Lifestyle and diet to prevent and cure disease

Therapeutic Nutrition Lifestyle (TNL) begins with God as the Creator. Simply said; God did not create anything that was not perfect. So what happened with our bodies that we now experience an epidemic of obesity and other eating/lifestyle problems? The easy answer is we developed a diet and lifestyle that is not in accordance with the principals of God’s creation. Literally the devil is in the details of this huge disaster now occurring right in front of our eyes.

If I told you I had a diet and associated lifestyle that really tasted good, but it, over time,  caused an underlying chronic inflammatory problem in your body, but don’t worry in most cases you will not notice it much for many years. It tastes really good and there are no rules to what, how much and how you eat and live your life. Over time though the diet and lifestyle will cause some problems like being overweight (66% presently and rapidly increasing), cancer, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, cardiac problems, allergies, behavioral problems, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and many other chronic inflammatory problems. It will also deliver these same nutrients to your in utero baby that can start them on a quicker path of these same health maladies being seen in much of the adult world. This would be the foundation for an eventual epidemic of childhood obesity (presently 10.2 % world wide for overweight and obese) never before seen in the history of mankind. These children will grow up with more asthma, allergies diabetes, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, orthopedic problems, etc as well. We will see morbidly obese children at younger ages and some will even be considered as candidates for radical bariatric surgery that generally does not last past 10 years for its effectiveness in diminishing weight.

How many of you would want to take me up on my wonderful diet? Oh gosh, I made a little mistake. We are already on that diet!

If some of you did not want to go on it, but now find yourself already on it, what can you do? That is easy, “eat right or healthy.” Well many of you are already doing that, right? You eat whole grains, or organic food products. You eat no beef or red meat, but instead eat chicken, turkey and other less fattening meat. You substitute honey or turbinado sugar for refined sugar. You have eliminated eggs from your diet. You are eating those vegetable based processed meat substitutes. You eat a lot of pasta, couscous, dried beans, fresh fruit and yogurt in your diet. That should be healthy enough? How about “dead” wrong!!

You are now totally confused? If this is not healthy, what is? We have to eat the foods that God created our bodies to ingest. Oh, good. What exactly does that mean though.

How do we know what God created our bodies to ingest? That is initially a problem, but we do know much more about what our bodies are not designed to ingest. From that we can begin to develop an evolving lifestyle plan that includes our diet. Our diet should properly nourish our bodies and assist the many processes of self healing that God built into our bodies. God created in our bodies a system full of operational redundancies. He knew we would struggle against this diet and lifestyle choices for most of our lifetimes. He created a dynamic organism that will always strive toward normal function and is the greatest auto healing process in the universe. All of medicine and the pharmacology associated are based on dovetailing with God’s plan for a body constantly seeking normal health and function. None of the medicine practiced and drugs are as powerful as ingesting the right diet and living the right lifestyle.

These principals of life and health are not limited to our species. Much of what TNL is all about are our animals, primarily our dogs and cats at least. They suffer mightily at our hands with what is fed and how they live. Most of this is done very innocently and out of pure ignorance, but done all the same. The only consolation, if that is what it is; we treat ourselves as badly or worse than we treat our animals. Those who want that to change is what TNL is all about. The rest of you can read this and file it away for that day, hopefully not in the too distant future, when you have faced the inevitable consequences of the poor choices most of us have made from the beginning. Choices we were taught to make and even choices forced upon us actually beginning in Utero and thereafter by innocently unsuspecting and misinformed parents, public, institutions and of course our governments.

TNL is not all diet, but other important principals of health for the body. The diet is the most important part of the lifestyle, so let's just start with this the most important and hardest part to grasp initially.

This next part is about you. At least about you and God and your life. How this relates to your body and those around you that you love. We know from our paleontologists and archeologists that Biblical/Genesis man or indigenous cave men, however you feel comfortable with the term, ate a diet of equal parts Omega-6 essential fatty acids and Omega-3 fatty acids. The ratio between the two in that early diet was 1 to 1. Our ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 today in our contemporary lifestyle is as high as 20 to 1, being between 15 and 20 to 1 omega 6 to omega 3.

The next sound bite is the most important in this writing and maybe your life for good health.

Increase the Omega-3 portion of your diet back toward 1 to 1. Once you get to 4 to 1 you will be within the parameters of how God created your body to ingest food.

Now, eat anything you want within that parameter but follow God’s principals of moderation and responsibility. I promise you everything else will simply fall into place.

Who said? Science says for one. Time after time, in almost every way imaginable studies document that a large imbalance between Omega-6 fatty acids and Omega-3 fatty acids with Omega-6 being higher than Omega-3 will create a state of inflammation in the body. As an example, the following from the University of Maryland Medical Center is but one of so many documented sources of this pervasive dietary problem.

“In fact, North American and Israeli diets tend to have too much omega-6, particularly in relation to omega-3 fatty acids. This imbalance contributes to long-term diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, asthma, arthritis, and depression. A healthy diet should consist of roughly 2 - 4 times more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3 fatty acids. The typical American diet tends to contain 14 - 25 times more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3 fatty acids, and many researchers believe this imbalance is a significant factor in the rising rate of inflammatory disorders in the United States. “ [1]

Purdue University has an Omega-3 Learning Center. [2] You can follow and subscribe. It includes information on both humans and animals.

Same type problems exist also with high Omega-6 imbalance for at least our dogs and cats. Our pets are experiencing their own health problem epidemics due to the diet we are feeding them.

Too easy? Think again! It’s so totally different you will struggle mightily with it, especially in the beginning. You will need to learn a lot and forget some things that you “knew” much of your lifetime. In the beginning you will have to question everything. Pretty quickly it starts falling into place and your systemic inflammation in your body will diminish. The good news is there is one powerful supplement to help you. It’s the oil from fish. It is very common, cheap and readily available. It will help you cover up the many mistakes you will make along the way, but especially in the beginning.

We must devote extensive efforts and resources in teaching others this basic principal of good health according to God’s design. I pray that the churches will lead the way by employing their resources and contacts to teach their members. I fear the government will never do it nor even recognize it for what it is. The health professionals associated with the area are so confused and defeated by the mammoth amount of pathology that is occurring and dealing with its own internal misinformation, they as a group do not seem capable of designing and implementing such a large educational project.

Now; teach your family and friends what God has led you to know and be an example of the good health He wants us all to have. Honor and glorify God with your obedience to His basic principles of health in these bodies He let us have for our journey here on this good earth He created. As a young student at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the great teaching hospitals in the world, back in early 1960’s, we had a saying:

The Grady Way: see one, do one, teach one!

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