You Are What You Eat
I remember when I was a child, and naive. I thought if foods were in our supermarkets and served in our restaurants, it must mean they were okay to eat. I remember understanding that an apple might be a better choice than a bag of chips, but I didn’t understand that the bag of chips had chemicals in it that were absolutely not for human consumption. I didn’t know there was an FDA and I definitely didn’t know that this governing agency, employed with the task of protecting me from harmful foods, was failing miserably at its task, because of corruption, bureaucracy, ignorance, politics, whatever. I remember believing that the adults of this world had my best interest in mind, that they knew what was up, and that no one would ever purposely sell me food that could make me sick.
I was wrong about that.
Chemicals make food taste flavorful and addicting. That makes people buy it. When people buy it, the companies producing that food get rich. Chemicals also make it so that products can be “instant” – staying on the shelves of the supermarket without spoiling and requiring little to no prep time to make, which, let’s be honest, you and I and everyone else appreciates. You get where I’m going with this? There is a very strong financial incentive to create foods with chemicals, regardless of the fact that these foods are toxic to our bodies. There is very little incentive to do otherwise. Even the produce we buy is chemical-laden, sprayed with toxic pesticides and treated to stay and look fresh on its trip from the farm to your market. We want tomatoes that look red and ripe and we don’t ask how they got that way. We want sugar-free gum and sugar-free soda, but we don’t know much about what’s in there instead, making it taste so good.
Our country as a whole has made a silent, collective decision to operate with the ignorance-is-bliss policy. Only there is no bliss, because everyone’s sick! If you have MS, you cannot afford to continue on this way.
As some of you may already know, diet and supplements are the primary way I treat my MS. I do not take any of the disease-management drugs. For the last two and a half years, I’ve eaten a diet free of sugar, gluten, wheat, dairy, soy, and red meat, and I do my best to avoid any meat raised with antibiotics and produce that’s not organic. It was challenging at first – and still is in some respects – but something magical happened at around six months. My body reset to this new way of eating, and suddenly, when I would eat something with sugar or wheat or dairy, I would feel an overwhelming urge to cleanse my system of it and get back to my pure diet. I could actually FEEL the toxicity in my system when I would stray from my diet and eat a processed food.
If you have MS, regardless of if you choose to treat it with the drugs or not, eating a clean diet is simply essential. It will have a profound effect on how you feel. Your symptoms will improve, your energy will increase, and you will begin to heal your body. Suzanne Somers said it well in her book Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness
“We are what we eat. I realize it’s a cliche, but that’s the bottom line. Good food feed our cells. Cells make up who we are, and reproduce themselves by the billions each day…unless we are in a toxic state. When chemicals and toxins are part of our diet and lifestyle, our cells malfunction and malfunctioning cells are what make us sick and cause disease.
Malfunctioning cells are an umbrella for every disease known to man. … It really doesn’t matter the name given to the disease, the reason you have the sickness is because your cells are malfunctioning.
The toxins in your diet make it impossible for your cells to receive the nutrients they need to be healthy and reproduce. Toxins essentially turn your lights out. You fade away, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. Toxins wipe out your hormones, and the process of accelerated aging and disease begins. Toxins will kill you, it’s just a matter of how soon.
To be healthy you have to take your food seriously. Yet, we rarely give it a thought…we are so used to having chemicals all around us. We mindlessly grab that handful of chips, packaged cookies, instant soups, or consume dangerous oils. Trans fats, hydrogenated oils, additives, and irradiated foods are making us sick and killing us.”
I’ll be writing more about Suzanne Somers and the work she’s doing in future posts, but for now I want to just say that she is a true pathbreaker – leveraging her celebrity for an excellent cause, bringing to the public first-hand interviews with cutting-edge doctors who understand how vibrant, kick-ass health can actually be achieved (hint: it has very little to do with allopathic medicine). She’s amazing and I’m gonna call this required reading for anyone who wants to be or stay healthy.
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i have been looking at this book. lots of interesting and potentially exciting info but also a lot of unsubstantiated claims made as sweeping truths, so to all, be careful and always do your own research before taking up a health regimen.
Hi Shaz. The thing that’s precisely so exciting about this book is that all the claims made are substantiated by studies and based in science. Many of these studies have been done in Europe and others are simply not publicized, because it’s not in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies to fund studies for natural substances that cannot be patented (and therefore cannot make them money). Even more, Big Pharma does its best to confuse the public and suppress these studies so that they can continue to offer what seems like the only option for relief. The doctors interviewed in the book have been working in western medicine for years and have switched to “breakthrough” medicine because allopathic medicine offers such dismal results. The reason they’re so passionate about what they do is that they are working in the trenches, in clinical practice every day and seeing remarkable results. As far as I’m concerned, I put much more stock in that then in any “substantiated” studies that are approved by the glaringly corrupt FDA. Synthetic estrogen and progesterone hormones like Prempro and Premarin were “substantiated” and then shown to cause cancer in women. I agree that everyone should definitely do their own research and speak with a well-chosen doctor before making any treatment decisions, and I think that this book is an excellent place to start.