re so rich they think
they can’t live without constant access to the worst
sources of calories. An old saying goes, “A man lives on a
third of what he eats. On the other two-thirds live his
doctor.”
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reality. For example, we know that some chemicals are
toxic, and that they can accumulate in the tissues. We also
know that every cell in the body must create metabolic
waste to run. The hypothesis of detox is simply that if
these waste products are synthesized faster than they are
excreted through the detoxification channels of our
mouth, nose, skin, bladder, and colon, then they back up
in the cells and cause illness as well as attracting mold,
fungus and bacterial forms that feed upon them. It’s
simple and intuitive. And in a society where the average
person gets 60% of their daily calories from “ultra-
processed” food, very prevalent. Various detoxification
protocols have been shown to increase the quantity of
various metals purged from the body through the urine.
I, myself, have reversed conditions through detox
protocols and seen dozens of others do the same. Seeing
is believing.
Only after the doctor had made sure that your condition
was not a result of your being poisoned either by your
own waste (autointoxication), or by external agents, then
would they start to consider whether anything needed to
be added. But rather than start with drugs, they would
begin by checking if your body was lacking in any of the
basic elements which a biological organism needs to
rebuild its tissues and stay healthy. You see, drugs don’t
have any nutritional elements in them. There is no such
thing as a statin deficiency, or a deficiency in NSAIDs, or
an SRI deficiency that is causing your depression. But
multiple conditions can be caused by one single
nutritional deficiency.
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healthy body without the necessary materials. How are
you supposed to stay healthy if you are lacking in some
essential building blocks or micronutrients? It seems
utterly insane that mainstream medicine will only look at
nutrition once you get scurvy.
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In addition to that, the micro-organisms in the soil are
required to pre-digest the minerals so that plants can
absorb them. Herbicides and pesticides kill them off, as
well as the microorganisms that make up our digestive
flora and are meant to help us absorb the nutrients from
the food we eat.
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10. The Value of Detox.
Now let’s look at the body and see what’s happening with
all people who are sick. When you were young and eating
well and taking regular exercise the garbage truck was
coming once a week to take away two trash cans full of
garbage and you were only filling one of them a week.
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Then you got older and lazier. You started eating more
processed food, and now you were producing 6 bags of
garbage a week. Then you were drinking on weeknights
instead of only at weekends and now you were producing
7 bags of garbage a week. And when you drunk you
smoked inside and now you were producing 8 bags of
garbage a week. You went to the doctor to have a look
and find out what was wrong with you, but he didn’t
understand the concept of auto-intoxication (self-
poisoning) so all he was able to do was give you some
drugs which alleviated some of your symptoms, but the
drugs were also poisonous and had side-effects. Now you
were producing 9 bags of garbage a week.
You may have been able to handle those bad habits, but
then you stopped taking exercise because you felt too
tired. So, the garbage truck was only coming every 8 days
instead of every 7. Then you stopped taking walks in the
park and going on camping trips because you couldn’t be
bothered driving out the city, so the garbage truck was
only coming every 9 days instead of every 7. Then you
stopped drinking enough water because it bothered you
getting up to pee all the time, so the garbage truck was
only coming every 10 days instead of every 7. Because
you were eating a lot of dry, processed food instead of
high fiber, high water-content fruits and vegetables your
bowels did not move very often and now the garbage
truck was only coming every 11 days instead of every 7.
Gradually your detoxification organs and filtration
systems– the intestines, liver, kidneys, skin, blood
circulation and lymphatic flow – became impaired
themselves because they were also full of backed-up
metabolic waste. And eventually the garbage truck was
only coming once every two-weeks!
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The mainstream doctors say you just get sick because
you were infected by a bug, but we say you just got
infected by bugs because your body was already sick.
Your tissues attracted them because they were full of
food for them to eat. The toxins from what you eat, drink,
rub on your skin and breathe are poisoning your cells,
making them a hospitable environment for germs, and
then when the germs come in they start eating and
pooping more metabolic wastes out into your body –
creating your illnesses!
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including fruit juice and honey as it makes the immune
system weaker when someone is ill. Fasting is a better
option still. All animals fast when sick, drinking only
water.
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11. Tubes in Trouble!
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tubes, lung tubes or intestinal tubes. If you try to stop
these symptoms with pharmaceutical you may be
blocking the healing process itself, as well as adding
more poisonous chemicals for your body to try and
purge.
What people are really dying from is things like their own
waste matter backing up in their tubes. You’re filthy
inside because the sewage system that’s supposed to
clean all your cells isn’t able to clean out your waste as
quickly as you produce it. That’s why fasting is in, now.
People are discovering that if you give the body a rest it
can finally catch up with the backlog of garbage you’ve
been accumulating as a consequence of what you’ve been
stuffing into your mouth.
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12. Basic Physiological Needs.
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4. Exercise. Enough of the right kinds of exercise
including cardiovascular training, resistance and
strength training, mobility, and flexibility training.
Some experts have said that exercise is not exactly
an anti-depressant – but rather, that, if you don’t
take exercise, you are bound to become
depressed. Our ancestors did extreme physical
activity most days, including working on a farm or
going down a coal mine. The body was made to
move and won’t do well without enough
movement. Even the simple act of walking
significantly improves circulation through the
limbs and aids digestion by moving the bowels
around in the body.
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7. Microbiome support. Our quality of life is strongly
dependent upon the trillions of tiny “good”
bacteria that inhabit and even make up our body.
Modern living seems to be taking its toll on the gut
microbiome as many people are not coping with foods
our grandparents used to eat. It is maybe partly due to
the overuse of antibiotics, and also to the increased use
of pesticides in our food – both of which kill
microorganisms indiscriminately. Poor gut health is
linked to anxiety and depression as well as a cause of
physical disease. Plus, if your digestion isn’t all there,
how are you going to absorb the nutrients from the food
you eat? You are bound to end up feeling sluggish and
lifeless.
There are some of the things that end up in our body are
more difficult to remove than our standard metabolic
wastes. When we had a natural diet rich in fruits and
vegetables these came pre-packaged with all the
enzymes, we needed to digest them intact. But once we
started to process our food, things changed. Processing
food is literally killing off enzymes in the interests of
increasing shelf-life. Components of highly processed
foods can stick around in our bodies for days, weeks,
months and even years, creating inertia within the
system. Digestive enzymes can aid the body in breaking
down and clearing up excess stored waste from highly
processed foods in our digestive tract, blood and cells.
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8. Collagen support. Collagen is used to build the
connective tissue for almost all the structures of
our bodies, including our heart, lungs, arteries,
joints, internal organs, hair, nails, and you name it.
As we age our collagen production tends to slow down
and all our systems are affected by that. Our muscles and
skin tend to sag, our bones lose their density, joints and
ligaments become weaker, organs and arteries are
affected, and our cartilage becomes thinner. Then we are
told we need a hip and a shoulder replacement.
You can get some of the collagen you need from eating
animal products like chicken feet, but it’s not very
metabolically efficient. The body first has to break it
down in the digestive system, reabsorb it, take it to the
exact places where it’s needed, and then reassemble it
into the exact structures your body needs to repair itself.
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contain almost all of the essential human amino acids,
including glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, glutamic acid,
alanine, arginine, aspartic acid. It doesn’t have
tryptophan so get that elsewhere.
You will not get the essential fatty acids you need which
creates cravings for the worst kind of carbs (like
processed sugar) and will drive you to eat badly. Even a
lot of olive oil today is unfortunately faked! In fact, when
we look at the statistics, we find that more olive oil is
supposedly sold than produced – which is a little
suspicious!
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Cold-pressed flaxseed oil has been shown to improve
cell-membrane integrity, enhances oxygen respiration
and may reverse cancer process to some degree. It’s a
cell-membrane medicine! Have one tablespoon of cold-
pressed flaxseed oil every day. Keep the bottle
refrigerated in the dark and consume it within three
weeks once opened to avoid it going rancid.
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for a minimum of twelve hours per day, so much
the better. If that is too strenuous for you at the
moment you can go on a juice cleanse to detox
instead, drinking between three and thirteen
glasses of freshly juiced organic produce every
day.
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Stress causes relationship problems as we are more
reactive when under stress and more likely to find
ourselves at odds with loved ones, family members, our
spouse, or kids. Our ability to communicate effectively is
compromised and we are more likely to be combative. We
simply were not intended to be stressed too often and for
so long, but we have made it normal. Hectic modern
lifestyles drive people to reach for anxiety medications,
but these come with side effects ranging from heart
problems and hypertension to tremors and seizures.
Wherever possible we want to take our health into our
own hands and learn to improve our ability to self-
regulate our moods.
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A couple of other words of advice for would-be parents:
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~ Next Steps.
If you like what you read, you can find more at:
www.terrainscience.com who kindly publish my work
alongside that of other great writers who are talking
about natural health and exposing lies and deception
used to propagate dangerous and ineffective treatments.
You can follow my podcast Be Yourself and Love It! for lots
of practical information on improving your life.
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