Hygiene Care Guide

Compared with the way things used to be, we have it so very soft today. It’s easy to take our modern conveniences for granted. We can fill our days with leisure, bustle around in comfy autos, work only 40 of the 168 hours in a week, chat with therapists, read philosophy, shop for unnecessary stuff to clog our closets and garages, climate control our dwellings and complain about the softness of our mattresses.

In the year 1000, even when agriculture had been around for some 10,000 years, life was entirely different. In Anglo-Saxon society, a precursor to the modern West, the possibility of famine was ever-present and memories of the last one made dread and fear a part of everyday life. Looming natural disasters were constant specters.

Domiciles were not the neat and clean hygienic environs we experience today. They did not smell of disinfectant or exhaust from engines wafting in the windows, but the exhaust from every manner of farm creature and humans always hung in the air. Manure was everywhere with each one having its characteristic bouquet of fragrance. The human nose in the year 1000 could certainly not be so prissy as ours today.

Latrines were located at or near the back door and moss was toilet paper. Flies filled the dank and earthen floor homes where there were few if any hard surfaced utensils and there was no understanding of disease vectors or antiseptic. If you dropped food on the filthy floor, you picked it up and ate it with relish. Five baths a year for monks was thought to be fanaticism by Saxon standards of personal hygiene.

In time of famine, their law code permitted fathers to sell their sons aged seven or above into slavery. Infanticide was not a crime. Communities of 40 or 50 starving emaciated people would join hands at the edge of a cliff and jump. Some chronicles report that “men ate each other.” They would comb the forests for beechnuts overlooked by the wild pigs and would grind acorns, beans, peas and tree bark into a flour to bake as bread. Hedgerows were scoured for paltry herbs, roots, nettles and grasses. “What makes bitter things sweet?” asked a Yorkshire schoolmaster. “Hunger.”

A “crazy bread” of ground poppies, hemp and darnel gave our poor starving ancestors some relief with visions of paradise. Molds that laced the rye that was aging contained a variety of mycotoxins (and lysergic acid [LSD], the psychedelic drug of the “60s) that could not only make people appear mad but would severely weaken the immune system, permitting disease to run rampant. (Note that the cause of the great plagues and epidemics was not the disease agent, but the fragile or non-existent immune system of the starving and poisoned host.)

The church would help allay the pain by harnessing hunger to spiritual purposes. Lent made virtue of necessity, coming as it did in the final months of winter when barns and larders were growing empty. Feast and famine were linked to spiritual purification and gave meaning to hardship as well as hope for better times.

July was particularly tough since the spring crops had not matured and the barns were empty from the previous year’s harvest. Starving was common in the balmiest month of the year when so much toil in the fields was necessary.

Every single hour of the August harvest month was filled with urgency, since everyone knew from the pains of July what was in store for them next year if they did not fill their larders now. Work was not a right, a place to lobby for benefits and ease. It was a life and death struggle.

The contrast between then and now is astonishing. They were on the verge of starvation; we are fighting an epidemic of obesity. They might have to subsist for months on potatoes or stale bread; we have a glut of food options at our instant disposal. They had shortened life spans and were highly vulnerable to injury and disease. We live longer but suffer cruel lingering degenerative conditions.

It is clear from a realistic view of times gone by that it was not the advent of modern medicine that brought relief, it was, as I mentioned in a previous article on SARS, it was the plumber bringing public utilities and with that the possibility of hygiene and the trucker distributing food supplies that brought us our present long lives.

For them it was a daily struggle for survival. Necessity and muscle ruled the day. It was the physical stress of enduring cold, harnessing 8 oxen to a plow to break new soil, hand harvesting and making their own way every moment of the day. It was the true helplessness and victimization (unlike modern day contrived social “victims” clamoring for rights and handouts) from floods, droughts, winds and rain that could wipe out their only hope to avoid starvation in the coming year. For us it is a surfeit of choices requiring intellectual decisions - decisions that make the difference between whether we experience full health or its slow insidious ruination by mindlessly partaking of every offering that promises yet more ease and flavor just because it is there.

Dr. Wysong is a former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college instructor in human anatomy, physiology and the origin of life, inventor of numerous medical, surgical, nutritional, athletic and fitness products and devices, research director for the present company by his name and founder of the philanthropic Wysong Institute. He is author of The Creation-Evolution Controversy now in its eleventh printing, a new two volume set on philosophy for living entitled Thinking Matters: 1-Living Life… As If Thinking Matters; 2-The Big Questions…As If Thinking Matters, several books on nutrition, prevention and health for people and animals and over 15 years of monthly health newsletters. He may be contacted at Wysong@Wysong.net and a free subscription to his e-Health Letter is available at http://www.wysong.net.

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Do you want to know how to feel good? Do you want to be vibrant for a long time? Take care of your body and it will take care of you.

Digestion takes probably more energy than anything else. The average meal takes 3 hours and 30 minutes to digest if combined properly. Incorrectly combined food can sometimes take up to 14 hours to digest. This is a very powerful way to conserve energy.

Take note: Recall the last time you had a huge meala huge meal when you felt so full you could hardly move. That doesn’t make you feel like going out and running a marathon, does it? How often do you feel like going out and running a marathon after eating a huge steak?

How would you like to learn something interesting? Starches and proteins require different mediums to digest in the stomach. One requires acid in the stomach to digest and the other alkaline. Now anyone with even a basic knowledge of chemistry knows that acids and alkalines cancel each other out.

If you want to have more energy you need to learn to properly combine your foods.

You’ve probably heard people say you need to eat more vegetables. I heard that too for a long time. It didn’t motivate me to go out and eat it. It wasn’t until I understood that food is literally the building blocks of all the substances of your body that I understood the importance of it. What you eat literally becomes your brain, your liver, your kidneys, your skin and your eyes. This is powerful. What you put in to yourself becomes part of your body.

If 70-80% of your body is water, what does it make sense to eat? Foods which have a 70-80% water content. Vegetables are the most important food you will feed yourself in your lifetime. Vegetables will cause your energy to increase, your skin to look brighter, your eyes to sparkle, your energy to rise and your libido to increase. Vegetables are high in almost every substance known to be essential to the building of the body and life.

For the next 7 days eat a salad with every meal.

See, would you take a green shiny apple, spray it with fly spray, then eat it? You know how ridiculous that sounds. Would you eat it? Of course not. Yet that’s what’s happening to our food every day. Our fruits and vegetables are now being treated with pesticides and industrial strength sprays that are poisonous to the delicate insides of our body. Some foods are now being treated with radiation. It’s now proven conclusively that radiation contributes to cancer.

If you tried describing sex to an alien, they probably wouldn’t understand it until they experienced it. They wouldn’t understand it until they did it. You won’t understand the power of making at least 50% of your diet vegetables until you take this and do it. Vegetables are around for a reason, and for the same reason there are no hamburger trees!

Organic food contains up to 3 times the amount of nutrients of conventional fruit and vegetables. How would you like to eat spinach and have the nutrients of 3 times the amount? I certainly would. As food grows, it’s draws nutrients from the ground. The better the quality of soil, the more nutrients can be drawn into the food. Research reports many of our foods are missing vitamins, minerals, enzymes etc because of depleted soils. Buy organic food wherever possible.

The brain knows when you are full, because the stomach sends a signal to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is 12 minutes “behind” the stomach. There is literally a 12 minute delay between being full, and your body knowing you are full. When you stop eating before you are full, you give your body a chance to recover energy.

Sugar is widely considered to be one of the most dangerous substances for the body. Avoid it at all costs. There are a few other ingredients to keep away from if you are serious about your health and energy. Salt dehydrates the body. It’s not widely known that black pepper is 17 more times irritating to the liver than alcohol.

That brings us to the next point, caffeine. I understand people love their coffee. I was once a coffee drinker, before I became interested in health. Caffeine gives us energy because it opens up the capillaries in the brain. The same effect can be had by deep breathing. The challenge comes when the effect of caffeine wears off. The capillaries in the brain restrict causing us to feel lethargic. Caffeine works because the body has to “speed up” to cope with the dose of poison it’s been given.

Unfortunately, while alcohol has perceived benefits, it is pure fermentation and decay, rotting sugar. It is absolutely toxic.
There are other things you also need to be aware of. White rice is treated with bleach. It starts out brown and is bleached to become white. What about white flour? It’s also bleached. What about sugar or pasta? They too have been bleached to give a false sense of purity. Would you go to your laundry cupboard and drink bleach? That’s preposterous, yet most of us eat food treated with bleach. Bleach has the effect of ripping the stomach lining - an effect that is similar to the drug ecstasy. A report out of Germany states “they’re putting fine pieces of cracked glass now in ecstasy, those pieces have the effect of putting finite tears in the stomach lining enabling the substance to enter the bloodstream more quickly”.

Do you like food? Amazingly, most people I interview say “Yes”. What’s the purpose of eating food? While it tastes good and feels good, physiologically eating is the building blocks of the body. Skin, eyes, internal organs, joints, white and red blood cells, they are all built out of the food and liquid that goes into our body. So logically, what’s one of the most powerful ways to change the appearance your eyes, skin and strength of the organs?

Change the building blocks that you choose to take in. Literally improve the food you eat. There’s an old saying that goes “There was no hamburger in the garden of Eden”. Religion aside, when your body starts getting the food it wants and needs, it will start to desire healthy foods. Try it; you’ll literally make new food choices.

Due to the common diet, most people’s bodies are full of bacteria; these bacteria are what are responsible for cravings for terrible food. It’s not the built in mechanism of the body to crave these substances, it’s the bacteria! No one smokes a cigarette for the first time and says “Oh boy, this tastes great!” Over time, the body learns to adapt to the poisons put in.

As you give your body more and more wholesome food and treat yourself with respect, you will naturally crave better and better food. There are plenty of delicious recipes around, recipes that will leave you with energy for hours rather than tired and bloated. It’s just that very few people know about them.

Eating natural food will also return your body to a more wholesome weight. Have you ever had the case of eating a big meal and immediately afterwards having to go and raid the cupboard? Why is that? The brain has a built in survival mechanism that when it senses the body is lacking nutrients, it tells us to get hungry. That is the sense of hunger is the body telling us it needs nutrients. If you suffer from the problem of being frequently hungry, it’s because the hunger mechanism is literally turned on all the time, the body is in a constant state of asking for nutrients. Due to our poor diets and low nutrients in most of our foods now, many people find themselves living in a case of constant hunger.

Ideally, you should invest in a “juicer”. A juicer takes all the nutrients in food and releases it for the body to absorb readily and quickly. A glass of vegetable juice is more filling than an entire pizza because of the concentrated amount of nutrients.

About the Author

Dr. Edward Steiner has dedicated over 15 years to understanding nutrition and articulating complex information simply. He has worked internationally with indivduals who wish to improve their lives through the proper use of exercise and nutrition. He has condensed the best information he has discovered in 15+ years into one place at http://www.energyboostnow.com.

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