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Apart from inadequate nutrition, the primary cause of premature aging - and all the fatigue, cell damage and disease which accompany it - is a buildup of waste products which are toxic to the system. They result in poor circulation to and from the cells and in a stagnation of cellular fluids. A continuous interchange takes place between your body's trillions of cells and their surrounding interstitial fluids. This is where nutrients and oxygen are exchanged for waste products from the cells. Wastes are then picked up by minute lymphatic tubules or ducts and sent through the lymph vessels to be detoxified. It is an exchange regulated by subtle electrochemical processes. Living cells will only thrive when both nutrients and oxygen are well supplied and toxic wastes are concurrently removed and eliminated from the body. The methods for encouraging this are extraordinarily simple yet their effects can be remarkably profound. Many are also immediately experienced in terms of improved good looks and vitality and a newfound sense of calm well-being. long weekend spring-clean This is a method I like to use when for one reason or another (such as after Christmas celebrations or living in hotels) I have not been able to eat the same kind of foods I do at home, or when I am feeling tired and need a lift. It takes three days to carry out. Ideally you should eat all raw foods the day before you begin but this is not always possible. It is an ideal way to regenerate yourself over a long quiet weekend. On rising, or at 9am, each day you begin with a cup of herb tea - not too hot. You can sweeten it with a little natural stevia if you like. Day 1 9am Herb tea 11am 8oz fresh fruit (not citrus) or vegetable juice 1pm 1 cup potassium broth 4pm Herb tea 7pm 8oz fresh fruit (not citrus) or vegetable juice 9pm 1 cup potassium broth Day 2 9am Herb tea plus half an apple - be sure to chew it thoroughly 11am Fresh fruit or vegetable juice 1pm Cup of potassium broth 4pm Herb tea 7pm Cup of potassium broth 9pm Fresh fruit or vegetable juice Day 3 9am A dish of prunes which have been soaked overnight in water 11am Fresh fruit or vegetable juice 1pm Salad of fresh raw vegetables with a little yogurt dressing. 4pm An apple 7pm Fresh fruit or vegetable juice 9pm Cup of potassium broth During this Weekend Spring-Clean you can drink as much spring water as you like. It is important that you take a brisk walk in the open air for at least half an hour each day. You can continue to work if you like but it is especially pleasant to carry out over a long weekend when you have time to yourself. You must not smoke, or drink alcohol, tea or coffee. Herb teas are available from healthfood stores. So is potassium broth which is made from fresh vegetables and herbs and contains no additives. The best you make yourself simply by boiling masses of fresh vegetables. Alternatively you can buy it in little cubes over which you pour boiling water, or in a powder form which I prefer. The best I have found is called Low Salt Marigold Swiss Vegetable Bouillon. You can make your own fresh vegetable or fruit and vegetable juices (half apple and half carrot is a particularly delicious and effective combination to use) provided you have a centrifuge juice extractor. Otherwise look for those processed by low heat to preserve their natural enzymes and nutrients. They too are available in health-food stores. The Biotta juices from Germany are the best. Daily baths are a must during the Long Weekend regime and you will probably find you need to brush your teeth more often than usual since your body will be rapidly eliminating wastes and both teeth and tongue can become coated when this occurs. Skin brushing is excellent for hastening the eliminative processes. Do not take a sauna during the Long Weekend Spring-Clean however. On the fourth day simply return to your normal way of eating, with particular emphasis on raw foods for a day or two.

Children are extraordinary people - neither the dewy-eyed little darlings we put on our Christmas cards nor the wild savages we fear will grow up to be criminals if not disciplined properly. And Nature's child is indeed wild - wild because he doesn't fit into our idea of what is and isn't done, wild because he hasn't learned the subtle art of concealment and hypocrisy we cultivate as adults, wild because no matter how much we try to make him conform to our will, if he is lucky he never will, so strongly directed from within is he by his own destiny. As adults, most of us can't help trying. When we try too hard, we succeed only in turning our children into the same hypocrites we ourselves have learned to be. It was a little girl named Jill - a freckle-faced, runny-nosed, redheaded three year old - and two of her nursery-school friends who first made me aware of my own hypocrisy. Jill and a friend were setting up an imaginary tea party. They had carefully laid the small table with battered plastic cups, filled the cracked teapot and put wadded-up pieces of paper in a paper cup for sugar cubes. During all of this the two girls chattered in obvious imitation of their mothers. `Who else is coming to tea?' asked Jill. `Oh, you know that awful old Mrs Simpson - the one who always has her hair in curlers,' replied her friend. `Do you know she doesn't even bother to put a coat over her nightgown when she goes out for the milk?' So the conversation went as the two girls, unaware that anyone was listening, prepared for their guest. When the table was all set, Jill leaned out the window and told a third little girl she could come to the party now. She entered the play house and was greeted with exclamations of: `Why, dear Mrs Simpson, how very nice of you to come. It is so lovely to see you.' I thought to myself how often a scene similar to the one I was witnessing takes place. I was trying to remember the last time I'd been guilty of this kind of two-faced behavior, when my thoughts were interrupted by `Mrs Simpson,' who had been seated at the table. Suddenly she rose, dumped her `tea' back into the cracked teapot, and said very slowly and deliberately: `I heard what you said about me from under the window, and I don't like it. I'm not going to be your old Mrs Simpson any more no matter how nice you are to me, so there!' Young children hate being patronized. They react strongly when someone is false with them. The less privileged the family background of the child, the easier it seems to be for him to see through superficial geniality - and the more demanding he becomes of true, undivided attention and real relationships with adults.

For most people, the face is the focus of attention and the most immediate expression of a woman's beauty. It is certainly the area of the body women most worry about. They spend a great deal of money looking after it with creams and lotions, cleansers and toners and masks, and of course the traditional facials, special treatments, and face-lifts. Everything seems to depend on the face. And all of this is done in an attempt to make sure skin stays smooth and young-looking, well colored, and free from blemishes. Skin is one of the most important criteria for sexual attraction between men and women. Perhaps this is the main reason the face seems so important. the craft of skin care A living, breathing thing, skin is far more than just a superficial covering for your body. It is your largest organ. It covers a surface area of about 17 square feet and weighs between six and eight pounds. So complex is this stuff called skin that a piece of it with the surface area of your thumbnail boasts a yard of blood vessels, twenty-five nerve endings, one hundred sweat glands, and over three million cells. Lasting skin beauty is a question of lasting care, just not spending lavishly on fancy creams and treatments. It is the everyday way you treat skin that matters year after year. But to know how to look after your skin you must first know something about it - what it is and isn't, what it's meant to do, and the many things that affect it for better or worse. For then you can see that its needs are met from day to day. In return it will give you what you desire: beauty that at the very least is skin deep. how your skin works Your skin is a world all its own: living tissue composed of billions of cells bathed in a lake of liquid with the same salt content as seawater. Each skin cell is separated from its neighbor by a membrane through which nutrients and respiratory gases pass, and all skin tissue is nourished by the myriad of tiny capillaries which bring fresh oxygen and nutrients to the cell. Cell growth and reproduction go on unceasingly in each of these microcosms. Life is sustained, wastes eliminated to be carried away via the lymph and blood, so that all of these cells can work together to perform the many vital functions that your skin carries out: It protects your body from invasion by bacteria, virus, or fungus. It helps eliminate the waste products of the metabolism directly through its surface. It conveys information about the outside world by way of a vast network of complex sensory nerve endings. It helps guard the inside of your body from the destructive ultraviolet rays of the sun. And it registers pleasure and pain from your environment. Your skin both depends on the rest of your body for its healthy existence and also offers help to it. And like all live things, in order to function well and look beautiful, it has to be free to carry out all its duties unimpaired by lack of proper nutrients or oxygen, poor circulation, illness, internal pollution, or prolonged stress, all of which threaten its integrity. Real skin care is not just skin deep. skin comes in layers Skin is made up of three layers: the stratified cellular epidermis (the part you see when you look into the mirror); an underlying dermis, made up of connective tissue, nerves, blood, and lymph systems, which also contain the sebaceous, or oil, glands, and sweat glands with ducts leading to its surface; and finally a fatty layer of subcutaneous tissue. The outermost layer, the epidermis, consists of two parts: an inner part of living cells called the stratum Malpighii, and an outer part of anucleated (meaning they have lost their nucleus) horny cells, the stratum corneum. The inner part is in direct contact with the dermis, beneath it. the outer skin Here, at the base of the epidermis, is the stratum Malpighii.  A single layer of cells known as the basal layer forms new cells for the rest of the epidermis by continuous cell reproduction. As they are formed, these new cells constantly push outward and upward towards its surface. In the process, they synthesize an insoluble protein called keratin, lose their cell nuclei, die, and dry out, becoming mere shells on the skin's surface. Once there, they are forever being sloughed off and replaced by new arrivals from below. Most skin care products concern themselves only with the treatment of this stratum corneum, making sure it does not dry out excessively (moisturizer); that the dead cells are periodically sloughed off (exfoliater, which stimulates the basal layer to produce more fresh cells and leaves the skin looking more translucent); and finally, that it is covered with a chemical or physical sunscreen to guard the deeper layers of the skin from damage as a result of exposure to sunlight. When the layers of dead cells in the stratum corneum lie flat and smooth against each other, the skin refracts light well, making your skin look beautifully smooth and silky. If, instead, they are turned up at the edges, then the skin looks dry and lacks smoothness. For they are the outermost manifestation of skin beauty and health. On the stratum corneum, that is on the surface of your skin, there is also a hydrolipidic film composed of water from the sweat glands and oil from the sebaceous glands in a kind of oil-in-water emulsion. This film acts as a natural moisturizer, maintaining acidity (referred to as the pH of skin) to help guard the body against invasion of any kind, and to protect it from chemical onslaught. The natural pH of your skin is between 4.5 and 5.5, which means that it is slightly acid. It is important to maintain this acid mantle. It can be disturbed by the use of soaps, most of which are strongly alkaline, and cosmetics which are not acid-balanced. This is particularly true if your skin is sensitive by nature, tends to be either excessively dry or excessively oily, or if it often breaks out in acne. the living skin Beneath the epidermis, in the dermis, or true skin (which unlike the epidermis is entirely a living thing), are found the nerves. They register pleasure, pain, touch, heat and cold. Here, too, is a rich supply of blood vessels and lymphatics plus all the various skin appendages: the hair follicles, with their sebaceous glands, and the sweat glands. Also important in the dermis is an elaborate network of fibers, made by special cells called fibroblasts. These fibers look like the warp and weft of fine cloth. They are collectively known as connective tissues, and are made up mostly of protein called collagen together with about 2 percent elastin. This network gives your skin its form and resilience. So long as it remains smooth and ordered, your skin stays young-looking and firm. When its fibers start to bunch up and harden or to cross-link and become disorganized, your skin rapidly begins to sag, to wrinkle, and to age. This aging process has many causes. It can occur as a result of exposure to the sun, internal wear and tear from illness, or an insufficiency of certain vitamins and minerals (particularly vitamin C and the trace element zinc), or exposure to cigarette smoke and pollution. It also appears to be part of your genetic programming. Much of the beauty and health of your skin depends on the dermal layer. The things it needs to stay strong and healthy come as much - if not more - from the inside than from what you apply to skin. This internal aspect of skin care is what is most ignored. Few women even consider it, and yet without ensuring that the dermis gets all it needs through optimum nutrition and regular exercise (not only for the face but also for the body as a whole), there is no way you can prevent or correct the disorganization of connective tissue, its consequent loss of tone, and the resulting deep line formation on the face. the subskin Underneath the dermis, in the subcutaneous tissue, are layers of muscle and fatty tissue which act as insulation to the body and which also give young female skin its characteristic (and very attractive) padding. When this padding starts to go, either because of hormonal changes that come with age or because of simple neglect, your skin loses tone and firmness. Looking after this layer of skin is a whole body challenge. Particularly important to it is the health of your endocrine system, in which constant regular exercise plays a vital part. Truly effective skin care has to ensure the continuous health and proper functioning of all three layers, to preserve beauty. This means treatment and protection from the outside of the epidermis. It also means treatment of the dermis through first-rate nutrition, vitamins and minerals, rest and exercise, and perhaps, too, the application of specific essential oils, fatty acids such as gamma linolenic acid (GLA), certain vitamins such as vitamin E, and/or other active substances which can be absorbed through the skin's outer layers into the dermis to stimulate cell metabolism, encourage waste elimination from cells, and help protect and preserve the collagen and elastin fibers. Finally, the subcutaneous layer has to be kept intact by maintaining a firm and well-used, healthy body. In other words, really good skin care for lasting beauty has to tackle the challenge simultaneously from within and without. And there are no shortcuts.

Hi. I’m Leslie Kenton and I’d like to share with you some of the history behind the development of Cura Romana’s unique Essential Spray.It was during the summer of 2010 that we made the decision to create it. Why? There were two reasons. By that time, enormous aggression had begun to be directed against homeopathics— especially against homeopathic hCG. In no small measure this was as a result of lobbying by multi-national pharmaceutical manufacturers. More about that in a moment. [video poster="http://d3oy45cyct8ffi.cloudfront.net/health/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Curaromana-BeyondHCGCuraRomanasEssentialSpray914.jpg" src="https://asset.artemis.cloud/images/articles/original/cura-romana-Essential-Spray.mp4"] The other reason we felt we needed a new spray was this: In addition to the hundreds of reports we got from people worldwide celebrating their weight loss and improved wellbeing from Cura Romana, we were receiving more and more praise for the inner, emotional and spiritual transformations from those who had done the program. I had developed our original homeopathic spray working with British pharmacist and gifted formulator John Morgan. So now, putting our heads together, John and I set out to see if we could create a non- homeopathic spray which, used on the program, would help us fulfill both of our goals. We tested numerous natural methods and substances, continuing to develop prototypes and make adjustments, until were satisfied we had one ready to try out for real. This we did with the help of many participants keen to help us with our trials. As a result of John’s hard work and creative vision, and thanks to the help of some wonderful men and women who helped us get it right, Essential Spray had been transformed into a complex vibrational essence via a unique proprietary process he developed. When it comes to weight loss, participants confirm that results are identical to those of the homeopathic we once used. However, judging from reports received from men and women throughout the world, our next-generation Essential Spray's spiritual benefits have been significantly enhanced. By mid-December 2010, we knew we had found the right formula and were ready to present Essential Spray to the world with the help of Amazon.co.uk. Since then Cura Romana’s Essential Spray has been successfully used by thousands. Let’s go back for a moment to the role Big Pharma plays in all of the lobbying and negative media directed at natural medicines including homeopathy. This is what’s important to remember: Like many nutritional supplements currently being removed from the market, hCG is a generic substance of natural origin. It is therefore not patentable. Pharmaceutical corporations can only make their billions each year by selling patented products. So if you think about all the fuss that Simeons’ Protocol generated and the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost weight using it, then think about the exponential rise in obesity in the Western world, you can see how the use of homeopathic hCG with the Cura Romana Protocol could result in an enormous loss of revenue for some very big corporations.

Thanks to our growing understanding of the natural laws of health and advanced research into high-tech biochemistry, what was once little more than a pipe dream - the notion that the length of human life can be extended - is becoming a reality. Gerontologists have now challenged the maximum lifespans of many species of animals. Man is next. Already physicians are using antioxidant nutrients, electromagnetic techniques and other anti-aging tools to prevent physical degeneration and to restore health and balance to ailing bodies. Meanwhile psychiatrists and psychologists trained in biochemistry and in the orthomolecular treatment of the brain are not only beginning to cure mental and emotional problems associated with age, they are even using the tools of their trade to expand consciousness. It becomes important to ask the question, `With what consequences?' The first worry about life extension for most people is usually, `What will we do with these old people we are creating?' `Won't they be yet a further burden to society?' Naturally they want to know about the effect that longevity will have on housing, medical costs and the rest. Such questions are valid. But it is also important to penetrate the point of view from which they come - the assumptions and paradigms which underlie them. Our society has imprinted its members with negative concepts about being old. In the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, Why Survive? Being Old in America, Dr Robert Buffer outlined the enormous practical problems of dealing with the aged: housing, pensions, personal security, need for meaningful occupations and the rest, and the horrific conditions in which many old people in modern Western society live. He also pointed out that we hold many unconscious assumptions about the aged which continue to create these conditions. They are always with us and they greatly distort our view of aging, old people and their place in society. These assumptions include a belief that the aged are inflexible, senile, unproductive people waiting for the inevitable arrival of the grim reaper. Basically not interesting, of little value, they are people worthy of being assigned to a foreclosed existence. Alex Comfort refers to these common views of age and the elderly as `ageism' which he defines as `the notion that people cease to be people, to be the same people or become people of a distinct and inferior kind, by virtue of having lived a specified number of years'. The assumptions of `ageism' lie behind many of the most often asked questions about the social and political consequences of ageless aging. They make such questions impossible to answer adequately from our current perspective and with our current views of reality. They also force us to ignore a number of important realities. We forget for instance that chronological age at its very best is only a limited indication of biological and functional age. Even our present old people are capable of far more than society allows them to express or contribute - indeed more than they themselves allow. We also forget that every major disease is age-dependent and all of the major causes of death and disability are secondary to the progressive degeneration of aging. Little wonder, for until now, after the age of 30 we have been witnessing a steady and inexorable increase in the probability of morbidity and mortality from one disease or another. But people living by the principles of ageless aging will be different. Highly resistant to the ravages of degeneration which manifest themselves in our major destructive chronic diseases such as cancer, coronary heart disease, arthritis and the rest, they will be less rather than more of a burden to the state in terms of medical, social and psychiatric care. Application of these life-lengthening and life-enhancing principles to health on a wide scale should lead to an increase in the ratio of productive to nonproductive men and women with prolonged life spans. This has been the conclusion of Yale's Professor Larry Kotlikoff, one of the few academics to look seriously at the issue. Kotlikoff initiated an inquiry into the economic effects of increased lifespan. He also concluded that this increase in the ratio of productive to nonproductive people would result in an increased per capita output whether or not the working period increased year for year with life expectancy. With the increased longevity and the improved resistance to degeneration which are the natural outcome of applying the findings of age-researchers to our everyday lives, the population of our old people will also change. So will our attitudes to them. No longer a burden, like the Vilcabamba Indians or the Abkhazians of the Soviet Caucasus they will become not `old people' but `long lived people'. Such a simple shift in attitude could revolutionize us as human beings not only in terms of politics and economics but by shifting us towards a more value orientated society. At that point the question of `What will we do with all these old people?' begins to take on quite a different meaning. For the challenge now becomes not how we house, feed, and care for a growing sector of the nonproductive population but rather how we can best use the energy and wisdom of the older members of our society.

At the moment we have about a quarter of a century allotted to us in which to grow to adulthood. The next forty years are generally directed towards accomplishment in the outside world, realizing the goals of adulthood, procreation and raising a family. Then we tend to slide headlong downhill until we die. The character Vitek in Karel Capek's celebrated play The Makropoulos Secret describes the plight of modern man: . . he hasn't had time for gladness, and he hasn't had time to think, and he hasn't had time for anything except a desire for bread. He hasn't done anything. No, not even himself... What else is immortality of the soul but a protest against the shortness of life? A human being is something more than a turtle or a raven; a man needs more time to life. Sixty years - it is not right. It's weakness, it's innocence, and it's animal-like. Within the confines of our three score and ten years and under the pressures of contemporary social values, modern man and modern woman have become quite extraordinarily obsessed with accomplishment. Since for most of us the time for worldly accomplishment is limited to this middle period we push ourselves forward, often at health-breaking and heartbreaking speed. To many of us the concern with fulfilling ourselves in our career, paying the rent, buying the baby a new pair of shoes, during what are supposed to be the best years of our lives, forces us to postpone the pleasures of a time to dream, a time to think and a time to play - in the very highest sense of the word. If we are to find a means of coping with the problems of our society-problems of poor statesmanship, overpopulation, Third World famine, pollution and economic inequities - we desperately need this time to dream. We need this time to recreate our own world and to take our destiny responsibly into our own hands, aside from the demands of adult life. connectedness - a priority Nobel laureate novelist Hermann Hesse wrote about such a time-expanded world in his Glass Bead Game. There, time's limits become the rules of the game of life and each human being is freed to order his existential choices. Such a time-expanded world could help us draw together our learning and re-synthesize our knowledge. It might enable the coming together of disciplines such as mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, art, literature, politics, theology and law - in fact the whole gamut of human concerns and disciplines - into a kind of connectedness which is urgently needed in the excessively fragmented postindustrial society that has become our home. Healthy longevity - ageless aging - would make available to us the steadily maturing wisdom of our old people - people whose experience and awareness have not become distorted by ill-functioning minds and rapidly waning energies. Such wisdom is, I believe, exactly what we need to help guide our species into its further evolution. Moreover, such time expansion takes hold of our personal sense of the present and in a very real way draws it into the future. For when we are able to project ourselves into the future, that future becomes not an abstract consideration but of active concern to all of us. The future of the earth is our future. We become responsible for it and we will live to see it as caretakers instead of irresponsible tenants of a rented property. Ageless aging will help us become its owners and like all owners we are far more likely to look after our property. In George Bernard Shaw's preface to Back to Methuselah - the play in which his character Dr Conrad Barnabas promotes an extended lifespan of 300 years - he writes: `Men do not live long enough; they are, for the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they die.' He then goes on to consider some of the creative possibilities of our being able to lengthen life: This possibility came to me when history and experience had convinced me that the social problems raised by millionfold national populations are far beyond the political capacity attainable in three score and ten years of life by slow growing mankind. On all hands as I write the cry is that our statesmen are too old, and that Leagues of Youth must be formed everywhere to save civilization from them. But despairing ancient pioneers tell me that the statesmen are not old enough for their jobs . . . We have no sages old enough and wise enough to make a synthesis of these reactions, and to develop the magnetic awe-inspiring force which must replace the policeman's baton as the instrument of authority. creators of destiny For me this magnetic awe-inspiring force of which he speaks is nothing less than man's potential to become the creator of his destiny on earth. The situation in which we live with all the global dangers to which we are exposed from the possibility of mass nuclear extinction to world economic collapse - are not accidents of nature. We have created them. And no act of God can suddenly remove their potential destructiveness from our future. Only we ourselves have the possibility of doing that. If we are to succeed, we will need to call forth every resource that we have - intelligence, wisdom, strength, courage, and patience, wit, compassion - and work with them. Ageless aging can help us do that. Life extension, the freedom from mental and physical degeneration, is no curious artifact of twentieth-century science. Who cares if, at the age of 85, we are all capable of running a marathon or if we look 30 years younger? Such things matter little on their own. But the high-level health, mental clarity and wellbeing, which are rewards of ageless aging, are of urgent concern to our future as residents of the earth. They form the foundation on which we as human beings can build if we are to make use of our full potential for creativity. In the full use of such creativity lies the future of our children our planet and ourselves. Again in the words of Capek's Vitek: Let's give everyone a three-hundred-year life. It will be the biggest event since the creation of man; it will be the liberating and creating anew of man! God, what man will be able to do in three hundred years! To be a child and pupil for fifty years; fifty years to understand the world and its ways and to see everything there is; and a hundred years to work in; and then a hundred years, when we have understood everything, to live in wisdom, to teach, and to give example. How valuable human life would be if it lasted for three hundred years! There would be no fear, no selfishness. Everything would be wise and dignified. Give people life! Give them full human life! Capek's Vitek An idealistic plea in the midst of the profound disillusionment with man that is so much a part of modern life? A dream? Perhaps. Yet our dreams become the myths by which we live. And right now we urgently need new myths to give our life direction - dreams which, having been tempered by the wisdom of age and experience, are large enough and rich enough to take us forward. Such dreams have power. They also have a remarkable way of becoming reality: All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. T.E. Lawrence

Widespread overweight is a relatively new phenomenon. So is adult-onset diabetes, kidney stones, hypertension, coronary heart diseases and cancer of the bowel. Together with many other chronic degenerative ailments, these belong to a group of illnesses now known as Diseases of Western Civilization. These conditions are hard to treat—so hard that, despite all the sophisticated drugs and leading-edge techniques of modern medicine, we have been unable to halt their spread. For, unlike the microbe-generated infectious diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis, Western Diseases are lifestyle-caused. Thanks to pioneering works from scientists such as Sir Robert McCarrison—who did the first epidemiological studies on the relationship between diet and health—and Drs Weston Price, Dennis Burkitt and Hugh Trowell, it is now widely accepted that degenerative conditions including obesity have developed as a direct result of the massive changes that have taken place over the last 150 years in how we live—especially in the way we eat convenience foods. Convenience Foods - NO WONDER WE’RE IN TROUBLE A lot has happened to our foods in the last century to produce this state of affairs. First, they are grown differently than the way our ancestors, for thousands of years, grew theirs. We grow food on chemically fertilized soils in which the organic matter has been degraded or destroyed. Eating foods this way leads to a depletion and imbalance in the minerals and trace elements available to our bodies—both of which we need in good quantities, to support complex metabolic processes on which health and leanness depend. Second, our foods are now highly processed. Raw foodstuffs, instead of being made into meals in home kitchens as they were in our grandparents' time, are sent to food manufacturers where they are fragmented—literally broken apart physically and chemically—then put through complex manufacturing processes to alter them out of all recognition. Third, our foods are shipped over long distances and stored for long periods of time, both of which lower their nutritional value. These modern practices destroy food's wholesomeness—a property very hard to measure, except in terms of the degenerative effects that eating such foods has on our bodies. Destroy a food's wholesomeness and you destroy a food's ability to support the highest levels of health. And once the health-giving integrity of any food has gone, it has gone for good. It can never be compensated for by vitamin and mineral supplements, or by eating cereals to which extra fiber and vitamins have been added. FOOD’S NATURAL STATE Our great-grandparents—whether they were Africans, Indians, Orientals or Europeans—had two important things in common. Their meals were mostly prepared from foods of animal and vegetable origin, and the foods they ate were little processed. They were eaten whole, as closely as possible to their natural state. Such foods form the basis of a way of eating that rejuvenates the body and restores healthy functioning. This kind of eating helps prevent the development of obesity and other degenerative conditions—even if you happen to have inherited a tendency towards them. This way of eating can free people of all ages from much suffering caused by degenerative conditions such as high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, diverticulitis and other Western diseases. FORGIVE YOURSELF NOW There is one more major change that has taken place: today we also swallow a kaleidoscope of chemical colorants, flavorings additives and `enhancers', not to mention pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, which our ancestors never imagined in their wildest dreams. We slurp down chemical pollutants with each sip of our diet cola and every bite of our pre-cooked meals. Such is the Western diet. So next time you upbraid yourself for what you perceive to be your lack of willpower as you reach for yet another biscuit and feel guilty about it, let the guilt go. It does not belong to you. The denatured, degraded, food we eat bears the lion's share of blame for the fat state we find ourselves in, as well as for how hard it is in our culture to stay lean and to remain healthy.

In 2009 the US FDA approved two versions of a new sweetener developed for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Truvia and PureVia, both of which use rebiana—an extract from the South American plant Stevia. Truvia has just hit the market in Great Britain supported by gigantic public relations celebrations that would do an aspiring politician proud. Stevia, in its natural state, is the best no-calorie health-supporting natural sweetener on the planet. Here is what you should know: 1. TRUVIA IS NOT STEVIA. 2. I ADVISE THAT YOU AVOID IT. Like every plant which has long been used as a food source, Stevia is a complex of synergistic substances and compounds including numerous steviosides, rebaudiosides, and glycosides. It is this synergistic power that creates its unique benefits including its anti-oxidant properties. When the FDA declared that these two manufactured zero-calorie sweeteners were “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) it referred only to a couple of the active ingredients taken from Stevia that had been used in manufacturing including rebaudioside A—a component which imparts to the natural Stevia plant some of its sweet taste. What takes place when you extract only one or two of a plant’s parts and throw away the rest? Does the product you make out of this affect your body the same way as the natural plant? Virtually never. In The Toxicology of Rebaudioside A: A Review, researchers at UCLA report that a living organism metabolizes stevioside compounds and rebaudioside A at different rates. This makes it impossible to assess the potential risks to the body. The company behind the development of both Truvia and PureVia is Cargill. Cargill is one of the most notorious corporate polluters in America (which Conde Nast Portfolio listed as one of the “Toxic Ten.”) Coke and Cargill have conducted their own ‘research’ into the safety of Truvia on which the FDA gave them the go ahead to sell the sweetener. However, no genuinely independent studies have been done to affirm the safety of the product. And as even the Truvia website itself states: “While rebiana is natural and comes from a plant, it is not certified or grown organically at this time. That could happen in the future, depending on consumer demand.” How absurd. How can you claim to have invented an “all-natural” zero-cal sweetener that is not only not organically grown but which no genuinely independent studies have shown to be safe to use over time? THE BEST SWEETENER Last, and by no means least, remember that nature has given us many wonderful wholesome sweeteners which can be used in moderation without any adverse effects. The best sweetener of all is natural stevia—available from iHerb.com. Here are the two best stevias I have found anywhere. The first is great for baking, porridge, and sprinkling. The second is ideal to sweeten tea, coffee, sparkling water, and anything that requires a liquid form. It is also absolutely delicious. STEVITA:SPOONABLE STEVIA Stevita Spoonable Stevia uses only stevia extract with at least 95% pure glycosides (extremely sweet tasting ingredients of the Stevia herb leaves), and erythritol, a crystal granulated naturally produced filler found in fruits, vegetables and grains Order Stevita from iherb ENGLISH TOFFEE STEVIA All Natural, Zero Calories, Dietary Supplement. SweetLeaf liquid stevia with all natural flavors is convenient and easy to use. As a supplement, add nutritious stevia to water, tea, coffee, milk, sparkling water, protein shakes, plain yogurt or anything else you can imagine.. Order SweetLeaf Liquid Stevia from iherb

There is a well-known saying about computers: “garbage in, garbage out.” The same can be said of your body. It’s no use thinking of the food you choose to eat as if it were a dead fuel. Yet most people do. It is an assumption which results in all our dreadful degenerative diseases, from high blood pressure and atherosclerosis to cancer, chronic fatigue, mental confusion, weight gain and the other conditions for which we are urged to swallow dangerous pharmaceuticals, believing that we are doing the right thing. Here’s what you need to know about starches such as grains and cereals. We’ve been taught that these foods are wholesome, salt of the earth fare. The smell of freshly baked bread celebrates home and comfort. It brings us a superb form of fiber to protect from constipation—or does it? Here is my advice: If you value your health and strength, cut down on or even eliminate grains and cereals from your diet. Your body was never designed to handle them. Sounds revolutionary? It is. But following this advice can not only help make you well and get rid of excess fat. It can restore lost vitality to your life. BACK TO THE FUTURE Here’s why. The genes you have inherited from your ancestors matter. It can take 100,000 years or more for the human body to make a single, natural alteration in its genetic structure. It is not true that your distant ancestors wandered through forests munching on wild fruits like gorillas. For thousands upon thousands of years, they were dwellers in grasslands. They walked bipedally and lived mostly by digging up starchy tubers, roots and corms, which have something in common with today’s potato and taro. Neanderthal man relied on these starchy plants for more than 250,000 years, also hunting and eating herbivores and fish. What scientists now call the Paleolithic diet consisted of 15 to 20% of these carbohydrate foods such as tubers, rhizomes, roots and corms, along with between 50 and 70% fatty animal foods, as well as insects, eggs, birds, reptiles, and creatures from lakes and the sea. Depending upon where these early humans lived in the world, some also gathered foods such as coconuts. Sweet fruits such as those we eat today were non-existent. So were grains. GO WILD, GO FREE At the top of the human food chain, our Paleolithic ancestors were characteristically tall and strong, with incredibly healthy teeth. Their high-meat-high-fat foods together with a relatively small percentage of these vegetable carbohydrates created an amazingly health-giving human diet that has hardly been seen since. They hunted mammoths and fought for their right to them with wild animals who also hunted and ate them. Whether our political and religious leanings like it or not, it still is their protein-oriented, flesh-based diet that remains the healthiest for us today. On such a diet that the forces of natural selection have refined and moulded us to function best. To put it another way, we have been genetically programmed to eat this way for hundreds of thousands of years. HERE COME GRAINS The agricultural revolution began some 10,000 years ago. With the coming of agriculture, man shifted away from his high-protein, low-carb diet. Gradually cereals, fruits, and starchy vegetables began to play a big part in human nutrition. Their bodies suffered for it, as ours still do today. By 4000 years ago, when the agricultural revolution was in full swing, a lot of physical degeneration had taken place. Men and women had shrunk in height. Dental decay and malformation of the jaw had become widespread. Disease epidemics began to shorten the human lifespan. This moment in history marks the very beginning of what nowadays are known as the diseases of civilization, including obesity. It’s hard to imagine a more different scenario from the healthy, nomadic ways of our ancient hunter-gatherer forefathers. Anthropologist Kathleen Gordon at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC describes this well when she says, ‘Not only was the agricultural “revolution” not really so revolutionary at its inception, it has also come to represent something of a nutritional “devolution” for much of mankind.’ WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? What’s wrong with grains and cereals? Plenty, and we are not told about it. For generations, we’ve believed that grains and cereals are good for us. Sadly, the truth is that there are plenty of reasons not to eat them often—and, for many people, not to eat them at all. Most grains can cause humans toxic effects. For instance, corn—the domesticated form of the teosinte grass—can create pellagra. Many of us are starch-sensitive as a result of toxins created by our gut bacteria as they try to digest starches. Our 21st century bodies have never been genetically adapted to thrive on them. Research affirms this fact. Grains and cereals contain anti-nutrients to protect them from predators such as birds and insects. They can exert negative effects on human metabolism. These toxins can include lectins and alpha-amylase inhibitors, which behave like allergens. Lectins are especially important anti-nutrients found in many places, especially in grains, legumes, seeds and nuts. They can trigger digestive problems such as nausea, diarrhea, bloating. Your body creates antibodies in response to lectins which can, in turn, launch an attack on your own body, causing autoimmune issues like celiac disease, lupus and multiple sclerosis. Lectins damage the walls of your intestines, creating “leaky gut” so that large particles of food cross the intestinal barrier to enter the bloodstream directly, creating food sensitivities and overwhelming the immune system so it starts attacking your body causing eczema, weight gain, depression and migraine. The best way to reduce lectin’s negative health effects is to cut down on your consumption of grains and cereals or even eliminatee these foods altogether. All grains and cereals are full of phytic acid—a mineral blocker. It prevents your body from absorbing vital minerals such as magnesium, calcium, zinc, copper, and iron. Finally, there is the fiber issue. We’ve been told we need to eat cereal grains to make sure we get enough whole grain fiber. Yet grain fiber contains toxic proteins, including gluten, and roughage that can actually damage the intestinal wall. Cut down on grains, cereals and legumes to create a low toxicity way of eating to keep you slim and fit, and protect you from rapid aging and degenerative diseases. This is your first step towards freedom. SAFE STARCHES What are the safe starches? They include white rice, potatoes, sago, tapioca, and sweet potatoes, provided they are organically grown. Akin to what our ancestors lived on for hundreds of years, these starches can improve your gut health. They also provide useful minerals such as potassium. These foods must be cooked gently so that any natural toxins which they contain are neutralized. Brown rice is not great because the phyten it contains can provoke an immune response. But there are no known auto immune antibodies generated by white rice protein. When it comes to potatoes, you should know that the solanine and chaconine toxins they can contain are generated when potatoes are exposed to light and heat. This is why it’s important to keep them in cool, dark conditions. Any potatoes that have become discolored or not fresh you should throw away. There are other sources of what appear to be safe starches, including buckwheat, amaranth and quinoa, but these have not yet been thoroughly researched. I refer to them as the faux grains. They can be great for baking and to replace the usual grains and cereals. People who choose to use them usually do very well on them. They do not appear to cause weight gain or digestive problems, provided you eat them in moderation. You can make wonderful baked goods from them, such as white rice noodles, pasta dishes, rice crackers to replace wheat crackers, sugar-free muffins, pancakes, and biscuits. To learn more about these delicious safe starches, click here. DECEPTIVE PROGRAMMING Grains and cereals are cheap to manufacture. And they are also highly addictive. For more than half a century, food manufacturers intent on making a profit have been producing a great variety of hyped foods by fragmenting and reducing raw material foodstuffs—including grains and seeds, cereals and legumes—to simple “nuts and bolts”. These are then whipped up into the manufactured convenience foods that most people pick up from supermarket shelves. You know the kind of thing: Ready-to-eat in a minute meals, to cakes, breads and packaged, denatured stuff that makes up three quarters of what most people eat these days. Flour and sugar-based convenience foods full of junk fats have an ultra-long shelf life. Most, in truth, are nothing more than junk foods, devoid of any nutritional value other than calories. The processed fats they contain, together with masses of artificial chemicals used as flavorings, colorings and preservatives, are far removed from the foods you need for health. It is little wonder many human beings today— even those in economically privileged countries—stuff themselves with dangerous pharmaceutical drugs, yet do little more than survive. STOP EARLY AGING Our high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet is a disaster for long-term health. Here are just a few of the negative effects of living on it: Raised serum insulin levels, causing insulin resistance and resulting in metabolic distortions which undermine health and vitality. Lowered basal metabolic rate, leading to weight gain and low energy. Increased adipose tissue growth accompanied by a gross reduction in lean muscle tissue. Acceleration of biological aging. Development of food allergies or sensitivity, especially to grains, legumes, cereals and dairy food. Development of over-active immune system and eventual immune failure. Soaring incidence of degenerative diseases, including heart disease, obesity and cancer. Such a way of eating brings about serious problems with blood sugar levels and causes endless suffering to people with diabetes. And it never reduces high blood pressure. People who lose weight on such a diet never keep it off. Yet the myths we are fed by the media and multi-national corporations persist. We find ourselves stuck in a frustrating circle of misinformation, temptation and self-blame. I believe it’s time to strip away the false “truths” and get back to basics. SET YOURSELF FREE I’ve worked with huge numbers of people who have changed their way of eating—by cutting out convenience foods based on refined flours, grains and legumes, and starchy vegetables—lose their cravings sometimes as quickly as in a few weeks. This feels like they have been set free from a life in prison. Their appetite diminishes, their blood sugar levels stabilize and their life transforms. Before long these people feel uncomfortable when they eat more than their body actually needs. For them, the transition to nutrient-rich-calorie-poor way of eating becomes a graceful, natural experience. They report that they have never felt better, while friends and family tell them they look wonderful. I would never have believed this had it not also happened to me. You will only know what it can do for you when you get yourself into a low-grain-and-cereal way of eating, or even eliminate these foods altogether. I challenge you to find out for yourself.