Читать книгу The Alkalizing Diet - Istvan Fazekas - Страница 12

IT IS QUITE ASTOUNDING TO DISCOVER THE LARGE NUMBER OF people who do not know their body—not to the degree of a medical specialist or health professional but just the basics—the ability to confidently answer the question “Where are the spleen, stomach, liver, and colon located?” If the plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, or heating unit in your house malfunctions, you should know where the equipment is in order to repair it, and I suspect that most people know more about their house than their own fleshy machine.

The most important factor in understanding how the body stays in balance (or does not) is the nervous system, specifically the autonomic nervous system and the cerebrospinal nervous system. These are not really separate systems, as no organ or tissue system functions completely independently; they are two sides of the same coin. When your body is in balance, in a state of ease, technically called homeostasis (or conversely, when out of balance and in a state of dis-ease), these two systems are functioning harmoniously.

The nervous system is the electrical medium between thoughts, ideas, and perceptions, all occurring in the mind, and the physical housing, principally the myofascial-skeletal system. The nervous system is the vehicle for translating thought into action and spirit into soma.¹

The health of the nervous system is predicated upon good nutrition, which includes nutrients rich in quality fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins. Your diet, coupled with how well you manage stressors (your mental diet), helps predict the state of your nervous system. Your nervous system is the center of all other biological functions, affecting all organs, as well as the endocrine (glandular), digestive, and myofascial-skeletal systems.

The nervous system is separated into two main divisions, the cerebrospinal system and the autonomic system, which play off each other in day-to-day activities and perceptions.

The cerebrospinal division includes the brain and spinal cord, and all the nerves that attach to your limbs. This division is responsible for voluntary functioning of the body. The principle job of the cerebrospinal division is moving the fleshy machine here and there with force, grace, urgency, style, rhythm—all the ways that one uniquely expresses himself or herself through movement and posture. This is how a person willfully moves through space.

The autonomic (another term for automatic) division includes nerve ganglia (networks) that lie parallel to the spine on both sides. This division is responsible for the mostly involuntary processes of the body, such as respiration, myocardial functioning and circulation, and peristalsis,² to identify just a few. The standard medical orthodoxy considers this division to be wholly involuntary and not significantly influenced by the will, but by emotional reactions only.

The ancient Asian traditions that produce advanced yogis, swamis, and lamas present a counterpoint to this modern orthodox idea. Many of these Asian adepts have been documented slowing their heartbeat to a standstill and slowing down respiration to such a degree that they can be buried for days and weeks underground only to be exhumed and found to be biologically fully functional. The great swami Paramahansa Yogananda writes about just a few of these adepts in his classic book Autobiography of a Yogi.³ There are numerous examples available for one to study.

The medical clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, along with the father of osteopathic medicine, A.T. Still, and respected Eastern teachers from B.K.S. Iyengar to Baba Hari Dass all concur on the importance of coordinating these two divisions of the nervous system: the voluntary and involuntary. It is the chronic discord between these two that facilitates many diseases.

What are some ways to remedy or, better yet, prevent this discord? A fantastic starting point would be to learn meditation and practice regularly. This is an outstanding method for gaining mind-body, cerebrospinal-autonomic harmony. Secondly, moderate your stress levels and cultivate methods to effectively handle stressors: allow more time for travel and commuting, do not take it all so seriously, and learn how to stop the “monkey mind” from perpetuating its crazy little agenda. Thirdly, get your eating habits on track. Eating good quality fats, produce raised in nutritious soil, and foods naturally high in C and B-complex vitamins, knowing your metabolic dominance (carbohydrate-, protein-, or mixed-type dominance), minimizing (or better yet, eliminating) refined sugars and starches, and drinking plenty of purified water will greatly enhance your health and well-being.

Even though the body is exceedingly resilient under most circumstances, there is a point of no return if you abuse yourself long enough. There are certain conditions of disease in which the catabolic or tearing-down functions of the cellular matrices are dominating the anabolic or building-up functions of the cells. If the underlying imbalance is not discovered early enough and treated properly, the above recommendations may be palliative at best.

The role stress plays in the perpetuation of disease cannot be overstated. A person who is always stressed out or a chronic nervous wreck will surely manifest an illness, as the autonomic and cerebrospinal systems cannot function well in disharmony. This is simply your body’s way of getting your attention to make a change. All the various symptoms of disease are gifts from the marvelous intelligence of your body alerting you that you are somehow out of balance. How you remedy the situation is up to your free will and common sense.

Every credible educator and researcher acknowledges this next point, even if there is not accord on any other detail: regular exercise is medicine for your body and mind and is excellent for naturally reducing stress levels while increasing your body’s stress adaptation ability.

What is good exercise? Here we may have diverging opinions, but undoubtedly one can rely on this definition: Moving the body with awareness and enthusiasm. A daily brisk walk does many good things for the body. Do not push it too far with exercise—just enough so that there is perspiration and a slight feeling of exhilaration. We are made to move the body with awareness and enthusiasm, whatever our age.

The sedentary life is a real killer. We are tied to our desks and computers five out of seven days during the sun’s best hours—forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. Certainly our evolutionary trajectory is thrown off a bit by this, being that we have worked much harder to accumulate our food supplies in the not-too-distant past. Add to this sedentary dilemma poor nutrition, which is becoming more common all the time with people’s frantic, overscheduled lives, with fewer people growing their own produce or raising their own animals for food. It seems we are verging on an epidemic of lethargy and dietary malaise, all the while over-relying on technology to show us the way.

Our post-industrial culture has created the habit of eating convenient empty-calorie foods on the run, with no thought of the essence or quality of the nutrient, with substitutes galore: fat substitutes, sugar substitutes, taste substitutes. After all, who really wants to eat cardboard sprinkled with paprika, conveniently available in a nearby vending machine, if it is not going to be chemically enhanced? If we add to this equation more refined sugar consumption per person than we have seen in the last two-hundred-plus years of sugar’s ignoble appearance in commercial food and drink supplies, we are set up for a Casey Jones nervous system train wreck.

Take care of the body’s nervous system: everything depends on its healthy functioning—organs, muscles, glands, hormones, and especially your spirit.

The next intriguing system to explore briefly is the myofascial-skeletal system. The body’s myofascia is the combination of the intricate connective tissue network (fascia) and muscle tissue (the Latin root for which is myo or mya). Covering every bone, organ, vein, artery, vessel, tendon, ligament, and muscle is the pervasive and sturdy tissue called fascia.⁴ Understanding fascia is crucial to understanding the integrity and long-term health of your entire biologic network.

Since fascia envelops all structures of the body, it interacts significantly with all structures. We cannot get a reliable sense of this by examining fascia on cadavers but only in vivo. By the time the body expires, fascia has already started dehydrating, and the crucial life energy that flows through fascia quickly dissipates.

Fascia is a dynamic, living system that can only be truly appreciated in living bodies. You may think of it as the Saran Wrap of all the tissues of the body—it is covering everything from your skull to your palms to your soles, deep to superficial. It is made up of three substances that rely considerably on nutritional sources for repletion and regeneration: collagen, hyaline, and ground substance. Collagen is a protein that has many uses in the body. It is widely known as an injectable substance used by models and entertainers to puff up their lip size (as in “I just had my lips done, dahling.”). Yes, they are getting injections of animal collagen. Where else has a person encountered collagen? In commercial gelatin (about 40–45% collagen) and upon the ends of chicken bones; that opaque gristle-like material is made of collagen.

Currently there are about twenty-one types of collagen used in medical or cosmetic applications, in everything from catheters, corneal implants, and artificial skin (for skin grafts) to the cosmetic kind with which Paulina Pouter gets her lip tissue distended. And yes, most of it comes from animal tissue. I wonder if the vegan supermodel knows that? The next time you see the model with the ballooned high-fashion lips, just think—her lip stuffing could have been the posterior loin of a common Hereford. Ah, the price to pay for beauty.

Not only do the soft tissues of the body have a fascial wrapping (muscles, tendons, and the like), but all the bones of the body do, too. The skeletal system acts as the dynamic support, the moving framework, for the myofascial system. It is also an important production center for red and white blood cells in the bone’s marrow and the most abundant storage system for calcium and phosphorus. Almost two-thirds of the weight of a bone is calcium phosphate, the two most plentiful minerals in the body. The majority of remaining third is collagen, and collagen components, the building block of connective tissue (fascia).

All life implies movement. This system of your muscles, connective tissues, and skeleton, which is referred to here as the myofascial-skeletal system, is the prime source of movement, of life. One of the essential functions of nutrition is to provide energy for the neuromuscular system (nervous + muscular tissues) and quality tissue production for the myofascial-skeletal system. If your nutritional habits are sub-par, your body will eventually reveal this in the myofascial-skeletal system in many possible manifestations of disease: osteoporosis, osteomalacia, fibromyalgia, persistent muscle cramps, postural deviations, gout, osteoarthritis. And the list has just begun.

One of the misleading aspects of studying the body as separate organ systems, organs, and tissues is that this approach can easily convey the illusion of biologic independence. The truth is that the body operates as a whole unit, and it always has. Each organ system—nervous, muscular, skeletal, fascial—is a separate “finger” connecting to one “hand.” It is important to emphasize this as one studies individual functioning and specific relationships of systems. A greater understanding of the various organ systems of the body inevitably leads the individual back to the concept of oneness: everything depends upon everything else.

The body is so complex in each individual system that modern medicine has developed specific disciplines to keep track of each area. A person sees a specialist for heart conditions, another for brain and nervous conditions, another for glandular disease, and yet another to work with the mind. Some contend that in this expanding field of separate medical specialties, the right medical hand may not know what the left medical hand is doing.

This is significant and comes to the public’s attention when, for example, one physician prescribes medication for a person’s ailment and another specialist, without the knowledge of the first physician’s prescription, recommends the patient take another pill for a different (although perhaps related) ailment. The interaction of these two chemicals, known as an iatrogenic reaction, causes difficulties and even considerable fatalities in some cases.⁵ There is no way for the chemical companies that produce these drugs to account for all the possible biochemical interactions, although software has recently been developed for pharmacists to warn them if a patient is taking multiple medications with possible dangerous interactive effects. Confucius says: The wise one does not completely put his fate in the hands of a computer program.⁶

The last area of investigation in understanding the fleshy machine is the digestive system, which starts with the three pairs of salivary glands in the mouth and terminates at the rectum, the final aspect of the large intestine.

When one eats carbohydrates, especially starches, there is a substantial amount of saliva required to properly digest that nutrient. What is very common with many people is washing down starches with liquids after a few chews. This is a highly inefficient way to digest starches. Starches require enzymes produced in the parotid glands to start turning the polysaccharide (multi-chained sugar, another name for a starch) into smaller saccharides, tri-, di-, and eventually monosaccharides (single unit sugars, also called simple sugars). The digestive system does this with all nutrients—transforms them from their complex form to their simplest form. Proteins become amino acids, and fats become fatty acids in the same manner. The foremost difference between the three major nutrients is that starches need lots of saliva for efficient digestion, especially if you are a person who already gets an upset stomach easily or excess stomach acidity, heartburn, etc. If this is you, then chew, chew, and chew.

For the average person, drinking small sips of liquid during a meal should not pose a problem; just be aware of not washing down food with liquids. The old-fashioned advice on this subject is still valid, although it should not be thought of as a gospel rule: drink liquids 20–30 minutes prior to a meal and 20 minutes after a meal. A variety of people who have applied this rule have reported very favorable results.

Besides the glands in the mouth breaking down starches, there are glands in the stomach that secrete acids to break down proteins and some fats. You would likely discover that if you ate one nutrient at a time this would facilitate optimal digestion—eating meat without anything else, for example—but this is unrealistic for most people. What is reasonable for most is to be aware of what nutrient is dominant in any given meal. Knowing your metabolic dominance plays a significant part in paying attention to what nutrient you are having the most of. If you are a protein-dominant type, you want to minimize (although not necessarily eliminate) your starches and, equally advisable, not eat sugars at the same time as meats. If you are a carbohydrate-dominant type, you want to maximize the fat-starch combinations and keep the protein portions smaller.

For a healthy person, especially for most under thirty-five, many nutrients in small portions can be combined at a meal without noticeable ill effects. For people who may have health concerns or who are enduring disease, being mindful of food combinations would be a very prudent course to take. (Refer to chapters 7 and 8.)

Your stomach is an expansive receptacle that mixes acids and other complex chemicals with your food. It works to break down organic constituents into a stomach smoothie, called chyme, which your small intestine can receive. You have seen this stomach smoothie before: with yourself, the last time you had the stomach flu, and with your neighbor, weak-stomached Willy, the last time you got on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the carnival with him.

When the food you eat gets chemically reduced into chyme, a signal is sent through the autonomic nervous system to move food along and open the pyloric sphincter at the end of your stomach. This is a smooth muscle “door” that allows approximately 1 to 1.5 teaspoons of food at a time to pass into your small intestine.

In the small intestine most of the assimilation occurs. This is where food becomes energy or building material. If the body does not require energy or building material, it will (a) get rid of it or (b) store it. Since the body is so intelligent, (“Get ready, here comes another plate full!”) it will likely opt for the latter. It assumes that a person is eating six meals a day for a reason: perhaps pregnancy or storing up for a long, hard winter. If a person is overweight because of careless portion control, the body cannot be in blame but just may be, in time, embalmed. Confucius says: “Don’t let the spoon dig your own grave.”

After the crucial functioning of the small intestine, which in some people can reach thirty to thirty-three feet in length (or more), food then passes to the large intestine, also known as the colon. This is where the final water-absorption phase occurs as well as bacterial digestion of any leftover nutrients.

The fleshy machine is a complex one. Since there are so many areas to consider when separating the whole into components, there are three primary areas that one can focus on to jump-start health: the nervous system, the myofascial-skeletal system, and the digestive system. Coordinating the active and restful branches of the nervous system is central to many health traditions around the world. Let us not be so haughty to think that because a system is ancient or uses a different biological or psychosomatic map than our present post-industrial one that it is inferior. Western medicine shares the same holistic roots as the Asian systems through the ancient Greeks. There are millions of people at present enjoying good health by following these ancient traditions and millions who have thrived in the past. In understanding the fleshy machine we benefit from everyone’s outlook, old and new. Let each person decide for himself or herself what the best course to take might be, but let us not limit our choices based on an ill-informed prejudice or bureaucratic myopia.

Although not the only way, one of the best habits for coordinating the nervous system is through regular meditation. This simple (but often challenging) discipline, coupled with stress management and a good quality diet, is paramount to good health. It is also important to have a basic understanding of how your body functions. The more you learn, the more informed you are to make worthwhile choices. The next step, as the Eastern traditions teach, is to get to the root of the mind, the source of the body’s purpose.