Mama Knows Best

So, I’ve been reading and reading thru the very long Gerson Therapy book, and here are the highlights of what I’ve learned.

The main premise behind the therapy is that all chronic degenerative illness is caused by the body having too many toxins and not enough nourishment – and by nourishment, I don’t mean just fat and calories. As modern agriculture has developed most farmers are just putting commercial, Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium,  based fertilizers on their crops. The soil is getting more and more depleted of trace minerals and other nutrients, vitamins, etc., as the same crops are harvested over and over and the soil is not replenished.  Some of the nutrients the body needs we don’t even know about yet, haven’t identified – micronutrients they are called.

So, we are eating more food that is lacking in the vital nutrients that we need in order for our bodies to not only live but thrive.
At the same time, we are taking in toxins all around us, from the air, the water (in most cases), and in the very food we eat – pesticide residues, plastic residues, etc., plus we are piling pills on our systems, which are just one more toxin, really, that the body has to filter out, and excrete. CNN recently had a special called Toxic America that pointed all this out, btw.

So, the Gerson Therapy, which has been in practice for more than 60 years (Gerson was way ahead of his time), is simple: flood the body with the most “clean” and rich nutrition possible thru juicing organic produce (you can drink a lot more than you can eat), and clean out the intestinal tract while helping to clean the liver and blood with the use of coffee enemas. The coffee has properties that have been shown to open up the bile ducts, and increase the amount of toxins eliminated. Along with the juice, you are supposed to also eat as much organic oatmeal as you want, and a special vegetable soup which has been boiled covered, to keep in it’s nutritional content, and it’s then pureed to make it easier to assimilate.

At the same time, salt is restricted because most of us use too much and when you have too  much salt, your cells have not enough potassium (they use the same spot in the cell) and that causes things like high blood pressure, slow healing, fatigue, etc. Fat is also restricted, as for a while is animal protein.

I screwed up by not reading enough of the book before I started – I just read the bit about the enemas and started those, but without the fiber from the oatmeal to soak up the toxins that were being pushed out in the bile into the intestinal tract, I was just reabsorbing them. Although, I did get a lot of incredibly nasty crap out of my bowels. And it’s still coming. (Wikipedia has a startling (to me) article about IBS where it talks about all the retained yuck in there…)

At the moment, my intestines and I are working on getting them cleaned out but also calmed down, so I’ve slowed on the coffee and after a couple days of chamomile tea enemas and eating lots and lots of oatmeal cooked with added slippery elm bark, am slowing adding back some coffee with the chamomile.  And taking lots of potassium, which is in the therapy. And, eating a lot of fresh, mostly organic, fruit.

I need to get to the store and get organic oatmeal, as well as some niacin (a B vitamin), and need some other supplements but will maybe order them online. And, of course, I have to settle on a juicer. It’s just that the recommended ones are very expensive, like $400.

So why does this post get the title “Mama Knows Best?”

Ask my mom – she’s been eating a big bowl of oatmeal with extra fiber and fruit added for breakfast about as long as I can remember. And she makes soups like that. And eats low fat most of the time, lots of veggies,  and low salt. And, she has had very few health problems.  She also benefited from being raised on a farm where they raised most of their own, or at least a lot of their own, food, so her body was able to build up reserves of the vital nutrients missing from most foods today.

Mama knows best.