Albino Lizard

   Occasionally someone tells me she admires how active I am at my age, and asks if I have a secret. Well I do but you may not want to hear it, because it’s don’t don’t don’t don’t. Of course with every don’t there’s a do. It’s not all self denial. In fact your body may be very happy to get some actual nutrition for a change. Your poor physical self is starving for nutrients. Alas, someone took all the vitality out of this food and gave me empty calories. Maybe if I eat enough of it I’ll finally get the nutrition my body was programmed to expect from this food group. But no, it never works, the food processors were very thorough in their nutrient removal. Why is this legal?
     Natives were deprived of their land and lifestyle then issued devitalized food. They became so habituated to devitalized food that they actually celebrate the kind of poor quality food that their great grandparents barely survived on. It’s emotional. Most of the ancestors could not adapt to the poor quality food and died. But the survivors who somehow managed to adapt produced offspring that have a hard time adapting to anything else. This swill is food! You can’t tell me otherwise.
     This scenario has happened to other groups as well. We all have ancestors who had to adapt to devitalized food to the point that devitalized food is just normal. Going against the grain requires courage, stamina, and determination.

     Refined wheat, and products made from it, distend the abdomen, because a layer of difficult-to-remove wall paper paste is laid down along the inner surface of the colon every time refined wheat is eaten. Layer by layer, day by  day, the abdomen extends more and more as the colon becomes larger and larger. As the colon becomes larger and larger, the channel in the center of the crusty buildup within it becomes smaller and smaller, and constipation is a frequent occurrence. The wheat bran originally part of wheat prior to refining would have enabled the pasty starch to be eliminated had it remained present.
     I was fortunate that my parents discovered the nutrition science about whole grains before I was born, although both of them had been raised on refined foods. My mother ground whole wheat in an electric mill and made whole wheat bread and sandwiches back in the day when grocers only stocked refined white bread. The sandwiches I brought to school made with light brown bread looked strange to my peers. I had been taught that whole grains build a better body than the refined variety, so I ignored the teasing and ate my lunch. Later I proved to my own satisfaction that I had been taught correctly. Whole grains satisfy a starch craving, and also provide the vitamins, enzymes and roughage necessary to move the food through the digestive system, and to utilize it for body building and fuel. If I ate something refined, I would experience digestion problems and fatigue. I knew what the cause of these symptoms was after going on a water fast for a week during my mid 20s and becoming acutely aware, afterwards, of how various foods affected my body.
     My father was a gruff individual and I never learned to converse with him much before he passed away at  83 when I was 51. I know it was he that discovered the benefits of whole grains and educated my mother about it. He served in the US Navy during WWII as a Lieutenant Commander, an office he said he merited because of his college education, having received a 4 year engineering degree from Cal Tech after also having attended UCLA. My mother, whom I found much easier to talk to, informed me, in response to my question, that it was from a teacher at UCLA that Daddy had learned the benefits of a natural diet.
     After having read, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston Price, I think Dad must have read it too. The book came out in 1939, and this would have been around the time that he would have been learning the facts about refined foods.

     “Dr. Price presents in this work documentation of the detrimental effects on health, bone structure and fertility that are seen when modern foods (sugar, white rice, white flour, canned foods, jams, lean muscle meat, vegetable oils), replace traditional foods (liberal use of sea foods, organ meats, eggs of many species of animal and fish, full-fat dairy from cow, goat and camel raised on fast growing grasses on mineral-rich soil, freshly cracked and ground whole grain breads).” Web

    Perhaps the followers of Weston Price, such as my parents, the current Paleo movement, and the Weston Price Foundation, put a little too much emphasis on (free range and grass fed) animal based foods, when actually these foods only comprised a small percentage of the diets of the healthy people Dr. Price studied. My parents, after their years of home butchering, egg gathering and milking of their free range and pastured birds and animals did not set remarkable records of longevity, although they were fit and active until their early 80s.
     Although healthy and active in dance groups until their early 80s — while watching many of their friends succumb  to degenerative diseases much earlier — my father died of prostate cancer at 83, and my mother passed with Alzheimer’s at 94, after going through 13 years of deepening stages of dementia. Both conditions may have resulted from a build up of agricultural chemicals, in their bodies and brains, second hand, from the commercial feed they bought for their animals, whose milk, eggs and flesh they consumed, thinking these products were the sources of health. Their two acres of pasture may not have been adequate for the 2 to 6 goats, along with a donkey sometimes, grazing on it, and required the commercially grown bales of dried alfalfa and commercially produced grain-based feed to supplement it.      The chicken feed appeared to be a mixture of whole grains, but the goats and pigs got what appeared to be pressed barley and some mysterious pellets that contained molasses and probably wheat bran. All these supplemental feeds were grown in a full complement of agricultural chemicals: pesticides, herbicides and petroleum based fertilizers. When the freezer was depleted of meat, and there wasn’t an animal available to butcher, the milk goat was dry, or the hens weren’t laying enough; commercial meat, dairy or eggs were purchased. Animals, whose products appear on store shelves have probably consumed commercially produced hay, grains or grain fractions.

     Even after decades of eating unrefined grains, fresh vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, and home raised milk, eggs, meat, and fresh-ground whole-grain cereal and bread, my mother never lost the bulging lower abdomen, like she was perpetually three months pregnant, that she got from an accumulation of refined flour products in her youth. Although fit and beautiful she never knew what it was like to have a flat abdomen.

     There are problems with grains other than being refined. Often grains are contaminated with herbicide right before harvest — not just to control the weeds — but to desicate the grain. The separation of the wheat from the chaff is more efficient if the grain is poisoned first.  The word, “organic” on the label protects us from this — we hope. All bets are off if the grain comes second hand in animal products. In this case, the words, “grass fed” on the label may provide some comfort, maybe even some assurance that the food this animal, or these animals, ate was less poisoned. I think I’d want to know what portion of an animal’s food must be grass, so the, “grass fed,” or “pastured” label can legally be applied, if I were to consume these products.
     Most of the protein in grains is found around the outside, the part that disappears in polished rice and refined wheat. The bran and germ of wheat, rice, and other grains, is noted for its vitamin content, particularly the B complex of vitamins, also minerals such as magneium. A whole grain – legume combination provides a complete protein, because the beans provide the aminos short in the grain and vice versa.

     Animals are fed the bran that was removed from the refined grains, along with the molasses that was removed from the refined sugar marketed to humans. Although the animals get a different fraction than the one humans get, they are still fed refined products. Getting these fractions second hand in meat and dairy products is just as bad or worse than getting them first hand in the original foods. Toxins in the feed become even more concentrated in the animal flesh and secretions than they were in the feed.
     The first step in a diet cleanup for a healthier body, and a more active life, is the grain one eats, including the grain eaten by the animals whose products one eats. These grains must be grown and harvested without toxic inputs, and they must be unrefined and complete. It is possible to skip anything from an animal and anything from grains, and live on nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruit, although that would be quite a leap for a lot of people, and might be better done in stages. The first step might be to eat more fruits and vegetables, being particular enough about the inputs used in growing them to seek out organically grown. Then look into converting grain based recipes to nut and seed based. Then study how to switch meat and dairy products to seed, nut or bean products. An extended water fast, or a series of them, an herbal parasite purge, and an herbal colon cleanse might be worthwhile. Want health? This may be the road, if it’s not too late.