2026-06-30
Nothing is more important than our health, but how can we know what is good for us and what isn't?
Most people rely on "expert advice". After all, life is complicated enough without having to diagnose our own ailments.
Until life catches up with us and the "expert advice" doesn't cut the mustard any more. Possibly around the age of 50 or 60, when the body rebels against whatever has been inflicted upon it since chldhood.
Yes, I've been there.
It's not a happy experience, in my case because my immune system became erratic and tended to overreact unpredictably to whatever minor irritant was offending it at the time. In fact looking back it was nothing to do with the proximate cause, and everything to do with immune system general overload. It simply threw it's toys out of the pram. In medical parlance I came out in hives and a tendency to have a fainting collapse. The doctor was reassuring - don't worry, we can give you a steroid pill - we know how to fix this. But as it soon turned out, only until next time.
Erratic months went by (in the interests of brevity I am oversimplifying here) until I decided that enough was enough and I would have to fix it myself.
So how to fix your health when you've no idea where to start?
Well, we are what we eat.
So I resolved to revamp my diet. Out went all the usual stuff that I had been thoughtlessly eating, all alcohol, and anything fermented (yes fermentation can be very very good but I didn't know that then) and in came fresh organic fruit and veg and filtered water, and not much else. Oh, and "nothing out of a packet". Shopping became very simple, my waistline decreased by leaps and bounds, and for the first time in many years I could get into my old fencing togs again! And my immune system recovered.
What I had done was to detox my system from the accumulated overload of toxins from poor food choices. It wasn't without some pain, mainly muscle aches across the back and shoulders. The other thing I had done was allow my body to recover its alkalinity again. Poor eating habits encourage acidity, acidity is unhealthy and leads to problems such as cancers. Fresh fruit and vegetables tend to support alkalinity. Dr Tennant calls it cell voltage, but it's the same thing expressed differently.
But there's more, there's always more ...
As I began to normalise my diet by reintroducing things like bread fat meat and offal, I went back to the saturated fats that we were told were bad for us. But which turned out to be good for us - yes, Mum knew best when she brought us up on butter, but coconut oil is good too, especially as creamed coconut in my morning coffee. Milk used to be good until they pasteurise it, homogenised it, took all the goodness out of it ("skimmed") and sold it to us as healthy! So creamed coconut it is these days, grated (boring) or sliced from a block with a vegetable peeler (quicker). Or use organic cream from grass-fed cattle if you prefer.
And lastly, modern grains (oats, barley, wheat etc) are harvested using glyphosate to wither the stems and make the grain easier to separate. And modern wheat is a hybrid variety that's ideal for the Chorleywood bread manufacturing process so beloved of supermarkets, possibly less so for human digestion. So a firm "no" to all of that. And "no" to sugar. Cancer thrives on sugar ...
I buy organic rye and spelt "ancient grain" flours and ferment with a rye sourdough - it's actually easy enough once you get in the swing of it and the longer ferment times mean that getting it into the oven at its exact peak of readiness isn't nearly as critical (although sourdough doesn't have such a predictable rise time as yeast).
Whilst "sourdough" bread is available from specialist suppliers and some supermarkets, it tends to be made with some wheat included and in my view is best avoided currently. Buy the book ("Bread Matters" by Andrew Whitley) if you want to get it right.
So, remind me, why did I start this article ..?
Oh yes, to introduce yet another of the ways that we are encouraged to destroy our health through official advice.
"Keep taking the tablets ... "
