bad. In fact, I recommend it over the natural approach for injuries, life-threatening emergencies, and acute illnesses, such as heart attack, lung infection (such as pneumonia), asthma or allergy attacks, renal (kidney) failure, gastrointestinal bleeding, certain bacterial infections, cancer, and alcohol or drug overdose.
Chapter 2
Adopting a Natural Cures Diet and Lifestyle
In This Chapter
▶ Replacing junk with food
▶ Exercising and de-stressing
Most illness results either from a genetic susceptibility combined with physical or emotional stressor or from a weak immune system exposed to an infectious agent – a bacteria, virus, or fungus. You can’t do anything to correct an underlying genetic vulnerability, but you can do a great deal to boost your immune system and avoid stressors that trigger illness – poor diet, emotional tension, and environmental toxins. In this chapter, I recommend changes to diet and lifestyle that strengthen your body’s ability to prevent illness while reducing your exposure to common stressors that trigger illness.
Changing What and How You Eat: Using Food as Medicine
Scientists are beginning to discover that food is more than mere sustenance. Not only does food fuel the body and provide the basic building blocks for growth and development, but it also conveys information. Foods can flip switches in the DNA to trigger numerous illnesses and health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, inflammation, cardiovascular diseases, and neurocognitive disorders. To improve health and reverse the course of disease, treat food as medicine and start making better food choices. This section shows you how.
Fewer than ten foods are responsible for triggering most cases of inflammation and numerous autoimmune disorders in humans: wheat, soy, dairy, sugar, corn, eggs, peanuts, artificial sweeteners, and trans fats. To find out whether any of the items on this list ails you, I encourage you to get tested for food allergies and sensitivities, as explained in Chapter 13, or perform a modified elimination diet. Table 2-1 lists the most common culprits to test.
You can do an elimination diet in a couple of different ways.
✔ Remove a suspect food from your diet for 28 days. If you feel better without it, you can eliminate that food from your diet for good, reintroduce it to see whether it really does cause problems, or get tested to confirm or rule out your suspicions. If you notice no difference whether you eat or abstain from eating the food, you can add it back into your diet.
✔ Eliminate for 28 days foods that are most likely to cause problems and then slowly re-introduce them, one every two to three weeks, until your symptoms return. Then eliminate any food(s) that triggered symptoms.
Table 2-1 Performing a Modified Elimination Diet
Read on to discover more about the foods that commonly trigger inflammation, autoimmune illnesses, and other disorders and why each one is a trigger for illness in a large portion of the population.
Wheat and gluten
Today’s wheat isn’t the wheat your ancestors ate. It doesn’t even resemble the wheat consumed during the 1980s. Modern wheat is grown and processed in ways that strip out vital nutrients and produce a high-starch flour that spikes blood sugar and insulin levels and triggers inflammation and immune reactions in many people.
Although you may be immune to the nasty side effects of consuming modern wheat, people with celiac disease can’t consume a single morsel of wheat without experiencing a severe reaction resulting in abdominal pain, bloating, gas, diarrhea, cramps, malabsorption of nutrients, and weight loss. And for every person who has celiac disease, at least eight others suffer from nonceliac gluten sensitivity, which is often linked to inflammation, migraines, allergic reactions, eczema, cardiovascular events, and neurological disorders.
Regardless of whether you’re experiencing symptoms, eliminate wheat/gluten from your diet for the next 28 days and take note of how you feel. I’d bet dollars to those donuts you’re no longer eating that you’ll feel better, eat less, and achieve a healthier, stable weight with lower body fat.
Soy
Soy is so abundant in “health foods” that most people actually think it’s healthy. However, 90 percent of all soy in the United States is derived from genetically modified organism (GMO) crops and is overly processed. Soy messes with your hormones and often triggers thyroid disorders. If your thyroid antibodies are high, eliminating soy from your diet can bring them down into normal range. Soy is also rich in phytic acid, which blocks absorption of key minerals, including calcium, magnesium, and zinc. It also blocks trypsin, an important enzyme for digesting protein.
Dairy
Regardless
