Amy and Simon Blog

The Natural and Healthy Lifestyle we Discovered Along the Way…

Interesting article on Tuberose.com – The Theory of Disease Causation September 30, 2008

Tuberose.comInformation for Transformation

This self-help alternative medicine site offers extensive educational information on the topics of natural healing, holistic and biological dentistry, herbal medicine, cleansing and detoxification, heavy metal detox, diet, nutrition, weight loss, and the finest, tried and tested health equipment and products available for the natural management of health.

Germ Theory of Disease Causation

 

  Medical Issues  Absurd Medical Assumptions  Mold & Fungus   

The Germ Theory of Disease Causation

“Even if all the experts agree, they may well be mistaken.”–Bertrand Russell

 

Human beings, the potentially highest form of life expression on this planet have built the vast pharmaceutical industry for the central purpose of poisoning the lowest form of life on the planet–germs! One of the biggest tragedies of human civilization is the precedence of chemicals over nutrition.”–Dr. Richard Murray

 

In the sciences, people quickly come to regard as their own personal property that which they have learned and had passed on to them at the universities and academies. If someone else comes along with new ideas that contradict the Credo and in fact even threaten to overturn it, then all passions are raised against this threat and no method is left untried to suppress it. People resist it in every way possible: pretending not to have heard about it; speaking disparagingly of it, as if it were not even worth the effort of looking into the matter. And so a new truth can have a long wait before finally being accepted.”–Goethe

 

Misconceptions about health are ingrained in our culture. The road to understanding the process of maintaining and restoring health has been a long and twisted one. From ancient and intuitive knowledge, science has taken over, made colossal errors, and clings to them for dear life. There was a rejection of wisdom or scientific discovery in favor of a more popular, convenient, or politically desirable system. Just as Socrates was poisoned for his ideas, and Galileo was forced by a fanatic clergy to withdraw his statements about astronomy, ignorance and power can be a dangerous combination.

 

We do not catch diseases. We build them. We have to eat, drink, think, and feel them into existence. We work hard at developing our diseases. We must work just as hard at restoring health. The presence of germs does not constitute the presence of a disease. Bacteria are scavengers of nature…they reduce dead tissue to its smallest element. Germs or bacteria have no influence, whatsoever, on live cells. Germs or microbes flourish as scavengers at the site of disease. They are just living on the unprocessed metabolic waste and diseased, malnourished, nonresistant tissue in the first place. They are not the cause of the disease, any more than flies and maggots cause garbage. Flies, maggots, and rats do not cause garbage but rather feed on it. Mosquitoes do not cause a pond to become stagnant! You always see firemen at burning buildings, but that doesn’t mean they caused the fire…

 

Traditional Western medicine teaches and practices the doctrines of French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). Pasteur’s main theory is known as the Germ Theory Of Disease. It claims that fixed species of microbes from an external source invade the body and are the first cause of infectious disease. The concept of specific, unchanging types of bacteria causing specific diseases became officially accepted as the foundation of allopathic Western medicine and microbiology in late 19th century Europe. Also called monomorphism,(one-form), it was adopted by America’s medical/industrial complex, which began to take shape near the turn of the century. This cartel became organized around the American Medical Association, formed by drug interests for the purpose of manipulating the legal system to destroy the homeopathic medical profession.

 

Controlled by pharmaceutical companies, the complex has become a trillion-dollar-a-year business. It also includes many insurance companies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), hospitals, and university research facilities. The microbian doctrine gave birth to the technique of vaccination that was blindly begun in 1796 by Edward Jenner. Jenner took pus from the running sores of sick cows and injected it into the blood of his “patients.” Thus was born a vile practice (immunization/vaccination) whose nature has changed little to this day, and whose understanding is still clouded by Pasteur’s theory. This also gave birth to the development of antibiotics, the first being penicillin in 1940. An antibiotic is the poisonous waste from one germ used in the attempt to kill another. Penicillin is the poison from a fungus. This has created the proliferation of aggressive and stubborn forms of resistant strains that haunt us today.

 

The Rife Universal Microscope, developed in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, clearly established that germs (microorganisms) are the result of disease (scavengers of dead cells) rather than the cause thereof. If germs are involved, they arise as primary symptoms of that general condition. Though germs don’t cause disease, secondary symptoms are produced in response to their activity (commonly called the disease). One reason the conventional medical community doesn’t see the big picture is their means of looking at it. A lot depends on how you look at it and what you look at it with.

 

In the 3rd Edition, Basic Histology, Junqueira & Carneiro, 1980, we discover the limitations of the electron microscope in that the electron beam demands the use of very thin tissue sections enclosed in a high vacuum. The authors of these requisites state on page 9: “These conditions preclude the use of living material…and…The electron beam on an object can damage it and produce unwanted changes in tissue structures. They take a living, changing scene (the blood), and disorganize it, by staining the blood sample. They then take a snapshot of this disorganized situation and interpret it as the entire story. During the study and interpretation of stained tissue sections in microscope preparations, the observed product is the end result of a series of processes that considerably distort the image observable in the living tissue, mainly through shrinking and retraction. It has been suggested in the past that the electron-microscopic specks identified as viruses could, more than likely, be nothing more than particles of lifeless, degraded protein–disintegrated peptides from cellular death–catabolic residues of cytoplasm, or repair proteins produced by the cells in response to the imbalanced biological terrain. It has been reported by researchers searching for the hypothetical “elusive virus,” that viruses can “mimic” human tissue! They are human tissue.

 

Antoine Béchamp

Dr. Antoine Béchamp noted the importance of lifestyles as the key to prevention and success against all diseases almost 150 years ago! He backed it up with thorough scientific precision, as a practicing physician and researcher who was degreed in and a university professor of chemistry, biology, physics and pharmacy. It took eight pages of the French national science journalMoniteur Scientifique just to list the titles of his scientifically published works in 1908.

 

The sound conclusions of Béchamp for lifestyle changes such as wholesome nutrition and environmental, hygienic cleanliness were ignored in favor of other “solutions” that profited industry and required “heroic” medical interventions.

 

The whitewashing of Antoine Béchamp from history was so thorough as to assign credit for his works to others such as Louis Pasteur.

 

Béchamp died in 1908. That same year the Nobel Prize was awarded to a German, E. Buchner, for his isolation of the fermentation factor in yeast and identification of it as an enzyme in 1897. This was a duplication of work that Béchamp had done more than half a century before. Buchner even used the same terminology that Béchamp suggested decades before.

 

Dr. Béchamp also postulated chromosomes long before anyone else.

 

Antoine Béchamp was the foremost pioneer of science, medicine, nutrition and genetics all at once. The lack of recognition for this is a literary loss to history, and has resulted in tremendous physical loss to humanity for generations.

 

Béchamp noted the importance of taking care of one’s self for prevention of disease. He was a champion of self-responsibility. He noted that germs abounded in unhealthy environments but were notably checked in healthful ones.

 

The Moniteur Scientifique noted upon the death of Béchamp, “Those of his acquaintance who cared for him and were about him know that he never doubted that one day justice would be rendered him.”

 

The English international science journal Nature was already a prestigious journal then as now. Its obituary noted that Dr. Béchamp was ensured “an honourable place among the founders of biological chemistry”.

 

2008 will mark 100 years since his death. It is way past time that justice, history, and humanity were served by the recognition of Dr. Antoine Béchamp and his honourable, timeless work.

_

_

______

Royal R. Rife ________________Rife Microscope

R. R. Rife

Perhaps the most profound confirmation of pleomorphis was executed by another nearly obliterated genius, this time an American microscopist with the name of royal Raymond Rife. His story was told in The Rife Report by Barry Lynes. It has been published in book form as The Cancer Cure That Worked! Rife’s ordinary microscope (with 31,000 diameters resolution), was capable of detail and clarity surpassing the newly emerging electron microscopes. Its use of prismatically dispersed natural light frequencies, rather than electron beams and acid stains, allowed clear views of living subjects. Each microorganism has its own fundamental frequency of light, something Béchamp apparently took advantage of with his polarimeter. Rife arrived at the conclusion that light could be used, instead of fatal chemicals, ot “stain” the subject. This was brilliant. equally brilliant was its execution. The entire optical system–lenses and prisms, as well as the illuminating units–are made of block quartz crystal. The illuminating unit used for examining the filterable forms of disease organisms contains fourteen lenses and prisms, three of which are in the high-intensity incandescent lamp, four in the Risley prism, and seven in the achromatic condenser, which has an aperture of 1.40.

 

Between the source of light and the specimen are subtended two circular, wedge-shaped, block-crystal quartz prisms for the purpose of polarizing the light passing through the specimen, polarization being the practical application of the theory that light waves vibrate in all planes perpendicular to the direction in which they are propagated. When light comes into contact with a polarizing prism, it is split into two beams, one of which is refracted to such an extent that it is reflected to the side of the prism, without passing through the prism, while the second ray, bent considerably less, is enabled to pass through the prism to illuminate the specimen. When the quartz prisms on the Universal Microscope (which may be rotated with vernier control through 360 degrees) are rotated in opposite directions, they serve to bend the transmitted beams at variable angles of incidence while, at the same time, since only a part of a band of color is visible at one time, a small portion of the spectrum is projected up into the axis of the microscope. It is possible to proceed this way from one end of the spectrum to the other–infra-red to ultra-violet. Now, when that portion of the spectrum is reached in which both the organism and the color band vibrate in exact accord with one another, a definite, characteristic wavelength is emitted by the organism. A monochromatic beam of light corresponding exactly to the frequency of the organism is then sent up through the specimen and the direct, transmitted light, enabling the observer to view the organism stained in its true chemical color and revealing its own structure in a field which is brilliant with light.

 

Instead of the light rays from the specimen passing through the objective and converging, they pass through a series of special prisms which keep the rays parallel. It is this principle of parallel rays in the Universal Microscope, and the shortening of projection distance between the prisms, plus the fact that three matched pairs of ten-millimeter, seven-millimeter, and four-millimeter objectives in short mounts are substituted for oculars, which make possible not only the unusually high magnification and resolution, but which serve to eliminate all distortion as well as all chromatic and spherical aberration. The fine adjustment being seven hundred times more sensitive than that of ordinary microscopes, the length of time required to focus ranges up to one hour and a half. A major upshot of Rife’s work was his ability, through several pleomorphic stages, to transform a virus he found in cancer tissue into a fungus, plant the fungus in an asparagus-based medium, and produce a bacillus E. coli, the type of microform indigenous to the human intestine. This was repeated hundreds of times. Rife showed that the pleomorphic capacity of microforms goes beyond the bacterial level to the fungal level, and its progression to the last stage–mold. Included in this cycle are the very important stages intermediate to microzymas and bacteria, the protein complexes usually referred to as viruses, and their immediate descendants, the cell-wall deficient forms.

 

Rife identified 10 families in the whole spectrum of microlife. Within each family, any form/member could become any other. Also, the fact that organisms have resonant frequencies allowed Rife to further develop his r.f. “beam ray,” which helped rid the body of cancer symptoms. What marvelous and beneficial revelations might have arisen with Rife’s technology guided by Béchamp‘s vision? These waves, or this ray, as the frequencies might be called, have been shown to possess the power of devitalizing disease organisms, or “killing” them when tuned to an exact wavelength, or frequency, for each different organism. In reality, it is not the bacteria themselves that produce the disease, but the chemical constituents of these microorganisms enacting upon the unbalanced cell metabolism of the human body that in actuality produce the disease symptoms. Disease-associated microorganisms do not originally produce the condition which has supported their morbid evolution in the body.

 

Biological Terrain

A healthy or diseased biological terrain is determined primarily by four things: its acid/alkaline balance (pH); its electric/magnetic charge (negative or positive); its level of poisoning (toxicity); and its nutritional status. One critical symptom of diseased terrain is low oxygen. Another is a stoppage of movement or stagnation in the colloidal body fluids between cells. Still another is loss of electrical charge on the surface of red blood cells. This contributes to a condition called rouleau, sometimes called “sticky blood.”

 

Within a cell’s wall, all the chemicals and components acting together make up life. Nothing within the cell is believed to be alive of itself. But, when you look at live blood, you can observe that microorganisms undergo an exact, scientifically verifiable cycle of change in their form. As profound as the change of a caterpillar to a butterfly, this evolution is even more fantastic, since it can happen quite rapidly (sometimes in a matter of minutes!). There are no enemies or specific diseases to fight. There is only the consequence of balance or imbalance. The universe seems to operate by keeping opposites in balance. When things get out of balance, a sign usually appears to make it known. Health is balance in the system. If you want to see a rough comparison of what’s happening in a sick body, try not cleaning your house for about a year.

 

In that environment, all kinds of small “guests” will come out of nowhere to take up residence with you. Similarly, the stresses of our wrong eating habits and way of life “dirty up” our inner environment. Our terrain becomes overly acidic (pH imbalance)–paving the way for unwanted guests. In this unbalanced environment, morbid bacteria can issue from our own cells. These tiny life forms can rapidly change their form and function. Through a process called pleomorphism, (pleo = many; morph = form), bacteria can change into yeast, yeast to fungus, fungus to mold.Microorganisms such as a specific bacterium, can take on multiple forms. This is a change of function as well as shape. It’s analagous to someone with multiple personalities, the person’s physiology changes with the personality changes. Dr. E.C. Rosenow of the Mayo Biological Labs, and other bacteriologists, demonstrated that a media change could alter streptococci topneumococci and the food change back would reverse pneumococci to streptococci. This showed that bacteria are scavengers of nature and being essentially bags of enzymes, alter their shape and enzyme production for the purpose of dissolving to its smallest element whatever dead tissue is present. In addition to pH and pleomorphism, we need to consider a most important concept–the difference between the symptoms of a disease and the disease conditionIn pleomorphism, a so-called species is just a stage in the growth cycle of a family of beings. Each member functions differently and looks a lot different from the others.

 

What most people call a “disease” is really a symptom or a collection of symptoms. For example, cancer tumors are symptoms, which is why trying to fight them has resulted in the epidemic we have today. What people commonly think of as causes of disease, are symptoms. In this category are bacteria, yeast, and their descendants. When germs are involved in illness, they are producing, or influencing the body to produce, secondary symptoms. In orthodox medicine, these secondary symptoms are thought of as the disease. The answer though, lies in the condition of your terrain. Is it in balance? Or will it support the development of unwanted guests? Once it gets going, the imbalance becomes a vicious circle. In pH imbalance, body tissues are on the acid side. The acid condition is promoted by a number of things, the main ones being food types and poor digestion. In poor digestion, food is either fermenting or putrefying. In the early stages of the imbalance, the outer symptoms may not be very intense and are frequently treated (manipulated) with drugs. They include such things as: skin eruptions, headaches, allergies, colds and flu, and sinus problems. As things get further out of balance, more serious conditions arise. Weakened glands, organs and systems start to give way–thyroid, adrenals, the liver, etc.

 

Unfortunately, symptom manipulation plays a major role in creating worse symptoms later. But most people don’t consider or realize this when they go for the quick medical fix. Even most doctors are not aware, or aren’t telling. The medical/militaristic approach is a substitution of artificial therapy over natural, of poisons over food, in which we are feeding people poisons (drugs), trying to correct (attack) the reactions of starvation. Lack of understanding creates fear, but when we understand that both health and disease are created by our own living and eating habits, then there is no longer any fear of “germs.” Our individual immune systems are inescapably linked to the planet Earth, of whose substance we are made. The entire planet Earth, the complete geosphere, has its own functioning immune system, a self-protecting, regenerating, healing system. When we are not integrated in that system, or we harm that system, the inevitable result is our own degeneration. There is no blessing that anyone has ever received that was not linked to the Earth, even if it came from the Internet! Even the British Medical Journal of November 1950 admitted: “With the best of care, heavy bacterial contamination of vaccine lymph is inevitable during its preparation, and as many as 500 MILLION organisms per ml. may be present…” This being true, if bacteria caused disease, everyone receiving their first vaccination would expire within 24 hours of inoculation.

__

_

_______

Louis Pasteur_________Paul Erlich_________Rudolf Virchow_________Antoine Béchamp

 

__

History

Rudolf Virchow, father of the germ theory, stated in his later years, “If I could live my life over again, I would devote it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat–diseased tissues–rather than causing disease.” Pasteur (1822-1895) and Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) jointly gave to the civilized world the disease theory doctrines of microbiology and immunology before vitamins, trace elements, and other nutrients had even been discovered. From their efforts and dubious discoveries, vaccines became vogue and were embraced by leading medical scientists–those longing for a sound and simple explanation for the inexplicable. Antoine Béchamp, M.D., one of the world’s foremost bacteriologists and Pasteur’s contemporary, was making great scientific discoveries and some of the greatest minds of his day accepted his theories and findings as definitely established facts. Béchamp attained so many achievements that it took eight pages of a scientific journal to list them when he died. Among many other things, he saved the French silk industry from devastation by silkworms, under the nose of Pasteur, who had been commissioned to solve it. He clearly described the process of fermentation for what it is: a process of digestion by microscopic beings. He was the first to assert that the blood is not a liquid, but a flowing tissue. He developed; a cheap process for the production of aniline which was the foundation of the dye industry.

 

What makes the germ theory so dangerous is that it seems so obviously true. But it is true only secondarily. Béchamp said “There is no doctrine so false that it does not contain some particle of truth. It is thus with microbian doctrines.” Béchamp discovered Microzyma (now known as micro-organisms) minute or small ferment bodies–the basic structure of cell life; and that germs definitely are the result, not the cause of disease. Through his experiments he showed that the vital characteristics of cells and germs are determined by the soil in which their microzyma feed, grow and multiply in the human body. Both the normal cell and germ have constructive work to do. The cells organize tissues and organs in the human body. Germs cleanse the human system and free it from accumulations of pathogenic and mucoid matter. We are constantly breathing in some 14,000 germs and bacteria per hour. If germs are so harmful, why aren’t we all dead?

 

In the primary stages of inflammation (pus formation), the bacteria present are streptococci but as blood cells and tissues further disintegrate, the “streps” turn into the staphylococcus–changing into forms native to their new surroundings of dead tissues. Bacteria do not have any action on live cells; only dead cells. They are not the cause of disease but the result thereof. That’s why in many cases of pneumonia; the pneumococci don’t appear on the scene until 36 to 72 hours after the onset of the disease. His biological work might then have revolutionized medicine with profound insight into the nature of life. But in a political world, he found himself up against a skillful politician with wealthy connections–Louis Pasteur. Antoinne Béchamp was a scientist, while apothecary Pasteur was a chemist with no education in life sciences, and an advertiser, plagiarized the research of Béchamp, distorted it, submitted it to the French Academy of Science as his own! And by making public these premature research findings, Pasteur had a devoted following–people acclaiming him a scientific genius. Pasteur was responsible in large part for the onslaught of animal experimentation in medical research. Pasteur used preparations made from the diseased tissues of previously sick animals, thus making the injected ones sick. This gave the appearance that a germ caused a disease, when if fact these preparations were extremely poisonous. This is not a scientific procedure, but simply demonstrates the fact that you can make someone sick by poisoning his or her blood. Based on his theory of microzymas, Béchamp warned emphatically against such direct and artificial invasion of the blood.

 

The German bacteriologist, Robert Koch, set forth rules by which microorganisms could be ruled as the cause of a disease or discounted as non-pathogenic (good) germs. He provided his famous Postulates Of Koch to assist in making the differentiation. The only problem was that none of the microorganisms, in practice, could satisfy the requisites necessary to confirm them as the cause of any given disease. Unfortunately, when these demands of causation failed to qualify a bacterium as the responsible culprit, a great void was left in the philosophy of medical science’s most cherished fantasy–the microbe THEORY of disease causation. When the inconsistencies of the germ theory of disease threatened the bacteria/disease premise, Eli Metchnikoff (1845-1916) bolstered the shaky germ theory of disease causation by revealing novel concepts about leukocytic phagocytosis (how certain white blood cells engulf foreign agents in the circulating blood and tissues), starting the indomitable THEORY of immunology. The newly developed concepts of Metchnikoff erased the obvious inadequacies of the germ theory: why everyone exposed to the same microbe didn’t develop the disease. Theoretical immunology per Ehrlich, Pasteur and Metchnikoff could now explain the whys and why-nots.

 

If a person’s immune cells were smart and could recognize the enemy–the invading bacterium–then phagocytosis immediately engulfed and destroyed the invader. If the leukocyte was incompetent (by whatever strange reason) the invader took control and proceeded to destroy the victim. The answer was to educate the leucocytes so they could recognize and destroy the invading microorganisms. This Platonic academia gave rise to the theory that injection of disease residues, (fractions of pus, into a healthy person), would provoke an immune reaction (the antigen/antibody theory). Thus, a sharpening up of leucocytes so they could recognize the invader and engulf it. Our bodies are densely populated with microorganisms, inside and out. What inhabits us doesn’t hurt us and is essential to us. We live in a symbiotic, mutually beneficial, mutually necessary relationship with our personal population of bacteria.

 

Leeuwenhoek discovered life on man with a 17th-century microscope and with unbiased detachment, contemplated the host of living things living on himself–not as disease causation. Social attitudes have developed over bacteria in relation to dirt, filth or cleanliness. Even Freudian views have entangled bacteria with sexual attitudes. Pasteur stated later in his career that germs and bacteria are not the exact and primary cause of disease. He abandoned his earlier beliefs on the Germ Theory and became convinced that the disease came first, the germ second. He stated, “The presence in the body of a pathogenic agent is not necessarily synonymous with infectious disease.” Pasteur was aware that fermentation (which he studied extensively while formulating his germ theory) only occurs in injured, bruised or dead material, and that bacteria are a natural result of fermentation, not the cause. He realized later that germs and bacteria change their form according to their environment. Unfortunately, the stepping-stones of modern-day medicine were already in place and Pasteur could not reverse the situation.

 

Most all textbooks of bacteriology reveal that the NORMAL throat routinely carries:

 

1. Alpha-hemolytic streptococci 2. Neisseria (gonorrhea and meningitis)

3. Coagulase-negative staphylococci 4. Staphylococcus Aureus

5. Group A streptococcus 6. Hemophilus hemolyticus

7. Yeasts, diptheroids and anaerobes 8. Pneumococci and gram-negative bacillus

9. Gamma Streptococci

 

Most infectious pathogenic bacteria, yeast, mold, and fungus, thrive in an imbalanced pH. The following bacteria, all well known enemies of modern science’s war on bacteria, grow optimally on pH imbalanced media:

 

staphylococcus (staph infection), meningococcus (meningitis),

streptococcus (strep throat), corymbacterium diptheria (diptheria),

pneumococcus (pneumonia) clostridium tetani (tetanus),

h. influenza (the flu) and others

 

The germ theory, virus theory, genetic theory and autoimmune theory–contemporary disease causation theories–are all based upon and rely upon IMMUNOLOGY. Immunology is based upon and must be supported by Darwinian concepts of evolution. Pull out the evolutionary foundation and all the prevailing theories collapse; the highly publicized, but nonexistent, advances of modern medicine are exposed as scatologists!. Nonetheless, the germ theory is still believed to be the central cause of disease, because around it exists a global supportive infrastructure of commercial interests that built multi-billion-dollar industries based upon this theory.

 

Virus

The inability of the Germ Theory to satisfy the POSTULATES OF KOCH…the Virus Theory can’t survive the basic requisites of scientific scrutiny to remain a theory, much less become a LAW.Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary tells us that a VIRUS is a minute, infectious agent not resolved (distinguished separately by the light microscope). It is without independent metabolism and can only replicate (reproduce itself) within a living host cell. A virion is defined as a complete viral particle found outside of host cells and can survive in crystalline form and can infect a living cell. In other words, the most intelligent virus (no brain or nervous system) outwits a cell membrane (the guardian of the cytoplasm), passes into the cells interior, sneaks by the lysosomes that normally ingest and digest intracellular decayed or foreign matter, trick the ribosomes and polysomes into believing that the virus is a friendly amino acid, enters into the amino acid polypeptide chain of amino acid residues, takes over the ribosomal control (coup d’etat), reproduces itself many times over and then kicks out a virion (crystalline) to attack the adjoining cell!

 

Russian bacteria hunter Dimitri Iwanowski, who gathered fluid from diseased tobacco plants, achieved the first isolation of a virus in 1892. He passed this liquid through a filter fine enough to retain bacteria; yet to Iwanowski’s surprise, the bacteria-free filtrate easily made healthy plants sick. In 1898, a Dutch botanist, Martinus Willem Beijerinck, repeating the experiment, also recognized that there was an invisible cause and named the infectious agent “tobacco mosaic virus.” In the same year as Beijerinck, report, two German scientists purified a liquid containing filterable viruses that caused foot-and-mouth disease in cattle (viruses were at one time called filterable viruses, but eventually came to apply only to viruses, and was dropped). Walter Reed followed in 1901 with a filtrate responsible for yellow fever, and soon dozens of other “disease-causing” viruses were found. In 1935, another American, Wendell M. Stanley, went back to the beginning and created pure crystals of tobacco mosaic virus from a filtered liquid solution. He affirmed that these crystals could easily infect plants, and concluded that a virus was not a living organism, since it could be crystallized like salt and yet remains infectious. Subsequently, bacteriologists all over the world began filtering for viruses, and a new area of biology was born–virology. Historically, medical science has vacillated on the question of whether a virus is alive. Originally it was described as nonliving, but is currently said to be an extremely complex molecule or an extremely simple microorganism, and is usually referred to as a parasite having a cycle of life. Commonly composed of either DNA or RNA cores with protein coverings, and having no inherent reproductive ability, viruses depend upon the host for replication. They must utilize the nucleic acids of living cells they infect to reproduce their proteins, which are then assembled into new viruses like cars on an assembly line. Theoretically, this is their only means of surviving and infecting new cells or hosts.

 

Underlying the birth of virology was the doctrine of monomorphism–that all microorganisms are fixed species, unchangeable; that each pathological type produces only one specific disease; that microforms never arise endogenously, i.e., have absolute origin within the host; and that blood and tissues are sterile under healthy conditions. Theoretically, under ideal health conditions, the blood might be sterile, though it has the inherent potential to develop morbid microforms, as discussed earlier. Long and repeated observation of live blood in the phase-contrast, dark-field microscope, however, shows that the blood can contain various microforms in an otherwise asymptomatic host, or in a condition, or in a condition defined as normal or healthy in orthodox terms. Monomorphism was the cornerstone of developments in 20th-century medical research and treatments. Refusal by the mainstream to examine fairly, much less accept, the demonstrated facts ofpleomorphism–that viruses and bacteria, yeast, fungi and mold, are evolutions from microzyma; that microforms can rapidly change their form (evolve and devolve) in vivo, one becoming another, dependent upon conditions in the biological terrain (environment); that blood and tissues are not necessarily sterile; and that there are no specific diseases, but only specific disease conditionswas the foundation of the debate. It is so called because those who wore the “robes” of scientific authority would not be swayed from folly when resented with its contrary proofs. These proofs began in earnest with Antoine Béchamp in the nineteenth-century.

 

In the early third of the 20th-century, the heated debate took place over filterable bacteria versus non-filterable. This was a major battle concerning micromorphology. The orthodox view prevailed: bacterial forms were not small enough to pass, or did not have a smaller, earlier stage. What passed through “bacteria-proof” filters was something else, i.e., viruses. Standard medical textbooks long made this filtering distinction between bacteria and viruses. Subsequently, however, the cellular nature of many filterable forms originally thought to be viruses, such as some mycoplasmas, rickettsias, and various other groups, has been established. With the victory of the monomorphic view, deeper understanding of infectious “disease” was lost, setting the stage for cancer, degenerative symptoms and AIDS.

 

A typical bacterium is about 1 micron in size. Most filterable forms now called viruses range in size from 0.3 micron to 0.01 micron–partially in the colloidal range. Most of the larger viruses are a third to a quarter the size of the average bacterium. Size is critical because 0.3 microns is the resolution limit of modern-day light microscopes. Thus, as viruses were discovered, they required an electron microscope to be seen, especially given the fact that Royal Rife’s microscope technology and career were destroyed by vested interests. Unfortunately, electron microscopes and the process of chemical staining disorganize all specimens, whereas Rife’s technology allowed life to proceed and thus evolve under its lens. As viruses became visible to advancing technology, the ramification was that the technology revealed, to minds infected with monomorphism, protein structures deemed foreign to the body. What is really known about viruses is that they are, according to Biochemistry, Lubert Stryer, 2nd Edition, 1981…”the most efficient of the self-reproducing intracellular parasites.” Yet, in the next sentence: “Viruses are unable to generate metabolic energy or to synthesize proteins.”–It’s a paradox! Maybe someday soon, with improvements in the electron microscope, we will find out that what are now being called and classified as viruses will prove to be intracellular crystallizations of protein catabolismmeaning the destructive process by which complex substances are converted into simple compounds.

 

The 7th edition of Russell L. Cecil’s A Textbook Of Medicine (1947), said then, what is still the case today: “The nature of viruses is not yet definitely known, but certain facts appear well established. At the present time it is convenient to think of viruses as though they were obligate intracellular parasites of extremely small size.” From whatever cause, when the proteinaceous structure of cellular cytoplasm is damaged, the bags of enzymes inside the cell, called lysosomes, release proteolytic enzymes that digest the dead protein of the cytoplasm. With death of the cell and disintegration of the cell nucleus, ribonuclease and deoxyribonuclease enzymes catalyze the depolymerization of RNA and DNA–providing the free strands of nucleoprotein which “mimic viruses” when viewed with the electron microscope. Volumes could be written about the assumptions, theories and hypothesis associated with immunology, the germ theory and the virus theory. Virologists today will state that the “virus” remains dormant and hidden in the body and some leading authorities reveal that these little trick-or-treaters are actually hiding in the nerve sheaths.

 

Immunology

If the concept of immunology can in any way be substantiated, then evolution has really let us down. The only thing that benefits from evolutionary progress is the microbe that outsmarts man, the virus that outsmarts the cell membrane and the rodent that by-passed man 65 million years ago (approximate time that man supposedly lost his ability to manufacture vitamin C)! If the antigen/antibody reaction is true…we have also been outwitted by anaphylaxis (an exaggerated reaction of an organism to an injected foreign protein. Such an injection renders the animal or human hyper-susceptible to a subsequent injection) which cannot exist under the circumstances. Dr. W. H. Manwaring, Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology at Leland Stanford University proclaimed: “Not only is there no evidence of these so-called antibodies being formed. But there is ground for believing that the injected germ proteins hybridize with the body proteins to form new tribes, whose characteristics and effects cannot be predicted. Even non-toxic bacterial substances sometimes hybridize with serum albumins to form specific poisons which continue to multiply, breed and cross-breed, ad infinitum, doing untold harm as its reproductivity may continue while life lasts.” He continued, “In spite of millions of dollars spent on research and tens of millions spent in commercial exploitation, of 100 theoretically logical monovalent, polyvalent, prophylactic and curative anti-sera, 95% of them were thrown into the clinical discard. The same thing is true of vaccines…and we call this scientific medicine. Twelve years of study with immuno-physiological tests have yielded a mass of experimental evidence contrary to, and irreconcilable with, the Ehrilich theory, and have convinced me that his conception of the origin, nature and physiological role of the specific “anti-bodies” is erroneous.”

 

Many harmful and unexpected reactions occurred during the original experimentation. Nevertheless, it was assumed that since man and animal derived from the same evolutionary beginnings, the disease residues could first be injected into animals and animal serum would produce antibodies acceptable to humans. That particular concept was not appetizing to the average scientist until Charles Darwin (1809-1882) assumed the “evidence” that man and lower animals were indeed blood brothers. According to Dr. Frances K. Widmann, M.D., Associate Professor of Pathology at Duke University said in her 1979 printing of Clinical Interpretation of Laboratory Tests page 439: “The fact that a patient’s serum contains a particular antibody does not prove that his ongoing or recent illness was due to that organism. If serum has little or no antibody at the beginning of an illness, and if high levels are present in the “convalescent” sample drawn several weeks later, there is strong circumstantial evidence only, that the illness was due to that organism.” She continues on page 401: “The war between microorganisms (germ and viruses) continues unremittingly. “Wonder drugs” have not eradicated infectious disease; they have merely changed the conditions and natural history of many infections. Organisms (microbes) display remarkable adaptative capacity, so that drugs effective today become ineffective against the same type of infection tomorrow.” Isn’t it strange that modern scientists have become so deeply entrenched in the microbial infection theory of disease causation that they are unable to comprehend that infection is not infection…but inflammation. Few people will consider chronic poisoning and/or malnutrition as possible factors in the futile search for disease eradication.

 

Microzymas

From dust you are and to dust you shall return” Genesis 3:19

 

Thirty years prior to the rise of monomorphism, Béchamp brought his attention to tiny “molecular granulations” found in body cells, which other observers had noted before him. They had been scantily defined, and no one had identified their status or function. After 10 years of careful experimentation, Béchamp brought to the world in 1866 the profound revelation that the granules were living elements. He renamed them microzymas, meaning “small ferments.” During the following 13 years, Béchamp, with his devoted co-worker, Professor Estor, developed and refined the Theory of Microzymas.

 

The essence of this theory is that the microzyma, an independently living element, exists within all living things, and is both the builder and recycler or organisms. It inhabits cells, the fluid between cells, the blood and the lymph. In a state of health, the microzymas act harmoniously and fermentation occurs normally, beneficially. But in the condition of disease, microzymas become disturbed and change their form and function. They evolve into microscopic forms (germs) that reflect he disease and produce the symptoms, becoming what Béchamp called “morbidly evolved” microzymas. This occurs due to modification of our terrain by an inverted way of eating and living. Béchamp observed granules linking together and lengthening into bacteria. He therefore observed, explored and expressed the concept of pleomorphism first. Being at the foundation of organization in the body, microzymian transformations build up cells and eventually the whole organism in which they exist. Their function is twofold, and they are poised to recycle the physical body upon death. It is matter, which cannot be created or destroyed, and is the precursor to all living organized matter.

 

The microzyma is a ferment: a living element capable of fermenting sugar. This is a digestive (chemical) process carried on by enzymes (from Greek, meaning “to ferment”). There are various classifications of fermentations, based on the final products. Alcohol is one such product, so there are alcoholic fermentations. There are also lactic fermentations, resulting in the production of lactic acid. This kind of fermentation happens in muscle, creating the fatigue and pain we’re all familiar with. Béchamp saw the life process as a continual cellular breakdown by microzymian fermentation–even in a healthy body. Renewal is happening as well, which is also being done by the microzymas. When illness is present, fermentative breakdown is not only accelerated, but is taken over by morbid evolutions, including bacteria, yeast, fungus and mold. These are the upper development forms of the microzyma, which feed on vital body substances. This results in degenerative disease symptoms.

 

Enzymes

Not only fermentation, but nearly all chemical reactions in the body are carried out, or controlled, by enzymes. Enzymes are catalysts–substances that assist chemical processes. They are complex proteins and perhaps the most amazing body substances. They quickly accomplish complex reactions at body temperature that would take days in a lab with very special equipment, or would be impossible altogether. According to Béchamp’s discoveries, it is possible that enzymes create, or themselves become, microorganisms. It is known that enzymes take part in repairing damaged genes–the elements that define and control our heredity and function. Béchamp suggested that microzymas coagulate to become genetic material. Enzymes, then, are quite magical and mysterious substances. Behind every enzyme is a microzyma. In one sense, the gene may be seen as the tool of the microzyma. The mechanism for repair could be that enzymes construct or become repair proteins, which are then spliced into the gene. There is a good possibility that this is what “viruses” are–repair proteins, or structures that do gene repair, not forms that cause symptoms. Most viruses are made of a core of genetic material surrounded by a protein coat.

 

The repair process has been misconstrued by mainstream bioscience as a disease, and its tools, the repair proteins, have been called viruses, particularly retroviruses. Retroviruses have the ability to insert themselves into our DNA. Supposedly, this is what the retrovirus HIV does. Observers with a certain bias could easily assume the thing shouldn’t be there. Such is the kind of error to which the conditioned scientific mind can be led by germ theory. Since viruses don’t have a reproductive mechanism, they must use the host cell to reproduce. But perhaps the reason they can’t replicate outside the cell is that they’re not intended to. Perhaps something in the cell is producing or becoming viruses for a reason. There is the possibility that a virus may have a complex of microzymas in the center. And, as with bacteria, monomorphic medical science offers no explanation as to where these forms come from in the first place. Pleomorphism, however, easily suggests an answer.

 

Disease conditions weaken our enzyme system so that “improper” repair structures can be formed. Since enzymes must have minerals to function, even a simple mineral deficiency could be involved in the failure of gene repair. A faulty protein structure may still have the ability to get into the DNA, but it may cause malfunction. If so, it would fail to fulfill properly its original purpose, and possibly instigate another morbid situation in the cell as well. Another possibility is that even if the repair structure is correct, nutritional deficiency or depletion of the enzyme potential may prevent proper function. Once a protein structure is floating around, it could evolve into a higher morbid form itself, depending on circumstances. It may evolve into a bacterium. This has been well documented in the lost chapters in the history of medical biology. And in a compromised terrain, today’s bacterium can be tomorrow’s terrain-poisoning yeast, fungus, or mold. Pasteur denied that bacteria could change their form. Only the unchanging, specific germs of the air were the cause of disease, he said. Béchamp, on the other hand, never denying that the air carried germs, maintained that airborne forms were not necessary for disease. Pasteur wished to establish that we must be invaded (and therefore be protected by profitable vaccination). But the true scientist showed that an independently living element, which could morbidly evolve, already exists in all cells of the body, and showed evidence that it is all that is needed for the appearance of symptogenic organisms. The body naturally has within it the factors and potential necessary to produce the symptoms of disease, including microorganisms. It means we also have the innate ability to become, and to stay, healthy.

 

Whether Pasteur or Béchamp is correct may still be an issue for some people. It does seem unusual, though, that Antoine’s name, and the controversy itself, have been omitted from history, medical and biology books–even encyclopedias. Given the magnitude and number of Béchamp’s discoveries, it is more-than-likely that this omission is more than oversight. The historical assassination of Antoine Béchamp resulted in medical science drawing conclusions from a half-truth. This has meant untold misery for the human race, especially in the West. The resulting concept of diseases as entities that attack us is highly questionable and is a major block to resolving health care issues today.

 

The odd thing is, Pasteur himself was reported to have admitted on his deathbed that, “Claude Bernard was right–the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.” But, even as he way dying, he would not give credit for the demonstration of this fact to whom it was due–Antoine Béchamp! One organism can rapidly assume many forms and it may be in several stages at once. The toxins (acids) from the whole spectrum of these microforms combine to produce symptoms, or provoke the body to produce them. The toxic output of yeast, fungus and mold is a primary disruptive influence in the body. But, it is not the microforms themselves that initiate disease. They only show up because of a compromised biological terrain. Pleomorphism is observable if only medical science will take the trouble to look. Once this cycle of development has begun, it further compromises the terrain, creating a vicious circle of imbalance. As explained earlier, humans rely on certain microorganisms for life, as does every higher organism on Earth. They reside primarily in our digestive tract. This is an incontestable fact. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that other forms could take over if the habitat changes. Invasion is not necessary for this to happen. They can evolve right out of any cell. To understand the principles of pleomorphism and terrain is to understand why we are sick and tired. Once we understand WHY we are sick and tired, we can start making the necessary changes in our lifestyle to bring our bodies back into balance.

 

Dark-Field Microscopy

By reviewing living blood under a dark-field, phase-contrast microscope, pleomorpic forms can be seen. This type of live-cell analysis is also used in marine biology for observing tiny sea life with fragile outer skins. The high-powered microscope can magnify objects up to 28,000 times, enabling one to clearly view bacterial and fungal forms in exact detail in the blood! The blood specimen is lit by a special apparatus in the microscope called a phase-contrast condenser. Objects under the lens show up against a black and/or gray background. This provides superior quality images.One can see red and white blood cells; crystallized exotoxins, mycotoxins, cholesterol, metals; blood clots; signs of oxygen deprivation; undigested fats; bacteria, yeast, mold, and many other things–all in ONE drop of live blood! Watching live blood on a slide, or on a video, one can actually see bacteria, yeast, fungus and mold feeding and growing as the blood loses its nutrition and oxygen. Most amazing is to see these forms coming right out of previously healthy red and white blood cells! They live off your body’s vital nutrients: glucose, protein, fats, hemoglobin, tissues and organs. They disorganize, or change form, in the presence of oxygen.

 

The American medical establishment does not look at live blood. They focus primarily on chemical analysis to make their diagnosis, and in doing so, are missing the show. Also, when looking at blood, their practice of “staining” samples disorganizes them. In fact, biological forms and elements have been defined by the artificial convention of staining, thus throwing that bias on the whole subject. This approach is an ingrained habit religiously taught in medical schools and practiced in research. But it is narrow and restricted, virtually blinding those who rely on it. The action of the chemical stain visually enhances certain things, such as the cell wall and nucleus. But this is at the cost of disturbing and disorganizing all the living, moving, feeding microforms–they become invisible or unidentifiable. Consequently, observers of dead blood refer to these forms as “artifacts,” “organelles,” “microsomes,” etc. Once a person has made the corrections necessary to reclaim their inner terrain, their blood is again examined under the microscope. It’s plain to see when the symotogenic microforms are reduced or have been completely eradicated. The bottom line is that we must provide an appropriate environment for our tiny life units. We must deal with them on their level, for after that they will become what they must, and no amount of manipulation with drugs will stop their evolution or completely subdue their progeny. If it could, it would be the end of the host as well.

 

Yeast, Fungus and Mold

Yeast and fungus are single-celled forms of plant life. Inhabiting land, air and water, they are everywhere. Mold, which is closely related to them, is the end-stage of all pleomorphic cycles in the body. Single fungal cells can be seen only under a microscope, but a colony of them make a visible presence I the form of mushrooms, toadstools, and the sometimes fuzzy molds we’ve seen growing on things. For hundreds of millions of years, yeast, fungus and mold have developed into over 500,000 different identifiable forms. For that period of time, they’ve undergone little genetic change. Apparently, they haven’t needed it, because they’re created as opportunists and survivalists, and perfectly suited for what they do. They can go from rapid growth to thousands of years of dormancy. This has been seen I their living spores which have been found in Egyptian tombs. There is a sound biological basis for our inherent ability to produce these pleomorphic forms. While humans, higher plants and animals are alive; bacteria, yeast, fungus and mold are unable to overcome entirely the natural balancing mechanisms that higher forms of life possess. But once the host organism dies, these microforms are the principal “undertakers” which reduce the higher life form into basic materials.

 

In biology, this is known as the carbon cycle, and it is a natural, necessary life process. The recyclers have evolved from, and are actually a scavenging form of, microzymas. And microzymas naturally reside within all pleomorphic microforms as they do within all living things. They are the ultimate imperishable form to which organic matter is reduced. Yeast and fungus can start their takeover while we’re still living. Because the microzymas are getting the chemical signal, from an acid terrain, that this organism is dead or disorganizing! The body naturally goes acid when it dies or when the cells begin to disorganize. And without respiration, oxygen is lost. One of the symptoms of terrain imbalance is lack of oxygen. These morbidly evolved organisms thrive without oxygen, i.e., they are anaerobic. We predispose ourselves to this takeover with various stresses. The main ones are chronic improper diet and/or other chronic toxicity. Emotional upheaval and unloving thoughts, anger, etc., have a strongly acidifying effect in the tissues.

 

These morbidly evolved organisms are literally eating us alive and polluting us. The thing is, we pollute ourselves first, thus creating the one physiological disease: pH imbalance/toxicity in our biological terrain. Toxins and an acid-forming diet disrupt body chemistry, and this loss of balance in turn disturbs the central balance of the microzyma. Nutritional deficiencies can have the same effect, but can also be created by acidification. Unless fatal or permanently damaging, an acute toxicity in a healthy terrain will only temporarily disrupt things and minimally disturb the microzymas, with a quick return to balance. Otherwise, in the chronic situation the one sickness follows: the evolution of microzymas into bacteria and ultimately into a yeast and fungus infestation. Yeast and fungus can infest the blood and any cell or tissue, resulting in a wide range of symptoms. The primary diet of yeast and fungus in our bodies is glucose for energy, plus fats and protein (even our genetic nucleic acids) for development and growth. As these organisms feed, they produce waste, just like you do. Their “urine and feces” are called mycotoxins (myco = fungus; toxin = poison), and they are very poisonous to humans! This poisoning of the body by mycotoxins is called mycotoxicosis. Being acids themselves, mycotoxins greatly worsen the acidity caused by diet. They are released into the blood as well as inside cells. The blood poisoning results in more cell and tissue poisoning, and all of this further disturbs the microzymas, making us sick and tired. Also, since many of these poisons are acids, they chemically destroy or break down our cells and tissues.

 

The symptoms of disease show up in two primary modes: (1) an attempt by the body to deal with toxic poisoning, and (2) a result of the action of toxins on body chemicals, cells and tissues. A combination of these two primary modes is also common. Most toxins are the metabolic waste of yeast and fungus, and this includes a large number of environmental chemical poisons we are exposed to. Primary mycotoxins are produced directly by the organisms, and secondary mycotoxins are either breakdown products or products resulting from combination. Although yeast and fungus wreak most of the havoc in the body, the earlier, or bacterial stages can produce considerable effects themselves by means of their metabolic wastes (exotoxins) and chemical contents (endotoxins). Bacterial forms don’t always evolve into fungus, nor does fungus always become mold, the end-stage form. It depends on the particular form and the condition of the terrain. In addition to our own ability to generate various microforms, we also have them entering the respiratory system and intestinal tract due to our exposure to the world at large. Béchamp saw that in plants, bacterial “invaders” appear to grow in the host as they would in a lab culture. But he concluded that what is really happening is that their presence initiates similar development in the plant’s own bacterial/fungal precursors. He suggested that the same thing happens in humans, and that both cases depend on prior susceptibility. Thus, we may or may not experience such a result from these “intruders.” One might contract a yeast and/or fungal infection such as athlete’s foot, vaginal yeast infection, strep throat, or ringworm on the skin. But s/he must be predisposed to it internally. At the other extreme is the person with AIDS, who faces major, death-threatening yeast and fungus infection because of a highly compromised terrain.

 

Although the immune system can become stressed and lose its effectiveness against yeast and fungus, anti-infectivity is not its primary role. It cannot be the “first line of defense,” as is commonly thought. By the time it comes into play to deal with infectious agents in the body, the terrain’s pH has already been compromised. The only part of the immune system that could be called a “line of defense” is that which stands between our inner terrain and the planetary environment–the mucosal barrier. The primary, ongoing role of inner immune function is that of an elegant janitorial service. It must constantly pick up and discard filth, including the body’s metabolic waste. It also deals with remnants of the 24 billion cells that die and are replaced everyday! It is so amazing that it not only picks up this waste, but recycles a good deal of it. Without this service, we’d get rather choked up inside with debris. But immunity to infection does not, and cannot, create wellness. Thus, infectious immunity is a back-up system–a spare tire, if you will. A balanced biological terrain is the primary discouragement to morbid microforms. The misplaced emphasis on immunity and stimulating immune function is an unfortunate hangover from germ theory. The result can be over-reliance on the system, so that most of us are riding around on the spare tire all the time.

 

Between the extremes of athlete’s foot and AIDS are the yeast and fungus overgrowths underlying symptoms such as diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, chronic fatigue, and more, including infections which appear to be transmitted among humans. Most disease symptoms, chronic and degenerative ones, follow bacteria, yeast and fungus, and their associated exotoxins and mycotoxins. In the 1930s and ’40s, as many as one thousand compounds, classifiable as mycotoxins, were studied by the pharmacology industry as potential antibiotics. Most were discarded as too poisonous for higher life forms to be of value in treating bacterial symptoms. These toxicity studies actually outlined the dangers of these substances. What was identified was the whole spectrum of symptomologies produced by mycotoxins! Some researchers believe there are more than a thousand toxins produced by yeast, fungus and mold. One common mycotoxin that is particularly troublesome is acetaldehyde. It is quite detrimental itself, yet also breaks down to other products (called metabolites) including oxalic acid, lactic acid, uric acid, and alcohol. All are disruptive waste products of yeast and fungus and are found in the flood and tissues of a compromised terrain. Compounding the situation is the fact that the presence of acetaldehyde and other mycotoxins causes the liver to increase low density lipoprotein in the blood. This high-cholesterol complex is used to bind with toxins, thereby deactivating them. The binding process is often referred to as chelation. However, the resulting substance also has the tendency to become oxidized and stick to lesions (toxin damage) in the artery walls, producing atherosclerosis. Minerals are used for chelating purposes also. Acetaldehyde can reduce strength and stamina, cause excessive fatigue, cloud thinking and take away ambition. One mechanism for these problems is that it directly destroys neurotransmitters, which are chemicals responsible for completing all nerve impulses. Another mechanism is that it can bind to the walls of red blood cells, making them less flexible and therefore less able to get into and through the capillaries of the circulatory system. This causes starvation and oxygen deprivation in the tissues. An added difficulty is that the liver converts acetaldehyde to the mycotoxin alcohol.

 

DNA may also be damaged when excess acetaldehyde reacts with it, creating the following symptom pictures: pancreatitis, cardiomyopathy, dilated cardiomyopathy, brain atrophy dementia, atrophied brain with large ventricles, jaundice, spider angina, enlarged spleen, stomach ulcers, esophageal varicosity, ascites, cirrhosis, enlarged spleen, tremor, bleeding tendency, bruising, ankle edema, and reddening of the palms, and others. Another example of the damaging effects of the waste products of yeast and fungus is the mycotoxin cyclosporin. This toxin suppresses the immune system so greatly that it’s used to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs. The irony is that people rarely get it directly from the fungus, but are dosed with it by doctors doing transplants. Cyclosporin has been shown to cause cancer and atherosclerosis in all humans who have been long-term survivors of transplants. Other mycotoxins, such as uric acid and oxalic acid, provoke symptoms ranging from gout to kidney stones. Cancer and AIDS are nothing more or less than a cellular disturbance of the electromagnetic balance, disorganization of the cellular microzymas, their morbid evolution to bacteria, yeast, fungus, and mold, and their ensuing production of exotoxins and mycotoxins. Cancer, therefore, is a four-letter word–acid, especially lactic acid, a waste product of yeast and fungus.

 

The amount of uric acid and acetaldehyde produced by yeast and fungus can be overwhelming to the body. When acetaldehyde is converted into alcohol in the liver, the body is depleted of magnesium, sulfur, hydrogen, and potassium, thus reducing cell energy. The body chelates uric acid and other toxins with fats, raising LDL cholesterol. In a similar balancing act, the body reacts chemically to neutralize uric acid by binding it with minerals such as potassium, magnesium, sodium, zinc, and calcium; this process further reduces mineral supplies and can create deficiencies.Fungal hampering of red blood cells also reduces oxygenation. The less oxygen there is in the body, the more alcohol is produced, which can give the symptoms of being drunk, disoriented, dizzy, or mentally confused. Acetaldehyde further reduces cell energy because it destroys essential enzymes. The immune system is provoked into trying to neutralize it and to retard the yeast and fungus by releasing large amounts of free radicals. If body pollution is constantly generated, then immune response, our amazing house-cleaning process, eventually becomes overloaded and exhausted. Thus, all immunological problems and infectious conditions are caused or worsened by the presence of mycotoxins. Yeast and fungus take advantage of the body’s weaker areas by poisoning and overworking them, and by direct penetration of cells. Yeast and fungus have the bizarre ability to change shape–to turn into a hard-edged arrow. Once transformed, they can aggressively plunge into the cells of the body, even penetrating the nucleus.

 

The fungus can now damage the genetic structure by feeding on it. Eventually, the cell may be converted entirely from normal fermentative metabolism (oxidative metabolism) to abnormal fermentative metabolism (absence of oxygen)–CANCER. Since cancer is primarily a systemic condition that localizes, not a local disease that spreads, it shows up in the body’s weakest links. These are like dead zones; they carry a declining electromagnetic charge. All healthy cells carry an electromagnetic negative charge. All fermentative cells and their acids carry an electromagnetic positive charge. These rotting cells and their acids act like glue, which causes healthy cells to attract and stick together. This leads to oxygen deprivation and the disturbance and disorganization of more healthy cells. Simply put, healthy cells begin to rot! Fermented cells can instigate the fermentation of other cells by fungal penetration or by poisoning them and provoking a morbid evolution of their inherent microzymas. Biopsies are a major cause of this by puncturing the capsule (tumor) that the body creates to isolate the morbid mass, but it can happen by itself. The body is spoiling, fermenting, or going bad–molding just like cream cheese.

 

In all cancer autopsies lactic acid or yeast, fungus and mold is found, and sometimes both. Perhaps the connection is not being made. But medical science is beginning at least to notice, if not recognize the significance of, the presence of lactic acid and yeast in cancer. They are present in cancer, but are also present in the blood before cancer, and without the presence of other symptoms for that matter! Hopefully biologists will approach the question of why and how the yeast gets into someone’s blood in the first place, rather than merely pursuing expensive DNA research to see if they can kill it. This is the mental limitation imposed by the germ theory–spend millions to kill a symptom of dietary and nutritional misguidance, without realizing that the human organism itself is the main source of the yeast. The two primary parasites in all infectious and degenerative disease are of the Aspergillus strain and the Mucor strain. These morbid forms can change rapidly when conditions change. They can revert to their original state after completing their recycling work. A pool of lactic acid–the waste product of a cancer microform–surrounds every cancer tumor, but the microform itself may or may not be there.

Home Site Map Natural HealingProducts Search this site  Free Catalog Contact Us Dictionary About Us Natural HealingLinks
 

Healthy Chocolate? Yes! A Health Food for Heart and Mind. September 18, 2008

This article was sent to us the other day, thought we would pass it along since we haven’t posted in a while. It is long and full of information.  It does talk about a product that we started using recently in addition to chocolate in general, so if you have any questions, let us know, or click the link at the right.  We’ve been busy with work and last minute preparations for the new arrival.  It’s getting close now.

Healthy Chocolate? Yes! A Health Food for Heart and Mind.

Cocoa is the Most Powerful Antioxidant Food!

©2005-2008 All rights reserved.

Cocoa – The Super Healthy Fruit

You may be surprised to learn that cocoa is actually a FRUIT – and even more surprised to learn that it is actually one of the most healthy fruits commonly eaten by man!

Recent research studies have shown a link between cocoa and cardiovascular health, with reduced risk of blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks.

Cornell University food scientists discovered that cocoa powder has nearly twice the antioxidants of red wine, and up to three times the antioxidants found in green tea.

Raw cocoa has the highest antioxidant value of all the natural foods in the world!

The ORAC score per 100 grams of unprocessed raw cacao is 28,000, compared to 18,500 for Acai Berries, 1,540 for Strawberries, and only 1,260 for raw Spinach. The ORAC score for a typical manufactured Dark Chocolate is an impressive 13,120 – although one unique, organic, and non-roasted brand of Dark Chocolate has a much higher ORAC score. But for Milk Chocolate the ORAC score is much lower at 6,740.

Cocoa also appears to have anti-aging and anti-inflammatory properties. And cocoa is a good source of the minerals magnesium, sulphur, calcium, iron, zinc, copper, potassium, and manganese; plus some of the B Vitamins.

When heart problems occur, magnesium is the most likely mineral to be missing in the person’s diet.

Cocoa has a high content of the “beauty” mineral, sulfur. Sulfur helps build strong nails and hair, promotes healthy and beautiful skin, helps detoxify the liver, and supports healthy functioning of the pancreas.

Fresh cocoa beans are super-rich in the type of bioflavonoid called flavanols which are strong antioxidants that help maintain healthy blood flow and blood pressure. The heart-healthy flavanols in cocoa, especially the epicatechins, prevent fatty substances in the bloodstream from oxidizing and then clogging the arteries.

Flavanols help make blood platelets less likely to stick together and cause blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes – without the negative side effects associated with the use of aspirin (ASA) and other pharmaceutical blood-thinners.

Cocoa beans contain 10,000 milligrams (10 grams) of flavanol antioxidants per 100 grams – or an amazing 10% antioxidant concentration level! When it comes to supplying your body with effective antioxidants, no other natural food can even come close. No exotic super-fruit like Acai berries, no high-antioxidant fruits like prunes or blueberries, and no vegetables. The antioxidants in cocoa are easily absorbed by the human body, and are more stable and long-lasting than those in any other foods.

Cocoa also contains the amino acid Tryptophan which makes the neurotransmitter known as serotonin, which promotes positive feelings and helps keep us from feeling depressed. Cocoa contains the neurotransmitters dopamine, and phenylethylamine (PEA), and contains anandamide and MAO Inhibitors – which make this heart-healthy food a healthy food for the brain too.

Phenylethylamine (PEA) helps promote mental alertness and the ability to concentrate. The PEA in healthy chocolate can be of help to students taking tests, and to senior citizens who want to retain the mental capacity of a younger person and postpone the onset of dementia.

Studies have indicated that consuming dark chocolate produced an increased sensitivity to insulin (which indicates a protective effect against diabetes).

While you may have believed that cocoa and chocolate were “bad for you”, the truth is that THE RIGHT KIND OF CHOCOLATE provides many health benefits that make it not only “good for you” but better for your body than most of the fruits and vegetables your mother made you eat when you were a child.

Eating a healthy dark chocolate provides a sweet, sensual, sin-free pleasure, as well as some significant health benefits. A heart-felt gift of healthy dark chocolate to a loved one offers a heart-warming, delightfully delicious treat, as well as a super heart-healthy food that promotes a longer and healthier life.

If the pharmaceutical industry managed to produce a patented product that offered all the health benefits of cocoa, they would likely proclaim it a “miracle drug”! But since cocoa is widely available, is relatively inexpensive, and does not require you to pay for a doctor’s prescription nor pay fees to a dispensing pharmacy, you are not likely to hear many members of the medical establishment recommending chocolate for its many health benefits.

You may also be surprised to learn that dark chocolate can help you lose weight! Because it has appetite-suppressant properties, cocoa is often added to weight loss products to help control hunger.

While you may have been told that chocolate is “fattening”, the truth is that the fats found in cocoa butter are actually healthy fats! Cacao contains oleic acid, a heart-healthy monounsaturated fat which is also found in olive oil and is believed to raise the level of the “good cholesterol” known as HDL cholesterol (the acronym HDL stands for “High Density Lipid”).

Healthy chocolate can be of great benefit to tobacco smokers – but not just because they need lots of the antioxidants which neutralize the free radicals generated by the toxic compounds in tobacco smoke. A recent study in Switzerland indicated that dark chocolate may help prevent hardening of the arteries.

A 2006 clinical study by Swiss researchers found that within minutes of consuming dark chocolate, their test group of 20 smokers experienced a significant improvement in the function of the endothelial cells which line the artery walls. Smoking tobacco has long been linked to hardening of the arteries and an increase in the production of clot-forming platelets in the blood.

Raw cocoa beans contain over 300 chemically identifiable compounds. This makes cocoa one of the most complex food substances on Earth!

Click here to learn more about the many Health Benefits of chocolate.

How Chocolate Is Made

Chocolate really does grow on trees! Cocoa beans come from the fruit of the cacao tree which grows in tropical rainforests in South America, Africa, and Malaysia. The official scientific name of the cocoa tree is Theobroma Cacao. “Theobroma” is Latin for “food of the gods”. Cacao is pronounced “ka-COW”. The words “cacao” and the more commonly used term “cocoa” both refer to the cacao bean, the seed of the Theobroma Cacao fruit.

The main producers and exporters of cacao beans are the West African countries of Cote d’Ivoire or “Ivory Coast” (40%); and Ghana, which until 1957 was the British colony known as the “Gold Coast” (15%). Indonesia also produces about 15%. Brazil, Nigeria, and Cameroon also grow cacao in lesser quantities.

Strictly speaking, cocoa or cacao is a nut, the seed of a fruit, but is most commonly called cocoa beans, cocoa seeds, cocoa nuts, chocolate seeds, or chocolate beans. Commercial cocoa growers and processors refer to the dried cocoa beans as cocoa nibs. The term cacao often refers to the beans before they are fermented and dried.

All of these terms refer to the dried fruit or nuts of the cacao tree, and here we will use the most popular term cocoa beans to refer to the fermented and dried bean that is used to make cocoa powder and dark chocolate.

The cacao pods take five to six months to ripen. In the typical cacao plantation, the growers harvest the pods from the cacao tree at the time of perfect ripeness, then remove the cacao beans from the pods (about 45 beans per pod) by cutting the pods open with a machete knife.

The beans are then covered with banana leaves and left for about five days to ferment, which reduces the bitterness and develops an enhanced chocolate flavor. When they have reached the proper level of fermentation, the beans are then left to dry in the sun, where the brown color and the chocolate flavor intensifies. Then the now-finished cocoa beans are shipped to the cocoa buyers and processors.

Cocoa butter is a fatty substance that comes from the fruit of the cacao tree, though some is also found inside the cocoa bean and is usually removed by pressing the beans to ensure the best cocoa flavor. Cocoa butter is often used in making chocolate, but the dark brown chocolate color and the chocolate flavor and the greatest health benefits come from the cocoa bean, not from the light-colored cocoa butter.

ABC News reported in 2005 that the average American consumes 11.5 pounds of chocolate each year. That would likely be chocolate bars and various types of chocolate candy, which are mostly sugar and fat. Chocolate consumption represents one percent of the American diet, yet most Americans have never tasted “real” chocolate – natural cocoa or the cacao bean in its raw form.

You could sprinkle crushed cocoa beans or cocoa nibs onto whipped cream, ice cream, puddings, or other desserts for a natural chocolate flavor from these original “chocolate chips”. The crushed raw cocoa beans or nibs look a lot like coarse-ground coffee beans and taste like unsweetened dark chocolate – because all real chocolate is made from cocoa/cacao beans.

From Cocoa Bean to Cocoa Liquor to Baking Chocolate

Chocolate is manufactured from cocoa mass, the base product produced by processing the cocoa/cacao beans or nibs by fermenting and then roasting them to produce a liquid called chocolate liquor, which is very “thick” or viscous. You might expect the cocoa mass to be solid or a kind of powder, but it is a thick liquid or paste because cacao beans are nuts, and all nuts contain fat – in this case the fat known as cocoa butter, which has a very high viscosity at room temperature, like soft butter made from dairy cream.

The chocolate liquor can be molded and hardened into the bitter chocolate known as unsweetened baking chocolate. Most people would not like to eat this chocolate because it is quite bitter in taste. Those who acquire a taste for it are able to eat this kind of sugar-free dark chocolate which is more healthy than other forms of chocolate.

From Cocoa Liquor to Cocoa Cake to Cocoa Powder

The chocolate liquor can be machine pressed under great pressure to squeeze out most of the the fats known as cocoa butter and leave a flattened dry material called cocoa cake, also known as “cocoa solids”. This cocoa cake can then be broken up or finely ground to produce a natural and unsweetened cocoa powder, which is used by chocolate manufacturers.

At their local grocery store, consumers can also buy a cocoa powder known as Hershey’s or Fry’s, or other cocoa powders from other makers.

A much healthier organic cocoa powder made from raw cacao beans which have not been fermented, roasted, or processed with high heat can be ordered online in a 16 oz. package. This raw cacao provides a much higher level (over 3 times higher) of antioxidant flavanols (i.e. has a much higher ORAC score = 95,500 per 100 grams) than other cocoa powders made from cacao beans which have been fermented and roasted.

This antioxidant-rich cocoa powder can be used to make a healthy hot chocolate and other hot or cold chocolate drinks, mixed with agave nectar to make a healthy chocolate syrup, or used with organic virgin coconut oil to bake healthy brownies and cookies and cakes. Click here to learn about raw organic cocoa powder.

From Cocoa Powder to Dark Chocolate

To make a solid dark chocolate from the cocoa powder, a chocolate manufacturer will add some cocoa butter (the natural fat from the cocoa fruit) and some kind of sugar, usually refined white cane sugar. A dark chocolate can be “bittersweet” or “semisweet” or “sweetened”, depending on how much sugar is added to the cocoa powder and cocao butter.

Since the viscous cocoa butter melts to a liquid at about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it provides that “melt in the mouth” creamy texture. After Christopher Columbus introduced chocolate (dried cacao beans) from the newly-discovered Americas to Queen Isabella of Spain, Europeans soon started adding sugar cane (also from the Americas) to the chocolate drink to sweeten the taste. They also experimented with adding flavorful New World spices like vanilla and cinnamon.

Good Chocolate, Bad Chocolate

Raw and unprocessed cocoa beans or cocoa powder made from raw cocoa beans which have NOT been treated with alkalis (in the Dutch chocolate process) are a true “healthy chocolate”. These forms of chocolate will contain the most flavanols and are the healthiest chocolate you can get.

The Xoçai X Power Squares are a dark chocolate made from cacao beans that are blanched, unfermented, sun-dried, non-roasted and cold-pressed, which means this cacao contains eight times the levels of the antioxidant epicatechins and catechins, and four times the levels of procyandins than cacao produced with standard processing.

The X Power Squares are loaded with antioxidants and have an unparalleled ORAC Value of 3,582 per 6 gram Square. They have an astounding 1,008 mg. of Total Flavonids per 18 gram serving (3 squares) – and the actual ORAC Value per serving is clearly listed on the front of the wrapper. Almost all other chocolate manufacturers do NOT indicate the actual ORAC Value of their products on the label, probably because it is too low to boast about.

Most of the scientific research studies which proclaim the many health benefits of chocolate were based on the study of raw cocoa which was not subjected to high heat or chemicals, or on dark chocolate which has no milk or dairy products added. They were NOT reporting health benefits being found in milk chocolate bars, chocolate candies, chocolate syrup, or white chocolate.

So while it is true that raw and unprocessed organic cocoa and “dark chocolate” made from raw and unprocessed organic cocoa really are a “healthy chocolate”, this is NOT true for just any kind of chocolate. The term “healthy chocolate” certainly does NOT apply to chocolate candies made from cocoa beans which have been subjected to high heat by roasting, treated with alkalis or other chemicals, and adulterated with various additives like hydrogenated oils, animal fats like lard, corn syrup, refined sugar, dairy products, and chemical preservatives.

Chocolate CANDY is still a sugar and fat filled junk food, not a health food!

If you look at the ingredient label on many chocolate candy products, you will likely see sugar listed as the first ingredient, which means the product contains more sugar than anything else – including the cocoa! It might be more truthful to call such unhealthy concoctions “chocolate flavored sugar”.

It is well known that refined sugar is a cause or a contributing or aggravating factor with respect to many medical conditions, including: heart disease, osteoporosis, obesity, insulin and blood sugar disorders like diabetes, mood disorders, immune system disorders, leukemia, inflammatory conditions, dental cavities, yeast infections, and depletion of essential nutrients. Sugar-laden chocolate candies and syrups are more of a health risk than a health food.

White Chocolate – The Little White Lie

While raw cocoa and cocoa powder and certain kinds of dark chocolate can legitimately claim to be “healthy foods”, this is definitely NOT true for the manufactured candy which is called “white chocolate”. A recent study showed ZERO health benefits from consuming white chocolate – while consuming dark chocolate showed some important measurable health benefits related to lowering blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, and increasing insulin sensitivity.

A study reported in the Journal of Hypertension in August, 2005 found that test subjects with high blood pressure who were given 3.5 ounces of dark chocolate daily for 15 days received these measurable health benefits:
(1) a drop in LDL cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol);
(2) a drop in blood pressure, both systolic and diastolic, which compared to the results of healthy changes in diet usually recommended for patients with hypertension;
(3) an increased sensitivity to insulin (which indicates a protective effect against diabetes).

In the same study, test subjects with hypertension who were given 3.5 ounces of white chocolate for 15 days received NONE of the above health benefits.
[Journal of Hypertension, 2005, August; 23(8):1453-1459.]

As much as we would all love to think of our favorite chocolate candy or chocolate syrup or hot cocoa drink as a “healthy chocolate” to justify the pleasure of our self-indulgence in this delightful delicacy and reduce our “guilty” feelings, we must face the truth that only raw cocoa and certain kinds of dark chocolate provide the many health benefits which modern research studies have attributed to the theobroma cacao bean.

The Truth About Dark Chocolate, Dutch Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, and White Chocolate

While there are many reported health benefits available from consuming the right kinds of cocoa and dark chocolate, please do not take this as a licence to over-indulge! Any good thing can produce negative effects if taken to extremes. So the ancient adage “moderation in all things” applies to consumption of all kinds of chocolate, including even the types of “healthy chocolate”.

Cocoa contains fairly high levels of the mineral copper, and TOO MUCH copper can inhibit certain chemical processes in the body and lead to several kinds of health problems. As with red wine, which can be healthy in moderate use, consume cocao and dark chocolate in moderation as a healthy treat, but do not think of it as a regular “health food”.

Dark Chocolate

Dark chocolate contains the three elements of cocao liquor or cocoa mass (cocoa cake), cocoa butter, and sugar. Cocoa butter is a fat that is found naturally in cocoa beans. The cocoa butter consists of 34% stearic acid, 34% oleic acid, 25% palmitic acid, and 7% other fatty acids.

A bittersweet dark chocolate bar contains about 70% chocolate liquor; while a semisweet dark chocolate contains about 60%. Note that this chocolate or cocoa “liquor” does NOT refer to alcohol, but is a term used by cocoa processors to describe the viscous liquid made from roasted cacao beans.

Next to raw and unprocessed organic cocoa, organic dark chocolate is the healthiest form of chocolate – especially when it contains more of the nutritious cocoa mass and less of the fattening cocoa butter and sugar. The dark chocolate is “healthier” when it is unsweetened or bittersweet dark chocolate. Any sweetened dark chocolate is a little less “healthy” when it is sweetened with refined white sugar (sucrose) instead of raw cane sugar or dehydrated cane juice.

Dutch Chocolate

Cocoa powder usually has a slightly bitter and acidic taste. In the 19th century Dutch chocolate makers learned that they could treat the cocoa powder with alkaline salts to reduce the bitter taste – a process now known as the “Dutching process”.

Dutch cocoa provides less antioxidants than natural cocoa because the alkali process destroys some of the flavanols (the powerful antioxidants found in cocoa). You can tell a cocoa or chocolate is Dutch Chocolate when the label indicates “Dutch process” or “alkali added” or “European style”.

Milk Chocolate

Milk chocolate contains the same ingredients of cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar as dark chocolate, but to these three are added milk solids and milk fats. Milk chocolate will typically contain about 20% milk fat – which does not make milk chocolate a “healthy” chocolate choice.

Aside from adding extra fat, dairy products also inhibit the body’s absorption of the powerful antioxidants naturally found in raw cocoa and dark chocolate – which reduces the ORAC value of milk chocolate to about half the ORAC value of dark chocolate or pure cocoa.

Modern milk chocolate bars and candies are usually made from cocoa powder (powdered cocoa mass with some cocoa butter extracted) mixed with some kind of refined sugar, some butter or lard or hydrogenated vegetable oils, some milk products, and various other ingredients.

White Chocolate

White chocolate is similar to milk chocolate, but without the cocoa base. Without any real cocoa bean content, “white chocolate” is not really a chocolate at all. Since it does NOT contain real cocoa beans and the many healthy nutrients which are naturally present in the cocoa beans, and since it has a high content of fats from both cocoa butter and milk fat, white chocolate is by far the LEAST healthy choice among the three common types of manufactured chocolate.

White chocolate should be considered a high-sugar and high-fat candy – not a health food. And it does not really deserve the name of “chocolate” at all. It doesn’t even taste like cocoa or chocolate! “Cocoa butter candy” would be a more accurate name than “white chocolate”. Few of the many health benefits from the nutrients in raw cocoa beans or dark chocolate will be gained from eating white chocolate candy which contains no real cocoa beans.

Healthy Organic Chocolate

While you may have heard that chocolate is “bad for you”, it is not the natural raw cocoa that is unhealthy, but the other ingredients in the kinds of manufactured chocolate made from refined sugar combined with various kinds of cheap animal fats like lard, or cheap and unhealthy hydrogenated vegetable oils.

When healthy and high-quality natural ingredients are used, it is possible to make a truly “healthy chocolate” from organically-grown, unprocessed, unroasted, raw cocoa/cacao beans that has no pesticide residue and little loss of the natural nutrients.

Next to organic raw cocoa/cacao beans or cocoa powder, unsweetened and dairy-free dark chocolate is the healthiest chocolate; while the LEAST healthy chocolate is milk chocolate which includes dairy products and milk fats, refined sugar, and possibly hydrogenated oils or lard.

Remember, so-called “white chocolate” is not really a “chocolate” – and certainly not a “healthy chocolate”. It is “white” because it does NOT contain any of the dark brown cocoa powder found in dark chocolate and milk chocolate, and provides none of the healthy flavanols. It is not made from the cocoa bean or nib, but from the fatty cocoa butter extracted from the “fruit” part of the cacao plant.

Here is another important fact to remember when choosing a “healthy chocolate”…
Studies indicate that dairy products block the absorption of the many antioxidants found naturally in raw cocoa powder and dark chocolate! Thus milk chocolate and most chocolate candies are not the best choices when you want to eat a truly “healthy chocolate” that supplies a naturally high concentration of antioxidants.

Drinking a chocolate beverage or “hot chocolate” which contains added milk solids, whole milk, or cream is not as “healthy” as a beverage made from pure cocoa powder without any kind of dairy product or added cream. If you like a hot chocolate with milk or cream, substitute rice milk or soy milk if you want to ensure you are getting the most healthy antioxidants into your body.

How Healthy Is Dark Chocolate? What Are the Health Benefits?

“The beverage of the gods was Ambrosia; that of man is chocolate. Both increase the length of life in a prodigious manner.”
– Louis Lewin, M.D., in Phantastica

Organic Chemical Compounds in Cacao Beans and Organic Dark Chocolate

It is important to understand that most of the scientific research on the cacao bean refers to organic cacao in its raw, unprocessed, and unadulterated form. Note that when the cacao beans are processed by roasting or heating, there will be a loss of some of the nutrient value, and treating the cocao with alkaline salts in the Dutch process will reduce the concentration of flavanols and reduce its high antioxidant value. So the levels of active nutrients and the health benefits discussed below may be not be fully applicable to all of the many kinds of commercially processed dark chocolate products marketed today.

So don’t expect that eating ANY type of chocolate bar or chocolate candy is going to be good for your health. You need to know WHICH KINDS of chocolate actually provide the health benefits – and that will usually be the kinds of COCOA POWDER and DARK CHOCOLATE which are closer to the raw cocoa bean, undergo the least amount of processing, and have the least unhealthy additives like saturated fats and refined sugar.

In general, the healthiest kinds of chocolate (in order) are:

raw, organic, unprocessed cacao beans (called “nibs”) or cocoa mass;
organic and unroasted cocoa powder not treated with alkalis;
organic dark chocolate with the highest percentage of cocoa liquor or cocoa powder and the lowest percentage of refined sugar (bitter or semi-sweet dark chocolate).

Organically-grown cacao beans will not contain pesticide residues. Non-organic cacao may have some pesticide residues, but other than that, the same order as above will apply to non-organic cacao, cocao powder, and dark chocolate.

“Most chocolate, in fact, isn’t flavanol-rich,” says Norm Hollenberg, a radiology professor and flavanol expert at Harvard Medical School. “But all chocolate is rich in fat and calories.” Hollenberg studied the Kuna Indians of Central America, island dwellers near Panama who grow their own flavanol-rich cacao beans.

The Kuna people drink a lot of cocoa, and they don’t have high blood pressure or diabetes …except for those who move to the mainland and start drinking flavanol-poor commercial cocoa. Hollenberg also fed cocoa with flavanols or cocoa without flavanols to a split study group in the United States, and discovered that flavanols in cocoa seemed to improve blood flow throughout the body.

Even when a chocolate product is made from organic cacao beans or nibs, this does not necessarily mean the finished product will have the same health benefits as the raw cocoa, if the way it is processed by the manufacturer has reduced the nutrient value of the cocoa beans, or if the addition of milk products limits the ability of the body to absorb all the natural antioxidants.

Also note that the CAFFEINE in the cacao fruit is found mainly in the shell or membrane which encloses the cacao beans. Most suppliers of cheaper cocoa powder grind up this outer membrane along with the beans, which helps to increase the yield and lower their cost of producing cocoa mass. But when the membrane is removed before shipping the raw cacao beans or grinding them into cocoa powder, the chocolate made from those more expensive beans will be of higher quality and essentially free of caffeine.

A List of Healthy Substances Found in Raw Chocolate (Theobroma Cacao)

Many of the natural chemical compounds in raw cocoa or cacao beans and in organic dark chocolate have been discussed in scientific literature as being pharmacologically significant to health. Here is a partial list of these active substances in natural organic chocolate (and more are discussed below).

Anandamide (a neurotransmitter known as “the bliss chemical”)
Arginine (nature’s aphrodisiac)
Dopamine (a neurotransmitter)
Epicatechins (antioxidants)
Magnesium (for healthy heart function)
Serotonin (anti-stress neurotransmitter)
Tryptophan (anti-depressant amino acid)
Phenylethylamine (PEA) (controls the ability to focus attention and stay alert)
Polyphenols (antioxidants)
Histamine
Tyramine
Salsolinol

Magnesium – the Mineral Your Heart Needs

Is dark chocolate good for your heart? Research by Dr. Bernard Jensen indicates that the heart muscle requires these two minerals more than any other minerals: Magnesium and Potassium. In the heart muscle Magnesium is concentrated eighteen times greater than in the bloodstream. Magnesium helps regulate blood pressure and the heartbeat.

The overall strength and vigor of the heart muscle and its ability to pump effectively is enhanced by the presence of Magnesium, and this important mineral also decreases blood coagulation and thus can lower blood pressure.

Magnesium also balances brain chemistry, and helps build strong bones.

When heart problems occur, Magnesium is the most likely mineral to be missing in the person’s diet.

Eighty percent of Americans are deficient in Magnesium. This deficiency is linked to hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, joint problems, and PMT.

Cocoa beans and organic dark chocolate are the #1 best food sources of this heart-supporting mineral, Magnesium. Can you see how a guilt-free daily dose of Magnesium-rich healthy chocolate could actually help lower your risk of heart disease?

Anti-Depressant Properties of Cocoa and Healthy Dark Chocolate

Cocoa is a potent source of serotonin, dopamine, and phenylethylamine. These are three well-studied neurotransmitters which help alleviate depression and are associated with feelings of well-being.

Cocoa contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAO Inhibitors) which help improve our mood because they allow serotonin and dopamine to remain in the bloodstream longer without being broken down.

Cocoa also contains anandamide which stimulates blissful feelings. Cocoa also contains B vitamins, which are associated with brain health.

Vascular Health Promoting Properties of Cocoa and Healthy Dark Chocolate

Nitric Oxide (NO)

One research study discovered that a substance in cocoa helps the body process nitric oxide (a chemical compound designated as NO, where N = 1 Nitrogen atom, and O = 1 Oxygen atom). Nitric oxide or NO is a critical component in healthy blood flow and blood pressure control.

Vascular diseases, including Erectile Dysfunction (ED) which is common in men over age 40, are connected to the inability of an artery to make the simple but fundamental chemical called nitric oxide (NO). It appears that flavanols help reverse that problem. Thus eating healthy chocolate might help men over 40 to enjoy a more active sex life without having to rely on expensive drugs like Viagra™ or Celebrex™ or those many herbal concoctions which are touted in millions of unwanted emails.

Another research study showed that a type of bioflavonoid called flavanols in cocoa prevent fatty substances in the bloodstream from oxidizing and then clogging the arteries. Flavanols also make blood platelets less likely to stick together and cause blood clots.

Researchers are excited by the potential of flavanols to ward off vascular disease, which can cause hypertension (high blood pressure), heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and even dementia.

Antioxidant Properties of Cocoa and Healthy Dark Chocolate

Scientists have known for years that cocoa/cacao contains significant antioxidants, but no one knew just how rich they were in comparison to those found in two other healthy foods – red wine and green tea.

According to research cited in The New York Times, fresh cocoa beans are super-rich in the type of flavonoid called flavanols (not flavOnols) which are very strong antioxidants. Cocoa/cacao beans contain 10,000 milligrams (10 grams) of flavanol antioxidants per 100 grams – or an amazing 10% antioxidant concentration level!

Recent research has demonstrated that the antioxidants found in cacao beans are highly stable and easily available to the human metabolism. Of all known foods, cacao is also the ONLY food which does NOT lose its Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC) over significant periods of time. This makes cocoa both the most POTENT source of antioxidants and a source of the most USABLE antioxidants found in any natural food.

Antioxidants help neutralize free radicals and keep them from damaging the DNA and mitochondria of the body’s cells, which is a major cause of many degenerative diseases, cancer tumors, heart disease, and premature aging. Cells with damaged DNA cannot reproduce healthy new cells, but will reproduce damaged or malignant cells.

Cornell University food scientists discovered that cocoa powder has nearly twice the antioxidants of red wine, and up to three times the antioxidants found in green tea.

Their findings were published in an article entitled “Cocoa Has More Phenolic Phytochemicals and a Higher Antioxidant Capacity than Teas and Red Wine”, published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, a peer-reviewed publication.

The Cornell researchers, led by Chang Y. Lee, chairman of the Department of Food Science and Technology at Cornell University’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY, state the reason that cocoa leads the other drinks is its high content of antioxidant compounds called phenolic phytochemicals, or flavonoids.

A class of flavonoids known as flavanols or flavan-3-ols includes: catechin, epicatechin, and epigallocatechin. All three are found naturally in the cocoa bean. (Note that flavanols are NOT the same as another very similar-sounding class of flavonoids known as flavonols, which includes: myricetin, quercetin and kaempferol.)

The Cornell researchers discovered 611 milligrams of the phenolic compound gallic acid equivalents (GAE) and 564 milligrams of the flavonoid epicatechin equivalents (ECE) in a single serving of cocoa. Examining a glass of red wine, the researchers found 340 milligrams of GAE and 163 milligrams of ECE. In a cup of green tea, they found 165 milligrams of GAE and 47 milligrams of ECE.

By comparison, 1.5 ounces of dark chocolate delivers as many antioxidants as five ounces of red wine.

That makes cocoa one of the richest sources of antioxidants in any food!

Compare the raw cocoa bean’s 10,000 milligrams of flavanols per 100 grams to other forms of commercial chocolate…
Processed cocoa powder (defatted and roasted cocoa beans treated with potassium carbonate) and chocolate candy range in flavanol content from the more common concentration of 500 milligrams of flavanols per 100 grams of normal chocolate bars, to a concentration of 5,000 milligrams (5 grams) of flavanols per 100 grams of Cocoapro cocoa powder from the Mars Corporation.

Neither comes close to the high concentration of flavanol antioxidants in raw cocoa/cacao beans – 10 grams of flavanols per 100 grams.

ORAC Score – A Measure of Antioxidant Quality

The current standard for testing and measuring the antioxidant properties of various foods is called the ORAC Score. ORAC is an abbreviation for “Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity” – which is a measure of the amount of free radicals that can be neutralized by a certain mass of a food substance (usually cited as “per gram” or “per 100 grams” of the food substance).

The higher the ORAC score, the higher the concentration of antioxidants present in the food. (Source: US Department of Agriculture / Journal of the American Chemical Society.)

Free radicals are molecules that are missing one or more electrons and are therefore chemically imbalanced with a positive electrical charge. They are created in several kinds of chemical reactions which take place in our bodies, such as when we burn energy by working our muscles. To balance their charge, these radical molecules will seek to attract or “steal” electrons from other molecules – including the molecules which make up the DNA in your body’s cells which is the blueprint for producing new cells, and the mitochondria in your cells which create the energy to sustain the cells.

Cells with damaged mitochondria are weak and have lower energy and less resistance to disease. When the DNA of a cell is damaged by the action of free radicals, the result is the creation of imperfect new cells – or even malignant new cells which form tumors and cancers.

Free radicals are the cause of most degenerative diseases, premature aging, and the creation of cancer cells.

Antioxidants are molecules which have one or more extra electrons and are chemically imbalanced with a negative electrical charge, so they can attract and “donate” an electron to a positively-charged free radical molecule, which balances its electrical charge and thus neutralizes it. So that “thieving” radical molecule which is now electrically balanced no longer needs to “steal” electrons from the molecules which form our body’s cells.

Thus the more antioxidant molecules we have in our body, the more free radicals are neutralized, and the less damage is done to our cells. By preventing the damage to our DNA and mitochondria, antioxidants can stop and even reverse the aging process, and help prevent all kinds of degenerative diseases and cancers.

The ORAC value rates the capacity of the substance to prevent oxidation, i.e. its effectiveness as an antioxidant. It might help to compare the oxidation of molecules in our body to the oxidation of iron in an automobile – which we call “rusting”. Oxidized or “rusted” iron becomes brittle and weak, and eventually breaks down into a reddish-brown dust known as iron oxide. You could say that our bodies are “rusting out” from oxidation by free radicals! Ashes to ashes, and rust to dust!

But our bodies can be protected from this rusting by the antioxidants we get from eating natural foods which have a high ORAC value. Many natural foods have been supplying human bodies with those protective antioxidants since we first evolved, but the problem today is that we are not eating many natural foods! We consume far too many processed foods and junk foods which have had the protective antioxidants proocessed out of them! So we suffer more and more from many diseases such as cancer and heart disease, which were relatively rare problems for our ancestors who were eating nothing but whole foods fresh from the farm.

It’s very difficult today to avoid eating processed foods with inferior nutritional value, but we can at least try to eat enough whole foods (like cocoa or high-antioxidant fruits) or health supplements that supply us with enough antioxidants to protect us from degenerative diseases and the ravages of aging. We don’t have to grow old before our time, or suffer painful ailments, or die from horrible diseases that could have been prevented.

While the general public may be aware that they need to eat more raw fruits to get a good supply of antioxidants, the fruits most commonly eaten by North Americans are fairly low on the ORAC scale. Cantaloupe, banana, apple, apricot, peach, pear, and watermelon all have an ORAC score of less than 251 per 100 grams. No wonder the average North American is not getting enough antioxidants in his or her daily diet.

Even milk chocolate with its ORAC score of 6,740 provides significantly more antioxidants per gram than most of the commonly consumed fruits and vegetables – and more than even the top scoring fruits like prunes (5,770), pomegranate (3,307), blueberries (2,400) and blackberries (2,036).

The daily diet of the average North American only scores 1,000 to 1,500 on the ORAC scale. Nutrition experts tell us that it should be at least 3,000 to 5,000 ORAC. Some say it should be even more than 5,000.

Eating healthy chocolate, with its super-high ORAC value, can be an efficient and enjoyable way to boost your daily dose of antioxidants and reduce the ravages of free radicals.

Be careful not to assume that ALL organic chocolate or dark chocolate products (or any processed food product) are “healthy” just because they claim to contain ingredients which are known to have a high ORAC score. It does NOT necessarily mean that the finished product you are consuming will have a high ORAC score too.

There are several factors that can affect the actual ORAC score of a finished food product such as dark chocolate:
(1) how it is processed (excessive heat can destroy flavanols and reduce the amount of available antioxidants, which lowers the ORAC value),
(2) how much of the high ORAC ingredients are actually in the product,
(3) how some ingredients affect the ORAC score of other ingredients (e.g. adding milk to cocoa lowers its effective ORAC score to a little more than half because dairy products tend to block the absorption of the antioxidant flavanols in the cocoa).

Only ONE company (which markets a variety of truly healthy chocolate products) actually dares to show you an independent laboratory’s ORAC score per serving of its finished products right on their packaging (see “The Healthiest Chocolate” below) – so “what you see is what you get”.

For the reasons given above, all other chocolate makers seem unwilling to let you know the actual ORAC score of the products they are selling you. One might wonder if their effective ORAC score is too low to really be considered a “healthy” chocolate product?

Table of ORAC Values for Common Foods

Here is a comparison of the ORAC score per 100 grams for some common foods known to have a high antioxidant level, listed in descending order.

Unprocessed Raw Cacao – ORAC 28,000
Acai Berries* – ORAC 18,500
Dark Chocolate – ORAC 13,120
Milk Chocolate – ORAC 6,740
Prunes – 5,770
Wolfberry Juice – 3,472
Pomegranates – 3,307
Raisins – 2,830
Blueberries – 2,400
Blackberries – 2,036
Garlic – 1,939
Kale – 1,770
Cranberries – 1,750
Strawberries – 1,540
Tahitian Noni Juice – 1,506
Raw Spinach – 1,260
Raspberries – 1,220
Brussels Sprouts – 980
Plums – 949
Alfalfa Sprouts – 930
Steamed Spinach – 909
Broccoli – 890
Beets – 840
Avocado – 782
Oranges – 750
Red Grapes – 739
Red Bell Pepper – 710
Cherries – 670
Pink Grapefruit – 495
Kidney Beans – 460
Onion – 450
Corn – 400
Cauliflower – 385
Frozen Peas – 375
Potato – 300
Cabbage – 295
Banana – 210
Carrot – 200
Apple – 207
Tomato – 195
Peach – 170
Lima Beans – 136
Pear – 110

(*ORAC for Acai as determined by Brunswick Laboratories, USA.)

This will be important new information for millions of children and teenagers who hate the taste of brussel sprouts or broccoli. Now they can advise Mom that dark chocolate is a much healthier alternate source of antioxidants!

When comparing the antixodidant value (ORAC value) of foods you may actually be eating on a regular basis, another consideration is antioxidant value per calorie. What foods provide a healthy source of antioxidants without also providing too many calories from carbs and fats? Dark chocolate, in spite of the sweetener added to overcome the bitterness of raw cocoa, is actually one of the better providers of antioxidants per calorie!

One hundred grams of healthy dark chocolate (more than you would normally eat) provides 13,120 ORAC units of antioxidants and 552 calories of energy – which works out to 24 ORAC units per calorie.

That gives dark chocolate a better ORAC/calorie ratio than brussels sprouts (23), beets (20), plums (17), oranges (16), cauliflower (15), cherries (13), onions (12), cabbage (12), red grapes (10), tomato (9), head lettuce (9), string beans (6), potato (5), frozen peas (5), corn (5), carrot (5), apple (4), tofu (3), baked beans (3), pear (2), banana (2), or lima beans (1). In other words, if you are looking to increase your antioxidant intake from natural fruits and vegetables while consuming the least calories, eating a healthy dark chocolate is actually a lower-calorie source than all the common foods in this list!

And the ORAC per calorie ratio for dark chocolate (24) is about the SAME as two of the top antioxidant fruits – prunes (24) and raspberries (25). So it’s not necessary to worry about getting too many calories when consuming healthy dark chocolate as`a supplemental source of antioxidants, because you don’t need to eat very much dark chocolate`to absorb more antioxidants than you would get from many common fruits`and vegetables!

Prunes or chocolate? You can choose the chocolate!

Methylxanthines in Cocoa: Theobromine and Caffeine

Cocoa/cacao can substantially increase a person’s energy level, since it contains two stimulating methylxanthines – a significant amount of theobromine and a small amount of caffeine.

Theobromine in Cocoa and Chocolate

Theobromine comprises between 1% and 2% of the cocoa bean. Its properties are: stimulating the central nervous system, relaxing smooth muscles, and dilating blood vessels. Compared to the other methylxanthine molecule, caffeine, the theobromine has about one-quarter the stimulating power.

Theobromine also acts as a mild diuretic (increases the rate of urination) and has been used as a medical drug in cases where a heart attack had resulted in too high an accumulation of body fluid. Theobromine is also a cardiac stimulant and has been used to treat high blood pressure.

One of the reasons why dogs should not eat cocoa or chocolate is because this food can cause cardiac arrest in dogs, since they simply lack the enzymes necessary to metabolize quantities of theobromine in excess of 100 to 150 mg per kilogram of the dog’s body weight. The smaller the dog, the less cocoa or chocolate it would take to cause death.

Dogs LIKE to eat chocolate and will gorge themselves on all the chocolate they find, so do NOT leave chocolate candies or baking chocolate or chocolate chips where your pet dog can get at them! And do not feed chocolate candies to your dog, which just trains your dog to like the food that can kill your pet! Even the type of garden mulch which is made from shredded cocoa hulls (and can attract some dogs who will eat it) could contain enough theobromine to harm or kill a dog.

Caffeine in Cocoa and Chocolate

It generally agreed that cocoa and chocolate are poor sources of caffeine, though estimates of how much caffeine is present in cocoa may differ, depending on the source of the opinion. (Note that cocoa made from cacao beans which had the surrounding membrane removed before processing will contain almost no caffeine.) Various researchers have made the following estimates of the caffeine content in cocoa and chocolate…

A cup of hot chocolate usually contains about 4 to 5 milligrams of caffeine, which is about 5% of the caffeine found in a cup of regular perked coffee. Some types of high-quality organic cocoa powder which have the outer membrane removed from the bean will contain almost no caffeine, for most of the caffeine is found in this membrane (which is usually ground up with the whole bean to make a cheaper form of cocoa powder).
A cup of coffee may contain 50 to 175 milligrams of caffeine, a cup of tea may contain 25 to 100 milligrams, and a cup of cocoa beverage may contain zero to 25 milligrams of caffeine.
A 1.4 ounce piece of chocolate (40 grams) contains about the same amount of caffeine as one cup of decaffeinated coffee.
800 grams of milk chocolate (a lot of chocolate!) contains the equivalent amount of caffeine found in a cup of regular coffee.
A 50 gram piece of dark chocolate (the size of an average chocolate bar) will yield between 10 and 60 milligrams of caffeine; while an average 5-ounce cup of coffee can yield up to 175 milligrams of caffeine. (According to the Chocolate Information Center.)

An interesting experiment in the medical field of Homeopathy showed that a decoction of ground, roasted cocoa beans in boiling water produced an excitement of the nervous system similar to that caused by black coffee, and an excited state of circulation, demonstrated by an accelerated pulse. Yet when the same decoction was made with unroasted cocoa beans, neither effect was noticeable.

Can Chocolate Help You Be Happy?

We have all heard how chocolate can be a “comfort food” to help us cope with stress and depression and general unhappiness. There might actually be some connection between chocolate and happiness, when we look at certain chemicals which are found naturally in the cocoa/cacao bean and which can affect parts of the brain.

Phenylethylamine (PEA) in Cocoa

PEA is a chemical found in cocoa/cacao beans which increases the activity of neurotransmitters (brain chemicals) in certain areas of the brain which control the ability to focus attention and stay alert. Elevated PEA levels occur naturally when we are captivated by a movie or good book, or are wholly focused on a project or task – when we lose track of time and are not consciously unaware of what is happening around us.

PEA is found in higher levels in the brains of happy people. Cocoa or dark chocolate has been found to contain up to 2.2 percent PEA (phenylethylamine).

Anandamide (The Bliss Chemical) in Cocoa

Anandamide (or n-arachidonoylethanolamine) is a neurotransmitter which has been isolated in cocoa in quantities which are significant enough to affect the brain. Anandamide is a cannabinoid naturally found in the human brain. Anandamide is a lipid (a fat) known as “the bliss chemical” because it is released when we are feeling good. (Anandamide is the English spelling; anandamine is the French spelling.)

It is true that anandamide has a similar effect to the compound THC in cannabis (marijuana), but it acts in a different way; acts only on certain groups of brain cells and not the whole brain; and thus creates blissful feelings with much less intensity.

Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAO Inhibitors) in Cocoa/Cacao

These rare MAO inhibitors actually produce favorable results when consumed, by allowing more serotonin and other neurotransmitters such as anandamide, dopamine and others to circulate in the brain. According to Dr. Gabriel Cousens, MAO inhibitors facilitate anti-aging and rejuvenation.

MAO inhibitors make one feel younger when they allow more neurotransmitters to remain in the bloodstream. A primary phenomenon that differentiates children from adults is the level of neurotransmitters in the blood and bodies of children. In general, as one lives longer and longer the level of neurotransmitters decreases. This leads to less creativity, less joy, more physical rigidity – and more rapid aging!

Cocoa, with its supply of MAO inhibitors, helps keep plenty of neurotransmitters in circulation, and thus helps prevent this unhappy phenomenon from occurring. “Think young – you’ll have more fun!”

Now that you have learned how cocoa contains PEA, Anandamide, and MAO Inhibitors, and learned about the happy effects these chemicals can produce, can you see how real chocolate might deserve to be called “the happiest food”?

Chocolate Myths

“Chocolate is a divine, celestial drink, the sweat of the stars, the vital seed, divine nectar, the drink of the gods, panacea and universal medicine.”
– Geronimo Piperni

Chocolate as an Aphrodisiac

The peoples of Central American in the pre-Columbian era often spoke in metaphors composed of words or phrases which had a hidden meaning when uttered in sequence. This is common in many languages, including English. One of these ancient metaphors was yollotl, eztli, meaning “heart, blood,” – a phrase which referred to cocoa. Chocolate is the heart’s “blood” due to its magnesium, antioxidants, love chemicals and esoteric properties. Chocolate truly is “food for the heart”.

Chocolate is a symbol of sensuality, pleasure, and sexuality. Some writers have claimed that 50 per cent of women actually prefer chocolate to sex! That percentage might even rise if the women were offerred real chocolate in the form of organic cocoa!

Chocolate is a favorite gift from a lover to the beloved one. Chocolates are always given as love offerings. A box of chocolates is one of the most popular gifts for Valentine’s Day.

Cocoa, because it is natural and unadulterated, has an even stronger love energy than manufactured chocolate candy. In ancient Aztec wedding ceremonies, the bride and groom would exchange five cacao beans with each other.

Chocolate Misconceptions and Misinformation

Is White Chocolate a Healthy Chocolate?

White chocolate is not really a “chocolate”. It is actually made from “cocoa butter”, which is produced from the fat extracted from the bean. The health benefits of dark chocolate made from cocoa beans are NOT provided by white chocolate, and the antioxidants provided by dark chocolate are not able to be absorbed when dairy products are added to make milk chocolate. Thus you can only say that raw cocoa beans or dark chocolate with NO milk or dairy ingredients are the kind of healthy chocolate that is actually good for you. White chocolate and milk chocolate do not qualify as “healthy chocolate”.

Does Chocolate Contain Caffeine? Not Much.

Chocolate is actually a poor source of caffeine. A 50 gram piece of dark chocolate (the size of an average chocolate bar) will yield between 10 and 60 milligrams of caffeine; while an average 5-ounce cup of coffee can yield up to 175 milligrams of caffeine. Basically, dark chocolate contains about as much caffeine as a cup of DE-caffeinated coffee. A cup of hot chocolate contains only about 5 percent as much caffeine as a cup of perked coffee.

The outer shell surrounding each set of two cacao beans contains most of the caffeine. It is usually ground up with the two beans inside to increase the yield and lower the cost of the cocoa mass. By removing this shell membrane before processing the cocoa beans, a higher quality cocoa can be produced which is essentially caffeine-free.

Does Chocolate Cause Migraine Headaches? No.

Migraines have long been associated with chocolate consumption, particularly among women. One study of 490 persons with migraines found that 19 percent reported that chocolate precipitated their headaches. But other research has demonstrated no relationship between chocolate and headaches.  Moffet, Swash and Scott studied a group of 25 migraine sufferers, giving them a chocolate sample one week and then a placebo (carob, which tastes like chocolate) two weeks later. The test subjects completed questionnaires regarding their reactions within 48 hours of consumption of the chocolate or carob sample. The subjects could not tell if they were eating chocolate or carob. There was no difference in headache occurrence after either sample. In a second study, the researchers repeated the same procedure with 15 of the 25 subjects and again found no difference in reported headaches after consuming either sample.
Thus, as many reported headaches after eating chocolate as after NOT eating chocolate. You can draw your own conclusions.

Does Chocolate Cause Acne? No.

Your mother probably warned you that you could get a case of acne if you eat too much chocolate, but research by the U.S. Naval Academy concluded that there is no evidence that chocolate (or cocoa) causes or exacerbates (i.e. increases) acne. It is much more likely that the refined sugar added to chocolate candy is what increases the incidence of acne. (A yeast such as Candida feeds on sugars, and can be the cause of acne, eczema, and other skin infections. See Yeast Infections.)

Does Chocolate Cause Allergies? Not Likely.

A recent study showed that only 1 out of 500 people who believed they were allergic to chocolate actually tested positive for an allergy to chocolate. The concept that chocolate is a common allergen has existed for a long time, but recent evidence suggests that allergy to real chocolate (cocoa) is actually quite rare. More often the person is in fact allergic to the milk and dairy products contained in many kinds of chocolate candy, such as “milk chocolate”.

Healthy Chocolate

Natural dark chocolate truly is a “health food” – especially in its raw form as natural organic cocoa beans, or as dark chocolate made WITHOUT dairy products or refined sugar.

The problems so often associated with chocolate and the many chocolate candy products are not caused by the real cocoa in the chocolate, but by substances added to it – the refined sugar, dairy products, milk, bad fats, waxes, and chemical preservatives. With all the chocolate flavored-products available today, you could even buy some that contain little or even no true Theobroma Cacao.

And even when you find some apparently healthy chocolate that contains 70 percent or more real cacao the heat processing and/or the Dutch process (using alkalis) will have destroyed most of the flavanols which provide most of the health benefits.

The Healthiest Chocolate

The very best healthy, high-quality, dairy-free, chocolate made from the fruit of the Theobroma Cacao tree is Xocai™ chocolate from MXI Corp. headquartered in Reno, Nevada, USA (and with distribution centers in countries throughout the world, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Philippines).

Xocai™ (pronounced like “SHOW-sigh”) healthy chocolate products are produced with unprocessed, non-alkalized, non-lecithinized cacao powder, combined with acai (“ah-SIGH-hee”) berries, blueberries, and low-glycemic natural sweeteners. Raw cacao has the greatest concentration of antioxidants, and acai berries the second greatest, among all of the natural foods.

Xocai is the world’s ONLY source of chocolate made from cold-pressed raw cocoa that has NOT been heat-treated OR treated with alkaline chemicals (which destroy much of the antioxidant flavanols). Their Belgian gourmet chocolate is made by a much healthier patented process that no other chocolate manufacturer is able to duplicate.

For example, the Xoçai™ dark chocolate “X Power Squares” use raw cacao that is blanched, unfermented, sun-dried, non-roasted and cold-pressed – which means it contains eight times the levels of epicatechins and catechins, and four times the levels of procyandins than cacao produced with standard processing.

Just ONE 6-gram square of this Xoçai™ chocolate has an ORAC value of 3,582. That’s more than the minimum U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance (USRDA) of 3,000 ORAC from fruits and vegetables.

Yet few North Americans ever eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables to obtain even the recommended minimum daily amount of antioxidants because they eat far too many processed foods.

The daily diet of the average North American only scores 1,000 to 1,500 on the ORAC scale. Eating that one little 6-gram Xoçai™ dark chocolate wafer provides more than twice the amount of antioxidants the average North American is getting per day.

Better yet, this healthy chocolate is caffeine-free and is low in fat and sugar!

Even diabetics can eat this amazingly delicious tasting gourmet chocolate.

And people have actually achieved some serious rapid weight loss by eating the Xocai chocolate 20 minutes before a meal! (It naturally reduces appetite, so you don’t eat more food than you really need.))

The patented Xoçai™ chocolate products are likely the healthiest brand of chocolate you can buy.

And it’s the only chocolate brand which can truly provide so many natural antioxidants in the form of flavanols and catechins that the certified ORAC score per serving is actually SHOWN on the packaging. Other dark chocolate manufacturers won’t disclose the actual ORAC score of their chocolate products – and we wonder why. But MXI Corp. has truly earned their “bragging rights” and proudly displays the ORAC score of all its healthy chocolate products right on the label.

MXI Corp. sends samples of its Xoçai™ chocolate products to a well-known and highly-respected independent testing facility in the USA, Brunswick Laboratories, to measure their actual ORAC value, which is then printed on the label of each organic chocolate product. To date, no other chocolate maker has been willing to publicly disclose the independently-measured ORAC score of its chocolates.

So go indulge yourself!  This guilt-free healthy chocolate is good for you!

————————————————————————

References

Antioxidants in Chocolate. wineserver.ucdavis.edu/chocolate/choc1.htm

Lee, KW, Kim, YJ, Lee, HJ, and Lee, CY. Cocoa Has More Phenolic Phytochemicals and a Higher Antioxidant Capacity than Teas and Red Wine. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2003;51:7292–7295.

Keen Carl L. Chocolate: Food as Medicine/Medicine as Food. Journal of the American College of Nutrition. 2001;20:436–439S.

Serum Cholesterol. World Cocoa Foundation

The Good News About Chocolate. World Cocoa Foundation

————————————————————————

Healthy Chocolate is ©2006 by Michael Star and others. E&OE.

The content of this page is provided for educational purposes only, and should not be considered as medical advice. It is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not review or test products classed as a “food supplement”. The following statement is required by the U.S. FDA:
“This product line has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product line is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent disease.”

 

Essential Oils September 10, 2008

Essential oils can be used in place of most any drug if you know what you are doing.  We use them to heal burns, help reduce high fevers, kill fungus (i.e. ringworm), kill bacterial germs, prevent illness, etc.  We have found Young Living Essential Oils to be the most pure and effective.  To give you an idea about what essential oils are this is the Preface from the Essential Oils Desk Reference (third printing May 2000) compiled by Essential Science Publishing.

Essential oils are the oldest and some of the most powerful therapeutic agents known.  They have enjoyed a millennium-long history of use in healing and anointing throughout the ancient world.  Oils, like frankincense, are cited repeatedly in many Judeo-Christian religious texts and were used to cure every ailment “from gout to a broken head.”  Myrrh, lotus, and sandalwood oils were widely used in ancient Egyptian purification and embalming rituals.  Other oils like clove and lemon were highly valued as antiseptics hundreds of years before the discovery of chemical germkillers.

 With the advent of modern industrial biochemicals during the last two centuries, natural therapeutic agents, like essential oils, have been largely forgotten.  It has been only during the last 20 years that essential oils have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as their broad-spectrum antibacterial and therapeutic action has been rediscovered by many health-care professionals.  Essential oils are some of the most concentrated natural extracts known, exerting significant antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, hormonal, and psychological effects.  Essential oils have the ability to penetrate cell membranes, travel throughout the blood and tissues, and enhance electrical frequencies.  As we watch an essential oil work, it becomes clear that the powerful life force inherent in many essential oils gives them an unmatched ability to communicate and interact with cells in the human body.

After using them, there is no doubt that essential oils were ordained as the medicine for mankind and will be held as the medicine of our future:  the missing link of modern medicine, where allopathic and holistic medicine join together for the leap into the 21st century.

 

Homeopathy

Let’s look at homeopathy.  We use homeopathy in place of regular over-the-counter medicines for headaches, colds, flu, teething, gas, etc. It’s always good to have some on hand, especially the Kid’s Kit by Hylands and Oscillococcinum by Boiron.  The Kid’s Kit contains the commonly used homeopathic remedies and a little pamplet on what to use them for.  The other will wipe out the flu quicker then you will believe if you follow the directions.  We also use homeopathy when it is prescribed by our Homepathic Doctor for things that are a little more severe.  

We went to our good friend Dotty’s site www.TheECHOFoundation.com to get some info for you.  Here is the general information:

 

General Information About Homeopathy

Homeopathy is an increasingly popular alternative system of healing whose basic philosophy has attracted much skepticism from the conventional medical profession because it has been difficult to prove ‘scientifically’. However, its success with patients has meant that it has continued to grow and develop over the past two hundred years and has even enjoyed a resurgence in the past twenty years. 
 

Homeopathic Principles:

The principles of homeopathy were first formulated at the end of the eighteenth century by Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician. Hahnemann had given up the practice of medicine because he found the therapies of his time to be ineffective and extremely harmful, and did not resume practice until he discovered, in homeopathy, a means to help people heal gently, rapidly, reliably – and without side effects. Homeopathy spread quickly throughout Europe and to the United States, where at the beginning of this century 15-20% of all doctors were homeopaths. Despite repeated criticism from orthodox medical circles, the validity of Hahnemann’s ideas has been demonstrated for over nearly 200 years.

Homeopathic treatment, like all natural therapies, seeks to stimulate the innate healing power of the individual so that all systems function at their best. As a person moves toward their optimal level of general health, they feel better in themselves. As their symptoms improve their strengthened body defenses become active. The homeopathic remedy does not directly treat a symptom or condition. Instead, it helps to initiate the process by which the person heals him or herself. 

 

Law of Similars:  This is homeopathy’s guiding principle. It states that any substance which can cause a set of symptoms in a healthy person can cure those same symptoms in a sick person. The symptoms the sick person experiences are therefore the most important guide to the choice of the correct remedy.

 

Whole Person:  Homeopaths view a person’s health as a condition of that entire individual rather than as isolated symptoms. A remedy is selected which best corresponds to that person’s total state. Important indicators of general health, like the level of vitality a person experiences, stress factors, and his or her emotional well-being, along with specific physical symptoms, demand close attention.

 

Minimum dose:  As little medicine as possible is employed. After a dose is given the individual’s response is carefully observed, and the remedy is repeated or changed as necessary. 

 

[General Information on Homeopathy written by Miranda Castro FSHom, CCH. Miranda is a British homeopath who has been practicing homeopathy since 1983. She is a Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths (UK) and certified with the Council on Homeopathic Certification. 

Miranda has a background in acupuncture and humanistic psychotherapy and has been teaching and speaking both sides of the Atlantic for 15 years. She is much loved for making classical homeopathy accessible to all through her articles and books, The Complete Homeopathy Handbook, Homeopathy for Pregnancy, Birth and Your Baby’s First years and A Homeopathic Guide to Stress

Please visit Miranda at www.MirandaCastro.com]

 

Supplementation and Medication

When it comes to most things natural is the way to go.  So what do you do about supplementation and when you are feeling ill?  Do you just grin and bare it?  Well, sometimes you should, but you don’t always have to.  We would like to introduce you to a variety of natural alternatives to your everyday vitamins and over the counter medicines (and some prescription ones too).  

Our first step into more natural was with prenatal vitamins while expecting our third in 2001.  This time instead of using the prescription ones, we used a whole foods based vitamin by Rainbow Light.  We also read about and began to use things to keep mom healthy during pregnancy, labor and birth.  For example, raspberry leaf tea, alfalfa and some omega-3’s.  

This was only the beginning of our more natural approach to supplementation and medication.  In the next few blog posts we will give you some information on these.  We’ll give you general information about them.  If you would like more information on a particular subject email us and we’ll help.  Also, if you would like us to include something else, just let us know.

 

Folic acid supplementation Link to Bowel Cancer September 1, 2008

Filed under: Natural Living — Amy and Simon @ 2:46 pm
Tags: , , , , ,

As we try to figure out the best way to tell you that vitamins are only good if they are natural and from whole food sources someone posts this article on one of our yahoo groups.  Please notice it talks about synthetic folic acid and foods fortified with it.  It is always best to get our vitamins from the source.  It is what nature intended.

“Can folic acid cause cancer?
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/09/2008

Supplements of vitamin B are thought to increase the risk of bowel
cancer, warns Jennifer Swift

Shirley Sepstrup’s busy job in a hospital lab in East Sussex left her
with little time to cook, so she often relied on convenience foods,
hoping that her daily multivitamin pill would make up for any dietary
deficiencies. But when a colonoscopy showed that, at 52, she had
developed bowel cancer – like her father, uncle and grandfather – she
had to radically change her eating habits.

Unexpected risk: Shirley Sepstrup
Out went the ready meals, and Shirley began to eat wholefoods, drink
1.5 litres of water a day, and avoid known risks for bowel cancer –
red meat, preserved meats such as ham and bacon, sugar and processed
foods. But recently she learnt of an unexpected risk: a vitamin.

Folic acid is the synthetic form of a naturally occurring B vitamin,
folate. Women who have good levels of folate in their diet, or take
folic acid supplements, are far less likely to have babies affected
by the birth defect spina bifida. America and Canada started adding
folic acid to flour in 1998 and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in
the UK has called for a similar fortification here. But recent
research has linked high folic acid consumption with an increased
risk of bowel cancer; the modest-sounding annual increase of one per
cent could, in fact, amount to an extra 3,000 cases per year in the
UK. Other evidence points to an increased risk of breast or prostate
cancers.

Natural folate protects against cancer because it allows the body to
copy DNA accurately.

“But many middle-aged and elderly people have tiny pre-malignant
lesions,” says Prof Young-Im Kim of the University of
Toronto. “Excess folate, especially in the form of folic acid, can
fuel lesion growth, accelerating progression into life-threatening
cancers, because high levels of the vitamin make it easier for tumour
cells to copy themselves.”
He says that soon after fortification of flour began in North
America, the rate of bowel cancer – then in decline – abruptly
increased. The FSA’s advisers were sufficiently concerned to
recommend holding off a similar initiative until the results of two
further studies emerge later this year.

Overdosing on B vitamins was thought to be impossible because they
are water-soluble and any excess is excreted in the urine. But
evidence is mounting that folic acid circumvents the body’s natural
mechanisms for limiting folate absorption in the gut. Folic acid goes
directly to the liver, which is easily saturated, and the excess
spills out into the body.

“People with a high intake end up with unmetabolised folic acid
floating in their bloodstream,” says Dr Siân Astley of the Institute
for Food Research in Norwich. “We don’t really know what its
consequences might be.”

The recommended daily intake for folate is 200 micrograms (mcg), and
most multivitamins contain this amount of folic acid. But it is also
added to breakfast cereals, snack bars and some margarines. Official
government advice puts the safe upper limit for folic acid at
1,000mcg per day, but the leading vitamin B expert, Prof David Smith
of Oxford University, thinks there is now sufficient evidence to cut
that down to 500mcg in general and 400mcg for cancer survivors.

“If you eat a lot of fortified cereals, you may want to rethink your
daily multivitamin. Or you could stick with the vitamin pill and
switch to wholegrains without added synthetic vitamins, such as
porridge or muesli,” says Dr Astley. “Fortification is an overly
broad approach that increases everyone’s folic acid intake, instead
of targeting those who need it.”

http://www.bowelcanceruk.org.uk

taken from:-

http://tinyurl.com/5c7gd9