Now that you’ve cleansed, it’s time to rebuild.
For those of you who’ve never accomplished an extended fast before, the 10-Day Daniel Diet may have felt like a significant reboot of the body’s operating system. For perhaps the first time in your life, your organs, tissues, bloodstream, lymphatic system, and digestive tract received a long “holiday.” You should be feeling an incredible sense of victory, especially after you stepped on a scale and saw in black and white that you lost a considerable amount of weight in ten days. Cleansing your body of toxins and giving your digestive system a prolonged period of down time is an extremely healthy practice.
So what’s next?
I’ve made the case about the importance of continuing to cleanse on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis as a way to maintain the health improvements you’ve experienced. Now I want to introduce the second phase of the Maker’s Diet Revolution, which is rebuilding and restoring the body’s internal ecosystem.
What I’m talking about is transforming your terrain.
Terrain? Isn’t that a geographical term referring the lay of the land?
Yes, but I’m talking about a different type of terrain—the internal environment of the body. A 19th-century French scientist, Claude Bernard, coined the term when he said “the terrain is everything” after hypothesizing that germs alone could not make a healthy person sick because the person’s milieu interieur—French for internal environment or terrain—was your defense against toxic invaders.
Bernard literally put his theory where his mouth was. The French scientist drank a glass of water infected with cholera, but he didn’t get sick! Bernard took the risk, he said, because he knew he was healthy, had a strong immune system, and believed his body would fight off the germs. When a colleague, Louis Pasteur—yes, the Pasteur of pasteurization fame—heard about Bernard’s crazy stunt, he called him “lucky.”
But think about the millions of doctors, nurses, and health workers who are around sick people all day long, breathing in germs and coming into physical contact with toxins. Yet they often avoid symptoms of ill health. Why does that happen?
It’s because the body’s terrain was armed with the proper defense mechanisms. Once you train your terrain, yours can be properly equipped as well.
The backstory about the discovery of the body’s terrain is an interesting one that I—a health history buff—loved researching.
We start our journey by going back to the period between 1775 and 1875, a century of time marked by the phenomenal changes throughout the Western world as scientific discoveries, labor-saving inventions, and technological innovations opened the door to the Industrial Age. This pivotal era was also marked by social upheaval: the thirteen original American colonies declared their independence from England and formed the United States, followed by the violent French Revolution and its Reign of Terror, which lopped off the heads of the monarchy and noble class and sent shivers through palace walls from London to Vienna.
France fell under the dictatorship of a victorious general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who enacted a uniform and modern administrative system, gave land tenure to the peasant proprietors, and left the bourgeoisie—the upper or merchant class—a political heritage that they claimed during the 19th century.
I relate this history lesson to help you understand why France, from its Napoleonic height in 1812 to its stunning defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, exerted a powerful diplomatic influence in the civilized world, shaped Western thought, and pioneered noteworthy scientific advancements throughout much of the 19th century. “France led Europe in theoretical and industrial chemistry, and her self-sufficiency during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was in no small part the result of her scientific superiority,” wrote author René Dubos.
Many of the scientific discoveries that impact our health today came from the fertile minds of three 19th century French scientists: Louis Pasteur, Claude Bernard, and Antoine Béchamp. It turned out that Pasteur gained immortality while Bernard and Béchamp became historical footnotes, which is a shame. As you’ll soon learn, Louis Pasteur, the father of the pasteurization process as well as the antibiotic age, promulgated a huge mistake 150 years ago, and the repercussions are being felt by millions of people today.
The hospital was the last place you wanted to go when you were sick in the 19th century. You went to the hospital to die, not to be cured. If leeches, bloodletting, torturous surgery without anesthesia, or benign neglect didn’t kill you, then infectious germs would hasten your ultimate demise.
Physicians and scientists still had no idea what germs were in the mid-19th century, but they were getting warm. The first breakthrough came from Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician posted at the Vienna General Hospital, site of the world’s largest maternity clinic, in the 1850s. Most women still gave birth at home back then, attended by a midwife, but “problem pregnancies” ended up at Vienna General.
The problem was that too many mothers and too many children were leaving in wooden coffins because mortality rates were ten, even twenty times higher inside the maternity ward than at home. No one knew why the mortality rate was so high. Doctors rubbed their bearded chins and blamed poor ventilation or crowded conditions in the maternity ward.
Dr. Semmelweis noticed something about his colleagues at Vienna General: doctors left the dissection room with their hands bloodied from working on cadavers and didn’t do much more than give their hands a cursory wipe on a towel before reporting to the delivery room, where they assisted in bringing a newborn into the world. No washing, scrubbing, or rubber gloves in those days.
On a hunch, Dr. Semmelweis established a new policy: from now on, doctors had to scrub their hands in chlorinated water after working on cadavers. (Dr. Joseph Lister of Scotland wouldn’t discover how to kill germs with heat and antiseptics for another eighteen years.) Within a month, the mortality rate in the maternity ward dropped sixfold to 2 percent! Dr. Semmelweis wrote a book about his discovery, which was released in 1861, a year before Pasteur and Claude Bernard completed their first pasteurization test—a process that eradicated undesirable microorganisms through heating—on April 20, 1862.
The middle of the 19th century was a time when huge strides were being made in the scientific world. Two scientists—Antoine Béchamp and Robert Koch, a German scientist and physician—were also conducting pioneering experiments in the area of chemistry, particularly in the areas of fermentation, yeast, and the discovery of microscopic organisms called bacteria.
That same year, 1862, Louis Pasteur was working with curved neck flasks that allowed contact with air but inhibited movement of non-gaseous particles. From these experiments, Pasteur demonstrated that microorganisms were present in the air but not created by air, which led him to theorize that:
◼ Germs, or microbes, caused disease.
◼ Germs invade the body from the outside.
◼ Human blood is sterile and can be infected only by outside microbes.
◼ The shapes and colors of microorganisms are constant.
◼ Every disease is associated with a particular microorganism.
◼ Germs should be killed at all costs by chemical drugs.
In other words, since germs cause disease, it was medicine’s challenge to find the right drug or vaccine to kill these germs or prevent the nasty bug without killing the patient first. This theory hardened into a scientific dogma that is considered conventional wisdom in the halls of medicine today. Pasteur’s so-called “germ theory” is widely hailed as the single most important contribution by the science of microbiology for the general welfare of the world’s people. Furthermore, you could say that the paradigm of modern medical treatment was based on Pasteur’s germ theory of disease. Diagnose the germ—for example, a bacteria, virus, parasite, or fungi causing the illness—and then prescribe something to destroy it or make the patient feel better.
Claude Bernard, even though he counted Pasteur as a friend, didn’t agree with his colleague’s germ theory. He believed germs and microorganisms were constantly changing within the body’s internal environment—the terrain. Bernard’s research convinced him that the body was constantly striving to maintain a stable, well-balanced environment, one that would not be overly affected by outside influences.
Bernard was a quiet soul who never set out to become a doctor or physiologist. Born in 1813 as the son of poor vineyard workers living in Saint-Julien, France, the young Bernard was educated in a simple village school and dreamed of becoming a playwright. He set off for Paris at the age of twenty-one. A well-known critic, Saint-Marc Girardin, gave his writings the once-over and imperiously announced that young Bernard may want to do something else with his life than pen stage plays.
Bernard accepted the critic’s rebuke and applied to medical school in Paris. Despite finishing at the bottom of his class, Bernard passed his studies and obtained a medical degree and moved into the research field, where he gravitated toward experiments centering on the digestive process. He read about a U.S. Army surgeon named William Beaumont, who became known as the “father of gastric physiology” after he devoted several years peering into the digestive tract of a patient who was shot in the stomach. Beaumont’s patient had survived the shooting, but the hole in his stomach never healed, which allowed the American doctor to observe the digestion process with his very own eyes.
Beaumont performed this research by tying a piece of food to a string and dropping it through the hole in the patient’s stomach. Every few hours, the American physician would slowly reel in the string and observe how well the food had been digested. This novel research led to the important discovery that digestion was a chemical process, not a mechanical one. Stomach acids, or gastric acids, digested foods into nutrients the body could use.
Claude Bernard replicated Beaumont’s work by creating artificial fistulas, or openings, in live animals such as horses. What the Frenchman discovered was that the stomach was not the sole digestive organ; much more digestion took place in the small intestine. He also demonstrated the importance of the pancreas, whose secretions of enzymes broke down protein and fat molecules. Bernard also discovered a sugar-like substance in horses’ livers, which he named glycogen.
Then Bernard turned his attention to the portion of the nervous system that governed blood circulation and how the red blood cells carry oxygen from the lungs to body tissues. Each of his findings convinced him that the body’s milieu interieur was continually striving to maintain a stable, well-balanced state. Disease, therefore, was caused by variations in the body’s terrain, to which the microbes responded by changing form to survive.
“The living body, though it has need of the surrounding environment, is nevertheless relatively independent of it,” he wrote. “This independence, which the organism has of its external environment, derives from the fact that in the living being, the tissues are withdrawn from direct external influences and are protected by a veritable internal milieu, which is constituted, in particular, by the fluids circulating in the body.”
Bernard’s legacy is that germs could not make a person sick unless the person’s internal environment—or terrain—was weak.
Antoine Béchamp, another French scientist who lived during the 19th century, also crossed swords with his colleague Louis Pasteur. Béchamp’s theory was that germs were the consequence of disease, not the cause.
Béchamp, who lived from 1816-1908, was one of France’s most prominent researchers and biologists. He earned degrees in biology, chemistry, physics, pharmacy, and medicine, and he practiced, researched, and taught in all those disciplines—up until the day he died at the age of ninety-one. The reason why you’ve never heard of Béchamp is because he called Pasteur’s theory that nearly all diseases were caused by germs “the greatest scientific silliness of the age.”
Béchamp’s voice was ignored by the elites guarding the gates of traditional medicine in the latter half of the 19th century. As Pasteur’s germ theory gained widespread acceptance in clinics and classrooms, it laid the foundation for modern medicine’s view that doctors should diagnose the disease and then write the proper prescription for “treating” the illness.
Today’s medicine is practiced that way: you describe your symptoms to the doctor, he or she diagnoses what ails you, and you walk out with a prescription—often for an antibiotic. Béchamp’s contrarian view stated that it was not the germ that caused disease but rather the condition in which the bugs lived in the milieu interieur, or internal terrain.
Disease happened when an imbalance in the body’s terrain allowed the dangerous or pathogenic microbes, including bacteria, to take over. Béchamp insisted that the germ was not the main focus, but rather what should be studied was the body’s terrain, where microbes or germs live.
So, to reiterate, we have two completely different viewpoints or world-views: Pasteur was certain that germs caused disease, while Béchamp argued that an imbalance in your body’s internal systems causes or allows germs to flourish in the body.
Here’s where their stories get really interesting. There’s strong evidence that Louis Pasteur, at the time of his death, recognized that his lifelong preoccupation with his “germ theory” had been misdirected all along. On this deathbed, he reportedly whispered: Le germe n’est rien; c’est le terrain qui est tout.
Translation: “The germ is nothing; it’s the terrain that’s everything.”
From all the reading and studying I’ve done, I agree completely with Béchamp, Bernard, and (arguably) Pasteur’s final words—the terrain is everything. Health problems come from inside the body, not from the outside. Scientists today know that there are microorganisms that cause—or at least contribute—to certain diseases, but I maintain that germs can thrive only in an unhealthy body—just as termites only munch on wooden homes with a weakened structure.
That’s why the Maker’s Diet Revolution’s cleansing and building plan is designed to help you create an impenetrable terrain that will support your overall health. You should be taking intentional steps to make sure that your terrain is as healthy as possible. Doing so will help you defend against the toxic enemies of your health.
One of those important steps is being sure to include fermented foods and beverages and their beneficial compounds—probiotics, enzymes, and, most importantly, organic acids in your diet. I’ll be introducing the concept of fermentation in the next chapter.