The 7 Stages of Disease

Today I would like to peel back some of the layers of collective denial that we as a society have been taught to create with relation to disease creation.

I just recently met with a local man, Chad Venucci, who found out at age 33 that he had stage 3 brain cancer.

I found it interesting that headaches, severe ones, were the symptoms that led to his brain cancer diagnosis, but that he had been having less severe ones for 10 YEARS prior to realizing he had a brain tumor. His doctors told him that the tumor could have been growing for 20 years prior to diagnosis (he was diagnosed at age 33 which would have put the possible cancer initiation at age 13!!!! So, teenager's diet of burgers, fries and ice cream DOES catch up) since it was the size of a baseball by the time it caused symptoms severe enough to warrant him to go to the doctor to get it checked out.

I don't feel that this story is by any means rare. Granted, not all people who get headaches end up having brain tumors, but there is a PROGRESSION of disease that starts small, and then becomes something big. What needs to change, is how we respond to "small" signals from our bodies.

There are seven stages to the development to disease that I share with you down below, and we need to become more body aware of what the small "whispers" of our bodies are telling us. We are not like cars where we can "pop the hood" and take a look underneath. If we did, we would catch stuff a lot sooner.

Instead, we respond to "minor" aches and pains, headaches, digestive upsets, colds, etc, with over-the-counter medications to suppress these symptoms, only to have them come back with a vengeance when we get diagnosed in later, or in these days, not so later, years.

This denial needs to change. We need to respect the body's signals early on and make necessary changes in our lifestyle and eating habits promptly just like we would do if we saw the red light on the dashboard of our car come on. Early tiredness and irritation should be like gaining 5-10 lbs: many people would adjust their eating habits with a weight gain this small because it is outside of their "acceptable" weight gain range. Some, however, have a 20-50 lbs weight gain range as "normal" for them and then they have a big challenge that lies ahead for them to lose that unwanted weight.

It's the same for tiredness or sub-par health. Chronic tiredness has become "acceptable". We joke about it, we mask it with energy drinks and coffee or who knows what else to stimulate us, and we ignore that our entire body runs on nerve energy, and just like when the battery of your car runs low and the lights dim and the radio doesn't work, when our brain is not recharged sufficiently with enough sleep and rest, our digestion is impaired and our elimination is checked resulting in the second stage, toxicosis. If this stage goes on chronically, which is does for the vast majority of people, they then get inflammation and irritation and some even get ulceration.

Catching and reversing these stages is possible. We need to make lifestyle changes such as not burdening our digestive tracts with so many animal foods, cooked foods and stimulants. These are enervating. Live foods, green foods, PLANT-based foods, give LIFE.

Getting enough sleep and reducing STRESS are equally important. Stress depletes nerve reserves and we need tranquility to build those back up.

Why not make it your goal this year to live well and listen to your body's early warning signs? Your length of life depends on you being a good caretaker of the body you live in.

Below is taken from http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/:

The Seven Stages Of Disease

1. ENERVATION - This is the first step in disease. Our fund of nerve energy becomes overdrawn to the point that the body is unable to eliminate the toxic by-products of metabolism. Enervation is a state in which the body is either not generating sufficient nerve energy for the tasks the body must perform, or the tasks  the body must perform may be greater than the normal nerve energy supply can cope with. The body thus becomes impaired and generates less nerve energy. All the body's functions become impaired and this includes the processes of elimination of both endogenous metabolic wastes and the exogenous poisons introduced into the body (such as in our chemicalized foods). This impairment results in further diminishing the body's ability to restore depletion of nerve energy. This situation results in a condition called toxemia or toxicosis—the second stage of disease.
2. TOXICOSIS - The blood and tissues become loaded with the uneliminated toxic materials from body metabolism and/or from toxins taken in from processed foods, drinks, drugs, etc. Intoxication occurs when we overload the body with toxic materials from the outside, or we fail to observe our capacities and overwork, get insufficient sleep, or are subjected to great stress, or when any number of other factors deplete the body of nerve energy or prevent its sufficient regeneration.  For instance, stresses, emotional shocks, or traumatic experiences can drain our bodies of nerve energy very quickly.
3. IRRITATION - This is the third stage of disease. The body unloads its toxicity at various points in the body. Irritation takes the form of itchiness, edginess, uncomfortable feelings, etc. Any toxic material, be it salt, caffeine, or condiments will irritate or stimulate. This is a condition wherein the body sets in force its defensive mechanisms and accelerates its internal activities. A burst of activity will result in an effort to rid the body of these unwanted irritants.
   If the causes of enervation/intoxication/irritation remain, inflammation results.
4. INFLAMMATION - This is the stage of disease that is usually first noticed and is recognized by physicians as pathology, for it involves pain. Energy that would normally be available for activity there is pre-empted and redirected to the massive effort to cope with a severe condition of intoxication.
   In inflammation, the toxicants have usually been concentrated in an organ or area for a massive expulsive effort. It is an evidence or symptom of increased and intense body activity directed at cleansing and repair. It is a healing activity. If this eliminative effort is suppressed by drugs, the toxicity increases until other organs become saturated—not only with this toxicity but with the drugs administered as well. This fourth stage of disease is the body's most intense effort to cleanse and restore itself. The following degenerative stages of disease will result if the causes of general body intoxication are continued.
5. ULCERATION - During this stage, poisonous matters have begun destroying cells and cellular organizations (tissues). This condition is often very painful as there are exposed nerves. The body may use an ulcer as an outlet for extraordinary toxic buildup thereby relieving itself. It will heal the ulcer if causes are discontinued, or if the toxicity level is lowered significantly.
6. INDURATION - This is a hardening where the body creates tumorous tissue (a kind of scar tissue) to bridge the lost tissue and to encapsulate the poisonous materials that are destroying it. The ulcer and the toxic materials are scaled off by the hardening of the tissue around them. This is the way of quarantining the toxic materials, often called tumor formation. It is this condition that is often falsely diagnosed as cancer. If the Life Science health regimen is followed at this point, the condition can largely be repaired or reversed. Should the pathogenic practices, which brought matters to this stage be continued, cells and tissues go wild and live in a parasitic manner. This condition is called cancer.
7. CANCER - This is the seventh and final stage of disease. Body vitality is at a very low ebb; cells are no longer under the control of the body's master control system, the brain. They multiply wildly in an unorganized manner without purpose. They may be giants or dwarfs and they draw their needs from the bloodstream without contributing to body functions. Cancer cells are parasitic cells. Once this condition is reached, there is little hope except to arrest and control the process. Only the healthiest of regimens can do this.

Cruelty Defined

Something that has been weighing on my mind as of late has been the anger that I've been seeing in people lately and acts of cruelty that humans perpetrate on eachother and on animals.

Nobody would ever admit to being cruel. There is not one person on earth that would be proud to be called that.

And yet, there are so many people who justify, rationalize their cruelty that the mask of denial needs to be ripped away....

Cruelty is not seeing another person's pain and exploiting them as an object for sale, or an object to serve us. We can rationalize cruelty through dehumanizing another through racial epithets or saying that animals don't feel.

What's really going on is that WE have stopped feeling and have lost the ability to be EMPATHETIC, which is man's beauty at it's zenith.

Empathy has been defined as "Your pain in MY heart".

Empathy is something that people can be born with....children have amazing capacity for empathy, but it is also taught and is also UNTAUGHT...

Parents are usually the first to destroy the empathetic spirit in a child by not mirroring their pain. Children are then taught to stuff their feelings and to survive they must numb out. They also learn that this is a "dog eat dog" world and that to survive they must eat or be eaten.

This is all role-modeled by parents themselves who are not receiving empathy in their world trying to earn a living in a same "dog eat dog" world and are scared to death they won't be able to provide for their children. Their children pick up this fear and pain and vocalize it, which makes the parents need to silence this as they don't have the answers yet on how to deal with it and aren't ready to face this fear, pain and feeling of failure and find it painful to be pointed out.

We as a society have lost most of our capacity to feel empathy for animals. They truly are at the bottom of the totem pole of the hierarchy of society.

If the way animals were treated were applied to humans, you would be bought, encaged, impregnated if you are a female, have your children taken away from you multiple times if you were a dairy cow, injected with antibiotics and hormones to fatten you up, and then ultimately killed to be served as food for someone else who could afford to buy you.

The bonds that we develop with "pets" haven't opened our eyes to the emotional lives of other non-pets that ultimately make it onto our plates. We just don't SEE them because we haven't KNOWN them as unique beings....much like soldiers can drop bombs on faceless men, women and children....

Food companies carefully design it this way since their factories have no signs out front and their slaughterhouses rarely allow tours. Their trucks are also unmarked. People have truly become disconnected from where their food comes from and if they had to slaughter their own food, most wouldn't be able to do it.

Some would. To those "some" they often have been doing it from a very early age as a weekend recreational outing with a loved parent to the woods to hunt as a family.

I have seen parents who were anorexic that would have weighing sessions with their children with them.

I have seen parents give their 3 year olds cigarettes to smoke or put Pepsi in their bottles.

I have heard of parents who have allowed their children to watch porn movies.

There is a HUGE disconnect out there with regards to how much suffering we feel inside that we've never fully processed and had to numb out and thus are unable to truly support the pain of another being because we can't even support our own pain.

Folks, it's OUR responsibility to get support for our pain. There are supportive safe places to go. There are Twelve Step groups that are free of charge to heal from our painful pasts.

There are Non-Violent Communication classes we can take to learn self-empathy and ultimately empathy for others.

We are responsible for changing our pasts and thus the future. We don't have to react or worse, mindlessly pass on that which we have inherited, but we can make conscious choices to be different and change our world.

Saying we are not cruel is one thing; LIVING a non-cruel life often makes us the butt of other's cruelty to often heap their unresolved pain onto us in an effort to salve their own pain and consciences.

This is an opportunitiy to reach out to these pained ones so that we can all heal. Morally judging will get us nowhere, because, somewhere in this person's past was a cruelty heaped on them that went unpunished....that does not justify them repeating the cycle, which is often done unconsciously, but a teaching opportunity to show a different way.

Yes, living a cruelty-free life requires COURAGE.

I was inspired by the late Martin Luther King Jr's words below. I do not celebrate birthdays, so this is not in honor of his birthday, but really in honor of how he lived his life and taught others to not be cruel. Being able to withstand society's disapproval by realizing they are projecting their own self-hate onto us will help us to stand tall even when we are standing for peace:

Crush Cancer! Meet Chad who did just that....

I learned about a very inspiring local man that I would love to meet: Chad, who overcame brain cancer and went on to compete in an Ironman! Who knew that someone so inspiring lived so close by?

He did it by going vegan and drinking wheatgrass and green smoothies and eating lots of salads and cleaning up the chemicals he used on his body and in his home. Hopefully, one of these days I can interview him and share some recipes. His website is http://www.crushcancer.net/ and he has several resources on there on how he did it.

More and more, people are realizing that they need to take responsibility for their health.

The documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead has inspired so many people to the benefits of raw juices.

That's great, however, what I'm seeing is that people don't know how to EAT WELL when they are done.

There is so much conflicting information out there with regards to how to eat healthfully, yet The China Study and the documentary Forks Over Knives has shown us that a vegan diet is not just about animal rights: a plant-based diet is the most healthy diet for man and the health of the chinese proves this out.

A vegan diet is only health-producing, however, if it is a whole foods diet that eschews white flour, sugar and soda pop as well as fried foods and oils and includes plenty of raw fruits and vegetables.

This word needs to get out. Cancer as well as heart disease, should be, in the words of Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a "toothless tiger". We can turn this trend around and it's not going to happen from the medical industry per se, even though there's some notable exceptions as cited above.

People inspiring people like Chad has done above and sharing how they've done it is how new trends emerge and take fire.

Even Venus and Serena Williams are going raw vegan to overcome Sjorgen's, an autoimmune disorder.

We tend to think "Oh, I could never do that".

Believe me, once upon a time I thought the same way. I LOVED and was addicted to dairy foods and sugar and chocolate. Now, I don't eat them.

Giving up pizza, Olive Garden and Taco Bell was hard, but when you learn to make delicious juices and raw food dishes, you don't miss them. Plus, you have the health and energy that you never had eating those foods.

I am so grateful to this way of eating for helping me overcome endometriosis. The traditional medical route of surgery or hormone pills just didn't sound appealing at all to me.

Gaining your life back is empowering. Especially conditions like brain cancer and endometriosis that the medical industry has a lack luster success rate with.

Medicine has it's virtues: trauma care and surgery for congenital defects have come leaps and bounds from 100 years ago. But medicine has it's limits and that's where we need to take responsibility for how we live, sleep, eat, drink and exercise. That's why I am looking forward to getting my PhD in Holistic Nutrition by this spring so I can help people build faith in their own body's ability to heal when given the right conditions.

Your health and quality of life are within YOUR control. Which life are you gonna choose? You are not a victim of circumstance:

Irritants can cause Vitamin Deficiencies

This post may be a little redundant and sound a bit like the one about our obsession with detoxing, but it's taken from a slightly different angle.

We get vitamin deficiences three ways: not taking enough in through the diet by eating processed foods like white flour, cola, sugar and coffee; eating an imbalanced diet such as mono-mealing for indefinite periods of time that eats foods high in some nutrients but not high in or deficient in others, and the third way which we will discuss today: eating foods that irritate the digestive system which cause the body to use it's own minerals to excrete it, or the digestive system is damaged by the irritant and thus is unable to absorb the nutrients that may be adequate in the diet, but are unable to be absorbed.

Here is an interesting paragraph from the late TC Fry:

All kinds of stresses are vitamin antagonists. Drugs are serious stress producers in the body because the body must exercise great effort in expelling them as quickly as possible, lest they damage tissues and cells and interfere too much with normal functioning. In addition, surgery, accidents, overly exhausting work or exercise, exposure to extreme's of heat or cold, and emotions such as fear, hatred, anger, worry and grief all produce great stress on the body. The B vitamins (thiamin, niacin, folic acid, pantothenic acid and vitamin B12) and vitamin C, as well as proteins and minerals, are all depleted and/or unassimilable as a result of stresses on the body. But don't think for a minute that the other vitamins can be properly or fully utilized when the body is under stress—they can't!

So stress is a big "irritant" of the system and makes great demands upon the body's reserves, but so are other foods that stress the body. Here is a paragraph from David Klein's newsletter:

Dr. Herbert M. Shelton warned: “Hardening and thickening of the tissues occurs in any and all parts of the body to resist constant irritation. This can be seen in the mouth, stomach and intestines of those who employ salt and condiments.” Dr. V. Virginia Vetrano cautioned: “Inorganic table salt itself irritates the lining of the arteries and predisposes to atherosclerosis.”

(I have been unable to verify if there is actually sand in sodium chloride--when I googled it, I couldn't find anything, so if you have any information on this, I would be grateful if you could share it)

Which items rank as the worst irritants in modern diets? Here’s my short list (there are many others): pepper; salt; vinegar; alcohol; oregano; curry spices; chile pepper; garlic; onion; leek; scallion; shallot; chives; radish; mustard paste; mustard leaf; arugula; coffee; cola; charred meat. Note that if we ingest a mouthful of many of those items, our nerves will scream with pain, while the other more deceptive items are palatable only after we have forced ourselves (or were forced in childhood) to “get used to” them. Also note that most of those are stimulants which leave us physically and mentally depressed after the “high” wears off, as the body expends a great amount of energy attempting to eliminate them and repair the damage. Unfortunately, many health enthusiasts, even rawfooders, have been taught that salt, spices and pungent herbs are needed to enhance the flavor of recipes, and most indulgers end up sick most of the time and do not understand why and they accept that as “normal”!

So, how does the body respond to “deal with” irritants which enter the stomach and bloodstream? If we are fortunate enough to still have ample vitality, the body will protect itself with any and all of these intelligent responses: watering eyes; hypersalivation; mucus secretion; vomiting; sneezing; coughing; expectoration; sweating; skin suppurations (pimples, rashes, boils); increased heart rate, blood pressure, urination, defecation and menstruation; and the so-called “immune system” (which is really our “defense system”) springing into action and working so hard that our body temperature rises to feverish heights as toxins are broken down and neutralized for elimination. All these are self-purification processes which we must learn to trust and support without interference!

When reading that list, there are a LOT of foods that wind up in vegan cooked and raw diets. All of them are caustic however, and you can tell you are damaging the body just by observing: when chopping up onions, our eyes tear from the oils and our noses start running. Oftentimes our noses run after eating spicy Indian food or Mexican salsa with hot chili peppers.

When we do this to our bodies, in it's attempt to protect itself, it secretes mucous which in turn makes it difficult for us to absorb our nutrients. We are TOX-ing our bodies with these substances which prevents us from getting the most out of our nutrition.

When we think of children, the descriptive words that come to mind are delicate and fragile. How often to you hear of parents feeding their children coffee, vinegar, salt, hot chili peppers, pepper, radishes, onions and alcohol?

We don't. In fact, babies will give us instant feedback by spitting it out and crinkling their noses at us if we attempted to feed it to them.

We need to enter into a loving and protective relationship with our bodies and be very selective about which foods we let in.

Many people have been inspired by the movie "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" do start the New Year off with a juice cleanse.

This is wonderful. Lives are being changed and many people are getting healthy and thin this way.

However, upon purusing some videos on Youtube, past juice feasters have often gained the weight they lost after ending the juice cleanse because they didn't educate themselves on the right way to eat and then change their eating habits after their cleanse.

Eating a raw vegan diet without stimulants or irritants will maintain whatever health gain or weight loss you've worked so hard to achieve and will keep you young, vibrant and healthy well into your golden years.

I still highly recommend you continue your daily juicing, however, one must come to terms with the fact that permanent eating changes are in order to maintain their hard-earned results.