SUPPORTING
LIFE SPAN MOLECULES

    We will compare freshly squeezed vegetable juice with a commercial preparation of a mixed vegetable juice. I urge the reader to do the following simple experiment to test the validity of this example. Open a can of vegetable juice and prepare a glass of freshly squeezed vegetable juice with red beets, carrots and celery. Take a sip of the fresh juice. Wait for a few moments. Next take a sip of the commercial canned juice. Repeat the two steps a few times at intervals of one to two minutes. Now let us compare the two. The fresh juice has a "life sense" to it. It is fresh, true, tasteful, invigorating and life-giving. The canned juice is flat, tasteless and carries a sense of staleness. Most people will know the truth of these statements the very first time they put them to the test.

    Taste is an acquired sense. This means that this simple experiment clearly carries a bias in favor of the canned vegetable juice because most people drink canned vegetable juice and have an acquired taste for such juice. Fresh juice made up of uncommonly eaten vegetables for most people can be expected to be a "new" and hence an unfamiliar taste. Yet, despite this bias, fresh juice will unequivocally emerge as the clear winner. Why? It is a matter of the wisdom of our taste buds and our digestive-absorptive cells.

    Our taste buds know more than our calculating and computing minds. Our digestive-absorptive cells know more than our most profound insights into the workings of nature. In the language of chemistry, life is living enzymes. The fresh juices are living juices. These juices live because their enzymes live. The canned juices are dead juices. These juices are dead because their enzymes are dead. Our taste buds know this even after years of having been molested by dead and dying foods.

    The fresh vegetable juice wins the contest because our taste buds have not forgotten the difference between the life-sustaining life span enzymes that give fresh foods the life sense and the aging-oxidant molecules that accumulate in processed foods, rendering them flat and lifeless. Our taste buds retain a clear memory of what is life-giving and what is lifeless.

Life span of foods and profitability of our food industry are sworn enemies of each other.

    What determines the life span of foods? The food enzymes. What assures the profitability of our food industry? Long shelf lives of foods. How are the shelf lives of food prolonged? By food processing and by using food preservatives. How do food processing and food preservatives work? By destroying the food enzymes.

    What is contained in our commercial canned foods? Money-making dreams of our marketing moguls. What is carried in our "preserved" foods, life span foods or aging-oxidant foods? The profitability in food products, the money men of food industry know, is in the shelf life of food items. What they do not seem to recognize — or do not care to know — is that the shelf-life of foods is inversely proportional to their life span. The money men of our food industry lace their vegetable juices with salt, up to 600 to 800 mg per can, to assure that their juices do not spoil. The salt kills the life enzymes of their juices. A dead juice cannot get any deader. A juice is now preserved. What is really preserved is the profitability of juice canners.

FOODS THAT FUEL MOLECULAR ROLLER COASTERS

    What happens to the sugar metabolism of a child when he gulps a can of soda or a glass of orange juice in three minutes? This question arose in my mind some years ago during a lecture to the medical staff of Holy Name Hospital. I was presenting data for a series of over 1000 glucose tolerance tests performed in our laboratory that I personally studied. Among patients who developed symptoms during the glucose tolerance study, 9 out of every 10 developed symptoms when their blood glucose levels rose rapidly within the first half hour. The remaining 10% individuals developed symptoms when the blood levels became low near the end of the study period. The slide projected on the slide made two telling point for me. First, that the symptoms evidently were caused by sudden increases in the blood levels rather than by low blood sugar levels as is generally believed. Second, the symptoms experienced by these individuals were identical to those caused by excess adrenaline and related stress hormones.

    Let us consider what happens to a child when he rapidly drinks a glass of orange juice or a can or soda. The blood glucose in health ranges from 75 to 105 mg/ 100 ml. We will take the example of an eight-year-old girl with a blood sugar level of 100 mg/100 ml (or 1,000 mg/1,000 ml or 1 gram per liter of blood). The total volume of circulating blood in our girl will be approximately 4 liters. This means the total amount of glucose circulating in her blood is 4 grams. Since one level teaspoon of sugar holds 4 grams of sugar, she has just one teaspoonful of sugar circulating in the blood in her entire body. A can of soda contains from 7 to 9 teaspoons of sugar. For this example, we say that our girl drinks her can of soda in 10 minutes. Now let us add it up. In a period of 10 minutes, she pours 7 to 9 times as much sugar into her blood as exists in the circulating blood in her total body. What does this avalanche of sugar do to her sugar metabolism?

    Rapid shifts in the blood sugar levels are accompanied by equally rapid surges in the secretion of insulin and adrenaline and its cousin molecules. These, in turn, are associated with sudden, highly stressful changes in the blood and tissue levels of neurotransmitter and other messenger molecules. The result: the whole biology is thrown into turmoil.

SUPPORT FOR THE NORMAL BOWEL ECOLOGY

    For many years I have studied a host of clinical syndromes in which the symptom-complexes can be related to events occurring in the bowel. As a hospital pathologist, I have examined more than 11,000 bowel biopsies during the last 25 years. During the early 1980s, my research colleague, Madhava Ramanarayanan, Ph.D., and I first introduced the use of micro-elisa technology for allergy diagnosis and analyzed thousands of blood specimens for food and inhalant allergy. As a practitioner of molecular medicine, I have had the opportunity to care for a very large number of patients with chronic bowel disorders. This work has given me some valuable insights into the nature of chronic bowel disorders and the special restorative capacity of some life span foods. I include below some text from my monograph The Altered Bowel Ecology States and Health Preservation published by the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Denville, New Jersey.

The human molecular defenses exist as plants rooted in the soil of the bowel contents.

     The ancients seemed to have known this intuitively. We seem to have taken a very circuitous route to this most fundamental of all aspects of the immune system.

    A cell looks at the world around it through its cell membrane. It is the cell membrane that separates internal order from external order for the cell. In my monograph, The Agony and the Death of a Cell published in the 1991 syllabus of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, I discuss at length the energy and biochemical events that occur at the cell membrane in health and disease. I also discuss the evolution of molecular host defense mechanisms, both of immune and non-immune types, in various life-forms as they differentiate from simple single-cell forms to multicellular forms to highly developed complex organisms. But the fundamental pattern of host defenses has remained the same: The cell membrane or its counterparts carry the primary responsibility of preserving the biologic integrity of the organisms. For man, gut mucosa is the true counterpart of the cell membrane of the unicellular organisms. From a phylogenetic perspective, the gut mucosa would be expected to be the primary host defense organ. This indeed is the case when one looks at the health and disease issues for man from a holistic perspective.

    The following foods stand out in their restorative value for people with disrupted internal ecology of the bowel: burdock, daikon, garlic, ginger, radish, sea vegetables, pre-digested soy products, squashes, turnips and some herbal products that can be taken as food supplements. Some other foods favor the overgrowth of yeast and some other pathogenic bacteria in the bowel, and so are best avoided in the altered states of bowel ecology. These foods include foods that are rich in simple sugars, contain yeast products, or have a high content of fermented items.

Food Compatibility and Allergy

    The subjects of food incompatibility and allergy and abnormal bowel responses to foods are essential subjects. In the prevailing notions of drug medicine in America, these subjects are considered materials for the fringe physicians. Scientists in medicine, I often hear, must stay clear of such hucksterism. I sometime wonder if there is another area in medicine in which more irresponsible statements are made by otherwise responsible physicians than in this area. A great enigma for me is this: How can any physician engage in any healing art without making nutrition the centerpiece of his practice? After all, as I wrote earlier, we are made of food, are sustained by food, fall ill when we eat wrong foods, and die if food is withheld from us.

    What is food for one is poison for another, observed Hippocrates almost 2,500 years ago. Hippocrates, it seems, learned his lesson from the Man from the Rift Valley who observed that some foods were healing and some others made him sick. We physicians are the intellectual progeny of this Man from Africa, even though many of us are now infatuated with drugs and despise the word empiricism.

    What is the commonest cause of fatigue after eating? Milk allergy. Is egg an excellent food? Yes. Should every one eat eggs? No. Egg is a very allergenic food. People with allergic genes are very likely to be allergic to eggs. Which is a better food for some one with allergic nasal and sinus symptoms, wheat or wild rice? Wild rice, because allergy to wild rice is very uncommon while wheat is one of the major allergens.

    The subjects of food allergy and abnormal bowel responses to foods are of paramount importance for both people who suffer from chronic immune disorders and professionals who care for them. It is also a complex subject. Food allergy often causes chronic headaches, arthritis, colitis, asthma, disorders of mood, memory and mentation, and hyperactivity in children. In the prevailing mode of drug medicine, these afflictions are usually treated with drugs. Food allergy as the true cause remains undiagnosed. The proper diagnosis and management of food allergy requires electrodermal conductance tests and micro-elisa blood tests (or skin tests). In my view, the electrodermal methods in the hands of experienced professionals give a far superior total profile of food tolerance and intolerance than the blood tests. As the benefits of this technology become better known to the physician community, it will, despite some variability in test results caused by individual operators, become widely accepted for this purpose.

EATING LESS TO SUPPORT THE FULL LIFE SPAN

    It is now clearly established in experimental animals that ad lib eating shortens the species life span. I discuss this subject at length in the chapter, On Limbic eating. What causes sugar craving? What are the causes of overeating? Sugar causes sugar craving. Rarely do we realize that more than sugar, salt causes sugar craving. What brings on gorging- starving- gorging cycles? The catabolic maladaptation. Here I make one important point: It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to eat less for vitality and for living the full life span in optimal health if we eat aging-oxidant foods. Aging-oxidant foods create molecular roller coasters that cause food craving and lead to paralyzing eating- bingeing cycles. Aging-oxidant foods cause catabolic maladaptation which trap the overweight person.

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