The speed and power of nutritional healing are sometimes astonishing. Blood test results can change in a matter of weeks with the proper diet and supplements. In fact, many nutrients cause changes in the blood within hours — changes that can be measured. In other cases, the healing is slow, but can reverse stubborn and persistent problems.
For eighteen months, I worked with a man deformed by psoriasis. He was covered with red and scaly patches from head to toe. He reminded me of a raw, peeling fish. The cortisone his doctors had prescribed in ever-increasing doses no longer helped.
I tested him for food allergies and eliminated all possible allergenic foods from his diet. In addition, I prescribed the following nutrients:
- Essential fatty acids, including those found in fish oil and primrose oil, which help stop inflammation
- Milk thistle and dandelion, herbs that help the liver detoxify harmful substances [Whenever a person suffers from skin problems like psoriasis, it’s a reasonable bet that their liver is having trouble detoxifying].
After eighteen months, not a single scaly patch was left. “I thought I would have to live the rest of my life with this disfiguring illness,” he told me. “I thought I’d never go on a date, or go to the gym. I’m in a state of shock.”
Nutrients As Edible Vaccines
Vaccines can protect you from lethal illness. So can foods. Can we refer to our foods, then, as ‘edible
vaccines?’ As potent and protective agents that help prevent disease? I like to think so. Consider this:
- Certain vitamins [such as vitamins C and A] can reduce the recurrence of bladder cancer by 50 per cent
- Flaxseed can slow tumour growth
- Milk thistle can reverse liver enzyme elevation
- Green tea, an ancient staple of Chinese society, has a powerfully protective effect against lung cancer, and in a study from The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, green tea drinkers had a 60 per cent lower risk of cancer
- Foods high in magnesium and potassium can lower high blood pressure in weeks
- The nutrient co-enzyme Q10 [CoQ10] has heart-healing properties — in clinical studies, it has sometimes eliminated the need for blood pressure medication, and in one study helped prevent breast cancer.
Just over ninety years ago, vitamin C was first discovered. In 1958, free radicals were discovered. In the past four decades alone, an incredible amount of research on nutrients has spilled out of laboratories and universities. When we think of disease-fighting nutrients today, we don’t just worry about vitamins A, or E, or C. We study the hormones and chemicals in plants and herbs. We study substances with long scientific sounding names, like sulphoraphanes [in broccoli].
These compounds have now been found to be essential elements for our health. For instance, we know that a cell has to jump through many biochemical hoops before it becomes malignant. But, at almost every hoop on the way to cancer, there are compounds in vegetables and fruits that can slow, or even stop the process.
Within hours after eating broccoli, sulphoraphane is coursing through the bloodstream, activating enzymes that literally whisk carcinogens out of the cell so that the body can discard them. And, within weeks of eating large amounts of broccoli, a compound called indole-3-carbinol dramatically lowers the form of oestrogen that promotes cancer. These are dramatic and rapid shifts, and it turns out that most natural foods — from cumin to cauliflower, garlic to strawberries — provide potent health factors.
