dimanche 6 octobre 2013

Global Inner Climate Changes: The Weather

Our bodies are a wonder. Consider the trillions of chemical reactions that happen instant after instant, the sum total of which adds up to our experience of life. It is impossible to affect a single one of those chem­ical reactions without affecting many others. Yet modern medicine has evolved in the other direction, away from seeing these balancing agents as a single, connected picture. Western medicine came to value superspecialists over generalists. One doctor looks at and understands mostly throats; another, the lungs; a different one looks at your heart; and so on. We need to shift our attention to the whole picture and create the conditions for the most apparently insignificant chemical reactions to happen as they should. The Detoxification program does just that. I think of it as molecular acupuncture, a comparison from the mind of Jeffrey Bland, the father of Functional Medicine: a small action in one place, like restoring the right balance of pro- to anti-inflammatory fats or shifting the body’s acid-base ratio, triggers a cascade of positive effects in the whole body.

When a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, the chain of cause and effect may well end up manifesting as a tornado in Argentina. In the same way, a failed chemical reaction involving a few molecules in your liver might just show up as a tumor in your brain. Everything is con­nected. One little point in space and time may trigger a cascade of reactions that affect a much larger system downstream—one on whose delicate balance life depends.

The reason many of these problems persist and get worse with time is that modern medicine tends to focus on making a diagnosis, instead of looking at what is behind it. What is the diagnosis behind all other diagnoses?

Many years ago, we started noticing that environmental disasters were on the rise: storms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, melting of the ice caps. Early on, they seemed isolated, unrelated accidents of nature. Slowly the dots were connected. All these disasters were related and had something in common: global warming.

Inside our bodies, a similar crisis is brewing. The massive load of toxins we are exposed to changes our inner climate the way green­house gases change Earth’s atmosphere.

Just like in an aquarium or a freshwater lake, where the degree of acid­ity must be carefully maintained for fish to survive, the environment inside our arteries needs to stay in a certain acid-base range or the cells circulating inside will die. The waste products of normal metabolism are almost exclusively acids, so the body is constantly neutralizing acids as part of daily life. Nature is the main provider of balancing alka­line molecules, in foods like green leafy vegetables. But modern “staple foods” like sugar, dairy products, meat, coffee, and junk food are acidi­fying. So are medications. So is stress, because the higher metabolic rates and adrenalin and cortisol created during stress speed up acidify­ing processes. (This is why practices like meditation help control excess acid formation.) It’s not an understatement to say that modern life is an acid-forming process.

Overly acidic conditions slowly but surely corrode our inner terrain to the point of causing damage. Acidity may corrode arteries, resulting in heart attacks or strokes. It may corrode joints, resulting in arthritis.

It certainly promotes the malfunctioning of key processes like oxygen exchange in the red blood cells, inflammation, blood clotting, hor­mone production, and nerve cell conduction. In fact, I can’t think of one single chemical reaction in the body that is not affected by acidity. You will be reducing acidity during Detoxification by removing the foods that are acidifying, lowering stress, and boosting detoxification.

The modern-day phenomenon of nutritional deficiency is devastating to our health. Everything that happens in the body does so through chemical reactions. Digestion, healing, and communicating between cells all take place through little acts of chemistry; these chemical reac­tions need a certain supply of naturally occurring ingredients. We are designed to get most of these micronutrients from foods. If they are missing, the chemical reactions simply don’t happen, imbalances start, and over time sickness and disease develop. Many people have heard they need to supplement their diet with omega-3 fatty acids (fish oils); it’s popular knowledge. But there are three newly identified deficiencies that are about to become just as popular.

Magnesium, a mineral, stabilizes and calms the nervous system and relaxes muscles. It is hard to absorb to begin with (only 10 percent of the magnesium ingested is absorbed), but its depletion is one of the con­tributing factors to the modern epidemic of stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, depression, edema, memory loss, irritability, and weakness.

Vitamin D is integrally involved in a multitude of vital processes. It helps the deposition of calcium in the bones and regulates the immune system, so a lack of it will contribute to bone disease and cause a pre­disposition to frequent infections. It plays an important role in mood chemistry and is critical for heart health. Because this vitamin needs sunlight for activation and we have shielded ourselves from the sun­light by living inside buildings, traveling in cars, and covering every inch of skin with clothing and sun protection creams, there is a new worldwide epidemic of vitamin D deficiency. Expect more diseases to be linked to the lack of this wonder vitamin soon.

Iodine is the latest deficiency to come to my awareness at the time of this writing. It is the main building block for the production of thyroid hormones, which are responsible for keeping the furnace of our metabo­lism going. Without sufficient amounts, weight gain becomes an issue. This is only one of the consequences of deficient thyroid production due to iodine deficiency (but a critical one, as obesity is becoming a major problem now affecting millions of children). Modern science is now link­ing it to many other diseases like cancer, heart disease, and depression. It is implicated in the wave of thyroid depletion I see especially among women today, a problem that my colleague Dr. Frank Lipman brilliantly diagnoses and treats as one of the components of an invisible syndrome in modern medicine that he calls “Spent”.

The process of detoxification depends on chemicals that our body used to obtain from a balanced diet of nutrient-filled foods. The liver is where the bulk of the detox chemistry happens, and it requires a whole shopping list of natural ingredients, such as vitamins and min­erals found in natural, whole foods as well as a good stock of antiox­idants. It is like having a well-stocked cleaning supply cupboard, so you can clean your house efficiently and well. But because of nutri­tional deficiency, your liver struggles, unable to fulfill its function of detoxification. The Detoxification program restores your supplies by adding specific nutrients to your diet that may have been missing. In addition, it addresses the lack of antioxidants in the standard American diet.

Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is water; our bodies are also sev­enty percent water. It is one of the essentials of life. Without enough water, the cells cannot function properly. Water is essential for detoxifi­cation, because our bodies eliminate most waste products with the help of water—in urine, in feces, which need enough hydration to move, and also in sweat. Most people today are dehydrated not only from not drinking enough water, but also because many foods and drinks, espe­cially caffeinated ones, soda, and alcohol, have a dehydrating effect.

The other basic raw material missing in the modern diet is fiber. Fiber from plants doesn’t get absorbed into the body as a nutrient; instead, it “sequesters” or pulls toxins out of the lower intestine (colon) after they have been processed in the liver and sent there for elimina­tion. Without a quantity of fiber, the toxins can sit in the intestines, irritating them, and getting reabsorbed back into the body.

Though “inflammation” is the buzzword in diet books and health mag­azines, most people understand just part of what it means. It is thought of as a localized area that is swollen, painful, red, and warmer than the areas around it. But inflammation is a survival mechanism of great complexity. Inflammation occurs when a set of chemicals in the blood are activated by something foreign or broken. These chemicals attract defense cells that protect tissues against whatever is injuring them, from a thorn to a disease-causing microbe. The repair system is also activated by calling in different cells to fix the damage. Normally, inflammation is self-regulated, which means that as soon as it is triggered, it will start reactions that will stop further inflammation. However, if the body is constantly exposed to irritants, the inflammation response is switched on all the time—not just at small specific sites, but systemically all over the body and throughout the blood. This is what happens when exposure to toxins is high: modern humans are chronically inflamed. Inflammation (from the Latin word inflatio, “to set on fire”) becomes to the body’s environment what wildfires are to the planet’s.

The body is built to work in harmony with nature, to make sure inflammation stays in check. It naturally sucks up certain nutrients from food that can switch inflammation on and off. An example of a nutrient that supports inflammation is omega-6 fatty acids; an exam­ple of one that switches it off, omega-3 fatty acids. These nutrients are designed by nature to exist in a balanced ratio everywhere, in our food and inside ourselves. Inflammation is not supposed to be left “on” for long, just neutral and always ready, if needed. Other essential anti­inflammatories such as polyphenols, curcumin, and MSM (methylsul­fonylmethane) should be available in our diet.

A diet loaded with the anti-inflammatory nutrients could do the trick, even with the modern volume of toxins triggering the inflamma­tion response. But without it, inflammation is “on” constantly. Soon, it is propagated throughout the body like the shockwaves of a grenade. It can become chronic and actually start degrading tissues, instead of fixing injuries. This lays the foundation for diseases like cancer, dia­betes, and most notably cardiovascular disease. Detoxification is designed to boost your anti-inflammatory nutrients while reducing the triggers for inflammation to a large degree.

When the organs of detoxification and elimination are overburdened and undersupported, they cannot do their job for the rest of the body. Depending on which cells or organs are affected the most, different dis­eases will manifest: arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and so forth. Some diseases occur when a body with reduced detoxification ability starts recruiting other systems to perform secondary “emergency” duties to help, sometimes in the extreme. This is all part of its design to survive. Take osteoporosis, for example. When acidity is chronic due to a bad diet, the bones can get recruited. Acidity control is more urgent for the body than bone formation, because high acidity is more lethal than osteoporo­sis. So the bones compensate by releasing some of their naturally alkaline bone salts, like calcium and phosphorus, to buffer acidity in the blood.

A specialist might then prescribe an expensive drug to stimulate the osteoblasts (the cells that “manufacture” bone) or large doses of cal­cium to encourage bone strengthening. But none of this makes sense without reducing blood acidity at the same time. Without the right alka­linity in the blood, that calcium will not be assimilated into bone and may actually end up in the coronary arteries or joints. (Furthermore, calcium is not deposited in the bones without adequate levels of vita­min D, a test for which is rarely ordered by primary-care physicians.) This is why drinking milk is now understood by some to be the worse possible way to combat osteoporosis. Milk generates acidity, which in the long run causes bone loss—not bone formation, as the milk indus­try wants you to believe. But we should take it back one step, before the treatment, and start with the question, “Why is the patient acidic?”

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