Heart Warming Testimonial - Healing Cancer the Natural Way

Ah, the fruit festival is rolling!

Had to miss it this year darn it!

But some good vids are already rolling in, and they give some of the flavor of the event, and the experience.

The Problem of Getting Sufficient Calories to Maintain Energy and Body Weight

Any diet with insufficient calories is going to crash sooner or later (usually sooner). On an insufficient calorie diet people become thin, drawn, and just generally unhealthy. Calories are the nutrient we need every day to get thru the day because they are our immediate source of energy. But the rest, vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, essential fatty acids, etc etc... we can get those essential needs met over the course of weeks from a variety of whole foods.

So on a low-fat, whole food, vegan diet the problem is getting enough calories. Most people get most of their calories from fat. Calories in fat are very dense, in other words a small quantity of fat has a lot of calories. This is why, on conventional high-fat diets, if one eats enough to "get full", they will have eaten a lot of calories, too many in fact to easily maintain a healthy body weight.

On a low-fat vegan diet there are two primary sources for "enough" calories, fruits, where the cals come from simple carbohydrates mostly, and starches, where the cals come from complex carbs. (The cals in whole veggies are minimal, but those foods are rich in other essential nutrients.)

Bananas are the potato of the fruit world: they are versatile, cheap, readily available, and rich in calories and other essential nutrients. Depending on ripeness they can have quite a bit of starch (less ripe), and spotted bananas have converted the starch to simple sugar.

Contrary to the current but incorrect meme, insulin resistance is not caused by sugar, it is in fact caused by free floating fat in the bloodstream, which is what happens on standard diets getting most cals from fat. Fat in the blood inhibits the uptake, transport, and delivery of fuel to the cells (fuel is glucose and oxygen in combination), a problem known as insulin resistance. If one insists on continuing with a conventional high-fat diet the only solution to this problem is to reduce carbohydrate consumption to nil, converting the bods primary fuel source to fat, a condition known as ketosis. This is the basis of the so-called Paleo diet, or the earlier Atkins diet. However it's not as efficient or healthy IMHO as simply getting the fat out of the blood to begin with.

Check out this book, a low-fat vegan approach, but less "radical" than the 100% raw Doug Graham version. It uses cooked starches as the base, for sufficient calorie intake.

"The Starch Solution"

http://www.amazon.com/Starch-Solution-Regain-Health-Weight-ebook/dp/B007PF7MGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407765640&sr=8-1&keywords=the+starch+solution

"Healthy" Fats

There is a lot of discussion about healthy fats and being sure we have sufficient quantities of them in our daily diets. The so called Paleo diet proponents also suggest a diet with most calories coming from fats, including saturated fats (essentially a variation on the Atkins diet).

However the clinical evidence suggests a low fat vegan diet is highly effective in the context of disease reversal, and very possibly overall health, energy, and longevity. Drs. Esselstyn, Ornish, Bernard, McDougall, Fuhrman and many others not as well known have repeatedly shown and published consistent and decisive reversals of heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, most of the other so-called metabolic disorders, and even cancer in some cases.

These doctors suggest healthy carbs as forming the bulk of caloric intake, as much as 80% of the total, with fats and proteins splitting the remainder at 10% each. They eliminate animal products and refined vegetable oils entirely from the diet, and reduce consumption of high fat plants such as avocado and nuts and seeds to moderate levels.

The two approaches essentially invert carbs and fats in the calo-nutrient ratio, but also incorporate other common sense ideas, most notably perhaps elimination of processed, refined or otherwise fractionated food products, sticking with whole foods nearly exclusively. Both approaches can have beneficial result, pointing to the benefit of a whole foods diet on its own regardless of calo-nutrient ratio, but to the best of my knowledge only the high carb approach is shown to be a consistently successful disease reversal protocol.

Check out the information at this link:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/more-than-an-apple-a-day-preventing-our-most-common-diseases/

Carbs are not the source of Insulin Resistance

You might find this idea interesting - carbs are not the source of insulin resistance, they are the trigger, but only in the context of a high fat diet. The reason why is when we eat fat it ends up in our blood and inhibits the uptake, transmission and delivery of glucose and oxygen to the cells, resulting in elevated blood sugar, resulting in additional insulin, resulting in spikes and crashes in blood sugar levels and nasty metabolic swings. If we reduce our carb intake dramatically the problem goes away, but, the problem also goes away in the context of a high carb diet if we do not eat a lot of fat to begin with.

There's a lot of resistance to this idea, mostly IMO because we are inculturated to think fat is essential. Fat is certainly a more efficient (and profitable) way to distribute calories to society, they are approximately 10x more calorie dense than carbs. Most people also do not know that so called lean meats are about 60% of calories from fat, most likely because that information is not conducive to "good marketing".

Calories are not nutrition per se, but they are fuel in the everyday immediate sense, so conversion efficiency is important - when we eat foods (animal products) that use 30% (or more) of the calories in the food to metabolize the food, we are fueling inefficiently, with long term negative ramifications.

You might find this youtube vid interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_42LfH8veEU

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride

I'm revisiting an older Mercola post because of something a friend sent

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/18/mcbride-and-barringer-interview.aspx

which led me to begin viewing two other vids of Campbell-McBride on youtube (better than the mercola audio interview by far)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cONYR7vAD-A

http://youtu.be/Z_0NvcJZwa8

I agree with the idea digestion has been damaged by post industrial life styles, and that this problem is corrected most efficiently using the idea "food is medicine". This is IMO at the base of all effective non-medical healing of the maladies of the industrialized world. I would be curious to see if McBrides method is as rapid and complete as Graham's (water fast followed by fruits and vegetables) in healing the variety of life style damaged conditions we see in ourselves and all around us.  My money going in would be on Graham, she in my opinion suffers a typical situational (cultural/industrial) form of myopia in the idea that humans are biologically suited to the modern industrialized "delivery of calories system" (fats as primary source), which is predicated on convenience (distribution and concentration of calories) not health, in my opinion. Sure it's more "efficient" to distribute and consume concentrated calories (fats), but is it healthy?

Which is not to say the multitude of other fractionated processed and refined "foods" are not also responsible for galloping disease, it is an overdetermined problem. So McBride, and the paleo community in general, have it half right IMO by eliminating fractionated/processed/refined foods. But the (health) problem is complex because there is more than one thing causing it. Concentrated calories is also a (mostly unrecognized) culprit. We run most efficiently on fruit and vegetable carbohydrates (when consumed in context of whole fresh ripe raw organic especially). Yes we also burn fat for energy, but it is less efficient than carbs when pushed to be the primary source of fuel. And when it comes to health, it's difficult to argue against the most efficient delivery of fuel and nutrients to the body.

But there also seems to be a problem with combining high levels of fats and carbohydrates into one diet - it appears to induce the condition known as insulin resistance, precursor to unhealthy weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease, among many others. So it's kind of a "pick your poison" kind of thing, to be optimally healthy it's either going to be a mostly carbs or mostly fats question. And then you also have to ask the other question, which choice is better overall?

It is true that 100% vegan raw is not sustainable the way it has been practiced, in my humble opinion. Well it's not just my opinion, all one has to do is look for healthy long term 100% raw vegans in the world... it's a small number. But Graham recognized this problem early on and asked the right questions - if a 100% raw vegan diet is truly sustainable (peak health over the long term), it would also have to sustain peak levels of athleticism (not just disease recovery), and robust growth. Graham realized which parameters constitute ideal measures for sustainability, and AFAIK he is the only raw foodist to have analysed the "sustainable raw food diet" problem from that perspective.

We all have inculturated "industrial world" myopia to one extent or other, so it is not surprising that Graham's method (fruits and vegetables almost exclusively) is "a bridge too far" for most citizens of this modern world. And there are many effective ways to address the "damaged digestion" problem, but the question remains open as to which is the most effective method across the broadest population. And as long as industry (medicine, science, pharma, ag) principally control what is formally studied we will not have a satisfying "hard science" answer. As Doug Graham himself said once to me: "you have to find the thing you CAN do".

yeah Bucky, that's what i'm talkin bout:)

Raw 80/10/10 (the fruit based version of 80/10/10) is a more efficient (orchards vs field crops) use of land/water resource (calorie yield per acre) than any other large scale feeding system. Meat production is least efficient, most polluting, and least healthy.

With orchard's much higher yield (calorie/acre) mass organic becomes increasingly viable.

Not only is calorie yield maxed, so is micro nutrient yield (raw fruits and veggies have the highest nutrition yield per calorie, and in correct proportions for optimum human health).

The efficiency numbers are not complicated. Maybe the lead engineering types (brainy boyz) in big ag/chem/pharma/medicine don't see this yet... or maybe they do, and that's why there's so much obfuscation of simple reality:

Global pollution goes way down

Chemical production goes way down

Global health goes way up

Medical/chemical/pharma system shrinks

But da boyz have a vested interest in disease, with the disease delivery system signed sealed and locked in place.

So let's get the word out Bucky:)