The Big C

The big C – Cancer. The word strikes fear in the bravest of us all, and rightly so. The American Cancer Society reveals the current, chilling statistics: one out of every two men and one out of every three women will battle cancer at some point in their lives. And too often, they will lose. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States.

The National Cancer Institute’s statistics report a 66%, five-year survival rate. Longitudinal studies reveal a 58-59% twenty-year survival rate. Conventional medicine claims today’s statistics prove current treatments are effective at curing cancer or at the very least extending life. Not everyone agrees with these claims.

Cancer is a slow moving disease; early detection is increasing. The earlier cancer is detected, the greater the odds of living for five years, with or without effective treatment. Critics, such as Mike Anderson, (from the documentary, Healing Cancer from the Inside Out) contend the increase in numbers of cancer patients living for five years is caused by the increase in early detection rather than the efficacy of current conventional treatment. In addition, he contends the methodology of reporting numbers is highly suspect—that the cancer industry massages numbers to support claims of effective treatment.

The National Cancer Institute’s data graphs show significant improvement in the survival rate for lymphoma and melanoma. When these numbers are combined with the statistics for all types of cancers, the overall cancer survival rates dramatically improve. But when the other cancers are looked at individually, their survival rate from 1975 through today shows negligible improvement on a graph.

Cancer begins with a single damaged cell—a cell that refuses to follow a normal life cycle of growth, division, and death. The cancer cell mutates and refuses to die; instead dividing to form a mass we call a tumor, or, in the case of leukemias, disrupting normal processes in the bone marrow and blood.

As cancer grows, tumors impede normal function of organs and body systems. The bloodstream and the lymphatic system become the means for cancer cells to invade other parts of the body.

Conventional treatment zeros in on the tumor or tumors, primarily using surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to kill the cancer cells. Treatment is aggressive and invasive. Chemotherapy and radiation destroy healthy tissue as well as cancerous tissue. Chemotherapy also suppresses the patient’s immune system, raising the risk of death by other causes such as pneumonia.

Nutritionally based alternative treatments such as the Gerson and Budwig diets view the tumor as a symptom of disease, not the cause. Treatment is focused on building health, strengthening the immune system and the liver, raising oxygen in the cells, detoxifying the body, and eliminating the wastes created as the body wages war against the cancer.

Whichever protocol you choose to follow, select a proven path and fully consider your ability to comply. If you’re a person who “can’t follow a diet to save my life,” conventional treatment may be a better fit for you. If you choose the alternative route, be sure to surround yourself with a safe and protective support system. Naysayers, both professionals and laymen, are vicious. They will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to undermine your decision, your confidence, and your resolve. They will truly believe you to be a fool in need of their advice and they will make every effort to bring you over to their way of thinking. Strangely enough, their concern for you, heartfelt as it may be, may vanish when alternative treatment is successful. Don’t be too surprised when they don’t show the least interest in your success.
You choose the way you live. You choose your quality of life. Choose well.

Is Stevia Safe?

Is stevia a good sugar replacement? Yes, up to a point. Sugar addicted people must stop and heal before switching to stevia.
Stevia, a plant-extract originally from Central and South America, has been used as a sweetener for several centuries. It has been described alternately as either 30 or 300 times as sweet as sugar. Stevia has slowly gained popularity as an alternative to sugar; it was initially marketed in the US as a dietary supplement, and only recently as a sweetener. Stevia has slowly gained popularity as an alternative to sugar, even though it wasn’t marketed until recently.

One would think a food or drug is either safe or not, right? As of September 2009, the Food and Drug Administration has given support to two stevia products, Truvia and Purevia, for use as a sweetener in sodas and other drinks. What changed the stance of a government organization that used a 1985 study that described stevia as a mutagenic agent in the liver (possibly carcinogenic)?

Apparently, Coca-Cola and other large manufacturers of drinks and sodas have twisted the arms of some regulators, because as more people grasp Sugar Bad, Stevia Good, Big Soda needs to give the people soda that appears healthy in order to keep up sales. Trust a corporation to turn something potentially helpful in moderation into something you still shouldn’t consume.

No soda is safe to drink. The primary culprit after sugar is phosphoric acid. Phosphoric acid is an industrial solvent used to clean toilets and kill insects. Putting the amount of phosphorus from one soda into your body damages the calcium-phosphorus ratio.

Truvia will eventually be stuffed into the rainbow of packets on the table at our favorite eateries. Presently that rainbow includes white (sugar or sucrose), blue (aspartame), pink (saccharin) and yellow (sucralose). For purely aesthetic reasons how about green for Truvia?

However, don’t eat stevia from these Truvia packs because it will be mixed with dextrose or maltodextrin as the first ingredient (largest amount) in each pack, as is the case with the other colors in the bin. These are sugar derivatives that willadulterate whatever is good and useful about stevia. Mixing good things with bad things only ruins the food value of the beneficial.

So, what is so good about stevia that we actually are cautiously optimistic about the eventual release of small bags of pure stevia powder in the supermarket for use in baking, coffee, grapefruit and lemonade? Well, despite the ignominious beginning to stevia as a sweetener, a study that had been described as being “able to classify distilled water as a mutagen”, enough people have used the product now that there are health studies that show benefits for many diseases.

A study published in 2000 gave stevioside (stevia’s active ingredient) to 60 hypertension patients with a placebo group of 49. Results described as significant for reducing blood pressure supplemented similar animal studies.¹

Stevia’s reputed limited effect on blood glucose naturally led to diabetes studies. A Denmark study took blood glucose readings from 12 type-2 diabetes patients before eating stevia or cornstarch with their meals and a couple of hours later. The stevia group showed blood glucose levels at least 18-percent less than the starch group, leading to the possibility that diabetes patients have finally found the sweetener that will allow them to have their sweet cake and eat it, too.²

But after the FDA has spent many years trying to keep stevia out of the U.S. marketplace, we should ask if there are any side effects. A study conducted by the Burdock Group generally supports the safety of stevia, finding no adverse effects in rats at the massive doses such studies use to determine carcinogenic or mutagen properties of foods.³

And so we give stevia qualified support because while almost no information has surfaced to say that this sweetener hurts people, we realize that the weak link in any health plan is the patient. Many of us are unlikely to moderate our consumption of stevia because we just have to have ice cream, chocolate cake, or soda. Too much of a good thing isn’t good. But, on the range of things that are sweet but not named sugar, stevia is a great start.

1 Chan, P, et al “A Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Study of the Effectiveness and Tolerability of Oral Stevioside in Human Hypertension” Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2000 September; 50(3): 215–220. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2125.2000.00260.x

2 Gregersen S, et al. “Antihyperglycemic Effects of Stevioside in Type-2 Diabetic Subjects.” Metabolism 2004 Jan;53(1):73-76

3 Williams LD, Burdock GA “Genotoxicity Studies on a High-Purity Rebauside A Preparation.” Food Chem Toxicol. 2009 Aug;47(8):1831-1836

Is Agave Nectar Healthy?

Is Agave Nectar Better Than Sugar?

Is Agave Nectar Good For You?

Is Agave Nectar Safe For Diabetics?

No! Agave Is Not Healthy!

Agave Nectar is highly concentrated fructose.

Now, many readers may believe that since fructose is fruit sugar, it is “healthy sugar”. It isn’t. Refined fructose is no better than refined glucose.

Consuming fructose naturally from whole foods is different from consuming concentrated agave. In its natural state, fructose is part of a whole food which includes enzymes, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. But refined sugars, sugars that have been stripped of their nutrition through processing, are never healthy.

Refined fructose lowers circulating insulin and leptin levels and raises ghrelin levels after the meal. Since leptin and insulin decrease appetite and ghrelin increases appetite, some researchers suspect that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.

Refined fructose puts an enormous strain on the liver. Dr. Meira Field says, “;…the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose.”

Large amounts of fructose in the diet rapidly turn into fatty acids, which are stored as fat or released into the bloodstream as triglycerides. These fatty triglycerides are insulin resistant and cause a host of problems. Overwhelming the liver and producing insulin resistant fatty triglycerides is the road to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases.

This is another example of marketing magic. Agave is sold as the healthy alternative to refined sugar. But it is refined sugar. Avoid it like you avoid white table sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

Good alternatives for sugar are stevia, raw honey, date sugar, or sugar cane juice. To understand more about sugar, please read Healthy Sugar Alternatives.

Coffee Enemas – How To, What You Need To Know, and Why

How Coffee Enemas Work

Coffee enemas are not done to improve intestinal functionality or to cleanse the colon. They are done to stimulate and detox the liver and gallbladder. During a coffee enema, coffee is absorbed into the hemorrhoidal vein, then taken up to the liver by the portal vein.

The body reuses bile. If the liver cannot expel all of the toxins within the bile, the toxins may continue to accumulate in the bile. The caffeine, theophylline, and theobromine cause dilation of blood vessels and bile ducts, while palmitates, the enzymes in coffee, stimulate the liver to produce new bile. The old toxin-laden bile is dumped into the large intestine where it is safely expelled from the body.

In 1981, Dr. Wattenberg and his colleagues, Sparrins and Lam, at the University of Minnesota, were able to show that palmitic acids found in coffee, kahweol and cafestol palmitate, also stimulate an enzyme system in the liver (glutathione S-transferase) above the norm. This enzyme system is responsible for removing electrophiles from the bloodstream (free radicals). The liver’s ability to remove these free radicals is increased by 600%-700% over normal levels.

To get the same effects by drinking coffee, one would have to drink about a liter at once—so much that the side effects would far outweigh the benefits.

How to Perform a Coffee Enema

You will need an enema bag, organic freshly ground fully caffeinated coffee, distilled water, a large pan, a fine metal strainer, and lubricant for inserting the tube into the rectum.

Consider Wilson’s Therapeutic Coffee Beans, which are organic, bird friendly, and up to 48% higher in caffeine and up to 87% higher in Palmitic Acid. (Note: they did not pay for this mention. OLM doesn’t operate that way).

Put 1 quart of distilled water into a pan with 3 tablespoons of freshly ground coffee and bring to a boil. Let it continue to boil for five minutes then turn the pan off and allow the mixture to cool to body temperature (98°) or lower. Never attempt to do a coffee enema with hot coffee!!! Strain the coffee to remove any large particles but ignore smaller particles, which are OK as they contain some important elements.

Note: Coffee will leak out of you so lying on a hard, easy to clean surface is advisable. Make sure you have plenty of old towels on which to lie.

Hang the enema bag about two feet above you. If you lie on the floor, a coat hanger and a doorknob should facilitate this. Hanging the bag too high will result in too forceful a flow, causing the coffee to travel too far into the colon and resulting in the body’s general circulation taking up the caffeine as if the coffee was ingested by mouth. The same effect can be caused by inserting the enema tube too far into the rectum.

Lube the end of the enema tube. Olive oil or any other kind of food oil will work (we do not recommend petroleum products). Lie down on your right side and insert the enema tube no more than a few inches into the rectum. Release the clamp of the enema tube and let half of the coffee solution (1/2 a quart) flow into the colon. Do not change positions. Retain the coffee enema for 15 minutes (unless an urge to evacuate is too strong). Evacuate the colon and repeat the process one more time with the rest of the coffee solution.

Ideally two separate enema procedures should be done between 4 and 6 hours apart because the first enema causes bile to be dumped into the small intestines, which then needs time to pass into the colon where the second enema can then remove it. If you are fighting disease and using coffee enemas in an effort to get well, I highly recommend Gluten, Candida, Leaky Gut Syndrome, and Autoimmune Diseases as well as the reading below, and there’s a very good chance you’re going to want to know about Heal Cavities, Gum Disease, Naturally with Organic Oral Care – Toothpaste recipes included.