Never Be Sick Again (20 page)

No foolproof way exists to check out a vitamin product without knowing exactly what is going into the product: how old the ingredients are; how they have been shipped, handled and stored; and how pure they are. But taking those steps that you can do on your own will bring you closer to buying an effective product. (Vitamin products I have selected for my own use can be found in appendix C.)

Tasty Choices

The choices you face as you select a diet each day rests on a combination of the nutritional content of the foods balanced against your own personal tastes. Taste is acquired and is based largely on what we are familiar with. A new taste can be acquired simply by eating something new for a few weeks. I found that I lost my taste for a lot of the less desirable foods I used to enjoy. While taste and pleasure in eating are important (and even psychologically beneficial), plenty of healthy foods are pleasurable to eat.

Our productive, fast-paced, modern lifestyles, combined with misinformation about nutrition, can make the right choices difficult to identify. These lifestyles create a demand for processed, prepared, speedy “convenience foods,” regardless of economic status or educational level. More parents than ever are working to support their families, while fewer and fewer are staying at home to tend gardens or prepare wholesome meals. Many of us no longer even eat at home. We eat in cafeterias, restaurants and fast-food chains where processed foods are the norm.

The food we ate yesterday is still affecting us today, and the food we eat at our next meal will affect our awareness, energy level, ability to think, learn and remember as well as our mood and behavior. What we eat in a week or a month or a year determines our biological makeup and our health, as well as the health of our children and grandchildren.

You must always remember that the biological reason for eating is to supply your cells with the nutrients they need on a daily basis. Becoming healthy and staying well with a diet of processed foods laced with sugar and processed oils is impossible. You are what you eat; your life and health depend on the foods you choose. You face these choices at every meal you eat for the rest of your life, so embrace it! You now know how to choose the good from the bad. Avoid the Big Four, eat “real” living food as nature provides and take high-quality supplements. To move yourself in the right direction on the nutritional pathway, start now to give your cells all the nutrients they need, every day, and they will thank you with the gift of good health.

6
T
HE
T
OXIN
P
ATHWAY

“[O]ur health is threatened not only by individual chemicals
—deadly or toxic—but even more by the overall chemical load
that the human organism now has to sustain.”

Joseph D. Beasley, M.D., Ph.D.
The Kellogg Report

O
ur bodies are under attack every day—from without and from within. We face more toxic chemicals and man-made poisons in our lives than ever before. We are weakened by chronic stress, lack of exercise, allergies and eating the wrong foods in the wrong ways. In these ways, we often sabotage our own defense systems and invite the toxic enemy inside. If the enemy overpowers us, we fall—often without recognizing our attackers.

Toxicity—from toxins taken into our bodies from the outside or those created inside our bodies—is one of two reasons that cells malfunction; remember, toxicity is one of the two causes of disease. To prevent or to reverse disease, we must limit our exposure to toxins and we must give our bodies what they need to detoxify themselves. Fortunately, most of this process is within our control. Unfortunately, the invaders are everywhere—especially in our own homes—and often they are hard to find.

A Living Hell

By the time I received the telephone call from a man who identified himself as David, his body was losing its battle against an enemy he could not identify. “I have no idea who you are or why I am calling you,” David said, “but I am going to kill myself.”

My mind racing and my fear intensifying, I began the longest telephone conversation of my life—four and a half hours of David's life story, now a nightmare. Before the onset of his problems, David had been a partner in a top New York City advertising firm. He earned a seven-figure income and lived in a posh community; his wife was a socialite, and his children attended private schools. Life was good—until he began to experience weakness and fatigue. David went to see his physician, who did many thousands of dollars worth of testing, only to pronounce David to be in perfect health. The doctor's only suggestion was that David was working too hard and that he should take a vacation. So, David and his wife rented a house in Hawaii and stayed there for two months.

The vacation did not help, and David gradually felt worse. He developed serious allergies as well as neurological and psychological problems, so he consulted more doctors. A wealthy man, David went to the best doctors money could buy; they, too, could find nothing wrong, so they referred him to a psychiatrist. Physicians often assume that if they do not understand what is wrong, their ignorance is not at fault, but rather the patient is imagining the problem. David's psychiatrist was equally baffled, and he referred David back to his physicians.

All the while, David's fatigue and allergic symptoms worsened; he became unable to continue working and had to resign from his firm. Finally, David was referred to a clinical ecologist, a physician who specializes in environmentally caused diseases. This doctor diagnosed David as suffering from multiple allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome and chemical hypersensitivity syndrome. He said David was too chemically sensitive to continue living in the highly polluted New York area and suggested he move where air quality was better. David uprooted his family and moved to an isolated ranch outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

David's problems continued to worsen; he became dangerously depressed and irritable, and he had frequent outbursts of anger. David had descended into an unending nightmare, and he had taken his family with him. The combined impact of the move and the isolation, coupled with David's frequent outbursts of anger and his worsening depression, was too much for David's wife. She left him and she took the children with her.

Everything that David had ever cared about was gone. He was depressed, isolated and alone. He became suicidal. At that point, at the advice of a friend, he called me.

From the moment David called, I knew (in a general way) what his problem was. Diagnosing any disease is simple, because there is only one disease: malfunctioning cells. David's problem had to be a large number of malfunctioning cells, that much I knew. The critical questions were: Why were they malfunctioning, and how to restore them to normal function?

Four hours into our conversation, David provided a key piece of information that gave me the answer. David said he liked tuna fish, liked it so much that he typically ate two cans per day. This statement set off alarm bells in my mind because tuna fish contains a significant amount of mercury—a highly toxic heavy metal that poisons cells and deactivates key enzymes, causing numerous physical and mental problems, including suicidal tendencies.

Mercury pollution in our oceans bioaccumulates (gradually builds up) in fish and is especially concentrated in large fish such as tuna. In fact, the average can of tuna fish contains the maximum allowable daily dose of mercury, and David was eating two cans of tuna fish almost every day. Constant exposure like this results in a toxic bioaccumulation, so I began to suspect that mercury poisoning was at the root of David's problems.

His mercury exposure did not end with his taste for tuna; David had many silver amalgam dental fillings, and these amalgams contain about 50 percent mercury. His dental fillings (in addition to the tuna fish) had been exposing David to small amounts of mercury for most of his life. Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was a dental procedure. David had to replace his aging mercury fillings and was exposed to high levels of mercury during this procedure because of the dentist's poor removal technique. This large exposure, combined with years of chronic, low-level exposure from the tuna fish and the dental fillings, was too much for David's body to handle. He fell into a state of toxic overload and his cells began to malfunction seriously.

David's failing health, chronic fatigue, emotional distress and suicidal tendencies were all symptoms of his toxic overload. The solution? I suggested nutritional supplements that would support David's natural ability to detoxify, and I also searched for and found a medical doctor who was an expert in mercury detoxification. Subsequently, David was cured of his mercury poisoning (through a process called chelation, which uses a chemical to react with the mercury and remove it from the body), and ultimately he was able to return to his life, his career and, most importantly, his family.

Killing Him Slowly

David is an excellent example of toxic overload in our modern society. He was chronically exposed to a specific toxin (mercury), which was slowly bioaccumulating in his cells. Already weakened by and sensitive to this toxin, he was suddenly exposed to a large amount, which pushed him over the brink. Another factor to be considered is David's biochemical individuality; he might have been born with a greater sensitivity to mercury than the average person.

Virtually all Americans are now in a state of toxic overload. No wonder our population is becoming sicker and sicker.
Small toxic exposures each day (from common sources such as
breakfast cereal, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, perfume,
deodorant, hair dye, newspapers, magazines, exhaust fumes,
carpets, new mattresses, dry cleaning or a newly painted bedroom)
will increasingly exceed and even incapacitate your
body's ability to detoxify, causing these chemicals to accumulate
to a level that will make you sick.

Man-made toxins are so prevalent today that they are impossible to avoid, regardless of where you live or what you do. Over the last one hundred years, we have introduced tens of thousands of man-made toxins to our environment, thus changing it dramatically. Our bodies are not genetically designed to deal with these levels and types of poisons that are accumulating in our tissues faster than we can rid ourselves of them.

Environmental toxins are not our only problem. We also generate powerful toxins inside our bodies. Unless we can minimize our exposure and maximize our bodies' detoxification systems, we will become sick. An extreme overload may even kill us:

• Only recently have researchers and health practitioners begun to understand the long-term effects of the thousands of chemicals we now encounter in our daily lives. At the time of my birth, the majority of these chemicals did not exist. Now they are all-pervasive.

• A growing body of scientific evidence links toxins to a wide variety of symptoms and syndromes, such as mental and behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, fatigue, migraines, allergies, rashes and gastrointestinal disorders.

• Frightening new evidence suggests that low-level exposures to certain environmental chemicals are causing hormone disruptions, resulting in serious problems that range from birth defects to cancer.

• Many of the diseases that baffle our physicians (often called “diseases of aging” or “diseases of civilization”) are the results of the toxic overload caused by modern industrialized society. These diseases are difficult to diagnose and impossible to cure using conventional medical approaches that just treat symptoms, rather than minimizing toxic exposure and optimizing detoxification.

• Chemicals posing little cancer risk can trigger cancer when combined together.

• Some chemicals and metals are toxic in any amount; others are beneficial or even essential in small amounts— such as vitamin A—but toxic in large amounts.

In the nineteenth century, less than 1 percent of all deaths in the United States were caused by cancer, and even at the turn of the twentieth century, only 3 percent of the population was affected.
Today, more than four in ten people will develop cancer
in their lifetime, and one in four will die from cancer.

The good news? Many of the strongest cancer-causing chemicals have been identified, and we can avoid them. The National Academy of Sciences sums up the challenge: “It is abundantly clear that the incidence of all the common cancers in humans is being determined by . . . potentially controllable external factors.”