One has control over each of the causes.
It is entirely possible that you may view this concept with a bit of well entrenched skepticism. Your reaction might be, "This fellow is really out in left field. I can name a bunch of causes of disease: bacteria, viruses, genetics, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, carcinogens, and just plain old age." And you would be absolutely correct-to a point. These apparent causes, plus many more, are merely character actors in the disease scenario. They are not the stars. They are among the "bad guys" that appear to be the culprits. However, they are not the back-to-square-one causes of disease. The stage has to be set for any of these dissidents to begin to make their effects known. They are the "terrorists" of the body that strike when there is no resistance. They may be present in a well-tuned, healthy body, but they are powerless against the impenetrable security system of the internal intelligence that maintains our resistance.

If disease were a "natural" consequence of life, we would all experience essentially the same ailments at about the same times of life. After all, we all follow roughly the same pattern of progress in our development: we teethe, learn to walk and talk, turn into a "terrible two," and suffer through the anguish of puberty at approximately the same ages. Although there are minor variations in the timing of the onset for each of us, the pattern is pretty consistent. The development of disease, however, isn't consistent. Heart disease, arthritis, or cancer, for example, can strike at any age.

Even the ravages of "old age" are inconsistent. The process of aging isn't as neat and tidy as the process of developing from infant to adult. There appears to be no particular "natural progression" from young adulthood to old age. I have patients in their forties, who are "old." They think, feel, and act "old." And I have patients, in their nineties who have more vigor and vitality than others in their fifties.

Wellness Principle
Age is no excuse for disease.

Aging and disease are individual processes that are affected by lifestyle. Your external, visible lifestyle is controlled by choices made within personal boundaries of values, geography, and economics. Your internal health determining lifestyle is controlled by your personal Toxicity, Timing, and Thoughts. This [book] is about Toxicity and how the food you eat contribute to the buildup of toxins in your body. Toxins are poison-like substances. They can come from the air we breathe, liquids we drink, things we eat, or substances we inject into our bodies.

Anything that goes into your body must be dealt with in some way. Your body must use it, store it, or lose it. No "foreign" substance in your body can be ignored, and until food is processed and assimilated it is a "foreign" substance.

Essentially, this book gives you a new perspective on how your body must adapt to take care of the elements in food that cause toxicity. Many food elements, such as vitamins, minerals, and enzyme are essential to health. However, excesses of even some of these beneficial elements can cause toxicity. When I talk about "toxicity" I am talking about the condition of your cells. The cells in your body -liver cells, pancreas cells, heart cells, and all of the rest - use glucose for energy; yet each type of cell has a specific function to perform. The function of the heart cell is contraction; the function of a parietal cell in the stomach is secretic of hydrochloric acid. Every type of cell has a different function, but each uses the same fuel-glucose-for energy.

If the cells become toxic and are not capable of functioning and utilizing that energy, disease begins. Cells become toxic when they and their environment become too acid. Most of the fluids in your body where your cells are operating are supposed to be slightly alkaline.

Wellness Principle
We live or die at the cellular level.

Your body is alkaline by design and acid by function. Although your cells live in an alkaline environment, they produce acid as they function.Acid must be either neutralized or eliminated. Acid produced by cells is "natural," and self-made acid is easily eliminated through the lungs, the urine, and feces.

Acid from foods is handled quite differently. There are intricate systems to neutralize dietary acid (more about acid, alkaline, and neutralization later). The body can handle reasonable quantities of dietary acid. However, too much acid producing food overloads neutralizing mechanisms; the environment of your cells deteriorates; and your body becomes overly acid - it becomes toxic.

Too much acid is termed acidosis.
ACIDOSIS = TOXICITY.

Any substance that interferes with the natural workings of the body is a toxin -food included.
As we have seen, toxins are sometimes eliminated by natural, periodic cleansing procedures we call colds and fevers. You don't "catch" a cold or "come down" with a fever; you earn them. The body is getting rid of toxins. When you realize that colds are beneficial physiological processes, you can then understand why science has been unable to find the long sought-after cure despite the megabucks poured into research.

If you can't get rid of toxins from foods through natural processes, your body adapts the function of some of the cells. Sustained necessary adaptations reduce a person's resistance and set the stage for disease. In our society, one of the principle sources of physiological toxins is too much protein. Excess protein does not have the immediate poisonous effect of strychnine or cocaine. However, when you eat more protein than your body needs to function optimally, a series of physiological changes is initiated.

Wellness Principle
Too much protein leads to toxicity.

The second villain that undermines health and is a major cause of pain is improper internal timing. Your body synchronizes an amazing number of functions. It simultaneously keeps the blood coursing through your veins, digest foods, assimilates nutrients, eliminates unusable parts of foods, tracts and relaxes muscles, processes chemicals, repairs itself - the list goes on. You stay relatively symptom-free as long as all of the natural physiological functions work smoothly. That's Intelligence.

Sometimes, however, the timing of one of these functions is not appropriate for the conditions of the moment. The concept of inapropriate timing can be explained by an illustration from daily life. Brushing your teeth is a "correct" action. It helps to preserve teeth, keep your mouth clean, and avoid the pain that comes with dental neglect. However, brushing your teeth during a job interview isn't appropriate. There's nothing wrong with the activity itself, the timing can be inappropriate.

To convert that analogy to your physiology, when you exercise hard, your heart rate increases. This is a natural, and necessary function to increase the oxygen supply to your muscles and to remove the waste products from them. If your were not able to increase its rate when needed, you would not have survived your first chase around the playground. However for your heart to continue to beat at the faster rate after you rested is inappropriate; if it does, your body is experiencing a timing problem.

Most of my patients come to me for relief of symptoms brought about by incorrect timing. Muscles that should be relaxed are tense. Of course, if we could not tense our muscles, we would not be able to move. However, when a patient is lying on an examination table, he should be able to consciously relax his voluntary muscles. A muscle that is continuously tense eventually becomes painful. Pain can be brought on by a perfectly proper physiological response that occurs at an inappropriate time.

You may wonder why the body would do something at the wrong time if its internal intelligence never makes a mistake. Doing the right thing is never a mistake-inappropriate maybe, but not wrong. The body does not judge an event good, bad, or appropriate. It just responds normally to all stimuli without judging whether or not the time is appropriate to execute the response. The information available to your control center serves as the data base for patterns of response to every situation. The brain (your brain, your thoughts) that directs everything that goes on in the body works with the information recorded there. Information recorded yesterday, last month, twenty, thirty, or sixty-years ago is equally as usable as information recorded now, twenty, thirty, or sixty seconds ago.

The response pattern is similar to retrieving data stored on a personal computer's hard disk. The computer doesn't care when the information was entered. It's either there or is not there. When the computer gets a particular sequence of commands (the stimulus), it will retrieve the data associated with those commands (response). The body (like the PC) does not evaluate the appropriateness or potential long-term consequences of responses to stimuli. The body (like the computer that doesn't give a tip about health) does not consider health or disease. The body responds to stimuli from a data base (memory bank) that is programmed for survival at the moment. Pain and health problems arise when your body responds to stimuli from past conditions that no longer exist: obsolete programming.

I have seen thousands of examples of this over the years. A patient (we'll call him Jim) comes to me complaining of back or neck pain. He had been in a minor accident several weeks earlier. He may have been in a car that was rear-ended with only enough force to damage the bumper. Or he could have merely moved a dining room table. Or perhaps he just bent over to pick up the morning paper and he couldn't straighten up again. Whatever the incident that caused the pain, it wasn't an earth shaking event. But here he is, weeks later, still hurting.

A thorough examination shows nothing torn, nothing broken, nothing dislocated-just activity-restricting, sleep-disturbing pain. It doesn't take long to recognize that Jim's body is still physiologically primed to handle the bumper-thumper, or lifting the table, or bending over. When he is lying on the treatment table "consciously relaxed," his muscles are more tense than they should be. Although the need for a physiological "alert" pattern is long gone, Jim's body is responding to the obsolete messages. All that is necessary for Jim's muscles to relax is to update the messages his subconscious mind is sending his muscles. With dated signals, his muscles can relax. When this is done, pain is relieved. Jim can go on about his business, and his body can retun its non-emergency mode of function instead of the crisis/survival mode it had been maintaining.

Wellness Principle
The body works only for immediate survival and not toward long term health and happiness.

We have a survival instinct that has served mankind well. In order to withstand threatened attacks, the body goes into what we call defense physiology. You may not be consciously aware that your body is responding to events of the past, but these buried memories may keep your body in defense physiology without you knowing it. In time, you will begin to experience pain and develop symptoms of illness, all because your memory patterns are keeping your body in an up-tight survival mode rather than allowing it to respond to the stimuli of the moment. Your body is in a defensive state and accumulating more acid than it can handle effectively.
Thoughts exert the most powerful influence on your health, and negative thoughts are the #1 acid producer in your body.

Wellness Principle
Emotional stress in the form of negative thoughts can have painful consequences.

The impact of thoughts on the musculoskeletal system was fully illustrated recently when a patient came to my clinic for back pain that had started the day before. In the course of conversation he said, "I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but my wife has lost her job ten days ago, and today is her last day. Two days ago my boss told me I'm losing mine in two weeks."

It's not hard to imagine how this fellow's thoughts were affected. He knew that it took two incomes to satisfy his family's standard of living, and in two weeks there would be no income. He hadn't really done anything unusual physically that would have caused back pain, but his thoughts had put his physiology in a defense mode. His body was on guard, ready to defend his family and himself. He knew they were in danger, but the enemy was invisible.

He was in a stressful situation. His body was responding in precisely the correct manner; however, the emergency showed no signs of letting up. Even though neither he nor his family was without food or shelter at the time, he was anticipating with strong feelings of emotion all sorts of dire consequences: defaulted mortgage, cars repossessed, major reductions in the trappings of affluence, personal embarrassment, and worse. And his body was ready for the physical fight that would never come.

Your body reacts to negative mental and emotional stress brought about by thoughts exactly the same way it reacts to "real" threats of physical harm. To the subconscious that governs physiology, stimuli from ideas are just as "real" as stimuli generated by being the target of a marauding street gang. Thoughts are things that can stimulate physiological responses-some appropriate for the occasion, some inappropriate. Physiologists have found that thoughts are so influential that all you have to do is anticipate exercise for the sympathetic nervous system to stimulate cardiac output.

Timing, toxicity, and thoughts are closely ineteroven. Rarely do I see a patient who doesn't have a problem with at least two of these factors, and most come to me with a combination of all three. Over time, any one of the three can force the body to adapt the way it functions, which in turn, leads to exhaustion, lowered resistance, and, ultimately, disease.