Restoration Monthly Feb ’16

Cancer in the U.S.

The statistics in the United States on cancer are astounding. If you are male living in the US, your lifetime risk of getting cancer is 1 in 2, females living in the US your risk is 1 in 3.

The fastest way to reduce your risk is to move out of the country. No joke. When people leave the United States, their risk drops significantly and rapidly. I’m actually serious about this. But what do we need to do if we want to stay in this country and be healthy?

When I heard these statistics I was astonished. What is it about living in the US that’s so difficult on our bodies? The truth is our environment is built & marketed to create illness. It’s not that we don’t want to be healthy. Our society makes it inconvenient to support healthy choices and we actually have to work to be healthy.

The other day I sat down to watch TV after work and listened carefully to what was coming out. According to TV, eating McDonalds chicken nuggets is like winning an Olympic medal! The McDonalds strawberry-chocolate shake (their online menu says it has 560 calories and 90 grams of sugar) will heal everything that ails you! And you can have a whole meal for $5.99 from Little Ceasers (a GIANT soda and pizza)! I got all of this from just one commercial break! When a society is bombarded by such messages combined with less home-cooking and education about healthy foods, we unknowingly create an epidemic of illness with food choices alone! Check out Jaimie Oliver’s TED talk.

I know I’m likely preaching to the choir here. The people who read this letter are likely to be those who already know the impact of fast, manufactured, prepackaged food and are making finer choices for your health and your family’s. But, what if you’re doing everything right? Unfortunately, the US has done things to our food supply to damage our food feed and cause disease.

Our farming practices have depleted our soils of nutrients since the 1960’s. As of 2012, we spray 1 billion tons of pesticides & herbicides on our food every year, making our food supply toxic, depleted, and just plain fake.

“Refined sugar is the most addictive substance known to man.”

So what can we do? Aside from keeping informed on your food and water supply, the following are suggestions to implement now to create a healthy foundation for your body and dial up your health:

1. Supplement your nutrients – especially phytonutrients.
2. Eat veg and fruit all day long. “Every color every day”.
3. Take a good whole-foods based multivitamin.
4. Detoxify your body. All of the sludge in our environment coupled with malnourishment = difficulty eliminating toxins. Do this cautiously with nutrients and the proper supervision of a qualified health-care provider.
5. Eat Organic. There is no substitute for good-quality, pesticide & herbicide free food. It tastes better, fills you up faster, and is not toxic to your body.
6. Ditch the sugar. Refined sugar is the #1 most addictive substance
   known to man (96% of lab rats chose refined sugar over cocaine when given the option.) eek!
7. Drink plenty of water –1/2 your body weight in ounces per day.
8. Optimize your Vitamin D levels.

These tips will give you the foundation to not only prevent cancer and chronic disease, but help you or a loved-one fight it.

Sugar & Cancer

Cancer loves and feeds off of sugar, or glucose. Period. One of the best ways of visualizing cancer in the body is to inject glucose and watch where it goes. Both PET scans and MRI’s can visualize cancer simply by watching where glucose travels once inside the body. If there is cancer, it will light up right where the cancer is.

There have been at least 6 research studies done over the past two years showing that people with the highest levels of blood glucose develop more cancers and that people with cancer that have the highest level of blood glucose survive the least.

Additionally, there have been several recent studies done showing that in a state of calorie restriction (let me clarify: NOT nutrient restriction) the first cells to die off in our body are the malignant and premalignant cells.

So what does this mean to you and your family? Certainly not to begin fasting cold-turkey. However, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that diets rich in fats, proteins and nutrients work against cancer by eliminating their food-supply: glucose. These diets are called “keto-genic”. These diets are rich in protein and fat with little glucose – thus cutting off the food-supply to cancer. For those of you who are research junkies, here is a link to one of the most-recent studies showing the benefits of a ketogenic diet on brain cancer.

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