Corporations have developed new ways of making food addictive that circumvents the need for that to be on the label warns Dr Brian Clements of The Hippocrates Health Institute. If you read our blog often, you’ll know that we have massive respect for his work in the field of healthcare. If he’s new to you, let us give you the quickest of introductions.
Dr Brian Clements
The Hippocrates Health Institute was founded by Ann Wigmore, who, as a child in the former USSR was left to die in a park by her parents because she was sickly and they had no means to heal her. Something inside her kept her going and she began eating the grass where she lay. She started to recover her strength and made a full recovery. Years later, she found herself in America and diagnosed with cancer. Remembering her childhood incident, she began juicing grass and cured herself of cancer by this means. She subsequently went on to found The Hippocrates Health Institute which would focus on healing people by natural means. The foundation of their therapy protocol was – and still is – the consumption of large amounts of fresh wheatgrass juice and Ann Wigmore is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of this this modality. Ann eventually passed at the age of 84, still in excellent health.
Dr Brian Clements was working with Ann Wigmore at this time and worked extensively with her and her patients. After her death, he and his wife, Dr Anna-Maria Clements, took over running The Hippocrates Health Institute. It’s now in Florida, and it still works to treat serious illnesses using natural methods, with wheatgrass and a raw, living food diet as the foundation. The Hippocrates Health Institute continues to go from strength to strength and has thousands of patients treated successfully as well as an ongoing health educator programme that teaches individuals to take a healthy lifestyle back into their community and lift up those around them.
Dr Brian Clements travels the world spreading the word on natural health and the team from The Detox Shop pretty much always attend every seminar he gives when he comes to London for a weekend. There is so much to this man’s experience that years later we are still finding great value in his talks and here we’ll share some of the key takeaways from his talk in Mayfair, London on Saturday 16th March 2013.
For someone famous for raw food and wheatgrass, Dr Brain Clements talks surprisingly little about these things when presenting a seminar. In fact he often jokes, “we’re not the raw food religion!”. What he means by this is that food and nutrition are something we do for life, so there’s no need to be obsessive, in fact that can even be unhealthy. His prescription for food works out like this:
1 – If you are sick
If you are sick, have a serious or terminal illness and want to live, you need to be 100% raw, vegan and organic in your diet. Eating cooked food – even just a couple of percent – is a stress to our immune system and when you need that immune system to be fighting the real bad guys, don’t give it stupid jobs to do like fighting off the shock to the system caused by cooked foods.
2 – If you are not sick and want to stay that way
If you are not unwell then you can eat some cooked food and Dr Clements advises that you still keep this as organic and vegan. On top of that, there are studies that show how the immune system quickly diminishes the more cooked food you eat. By the time 50% of your diet is cooked, your immune system is already compromised. A minimum we should aim for as maintenance/staying healthy level is 75% of our food being raw and up to 25% cooked. Eating at this level, your immune system will function at around 30% less strength than if you were all raw, and it goes without saying that if you’re eating non-biologically evolved foods like grains or dairy, or friend and deep fried foods, these reduce your immune function more. If you must cook, baked and steamed are your best choices.
That said, don’t get irrationally hung up on numbers. We’re not meant to spend our life dieting or detoxing. We’re best if we choose a lifestyle and spend our days enjoying it. Everyone will have good and bad days. Concentrate on the good days and building a healthier lifestyle is easier. Concentrating on what you do wrong is often symptomatic of the bigger problem, a problem that Dr Brian Clements would spend most of his talk elaborating on. It’s hard to do him justice in a short space but the fundamentals of it are this:
We don’t love ourselves enough.
By loving ourselves, Dr Clements is not insinuating that we become conceited, self-masturbatory and thoughtless of others. It’s that basic premise that we all need to care for ourselves and our needs first so that we are fully able to help others. The needs of a human being are quite different from what City Fat Cats seem to think the needs are. And the problem is that so many of us have gotten so good at being mean to ourselves, it’s a wonder we aren’t sicker than we are.
As a society, we’ve become displaced and estranged from our natural needs. We no longer live a nomadic existence feeding off of the land. Instead we’re confined to boxes and buy our food in boxes. We no longer live in extended family communities but are forced far and wide by the needs of work and commerce. Most people’s dreams of money and fame are just so that they can buy the freedom and love that was the basis of human life in our ancestral communities.
As such, it’s not always just that we don’t love ourselves enough because we did something bad. It’s often the case that we feel that there’s something missing in modern life, that we’re always searching for something that will fill this void inside and that time and time again we fail.
The commonest answer to this situation is to drug ourselves. Sure, some do it with cannabis and heroin or alcohol and Valium. But almost everyone does it with food. In the modern world, endless consumption is the one ready fuel that can change our state whenever we need it, and it’s a situation that’s been marched forwards by numerous industries that profit from this issue.
Let’s make this clear. You live in a world where cancer is killing 1 in 2 people and heart disease claims a further 1 in 2. YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER. You need to take action to break our of the systemic brain washing and propaganda that is poured upon you daily and you need to start taking steps towards a healthier lifestyle today. It begins with a single step – the step to ‘I will care about myself’. Care about what you eat. Care about how you maintain your body. Care about the lifestyle you lead and where it is taking you. Care about the planet and how this Earth that sustains you and all is doing. Care about the emotions you feel on a daily basis. You don’t need to have all the answers right here and now but by educating yourself and by trying new things, big changes can occur with time.
There are challenges. All the biggest industries on Earth – oil and mining, arms, pharmaceutical and animal farming – are gaining from the destruction of our planet. The pollution from their greed creeps into everyone’s lives. And there are ongoing efforts to make you more profitable to them at the cost of your money, health and life. Hyper palatability is good example. That’s when food is so good, it’s addictive. Don’t take our word for it, take the director of FDA, Dr David Kessler’s word on hyper palatability.
You can learn more about Dr Brain Clements and the techniques for health he practices through his many books. Till next time we hear from Dr Brian Clements, keep on that wheatgrass!