CONNECT THE DOTS

While watching commentators report and editorialize on the terrorist situation, I notice an extensive use of the term ”connect the dots.” The idea here is to evaluate the plethora of information available, present and past, and derive an accurate assessment of the current situation. If done correctly, the hope is to figure out what is going on ahead of time and make intelligent choices to avoid a future disaster.
The media suggests that if the FBI and other federal agencies would have connected the dots, the 9/11 tragedy could have been prevented, saving the lives of over 3000 people. I’m suggesting that if mainstream medical institutions were to connect the dots, hundreds of thousands of lives every year would be saved and many more spared the poor quality of life and suffering associated with chronic disease.

According to the National Vital Statistics Report, the leading cause of death in America is due to heart disease. Over 56% of US adults are overweight, and it is estimated that 300,000 deaths each year are due to complications of obesity. Diabetes increased by 33% during the 90s now afflicting 7.3% of the US population and ranks 6th for cause of death in America. How many people you know, including yourself, are overweight, have high cholesterol and/or high triglycerides, hypertension or diabetes?

All of these conditions are viewed as separate medical disease entities and are most often are treated as such. People with high blood pressure are treated with anti-hypertensive drugs. People who are overweight are treated with drugs, low calorie diets, and surgery. Someone with high triglycerides is treated with medications to lower blood fats. People with diabetes are treated with drugs to bring their blood sugar down often with insulin, even though they already have very high levels of insulin. Together these health conditions account for most of the preventable deaths each year.

But what if we could find the single common denominator that sets the stage for the progressive onset of these pathologic processes; in other words, what if we connect the dots? We would find that all these diseases are self-inflicted primarily by eating a diet with too many sugars and refined carbohydrates. There are two different pathways that develop from this abuse: hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar and hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar. The most common symptoms seen with these conditions are fatigue, anxiety, depression, overweight, underweight, mood swings and premature aging. Over time many of these people will become less sensitive to insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar levels. This condition is called insulin resistance and characteristic of normal to excessive levels of insulin getting secreted in reaction to dietary carbohydrates but with a sluggish physiologic response resulting in glucose and insulin to stay in the blood too long.

For many decades scientists have known that insulin resistance is associated with high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and elevated triglycerides but did not know the exact cause and effect relationship. Many authorities concluded that obesity was the cause of this metabolic syndrome because losing weight improves all of these conditions. Aging also got the blame because, to some degree, almost everyone shows these conditions with age.

However, through a series of experiments on laboratory animals the exact sequence of events was uncovered. Here is the sequence dot by dot.

• Step one: a diet of high fat plus high sugar.
• Step two: insulin resistance, which lowers the body’s ability to transport glucose and raises the levels of insulin in the blood.
• Step three: elevated levels of triglycerides in the blood and increased size of abdominal fat cells. In other words, a spare tire develops.
• Step four: elevated blood pressure and increased tendency of the blood to clot.
• Step five: obesity.
• Step six: the onset of type II diabetes mellitus.

Knowing this sequence should change your thinking patterns regarding these diseases. For instance, obesity did not cause high blood pressure in the above example. Yet obesity is commonly cited as the causative factor for hypertension. Also a high-fat diet did not cause increased cholesterol levels. It was a high-fat plus high-sugar diet. This distinction is critical because almost all the information available to the consumer regarding a healthy diet promotes a low-fat diet as your weapon against cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. There is very little emphasis on the effects of sugar and almost no mention of the foods that quickly convert to sugar with digestion: namely foods made from grains, such as bread, rice and pasta. In fact the mainstream medical institutions support the consumption of these very foods that are the primary culprit. Log on to www.americanheart.org and notice the emphasis the American Heart Association has with a low-fat diet and their strong suggestion to eat six servings of grains per day. The people that work there may have their hearts in the right place but when you connect the dots you find an organization that missing the heart of the matter. Knowing this sequence should also change the thinking patterns of doctors and other health care providers. Anyone who tries to intervene therapeutically in this pathological metabolic process only gets a limited improvement unless they address the primary issue: diet. In most cases, consumers get farther away from a healthy state by confusing the body with unnecessary drugs.

When you intervene in the body’s healing response with drugs, it may seem like the right thing to do at the time. But there are always consequences if you do not eventually allow that healing process to continue. For people with increased blood pressure that is getting dangerously high, medication may be appropriate at the moment. But just because your blood pressure appears normal does not mean you no longer have a life-destroying metabolic imbalance. You have just chosen to enable the drug to hide the imbalance and insidiously destroy you over a longer period of time. Medication may be good short-term strategy but is also a bad long-term strategy. With that being said notice how anyone put on blood pressure medication is told he or she will have to be on it for life. This method of treatment is based, not on a foundation of wellness, but on the treatment of symptoms. Mainstream medicine is excellent for treating acute conditions-people with gunshot wounds should go to the emergency room. However do not expect mainstream medicine to provide you the best avenues toward attaining superior health and wellness, leave that to chiropractic and other natural healing methods.

If you are taking medication, do yourself a favor and investigate the drug. Run a search on the Internet, try www.gettingwell.com or check out a PDR at the library. You may find that many of your health concerns are actual side effects from your prescription. Also check out the special warnings for important information, like estrogen causes cancer, and Lipitor destroys the liver, to name a few.

When you connect the dots you always find that for superior health, all roads lead back to what you put in your mouth, physical activity, and the quality of the communication within your nervous system. Call our office and start getting your spinal cord cleared of interference and set up a metabolic consultation.