Reengineering Life, Mind and Spirit

Go to any health website these days and one of the first things you will see is either a reference to, or an article about inflammation.  Modern research shows that inflammation is being blamed for anything from Alzheimer's to obesity to heart disease.  How can one condition cause so much destruction to the human body? Why is it rampant, and what can we do about it?

Inflammation refers to swelling and irritation of our bodily tissues in response to an outside irritant.  We get inflammation when our bodies are highly acidic - and much of the highly processed foods we eat in America ARE highly acidic.  Eating sugar or worse, high fructose corn syrup creates an acid condition in the body as does eating refined carbohydrates such as white breads or pastas. 

Inflammation is not necessarily a bad thing when it is acute - it is actually our body's natural response to an infection or irritant.  According to Medical News Today,

• Inflammation is the body's attempt at self-protection to remove harmful stimuli and begin the healing process.
• Inflammation is part of the body's immune response.
• The first stage of inflammation is often called irritation, which then becomes inflammation - the immediate healing process.
• Inflammation is followed by suppuration (discharging of pus). Then there is the granulation stage, the formation in wounds of tiny, rounded masses of tissue during healing.
• Acute inflammation - starts rapidly (rapid onset) and quickly becomes severe.
• Chronic inflammation - this means long-term inflammation, which can last for several months and even years.
• Our infections, wounds and any damage to tissue would never heal without inflammation - tissue would become more and more damaged and the body, or any organism, would eventually perish.
• Chronic inflammation can eventually cause several diseases and conditions, including some cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, periodontitis, and hay fever.
• Although scientists know that inflammation plays a key role in heart disease and several other illnesses, what drives inflammation in the first place is still a mystery.
• It should be remembered that inflammation is part of the healing process. Sometimes reducing inflammation is necessary, but not always.

So - how do we keep our bodies out of the chronic inflammation stage, or heal them if we are already there and experiencing health problems?

First of all, we stop putting garbage into our bodies that causes this state (yes, the allopathic medical profession says what causes inflammation is a mystery per the above, but there is plenty of evidence that food additives, high fructose corn syrup, and acidic conditions create inflammation).   Read food labels, and get rid of anything in your pantry that has high fructose corn syrup, a list of ingredients that goes on for miles and reads like greek, and is highly processed (convenient but deadly).  Better living through chemistry is no longer a good idea in this day and age.  Secondly, limit eating out to a couple of times a month, OR go to a restaurant where you know food ingredients and nutrition information will be listed.  Make sure you keep the sugar and fat down.  Third, take steps to alkalize your body.  How do you do that?  Eat more green veggies - even if you hate them now, over a short period of time your taste buds adjust and you start loving them.  Go to a farmer's market and buy fresh ones, they taste a lot better than what you get in the grocery store and have more nutrients.  Try to buy the darker green varieties - Iceberg or lighter lettuce is just like eating paper; it has almost no vitamins and minerals.  The darker varieties have more "phytonutrients" - plant chemicals that help prevent everything from cancer to insulin resistance. 

Even if you do these things, there are still more steps you can take to obtain optimum health.  Inflammation can be caused by an allergy that you don't know you have.  Doctors and insurance companies don't always authorize allergy tests, or they just authorize the cheaper "back scrape" method that is less than accurate.   You can find several online companies that will allow you to purchase a kit to test at home that is simple and convenient.  You can then take the results to your doctor and get the bigger test authorized.  And many of these tests take HSA cards too, so you can pay with pretax dollars. 

You can also take supplements that help with inflammation, or better yet, use meal replacement shakes that have patented, engineered ingredients that fight inflammation.  I am presently using Tumeric supplements which really seem to have made a difference

These supplements have Black pepper also, which has been shown to improve the efficiency of Tumeric as an inflammation fighter. 

I am also enjoying two meal replacement shakes daily from Isagenix that contain a proprietary blend of branched chain amino acids, trace minerals (as our soil is depleted of them), healthy fats and 24 grams of protein. 

I also recommend staying out of intense heat - this weekend's heat really turned up my chest pains as the area of the blood clot in my heart was inflamed.   Heat is generated by inflammation, so having environmental excess heat is a no brainer for worsening bodily inflammation.  Bad luck for those who live in Arizona! 

Stay tuned for more as I discover more healthy tips and information - hope this helps my readers. 

Continuing the saga of my heart attack and experience - as they weren't able to put a stent in my heart, they kept me in the Cardiac ICU for five days. The first few days, I wasn't allowed to get out of bed, thanks to the wound in my groin where the angioplasty line was inserted.  This meant the lovely and unholy bed pan was my friend.  No fun, no fun at all.

I did enjoy my daily visits by the cardiologists on staff at the time - one in particular - I am not sure of his name and he is not pictured on the hospital website but I think it was Dr. Fisher - took the time to explain to me how our health is affected primarily by our diet.  He said that our veins and arteries are naturally smooth, but when "scratchy" excess sugar molecules are transported, they scratch the walls.  Then, when we eat fats, these fats can stick to the walls of our cardiovascular transport system instead of moving on through.   Excess carbs turn to sugar in our systems - and we become prediabetic and then diabetic with much damage to our hearts and arteries. 

He also explained that the "Big Food" companies control the entire life cycle of our human consumption -from what we enjoy as teenagers to the pharmaceuticals we will need at the end, once these junk foods wreak the desired havoc on our bodies.  A brilliant business model, yes, but with no humanity whatsover in it.   Most "Big Name" junk foods were produced with GMO crops heavily saturated with Roundup - a known endocrine disruptor and possible cause of the uptick in fatty liver disease and liver cancer in nonalcoholics.  Why do they get away with this?  Why does RJ Reynold's still make tobacco products with mounds of undeniable evidence that smoking causes a wide variety of diseases?  Because we are all dedicated to our free enterprise system and are taking the good with the bad.  It gives me chills that our current leadership wants to completely privatize our health care.  With no checks and balances, this portends having profits take precedence over human life.   Not good. 

I am in the process of cleaning out my pantry.  No more "Ritz" crackers (new studies show they are very high in Glyphosate, the active chemical in Roundup which California has just labeled as as a carcinogen after a HUGE fight with the mother company, Monsanto), no more high sodium soups, no more BBQ sauces with high fructose corn syrup( cheaper to produce than "real" sugar, widely found in popular American food products, and known to accelerate cancer cell growth), and in short, no more mass produced poisons.  

I am in my third week since my big event - the simple acts of measuring the amount of oil I am cooking with instead of just throwing it in the pan, eating NO poisonous mass produced American crap, and limiting my portion sizes has led to a 14 pound weight loss.  I look for even greater results in the weeks to come.  

This great cardiologist also recommended that I add four supplements to my daily routine; Magnesium, Vitamin D, COQ-10, and Fish Oil.  I will cover each of these in depth in subsequent posts.