A Good diet is the basis of enjoying good health:A well balanced diet is the indispensable bedrock of all preventive and corrective medicine. Herbs, vitamins & minerals are indispensable when it come to fighting disease and infections but good diet and proper eating habits is the basis of good health & well being. Among their many assets, herbs are foods in themselves and serve to supplement and assist the other things that are being ingested.
The most basic weapons in the fight against disease are those most ignored by modem medicine: the numerous nutrients that the cells of our bodies need. Most diseases and ailments are caused by some sort of nutritional deficiency in the body. Faulty cellular nutrition of one type or another may be the most basic cause of the non-infective diseases that are at present poorly controlled by medical science. This is why a good diet is the cornerstone of any healing programme. Let's he clear about this. No one diet suits everyone. Our nutritional needs are as different and as individual as our fingerprints. One individual's meat can literally he another's poison. It is now readily acknowledged that people's nutritional needs will vary according to lifestyle and stage of life, and is affected by such factors as stress, illness, puberty, pregnancy and lactation, the menopause and old age. But what is less dearly understood is that structural and enzymatic differences, which are partially determined by genetics, will determine how you will absorb any nutrients. You may be continually urinating a nutrient away simply because your renal threshold for it is very low, or you may have insufficient intestinal bacteria to ensure the absorption or manufacture of a certain nutrient. Meats and Hormones in meatModern meat rearing now involves administering hormones to animals in the form of implants. One of these hormones, zeranol, is a form of oestrogen made from mould called fusarium. Ibis hormone occurs naturally in crops cut in damp weather and, given our miserable climate, the level of this natural hormone in our food can be quite high. High levels of oestrogen are now known to aggravate cancers of the breast, ovary and lining of the womb. While the level of oestrogen we eat in meat is not that high in itself, if you couple it with the oestrogen already present in women on the pill and pregnant women the balance might just prove damaging. In addition, a large percentage of women in this country are noticeably zinc-deficient and some animals ingest copper containing formulae which makes this balance even worse because copper is antagonistic to zinc. Antibiotics in meatAntibiotics have also been used as a growth promoter for forty years and we now get a small but insidious dose of antibiotics in nearly every meat and dairy product. These kill the benign intestinal bacteria we need for optimum digestion, leaving us wide open to - among other bugs - yeast organisms like Candida albicans and consequent infections like thrush. Dairy productsCow's milk was designed to feed calves. At birth they weigh 70 lb. (3o kg) and once their weight has increased tenfold they have reached adolescence and are living off grass alone. This takes less than a year. Humans are designed to increase their weight much more slowly. Many of us do not produce enough lactase to digest cow's milk properly and consequently get wind, indigestion, bloating and mucus and sinus problems. Pasteurised milk is not the answer. Is vastly deficient in vitamins A, B and C, calcium, iodine and the enzymes that make it more digestible. Homogenised milk isn't the answer either. The tiny globules of fat in it pass through the intestinal wall unaltered and the xanthine oxidase (an enzyme that leads to deterioration of heart function) in these globules is now believed to be one of the major causes of heart failure. Under ordinary circumstances, when the fat globules remain their normal size, xanthine oxidase merely gets excreted harmlessly. In case you are beginning to get hopeful, low-fat milk is not the answer either because the more fat is removed the less calcium is assimilated. By reducing the fat content the fat-soluble vitamins A and D are also proportionately reduced, and these are then often added back synthetically which is about as silly as putting petrol in a car without wheels, because the fat in milk facilitates the passage of vitamin D into the bloodstream. Also, butter fat actually protects us against atherosclerosis. The Masai people, whom 1 used to admire as a child in East Africa, ingest well over half their calories in raw butter fat, and heart disease, cancer and diabetes are rarities among them. There are extensive studies proving that non-fat dry milk fed to rats produced atherosclerosis when full-fat did not. One alternative is raw milk produced by cows certified to be free of disease, but this is difficult to get hold of. An easier alternative is yoghurt or kefir, both of which actually lower cholesterol in the bloodstream. Yoghurt or kefir should ideally be made with sheep's or goat's milk. I bought my own kefir plant back from Istanbul and 1 feed it daily with one or the other. It is a cousin to yoghurt but has the added advantage of being extremely easy to make and needing no special temperature control. It is a mushroom-like fungus which simply needs to he strained through anything other than metal, washed under cold running water, mixed with any quantity of room-temperature milk and left until the milk turns the consistency of thin yoghurt, which takes about 14 hours - then the whole process is repeated. Goat's milk contains fat and protein molecules, which are much smaller than those in cow's milk, making it easier to digest. Cow's milk takes two hours, goat's only twenty minutes. Sheep's milk, admittedly still a rarity, is better still. For one thing it has no taint and has even smaller fat globules; for another it contains more protein and B vitamins than either of the other two and it freezes beautifully. Greek sheep's milk yoghurt is now widely available commercially. YoghurtAll the vegetable gums or gelatine added to commercial yoghurt for thickness actually denature the yoghurt and so invalidate its bacterial content. Be wary of 'no sugar added' yoghurt - it is a labelling which may hide the fact that the fruit added has been previously treated with sugar, and remember that sugar kills acidophilus, the benign flora in yoghurt which helps to protect the intestine. Commercial frozen yoghurt may be ripe with sugar, corn syrup, sodium citrate, polysorbate go, mono- and di- carboxymethyl cellulose - enough artificials to put a chemical factory to shame! The thickest, creamiest yoghurts often don't have any five yoghurt culture at all. If in doubt read the label and look for the word 'live' or the name of the bacteria in the yoghurt, usually Lactobacillus bulgaricus or Lactobacillus acidophilus. CheeseTraditional rennet (rennet is used in cheese-making to curdle the milk) comes from calves' stomachs. Vegetable rennet is not derived from a vegetable source but from chemicals, so when you cat a so-called 'vegetarian' cheese this is what you are eating. Avoid cheeses containing artificial colouring and go for goat's milk and sheep's milk cheeses and those from organic farms. Don't buy Danish feta cheese as it is made from cow's milk with additives in it. Greek feta cheese is exceptionally salty and needs to be soaked overnight in water and then drained. Homemade cottage cheese is best. Probiotics for good bowel health & digestion of foods.
Digestive enzymes. | 
