Juice Fasting For Health
Juice Fasting For Health
Modern living exposes you to a range of toxins, both in the air you breathe and the heavily processed foods you eat. While your body works hard to cope with this constant influx of toxins, the unfortunate truth is that it is overwhelmed and becomes stressed as the result. Because of this, you may be suffering from any of a range of symptoms.
The question is, what can you do to assist your body in coping with this? One thing you should consider is juice fasting as a beneficial method of detoxing yourself. It can help in a variety of ways, including the treatment of biochemical imbalances, reduction of serum cholesterol, allergy treatment, and so on.
The idea behind juice fasting is that you provide your immune system the opportunity to concentrate its action on eliminating toxins because your body does not have to focus energy on the digestive process. Health care practitioners who promote this method believe that by fasting for 3 or more days, you will enter a state known as autolysis in which your body begins to digest its own tissues.
While this may not sound like a good thing, it will begin with tissues and cells that are either aged, dead, diseased, or otherwise damaged. In addition, your stomach will contract and achieve a state of lower acidity. As you begin to eliminate these toxins, you may experience some temporary detox symptoms, such as headaches and fatigue. However, these symptoms will pass, and afterward you will experience improved health and a sense of well-being.
So you might wonder what fruits and vegetables you can juice. The good news is that you can make virtually any vegetable or fruit that you would consume raw into juice. Particularly good choices include: carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, and celery.
To help make your juice fasting a success, here are some tips:
Tip #1: for delicious juices try combining fruits and vegetables, like tomato, apple, and celery, or carrot and apple juice.
Tip #2: Remove the skins of any fruits and vegetables you want to juice, particularly if they are not organic. Pesticide and herbicide residue may be on these skins. And when you wash whatever you juice, do so in distilled or filtered water.
Tip #3: Don’t drink the juice straight. You will find it much more satisfying if you dilute it to a ratio of about one part juice to one part water.
Tip #4: Only do your juice fasting with juice you make yourself from fresh, preferably organic produce. Processed juice from the grocery store (or anywhere else) will have been heat-treated, which obviates the value of the fast.
Tip #5: Prepare your juice fresh. Part of what you are after are the food enzymes only present in freshly made juice from raw produce. The best way to do this is to get yourself a juicer and keep plenty of raw, organic produce on hand while you do your juice fasting. Why not start today?
Leaky Guts and Multiple Sclerosis
Leaky Guts and Multiple Sclerosis
The cause of multiple sclerosis has not yet been definitively identified. There are many theories, nearly as many as there are doctors and scientists who investigate this debilitating and disheartening disease.
However, many health care workers support the theory that leaky gut syndrome causes autoimmune diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), asthma, and multiple sclerosis (MS). So what is leaky gut syndrome (or “leaky guts”)?
Leaky gut syndrome (sometimes called increased intestinal permeability) is a condition in which undigested proteins are able to enter your blood stream via tiny gaps in your intestinal lining. These proteins are not meant to be in your blood stream, so your immune system reacts to them as invaders and mounts an attack. The way in which this may lead to diseases like MS and ALS is that the structure of these undigested proteins is similar to the proteins that form the structure of your central nervous system (CNS), specifically the insulative sheath known as myelin.
Fortunately, leaky guts can be healed, and doing so will keep undigested food particles out of your blood stream. One part of healing your leaky gut syndrome is to not eat foods which contain proteins that are mimics of those in the CNS.
As with many health disorders, some of us suffer from a predisposition to leaky guts. A number of factors can transform this predisposition into the full-blown syndrome, such as the consumption of alcohol, NSAIDs like ibuprofen, parasites, other infections, and an overgrowth of the yeast Candida. In sensitive individuals, any of these can cause irritation of the intestinal lining, thereby increasing its permeability and allowing undigested food particles into the blood stream.
So, an important part of healing from leaky guts is to adopt a diet for leaky gut syndrome that in large part consists of restricting your intake of foods to which you may be sensitive or allergic. You can undertake an elimination diet to identify which foods you are sensitive to, or you can get a test called an ELISA.
We don’t know definitively that leaky gut syndrome causes multiple sclerosis. What we do know is that many sufferers of MS have reported that by identifying and restricting which foods that they are sensitive to, they have experienced improvement in their symptoms. It is definitely worth a try.
Traditional Chinese Medicine and Leaky Gut Syndrome
Among the potential causes of Leaky Gut Syndrome is the fact that antibiotics can create an unfavorable balance between “good” bacteria and “bad” bacteria in your colon. This can lead to increased permeability of the intestinal lining, allowing harmful substances from your intestine into your bloodstream. This is the allopathic (Western Medicine) explanation.
However, practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) have another explanation. TCM describes the healthy function of your body’s systems in terms of qi (pronounced “chee”), or life energy, and yin and yang, which refer to balance. Heat and cold must be in proper balance, and when they aren’t, problems can occur. So, part of the objective of TCM is to restore this balance when it is disrupted.
In the view of TCM, antibiotics impose a cold influence on your digestive system, This has the effect of depleting yang from the spleen and disrupting stomach-spleen harmony, which in turn disrupts your digestion and ability to properly absorb liquids and the food you eat. Moreover, qi is depleted and your body’s ability to sustain the small intestine’s integrity is disrupted.
Your spleen controls your small intestine, which is also the site of the distribution and absorption of qi. Hence when qi is depleted, fluid accumulates in your small intestine. In other words, your small intestine’s integrity is compromised by interruption of the spleen’s ability to properly regulate the small intestine.
Practitioners of TCM describe this phenomenon in terms of an “insult” to the liver by the spleen. This insult moves the liver into “excess”, which causes blood and qi to stagnate. The liver thereby becomes unable to do its job of cleansing and distributing blood. Therefore, a TCM expert will employ “Zang-FU” therapy to address this imbalance and impairment of liver function.
Another TCM theory called “Wu Xing” posits that depletion of your spleen will also move your kidney into excess in an attempt to compensate for your spleen’s depletion of yang with excess yang from another source. As a result, you will experience insomnia, stress, and anxiety. Eventually, however, depletion of both the yin and yang of your kidneys will diminish. This results in a depletion of your reserves (yuan-jing). Hence, the flow through your energy channels of ying qi will also diminish, which reduces your ability to respond properly to pathogens.
In the view of TCM, your digestive tract lies outside your body (similarly to allopathic medicine’s view), and when your wei qi is depleted as has been described above, toxins and pathogens enter the body proper and drain its energy reserves and leading to the symptoms of leaky gut.
TCM treatment of leaky gut syndrome therefore requires that normal levels of wei and ying be restored – in other words, that balance be restored. To do so requires regulating your kidneys and your spleen, which will lead to repair of the intestinal lining. In part liver congestion and blockage must be “dredged” (relieved).
Much of what contributes to this overall condition is the fact that how we tend to eat in modern society depletes your overall qi and results in damage to your spleen (which supports what we know about the importance of a proper diet for leaky gut) . In addition, your kidneys’ qi is sapped by the stress commonly experienced in modern life.
To treat this, acupuncture will typically be employed by a skilled practitioner of TCM. Acupuncture is an ancient TCM technique that enables the restoration of qi flow where it is deficient and helps to restore the body’s balance, or yin/yang. Even practitioners of modern Western Medicine have acknowledged the value of acupuncture for treating pain and anxiety, so even if you are skeptical about TCM, you should consider acupuncture as part of your tool set for recovering from leaky gut syndrome.
