Never Be Sick Again (7 page)

• Completely changed its diet.

• Created a new environment.

• Developed new patterns of behavior and lifestyle.

Granted, in this millennium, most of us simply cannot grow our own food and harvest it when ripe, walk to our destinations, or totally avoid the stresses of modern industrial society. However, in recognizing what contributed to the health of traditionally healthy people, combined with an understanding of the significant changes we have made to our own environments and lifestyles, we can begin to see how we must compensate. We need to learn how to create healthy habits for living within our modern ways of life.

Our way of life is completely different from the lives of even a century ago. From a personal standpoint, these changes have been made too slowly for us to notice, but from an evolutionary standpoint, they have come rapidly— much too rapidly for healthy adaptation by our bodies and minds.

The Web of Life

Choosing health would be easy if only one factor were involved. However, no one factor determines our health. Rather, our state of health is the end result of countless biological and behavioral interrelationships called the “web of life.” Unwittingly, we have been busy pulling this web apart, through the fundamental changes we have made in our diet, our environment and our behavior. Everything relates to everything else; making a change in one part of the web affects the rest of it.

We are learning that life support systems are more interdependent and delicately balanced than we ever realized. No one fully understands how it all works. The web is as big and complex as the planet itself, and as some scientists suggest, as big as the universe. But the fact that we do not understand it thoroughly certainly should not prevent us from using what we do know for protecting and supporting our health right now.

Acting on our knowledge of the factors described in the chapters about the six pathways can take us beyond “health” as we have come to accept it. We have seen traditionally healthy people such as the Hunzas achieve a potential for human health that is truly awesome, but to achieve a high level of health in our society requires knowledge, commitment and a willingness to try new things. It can be done. While none of us can or probably want to revert to living a primitive lifestyle, we can, with a few changes in diet and lifestyle, improve our health and quality of life.

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ISEASE

“The most basic weapons in the fight against disease are
the most ignored by modern medicine:
the numerous nutrients the cells of our bodies need.
If our body cells are ailing—as
they must be in disease—the chances are excellent that it is
because they are being inadequately provisioned.”

Roger J. Williams, Ph.D.
Nutrition Against Disease

M
odern medicine believes that thousands of diseases exist, each with different causes and treatments. This belief has led to a system of medicine so complex and baffling that physicians resort to protocols that merely suppress symptoms. By suppressing symptoms rather than addressing causes, diseases remain chronic. In this chapter, you will learn a new approach. This new theory of health and disease is a model that recognizes not thousands of diseases but only one disease, along with only two causes of disease. This simple model of disease is so powerful that it can enable you to go beyond health as you have experienced it and never be sick again.

One Disease—Two Causes—
Six Pathways

A real understanding of the relationship between health and disease cannot be achieved through knowledge of germs, inherited genes, medicines, surgery, or any of the many “diseases” that make people sick. Keeping up with these subjects is complex and doesn't really help people to take care of themselves. What we need right now are solutions for good health. The time is ripe to simplify: Understand what your cells need, how they work and what causes them to malfunction. Your cells are what make your life possible.

There is only one disease:
malfunctioning cells.

When cells malfunction, the body is no longer able to maintain homeostasis (balance) by regulating and repairing itself. This is the essence of disease, no matter what you call it or how it happens. Because only one disease exists, all we need to do is prevent the causes of that one disease.

There are only two causes of disease:
deficiency
and
toxicity.

All you have to do for health is to give your cells what they need and protect them from what they don't need. Cells malfunction only if they suffer from a lack of nutrients (deficiency), toxic damage (toxicity) or a combination of both. Preventing these two causes of disease is made possible by our ability to choose how we live our lives. Health depends on the choices we make. These choices fall into six categories, or pathways.

There are six pathways between health and disease:
nutrition, toxin, psychological, physical,
genetic
and
medical.

The body knows how to take care of itself, provided it has what it needs to do so. Good choices along the six pathways provide for the needs of your body just as sunshine, water and rich soil provide for the needs of a houseplant. These concepts are not complicated; in fact they are incredibly simple. We just become lost along the way sometimes because we don't have a sound theory of health and disease. Well, now we do: one disease, two causes, six pathways. Applying this theory can restore balance to your cells and support your cells' natural ability to self-regulate and repair damage. Along each of the six pathways, I teach you in this book how to prevent the two causes of disease. Using this knowledge, you can restore health and prevent future sickness.

The Need to Simplify

At the time of my illness, despite my scientific education and background, I probably knew as much, or as little, about disease as most people. I thought that disease was something that came from germs and from genetic predisposition. I thought disease was something that happened to the unlucky, the starving, or to those who really abused themselves, such as alcoholics and drug addicts. My physician said that my problems were the result of aging, as opposed to something that I had unknowingly chosen and could choose to reverse.

During my recovery process, I realized that I would have been able to prevent my illness if I had understood the causes of disease. I realized that as long as disease remained something mysterious, complicated and difficult to understand, then only the high priests of medicine—the educated experts we call doctors—would be able to deal with it. What if we could all understand what causes disease? Wouldn't we be empowered to prevent disease? Can we actually do that? Can we distill simple truth from this complex mystery? Throughout man's history, great advancements in science have often come from people who were able to take extraordinarily complex subjects and simplify them. In this chapter we are trying to simplify the concepts of health and disease.

Simplifying Disease

Consider this: Rather than thousands of diseases, there is only one disease. Does this sound ridiculous? Probably, but that is because we are conditioned to think of many different diseases, rather than recognizing what is common to all disease. The most difficult aspect of this theory is that it requires you to look at health and disease in a completely different way. Using the concept of one disease dramatically simplifies how we perceive disease in general.

To simplify disease, we must first have an understanding of what disease is. In order to do that, we need a basic understanding of
cells.
Every plant and animal on earth is made of cells—the smallest unit of life. Fossil records show that the earliest forms of life were single-celled organisms. Likewise, each human being started as one cell—a single cell encoded with all of the information needed to develop into the vastly complex, multitrillion-celled organisms that we are today.

Each of us is made of about seventy-five trillion cells. Not all of these cells are the same. Humans have over 200 different types of cells (nerve cells, blood cells, muscle cells, bone cells, etc.), forming many different types of tissues that enable us to eat, breathe, feel, move, think and reproduce. Together, cells combine to form the building blocks of biological structure and function. All of these cells communicate with each other and rely on these communications in order to keep us alive and well. Healthy cells make healthy tissues, which are highly resistant to disease and physical injury. Unhealthy cells create unhealthy tissues, which are quite susceptible to both disease and injury.

What Is Disease?

Each cell must perform specific tasks in order to collaborate effectively with other cells in the body. If all of your cells are healthy, these tasks are well executed and the body functions at optimal levels.
If all of your cells are healthy, you cannot be
sick.
If, for any reason, a cell starts to malfunction, it is less able to perform its assigned tasks, which is where problems can begin. When such malfunction occurs in a large enough number of cells to impair the body's ability to self-repair and self-regulate, disease occurs.

The scientific term for a cell that is malfunctioning is
cytopathy
(
cyto
referring to cell, and
pathy
to sickness or disease). As fantastically complex as we humans are, the fundamental concept of disease is simple.
Disease is the result of a
large number of malfunctioning cells (widespread cytopathy).
This definition is not fancy or eloquent; it may even seem absurdly simple. However, it is a profound, precise and irrefutable definition of disease. This definition is so simple that no one—scientist, physician or layperson—can deny it. This definition provides the unifying theory of health and disease that the modern medical establishment lacks, which is the reason that modern medicine is unable to address the current epidemic of chronic disease.

Perhaps you are thinking, “But wait! Disease is much more complex than that! What about genetic predisposition? What about bacterial and viral infection? What about cancer? What about AIDS? What about . . . ?” True, many factors may conspire in contributing to the malfunction of our cells and the many different ways in which they can malfunction. In the end, though, cellular malfunction creates the measurable abnormalities that we call disease. Therefore, no matter which cells malfunction, or why they malfunction,
the malfunction is
the one disease.

A person cannot be sick unless a large number of cells are malfunctioning. The first steps on the path to disease are taken when, for whatever reason, a single cell begins to malfunction, and then another cell and another. When the number grows large enough, we may begin to notice. We may “feel sick” along the way, perhaps experiencing a pain here, a discomfort there or a lack of energy. By the time your health has deteriorated into a diagnosable chronic disease, no cell may be left in your body that is still functioning optimally. I am astounded when people describe their health problems and then claim that, “other than this,” they are in excellent health!

Unfortunately, modern medicine finds itself mired in complexity, confronted with numerous diseases, diagnoses and treatments. Lost in the midst of thousands of different diseases (each supposedly with its own unique causes), physicians are unable to effectively diminish disease in our society. A simpler and more effective solution is to focus on the process—the one disease—and to ask what causes it. When you understand disease as a process, rather than a “thing” to be cut out or suppressed, then you see why surgery and drugs, virtually the only tools of the physician, are limited in what they can do.

The Two Causes of Disease

Cellular malfunction is the essence of disease. But why does it happen? Cells can malfunction in a multitude of ways, and the biochemistry of these malfunctions can be exceedingly complex. All malfunctions can be reduced to two causes:
deficiency
and
toxicity. Deficiency
means that cells are lacking something that they need in order to function the way they are designed to function.
Toxicity
means that cells are poisoned by something that inhibits proper function. Either one of these factors—and usually a combination of both—can and will cause disease.