The New Biology of Health - Part 6

I was up to a record 192 pounds. I was depressed and tired and had attempted almost every diet known to humankind. I would lose weight and then gain it right back when I returned to my old eating habits. I became more and more discouraged. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired - and fat! I knew it was tine to make some major lifestyle changes.

So, once again I stepped onto the diet roller coaster by going to a local weight loss organization. It worked for the first few months. It worked for the first few months. I lost thirty-two pounds, traded in my diet sodas for water, and started to exercise. I thought I might really have the problem licked this time.

At this same time, my husband applied for a life insurance policy. The findings of the company's physical exam scared us to death. His cholesterol was practically off the charts at 340. He had fatty growths in his shoulder. He was at his heaviest ever, too: 227 pounds. For someone who is five-foot-nine, that's quite a load to carry around. The report made him out to be a walking time bomb. An accident waiting to happen. Just like me, he realized he needed to make some serious changes. But he was confused about what and how.

Before he could take action, we moved into a new house and went on a vacation. I went back to my old eating habits, stopped exercising, and regained twenty of the thirty-two pounds I had lost. When things settled down again and we realized we had to take action, that's when the pH Miracle program came into our lives.

We shared the same first thought: How on earth could we change our lifestyle so drastically? And the same second thought: We had to try. That night we committed to the program - and immediately headed over to a favorite local restaurant to pig out on our last barbecue pork ribs and mud pie. The next morning we changed our diets - and changed our lives. We've never looked back.

My husband's cholesterol dropped to 242 in six weeks, and is now under 200. He had been experiencing arthritis in the hips and had been thinking about surgery. But the pain has disappeared! For the first time in my life, I'm not depressed. I'm no longer a compulsive eater; no longer do I eat until I get sick - and then eat some more. I'm not a slave to my addiction to sugar and breads. Now the foods I crave are avocados and soybeans. We both would still like to lose a few more pounds, but we don't worry about it anymore. We know our bodies will reach an optimum weight. And we'll never regain it because we no longer crave the foods that made us sick, tired, and fat in the first place.

It turns out weight loss is almost a side benefit. What we've really gotten out of this is feeling better. Our minds and bodies are stronger. We no longer feel sick and tired all the time. Even our relationship has benefited. We have a more fulfilling life. We can more fully enjoy the best things in life - mainly, our kids.

Speaking of our kids, we are now gradually working them into the program, too. They have been raised on fast food and pizza, candy bars and soda pop. And they've been addicted to sugar, bread, and meat - and been tired, obese, and depressed as a result, just like so much of their generation. Who would have thought they would ever be drinking green vegetable juice for breakfast? We feed them healthy meals, and they take supplements as well. They still have some sugar now and then, but we know this is not an overnight process. The whole family is headed in the right direction.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: "There will come a time when we will sit down to the banquet of our consequences."

We were. And we are. I like this way much better.

Besides the huge volume of tales like this one - which I'll share more of throughout the book - I've seen the scientific proof of such transformations with my own eyes, though nothing is more persuasive than the radical changes in people's everyday lives. I've observed many thousands of blood samples, including pH levels, from people all over the world, and seen the transformation that occurs - right down to the individual cells - when people change the way they eat, the way they drink, and the way they think.

The New Biology of Health - Part 5

The following chapters explore the details of why, and the remainder of the book shows you specifically what and how. You'll get the benefit of my own exhaustive research and the work of the great minds that have gone this road before me, and you'll also get Shelley's real-life, practical expertise in how to make this all happen for you.

Bottom line: This program will bring you increased quality and quantity of life. I guarantee you'll see immediate improvement. Your energy will increase, you'll find new mental clarity and powers of concentration, you'll build strength and stamina, and you'll lose excess body fat while increasing muscle mass. You'll have bright eyes and clear skin. You'll look better. You'll improve your athletic performance. Your entire body will function more efficiently. Whatever health challenges you've been facing will improve and most likely evaporate altogether. In short, you'll regain all the effortless, sustainable energy and wellness you thought was lost with your childhood. With the healing, wholeness, and rejuvenation that this program brings, you'll experience, possibly for the first time in your life, vibrant, energetic personal health.

Over and over again, we've witnessed joy, relief, and renewed peace of mind in those who have turned a serious or chronic illness around, those who lost weight that they had been battling for years, those whose cholesterol levels dropped, blood sugars normalized, blood pressure improved, skin cleared up, itching stopped, energy returned. I've seen people who no longer required insulin injections for their diabetes. People whose aches and pains disappeared. Even people who had been diagnosed with cancer whose tumors vanished and who were pronounced cancer-free. We hear frequently from people who haven't been able to work for months or years who are returning to work, people whose allergies are letting up, people whose infections clear. People who are well, whole, and energetic again. People like Sharon and her husband. We'll let her tell their story:

The New Biology of Health - Part 4

Forget cholesterol and carbohydrate counts. Forget calories and fat grams. Forget blood pressure, blood sugar, hormone levels, or any of the other markers of health you're used to at the doctor's office. It turns out that the single measurement most important to your health is the pH of your blood and tissues - how acidic or alkaline it is. Different areas of the body have different ideal pH levels, but blood-and-tissue pH is the most telling of all. Just as your body temperature is rigidly regulated, the blood and tissues must be kept in a very narrow pH range - mildly basic or alkaline. The body will go to great lengths to preserve that, including wreaking havoc on other tissues or systems.

The pH level of our internal fluids affect every cell in our bodies. The entire metabolic process depends on an alkaline environment. Chronic overacidity corrodes body tissue, and if left unchecked will interrupt all cellular activities and functions, from the beating of your heart to the neutral firing of the brain. In other words, overacidity interferes with life itself. It is (as we'll see in more detail in the next chapter) at the root of all sickness, dis-ease, and disease.

If that's not enough to get you interested in balancing your boy pH naturally, nondestructively, keep this in mind: Overacidity is also what's keeping you fat. (More about that later.)

The goal, then - and what this program allows you to do - is to create the proper alkaline balance within your body. The way to do that is by eating the proper balance of alkaline and acid foods. That means 80 percent of your diet must be alkalizing foods such as green vegetables. (This percentage will go down somewhat once you've successfully rebalanced yourself. And if you're very sick, the percentage should go up for some period of time.) That leaves much smaller portions of acid foods (such as meat and grains) on our plates. In addition, carefully chosen, high-quality alkalizing supplements will help you achieve and maintain pH balance. You'll learn more about all this in detail in later chapters. You'll also need to exercise properly (see chapter 13) and adopt other alkaline lifestyle practices, like learning to manage stress (see chapter 14).

That's it. That's all there is to it. Get at least three-quarters of your plate covered with alkalizing food, use the alkalizing supplements as explained in this book, and you'll be good to go.

The New Biology of Health - Part 3

Even mainstream medicine agrees: "Foods contain nutrients essential for normal metabolic function, and when problems arise, they result from imbalances in nutrient intake and from harmful interaction with other factors. For...adult Americans who do not smoke and do not drink excessively, one personal choice seems to influence long-term health prospects more than any other - What We Eat" (from the 1988 "Surgeon General's Report on Health and Nutrition," emphasis added).

Since that landmark report from C. Everett Koop (and even before, depending on the circles you run in), Americans have been following one diet craze after another, not only in an attempt to drop the excess baggage most of us are carrying around but also as a way to find our way back to good health. Further, since that report, America's agribusiness industry and the advertising world have dramatically and disingenuously increased the false, distorted, misleading, and nonsensical information about the food sold in our grocery stores and served up in our fast-food restaurants. The result? We, as a country, are fatter than ever. And we're certainly no healthier.

The problem is that while diet is the key not only to slimness but also overall health and well-being, it has to be a diet that properly balances our body chemistry. But every one of the diets Americans have tried - including not just the "average American diet" but also such supposedly healthful regimens as low-fat diets, the food pyramid, the macrobiotic diet, the blood type diet, the metabolic type diet, high-protein and low carbohydrate diets, the raw food diet, and vegetarianism - creates wildly imbalanced body chemistry. Even if one way of eating gets rid of extra pounds (usually temporary) or lower cholesterol levels or lessen digestive troubles for some people, it does not fulfill the promise of simple good health. We're so used to our modern medical machinery, in fact, that good health seems anything but simple. I'm here to tell you: It is simple.

The New Biology of Health - Part 2

All you have to do is take a look around you to see that most people with our modern lifestyles are suffering from imbalance. They are obese. Tired. Prematurely aging. Perhaps you are, too. Chances are at least one person you love is suffering from one of the top three killers in the United States - heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. When I asked the audience at one of my lectures how many of them had a family member with one of these big bad three, 80 to 90 percent raised their hands. The fact is, half of us will die from heart disease or diabetes. A third will die from cancer.

If you're like many people in our culture, at this point you're thinking, Well, you have to die of something. We've forgotten that it is natural to die - and to live - healthy! In fact, it is your birthright to live healthy, right up until the day you die. Making that vision a reality is the great gift of this program. And believe me, it has nothing to do with mapping the human genome, cutting-edge medical technologies, or even more powerful - and dangerous - pharmaceuticals. The good news is, the answer is much, much simpler than all that. And available right here and now. Today.

One of the most obvious clues is right there in the top three killers - cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. All are directly linked to diet. In fact, eight of the top ten causes of death in America today are - not to mention that diet is obviously the cause of the obesity of 60 percent of Americans. (I have no doubt that if and when we devote enough energy to studying the less common "diseases" and health challenges, we will prove that they are also related to your diet.) Eating the proper foods and getting the best nutrients, in balance, will help you avoid all that - along with the misery and poor quality of life that so often precede death, sometimes by decades. The simple secrets to finding the right combinations are what The pH Miracle is all about.

The New Biology of Health

The pH Miracle

Chapter 1: The New Biology of Health

A new day is dawning. A day of truly holistic health, vitality, and well-being. A time of energizing our very cells, maximizing the life force of our bodies. An era of naturally lean and strong physiques! An era of focusing on right food instead of wrong drugs. This book, based on the microscopic evaluation of blood leading to correct nutrition, will light this path for you. It will help you understand the revolutionary science I (Rob) call the New Biology, and explains the practical ways to change your diet and unleash the full power of your body to heal itself.

In truth, the light came over the horizon more than a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the radical work of some great pioneering scientists has been overlooked by a mainstream medical model so deeply involved with its own myths that it was blind to larger truths. Until now. We are in the process of peeling off the blinders and looking at an entirely new model of human health while correcting the old model of disease. Working from decades of exhaustive research - my own as well as the work of those early (ignored) pioneers - we'll discover the basic pathways to illness and wellness. You'll get the science, of course. but also the practical applications that will allow you to put science to work.

It's all about balance - pH balance. The universe operates by keeping opposites in balance, and the universe contained within your body is no exception. When imbalance occurs, we get the signs of disease (or dis-ease): low energy, fatigue, poor digestion, excess weight, foggy thinking, aches and pains, as well as major disorders. This book is about reclaiming balance: energy; mental clarity; smooth operation of all body systems; clear, bright eyes and skin; and a a lean, trim body. By following the program in this book, all that can be yours within weeks.

The pH Miracle: Foreword

By Gabriel Cousins, MD

The pH Miracle is a historically and profoundly significant conceptual medical breakthrough in the functional understanding of the basic cause of disease. The focus of Dr. Young on the pH is a major conceptual insight and contribution to natural healing. It reflects a brilliant continuum from the work of medical doctors like Antoine Bechamp and Claude Bernard, who taught that the biological terrain (a person's basic psycho-physical-biochemical balance as reflected in the immune system) was the most important factor in whether a person remained healthy or developed acute or chronic disease. As Florence Nightingale described in the 1850s, the swamp breeds the mosquitoes; the mosquitoes do not create the swamp. As Dr. Young beautifully clarifies, "Germs are really just the expression of the underlying disease condition (overacidity and microform growth)."

This way of understanding disease is distinctly different from the current allopathic model, which is based on the theory of Louis Pasteur of one pathogenic organism - one disease approach. Even Pasteur himself refuted it on his deathbed, when he stated that Claude Bernard was right, the terrain is everything. Today this represents the core of the debate between the holistic approach to disease, which reflects a body-mind-spirit pleomorphic approach to preventing and healing disease, and the allopathic-symptom-focused approach to disease.

The pH Miracle is sharing a new and fundamental view of health and the prevention of disease. It it BASE-ic. When you create a healthy pH, you create a significantly more disease-resistant body. With this book Dr. Young has established himself as a visionary pioneer in bringing forth this elegant yet profoundly simple approach to maintaining high-level health and healing disease. At the Tree of Life, a clinical study of more than a thousand people found that those who were healthiest had a venous blood pH of approximately 7.46 - distinctly more alkaline than the traditional teaching of 7.35 as a healthy blood pH. Research done at UCLA by Dr. Watson produced similar findings; in a study of more than three hundred people, the venous blood pH associated with healthiest brain and emotional functioning was 7.46.

The optimal alkalizing dietary approach for creating and maintaining optimal well-being is organic, plant source only, 80 percent live food, and low glycemic. Dr Young's revolutionary teaching about minimizing fruit in the diet, especially sweet fruits, is both courageous and one that I share with him. The other components of the healthy alkalizing diet are good hydration, high oxygen intake, and highly mineralized food intake. In addition, this revised addition has made a significant and healthy step away from recommending all forms of soy as part of the diet. The decrease in emphasis of soy shows the evolution of thinking as new information has emerged since the first edition.

After thirty-six years of clinical experience, these are the basics of what I consider the optimal dietary way of life. I would add one additional emphasis, which is to eat moderately, as excessive eating, even of the most alkalizing food, can also create acidity because it overloads the digestive system.

In sum, this is a powerful approach. As we expand our understanding of the implications of The pH Miracle, we begin to look at our whole acidic, high-stress lifestyle as a source of illness. It takes us beyond diet to a whole alkalinizing way of life.

This book is great theoretically, yet also offers a well-balanced practical side. The pH Miracle shows how to transition to this lifestyle step by step. Remember that although it may appear difficult to live an alkalinizing, plant-source-only, organic, live-food lifestyle, it is profoundly worth it. From my own experience of living this way since 1983, I know it creates extraordinary vitality, strength, health, and a most delicious sense of well-being. For example, at the age of 21 as the captain of an undefeated football team, I was able to do 70 push-ups more than anyone else on the team could do. That was before I went alkaline. Almost forty years later, having lived for years on an alkaline diet and lifestyle, I was able to do 601 consecutive push-ups. It is interesting to note that in more than ten studies, nonathletic vegetarians had two to three times more endurance than meat-eating athletes. Research by Dr. Brekman in Russia showed that the same mice eating the exact same amount of cooked and raw food has three times more endurance when eating raw food. A properly alkalinized person optimizes all mental and physical functions.

A visionary breakthrough, this book is already a classic in natural healing literature. It makes a great contribution to the emerging culture-of-life world in which we choose to return to the natural healing ways of the Divine.

Sir Gabriel Cousens, MD, MD (H), DD is a diplomat of the American Board of Holistic Medicine, director of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center and Foundation, and author of Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine, Conscious Eating, and Spiritual Nutrition.