Positive Health Online

Fast Food, Obesity and Ill Health (see page 26), Living with Multiple Sclerosis and Treatment Approaches (see page19), The Holistic and Environmentally Friendly Home (see page 34), Yoga, Dietary and Lifestyle Approaches for Prostate Problems (see page 45); these features  epitomize some of the most important paradigm challenges of our modern world – i.e. that there may be considerable knowledge, even clinical research validating effective treatment approaches, but that changing our collective dietary, medical treatment and lifestyle habits is a huge slog.

Jane Lorimer speaks eloquently in her learned exposé of the links between our fast food diet, intake of toxic and poisonous foods, coupled with horrendously depleted soil vitamins and minerals, together with our collective slothfulness and inactivity, of our resultant obesogenic society and consequent epidemic of chronic ill health.

We all know that pigging out on burgers, fries, ice cream, cream cakes, not to mention copious quantities of coffee, alcohol and fizzy drinks, is unhealthy, will make us fat, and put us on the road to chronic life-threatening illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. We all know that if we do no exercise, we won’t be fit and will get even fatter. These are not rocket science revelations. We have volumes of research in learned journals, not to mention the acres of space in the tabloids and popular magazines, about binge eating, drinking, and dieting.

There are highly popular TV series about fat people who lose weight when they change their eating and exercise habits, sometimes supervised by celebrity nutritionists (sometimes nicknamed the food police or worse) .

There is probably not a person alive on the planet who is not aware that smoking can lead to serious and fatal diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease. We have known for about 50 years about these links, yet there still is a significant minority of people within our modern society who continue to smoke. These individuals know that smoking is bad for them, yet they continue with the habit.

Trying to change people’s long established and ingrained beliefs and habits is a mighty task. We catch glimpses of the Herculean proportions of this battle when we watch celebrities such as Jamie Oliver take on the grossly unhealthy state of school dinners. Jamie Oliver had to face the resistance of the schools, the dinner ladies, the children themselves, their parents, not to mention the financial might of the vending machine and junk food companies. It is a tremendous feat which he has accomplished, and he is to be congratulated, along with the hard work of the dinner ladies and the vision of the government to help fund the school dinners project.

There are many battles ongoing and facing us for the holistic and environmental movements. One of the most crucial – that of saving optimum dosage nutritional supplements – is outlined in the letters pages (see pages 51-2) EU Directive Update – Nutritional Therapy at Risk by Dr Robert Verkerk, Executive Director of the Alliance for Natural Health.

PH readers may recall that the EU is considering upper safe limits dosages of the many vitamin and mineral supplements products to which we have been fortunate to have access in the UK. Dr Verkerk describes  the madness of the ‘risk assessment’ procedure, whereby the so-called Upper Safe Levels (USLs) of these nutrients are then diluted using absurd measures, including the No Observable Adverse Level (NOAEL) (safe level), which is then divided by an arbitrary Uncertainty Factor (UF), which is then assessed by Risk Managers, who subtract dietary intakes from the USL, adjust for other unknowable factors and end up with measures of utter nothingness for these precious, health- and life-enhancing nutrients. This is deeply worrying. I look forward to floods of emails correcting me if I have misrepresented this concocted and convoluted mishmash of double speak.

On these same letters pages is a summary of research by a variety of physicians going back 60 years, documenting the efficacy of vitamins B-3 and B-1, along with the rest of the B-complex vitamins, vitamins C and E, and other nutrients including magnesium, calcium and zinc, to arrest and reverse multiple sclerosis. This will undoubtedly be hotly disputed by members of the mainstream medical profession, who are largely ignorant of the nutritional scientific literature, and who seem to delight in censuring and harassing brilliant pioneering physicians who were ahead of their time. If I had MS, I would follow the advice of author Wendy Gist, who describes the Case of MS patient Carol, who discovered the approaches which were helpful to her (see pages 19-22).

If we can overcome the EU and CODEX Nutritional Supplement battles, and survive into old age, then we can all come together at the ramparts to prevent global warming, climate change and the other cataclysmic events which all stem, in one way or another, from our greedy, obesogenic and materialistic rampages on the planet.

I do hope that you all enjoy this issue of Positive Health.