Friday, July 25, 2008
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Divine Food for Divine Beauty
Divine Food for Divine Beauty
"When our actions are in opposition with nature, the results are different types of bodily ills, deformities and ugliness. Eating cooked food leaves residues that the body cannot utilize and they become deposited in places where our Creator never intended."
Divine Food for Divine Beauty
By Tonya Zavasta
Excerpted from the book Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You by Tonya Zavasta.
The natural world is filled with beauty. It delights us with its magnificent colors and extraordinary designs. God's artistic taste and superior craftsmanship are manifested in spectacular sunsets and diminutive snowflakes. We look on nature and exclaim in adoration: "How great Thou art!" But what about our own image -the one we view in the mirror? Most of us are not pleased with what we see. Why do plants and animals often display greater visual beauty than God's favorite creation - human being? Ordinarily all flowers are beautiful and only a wilted flower looks abnormal. And yet humankind calls less than one percent of the adult population officially beautiful. Double chins, protruding stomachs, and sallow complexions are seen everywhere, even in young people.
Our body was created in the image of God, the Supreme Beauty. In Genesis 1:29 we read: "And God said, 'See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.'" God's original diet of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds is the most suitable one for the human body. It is salubrious to the body's health and salutary to its beauty. The raw food diet is awesome, it should be called the very name it inspired: the Rawsome diet.
When our actions are in opposition with nature, the results are different types of bodily ills, deformities and ugliness. Eating cooked food leaves residues that the body cannot utilize and they become deposited in places where our Creator never intended. Everything that is not fully digested and then is not properly eliminated the body treats as an abnormal substance. The body becomes ingeniously resourceful faced with substances it cannot metabolize or eliminate. It breaks them down into minute particles and distributes them to remote areas of the body, way from vital organs to minimize harm. The body takes the poisons out-of-the-way but necessarily out of sight. The toxic wastes are pushed towards the peripheral organs, which happen to be the skin and every other organ that we can see on the outside.
Most of us feel our appearance lacks something. In reality, ugliness is more about excess. Toxic accumulations in our bodies are responsible for stealing our health and attractiveness. Beauty lies latent under cushions of retained fluids, deposits of fat, and sick tissues. Your beauty is buried alive, but in most cases it can be revived in a version that will be satisfactory to you. You must take immediate action to revitalize it. When you do, your uncovered beauty will surprise and delight you.
Some physical characteristics of our face and body we cannot change--they were determined prior to our birth. But the consumption of the raw plant diet as an adult will make a difference in the texture of skin and hair, the health of nails, weight and complexion. All of these traits and more are determined by daily choices, with food being one of the most important and, luckily, the one over which we have fully control.
The ability to renew cells is built into your body, and the body itself is capable of making you look more attractive. After all, we were designed to bloom continuously as old cells get replaced by new ones. The Rawsome diet makes the most of this rejuvenating ability of our bodies. Rawsome beauty is not manufactured from the outside but cultivated from the inside by nutritionally charged food. Whole raw food restores the integrity of every cell and facilitates the optimal operation of every organ inside and out. The body, having been awakened by the improved diet, in its wisdom, will reach out to the places where health was lacking, and you will gradually see your beauty surfacing. The Rawsome diet will eliminate all the toxins on a deeper level and bring amazing changes to your appearance.
The Bible says in Esther 2:9, that Esther was provided with some beauty treatments and special food before facing King Xerxes. The Bible does not specify what kind of food was used, but I believe it had to be God's original diet that is mentioned in Genesis 1:29 where "God said, 'See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.'" Special food together with oil treatment and cosmetics were part of Esther's beauty rituals for twelve months. Like Esther, it will take about a year for your face and body to reach its full beauty potential.
The landscape of the body will change. The surface of the skin will become soft and smooth but firm and supple. Visible pores will diminish. A sallow skin with a yellow pallor will turn into a porcelain-like complexion. The whites of eyes, once red, will become bright with a bluish tinge. As natural collagen production improves, it will fill in the places where it is needed as in hollow cheeks.
The artistic ability of your body will amaze you. It will look as if a sculptor is chiseling your face and body. It's amazing how the fat deposits will disappear at the right spots. All excesses will be eliminated. Everything that is bumpy or lumpy will be smoothed or straightened. Everything that is dull will be illuminated. The features will be carved until a lovely face surfaces, and the skin will be polished until it glows. Raw food eating will clarify and refine your features and bring delicacy to your face.
Regular features are not essential for the whole effect to be seen as beautiful. You will marvel at how the Master Artist will make the most of your individual features and bring balance to the entire face. Texture, hues, and shape will be harmoniously arranged into a genteel whole. Perfection and imperfection will be tied together into a unique original version of beauty.
Only the body sustained on raw food will host natural beauty, or should we say Rawsome beauty. People who have been on the raw food lifestyle for several years begin to have a glow, the kind not often seen in middle-aged people. Optimal health is recognized by an emerging radiance. Glow is hard to fake because it is internal. It comes from an abundance of clear, pink, almost transparent cells that light up the face. Only superior blood circulation can bring this transfiguring glow. Several years on the raw food diet will make you look as though you just stepped out of a painting by Renoir--the impressionist best known for his preoccupation with light.
From age 15 until recently, I wore my hair permed, only to discover at 45 that straight hair in my natural color was the best possible frame for my face. Did my preference change? Not at all. My face did. So let me give you a hint, if you need a camouflaging hairdo, you are not looking your best. The changes in your face brought about by raw foods will bring the freedom to arrange your hair in any way you want. When your peer group is thinking: "I am losing my looks", you will be finding yours. At 45, I enjoy looking in the mirror while before I detested my reflection.
When a person starts to attend the gym regularly he or she becomes aware of trained bodies. The same phenomenon occurs with the raw food diet. You begin to see how much people's appearance differs from their optimal one. Each time I see a woman, I study her appearance, and I see not only the way she looks but also the way she could look. What I see is how far her image digresses from her potential beauty. I perceive her beauty as it will stand out after the body has cleansed itself from toxins and excesses.
I have come to believe if you embrace the 100 percent raw food diet, you will meet The Most Beautiful You. The best proof that the Rawsome diet is optimal for the body is it makes you beautiful. Slim face, slender waist, and clear skin with smooth coloration-these subtle changes will convince you the raw plant diet is the best for good health and graceful beauty.
"When our actions are in opposition with nature, the results are different types of bodily ills, deformities and ugliness. Eating cooked food leaves residues that the body cannot utilize and they become deposited in places where our Creator never intended."
Divine Food for Divine Beauty
By Tonya Zavasta
Excerpted from the book Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You by Tonya Zavasta.
The natural world is filled with beauty. It delights us with its magnificent colors and extraordinary designs. God's artistic taste and superior craftsmanship are manifested in spectacular sunsets and diminutive snowflakes. We look on nature and exclaim in adoration: "How great Thou art!" But what about our own image -the one we view in the mirror? Most of us are not pleased with what we see. Why do plants and animals often display greater visual beauty than God's favorite creation - human being? Ordinarily all flowers are beautiful and only a wilted flower looks abnormal. And yet humankind calls less than one percent of the adult population officially beautiful. Double chins, protruding stomachs, and sallow complexions are seen everywhere, even in young people.
Our body was created in the image of God, the Supreme Beauty. In Genesis 1:29 we read: "And God said, 'See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.'" God's original diet of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds is the most suitable one for the human body. It is salubrious to the body's health and salutary to its beauty. The raw food diet is awesome, it should be called the very name it inspired: the Rawsome diet.
When our actions are in opposition with nature, the results are different types of bodily ills, deformities and ugliness. Eating cooked food leaves residues that the body cannot utilize and they become deposited in places where our Creator never intended. Everything that is not fully digested and then is not properly eliminated the body treats as an abnormal substance. The body becomes ingeniously resourceful faced with substances it cannot metabolize or eliminate. It breaks them down into minute particles and distributes them to remote areas of the body, way from vital organs to minimize harm. The body takes the poisons out-of-the-way but necessarily out of sight. The toxic wastes are pushed towards the peripheral organs, which happen to be the skin and every other organ that we can see on the outside.
Most of us feel our appearance lacks something. In reality, ugliness is more about excess. Toxic accumulations in our bodies are responsible for stealing our health and attractiveness. Beauty lies latent under cushions of retained fluids, deposits of fat, and sick tissues. Your beauty is buried alive, but in most cases it can be revived in a version that will be satisfactory to you. You must take immediate action to revitalize it. When you do, your uncovered beauty will surprise and delight you.
Some physical characteristics of our face and body we cannot change--they were determined prior to our birth. But the consumption of the raw plant diet as an adult will make a difference in the texture of skin and hair, the health of nails, weight and complexion. All of these traits and more are determined by daily choices, with food being one of the most important and, luckily, the one over which we have fully control.
The ability to renew cells is built into your body, and the body itself is capable of making you look more attractive. After all, we were designed to bloom continuously as old cells get replaced by new ones. The Rawsome diet makes the most of this rejuvenating ability of our bodies. Rawsome beauty is not manufactured from the outside but cultivated from the inside by nutritionally charged food. Whole raw food restores the integrity of every cell and facilitates the optimal operation of every organ inside and out. The body, having been awakened by the improved diet, in its wisdom, will reach out to the places where health was lacking, and you will gradually see your beauty surfacing. The Rawsome diet will eliminate all the toxins on a deeper level and bring amazing changes to your appearance.
The Bible says in Esther 2:9, that Esther was provided with some beauty treatments and special food before facing King Xerxes. The Bible does not specify what kind of food was used, but I believe it had to be God's original diet that is mentioned in Genesis 1:29 where "God said, 'See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.'" Special food together with oil treatment and cosmetics were part of Esther's beauty rituals for twelve months. Like Esther, it will take about a year for your face and body to reach its full beauty potential.
The landscape of the body will change. The surface of the skin will become soft and smooth but firm and supple. Visible pores will diminish. A sallow skin with a yellow pallor will turn into a porcelain-like complexion. The whites of eyes, once red, will become bright with a bluish tinge. As natural collagen production improves, it will fill in the places where it is needed as in hollow cheeks.
The artistic ability of your body will amaze you. It will look as if a sculptor is chiseling your face and body. It's amazing how the fat deposits will disappear at the right spots. All excesses will be eliminated. Everything that is bumpy or lumpy will be smoothed or straightened. Everything that is dull will be illuminated. The features will be carved until a lovely face surfaces, and the skin will be polished until it glows. Raw food eating will clarify and refine your features and bring delicacy to your face.
Regular features are not essential for the whole effect to be seen as beautiful. You will marvel at how the Master Artist will make the most of your individual features and bring balance to the entire face. Texture, hues, and shape will be harmoniously arranged into a genteel whole. Perfection and imperfection will be tied together into a unique original version of beauty.
Only the body sustained on raw food will host natural beauty, or should we say Rawsome beauty. People who have been on the raw food lifestyle for several years begin to have a glow, the kind not often seen in middle-aged people. Optimal health is recognized by an emerging radiance. Glow is hard to fake because it is internal. It comes from an abundance of clear, pink, almost transparent cells that light up the face. Only superior blood circulation can bring this transfiguring glow. Several years on the raw food diet will make you look as though you just stepped out of a painting by Renoir--the impressionist best known for his preoccupation with light.
From age 15 until recently, I wore my hair permed, only to discover at 45 that straight hair in my natural color was the best possible frame for my face. Did my preference change? Not at all. My face did. So let me give you a hint, if you need a camouflaging hairdo, you are not looking your best. The changes in your face brought about by raw foods will bring the freedom to arrange your hair in any way you want. When your peer group is thinking: "I am losing my looks", you will be finding yours. At 45, I enjoy looking in the mirror while before I detested my reflection.
When a person starts to attend the gym regularly he or she becomes aware of trained bodies. The same phenomenon occurs with the raw food diet. You begin to see how much people's appearance differs from their optimal one. Each time I see a woman, I study her appearance, and I see not only the way she looks but also the way she could look. What I see is how far her image digresses from her potential beauty. I perceive her beauty as it will stand out after the body has cleansed itself from toxins and excesses.
I have come to believe if you embrace the 100 percent raw food diet, you will meet The Most Beautiful You. The best proof that the Rawsome diet is optimal for the body is it makes you beautiful. Slim face, slender waist, and clear skin with smooth coloration-these subtle changes will convince you the raw plant diet is the best for good health and graceful beauty.
Vibrant Living
A Simple Program
For Vibrant Living
Nutrition
Respect Nature and use the foods that Nature provides - as close as possible to how Nature provides them. Avoid refined foods and pre-cooked foods. Avoid preservatives, colourants etc. Fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and grains must feature predominantly in the diet.
Air
Sleep with your windows open - this is vital. In air conditioned rooms, make sure the vents in the air-conditioner are open. Some windows must be open 24 hours a day - even in air-conditioned offices. Kindly refuse to work in an office with someone who smokes. Practice deep breathing regularly.
Trust
The Creator has equipped us with a marvelous body that is programmed for survival. When we respect the common-sense laws of life our eliminative organs will function as they should and our immune defenses will protect us and/or cure us from disease. As with all the laws of life, the laws of health are only there for our benefit.
Uplift Others
"Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people." (Einstein) "The pleasure of doing good to others imparts a glow to the feelings, which flashes through the nerves, quickens the circulation of the blood, and induces mental and physical health." (E. G. White). If you want to be happy, make others happy. If you want peace, love your enemies.
Rest
Laborers who rest 20 minutes in every hour can accomplish much more in a day than those who rest only at lunch time. Respect your body's need for rest and your body will reward you. One hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours after midnight. Avoid anything stimulating.
Exercise
Exercise is a must for natural bowel function, to aid elimination, to help drain the lymph system, and to condition and tone every cell and organ in the body. Take a short brisk walk outside after every meal. Do half an hour of walking or moderate exercise every day - if you do much mental work you will need to do this twice a day or more. As a rule, outdoor exercise is better than indoor exercise.
Sunlight
The sun is the battery charger of life. We all need at least 30 minutes in the direct sunlight every day. Sunlight converts cholesterol into vitamin D. Living and/or working in a room that does not get direct sunlight will stunt growth and weaken the entire system. Install Perspex sun boxes in the ceiling of rooms that do not get any sun (they must be made from Perspex.)
Water
Water is the internal and external cleanser of Nature. Drink at least 2 glasses of water at least one hour before every meal. Take the bulk of your liquids in between meals rather than with your meals. Drink the best water available - your tap water could be recycled urine. Warm baths soothe the nerves. Study hydrotherapy.
Abstemiousness
Eat, work, play and study in moderation. The use of whole foods will put a permanent end to over-eating as well as to the desire to eat in between meals. Over-exercising will undermine your immune system. Over-work is a killer - devote the evenings to your family - not to work. Be wise and be safe.
Your Attitude
Love and respect the miracle that you are. Think big but remember that big things are only accomplished when we pay attention to the small detail. Feed on your trials - for trials make us stronger. Pride is an exhausting tyrant, -humility is the only way to escape her clutches. Each day is a precious gift - that's why it is called "the present".
Unwrap each day excitedly, cherish it and enjoy each moment. Remember that life is now - this moment - it is not some future state of euphoria that will come upon us when all of our dreams finally come true.
For Vibrant Living
Nutrition
Respect Nature and use the foods that Nature provides - as close as possible to how Nature provides them. Avoid refined foods and pre-cooked foods. Avoid preservatives, colourants etc. Fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and grains must feature predominantly in the diet.
Air
Sleep with your windows open - this is vital. In air conditioned rooms, make sure the vents in the air-conditioner are open. Some windows must be open 24 hours a day - even in air-conditioned offices. Kindly refuse to work in an office with someone who smokes. Practice deep breathing regularly.
Trust
The Creator has equipped us with a marvelous body that is programmed for survival. When we respect the common-sense laws of life our eliminative organs will function as they should and our immune defenses will protect us and/or cure us from disease. As with all the laws of life, the laws of health are only there for our benefit.
Uplift Others
"Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people." (Einstein) "The pleasure of doing good to others imparts a glow to the feelings, which flashes through the nerves, quickens the circulation of the blood, and induces mental and physical health." (E. G. White). If you want to be happy, make others happy. If you want peace, love your enemies.
Rest
Laborers who rest 20 minutes in every hour can accomplish much more in a day than those who rest only at lunch time. Respect your body's need for rest and your body will reward you. One hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours after midnight. Avoid anything stimulating.
Exercise
Exercise is a must for natural bowel function, to aid elimination, to help drain the lymph system, and to condition and tone every cell and organ in the body. Take a short brisk walk outside after every meal. Do half an hour of walking or moderate exercise every day - if you do much mental work you will need to do this twice a day or more. As a rule, outdoor exercise is better than indoor exercise.
Sunlight
The sun is the battery charger of life. We all need at least 30 minutes in the direct sunlight every day. Sunlight converts cholesterol into vitamin D. Living and/or working in a room that does not get direct sunlight will stunt growth and weaken the entire system. Install Perspex sun boxes in the ceiling of rooms that do not get any sun (they must be made from Perspex.)
Water
Water is the internal and external cleanser of Nature. Drink at least 2 glasses of water at least one hour before every meal. Take the bulk of your liquids in between meals rather than with your meals. Drink the best water available - your tap water could be recycled urine. Warm baths soothe the nerves. Study hydrotherapy.
Abstemiousness
Eat, work, play and study in moderation. The use of whole foods will put a permanent end to over-eating as well as to the desire to eat in between meals. Over-exercising will undermine your immune system. Over-work is a killer - devote the evenings to your family - not to work. Be wise and be safe.
Your Attitude
Love and respect the miracle that you are. Think big but remember that big things are only accomplished when we pay attention to the small detail. Feed on your trials - for trials make us stronger. Pride is an exhausting tyrant, -humility is the only way to escape her clutches. Each day is a precious gift - that's why it is called "the present".
Unwrap each day excitedly, cherish it and enjoy each moment. Remember that life is now - this moment - it is not some future state of euphoria that will come upon us when all of our dreams finally come true.
Depression myths exposed
Depression myths by psychiatry professor,
but the real myths come from the pharmaceutical industry.
A noted professor in the field of psychiatry is publicly challenging some of the myths about depression. Prof. Malcolm Lader, emeritus professor of clinical psychopharmacology, Institute of Psychiatry, London, says that fewer people are subject to depression than currently believed. For the real story on busting myths about depression, however, let's dig deeper.
When it comes to clinical depression, the biggest myth of all is that depression is a disease that you can't do anything about and, therefore, you need prescription drugs to "rebalance your brain chemistry." It's one of the greatest hoaxes of modern medicine, and it's generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues for drug companies. In reality, practically all cases of so-called clinical depression can be completely reversed with three simple things:
1) radical shifts to a healthy diet rich in essential fatty acids like GLA and completely absent any processed foods.
2) Regular physical fitness activites that include both a cardiovascular and strength training component (at least 4 days a week).
3) Regular exposure to natural sunlight, for at least one hour a day, directly on the skin with no sunscreen.
Show me a depressed person, and I'll show you someone who has absolutely not done these three things. In fact, I've never met a person who does these three things and is depressed. Not one. I don't believe there are any. That's because depression is actually just the natural cause-and-effect outcome that results from poor nutritional habits combined with a lack of physical exercise and avoidance of natural sunlight. It's really that simple. You don't need prescription drugs to fight depression, you need to get back to nature.
Oh, I know your doctor has probably told you that depression is an "illness" and you have no control over it. That's the old propaganda line taught to them by the pharmaceutical companies and medical journals. That belief system generates lots of profits for the drug companies. If you fall for it, they've got you trapped in their little mind game. The only way you can take control over your own mental health is to let loose of those beliefs and realize that you were born to be healthy and happy, and all you have to do is return to nature to find it.
In nature, you eat wholesome foods, not processed foods like white flour and high fructose corn syrup. In nature, you move your body every day, you don't sit behind a desk for your entire life. In nature, you get sunshine on your skin, you don't hide behind sunscreens loaded with toxic perfumes and cancer-causing chemicals.
Just get back to nature and, in a short period of time, you'll feel a whole lot better about life, too. Suddenly, your so-called "clinical depression" will be nothing but a memory.
but the real myths come from the pharmaceutical industry.
A noted professor in the field of psychiatry is publicly challenging some of the myths about depression. Prof. Malcolm Lader, emeritus professor of clinical psychopharmacology, Institute of Psychiatry, London, says that fewer people are subject to depression than currently believed. For the real story on busting myths about depression, however, let's dig deeper.
When it comes to clinical depression, the biggest myth of all is that depression is a disease that you can't do anything about and, therefore, you need prescription drugs to "rebalance your brain chemistry." It's one of the greatest hoaxes of modern medicine, and it's generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues for drug companies. In reality, practically all cases of so-called clinical depression can be completely reversed with three simple things:
1) radical shifts to a healthy diet rich in essential fatty acids like GLA and completely absent any processed foods.
2) Regular physical fitness activites that include both a cardiovascular and strength training component (at least 4 days a week).
3) Regular exposure to natural sunlight, for at least one hour a day, directly on the skin with no sunscreen.
Show me a depressed person, and I'll show you someone who has absolutely not done these three things. In fact, I've never met a person who does these three things and is depressed. Not one. I don't believe there are any. That's because depression is actually just the natural cause-and-effect outcome that results from poor nutritional habits combined with a lack of physical exercise and avoidance of natural sunlight. It's really that simple. You don't need prescription drugs to fight depression, you need to get back to nature.
Oh, I know your doctor has probably told you that depression is an "illness" and you have no control over it. That's the old propaganda line taught to them by the pharmaceutical companies and medical journals. That belief system generates lots of profits for the drug companies. If you fall for it, they've got you trapped in their little mind game. The only way you can take control over your own mental health is to let loose of those beliefs and realize that you were born to be healthy and happy, and all you have to do is return to nature to find it.
In nature, you eat wholesome foods, not processed foods like white flour and high fructose corn syrup. In nature, you move your body every day, you don't sit behind a desk for your entire life. In nature, you get sunshine on your skin, you don't hide behind sunscreens loaded with toxic perfumes and cancer-causing chemicals.
Just get back to nature and, in a short period of time, you'll feel a whole lot better about life, too. Suddenly, your so-called "clinical depression" will be nothing but a memory.
Diseased Economy
This is an article about the disease economy. That's a term I coined because I could find no other existing term to describe what I'm observing in our economy today. I call it the disease economy because such a huge percentage of the economic activity and economic growth I see in this country is based on the manufacturing, marketing and selling of products and services based on disease. That is, products and services that either cause diseases or "treat" those diseases.
How do I know we're in a disease economy today? You can see it for yourself. Just drive around any city or town in the United States and you can see what's happening. Take a look at the new construction. What's going to be there? If it's an office complex, chances are it's going to be a medical office building. If it's on a street corner, it's probably going to be a pharmacy -- maybe a new Walgreens or CVS Pharmacy or a new drive-through Wal-Mart pharmacy. You even see pharmacies in grocery stores now, because they are so profitable. When you go into grocery stores and look at what's being sold there, you're getting a good look at the economic activity in this country. You mostly see products that promote disease, thanks to their disease-causing ingredients.
Of course, the disease economy promotes Big Pharma companies. These are the pharmaceutical manufacturers in this country, and they are huge global corporations. The selling of pharmaceuticals is a $1 trillion industry.
It's an amazing statistic. Here in the United States, some of our largest corporations are drug companies. In fact, as I've stated before, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the United States earn more money than the remaining 490 Fortune 500 companies. Just recently, I heard the Bush administration was very excited about the news that we are experiencing economic growth in this country. The economy is up, more money is changing hands, and that's all that economists really look at when calculating gross domestic product or gross national product. They're just looking at the total number of dollars that changed hands.
An economy based on paying for disease treatment
However, if you look at the quality of the products and services that are being exchanged for these dollars, you'll realize something is amiss here, because what we're doing is basing our economic growth on the growth of chronic and degenerative disease. We're basing our economy on the idea that we can treat more and more people with drugs and medical services and keep selling them soft drinks and fast food while calling it economic growth.
This leads me to the most important point of this article, which is that we cannot create abundance in the United States or in any country by selling each other increasingly expensive products and services that promote disease. In other words, we cannot create abundance by poisoning ourselves. The very idea is absurd. The whole point of economic growth is to create economic abundance, and if you look at the classic definitions of economic growth, they are about providing more goods and services to people in a more efficient manner. Those goods and services are supposed to improve the quality of life for those people.
In the old days, the arguments for the invisible hand in the economy were that if you let entrepreneurs compete in a free market, they would devise clever and efficient ways to create, produce and deliver goods and services to consumers that would ultimately enhance their quality of life. That part is absolutely true, and the United States has done that very successfully. The free market does work in accomplishing that, but what we're seeing now is something beyond what those old-school economists could have ever conceived. We're seeing an economy that is increasingly based on goods and services that do not add to the quality of consumers' lives but rather take away from it. We're seeing entrepreneurs and creative, clever people finding new ways to market products that harm people and calling that profitability or economic growth.
We see this quite blatantly in the drug industry, where creative marketers keep coming up with new, absurd ways to sell drugs to people through direct-to-consumer advertising on television. Some of these ads are absolutely idiotic in what they are promising. Yet, they are effective in creating demand. They sell products, but these products do not help consumers.
We also see a lot of products being marketed and sold to consumers that may give them very short-term benefits -- such as the taste of a hamburger or the taste of french fries, which lasts about 10 seconds -- but has long-term detrimental consequences, like obesity, heart disease, brain disorders, cancer and diabetes. These diseases largely come about as a result of long-term consumption of nutritionally depleted foods.
Without question, the U.S. economy is heavily invested in disease. Retailers like Walgreens have mastered the art of selling products on both sides of the equation. At the front of the store, Walgreens sells junk food products, soft drinks, candy and a lot of food that really has no nutrition. At the back of the store, they sell prescription drugs -- drugs that treat the symptoms of diseases that are ultimately caused by people's poor dietary choices and their consumption of junk food.
Walgreens has really mastered this. They will sell you the problem and the treatment, all in the same store. One reason Walgreens is so incredibly successful as a business is because it has mastered the art of selling products to consumers as part of the disease economy. It is a flagship company of the disease economy, perhaps even more so than pharmaceutical companies.
Illusions of wealth in the disease economy
One of the funniest things about the disease economy is that the consumers who are diseased think they're doing well because they own stocks in the companies selling the products that harm them. This fascinates me. A guy dying of cancer or suffering from heart disease, because of the products he has been consuming for years, believes he's doing well because he owns stock in large food manufacturing companies or large pharmaceutical companies. Maybe he owns stock in a new medical technology, or maybe he's a partner in a local medical clinic. His investments are doing great, but he's dying, and he's dying from preventable degenerative disease.
This is what's happening across the country, not just to one person, but to millions of people -- perhaps hundreds of millions -- who think the economy is looking up and think that maybe they have a good job because they work for a pharmaceutical company. They think they have good investments now because they have stocks in the junk food manufacturers. They think they're doing well financially, but guess what? They're consuming the product themselves, and they are dying. They're dying from a degenerative disease at a rate that has never before been witnessed in human history. This demonstrates my entire point: We cannot create abundance by selling each other increasingly expensive products and services that harm each other.
By the way, I don't mean to leave out all those chemical companies manufacturing pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, toxic household cleaners and toxic personal care products. A lot of those skincare companies are really just chemical manufacturers with sexy marketing and lots of women in lab coats selling you products that actually harm your health; that literally contain ingredients that cause cancer and liver disease. People think our economy is booming, but we're all dying of chronic disease. Why is it that 50 percent of our senior citizens in the United States have high blood pressure? Why is it that 40 percent of our senior citizens are now clinically obese? I'm willing to bet that a similar percentage may have nervous system disorders or early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Most of them are probably metabolizing some form of cancer right now, even though it may not have been diagnosed yet.
We are a nation of diseased individuals, and that disease starts very early. There are 12-year-old children who have atherosclerosis. There are teenagers with osteoporosis, and teenage children with obesity are now common. In fact, diabetes has gotten so bad in young people that they had to change the name. That used to be the name. Now they just have to call it diabesity, and that applies to children, teenagers and adults alike.
Returning to health would bankrupt the economy
We have created so much disease in this country, and we have based our economy on it to such a degree that, frankly, we cannot untangle this situation without causing economic distress. If there were a cure for cancer, diabetes or heart disease tomorrow, where a person could wave a magic wand and instantly eliminate those diseases, and if every person in the country did that tomorrow, the sobering truth is that our national economy would collapse overnight. It would collapse because there's so much money, so much real estate, so much education and so much expertise and research invested in disease that we could not financially survive in an economy based on health and abundance, at least not the way things are configured right now.
We could not economically survive in an economy based on real health. We are so invested in disease in this nation that we truly have a disease economy, and in order for that economy to grow, you have to expand the number of people with disease, expand the definition of disease or expand the coverage of people who are treated with high-profit disease-masking products. All three of those things are happening right now.
Corruption in the Disease Economy
Drug companies have experts on their payroll who are part of the FDA's drug safety decision panels, and who don't disclose their conflicts of interest. They are making decisions that expand the definition of disease. A classic case of this was when cholesterol numbers were lowered from 130 to 100 to instantly make 10 million more Americans diagnosable with high cholesterol so they could be treated with statin drugs.
We have the ridiculous (and scientifically dishonest) expansion of psychiatric disorders or so-called brain chemistry diseases, which really have nothing to do with chemistry, but everything to do with expanding the marketplace of psychiatric drugs. The way you expand the marketplace is not to sit around and wait for people to become mentally disturbed. What you do is change the definition of mental disorders and make up new ones.
One of the biggest questions right now is the marketing of adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or adult ADHD. It is a made-up disease. What are the symptoms of this disease? You have too many things on your mind, you can't keep track of everything you need to get done and you are easily distracted. What adult doesn't meet those criteria? We all do, because modern society is a busy place. According to the drug company definition, and even the definition offered by the psychiatric community, we are all suffering from mental illness and must be treated with drugs.
This is one way to expand the disease economy. This is one way you keep those profits flowing and those shareholders happy that they've invested in your company. Most of us here in America are invested in a disease economy, one way or another. Take a look at your own retirement portfolio, if you're fortunate enough to have one, and you're likely to find that you own some percentage of some company that's invested in disease. Interesting, isn't it?
Transforming the Disease Economy into a Health Economy
Enough about the problem; what about the solution? How do you solve the disease economy, challenge it and turn it around into a health economy, a healing economy or an abundant economy? To do that, you first have to figure out a way to make health profitable. How do you make healthy people profitable when there's so much money in treating disease and chronic illness and so much money in addicting people to lifetime requirements for prescription drugs? How do you generate profits off of healthy people, as a nation?
Let's face it: If people are healthy, especially well into their old age, they are no longer customers of those clinics being constructed all over this country. They are no longer customers of Walgreens, CVS or the Wal-Mart pharmacy. They are no longer customers of surgeons, physicians, foot specialists or Alzheimer's doctors. This is why I believe there is absolutely no genuine investment in disease prevention in this country. There's really no investment at all, because preventing disease is the last thing that this disease economy wants.
How do you make it worthwhile to keep people healthy? The answer to that comes down to education, and here's why: When a person is educated, whether it be an education in the arts, the sciences or in any other realm, they live longer and healthier. They maintain their brain function, and they remain productive members of society, no matter how long they live. They can be producing something that benefits other members of society well into their 70s, 80s or even 90s. Healthy individuals can age gracefully and maintain healthy cognitive function. They can directly produce things, such as writing a book, or they can help teach others. They can even be mentors to young entrepreneurs, who can benefit from experience in learning how to manufacture, market or sell something useful.
An uneducated individual, on the other hand, tends to be more of a consumer than a producer of things of value, because they don't have the background, education or experience to be productive members of society. If you don't educate the population, they all become consumers and not producers. It is when people are stuck in the consumer state that they can be profitable to the disease economy. But when the public is educated, it becomes far more profitable to keep people healthy. You could add 20 or 30 years of creative productivity to an individual's life, which means you could boost the productivity of the entire nation by perhaps 15 to 20 percent, which is a huge number. You wouldn't have to base it on disease anymore. You could base it on health. We need a health economy that's based on disease prevention, tied with genuine education.
Think about what we produce in the United States versus other countries. While we are toiling away in our disease economy and inventing new super extreme nacho Doritos and coming up with new prescription drugs that alter brain chemistry in children, genius-level students in other countries are actually doing something useful. In Japan, for example, they are inventing a whole new industry, which I believe will dominate the world's economy. It will be bigger than the computer industry and automobile industry ever was. It's the robotics industry.
In the next 20 or 30 years, the robotics industry will be absolutely huge. Japan is at least 10 years ahead of the United States in this key industry. Why? It's because Japanese students are well educated. They also tend to have a lot better health than students in the United States. In India, they're inventing new computer technologies and new customer service systems that are siphoning labor away from the United States because they do it faster, cheaper and with similar quality but for less money and far lower health-care costs.
Globally, our disease economy simply cannot compete with global economies that actually produce something useful. You want proof of it? Just look at what's happening to General Motors. General Motors is shutting down. General Motors is probably headed for bankruptcy. One of the largest corporations ever produced by the United States is about to go bankrupt. Why? In my opinion, the answer is that General Motors is spending more on health insurance than it is on steel. They're operating in a disease economy, and in a disease economy, it costs way too much for workers because workers are diseased, and you have to cover the costs of treating all that disease so you can have health insurance for all those workers. The United State's health insurance costs are the highest of any nation in the world.
Not only do we have workers who are under-educated in the United States, they are also over-diseased. We have a disease economy, so we think we're creating abundance by selling each other expensive treatments, products and services for disease. The real industries, like automobile manufacturing, are disappearing. Toyota is smart. Toyota is going to dominate the auto industry. Personally, I won't drive anything other than the Toyota. Toyota is the best mainstream vehicle in the world.
Interestingly enough, Toyota is going to be making robots soon, too. Japan does not have a disease economy. Japan has an economy with a good dose of innovation. In fact, innovation is thriving throughout Asia. They don't have a disease economy. They have an innovation-based economy where they actually have to produce something useful to get paid.
Smart nations will invest in prevention
Now, at some point these nations, as they adopt the Western lifestyle and become richer and start to consume more beef animal products, as well as junk food, may very well become disease economies. But some of these nations will be smart about it and start investing in prevention. For example, any nation right now in this world that allows cigarettes to be sold to its population is committing a form of self-destruction. It's like national suicide. What nation would want its citizens to smoke cigarettes so that they would halve their own lives, create huge health-care costs and at the same time reduce their long-term productivity?
Then there are nations like Singapore. Singapore is doing some very intelligent things, and education is one of them. Singapore has a very smart population and a booming economy based on actual abundance and not disease. Of course, people say, "Singapore is almost like a police state. What about personal rights?" That's a huge argument. Should people have the right to smoke themselves to death? Should they have the right to drink soft drinks until they're so obese that they need a knee replacement and demand to be covered by Medicare? Should people be allowed to eat junk food all day, avoid exercise and then get heart disease and need a heart transplant that's paid for by other taxpayers or other participants in their insurance company? These are questions I can't answer in this article. All I can say is that any nation that bases its economy on "diseasification" of its citizens is ultimately doomed to economic collapse. That's exactly where the United States economy is currently headed, to certain economic collapse.
We are losing our health. We are losing our minds. We're losing our genuine economic base. We're losing our manufacturing. We're losing our scientific edge. We're losing our education, and we're losing the inherent value of our money supply as the U.S. dollar continues to slip. What do we have left? Well there's always the Wal-mart and the Walgreens. Give me a Snickers bar. If you can't sleep, you can always buy sleeping pills. If you can't wake up in the morning, you can always drink some coffee. It's the disease economy.
The disease economy is all around you
You're probably participating in it, and if you think you're not, check again, because almost everyone is. It takes an act of great self-determination and courage to extricate oneself from the disease economy and be a productive member of society. It is a rare thing to witness. Very few people I've ever known, or know today, are actually productive members of society doing something useful for the benefit of other human beings.
Do you know who some of those people are? Organic farmers. These are people I greatly respect who are actually doing something useful for others. It is something difficult, something laborious, something a lot of people wouldn't want to do. There are people in society that are productive, and if we're going to succeed as an economy -- or even as a nation -- into the future, we're going to have to expand the number of people who are making a living doing something useful, not something that is just based on disease.
You see, thinking that money spent on disease treatment is economic productivity is actually an economic fallacy. Here's an example: If you just want to create jobs in the country, I have a brilliant plan for job creation. First, hire half the nation to be window breakers. Give them all hammers. Their job is to go around the entire country and break windows. Then you hire the other half of the nation to be window replacers. Their job is to go around and replace all the windows that were broken by the window breakers. You do that and you will have full employment! Sounds insane, doesn't it? But that's what's actually happening today with health.
We have people who are health breakers. They work for pharmaceutical companies, and they work for junk food companies and medical facilities. We have relatively few people who are healers. We've got to change that ratio so that we have fewer health breakers and more health healers in this nation. That's why I'm very happy to see the rising popularity of massage therapists, herbalists, nutritionists, acupuncturists and naturopathic physicians -- people who are true healers. That's what we've got to do in this country to turn things around. We've got to base the economy on healing, disease prevention and the education of our population so that as people live longer they can contribute to society in a meaningful way.
Vote with your dollars
You can remove yourself from the disease economy. You know how you do that? You vote with your dollars. You stop funding these drug companies, junk food companies, toxic personal-care product manufacturing companies, pesticide companies and petroleum companies. You stop giving them your money. You starve them of economic growth by voting with your dollars. You go somewhere else.
You buy food from organic farms at your local food co-op or farmer's market. You buy honest personal care products made with natural ingredients, like Dr. Bronner's soap. You reduce your dependence on fuels. You start riding a bicycle rather than firing up your car all the time. You can change your behavior, and you can change the effect of your dollars. You can help reverse this disease economy and turn it into a healing economy.
You, me and the hundreds of thousands of people who read this article have got to change this world one buying decision at a time, because money is the only way we're ever going to change it. By changing the way we choose to spend our money, we reshape the corporate landscape. We reshape this economy and move it away from a disease economy. Pay attention to your actions when you're at a cash register. Look in your grocery cart. Ask yourself, "What am I invested in here? What am I supporting?" Commit yourself to making positive changes so that you support the companies, organizations and individuals that are actually doing something positive.
If you're currently working for a drug company, quit your job and find something productive to do. Find something that actually benefits humankind and isn't just based on scientific fraud and over-exaggerated, hyped-up marketing.
How do I know we're in a disease economy today? You can see it for yourself. Just drive around any city or town in the United States and you can see what's happening. Take a look at the new construction. What's going to be there? If it's an office complex, chances are it's going to be a medical office building. If it's on a street corner, it's probably going to be a pharmacy -- maybe a new Walgreens or CVS Pharmacy or a new drive-through Wal-Mart pharmacy. You even see pharmacies in grocery stores now, because they are so profitable. When you go into grocery stores and look at what's being sold there, you're getting a good look at the economic activity in this country. You mostly see products that promote disease, thanks to their disease-causing ingredients.
Of course, the disease economy promotes Big Pharma companies. These are the pharmaceutical manufacturers in this country, and they are huge global corporations. The selling of pharmaceuticals is a $1 trillion industry.
It's an amazing statistic. Here in the United States, some of our largest corporations are drug companies. In fact, as I've stated before, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the United States earn more money than the remaining 490 Fortune 500 companies. Just recently, I heard the Bush administration was very excited about the news that we are experiencing economic growth in this country. The economy is up, more money is changing hands, and that's all that economists really look at when calculating gross domestic product or gross national product. They're just looking at the total number of dollars that changed hands.
An economy based on paying for disease treatment
However, if you look at the quality of the products and services that are being exchanged for these dollars, you'll realize something is amiss here, because what we're doing is basing our economic growth on the growth of chronic and degenerative disease. We're basing our economy on the idea that we can treat more and more people with drugs and medical services and keep selling them soft drinks and fast food while calling it economic growth.
This leads me to the most important point of this article, which is that we cannot create abundance in the United States or in any country by selling each other increasingly expensive products and services that promote disease. In other words, we cannot create abundance by poisoning ourselves. The very idea is absurd. The whole point of economic growth is to create economic abundance, and if you look at the classic definitions of economic growth, they are about providing more goods and services to people in a more efficient manner. Those goods and services are supposed to improve the quality of life for those people.
In the old days, the arguments for the invisible hand in the economy were that if you let entrepreneurs compete in a free market, they would devise clever and efficient ways to create, produce and deliver goods and services to consumers that would ultimately enhance their quality of life. That part is absolutely true, and the United States has done that very successfully. The free market does work in accomplishing that, but what we're seeing now is something beyond what those old-school economists could have ever conceived. We're seeing an economy that is increasingly based on goods and services that do not add to the quality of consumers' lives but rather take away from it. We're seeing entrepreneurs and creative, clever people finding new ways to market products that harm people and calling that profitability or economic growth.
We see this quite blatantly in the drug industry, where creative marketers keep coming up with new, absurd ways to sell drugs to people through direct-to-consumer advertising on television. Some of these ads are absolutely idiotic in what they are promising. Yet, they are effective in creating demand. They sell products, but these products do not help consumers.
We also see a lot of products being marketed and sold to consumers that may give them very short-term benefits -- such as the taste of a hamburger or the taste of french fries, which lasts about 10 seconds -- but has long-term detrimental consequences, like obesity, heart disease, brain disorders, cancer and diabetes. These diseases largely come about as a result of long-term consumption of nutritionally depleted foods.
Without question, the U.S. economy is heavily invested in disease. Retailers like Walgreens have mastered the art of selling products on both sides of the equation. At the front of the store, Walgreens sells junk food products, soft drinks, candy and a lot of food that really has no nutrition. At the back of the store, they sell prescription drugs -- drugs that treat the symptoms of diseases that are ultimately caused by people's poor dietary choices and their consumption of junk food.
Walgreens has really mastered this. They will sell you the problem and the treatment, all in the same store. One reason Walgreens is so incredibly successful as a business is because it has mastered the art of selling products to consumers as part of the disease economy. It is a flagship company of the disease economy, perhaps even more so than pharmaceutical companies.
Illusions of wealth in the disease economy
One of the funniest things about the disease economy is that the consumers who are diseased think they're doing well because they own stocks in the companies selling the products that harm them. This fascinates me. A guy dying of cancer or suffering from heart disease, because of the products he has been consuming for years, believes he's doing well because he owns stock in large food manufacturing companies or large pharmaceutical companies. Maybe he owns stock in a new medical technology, or maybe he's a partner in a local medical clinic. His investments are doing great, but he's dying, and he's dying from preventable degenerative disease.
This is what's happening across the country, not just to one person, but to millions of people -- perhaps hundreds of millions -- who think the economy is looking up and think that maybe they have a good job because they work for a pharmaceutical company. They think they have good investments now because they have stocks in the junk food manufacturers. They think they're doing well financially, but guess what? They're consuming the product themselves, and they are dying. They're dying from a degenerative disease at a rate that has never before been witnessed in human history. This demonstrates my entire point: We cannot create abundance by selling each other increasingly expensive products and services that harm each other.
By the way, I don't mean to leave out all those chemical companies manufacturing pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, toxic household cleaners and toxic personal care products. A lot of those skincare companies are really just chemical manufacturers with sexy marketing and lots of women in lab coats selling you products that actually harm your health; that literally contain ingredients that cause cancer and liver disease. People think our economy is booming, but we're all dying of chronic disease. Why is it that 50 percent of our senior citizens in the United States have high blood pressure? Why is it that 40 percent of our senior citizens are now clinically obese? I'm willing to bet that a similar percentage may have nervous system disorders or early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Most of them are probably metabolizing some form of cancer right now, even though it may not have been diagnosed yet.
We are a nation of diseased individuals, and that disease starts very early. There are 12-year-old children who have atherosclerosis. There are teenagers with osteoporosis, and teenage children with obesity are now common. In fact, diabetes has gotten so bad in young people that they had to change the name. That used to be the name. Now they just have to call it diabesity, and that applies to children, teenagers and adults alike.
Returning to health would bankrupt the economy
We have created so much disease in this country, and we have based our economy on it to such a degree that, frankly, we cannot untangle this situation without causing economic distress. If there were a cure for cancer, diabetes or heart disease tomorrow, where a person could wave a magic wand and instantly eliminate those diseases, and if every person in the country did that tomorrow, the sobering truth is that our national economy would collapse overnight. It would collapse because there's so much money, so much real estate, so much education and so much expertise and research invested in disease that we could not financially survive in an economy based on health and abundance, at least not the way things are configured right now.
We could not economically survive in an economy based on real health. We are so invested in disease in this nation that we truly have a disease economy, and in order for that economy to grow, you have to expand the number of people with disease, expand the definition of disease or expand the coverage of people who are treated with high-profit disease-masking products. All three of those things are happening right now.
Corruption in the Disease Economy
Drug companies have experts on their payroll who are part of the FDA's drug safety decision panels, and who don't disclose their conflicts of interest. They are making decisions that expand the definition of disease. A classic case of this was when cholesterol numbers were lowered from 130 to 100 to instantly make 10 million more Americans diagnosable with high cholesterol so they could be treated with statin drugs.
We have the ridiculous (and scientifically dishonest) expansion of psychiatric disorders or so-called brain chemistry diseases, which really have nothing to do with chemistry, but everything to do with expanding the marketplace of psychiatric drugs. The way you expand the marketplace is not to sit around and wait for people to become mentally disturbed. What you do is change the definition of mental disorders and make up new ones.
One of the biggest questions right now is the marketing of adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or adult ADHD. It is a made-up disease. What are the symptoms of this disease? You have too many things on your mind, you can't keep track of everything you need to get done and you are easily distracted. What adult doesn't meet those criteria? We all do, because modern society is a busy place. According to the drug company definition, and even the definition offered by the psychiatric community, we are all suffering from mental illness and must be treated with drugs.
This is one way to expand the disease economy. This is one way you keep those profits flowing and those shareholders happy that they've invested in your company. Most of us here in America are invested in a disease economy, one way or another. Take a look at your own retirement portfolio, if you're fortunate enough to have one, and you're likely to find that you own some percentage of some company that's invested in disease. Interesting, isn't it?
Transforming the Disease Economy into a Health Economy
Enough about the problem; what about the solution? How do you solve the disease economy, challenge it and turn it around into a health economy, a healing economy or an abundant economy? To do that, you first have to figure out a way to make health profitable. How do you make healthy people profitable when there's so much money in treating disease and chronic illness and so much money in addicting people to lifetime requirements for prescription drugs? How do you generate profits off of healthy people, as a nation?
Let's face it: If people are healthy, especially well into their old age, they are no longer customers of those clinics being constructed all over this country. They are no longer customers of Walgreens, CVS or the Wal-Mart pharmacy. They are no longer customers of surgeons, physicians, foot specialists or Alzheimer's doctors. This is why I believe there is absolutely no genuine investment in disease prevention in this country. There's really no investment at all, because preventing disease is the last thing that this disease economy wants.
How do you make it worthwhile to keep people healthy? The answer to that comes down to education, and here's why: When a person is educated, whether it be an education in the arts, the sciences or in any other realm, they live longer and healthier. They maintain their brain function, and they remain productive members of society, no matter how long they live. They can be producing something that benefits other members of society well into their 70s, 80s or even 90s. Healthy individuals can age gracefully and maintain healthy cognitive function. They can directly produce things, such as writing a book, or they can help teach others. They can even be mentors to young entrepreneurs, who can benefit from experience in learning how to manufacture, market or sell something useful.
An uneducated individual, on the other hand, tends to be more of a consumer than a producer of things of value, because they don't have the background, education or experience to be productive members of society. If you don't educate the population, they all become consumers and not producers. It is when people are stuck in the consumer state that they can be profitable to the disease economy. But when the public is educated, it becomes far more profitable to keep people healthy. You could add 20 or 30 years of creative productivity to an individual's life, which means you could boost the productivity of the entire nation by perhaps 15 to 20 percent, which is a huge number. You wouldn't have to base it on disease anymore. You could base it on health. We need a health economy that's based on disease prevention, tied with genuine education.
Think about what we produce in the United States versus other countries. While we are toiling away in our disease economy and inventing new super extreme nacho Doritos and coming up with new prescription drugs that alter brain chemistry in children, genius-level students in other countries are actually doing something useful. In Japan, for example, they are inventing a whole new industry, which I believe will dominate the world's economy. It will be bigger than the computer industry and automobile industry ever was. It's the robotics industry.
In the next 20 or 30 years, the robotics industry will be absolutely huge. Japan is at least 10 years ahead of the United States in this key industry. Why? It's because Japanese students are well educated. They also tend to have a lot better health than students in the United States. In India, they're inventing new computer technologies and new customer service systems that are siphoning labor away from the United States because they do it faster, cheaper and with similar quality but for less money and far lower health-care costs.
Globally, our disease economy simply cannot compete with global economies that actually produce something useful. You want proof of it? Just look at what's happening to General Motors. General Motors is shutting down. General Motors is probably headed for bankruptcy. One of the largest corporations ever produced by the United States is about to go bankrupt. Why? In my opinion, the answer is that General Motors is spending more on health insurance than it is on steel. They're operating in a disease economy, and in a disease economy, it costs way too much for workers because workers are diseased, and you have to cover the costs of treating all that disease so you can have health insurance for all those workers. The United State's health insurance costs are the highest of any nation in the world.
Not only do we have workers who are under-educated in the United States, they are also over-diseased. We have a disease economy, so we think we're creating abundance by selling each other expensive treatments, products and services for disease. The real industries, like automobile manufacturing, are disappearing. Toyota is smart. Toyota is going to dominate the auto industry. Personally, I won't drive anything other than the Toyota. Toyota is the best mainstream vehicle in the world.
Interestingly enough, Toyota is going to be making robots soon, too. Japan does not have a disease economy. Japan has an economy with a good dose of innovation. In fact, innovation is thriving throughout Asia. They don't have a disease economy. They have an innovation-based economy where they actually have to produce something useful to get paid.
Smart nations will invest in prevention
Now, at some point these nations, as they adopt the Western lifestyle and become richer and start to consume more beef animal products, as well as junk food, may very well become disease economies. But some of these nations will be smart about it and start investing in prevention. For example, any nation right now in this world that allows cigarettes to be sold to its population is committing a form of self-destruction. It's like national suicide. What nation would want its citizens to smoke cigarettes so that they would halve their own lives, create huge health-care costs and at the same time reduce their long-term productivity?
Then there are nations like Singapore. Singapore is doing some very intelligent things, and education is one of them. Singapore has a very smart population and a booming economy based on actual abundance and not disease. Of course, people say, "Singapore is almost like a police state. What about personal rights?" That's a huge argument. Should people have the right to smoke themselves to death? Should they have the right to drink soft drinks until they're so obese that they need a knee replacement and demand to be covered by Medicare? Should people be allowed to eat junk food all day, avoid exercise and then get heart disease and need a heart transplant that's paid for by other taxpayers or other participants in their insurance company? These are questions I can't answer in this article. All I can say is that any nation that bases its economy on "diseasification" of its citizens is ultimately doomed to economic collapse. That's exactly where the United States economy is currently headed, to certain economic collapse.
We are losing our health. We are losing our minds. We're losing our genuine economic base. We're losing our manufacturing. We're losing our scientific edge. We're losing our education, and we're losing the inherent value of our money supply as the U.S. dollar continues to slip. What do we have left? Well there's always the Wal-mart and the Walgreens. Give me a Snickers bar. If you can't sleep, you can always buy sleeping pills. If you can't wake up in the morning, you can always drink some coffee. It's the disease economy.
The disease economy is all around you
You're probably participating in it, and if you think you're not, check again, because almost everyone is. It takes an act of great self-determination and courage to extricate oneself from the disease economy and be a productive member of society. It is a rare thing to witness. Very few people I've ever known, or know today, are actually productive members of society doing something useful for the benefit of other human beings.
Do you know who some of those people are? Organic farmers. These are people I greatly respect who are actually doing something useful for others. It is something difficult, something laborious, something a lot of people wouldn't want to do. There are people in society that are productive, and if we're going to succeed as an economy -- or even as a nation -- into the future, we're going to have to expand the number of people who are making a living doing something useful, not something that is just based on disease.
You see, thinking that money spent on disease treatment is economic productivity is actually an economic fallacy. Here's an example: If you just want to create jobs in the country, I have a brilliant plan for job creation. First, hire half the nation to be window breakers. Give them all hammers. Their job is to go around the entire country and break windows. Then you hire the other half of the nation to be window replacers. Their job is to go around and replace all the windows that were broken by the window breakers. You do that and you will have full employment! Sounds insane, doesn't it? But that's what's actually happening today with health.
We have people who are health breakers. They work for pharmaceutical companies, and they work for junk food companies and medical facilities. We have relatively few people who are healers. We've got to change that ratio so that we have fewer health breakers and more health healers in this nation. That's why I'm very happy to see the rising popularity of massage therapists, herbalists, nutritionists, acupuncturists and naturopathic physicians -- people who are true healers. That's what we've got to do in this country to turn things around. We've got to base the economy on healing, disease prevention and the education of our population so that as people live longer they can contribute to society in a meaningful way.
Vote with your dollars
You can remove yourself from the disease economy. You know how you do that? You vote with your dollars. You stop funding these drug companies, junk food companies, toxic personal-care product manufacturing companies, pesticide companies and petroleum companies. You stop giving them your money. You starve them of economic growth by voting with your dollars. You go somewhere else.
You buy food from organic farms at your local food co-op or farmer's market. You buy honest personal care products made with natural ingredients, like Dr. Bronner's soap. You reduce your dependence on fuels. You start riding a bicycle rather than firing up your car all the time. You can change your behavior, and you can change the effect of your dollars. You can help reverse this disease economy and turn it into a healing economy.
You, me and the hundreds of thousands of people who read this article have got to change this world one buying decision at a time, because money is the only way we're ever going to change it. By changing the way we choose to spend our money, we reshape the corporate landscape. We reshape this economy and move it away from a disease economy. Pay attention to your actions when you're at a cash register. Look in your grocery cart. Ask yourself, "What am I invested in here? What am I supporting?" Commit yourself to making positive changes so that you support the companies, organizations and individuals that are actually doing something positive.
If you're currently working for a drug company, quit your job and find something productive to do. Find something that actually benefits humankind and isn't just based on scientific fraud and over-exaggerated, hyped-up marketing.
Being human is now a disease, too
Let's get to the raw truth about the pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies want to turn every normal human experience into a diagnosable disease that's treatable with their high-priced, patent-protected, brand-name drugs. It used to be that drugs were intended just to treat bonafide diseases -- things like malaria or infections -- but now the drug companies have realized that it's a much more profitable venture to invent diseases, and then sell drugs to treat them.
So today, we have drugs to help you do everything a normal, healthy human being can manage on their own in the first place. We have drugs to make you sleep and other drugs to make you wake up. We have drugs to calm you down if you're hyperactive and drugs to make you feel peppy if you're depressed. We have drugs to make you pee, drugs to force a bowel movement and yet more drugs to "enhance sexual performance." Just in case you're feeling a little bit nervous about some of this language, don't worry, there's a drug for that, too. It makes you feel calm when you might normally feel uncomfortable. In fact, no human experience is safe from being targeted and exploited by the pharmaceutical industry.
What's the ultimate aim of drug companies? It's quite simple. Just as Morpheus described in the movie "The Matrix," the purpose of the machines is to turn the human body into a battery. In modern medicine, the aim of drug companies is to turn the human body into a profit-generating machine. It's designed to exploit your body for financial gain. It's pure greed. There is no normal human condition that is safe from disease designation.
Since drugs are now widely used to treat mental states or emotions, it's not too far off that we'll have drugs to treat so-called diseases like "lack of patriotism." If you don't support the war efforts of the United States empire, then obviously you're not a patriot. You must be a traitor, and therefore there must be something mentally wrong with you. You need to be put on prescription drugs to treat that lack of patriotism. Call it the patriot drug.
The real lie from the drug industry is that it's not okay to be human anymore. It's wrong to feel sad. Humans shouldn't ever cry, be depressed or feel down. If you have a sleepless night, there's something wrong with you. It's now a disease, not just a sleepless night.
Consumers buy into this, too. They think that every waking moment should feel wonderful. They think that they have to feel happy, uplifted and energetic at every moment, with no pain whatsoever, all with no effort on their part. God forbid they actually have to get off a couch, break a sweat or move their body to experience some health benefits. They are now convinced that that's the job of drug companies -- that if there's anything that doesn't feel completely comfortable, it's because they don't have the right chemicals in their bloodstream. This view is supported by the psychiatric community and the traditional medical community -- what I call organized medicine -- which continues to search for yet more synthetic chemicals to put into your bloodstream to treat or "manage" every disease, malady, disorder or discomfort that can be dreamed or imagined.
Consumers have been taught to think their foods should be a carnival ride, and that bland food equals bad food From the point of view of consumers, much of the same beliefs are carried into the foods they consume. Consumers have been taught to think that every meal has to be a feast; that everything they put into their mouth has to be amusing, delightful or absolutely delicious. They won't even eat things that are good for them if they taste too bland.
Everything has to be like a carnival ride when it comes to food, and thus every single meal they eat is basically just dessert. The pizza sauce in pizza is loaded with sugar. Cornbread at a restaurant, which 20 years ago used to be cornbread, is now cake. Bagels are cake, and breads are sweetened up to taste like cake as well. Foods are enhanced with excitotoxins and chemical taste enhancers like monosodium glutamate so that nothing tastes like it really should.
Everything has been exaggerated to create this sensory explosion in the mouth of consumers, so consumers live a life in which they can't taste anything unless it's been chemically altered. And they can't function from one day to the next unless they've been chemically doped up with psychotropic drugs and blood-chemistry-altering chemicals sold to them at prices so high that our entire national economy is now headed toward bankruptcy due to healthcare costs.
I have news for these consumers, and I have news for everyone out there considering taking drugs to treat some symptom, disorder or discomfort. The news is that even healthy people have bad days sometimes. Life is not a giant party. Sometimes you don't feel like waking up. Sometimes your muscles ache because you've overworked them or you've eaten some bad food. Sometimes you get sick, but your immune system eventually overcomes it. Sometimes you feel a little down. This is normal. Sometimes you're afraid to speak in front of crowds or you feel anxiety in social situations. This is normal human behavior, folks. Sometimes you feel like you have 12 projects going and you can't concentrate on any one of them. That's not attention deficit disorder; that's normal human behavior. In fact, it's how children learn. They don't focus on one thing; they do multiple things at once.
My message to those of you out who might be taking prescription drugs in the desperate effort to create this perfect, comfortable daily existence is this: Your expectations are way off base. There is no perfect human experience, not even in those who you might think are in perfect health.
The difference between people who are healthy and those who are not is not that we don't feel pain or don't feel inconvenienced in doing the things we do to stay healthy. The difference is that we are willing to do them anyway. In other words, we will feel the pain and still exercise. We feel tired but still get out of bed. We might not like the taste of some supplement, fiber shake or bland-tasting food, but we'll eat it anyway because we're willing to do what it takes to get the results. The results are lifelong health without prescription drugs, with zero medical bills, free of pain and free of chronic disease.
But that's not what Big Pharma wants you to believe.
Big Pharma's big lie: If you pump enough chemicals into your body, your life will be perfect The whole promise of the drug industry is fraudulent. The promise is that if you take all these chemicals, you'll have healthy cholesterol, normal blood pressure levels, you'll never be nervous in social situations, you won't be depressed, you'll be happy all the time, you'll be able to have a bowel movement when you need one, you'll be able to pee when you have to and you'll be able to get an erection when you want one. You'll be able to be this superhuman being just by taking all these chemicals -- that's the promise of the drug industry.
These are empty promises, because any person who is on such drugs is a health wreck. They are very likely numb to the world because their senses have been shut down by these drugs. They probably have hundreds of different side effects metabolizing in their bodies as a result of these drugs. They don't have good energy, and they don't have good, healthy blood chemistry. They are basically just patching one symptom after another with these synthetic chemicals. That is not the pathway to health, and yet that's the empty promise of the pharmaceutical industry.
Disease mongering for business success!
Do you realize the pharmaceutical industry can only continue to grow by inventing new diseases and by redefining existing ones so that more and more people are now labeled diseased? That's the only way the industry can get bigger: By selling more drugs to the same population. The population is not getting any larger around here, so how does the pharmaceutical company make more money? It's easy -- it just invents more conditions.
There's no fundamental need for pharmaceuticals. The human body has no innate need for these chemicals. There is no normal, healthy human being who needs any pharmaceuticals whatsoever. Drug marketing is nothing but an effort to turn your body into a profit machine; to exploit your health, your pain, your suffering and your checkbook for companies who are paying their CEOs $134 million a year plus $120 million in stock option bonuses. They claim they're putting their money into research to help find tomorrow's cures, but that's hogwash. What they're trying to find is tomorrow's new diseases, which they can invent and then treat with more prescription drugs.
Can you name one disease that any pharmaceutical company has ever cured? Just one? There are none. There are no diseases that have been cured by pharmaceutical companies. Yet people continue to be gullible and buy into this fraudulent industry that claims if it just had a few more billion dollars and a few more years, it could cure all diseases.
So what might their cure be? Do you think it is going to be free? If drug companies do find the cure, will they distribute it for free, just to help free people from disease? Of course not. If they find a cure, they're going to charge you for it. Their research into finding a cure is their financial overhead. That's their investment in finding some drug, and it's not your responsibility to pay for their research. The fact is you're paying for their research anyway. Most people don't know this, but the vast majority of new drugs approved by the FDA are based on research that's been funded by taxpayers, not by drug companies. So you're paying for the research anyway, and you're paying for it again when you buy prescription drugs, and you're paying for it yet again when you have to pay for the side effects caused by these prescription drugs.
You're actually paying for these drugs three times, yet they do nothing to improve your health for the long term. Yes, they may mask one symptom for as long as you keep taking the pill. They can effectively lower one measurable chemical milestone such as LDL cholesterol or blood pressure, or they can mask the symptoms of arthritis pain temporarily. But none of them actually reverses any disease; they never address the underlying cause. They never help patients heal. In fact, they do patients a disservice by denying them the opportunity to heal themselves.
Drug companies invent diseases and expand on pre-existing ones to turn people into profit machines
Remember, the purpose of the drug industry today is actually to turn the human body into a profit machine. The way to do that is to expand the number of diseases that exist by attaching a pathological definition to every normal human behavior imaginable. Someday, daydreaming will probably be called a disease. Every undesirable moment of daily life will be called a disease. Have a fear of heights? Well, that could be a disease. Have trouble swimming? They could call that a disease, too. Does your skin attract mosquitoes? Well, certainly you should be taking a pharmaceutical that distributes a poison throughout your entire body and wards off mosquitoes. That's what they do for dogs with pills that prevent ticks and fleas. You feed your dog poison, and the poison circulates throughout that dog's entire body and ends up in the skin where it poisons parasites.
You see, they can come up with drugs for practically anything, but the truth is that these are not diseases. You don't need these drugs, and day-to-day life, even for healthy people, is not a 100 percent perfect experience. It's life, folks. Things happen. Get used to it, and get healthy anyway. There are speed bumps, there are potholes, but so what? No one ever got healthy by sitting around on the couch, waiting for drug companies to cure all their ailments. It won't happen, not in our lifetime, or anyone else's. Learn how to put yourself in control and transform your health outcome from this day forward. If you want to be healthy, take responsibility for your health today. Just say no to pharmaceuticals, and say yes to a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle and nutrition, while avoiding the foods and products that actually promote chronic disease. Say yes to your naturopath and say no to your MD. Fire your doctor, and hire a true healer instead. Above all, don't let any drug company, doctor or government regulatory body tell you that you are diseased because you happen to have a human emotion or a human thought or an off day that isn't 100 percent comfortable. That's not a disease -- that's life. Don't let drug companies convince you that life is a disease.
So today, we have drugs to help you do everything a normal, healthy human being can manage on their own in the first place. We have drugs to make you sleep and other drugs to make you wake up. We have drugs to calm you down if you're hyperactive and drugs to make you feel peppy if you're depressed. We have drugs to make you pee, drugs to force a bowel movement and yet more drugs to "enhance sexual performance." Just in case you're feeling a little bit nervous about some of this language, don't worry, there's a drug for that, too. It makes you feel calm when you might normally feel uncomfortable. In fact, no human experience is safe from being targeted and exploited by the pharmaceutical industry.
What's the ultimate aim of drug companies? It's quite simple. Just as Morpheus described in the movie "The Matrix," the purpose of the machines is to turn the human body into a battery. In modern medicine, the aim of drug companies is to turn the human body into a profit-generating machine. It's designed to exploit your body for financial gain. It's pure greed. There is no normal human condition that is safe from disease designation.
Since drugs are now widely used to treat mental states or emotions, it's not too far off that we'll have drugs to treat so-called diseases like "lack of patriotism." If you don't support the war efforts of the United States empire, then obviously you're not a patriot. You must be a traitor, and therefore there must be something mentally wrong with you. You need to be put on prescription drugs to treat that lack of patriotism. Call it the patriot drug.
The real lie from the drug industry is that it's not okay to be human anymore. It's wrong to feel sad. Humans shouldn't ever cry, be depressed or feel down. If you have a sleepless night, there's something wrong with you. It's now a disease, not just a sleepless night.
Consumers buy into this, too. They think that every waking moment should feel wonderful. They think that they have to feel happy, uplifted and energetic at every moment, with no pain whatsoever, all with no effort on their part. God forbid they actually have to get off a couch, break a sweat or move their body to experience some health benefits. They are now convinced that that's the job of drug companies -- that if there's anything that doesn't feel completely comfortable, it's because they don't have the right chemicals in their bloodstream. This view is supported by the psychiatric community and the traditional medical community -- what I call organized medicine -- which continues to search for yet more synthetic chemicals to put into your bloodstream to treat or "manage" every disease, malady, disorder or discomfort that can be dreamed or imagined.
Consumers have been taught to think their foods should be a carnival ride, and that bland food equals bad food From the point of view of consumers, much of the same beliefs are carried into the foods they consume. Consumers have been taught to think that every meal has to be a feast; that everything they put into their mouth has to be amusing, delightful or absolutely delicious. They won't even eat things that are good for them if they taste too bland.
Everything has to be like a carnival ride when it comes to food, and thus every single meal they eat is basically just dessert. The pizza sauce in pizza is loaded with sugar. Cornbread at a restaurant, which 20 years ago used to be cornbread, is now cake. Bagels are cake, and breads are sweetened up to taste like cake as well. Foods are enhanced with excitotoxins and chemical taste enhancers like monosodium glutamate so that nothing tastes like it really should.
Everything has been exaggerated to create this sensory explosion in the mouth of consumers, so consumers live a life in which they can't taste anything unless it's been chemically altered. And they can't function from one day to the next unless they've been chemically doped up with psychotropic drugs and blood-chemistry-altering chemicals sold to them at prices so high that our entire national economy is now headed toward bankruptcy due to healthcare costs.
I have news for these consumers, and I have news for everyone out there considering taking drugs to treat some symptom, disorder or discomfort. The news is that even healthy people have bad days sometimes. Life is not a giant party. Sometimes you don't feel like waking up. Sometimes your muscles ache because you've overworked them or you've eaten some bad food. Sometimes you get sick, but your immune system eventually overcomes it. Sometimes you feel a little down. This is normal. Sometimes you're afraid to speak in front of crowds or you feel anxiety in social situations. This is normal human behavior, folks. Sometimes you feel like you have 12 projects going and you can't concentrate on any one of them. That's not attention deficit disorder; that's normal human behavior. In fact, it's how children learn. They don't focus on one thing; they do multiple things at once.
My message to those of you out who might be taking prescription drugs in the desperate effort to create this perfect, comfortable daily existence is this: Your expectations are way off base. There is no perfect human experience, not even in those who you might think are in perfect health.
The difference between people who are healthy and those who are not is not that we don't feel pain or don't feel inconvenienced in doing the things we do to stay healthy. The difference is that we are willing to do them anyway. In other words, we will feel the pain and still exercise. We feel tired but still get out of bed. We might not like the taste of some supplement, fiber shake or bland-tasting food, but we'll eat it anyway because we're willing to do what it takes to get the results. The results are lifelong health without prescription drugs, with zero medical bills, free of pain and free of chronic disease.
But that's not what Big Pharma wants you to believe.
Big Pharma's big lie: If you pump enough chemicals into your body, your life will be perfect The whole promise of the drug industry is fraudulent. The promise is that if you take all these chemicals, you'll have healthy cholesterol, normal blood pressure levels, you'll never be nervous in social situations, you won't be depressed, you'll be happy all the time, you'll be able to have a bowel movement when you need one, you'll be able to pee when you have to and you'll be able to get an erection when you want one. You'll be able to be this superhuman being just by taking all these chemicals -- that's the promise of the drug industry.
These are empty promises, because any person who is on such drugs is a health wreck. They are very likely numb to the world because their senses have been shut down by these drugs. They probably have hundreds of different side effects metabolizing in their bodies as a result of these drugs. They don't have good energy, and they don't have good, healthy blood chemistry. They are basically just patching one symptom after another with these synthetic chemicals. That is not the pathway to health, and yet that's the empty promise of the pharmaceutical industry.
Disease mongering for business success!
Do you realize the pharmaceutical industry can only continue to grow by inventing new diseases and by redefining existing ones so that more and more people are now labeled diseased? That's the only way the industry can get bigger: By selling more drugs to the same population. The population is not getting any larger around here, so how does the pharmaceutical company make more money? It's easy -- it just invents more conditions.
There's no fundamental need for pharmaceuticals. The human body has no innate need for these chemicals. There is no normal, healthy human being who needs any pharmaceuticals whatsoever. Drug marketing is nothing but an effort to turn your body into a profit machine; to exploit your health, your pain, your suffering and your checkbook for companies who are paying their CEOs $134 million a year plus $120 million in stock option bonuses. They claim they're putting their money into research to help find tomorrow's cures, but that's hogwash. What they're trying to find is tomorrow's new diseases, which they can invent and then treat with more prescription drugs.
Can you name one disease that any pharmaceutical company has ever cured? Just one? There are none. There are no diseases that have been cured by pharmaceutical companies. Yet people continue to be gullible and buy into this fraudulent industry that claims if it just had a few more billion dollars and a few more years, it could cure all diseases.
So what might their cure be? Do you think it is going to be free? If drug companies do find the cure, will they distribute it for free, just to help free people from disease? Of course not. If they find a cure, they're going to charge you for it. Their research into finding a cure is their financial overhead. That's their investment in finding some drug, and it's not your responsibility to pay for their research. The fact is you're paying for their research anyway. Most people don't know this, but the vast majority of new drugs approved by the FDA are based on research that's been funded by taxpayers, not by drug companies. So you're paying for the research anyway, and you're paying for it again when you buy prescription drugs, and you're paying for it yet again when you have to pay for the side effects caused by these prescription drugs.
You're actually paying for these drugs three times, yet they do nothing to improve your health for the long term. Yes, they may mask one symptom for as long as you keep taking the pill. They can effectively lower one measurable chemical milestone such as LDL cholesterol or blood pressure, or they can mask the symptoms of arthritis pain temporarily. But none of them actually reverses any disease; they never address the underlying cause. They never help patients heal. In fact, they do patients a disservice by denying them the opportunity to heal themselves.
Drug companies invent diseases and expand on pre-existing ones to turn people into profit machines
Remember, the purpose of the drug industry today is actually to turn the human body into a profit machine. The way to do that is to expand the number of diseases that exist by attaching a pathological definition to every normal human behavior imaginable. Someday, daydreaming will probably be called a disease. Every undesirable moment of daily life will be called a disease. Have a fear of heights? Well, that could be a disease. Have trouble swimming? They could call that a disease, too. Does your skin attract mosquitoes? Well, certainly you should be taking a pharmaceutical that distributes a poison throughout your entire body and wards off mosquitoes. That's what they do for dogs with pills that prevent ticks and fleas. You feed your dog poison, and the poison circulates throughout that dog's entire body and ends up in the skin where it poisons parasites.
You see, they can come up with drugs for practically anything, but the truth is that these are not diseases. You don't need these drugs, and day-to-day life, even for healthy people, is not a 100 percent perfect experience. It's life, folks. Things happen. Get used to it, and get healthy anyway. There are speed bumps, there are potholes, but so what? No one ever got healthy by sitting around on the couch, waiting for drug companies to cure all their ailments. It won't happen, not in our lifetime, or anyone else's. Learn how to put yourself in control and transform your health outcome from this day forward. If you want to be healthy, take responsibility for your health today. Just say no to pharmaceuticals, and say yes to a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle and nutrition, while avoiding the foods and products that actually promote chronic disease. Say yes to your naturopath and say no to your MD. Fire your doctor, and hire a true healer instead. Above all, don't let any drug company, doctor or government regulatory body tell you that you are diseased because you happen to have a human emotion or a human thought or an off day that isn't 100 percent comfortable. That's not a disease -- that's life. Don't let drug companies convince you that life is a disease.
THE GREAT CAFFEINE HOAX
Most of my readers are aware of the evils of coffee, and probably all of them have given up this habit. However, I often meet raw foodists or vegetarians who, otherwise following a healthy lifestyle, still drink coffee. It’s their guilty pleasure they say. Others still have an occasional cup of green tea, maté, guarana, or other caffeinated beverages. Some may even think that these beverages are healthy. For many, it's chocolate, which gives the same strange “pleasure” as the beverages.
The effects of caffeine on the body are well researched, but you never hear about it in your newspaper. You never hear about it anywhere because the whole nation, if not the whole world, is addicted to caffeine. Doctors, journalists, scientists, writers, everyone drinks coffee. Those whose job is to inform us are usually heavy coffee drinkers. And few of them ever rise up to speak against this popular drug.
But one did, his name is Stephen Cherniske, and he's a scientist who spent 10 years of his life researching the effects of caffeine on the body and compiling them in a shocking document, “Caffeine Blues.” On the first page of this book we can read:
Caffeine can't provide energy, only chemical stimulation and induced emergency state that can lead to irritability, mood swings, and panic attacks.
Caffeine's ultimate mood effect can be letdown, which can lead to depression and chronic fatigue.
Caffeine gives the illusion of heightened alertness by dilating pupils, quickening heart rate, and raising blood pressure. In fact, caffeine does not increase overall mental activity.
I have read “Caffeine Blues” and selected the most relevant information and quotes out of it for this article.
The Great Caffeine Hoax
You may have read somewhere, or have been told in school, that as long as caffeine was consumed in “moderate” quantities, it did not pose any threat to health. You were reassured. Once in a while, you may even read somewhere in the newspaper about the “benefits” of drinking coffee. So far, so good. Who could ever say anything against coffee? Mr. Cherniske responds:
“I had been told only that caffeine was a mild stimulant and its association with health disorders was unproven. I was also told that caffeine is not addictive. Since I knew from my own painful experience that the opposite was true, I reasoned that perhaps I had been snowed on the whole topic.
“What I quickly learned was that everyone has been snowed — researchers, doctors, journalists, and especially the public. The deception has been well coordinated by an industry whose goal is quite simple: to get as much caffeine into our bodies as possible. The caffeine industry knows caffeine saps your natural sense of vitality, leaving you dependent on their products to get through the day. They know that you actually crave their products and, more importantly, that you suffer when you don't consume them.
“It's a marketing dream, and it's legal. No wonder more and more companies are jumping on the caffeine bandwagon, churning out products from specialized coffees and teas to 'herbal' caffeinated energy pills, caffeine laced fruit beverages, 'supercharged' soft drinks, caffeinated beer, and even caffeinated bottled water.” (Caffeine Blues, page 4)
The Caffeine Stimulation: Not Energy
Caffeine is a poison. The body has absolutely no use for it as it is a danger to its living function. It must detoxify it through the liver and reject it with great effort. The “stimulation” we feel after drinking coffee is nothing more than the expended effort in eliminating this poison.
The Law of Excitation
Herbert Shelton clearly explained the delusion of stimulation in his classic book, “Orthobionomics.”
“Whenever any irritating substance or influence is brought to bear upon the living organism this occasions vital resistance and excitation manifested by increased and impaired action, which, always necessarily diminishes the power of action and does so in precisely the degree to which it accelerates action; the increased action is caused by the extra expenditure of vital power called out, not supplied, by the compulsory process, and therefore the available supply of power is diminished by this amount…
“Under all circumstances, vitality or energy of any character whatever is invariably manifested or noticed by us, as energy, in its expenditure, never in its accumulation.”
In other words, what appears to give us energy is draining our energies. The stimulation people get from drinking coffee is an expenditure of vital forces, not real energy which can only come from rest.
Cherniske who well understands this, wrote:
“Caffeine does not provide energy — only chemical stimulation. The perceived energy comes from the body's struggle to adapt to increased blood levels of stress hormones... Using coffee for mood enhancement is a short-term blessing and a long-term curse. While the initial adrenal stimulation may provide a transient anti-fatigue ‘lift,’ caffeine's ultimate mood effect is a letdown, either subtle or profound. Advertisers and coffee 'institutes' have kept this side of caffeine from public view...
“While caffeine users may feel more alert, the experience is simply one of increased sensory and motor activity (dilated pupils, increased heart rate, and higher blood pressure). The quality of thought and recall is improved no more than the quality of music is improved when played at a higher volume or speed.”
The energy we get from caffeine is similar to the “energy” a horse gets when whipped. It is not energy gained but power spent responding to an injury.
Tolerance
About tolerance to caffeine, he says: “What is tolerable for one person may be excessive for another. Moreover, what is tolerable caffeine intake at some point in your life may actually cause health problems just a few years later.” We often hear that caffeine is only bad when consumed in excess, but when taken in small quantities it is not dangerous, and could even be beneficial, raising “mental alertness.” But since when can a poison be good for you?
“... of all the thousands of research papers that have been published on caffeine, none have concluded that caffeine is good for you.”
The truth is that the moderate coffee drinker is a rare gem, because coffee is so addictive that most consumers eventually end up drinking quite a bit. And the “average person” is a myth anyway. This person described by scientists in their research papers when they statistically analyze caffeine consumption simply does not exist. Not everyone reacts to a poison the same way, not everyone can detoxify it at the same rate, and not everyone consumes the same dose.
Those who are purified by, for example, a raw vegan diet, will react more strongly to caffeine than the average person. Children are more affected too, because their organism is purer. So the same dose of caffeine will have different effect on different people. So we can see the fallacy of recommending “moderation” - because it doesn't mean anything. Moderation can only concern the healthy factors of life, not those that are damaging to it. Moderation in them is impossible. Any quantity will be an excess.
But how did we come to drink coffee?
It seems that coffee beans were used as a drug long before they were used as a food. The practice of giving toxic substances to the sick has been in vogue for a long time and has not changed much today. A large percentage of today's pharmaceutical drugs contain caffeine as one of their “active ingredients.”
“It was not until the thirteenth century that Arab monks made a revolutionary discovery. Roasted coffee beans could be made into a drink. No more falling asleep at prayers! The news spread from monastery to monastery, then hit the streets in the world's finest coffeehouses.” (Caffeine Blues, page 14)
“When coffee was first brought to European cities in the seventeenth century, people were repelled by its color and taste. They complained that it smelled and looked like roofing tar. But after they experienced its stimulating effect, the beverage was quickly proclaimed to be one of nature's miracles. Historians record this phenomenon without noticing the irony of what they are writing. Caffeine is, after all, a psychoactive drug, and human beings tend to crave substances that alter their states among them caffeine, morphine, nicotine, and cocaine. Indeed, all of these alkaloids are chemically related and, while they produce widely different effects, all are poisonous.” (Caffeine Blues, page 17)
Now coffee has conquered the world to the point where almost everyone drinks coffee, if not tea, if not another type of caffeinated beverage, such as coca-cola. Americans are the largest coffee drinkers in the world - with a dazzling record of 420 million cups drunk every single day.
Toxicity of Coffee
Coffee is not a food, it is not a drink - it's a poison. It's a “mild” drug containing a whole array of toxic substances. In addition to caffeine, coffee contains hundreds of volatile substances including more than 200 acids. These the body must reject by a great expense of energy, which is the strange stimulation perceived as “energy.”
“Caffeine is a biological poison used by plants as a pesticide. The caffeine gives seeds and leaves a bitter taste, which discourages their consumption by insects and animals. If predators persist in eating a caffeine-containing plant, the caffeine can cause central nervous system disruptions and even lethal side effects. Most pests soon learn to leave the plant alone.” (Caffeine Blues, page 17)
But humans have fooled their instincts and tastes bud and transformed coffee into a drinkable beverage, often mixed with milk and sugar. The same holds true for chocolate. No one would ever think of eating cocoa beans, because of their horrible taste. So we mix it with sugar and fat and call it chocolate. But our sense of taste was right in detecting that poison - used by the plant as a pesticide to repel insects.
Caffeine, like Theo bromine (found in chocolate), has to be detoxified by the liver, and injures it overtime. Caffeine is a poison for the liver. But caffeine is not the only toxic substance in coffee.
“Remember that coffee contains a host of chemicals, not just caffeine, among them a group of extremely toxic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). You might remember them as the cancer-causing agents isolated from barbecued meat.” (Caffeine Blues, page 53)
Chocolate
Chocolate contains a small amount of caffeine, but also contains a good amount of another substance called Theo bromine. This is a substance analogous to caffeine, producing similar physiological effects. When you combine the caffeine and the Theo bromine contained in a one-ounce piece of chocolate, you end up with the stimulating power of 40 milligrams of caffeine!
But everyone drinks coffee!
“When it comes to coffee, the most common reaction I hear is, ‘How can it be bad for you? People have been drinking coffee for centuries.’
“To a scientist, this observation is meaningless. History is filled with cases where millions of people made serious mistakes. There are herbs in China, for example, that has been used medicinally for thousands of years, and are still being used to treat sinus congestion. But repeated use of these herbs over time can cause cancer of the nose and throat. Epidemiologists (scientists studying the distribution of disease in populations) have estimated that this habit has caused premature and painful death for millions of Chinese people. Clearly, great numbers of people can be wrong, especially when they don't know the facts.” I have a saying: A lot of what popular wisdom holds true is wrong. With so much misinformation spread today, I rarely say this line inappropriately.
“You should also question the sanity of common statements that we hear from friends, celebrities, and co-workers. In the movie Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotten's famous line was, ‘I can't face the world in the morning. I must have coffee before I can speak.’ Now, substitute for the word coffee any other drug, say amphetamines. If a person said he or she can't face the world without amphetamines, we'd call him or her an addict. We'd whisk the person off to rehab and maybe even throw him in jail. But because coffee is a drug we consume ourselves, we wink and nod and say, 'Yeah, isn’t it the truth!'“
Caffeine and Impaired Digestion
“Impaired digestion is more of a problem than most people realize - and it gets worse with caffeine. That jumbo 32-ounce soft drink or the double espresso we have with meals is a major contributor to the bloating, pain, and gas that roughly 50 percent of American adults experience after they eat. And these symptoms are only the physical signs of indigestion. Unseen are the harmful by-products of fermentation and putrefaction. Some of these by-products are absorbed back into the bloodstream, and the toxins that stay in the gut increase your risk of gastrointestinal disease.”
Caffeine and Sleep Disturbance
“There is a popular notion that coffee before 3 P.M. can't disturb your sleep. In fact, caffeine at any time of the day can cause sleep problems, especially if you are under stress.”
It seems that caffeine disturbs the most important phase of sleep, the deep-sleep phase. It's a vicious circle: caffeine intake leads to decreased sleep quantity, which leads to increased caffeine intake, which leads to decreased sleep quality, which leads to disease and fatigue, which leads to increased caffeine intake, and so on.
“We also tend to think that caffeine-related problems are mostly experienced by people in the workforce. In reality, those hardest hit appear to be the elderly. Oven though seniors tend to cut back on coffee, the caffeine they do ingest is detoxified much more slowly and their nervous systems are much more sensitive than those of younger people. Research is now showing that sleep disturbance among the elderly is a major factor not only in age-related physical degeneration but in mental degeneration as well.” (Caffeine Blues, page 85)
Caffeine & Malnutrition
Coffee also causes many nutritional deficiencies. Poisons in tea and coffee, including caffeine, cause an increased loss of B vitamins in the urine. There is also a loss of calcium.
“Research just published in the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism found that caffeine increased potassium loss by nearly one-third. To make matters worse, such mineral loss appears to be accelerated when caffeine is mixed with sugar. Studies show that the mechanism behind this mineral-wasting phenomenon may have to do with the fact that caffeine impairs the kidney's ability to hold on to calcium, magnesium, and other minerals. Most recently, zinc was added to the list of nutrients depleted by caffeine.” (Caffeine Blues, page 90)
To add to this list, iron absorption is also impaired when caffeine is taken.
Caffeine and Mental Illness
I have known for a long time that even a moderate caffeine intake may cause a small depression, the “blues.” I have noticed this on myself a couple years ago when I started drinking green tea, thinking that this beverage only had a tiny amount of caffeine in it. I couldn't fall asleep before 2 a.m. and started to experience a mild depression.
As soon as I discarded the green tea, it went away. How many people feel depressed and tired for no apparent reason? And how many of them drink coffee or tea and can't give it up?
“If a person were injected with 500 milligrams of caffeine, within an hour he or she would exhibit symptoms of severe mental illness, among them, hallucinations, paranoia, panic, mania, and depression. But the same amount of caffeine administered over the course of a day only produces the milder forms of insanity for which we take tranquilizers and antidepressants.” (Caffeine Blues, page 124)
Coffee and Constipation
Many people claim that caffeine helps them maintain normal bowel regularity, but that is the same as relying on laxatives. Either way, you're using a drug to induce bowel movements, and ultimately many coffee drinkers become dependent on this laxative action. Without the caffeine stimulation, they experience what is known as ‘rebound constipation.’ (page 173)
Caffeine and Headaches
“Forty-five million Americans suffer from chronic headaches. Seventeen million are migraine sufferers.”
“The person with a headache doesn’t know that it was caused or triggered by caffeine, so he or she looks for a painkiller (analgesic). Studies show that in 95 percent of cases, the analgesic drug contains caffeine. Such painkillers work, especially if the headaches were caused by caffeine withdrawal, but the caffeine ultimately triggers another headache. Ultimately, the hapless sufferer becomes dependent on the painkiller for even a modicum of relief, but the headaches increase in frequency and intensity. This may go on for many years, creating a cycle of pain and depression that destroys the quality of life.” (Caffeine Blues, page 185)
“A caffeine deprivation (withdrawal) headache results from the normal opening (dilation) of blood vessels that are constricted by caffeine. In other words, habitual caffeine intake keeps blood vessels in the brain constricted. When caffeine is not consumed, these blood vessels return to their normal blood-flow potential, and it is this increased circulation in the brain that causes the throbbing agony of a caffeine withdrawal headache
Adrenal Exhaustion
“Caffeine contributes to adrenal exhaustion, wherein a raft of important hormones is depleted. The destruction is not silent. You’ll feel it every day in many ways as you simply can no longer command the vitality necessary for what were once everyday tasks.” (Caffeine Blues, page 197)
Caffeine and Women
“Compared to men, research shows that caffeine is much more damaging to women, producing adverse effects at lower intake. The effects are even more far-reaching when you consider the harm caffeine does to fetuses and nursing babies.” (Caffeine Blues, page 225)
Here are other facts about caffeine concerning women: caffeine causes iron deficiency; increases calcium loss and risk of osteoporosis; caffeine produces short-term mood elevation, but contributes to rebound depression.
Ecology: pesticides, rain forest destruction and land use issues.
Coffee is the most important crop in the world. More than wheat, rice, corn, or livestock. More than fruit, more than vegetables, or any other staple crop - coffee is number one. More than cars, more than steel, more than everything, only third next to petroleum and some metals used to make weapons. The reason: coffee is a drug, nearly everyone is addicted to it, and it’s part of the culture.
Coffee also happens to be one of the most heavily sprayed agricultural crops. In the countries where it is grown, there are few restrictions concerning pesticide use, where there are fewer laws to protect workers and the environment.
“Coffee plantations use huge amounts of pesticides that pollute the land, rivers, and destroy plant and animal life around them. The beans go off to market, but what happens to coffee pulp and the processing water? This water, now laden with pesticides, fungicides, and nitrogenous waste, goes directly into local streams, rivers, and lakes. With no filtration or reconditioning, the water pollution harms aquatic life as well as the health of people who live alongside those same bodies of water. And the coffee pulp? It sits in huge, rotting piles, leaching out its high nitrogen discharge into the groundwater and eventually into the same polluted waterways.” Cherniske also mentions in his book how coffee plantations have probably contributed to the destruction of Rain Forests more than any other crop in the world, since large portions of the forest are destroyed every year to make room for the coffee plantations.
Coffee culture is labor-intensive and requires large portions of land and resources. These are astronomical numbers once you get your calculator out and consider that the world demand for coffee is 13 billion pounds a year. Since the average plant produces one to two pounds of roasted coffee a year, this will require 7 billion trees. Judging from what the average farmer can get from one acre, it ends up that 70 million acres are devoted to grow this non-food, this drug, this poison that contributes to human suffering and ruins the health of the millions without their being aware of it.
70 million acres devoted to the culture of coffee. Let’s ponder that for a moment. 70 million acres... If we add to that the land devoted to cacao culture (for the making of chocolate), tea leaves culture, sugar cane (for the making of sugar), and grape culture (for the making of wine), we would arrive at frighteningly high numbers. Hundreds of millions of acres of the most fertile land in the world exclusively devoted to the culture of non-foods and beverages that contribute to the suffering of humanity. Why talk about a lack of food? We’re simply cultivating the wrong plants for the wrong purposes!
The corruption of the health food industry.
“Until the 1990’s, caffeine was one of the no-nos of the health-food industry, like sugar and white flour. Caffeine-free herbal teas got their start in the health food industry, where caffeine-free products have traditionally been the hallmark of natural food choices. Now those same stores have huge display bins full of coffee beans and many have coffee bars serving pumped-up caffeine concoction. How did this happen? (Caffeine Blues, page 266)
“The face of the industry changed as the original visionaries sold out to conglomerates for which profit superseded health principles. The proliferation of organic coffee bins in natural food stores took off, and before you knew it, manufacturers of health food products discovered what the food and beverage industry has known for decades: Caffeine sells.” (Caffeine Blues, page 267)
Coffee replacement and giving up coffee
We know it: giving up coffee is rarely easy, especially for those who have been drinking a few cups a day for many years. The detoxification symptoms can include headaches, depression, tiredness, and many more discomforts.
Cherniske mentions a plan where one can give up coffee with little discomforts, by gradually replacing coffee with herbal replacements until no more coffee is drunk. However, this process seems a bit long, and I personally would recommend a more radical method, but people will go with what they think they can do best.
It takes 60 days for your body to eliminate all the caffeine and really see the results. But this could be accelerated by a short fast, or a raw food, eliminating diet, such as a strict raw fruits and vegetables diet.
There are coffee replacements that can be used to give up coffee. Health food stores now offers a wide range of products, usually made from roasted cereals, that have a similar taste to coffee. However, you have to make sure that you buy genuine, caffeine free replacements. Items such as guarana, kola nut, green tea, maté tea, and ephedra are just other plant sources of caffeine and other stimulant drugs. They impair the body’s functions just like coffee does. There is also a new product called “Teeccino” that brews like regular coffee but does not contain any caffeine or any coffee beans. It is made from dates, figs, carob, barley, etc. It can be found in many health food stores or ordered from: Teeccino Caffé, Inc P.O. Box 42259, Santa Barbara, CA 93105, 800-498-3434, www.teeccino.com, email: teeccino@aol.com
The effects of caffeine on the body are well researched, but you never hear about it in your newspaper. You never hear about it anywhere because the whole nation, if not the whole world, is addicted to caffeine. Doctors, journalists, scientists, writers, everyone drinks coffee. Those whose job is to inform us are usually heavy coffee drinkers. And few of them ever rise up to speak against this popular drug.
But one did, his name is Stephen Cherniske, and he's a scientist who spent 10 years of his life researching the effects of caffeine on the body and compiling them in a shocking document, “Caffeine Blues.” On the first page of this book we can read:
Caffeine can't provide energy, only chemical stimulation and induced emergency state that can lead to irritability, mood swings, and panic attacks.
Caffeine's ultimate mood effect can be letdown, which can lead to depression and chronic fatigue.
Caffeine gives the illusion of heightened alertness by dilating pupils, quickening heart rate, and raising blood pressure. In fact, caffeine does not increase overall mental activity.
I have read “Caffeine Blues” and selected the most relevant information and quotes out of it for this article.
The Great Caffeine Hoax
You may have read somewhere, or have been told in school, that as long as caffeine was consumed in “moderate” quantities, it did not pose any threat to health. You were reassured. Once in a while, you may even read somewhere in the newspaper about the “benefits” of drinking coffee. So far, so good. Who could ever say anything against coffee? Mr. Cherniske responds:
“I had been told only that caffeine was a mild stimulant and its association with health disorders was unproven. I was also told that caffeine is not addictive. Since I knew from my own painful experience that the opposite was true, I reasoned that perhaps I had been snowed on the whole topic.
“What I quickly learned was that everyone has been snowed — researchers, doctors, journalists, and especially the public. The deception has been well coordinated by an industry whose goal is quite simple: to get as much caffeine into our bodies as possible. The caffeine industry knows caffeine saps your natural sense of vitality, leaving you dependent on their products to get through the day. They know that you actually crave their products and, more importantly, that you suffer when you don't consume them.
“It's a marketing dream, and it's legal. No wonder more and more companies are jumping on the caffeine bandwagon, churning out products from specialized coffees and teas to 'herbal' caffeinated energy pills, caffeine laced fruit beverages, 'supercharged' soft drinks, caffeinated beer, and even caffeinated bottled water.” (Caffeine Blues, page 4)
The Caffeine Stimulation: Not Energy
Caffeine is a poison. The body has absolutely no use for it as it is a danger to its living function. It must detoxify it through the liver and reject it with great effort. The “stimulation” we feel after drinking coffee is nothing more than the expended effort in eliminating this poison.
The Law of Excitation
Herbert Shelton clearly explained the delusion of stimulation in his classic book, “Orthobionomics.”
“Whenever any irritating substance or influence is brought to bear upon the living organism this occasions vital resistance and excitation manifested by increased and impaired action, which, always necessarily diminishes the power of action and does so in precisely the degree to which it accelerates action; the increased action is caused by the extra expenditure of vital power called out, not supplied, by the compulsory process, and therefore the available supply of power is diminished by this amount…
“Under all circumstances, vitality or energy of any character whatever is invariably manifested or noticed by us, as energy, in its expenditure, never in its accumulation.”
In other words, what appears to give us energy is draining our energies. The stimulation people get from drinking coffee is an expenditure of vital forces, not real energy which can only come from rest.
Cherniske who well understands this, wrote:
“Caffeine does not provide energy — only chemical stimulation. The perceived energy comes from the body's struggle to adapt to increased blood levels of stress hormones... Using coffee for mood enhancement is a short-term blessing and a long-term curse. While the initial adrenal stimulation may provide a transient anti-fatigue ‘lift,’ caffeine's ultimate mood effect is a letdown, either subtle or profound. Advertisers and coffee 'institutes' have kept this side of caffeine from public view...
“While caffeine users may feel more alert, the experience is simply one of increased sensory and motor activity (dilated pupils, increased heart rate, and higher blood pressure). The quality of thought and recall is improved no more than the quality of music is improved when played at a higher volume or speed.”
The energy we get from caffeine is similar to the “energy” a horse gets when whipped. It is not energy gained but power spent responding to an injury.
Tolerance
About tolerance to caffeine, he says: “What is tolerable for one person may be excessive for another. Moreover, what is tolerable caffeine intake at some point in your life may actually cause health problems just a few years later.” We often hear that caffeine is only bad when consumed in excess, but when taken in small quantities it is not dangerous, and could even be beneficial, raising “mental alertness.” But since when can a poison be good for you?
“... of all the thousands of research papers that have been published on caffeine, none have concluded that caffeine is good for you.”
The truth is that the moderate coffee drinker is a rare gem, because coffee is so addictive that most consumers eventually end up drinking quite a bit. And the “average person” is a myth anyway. This person described by scientists in their research papers when they statistically analyze caffeine consumption simply does not exist. Not everyone reacts to a poison the same way, not everyone can detoxify it at the same rate, and not everyone consumes the same dose.
Those who are purified by, for example, a raw vegan diet, will react more strongly to caffeine than the average person. Children are more affected too, because their organism is purer. So the same dose of caffeine will have different effect on different people. So we can see the fallacy of recommending “moderation” - because it doesn't mean anything. Moderation can only concern the healthy factors of life, not those that are damaging to it. Moderation in them is impossible. Any quantity will be an excess.
But how did we come to drink coffee?
It seems that coffee beans were used as a drug long before they were used as a food. The practice of giving toxic substances to the sick has been in vogue for a long time and has not changed much today. A large percentage of today's pharmaceutical drugs contain caffeine as one of their “active ingredients.”
“It was not until the thirteenth century that Arab monks made a revolutionary discovery. Roasted coffee beans could be made into a drink. No more falling asleep at prayers! The news spread from monastery to monastery, then hit the streets in the world's finest coffeehouses.” (Caffeine Blues, page 14)
“When coffee was first brought to European cities in the seventeenth century, people were repelled by its color and taste. They complained that it smelled and looked like roofing tar. But after they experienced its stimulating effect, the beverage was quickly proclaimed to be one of nature's miracles. Historians record this phenomenon without noticing the irony of what they are writing. Caffeine is, after all, a psychoactive drug, and human beings tend to crave substances that alter their states among them caffeine, morphine, nicotine, and cocaine. Indeed, all of these alkaloids are chemically related and, while they produce widely different effects, all are poisonous.” (Caffeine Blues, page 17)
Now coffee has conquered the world to the point where almost everyone drinks coffee, if not tea, if not another type of caffeinated beverage, such as coca-cola. Americans are the largest coffee drinkers in the world - with a dazzling record of 420 million cups drunk every single day.
Toxicity of Coffee
Coffee is not a food, it is not a drink - it's a poison. It's a “mild” drug containing a whole array of toxic substances. In addition to caffeine, coffee contains hundreds of volatile substances including more than 200 acids. These the body must reject by a great expense of energy, which is the strange stimulation perceived as “energy.”
“Caffeine is a biological poison used by plants as a pesticide. The caffeine gives seeds and leaves a bitter taste, which discourages their consumption by insects and animals. If predators persist in eating a caffeine-containing plant, the caffeine can cause central nervous system disruptions and even lethal side effects. Most pests soon learn to leave the plant alone.” (Caffeine Blues, page 17)
But humans have fooled their instincts and tastes bud and transformed coffee into a drinkable beverage, often mixed with milk and sugar. The same holds true for chocolate. No one would ever think of eating cocoa beans, because of their horrible taste. So we mix it with sugar and fat and call it chocolate. But our sense of taste was right in detecting that poison - used by the plant as a pesticide to repel insects.
Caffeine, like Theo bromine (found in chocolate), has to be detoxified by the liver, and injures it overtime. Caffeine is a poison for the liver. But caffeine is not the only toxic substance in coffee.
“Remember that coffee contains a host of chemicals, not just caffeine, among them a group of extremely toxic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). You might remember them as the cancer-causing agents isolated from barbecued meat.” (Caffeine Blues, page 53)
Chocolate
Chocolate contains a small amount of caffeine, but also contains a good amount of another substance called Theo bromine. This is a substance analogous to caffeine, producing similar physiological effects. When you combine the caffeine and the Theo bromine contained in a one-ounce piece of chocolate, you end up with the stimulating power of 40 milligrams of caffeine!
But everyone drinks coffee!
“When it comes to coffee, the most common reaction I hear is, ‘How can it be bad for you? People have been drinking coffee for centuries.’
“To a scientist, this observation is meaningless. History is filled with cases where millions of people made serious mistakes. There are herbs in China, for example, that has been used medicinally for thousands of years, and are still being used to treat sinus congestion. But repeated use of these herbs over time can cause cancer of the nose and throat. Epidemiologists (scientists studying the distribution of disease in populations) have estimated that this habit has caused premature and painful death for millions of Chinese people. Clearly, great numbers of people can be wrong, especially when they don't know the facts.” I have a saying: A lot of what popular wisdom holds true is wrong. With so much misinformation spread today, I rarely say this line inappropriately.
“You should also question the sanity of common statements that we hear from friends, celebrities, and co-workers. In the movie Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotten's famous line was, ‘I can't face the world in the morning. I must have coffee before I can speak.’ Now, substitute for the word coffee any other drug, say amphetamines. If a person said he or she can't face the world without amphetamines, we'd call him or her an addict. We'd whisk the person off to rehab and maybe even throw him in jail. But because coffee is a drug we consume ourselves, we wink and nod and say, 'Yeah, isn’t it the truth!'“
Caffeine and Impaired Digestion
“Impaired digestion is more of a problem than most people realize - and it gets worse with caffeine. That jumbo 32-ounce soft drink or the double espresso we have with meals is a major contributor to the bloating, pain, and gas that roughly 50 percent of American adults experience after they eat. And these symptoms are only the physical signs of indigestion. Unseen are the harmful by-products of fermentation and putrefaction. Some of these by-products are absorbed back into the bloodstream, and the toxins that stay in the gut increase your risk of gastrointestinal disease.”
Caffeine and Sleep Disturbance
“There is a popular notion that coffee before 3 P.M. can't disturb your sleep. In fact, caffeine at any time of the day can cause sleep problems, especially if you are under stress.”
It seems that caffeine disturbs the most important phase of sleep, the deep-sleep phase. It's a vicious circle: caffeine intake leads to decreased sleep quantity, which leads to increased caffeine intake, which leads to decreased sleep quality, which leads to disease and fatigue, which leads to increased caffeine intake, and so on.
“We also tend to think that caffeine-related problems are mostly experienced by people in the workforce. In reality, those hardest hit appear to be the elderly. Oven though seniors tend to cut back on coffee, the caffeine they do ingest is detoxified much more slowly and their nervous systems are much more sensitive than those of younger people. Research is now showing that sleep disturbance among the elderly is a major factor not only in age-related physical degeneration but in mental degeneration as well.” (Caffeine Blues, page 85)
Caffeine & Malnutrition
Coffee also causes many nutritional deficiencies. Poisons in tea and coffee, including caffeine, cause an increased loss of B vitamins in the urine. There is also a loss of calcium.
“Research just published in the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism found that caffeine increased potassium loss by nearly one-third. To make matters worse, such mineral loss appears to be accelerated when caffeine is mixed with sugar. Studies show that the mechanism behind this mineral-wasting phenomenon may have to do with the fact that caffeine impairs the kidney's ability to hold on to calcium, magnesium, and other minerals. Most recently, zinc was added to the list of nutrients depleted by caffeine.” (Caffeine Blues, page 90)
To add to this list, iron absorption is also impaired when caffeine is taken.
Caffeine and Mental Illness
I have known for a long time that even a moderate caffeine intake may cause a small depression, the “blues.” I have noticed this on myself a couple years ago when I started drinking green tea, thinking that this beverage only had a tiny amount of caffeine in it. I couldn't fall asleep before 2 a.m. and started to experience a mild depression.
As soon as I discarded the green tea, it went away. How many people feel depressed and tired for no apparent reason? And how many of them drink coffee or tea and can't give it up?
“If a person were injected with 500 milligrams of caffeine, within an hour he or she would exhibit symptoms of severe mental illness, among them, hallucinations, paranoia, panic, mania, and depression. But the same amount of caffeine administered over the course of a day only produces the milder forms of insanity for which we take tranquilizers and antidepressants.” (Caffeine Blues, page 124)
Coffee and Constipation
Many people claim that caffeine helps them maintain normal bowel regularity, but that is the same as relying on laxatives. Either way, you're using a drug to induce bowel movements, and ultimately many coffee drinkers become dependent on this laxative action. Without the caffeine stimulation, they experience what is known as ‘rebound constipation.’ (page 173)
Caffeine and Headaches
“Forty-five million Americans suffer from chronic headaches. Seventeen million are migraine sufferers.”
“The person with a headache doesn’t know that it was caused or triggered by caffeine, so he or she looks for a painkiller (analgesic). Studies show that in 95 percent of cases, the analgesic drug contains caffeine. Such painkillers work, especially if the headaches were caused by caffeine withdrawal, but the caffeine ultimately triggers another headache. Ultimately, the hapless sufferer becomes dependent on the painkiller for even a modicum of relief, but the headaches increase in frequency and intensity. This may go on for many years, creating a cycle of pain and depression that destroys the quality of life.” (Caffeine Blues, page 185)
“A caffeine deprivation (withdrawal) headache results from the normal opening (dilation) of blood vessels that are constricted by caffeine. In other words, habitual caffeine intake keeps blood vessels in the brain constricted. When caffeine is not consumed, these blood vessels return to their normal blood-flow potential, and it is this increased circulation in the brain that causes the throbbing agony of a caffeine withdrawal headache
Adrenal Exhaustion
“Caffeine contributes to adrenal exhaustion, wherein a raft of important hormones is depleted. The destruction is not silent. You’ll feel it every day in many ways as you simply can no longer command the vitality necessary for what were once everyday tasks.” (Caffeine Blues, page 197)
Caffeine and Women
“Compared to men, research shows that caffeine is much more damaging to women, producing adverse effects at lower intake. The effects are even more far-reaching when you consider the harm caffeine does to fetuses and nursing babies.” (Caffeine Blues, page 225)
Here are other facts about caffeine concerning women: caffeine causes iron deficiency; increases calcium loss and risk of osteoporosis; caffeine produces short-term mood elevation, but contributes to rebound depression.
Ecology: pesticides, rain forest destruction and land use issues.
Coffee is the most important crop in the world. More than wheat, rice, corn, or livestock. More than fruit, more than vegetables, or any other staple crop - coffee is number one. More than cars, more than steel, more than everything, only third next to petroleum and some metals used to make weapons. The reason: coffee is a drug, nearly everyone is addicted to it, and it’s part of the culture.
Coffee also happens to be one of the most heavily sprayed agricultural crops. In the countries where it is grown, there are few restrictions concerning pesticide use, where there are fewer laws to protect workers and the environment.
“Coffee plantations use huge amounts of pesticides that pollute the land, rivers, and destroy plant and animal life around them. The beans go off to market, but what happens to coffee pulp and the processing water? This water, now laden with pesticides, fungicides, and nitrogenous waste, goes directly into local streams, rivers, and lakes. With no filtration or reconditioning, the water pollution harms aquatic life as well as the health of people who live alongside those same bodies of water. And the coffee pulp? It sits in huge, rotting piles, leaching out its high nitrogen discharge into the groundwater and eventually into the same polluted waterways.” Cherniske also mentions in his book how coffee plantations have probably contributed to the destruction of Rain Forests more than any other crop in the world, since large portions of the forest are destroyed every year to make room for the coffee plantations.
Coffee culture is labor-intensive and requires large portions of land and resources. These are astronomical numbers once you get your calculator out and consider that the world demand for coffee is 13 billion pounds a year. Since the average plant produces one to two pounds of roasted coffee a year, this will require 7 billion trees. Judging from what the average farmer can get from one acre, it ends up that 70 million acres are devoted to grow this non-food, this drug, this poison that contributes to human suffering and ruins the health of the millions without their being aware of it.
70 million acres devoted to the culture of coffee. Let’s ponder that for a moment. 70 million acres... If we add to that the land devoted to cacao culture (for the making of chocolate), tea leaves culture, sugar cane (for the making of sugar), and grape culture (for the making of wine), we would arrive at frighteningly high numbers. Hundreds of millions of acres of the most fertile land in the world exclusively devoted to the culture of non-foods and beverages that contribute to the suffering of humanity. Why talk about a lack of food? We’re simply cultivating the wrong plants for the wrong purposes!
The corruption of the health food industry.
“Until the 1990’s, caffeine was one of the no-nos of the health-food industry, like sugar and white flour. Caffeine-free herbal teas got their start in the health food industry, where caffeine-free products have traditionally been the hallmark of natural food choices. Now those same stores have huge display bins full of coffee beans and many have coffee bars serving pumped-up caffeine concoction. How did this happen? (Caffeine Blues, page 266)
“The face of the industry changed as the original visionaries sold out to conglomerates for which profit superseded health principles. The proliferation of organic coffee bins in natural food stores took off, and before you knew it, manufacturers of health food products discovered what the food and beverage industry has known for decades: Caffeine sells.” (Caffeine Blues, page 267)
Coffee replacement and giving up coffee
We know it: giving up coffee is rarely easy, especially for those who have been drinking a few cups a day for many years. The detoxification symptoms can include headaches, depression, tiredness, and many more discomforts.
Cherniske mentions a plan where one can give up coffee with little discomforts, by gradually replacing coffee with herbal replacements until no more coffee is drunk. However, this process seems a bit long, and I personally would recommend a more radical method, but people will go with what they think they can do best.
It takes 60 days for your body to eliminate all the caffeine and really see the results. But this could be accelerated by a short fast, or a raw food, eliminating diet, such as a strict raw fruits and vegetables diet.
There are coffee replacements that can be used to give up coffee. Health food stores now offers a wide range of products, usually made from roasted cereals, that have a similar taste to coffee. However, you have to make sure that you buy genuine, caffeine free replacements. Items such as guarana, kola nut, green tea, maté tea, and ephedra are just other plant sources of caffeine and other stimulant drugs. They impair the body’s functions just like coffee does. There is also a new product called “Teeccino” that brews like regular coffee but does not contain any caffeine or any coffee beans. It is made from dates, figs, carob, barley, etc. It can be found in many health food stores or ordered from: Teeccino Caffé, Inc P.O. Box 42259, Santa Barbara, CA 93105, 800-498-3434, www.teeccino.com, email: teeccino@aol.com
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