The All and Everything of Healthy Living

Health

Sambodhi Prem and Sandipa are sharing their health notes – Part I – section 1

The word ‘Organic’ and other door openers

The word ‘organic’ is a magic word that can open doors into a world of health. Years ago we moved to Melbourne, Australia and not knowing the place at all, we decided to live in a neighbourhood that had the greatest concentration of organic food stores which turned out to be a good choice.

Similar magic words are: ‘demeter certified’, ‘nutrient-dense’, ‘meditation’, ‘raw milk’, ‘sustainable’, ‘permaculture’, ‘solar’, etc. All these words have worlds of pragmatic people attached to them, representing a more holistic approach to life. Do a Google search on any of these words and you’ll find your inspirational tribe.

And don’t get us wrong, we’re not Luddites, your GP (and the regular medical science to which he or she is the portal) is great for dealing with many health issues (broken legs don’t heal just with herbs) but not so great for issues around maintaining health or what you eat.

This is not surprising as during the average medical training of about 5 years, a grand total of 5 hours is devoted to diet! So your GP simply does not know much about diet and the power of ‘healing yourself through what you eat’… because he or she has not been taught about it.

The pharmaceutical industry (one of the biggest industries in the world, after oil and armaments) which is heavily involved in the training of doctors, is not interested in diet, because if you can deal with health issues through eating the right kind of foods and preparing them properly, there will be less need for their expensive medicines.

Do watch ex-pharma sales rep Gwen Olsen’s YouTube video ‘Pharma Not in Business of Health, Healing, Cures, Wellness’ above. It is only 7 minutes and she spells it out best: the pharmaceutical industry, also known as ‘big pharma’ is not interested in healing people. It’s interest is in treating symptoms.

The classical music director Benjamin Zander once said:

Success is measured by how many shining eyes you see around you.”

 

Fat in diet – unjustified villain?

From the point of man’s evolution, an excessive amount of sugar has been in our diet for only a split second. Yes, we ate honey and we might have chewed on a sugar cane or eaten sugar beets and fruits, but only since the industrial revolution has the human race had an increasing amount of sugar in its diet. Whereas fat has been in our diet since ever.

Branding fat as the bogey man of our diet is short-sighted and ill-informed from an evolutionary point of view.

By the way there’s a great book called Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. We’re thanking them for so many great insights within the pages of that book. Lay your eyes on a copy if you can… pretty much all the essentials lined up in a row.

Ever since the food-chemical-agricultural-pharmaceutical-media apparatus managed to sell us ‘low-fat’, they have been raking in the cash from all sides.

Take for instance a wholesome food like milk: heat it up, take off the cream, sell the lowfat milk at a premium. Then sell the cream separately, sell the butter separately as another product, and sell cream loaded up with additives as ice cream – yet another product. Turn the bulk of it into skim milk powder… yet another product… And then we’re not even talking about the fact that pasteurised milk has lost most of its nutritional value, but we’ll get to that…

Milk that’s been turned into milk powder is rendered virtually indigestible. Look on the ingredients of so many products and see ‘milk solids’ or ‘milk concentrate’ which is made of milk powder – a dairy industry dream come true because of its unlimited shelf life.

Tip: don’t consume anything that contains ‘milk solids’ or ‘milk powder’ – look for the products free of this indigestible substance.

The deal with dairy

Milk that has been heated (pasteurised) and included (as milk powder, low-fat milk solids, etc.) into so many processed products that end up on peoples’ plates, is more likely to make you sick than nourished, because the very enzymes needed to digest dairy are wiped out by the heating and processing.

The sad merry-go-round: enter big pharma

Many reasons for illness are there, some of them will be discussed in this book, but whatever the situation, when people fall ill, they generally go to their GP who prescribes them medicines.

Enter big pharma. These medicines keep the intestinal tract and liver so preoccupied that people are unable to absorb their food properly or purify their blood.

So this is how the song goes: big agriculture (more about them later) produces inferior food… people get sick because of it… then big pharma sells them medicines… which make it more difficult to absorb and digest that inferior food. An unhappy merry-go-round.

We’re not suggesting that farmers and health professionals are knowingly harming people, but this whole thing of corporate irresponsibility is a product of an unconscious mindset. It reminds us of a Sufi story we have heard, of two partners in business… one who goes around the neighborhood at night putting tar on peoples’ windows… and in the morning a cleaning service passes through, run by his partner…. “window cleaning! window cleaning!”

Food, love, intimacy and sexuality

Food is strongly related to love and intimacy. We’re going to let you figure this out yourself… we’ll only ask a simple question – If you were a scientist and you would do a study where you had 40 equally obese people (obesity can be measured) and you put all of them on a healthy diet for 6 months and you educate them on how to prepare healthy, nourishing food for themselves. But half of them in addition to that, would once a month go to a two-day workshop around sexuality, body self-image, intimacy, emotional expression, meditation, etc. Which of the two groups will have lasting health benefits and be less likely to go back to their previous lifestyle?

It’s all about the mother’s milk. After birth, before the mind is formed, the link between love and food is forged. The child receives both food and love when it drinks from its mother’s breast. People who maintain a physically intimate love relationship are less likely to be overweight, because they are nourished on a deeper level.

We’re talking about intimacy and love.

A good moment to paraphrase the famous beer ad:

Love nourishes the parts where hamburgers and french fries can’t reach.”

 

Look after your mental ecology

What you eat influences your thinking. If your diet is healthy, wholesome and nutrientdense, you can think and feel more clearly and you can be more responsive and effective at what you do. Don’t take a person too seriously who just had a diet coke! Why?

Well, the American association of pilots advises its members not to drink diet products, due to the unavoidable effects on judgment caused by the artificial sweetener aspartame that is in all diet products. It has also been linked to serious illness – since two decades! See the article Donald Rumsfeld and the Strange History of Aspartame

If you want sweet, try using stevia instead – it’s a herb from South America originally, a natural sweetener. Do like the Japanese… they import more stevia than sugar. Smart.

Be sure to obtain the pure leaf extract… a lovely dark brown liquid substance, which is a whole food and supports the pancreas. Unlike the stevia now found on the health food shelves everywhere, a white refined liquid or powder, which surprise surprise, does not support the pancreas, but is considered superior because it’s sweeter. Too sweet to our taste…

It’s the gut, stupid

Excessive body fat is a consequence of couch potatoism, wrong diet and malabsorption. Your body can normalize if you give it a slow but steady detox, followed by proper nutrition.

Proper nutrition means the nutrients that you eat are reaching the bloodstream. And that’s a big if, because they can only reach the bloodstream if the digestive tract is functioning properly.

Unfortunately many digestive tracts are not doing their jobs. We eat food, but the nutrients are not reaching our bloodstream, that’s why we are often hungry. If your gut is not functioning properly, most nutrients will end up in the toilet bowl… and that’s a waste…

Therefore every journey of regaining one’s health should start with the gut. Or to put it another way, no restorative treatments will have lasting benefit if the health of the intestinal tract is not addressed first and foremost.

Our intestinal health, or lack of, is the result of a lifetime of our incorrect eating habits. Once that’s all cleared and happy, which can take a year or more, then the cells can receive their nourishment. And if they do, they can do their myriad functions perfectly as nature intended, and you’ll be working towards a regenerating body system, as opposed to a degenerating one.

The liver needs nutrients to do its job

You might wonder why we keep harping on about getting nutrients into your bloodstream. Well, one important reason is that the liver uses nutrients to turn fat-soluble toxins into water-soluble ones. Only then can the body get rid of toxins, by peeing them out.

This happens in the second stage of the liver’s activity cycle. I’ve forgotten what happens
in the first stage, but it doesn’t matter (as long as your naturopath knows! Luckily we know of one who does and we’ll get to that…) As long as you can remember that the poor liver needs nutrients to do its job of detoxification.

Many toxins in our bodies are fat-soluble, the body can’t do anything with them directly – it’s in a holding pattern with these toxins, until there are enough nutrients available to the liver for it to kick start detoxification.

 

Read on in our next issue…
Read all previous parts…
If you wish to download Sambodhi Prem and Sandipa’s book, please go to: The All and Everything of Healthy Living

 

Sambodhi and SandipaSambodhi Prem and Sandipa have experienced the world of alternative health for years and now they’d like to share what they’ve learned. They are two artists, musicians and gardeners… what do you get when they decide to write a book about health? You get a book that’s more poetic, more from the gut and from the heart, than from the head, because they’re able to say things that many health professionals don’t dare to say… When you have been on the brink of death (like one of them has) and been around the block with intestinal malfunction, depressed immune system, migraines, or walked up a flight of stairs and felt so tired that you needed a day’s rest, you start looking for answers.

We have previously met Sambodhi Prem and Sandipa in this magazine as singers and songwriters, when we presented their song Sweetness

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