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Treating arthritis II: cleansing, nourishing and rebuilding

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Preventing arthritis is easy. Unfortunately, everything everyone does, or almost, promotes arthritis. But not just arthritis, all inflammatory degenerative conditions. The amazing thing is that what must be done to prevent any of them is quite well known. We have covered a lot of material relating to this already, and it was made clear at the start of Treating arthritis I, that natural healing, even when motivated by the healing of a particular condition, is done through healing the entire organism—all cells, all tissues, all organs, all parts—all at once. Therefore, we could just as well entitle this article “treating arthritis and all other inflammatory degenerative disease conditions” because the approach is fundamentally always the same.

Treating arthritis after it has already developed is not as easy as preventing it, but the extent to which it can be reversed and cured depends firstly on our own dedication and determination, and secondly on the state of the body and amount of damage it has sustained. The first article on arthritis was posted a while back. Its writing was motivated by my wish to help a friend who suffers from a highly debilitating form of arthritis for which conventional approaches are mostly inadequate—as inadequate as they are for all other degenerative chronic conditions.

It is useful for me to know that even if these efforts of were in vain in the sense that they were not acknowledged and didn’t motivate in them to make the recommended changes in lifestyle and diet, the article must have made some difference to some people because it has at this point been viewed more than 4600 times, and is the most viewed of all the posts on the blog after the Welcome page. If you are among the millions of people who suffer from arthritis, and also happens to be one of those who read Treating arthritis I, I hope you found it useful, and you are most welcome to let me and every other reader know how.

There is an obvious difficulty in overcoming any state of disease, especially one like arthritis. It is that everything about our success depends on our efforts to foster and nurture the conditions under which the organism can heal and repair itself. This is the only way to regain health. I want to emphasise this more explicitly:

It is only by creating, fostering and maintaining the biochemical, hormonal and physiological conditions under which the organism has the ability to clean, repair and rebuild its cells, tissues and organs that disease conditions—no matter what they are—can be prevented, overcome, reversed and recovered from. What we are required to do is provide the organism what it needs to do this.

The fundamental elements we concentrated on in the first part were: hydration, alkalisation, and magnesium. As was underlined, these are essential for everyone, but primordial for arthritis relief. The detailed recommendations were intended to help establish good habits. Their essence should be understood as follows.

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Illustration of painful, inflamed, arthritic joints. (Image taken from Everyday Health)

Every day, from the moment you get out of bed, your primary concern should be to hydrate and alkalise. This is particularly important in the morning and the first part of the day. There is a natural daily cycle governed by the circadian rhythm which controls all processes in the organism by a delicate balance of a vast number of different hormones. A good example relating to the hydration-dehydration cycle, is that the hormone calcitonin whose role is to put calcium from the bloodstream into bones and teeth, is active at night as dehydration sets in: as the water content of the blood decreases, the kidneys release renin and angiotensin, calcitonin is activated, and can thus do its work for fixing calcium where it is needed, subject to adequate amounts of the all-important fat-soluble vitamins D and K2. There are surely many more hormonal processes that depend on the diurnal cycle than those we currently know of. The point to remember is that we have to make hydration and alkalisation a priority in our life, and repeat this every day, while allowing dehydration during the night by typically having our last drink of water between 19 and 20 hours and nothing else until the morning.

Hydration and alkalisation are most effectively done when there is no food in the stomach, and both depend critically on maintaining a balanced intake of water and unrefined salt. An easy way to keep track of both and ensure optimal balance, is to prepare capsules filled with unrefined sea salt, taking one capsule for every half liter of water tea or green juice. This is particularly useful when doing a cleanse. In normal circumstances, it can also easily be achieved by having watery veggies like cucumber, celery or kohlrabi with liberal amounts of salt a couple of times a day. It is ideal to finish drinking about 30-45 minute before eating and not drink for two to three hours after. This leads to a natural rhythm of drinking, waiting, eating, waiting, and repeating this pattern throughout the day.

As this is so, it is easiest to hydrate and alkalise thoroughly each day by adopting a regime based on having only one big meal in the late afternoon or early evening, leaving the rest of the day before that to focus on these crucial aspects of our optimal health without the constraints of the timing surrounding eating. Snacking on raw veggies and salt is perfect and can be done at any time regardless of drinking, because it is also a kind of drinking: watery veggies are basically water with minerals, enzymes, phytonutrients and some fibre. Intermittent fasting, as is called, has many metabolic and physiological benefits not least of which is natural detoxification.

We have looked at some of the key aspects of this practice in The crux of the intermittent fasting, and I plan to deepen this investigation in the future, but maybe the most useful consequence of it, which should also come across as a rather obvious, is that if the body is getting food of any kind that requires processing, then it will immediately engage in doing just that: processing it to extract what it can from it.

Food processing is prioritised and mobilises much of the body’s energy and resources: blood supply (directed to the stomach), secretions from the digestive organs (acid and enzymes from the stomach; insulin, bicarbonate and more digestive enzymes from the pancreas; and bile produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder), active transport across the intestinal wall into the bloodstream, increased workload on kidneys and liver in filtering metabolic wastes out of the blood, and although you don’t feel it, you can be sure that this does indeed require a lot of energy and bodily resources.

Allowing the body to rest from all this food processing related physiological activity leaves all this energy for other tasks which generally fall in the category of “clean and repair”. This is the natural detoxification that the body desperately needs to engage in as often and regularly as possible but unfortunately cannot because we are, from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, almost constantly eating. As soon as we take the foot off the gas pedal and give the system a much-needed break from food processing, the organism immediately begins to clean and repair itself. This is why fasting is so good.

Now, if you, in addition to that, provide the organism with a supply of vital nutrients—enzymes, vitamins, minerals—in a form that requires no digestion and is immediately absorbable from the intestines into the bloodstream in the form of vegetable juices, this becomes an amazing way to bring about self-healing in what will indeed look like a most miraculous manner depending on how sick we are at the onset. This is what happens during a juice fast or cleanse, and although fasting has been practiced for centuries, and juice fasting for many decades, both with awe-inspiring results, one recent and vocal advocate of juicing cleanses for healing is the Englishman Jason Vale who runs the Juicy Oasis retreat and healing centre in Portugal (see Superjuice Me on FMTV).

Arthritis sufferers would do extremely well to consider doing such a juice fast as well as adopting intermittent fasting as a long-term daily practice. These measures—in and of themselves—could resolve the problem permanently in a relatively brief period of time.

The importance of magnesium was also emphasised in Treating arthritis I. The best is to have baths with one cup of nigari and one cup of baking soda at least once a week (a couple of times is great, and in some circumstances you may want or need to have them every other day). We should soak the whole body for 45–60 minutes. Magnesium oil, a saturated solution of nigari in water, is also very effective. Putting it on the skin of the arms, upper back and neck, chest and belly, legs and bum, avoiding sensitive skin of the armpits and genital area, and leaving it at least 30 minutes before showering. It can work wonders to loosen tight, achy or cramping muscles, and will often do this quickly from the first application. It doesn’t need to be done every day, but it can for several months without risking overwhelming the system with too much magnesium. Oral supplementation with liposomal (fat-bound) magnesium is also a very good idea.

Once we have understood the importance of these elements of health, healing and recovery that are hydration, alkalisation, magnesium, juicing green vegetables and intermittent fasting, and incorporated them into our life as fundamental pillars of optimal health, then we can and must turn to the question of what to eat when we do eat.

When we consider what to eat from the perspective of eating to most effectively promote health, the considerations can be very different from what they might be were we to take any other point of view as to our primary motivation. For optimal health, the first and foremost important consideration is the old and well-known principle first do no harm. This means what it says, but more explicitly means to not eat anything that has or may have detrimental effects on the organism. Using “has” implies negative effects have been identified and demonstrated to a lesser or greater extent, whereas “may have” means that even though there may be little, inconclusive or no evidence, there are nevertheless reasons to be skeptical or at least cautious about its safety or health benefits. Simple examples include cigarette smoke that is well established to have multiple negative impacts on our health, and industrial pesticides demonstrated to be endocrine disruptors or neurotoxic: a new brand of cigarettes or a new yet untested agricultural pesticide should therefore also be considered as potentially harmful. This is just common sense.

Following this principle encourages us to eliminate industrial chemicals and additives from our food and drink, but also from our cleaning and body care products. This can sound as an obvious and simple first step, but it is not so easy nor so simple without considerable care and attention to detail. Moreover, it also implies, right from the start, no industrially processed products of any kind, and that is a major step for most people given the state of affairs and average dietary regime of the bulk of the population in industrialised countries.

Assuming you are reading this because you are already on the lookout for better ways of doing things, as well as already feeding yourself with real food, this is not such a big deal. And in practice, it means this: buy and eat only whole organically grown or raised food, use only the simplest and most benign organic cleaning and body care products, drink the highest quality filtered or natural spring or mineral water that is certified to be free of known major and minor pollutants, and take only the highest quality supplements. Doing only this ensures an already excellent base for a healthy lifestyle, and it is already enough to avoid and prevent a lot of potential health disorders.

It is, however, not enough if our goal it to be optimally healthy, never have any health disorders at all, and live strong and vibrant to 100, 120 or 140 years of age. It is, also, not enough if we are trying to stop progression, reverse already existing damage, and eventually recover from our own arthritic condition that may have been causing us pain for years or decades. In either case, we need to go further.

The statement in the opening paragraph about the universality of the natural healing approach to treatment and prevention of disease conditions is here both appropriate and necessary to emphasise:

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening arthritis symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening cardiovascular heart disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening cardiovascular brain disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening Alzheimer’s disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening multiple sclerosis symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening Crohn’s disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

and, of course, the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening type II diabetes symptoms and degeneration is also chronic systemic inflammation,

even if we know that the root cause of this diabetes is chronically elevated glucose and insulin levels, that this leads to systemic inflammation, which in turn leads to the pathological symptoms and degeneration, something that is underlined by the fact that diabetics suffer all other chronic diseases listed above 200-400% more than non-diabetics.

This was a forceful, repetitive, heavy-handed way to express and highlight this fundamental characteristic that is shared by so many disease conditions. But it is, I think objectively, the most important point to have in mind when our intention is to really understand health and to be ourselves, at all levels, an expression and embodiment of health. Because whether it is inflammation in the joints as in arthritis, in the arteries supplying the heart or brain as in cardiovascular disease, in the brain itself as in Alzheimer’s disease, in the nerves throughout the body as in multiple sclerosis, in the lining of the gut as in Crohn’s disease, or basically everywhere in the body as for diabetes, this inflammation—in all cases—is chronic and systemic. Hence, it is this which must be addressed and corrected, and it is addressed and corrected in exactly the same way in every case.

Taking into account differences and thus tuning the treatment, especially in what concerns reversing and repairing existing damage, is important. But it is definitely secondary with respect to the root cause of degeneration that is systemic inflammation. And even these differences whose importance varies depending on the specificity of the condition we aim to address, all of them—when working with natural, nutrition-based medicine—are useful and health-promoting for all conditions: none are detrimental to the treatment of any other specific disease.

For example, supplementing with organic silicic acid, collagen, vitamin C, and vitamin D is essential for repairing and rebuilding cartilage and soft tissues, and thus essential in the treatment of arthritis. It is, however, greatly beneficial for everyone to supplement with these micronutrients because all will benefit from it. It is essential to supplement with and maintain very high levels of vitamin B12 (>1200 pg/ml) when treating multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease, but it is excellent for everyone to do the same. It is essential to supplement with L-Carnosine when treating Crohn’s disease because it is particularly useful for healing the lining of the gut. But it is also very beneficial for everybody to take because it helps to stop and repair the damage caused by glycation, which affects everyone to a greater or lesser extent depending on circulating glucose and insulin concentrations.

And thus, the first principle is to eliminate from our life what causes inflammation: everything that triggers an inflammatory reaction in the body. This obviously includes all allergens which, even if there are some well-known foods that have been recognised as causing allergic reactions, mild or severe, in a large fraction of the population, and could, therefore, be eliminated from our diet directly in order to minimise unnecessary exposure to potentially harmful substances, it is nevertheless ultimately an individual assessment and testing of food intolerance that is needed.

The foods most likely to cause an inflammatory immune system response are gluten-containing grain products and animal milk products. Estimates of intolerance for these two classes of foods—grains and dairy—range between 50 and 75% in most countries, although evolutionary adaptations can have an important effect. Good examples are the indigenous Swiss mountain dwellers and the African nomadic tribe called Masai, who, by consuming most of their daily calories from milk and milk products for thousands of years, have developed the genetic adaptations for the immune system to tolerate the proteins in milk that cause mild to severe allergic reaction in close to 75% of the world’s population, with the most extreme proportions of 90-95\% in the Chinese and other Asian populations that have never, throughout their history, consumed milk products.

The other two classes of foods that are established as inflammatory—highly inflammatory—even if they rarely cause intolerance or allergic reactions, are insulin-stimulating carbohydrates and omega-6 fats. In the case of these substances, it is not inflammation triggered by a reaction to them of the immune system. Rather, they themselves trigger inflammatory biochemical pathways: several hundred inflammatory pathways! These foods should therefore be eliminated from the diet: all simple and starchy carbohydrates, and all vegetable oils. Nuts and seeds, which contain omega-6 oils, can be had whole in small quantities. Olive oil is mono-unsaturated and is the best vegetable oil to use for salads. No omega-6 rich vegetable oil should be used.

I don’t think it’s necessary nor useful to discuss the inflammatory effects of industrial chemicals because we already know that they only cause harm and should be eliminated from our food supply, avoided at all costs in all their other forms by everyone who is even superficially concerned with their health.

This is our first conclusion: to minimise inflammation, it is essential to eliminate inflammatory foods; and the most inflammatory classes of foods are dairy, grains, insulin-stimulating carbohydrates and omega-6 oils. To overcome or prevent inflammatory disease conditions, arthritis but also all others, we have to stop eating these foods. It is as simple as that. And although it is true that we could potentially supplement with adequate types and amounts of enzymes to try to ensure that all types of proteins found in these foods are actually broken down properly during digestion in order to avoid triggering an immune response, it does seem silly to eat or drink something that we know cannot be metabolised correctly and which is, for this reason, harmful to the organism, but still try to mitigate the harm it causes by taking a supplement of those enzymes needed to digest it that do exist even if our body’s genetic and evolutionary makeup doesn’t produce. This reflection applies to dairy and grain proteins to which we are intolerant. It doesn’t apply to insulin-stimulating carbohydrates or omega-6 fats, because these seldom cause allergic reactions in people, but are nevertheless universally inflammatory.

The second principle is to consume anti-inflammatory foods. It should not be a surprise to find out that the most anti-inflammatory foods (think of them as soothing to the body), also tend to be the most alkalising: raw, green, chlorophyl-rich plant foods, and especially green vegetable juices. The most anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant fat is the miraculously beneficial, highly saturated (96%), and medium chain triglyceride-rich (50%) coconut oil. Hence, without any additional considerations, we already know that an optimally anti-inflammatory and healing diet should be based on mostly raw vegetables and salads, in particular green ones, green juices, and lots of coconut oil from all coconut products.

Also not surprisingly, we can have as much of these nutrient-rich foods as we want, and the more the better. This, it turns out, is an extremely useful selection criterion to determine the level to which something can be good or bad: how much of it we can eat, and what are the consequences, if any, of having increasingly larger quantities; is there an upper limit in the sense that above a certain amount we can expect negative consequences, or is there only a lower limit below which therapeutic value is not noticeable? For what concerns green juices, greens and coconut oil, I would say that there are only lower limits to the minimum we should all intake in order to be perfectly healthy, and no upper limits within what can be considered reasonable through the body’s auto-regulation mechanisms of satiety and digestive function.

For instance, we can drink a 250 or 500 ml of green juice, and that’s great. We can drink 1000 ml and that’s much better. We can drink two or three litres of green juice per day, and that is truly amazingly therapeutic, something that would be done during a juice cleanse. For coconut oil and milk, we can have one or two tablespoons per day, and that’s really good (apparently enough to slow down cerebral degeneration). We can have five to seven tablespoons per day, and that’s far better (apparently enough to reverse early stage dementia and Alzheimer’s). We can have as much as 200 or 300 ml (between 13 and 20 tbsp) of oil per day, and that’s better still. In the case of coconut oil and milk, eating such large quantities amounts to a lot of calories, all from fat which makes us feel really full and not willing to eat anything. This is the body’s natural hormonal messaging system to prevent over-eating and it works perfectly well in this case. It also works well for protein. Only for sugars and starches does it not work so well because we evolved having very few carbohydrates and thus didn’t have to develop the mechanism to avoid overeating them—what pretty much the whole world is doing nowadays.

Most nuts and seeds can be considered as superfoods because of they are very concentrated sources of minerals, antioxidants, unique phytonutrients, vitamins, as well as fat and protein. Because they are seeds, they also have anti-nutrient—phytates and enzyme inhibitors—without which they would not keep for months on end as they do, and would spoil much more quickly. These are not as strong as they are in cereal grains, which have can keep for thousands of years, as they have in some pyramids, and then sprout after soaking in water for a while. This is nature’s very clever way to ensure dry seeds retain the nutrients needed to grow the plant when the conditions are suitable. But it implies that we must do something to them before we can consume them and know that they are wholly beneficial and health-promoting rather than only partially so.

The solution is simple: soak the dry seeds or nuts in water for 24 hours to hydrate them and activate the biological mechanisms responsible for sprouting—to get the seed ready to produce a new plant by making inactive the enzyme inhibitors and phytates—and making all of its nutrients fully available. Soaked nuts and seeds can definitely be eaten hydrated, and are much more filling that way because they hold as much water as their dry weight (they double in weight and volume when fully hydrated), but they can also be dehydrated after having soaked for 24 hours, and be preserved for much longer than the couple of days they can in the fridge before going bad when hydrated. This is what I do at home: 24 hours of soaking with rinsing and changing of the water a couple of times in between, and 24-36 hours of drying in the dehydrator at 45 C to keep all enzymes alive.

Roasting or otherwise heating the nut or seed also neutralises the anti nutrients, but this also destroys the enzymes, making it a dead food that will require the pancreas to produce the necessary enzymes for digestion, as well as cause digestive stress and acidification. Nonetheless, roasted nuts are nutritious and delicious, and thus great to have once in a while. Either way, sprouted or not, nuts and seeds are by their nature nutrient-rich concentrated food and should generally only be had in relatively small quantities (a handful or two). Doing this will also prevent excessive intake of omega-6 fats that make up about 50% of their weight, even if whole nuts and seeds have their own anti-oxidants that give additional protection from free-radicals in the body.

Having a somewhat different status as food, but being naturally most anti-inflammatory, are the trio of ginger, turmeric and garlic. Some may have difficulty digesting garlic (as is the case with onions as well), but ginger and turmeric are generally very easy to digest and actually digestive aids. It is important in the treatment of arthritis to consume them often, even daily, and in liberal amounts. Ginger is very easy to have in relatively large quantity by cold press juicing it in your daily green juice (that’s what we do), which guarantees you a good therapeutic amount on a daily basis. For turmeric, it is also possibly to find it fresh in some places, but it stains everything that it comes in contact with. Mostly for this reason, we take it in capsules, where it can even be concentrated further to be more potent still. The beneficial compounds in turmeric are most effectively absorbed when taken with plenty of fat (coconut fat is perfect).

Animal protein other than from dairy—eggs, meat and fish—is important for the body but also highly acidifying and therefore inflammatory. In addition, the proteins need to be completely broken down first by the acidic gastric juices in the stomach and then by the digestive enzymes in the intestines in order for the amino acids of which they are made to be available to the brain and other organs, but also prevent partially digested proteins from finding their way into the bloodstream and causing additional inflammatory immune responses.

Therefore, we have to eat only small quantities of the highest quality grass-fed or wild caught animal products, give the organism plenty of time to cleanse the metabolic byproducts of their digestion, and, I recommend, supplement with digestive enzymes when eating animal foods. In fact, I recommend taking digestive enzymes whenever you eat cooked foods: we do not want to get anywhere close to exhausting the pancreas’ enzyme-producing potential, because enzymes are far more important for all other molecular repair and rebuild processes than they are for digesting cooked food, and we need to keep them for these purposes if we aim to live healthy for a long time.

This is our second conclusion: to minimise inflammation and maximise repairing and rebuilding of damaged tissues, it is essential to consume the most powerfully anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense and anti-oxidant foods. The diet should therefore be mostly raw, primarily green vegetables, green juices, special anti-inflammatory foods such as ginger, turmeric and garlic, unlimited amounts of coconut products rich in coconut oil, some sprouted nuts and seeds, and small amounts of clean animal flesh products accompanied with plenty of time for metabolic cleansing on a continual basis. The supplements most important in treating and reversing arthritis are organic silica, collagen complex (Reverse Aging), whole food vitamin C (from The Synergy Company), magnesium (L-Threonate; both from Mercola), B12 (Thorne), the fat soluble vitamins A-D-K (DaVinci), turmeric extract (Organic India and Gaia Herbs), niacinamide (Thorne), and the universally needed but universally deficient iodine (in Lugol’s solution). In addition, it may be really beneficial to take high doses (50000 IU/day) of vitamin D3 for at least three and maybe up to six months or more, in order to set the body on its course to intensive healing and recovery from years of arthritic degeneration. This has been found to be very effective in some people. Supplementing with proteolytic enzymes is also very important to accelerate healing and repair of damaged tissues.

Incorporating these principles and specific recommendations into one’s life, not as a special diet, but as a comprehensive way of taking care of this amazing organism that is the human body mind, will not only treat, reverse and cure arthritis to the greatest extent, and maybe even completely depending on the level of degeneration, but will do the same for all inflammatory conditions, which underlie all degenerative diseases. In addition, the immune system will grow to be so strong that no infectious diseases will be able to take hold or develop within your body: never get a cold, never get a flu, never catch anything at all.

Finally, there are two crucially important factors which are not related to diet, and that in many ways can overshadow all other efforts to heal and remain in optimal health: lack of sleep and psychological/emotional stress. They are more than important: they are foundational. Without good sleep and minimal stress it is impossible to become and remain vibrantly healthy, no matter what else we do or don’t do.

This shouldn’t be understood to mean that if we don’t sleep well or are overstressed there is no point doing anything else. On the contrary! It is all that much more important to do everything else we can. However, it means that if we are already doing everything else, then without correcting the conditions causing us stress and preventing us to get enough restful sleep, we will never reach our optimal health potential.

Having said that, you can be sure that they go hand in hand: optimal nutrition and biochemistry promote less stress and better sleep; better sleep and less stress promote more balanced biochemistry, digestion, cleansing, and cellular rebuilding and repairing. They are the two sides of the same coin, one that is measurelessly priceless: optimal health.

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The worst mistake in the history of the human race

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In We were never meant to eat simple or starchy carbohydrates, I mention those three books of Professor Jared Diamond that I have read, in the context of archeological evidence for the ill effects of the grain-based diet that our first farming ancestors adopted some 10000 years ago. This morning, I stumbled upon this article (link to pdf file) by him that was published in Discover magazine in May 1987. He boldly gave it the title The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (link to Discover magazine’s online version with adds and everything else). It is a short article that presents the issue succinctly, but nonetheless convincingly, I think.

He doesn’t mention anything about insulin and its metabolic effects, (maybe he doesn’t even know anything about the topic). He only discussed archeological evidence and studies. But I think that if you were not completely convinced by my post that the human animal that we are simply shouldn’t be eating simple or starchy carbohydrates at all, then reading Diamond’s article will certainly help in that respect. If you were convinced, (which I truly hope is the case), I have no doubts that you will certainly find his article interesting, maybe even more so in the light of the physiological background presented in mine.

On the same topic, the very extensive work of Dr. Loren Cordain and his team turned him into a world scientific celebrity, and rightly so, I think. His public lecture on the Origins and Evolution of the Western Diet is really incredibly informative, interesting and eye-opening. Naturally, it goes in the same direction, but from a somewhat different angle.

Healthy and lucid from childhood to old age

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So you’ve been around for 70 years, and you’re still well enough to read this. Have you actually made it past 75, 80 or even 85? This is really great! Through a combination of different factors, various reasons, personal habits and choices, you have made this far.

Maybe because of your genetic makeup: Your parents and grand-parents all lived well into their 80’s or 90’s by following a kind of innate, traditional wisdom based on the understanding that we really are what we eat, in a very real sense, and you’ve done more or less the same, following in their footsteps.

Maybe because you have always been moderate in your eating habits: You’ve never been overweight; you’ve never eaten much sweets or deserts; you’ve never eaten much preserved meats and canned foods; you’ve never drank much alcohol; you’ve never drank sweetened soft drinks, juice or milk—mostly just water, always paying attention not to drink too much coffee or strongly caffeinated tea.

Maybe you have made it this far because you have also been moderately active throughout your life, never exercising too much or too intensely, but always quite regularly: Walking; doing light exercises for your joints (rotations of the arms for your shoulders, stretches for your neck and back, and exercises for your knees); riding a bike a couple times a week in the good season, not getting off the bike but instead riding up those hills; maybe you went skiing a week or two most years; went for long walks or even hikes in the mountains during holidays; or did a little swimming in the sea or in lakes when the occasion presented itself.

The golden middle, as my grand-father called it: everything is moderation. And he almost made it to 90 years of age! But no matter what the reason is, it is truly wonderful that you have indeed made it this far. Then again, you might be young or middle aged, but interested—maybe somewhat, maybe highly, but nonetheless interested—in being healthy and lucid for as long as possible, and hopefully well into your old age.

Either way, young or old, you live in this modern world like most of us. You live in a city, you drive a car, you work in an office, you fly or flew often on business trips, maybe even several times per week. You eat meat and fish; bread, potatoes, rice and pasta; fruits and vegetables, all from the supermarket.  And so you have, throughout your life, been continuously exposed to increasing amounts of chemicals, heavy metals and various other toxins in our environment, most of which have been accumulating in your tissues. You live in the modern world like most of us, and so you have taken medication on various occasions during your life: antibiotics a few times, maybe some pain killers, maybe some sleeping pills, maybe simple anti-histamines when you had a cold. Maybe you are and have even been taking medication on a daily basis for some “minor” but “chronic” condition.

You live in this modern world and so you have been told to drink plenty of fluids and that salt is bad and should be avoided. You’ve been told that fat in general, but especially saturated fats and cholesterol, are bad because they cause heart disease: they cause your arteries to clog up with fatty plaques that eventually block them to give you a heart attack. You’ve been told to avoid them as much as you can, and instead to consume polyunsaturated vegetable oils, plenty of whole grains and cereal products, legumes, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and so you have done that: you have decreased or almost eliminated your intake of butter, eggs, fatty cheese, fatty yoghurt, red meat—never ever eating the fatty trimmings, and also of the fatty skin on chicken or fish.

Consequently, you have increased your intake of morning cereal—but only sugar-free whole grain cereal like muesli; increased your intake of bread—but usually whole grain bread; increased your intake of rice—but usually brown rice; increased your intake of pasta—but usually also whole grain pasta; and increased you intake of potatoes—but never fried, only baked, steamed or boiled potatoes.

Maybe your total lipoprotein levels are around 220 or 240 mg/dl, and you have been told that this is too high, and for this reason you have tried to further reduce your fat intake, and are even taking statins or other cholesterol-lowering drugs, every day, just like hundreds of millions of other people in this modern world.

Unfortunately, you have not been told that you should be drinking water; not fluids in general, and that there are many reasons water, ageing and disease are intimately connected—the lack of water, that is. In addition to that, you have not been told that it is not enough to drink some water sometimes: it is essential to drink water before meals. Unfortunately, you have not been told that sodium is one of the most important minerals for health: why else would the kidneys, without which we cannot live for more than a few days, go to such great lengths to prevent its excretion in the urine, and keep it in the blood if it wasn’t? But even more unfortunately, you have not been told that minerals in general, are essential for health, and that unrefined sea salt contains all naturally occurring trace minerals is proportions that closely match those of several of our bodily fluids. And that furthermore, proper bodily function depends intimately on the balance of the minerals available, and that our salt-phobic and calcium-phillic society has led to most of us becoming completely over-calcified while growing more and more deficient in the rest of the trace minerals, and in particular magnesium. The link between generalised magnesium deficiency and minerals, ageing and disease are now everywhere painfully obvious.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told that cholesterol is absolutely vital for life and good health: that it forms the membrane of every single cell in your body and in that of every animal, that your entire nervous system and especially your brain are built using cholesterol and depend intimately on the availability of plenty of cholesterol, that your hormonal system relies completely on cholesterol for building hormones, and that your best defences against infectious and inflammatory pathogens are in fact the lipoproteins carrying around the precious cholesterol throughout your body. You have not been told that cholesterol is so important that it is manufactured continuously by our liver to keep up with the body’s needs, and that therefore, the cholesterol we eat does not in any ways raise lipoprotein concentrations. You have not been told that in addition to cholesterol, fat is also essential for building hormones, essential for absorbing minerals from the intestines into our bloodstream, essential for the binding of these minerals into the bones and teeth, essential for energy production in every cell of our body.

Furthermore, you have not been told that saturated fats like those found in animal products and coconut oil are molecularly stable, whereas unsaturated and particularly polyunsaturated oils such as those that make up all vegetable oils are molecularly unstable, some more than others, for the double bonds between carbon atoms in the chain that forms the fat molecule are weak and readily broken to permit some other unstable molecule seeking a free electron to attach in order to make the final molecular configuration stable. But that those unstable compounds are actually scavenging around for any electron to bind to, and unfortunately most of the time if not always, these free-radicals will attach themselves to healthy tissue without proper enzymatic action to guide them in the proper place and position, thus damaging our tissues.

In fact, you have not been told that all large studies that have been conducted to evaluate the “health-promoting” properties of polyunsaturated fats have not only failed to do so, but instead have shown that the more polyunsaturated oils we consume, the more atherosclerotic plaques develop in our arteries, and therefore the more likely we are to suffer a heart attack or stroke. And that on the contrary, the more saturated fats we consume, the less plaques we have, and consequently, the less likely we are to have a heart attack or a stroke (see any of the books about cholesterol in Further readings).

You have not been told, that for millions of years our species has evolved consuming most of its calories in the form of saturated fats from meat and animal products—in some cases exclusively from these, from coconut and palm oil (where these grow), and to a much lesser extent from polyunsaturated fats, and this only in whole foods such as fish, nuts and seeds—never concentrated into vegetable oils.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told that we were never meant to eat simple or starchy carbohydrates: that eating such carbohydrates always triggers the pancreas to secrete insulin in order to clear the bloodstream of the damaging glucose in circulation, that chronically elevated glucose levels lead to chronically elevated insulin levels that in turn lead to insulin resistance—first in our muscles, then in our liver, and finally in our fat cells—which leads to type II diabetes, to heart disease from the buildup of plaque in the coronary arteries and vessels, and to Alzheimer’s and cognitive degradation from the buildup of plaque in the cerebral arteries and vessels.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told and have not considered that all the multitude of chemicals and heavy metals that we are exposed to in the medications we take, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the soaps and shampoos we use, and in the household products we employ to keep our house sparkling clean and bacteria-free, accumulate in our bodies. They accumulate in our fat cells, in our tissues, in our organs, in our brains. They burden, disrupt and damage our digestive system, our immune system, our hormonal system, our organs, tissues and cells. Sometimes they reach such concentrations that we become gravely ill, but none of the doctors we visit in seeking a solution and relief understand why. Most often, however, we don’t get gravely ill but instead start developing different kinds of little problems: we get colds more often and take longer to recover, we get mild but regular digestive upsets that we can’t explain and that seem to get worse with time, we get headaches and have trouble sleeping, we feel depressed, tired, alone, helpless, not acutely but enough to disturb us enough that we notice it.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you have not been told how truly essential vitamin B12 really is, but how, for a variety of different reasons, blood concentrations B12 decrease with age, and eventually dwindle to very low levels. That B12 is essential most crucially to preserve the myelin sheath that covers all of our nerves healthy, and thus crucially important for everything that takes place throughout the nervous system, which means, everything in the body and brain. Levels of B12 should never go below 450 pg/ml, and ideally should be maintained at 800 pg/ml throughout life, from childhood to old age hood.

Can we do anything about all this?

The most fundamental point to understand is that everything about your health depends on the state of health of your digestive system. All absorption of nutrients and elimination of waste happens in the digestive system. Since our health depends on proper absorption and efficient elimination, the digestive system should be our first as well as our main concern.

The first step is to rebuild and establish a healthy intestinal flora of beneficial bacteria (breakdown and absorption), and at the same time begin to detoxify the body and clean out the intestines (elimination). This is done by taking high quality probiotics to supply beneficial bacteria on a daily basis, high quality chlorella to both supply a lot of micronutrients and pull out heavy metals, and water-soluble fibre like psyllium husks to clean out the intestines by pushing out toxins and waste products. If you are not already taking these, read Probiotics, chlorella and psyllium husks.

The second step is by far the most important, and in fact, crucial dietary change necessary to achieve optimal metabolic health. It is to eliminate simple and starchy carbohydrates from you diet, and replace them with more raw vegetables—especially green and leafy salads and colourful vegetables such as red and yellow peppers, more nuts and seeds—especially raw and soaked, more good and efficiently absorbed protein—especially eggs, fish and raw cheeses, and much more saturated fats—especially coconut oil (at least 3 tablespoons per day) and butter. Doing this is  essential for the systemic detoxification, rebuilding and then maintaining a healthy digestive system. Everything should be organic: you obviously don’t want to be adding to your toxic load while trying to detoxify.

And the third step is to supplement our now-excellent, health-promoting diet with a few essential and very important nutrients that are, for most of us, difficult to obtain. The only such supplements that I believe to be essential, and that my family and I take daily, are: Vitamin B12 and vitamin D3—the most important supplements to take for overall health, but in which we are almost all deficient; Krill oil—a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat with its own natural anti-oxidants, highly absorbable, and particularly important for proper brain function; Ubiquinol—the reduced and thus useable form of coenzyme Q10, critical for cellular energy production, and a powerful lipid-soluble anti-oxidant that protects our cells from oxidative damage, but both of whose synthesis as CoQ10 and conversion from CoQ10 to ubiquinol drop dramatically after about age 30-40; Vitamin K2—essential for healthy bones but very hard to get other than from fermented foods, which we typically eat little of.

In addition to these, we usually always take Astaxanthin and turmeric—very powerful antioxidants with amazing general and specific anti-ageing health benefits, and also sometimes take a whole-foods-multi—basically dehydrated vegetables and berries made into a powder and compressed into a pill for extra micronutrients. (You can read about all of these supplements on Wikipedia or any other page you will find by doing an internet search.)

I tend to buy our supplements from Dr Joseph Mercola, (whose website also provides a lot of info about these and other supplements, as well as about a multitude of other health-related issues and conditions), because I trust that his are among if not the best on the market: there’s really no point in buying cheap supplements at the pharmacy, and risking doing yourself more harm than good, as would happen with a rancid omega-3 supplement, or a synthetic Vitamin D, for example.

Staying healthy and lucid is, in reality, quite easy and simple. Unfortunately, most of us, including, and maybe especially our medical doctors, just don’t know how. And so, medical diagnostic and high-tech treatment technologies continue to improve and develop, and medical expenditures continue to rise throughout the modern world, but we are sicker than ever: more obesity, more diabetes, more strokes, more heart attacks, more cancers, more Alzheimer’s, more leaky guts, more ulcers, more liver failures, more kidney failures, and on and on. There is more disease, more pain, more suffering and more premature deaths. And all of it is completely unnecessary and avoidable by such simple and inexpensive means as those outlined herein. The only critical point is that only you can do it; nobody else can do it for you.

We were never meant to eat simple or starchy carbohydrates

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The transition between hunting-gathering and farming took place over a period of about 1000 years between 11000 and 10000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a crescent-like shape of land that stretches across parts of Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iran and Iraq. The first people to settle were hunter-gatherers that built villages in places they found provided enough food to sustain them without having to move around. At first, these were “seasonal” villages located in different areas, to which they returned in a seasonal cycle. Finding ways to store the grain from the large seeded grasses like barley and emmer wheat growing wild but in large quantities, allowed them to settle permanently. This most likely led to a rapid growth of the population, that was matched with a proportionally rapid growth in the demand for food. The response was the development of agriculture.

The gradual decimation of the wild game over the course of about 2000 years led to the domestication of the most easily domesticable, large mammals to inhabit the region, the sheep, goat and pig, all about 8000 years ago, followed by the cow about 6000 years ago. It is very interesting and important to point out, from an anthropological point of view, that the Fertile Crescent—the seat of civilisation—is the region in the world where there were the greatest number of large-seeded grasses, as well as the greatest number of large, easily domesticable animals, by far.

The cultivation of cereal crops allowed our ancestors, some 10000 years ago, to have, for the first time in our evolutionary history, enough spare time to develop tools and technologies, as well as arts and music. For the first time in evolutionary history, a handful of people could sow, tend to, and harvest enough cereal grain to feed hundreds or even thousands of people who were, therefore, free to do a multitude of other things. Without agriculture and this shift from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of spending most of our waking hours hunting and rummaging around looking for food, we would not have developed much of anything because we simply never would have had the time to do so.

Now, although it is well known to most anthropologists, it is not a well appreciated fact that the cultivation and eating of cereal crops as an important source of calories, is possibly the most negatively impacting evolutionary mistake to have been made in regards to the health and robustness of our species as a whole. There was, indeed, plenty of free time, and we did develop technologies extremely quickly considering how slowly things had changed before then. But the price to pay was high.

Within as little as one or two generations, our powerful stature shrank markedly, our strong teeth rotted, our massive bones became thin and brittle, our thick hair grew thin and fell out at an early age. In fact, evidence indicates that while our hunter-gatherer ancestors were tall, strong, robust, with hard teeth and bones, and apparently healthy to their death—usually of a violent nature instead of progressive degradation through “ageing” as later became the norm, our oldest cereal-eating ancestors in contrast, were the exact opposite: small, weak, fragile, with rotten teeth, and advanced osteoporosis in their bones at the time of their death in their early 50’s. (For a lot more details about all the points discussed up to here, I strongly recommend Jared Diamond’s fascinating books: The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs and Steel; and Collapse).

Today, at the beginning of the 21st century some 10000 years later, we know exactly why we were never meant to consume carbohydrates on a regular basis, let alone in large quantities as we do today, such that they provide a significant part of our daily calories—sometimes even the majority! We know exactly why because we have pretty clearly understood the primary effect of phytic acids or phytates, the importance of dietary fats, and the insulin mechanism.

Phytates are compounds that exist in all grains and legumes—where they are found in the greatest concentration—as well as in all nuts and seeds. Some animals like rats, for example, have evolved the necessary digestive mechanisms to break down phytates, but humans have not. The consequence is these bind to minerals in the gut and in so doing prevent their absorption into the bloodstream. The regular consumption of grains and legumes—and we believe that many of our first agrarian ancestors lived almost exclusively from grains—leads to severe mineral deficiencies that result in demineralisation of the teeth and bones, exactly as is seen in the remains of these ancestors.

Moreover, any diet consisting primarily of grains (and legumes) as was theirs, will also inevitably be extremely deficient in fat, that is now know to be essential for the proper function of every cell, tissue and organ in the body (especially the brain), but also crucial in the absorption of minerals. So, the combination of a high concentration of phytates together with an almost complete absence of fat, made for an extremely effective demineralisation, which is indeed seen in the smaller statures, weakened bones and teeth, and considerably shortened lifespan of our agrarian ancestors. This obviously still applies today: the more phytates, the faster the demineralisation; and the less fat; the faster the demineralisation.

Finally, insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas. There is always a certain concentration of glucose in the blood, and there is also always a certain concentration of insulin. If there isn’t a major metabolic disorder, then the higher the glucose concentration, the higher the insulin concentration. And conversely, the lower the glucose concentration, the lower the insulin concentration. But since the body is programmed to always keep glucose concentrations to a minimum, as soon as there is a simple carbohydrate in our mouth, insulin is secreted into the bloodstream. As the glucose—either from the simple carbohydrates or from the breakdown of starches—enters the bloodstream through the intestinal wall, and as its concentration continues to rise, the pancreas continues to secrete insulin to match the concentration of glucose; but always a little more, just to be on the safe side.

Why? If glucose were good for us, then why should we have this highly sensitive mechanism to always try to get rid of it?

Insulin’s primary role is storage of “excess” nutrients, and regulation of fat storage and fat burning: when insulin is high, there is fat storage; when insulin is low, there is fat burning. It’s very simple. This, in turn, means that insulin is the primary regulator of energy balance, and therefore of metabolism. From an evolutionary perspective, the importance of insulin is perfectly clear. Firstly, it is a mechanism that is common to almost if not all living creatures, from the simplest to the most complex, because all living creatures depend for their survival on a mechanism that allows them to store nutrients when they are available for consumption but not needed by their metabolism, in order to live through periods where food is not available. This is why the role of insulin is so fundamental and why it is a master hormone around which most others adjust themselves. But when glucose levels are higher than a minimum functional threshold, what insulin is trying to do, in fact, is to clear away the glucose circulating in our bloodstream.

Why? Because the body simply does not want large amounts of glucose in circulation. In fact, it wants blood glucose to be low, very low, as low as possible. And beyond this very low threshold of glucose concentration between 60 and 80 mg/dl, it always tries to store it away, to clear it from the bloodstream, to make it go away. It tries to store as much as possible in the muscles and the liver as glycogen, and converts the rest to fat stored away in fat cells. That the body does not want glucose in circulation is most certainly related to the fact that the insulin mechanism even exists: very small amounts of glucose in the bloodstream is essential for life, but large amounts of glucose in the bloodstream is toxic. And all simple and starchy carbohydrates stimulate the secretion of insulin from the pancreas.

Keep in mind that the presence of insulin promotes the storage of glucose, but also of proteins as well as fats. Once more, its role is to store away and deplete the “excess” nutrients in the bloodstream for later times of food scarcity. Once the insulin molecule has delivered its load (glucose, protein or fat) through the receptor on the cell, it can either be released back into circulation or degraded by the cell. Degradation of circulating insulin is done by the liver and kidneys, and a single molecule will circulate for about 1 hour from the time it was released into the bloodstream by the pancreas until it is broken down.

It is important to add that stress stimulates the secretion of stress hormones that in turn stimulates the release from and production of glucose by the liver, just in case we need to sprint or jump on someone to save ourselves. Obviously, the presence of glucose—now not from ingested carbohydrates but from the liver itself—will trigger the secretion of insulin in exactly the same way as if we had eaten sugar. This means that stress mimics the physiological effects of a high sugar diet. And that’s not good. In fact, it’s pretty bad.

Chronically elevated glucose levels lead to chronically elevated insulin levels. And this is much worse. Like for any kind of messenger mechanism—as is insulin, if there are too many messengers repeating the same message over and over again, very soon they are not heard well because their efforts at passing on the message becomes more like background noise. Frustrated that they are not taken seriously, the messengers seek reinforcements in numbers to be able to pass on their message more forcefully. This, however, leads to even more annoyance on the part of the listeners—the message recipients—that now start to simply ignore the message and the messengers. This process continues to gradually escalate up to the point where the terrain is completely flooded by messengers yelling the same thing, but there is no one at all that is listening because they have insulated their windows and doors, and closed them tightly shut.

Here, the messengers are the insulin hormone molecules secreted by the pancreas and coursing throughout the body in our veins and arteries; the message recipients are our cells: muscle tissue, liver and fat cells; and the message itself is “Take this sugar from the bloodstream, and store it away. We don’t want this stuff circulating around.” The desensitisation—the not-listening—to different, progressively higher degrees with time, is called insulin resistance. Finally, the complete ignoring by the cells of the message and the messengers is called type II diabetes.

Furthermore, insulin resistance—not in the muscle, liver and fats cells, but in the brain cells—clearly leads to neurological degradation identified as cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s or whatever other terms are used. Because beyond the fact that type II diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are both increasing together at an alarming rate in the US and other western countries, and beyond the fact that diabetics are at least twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s compared to non-diabetics, the basic condition of insulin resistance inevitably leads to chronically elevated glucose concentrations simply because the cells do not allow the glucose to enter. And it is well known that glucose in the blood simply and straight forwardly damages to the lining of the blood vessels, which then leads to plaque formation—the body’s repair mechanism for the damaged cells underneath. Thus, as are the coronary arteries of advanced atherosclerotic heart disease sufferers (and diabetics): riddled with plaques, so are the arteries and blood vessels in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers (and diabetics).

Now, although many claim that these and other issues related to the development of Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of neurological degradation are still relatively poorly understood, as far as I’m concerned, it’s all the evidence I need: Do you want the vessels supplying blood to the brain fill up with plaque in response to the damage caused by glucose circulating in the bloodstream? Do you want the coronary arteries fill up with plaque in response from the damage caused by glucose circulating in the bloodstream? I certainly don’t. How could anyone?

What do we need to do? Very simple: just eliminate  simple and starchy carbohydrates from the diet. Concentrate on eating a lot of green vegetables, tons of green leafy salad greens; plenty of fat from coconut milk, coconut oil, nuts and seed of all kinds; and a little animal protein from eggs, raw cheese, wild fish and meat (if you chose to do so). Blood sugar will drop to its minimum, insulin will follow suit, and the body’s own repair and maintenance mechanisms will clear out the plaques, repair damaged tissues, degraded unneeded scar tissues and small tumours and recycle these proteins into useful muscle tissue, and many, many more amazing things will happen to the body that it will gradually look and feel younger and stronger as time passes. Sounds too good to be true? Just try it, and you’ll see for yourself. I guarantee it.