We are getting older but many of us are getting older with loss in quality of life as our health starts deteriorating because of poor lifestyle management – the topic of my Blog last week.
We have to go back a little in history to understand why most of us have fallen prey to the fallacy that illness is fate and that we have no control over our health. Western medicine is based on the 19th century concept of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) that certain types of bacteria invade the body, causing infectious disease. Pasteur’s concept that disease had to be fought like a war with antibiotics, like penicillin, gave birth to today’s multi-trillion dollar antibiotics industry.
Pasteur achieved fame and fortune as the father of penicillin. Few people today remember a person called Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908) a vigorous opponent of Pasteur. He argued that health on the cellular level is mainly determined by the biological terrain, such as the level of acidity (pH level), the electric charge, level of toxicity and the nutritional state. While Pasteur was being supported by the pharmaceutical industry Bechamp, the other great germ scientist at the time, even had his work placed on an index of prohibited books and died in obscurity.
Simply put: Béchamp was convinced that we have to create health in order to prevent disease while Pasteur was all about creating defensive walls to prevent “alien exterior agents” from entering the body.
With more and more infectious diseases becoming resistant to antibiotics and an explosion of diseases like diabetes II and cancer its worth taking a look again at the biological terrain. Another great scientist Dr. Otto Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1931, took up much of Bechamp’s theories, arguing that basically all disease, especially cancer, feed on an acidic environment.
So what is the real problem here?
Our body should have an alkaline environemnt with a pH value higher than 7.0, anything below that is considered acidic. And, most of us living on a Western diet have an acidic body because of the processed foods we eat with too much sugar and other additives that our body cannot digest.It is compounded by the high-stress levels we have to deal with in today’s fast-paced economic environment. Stress hormones like adrenaline, nodrenaline and cortisol add to an acidic environment. While under stress, our breathing is too shallow, providing our lungs with too little oxygen to supply our cells with the oxygen they need to detox.
The other big detox organ is our skin but it cannot do its job adequately because we use soaps, perfumes, shampoos and shaving creams filled with toxins including microplastics and crude oil.
As our inner terrain becomes more acidic our body’s defensive walls start to break down creating an environment for unwanted guests. In Chinese medicine health is defined as having the right balance with disease being a symptom of many things running out of control. Initial symptoms might be a series of colds and flus, headaches and allergies. Later this might be followed by loss of vitality, chronic fatigue and a more serious illness.
Interestingly, Pasteur was quoted on his deathbed as saying to Professor A. Rénon who looked after him: ‘Bernard avait raison. Le germe n’est rien, c’est le terrain qui est tout.’ (‘Bernard was right. The microbe is nothing, the soil is everything.’).” He was referring to his other contemporary Claude Bernard.
Reino Gevers – Mentor for Leaders and Achievers – Your Health Matters
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