Parting Shots

By Paul M. Otten, Editor

With this last issue of the Bulletin, I feel compelled not only to “spill my guts” with you, but also summarize the best of what I have come to in terms of human health and wellness in my 67 years of life. Much of this was clarified and solidified during the past decade when I was director of corporate health department with the missions of keeping some 500 members healthy, out of hospitals and surgery centers, off of drugs, away from doctor and onto health-sustaining lifestyle choices.

There is something fundamentally wrong
1. when the wealthiest nation of the world (economically speaking) is also one of the sickest ones;
2. when two thirds of all its citizens are either overweight or obese, and almost everyone else is daily battling to not become one of the majority;
3. when the major killer “diseases” are not diseases at all in the traditional sense of the term (infectious diseases) but degeneration resulting from self-inflicted lifestyle choices of food, inactivity, stress, lack of sleep and water, smoking, drugs, etc.;
4. when the highest level of health professionals - MDs - are by legislative fiat entrusted with our “healthcare,” are NOT trained in nutrition and health but in a form of perpetuation of degeneration by the use of pharmaceutical drugs which in themselves create a vast amount of degeneration and kill over 100,000 of us a year
5. when we spend twice as much on “healthcare” (misnomer for “disease maintenance”) as we do on food;
6. when most of this “food” is actually an industrial, chemical product, not genuine whole food as produced on rich soil;
7. when “industrial agriculture” is heavily subsidized with our tax moneys while small family farmers who produce much of the local , fresh, and health sustaining food are penalized through a multitude of burdening codes . ordinances and taxes ;
8. when the federal government's department assigned to oversee the health practices of the country - the FDA - operates as a protector of the international pharmaceutical cartel , allowing the use of killer prescription drugs long after they are known to be such;
9. when the average citizen has relegated his or her personal responsibility for health into the hands of highly paid professionals who themselves are generally unhealthy and are not trained in health but in disease management;
10. when the majority of citizens suffer bitterly and die prematurely from self-inflicted, avoidable conditions such as cardiovascular disease , stroke and its paralyzing effects, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, obesity - all largely lifestyle related.

This Bulletin and the Wisconsin Natural Food Associates have been two small voices crying in the wilderness of ignorance for better understanding of what belongs to health and specifically what each reader can do for him- or herself. This is where the problem and solution ultimately rests. If I don't take personal responsibility for my wellbeing, and then for the wellbeing of my family and those on whom I have some influence, no legislation or government programs can or will do the job.

“If I don't take personal responsibility for my wellbeing, and then for the wellbeing of my family and those on whom I have some influence, no legislation or government programs can or will do the job.”

Decades back, neighbors knew and cared about each other to a much greater extent than today. Maybe it was out of sheer necessity and survival. If my house, barn or business burned down or the family experienced some other catastrophe, neighbors would rush in to help. Not all neighbors nor in all neighborhoods, of course. Not only have we relegated the helping of neighbor in need to insurance companies and government agencies, we have done a similar thing with health. Allow me to share with you how I, in my simplicity, think of this.

From a physical perspective, my body is made up of organs, which are made of tissues, which is made of cells, which are ultimately made of molecules. ALL the molecules that make up the 75 trillion or so cells that are you or I, come from the food you or I choose to put into our bodies. (Granted, some pollutants enter via breathing unclean air, drinking impure water, or are absorbed through out skin . Over these we tend to have little control and choices. So let's deal with the vast majority over which we have a great deal of control.)

We can choose NOT to smoke or use tobacco in any form (even secondary smoke in most cases) and thus avoid these toxic molecules from entering into us. We can choose to avoid illicit and street drugs. We can choose to avoid non-prescription and prescription drugs that can be as bad or worse than their street counterparts (It kills more people yearly!) We can choose to avoid alcohol or consume the best kinds and in moderation. We can choose, in most cases, the kind and amount of foods we consume. We can choose to get regular and sufficient sleep and drink sufficient water. We can choose to be physically active, grow our own garden in many cases, prepare our food from scratch, read up on the relationship between soil health, plant health, and human and animal health. If we have access to the internet, we can find a wealth of reliable and helpful information, as well as mountain of BS disguised as “scientific” information. I have come to suspect many large corporate or governmental sites, though they have valuable and truly helpful info. The problem is being able to sort out the good from the bad, the marketing hype and bottom-line promotional stuff from that which is truly factual. And helpful.

We must learn to read your body's signaling mechanisms. Our body is a marvelous, fabulous, miraculous creation and it has thousands - probably millions - of measuring, monitoring and feed-back mechanisms. We are aware of some of these, but the majority of them operate outside of our consciousness. We need to read and study as much about the functions of our bodies as we are able - not as one more stressful obligation , but as a pleasure-trip into this infinitely small part of creation.

Headaches, bellyaches, diarrhea, constipation, fever, soar throat, nausea, chills , gout, itching skin and numerous other “symptoms” can be - at least to start with - signaling mechanisms of something not functioning well. We have similar mechanisms built into our cars. When the oil pressure in the engine drops excessively or the radiator coolant gets too hot, an orange or red light goes on. In contemporary medical practice in this country, these symptoms are treated as though they were the maladies themselves and therefore needed to be eliminated with drugs.

Wholeness vs Fragmentation & Isolation

Skin problems, such as eczema (itching, inflamed, scaling, oozing skin also known as dermatitis or inflammation of the skin), scaling, plugged hair follicles, and hair loss can occur because of one or more deficiencies of essential nutrients - nutrients which the body cannot make from other substances: (a) essential fatty acid, (b) certain B vitamins, and/or (c) zinc. How can this be?

Zinc works with enzymes that convert short-chain into longer-chain essential fatty acids, some of which become prostaglandins. Prostaglandins are regulatory chemicals involved in inflammation and healing.

Prostaglandins are formed from essential fatty acids. The lack of single essential fatty acid , omega-3, creates a condition where too many prostaglandins incite inflammation and too few to promote healing. Be aware that a large number of our degenerative diseases are involved with inflammation. Any disease name that ends with “itis” (dermatitis, tonsillitis, bronchitis, neuritis, arthritis, etc.) is so named from the Latin because these are all forms of inflammation, yet few MDs connect the dots and look for a potential common cause.

The lack of omega -3 certainly plays a role in many, if not all, inflammatory processes. Omega-3 is an ANTI-inflammatory essential fatty acid t and is so used by numerous complimentary and alternative health practitioners. According to some studies, having an adequate amounts of omega -3 in your circulatory system can reduce one's risk of dying of a heart attack by up to 70%, decrease one's risk of developing heart disease by about a third, and help control inflammation that can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer, ADD, arthritis and numerous other inflammatory dysfunctional conditions.

“Attempting to reform our healthcare system without fundamentally changing our industrial agricultural practices and food processing is an exercise in futility.”

This is one reason our disastrous healthcare system cannot be cured by simply reforming the system. The diagnosis of the sick system has to reach deeper, right down to where our food comes from and how it is produced. Attempting to reform our healthcare system without fundamentally changing our industrial agricultural practices and food processing is an exercise in futility.

And why do so many of us lack omega-3 fatty acids? Largely because of industrial agriculture, we get much of our fats from animals sources (meat, milk, cream, cheese, butter, eggs). Our animals, in turn, get their fats either from greens (pasture, alfalfa, silage) or from grains. Our cattle are not natural grain consumers, but that is their forced diet in “captivity” (confinement). The dreadful results is that they get very little omega-3 to pass on to us, since ALL omega -3 originates with green plants, not grains. Thus, when you are advised to consume fatty ocean fish a few times a week, it is because these fish somewhere along their food chain consume plankton, sea weed, and other “greens.”

Not only do nutrients work in conjunction with one another, hardly ever in isolation, we also need to learn to work together toward the common good of health and wellness.

• The industrial farmer may not divorce himself of the ill consequences his “bottom line” mentality may have on the health of his soil, animals, environment or ultimate consumers.
• The medical specialist must not only look at the toe nail or tumor, but must have some consciousness of how the toe nail fungus or tumor in the colon is a product of the entire bodily environment. The fungus could not multiply and the tumor could not develop and grow if certain conditions did not exist in the entire body.
• And all of us must take greater responsibility for our own health and thus treat our whole being with the respect it was intended to have.

We don't just dump any kind of oil into our lawnmowers or automobiles for fear that the wrong oil may wreck the engine and deprive us of its use. Yet, we do precisely that with an infinitely more valuable “living machine” and hardly stop to contemplate why it breaks down so early with numerous forms of “itis” - conceivably caused, at least in part, by the wrong oils as well .

Please treat the body that carries your name with the utmost care, better than if you owned a Rolls and wanted it to last 120 years.