When I was a kid, I hated Brussels sprouts. My mom would give me the evil eye after she put those nasty things on my plate and give me the ultimatum every kid hates, "you’re not leaving this table until every bite of those yummy things are gone from your plate."

     I came up with some very creative ways to dispose of those Brussels sprouts, but most of the time I would cut them up and wash them down like I was eating poison. Of course, everyone has a similar story about the archenemy vegetable of their youth.

     Why was Mama so hardcore about me eating those slimy things, anyway? I always thought she was punishing me for things I had done wrong that she hadn’t caught me doing, and this was her way of equalizing the playing field.

     Today I know she wasn’t trying to make me gag for the fun of it. She was trying to feed me healthy whole food to keep my young body growing. Whole foods such as vegetables, fruits, animal proteins, and fats are extremely important parts of your wellness journey. But whole foods aren’t what they used to be. Whole foods have been broken, dismantled, and modified for over 100 years. The general public hasn’t seemed to notice, so the trend continues to break whole foods and sell the parts.

     You might be wondering what the big deal is. What do whole foods have to do with your overall wellness? Your lifestyle today is so hectic it’s nice to have prepackaged meals to put into the microwave. I know you probably don’t have the time your mother did to fix every meal from scratch. This chapter is not designed to make you feel guilty about what you are feeding yourself and your family. It’s designed to give you a better understanding of the basics of whole food nutrition.

     Nutrition is the basis for your entire wellness journey. In Food and Life: The United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook, 1939, it states the chief fault of many American diets is that they provide too little of the essential minerals and vitamins. This fault is due in large measure to the fact that refined foods are consumed in such amounts that intake of minerals and vitamin-rich foods is lower than it should be. [Hambridge, Gore. Food & Life: The United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook. 1939, p. 62.]

     The general public has been told for over five decades that there is no difference between whole foods and modified or enriched foods. Yet many scientific studies show that the mother of all mothers, Mother Nature, had it right for millions of years. And it’s only been since people have been trying to improve on nature that our nutritional problems have gotten worse, leading to the current wellness crisis.

     This chapter will provide you with an understanding of whole foods and how they are different than the enriched foods we see at the market. A brief discussion of how our food supply has been altered over the last 100 years will give you a new reference point to make nutritional decisions for you and your family. Once you have a better understanding, you can make an informed decision about what vitamins and foods your family really needs.

What Is Whole Food Nutrition?

     Mother Nature had it right. All of our vitamin and mineral needs have always been packed into our natural food supply. When you pull a plant from the ground or pick fruit from a tree, your body has been designed to digest and use those nutrients easily and effectively. You never get mega doses of vitamins and minerals from whole food sources. You get small amounts of nutrients in the right proportion with all of the necessary co-factors, phytonutrients, enzymes, and mineral activators to make these vitamins work properly.

     Whole foods are alive. They have grown to their current state using the life force that no one can adequately describe. Nobody really understands what makes things grow or blossom. It’s the miracle of a living thing. You can dissect a frog, put it all back together exactly the way it was before, but it will still be dead. Living things are special. They have innate intelligence within each cell to grow, repair themselves, and create energy, along with the ability to get rid of toxins and protect themselves from predators. Living systems are like no other system in the world. You can’t take them apart and expect the same results. Living systems are always more valuable together than the sum of their parts.

     Whole foods are living systems. They have had to survive, grow, and adapt to their environment. The genetic code these whole foods have expressed allowed them to flourish. They have done well. Therefore, the content of whole foods fat, carbohydrates, and proteins is the proper balance and has supported life for its entire cycle. This food is exactly what your body needs to survive.

Whole Food versus Enriched Food

     What’s so different about enriched food that means it isn’t whole? White bread is a good example. White bread originated in World War II when the government decided to boost the quality of the American diet, to improve the war effort. Dieticians at the time told the government that the only difference between white (refined) bread and whole food bread was that thiamin (vitamin B1) was not present in white bread. So the government decided to enrich white bread with three B vitamins and one mineral. Niacin, riboflavin, and thiamin were the vitamins and iron was the mineral. These vitamins were made from a synthetic source (usually from coal tar in the laboratory) and added to the white flour. The editors of an authoritative journal at the time, Nutrition Reviews, were unhappy with the U.S. government’s decision to go ahead with the enrichment plans. They wrote it is a curious fact that enrichment of white flour and white bread was promulgated with little direct experimental evidence to demonstrate the value of such a proposal to the human being. [Williams, Ray P., Harvey L. Mason, Paul L. Cusick, and Russell M. Wilder.  Observations on Induced Riboflavin Deficiency and Riboflavin Requirements of Man. J. Nutr. (25:361–377), 1943.]

     Chlorine is also used to make enriched bread white. Chlorine, a potent poison, does two things. First, it destroys the carotene, an organic substance that gets converted into vitamin A. Second, the chlorine reacts with the gluten to mature the flour faster. This allows the dough to hold the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast more effectively.

     Other chemicals found in white bread can include aluminum chloride, azocarbonamide, benzyl peroxide, calcium propionate, calcium sulfate, chlorine dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, potassium bromate, and potassium iodide. Sound pretty tasty doesn’t it?

     When these four substances were put back into the white bread it was called enriched. I’m sorry, but if somebody took a couple of hundred dollars (or nutrients in this case) away from me and gave me four bucks back, I wouldn’t feel enriched. This is what happened to our daily bread. Hundreds if not thousands of nutrients, co-factors, and mineral activators were taken out of the grain during the refining process and were replaced with four. It sounds to me like we have been nutritionally mugged.

Synthetic Versus Organic

     Comparing synthetic vitamins with organic whole food vitamins brings to light many differences. Synthetic vitamins are made in the laboratory and have the exact same chemical structure as organic vitamins. But do they have the same effect in your living system? The answer is no. Just because you have gas in your car doesn’t mean your engine will run smoothly, does it? If your spark plugs are fouled or your electrical system isn’t working or it’s the wrong type of gas, you won’t be going far.

     Your body is designed to use real vitamins and minerals in combination and in small amounts to activate all of its internal systems. Your body was never designed to take in a huge amount of one specific vitamin or mineral. Your body wants to take in small amounts of many different vitamins and minerals and use those combinations to run your energy system.

     Until about 60 years ago, vitamins could only be found in food. But as our culture learned more about drugs, the exact same philosophy was applied to vitamins. Drugs work by overwhelming your liver and getting into the bloodstream to reach the target tissue. This is why you need to take high doses of drugs. If you take a small dose, your liver will neutralize the drug and make it harmless. But if you take a large dose the liver can’t neutralize the entire drug and it gets into the bloodstream. This is where the more-is-better or mega dose concept came from.

     Mistakenly, the same concept was used when it came to vitamins. When parts of vitamins are given in mega doses, the body will neutralize as much as it can, then the rest will be put into the bloodstream. Then additional problems occur. When you give one part of a vitamin, your body must supply the rest of the vitamin complex from your internal reserve for the vitamin to work properly. If you don’t have the internal reserve, you will actually start causing the problems you are trying to correct.

     It wasn’t until the early 1900s when vitamins were discovered and parts of those vitamins became isolated that our bodies had to deal with this problem. Dr. Royal Lee, a pioneer in the field of nutrition, knew that if you took one part of a vitamin without the rest of the vitamin complex, you would force the body to take the other parts of that vitamin complex out of storage within the body. Once the storage amounts of those vitamins were depleted, the vitamin in high doses would start causing the symptoms they were designed to treat.

     Vitamins and minerals cannot be used in the same way as pharmaceutical drugs. Drugs must be given in high doses because your liver will deactivate quite a bit of the drug. But vitamins and minerals are different. In their whole form, your body will absorb vitamins and minerals in very small amounts and use them effectively. Using synthetic fractions of vitamins and inorganic minerals causes your body to activate your liver, and this is why you need to take most over-the-counter vitamins and minerals in high doses to have any effect at all.

     So how can you tell if your vitamins and minerals are coming from a whole food source? The easiest way is to look on the label. If the label lists ingredients like beet root or pea vine, then you are probably looking at a whole food vitamin supplement. Many supplements will say whole food, but if there is no mention of whole food anywhere in the ingredients, chances are it’s not a whole food vitamin.

How Did We Get into This Food Crisis in the First Place?

     With all the technology available to us today, you would think our food would be far superior to the food of our ancestors. But the sad truth is our planet is in a state of depletion never seen before. Our soil has lost much of its mineral content. Our water supply has been polluted by insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. And deforestation has created an environment that can’t replenish itself with nearly the effectiveness it had in the time of our forefathers.

     It has been well documented that our soil doesn’t contain the organic minerals it once did. In 1992, the Earth Summit Report indicated that an average of 73% depletion of the mineral content of soils has occurred around the world. The United States topped the list in soil mineral depletion, with 85% over the last 100 years. According to Gary Price Todd, MD, the human body requires at least 60 minerals for optimal health. But only eight minerals are available in any significant quantity in the food we eat today. [Gary Price Todd, MD.] Acquiring Optimal Health: How Many Degenerative and Age-Related Diseases Can Be Prevented or Repaired. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 1994, p. 39.]

     Dr. Walter Mertz of the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Congress in 1971 in the future we will not be able to rely anymore on the premise that our consumption of a varied, balanced diet will provide all the essential trace elements because such a diet will be very difficult to obtain for millions of people.  [Walter Mertz, MD. ―Fortification of Foods with Vitamins and Minerals.  Annals of New York Academy of Sciences. (300(1):151–161).]

     This problem is due to the lack of minerals found in the soils around the world. The Doctor’s Vitamin and Mineral Encyclopedia states, you can live in some areas, eat a perfectly balanced diet and still develop mineral or trace mineral deficiency that can only be averted through dietary change or supplementation. [Sheldon Saul Hendler, MD, PhD. The Doctor’s Vitamin and Mineral Encyclopedia: The Most Comprehensive and Authoritative Guide to Food Supplements Ever Published. Simon & Schuster Inc., 1990.]

     You might be thinking, what’s the big deal about minerals anyway? Most people don’t think about minerals. Dr. Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel Prize winner once stated, you can trace every sickness, every disease, and every ailment to a mineral deficiency. What he was getting at was minerals are the activators of your body. In the absence of minerals, vitamins have no function, states Dr. Charles Northern, MD. [Senate Document 264: ―Modern Miracle Men: Relating to Proper Food Mineral Balances, by Dr. Charles Northern, reprinted from Cosmopolitan, June 1936.]

     Vitamins can’t work without their mineral activators. This is another reason so many studies have recently been published about the negative effects of synthetic vitamins on human health. If you give a specific pharmaceutical-grade vitamin fraction to your body, it has no choice but to utilize your mineral reserves in order to deal with it. And once your mineral reserve is depleted, this vitamin fraction will begin to cause the exact symptoms you were trying to correct.

     As the soil depletion of minerals continues, your body’s reserves of vitamins and minerals will also continue to decline. As your reserves get depleted so will your ability to fight disease. In his book, Empty Harvest, Dr. Bernard Jensen talks about how our immunity is affected a great deal by the health of the soil around us. [Jensen, Bernard, DC, PhD, and Mark Anderson. Empty Harvest: Understanding the Link Between Food, Our Immunity, and Our Planet. Garden City Park: Avery Publishing Group, 1990.] Veterinarians have known this for years and there are up to 45 trace minerals added to dog food and livestock feed. The more mineral activators available to the vitamins in your body, the better your immune response will be.

     In 2003, David Thomas wrote an article in Nutrition and Health that summarized the mineral content of 27 vegetables, 17 fruits, and 10 cuts of meat. Between 1940 and 1991 the vegetables had an average decrease in minerals of 33%, the fruit had an average decrease of 17%, and the meat had an average decrease of 29%. [David Thomas. A Study on the Mineral Depletion of the Foods Available to Us as a Nation Over the Period 1940 to 1991. Nutrition and Health (17:85–115), 2003.]

     These deficiencies became amplified due to huge changes in the eating behavior of Americans during the same time frame. Convenience and processing replaced preparation and gardening for the majority of the American population. Junk food became more accepted and commonplace in the U.S. This has led to our current population being overfed but malnourished in essential whole food vitamins and minerals, and contributed to the rise of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis.

     Deforestation had led to climate changes and further depletion of the soil in many ways, primarily through soil erosion. (Many studies have shown the effects of soil erosion on the quality of soil.) Not only does deforestation change rain patterns and decrease air quality, but it causes a decrease in the amount of organic matter and beneficial microbes in the soil.

     The chemicals placed in the soil have been big business for over a century. Fertilizers have been used since the 1920s. Insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides are used to decrease pests and increase yield of the crop. The crop yield is very important in agriculture today. This is where the money is. Genetic alterations, advanced chemicals, and machinery are used to boost the profit per acre.

     Do you think much thought is given to replenishing the quality of the soil? If the soil was replenished, wouldn’t the yields improve and the quality of the plants improves also? What about the quality of the crop? I never hear people talk much about the quality, just the quantity. But quality is what should really matter.

     So what is ideal soil made of? Fifty percent of ideal soil is air and water. The air circulates bacteria and particulate matter throughout the soil to add enzyme activity. Water is the medium used to transport and bathe the other 50% of soil with nutrients it needs to keep the soil alive. Soil is a living system. Healthy soil has billions of microbes per tablespoon. The solid 50% of healthy soil is made up of two parts. Forty- five percent is rock minerals, and the other five percent is made up of organic matter. Calcium is the mother of all minerals in healthy soil. Healthy soil needs to be seven parts calcium to one part magnesium. Optimal soil pH is 6.2 to 6.4. Healthy soil doesn’t stick to your shoes and it smells like a forest.

     Why is soil quality so important? Dr. Royal Lee talked about how the steak-on-your-plate nutrients aren’t nearly as important as the soil content of the grass that cow ate. In other words, our entire food chain is dependent on the quality of the soil that starts the food chain. If the soil is depleted, the plants will be depleted. If the plants are depleted, then the animals that eat the plants will be further depleted.

     This brings me to a discussion of what depleted foods do to you and your children over time. Francis M. Pottenger, MD, performed an experiment beginning in the 1940s on 900 cats. This experiment examined the effects of nutrition on a cat’s health and wellness potential.

     Dr. Pottenger put cats into five different groups. He then followed each group and their offspring for four generations. All five groups were fed a minimum basic diet, just enough to sustain life. Each group got the majority of their nutrition from one of five foods: Group A was fed raw meat, Group B was fed raw milk, Group C pasteurized milk, Group D evaporated milk, and Group E condensed milk. [Pottenger, Francis M., Jr., MD. Pottenger’s Cats: A Study in Nutrition. San Diego, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1983.]

     What Dr. Pottenger found was very interesting. The first two groups, the raw meat and raw milk groups remained healthy and free from disease for all four generations. The other three groups began to develop diseases in the first generations. The illnesses and diseases occurred near the end of life for the first generation. During the second generation, the three groups developed illnesses and diseases in the middle of life. By the third generation, all three groups had developed illnesses and diseases in the beginning of life and many cats died before reaching six months of age. There was no fourth generation produced in any of these three groups either due to sterility or spontaneous abortions before birth.

So What Does All This Mean to You?

     For the last 90 years, our food supply has been under attack from many different sources. Humans have an unbelievable ability to adapt to changes in the environment. But studies like Dr. Pottenger’s must be taken seriously because our ability to adapt to the nutritional mugging we have been through for the last four generations is frightening. Our genetic expression today is a result of the foods eaten by our parents and our grandparents. So what do you want for your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren?

     Today’s hectic lifestyle and commercialism of fast food have created a huge problem to overcome. Poor nutritional content and marketing have replaced common sense and quality.

     There must be a happy medium somewhere. Organic food is hard to find and it is expensive. Where can you find raw milk? People look at you weird if you ask for it. They will look at you thinking, this person doesn’t know what they are talking about, and they’ll get sick drinking raw milk.

     What happens to real food when you leave it out? It starts to go bad, doesn’t it? Cut an apple and let it sit for awhile. It turns brown and nasty. The reason it goes bad so quickly is because the living cells begin to die and become oxidized. Oxidation occurs when oxygen attacks the living cells by breaking bonds, degrading the apple. This is what nature intended.

     Cut open a snack cake and let it sit for awhile. What happens? Nothing, it just sits there. It doesn’t get brown, it doesn’t get nasty, it just sits there. Why? Because it wasn’t alive to begin with. It was made with refined, processed ingredients combined with synthetic nutrients to create a longer shelf life.

     Now let’s talk about what will happen if we don’t start eating real food again. For his foundational book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston Price, DDS, traveled the world for about ten years in the 1930s to document the effects processed foods had on populations around the world. His research provided startling proof that foods of commerce, as he called them, allowed inferior genetic traits to be displayed and the offspring of people who ate this type of diet passed on inferior health to the next generations. [Price, Weston A., MS, DDS, FAGD. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects. New York/London: Medical Book Department of Harper & Brothers, 1939.]

     Dr. Price went around the world documenting his research. From the Great Barrier Reef to Ireland, he took pictures and analyzed the differences between generations of people who ate processed and refined foods of commerce and the primitive local diet. Once he analyzed the difference between the two diets he discovered a four- to ten-fold decrease in the amount of vitamins and minerals eaten by the food of commerce group compared to the local diet group.

     His conclusion was simple. If you eat fewer vitamins and minerals, you will pass on a weaker genetic expression of your DNA to your offspring. Your wellness potential and the wellness potential of your children and grandchildren depend on how well you eat and exercise in days to come.

     The University of Florida studied male sperm counts over the last 80 years. In 1929, the average male sperm count in the United States was 100 million sperm per ml. By 1973 the sperm count had dropped to 60 million. In 1980 the count had dropped to 20 million. [Hudec, T., J. Thean, D. Kuehl, and R.C. Doughterty. Tris (dichloropropyl) phosphate, a Mutagenic Flame Retardant: Frequent Concurrence in Human Seminal Plasma Science (211:951–952), 27 Feb. 1981.]

     What this means is our wellness potential is declining with every generation. This weaker expression will pave the way for your children and your children’s children to be susceptible to more health problems, such as diabetes, heart disease, dental problems, and sterility.

     But doesn’t this make sense when you think about it? Isn’t the daily news full of reports about increases of all these diseases occurring at younger ages, despite billions of dollars being spent to research and fight these problems? Could the solution really be as simple as going back and eating the foods of our ancestors in the early 1900s?

     Yes! But wait a minute. This program is called Real Life Wellness, isn’t it? There is no way in today’s real world you can grow all of your own vegetables, make your own butter, raise your own livestock, and bake your own bread. So what are you supposed to do?

     The best you can. That’s it you do the best you can. You eat as many whole foods as you can. Fresh vegetables and fruit, whole grains, nuts, and meat protein should be the staples of your diet. Buy them as fresh and organic as you can and prepare them simply. Do your best to eat as much real food every day as possible. Teach your children the difference between real food and fake food. Explain to them the difference between whole food vitamins and minerals and synthetic vitamins and minerals. And finally, you need to take whole food vitamin and mineral supplements to make up the difference of what you can’t get in your diet.

     The healthcare providers who recommend this book have had extensive training in the use of whole food nutritional supplements. Standard Process Inc., the leader in whole food nutrition supplements, has been around since 1929. Its founder, Dr. Royal Lee, understood how important whole food nutrition was and would be for generations to come. So his company has provided organically grown whole food nutritional supplements for almost 80 years.

     The human body has been digesting food for millions of years. It has only been in the last 60 or 70 years that we have had to try to digest anything other than real food. As I said earlier, when vitamins were isolated for the first time in the early 1900s, scientists thought they were doing the right thing by isolating parts of vitamins and making them in high doses. It was mistakenly thought that mega doses of vitamins would work like a drug to cure a disease.

     In the initial trials they got positive results. So they thought they were right. But after a short time the results reversed and they actually started causing the disease they were trying to treat. Dr. Royal Lee knew this was going to happen. He said many times if you give a part of a vitamin, the other parts of the vitamin must be pulled out of the body’s reserve, depleting the reserve and causing problems.

     So the question becomes, why aren’t we all taking whole food vitamins? The answer is simple economics. The technology required to extract a whole vitamin complex, with all of its synergists and mineral activators, and put it into a pill or capsule is very complex. It is much easier (and cheaper) to take a petroleum byproduct into a laboratory and make parts of vitamins. You can literally make some synthetic vitamins for pennies per pound.

     Another common problem is people think they have to take mega doses of vitamins to get a positive effect. This is another crossover perception from the drug culture. Mother Nature knew the right dosage long before we started to mess around with it. Whole food vitamins are potent because they are extracted from real food. Everything your body needs is in the whole food already. All the whole food supplement does is put it in a pill form to make it easy to swallow.

     Another reason a whole food vitamin is more effective is the symphony of the combination of the parts from real food. There are over 200 known active compounds found in a carrot. Each one of these compounds works together with the others to have a positive effect on your health. The same statement can be made for beets, broccoli, cauliflower and the list goes on. Mother Nature knew what she was doing. A whole vitamin simply concentrates these whole foods and gives your body exactly what it needs to work.

     You can’t find Standard Process nutritional supplements over the counter. Healthcare professionals are the only vendors allowed to order and distribute these products. Ask your healthcare professional to do a complete health history to ensure your special needs are met. You should always have a complete case history and examination before you begin to take any type of supplement to your diet.

     This brings me to the old excuse of I eat pretty well; I don’t think I need to take any extra vitamins. Well, think again. As previously discussed, with soil depletion and food processing it is almost impossible to meet your daily wellness requirements. If you wrote down everything you ate and drank for a week, what do you think you would find? Most likely you are overeating carbohydrates and under eating whole foods. Do you really spend time looking at the nutritional content of the foods you eat? Or do you eat what you have always eaten because it is convenient?

     It’s okay. You are in the majority. As Dr. Janet Lang says, you are going to do what you are doing until you’re done, then you will be ready to do something else.  I think this is very profound. It means you can make changes in your life at any point, for better or worse. This doesn’t make you a bad person it just makes you human.

     So what does all this stuff have to do with you? It sounds like a huge amount of work, research, and investment of time and money you don’t have. This is where Real Life Wellness comes in. Your healthcare provider has tapped into more than 20 years of research in wellness. Standard Process Inc. has been around since 1929. They both continually update information based on current research. Use their expertise to make your transistion easy and painless.

     Your healthcare provider is doing the work so you don’t have to. All you have to do is decide to be well and not take no for an answer. But remember, your wellness is a participation sport. You can’t just sit on the sidelines and watch your life go by and expect to get the most out of it. You have to get into the game. Is it easy? No. Is it always fun? No. Can you stumble, fall, get bruised up, and have a heck of a time getting back into the game? Absolutely!

     The times of allowing someone else to be in charge of your healthcare are over. With the right information and guidance, you can make the right decisions about your nutritional, fitness, emotional, and spiritual needs. But the key is getting the right information and guidance. You need information and advice, not a sales pitch or prescription. 

Why Isn’t This Information Common Knowledge?

     So why haven’t you heard all of this information before?  Why hasn’t the mainstream media uncovered these problems with our food supply? Why hasn’t the FDA had hearings to address the depletion of our soil, which has led to the decrease of vitamin content in our foods? The answer to all of those questions is the same, money.

     When food became a profitable item for sale, the race was on to make it cheaper so profits would be higher. In the days when we went to the local market daily for food, the pressure wasn’t nearly as big for companies to turn a large profit. But in today’s society of long shelf life and huge quantities, profit is king.

     I know there is no way to turn the clock back to those days. But there are ways to help you and your family make yourselves stronger and better. You can buck the trend of getting sicker and more obese for generations to come. Reading this book and books like it is the first step in the process. The next step is to begin taking whole food supplements to rebuild and repair your organs and genes.

     Most researchers agree that 30% of your wellness potential is determined by your genetic makeup. The other 70% of your wellness potential is determined by your lifestyle. This entire book is designed to give you new, better information to help you make positive changes in your lifestyle. And when you make positive changes in your lifestyle you also make positive changes in your genetic code.

     Just because your mother got cancer doesn’t mean you have to get cancer. Your mother’s lifestyle allowed the 30% of her wellness potential to break down so that cancer could take hold and develop. If you create a better wellness life style by eating nutritious foods, staying fit, taking whole food supplements, handling your stress, and staying spiritually connected, you don’t have to go down the same road.

Conclusion

     The healthcare provider who suggested this book to you has only one goal in mind. They want you to become informed about what has happened to your wellness potential because of changes over the last 80 years. Their goal is for you to take control of your healthcare and become an active participant in your lifestyle choices.

     Today’s healthcare system is symptom-based and you aren’t expected to take control. You are given a drug or put through surgery to decrease or eliminate the symptom by somebody else’s hand. Somebody else owns your health. You are supposed to sit back and let them take responsibility for your wellness.

     This is the exact opposite approach functional medicine healthcare providers take to help you. Functional medicine providers look at you as a whole. The easiest way to describe the functional medicine approach to your health is to picture a person as if they were a tree. If a tree had a problem with its leaves or branches, the first thing a functional medicine healthcare provider would ask would be what kind of soil the tree is in (nutrition). Then they would ask what kind of environment the tree is in (fitness, stress). Then they would look at the toxins and pollutants around the tree (spiritual problems). After any problems were identified, they would examine the trunk and move up towards the branches. If they fixed all the issues with the soil, environment, and toxins, the problem with the leaves would go away on its own. Focusing on symptoms is like focusing on the branches of the tree. Functional medicine healthcare is all about getting to the lowest part of the problem and fixing it from there.  

Case Study  

     A 44-year-old female presents with extreme fatigue, weight gain, and memory problems, which have been getting worse. She is the mother of two. She works outside the home, averaging about 30 hours per week. She has been slowly gaining weight for the past ten years. Her children are now in middle school and high school and are involved in activities almost every night. Most family meals are either passed through a fast food window or the kids make frozen pizza after school.  

     She currently weighs 177 pounds and is 5' 9" tall. Her blood pressure has been slowly rising over the last five years and she takes a small dose of blood pressure medication. Her last physical included a hemoglobin A1C (to check average blood sugar) which was 5.7. This means she was not quite a Type II Diabetic, but she is certainly well into insulin resistance. She has taken birth control pills for almost 15 years.  She took them at first because they didn’t want any more children, and then continued to take them to regulate her menstrual cycle. She has read many articles about possible problems with these drugs and wants to quit taking them, but she is scared of how her periods might be if she gets off of them. She isn’t on any other medications.  

     She tries to buy and eat healthy foods but has a very hard time because of her lifestyle. She used to work out, but time problems made her quit. She injured her lower back about five years ago and every time she tries to exercise it is aggravated.  

     After we gathered her initial medical history, we gave her a seven-day diet history. Standard Process provides an excellent form to keep this information in one place. The results were very surprising upon analysis. The majority of her diet consisted of simple carbohydrates and sugar. Less than 20% of her daily food intake was proteins and fats. She was shocked.  

     The next step was to perform a time audit of her daily activities. She discovered she had better energy for fitness in the morning, but she had a hard time getting out of bed. We suspected she was dealing with profound adrenal fatigue and once she started feeling better it wouldn’t be as difficult to get out of bed in the morning.  

     Her program included many different things. She needed to have her vitamin and mineral tank refilled because of a lifetime of eating processed foods. She rarely, if ever, took any vitamins, and the ones she did take were the cheapest she could find at a discount store.  

     She had always resisted taking anything because she doesn’t like to take medications. We explained taking vitamins and minerals is different. Drugs are designed to overpower your body to have their desired effect, but vitamins and minerals can be given in very small doses and have huge effects. This is because they are nature’s raw material to rebuild your body and allow you to regenerate faster than you degenerate. Your body has been designed to repair itself automatically. Giving extra vitamins and minerals helps provide the raw materials for your body to repair itself.  

     A wise man once said, “If you fix the foundation, you don’t have to fix the roof.” Giving whole food supplements helps you fix the foundation of wellness. Your body is designed to repair itself given the proper environment for healing. Our job as her healthcare provider was to provide that environment.

     So she agreed to start taking Standard Process whole food supplements. She started with Catalyn (six tabs per day in divided doses). She also took Cataplex B (a whole vitamin B complex) to help her energy systems (four tabs per day in divided doses) and Drenamin to begin to rebuild her adrenal gland (six tabs per day in divided doses).  

     After three weeks she was already feeling quite a bit better. She hadn’t made changes in her nutrition or even started a fitness program yet, but the supplements had stabilized her mood and energy and she had a great deal of hope for the future.  

     She began her complete Real Life Wellness program after almost a month of preparation with specific goals and plans for success. She was already feeling better. She was sleeping better, didn’t have the large dips in energy in the afternoon, and had found time in her day to begin a fitness routine she enjoyed.  

     After three months, she had made significant progress. She was consistently losing one to two pounds per week. She had done some research on her own about nutrition and decided we needed to add a source of omega-3 oil and Gymnema (an herb to help her insulin resistance) to her supplement program. She started on the Standard Process tuna oil (to decrease inflammation of the body, four pearls a day in divided doses) and Mediherb Gymnema (six tabs per day in divided doses). She continues to improve slowly and her energy and lifestyle is better than it has been in over 20 years. She states, “This is my lifestyle now. I will only get better from here.”