Are You As Healthy As You Think?

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News By Raymond Francis Most people who think they’re healthy are actually slowly declining toward serious health problems that, when they finally arrive, will seem to have come without warning. Most of us consider it normal to get sick several times a year, to use up our sick leave at work, or to occasionally miss a favorite gathering or activity because we’re feeling “a little under the weather.” This may be normal, but it isn’t how it’s supposed to be. The body’s natural state is homeostasis, where all systems are balanced and running smoothly. When in homeostasis, you can’t get sick, not even a cold. When properly supported, the body knows exactly how to maintain this healthy state. Ignore its basic needs for too long, however, and your body will let you know that it is not amused! You might be tapped on the shoulder with a little sniffle, a headache, indigestion, a cough, or some aches and pains. (We have drugstore aisles full of pills to whisk away these little nuisances.) Or you might get a whack that sends you to the doctor and lands you in bed for a few days. Either way, by the time these symptoms appear on the surface, homeostasis has been compromised, and an iceberg of nutritional deficiencies and toxic accumulation has been forming in your body. You see, there really aren’t thousands of diseases, each caused by its own nasty bug. There is only one disease: malfunctioning cells. If every cell in your body were doing what it was designed to do, you would be in homeostasis, and you couldn’t possibly be sick. Yet there are only two causes of malfunctioning cells: deficiency and toxicity. Either the cells aren’t getting enough of something they need, or they’re getting too much of something they don’t need. So the only way to get sick is to starve your cells, or poison them! The secret to health is giving cells what they need while protecting them from what they don’t need. Why So Many of Us Are Sick More than three out of four Americans have a diagnosable chronic disease, and more than two out of three of us are overweight. The reason we have so much disease today is that almost every one of us is in toxic overload and is chronically deficient in at least several essential nutrients. The result is a pandemic of chronic disease. To end the pandemic, we have to improve our diets and reduce our exposure to toxins. This will require a major change in our lifestyles—a change that is highly preferable to a future of declining health and escalating medical expenses. Deficiency is the first problem we must address. Americans are starving to death! That may be hard to swallow when you notice that more and more people are overweight and obese, but it’s true. We’re eating more calories than ever before, but our cells are not getting the nutrients they need to stay healthy. And it is making us sick and lowering our quality of life. Ninety cents out of every American food dollar is spent on processed foods. The processed foods we eat are bulging with empty calories but are lacking in life-supporting nutrients. They’re also loaded with toxins that poison our cells. If you want to be healthy, you don’t have a choice. As much as possible, you must get the processed foods out of your life and switch to a diet based on organically produced fresh fruits and vegetables that are high in nutrition and low in toxins. In addition to giving yourself better nutrition, you have to stop poisoning yourself. Not only are processed foods full of toxins, so is our air and water, and so are our homes, automobiles, and cleaning and personal care products. Our tap water is intentionally contaminated with toxic chlorine and fluoride. Making matters worse, conventional medicine damages our health with toxic prescription drugs, immunestressing vaccinations and DNA-damaging X-rays. In the course of a normal day, you put a lot of wear and tear on the body that needs repair. When you are healthy, your body is self-regulating and self-repairing. But when you’re out of balance and the damage is not repaired every day, you start the next day with a repair deficit. If you continue to do this long enough, those repair deficits will accumulate to the point that your body starts to fall apart. Just as your car will break down for lack of maintenance, so will you. Poorly maintained cars end up in junkyards, while poorly maintained people end up in nursing homes. When your repair deficits stack up, your body ceases to internally communicate and self-regulate, and homeostasis is lost. So you see, a big disease that seems to strike for no reason was actually a long time coming! How to Get Well and Stay Well To keep yourself in good repair, you need to supply your cells with all the raw materials they need to do their jobs. This will not happen if you are chronically short even one nutrient. You also have to be careful not to disable your repair machinery with toxins. Unfortunately, most of us are doing just the opposite. Almost every American is chronically deficient in at least several essential nutrients, including essential fatty acids to build cell membranes. We are also overloaded with hundreds of toxins that are accumulating in our bodies, interfering with cell repair. No wonder virtually every American is sick to one degree or another. For most people, disease is a result of a combination of poor nutrition, toxic exposure, lack of exercise, stress, vaccinations, x-rays, antibiotics and other prescription drugs. But no matter how you got there, if you are on the downward spiral to chronic degenerative disease, you have only one choice—get well! It’s not easy, but it’s your only real option. Suppressing symptoms with drugs and surgery will not solve your problem—restoring your health will. Beyond Health provides many free articles, its own line of superior quality supplements, and other carefully selected products to help you get well and stay well. Go to www.beyondhealth.com. It is amazing how healthy you can become if you stop making yourself sick! Raymond Francis is an MIT-trained scientist, a registered nutrition consultant, and author of Never Be Sick Again, Never Be Fat Again, and Never Fear Cancer Again. He is the chairman of The Project to End Disease and an internationally recognized leader in optimal health maintenance. Reprinted with permission from: Beyond Health® News email: mail@beyondhealth.com Copyright 2011, Beyond Health