For the life of all flesh is the blood.
—LEVITICUS 17:14
In a word, everything. Blood’s central role in your health and weight makes sense when you consider just how much of it your body contains—exactly how much of your body is blood. Everyone has about 5 liters of the stuff. To circulate it through the body, the heart beats over 100,000 times a day, moving two and a half ounces of blood with each pulse—about 8 tons each day. All the blood in the body passes through the heart every three minutes.
You probably already know that red blood cells deliver oxygen throughout your body and remove cellular wastes. Beyond that, even, your blood holds the key to living at an ideal, healthy weight. First of all, the blood dictates your body’s internal environment: acidic blood, acidic body; alkaline blood, alkaline body. In addition, your blood cells eventually become body cells (and vice versa). You need to keep your blood clean and pure—and nonacidic. I choose the food and drinks I recommend accordingly: They will build healthy blood cells. Your body makes between 3 and 4 million new blood cells and 11 to 13 million body cells every second, so you need to make sure it has the very best materials to work with at any given time.
Later in this chapter, I’ll tell you how and why I always put my clients’ blood under a microscope—in a procedure different from anything traditional doctors or labs do—and what I can learn from the astonishing things I see. You’ll see a series of pictures of real clients’ blood samples, taken before and after they followed this program; so you can see for yourself the dramatic difference adhering to these principles makes. But first, let’s start with some background on how blood is made and what blood makes, so you can truly understand how crucial healthy blood is to permanent healthy weight loss.
Blood is the most basic material of the human body. Body cells from all types of tissue are continually being formed from the blood. It’s actually a two-way street, and body cells can also be transformed into blood cells. Better, however, is when the body follows the normal course of blood production, which is intimately connected to both digestion and respiration. Not only are you in this most fundamental way literally what you eat (and drink), but also what you breathe.
Normal blood cell production originates in the small intestine. Nutrients set free by the digestion process are circulated through the delicate microvilli (microscopic fibers lining the villi of the intestine walls) along the (9 yards of) small intestine, and into the bloodstream, building blood cells, tissues, and organs. Air breathed in through the lungs enters the arteries and chemically unites with the minerals and other elements in the blood to create new blood cells. These red blood cells can then be transformed into bone cells, muscle cells, heart cells, liver cells, and so on, as needed.
When your body is healthy, and you are eating alkaline/electron-rich food, you build healthy blood cells—and so healthy body cells. The digestive process breaks down the foods you eat through a clean, efficient process called oxidation/reduction, which bathes the body cells in a continuous supply of oxygen. Your body stays energetic—and stays at a healthy weight.
When you are subsisting on acidic/proton-rich food, and the intestine becomes damaged or congested, blood production is impaired or stops. In order to keep constant the amount of red blood cells in the body (five million per cubic millimeter!), the body will convert body cells to blood cells—literally wasting away.
As is the blood, so is the body. As is the body, so is the blood. The quality of the blood—and so, the body—depends on the quality of what we eat and drink. If you are eating acidic foods you will have weak blood cells and then weak body cells—and you’ll be overweight. You have another choice: With alkaline food and drinks, you’ll build healthy blood—and a healthy body, which naturally seeks its own ideal healthy weight (hear an audio of Dr. Young on “Life and Death Is in the Blood” at www.pHMiracleLiving.com/bookbonus).
LIVE BLOOD ANALYSIS
I estimate I’ve performed blood tests on about ten thousand people in the course of my research over the past twenty years. What I’ve seen makes a more dramatic case for this program than anything I could tell you in just words. I think you’ll agree after you look at the following samples: The blood of a person eating a standard American diet of acidic foods looks incredibly different from the blood of someone eating alkaline. I arrived at the principles of the pH Miracle through observing differences in the blood I tested, and each new set of “before-and-after” blood tests I see confirms their power.
My main techniques differ from those of standard laboratory tests, which can involve fixing blood on a slide with preservatives before putting it under a microscope. Stains may be used to help show up white blood cells, sickle cells or some other distinctive condition, or bacteria, although the addition of those chemicals compromises the blood sample and changes the way it looks. Or the blood drawn in your doctor’s office is put in a vial, sent to a lab, spun to separate out the various elements, and weighed with specialized machinery to determine the density of the blood—no microscope needed. In any event, blood prepared in these ways is no longer a living substance. And the purpose of these tests is generally quantitative (i.e., how many white blood cells are there? How many red blood cells?) rather than qualitative (what is the condition of the cells?) like mine. They may also be useful in diagnosis or pathology.
(I do often use standard blood tests as well as my techniques, because there is value in knowing both the quality and the quantity. Results can confirm my observations. I may interpret the results differently than a mainstream physician would, however. In any case, you get the most complete picture by seeing what you can see with all of these approaches.)
I’m more interested in the quality of the blood cells than the number. I take two complementary approaches. The first is live blood analysis. I take a drop of capillary blood from the fingertip, put it on a slide, and place it immediately under a high-powered microscope using the phase contrast setting, which filters and diffuses the light to make transparent objects visible as various shades of gray. I project the image, live, onto a video screen. The point is to see the blood live, right out of the body, and to see the state of the cells and the environment in which they live. All this allows me to see the structure and strength of the red and white blood cells, and the cleanliness of the plasma fluid that surrounds them.
My second technique is dried blood analysis, or what I call the mycotoxic oxidative stress test (MOST). This time blood taken from the fingertip is pressed onto a slide and allowed to air dry. It is then examined under a high-powered microscope, this time using the bright field setting. Most of the light passes directly through the specimen, which shows up details like whether or not the blood is coagulating too much or too little, cellular breakdown, irritation, inflammation, congestion, acidosis, signs of parasites, and even specific organ imbalances. Here I’m looking for certain patterns in the blood drops, especially in regard to aspects of clotting. Under stress of various kinds, the pattern deviates from normal.
The most useful thing about both live and dried blood analyses is that they give you early warning of possible upcoming health issues. Stresses on your body are often observable as abnormalities in the blood long before they manifest as symptoms. You see the genesis of symptoms before they are expressed. These tests are one better than preventive medicine. They are preemptive medicine. If you take action to correct what you see, you can save yourself from ever developing the symptoms or conditions you can see first in the blood.
With these blood tests, I am looking, in general, for
• the condition of the red blood cells including size, shape, and symmetry
• the activity level of the immune system (white blood cell activity)
• the presence of blood clots or blood clotting factors
• the presence of parasites, yeast, fungus, bacteria, and/or mold
• the presence of crystalline structures such as arterial plaques, protoplasts, fibrous thallus, uric acid, cholesterol, and crystallized exotoxins and/or mycotoxins
• protein masses indicating cellular breakdown and/or inflammation
• the acidity level and effects of acidity
I can also see signs of specific conditions in the patterns I observe, including
• liver, kidney, pancreatic, heart, lung, prostate, ovarian, breast, and other organ stress
• gastrointestinal tract dysfunction
• degenerative conditions including cancer, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, and heart disease
• allergies
• adrenal stress
• poor circulation
In addition, these blood tests can guide your nutritional program. They can be used to identify and monitor your condition and your healing approach. They can reveal
• metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar imbalances
• malabsorption of fats, proteins, vitamins, and other nutrients
• nutritional deficiencies
These final points are the most immediately relevant to the pH Miracle Living plan for healthy weight loss. For one thing, there’s no better motivation to make the changes you know you need to make than to get a good, honest look at what exactly is circulating through your body—and no better way to commit to those changes permanently than to see, right before your eyes, what an incredible difference they make.
THE PICTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
So, have a look at the picture on the left below, which is a still from a live blood sample, typical of blood with acidic diets and lifestyles. The blood cells are irregularly shaped, and different sizes, and many are sticking together. There are a lot of white blood cells in there trying to clean up the mess. You can see the yeast and the bacteria, as well as aggregations of cellular debris, formations made of crystallized acids, bacterias, yeasts, and molds.
The contrast is obvious with the picture on the right, showing clean, alkaline blood—my blood, in fact. The red blood cells are all the same size, are all nicely round, and are not sticking together. There are no yeasts, molds, bacterias, or white blood cells.
Live blood acidic diet
Live blood alkaline
In other words, this is your blood on acid; this is your blood on greens and good fats. Any questions?
Dried blood pictures show an equally dramatic contrast (below). On the acidic blood on the left, you’ll see pasty white masses of proteins from cellular breakdown, an abnormal clotting pattern common in diets high in protein or carbohydrate. On the right is a picture of alkaline blood, with normal clots and no polymerization of protein.
Dried blood acidic diet
Dried blood alkaline
OMAHA
For the past fifteen years, I’ve been evaluating the diets and looking at the blood of a group of hundreds of clients in Omaha, Nebraska, going back at least twice each year. I’ve been seeing many of the same folks for all that time. It’s been a learning experience for me as well as them. They get to see what happens to their health—and their blood—as they start applying my principles, and what happens when they go back to a standard American diet. And so do I!
What I’ve observed has guided me as I prepared the recommendations in this book, helping me to determine the impact of certain foods and supplements on the body at the cellular level. I’ve been able to watch the impact of different types of diets on the blood, homing in on alkaline, electron-rich greens and polyunsaturated fats as key ingredients in healthy blood, healthy cells, and healthy, ideal-weight bodies. Acidic diets, on the other hand, pollute the blood and compromise cellular structure. As I continued my research, I learned that I could not only tell which blood was acid and which alkaline by looking at it live, but also I could discern patterns in the unhealthy blood that associated with specific health problems. Over and over again, I witnessed what I’ve come to call the pH Miracle: As acidic patients switched to an alkaline lifestyle, their blood became clean, they lost weight, and they became stronger, more energetic, and healthier.
I’ve got filing cabinets full of pictures of Omaha blood, but here I’ll share just one representative example with you. The changes after this patient followed a program like the one laid out in this book are dramatic. But I’ve chosen to showcase this client not because her results are extreme, but because they are typical. In other words, this could be you—both the before and the after.
In the next chapter, you’ll see even more pictures of the blood, this time taken from people following specific fad diets—then switching to the pH Miracle Living plan. There you’ll see even more dramatic differences in before-and-after pictures. Plus, those people were working with a more formatted pH Miracle Living program, as part of a controlled study, for those of you who like to see strict scientific formality before you are convinced.
For now, consider getting an analysis of your own blood. Admittedly, this program is going to take some work on your part, and it requires significant lifestyle changes. I know from experience the amazing motivation that comes from seeing the state of your own blood. It will move you to take action like nothing else ever has. And after twelve weeks, you’ll get clear-as-day proof that all you are doing is making a difference.
It is critical that you see the inside as well as the outside of your body. If the blood is sick, you will be, too—and fat—regardless of what you look like on the outside. Healthy, permanent weight loss comes from the inside out, starting with clean blood and healthy red blood cells.
