During a recent trawl of the local second-hand book market, my son brought home Why E=mc2 by
Jeff Forshaw and Brian Cox. In the introduction it says ‘In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that
have yet to be shown to be false’. That is certainly something to think
about in relation to what we have been told in the last few years about climate
change and covid, and that the ‘science is settled’! Someone should remind Brian Cox about this since he has now joined
the climate crisis cult too.
The
scientific method, where a hypothesis is formulated and through a process of
observation and/or experimentation is shown to be correct or incorrect, has
been the main basis for all scientific research and discovery for a few hundred
years now. If a hypothesis is shown to be incorrect, it has to be reformulated and
further observation and experimentation carried out until a conclusion is
reached. If a hypothesis is correct, the same result should be achieved by
following the same steps and/or methodology. This is what makes the difference
between opinion and scientific fact. The whole purpose of science is to
question everything but we seem to be moving towards a world where no one is
allowed to question anything and we are just supposed to accept what we are
being told as truth.
Within
science, there are, and have been, major disagreements over many subjects; the
movement of the earth in relation to the sun and its place in the universe,
global warming and the cause of disease to name but a few. In relation to the
cause of disease and illness, there is Germ Theory vs Terrain or Cell Theory. Germ
Theory was championed by Louis Pasteur and is the model that has been adopted
by the medical profession as the cause of illness. Germ theory believes that
germs invading the body are the cause of disease.
Terrain
or Cell theory was supported by Antoine Bechamp who
believed that diseases are caused by microorganisms which multiply in the body
and cause infections. Terrain or Cell Theory believes that illness and disease
are mainly due to the individual’s state of internal health. When, through bad diet and a sedentary
lifestyle, the body become weak, the cells become damaged and diseased, the balance
of microorganisms within the body is thrown out of balance causing illness.
It is estimated that there are between 30 – 700 trillion
cells in the human body, about 37 trillion bacteria and fungi, and maybe ten
times that in viruses. Some scientists
believe that what we call viruses are a natural part of the body’s own immune
system, exosomes, which I wrote about before on the blog. They believe you
cannot ‘catch’ a virus from someone else and when bugs appear to go around in
the winter, it is merely the body’s own immune system clearing out old and
diseased cells. It is also believed that one of the reasons we become ill more
in the winter is due to a lack of vitamin D from reduced levels of sunshine.
This can be supported by the lack of certain types of illness, Multiple
Sclerosis, for example, that are present here but virtually non-existent in
countries with high levels of sunshine.
The majority of patients who die in hospitals die from
pneumonia. Pneumonia sets in when the body is in a weakened state and often
kills the patient. Pneumonia can be viral or bacterial. Bacterial pneumonia can
be treated with antibiotics but viral pneumonia cannot. The medical profession
started a campaign a few year ago to reduce the amount of antibiotics being
prescribed as their overuse was making them ineffective (even though they were
doing the prescribing) and who, prior to the pandemic, would have told you when
you brought your child in sick ‘It’s a virus, it’ll clear up on its own’.
However, regardless of whether you believe in catching
viruses or not, one other factor that is being ignored in the debates about health,
disease and illness is the role of diet and good nutrition.
I’ve just finished reading a book called Nutrition and
Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price. The book was published back in the
1930’s and details studies done comparing the dental health of tribal/isolated communities eating traditional
foods to those on modern diets. Weston was a dentist and wanted to find out the
cause of tooth decay. His studies were conducted around the world from the
outer islands of Scotland to the Inuit and Maori. He found that within a
generation of adopting the western diet (white flour/sugar/processed food)
crowded mouth and dental caries/tooth loss became endemic. Those communities
who maintained their traditional eating habits also maintained their teeth,
strong dental arches and overall good health. This would tend to support
Terrain Theory that poor diet is a contributing factor to the cause of illness
and disease. Dr Weston showed numerous examples of skulls from previous generations
who had perfect dental arches and a full complement of teeth. He also concluded
that the degeneracy of the dental health was reflected in a degeneracy in
overall physical and mental health, a lowering of the IQ and a general
downwards trend in both character and behaviour within society with increases
in crime and mental illness.
‘How different the level of life and horizon
of such souls from those in many places in the so-called civilised world in
which people have degraded themselves until life has no interest in values that
cannot be expressed in gold or pelf (money gained by dishonest or dishonourable
means) which they would obtain even though the life of the person being cheated
or robbed would thereby be crippled or blotted out.
One immediately wonders if there is not
something in the life-giving vitamins and minerals of the food that builds not
only great physical structures within which their souls reside but builds minds
and hearts capable of a higher type of manhood in which the material values of
life are made secondary to individual character’.
It
would seem that food for the body is also food for the soul and when the body
is given food that is not nutritionally adequate, it is not just the
physicality of the person that is affected.
When Jamie Oliver was running his campaign to improve school
dinners he said ‘Even while doing the
show, we could see the benefits to children's health - we could see that
asthmatic kids weren't having to use inhalers so often, for example. We could
see that it made them calmer and therefore able to learn.'
This was
further supported by a follow up study that was carried out - Between
2004 and 2008, Michele Belot, of Nuffield
College at Oxford University, and Jonathan James of the Department for
Economics at Essex University found there was on average a 6% improvement in
the number of pupils reaching a high level in English tests in the schools
surveyed where the healthy meals were eaten and an 8% improvement in science.
There was a 2% increase in the number of children reaching the basic level of
attainment in science and 3% in English and maths. In addition, the number of
children marked as having authorised absences for sickness since 2004 showed a
14% decrease.
There has been a big change to our
eating habits in the last 50 years with the addition of processed food to our
diets and which seems to have accelerated since covid. I have seen in my own town
the increase in fast food outlets and hot food and ready meals available for
sale in the local shops. One of our local shops which was a butchery and bakery,
has now stopped selling meat altogether. I know a couple of families who have
never had a home cooked meal cooked from scratch, and another family who eat
from one of the local chippies every day, and it shows.
When the government shut down the
country for covid, they closed the gyms and stopped people going to forest
parks and beaches but they kept the fast food outlets and off-licences open. If
there was any real consideration for our health, they would have done the
opposite.
In
reading Price’s book, I considered my own diet. Because I am from Ireland,
people sometimes assume that the potato is one of the fundamental foods in the
traditional Irish diet but this is not so. The potato came from America and our
traditional diet would have been similar to the isolated communities in the
Scottish islands, with a reliance on oats and barley. Dairy also played a
significant role and, as an island, salmon and other seafood would have been
important for coastal communities. Pork would probably have been the primary meat
eaten along with game like deer, pheasant and rabbit.
The
collapse of the potato crop in the 1840’s, which halved the population of
Ireland from 8 to 4 million, through a combination of starvation and
emigration, might not have happened if the Irish had maintained their
traditional diet. I cannot even begin to imagine the horror of what it must
have been like in a country as small as Ireland for millions to have been left
to starve to death. However, the famine
has had another long-term consequence that still reverberates today. The loss
of nutrition from the famine and the traditional diet, combined with ongoing
poverty and the introduction of processed food, has had a detrimental effect on
the people of Ireland which explains why, as I have said many times before on
the blog, there are no, or very few, ‘men’ in Ireland. These factors have
reduced the ‘manliness’ of the population and this has been reproduced across
the west where we have seen a decline in masculinity and a growing imbalance
towards the feminine in society. In Weston’s book it was noted that in the
Scottish Isles the average height of men went down by up to four inches within
a generation of adopting a diet of white flour, sugar and processed food.
Advances
in modern medicine were assumed to be responsible for improved health outcomes and
longer life spans, however, in The Modern Rise of Population (1976), Thomas
McKeown proposed that improved nutrition, clean water and better hygiene were
the main factors responsible for reductions in illness and death from
infectious disease. Mortality rates were falling before the introduction of
vaccines as part of general health care. However, we seem to have reached a
point now where, despite all our scientific and technical advances, our health
is moving in reverse and illness in the general population has exploded with
more than one in 3 adults suffering with at least 2 chronic health issues, and
even rickets, which is due to a lack of vitamin D, making a comeback among
children. This could have more serious long term impacts as MS is believed to
be caused by a lack of vitamin D in childhood.
The
National Health Service started with good intentions to provide basic universal
health care for everyone but, sadly, the NHS is no longer about health, it is
about medicine and medication. Even our local ‘health centre’ has changed its
name to ‘medical practice’. For all the knowledge the medical profession have,
they are trained in medicine not health and their medical training contains
nothing about diet and nutrition which seems completely ridiculous even though
Type 2 Diabetes is diet related and cases of which have sky-rocketed in the
last 40 years. There were 2 million diabetics in the US
in 1964 when the population was 194 million, and today there are over 37
million diabetics in a population of 330 million.
Increases
in diabetes and obesity are correlated with increases in crime and a lowering
of the IQ. Recorded
crime increased by 5 per cent a year between 1915 and 1930; by 7 per cent
between 1930 and 1948 (compared with a post-war annual growth rate of 10 per
cent and more). It is no coincidence that poorer areas have higher
levels of crime yet, when is improved nutrition ever considered as a solution
to this.
In a
Norwegian study of IQ scores from 1970 to 2009, showed that children born after
1975 were on average 7 IQ points lower per generation. This same pattern was
also observed in British teenagers.
As
Price noted, tribal communities did not have prisons or asylums prior to
adopting the western diet.
Food
manufacturers tried for many years to deny the link between diet and health and
even now they say is it ‘complex’ issue despite the fact that the evidence is
overwhelming that something is not right with our diets (the obesity crisis is definitely
not caused by the weather). This state of affairs is not helped by the ever-changing
‘health’ advice from government and other vested interests. Every day it seems
that for every study recommending a certain food or diet, there is another
contradicting it. Even that statement ‘food manufacturers’ speak volumes. You
do not ‘manufacture’ food you grow it or tend to it, at least until it is time
to eat it.
When
processed food came on the market it was packaged as time saving and convenient
for working mothers. However, it has not turned out as well as was hoped and
all our ideas of progress do not always turn out to be progressive. Like the
birth control pill, which was hailed as another step towards personal freedom
for women, it too has had a downside and is responsible for the increase in
oestrogen in the environment. This has been shown to affect the testosterone
levels in males and is responsible for an increase in female to male fish
species in some areas by as much as 10 to 1.
There
has been a decline in sperm counts in men across the world which have decreased
by 52% since the 1970’s. While the increase in oestrogen is a factor, diet is also
part of it and, in traditional communities, it was the practice to put young
men and women on special diets prior to marriage to ensure healthy offspring. The
ages between children were also restricted to ensure that the mother had fully
recovered her health before another pregnancy which was why polygamy was
practiced in some groups.
The
increase of oestrogen in the environment is also believed to be a significant factor
in the increasing numbers of breast cancer, which has more than doubled in the
last 50 years.
Overall,
there has also been a huge increase in other cancers. Global incidence of early-onset cancer
increased by 79.1% and the number of early-onset cancer deaths increased by
27.7% between 1990 and 2019.
In
looking for a way forward, it would do no harm to look backwards to what we ate
before all this ‘progress’. A return to
whole foods, whole fat milk, butter and whole grain bread is a good starting
point. This is demonstrated in Price’s book by the case of a young boy crippled
with inflammatory rheumatism and arthritis who, after a year of having these
foods introduced into his diet, had his health restored.
While
no one in Ireland is starving to death now, I only have to look around me to
see that many of us are still starved of nutrients with narrow faces, poor
dental health and rampant illness. Poverty is a factor but some of the most
nutritious food is also the cheapest, like oats, barley, mackerel, lentils and
liver. Liver is £2.50/1lb in my local butchers and is one of the most
nutritionally dense foods you could eat, high in the vitamins and minerals that
are essential to good health. I know many people find the taste too strong but
it can be mitigated by soaking in milk prior to cooking and goes well with
bacon. Taste can be acquired if something is eaten enough times and the more
you eat real whole foods the more you acquire a taste for them. I remember
watching Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners and children who had been having
meltdowns about the meal changes were happily eating the food within a couple
of weeks.
Granted
butter is more expensive than the congealed oil alternatives and while some people
can’t believe it’s not butter, I’m not one of them. Sometimes choosing quality
over quantity and paying a little extra can be more beneficial in the long run.
If
there is a crisis for humanity to worry about it isn’t the climate or world war
3, it is that we are eating our way towards extinction. The nutritionally
deficient western diet is toxic to the human body (and soul) and the social and
dietary changes of the last 50 years are destroying the physical and mental
health of society at large. The events of the last few years have put the
worlds focus on health and whatever you believe about the cause of illness and
disease, or its cure, the food we eat has to be an important factor in building
and maintaining our health.
While
it suits certain interests to have a population that is sick, tired and
becoming dumber by the day, after all you can’t make money on health if the
population is well fed, fit and healthy, it is to our own detriment that we
continue on this road. Good nutrition is the foundation stone of good health
and if you wouldn’t feed it to an animal then don’t eat it or feed it to your
children. Sadly, too many do not even
consider their diet until serious illness appears and, by which time, it is
usually too late to make a difference.
I
personally believe that food is the first medicine and within the plant and
animal life of our indigenous countries lies the nutrition we need to grow and
thrive as humans. In building a defence against illness a good diet is a better
place to start than the contents of a needle. And, as any good gardener will
tell you, in order for plants to grow well they must be able to access the
proper nutrients, in conditions that are favourable and suitable to their
needs. The same can be said for us and, surely, it is the least we could do for
our children to feed them wholesome nutritious food.
In
view of the importance of good nutrition, the ongoing attacks on farming under
the guise of ‘saving the planet’ appear rather insidious. Vegan diets do not
provide the nutrition the human body needs in order to function well. It is
also no surprise that the processed food industry is funding the body
positivity movement which hails obesity as a healthy option. There is nothing
healthy about obesity or morbid obesity and if there was one illness stretching
the NHS to its limits it is type 2 diabetes.
While
there is a certain degree of personal responsibility regarding diet and what we
eat, sugar and carbs make the body/brain crave more sugar and carbs, which is
why sugar is so difficult to give up. Sugar causes changes to the brain chemistry
which ordinary food does not. You could give up broccoli tomorrow without any
negative side effects or cravings.
It is
also noteworthy that the authors concerns about the degeneration of society
have played out exactly as feared. And for those who despair at how society
appears to be declining rapidly, a return to eating home-cooked real food, rich
in the proteins, fats and minerals we are starved of, may be the place to begin
to arrest the decline and start to ‘build back better’. However, if we continue
as we are, it is inevitable that the decline will continue and western society
will collapse within a couple of generations, if not before.
There
is one issue with the book that readers may find off-putting, and that is the language,
which would not be considered politically correct today. However, while it is archaic
at times, the outcomes and conclusions reached are sound.
Also,
when the book was written in the 1930’s, Eugenics was being touted as a science,
which allegedly proved the superiority of some ‘races’ over others. It is very
positive in that it shows there is no evidence of this at all, and that many of
the problems regarding illness, disease and birth defects can be traced back to
poor nutrition and its outcomes, and nothing else.
“Illnesses do not come
upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against
Nature. When enough sins accumulate, illnesses will suddenly appear.”
—Hippocrates (460 - 370 BCE), Greek physician
‘Doctors
are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little to cure diseases of
which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing’ Voltaire
“The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak,
uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There
are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.” —Florence Nightingale, OM RRC DStJ, statistician and
the founder of modern nursing
References
Nutrition
and Physical Regeneration by Weston A Price
Difference
Between Germ Theory and Terrain Theory | Compare the Difference Between Similar
Terms
The
human virome: The trillions of viruses keeping you alive - BBC Science Focus
Magazine
Jamie
Oliver's healthy school dinners continue to boost learning, study shows |
School meals | The Guardian
Jamie
Oliver's healthy school dinners campaign 'boosted exam results' | Daily Mail
Online
Major
report highlights impact of Britain's disastrous food policy | Food Foundation (.org.uk)
Improving
Nutrition to Turn the Tide on Diet-Related Chronic Disease | FDA
The Impact of
Improved Nutrition on Disease Prevention | Silent Victories: The History and
Practice of Public Health in Twentieth Century America | Oxford Academic
(oup.com)
The
Modern Rise of Population (1976),
Thomas McKeown
The
Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis? (1979)
Thomas McKeown
Rickets
making a comeback in the UK, doctors say (business-standard.com)
Sperm
counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought | National Geographic
The
Profitable Destruction of Americans’ Health (shiftfrequency.com)
IQ
Scores Are Falling in "Worrying" Reversal of 20th Century
Intelligence Boom: ScienceAlert
IQs
are falling - and have been for years | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
Crime in
20th Century Britain | History Today
The
Relationship Between Poverty and Crime: A Cross Section Analysis (bryant.edu)
The
shocking impact of estrogen on our health and environment | by Sara Korchmaros
| DataCures | Medium
https://www.hli.org/resources/what-are-the-environmental-impacts-of-hormonal-birth-control/
Global trends in
incidence, death, burden and risk factors of early-onset cancer from 1990 to
2019 | BMJ Oncology
