Dave Pollard on how we are poisoning ourselves

Dave Pollard is on the same track - Here is a summary of a recent post of his - the link is at the bottom for the full piece.

"So, back to what I know, what I don't know and what I imaginatively or instinctively hypothesize about ulcerative colitis, starting with three hypotheses:

1. Hypothesis 1: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by 'Modern' Malnutrition: By 'malnutrition' I don't of course mean a shortage of consumed calories. And (thanks in my case at least to my wife's cooking), I don't mean lack of variety or balance in cuisine either, though unbalanced eating may be part of the problem for some, and it was a major problem for me in my 'single' years. No, what I'm referring to in this hypothesis is something much subtler and more ubiquitous: the lack of variety of natural micronutrients and non-nutritional microorganisms in what we eat, drink, breathe and otherwise continuously take into our bodies.

This is the internal analogue of the way we use and treat the land, the external space under our 'civilized' care. In gatherer-hunter societies we allowed biodiversity to proliferate, we ate a staggering variety of different foods, and we at them with everything that came with them -- all the bacteria, micro-organisms, parasites and 'dirt' attached to them. As a result, our bodies evolved to cope with this astonishing array of nutritional choices and 'unfriendly' substances, in minute amounts, learning to use exactly what it needed, urge the body to crave more of those needed things, and to neutralize what hurt it.

Before we messed with the program, our bodies became exceedingly good, over a few million years of practice, at doing this, without the need for antibiotics or medical 'experts'. And while few early humans lived to old age, this is because they were eaten young, in the interest of the greater Earth organism, not because they were sickly -- anthropologists increasingly agree that prehistoric humans lived a much healthier, more disease-free, and usually longer, life than most civilized humans ever have.

The digestive system is the very definition of complexity: It contains more nerve cells than the nervous system, so many different enzymes and sub-processes that most of them have not been (and may never be) mapped (the genome is a snap by comparison), the enteric nervous system, chemically very similar in makeup and function to the one managed by our brain, and billions of highly specialized organisms, each evolved for some essential purpose needed to sustain human health.

But today, food processing, the elimination of over 90% of varieties of food we have eaten for millennia (in the interest of agricultural efficiency) and the soaking of our foods and drinking water in chemicals deliberately designed to impoverish the richness and diversity of organisms we consume, means that this incredibly intricate and finely-honed system is largely unused, standing around 'unemployed' looking for something appropriate and useful to do. If you're unemployed long enough you lose your craft, and when essential micronutrients or undesirable microorganisms finally come along now they can surprise our bodies, which may no longer be able to know, from practice, how to handle them properly.

Mistakes occur and are compounded and crises are created as a result. The system staggers and breaks down from disuse caused by the malnutrition -- the lack of practice -- we give it. Exactly in the same way the land we plow into monoculture and soak with artificial fertilizers breaks down, unable to restore itself, starved of natural nutrients, impoverished, blows away in the wind and runs off in the rain, unable to support life at all.

2. Hypothesis 2: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by Antibiotic Toxins: With the natural systems impoverished, malnourished, and bereft of the practice and learning needed to do their job, civilized humans decided they needed a backup system. Just as they did to the land with agriculture, the chemicals of choice for doctors to treat our internal ecosystem were the most potent poisons we could find: the word antibiotic means 'life-killing'.

But we thought we understood complex systems, so the same twisted thinking that came up with the oxymoron 'antibiotic therapy' soon added 'chemotherapy' and 'radiation therapy' to the lexicon. The same simplistic, militaristic thinking that prevailed in agriculture and in war is now employed in the war on all life in the human body, as if the body were some simple mechanical system whose billions of essential living parts were superfluous and dangerous.

What malnutrition didn't mess up, the man-made poisons in our water, food, soil, air, pills, and deliberately sprayed on our gardens, our lawns, and on every surface of our homes have.

When I was in my teens, before the discovery of retinoin, the drug of choice for runaway acne (which I suffered from) was tetracycline, a potent antibiotic that I consumed, on doctor's orders, several times daily for a decade. The drug slowly cleared my acne but wreaked havoc on my digestive system, causing chronic diarrhea and frequent digestive system upsets. I was warned not to take it with milk products or antacids which would lessen its effect. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that that ten years of self-poisoning has contributed to my current condition.

3. Hypothesis 3: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by Musculo-Skeletal Distress: From my early teen years, my posture has been poor. Lousy school furniture, gradual reduction of exercise as coaches focused their attention on 'star' athletes, loss of social self-confidence leading to a semi-permanent slouch, staring away from a world I found bewildering, cruel and unbearable. One girl friend, when I was in my twenties, said I stood as if I were 'hollowed out'. For decades my body adapted to this strange stance, complaining by means of frequent neck and shoulder aches, and an inability to stand for more than a half hour without developing a sore back and having to crouch on my haunches to relieve it.

Then recently, as described above, this awkwardness started to create debilitating spinal distress, to the point that at times I couldn't lie down, couldn't sit, couldn't stand. Three times I went for physiotherapy. Once I was hospitalized, convinced it was a heart attack. My physio applied a technique analogous to traction treatment, extending my spine. It was briefly exhilarating, but caused bizarre immediate after-effects -- abdominal aches, indigestion, and terrible skin breakouts. I stopped going.

And then, when I started exercising, I read about the importance of running posture -- an erect, hips and chest forward posture rather than a hollowed-out, curved running posture. I tried it, and it worked, but it was excruciating -- the same symptoms as the traction, but worse. I relapsed into a curved running posture and my performance plummeted. That was just before the ulcerative colitis showed its full fury. My final note before abandoning the exercise program reads "focus more on running posture and monitor reactions carefully -- something wrong here".

How to Save the World

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