Major minerals like silicon, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, zinc, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and iodine that construct our tissues are typically all derived from our food. If the foods we are eating lack these minerals and nutrients, then we will be missing crucial elements in our physical makeup. With the proliferation of super-drug sugars (high-fructose corn syrup) and artificial protein powders, as well as every kind of nutrition marketing scam, we must be keenly concerned with quality. We must be able to distinguish what is sugar-filled chemical garbage and what is valuable. To do this, I recommend that you reflect on the ancient wisdom of diet that has been time-tested over thousands of years: a wisdom that directs us to add certain foods, superfoods, and superherbs into our diet that will help us to automatically develop healthy and longevity-inducing eating habits.
You are going to discover that in one fell swoop it may be possible for you to go from zero to superhero. This means you will be able to go from food that’s worthless all the way to superhero food because it’s simple, easy, and enjoyable! Anybody can eat a goji berry, and it tastes awesome. The goji berry is perhaps the number-one-ranking superfood in the world.
Let’s say you’ve been surviving on junk food; in one day you could go from zero to superhero. That day is now. This a powerful technology. We need this technology in our current situation—a situation that is, essentially, a dietary holocaust.
But in that dietary holocaust, massive opportunities for transformation and health and healing become available because nothing’s out of balance in the universe. Everything is in a sort of balance—a dynamic disequilibrium that favors health and growth. And yes, there might be chaos, destruction, genetically modified GMO stuff, and fast food on one end of the spectrum; but on the other end of the spectrum guess what becomes available? The best food ever.
A wild Arizona goji berry bush
For me, “the best food ever” means the highest-quality, mineral-rich, organic, homegrown, or wild foods, superfoods, and superherbs. I have found that following this principle is not only the simplest way to choose what I eat, it is also the best way to bring about good health and spiritual transformation. Because of this, I have made my life’s work a study of how to help as many people as possible succeed and prosper with super-healthy foods, superfoods, and superherbs.
I encourage anyone who wishes to experience the bounties of Nature to delve into eating what Nature provides us. That is: raw plant foods, superfoods, and superherbs. I encourage people to learn about what plants are most edible, to learn a new way of living, to experience the incredible health that Nature will give to you by accepting the foods she provides, and to live a life in harmony with the plants and animals. By doing so, you may experience and reclaim your own little bit of paradise!
“You are what you eat” is the zip file that we received when we were emailed to the planet by God. “You are what you eat” is a quantum phenomenon. Quantum physics indicates that we are a mineral matrix consisting mostly of empty space (vast spaces between minerals or atoms). And that empty space is defined by an energy field that we call our body. According to the blossoming field of epigenetics, our energy field or body is dramatically affected by our environment—especially our internal environment. The substances we are putting inside our energy field day after day shape our internal environment; these include, most notably, our food, air, and water.
Eating poorly is similar to building a house or office complex with inferior materials that wear out in twenty years instead of two hundred years. This is the power of “you are what you eat.” This maxim implies that you have control over your physical and mental destiny so that you can manifest your true phenotype and genotype. Specifically, eating healthfully allows your phenotype to fully express your genotype. This means you become capable of achieving a full expression of your genetics.
“You are what you eat” means that if we are eating junk food, we create a junk body. If we’re eating fast food, then our body is going to burn up fast and we’re not going to be around very long. If your “you are what you eat” bank account is bankrupt because the food you consume is full of empty calories, then you will consequentially lack the capability to manifest your real resources. Those resources can be tapped through the diet of foods, superfoods, superherbs, super-supplements, and technologies that I recommend in these pages.
By incorporating the information found in this book, we will, step by step, manifest our true abilities to control what we’re eating. Eventually impulsive behaviors (such as going through half a bag of potato chips before we realize what’s happening) start to lessen their grip upon us. It is important that we are very gentle with ourselves because it takes some time to change for the better.
Some of us can make a commitment to health and stick with it more easily than others can. But a lot of us are not there. We need to take simple, easy steps and gradually add foods that work for our body, foods that we enjoy—foods that have tremendous nutritional value. And then slowly we start letting go of all the foods and substances that we know are not good for us—foods that are actually working against us.
We do know what’s good for us and what’s not. Everybody knows that junk food is junk. Everybody knows that food you buy in a normal store is nutrient-deficient and mineral-deficient. Everybody knows that you can have better-quality food if you grow it in your own backyard. If you grow a garden, you know that your own tomatoes taste better based on personal experience!
One of the most important distinctions found within these pages is the fact that all foods are not created equal. Some foods are deficient in minerals and key nutrients, while other foods are packed with a powerhouse of valuable nutrients that can change your life, your health, and your body in a truly incredible way. Selecting those foods that also deliver the flavor, taste, and enjoyment that we are seeking will cause us to develop new, healthy eating habits that simultaneously satiate all our cravings. You can have salads that taste extraordinary! You can eat amazing foods like avocados and literally become hooked on them as your favorite snack food.
As a gastronaut, I have explored “you are what you eat” for more than twenty-five years. I’ve made a couple of appropriate observations about this famous phrase:
1. Eating superfoods and/or superherbs that are the products of long-lived plants helps you to live long. For example: green tea shrubs-trees are exceedingly long-lived (they can live over one thousand years) and impart that quality upon us; olive trees can live thousands of years (it is no wonder that olive oil has such strong research supporting its longevity-enhancing properties); baobab trees can live thousands of years, with their longevity properties being potentially conferred in their baobab fruit; goji berry bushes and ginseng can live hundreds of years; etc.
2. Powerful pioneer plants that grow where the Earth has been disturbed, deforested, eroded, etc. often are good medicines for us. These include: chaga mushroom and its pioneering, medicinal host birch tree; astragalus and its power as a nitrogen-fixing (soil-replenishing) superherb; noni and its ability to grow even on barren lava fields; grapes and their tendency to survive damaged ecosystems; mucuna and its antistimulant, nourishing qualities; Andean “grain” quinoa and its character of being able to survive even sterile soils; etc.
The Sunland baobab (Limpopo, South Africa), estimated to be anywhere from 1,700 to 6,000 years old. Theoretically, baobab fruit confers these longevity properties.
What we eat deeply and radically affects the way we think, feel, and behave. We are what we eat, and we eat what we are. Food affects every aspect of our being.
Every person is a work of art in progress. One can become progressively more beautiful, or one can follow the fate that aspects of our civilization have set out for us: decay, illness, and an untimely death. Each action taken determines which of these two destinies will be achieved. What we eat helps to guide our path. Eating determines what level of health our body will experience. Every bite of food put into the body should add to our strength, spirituality, and beauty. Each meal becomes part of who we are at the deepest level.
“You are what you eat” will have the final say.
Eating organic is critical, because it provides us with the most basic form of food to build a happy, healthy body. Organic food is the oldest form of agriculture known. It is completely natural. Organic foods are not sprayed, not genetically modified, and not grown with pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides—all chemicals specifically designed to kill living organisms. These chemicals should not be put into the Earth, sprayed on our foods, or fed to our children.
Spraying all kinds of growth hormones on plants to accelerate their production, and adding artificial fertilizers to the soil that are contaminated with petroleum and the slag from burning metals is not natural. This is harmful to our bodies and our children’s bodies. This is a big mistake and a dangerous practice, and we need to stop it, reverse it, and go back to growing food naturally, with no artificial processes whatsoever.
Perhaps we have thought in the past that organic food was too expensive. My position is: if you have to spend $1 more, $5 more, or $20 more for organic produce, spend the extra money, because you are worth it. That investment in your health will come back to you a hundredfold. You can either pay a little more now for nutrient-filled, natural food, or you can pay later with sickness while in the hospital, racking up bills that your health insurance will not cover. The choice is yours. By eating organic, you will be investing in your health as well as supporting organic farmers and food distributors who are doing the right thing for a sustainable future.
Benefit #1: Organic foods are richer in minerals.This is because all agriculture, and all nutrition, begins with mineral-rich soil. When more minerals are available to the plant, the plant’s vitamin, polysaccharide, and enzyme content, as well as overall immune system, are improved. When we eat mineral-rich foods we directly absorb the nutrients that made the plant healthy. We also enjoy more conscious choices and freedom as the cells throughout our body become healthier and more vital. Entire books have been written on how rich soils helped build enormous civilizations; and how the subsequent mismanagement of crops and soil led to the loss of mineral-rich soil and a subsequent collapse of those civilizations.
The famous twelve-year Schuphan study tested the nutritional superiority of organically grown foods. Among other things, Schuphan found the following.1
• Organic foods have far higher mineral and trace mineral contents, with the exception of sodium. For example, organic produce contains far more iron, potassium, magnesium, and calcium than conventional crops. (Most studies of this type demonstrate that organic foods have two to ten times the mineral content of conventional foods—you really do get more value for the money.)
• Organic spinach contained 64 to 78 percent more vitamin C.
• Organic savoy cabbage contained 76 to 91 percent more vitamin C.
• Organic crops had a dry weight (after dehydration) of 69 to 96 percent more than conventional crops, demonstrating a higher food-value content.
Love in the garden. Love in the cabbage.
In 1993 Bob Smith, a trace minerals laboratory analyst, began a small experiment. For two years he visited stores in Chicago and purchased four to fifteen samples of both organic and commercial produce. He brought these samples back to his laboratory and tested them for trace elements. His conclusions were as follows:2
• Organically grown wheat had twice the calcium, four times the magnesium, five times the manganese, and thirteen times more selenium than commercial wheat.
• Organically grown corn had twenty times more calcium and manganese, and two to five times more copper, magnesium, molybdenum, selenium, and zinc.
• Organically grown potatoes had two or more times the boron, selenium, silicon, strontium, and sulfur, and 60 percent more zinc.
• Organically grown pears had two to nearly three times more chromium, iodine, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, and zinc.
• Overall, for twenty of the twenty-two beneficial trace minerals, the quantities found in organically grown food significantly exceeded that of the commercially grown crops. Organic foods also had lower quantities of toxic trace elements such as aluminum, lead, and mercury.
Benefit #2: Organic agriculture is sustainable.Organic food production has existed for thousands of years (since the beginning of agriculture) and it will continue as long as humans live on the planet. Organic agriculture is nontoxic: it leaves no permanent toxicity. The pesticide and artificial fertilizer industries are toxic and nonsustainable. These industries have covered the entire planet with dangerous chemicals.
The story of DDT is known to nearly all of us. DDT went into commercial distribution in 1948. Because of its unsustainable toxicity, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 and soon afterward was banned worldwide. DDT is a known neurotoxin, xenoestrogen, and carcinogen. Who was brought to justice after the facts of DDT were revealed? How many people, children, and animals have been injured by this chemical? How much longer will we continue to spray the Earth with poisons? These are critical questions that we have to ask ourselves. We now know that DDT has been found in the sweat of polar bears. It is in the tissues of animals, including the milk of human mothers. It is all over the planet. That is just one chemical. There are at least 77,000 different artificial chemicals that we have released into the biosphere, geosphere, and atmosphere.
We know that kids are being born today with hundreds of different chemicals in the blood of their umbilical cord. In one study, researchers from two major laboratories looked for the presence of toxic chemicals in the umbilical-cord blood of ten newborns born in U.S. hospitals in August and September 2004. Of the more than 400 chemicals tested for, 287 were detected in umbilical cord blood. Of these, 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain or nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animals.3 These are synthetic chemicals created by humankind that have gotten into the food supply and are brought into the baby by the mother. We used to believe that the baby was protected by the mother, that toxins were filtered by the umbilical cord and placenta. The truth is that the chemicals are not entirely filtered out. In my estimation, this is a key reason we have an explosion of autism. Now, 1 in 150 babies is born with autism. Estimates indicate that this number could become 1 in 50 babies born autistic in the future.4
These chemicals are also one of the reasons we have a massive explosion of cancer, especially cancer in children. It is one of the reasons kids have chronic asthma and allergies from birth. It is one of the reasons kids are suffering from skin diseases. It is from spraying chemicals in the air, in water, on food, and on everything. “Better living through chemistry” has been an experiment in suffering and genocide.
We must stop eating chemical-grown food and return to organic food to be healthy and maintain a sense of certainty, quality control, and safety. There is no other choice. What we choose to buy and eat is like voting. When we buy conventionally grown, we are voting for conventional farming. We are saying that we want more pesticides and chemicals. Anyone reading this right now knows that this is not what we want.
TIP Just a few thousand years ago, 100 percent of the human population was eating 100 percent wild food! Agriculture did not exist.
Wild food contains even more minerals than organically farmed food. Picking wild berries, fruits, vegetables (such as dandelion), and medicinal mushrooms (reishi, chaga, maitake, shiitake, poria, etc.) makes for a wonderful hobby. It reconnects us with Nature in a simple and enjoyable way. For an excellent field guide to discovering and harvesting wild food—in urban, suburban, and rural areas—read Sergei Boutenko’s Wild Edibles.
If you cannot pick wild fruits and vegetables for at least 25 percent of your diet, it is recommended to include a raw organic green superfood powder in the diet, as well as fresh vegetable juices, to supply a full spectrum of alkaline minerals and nutrients.
Benefit #3: Organic food is safer for our endocrine system, which produces hormones.When our endocrine system is disrupted, our hormones are thrown out of balance and/or hormone production stops altogether. We know that our reproductive system, thyroid system, thymus, immune system, and adrenals are all hormonally operated. We also know that estrogen-mimicking pesticides interfere with the function of the human hormone system.
Some better-known examples of highly toxic, endocrine-disrupting pesticides are:
• DDT and its metabolite DDE, which are both now known to exhibit their toxicity through antiandrogenic demasculinizing properties
• thinclosalin, a heavily used fungicide that is antiandrogenic
• endosulfan, a DDT relative with estrogenic properties that is found more often in food than any other pesticide
• atrazine, a weed killer with broad hormonal activity, contaminates the drinking water of about twenty million people in the United States
In addition, plastics are known to contain xenoestrogens, such as BPA, that interfere with hormones. Plastics need to sit for at least a year before coming into contact with liquids due to the volatility of plasticizers such as BPA. Typically, plastic bottles are blown and less than sixty seconds later filled with liquids such as drinking water. Plastic bottled water should be avoided.
Benefit #4: Eating organic foods, superfoods, and superherbs is safe, easy, and fun.You can grow organic foods anywhere with seeds, nice soil, sunshine, sufficient moisture, smiles, and lots of love. Gardening skills are attractive and sexy and make for a safe, healthy hobby. Organic foods have been proven over thousands of years to be safe to eat. Conventional chemical-sprayed foods have been proven over fifty years to be unsafe to eat.
Make the determination to eat organic. It is the best thing you can do for yourself and your family. The only foods that have any value are organic foods or, even better, high-quality homegrown and/or wild foods.
If You Don’t Have Access to Organic Foods
• Request organic food at your local store.
• Shop on the Internet and order organic foods to be delivered to your home.
• Start your own organic farm.
• If you do not have a yard, ask a friend if you can grow a garden in his or her yard and then share the delicious food you grow with them!
• Write an email to your local politicians, online magazines, and other media outlets, telling them how you feel about the difficulties of finding nonsprayed, natural foods in your area.
• Learn to forage and eat wild foods.
• Plant fruiting plants and trees wherever you legally can and enjoy the harvest each year.
• Consider moving to a location where higher-quality foods are available.
• Contact gardening advocacy groups and solicit their assistance.
Let’s start this section by addressing an incorrect assumption about food. It is so basic that it literally has slipped by us all for thousands of years. It’s an assumption that was never really scientifically questioned until the twentieth century. And that is the assumption that cooked food is a normal and natural part of a daily balanced diet.
Cooking is something that was invented. It is not indigenous to the Planet Earth. Fire is indigenous, but cooking food is not. It is something we do that is different from every other creature on Earth. We humans and our domesticated animals are the only creatures on this planet who eat cooked foods. All animals living in the wild eat their food raw and, almost always, fresh. Cooked and processed foods are artificial. The cooking and processing of foods has become so common that most of us do not even question it.
The basis of human nourishment is obvious: it is raw plant foods. And Nature presents this to us in abundance. Raw plant foods are simple, easy to find, fun to eat, enjoyable, contain thousands of discovered and yet-to-be-discovered health-giving nutrients, and conform to the biological design of the human digestive system. The Sun is the beating heart of all life, and raw plant foods represent the purest form of transformed sun energy.
Kirlian imagery: raw cabbage on the left; cooked cabbage on the right
TIP If you eat cooked foods, try to eat a salad with your meal. This increases the amount of enzymes present in your diet. I also recommend that you add cultured vegetables, seaweeds, and superfoods because of their high enzyme content.
Eating a balanced mix of raw plants (and especially their juices) restores the body on a molecular level, builds strong cells, neutralizes oxidation damage (aging), raises alkalinity, and grounds the person in the natural world. Of course, the body resists shocking changes, so everyone should ease into the raw-food approach at an appropriate pace. Also, everyone should self-educate on this subject by visiting www.thebestdayever.com and other online sources, reading raw-food books, attending lectures, and talking to others so that the common mistakes are avoided.
I strongly recommend that you take action with your diet and make purer, cleaner choices by looking into a raw, organic, plant-based diet filled with fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, seaweeds, sprouts, flowers, fermented foods, herbs, superherbs, and superfoods (as described in my books The Sunfood Diet Success System and Eating for Beauty). Such a diet significantly reduces the toxic load, enhances the immune system, and helps achieve great strides toward clearing energy blockages, attaining wonderful health, and achieving vital longevity.
Here are the benefits of eating live food and avoiding cooked and processed foods.
Benefit #1: Living food is better for the environment.When one eats a bag of corn chips, the wrapper goes into a landfill. When one eats an orange, the wrapper (peel) becomes compost. When one follows a raw-plant-food lifestyle, the amount of trash produced by that individual decreases to almost nothing. Test for yourself and see. Cooked food and pollution are directly related.
Benefit #2: Living food is easier on your immune system.Swiss scientist Dr. Paul Kouchakoff discovered that if at least 50 percent of your meal consists of raw plants, then the body’s reaction to digestion is much easier on the immune system.5 Most people are activating their immune system with every single meal. This is because every single cooked meal stimulates the production of white blood cells. The body experiences this food as an attack on the immune system. Everything has to be “recoded” in order to be properly divided up and delivered throughout the body. When each meal is at least 50 percent raw, there is no such white blood cell response.
Most people don’t realize that the very act of cooking food can introduce toxins, as the food’s chemicals change during the heating process. In Instinctive Nutrition, Severen Schaeffer wrote:
The number of derivatives appearing at the end [of the cooking process] is extremely impressive; we are constantly discovering new ones: volatile alcohols, cetones, aldehydes, esters, ethers, nonvolatile heterocycles. The overall result is a mixture of derivatives with different chemical and biological properties: aromatic, peroxydizing, antioxidizing, toxic, some of them possibly mutagenic or carcinogenic. As an indication, at the present time in a fried potato we have identified more than 50 derivatives, most of them derivatives of pyrozenes and thiazole, but we know that in all, there are still 400 yet to be identified.
TIP Make sure to add a high-quality enzyme supplement to your diet. Do this regularly, with your meals and/or between meals. Enzymes will help you digest raw and cooked food, help your tissues remain young, assist you in losing weight, and help purify your body of toxins.
Benefit #3: Living food is rich in enzymes.More than twenty years of experience have shown me that enzyme-rich foods (raw foods) and enzyme supplements (especially taken in large doses) do accelerate healing. In spite of controversies on the subject usually generated by pessimists, my experience compels me to inform you of the healing, youthening power of raw foods and enzymes.
Research shows that once food is cooked between temperatures ranging from 120 to 170°F, valuable nutrients and enzymes are destroyed. Enzymes have many important functions in the body. They break down food, assist the immune system, carry out functions of the metabolism, and help the body detoxify harmful substances. Enzymes help the body unlock nutrients. Enzymes are, in fact, vital to all life processes.
There are two classes of enzymes: metabolic and digestive. Metabolic enzymes operate in all the cells, tissues, and organs and are an essential part of every biological activity. Digestive enzymes are produced by and appear in the alimentary organs—that includes your stomach, pancreas, salivary glands, and to some degree your intestines. They help to digest carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.
Within these classes of enzymes are three main sub-categories. Amylases are enzymes that digest carbohydrates. Lipases are enzymes that digest fats. And proteases are enzymes that digest proteins.
Enzymes are small proteins. Some nutritionists mistakenly believe that enzymes are destroyed by stomach acid. However, protein cannot be broken down by hydrochloric acid in the stomach; therefore enzymes, especially plant enzymes, survive in our intestines. There they can be absorbed into our tissue system and can help us break down cooked-food particles, incompletely digested raw-food particles, as well as toxins that are caught up in our metabolism.
Enzymes are also present in their proper proportions in whole raw plant foods. These enzymes are there to assist the digestion of food. Many food enzymes are destroyed at 150°F (66°C). The dehydration of food below 104°F (40°C) keeps nearly all enzymes intact. Enzymes are heat-sensitive and therefore their loss is likely the primary reason cooked food affects us very differently from raw food. After a great deal of research, loss of enzymes was identified by Dr. Edward Howell (author of Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity and Enzyme Nutrition) as being the main reason humans age prematurely. Food-enzyme shortages sooner or later result in physical degeneration.
All our food comes naturally packed with enzymes. As long as that food is raw, natural, and intact, the enzymes themselves will help to predigest the food. For example, an apple comes complete with all the enzymes to help digest its apple self in our bodies. If we cook that apple, we remove those enzymes, and we end up having to use our own enzymes to do the job. When the digestive enzymes present in the body are insufficient, the body draws upon its reserves—the metabolic enzymes from the major and minor organs and glands—which weakens one’s overall vitality. It takes ten metabolic enzymes to form one digestive enzyme!
To understand this more clearly, let’s say we were on a diet of all processed food, everything is cooked, with no enzymes in anything. Our body then has to use digestive enzymes that are secreted by the pancreas, the salivary glands, and the liver. Once those digestive enzymes are depleted, the body starts drawing upon and sucking energy from the metabolic enzymes that are keeping all our cells healthy and happy. Because the draw on the metabolic enzymes is so high, we can see a cascading reaction later in life when someone goes into such an enzyme depletion that major vitality is sucked out, not in a year’s time but literally in months.
One of the most enzymatically active locations that exists in Nature is to be found in the mouth of a child eating cooked food. If cooked food is eaten, the body attempts to adapt by increasing the enzyme content of the saliva in order to begin breaking down cooked food as quickly as possible. This adaptation will last as long as the body has enzyme reserves. As we age our reserves decrease; later in life they decrease significantly because we have cashed out our enzyme bank account.
The level of amylase in human saliva is approximately thirty times more abundant in the average twenty-five-year-old than the average eighty-one-year-old.6 In contrast, whales and dolphins, who live in the perfectly balanced aquatic environment and eat only raw foods (like the rest of the two million species of this planet) have no difference in cell enzyme composition in young and old.7
Without the proper enzymes to break down our food, we begin to accumulate undigested materials in our system. This leads to weight gain, inflammation, stagnation, digestive distress, and fatigue. According to Dr. Bernard Jensen, the enzymes found in raw foods are codes that tell the food where to go in our bodies. For example, the enzyme erepsin that is found in cucumbers encodes for breaking down excessive protein in the kidneys.8 Therefore cucumbers are excellent for kidney health.
Many herbs also work along enzymatic principles; thus, it is important that the herbs we consume are dried properly so that the enzymes remain intact. When we consume the powder of those dried herbs, we get a tremendous blast of enzymes in the form of food, thereby decreasing the amount of digestive enzymes we need, which decreases our draw upon metabolic enzymes. The next thing we know, we start building up our enzyme bank account—which is Dr. Howell’s entire scientific point.
Every time we eat cooked food the body has to recode the food, or reidentify it, because the enzymes are missing. To recall the example about erepsin (the enzyme in cucumbers): that enzyme is like a code, and when the body sees that code it says, “I need to deliver this food to the kidneys!” If that code is missing because the food has been cooked, the body says, “Okay, we have some work to do to figure this out,” and a new code has to be put on the food. What ends up happening is that the body has to send all sorts of signals and rearrange lots of different pieces. This is where mistakes can happen over time because food often gets sent to the wrong places. We can actually become malnourished because of this. This is critical, especially later on in life, because our primordial vitality or jing decreases, and cooked food actually drains us of increasingly more vital energy.
Raw food is a great source of enzymes. Whenever you eat raw food you are getting enzymes 100 percent directly from your food; but enzymes are also found in every cell of the human body. This is an important point. All cells have the potential to act as highly charged batteries, and each cell contains at least four thousand different enzymes. Most of us have not activated each of these four thousand enzymes within each cell because we do not have enough of the major and trace minerals in our diet. Minerals, when obtained through their whole-food complexes, especially their whole raw-food complexes, activate our cellular metabolic enzyme system. Trace elements and minerals are essential for the proper release and functioning of enzymes.
The goal is to increase the minerals and nutrition within each cell so as to activate every enzyme while simultaneously building up one’s enzyme bank account with the visualized goal of increasing the electromagnetic charge in each cell, causing all cells to resonate in harmony. At the cellular level, this is truly the picture of perfect health.
Cooking or heating shifts the molecular structure of food to both slight and great degrees. These altered molecules are not the ideal building blocks for our tissues; however, since our body is always doing the best it can, if given nothing else it will incorporate these altered or cooked molecules into our bodily structure. Cooked and processed foods have an accumulative effect on our body because one’s inherent enzyme bank account decreases over time in the effort to digest these enzyme-deficient foods. Once the body’s enzyme bank account, or enzyme potential, is diminished beyond a certain threshold (usually having to do with the inability of the glands to produce the enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin), the body wears out and inner vitality is lost.
Because we know that heating raw food destroys enzymes, this question often comes up: does freezing food destroy enzymes too? Here is what we found out. Freezing food destroys at least 30 percent, and up to 66 percent of enzymes. So, it is not a complete loss; enzymes remain to some degree. For example, frozen berries are still considered raw—they still have that raw “high” about them. When you eat frozen berries you don’t feel your energy sag or notice any kind of depletion in the food; however, if you cook those blueberries, things change—the enzymes are lost—and they suddenly take on a slight “downer” vibe.
We know that enzymes are particularly beneficial for our health if they come from raw unfrozen plants (as opposed to animal sources or the body’s endogenous enzyme stores). This is because plant enzymes initiate the most health-giving activity throughout all the various pH (acid and alkaline) conditions in the body. When we eat food we have an environment within our mouth of either an acidic pH or an alkaline pH. As the food goes down into our stomach we have an acidic pH, and as it continues into our intestine we have both acidic and alkaline levels of pH. The most desirable enzymes are those that survive all the way through our system, through both acid and alkaline pH.
When you take cabbage, put it in a crockpot, add acidophilus to it, and make raw sauerkraut, you will discover that there is a very high enzymatic activity present in the final product. This is because the good bacteria actually begins breaking down (digesting) the cabbage, and this process secretes enzymes. This is why fermented foods like sauerkraut are a very important part of a healing diet. They are rich in friendly bacteria and they supply tremendous amounts of enzymes directly into one’s digestive system.
Going back to Dr. Howell’s research, he presents a wealth of evidence in his books Enzyme Nutrition and Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity, demonstrating that all living creatures have a fixed enzyme bank account. He believed that we have a certain amount of enzymes, and if we wipe them out early, our life is going to end early. In his words, “Humans eating an enzyme-less diet use up a tremendous amount of their enzyme potential and lavish secretions of the pancreas and other digestive organs. The result is a shortened life span of sixty-five years or less as compared to 100 or more years. Also resulting will be illness and a lowered resistance to stresses of all types both physiological and environmental.”
As opposed to Dr. Howell’s view, my experience and research supports the view that by eating raw and living foods, and taking the right superfoods, superherbs, and supplements, you can actually rebuild your enzyme bank account and get your vitality back. In my opinion, nothing is fixed in this universe, and you can always get more out if you put in the intention, time, energy, and discipline.
Dr. Howell uncovered connections between enzyme deficiencies in the diet, eating cooked food, and a decrease in brain size and weight. Proper nutrition is the basis of mental power. The nutriment of the brain cells is derived from the blood corpuscles being perpetually suctioned in to nourish the brain cells by the delivery of rarified gases from the lungs. If the food stream is devoid of enzymes and impure, then the heart regulator valves become weak, the stomach disordered, the liver contaminated, the lungs congested, and the brain starved, drugged, and poisoned. When a body is in this condition, all the thoughts that germinate therein will be inappropriate to solve the problems that we are facing in our world today.
TIP Add raw plant foods to your diet to increase enzyme activity. This includes raw fruits, vegetables, activated nuts, sprouted seeds, seaweeds, sprouts, flowers, wheatgrass and other grasses, herbs, superherbs, superfoods, and fermented foods. If I try to take something away from you, you are going to try to take it back. So let’s simply add in the good stuff, and the bad stuff will naturally fall away when we are ready; that is the approach that works.
Kirlian aura imagery: the hands of a junk-foodist on the left; the hands of a raw-foodist on the right
Benefit #4: Living food is great for your “right brain.”There is a known connection between eating cooked food and a change in brain chemistry. This was recently confirmed by my friend Tony Wright, who broke the world record for staying awake (nearly twelve days straight). He has been a raw and living foods eater for more than fifteen years, and he discovered that eating cooked food not only changes brain size but also causes us to suffer from left-brain dominance (the left brain is the logical, analytical side of our brain). In comparison, the right brain is action-oriented and imaginative, the part that has fun and wants to go out and do new things. The right brain has been shown to not need sleep—only the left brain requires sleep, hence Tony Wright’s ability to stay awake by avoiding left-brain activities.* It has been shown that living foods and enzyme-rich foods help us access our right brain and activate those energy centers.
This might actually be one of the greatest discoveries in human history, because it indicates why the world is in the shape it is right now. Because the majority of the population is left-brained, we are not thinking in an imaginative way and have become too linear, too much in the box, and are therefore not really capable of solving problems at a level above the consciousness that created them. We have to get out of that place where we created the problem, which is all the cooked food we ate throughout all the history of civilization, and start getting back to the creative side of our brain by eating food that is rich in enzymes—raw and living foods.
When minerals are discussed I always correlate them with atoms. According to the conventionally accepted atomic theory, atoms are the basic material substances that we can understand as frozen clouds of energy of different, extremely small weights and sizes. With the Ormus minerals we also consider differing levels of materialization. (Ormus atoms in higher states of spin can actually lose mass and apparently move out of this dimension entirely.)
Early in my nutrition career, I was exposed to the importance of mineralization for health and longevity by my friend Don Weaver. Don is a soil remineralization agricultural scientist who focuses on using rock dusts and rock powders to remineralize soil and thus improve the quality of plant nutrition for humans and animals. Don gave me the book Trace Minerals and Man by Henry Schroeder, in which the author posits that trace minerals play a crucial role in complete nutrition and disease resistance.
The book Minerals for the Genetic Code by Charles Walters compiles the research of geneticist Dr. Richard Olree. As summarized by Walters on the back cover: “Radiomimetic chemicals, faltering nutrition, injury and—not least—an absence or marked imbalance of critical minerals can injure the chromosome by altering the chemistry of a gene so that it conveys misinformation (called point mutation) or by breaking the chromosome (called deletion). The cell may be killed, or it may reproduce the induced error.”
Later, due to the urging of another soil mineralization scientist, Don Jansen, I read Dr. Maynard Murray’s Sea Energy Agriculture, which precisely correlates the concept that plants become healthier and more disease-resistant when they are given access to a wider spectrum of mineral nutrients. Because the concept of longevity presupposes resistance to disease, the inference is clear: if mineralization improves the health of plants, then consuming mineral-rich foods will increase human longevity.
As reported in Valery Mamanov’s book Control for Life Extension, raw foodist Sauren Arakelyan’s work in extending the life span of chickens to world-record levels indicates that the mineralization idea is valid. Arakelyan’s success can be attributed to utilizing three factors:
1. Eat mineral-rich food.
All food eaten should be of a mineral-rich character, coming from healthy soil and water, such as organically grown vegetables, wild plants, and healthy animals.
2. Eat less food.
Calorie restriction (the only well-known scientifically accepted method of extending life span) should be practiced. This, of course, becomes probable and possible only when mineral-rich food is eaten, because mineral-rich foods shut off hunger instincts by meeting our nutrition and mineral requirements.
3. Eat raw food.
Raw food is more complete and nutritious. Raw foods are free of oxidative damage caused by heat and fire—the minerals in raw foods are intact and original. Interestingly, French scientist Louis Kervran’s life work, summarized in the English-language book Biological Transmutations, indicates that oxidation reactions, reduction reactions, enzymatic activity, low-energy phenomena, and nuclear phenomena are able to change one mineral (atom) into another, thereby changing the “mineral character” of foods and substances.
The Three Categories of MineralsAs a result of compiling all the research I am aware of, along with my own laboratory studies, I have grouped the minerals that are required for excellent health, genetic integrity, and longevity into three categories: major minerals, trace minerals, Ormus minerals.
These include carbon, iron, magnesium, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, silicon, sulfur, and good calcium. (Hydrogen and oxygen also fall into this list, even though they are not traditionally considered minerals. They are in fact atoms, and they fall into the definition of minerals I use in my writings and lectures.) Best sources of major minerals: organic raw or wild uncooked foods, organic superfoods, and organic or wild superherbs.
These include boron, chlorine, chromium, copper, fluorine, germanium, gold, iodine, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, silver, tin, vanadium, and zinc. Best sources of trace minerals: sea salt, seaweeds, or sea vegetables, organic superfoods, and organic or wild superherbs.
These were rediscovered by David Radius Hudson around the year 1980 via his analyses of Arizona basalt rock. These minerals were known to European alchemists, Arabic alchemists, Vedic scientists, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Chinese. Evidence is present, though not conclusive, that civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia were also aware of these strange mineral substances. Ormus minerals are atoms that do not fit into Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements, or Walter Russell’s Periodic Chart. They are typically metals in a hidden, infolded form; thus we identify them as Ormus copper, Ormus gold, etc. When oxidized or presented with specific types of high-energy environments, these Ormus elements can “pop” and become fully materialized as metals. Thus Ormus copper becomes copper, and Ormus gold becomes gold. Best sources of Ormus minerals: sea salts or sea vegetables, organic superfoods, organic or wild superherbs, and fresh spring water.
According to Hudson’s research, all living things contain Ormus elements in quantities ten times greater than all trace minerals combined. Just like other minerals, certain animals and plants contain different amounts of Ormus minerals and concentrate them in different parts. The idea that has been presented by Ormus researchers is that we are not realizing our genetic potential for the use of these Ormus minerals—this means that we are not getting enough of these minerals.
Ormus minerals have a high affinity (like mother with baby) for hydrogen, spring water, salts, lava, fats/oils, polysaccharides, and silicon-bearing plants (horsetail, nettles, bamboo, etc.). It has been theorized that the nervous systems of mammals and the fast-growing annual antlers of Cervids (deer, elk, reindeer, moose, etc.) are rich in Ormus, some of this theory being based on Hudson’s research. It appears that what makes superfoods and superherbs “super” is their high fraction of Ormus minerals. Indicators continue to point to superfoods and superherbs as being critical components of a longevity strategy. Going beyond that, it appears that growing superfoods and superherbs with substances containing a high fraction of Ormus minerals (ocean water, dead sea salt, spring water, certain rock powders, biodynamic preparations, and other modalities) to increase the Ormus-bearing fraction of the constituents of those foods intuitively leads us to what may be the destiny of longevity nutrition.
Ormus-rich volcanic rock
The Dead Sea: Its salt and clays contain Ormus minerals.
Ormus minerals are known to behave “consciously” or “intelligently,” and they defy conventional approaches of analysis. For example, the spectroscopic signature form of mineral analysis misidentifies the Ormus minerals as aluminum, carbon, silicon iron, and/or calcium. The implication of the discovery of this mistake across the sciences is profound.
Ormus minerals are trapped more easily by alchemical phenomena (vortexing, implosion, clever use of magnets, simple chemistry tricks, etc.) and not by cutting, burning, poisoning, radiating, oxidizing, or any form of adding high-energy acids typically used by science.
A Word on Hydrogen
The most important atom or mineral for life is hydrogen. Hydrogen is the embryonic substance of the universe—it is the infant. Ormus minerals are the mother, oxygen is the father, and silicon is the grandmother or nanny who is always silently supporting and present.
Hydrogen is the basic building block of all other atoms. If we look at the word “hydrogen” closely, we see that it consists of two Greek root words, “hydro” (water) and “gen” (generator). Thus, hydrogen means generator of water.
Russian research on longevity indicates that water-carrying “heavy” hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium are radioactive, poisonous, and have an adverse effect on our longevity. Water exposed to nuclear reactions (depleted uranium, irradiated foods, nuclear power plants cooled by water, and nuclear explosions near water) becomes contaminated with deuterium and tritium. Russian research cited by Valery Mamanov indicates that periodic practices of alternate dry fasting (one day of consuming no food or water, followed by one day with only water, no food, then repeat) can reduce the presence of deuterium in the body and increase life span. In my opinion, nobody is fit to dry fast unless they are experienced with cleansing, detoxification programs, juice fasting, and water fasting.
Ormus gold may have applications for removing bad calcium via topical application. It is probable that most or all Ormus minerals have a role to play in longevity. It appears from field research and experience that Ormus gold behaves very much like DMSO (reactive liquid sulfur) in helping to soothe arthritic joint pain when applied topically. Some Ormus minerals appear to take up the same receptor sites as sulfur and silicon in our joints, and perhaps in other areas of metabolism such as the hair, skin, nails, cardiovascular system, and nervous system. Ormus gold may be involved in remineralizing teeth and bones. I have experienced the healing of a cracked broken tooth by topically dripping liquid Ormus gold on the tooth two to five times a day for several months. Additionally, Ormus gold appears to be a powerful antiviral but not an antifungal.
If you would love more information on the subject, I have written extensively on Ormus minerals in my book Amazing Grace.
The best sources of clean, pure waters (that are relatively free of bacteria) emanate from deep (sometimes new, sometimes ancient) volcanic aquifers and natural forest springs far away from civilization. Fresh spring water is the quintessential product of the Earth’s natural hydrological cycle. Spring water captured in glass, that you bottle yourself at the source or purchase secondarily, is a great choice for drinking water. The best spring water is, of course, low in calcium and iron. You can test for the presence of calcium by boiling the water off in a pot and looking for white film residue on the pot surface.
Drinking spring water, especially fresh from the source, is one of the best ways to pull inflammation right out of our systems and de-stress our bodies. Stress is associated with over-heating, which is inflammation; because ice-cold spring water has the exact opposite type of energy (cooling), it balances us. Spring water is a natural anti-inflammatory with a high antioxidant potential.
Pure, wild, spring water (Kalalau Valley, Kauai)
Real spring water never freezes at the source.
When we drink spring water collected fresh from the source, it typically has low surface tension (a low dyne count), and therefore it is absorbed directly into the body. The cells are able to absorb all the hydrogen ions present in the water (water = H2O + Ormus + Silicon + Carbon), so the water barely reaches the stomach. When we drink water that feels heavy inside our body it means that the water is of a poor quality and high surface tension, as it did not directly absorb into our system.
Victor Schauberger was the first person to bring to my attention the idea that water can be “ennobled.” He also taught me how all of life is about ennobling water in a dynamic interaction between the “heavens” and the Earth. I started to see that what is going on inside every tree, every plant, and every living organism is, ultimately, an ennobling of water. That organism is taking water into its own biology, its own consciousness, and is ennobling the water to reflect its view of the world. For example, a gecko’s perspective of the world is clearly different than ours, and so the “consciousness” of the water gets to go through a wide range of life and collect infinite information.
When any living thing takes in water, whether a bee, a tree, or ourselves, the water gets to experience its perspective of the world. This is an interesting angle from which to approach life on Earth. When we look at water as a living thing that is having experiences just like we are, it helps us come into a relationship with water whereby we don’t pollute our rivers, we don’t pollute the aquifers, and we actually produce pure drinking water and spring water, consciously bottled in glass.
One of my personal goals is: “I drink the best water ever.” I hold this very strongly as an ethic in my life, as water, to me, is sacred and to be respected as the most holy substance.
Dr. Masaru Emoto, whose work with water crystals has recently become very popular, wrote in his books how water immediately and literally reacts to our thoughts and intentions. I think Dr. Emoto’s information is great; however, it was from Victor Schauberger that I first heard someone say that we need to go to a spring and drink the water directly from the spring source, because that is the real water that we want. If he had never said it, I would never have tried it. Eventually I did try it, and now, as a hobby, I am a wild cold-spring hunter.
At my house the water comes from a spring that is about 400 meters away. When I am not at home I am always on the lookout for fresh spring water sources to fill up at. It is such a gift to be able to drink fresh, natural water, the way the Earth produces it. When one has this kind of radiant living water in one’s diet, it becomes much easier to fast and eat less in general, because the water is so deeply nourishing. See this page to read about the health concerns of regular tap water.
TIP As a reminder, it is important to check the level of calcium present in your water. Boil it. The amount of scale (white film) left behind will indicate to you how much calcium is in your water.
Charging WaterCharging water means giving a “life pattern” or structure to the water at a microscopic level. The hydrogen molecules in water are closer together if the water is charged. This makes the water more polar (strongly electrical). The best ways to charge stored or dead water are as follows:
• Squeeze fresh juices into the water. Lemons or limes are excellent choices because they have incredible cleansing and mucus-dissolving properties. Citrus juice lowers the surface tension of water, thus increasing its absorbability.
• Add a blade of grass or a few green herbs and leaves to the water.
• Add some green superfood powders (you can add some honey, lo han guo syrup, yacon syrup, or stevia to sweeten up the taste).
• Add a few pinches of sea salt or Himalayan pink salt. These are some of the best choices for nonvegetable sources of salt. These salts each contain more than eighty different minerals in similar ratios as they appear in seawater. They are “raw” salts, thus they differ from coagulated table salt and most “kiln-dried” sea salts that have had their minerals oxidized away through heating.
• Add Dr. Patrick Flanagan’s Crystal Energy. This product is known to lower the surface tension of water (lowers its dyne count) and increase the absorbability of the water.
• Add MSM powder crystals.
• Add TMG (betaine) powder.
• Place a crystal inside your glass of water.
• Put water in a glass jar outside under moonlight for the night (especially the full moon). Water reacts positively to moonlight.
• Run water through a magnetic vortex, water spinner/vitalizer, or vortrap (the tornado effect) to improve its quality and lower surface tension.
• Dr. Emoto has shown in his book Messages from Water that water responds to loving thoughts and even words written on a water bottle. Water quality seems to always reflect our actions and intentions. Try it for yourself!
TIP When buying bottled water, always choose glass over plastic. Plastic leaches into the water (this is often detectable by taste) and is detrimental because it mimics estrogen hormones in our body, causing glandular imbalances and feminization in males and over-feminization in females. Obviously, select brands that are low in calcium and iron.
Well Water, Distilled Water, and Alkaline WaterWell water may be a great source of water, yet let us consider that it is being pulled up prematurely, before the water is ripe. Therefore it may actually contain too many sedimentary minerals such as iron or calcium. I recommend, for any high-calcium and/or high-iron well water sources, that they be filtered using a water softener purification system before they are bathed in or consumed.
A lot of people drink distilled water. Distilled water is not natural since Mother Nature utilizes evaporation, not distillation, to vaporize water most of the time. Distilled water is a disturbed and unnatural form of water. It is lacking in information and should be avoided. Most of the time distilled dead water that is bottled in plastic absorbs plastic.
The alkaline water (8–9+ pH) craze has become increasingly popular in recent years. Please be aware that some of the machines that produce alkaline water may have a number of challenges inherent in the way they work and the quality of water they deliver. It directly depends on how they are constructed and engineered. Therefore, please do your research before you purchase a machine. These challenges include the following:
• Alkaline water machines do not effectively soften the water, therefore they require pre-filter water softeners. Without a pre-filter water softener a wide variety of contaminants, including bad calcium and toxic chemicals found in municipal water, may enter into the final drinking-water product.
• Bad calcium (instead of pearl calcium or magnesium bicarbonate) is used to alkalize the water. Because calcium is alkaline does not automatically mean it is good for us.
• Natural cold spring water with a low total dissolved solids count (TDS count) is acidic because it is high in hydrogen (hydration potential). We want water the way that Nature presents it to us in spring water, with high levels of embryonic, rejuvenating hydrogen.
• Alkaline water usually contains more hydroxy free radicals (OH-) and increases oxidation damage to healthy tissue, thus speeding up aging.
• The actual water-structuring mechanism of the electrified platinum plates inside some of these alkalizing machines works along not-well-understood high-spin Ormus mineral physics. High-spin Ormus platinum atoms that are being sheared off the platinum plates may be the actual agent that is structuring the water. Our general understanding of this phenomenon is mostly a “shot in the dark” and we should only proceed with this technology when this area of physics is better understood.
• Many alkaline water machines lack effective pre-filters to clean up municipal tap water before alkalizing it. Municipal tap water is usually of such poor quality due to its content of low-spin elements, bad calcium, bad iron, radioactive tritium content, bad estrogens, diluted pharmaceutical drugs, and numerous other dangerous contaminants that it cannot be rejuvenated into healthy, healing, spring-like water based on our current technology.
TIP Be aware that dehydration can happen rapidly. An hour of intense exercise, or a four-hour airline flight, can cause us to lose up to a quart (liter) of water.
When and How Much Water to Drink?We should ideally drink when our stomach is empty. Drinking water with food can dilute digestive fluids, leading to poor absorption and constipation. The best time to drink water is upon rising in the morning. Drink at least a half liter (16 fluid ounces) or more at that time. Feel free to experiment with adding several pinches of sea salt to your water to enhance the water’s ability to hydrate you.
The typical recommendation to drink “eight to ten 12-ounce glasses of water” each day is excessive if one eats at least 80 percent juicy raw plant foods. But even if one eats 100 percent raw foods, drinking water each day is still very important. Straight water has flushing abilities that simply are not found in coconut water, fruits, and vegetable juices.
If one eats at least 80 percent raw foods, I recommend drinking a daily quantity of water based on the following ratio. Take one’s total body weight (in pounds) and divide it by four. This number is then the number of fluid ounces of water one should drink in a day. For example, if one weighs 170 pounds and eats primarily raw plant foods, 170 divided by 4 is 42.5. A good daily intake of water for this person would be 42.5 ounces. (One fluid ounce is equivalent to approximately 30 milliliters.)
* You can read about Tony’s philosophy about the brain in his book Left in the Dark.