Truths about Health

An Introduction

Delivered 04/22/2012

Most of the prayer requests that you hear in the church today are for what? With out a doubt they are for physical healing. This is a major prayer request because we all want to be healthy. Would you agree with that? But the sad truth is that most Christians take better care of their homes, lawns, and cars than they do their bodies.

Let’s say that a Christian that we knew was slowly poisoning themselves with arsenic. As they continued to get sicker and sicker, they would constantly request prayer for their ill condition. How would you respond to their prayer request? You might say, “You idiot, you’re poisoning yourself, and then asking us to pray that you would feel better.” This may be an extreme illustration, but I think it illustrates the point. We can’t keep putting things into our bodies that are harmful for them, and then asking God to make us healthy. If you want to be healthy, stop eating things that are harmful to you.

Let me try to explain. I believe that the main factor in poor health is a poor diet. We are literally making ourselves sick through inactivity and poor diet. If we have a stewardship to the planet, which I believe we do, we certainly have one to our physical bodies. We are to be good stewards of the bodies God gave us.

Most Christians and most people in general don’t understand that the “Standard American Diet” (SAD) is making us sick. So we pray for health while poisoning ourselves. We need to be Bereans not just in our theology, but in our politics and nutrition also. We need to be informed so we can make good choices.

You might ask, what’s wrong with our food? Great question, I’m glad you asked.

God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:31 NASB

When God created it our food supply was good, pure, healthy and life giving. But not any more, our food supply has been contaminated and is killing us. So what happened?

For most of history, the quest for sufficient food was the chief occupation of the earth's people. The diet of hunter-gatherers, before the development of agriculture, is believed to have consisted of approximately 35% meat and 65% plant foods; no dairy products and practically no cereal grains were consumed. Meat from wild animals contains low levels of fats (4% in this early diet compared to 25 to 30% fat in today's domesticated animals), and the plant foods in this early diet consisted of a variety of vegetables and fruits (Eaton and Konner, 1985).

Over the years people began to give up their nomadic ways in favor of living on specific plots of land, existing chiefly on plants they grew and animals they domesticated. For the first time, dairy products and cereal grains became a part of the diet. Then came the Industrial Revolution of the 1800's. When large numbers of people left farming to work for wages in factories or to become entrepreneurs, there was a marked change in the kinds and quantities of food that were readily accessible. In the years since the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. diet has again undergone very large changes. In 1800, 95% of all Americans consumed minimally processed foods produced chiefly on their own small farms, but by 1900, only 60% of the population remained on farms (Hampe and Wittenberg, 1964). In less than 175 years, nearly all Americans have become dependent on others to produce and distribute food to supermarkets.

Unlike our ancestors who ate real food, our food is grown in soil that has been depleted of minerals, is loaded with pesticides, herbicides, GMO’s, BGH’s and preservatives and I’m just talking about fruits, vegetables and meats. Not to mention that so much of what we eat today is processed in a factory not grown from the soil. So much of what we eat today is destructive to our health. And taking a pill won’t fix it.

Let me give you some evidence to back up my assumption that the main factor in poor health is a poor diet.

Max Gerson, M.D. was born in Germany (1881). He attended the universities of Breslau, Wuerzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg. As a young physician Max suffered from severe migraines which sometimes kept him in bed, in a darkened room, with violent pain and nausea, for two or three days a week. He read everything he could get his hands on to try to find a cure. Then one day he came across a paper describing how a woman suffering from migrains, was helped when she changed her diet. Nobody had ever taught the young doctor anything about diet nor had his teachers ever mentioned the possibility that any chronic disease was connected with diet. Dr. Gerson focused his initial experimentation with diet on preventing his headaches. One of Dr. Gerson’s patients discovered in the course of his treatment, that the “migraine diet” had cured his skin tuberculosis. This discovery led Gerson to further study the diet, and he went on to successfully treat many tuberculosis patients. His work eventually came to the attention of famed thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D.

Under Sauerbruch’s supervision, Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely. Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world’s leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson treatment as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.

At this time, Dr. Gerson attracted the friendship of Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer, M.D., by curing Schweitzer’s wife of lung tuberculosis after all conventional treatments had failed. Gerson and Schweitzer remained friends for life, and maintained regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson’s progress as the dietary therapy was successfully applied to heart disease, kidney failure, and finally – cancer. Schweitzer’s own Type II diabetes was cured by treatment with Gerson’s therapy.

Today the Gerson therapy’s focus is on what it sees as the two major enemies of health: toxicity and deficiency. Both are the result of today’s denatured, artificial lifestyle; both are, to some extent , connected to the modern Western diet and to our polluted environment.

So what can we do? How can we eat healthier today? The simplistic answer is don’t eat any thing with a nutritional label on it. These labels aren’t usually on food. Don’t eat anything in a box, package or can. If you have to eat something with a label, the fewer ingredients on it the better.

The longer answer would be if you want to live healthy, we need to remove, or greatly cut back on five white foods from our diet, and to switch to a raw vegetarian/fruitarian diet. What are the five white foods that cause most of our physical problems?

1. MEAT – contains white fat! I am not a vegetarian, don’t think that I ever will be but the meat that we eat today is a problem for our health. The meat our forefathers ate was a totally different animal!" Meat from wild animals contains low levels of fats, about 4% compared to 25 to 30% fat in today's domesticated animals. And the meat that our forefather ate was not full of antibiotics, growth hormones, preservatives, and toxins!

I do not think that meat is a problem if you get your meat from grass fed beef that is organic, and from free range chickens that is totally different that what is found in stores and fast food restaurants.

2. DAIRY – In American society, one of the most sacred of all sacred cows is the milk of the cow itself. Cow's milk is more American than apple pie, but that's because apple pie doesn't have Congressional lobbyists and a multi-million dollar advertising budget. Most parents wouldn't think of raising their children without the benefit of cow's milk to help their little bones to grow big and strong. Its silky, white texture is the very epitome of our concept of wholesome purity.

Despite what the dairy industry has led us to believe, many medical doctors and nutritionists are now saying that cow's milk is not healthy for human consumption, and that it can lead to many serious diseases. When you look at the credentials of the doctors making these statements, it would be hard for the dairy industry to accuse these physicians of being on the lunatic fringe of the medical world.

Frank Oski, M.D., author of Don't Drink Your Milk!, is the Director of the Department of Pediatrics of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 19 medical textbooks and has written 290 medical manuscripts.

Dr. Oski cites:

A study of over twenty thousand infants conducted in Chicago as far back as the 1930s. The overall death rate for the babies raised on human milk was 1.5 deaths per 1,000 infants while the death rate in the babies fed cow milk was 84.7 per 1,000 during the first nine months of life. The death rate from gastrointestinal infections was forty times higher in the non-breast-fed infants, while the death rate from respiratory infections was 120 times higher. An earlier analysis involving infants in eight American cities showed similar results. Infants fed on cow milk had a twenty times greater chance of dying during the first six months of life.

Samuel Epstein, MD, a scientist at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, is one of the top experts on cancer prevention. Dr. Epstein points out that rBGH milk is “supercharged with high levels of a natural growth factor (IGF-1), excess levels of which have been incriminated as major causes of breast, colon, and prostate cancers.”

Dr. Mercola writes, “I don’t recommend drinking any milk, organic or otherwise, that is pasteurized. You can avoid both the risks of rBGH and pasteurization by only drinking raw milk that comes from a small farmer you know and trust. This is the only way to drink milk if you’re interested in protecting your health.”

3. SALT – is another white substance that creates untold physical problems and suffering. The body needs sodium, but it must be in an organic form in order to be usable by the body. Table salt, sodium chloride, is an inorganic sodium compound, formed by the union of sodium and chlorine, that is extremely toxic to the body, causing it to retain fluid in an effort to keep this protoplasmic poison in suspension and out of the cells.

4. SUGAR – is another white substance creating our physical problems. Sugar is so changed and concentrated from its original plant form that it is actually a drug! Dr. George Malkmus of Hallelujah Acres says, “Just 10 teaspoons (approximately the amount found in one soft drink) will immobilize the immune system by about 33 percent. Approximately 30 teaspoons of sugar will shut down the immune system for a whole day.”

If you want to avoid diabetes and heart disease, fructose is one type of sugar you’ll want to avoid, particularly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. This is not natural, it is a science project that is killing people. On biochemical analysis HFCS has some weird contaminants, some recent testing found mercury in it. HFCS is not biochemically identical to sugar. Researchers from Children’s Hospital in Oakland found that it punches little holes in your gut, this creates something called a leaky gut. This condition allows toxic bacteria and food proteins to get into you blood stream causing serious inflamation and allergies.

5. WHITE FLOUR – is the fifth white substance that creates physical problems. White bread has no fiber and no real nutrition! On top of that, there are other poisons added to that loaf of bread - sugar, salt, dough conditioners, preservatives, etc. White flour is not good food... in fact it is hazardous to your health!

Sickness, for the most part, is the result of unhealthy living, and if health is to be restored, we must remove the causes of the illness and supply the conditions for health. Healing is a normal biological process programmed into our DNA, but to make it happen, we must remove the causes of our physical problems. No true healing can take place without first removing the cause, and then providing the body with its simple, basic needs so it can restore itself.

Dr. Norman Walker became seriously ill with cancer in his early 40s, but healed himself with the juices of raw vegetables, and lived to be 117 years old, writing his last book when he had passed the century mark. And since the 1920s, the Gerson Therapy, developed by Dr. Max Gerson, has obtained results with fresh vegetable juices that have been unparalleled by orthodox medical practice. "Incurable" diseases are being healed at the Gerson Clinic, such as lung cancer, spreading melanoma, lymphoma, bone cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis, severe asthma, emphysema, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, lupus, and more.

Dr. Mary Ruth Swope writes:

If it could be expected that all scientists in the world agreed on a single fact, I believe they would agree... 'Life begins, is maintained and ends at the cellular level.' The health of a single cell holds the key to the health of the whole organism. Cells made strong through good nutrition will go a long way in giving you an immune system that will resist the illnesses so prevalent in our society.

Healthy cells require healthy food. Healthy food is food eaten just as close to the way God made it as possible... and that means RAW!!! Every step in the processing of food takes it further from the way God intended the body cells of man to be nourished, and this includes the cooking of food! Man is the only member of the animal kingdom that destroys his food before he eats it!

Almost all sickness and disease can be corrected by simply cleansing the body of toxins, and providing the cells with the proper building materials. The sickness will usually disappear as the body rebuilds itself! The cause and cure of sickness is not a mystery - it is simply a matter of cause and effect!

Please understand, I believe in the absolute sovereignty of God. God ordains when we are born and when we die. But God also uses means to accomplish His ends. My favorite Calvinistic theologian, John Calvin writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter 17, paragraph 4:

For he who has fixed the boundaries of our life, has at the same time entrusted us with the care of it, provided us with the means of preserving it, forewarned us of the dangers to which we are exposed, and supplied cautions and remedies, that we may not be overwhelmed unawares. Now, our duty is clear, namely, since the Lord has committed to us the defence of our life,—to defend it; since he offers assistance,—to use it; since he forewarns us of danger,—not to rush on heedless; since he supplies remedies,—not to neglect them. But it is said, a danger that is not fatal will not hurt us, and one that is fatal cannot be resisted by any precaution. But what if dangers are not fatal, merely because the Lord has furnished you with the means of warding them off, and surmounting them?

Believers, I believe that Yahweh has furnished us with means to be healthy. We are stewards of the bodies that God has given us. If we take care of them we will reap the benefit of health. The best way to take care of your body is to give in proper nutrition. Try to make the bulk of your food intake raw fruits, vegetables and nuts. Drink plenty of good clean water. Exercise on a regular basis. Please understand that there is a connection between mental health and physical health. I believe that if we work on eating a healthy diet we will have healthy bodies and healthy minds that our Lord can us to influence His world for His glory.