Smoothie recipes by Don
Strawberry Classic
1 banana, peeled
One Fuji apple
1 box of strawberries
Four oranges, peeled or juiced
5 ice cubs
Serve immediately
Green Goliath
1 handful of Kale
1 banana
1 heaping scoop of Vegan Protein Powder
1 table scoop of Flax seeds
1 Fuji apple
1 half cantaloupe, skinned
4 oranges, peeled or juiced
5 ice cubes
Serve chilled
Berry Blast
1 heaping scoop of Vegan Protein Powder
1 cup of blueberries
1 Papaya, less core
1 Fuji apple
1 table scoop of Flax seeds
4 oranges, peeled or juiced
5 ice cubes
Creamy Dream
½ cup of blueberries
1 banana
5 apricots, without seed
4 oranges, peeled or juiced
1 Fuji apple
1 heaping scoop of Vegan Protein Powder
5 ice cubes
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Fear
Fear
By Don Bradley, May 2009
My, how they sell it, package it, use it like a weapon, and shower it over the heads of the masses. Fear is the ultimate Weapon of Mass Distortion. It blinds, restricts, hypnotizes, impedes forward motion, and reduces the recipient to a quivering mass of spineless jelly, ready and able to receive any post-hypnotic suggestion and behavior. Fear is used mainly in our time as a control feature, its powerful solar-plexus frequencies shutting down the higher, leaving the mind and body under the animalistic control of the limbic brain and reactive thinking. And this is just the beginning.
Like most people, I’ve had my own confrontations with fear. At 19, I stood on the edge of a water control dam—only four inches wide at the top—with a drop off of about 60 feet on one side and about 90 feet on the other, all the while with a guitar strapped on and playing. The idea occurred to me to walk out on this ledge to the center of the dam (no hand rails or footing other than the 4” surface) and continue playing the piece. Naturally, from the pit of my stomach, came the reaction and fierce rejection of the suggestion. “If you fall, you’ll surely die,” kind of thing and so on. However, gently and firmly from above that pit, came the suggestion, “you’ll be fine.” So, I stepped out onto the ledge, all the while still playing, and went to the center of the dam and sat down. To this day, I am unable to explain how I was able to sit down, continue playing, and stand back up when the piece was done and return to the other side. The friends I was with didn’t say a word, neither to encourage nor object; they simply watched what was to them, something both insane and unbelievable.
I dealt with fear through cliff-diving, surfing, death, white-water rafting, treating with prowlers late at night, taking insane risks, and dealing with the mind-numbing viscidities of fate and what it brings to our door at the most unexpected times. Each time, the fear welled up inside me. Each time, it had to take a back-seat to the higher guidance I was learning to trust in. As many of us do, to be certain. Each time, the voice of fear grew less powerful, less controlling, when I refused to submit to it. Every time someone attacked me physically in my life, I began to find that I felt zero fear, even as I lay hospitalized with dozens of contusions to my head. I simply disallowed its powerful entry as a control feature in my life. I had a fear of flying (mainly to a few near air crashes when I was younger,) and as a birthday present to myself about a dozen years ago, hired a small Cessna to take me over the ocean. Again the fear welled up inside, as before, and again, it was put down as the ancient devil I had come to know all too very well. Not a quarter goes by without some kind of public attack—with physical threats to my person and implied harm. Each time, I check to see if the frequency of fear is to be found inside myself. This ancient evil, I am happy to report, is non-existent as a threat to my internal self awareness and strength. Several years ago, I began to test if even a miter of fear was still present on any kind of subjective, subconscious level by checking my pulse in dire circumstances and when under physical attack, especially when it related to a group of thugs intent on erasing my existence, as happened twice last year. My pulse rate remained low and steady. These are just the physical fears, usually ascribed to our more animal self, our physical bodies: fight or flight, if you will. There are other fears. Emotional and mental fears, which are far more devious to detect and defeat, given the fact that so very much of our identity is wrapped up in fearful self-perceptions and programming by our experiences and educational foundations inherent in the life we have lived, each to his or her own.
I illustrate the above points for two reasons. That like many of you, I’ve faced my fears and beat them…so far. And that, in order to write the following article, there is a certain frame of reference that this author has and therefore is in some small way, capable of speaking about it with a degree of firsthand experience. This means that if someone as such as I can do it, anyone can. But before we get into the victory side of the equation, let’s look at the causations of fear and how it does what it does and why.
More than any one physical, emotional, and mental state in humanity, fear is by and large the most powerful contributor to action states, in both behavioral and sociological terms of understanding. You’ll be hard-pressed to find this information in psychological books or journals. If anyone is more locked into fear paradigms, it’s the head-shrinkers that have turned so many people of higher potential in mental wrecks. It’s why they have the highest suicide rate of any profession. Their fear and low self-esteem is of the worst kind.
So far, we’ve discussed physical fears, which each of us can relate to on some level. For all have undergone this experience. That car that zips just inches in front of you at an intersection in traffic and the amazingly fast working of fear and the adrenaline rush that comes with that. That trepidation that is felt as we cross a steep gully on a log, with a sheer drop on either side that spells certain destruction (done that.) We all know about physical fears.
The reason we feel this fear and sense it as a consciousness quite outside ourselves at souls is because it is outside our selves. As we’ve learned from the photography I’ve been making public for some years now, everything in nature is alive, on an elemental level and in the various kingdoms. We see the faces in the water, the sky, the trees, in fire, and so on. We see and have come to understand that the whole of creation is a living, breathing reality with varying forms of consciousness animating each form of life and its myriad expressions.
Once we understand this fact of life, it then occurs to us that we ourselves are in fact, miniatures of the world in which we find ourselves. Our physical, emotional, and mental bodies are as well, inhabited by the very self-same elements which make up the world in which we live. It stands to reason then that these vehicles of expression—of which the soul finds itself able to function and express itself—are conscious on the same elemental level that the elements of our world are conscious. They have a life, purpose, reason for being, job to do, and will to live—just as they do in the ocean, lakes, rivers, sky, and in the fireplace.
They literally have an existence to be. And their to be, is to provide every plant, animal, and human with a functioning body in which the spirituous or soul, can live, move, and have its being. It then becomes a symbiotic relationship in which we need our bodies and they need our soul, for both to exist on the physical plane. Think long and hard about this last series of statements, coupled with the evidence this writer has given over in the previous years. Some lights will come on. Once the soul leaves the body, it dies and begins to breakdown into varying components through the process of decay. If there is no body, then the soul cannot exist on this plane; symbiotic.
Very often, I will tell my sons, “listen to what your body is saying to you,” about this or that food or activity. Things that are destructive to the body will yield a negative reaction, whereas wholesome food and drink, and healthy activities will provide an affirming response. There is even a science in this regard known as muscle testing or Kinesiology. This is proof that the body is quite capable of communicating its likes and dislikes, as regards what it knows is best for its survival. That implies what exactly is so as fact: the body is conscious, even if we are unaware of the facts in the case consciously; the body knows when a poison is being handed to it or when something healthy is being provided. And this goes way beyond food. The body, via even the rudimentary level of kinesiology, will communicate its needs, warnings, and other realities as it applies to clothing, housing, items of use, even sound and color. Of course, there are higher forms of guidance as relates to our own spiritual and mental development, and very often, as we progress, we can discern between bodily communications and those of the much higher and divine planes of existence, especially as it relates to our own, inner planes of perception and contact, with the kingdom of heaven within ourselves.
The body is conscious, beyond chemical/electrical connections via the pathways of the nervous system and brain. How else to explain its ability to sense poisons from non-poisons, even when the items to be tested are in sealed, unmarked containers?
This is so because this elemental consciousness is a living, lower-order class of being. For the physical plane, its perceptions and functions are at once clear and decipherable, even if the host inhabitant (human soul) is wholly unaware and disconnected with this consciousness. Because animals function less as individualized souls and more instinctual, they are therefore more in tune with their body’s elemental. This explains why ants will avoid aspartame and other poisons, which human beings seem quite eager to consume, much to their detriment. The animal kingdom is more closely linked to the physical elemental than humanity is; except in advanced cases where the soul of the man, woman, or child has purposely made the connection, yet while retaining command and control.
Most of humanity is a slave to its elementals when said consciousness uses fear to express itself. Because the elemental has total control over the body, it is able to secret various enzymes from various glands, which enable it to achieve its necessary aims. Fear is its main control feature, forcing the human soul within to obey. This explains why someone who is, say, afraid of heights, will freeze and be unable to move. Even though they are advised it’s okay, know in their mind its okay, they will state aloud that they are unable. They are speaking factually, because the elemental—through fear—has taken control of the body.
Given the above, it would seem that obeying these fear frequencies are not only sensible, but a good idea, given the elemental’s connection to the corporeal reality. In our younger stages, especially when we are dependent upon parents for food, shelter, and clothing, this elemental feature is a kind of safety device which protects the child from basic dangers: the rabid dog, the black widow, strangers with mal-intent, and so on.
However, in order to grow beyond fear, we must become a master of it, so that we can then find freedom. And the first fears to be mastered are the physical fears. It is there that we set the tone of our future victories in the emotional and mental realities, of which the true slaveries on this planet threaten our very existence by the master controllers who have used fear for thousands of years to keep this planet in bondage.
To attain this mastery we simply must listen to any inspiring suggestions which encourage us to face our fears. We can discern this by the overwhelming sense of calm, peace, balance, and helpful nod that things will be okay. This is our divine connection within ourselves which is inspiring us to step up to the plate and become more than what we were before. This kind of loving encouragement is telling us that we are ready and able to make a new grade of being, to be more in mastery of our bodies than we previously thought possible.
Happily, this kind of divine guidance will often work as the elemental does, in warning us dangers, but without the adrenaline rush and mind-crushing communication that comes with fear. We still get the protection we used to get from the elemental, but we retain our balance, composure, clarity of thought, and most importantly, because we are mastering our fears, we get something extra: the ability to see the situation as it really is.
As many already know, the moment we choose to make these first steps in overcoming our fears, we find that we then have new-found levels of courage, conviction, and an increasing aspiration to overcome life’s obstacles on more than just what comes at us as physical events. We grow a spine, a backbone, and are eager to do and be more. We get inklings that we’ve only just begun, too. That there are other fears to be known and defeated; emotional fears and fears of the mind, by far the hardest to detect, and yet the easiest to defeat, once discerned.
We also begin to feel as though we are finally living. And that the old “us”—all full of fear and indecision—was a life lived in a kind of prison. A prison without walls, except in our own minds. We see how many times fear kept us from speaking, doing, and being. How many times we could have been, but our fears kept us back.
These are the moments in which the fears of feeling and of mind begin to make themselves visible. We finally begin to see that the real us—the aware and loving soul within the bodies—has been kept back, slowed, delayed, and hindered every step of the way by fears implanted in us by the culture, education, and rulers of our time. As we look back in history, we see that every slavery was sold to us, using mental, emotional, and physical fears as the means to deploy said slaveries upon the planet. We see its deployment in banking, wars, race relations, family relations, and in every aspect of our life, bar none.
Then the lights really start to come on, bit by bit. Then we start asking the big questions: Who is selling this fear and why?
At that moment, we start beginning to see the world as it really is. Fear is sold constantly as a means in which one party seeks to influence and control the behavior of another party. I have these scams laid on me all the time, with zero effect. They are visible to me, though it disappoints and even surprises that they are still used as weapons against me. If it didn’t work the first 200 times, what makes them think it will work now? Still, they try. If anything can be said of the dark side, they are a persistent lot.
Once we see the reality of fear paradigms within ourselves as control features, then we can see them in the world. But to have true victory, we must make real effort to understand how our minds work. We must understand how worry, fear, trepidation, and other aspects are all just varying magnitudes of fear. We can do this by observing how we function as souls using a mind, just as we observe and understand our bodies. We need to see that we are above these vehicles, yet they are extensions of our soul in expression. Once we clearly see that this is so, we can then proceed to work on seeing how fear keeps us mentally, emotionally, and physically in a kind of perpetual bondage that must end.
As long as we are subject and controlled by any and all kinds of fear, we are slaves. Regardless of how much power, money, and prestige we may believe we have, as souls, we are barely much better than animals. This may seem a slight towards those still in bondage, but rest assured that it merely means that animals as we know, are domesticated and trained to be whatever their trainers want them to be, whether it’s a puppy dog, cat, tiger, or horse. And that exactly describes the world today, as in times past.
We see it all around us, in television, articles, and movies and so on.
Last week, I was at the beach surfing and it being a weekday, there were only a few people there, and I knew them as fellow surfers. We surf together when we happen to be at the same break. Lo and behold, as I was standing on the road over-looking the beach, a channel 3 film-crew pulls up and wants to interview me and Sue, who was there with her husband, Randy. Boy oh boy, talk about selling the fear. It seems there was a double homicide on the beach at a house a bit up the way two nights before and she wanted us to say on camera how afraid we were about being around with a murderer loose! Really!
Her fist question was “Aren’t you afraid of being out here with a killer on the loose?”
NO.
She was clearly disappointed. She asked Sue the same question.
NO.
The newscaster was again disappointed, and showed it. She wanted a fear reaction, but Sue and I wouldn’t give her one. We both could see that she wanted to sell fear and refused to be party to selling that evil on the six-o’clock news. I made sure she could see I was saddened to see that she had chosen a profession where her goal of the day was to sell fear to the masses. I am sure our interviews never made it on the air. Other film crews showed up, but we avoided them by hitting the waves. They all wanted the same thing: to shove fear down the public’s throat. This is what their producers told them to go out and get.
Now, who are these people that tell newscasters to seek out citizens and get them to blather on about how all afraid they are? They have names. They have motives. They have lots of money. They have a kind of power. And it’s a power based on the energy of fear as a control weapon. It is power based upon manipulating the minds, feelings, and insecurities of those still in bondage. These very same people have used fear like a weapon successfully for so long, that many people are walking-talking billboards of insecurities and fears.
THE FEAR PARADIGM SELL
I remember the cold war and how fear was sold in schools, radio, television, magazines, and newspapers and by parents about how those evil Russians were trying to take over the world and kill us all. Then came part two of the fear sell, the what to do about it. And it always involved surrendering our money and freedoms to protect us from those evil communists. In the 21st century, it’s the War On Terror, a faceless, nameless perpetual war where huge budgets of money are allocated to do what? Save us from terrorists? Hardly.
And where do these monies go? They go into more surveillance of the people, that’s where. Cameras everywhere, new Federal Gestapo creations that focus solely on the average citizen; into training the local police into treating the communities they function in as sub-humans, to be verbally abused and tasered constantly. And it’s allowed because humanity has bought into the fear paradigms being foisted upon us.
Sell the fear, control the people. It’s how it is done. You can see it in every country. You can pick up any daily newspaper or listen to any TV news program and there the shills are, all ramping up the fear to keep us all quaking in our boots.
That is, if you buy into that nonsense.
Sadly, a great portion of the population does buy into because it is reinforced by their parents, peers, educators, and pastors. I’ve listened to many sermons given from the pulpit about this or that evil and it was all about the fear. Many times have I glanced at a front page of a newspaper in some city, only to see the latest fear being blasted in three inch letters. Remember after 9/11, how they even had coded fear alerts and how each darkened shade of amber color was supposed to keep us frightened about some terror attack that was coming at any moment, we’re sure of it! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Sigh…
As long as humanity buys into these fear programs, believes them, and allows them to influence its behavior and critical thinking skills, will this planet remain in the bondage it has been in for so very long. It is our duty to step outside these fear paradigms, see them for what they are, and help those around us find their way out of slavery. We owe it to our children, our neighbors, and the world at large to understand the nature of fear, how it works, and why it is being used against us by the controllers.
Dealing with our mental fears by and large have to do with the issues of
Self-esteem,
Doubt,
Uncertainty,
Ignorance, and
Lack of Critical-Thinking as applied to the life experience.
Until we start to use our mind to gain an education about the realities of life, how it works, and how we function as souls in bodies, will we always be slaves to the will of those who do understand these things. Therefore, getting an education is first and foremost in obtaining mental freedoms. This education cannot be found in high schools or colleges. These network controlled realities are designed to create unthinking-memory-bots who simply repeat what they’ve read in a text book. I know, I went to college. In only one class in all those years did the instructor try to get us to think critically about information and the how’s and why’s it was being presented to us. Bless his soul for that.
Learning and understanding erases ignorance, which then allows us to make informed choices. Once we see, know, and begin to understand how things work in the world—and this is done by paying attention and observing the world around us—can we then see and understand who and what we are. Why we do the things we do. What our motivations for doing them, and so on.
With critical thinking and education, we then begin to know things. And in this knowing, we can then erase uncertainty and eliminate doubt from our minds. Only then can we see how the world is presented to us and why it is presented in the way it is. Only then can we take those first steps toward real freedom: freedom of the mind, soul, and body. Only then can our inner divinity—so long held in bondage under slave conditions—find expression in the world. Our world. The world that matters to us.
For this is a great truth. My world is not your world and your world is vastly different from a fisherman in the South Pacific. We each live in our own world, yet we share the planet and it resources as a family. We can share our worlds with others via the mediums found in the world today; the very same mediums that enslave us can also set us free.
The moment we start thinking outside the programmable box, we start to see how our minds function from ego, vanity, and self-interest and these very same vices are used by the controllers. For example, how we perceive ourselves is linked to our self-image and self-esteem. Look at the covers of women’s magazines and you can see how they use fear of failure keyed to a woman’s self-esteem and self-image to sell the magazine. You can see it on every single cover on every single woman’s magazine in existence. Over and over again, fear keyed to self-image. Fear keyed to self-esteem. So, you have to buy the issue, because you are afraid. The woman doesn’t realize she’s buying or reading the magazine because of fear, because most people hardly ever take the time to observe their thinking and feeling states. They simply waddle through life, programmed from birth, by all the previous mentioned devices.
Once this is seen for what it truly is, can we then see how fear is used to sell practically everything in the world by the corporate media through magazines, televisions, and movies.
It explains why fads take over and clothing styles change. If you don’t wear the latest (and usually most ridiculous clothing articles) you’ll be outside your peer group; an outcast, different, and unaccepted and unapproved. There again, we have fears keyed to self-image and self-esteem. You’ll be the weirdo, the nerd, the emo, the-whatever-current-slur-of-the-decade. All this happens because of fear.
Once we see this, we can then see that our self-image is based upon how we want others to see us, rather than the reality of the situation. As long as our self-esteem needs approval from others to maintain its sense of serenity and feelings of well-being, will we be eternally little better than slaves to popular opinion. How many parents have heard their daughters go into total fits because they didn’t have the latest purse, or shoes, or pants, or haircut that was all the rage. Did any of these parents sit down with their children and explain to them the slavery paradigms being employed by ad agencies serving the dark side? Of course not. Because they themselves are slaves, too. The latest neat car, the latest correct this or that, fitting in with community. You can see it at parks all the time. The men dress and wear the latest carbon-copy junk straight out of whatever is being pushed on them. Currently, it’s these terribly ugly plaid clothes. But, there they are, all wearing the same ball caps, the same shorts, the same shoes, and all looking and dressing like the obedient droids they have been their whole lives. It’s fear that keeps them in slavery. Always has, always will. And it’s a fear of the mind alone; therefore it’s a mental fear.
We have to make those inroads towards self-understanding so that we can truly see how much of our character and self-image is controlled from the outside, by fear paradigms sold to us and reinforced by whatever our peer group happens to be. Fortunately, most people reading this article are well beyond the herd mentality and are taking those steps toward freedom from all fears.
Once we make these initial steps, we then find all the other fears that have been controlling our thinking and feeling states. It takes self-observation. The what’s and why’s of our daily life. Then we begin to see the masks we create for the benefit of others. We all know this occurs because we have, in the past, seen behavior changes in others when certain people come into the room. They change. They present themselves differently; they present a different persona for that person to relate to—a mask, if you will—that shields and acts as an acted out barrier between the real person and the world in which they relate. And why? For fear of rejection. It’s why people create, use, and assume masks to be deployed in the world. To gain acceptance and approval by others—especially as it relates to their perceived peer group. Because they are afraid of being themselves wherever they are and wherever they go, for fear that the real them will be rejected. This means they are basing their self-esteem and self-image upon what others think. Then, they ruggedly proclaim their individuality, once they’ve created a peer-group-approval-identification-mindset. This then becomes a kind of badge which all others must accept as “being who they are.” In short, once this fear is assuaged by whatever peer group identification takes place, then the new “I am accepted, therefore I must be loved” persona becomes their mask which they then present to the world. And these masks have names like: yuppie, Goth, Emo, Surfer, Businessman/woman, Soccer Mom, Cop, Fireman, and so on down line. As the age of the person changes, so then do their peer-group-evaluation-masks. Goth girl becomes college chick becomes expecting mother becomes soccer mom.
Between the ages of 21 and 52, a person’s profession becomes part and parcel of their peer group identification. How very often do we hear in the world when two people meet, the first words being, “so…what do you do for a living?” Then comes the fateful words of masking. “I AM a fill-in-the-blank.” This key phrase reveals a mask identification. Rather than answer with the correct and free reality of “well, I dig ditches in Dunkirk as a means of employment,” the enslaved always use their profession or current occupation as an identity of how they see themselves or how they project onto to others how they want to be seen!
This can especially be seen in the dating world. Very few people remain who they are at all times, damn what other people think. The people who function that way stand firm in their self-esteem and could care less what others think of them. Think what you want, I live in my world, you live in yours.
I actually know surfers who refuse to wear thermal booties in frigid waters—50 degrees or less; your feet turn purple in under 10 minutes without them, all feeling is gone—because they are afraid of being perceived as a “kook,” as someone uncool. For them, surfing is about image, rather than interacting with a living and breathing ocean. They have to have the coolest board, the hottest wetsuit, and make sure they look at all times like the media-whores who pose in surfer magazines. They’d rather freeze; have their feet cut up on sharp barnacles and rocks, because it’s so very important to them that others see them in the “correct and cool” light. If you say so, dude…
Every mental slavery we have comes down to issues of security, self-image, self-esteem, and doubt. The only way to know this is by taking those steps toward seeing who we are and what we do and mainly, the why behind our actions. Until those steps are taken, we are little better than programmable droids. It’s a sad state of affairs, really, for this day and age. We have all this advancement in all these fields, and then we look at the internal human condition and it’s a seething sea of fears, insecurities, doubts, and negative self-images; a literal cauldron of boiling soup, easily misled and played upon by the controllers.
The media-whores who allow them selves to be used by the Dark Side to keep us in slavery very often know what they are doing. Pay close attention to the people on these TV shows; you can see, with the right eyes, exactly what is behind the scripted verbiage being deployed as weapons against our collective psyche. I’ve met and have interacted with them on countless occasions in my life, and believe when I tell you, they know exactly what they are doing.
Security is by and large, a big seller for fear because in our deepest nature, we all want security for our home and family and the people we love. Anything that threatens that is something to be feared. The reality of the situation is, no one is safe. Ever. At any time, fate can bring to our door whatever it’s going to bring: hurricanes, tornadoes, home intruders, earthquakes, bombs from planes, illness, you name it—it’s possible. Most of the time, we simply have little forewarning of what is coming. Yet, we allow our minds to run rampant with fear about this or that perceived threat, which usually never comes at all. It’s the unseen threat that usually deals us the blow. Once we can see this, we can then observe our behaviors and closely watch them for any kind of action built upon fear. Again, as before, we can take those small steps toward becoming free of fear and seeing life as it really is and was meant to be: lived one day at time. Yesterday is gone, who knows what tomorrow may bring. Sure, take steps to have some extra food and water on hand; that’s just good planning, and it assures all in your domicile of living beyond any immediate emergency of the moment. That’s just common sense. Like so many preventative actions; like having band-aids on hand in case of a cut. This shows responsibility. The fears of security run deeper than being a good provider or parent. They have to do with implied fears given over by others of threats that may or may not exist in reality. Careful and prudent thinking will expose the validity or lie of any situation by any honest thinker. And even if the threat has some basis in reality, is there really anything YOU can do about it? If so, then act responsibly. Either way, remain calm and centered and keep fear from controlling your thinking.
One of the interesting aspects regarding fears is their destructive influence upon the reality that even if a threat is valid, being flattened by fear won’t in any way help the situation or the person deal with the event. Sure, if someone throws a rock at you and you see it out of the corner of your eye and you react, as any creature would, this is simply doing and dealing with a REAL threat you can see coming. The main problem with fears of the mind and their ruination of our life path has to do with self-esteem and self-worth perceptions of how we see ourselves.
It is in these domains of self-understanding that humanity has yet to make any real inroads. In the main, most of our self-esteem and self-images have been pressed upon us by those in whom we have placed trust in the past, starting with our parents and home life, whatever it may have been. From there, peers we esteem and their statements regarding us—how we look, act, and especially, their perceptions regarding our feeling states, mental states, goals, and plans—influence us in the extreme, often for life. These wounding impressions create self-destructive mental images that lead to aberrant behavior patterns and cycles that very often ruin what would have been, very useful and constructive lives. This is especially so when the soul in question is targeted by the dark side to ruin any potential they might have in this life by concerted efforts by that group to stunt their growth in every department.
What follows from these dark foundations are the tragedies of failed relationships, lack of focus and direction, and self-destructive behaviors that we see all around us. Because no one is taught to be their own leader, teacher, and advisor and to rely on their best and highest self-esteem as a divine soul as a birthright of existence, that so many listen to and believe the varying slanders, lies, attacks, and malicious efforts by others, who very often themselves are just as screwed up as anyone else as regards their own self-image.
And on it goes, parent to child, parent to child, parent to child, until someone in the chain breaks the cycle and decides to be themselves. They realize that listening to the negative slanders of others is destroying them. They learn that even if a miter of the criticism is accurate, it in no wise means they are a fecundated soul. It merely means that there is always room for improvement and herein lies the key to it all.
Once we decide that our self-image and self-esteem are built upon how we decide we see ourselves, only then can we discern the flaws in our character and make those changes necessary without the critique of others affecting us. Once we start forward in this self-realization, we easily see when someone is being helpful, or just attacking our character so they themselves can feel better about themselves by hurting and slandering another. This then shows to us the nature of disconnected souls in existence. Those people who exist in misery will only feel happy when others are miserable, too. They project their unhappiness, their pain, their low self-esteem upon any soul around them who has their mind, body, and spirit on the path of true freedom and self-awareness. For those traveling upon this path, this disconnected humanity is like a seething ocean of colliding pain and confusion, never looking up from the ground to see the beautiful sky that is always present within their hearts.
All the motivations for hatred, anger, contempt, and malice become visible for what they truly are: disconnected souls, lost in darkness, hating the light that radiates from souls who are on the road of freedom from all fears. You see it in schoolyards, when a handsome child is attacked by others who feel they are less attractive. You see it in all ages, professions, and cultures: Judgment, hatred, projection, low self-esteem, and a negative self-image. From these corruptions, the frequency of fear has control at every turn of the person, group, family, community, and world.
And these fears are used by the controllers to keep the world down, under the boot, and to make sure that any soul that is born is kept from blooming whenever possible. I’ve seen this over and over and over—the concerted efforts by others to push their will upon another they hate. They use word-play, character assassination, doubt, guilt—any device and every device at hand to keep the soul bewildered, low, and feeling hopeless; about themselves, their life, and who they could be.
To this day, people I have never met still try to enforce their will upon me, usually with trickery and deception. It amazes to no end. For this is what hatred does. It makes monsters out of people.
It is our divine right to follow our impulses to a spiritual life that leads to freedom as much as it is the right—by virtue of freewill—for those following the dark side to choose theirs. On the one hand, we leave them free to be whatever they want to be. Yet, on the other, they are constantly seeking out new ways to create hate-laws, attack souls through concerted efforts, and to manipulate anyone who is breaking free from the prison of fear, lies, and illusions that is keeping this planet in a state of perpetual slavery. They want to paint it black, black as night; the sun, blotted out from the sky—just like the song says. And woe to anyone who figures out how this mess works, because they will find themselves under continuous assault by those darksiders who will use every angle to get into their mind and hearts, so as to destroy their self-image and road to freedom.
The person seeking freedom from fear must remain vigilant for any and all attacks, for they come not single spies, but in battalions. But know this…
There are realities beyond this visual physical domain that stand untouched by the machinations of those who ply dark wares on unwary souls. These domains have the spiritual energy, inhabitants, and helpers who are always there, eager to aid those who are making straight the winding road of lies. From the first moment anyone takes their life in hand and seeks to understand themselves, their relationship with the divine—and the hows and whys of the mechanics of existence—they are at once aided.
This aid is equal only and slightly ahead of where you are as a growing, learning, loving, and knowing soul. Be more, do more, learn more, love more, and this spiritual domain will increase more in your perceptual world and existence. As you free yourself from fear, doubt, guilt, and lies you will find that, yay, there are new aspects of mind, body, and spirit beyond any of your wildest imaginations. The spiritual scriptures of the past become, for you, real. Because you are living your version of them, in the eternal now. Instead of reading of past heroes and saints, you find that little by little, their stories are becoming your facts.
You get constant affirmations and newfound encouragements that help you find the energy, courage, and determination to keep going forward, regardless of the tremendous buildup of attacks on every aspect of your daily life: income, family, friends, you name it. This then becomes your new standard of self-esteem and self-image against which all other values are measured by. For you are finding and solving the ancient riddles of existence: the meaning life, relationships, love, work, value, family, goals and you see that they have nothing to do with seeking satisfaction of your desires, lusts, ambitions, ego, and vanities but every thing to do with those things that are and always have been, eternal: trust, honesty, courage, love, character, compassion, tolerance, gratitude, and sincerity.
As you grow farther away from the slaveries of the mind, emotions, and body, you find that these qualities then become part and parcel of your self and who you are. You also find that you are tested on these qualities under the oddest of circumstances. Sometimes you fail, most of the time you succeed; each time you grow stronger in each virtue than before to the point where, come one fine day, you look at the old you of five, ten, or twenty years ago and it seems as though that person were someone else: lost, confused, and manipulated at every turn of your life.
Of course, many people are even beyond the realities as given forth in this small treatise. They are the great unknown, for the dark side makes sure their names are never known, nor can the public see or know of their existence. For when you do reach a point of divinity that moves you beyond the physical limitations, very often, as in times past, your life is taken from you lest your example be emulated by others searching for freedom.
This is why the world is filled with so many false prophets and pretenders to the great truths. They all have one thing in common among them, they are slaves to their ego and seek only to serve the vanities and desires of the masses, hence their massive followings, book sales, and exposure by the media machine.
For as you free yourself from fear and from the false images projected upon you by others, you find that the last battle in the war is your own ego. It is here that you will finally rise or fall, depending. If you are seeking true freedom from fear, you’ll find that the great architect of all your life’s miseries was truly your subjection to the satanic quality of self vanity: the ego.
Humility then becomes your watchword. You know clearly by the degrees of reality you’ve discerned and made your own, that ego is the ultimate illusion. It is the rock that breaks you or upon which you step on and rise above. You find that it becomes your duty to seek out your ego and remove its power over you in exactly the same fashion that fears were overcome; little by little, until none remained.
You also see that the dark side will know that you are struggling with each step upon the spiritual path as given over by the likes of Christ, and lesser prophets in the past, and they will try to assail your new perceptions and attainments in precisely the same and in equal measure that you are at. However, you’ll see these manipulations for the feeble attempts that they are; and once seen, as with anything, their power over you comes to an end for good and all. As they say, being aware of the problem is half the battle. And so it is.
Life becomes an endless onion, one layer of reality at a time, peeling away to the wonderment and amazement of you, the person becoming free from all fear and on every level. For you, the words love, truth, honesty, trust, and sincerity start to become very precious commodities. You see how valuable truth is, in a world full of deception and lies. You see how dogma, superstition, ignorance, and fear are keeping the world in a continual state of slavery and your heart is both filled with abounding compassion and love, and yet is torn by the blind slaveries of all you see around you.
Yet, you remember that even where you might be in your perceptions, that you are still but scratching the surface of truth, reality, love, and all the other endless facets of life that exists in the here and now, and beyond.
Keeping your eyes firmly on the goal of freedom, keeping your hands open for others, and moving forward, always forward, until you are done. This then becomes your motivation for being, your purpose for living. Freedom for ALL.
God Bless you always in your quest for freedom.
By Don Bradley, May 2009
My, how they sell it, package it, use it like a weapon, and shower it over the heads of the masses. Fear is the ultimate Weapon of Mass Distortion. It blinds, restricts, hypnotizes, impedes forward motion, and reduces the recipient to a quivering mass of spineless jelly, ready and able to receive any post-hypnotic suggestion and behavior. Fear is used mainly in our time as a control feature, its powerful solar-plexus frequencies shutting down the higher, leaving the mind and body under the animalistic control of the limbic brain and reactive thinking. And this is just the beginning.
Like most people, I’ve had my own confrontations with fear. At 19, I stood on the edge of a water control dam—only four inches wide at the top—with a drop off of about 60 feet on one side and about 90 feet on the other, all the while with a guitar strapped on and playing. The idea occurred to me to walk out on this ledge to the center of the dam (no hand rails or footing other than the 4” surface) and continue playing the piece. Naturally, from the pit of my stomach, came the reaction and fierce rejection of the suggestion. “If you fall, you’ll surely die,” kind of thing and so on. However, gently and firmly from above that pit, came the suggestion, “you’ll be fine.” So, I stepped out onto the ledge, all the while still playing, and went to the center of the dam and sat down. To this day, I am unable to explain how I was able to sit down, continue playing, and stand back up when the piece was done and return to the other side. The friends I was with didn’t say a word, neither to encourage nor object; they simply watched what was to them, something both insane and unbelievable.
I dealt with fear through cliff-diving, surfing, death, white-water rafting, treating with prowlers late at night, taking insane risks, and dealing with the mind-numbing viscidities of fate and what it brings to our door at the most unexpected times. Each time, the fear welled up inside me. Each time, it had to take a back-seat to the higher guidance I was learning to trust in. As many of us do, to be certain. Each time, the voice of fear grew less powerful, less controlling, when I refused to submit to it. Every time someone attacked me physically in my life, I began to find that I felt zero fear, even as I lay hospitalized with dozens of contusions to my head. I simply disallowed its powerful entry as a control feature in my life. I had a fear of flying (mainly to a few near air crashes when I was younger,) and as a birthday present to myself about a dozen years ago, hired a small Cessna to take me over the ocean. Again the fear welled up inside, as before, and again, it was put down as the ancient devil I had come to know all too very well. Not a quarter goes by without some kind of public attack—with physical threats to my person and implied harm. Each time, I check to see if the frequency of fear is to be found inside myself. This ancient evil, I am happy to report, is non-existent as a threat to my internal self awareness and strength. Several years ago, I began to test if even a miter of fear was still present on any kind of subjective, subconscious level by checking my pulse in dire circumstances and when under physical attack, especially when it related to a group of thugs intent on erasing my existence, as happened twice last year. My pulse rate remained low and steady. These are just the physical fears, usually ascribed to our more animal self, our physical bodies: fight or flight, if you will. There are other fears. Emotional and mental fears, which are far more devious to detect and defeat, given the fact that so very much of our identity is wrapped up in fearful self-perceptions and programming by our experiences and educational foundations inherent in the life we have lived, each to his or her own.
I illustrate the above points for two reasons. That like many of you, I’ve faced my fears and beat them…so far. And that, in order to write the following article, there is a certain frame of reference that this author has and therefore is in some small way, capable of speaking about it with a degree of firsthand experience. This means that if someone as such as I can do it, anyone can. But before we get into the victory side of the equation, let’s look at the causations of fear and how it does what it does and why.
More than any one physical, emotional, and mental state in humanity, fear is by and large the most powerful contributor to action states, in both behavioral and sociological terms of understanding. You’ll be hard-pressed to find this information in psychological books or journals. If anyone is more locked into fear paradigms, it’s the head-shrinkers that have turned so many people of higher potential in mental wrecks. It’s why they have the highest suicide rate of any profession. Their fear and low self-esteem is of the worst kind.
So far, we’ve discussed physical fears, which each of us can relate to on some level. For all have undergone this experience. That car that zips just inches in front of you at an intersection in traffic and the amazingly fast working of fear and the adrenaline rush that comes with that. That trepidation that is felt as we cross a steep gully on a log, with a sheer drop on either side that spells certain destruction (done that.) We all know about physical fears.
The reason we feel this fear and sense it as a consciousness quite outside ourselves at souls is because it is outside our selves. As we’ve learned from the photography I’ve been making public for some years now, everything in nature is alive, on an elemental level and in the various kingdoms. We see the faces in the water, the sky, the trees, in fire, and so on. We see and have come to understand that the whole of creation is a living, breathing reality with varying forms of consciousness animating each form of life and its myriad expressions.
Once we understand this fact of life, it then occurs to us that we ourselves are in fact, miniatures of the world in which we find ourselves. Our physical, emotional, and mental bodies are as well, inhabited by the very self-same elements which make up the world in which we live. It stands to reason then that these vehicles of expression—of which the soul finds itself able to function and express itself—are conscious on the same elemental level that the elements of our world are conscious. They have a life, purpose, reason for being, job to do, and will to live—just as they do in the ocean, lakes, rivers, sky, and in the fireplace.
They literally have an existence to be. And their to be, is to provide every plant, animal, and human with a functioning body in which the spirituous or soul, can live, move, and have its being. It then becomes a symbiotic relationship in which we need our bodies and they need our soul, for both to exist on the physical plane. Think long and hard about this last series of statements, coupled with the evidence this writer has given over in the previous years. Some lights will come on. Once the soul leaves the body, it dies and begins to breakdown into varying components through the process of decay. If there is no body, then the soul cannot exist on this plane; symbiotic.
Very often, I will tell my sons, “listen to what your body is saying to you,” about this or that food or activity. Things that are destructive to the body will yield a negative reaction, whereas wholesome food and drink, and healthy activities will provide an affirming response. There is even a science in this regard known as muscle testing or Kinesiology. This is proof that the body is quite capable of communicating its likes and dislikes, as regards what it knows is best for its survival. That implies what exactly is so as fact: the body is conscious, even if we are unaware of the facts in the case consciously; the body knows when a poison is being handed to it or when something healthy is being provided. And this goes way beyond food. The body, via even the rudimentary level of kinesiology, will communicate its needs, warnings, and other realities as it applies to clothing, housing, items of use, even sound and color. Of course, there are higher forms of guidance as relates to our own spiritual and mental development, and very often, as we progress, we can discern between bodily communications and those of the much higher and divine planes of existence, especially as it relates to our own, inner planes of perception and contact, with the kingdom of heaven within ourselves.
The body is conscious, beyond chemical/electrical connections via the pathways of the nervous system and brain. How else to explain its ability to sense poisons from non-poisons, even when the items to be tested are in sealed, unmarked containers?
This is so because this elemental consciousness is a living, lower-order class of being. For the physical plane, its perceptions and functions are at once clear and decipherable, even if the host inhabitant (human soul) is wholly unaware and disconnected with this consciousness. Because animals function less as individualized souls and more instinctual, they are therefore more in tune with their body’s elemental. This explains why ants will avoid aspartame and other poisons, which human beings seem quite eager to consume, much to their detriment. The animal kingdom is more closely linked to the physical elemental than humanity is; except in advanced cases where the soul of the man, woman, or child has purposely made the connection, yet while retaining command and control.
Most of humanity is a slave to its elementals when said consciousness uses fear to express itself. Because the elemental has total control over the body, it is able to secret various enzymes from various glands, which enable it to achieve its necessary aims. Fear is its main control feature, forcing the human soul within to obey. This explains why someone who is, say, afraid of heights, will freeze and be unable to move. Even though they are advised it’s okay, know in their mind its okay, they will state aloud that they are unable. They are speaking factually, because the elemental—through fear—has taken control of the body.
Given the above, it would seem that obeying these fear frequencies are not only sensible, but a good idea, given the elemental’s connection to the corporeal reality. In our younger stages, especially when we are dependent upon parents for food, shelter, and clothing, this elemental feature is a kind of safety device which protects the child from basic dangers: the rabid dog, the black widow, strangers with mal-intent, and so on.
However, in order to grow beyond fear, we must become a master of it, so that we can then find freedom. And the first fears to be mastered are the physical fears. It is there that we set the tone of our future victories in the emotional and mental realities, of which the true slaveries on this planet threaten our very existence by the master controllers who have used fear for thousands of years to keep this planet in bondage.
To attain this mastery we simply must listen to any inspiring suggestions which encourage us to face our fears. We can discern this by the overwhelming sense of calm, peace, balance, and helpful nod that things will be okay. This is our divine connection within ourselves which is inspiring us to step up to the plate and become more than what we were before. This kind of loving encouragement is telling us that we are ready and able to make a new grade of being, to be more in mastery of our bodies than we previously thought possible.
Happily, this kind of divine guidance will often work as the elemental does, in warning us dangers, but without the adrenaline rush and mind-crushing communication that comes with fear. We still get the protection we used to get from the elemental, but we retain our balance, composure, clarity of thought, and most importantly, because we are mastering our fears, we get something extra: the ability to see the situation as it really is.
As many already know, the moment we choose to make these first steps in overcoming our fears, we find that we then have new-found levels of courage, conviction, and an increasing aspiration to overcome life’s obstacles on more than just what comes at us as physical events. We grow a spine, a backbone, and are eager to do and be more. We get inklings that we’ve only just begun, too. That there are other fears to be known and defeated; emotional fears and fears of the mind, by far the hardest to detect, and yet the easiest to defeat, once discerned.
We also begin to feel as though we are finally living. And that the old “us”—all full of fear and indecision—was a life lived in a kind of prison. A prison without walls, except in our own minds. We see how many times fear kept us from speaking, doing, and being. How many times we could have been, but our fears kept us back.
These are the moments in which the fears of feeling and of mind begin to make themselves visible. We finally begin to see that the real us—the aware and loving soul within the bodies—has been kept back, slowed, delayed, and hindered every step of the way by fears implanted in us by the culture, education, and rulers of our time. As we look back in history, we see that every slavery was sold to us, using mental, emotional, and physical fears as the means to deploy said slaveries upon the planet. We see its deployment in banking, wars, race relations, family relations, and in every aspect of our life, bar none.
Then the lights really start to come on, bit by bit. Then we start asking the big questions: Who is selling this fear and why?
At that moment, we start beginning to see the world as it really is. Fear is sold constantly as a means in which one party seeks to influence and control the behavior of another party. I have these scams laid on me all the time, with zero effect. They are visible to me, though it disappoints and even surprises that they are still used as weapons against me. If it didn’t work the first 200 times, what makes them think it will work now? Still, they try. If anything can be said of the dark side, they are a persistent lot.
Once we see the reality of fear paradigms within ourselves as control features, then we can see them in the world. But to have true victory, we must make real effort to understand how our minds work. We must understand how worry, fear, trepidation, and other aspects are all just varying magnitudes of fear. We can do this by observing how we function as souls using a mind, just as we observe and understand our bodies. We need to see that we are above these vehicles, yet they are extensions of our soul in expression. Once we clearly see that this is so, we can then proceed to work on seeing how fear keeps us mentally, emotionally, and physically in a kind of perpetual bondage that must end.
As long as we are subject and controlled by any and all kinds of fear, we are slaves. Regardless of how much power, money, and prestige we may believe we have, as souls, we are barely much better than animals. This may seem a slight towards those still in bondage, but rest assured that it merely means that animals as we know, are domesticated and trained to be whatever their trainers want them to be, whether it’s a puppy dog, cat, tiger, or horse. And that exactly describes the world today, as in times past.
We see it all around us, in television, articles, and movies and so on.
Last week, I was at the beach surfing and it being a weekday, there were only a few people there, and I knew them as fellow surfers. We surf together when we happen to be at the same break. Lo and behold, as I was standing on the road over-looking the beach, a channel 3 film-crew pulls up and wants to interview me and Sue, who was there with her husband, Randy. Boy oh boy, talk about selling the fear. It seems there was a double homicide on the beach at a house a bit up the way two nights before and she wanted us to say on camera how afraid we were about being around with a murderer loose! Really!
Her fist question was “Aren’t you afraid of being out here with a killer on the loose?”
NO.
She was clearly disappointed. She asked Sue the same question.
NO.
The newscaster was again disappointed, and showed it. She wanted a fear reaction, but Sue and I wouldn’t give her one. We both could see that she wanted to sell fear and refused to be party to selling that evil on the six-o’clock news. I made sure she could see I was saddened to see that she had chosen a profession where her goal of the day was to sell fear to the masses. I am sure our interviews never made it on the air. Other film crews showed up, but we avoided them by hitting the waves. They all wanted the same thing: to shove fear down the public’s throat. This is what their producers told them to go out and get.
Now, who are these people that tell newscasters to seek out citizens and get them to blather on about how all afraid they are? They have names. They have motives. They have lots of money. They have a kind of power. And it’s a power based on the energy of fear as a control weapon. It is power based upon manipulating the minds, feelings, and insecurities of those still in bondage. These very same people have used fear like a weapon successfully for so long, that many people are walking-talking billboards of insecurities and fears.
THE FEAR PARADIGM SELL
I remember the cold war and how fear was sold in schools, radio, television, magazines, and newspapers and by parents about how those evil Russians were trying to take over the world and kill us all. Then came part two of the fear sell, the what to do about it. And it always involved surrendering our money and freedoms to protect us from those evil communists. In the 21st century, it’s the War On Terror, a faceless, nameless perpetual war where huge budgets of money are allocated to do what? Save us from terrorists? Hardly.
And where do these monies go? They go into more surveillance of the people, that’s where. Cameras everywhere, new Federal Gestapo creations that focus solely on the average citizen; into training the local police into treating the communities they function in as sub-humans, to be verbally abused and tasered constantly. And it’s allowed because humanity has bought into the fear paradigms being foisted upon us.
Sell the fear, control the people. It’s how it is done. You can see it in every country. You can pick up any daily newspaper or listen to any TV news program and there the shills are, all ramping up the fear to keep us all quaking in our boots.
That is, if you buy into that nonsense.
Sadly, a great portion of the population does buy into because it is reinforced by their parents, peers, educators, and pastors. I’ve listened to many sermons given from the pulpit about this or that evil and it was all about the fear. Many times have I glanced at a front page of a newspaper in some city, only to see the latest fear being blasted in three inch letters. Remember after 9/11, how they even had coded fear alerts and how each darkened shade of amber color was supposed to keep us frightened about some terror attack that was coming at any moment, we’re sure of it! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Sigh…
As long as humanity buys into these fear programs, believes them, and allows them to influence its behavior and critical thinking skills, will this planet remain in the bondage it has been in for so very long. It is our duty to step outside these fear paradigms, see them for what they are, and help those around us find their way out of slavery. We owe it to our children, our neighbors, and the world at large to understand the nature of fear, how it works, and why it is being used against us by the controllers.
Dealing with our mental fears by and large have to do with the issues of
Self-esteem,
Doubt,
Uncertainty,
Ignorance, and
Lack of Critical-Thinking as applied to the life experience.
Until we start to use our mind to gain an education about the realities of life, how it works, and how we function as souls in bodies, will we always be slaves to the will of those who do understand these things. Therefore, getting an education is first and foremost in obtaining mental freedoms. This education cannot be found in high schools or colleges. These network controlled realities are designed to create unthinking-memory-bots who simply repeat what they’ve read in a text book. I know, I went to college. In only one class in all those years did the instructor try to get us to think critically about information and the how’s and why’s it was being presented to us. Bless his soul for that.
Learning and understanding erases ignorance, which then allows us to make informed choices. Once we see, know, and begin to understand how things work in the world—and this is done by paying attention and observing the world around us—can we then see and understand who and what we are. Why we do the things we do. What our motivations for doing them, and so on.
With critical thinking and education, we then begin to know things. And in this knowing, we can then erase uncertainty and eliminate doubt from our minds. Only then can we see how the world is presented to us and why it is presented in the way it is. Only then can we take those first steps toward real freedom: freedom of the mind, soul, and body. Only then can our inner divinity—so long held in bondage under slave conditions—find expression in the world. Our world. The world that matters to us.
For this is a great truth. My world is not your world and your world is vastly different from a fisherman in the South Pacific. We each live in our own world, yet we share the planet and it resources as a family. We can share our worlds with others via the mediums found in the world today; the very same mediums that enslave us can also set us free.
The moment we start thinking outside the programmable box, we start to see how our minds function from ego, vanity, and self-interest and these very same vices are used by the controllers. For example, how we perceive ourselves is linked to our self-image and self-esteem. Look at the covers of women’s magazines and you can see how they use fear of failure keyed to a woman’s self-esteem and self-image to sell the magazine. You can see it on every single cover on every single woman’s magazine in existence. Over and over again, fear keyed to self-image. Fear keyed to self-esteem. So, you have to buy the issue, because you are afraid. The woman doesn’t realize she’s buying or reading the magazine because of fear, because most people hardly ever take the time to observe their thinking and feeling states. They simply waddle through life, programmed from birth, by all the previous mentioned devices.
Once this is seen for what it truly is, can we then see how fear is used to sell practically everything in the world by the corporate media through magazines, televisions, and movies.
It explains why fads take over and clothing styles change. If you don’t wear the latest (and usually most ridiculous clothing articles) you’ll be outside your peer group; an outcast, different, and unaccepted and unapproved. There again, we have fears keyed to self-image and self-esteem. You’ll be the weirdo, the nerd, the emo, the-whatever-current-slur-of-the-decade. All this happens because of fear.
Once we see this, we can then see that our self-image is based upon how we want others to see us, rather than the reality of the situation. As long as our self-esteem needs approval from others to maintain its sense of serenity and feelings of well-being, will we be eternally little better than slaves to popular opinion. How many parents have heard their daughters go into total fits because they didn’t have the latest purse, or shoes, or pants, or haircut that was all the rage. Did any of these parents sit down with their children and explain to them the slavery paradigms being employed by ad agencies serving the dark side? Of course not. Because they themselves are slaves, too. The latest neat car, the latest correct this or that, fitting in with community. You can see it at parks all the time. The men dress and wear the latest carbon-copy junk straight out of whatever is being pushed on them. Currently, it’s these terribly ugly plaid clothes. But, there they are, all wearing the same ball caps, the same shorts, the same shoes, and all looking and dressing like the obedient droids they have been their whole lives. It’s fear that keeps them in slavery. Always has, always will. And it’s a fear of the mind alone; therefore it’s a mental fear.
We have to make those inroads towards self-understanding so that we can truly see how much of our character and self-image is controlled from the outside, by fear paradigms sold to us and reinforced by whatever our peer group happens to be. Fortunately, most people reading this article are well beyond the herd mentality and are taking those steps toward freedom from all fears.
Once we make these initial steps, we then find all the other fears that have been controlling our thinking and feeling states. It takes self-observation. The what’s and why’s of our daily life. Then we begin to see the masks we create for the benefit of others. We all know this occurs because we have, in the past, seen behavior changes in others when certain people come into the room. They change. They present themselves differently; they present a different persona for that person to relate to—a mask, if you will—that shields and acts as an acted out barrier between the real person and the world in which they relate. And why? For fear of rejection. It’s why people create, use, and assume masks to be deployed in the world. To gain acceptance and approval by others—especially as it relates to their perceived peer group. Because they are afraid of being themselves wherever they are and wherever they go, for fear that the real them will be rejected. This means they are basing their self-esteem and self-image upon what others think. Then, they ruggedly proclaim their individuality, once they’ve created a peer-group-approval-identification-mindset. This then becomes a kind of badge which all others must accept as “being who they are.” In short, once this fear is assuaged by whatever peer group identification takes place, then the new “I am accepted, therefore I must be loved” persona becomes their mask which they then present to the world. And these masks have names like: yuppie, Goth, Emo, Surfer, Businessman/woman, Soccer Mom, Cop, Fireman, and so on down line. As the age of the person changes, so then do their peer-group-evaluation-masks. Goth girl becomes college chick becomes expecting mother becomes soccer mom.
Between the ages of 21 and 52, a person’s profession becomes part and parcel of their peer group identification. How very often do we hear in the world when two people meet, the first words being, “so…what do you do for a living?” Then comes the fateful words of masking. “I AM a fill-in-the-blank.” This key phrase reveals a mask identification. Rather than answer with the correct and free reality of “well, I dig ditches in Dunkirk as a means of employment,” the enslaved always use their profession or current occupation as an identity of how they see themselves or how they project onto to others how they want to be seen!
This can especially be seen in the dating world. Very few people remain who they are at all times, damn what other people think. The people who function that way stand firm in their self-esteem and could care less what others think of them. Think what you want, I live in my world, you live in yours.
I actually know surfers who refuse to wear thermal booties in frigid waters—50 degrees or less; your feet turn purple in under 10 minutes without them, all feeling is gone—because they are afraid of being perceived as a “kook,” as someone uncool. For them, surfing is about image, rather than interacting with a living and breathing ocean. They have to have the coolest board, the hottest wetsuit, and make sure they look at all times like the media-whores who pose in surfer magazines. They’d rather freeze; have their feet cut up on sharp barnacles and rocks, because it’s so very important to them that others see them in the “correct and cool” light. If you say so, dude…
Every mental slavery we have comes down to issues of security, self-image, self-esteem, and doubt. The only way to know this is by taking those steps toward seeing who we are and what we do and mainly, the why behind our actions. Until those steps are taken, we are little better than programmable droids. It’s a sad state of affairs, really, for this day and age. We have all this advancement in all these fields, and then we look at the internal human condition and it’s a seething sea of fears, insecurities, doubts, and negative self-images; a literal cauldron of boiling soup, easily misled and played upon by the controllers.
The media-whores who allow them selves to be used by the Dark Side to keep us in slavery very often know what they are doing. Pay close attention to the people on these TV shows; you can see, with the right eyes, exactly what is behind the scripted verbiage being deployed as weapons against our collective psyche. I’ve met and have interacted with them on countless occasions in my life, and believe when I tell you, they know exactly what they are doing.
Security is by and large, a big seller for fear because in our deepest nature, we all want security for our home and family and the people we love. Anything that threatens that is something to be feared. The reality of the situation is, no one is safe. Ever. At any time, fate can bring to our door whatever it’s going to bring: hurricanes, tornadoes, home intruders, earthquakes, bombs from planes, illness, you name it—it’s possible. Most of the time, we simply have little forewarning of what is coming. Yet, we allow our minds to run rampant with fear about this or that perceived threat, which usually never comes at all. It’s the unseen threat that usually deals us the blow. Once we can see this, we can then observe our behaviors and closely watch them for any kind of action built upon fear. Again, as before, we can take those small steps toward becoming free of fear and seeing life as it really is and was meant to be: lived one day at time. Yesterday is gone, who knows what tomorrow may bring. Sure, take steps to have some extra food and water on hand; that’s just good planning, and it assures all in your domicile of living beyond any immediate emergency of the moment. That’s just common sense. Like so many preventative actions; like having band-aids on hand in case of a cut. This shows responsibility. The fears of security run deeper than being a good provider or parent. They have to do with implied fears given over by others of threats that may or may not exist in reality. Careful and prudent thinking will expose the validity or lie of any situation by any honest thinker. And even if the threat has some basis in reality, is there really anything YOU can do about it? If so, then act responsibly. Either way, remain calm and centered and keep fear from controlling your thinking.
One of the interesting aspects regarding fears is their destructive influence upon the reality that even if a threat is valid, being flattened by fear won’t in any way help the situation or the person deal with the event. Sure, if someone throws a rock at you and you see it out of the corner of your eye and you react, as any creature would, this is simply doing and dealing with a REAL threat you can see coming. The main problem with fears of the mind and their ruination of our life path has to do with self-esteem and self-worth perceptions of how we see ourselves.
It is in these domains of self-understanding that humanity has yet to make any real inroads. In the main, most of our self-esteem and self-images have been pressed upon us by those in whom we have placed trust in the past, starting with our parents and home life, whatever it may have been. From there, peers we esteem and their statements regarding us—how we look, act, and especially, their perceptions regarding our feeling states, mental states, goals, and plans—influence us in the extreme, often for life. These wounding impressions create self-destructive mental images that lead to aberrant behavior patterns and cycles that very often ruin what would have been, very useful and constructive lives. This is especially so when the soul in question is targeted by the dark side to ruin any potential they might have in this life by concerted efforts by that group to stunt their growth in every department.
What follows from these dark foundations are the tragedies of failed relationships, lack of focus and direction, and self-destructive behaviors that we see all around us. Because no one is taught to be their own leader, teacher, and advisor and to rely on their best and highest self-esteem as a divine soul as a birthright of existence, that so many listen to and believe the varying slanders, lies, attacks, and malicious efforts by others, who very often themselves are just as screwed up as anyone else as regards their own self-image.
And on it goes, parent to child, parent to child, parent to child, until someone in the chain breaks the cycle and decides to be themselves. They realize that listening to the negative slanders of others is destroying them. They learn that even if a miter of the criticism is accurate, it in no wise means they are a fecundated soul. It merely means that there is always room for improvement and herein lies the key to it all.
Once we decide that our self-image and self-esteem are built upon how we decide we see ourselves, only then can we discern the flaws in our character and make those changes necessary without the critique of others affecting us. Once we start forward in this self-realization, we easily see when someone is being helpful, or just attacking our character so they themselves can feel better about themselves by hurting and slandering another. This then shows to us the nature of disconnected souls in existence. Those people who exist in misery will only feel happy when others are miserable, too. They project their unhappiness, their pain, their low self-esteem upon any soul around them who has their mind, body, and spirit on the path of true freedom and self-awareness. For those traveling upon this path, this disconnected humanity is like a seething ocean of colliding pain and confusion, never looking up from the ground to see the beautiful sky that is always present within their hearts.
All the motivations for hatred, anger, contempt, and malice become visible for what they truly are: disconnected souls, lost in darkness, hating the light that radiates from souls who are on the road of freedom from all fears. You see it in schoolyards, when a handsome child is attacked by others who feel they are less attractive. You see it in all ages, professions, and cultures: Judgment, hatred, projection, low self-esteem, and a negative self-image. From these corruptions, the frequency of fear has control at every turn of the person, group, family, community, and world.
And these fears are used by the controllers to keep the world down, under the boot, and to make sure that any soul that is born is kept from blooming whenever possible. I’ve seen this over and over and over—the concerted efforts by others to push their will upon another they hate. They use word-play, character assassination, doubt, guilt—any device and every device at hand to keep the soul bewildered, low, and feeling hopeless; about themselves, their life, and who they could be.
To this day, people I have never met still try to enforce their will upon me, usually with trickery and deception. It amazes to no end. For this is what hatred does. It makes monsters out of people.
It is our divine right to follow our impulses to a spiritual life that leads to freedom as much as it is the right—by virtue of freewill—for those following the dark side to choose theirs. On the one hand, we leave them free to be whatever they want to be. Yet, on the other, they are constantly seeking out new ways to create hate-laws, attack souls through concerted efforts, and to manipulate anyone who is breaking free from the prison of fear, lies, and illusions that is keeping this planet in a state of perpetual slavery. They want to paint it black, black as night; the sun, blotted out from the sky—just like the song says. And woe to anyone who figures out how this mess works, because they will find themselves under continuous assault by those darksiders who will use every angle to get into their mind and hearts, so as to destroy their self-image and road to freedom.
The person seeking freedom from fear must remain vigilant for any and all attacks, for they come not single spies, but in battalions. But know this…
There are realities beyond this visual physical domain that stand untouched by the machinations of those who ply dark wares on unwary souls. These domains have the spiritual energy, inhabitants, and helpers who are always there, eager to aid those who are making straight the winding road of lies. From the first moment anyone takes their life in hand and seeks to understand themselves, their relationship with the divine—and the hows and whys of the mechanics of existence—they are at once aided.
This aid is equal only and slightly ahead of where you are as a growing, learning, loving, and knowing soul. Be more, do more, learn more, love more, and this spiritual domain will increase more in your perceptual world and existence. As you free yourself from fear, doubt, guilt, and lies you will find that, yay, there are new aspects of mind, body, and spirit beyond any of your wildest imaginations. The spiritual scriptures of the past become, for you, real. Because you are living your version of them, in the eternal now. Instead of reading of past heroes and saints, you find that little by little, their stories are becoming your facts.
You get constant affirmations and newfound encouragements that help you find the energy, courage, and determination to keep going forward, regardless of the tremendous buildup of attacks on every aspect of your daily life: income, family, friends, you name it. This then becomes your new standard of self-esteem and self-image against which all other values are measured by. For you are finding and solving the ancient riddles of existence: the meaning life, relationships, love, work, value, family, goals and you see that they have nothing to do with seeking satisfaction of your desires, lusts, ambitions, ego, and vanities but every thing to do with those things that are and always have been, eternal: trust, honesty, courage, love, character, compassion, tolerance, gratitude, and sincerity.
As you grow farther away from the slaveries of the mind, emotions, and body, you find that these qualities then become part and parcel of your self and who you are. You also find that you are tested on these qualities under the oddest of circumstances. Sometimes you fail, most of the time you succeed; each time you grow stronger in each virtue than before to the point where, come one fine day, you look at the old you of five, ten, or twenty years ago and it seems as though that person were someone else: lost, confused, and manipulated at every turn of your life.
Of course, many people are even beyond the realities as given forth in this small treatise. They are the great unknown, for the dark side makes sure their names are never known, nor can the public see or know of their existence. For when you do reach a point of divinity that moves you beyond the physical limitations, very often, as in times past, your life is taken from you lest your example be emulated by others searching for freedom.
This is why the world is filled with so many false prophets and pretenders to the great truths. They all have one thing in common among them, they are slaves to their ego and seek only to serve the vanities and desires of the masses, hence their massive followings, book sales, and exposure by the media machine.
For as you free yourself from fear and from the false images projected upon you by others, you find that the last battle in the war is your own ego. It is here that you will finally rise or fall, depending. If you are seeking true freedom from fear, you’ll find that the great architect of all your life’s miseries was truly your subjection to the satanic quality of self vanity: the ego.
Humility then becomes your watchword. You know clearly by the degrees of reality you’ve discerned and made your own, that ego is the ultimate illusion. It is the rock that breaks you or upon which you step on and rise above. You find that it becomes your duty to seek out your ego and remove its power over you in exactly the same fashion that fears were overcome; little by little, until none remained.
You also see that the dark side will know that you are struggling with each step upon the spiritual path as given over by the likes of Christ, and lesser prophets in the past, and they will try to assail your new perceptions and attainments in precisely the same and in equal measure that you are at. However, you’ll see these manipulations for the feeble attempts that they are; and once seen, as with anything, their power over you comes to an end for good and all. As they say, being aware of the problem is half the battle. And so it is.
Life becomes an endless onion, one layer of reality at a time, peeling away to the wonderment and amazement of you, the person becoming free from all fear and on every level. For you, the words love, truth, honesty, trust, and sincerity start to become very precious commodities. You see how valuable truth is, in a world full of deception and lies. You see how dogma, superstition, ignorance, and fear are keeping the world in a continual state of slavery and your heart is both filled with abounding compassion and love, and yet is torn by the blind slaveries of all you see around you.
Yet, you remember that even where you might be in your perceptions, that you are still but scratching the surface of truth, reality, love, and all the other endless facets of life that exists in the here and now, and beyond.
Keeping your eyes firmly on the goal of freedom, keeping your hands open for others, and moving forward, always forward, until you are done. This then becomes your motivation for being, your purpose for living. Freedom for ALL.
God Bless you always in your quest for freedom.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Gas...again
Gas demand has dropped 28% since january, but gas prices have gone up nearly 60% in the same period. We are back to the same pattern as last year, where gas is going up about 10 cents a week again. So much for the "law" of supply and demand determining prices.
Nutrition
Nutrition
By Don Bradley, May 2009
Having been a student of dietetics since I was about 17, it’s been an interesting ride to see how much the public’s perception has changed over the years. Until the 1990s, about as high-frequency as you could get was being vegetarian; as far as mainstream health was concerned. Even mention of that word, prior to that time, usually led to weird questions and vague inferences as to being some kind of nutcase. The usual rap from just about anyone was how necessary eating dead animals was to our survival and all the rest of that claptrap. This still goes on today, for one of my sons was told by his school teacher recently that if people were to go vegetarian they would weaken and die, and the economy would collapse because of all the dairy and animal farms. See how the programming works and at a young age? My son just openly laughed in class, being better informed upon the issue.
In the 1980s, there were very few healthful stores about, and those were usually small little out of the way places, with sawdust on the floor and with most of the health-food packages covered with a layer of dust. Usually, they were run by older women and ex-hippies, with long grey hair. Nothing was corporatized in those days. When a label said organic, it usually meant it was grown nearby and you could believe it, too.
Now, the whole health food thing is a big corporate industry. Most organic labels and small producers of healthy products have been bought out by the likes of Colgate, General Mills, Monsanto, and all the usual killers who have been GMOing our food and giving us chemicals instead of nutrition since the 1950s. Very often, while visiting a health food store, it’s a veritable sea of differing labels and stuff. And very, very expensive. A one pound bag of flax ten years ago was two bucks. Now, it’s forty dollars and still rising. To eat well, to avoid the chemical-agro industry requires a budgetary expenditure usually four to six times what is required in a usual chain grocery store, where all the foods are processed and all the vegetables are irradiated and have been genetically modified.
Even so, with a small budget, there are still ways to do the best we can and generally give our bodies the things it needs to stay healthy. Of course, if you have the money and can afford the very best, than you can probably do much better than the average person. You’ll have all the necessary organic supplements, you’ll have non-GMO food, and you can assure you and yours a healthy lifestyle that will provide for the very best of what your body needs.
I base the following on careful observation of what I’ve observed over the years, especially as it relates to diet. It seems that for most, diet is all about losing weight. Hmm…well that’s incorrect. Diet is about what we put into our bodies and when we should put it in there. Losing weight is about reversing a trend toward obesity because the person made and has continued to make, extremely poor life choices as regards to their diet.
If you are overweight and generally obese, these words will mean very little to you. You serve your stomach, gluttony, and are a slave to sweeteners, chemically modified foods, and have been hypnotized by network advertising to such an extreme, that you take little responsibility for reversing any trend toward a healthy diet until something severe happens in your life path, like diabetes, etc., And any fleeting thought of making a real change in your diet is instantly forgotten when a milkshake appears on the horizon. So be it. You have the freewill to be that, if you want. Go ahead, have another candy bar.
However, many people want freedom. In every sense of the word. That usually means that at one point in our life path, we must take stock of our diet and see if changes are necessary so that we can have a better functioning body that will do what we need it to do, so we can move to more important things. If you are such a person, than possibly you already know much of what you are reading and are about to read.
It’s been said many times, and by moi, that we must really take the time to listen to our bodies. When we are under emotional and mental stress (usually based on fear issues and thought forms,) it shows up in the body. If we have poor diet choices, it shows up in the body. If we are functioning against the higher potentials of this life wave, it shows up in the body. Everything devolves down to a physical issue, if ignored or suppressed.
Our first step and the easiest one, is to change our food choices and to do it slowly. I say this because radical changes will often lead to boomerang results, which will often—especially if you are weak in regards to being the master of your body—lead to you failing in your quest for a better diet and doing even more damage than was done previously. This is especially true if you are responsible for a group of people, such as your family, who have been for years, accustomed to having the old poisonous foods and regularly. Introduce changes firmly, but s l o w l y. If you want a total rebellion and reaction in your home, make sweeping changes overnight and you’ll have a full-scale revolt on your hands and a house full of pissed-off people. Modern processed foods are made to be addictive on purpose with additives that clearly create addictive personalities out of people. FACT. Many have made their changes early on, and their family is already on a healthy course. Well done. This article is like preaching to the choir for you.
By far, the hardest part of changing the diet in a home is when your spouse or significant other is totally enslaved by the chemical/agro food chain and has informed you that he/she likes things just the way they are…or else! This is still solvable, but you have to solve the problem correctly by making little changes here and there, and slowly—and this works best while eating dinner as a family—by educating the assemblage as to the food they are enjoying is thus and so, and for thus and so reasons. And golly, it tastes great! Then you have agreement. Children are most receptible to change, especially if they have been raised in a loving and encouraging home, devoid of television, fear, and anger.
What follows is what has worked for me. I paid close attention to my sons and gently made those changes, little by little, which would allow their bodies and especially their minds, to understand why these changes were occurring and so that there would be little addiction reaction by their various systems. Tell a kid no more soda and his body has a total fit. This is so, because colas are filled with many different kinds of addictive substances which causes withdrawal symptoms, the least of which is caffeine.
1. Get your family on water and make that your first and number one priority. That means you have to make a plan and stick with it at all hazards. Obviously, distilled water is the best, because most bottled water comes straight from municipal water supplies and is often so loaded with fluoride and other heavy metals that giving them that stuff is nearly as harmful as letting them drink a half dozen sugar drinks a day. And by the way, all those colas have fluoride in them. That’s a fact. The beverage makers use muni-water just like Arrowhead and Sparkletts water companies. And in the state of California, all bottled water sold in stores (except for distilled) has fluoride in it, as required by law. If it’s bottled in California, it has fluoride. Water is the number one cleanser of the body of any and all pollutions. It rinses, washes, energizes, hydrates, and animates everything that your body needs. Consider it the primary building block of any good diet. It all starts with water and goes uphill from there. Making diet changes and leaving water out of the equation is like building a house on sand. One day, the whole mess will come crashing down, taking you with it. You know the drill, about six to eight glasses a day. Start throwing out the sodas and please, stop buying energy drinks, by and large the worst liquids a person can drink. Do some online reading about them and it reads like nutritional horror stories. Energy drinks are poison. As are soft drinks, especially if in daily use. Bless your water before drinking and bless your food, every time you prepare a meal.
The boys and I were at a surfing competition among high schools a few months ago at Surfer’s Point in Ventura, just to see what all the blather was about, and a major beverage company had these little pretty blonds and brunettes in skimpy bikinis walking around offering free cans of RED BULL. Eventually, they got around to us and as she lifted the can, all I could see was this black energy field around the can. “No thanks.”
2. Next, start slowly having vegetarian or vegan only days. Here and there, but at least twice a week. Increase this every few weeks until you are at least at a place where you are serving vege-meals five days week. Sure, you can still have your meat days, but get to a place where they are requested. Usually and within a very short time, the bodies of your household will be responding to the new healthy paradigms and the old cravings will have gone by then. Mostly, after that point, it will be psychological cravings of gluttony that fuels the obesity fires so rampant in the western world, especially in America. Twenty years ago, at the beach, about one out of ten people was obese. Nowadays, it’s more like nine out of ten. At the beach, there are no lies, especially as regards to nutrition. You see it all there: the spotty skin, the sagging arms, the huge guts, everything.
3. While you are doing step number one, slowly stop buying sugar treats. Boxes of cookies and all that, flat-out have to go, except as the occasional treat. As well, make it so that within 45 days, your house is cola free and stick to it. You’ll notice that the sleep patterns in your home will become normalized and that as you reduce processed sugary foods, the glassy-eyes of your family will also vanish. Moods will become better. In point of fact, you’ll see a great many changes, all for the better. The thing is, avoid being fanatical about it. Your family wants some ice cream? Go ahead. Having it once in awhile is fine. Like with any sugar treat. But having every day and several times a day and you’ll be fat and diabetic, with terrible health very quickly. If your hubby or wife has to have a hamburger, be happy to make them one; hey, it’s all about freewill, you know. But if you do things right, explaining things correctly as you go without being dictatorial or strident like some martinet, than you’ll have agreement and cooperation with your suggested changes. Be smart about it, and do it with love, rather than with the whip.
4. Throw out all pill-based vitamins and minerals. Your body simply was never designed to process inorganic minerals. There it is. At best—AT BEST—your body will only process about 4% of them, the rest either clogging the lining of your colon, or toxifying your system. The body then becomes so polluted with these harmful inorganics, that they end up in your sweat, breath, and skin. You can really smell this foul toxic discharge any place on the body where moisture from glands collects: under the arms, between the legs, like that. Ever notice how senior citizens—all on various pill-based vitamins and minerals—smell like vitamins? This is so, because their bodies, at their advanced age, can no longer process out all those toxic metals and minerals and their sweat glands and lunges and skin are petrifying with the overload and it becomes their body odor. If you can smell vitamins on a person—like with alcoholics—it means their body has reached a total saturation point of toxicity and is now bleeding out the harmful substances through the lungs and skin. Notice how you can’t find this information on the internet? Notice how not one health food magazine or guru talks about this? Why? You can see it and smell it on people, when they breathe; the room fills with the odor. Once the body reaches toxification of anything, it ends up in our breath and sweat.
The solution is to make the change over to colloidal vitamins and minerals. This is so, because our bodies were designed to get vitamins and minerals from our food supply, mainly from fruits and vegetables. Plants take minerals from the earth through the uptake system of their roots. This then puts the mineral in suspension of colloid, which our body was designed to absorb and receive. Chelated vitamins are also good, and it’s best to have both and mix them up. Colloidal in the morning; chelated in the evening. Then, your body has and gets everything it needs to stay healthy, for all the systems that make up our personal biosphere. The reason we no longer get it in our food supply is because the big agro farms and even many organic producers only add NPK as minerals for plants to grow in. Sure, it makes the plants look great, but they are nutritionally devoid of the necessary minerals our bodies need to stay healthy and strong. Our family has been on Colloidal vitamins and minerals since 1995 and we rarely, if ever, get sick. Check it out.
5. Start making fruit shakes or smoothies on a daily basis. This is where you can go raw and vegan, and where you can provide the best nutrition your body needs. One of these babies, if made correctly, can supply your body with all manner of goodness. There are dozens of smoothie recipes out there, but while you are doing so, have fun with it. Some days are GREEN, which means leafy green smoothies with varying organic additions which will override the sometimes bitter taste of going green. Make other days strawberry days, or blueberry days; like that. Add flax, vegan protein powder, and whatever you feel guided to give your family. It will be different things on different days. Just listen. You’ll know. If done right, smoothies will become an often looked-for treat that everyone will want to have. After a few months of this new addition to the family diet, sodas and other nasty things will be looked upon with abhorrence; as well they should be. This is where you get the best vitamins and the best fuel for your body. It means the body gets what it was designed to get: Raw Food. Pay attention as you drink these things and you’ll get total affirmation responses from your body on every level. This lets you know it is happy that you’ve finally found the right gasoline for its various engines of being. Well done.
6. Stop using processed mixes and packaged dinner preps and move toward making everything in your kitchen from scratch. The big lie is that it takes more time. WRONG. It takes about the same time to make something from scratch as it does to pull it out of a box and all the stuff with it. The reason for going with scratch ingredients is so that the food you eat is additive free on every level. The additives put into food are designed to be addictive and destructive at the same time. FACT. Most food additives kill cells and create colon problems that can take up to seven years to fix, depending. This is a deal-breaker, friends. You will taste the difference right off. Why make Uncle Ben’s pre-made nasty rice, when you can pull out of bag of organic rice and boil some water? Do a kinesiology test of the two preparations and you’ll see which is better.
7. Cooking oils. Throw them out. All of them. All processed cooking oils do one thing and one thing at their very best or worst, as it really is. They slowly erode the myelin sheath around your nervous system. Want Parkinson’s and short-term memory loss at an early age? Do you like have increasingly poor motor skills? Like blurred vision do you? The reason ALL OF THESE so-called vegetable and canola oils are so bad is because they are made of short-chain fatty acids, which are poisons to the nervous system and the colon. The solution is olive oil. For use on the stove, get extra-light—which adds no extra taste to the meal—and for all other items such as baked breads or anywhere in your recipe that requires cooking oil, use olive oil instead. And get the good kind. Hand and cold-pressed olive oils, when frozen, create clear beautiful forms. Chemically processed olive oils look like an oil smudge when frozen and are cloudy; that’s how you test them. Olive oil comes from trees and is a long-chain fatty acid, which is the kind the body wants and needs. The switch over to olive oils also means you will no longer have liver problems and stones, btw, an added benefit, wouldn’t you agree? Olive oil has dozens of benefits beyond what has been mentioned. Check it out.
8. Throw your microwave oven into the trash. NOW. Irradiating your food is the absolute worst thing you can do to yourself. In short, you kill the spiritual life out of it, making it dead. DOA. No longer alive. Get a table top oven and start using it, if needs be. Learn to cook, if you have yet to make the transition to totally raw. It takes time to get to that place, especially if you have a family on your hands. Learn to use the oven under your stovetop. And save your family’s life in the process. BTW, if you are in a restaurant and get a baked potato, inquire if the potato is cooked in a microwave. Most restaurants use them for those kinds of preparations because they cook the potato fast. FYI.
9. It will come to pass that dairy is one of the last thresholds which ultimately must be crossed. At the very least, and if you can afford it, get dairy that is organic and free of hormones. You’ll know when this transition is necessary. In our family, we’ve pretty much switched away from all dairy. In the main. Distilled water works just as good in recipes as milk does, and very often, much better. The thing is to listen. When your body is ready and you’ve made many of the changes listed above, you’ll soon find that dairy is lowering your etheric frequency, especially during certain lunar cycles. Menstruating women are more attune to lunar cycles than men and will notice this need for change usually sooner than men. You’ll know. Trust in that knowing. Pray for guidance and direction in all dietary changes, and listen well.
10. As your body gets clear of its lifetime of toxins, start instituting annual and semi-annual colon cleanses and other detoxification protocols. Get your liver and kidneys back into shape. It will do little good to do it if your diet is still full of processed sugars and poisons, but once you get clear of these toxins, you’ll see and feel the need to do a full body flush. Get a good colon cleanse and get the past behind you once and for all and be free. The past is gone; time to let it go and release all those years of ignorance and self-destruction.
11. Obviously, throw out iodized salt and fluoridated toothpaste. Get plain table salt or sea salt. The good sea salt is not white (which means it was processed, which at the end of the day, is simply table salt again), but is slightly off-color, which means it has all 92 minerals that are present in ocean water. The problem with sea-salts is that again, the body prefers mineral in colloidal suspension, over any other form. Really, plain table salt is fine. Cook with that and be wary of the sea-salt propaganda going around. I’ve looked into it and it’s mostly nonsense. It’s your call, of course. But if your recipe calls for salt, then plain table salt (sodium chloride) is all you need to add and your body will do fine with it. Your body reacts to inorganic iodized salt as it would any toxin. In fact, do a taste test. Plain salt tastes like plain salt. Iodized salt actually will numb the tongue. As for fluoridation, avoid it at all costs. Some people will even tell you that its better to use just plain baking soda for toothpaste, but kids may rebel at the horrific taste of that stuff. At the very least, get fluoride-free toothpaste and go from there.
12. Check all your bathroom supplies for any ingredients which have aluminum in them and trash them at once and while you are at it, throw out all your aluminum and Teflon cookware. Get stainless steel and stop poisoning your body. Look…bird owners will tell you that using Teflon cookware will kill your pet birds. If it’s doing that to those sensitive little angels, imagine what it’s doing to you. Check it out; it’s a real nightmare.
13. While you are at it, start switching over to chemical free skin and body lotions. Your body wasn’t meant to have a 40 item list of unpronounceable chemicals slathered all over it on a daily basis. The skin is the largest organ in the body and it absorbs everything and in the body it goes. I made the switch over to chemical free skin lotions last year (have to, spend a lot of time in the sun and water) and my skin immediately responded by becoming tight again and all sagging disappeared—everywhere, within one month. It’s amazing how much chemicals are sold to women for “youthful skin” and they are actually toxifying it! The best one I’ve found (so far) is Desert Essence. No chemicals at all and organic to boot. Yay! The last two items may not seem like nutrition items at all but think about it: you are putting these things in your body. That means your body is absorbing it, like food, and has to process what it absorbs, right? It’s impossible to make food changes, but keep poisoning our bodies with chemicals which still harm it and think we are going forward. Anything that goes in or on the body has to be looked at.
14. If you drink or do drugs daily, well…’nuff said.
15. If you can, and have the space and live in a house, plant a garden. Get seeds and start planting as your particular seasons warrant. You can actually buy minerals online that you can mix into the earth so you can have the best vegetables ever. Every single day, go out and bless your plants, and give them a bit of love. All that loving affection will make those vegetables the best and brightest they can be. Lucky you, if you can have a vegetable garden.
16. When you go shopping, say a prayer: guide me to what me and my family need most this week. Please. Then be attentive, stay in the moment, stop day-dreaming and focus. See what shakes out.
Well, this is a good start, and obviously more can be said about the varying things regarding nutrition, but already this article is getting long and I’ve learned to keep things short and to the point. However, remember this and always: keep things in balance. The highest frequency foods are fruit. Next comes tree branch foods, like olives, grapes, etc. From there its bush type foods, then foods just above the ground; then ground based foods, legumes next, and finally tubes, like potatoes. The body needs them all to be in balance. Each food group, according to what I’ve observed has different spiritual actions to different parts of the body. I’m not referring to that load of horse-dung called the four food groups put out by the FDA which is an ongoing load of nonsense, but by the spiritual caliber and energetic action each food type I’ve listed above in this paragraph by brightness. Fruits carry the largest amount of sun energy and brightness, decreasing as the vegetable gets nearer to the ground. Meat and some dairy are literally dead material very often energized with fear because of the circumstances in which the animal was slaughtered, but that’s another article for another day. Your body needs all types of vegetables, not just fruit. Fruit energetically affects the region of between the knees and the navel, whereas peas and ground based vegetables work nearer to the throat and head. You can see the effects of meals on any body, any where, within a few minutes after consuming. Same with liquids, pills, or whatever goes on or in the body. It’s visible. Fifty pages could be written about this easily, with detail, and by food article.
Trust your own perceptions, do your own thinking and research. Double check everything. Learn, know, be, observe, like that. What was written in this article was how I got my nutrition world on track and I did it by listening mainly to what my body was saying to me. Some years, it was complete vegetarian. Some, not. Some are blends. Some are vegan. Pay attention and your body and your prayers will provide you with all the guidance you need to get healthy and provide a healthy home for your loved ones. Once you get the basic and honest nutrition education, it’s easy.
Be wary of the big agro companies and their propaganda organs. If it’s an advertisement on TV, that should be enough to send you in the opposite direction for the truth of things. It’s a good rule to follow. Corporations, the big pharmaceutical companies, and the like, want a sick and a weak population that is easily programmed, hypnotized, and obedient. And the food these monsters make available to the masses is mainly, poisonous to the body.
You can do it. It’s in your hands, and while we still have the freewill and choice to make the change. One day, only the elite will have access to organic and healthy foods. The rest of us will be given whatever version of soylent green they intend for us to consume.
God bless you and yours, and I wish you the very best on your journey to good health.
By Don Bradley, May 2009
Having been a student of dietetics since I was about 17, it’s been an interesting ride to see how much the public’s perception has changed over the years. Until the 1990s, about as high-frequency as you could get was being vegetarian; as far as mainstream health was concerned. Even mention of that word, prior to that time, usually led to weird questions and vague inferences as to being some kind of nutcase. The usual rap from just about anyone was how necessary eating dead animals was to our survival and all the rest of that claptrap. This still goes on today, for one of my sons was told by his school teacher recently that if people were to go vegetarian they would weaken and die, and the economy would collapse because of all the dairy and animal farms. See how the programming works and at a young age? My son just openly laughed in class, being better informed upon the issue.
In the 1980s, there were very few healthful stores about, and those were usually small little out of the way places, with sawdust on the floor and with most of the health-food packages covered with a layer of dust. Usually, they were run by older women and ex-hippies, with long grey hair. Nothing was corporatized in those days. When a label said organic, it usually meant it was grown nearby and you could believe it, too.
Now, the whole health food thing is a big corporate industry. Most organic labels and small producers of healthy products have been bought out by the likes of Colgate, General Mills, Monsanto, and all the usual killers who have been GMOing our food and giving us chemicals instead of nutrition since the 1950s. Very often, while visiting a health food store, it’s a veritable sea of differing labels and stuff. And very, very expensive. A one pound bag of flax ten years ago was two bucks. Now, it’s forty dollars and still rising. To eat well, to avoid the chemical-agro industry requires a budgetary expenditure usually four to six times what is required in a usual chain grocery store, where all the foods are processed and all the vegetables are irradiated and have been genetically modified.
Even so, with a small budget, there are still ways to do the best we can and generally give our bodies the things it needs to stay healthy. Of course, if you have the money and can afford the very best, than you can probably do much better than the average person. You’ll have all the necessary organic supplements, you’ll have non-GMO food, and you can assure you and yours a healthy lifestyle that will provide for the very best of what your body needs.
I base the following on careful observation of what I’ve observed over the years, especially as it relates to diet. It seems that for most, diet is all about losing weight. Hmm…well that’s incorrect. Diet is about what we put into our bodies and when we should put it in there. Losing weight is about reversing a trend toward obesity because the person made and has continued to make, extremely poor life choices as regards to their diet.
If you are overweight and generally obese, these words will mean very little to you. You serve your stomach, gluttony, and are a slave to sweeteners, chemically modified foods, and have been hypnotized by network advertising to such an extreme, that you take little responsibility for reversing any trend toward a healthy diet until something severe happens in your life path, like diabetes, etc., And any fleeting thought of making a real change in your diet is instantly forgotten when a milkshake appears on the horizon. So be it. You have the freewill to be that, if you want. Go ahead, have another candy bar.
However, many people want freedom. In every sense of the word. That usually means that at one point in our life path, we must take stock of our diet and see if changes are necessary so that we can have a better functioning body that will do what we need it to do, so we can move to more important things. If you are such a person, than possibly you already know much of what you are reading and are about to read.
It’s been said many times, and by moi, that we must really take the time to listen to our bodies. When we are under emotional and mental stress (usually based on fear issues and thought forms,) it shows up in the body. If we have poor diet choices, it shows up in the body. If we are functioning against the higher potentials of this life wave, it shows up in the body. Everything devolves down to a physical issue, if ignored or suppressed.
Our first step and the easiest one, is to change our food choices and to do it slowly. I say this because radical changes will often lead to boomerang results, which will often—especially if you are weak in regards to being the master of your body—lead to you failing in your quest for a better diet and doing even more damage than was done previously. This is especially true if you are responsible for a group of people, such as your family, who have been for years, accustomed to having the old poisonous foods and regularly. Introduce changes firmly, but s l o w l y. If you want a total rebellion and reaction in your home, make sweeping changes overnight and you’ll have a full-scale revolt on your hands and a house full of pissed-off people. Modern processed foods are made to be addictive on purpose with additives that clearly create addictive personalities out of people. FACT. Many have made their changes early on, and their family is already on a healthy course. Well done. This article is like preaching to the choir for you.
By far, the hardest part of changing the diet in a home is when your spouse or significant other is totally enslaved by the chemical/agro food chain and has informed you that he/she likes things just the way they are…or else! This is still solvable, but you have to solve the problem correctly by making little changes here and there, and slowly—and this works best while eating dinner as a family—by educating the assemblage as to the food they are enjoying is thus and so, and for thus and so reasons. And golly, it tastes great! Then you have agreement. Children are most receptible to change, especially if they have been raised in a loving and encouraging home, devoid of television, fear, and anger.
What follows is what has worked for me. I paid close attention to my sons and gently made those changes, little by little, which would allow their bodies and especially their minds, to understand why these changes were occurring and so that there would be little addiction reaction by their various systems. Tell a kid no more soda and his body has a total fit. This is so, because colas are filled with many different kinds of addictive substances which causes withdrawal symptoms, the least of which is caffeine.
1. Get your family on water and make that your first and number one priority. That means you have to make a plan and stick with it at all hazards. Obviously, distilled water is the best, because most bottled water comes straight from municipal water supplies and is often so loaded with fluoride and other heavy metals that giving them that stuff is nearly as harmful as letting them drink a half dozen sugar drinks a day. And by the way, all those colas have fluoride in them. That’s a fact. The beverage makers use muni-water just like Arrowhead and Sparkletts water companies. And in the state of California, all bottled water sold in stores (except for distilled) has fluoride in it, as required by law. If it’s bottled in California, it has fluoride. Water is the number one cleanser of the body of any and all pollutions. It rinses, washes, energizes, hydrates, and animates everything that your body needs. Consider it the primary building block of any good diet. It all starts with water and goes uphill from there. Making diet changes and leaving water out of the equation is like building a house on sand. One day, the whole mess will come crashing down, taking you with it. You know the drill, about six to eight glasses a day. Start throwing out the sodas and please, stop buying energy drinks, by and large the worst liquids a person can drink. Do some online reading about them and it reads like nutritional horror stories. Energy drinks are poison. As are soft drinks, especially if in daily use. Bless your water before drinking and bless your food, every time you prepare a meal.
The boys and I were at a surfing competition among high schools a few months ago at Surfer’s Point in Ventura, just to see what all the blather was about, and a major beverage company had these little pretty blonds and brunettes in skimpy bikinis walking around offering free cans of RED BULL. Eventually, they got around to us and as she lifted the can, all I could see was this black energy field around the can. “No thanks.”
2. Next, start slowly having vegetarian or vegan only days. Here and there, but at least twice a week. Increase this every few weeks until you are at least at a place where you are serving vege-meals five days week. Sure, you can still have your meat days, but get to a place where they are requested. Usually and within a very short time, the bodies of your household will be responding to the new healthy paradigms and the old cravings will have gone by then. Mostly, after that point, it will be psychological cravings of gluttony that fuels the obesity fires so rampant in the western world, especially in America. Twenty years ago, at the beach, about one out of ten people was obese. Nowadays, it’s more like nine out of ten. At the beach, there are no lies, especially as regards to nutrition. You see it all there: the spotty skin, the sagging arms, the huge guts, everything.
3. While you are doing step number one, slowly stop buying sugar treats. Boxes of cookies and all that, flat-out have to go, except as the occasional treat. As well, make it so that within 45 days, your house is cola free and stick to it. You’ll notice that the sleep patterns in your home will become normalized and that as you reduce processed sugary foods, the glassy-eyes of your family will also vanish. Moods will become better. In point of fact, you’ll see a great many changes, all for the better. The thing is, avoid being fanatical about it. Your family wants some ice cream? Go ahead. Having it once in awhile is fine. Like with any sugar treat. But having every day and several times a day and you’ll be fat and diabetic, with terrible health very quickly. If your hubby or wife has to have a hamburger, be happy to make them one; hey, it’s all about freewill, you know. But if you do things right, explaining things correctly as you go without being dictatorial or strident like some martinet, than you’ll have agreement and cooperation with your suggested changes. Be smart about it, and do it with love, rather than with the whip.
4. Throw out all pill-based vitamins and minerals. Your body simply was never designed to process inorganic minerals. There it is. At best—AT BEST—your body will only process about 4% of them, the rest either clogging the lining of your colon, or toxifying your system. The body then becomes so polluted with these harmful inorganics, that they end up in your sweat, breath, and skin. You can really smell this foul toxic discharge any place on the body where moisture from glands collects: under the arms, between the legs, like that. Ever notice how senior citizens—all on various pill-based vitamins and minerals—smell like vitamins? This is so, because their bodies, at their advanced age, can no longer process out all those toxic metals and minerals and their sweat glands and lunges and skin are petrifying with the overload and it becomes their body odor. If you can smell vitamins on a person—like with alcoholics—it means their body has reached a total saturation point of toxicity and is now bleeding out the harmful substances through the lungs and skin. Notice how you can’t find this information on the internet? Notice how not one health food magazine or guru talks about this? Why? You can see it and smell it on people, when they breathe; the room fills with the odor. Once the body reaches toxification of anything, it ends up in our breath and sweat.
The solution is to make the change over to colloidal vitamins and minerals. This is so, because our bodies were designed to get vitamins and minerals from our food supply, mainly from fruits and vegetables. Plants take minerals from the earth through the uptake system of their roots. This then puts the mineral in suspension of colloid, which our body was designed to absorb and receive. Chelated vitamins are also good, and it’s best to have both and mix them up. Colloidal in the morning; chelated in the evening. Then, your body has and gets everything it needs to stay healthy, for all the systems that make up our personal biosphere. The reason we no longer get it in our food supply is because the big agro farms and even many organic producers only add NPK as minerals for plants to grow in. Sure, it makes the plants look great, but they are nutritionally devoid of the necessary minerals our bodies need to stay healthy and strong. Our family has been on Colloidal vitamins and minerals since 1995 and we rarely, if ever, get sick. Check it out.
5. Start making fruit shakes or smoothies on a daily basis. This is where you can go raw and vegan, and where you can provide the best nutrition your body needs. One of these babies, if made correctly, can supply your body with all manner of goodness. There are dozens of smoothie recipes out there, but while you are doing so, have fun with it. Some days are GREEN, which means leafy green smoothies with varying organic additions which will override the sometimes bitter taste of going green. Make other days strawberry days, or blueberry days; like that. Add flax, vegan protein powder, and whatever you feel guided to give your family. It will be different things on different days. Just listen. You’ll know. If done right, smoothies will become an often looked-for treat that everyone will want to have. After a few months of this new addition to the family diet, sodas and other nasty things will be looked upon with abhorrence; as well they should be. This is where you get the best vitamins and the best fuel for your body. It means the body gets what it was designed to get: Raw Food. Pay attention as you drink these things and you’ll get total affirmation responses from your body on every level. This lets you know it is happy that you’ve finally found the right gasoline for its various engines of being. Well done.
6. Stop using processed mixes and packaged dinner preps and move toward making everything in your kitchen from scratch. The big lie is that it takes more time. WRONG. It takes about the same time to make something from scratch as it does to pull it out of a box and all the stuff with it. The reason for going with scratch ingredients is so that the food you eat is additive free on every level. The additives put into food are designed to be addictive and destructive at the same time. FACT. Most food additives kill cells and create colon problems that can take up to seven years to fix, depending. This is a deal-breaker, friends. You will taste the difference right off. Why make Uncle Ben’s pre-made nasty rice, when you can pull out of bag of organic rice and boil some water? Do a kinesiology test of the two preparations and you’ll see which is better.
7. Cooking oils. Throw them out. All of them. All processed cooking oils do one thing and one thing at their very best or worst, as it really is. They slowly erode the myelin sheath around your nervous system. Want Parkinson’s and short-term memory loss at an early age? Do you like have increasingly poor motor skills? Like blurred vision do you? The reason ALL OF THESE so-called vegetable and canola oils are so bad is because they are made of short-chain fatty acids, which are poisons to the nervous system and the colon. The solution is olive oil. For use on the stove, get extra-light—which adds no extra taste to the meal—and for all other items such as baked breads or anywhere in your recipe that requires cooking oil, use olive oil instead. And get the good kind. Hand and cold-pressed olive oils, when frozen, create clear beautiful forms. Chemically processed olive oils look like an oil smudge when frozen and are cloudy; that’s how you test them. Olive oil comes from trees and is a long-chain fatty acid, which is the kind the body wants and needs. The switch over to olive oils also means you will no longer have liver problems and stones, btw, an added benefit, wouldn’t you agree? Olive oil has dozens of benefits beyond what has been mentioned. Check it out.
8. Throw your microwave oven into the trash. NOW. Irradiating your food is the absolute worst thing you can do to yourself. In short, you kill the spiritual life out of it, making it dead. DOA. No longer alive. Get a table top oven and start using it, if needs be. Learn to cook, if you have yet to make the transition to totally raw. It takes time to get to that place, especially if you have a family on your hands. Learn to use the oven under your stovetop. And save your family’s life in the process. BTW, if you are in a restaurant and get a baked potato, inquire if the potato is cooked in a microwave. Most restaurants use them for those kinds of preparations because they cook the potato fast. FYI.
9. It will come to pass that dairy is one of the last thresholds which ultimately must be crossed. At the very least, and if you can afford it, get dairy that is organic and free of hormones. You’ll know when this transition is necessary. In our family, we’ve pretty much switched away from all dairy. In the main. Distilled water works just as good in recipes as milk does, and very often, much better. The thing is to listen. When your body is ready and you’ve made many of the changes listed above, you’ll soon find that dairy is lowering your etheric frequency, especially during certain lunar cycles. Menstruating women are more attune to lunar cycles than men and will notice this need for change usually sooner than men. You’ll know. Trust in that knowing. Pray for guidance and direction in all dietary changes, and listen well.
10. As your body gets clear of its lifetime of toxins, start instituting annual and semi-annual colon cleanses and other detoxification protocols. Get your liver and kidneys back into shape. It will do little good to do it if your diet is still full of processed sugars and poisons, but once you get clear of these toxins, you’ll see and feel the need to do a full body flush. Get a good colon cleanse and get the past behind you once and for all and be free. The past is gone; time to let it go and release all those years of ignorance and self-destruction.
11. Obviously, throw out iodized salt and fluoridated toothpaste. Get plain table salt or sea salt. The good sea salt is not white (which means it was processed, which at the end of the day, is simply table salt again), but is slightly off-color, which means it has all 92 minerals that are present in ocean water. The problem with sea-salts is that again, the body prefers mineral in colloidal suspension, over any other form. Really, plain table salt is fine. Cook with that and be wary of the sea-salt propaganda going around. I’ve looked into it and it’s mostly nonsense. It’s your call, of course. But if your recipe calls for salt, then plain table salt (sodium chloride) is all you need to add and your body will do fine with it. Your body reacts to inorganic iodized salt as it would any toxin. In fact, do a taste test. Plain salt tastes like plain salt. Iodized salt actually will numb the tongue. As for fluoridation, avoid it at all costs. Some people will even tell you that its better to use just plain baking soda for toothpaste, but kids may rebel at the horrific taste of that stuff. At the very least, get fluoride-free toothpaste and go from there.
12. Check all your bathroom supplies for any ingredients which have aluminum in them and trash them at once and while you are at it, throw out all your aluminum and Teflon cookware. Get stainless steel and stop poisoning your body. Look…bird owners will tell you that using Teflon cookware will kill your pet birds. If it’s doing that to those sensitive little angels, imagine what it’s doing to you. Check it out; it’s a real nightmare.
13. While you are at it, start switching over to chemical free skin and body lotions. Your body wasn’t meant to have a 40 item list of unpronounceable chemicals slathered all over it on a daily basis. The skin is the largest organ in the body and it absorbs everything and in the body it goes. I made the switch over to chemical free skin lotions last year (have to, spend a lot of time in the sun and water) and my skin immediately responded by becoming tight again and all sagging disappeared—everywhere, within one month. It’s amazing how much chemicals are sold to women for “youthful skin” and they are actually toxifying it! The best one I’ve found (so far) is Desert Essence. No chemicals at all and organic to boot. Yay! The last two items may not seem like nutrition items at all but think about it: you are putting these things in your body. That means your body is absorbing it, like food, and has to process what it absorbs, right? It’s impossible to make food changes, but keep poisoning our bodies with chemicals which still harm it and think we are going forward. Anything that goes in or on the body has to be looked at.
14. If you drink or do drugs daily, well…’nuff said.
15. If you can, and have the space and live in a house, plant a garden. Get seeds and start planting as your particular seasons warrant. You can actually buy minerals online that you can mix into the earth so you can have the best vegetables ever. Every single day, go out and bless your plants, and give them a bit of love. All that loving affection will make those vegetables the best and brightest they can be. Lucky you, if you can have a vegetable garden.
16. When you go shopping, say a prayer: guide me to what me and my family need most this week. Please. Then be attentive, stay in the moment, stop day-dreaming and focus. See what shakes out.
Well, this is a good start, and obviously more can be said about the varying things regarding nutrition, but already this article is getting long and I’ve learned to keep things short and to the point. However, remember this and always: keep things in balance. The highest frequency foods are fruit. Next comes tree branch foods, like olives, grapes, etc. From there its bush type foods, then foods just above the ground; then ground based foods, legumes next, and finally tubes, like potatoes. The body needs them all to be in balance. Each food group, according to what I’ve observed has different spiritual actions to different parts of the body. I’m not referring to that load of horse-dung called the four food groups put out by the FDA which is an ongoing load of nonsense, but by the spiritual caliber and energetic action each food type I’ve listed above in this paragraph by brightness. Fruits carry the largest amount of sun energy and brightness, decreasing as the vegetable gets nearer to the ground. Meat and some dairy are literally dead material very often energized with fear because of the circumstances in which the animal was slaughtered, but that’s another article for another day. Your body needs all types of vegetables, not just fruit. Fruit energetically affects the region of between the knees and the navel, whereas peas and ground based vegetables work nearer to the throat and head. You can see the effects of meals on any body, any where, within a few minutes after consuming. Same with liquids, pills, or whatever goes on or in the body. It’s visible. Fifty pages could be written about this easily, with detail, and by food article.
Trust your own perceptions, do your own thinking and research. Double check everything. Learn, know, be, observe, like that. What was written in this article was how I got my nutrition world on track and I did it by listening mainly to what my body was saying to me. Some years, it was complete vegetarian. Some, not. Some are blends. Some are vegan. Pay attention and your body and your prayers will provide you with all the guidance you need to get healthy and provide a healthy home for your loved ones. Once you get the basic and honest nutrition education, it’s easy.
Be wary of the big agro companies and their propaganda organs. If it’s an advertisement on TV, that should be enough to send you in the opposite direction for the truth of things. It’s a good rule to follow. Corporations, the big pharmaceutical companies, and the like, want a sick and a weak population that is easily programmed, hypnotized, and obedient. And the food these monsters make available to the masses is mainly, poisonous to the body.
You can do it. It’s in your hands, and while we still have the freewill and choice to make the change. One day, only the elite will have access to organic and healthy foods. The rest of us will be given whatever version of soylent green they intend for us to consume.
God bless you and yours, and I wish you the very best on your journey to good health.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Fear
By Don Bradley, May 2009
My, how they sell it, package it, use it like a weapon, and shower it over the heads of the masses. Fear is the ultimate Weapon of Mass Distortion. It blinds, restricts, hypnotizes, impedes forward motion, and reduces the recipient to a quivering mass of spineless jelly, ready and able to receive any post-hypnotic suggestion and behavior. Fear is used mainly in our time as a control feature, its powerful solar-plexus frequencies shutting down the higher, leaving the mind and body under the animalistic control of the limbic brain and reactive thinking. And this is just the beginning.
Like most people, I’ve had my own confrontations with fear. At 19, I stood on the edge of a water control dam—only four inches wide at the top—with a drop off of about 60 feet on one side and about 90 feet on the other, all the while with a guitar strapped on and playing. The idea occurred to me to walk out on this ledge to the center of the dam (no hand rails or footing other than the 4” surface) and continue playing the piece. Naturally, from the pit of my stomach, came the reaction and fierce rejection of the suggestion. “If you fall, you’ll surely die,” kind of thing and so on. However, gently and firmly from above that pit, came the suggestion, “you’ll be fine.” So, I stepped out onto the ledge, all the while still playing, and went to the center of the dam and sat down. To this day, I am unable to explain how I was able to sit down, continue playing, and stand back up when the piece was done and return to the other side. The friends I was with didn’t say a word, neither to encourage nor object; they simply watched what was to them, something both insane and unbelievable.
I dealt with fear through cliff-diving, surfing, death, white-water rafting, treating with prowlers late at night, taking insane risks, and dealing with the mind-numbing viscidities of fate and what it brings to our door at the most unexpected times. Each time, the fear welled up inside me. Each time, it had to take a back-seat to the higher guidance I was learning to trust in. As many of us do, to be certain. Each time, the voice of fear grew less powerful, less controlling, when I refused to submit to it. Every time someone attacked me physically in my life, I began to find that I felt zero fear, even as I lay hospitalized with dozens of contusions to my head. I simply disallowed its powerful entry as a control feature in my life. I had a fear of flying (mainly to a few near air crashes when I was younger,) and as a birthday present to myself about a dozen years ago, hired a small Cessna to take me over the ocean. Again the fear welled up inside, as before, and again, it was put down as the ancient devil I had come to know all too very well. Not a quarter goes by without some kind of public attack—with physical threats to my person and implied harm. Each time, I check to see if the frequency of fear is to be found inside myself. This ancient evil, I am happy to report, is non-existent as a threat to my internal self awareness and strength. Several years ago, I began to test if even a miter of fear was still present on any kind of subjective, subconscious level by checking my pulse in dire circumstances and when under physical attack, especially when it related to a group of thugs intent of erasing my existence, as happened twice last year. My pulse rate remained low and steady. These are just the physical fears, usually ascribed to our more animal self, our physical bodies: fight or flight, if you will. There are other fears. Emotional and mental fears, which are far more devious to detect and defeat, given that fact that so very much of our identity is wrapped up in fearful self-perceptions and programming by our experiences and educational foundations inherent in the life we have lived, each to his or her own.
I illustrate the above points for two reasons. That like many of you, I’ve faced my fears and beat them…so far. And that, in order to write the following article, there is a certain frame of reference that this author has and in some small way, capable of speaking about with a degree of firsthand experience. This means that if someone as such as I can do it, anyone can. But before we get into the victory side of the equation, let’s look at the causations of fear and how it does what it does and why.
More than any one physical, emotional, and mental state in humanity, fear is by and large the most powerful contributor to action states, in both behavioral and sociological terms of understanding. You’ll be hard-pressed to find this information in psychological books or journals. If anyone is more locked into fear paradigms, it’s the head-shrinkers to have turned so many people of higher potential in mental wrecks. It’s why they have the highest suicide rate of any profession. Their fear and low self-esteem is of the worst kind.
So far, we’ve discussed physical fears, which each of us can relate to on some level. For all have undergone this experience. That car that zips just inches in front of you at an intersection in traffic and the amazingly fast working of fear and adrenaline rush that comes with that. That trepidation that is felt as we cross a steep gully on a log, with a sheer drop on either side that spells certain destruction (done that.) We all know about physical fears.
The reason we feel this fear and sense it as a consciousness quite outside ourselves at souls, is because it is outside ourselves. As we’ve learned from the photography I’ve been making public for some years now, everything in nature is alive, on an elemental level and in the various kingdoms. We see the faces in the water, the sky, the trees, in fire, and so on. We see and have come to understand that the whole of creation is a living, breathing reality with varying forms of consciousness animating each form of life and its myriad expressions.
Once we understand this fact of life, it then occurs to us that we ourselves are in fact, miniatures of the world in which we find ourselves. Our physical, emotional, and mental bodies are as well, inhabited by the very self-same elements which make up the world in which we live. It stands to reason then that these vehicles of expression—of which the soul finds itself able to function and express itself—are conscious on the same elemental level that the elements of our world are conscious. They have a life, purpose, reason for being, job to do, and will to live—just as they do in the ocean, lakes, rivers, sky, and in the fireplace.
They literally have an existence to be. And their to be, is to provide every plant, animal, and human with a functioning body in which the spirituous or soul, can live, move, and have its being. It then becomes a symbiotic relationship in which we need our bodies and they need our soul, for both to exist on the physical plane. Think long and hard about this last series of statements, coupled with the evidence this writer has given over in the previous years. Some lights will come on.
Very often, I will tell my sons, “listen to what your body is saying to you,” about this or that food or activity. Things that are destructive to the body will yield a negative reaction, whereas wholesome food and drink, and healthy activities will provide an affirming response. There is even a science in this regard known as muscle testing or Kinesiology. This is proof that the body is quite capable of communicating its likes and dislikes, as regards what it knows is best for its survival. That implies what exactly is so as fact: the body is conscious, even if we are unaware of the facts in the case consciously; the body knows when a poison is being handed to it or when something healthy is being provided. And this goes way beyond food. The body, via even the rudimentary level of kinesiology, will communicate its needs, warnings, and other realities as it applies to clothing, housing, items of use, even sound and color.
The body is conscious, beyond chemical/electrical connections via the pathways of the nervous system and brain. How else to explain its ability to sense poisons from non-poisons, even when the items to be tested are in sealed, unmarked containers?
This is so because this elemental consciousness is a living, lower order class of being. For the physical plane, its perceptions and functions are at once clear and decipherable, even if the host inhabitant (human soul) is wholly unaware and disconnected with this consciousness. Because animals function less as individualized souls and more instinctual, they are therefore more in tune with their body’s elemental. This explains why ants will avoid aspartame and other poisons, which human beings seem quite eager to consume, much to their detriment. The animal kingdom is more closely linked to the physical elemental than humanity is; except in advanced cases where the soul of the man, woman, or child has purposely made the connection, yet while retaining command and control.
Most of humanity is a slave to its elementals when said consciousness uses fear to express itself. Because the elemental has total control over the body, it is able to secret various enzymes from various glands, which enable it to achieve its necessary aims. Fear is its main control feature, forcing the human soul within to obey.
Given the above, it would seem that obeying these fear frequencies are not only sensible, but a good idea, given the elemental’s connection to the corporeal reality. In our younger stages, especially when we are dependent upon parents for food, shelter, and clothing, this elemental feature is a kind of safety device which protects the child from basic dangers: the rabid dog, the black widow, strangers with mal-intent, and so on.
However, in order to grow beyond fear, we must become a master of it, so that we can then find freedom. And the first fears to be mastered are the physical fears. It is there that we set the tone of our future victories in the emotional and mental realities, of which the true slaveries on this planet threaten our very existence by the master controllers who have used fear for thousands of years to keep this planet in bondage.
To attain this mastery we simply must listen to any inspiring suggestions which encourage us to face our fears. We can discern this by the overwhelming sense of calm, peace, balance, and helpful nod that things will be okay. This is our divine connection within ourselves which is inspiring us to step up to the plate and become more than what we were before. This kind of loving encouragement is telling us that we are ready and able to make a new grade of being, to be more in mastery of our bodies than we previously thought possible.
Happily, this kind of divine guidance will often work as the elemental does, in warning us dangers, but without the adrenaline rush and mind-crushing communication that comes with fear. We still get the protection we used to get from the elemental, but we retain our balance, composure, clarity of thought, and most importantly, because we are mastering our fears, we get something extra: the ability to see the situation as it really is.
As many already know, the moment we choose to make these first steps in overcoming our fears, we find that we then have new-found levels of courage, conviction, and an increasing aspiration to overcome life’s obstacles on more than just what comes at us as physical events. We grow a spine, a backbone, and are eager to do and be more. We get inklings that we’ve only just begun, too. That there are other fears to be known and defeated; emotional fears and fears of the mind, by far the hardest to detect, and yet the easiest to defeat, once discerned.
We also begin to feel as though we are finally living. And that the old “us”—all full of fear and indecision—was a life lived in a kind of prison. A prison without walls, except in our own minds. We see how many times fear kept us from speaking, doing, and being. How many times we could have been, but our fears kept us back.
These are the moments in which the fears of feeling and of mind begin to make themselves visible. We finally begin to see that the real us—the aware and loving soul within the bodies—has been kept back, slowed, delayed, and hindered every step of the way by fears implanted in us by the culture, education, and rulers of our time. As we look back in history, we see that every slavery was sold to us, using mental, emotional, and physical fears as the means to deploy said slaveries upon the planet. We see its deployment in banking, wars, race relations, family relations, and in every aspect of our life, bar none.
Then the lights really start to come on, bit by bit. Then we start asking the big questions: Who is selling this fear and why?
At that moment, we start beginning to see the world as it really is. Fear is sold constantly as a means in which one party seeks to influence and control the behavior of another party. I have these scams laid on me all the time, with zero effect. They are visible to me, though it disappoints and even surprises that they are still used as weapons against me. If it didn’t work the first 200 times, what makes them think it will work now? Still, they try. If anything can be said of the dark side, they are a persistent lot.
Once we see the reality of fear paradigms within ourselves as control features, then we can see them in the world. But to have true victory, we must make real effort to understand how our minds work. We must understand how worry, fear, trepidation, and other aspects are all just varying magnitudes of fear. We can do this by observing how we function as souls using a mind, just as we observe and understand our bodies. We need to see that we are above these vehicles, yet they are extensions of our soul in expression. Once we clearly see that this is so, we can then proceed to work on seeing how fear keeps us mentally, emotionally, and physically in a kind of perpetual bondage that must end.
As long as we are subject and controlled by any and all kinds of fear, we are slaves. Regardless of how much power, money, and prestige we may believe we have, as souls, we are barely much better than animals. This may seem a slight towards those still in bondage, but rest assured that it merely means that animals as we know, are domesticated and trained to be whatever their trainers want them to be, whether it’s a puppy dog, cat, tiger, or horse. And that exactly describes the world today, as in times past.
We see it all around us, in television, articles, and movies and so on.
Last week, I was at the beach surfing and it being a weekday, there were only a few people there, and I knew them as fellow surfers. We surf together when we happen to be at the same break. Lo and behold, as I was standing on the road over-looking the beach, a channel 3 film-crew pulls up and wants to interview me and Sue, who was there with her husband, Randy. Boy oh boy, talk about selling the fear. It seems there was a double homicide on the beach at a house a bit up the way two nights before and she wanted us to say on camera how afraid we were about being around with a murderer loose! Really!
Her fist question was “Aren’t you afraid of being out here with a killer on the loose?”
NO.
She was clearly disappointed. She asked Sue the same question.
NO.
The newscaster was again disappointed, and showed it. She wanted a fear reaction, but Sue and I wouldn’t give her one. We both could see that she wanted to sell fear and refused to be party to selling that evil on the six-o’clock news. I made sure she could see I was saddened to see that she had chosen a profession where her goal of the day was to sell fear to the masses. I am sure our interviews never made it on the air. Other film crews showed up, but we avoided them by hitting the waves. They all wanted the same thing: to shove fear down the public’s throat. This is what their producers told them to go out and get.
Now, who are these people that tell newscasters to seek out citizens and get them to blather on about how all afraid they are? They have names. They have motives. They have lots of money. They have a kind of power. And it’s a power based on the energy of fear as a control weapon.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Minerals
- Tim O'Shea
Minerals is one confusing topic. Inorganic, organic, chelated, elemental, ionic, colloidal, essential, trace - all these claims! What do we really need? Credentials in nutrition apparently mean very little when it comes to minerals. Much of what is written about minerals is speculative, market-oriented, or dead wrong.
A net search on minerals is an overwhelming assault on one's patience, time and credulity. How could all this stuff be right?
Minerals come from mines. Except when you're talking about nutrition. Then they come from food. At least they used to. When we still had some viable topsoil.
Four elements compose 96% of the body's makeup:
*carbon*hydrogen*oxygen*nitrogen
The remaining 4% of the body's composition is mineral.
WHY TAKE MINERALS?
The average lifespan of an American is about 77 years. No one has ever proven that taking mineral supplements will extend life. Many old people never took a mineral or a vitamin in their life. It really comes down to quality of life. How many of the last years were spent in illness? Mineral content factors largely in the quality of our solutes: the blood - the milieu interior, the biological terrain. That determines overall health.
The U.S. has the highest incidence of degenerative diseases of any developed country on earth. In addition, infectious diseases are coming back; antibiotics are getting less effective every year. Americans' confidence in prescription drugs is weakening. Cancer and AIDS will never be cured by the discovery of some new drug. There will never be another Alexander Fleming; turns out penicillin was just a brief detour anyway. Bacteria have had 50 billion years to figure out how to adapt. The only way that anyone recovers from any illness is when the immune system overcomes the problem. Allergy shots never cured an allergy; people who take allergy shots always have allergies.
Our only hope of better health is to do everything possible to build up our natural immune system. One of these preventative measures is nutritional supplementation. It may not be dramatic, but daily deposits to the immune system bank account will pay off down the road. Healthy people don't get sick.
There are six nutrient groups:
*Water*Vitamins*Minerals*Fats*Protein*Carbohydrate
All groups are necessary for complete cell function.
The following table shows the 21 minerals that have been shown to have nutritive value for humans.
Macro means more than 100mg per day.
Trace usually means either the requirements are measured in micrograms or that the amount required has never been measured.
Essential means the body can’t manufacture it: we must get it from the diet.
Essential Minerals
.....MACROMINERALS........
*Calcium*Chlorine*Sodium*Potassium*Phosphorus*Magnesium*Sulfur........TRACE MINERALS . . . . . . .
*Chromium*Tin*Zinc*Vanadium*Copper*Silicon*Manganese*Nickel*Iron*Molybdenum*Fluorine*Iodine*Cobalt*Selenium- U.S. Dept. of AgricultureNational Research Council
Deficiency amounts have never been determined for many trace minerals, although several diseases have been linked with deficiencies of certain ones.
Beyond this, the marketplace takes over and science bows out. People are out there talking about 88-mineral toddies, minerals from ancient lakes, longevity of 150 years, calcium from pasteurized milk, calcium from coral reefs, mineral doses measured in grams, salubrious doses of silver, "normal" doses of lead, eye of newt, etc., making claims about this or that combination, trumpeting anecdotal cures for everything from cancer to hangnails.
The purpose of this chapter will be to try to sift through the debris and leave behind only the information which can be verified.
HISTORY OF MINERALS
The necessity for minerals is a recent historical discovery, only about 150 years old. In the 1850s, Pasteur's contemporary, Claude Bernard, learned about iron. Copper came about 10 years later, and zinc about the turn of the century.
With the discovery of Vitamin A in 1912, minerals were downplayed for about 50 years in favor of vitamin research. By 1950, after about 14 vitamins had been discovered, attention returned once more to minerals when it was shown that they were necessary co-factors in order for vitamins to operate. Minerals are co-factors for most biological reactions. Soon the individual functions of minerals in the body were demonstrated:
*Structural: bones, teeth, ligaments*Solutes and electrolytes in the blood*Enzyme actions*Energy production from food breakdown*Nerve transmission*Muscle action
For several years now, even mainstream medicine has acknowledged the incontrovertible importance of mineral supplementation. An example: In an article appearing in JAMA, the top American medical journal, 24 Dec 1996, a controlled study of selenium use for cancer patients was written up. [24] Selenium as you remember, effects powerful antioxidant activity, neutralizing free radicals, which are rampant in the presence of cancer. In this study, 1312 subjects were divided into groups. Some were given selenium; others the placebo.
There was a decrease of 63% with prostate cancer, and 46% with lung cancer in the selenium group. The results were so blatant that the designers actually terminated the study early so that everyone could begin to benefit from selenium.
This is just one example of the research that is currently being done on mineral supplementation. The problem is, if the results of studies economically threaten a current drug protocol, like chemotherapy, it is unlikely that an inexpensive natural supplement like selenium would be promoted by oncologists as a replacement any time soon.
TABLE OF MINERAL FUNCTION
Calcium
*Muscle contraction*Bone building
Sodium
*Cell life*Waste removal*Potassium*Nerve transmission*Cell life*Normal blood pressure*Muscle contraction
Phosphorus
*Bone formation*Cell energy*Magnesium*Muscle contraction*Nerve transmission*Calcium metabolism*Enzyme cofactor*Chlorine*Digestion*Normal blood pressure
Sulfur
*Protein synthesis*Collagen cross-linking, bone and ligament structure
Copper
*Immune system*Artery strength*Forms hemoglobin from iron
Chromium
*Insulin action*Immune function
Iron
*Hemoglobin formation*Immune function
Zinc
*antioxidant production*cofactor for over 80 enzymes*wound healing*fat metabolism*myelin*insulin function*tissue repair*skin health
Selenium*Immune stimulant*Fight free radicals*Activates Vit E
Nickel*Immune regulation*Brain development*DNA synthesis
Iodine
*Thyroid function
Vanadium*Circulation*Sugar metabolism
Molybdenum
*Enzyme action
Silicon*Enzyme action*Connective tissue
Tin
*Enzyme action
Manganese
*Enzyme action
FluorineT*Teeth enamel
- Larry Berger, PhD and Parris Kidd, PhD [21](Erasmus p 172) [30]
Mineral deficiency means that some of these jobs will not get done. The body is capable of prodigious degrees of adaptation, and can operate for long periods of time with deficiencies of many of the above. But someday those checks will have to be cashed. When that happens: premature aging. Cell breakdown.
Without minerals, vitamins have little or no effect. Minerals are co-factors - triggers for thousands of essential enzyme reactions in the body. No trigger - no reaction. Without enzyme reactions, caloric intake is meaningless, and the same for protein, fat, and carbohydrate intake. Minerals trigger the vitamins and enzymes to act; the 3 legs of a stool.
DEFICIENCY
Mineral deficiency is not really a subject of controversy today. Soil depletion has been well documented since the US Senate made their study back in 1936. Their conclusion was that:
"...most of us are suffering from certain diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until deplete soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance."
"The alarming fact is that food...now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough...minerals are starving us, no matter how much of them we eat."
"Lacking vitamins, the system can make use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless." Senate Document 264 74th Congress, 1936 [25]
The same document went on to quantify the extent of mineral deficiency:
"99% of the American people are deficient in minerals, and a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease."
Congressional documents are generally not highly regarded as scientific sources, and other reference texts cite other percentages. The figures quoted by Albion Laboratories, the world leader in patents on supplemental minerals, are somewhat lower, and more credible, and agree with Udo Erasmus, another expert in the field:
DEFICIENCIES - % of U.S. Population
*Magnesium - 75%*Iron - 58%*Copper - 81%*Manganese - 50%*Chromium - 90%*Zinc - 67%*Selenium - 60%
sources: Albion Labs, Fats That Heal [30]
FIVE REASONS FOR MINERAL DEFICIENCY:
1. SOIL DEPLETION
Different studies will show different figures, of course, but there is certainly no lack of evidence for mass deficiencies of mineral intake. The most obvious of these is soil depletion and demineralization.
In 1900, forests covered 40% of the earth. Today, the figure is about 27%. (Relating Land Use and Global Land Cover, Turner, 1992 [5]). Aside from hacking down rainforests in order to raise beef cattle or soy or to build condos, one of the main reasons for the dying forests is mineral depletion.
According to a paper read at the 1994 meeting of the International Society for Systems Sciences, this century is the first time ever that "mineral content available to forest and agricultural root systems is down 25%-40%." Less forests means less topsoil. In the past 200 years, the U.S. has lost as much as 75% of its topsoil, according to John Robbins in his Pulitzer-nominated work Diet for a New America [4]. To replace one inch of topsoil may take anywhere from 200-1000 years, depending on climate. (Utah Teachers Resource Books) [3]
Demineralization of topsoil translates to loss of productive capacity. Contributing further to this trend is the growing of produce that is harvested and shipped far away.
The standard NPK (nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium) fertilizer farmers commonly use is able to restore the soil enough to grow fruits and vegetables which are healthy looking, but may be entirely lacking in trace minerals. The inventor of the entire NPK philosophy, Baron von Leibig, recanted his own theories before he died when he saw the deficiencies his methods were fostering as they became the agricultural standard in both Europe and America. [29]
Mineral depletion in topsoil is hardly a controversial issue. The question is not if, but how much. Plants are the primary agents of mineral incorporation into the biosphere. The implication for our position on the food chain is simply: lowered mineral content in produce grown in U.S. topsoil.
You won't find any source that insists that the mineral content of American topsoil is as good today as it was 50 years ago. Generally, studies talk in terms of how much, if any, minerals are still present.
2. DIET
The second contributor to mineral deficiency within the population is obviously, diet. Even if our produce did contain abundant minerals, less than 4% of the population eats sufficient fruits and vegetables to account for minimal RDAs. To compound matters, mass amounts of processed food, excess protein, and refined sugars require most of our mineral stores in order to digest it and remove it. The removal process involves enzymes, which break things down. Enzyme activity, remember, is completely dependent on minerals like zinc and copper and chromium. No minerals - no enzyme action.
In addition, pasteurized dairy products, alcohol, and drugs inhibit the absorption of these minerals, further depleting reserves. So it is cyclical: refined foods inhibit mineral absorption, which then are not themselves efficiently digested because of diminished enzyme activity. And then we go looking for bugs as the cause of disease?
3. MUCOID PLAQUE
In the chapter on the COLON we saw how the standard indigestible American diet packs layer upon layer of plaque onto the inner lining of the colon. One of the prime functions of the colon is to resorb water, in order to prevent dehydration. Plaque prevents such a reclamation, and the result is that we lose both water and minerals that normally should be reabsorbed.
4. COMPETITION
The fourth reason for inadequate minerals in the body is a phenomenon known as secondary deficiency. It has been proven that an excess of one mineral may directly cause a deficiency of another, because minerals compete for absorption, compete for the same binding sites, like a molecular Musical Chairs. Secondary deficiency means that an excess of one mineral causes a deficiency of another. (Kidd)
For example, iron, copper, and zinc are competitive in this way. Copper is necessary for the conversion of iron to hemoglobin, but if there is excess zinc, less iron will be available for conversion, because zinc is competing. This may result in a secondary deficiency of iron, which can manifest itself as iron deficiency anemia. All due simply to excess zinc. Researchers have found that these secondary deficiencies caused by excess of one mineral are almost always due to overdosing on mineral supplements, since the quantities contained in food are so small.
A few other competitions:
*aluminum competes with silicon*cadmium competes with zinc*tellurium competes with selenium" - Kidd, p42
Think about this the next time some genius tries to tell you that your particular health problem can be remedied with daily mega-doses of calcium, iron, zinc, silver, or stainless steel, which he just by coincidence happens to have on hand....
Human mineral requirements are very small, but specific.
5. DRUGS
A fourth reason for mineral deficiency in humans is overuse of prescription drugs. It has been known since the 1950s that antibiotics interfere with uptake of minerals, specifically zinc, chromium, and calcium. (The Plague Makers [32])
Tylenol, Advil, Motrin, and aspirin have the same inhibitive effect on mineral absorption. Moreover, when the body has to try and metabolize these drugs to clear the system, its own mineral stores are heavily drawn upon.
Such a waste of energy is used to metabolize laxatives, diuretics, chemotherapy drugs, and NSAIDs out of the body. This is one of the most basic mechanisms in drug-induced immunosuppression: minerals are essential for normal immune function.
BIOAVAILABILITY
Ultimately, the only issue that really counts with minerals is bioavailability. Really doesn't matter what we eat; it only matters what makes it to the body's cells.
Let's say someone is iron deficient, for example. Can't he just take a bar of iron and file off some iron filings into a teaspoon, and swallow them? Just took in more iron, didn't he? Well, yes but here is a major distinction: the difference between elemental minerals and nutrient minerals. Iron filings are in the elemental form; absorption will be 8% or less. [Ashmead]
Another word for elemental is inorganic.
Same with most store-bought multi supplements.
Food-bound iron, on the other hand, like that contained in raisins or molasses, will have a much higher rate of absorption, since it is complexed with other living, organic forms, and as such is classed as a nutrient mineral.
Minerals are not living, though they are necessary for life. Minerals are necessary for cell life and enzyme reactions and hundreds of other reasons. But they must be in a form that can make it as far as the cells. What is not bioavailable passes right through the body, a waste of time and money.
Bioavailability has a precursor, an opening act. It is called absorption. Take a mineral supplement pill. Put it in a glass of water and wait half an hour. If it is unchanged, chances are that the tablet itself would never even dissolve in the stomach or intestine, but pass right out of the body. You would be astounded how many mineral supplements there are in this category.
OK, let's say the tablet or capsule actually does dissolve in the digestive tract. Then what? In order to do us any good, the mineral must be absorbed into the bloodstream, through the intestinal walls. Elemental (inorganic) minerals are absorbed about 1-8% in this manner. The rest is excreted.
Elemental minerals are those found in the majority of supplements, because they're very cheap to produce. For the small percentage that actually makes it to the bloodstream, the mineral is available for use by the cells, or as a cofactor in thousands of essential enzyme reactions that keep every cell alive every second. Use at the cellular level is what bioavailability is all about.
With this background in mind we can begin to understand that varying amounts of the seven macrominerals and approximately 14 trace minerals, in a bioavailable form are necessary for optimum cell activity, optimum health and would seem to contribute to longevity. So besides epidemic mineral deficiency, what's the problem?
In a word,
SUPPLEMENTATION
Mineral deficiency has become such an obvious health concern, causing specific diseases because of a lack of a single mineral, and general immune suppression with a lack of several, that the obvious need for supplementation has spawned an entire industry to the rescue. But in any market-driven industry involving pills, we sometimes find the cures are worse than the original problems. Why?
First off, toxicity. Remember, even macrominerals are only necessary in tiny amounts. Most trace minerals are necessary in amounts too small to be measured, and can only be estimated. Toxicity is a word that simply means excess. When extra stuff gets put into the body, it's a big deal. All forces are mobilized for removal of the extra stuff - the antigens, toxins, poisons, reactants, etc.
Toxicity results from taking a nonessential non-nutrient mineral into the body.
Take lead poisoning, for example. If lead gets into the blood, the body will try to remove it. Since the metal atoms are so heavy compared with the body's immune forces, removal may be impossible. Lead can initiate a chronic inflammatory response and can remain in the body permanently, which is why we don't have lead in paint or gasoline any more.
Most minerals can be toxic if taken to excess. And this excess would not happen from food; only from supplements or the environment.
Again, remember this the next time somebody tries to rope you into taking 3000 mg of calcium per day, or huge amounts of any mineral. Anytime you hear this song and dance, guaranteed the next step will be about marketing.
SO, WHAT SUPPLEMENTS WOULD BE INFERIOR?
Well, for starters, any supplement containing more than about 21 minerals, because that's all that have been proven to be necessary for humans. New toxicities are always being discovered. Aluminum linked to Alzheimer's is a recent discovery. Beyond these 21 or so it's simply anybody's guess, no matter what they tell you about the 5 civilizations where people live to be 140 years old.
People who show dramatic improvements from taking these 60 and 80-mineral drinks generally were so depleted that they rapidly absorbed the essential minerals in which they were deficient. But the toxicities from the nonessential, unknown minerals may take a long time to show up. Why take in anything extra?
Here's an example of an ingredient list from one of these mega-mineral drinks: Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, Vanadium, Manganese, Potassium, Selenium, Chromium, Phosphate, Iron, Sulfur, Carbon, Sodium, Barium, Strontium, Cesium, Thorium, Molybdenum, Nickel, Cerium, Germanium, Copper, Rubidium, Antimony, Gallium, Neodymium, Lanthanum, Bismuth, Zirconium, Thallium, Tungsten, Ruthenium, Boron, Iodine, Chloride, Bromine, Titanium, Cobalt, Dysprosium, Scandium, Samarium, Fluoride, Niobium, Praseodymium, Erbium, Hafnium, Lithium, Ytterbium, Yttrium, Cadmium, Holmium, Rhenium, Palladium, Gold, Thulium, Terbium, Iridium, Tantalum, Europium, Lutetium, Rhodium, Tin, Indium, Silver, Beryllium, Tellurium, and Platinum.
Any questions?
Amidst all the confusion about minerals, one thing should be made clear: we only need a little. So the mineral supplements we take should be as absorbable and as bioavailable as possible. That way we won't have to take much. Less chance of toxicity.
So the question then becomes: which mineral supplements are the most absorbable and the most usable, and therefore effective in the smallest amounts possible? Four candidates present themselves, all contending for the title:
*Elemental*Ionic*Colloidal*Chelated
Unraveling this puzzle is one area where blindly surfing the internet very likely impedes progress. Try it and you'll see why.
There's only one answer, but it's buried deep. To find it, we have to review a little
BASIC PLUMBING
The digestive tract goes like this: mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and out. Mineral absorption means transferring the mineral from the digestive tract through the wall of the intestine, into the bloodstream.
You really have to picture this: the digestive tract is just a long tube, from one end to the other. As long as food and nutrients are inside this tube, they are actually considered to be still outside the body, because they haven't been absorbed into the bloodstream yet. This is an essential concept to understanding mineral absorption.
Minerals can't do any good unless they make it into the bloodstream. This is exactly why most minerals bought at the grocery store are almost worthless: they pass right through the body - in one end and out the other. It's also why most nutritionists' and dieticians' advice is valueless; they commonly pretend everything that is eaten is absorbed.
Two main reasons for lack of absorption:
- the pill never dissolved - the mineral was in its elemental form (non-nutrient, e.g., iron filings)
Let's say these problems are overcome; neither is true. Or let's say the mineral is contained within some food, such as iron in molasses, or potassium in bananas. Food-bound minerals are attached or complexed to organic molecules. Absorption into the blood is vastly increased, made easy. The mineral is not just a foreign metal that has been ingested; it is part of food.
Fruits and vegetables with high mineral content are a very good way to provide the body with adequate nutrition. Food-bound minerals were the original mode. As we saw above, however, sufficient mineral content is an increasingly rare occurrence. Foods simply don't have it. How little, what portion of normal depends on what studies one finds. Soon the necessity for supplementation becomes obvious: if the food no longer has it, and we need it, pass the supplements, please. At that point, the marketplace assaults one's awareness and we're back to the days of the tonics, brews, toddies, powders and potions of yesteryear.
THE FOUR TYPES OF MINERAL SUPPLEMENTS
1. ELEMENTAL
Least beneficial are the supplements containing minerals in the elemental form. That means the mineral is just mentioned on the label. It's not ionized, it's not chelated, it's not complexed with an oxide or a carbonate or a sulfate, or with a food, and it's not colloidal. It may not even be there at all. Like under "ingredients" it just says "iron" or "copper," or "calcium," etc.
Elemental minerals are obviously the cheapest to make. A liquid would only have to be poured over some nails to be said to contain iron. Elemental minerals are the most common in grocery store supplements. Most of these multi's are actually manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry, either directly or indirectly. Run it down.
They may not be toxic, as long as only the minerals mentioned on the label are included in the supplement. The problem is absorption: it's between 1 and 8 percent. The rest passes right through. Not only a waste of money; also a waste of energy: it has to be processed out of the body.
2. IONIC
Next comes ionic minerals. Usually a step up. Ionic means in the form of ions. Ions are unstable molecules that want to bind with other molecules. An ion is an incomplete molecule.
There is a definite pathway for the absorption of ionic minerals through the gut (intestine) into the blood. In fact, any percent of the elemental minerals that actually got absorbed became ions first, by being dissolved in stomach acids.
Ionic minerals are not absorbed through the intestine intact.
The model for mineral ion absorption through the intestine is as follows. Ions are absorbed through the gut by a complicated process involving becoming attached or chelated to some special carrier proteins in the intestinal wall. Active transport is involved; meaning, energy is required to bring the ionic mineral from inside the intestine through the lining, to be deposited in the bloodstream on the other side. [7]
Ionic minerals may be a good source of nutrients for the body, depending upon the type of ions, and on how difficult it is for the ion to get free at the appropriate moment and location. Minerals require an acidic environment for absorption. Remember low pH (less than 7) is acidic; high pH (above 7) is alkaline. As the stomach contents at pH 2 empty into the small intestine, the first few centimeters of the small intestine is the optimum location for mineral absorption. The acidic state is necessary for ionization of the dissolved minerals.
If the pH is too alkaline, the ions won't disassociate from whatever they're complexed with, and will simply pass on through to the colon without being absorbed.
As the mineral ions are presented to the lining of the intestine, if all conditions are right, and there are not too much of competing minerals present, the ions will begin to be taken across the intestinal barrier, making their way into the bloodstream. This is a complicated, multi-step process, beyond the scope of this chapter. Simply, it involves the attachment of the free mineral ion to some carrier proteins within the intestinal membrane, which drag the ion across and free it into the bloodstream. A lot happens during the transfer, and much energy is required for all the steps. Just the right conditions and timing are necessary: proper pH, presence of vitamins for some, and the right section of the small intestine. [7]
Ionic mineral supplements do not guarantee absorption by their very nature, although they are certainly more likely to be absorbed than are minerals in the raw, elemental state. However, ionic minerals are in the form required for uptake by the carrier proteins that reside in the intestinal wall.
The uncertainties with ionic minerals include how many, how much, and what else are the unstable ions likely to become bound to before the carrier proteins pick them up. All ionic supplements are not created equal. Just because it's an ion doesn't mean a supplemental mineral will be absorbed. Too many minerals in a supplement will compete for absorption. Too much of one mineral will crowd out the others. The idea is to offer the body an opportunity for balance; rather than to overload it with the hope that some will make it through somehow. All we need is a little.
Ionic minerals are the second lowest form of supplementation.
3. COLLOIDAL
Speaking of overloading, the third type of supplemental minerals is called colloidal. What does colloidal really mean? Colloidal refers to a solution, a dispersion medium in which mineral particles are so well suspended that they never settle out: you never have to shake the bottle.
The other part of the dictionary definition has to do with diffusion through a membrane: "will not diffuse easily through vegetable or animal membrane." Yet this is supposed to be the whole rationale for taking colloidal minerals - their absorbability. Colloidal guru Joel Wallach himself continuously claimed that it is precisely the colloidal form of the minerals that allows for easy diffusion and absorption across the intestinal membrane, because the particles are so small. Wallach claims 98% absorption, but cites no studies, experiments, journal articles or research of any kind to back up this figure. Why not? Because there aren't any. The research on colloidal minerals has never been done. It's not out there. Senate Document 264 doesn't really cover it. Nor did Wild Kingdom.
In reality, colloidal minerals are actually larger than ionic minerals, as discussed by researcher Max Motyka, MS. [22] Because of the molecular size and suspension in the colloid medium, which Dorland's Medical dictionary describes as "like glue," absorption is inhibited, not enhanced. No less an authority than Dr. Royal Lee the man responsible for pointing out the distinction between whole food vitamins and synthetic vitamins, stated:
"A colloidal mineral is one that has been so altered that it will no longer pass through cell walls or other organic membranes." [2]
Does that sound like easy absorption?
Stedman's Medical Dictionary talks about colloids "resisting sedimentation, diffusion, and filtration " Again, resisting diffusion seems to indicate inhibition of absorption, not increased absorption, wouldn't you say?
As Alexander Schauss and Parris Kidd both explain, colloids are suspensions of minerals in clay and water. [18] Clay often has levels of aluminum as high as 3000 parts per million, with safety levels set at 10 ppm or lower ([21] Kidd). Aluminum has been proven to kill nerve cells, which we now see in Alzheimer's.
Dr. Schauss characterizes the aluminum content as the big problem with colloidal minerals. He cites a standard geology reference text - Dana's Manual of Mineralogy - describing clay as primarily aluminum:
"Clay minerals are essentially hydrous aluminum silicates." - Dana's Manual, p436 [19]
Schauss finds references as high as 4400 PPM of aluminum in colloidal clay. Schauss states that he has done an exhaustive search for any human studies using colloidal minerals and after searching 2000 journals, like everyone else, has come up with zero.
For a mineral to be well absorbed, it must be either in the ionic state, or else chelated, as explained above. The percentage of colloidal minerals which actually does get absorbed has to have been ionized somehow, due to the acidic conditions in the small intestine. Only then is the mineral capable of being taken up by the carrier proteins in the intestinal membrane, as mentioned above. But why create the extra step? Ionic minerals would be superior to colloidal, because they don't have to be dissociated from a suspension medium, which is by definition non-diffusible.
QUALITY CONTROL
Consistency of percentages of each mineral from batch to batch. Very simply, there isn't any with the mega mineral supplements, as the manufacturers will themselves admit. The ancient lakes and glaciers apparently have not been very accommodating when it comes to percent composition. Such a range of variation might be acceptable in, say, grenade tossing or IQ threshold of lawyers, or other areas where high standards of precision are not crucial. But a nutritional supplement that is supposed to enhance health by drinking it? This is an area in which the details of composition should be fairly visible, verifiable, the same every time. In these 80-trace-mineral toddies, there is no way of testing the presence or absence of many of the individual minerals. Many established essential trace minerals do not even have an agreed-upon recommended daily allowance, for two reasons:
- the research has never been done - the amounts are too small to be measured.
TOXICITY AND COMPETITION
Some essential minerals are toxic in excess, but essential in small amounts. Iron, chlorine, sodium, zinc, and copper are in this category. Toxic levels have been established, and resulting pathologies have been identified: we know what diseases are caused by their excesses. How risky is it to take in 40 or 50 minerals for which no toxicity levels have ever been set?
The problem is selective utilization, as explained by Dr. Parris Kidd. [21] Toxic trace minerals may closely resemble the essential minerals in atomic configuration. The result is competition for enzyme sites by two similar minerals only one of which is beneficial:
A separate hoax is being played out with
COLLOIDAL SILVER
hawked by many as a "natural antibiotic." Extremely uninformed physicians recommend daily doses of colloidal silver, in order to "prevent" colds, in the absence of any studies or trials whatsoever. As Dr. Kidd points out:
"...the body is not well-equipped to handle silver. This element can poison the kidneys, become deposited in the brain, and even give to the skin a gunmetal type of gloss." [21]
Silver:
questionable as a single-dose antibiotic, consistent intake of silver accumulates in the blood-forming organs - spleen, liver, and bone marrow, as well as the skin, lungs, and muscles. Serious pathologies have resulted: blood disorders, cirrhosis, pulmonary edema, chronic bronchitis, and a permanent skin condition known as argyria, to name just a few. Silver is better left in the ancient lakes, and in tableware.
A few other minerals you definitely want to avoid, especially in supplements you are taking for health reasons:
Aluminum:
Documented since the article in Lancet 14 Jan 1989 to be associated with Alzheimer's Disease, as well as blocking absorption of essential minerals like calcium, iron, and fluoride.
Gold:
Manufacturers of mega-minerals hawk that "there's more gold in a ton of seawater than there is in a ton of ore." So what? Our blood is not seawater; it evolved from seawater. Gold used to be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, but has largely been abandoned when they proved that it caused kidney cell destruction, bone marrow suppression, and immune abnormalities.
Lithium:
Used as an antipsychotic medication, lithium definitely can cause blackouts, coma, psychosis, kidney damage, and seizures. Outside of that, it should be fine.
The list goes on and on. These are just a few examples of mineral toxicities about which we have some idea. But for at least half the minerals in the mega toddies, we know nothing at all.
4. CHELATED
Finally we get to the top shelf of mineral supplementation. The fourth form of supplemental minerals is the chelated variety. Some clarification of this term is immediately necessary. Chelated is a general term that describes a certain chemical configuration. When a mineral is bound or stuck to certain carrier molecules, which are known as chelators, or ligands, and a ring-like molecule is the result, we say that a chelate is formed. Chelate is from the Greek word for claw, suggested by the v-shape of the two ligands on each side, with the mineral ion in the center.
Chelation occurs in many situations. Many things can be chelated, including minerals, vitamins, and enzymes. Minerals in food may be bound with organic molecules in a chelated state. Many molecules in the body are chelated in normal metabolic processes. The carrier proteins in the intestinal wall discussed above, whose job it is to transport ionic minerals - these chelate the ions.
Another sense of the word chelation exemplified in a mainstream therapy for removing heavy metals from the blood is called chelation therapy. The toxic metals are bound to a therapeutic amino acid ligand called EDTA. With a Pac-Man action, the metals are thus removed from the blood. (See chapter on Oral Chelation)
Molecular weight is measured in units called daltons. The ligands or binding agents may be very small (800 daltons) or very large (500,000 daltons) resulting in many sizes of chelates. Mineral + ligand = chelate. Generally the largest chelates are the most stable, but also the most difficult to absorb.
Using the word chelated with respect to mineral supplements refers to a very specific type of chelation. The idea is to bind the mineral ion to ligands that will facilitate absorption of the mineral through the intestine into the bloodstream, bypassing the clumsy pathway used for ionic mineral absorption.
After decades of research at Albion Laboratories in Utah, it was learned that small amino acids, especially glycine, are the best ligands for chelating nutrient minerals, for three reasons:
- bypasses the entire process of chelation by the intestine's own carrier proteins - facilitates absorption by an entirely different pathway of intestinal absorption, skipping the intermediate steps which ionic minerals go through - the chelate will be the at the most absorbable molecular weight for intestinal transfer: less than 1500 daltons [9]
It has also been established beyond controversy that certain pairs of amino acids (dipeptides) are the easiest of all chelates to be absorbed, often easier than individual amino acids.
Proteins are made of amino acids. Normal digestion presumably breaks down the proteins to its amino acid building blocks so they can be absorbed. But total breakdown is not always necessary. It has long been known that many nutrient chains of two or three or even more amino acids may be absorbed just as easily as single amino acids. Food-bound copper, vitamin C with hemoglobin molecule, animal protein zinc, are some examples of amino acids chelates that are easily absorbed intact. (Intestinal Absorption of Metal Ions, see COLON chapter). [7]
To take another example, in abnormal digestion it is well known that chains of amino acids - dipeptides, tripeptides, even polypeptide proteins - sometimes become absorbed intact in a pathology known to gastroenterologists as Leaky Gut Syndrome. Obviously it is not healthy and has many adverse consequences, but the point is that amino acids chains are frequently absorbed, for many different reasons.
The reason these dipeptide chelates are absorbed faster than ionic minerals is that the chelated mineral was bonded tightly enough so that it did not dissociate in the acidic small intestine and offer itself for capture by the intestinal membrane's carrier proteins. That whole process was thus avoided. The chelate is absorbed intact. An easier form.
This is a vast oversimplification, and the most concise summary, of why chelated minerals are superior. Only a specific chelate can resist digestion and maintain its integrity as it is absorbed through the gut. Again, all chelates are not created equal. Inferior chelates, used because they are cheaper to produce, include the following:
- carbonates - citrates - oxides - sulfates - chlorides - phosphates
If the label gives one of these chelates, it means the mineral is bound either too strongly or not tightly enough, and will be released at the wrong time and the wrong place. Chelation of minerals in nutrient supplements is a very precise science, yielding chelates even superior to those occurring naturally in foods.
To compare chelated and ionic minerals, once the research is presented, there is really not much of a dispute about which is absorbed faster, ionic minerals or dipeptide-like amino acid chelates. Meticulous isotope testing has shown the following increases in percent absorption of chelates, as compared with ionic:
Iron 490% greater Copper 580% greater Magnesium 410% greater Calcium 421% greater Manganese 340% greater
- source: Journal of Applied Nutrition 22:42 1970 [31]
Again, this is just the briefest glance at the prodigious amount of research comparing ionic with chelated minerals, but the results are uniform. The winner of the bioavailability contest is: chelated minerals, provided the chelate was maintained as small as possible, generally using glycine as the amino acid ligands, at a total weight below 1500 daltons.
OUR OBJECTIVES
With respect to minerals, then, what are our goals? Having once apprehended the necessity for mineral supplementation, our objectives should be simple:
- Take only the minerals we absolutely need- Take the smallest amounts possible- Nothing left over (no metabolic residue)
THE NEW BOTTOM LINE - TOTAL COMPLETE CHELATED MINERALS
What mineral supplement should you buy? The reader now has enough background data to be somewhat discriminating. Obviously the chelated minerals should be the first choice.
For almost 15 years this website has recommended Infinity's Chelated Minerals formulated by the world leader in mineral supplementation - Albion Labs. This remains a fine product. Patients have been consistently happy with results; the minerals have been part of the 60 Day Program from its inception.
In early 2007 I took a careful look and noticed some room for an improved chelated mineral supplement. I wanted a product that would be the best daily mineral product that anyone could take, no matter what age or sex. And I also was going for a 3-capsule daily serving to contain one's complete mineral requirements without the need for any additional mega mineral supplementation, as long as the patient had an adequate diet.
I began collaborating with Albion to come up with a slightly better product. It took the better part of a year but the results have been rewarding. The product is called Total Complete Chelated Minerals and bears thedoctorwithin label.
Is it redundant to say Total Complete? Total is meant to signify that no other mineral supplementation would be necessary - no mega-dosing of single minerals. Complete means that all the essential mineral nutrients are covered, along with an adequate diet - like the New West Diet.
Here are some of the improvements of Total Complete:
We added more chromium, because of today's skyrocketing incidence of diabetes. (See sugar chapter)
We added more calcium to belay any worries about the need for extra calcium supplementation.
We added iodine for thyroid balance.
Potassium is now included for electrolyte balance.
If there is a better designed mineral supplement on the market, it is certainly well hidden. Total Complete simplifies the whole issue of mineral supplementation and reduces it down to 1 serving per day. Next problem.
Are minerals important? Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling thought so:
"You can trace every sickness, every disease, every ailment to mineral deficiency."
Using the image of Carrel's solutes in the petri dish as the analogue of blood in our bodies, adequate mineral content is undoubtedly a vital component for the body's constant effort to operate all its cells at optimum metabolic vibrancy and resilience.
Healthy people don't get sick. Ever.
Minerals is one confusing topic. Inorganic, organic, chelated, elemental, ionic, colloidal, essential, trace - all these claims! What do we really need? Credentials in nutrition apparently mean very little when it comes to minerals. Much of what is written about minerals is speculative, market-oriented, or dead wrong.
A net search on minerals is an overwhelming assault on one's patience, time and credulity. How could all this stuff be right?
Minerals come from mines. Except when you're talking about nutrition. Then they come from food. At least they used to. When we still had some viable topsoil.
Four elements compose 96% of the body's makeup:
*carbon*hydrogen*oxygen*nitrogen
The remaining 4% of the body's composition is mineral.
WHY TAKE MINERALS?
The average lifespan of an American is about 77 years. No one has ever proven that taking mineral supplements will extend life. Many old people never took a mineral or a vitamin in their life. It really comes down to quality of life. How many of the last years were spent in illness? Mineral content factors largely in the quality of our solutes: the blood - the milieu interior, the biological terrain. That determines overall health.
The U.S. has the highest incidence of degenerative diseases of any developed country on earth. In addition, infectious diseases are coming back; antibiotics are getting less effective every year. Americans' confidence in prescription drugs is weakening. Cancer and AIDS will never be cured by the discovery of some new drug. There will never be another Alexander Fleming; turns out penicillin was just a brief detour anyway. Bacteria have had 50 billion years to figure out how to adapt. The only way that anyone recovers from any illness is when the immune system overcomes the problem. Allergy shots never cured an allergy; people who take allergy shots always have allergies.
Our only hope of better health is to do everything possible to build up our natural immune system. One of these preventative measures is nutritional supplementation. It may not be dramatic, but daily deposits to the immune system bank account will pay off down the road. Healthy people don't get sick.
There are six nutrient groups:
*Water*Vitamins*Minerals*Fats*Protein*Carbohydrate
All groups are necessary for complete cell function.
The following table shows the 21 minerals that have been shown to have nutritive value for humans.
Macro means more than 100mg per day.
Trace usually means either the requirements are measured in micrograms or that the amount required has never been measured.
Essential means the body can’t manufacture it: we must get it from the diet.
Essential Minerals
.....MACROMINERALS........
*Calcium*Chlorine*Sodium*Potassium*Phosphorus*Magnesium*Sulfur........TRACE MINERALS . . . . . . .
*Chromium*Tin*Zinc*Vanadium*Copper*Silicon*Manganese*Nickel*Iron*Molybdenum*Fluorine*Iodine*Cobalt*Selenium- U.S. Dept. of AgricultureNational Research Council
Deficiency amounts have never been determined for many trace minerals, although several diseases have been linked with deficiencies of certain ones.
Beyond this, the marketplace takes over and science bows out. People are out there talking about 88-mineral toddies, minerals from ancient lakes, longevity of 150 years, calcium from pasteurized milk, calcium from coral reefs, mineral doses measured in grams, salubrious doses of silver, "normal" doses of lead, eye of newt, etc., making claims about this or that combination, trumpeting anecdotal cures for everything from cancer to hangnails.
The purpose of this chapter will be to try to sift through the debris and leave behind only the information which can be verified.
HISTORY OF MINERALS
The necessity for minerals is a recent historical discovery, only about 150 years old. In the 1850s, Pasteur's contemporary, Claude Bernard, learned about iron. Copper came about 10 years later, and zinc about the turn of the century.
With the discovery of Vitamin A in 1912, minerals were downplayed for about 50 years in favor of vitamin research. By 1950, after about 14 vitamins had been discovered, attention returned once more to minerals when it was shown that they were necessary co-factors in order for vitamins to operate. Minerals are co-factors for most biological reactions. Soon the individual functions of minerals in the body were demonstrated:
*Structural: bones, teeth, ligaments*Solutes and electrolytes in the blood*Enzyme actions*Energy production from food breakdown*Nerve transmission*Muscle action
For several years now, even mainstream medicine has acknowledged the incontrovertible importance of mineral supplementation. An example: In an article appearing in JAMA, the top American medical journal, 24 Dec 1996, a controlled study of selenium use for cancer patients was written up. [24] Selenium as you remember, effects powerful antioxidant activity, neutralizing free radicals, which are rampant in the presence of cancer. In this study, 1312 subjects were divided into groups. Some were given selenium; others the placebo.
There was a decrease of 63% with prostate cancer, and 46% with lung cancer in the selenium group. The results were so blatant that the designers actually terminated the study early so that everyone could begin to benefit from selenium.
This is just one example of the research that is currently being done on mineral supplementation. The problem is, if the results of studies economically threaten a current drug protocol, like chemotherapy, it is unlikely that an inexpensive natural supplement like selenium would be promoted by oncologists as a replacement any time soon.
TABLE OF MINERAL FUNCTION
Calcium
*Muscle contraction*Bone building
Sodium
*Cell life*Waste removal*Potassium*Nerve transmission*Cell life*Normal blood pressure*Muscle contraction
Phosphorus
*Bone formation*Cell energy*Magnesium*Muscle contraction*Nerve transmission*Calcium metabolism*Enzyme cofactor*Chlorine*Digestion*Normal blood pressure
Sulfur
*Protein synthesis*Collagen cross-linking, bone and ligament structure
Copper
*Immune system*Artery strength*Forms hemoglobin from iron
Chromium
*Insulin action*Immune function
Iron
*Hemoglobin formation*Immune function
Zinc
*antioxidant production*cofactor for over 80 enzymes*wound healing*fat metabolism*myelin*insulin function*tissue repair*skin health
Selenium*Immune stimulant*Fight free radicals*Activates Vit E
Nickel*Immune regulation*Brain development*DNA synthesis
Iodine
*Thyroid function
Vanadium*Circulation*Sugar metabolism
Molybdenum
*Enzyme action
Silicon*Enzyme action*Connective tissue
Tin
*Enzyme action
Manganese
*Enzyme action
FluorineT*Teeth enamel
- Larry Berger, PhD and Parris Kidd, PhD [21](Erasmus p 172) [30]
Mineral deficiency means that some of these jobs will not get done. The body is capable of prodigious degrees of adaptation, and can operate for long periods of time with deficiencies of many of the above. But someday those checks will have to be cashed. When that happens: premature aging. Cell breakdown.
Without minerals, vitamins have little or no effect. Minerals are co-factors - triggers for thousands of essential enzyme reactions in the body. No trigger - no reaction. Without enzyme reactions, caloric intake is meaningless, and the same for protein, fat, and carbohydrate intake. Minerals trigger the vitamins and enzymes to act; the 3 legs of a stool.
DEFICIENCY
Mineral deficiency is not really a subject of controversy today. Soil depletion has been well documented since the US Senate made their study back in 1936. Their conclusion was that:
"...most of us are suffering from certain diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until deplete soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance."
"The alarming fact is that food...now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough...minerals are starving us, no matter how much of them we eat."
"Lacking vitamins, the system can make use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless." Senate Document 264 74th Congress, 1936 [25]
The same document went on to quantify the extent of mineral deficiency:
"99% of the American people are deficient in minerals, and a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease."
Congressional documents are generally not highly regarded as scientific sources, and other reference texts cite other percentages. The figures quoted by Albion Laboratories, the world leader in patents on supplemental minerals, are somewhat lower, and more credible, and agree with Udo Erasmus, another expert in the field:
DEFICIENCIES - % of U.S. Population
*Magnesium - 75%*Iron - 58%*Copper - 81%*Manganese - 50%*Chromium - 90%*Zinc - 67%*Selenium - 60%
sources: Albion Labs, Fats That Heal [30]
FIVE REASONS FOR MINERAL DEFICIENCY:
1. SOIL DEPLETION
Different studies will show different figures, of course, but there is certainly no lack of evidence for mass deficiencies of mineral intake. The most obvious of these is soil depletion and demineralization.
In 1900, forests covered 40% of the earth. Today, the figure is about 27%. (Relating Land Use and Global Land Cover, Turner, 1992 [5]). Aside from hacking down rainforests in order to raise beef cattle or soy or to build condos, one of the main reasons for the dying forests is mineral depletion.
According to a paper read at the 1994 meeting of the International Society for Systems Sciences, this century is the first time ever that "mineral content available to forest and agricultural root systems is down 25%-40%." Less forests means less topsoil. In the past 200 years, the U.S. has lost as much as 75% of its topsoil, according to John Robbins in his Pulitzer-nominated work Diet for a New America [4]. To replace one inch of topsoil may take anywhere from 200-1000 years, depending on climate. (Utah Teachers Resource Books) [3]
Demineralization of topsoil translates to loss of productive capacity. Contributing further to this trend is the growing of produce that is harvested and shipped far away.
The standard NPK (nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium) fertilizer farmers commonly use is able to restore the soil enough to grow fruits and vegetables which are healthy looking, but may be entirely lacking in trace minerals. The inventor of the entire NPK philosophy, Baron von Leibig, recanted his own theories before he died when he saw the deficiencies his methods were fostering as they became the agricultural standard in both Europe and America. [29]
Mineral depletion in topsoil is hardly a controversial issue. The question is not if, but how much. Plants are the primary agents of mineral incorporation into the biosphere. The implication for our position on the food chain is simply: lowered mineral content in produce grown in U.S. topsoil.
You won't find any source that insists that the mineral content of American topsoil is as good today as it was 50 years ago. Generally, studies talk in terms of how much, if any, minerals are still present.
2. DIET
The second contributor to mineral deficiency within the population is obviously, diet. Even if our produce did contain abundant minerals, less than 4% of the population eats sufficient fruits and vegetables to account for minimal RDAs. To compound matters, mass amounts of processed food, excess protein, and refined sugars require most of our mineral stores in order to digest it and remove it. The removal process involves enzymes, which break things down. Enzyme activity, remember, is completely dependent on minerals like zinc and copper and chromium. No minerals - no enzyme action.
In addition, pasteurized dairy products, alcohol, and drugs inhibit the absorption of these minerals, further depleting reserves. So it is cyclical: refined foods inhibit mineral absorption, which then are not themselves efficiently digested because of diminished enzyme activity. And then we go looking for bugs as the cause of disease?
3. MUCOID PLAQUE
In the chapter on the COLON we saw how the standard indigestible American diet packs layer upon layer of plaque onto the inner lining of the colon. One of the prime functions of the colon is to resorb water, in order to prevent dehydration. Plaque prevents such a reclamation, and the result is that we lose both water and minerals that normally should be reabsorbed.
4. COMPETITION
The fourth reason for inadequate minerals in the body is a phenomenon known as secondary deficiency. It has been proven that an excess of one mineral may directly cause a deficiency of another, because minerals compete for absorption, compete for the same binding sites, like a molecular Musical Chairs. Secondary deficiency means that an excess of one mineral causes a deficiency of another. (Kidd)
For example, iron, copper, and zinc are competitive in this way. Copper is necessary for the conversion of iron to hemoglobin, but if there is excess zinc, less iron will be available for conversion, because zinc is competing. This may result in a secondary deficiency of iron, which can manifest itself as iron deficiency anemia. All due simply to excess zinc. Researchers have found that these secondary deficiencies caused by excess of one mineral are almost always due to overdosing on mineral supplements, since the quantities contained in food are so small.
A few other competitions:
*aluminum competes with silicon*cadmium competes with zinc*tellurium competes with selenium" - Kidd, p42
Think about this the next time some genius tries to tell you that your particular health problem can be remedied with daily mega-doses of calcium, iron, zinc, silver, or stainless steel, which he just by coincidence happens to have on hand....
Human mineral requirements are very small, but specific.
5. DRUGS
A fourth reason for mineral deficiency in humans is overuse of prescription drugs. It has been known since the 1950s that antibiotics interfere with uptake of minerals, specifically zinc, chromium, and calcium. (The Plague Makers [32])
Tylenol, Advil, Motrin, and aspirin have the same inhibitive effect on mineral absorption. Moreover, when the body has to try and metabolize these drugs to clear the system, its own mineral stores are heavily drawn upon.
Such a waste of energy is used to metabolize laxatives, diuretics, chemotherapy drugs, and NSAIDs out of the body. This is one of the most basic mechanisms in drug-induced immunosuppression: minerals are essential for normal immune function.
BIOAVAILABILITY
Ultimately, the only issue that really counts with minerals is bioavailability. Really doesn't matter what we eat; it only matters what makes it to the body's cells.
Let's say someone is iron deficient, for example. Can't he just take a bar of iron and file off some iron filings into a teaspoon, and swallow them? Just took in more iron, didn't he? Well, yes but here is a major distinction: the difference between elemental minerals and nutrient minerals. Iron filings are in the elemental form; absorption will be 8% or less. [Ashmead]
Another word for elemental is inorganic.
Same with most store-bought multi supplements.
Food-bound iron, on the other hand, like that contained in raisins or molasses, will have a much higher rate of absorption, since it is complexed with other living, organic forms, and as such is classed as a nutrient mineral.
Minerals are not living, though they are necessary for life. Minerals are necessary for cell life and enzyme reactions and hundreds of other reasons. But they must be in a form that can make it as far as the cells. What is not bioavailable passes right through the body, a waste of time and money.
Bioavailability has a precursor, an opening act. It is called absorption. Take a mineral supplement pill. Put it in a glass of water and wait half an hour. If it is unchanged, chances are that the tablet itself would never even dissolve in the stomach or intestine, but pass right out of the body. You would be astounded how many mineral supplements there are in this category.
OK, let's say the tablet or capsule actually does dissolve in the digestive tract. Then what? In order to do us any good, the mineral must be absorbed into the bloodstream, through the intestinal walls. Elemental (inorganic) minerals are absorbed about 1-8% in this manner. The rest is excreted.
Elemental minerals are those found in the majority of supplements, because they're very cheap to produce. For the small percentage that actually makes it to the bloodstream, the mineral is available for use by the cells, or as a cofactor in thousands of essential enzyme reactions that keep every cell alive every second. Use at the cellular level is what bioavailability is all about.
With this background in mind we can begin to understand that varying amounts of the seven macrominerals and approximately 14 trace minerals, in a bioavailable form are necessary for optimum cell activity, optimum health and would seem to contribute to longevity. So besides epidemic mineral deficiency, what's the problem?
In a word,
SUPPLEMENTATION
Mineral deficiency has become such an obvious health concern, causing specific diseases because of a lack of a single mineral, and general immune suppression with a lack of several, that the obvious need for supplementation has spawned an entire industry to the rescue. But in any market-driven industry involving pills, we sometimes find the cures are worse than the original problems. Why?
First off, toxicity. Remember, even macrominerals are only necessary in tiny amounts. Most trace minerals are necessary in amounts too small to be measured, and can only be estimated. Toxicity is a word that simply means excess. When extra stuff gets put into the body, it's a big deal. All forces are mobilized for removal of the extra stuff - the antigens, toxins, poisons, reactants, etc.
Toxicity results from taking a nonessential non-nutrient mineral into the body.
Take lead poisoning, for example. If lead gets into the blood, the body will try to remove it. Since the metal atoms are so heavy compared with the body's immune forces, removal may be impossible. Lead can initiate a chronic inflammatory response and can remain in the body permanently, which is why we don't have lead in paint or gasoline any more.
Most minerals can be toxic if taken to excess. And this excess would not happen from food; only from supplements or the environment.
Again, remember this the next time somebody tries to rope you into taking 3000 mg of calcium per day, or huge amounts of any mineral. Anytime you hear this song and dance, guaranteed the next step will be about marketing.
SO, WHAT SUPPLEMENTS WOULD BE INFERIOR?
Well, for starters, any supplement containing more than about 21 minerals, because that's all that have been proven to be necessary for humans. New toxicities are always being discovered. Aluminum linked to Alzheimer's is a recent discovery. Beyond these 21 or so it's simply anybody's guess, no matter what they tell you about the 5 civilizations where people live to be 140 years old.
People who show dramatic improvements from taking these 60 and 80-mineral drinks generally were so depleted that they rapidly absorbed the essential minerals in which they were deficient. But the toxicities from the nonessential, unknown minerals may take a long time to show up. Why take in anything extra?
Here's an example of an ingredient list from one of these mega-mineral drinks: Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, Vanadium, Manganese, Potassium, Selenium, Chromium, Phosphate, Iron, Sulfur, Carbon, Sodium, Barium, Strontium, Cesium, Thorium, Molybdenum, Nickel, Cerium, Germanium, Copper, Rubidium, Antimony, Gallium, Neodymium, Lanthanum, Bismuth, Zirconium, Thallium, Tungsten, Ruthenium, Boron, Iodine, Chloride, Bromine, Titanium, Cobalt, Dysprosium, Scandium, Samarium, Fluoride, Niobium, Praseodymium, Erbium, Hafnium, Lithium, Ytterbium, Yttrium, Cadmium, Holmium, Rhenium, Palladium, Gold, Thulium, Terbium, Iridium, Tantalum, Europium, Lutetium, Rhodium, Tin, Indium, Silver, Beryllium, Tellurium, and Platinum.
Any questions?
Amidst all the confusion about minerals, one thing should be made clear: we only need a little. So the mineral supplements we take should be as absorbable and as bioavailable as possible. That way we won't have to take much. Less chance of toxicity.
So the question then becomes: which mineral supplements are the most absorbable and the most usable, and therefore effective in the smallest amounts possible? Four candidates present themselves, all contending for the title:
*Elemental*Ionic*Colloidal*Chelated
Unraveling this puzzle is one area where blindly surfing the internet very likely impedes progress. Try it and you'll see why.
There's only one answer, but it's buried deep. To find it, we have to review a little
BASIC PLUMBING
The digestive tract goes like this: mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and out. Mineral absorption means transferring the mineral from the digestive tract through the wall of the intestine, into the bloodstream.
You really have to picture this: the digestive tract is just a long tube, from one end to the other. As long as food and nutrients are inside this tube, they are actually considered to be still outside the body, because they haven't been absorbed into the bloodstream yet. This is an essential concept to understanding mineral absorption.
Minerals can't do any good unless they make it into the bloodstream. This is exactly why most minerals bought at the grocery store are almost worthless: they pass right through the body - in one end and out the other. It's also why most nutritionists' and dieticians' advice is valueless; they commonly pretend everything that is eaten is absorbed.
Two main reasons for lack of absorption:
- the pill never dissolved - the mineral was in its elemental form (non-nutrient, e.g., iron filings)
Let's say these problems are overcome; neither is true. Or let's say the mineral is contained within some food, such as iron in molasses, or potassium in bananas. Food-bound minerals are attached or complexed to organic molecules. Absorption into the blood is vastly increased, made easy. The mineral is not just a foreign metal that has been ingested; it is part of food.
Fruits and vegetables with high mineral content are a very good way to provide the body with adequate nutrition. Food-bound minerals were the original mode. As we saw above, however, sufficient mineral content is an increasingly rare occurrence. Foods simply don't have it. How little, what portion of normal depends on what studies one finds. Soon the necessity for supplementation becomes obvious: if the food no longer has it, and we need it, pass the supplements, please. At that point, the marketplace assaults one's awareness and we're back to the days of the tonics, brews, toddies, powders and potions of yesteryear.
THE FOUR TYPES OF MINERAL SUPPLEMENTS
1. ELEMENTAL
Least beneficial are the supplements containing minerals in the elemental form. That means the mineral is just mentioned on the label. It's not ionized, it's not chelated, it's not complexed with an oxide or a carbonate or a sulfate, or with a food, and it's not colloidal. It may not even be there at all. Like under "ingredients" it just says "iron" or "copper," or "calcium," etc.
Elemental minerals are obviously the cheapest to make. A liquid would only have to be poured over some nails to be said to contain iron. Elemental minerals are the most common in grocery store supplements. Most of these multi's are actually manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry, either directly or indirectly. Run it down.
They may not be toxic, as long as only the minerals mentioned on the label are included in the supplement. The problem is absorption: it's between 1 and 8 percent. The rest passes right through. Not only a waste of money; also a waste of energy: it has to be processed out of the body.
2. IONIC
Next comes ionic minerals. Usually a step up. Ionic means in the form of ions. Ions are unstable molecules that want to bind with other molecules. An ion is an incomplete molecule.
There is a definite pathway for the absorption of ionic minerals through the gut (intestine) into the blood. In fact, any percent of the elemental minerals that actually got absorbed became ions first, by being dissolved in stomach acids.
Ionic minerals are not absorbed through the intestine intact.
The model for mineral ion absorption through the intestine is as follows. Ions are absorbed through the gut by a complicated process involving becoming attached or chelated to some special carrier proteins in the intestinal wall. Active transport is involved; meaning, energy is required to bring the ionic mineral from inside the intestine through the lining, to be deposited in the bloodstream on the other side. [7]
Ionic minerals may be a good source of nutrients for the body, depending upon the type of ions, and on how difficult it is for the ion to get free at the appropriate moment and location. Minerals require an acidic environment for absorption. Remember low pH (less than 7) is acidic; high pH (above 7) is alkaline. As the stomach contents at pH 2 empty into the small intestine, the first few centimeters of the small intestine is the optimum location for mineral absorption. The acidic state is necessary for ionization of the dissolved minerals.
If the pH is too alkaline, the ions won't disassociate from whatever they're complexed with, and will simply pass on through to the colon without being absorbed.
As the mineral ions are presented to the lining of the intestine, if all conditions are right, and there are not too much of competing minerals present, the ions will begin to be taken across the intestinal barrier, making their way into the bloodstream. This is a complicated, multi-step process, beyond the scope of this chapter. Simply, it involves the attachment of the free mineral ion to some carrier proteins within the intestinal membrane, which drag the ion across and free it into the bloodstream. A lot happens during the transfer, and much energy is required for all the steps. Just the right conditions and timing are necessary: proper pH, presence of vitamins for some, and the right section of the small intestine. [7]
Ionic mineral supplements do not guarantee absorption by their very nature, although they are certainly more likely to be absorbed than are minerals in the raw, elemental state. However, ionic minerals are in the form required for uptake by the carrier proteins that reside in the intestinal wall.
The uncertainties with ionic minerals include how many, how much, and what else are the unstable ions likely to become bound to before the carrier proteins pick them up. All ionic supplements are not created equal. Just because it's an ion doesn't mean a supplemental mineral will be absorbed. Too many minerals in a supplement will compete for absorption. Too much of one mineral will crowd out the others. The idea is to offer the body an opportunity for balance; rather than to overload it with the hope that some will make it through somehow. All we need is a little.
Ionic minerals are the second lowest form of supplementation.
3. COLLOIDAL
Speaking of overloading, the third type of supplemental minerals is called colloidal. What does colloidal really mean? Colloidal refers to a solution, a dispersion medium in which mineral particles are so well suspended that they never settle out: you never have to shake the bottle.
The other part of the dictionary definition has to do with diffusion through a membrane: "will not diffuse easily through vegetable or animal membrane." Yet this is supposed to be the whole rationale for taking colloidal minerals - their absorbability. Colloidal guru Joel Wallach himself continuously claimed that it is precisely the colloidal form of the minerals that allows for easy diffusion and absorption across the intestinal membrane, because the particles are so small. Wallach claims 98% absorption, but cites no studies, experiments, journal articles or research of any kind to back up this figure. Why not? Because there aren't any. The research on colloidal minerals has never been done. It's not out there. Senate Document 264 doesn't really cover it. Nor did Wild Kingdom.
In reality, colloidal minerals are actually larger than ionic minerals, as discussed by researcher Max Motyka, MS. [22] Because of the molecular size and suspension in the colloid medium, which Dorland's Medical dictionary describes as "like glue," absorption is inhibited, not enhanced. No less an authority than Dr. Royal Lee the man responsible for pointing out the distinction between whole food vitamins and synthetic vitamins, stated:
"A colloidal mineral is one that has been so altered that it will no longer pass through cell walls or other organic membranes." [2]
Does that sound like easy absorption?
Stedman's Medical Dictionary talks about colloids "resisting sedimentation, diffusion, and filtration " Again, resisting diffusion seems to indicate inhibition of absorption, not increased absorption, wouldn't you say?
As Alexander Schauss and Parris Kidd both explain, colloids are suspensions of minerals in clay and water. [18] Clay often has levels of aluminum as high as 3000 parts per million, with safety levels set at 10 ppm or lower ([21] Kidd). Aluminum has been proven to kill nerve cells, which we now see in Alzheimer's.
Dr. Schauss characterizes the aluminum content as the big problem with colloidal minerals. He cites a standard geology reference text - Dana's Manual of Mineralogy - describing clay as primarily aluminum:
"Clay minerals are essentially hydrous aluminum silicates." - Dana's Manual, p436 [19]
Schauss finds references as high as 4400 PPM of aluminum in colloidal clay. Schauss states that he has done an exhaustive search for any human studies using colloidal minerals and after searching 2000 journals, like everyone else, has come up with zero.
For a mineral to be well absorbed, it must be either in the ionic state, or else chelated, as explained above. The percentage of colloidal minerals which actually does get absorbed has to have been ionized somehow, due to the acidic conditions in the small intestine. Only then is the mineral capable of being taken up by the carrier proteins in the intestinal membrane, as mentioned above. But why create the extra step? Ionic minerals would be superior to colloidal, because they don't have to be dissociated from a suspension medium, which is by definition non-diffusible.
QUALITY CONTROL
Consistency of percentages of each mineral from batch to batch. Very simply, there isn't any with the mega mineral supplements, as the manufacturers will themselves admit. The ancient lakes and glaciers apparently have not been very accommodating when it comes to percent composition. Such a range of variation might be acceptable in, say, grenade tossing or IQ threshold of lawyers, or other areas where high standards of precision are not crucial. But a nutritional supplement that is supposed to enhance health by drinking it? This is an area in which the details of composition should be fairly visible, verifiable, the same every time. In these 80-trace-mineral toddies, there is no way of testing the presence or absence of many of the individual minerals. Many established essential trace minerals do not even have an agreed-upon recommended daily allowance, for two reasons:
- the research has never been done - the amounts are too small to be measured.
TOXICITY AND COMPETITION
Some essential minerals are toxic in excess, but essential in small amounts. Iron, chlorine, sodium, zinc, and copper are in this category. Toxic levels have been established, and resulting pathologies have been identified: we know what diseases are caused by their excesses. How risky is it to take in 40 or 50 minerals for which no toxicity levels have ever been set?
The problem is selective utilization, as explained by Dr. Parris Kidd. [21] Toxic trace minerals may closely resemble the essential minerals in atomic configuration. The result is competition for enzyme sites by two similar minerals only one of which is beneficial:
A separate hoax is being played out with
COLLOIDAL SILVER
hawked by many as a "natural antibiotic." Extremely uninformed physicians recommend daily doses of colloidal silver, in order to "prevent" colds, in the absence of any studies or trials whatsoever. As Dr. Kidd points out:
"...the body is not well-equipped to handle silver. This element can poison the kidneys, become deposited in the brain, and even give to the skin a gunmetal type of gloss." [21]
Silver:
questionable as a single-dose antibiotic, consistent intake of silver accumulates in the blood-forming organs - spleen, liver, and bone marrow, as well as the skin, lungs, and muscles. Serious pathologies have resulted: blood disorders, cirrhosis, pulmonary edema, chronic bronchitis, and a permanent skin condition known as argyria, to name just a few. Silver is better left in the ancient lakes, and in tableware.
A few other minerals you definitely want to avoid, especially in supplements you are taking for health reasons:
Aluminum:
Documented since the article in Lancet 14 Jan 1989 to be associated with Alzheimer's Disease, as well as blocking absorption of essential minerals like calcium, iron, and fluoride.
Gold:
Manufacturers of mega-minerals hawk that "there's more gold in a ton of seawater than there is in a ton of ore." So what? Our blood is not seawater; it evolved from seawater. Gold used to be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, but has largely been abandoned when they proved that it caused kidney cell destruction, bone marrow suppression, and immune abnormalities.
Lithium:
Used as an antipsychotic medication, lithium definitely can cause blackouts, coma, psychosis, kidney damage, and seizures. Outside of that, it should be fine.
The list goes on and on. These are just a few examples of mineral toxicities about which we have some idea. But for at least half the minerals in the mega toddies, we know nothing at all.
4. CHELATED
Finally we get to the top shelf of mineral supplementation. The fourth form of supplemental minerals is the chelated variety. Some clarification of this term is immediately necessary. Chelated is a general term that describes a certain chemical configuration. When a mineral is bound or stuck to certain carrier molecules, which are known as chelators, or ligands, and a ring-like molecule is the result, we say that a chelate is formed. Chelate is from the Greek word for claw, suggested by the v-shape of the two ligands on each side, with the mineral ion in the center.
Chelation occurs in many situations. Many things can be chelated, including minerals, vitamins, and enzymes. Minerals in food may be bound with organic molecules in a chelated state. Many molecules in the body are chelated in normal metabolic processes. The carrier proteins in the intestinal wall discussed above, whose job it is to transport ionic minerals - these chelate the ions.
Another sense of the word chelation exemplified in a mainstream therapy for removing heavy metals from the blood is called chelation therapy. The toxic metals are bound to a therapeutic amino acid ligand called EDTA. With a Pac-Man action, the metals are thus removed from the blood. (See chapter on Oral Chelation)
Molecular weight is measured in units called daltons. The ligands or binding agents may be very small (800 daltons) or very large (500,000 daltons) resulting in many sizes of chelates. Mineral + ligand = chelate. Generally the largest chelates are the most stable, but also the most difficult to absorb.
Using the word chelated with respect to mineral supplements refers to a very specific type of chelation. The idea is to bind the mineral ion to ligands that will facilitate absorption of the mineral through the intestine into the bloodstream, bypassing the clumsy pathway used for ionic mineral absorption.
After decades of research at Albion Laboratories in Utah, it was learned that small amino acids, especially glycine, are the best ligands for chelating nutrient minerals, for three reasons:
- bypasses the entire process of chelation by the intestine's own carrier proteins - facilitates absorption by an entirely different pathway of intestinal absorption, skipping the intermediate steps which ionic minerals go through - the chelate will be the at the most absorbable molecular weight for intestinal transfer: less than 1500 daltons [9]
It has also been established beyond controversy that certain pairs of amino acids (dipeptides) are the easiest of all chelates to be absorbed, often easier than individual amino acids.
Proteins are made of amino acids. Normal digestion presumably breaks down the proteins to its amino acid building blocks so they can be absorbed. But total breakdown is not always necessary. It has long been known that many nutrient chains of two or three or even more amino acids may be absorbed just as easily as single amino acids. Food-bound copper, vitamin C with hemoglobin molecule, animal protein zinc, are some examples of amino acids chelates that are easily absorbed intact. (Intestinal Absorption of Metal Ions, see COLON chapter). [7]
To take another example, in abnormal digestion it is well known that chains of amino acids - dipeptides, tripeptides, even polypeptide proteins - sometimes become absorbed intact in a pathology known to gastroenterologists as Leaky Gut Syndrome. Obviously it is not healthy and has many adverse consequences, but the point is that amino acids chains are frequently absorbed, for many different reasons.
The reason these dipeptide chelates are absorbed faster than ionic minerals is that the chelated mineral was bonded tightly enough so that it did not dissociate in the acidic small intestine and offer itself for capture by the intestinal membrane's carrier proteins. That whole process was thus avoided. The chelate is absorbed intact. An easier form.
This is a vast oversimplification, and the most concise summary, of why chelated minerals are superior. Only a specific chelate can resist digestion and maintain its integrity as it is absorbed through the gut. Again, all chelates are not created equal. Inferior chelates, used because they are cheaper to produce, include the following:
- carbonates - citrates - oxides - sulfates - chlorides - phosphates
If the label gives one of these chelates, it means the mineral is bound either too strongly or not tightly enough, and will be released at the wrong time and the wrong place. Chelation of minerals in nutrient supplements is a very precise science, yielding chelates even superior to those occurring naturally in foods.
To compare chelated and ionic minerals, once the research is presented, there is really not much of a dispute about which is absorbed faster, ionic minerals or dipeptide-like amino acid chelates. Meticulous isotope testing has shown the following increases in percent absorption of chelates, as compared with ionic:
Iron 490% greater Copper 580% greater Magnesium 410% greater Calcium 421% greater Manganese 340% greater
- source: Journal of Applied Nutrition 22:42 1970 [31]
Again, this is just the briefest glance at the prodigious amount of research comparing ionic with chelated minerals, but the results are uniform. The winner of the bioavailability contest is: chelated minerals, provided the chelate was maintained as small as possible, generally using glycine as the amino acid ligands, at a total weight below 1500 daltons.
OUR OBJECTIVES
With respect to minerals, then, what are our goals? Having once apprehended the necessity for mineral supplementation, our objectives should be simple:
- Take only the minerals we absolutely need- Take the smallest amounts possible- Nothing left over (no metabolic residue)
THE NEW BOTTOM LINE - TOTAL COMPLETE CHELATED MINERALS
What mineral supplement should you buy? The reader now has enough background data to be somewhat discriminating. Obviously the chelated minerals should be the first choice.
For almost 15 years this website has recommended Infinity's Chelated Minerals formulated by the world leader in mineral supplementation - Albion Labs. This remains a fine product. Patients have been consistently happy with results; the minerals have been part of the 60 Day Program from its inception.
In early 2007 I took a careful look and noticed some room for an improved chelated mineral supplement. I wanted a product that would be the best daily mineral product that anyone could take, no matter what age or sex. And I also was going for a 3-capsule daily serving to contain one's complete mineral requirements without the need for any additional mega mineral supplementation, as long as the patient had an adequate diet.
I began collaborating with Albion to come up with a slightly better product. It took the better part of a year but the results have been rewarding. The product is called Total Complete Chelated Minerals and bears thedoctorwithin label.
Is it redundant to say Total Complete? Total is meant to signify that no other mineral supplementation would be necessary - no mega-dosing of single minerals. Complete means that all the essential mineral nutrients are covered, along with an adequate diet - like the New West Diet.
Here are some of the improvements of Total Complete:
We added more chromium, because of today's skyrocketing incidence of diabetes. (See sugar chapter)
We added more calcium to belay any worries about the need for extra calcium supplementation.
We added iodine for thyroid balance.
Potassium is now included for electrolyte balance.
If there is a better designed mineral supplement on the market, it is certainly well hidden. Total Complete simplifies the whole issue of mineral supplementation and reduces it down to 1 serving per day. Next problem.
Are minerals important? Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling thought so:
"You can trace every sickness, every disease, every ailment to mineral deficiency."
Using the image of Carrel's solutes in the petri dish as the analogue of blood in our bodies, adequate mineral content is undoubtedly a vital component for the body's constant effort to operate all its cells at optimum metabolic vibrancy and resilience.
Healthy people don't get sick. Ever.
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