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Baseline of Health ® – Part 1

The Baseline of Health(R) program can actually eliminate the causes of many diseases — even if we don’t know exactly what those causes are!

It’s been almost ten years since I wrote Lessons from the Miracle Doctors. That’s a lot of time in the world of health and nutrition, and although I have periodically “updated” it in subsequent printings, I have never really done a full rewrite — until now. That’s right; I am now engaged in the first major rewrite of Miracle Doctors since I published that first edition in 1999. At the moment, it looks like there may be close to one hundred additional pages. In any case, it certainly raises a key question:

  • Why is a rewrite needed?

I thought it would be a good idea to share with you some of my answers to that question since they go to the heart of the Baseline of Health® program — both in theory and practice. I also thought this would be a good time to lay out the core principles of the program and provide specific instructions on how you can apply it in your daily life.

The Baseline of Health® program

The amazing thing is that virtually nothing involved with the core of the program is in need of updating or correction. A decade has passed, and the basic principles are as valid now as they were when I first wrote them. (Actually, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise when you consider that the principles mirror some of the concepts used by some of the greatest alternative healers of the last 50 years.) What are these basic principles that define the Baseline of Health® program? There are really just three.

  1. Your body is composed of a series of integrated systems — some large (such as your organs, immune system, and hormonal system) and some small (such as your cellular ATP energy system, your blood/brain barrier, and your various enzyme systems). Your body is the sum of those systems and is only as strong as the weakest link. You can have the strength of a Hercules, but if the smallest of blood clots manages to get lodged in an artery leading to your brain, you can drop dead in the blink of an eye. (Don’t blink.) Again, you are only as strong as your weakest link.
  2. Your body is designed to be healthy. It has intelligent mechanisms built-in to repair damage, optimize performance, and keep you going — provided you don’t damage those mechanisms. What can damage those mechanisms?
    1. An accumulation of toxins and harmful substances including heavy metals, industrial chemicals, xenoestrogens, excessive free radicals, unrelieved stress, excessive circulating immune complexes, etc. If these substances accumulate beyond the body’s ability to eliminate them, the degradation of your internal organs and systems will be both rapid…and catastrophic.
    2. An insufficient supply of essential nutrients. Quite simple, you cannot build the same body out of pepperoni pizza, beer, and Ding Dongs as you can out of live food.
  3. Since you don’t know everything affecting your body at any point in time, you’ve got to do the entire program all at once. You can’t look for magic bullets. If there were a magic bullet for what ails you, your doctor would have already given it to you. Or to look at it another way: suppressing symptoms is not actually the same thing as truly eliminating the cause of a disease. Magic bullets and drugs are pretty much symptom suppressors. The Baseline of Health® program can actually eliminate the causes of many diseases — even if we don’t know exactly what those causes are!

That’s it. That’s the Baseline of Health® Program. Everything else in the book is mere commentary. Then again, that commentary is important. It provides the step-by-step instructions (the methodologies, if you will) that allow you to attain those three principals. But then again, those methodologies have also remained largely unchanged over the last ten years! So if the core principles and methodologies of the Baseline of Health® program haven’t changed, what’s the need for a new edition? Why am I adding so many new pages?

The answer is that although the core of Baseline of Health® hasn’t changed, there has indeed been tremendous change in the environment surrounding program — things like:

  • The availability of “new” ingredients and a “new understanding” of some old favorite ingredients.
  • New areas of interest. We receive almost 10,000 emails a month at the Baseline of Health® Foundation. Every day people from all over the world let us know the “hot, new” major health issues they want to know more about — everything from anti-aging to bird flu.
  • Also, as evidenced by the questions coming in, there is a profound need to expand on some specific health issues such as cholesterol and diabetes that were only touched on in the previous editions.
  • And finally, the world of medicine is catching up (well, maybe just a little) with the Baseline of Health®. Many “new” areas of exploration in medicine now echo the principles and techniques of the Baseline of Health® detailed over a decade ago, and that’s certainly worth exploring.

Now, keep in mind that the effective response to all of these new issues still lies in the same core principles and methodologies of the Baseline of Health® program. That hasn’t changed. But it is useful and reassuring to know in detail why the program works, not only for old threats such as cancer but equally well for new ones such as bird flu.

Just for fun, let’s now take a peek at this changing environment that I am exploring in detail in the rewrite of the book.

New ingredients

What are some of these marvelous new ingredients that justify rewriting the book? Well, medical research has finally started to recognize the value of phytonutrients beyond vitamins and minerals. Whereas ten years ago, my discussion of these ingredients may have been fringe, it is now definitely mainstream. Marvelous new ingredients (or newly researched ingredients in many cases) include:

  • Krill are small shrimp-like creatures whose oil contains phospholipids specially integrated with omega-3 essential fatty acids. This unique structure provides important cell membrane building blocks in the ratios used by the body and may be far better utilized than stand alone phospholipids or other omega-3 oils.
  • In the last ten years, AHCC, a special form of medicinal mushroom extract, has emerged, not only as a potent cancer protector, but also as a powerful immune booster, helpful with everything from Hepatitis C to the common cold.
  • Pomegranates have hit the big time in health food stores and mainstream markets, with pomegranate juice now appearing in all kinds of drinks. Are they really good for the heart, and can they really prevent cancer?
  • Resveratrol: I’ve been using resveratrol for years in my antioxidant formula for its anti-cancer benefits, but new research shows resveratrol may increase life expectancy by 15-30% — if you use the right form, that is.

Studies have emerged on all of these ingredients (and a dozen more) over the last ten years. Understanding these benefits and how to realize them, certainly makes these foods and supplements more than worthy of further exploration.

New Areas of Interest

As I mentioned earlier, we receive almost 10,000 emails a month at the Baseline of Health® Foundation, and they come from virtually every country in the world. We’re talking about all of Europe and the Middle East (including Spain, Serbia, Iran, Syria, Israel, and Egypt), Asia (including China, India, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia), and Africa (including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ghana, and Ethiopia) — you name it. We receive constant input from virtually every country in the entire world. In that sense, we are uniquely positioned to get a read on what heath topics matter most to people throughout the world — from overcoming catastrophic illness in developing countries to countering rising obesity in more affluent countries. Specifically, some of the topics that have emerged as major concerns in the last ten years include:

  • Aging
  • Bird Flu
  • Drug resistant TB
  • Diabetes
  • Obesity
  • MS

Topics requiring elaboration

Also, both as a result of questions we have received (over a thousand a month on cholesterol alone, on average) and changing demographics such as the emergence of diabetes as probably the major epidemic of our time, some topics covered briefly in previous editions of the book, require substantial elaboration. These include:

  • Cholesterol. (Much of what you think you know is just urban medical myth.)
  • Exercise
  • Diet (including the Atkins craze)
  • Dispelling the latest cancer myths such as the value of prophylactic mastectomies, the reduction in breast cancer mortality, and the benefits of chemotherapy.

Medicine is finally catching up

The news isn’t all bad when it comes to modern medicine. They may be a bit slow, which has indeed cost several million people their lives, but they are coming around to validating certain aspects of the Baseline of Health® program, and that’s certainly worth exploring in more detail. For example:

  • In 1999, I was just one of a handful of fanatics screaming that hydrogenated oils were some of the most dangerous “foods” on the planet. Today, governments and medical authorities around the world are starting to squeeze trans fatty acids out of the market.
  • Although high fructose corn syrup is still widely available in thousands of food items available on your market shelves, it is finally starting to attract the attention of the medical establishment. It can only be a matter of time before some eager, up-and-coming politicians decide to act on the information and start squeezing this poison out of the market too.
  • Hey, and even when it comes to cancer, some sanity is starting to emerge — albeit slowly. Ten years ago, I argued into a vacuum that cancer was fundamentally a disease of the immune system. In the last ten years, modern medicine has started to recognize the value of actually working with your body’s immune system (rather than destroying it) to kill cancer cells.

Conclusion

It certainly seems that the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same” applies to the Baseline of Health® over the last ten years. There have indeed been many changes and much new information to deal with in revising Lessons from the Miracle Doctors. But once again, when it comes to the core principles and step-by-step techniques of the book, they remain unchanged. If anything, much of their validity has been confirmed by medical research (within limits).

In the next issue of the newsletter, we’ll deal with some specific applications of the Baseline of Health®. Yes, it’s important to do it all, and do it all at once. But that said, there are still ways to emphasize parts of the program when dealing with things such as overcoming diabetes, fighting cancer, losing weight, optimizing athletic performance — or just plain living longer and healthier. In the next issue of the newsletter we’ll cover some of those.

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