All posts by Paul Yeager

Healing and Building Health with Nutrient-Dense Foods

Completely Full

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…yes indeed, of a heritage, native, wild turkey and stuffing this Thanksgiving!

Also on the subject of being completely full, the great 14th century poet-mystic-saint Rumi, founder of Sufism:

”
Even a candle, when it knows it will melt away, doesn’ t quit spreading its light out. Oh human! You, while completely full of the Power of the Creator, why do you hang back?
”

Something tells me Rumi was equally as full of highly saturated animal fats with high vitamin A and D. His words are dripping with abundant brain power.

Healing and Building Health with Nutrient-Dense Foods, Sustainable Farming, Health, Soil and Environment

Barley dough and potatoes

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Paul Yeager, guest blog writer here once again.

I’d like to ask on this day of Gratitude: just how good DO we have it now as humans living in most of America–and most of anywhere in the first world for that matter–where we are, in fact capable of securing food on this day, and mostly healthy enough to chew and swallow it?

And, I’d like to ask: just how good DO we have it now as humans living in most of the first world during this particular TIME in the whole history of human civilization, regarding the fact that we are mostly guaranteeably able to access food on this day, like we were able to access some food yesterday and like we will likely access some food tomorrow?

Relatively speaking, for the first time in *all civilized human history*, for the last few decades in just a few places on earth, many of us in the “first world” have generally been able to secure two or three meals a day, every day, and every day we know that likely tomorrow we will be able to do that again. And many of us in the “first world” even know that if the economy gets a little worse than it already is, we and our loved ones will likely ourselves continue to keep eating, one way or another. Even if our forms of income are cut off, we can in many cases get at least some food via the social safety net our society has constructed for itself.

This situation we are in is a TRUE novelty of novelties amongst the vast spread of geographies and histories amidst the total spread of human life on this planet. Many of us are able to eat today! And what’s more, many of us will be able to eat tomorrow and the next day! This is a miracle! For hundreds of centuries, our evolutionary ancestors did not possess this situation of constant access to food, having to continually remain in fight-or-flight mode to attain access to meals.

But does this sudden burst of access in the last century necessarily imply a similar or higher quality of nutrient density in the food? Quite the opposite I’m afraid, according to overwhelming scientific evidence.

What our nearby evolutionary ancestors DID have, even if they did not have constant *access*–provedly amidst 14 different tribal/indigenous societies that Weston A. Price formally studied for around 10 years in the 1930’s in his magnus opus “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”–were consistently much more nutrient-dense foods consisting of highly saturated animal fats with high vitamin A and D, cartilaginous and high-elastin -containing bone stocks, raw/unpasteurized milk, truly homemade lacto-fermented foods, soaked/sprouted and naturally-leavened grains, soaked/sprouted nuts, seeds, berries, beans/legumes, and many other such foods, which had not yet been divorced from their traditional indigenous wisdom by the poison of industrialization’s influence on mainstream processed/packaged food.

Again, perhaps these isolated, untouched tribes did not always have these foods in plenty (and yes, these peoples did often get some of the diseases which modern medicine has been able to deal with such as tuberculosis, THEN AGAIN: they did not get heart disease, cancer, allergies, cavities, rampant mental disease, or difficult childbirth–all of which modern medicine and industrialization has had a hand in creating more of!), but their foods nearly always had extremely superior nutrient density vs. the processed, packaged, mass-produced food of today. One of the most common traits this created in those people was the radiant quality of their general mental quietude and “general ease and contentment with life,” according to Dr. Price’s notes.

Which leads me to: just how good DO “we” have it, “we” who know something of these “deep secrets” of traditional, nutrient dense foods (i.e. yours truly), AND who get to live in this technological world! –All thanks to the printed and electronically published works of communication-genius health luminaries such as Kathy Pirtle, Sally Fallon, Mary Enig, Kaayla Daniel, Natasha Campbell McBride, Sandor Ellix Katz, and of course Dr. Weston A. Price and his partner Dr. Francis Pottenger (and the list goes on and on)–along with numerous other food revolutionaries and visionaries who have re-unearthed the ancient, archaic, timeless knowledge of countless ancestors’ *Innate Wisdom* on “how our foods are meant to be,” then cleverly re-applying it to how we can use this timeless knowledge to actually heal our own bodies of countless diseases (such as how to heal acid reflux with diet for starters).

As for me, without these people and their work, today I would likely be dead. I am living with an HIV+ diagnosis, yet I do not require the medicines and I survived nearly dying from chronic wasting and diarrhea five years ago, thanks to them and their food help. I am truly thankful for them.

Lately I’ve been watching a BBC documentary about a year spent in Tibet, which was filmed just a few years ago. Tibet is a rather severe example of food gone wrong, or more simply no food being available to much of the population much of the time, because of the harsh oppression of the Chinese communist regime, and no doubt their influence on the food supply. Last night the episode I watched had us observing a family who does not get to eat anything but barley dough and potatoes. When asked what else they eat, they said “barley dough and potatoes.”

Barley is very native to Tibet. When the Chinese tried to replace all barley with wheat, because of the fact that they found the Tibetans dirty and uncivilized and inferior for eating barley, the Tibetans couldn’t grow wheat (perhaps because the soil and harsh climate of the Tibetan plateau wouldn’t allow it or because they didn’t understand how to cultivate the new crop, I’m not clear on that), and as a direct result much of the Tibetan population starved to death. The Chinese, fearing more uprising, and wanting to keep a decent number of Tibetans alive for their value as human commodities, gradually let them return to growing barley, thus fewer people died of starvation.

So, today Tibetans are apparently quite happy to be able to grow and eat barley. A favorite past-time of Tibetan farmers is also barley beer, to the extent that now much of the Tibetan population has a serious alcoholism problem because of how much they enjoy their barley beer.

As a person sensitive to gluten, which is plentiful in both wheat and barley, I simply cannot imagine this way of living, but it does seem as though the Tibetan gene pool may not have such a big issue with gluten. Gluten aside, there’d be the situation of eating only a grain and some starches most or all of the time if I suddenly had to subsist on a Tibetan diet in Tibet. I’m pretty sure I would die on such a diet quite quickly. I’m not sure exactly how fast my immune system would collapse, but one thing is certain: I would go insane first, because the gluten would bring back the crippling mental illness I dealt with all my life prior to realizing that gluten was one of the biggest culprits in my severely faulty brain chemistry.

And just a little irresistible side-note: where COULD I go to eat in Tibet to try and get off the gluten and starch? Just guess where. American-based fast food, that’s where! –which is apparently slowly making its way into Tibet through dealings with the Chinese government! Oh yes, I could find a homogenized, pasteurized, hormone-injected, forced-to-prey-on-its-own-kind super-industrialized yak-burger at the nearby B**ger *ing, and maybe even on a PROCESSED glutenous barley bun! If this doesn’t tell us something about the intentions of fast food mega-conglomerates, and the precise ethical integrity of their visions for the world, I don’t know what does. They seem to get a real kick out of “nourishing” the third world, don’t they? < / end_sarcasm >

It is really too bad Dr. Weston A. Price didn’t get to visit Tibet and study indigenous Tibetan diet in the 1930’s! I’m sure it would have added to his disappointments of indigenous cultures not being vegetarians (and doubly so because of their Buddhist and therefore supposedly vegetarian-leaning morality), because I have heard through the grapevine, from many actual practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, that actually Tibetan Buddhists aren’t at all natively vegetarians (why am I not surprised–almost none of the rest of Dr. Price’s indigenous tribes were vegetarians, after all).

Actually the lamas (or high Buddhist teachers) were known to consume a good deal of yak, a very high-protein/high-amino-acid source of meat with no doubt very highly saturated fat. I was happy to hear in the BBC documentary I was watching that at least the Tibetans have a somewhat constant supply of no-doubt highly saturated [and raw] yak butter from their own few yaks, to balance their high barley-n-potato intake. So my guess is that before the devastation of the communist invasion 50 years ago, they likely consumed yaks aplenty.

Perhaps they still traditionally ferment their barley beer, and it isn’t so bad after all? Hm…

Anyhow, what a Blessing to be alive in the nutrient dense here and now. Today, Thanksgiving Day, I am eating so much yummy, nutrient dense food, with a wide diversity of plants and animals, highly saturated animal fats with high vitamin A and D, highly lacto-fermented foods, foods that kill candida and keep my immune system strong, turkey gravy from bone stock, wild turkey with amino acids that will make my soul sing, and much more!

Unlike the Tibetan farmers living under Chinese communist oppression, I have access to it, I was able to buy it, and now I will be able to eat it because I am healthy enough to eat it, thank God! And with my friends/family! And the day after that I will feel like eating again, and eat!

an image of Tibetan prayer flags in the mountains of the Himalayas

Is 1500 words enough to express my thanks? Or 100,000 words? Or a million words? No.

But I will continue, while I continue to be able to breathe in and out, to try and get both the knowledge of these foods and access to these foods to as many human beings living on this planet as possible. Because the truth is: ALL human beings REQUIRE access to these foods FOR REAL HEALTH and the knowledge of that state of REAL HEALTH which is contained at websites like performancewithoutpain.com.

Kathy Pirtle has done a much clearer/better job at communicating this sacred knowledge than I to large numbers of people, and this site delivers two powerful vehicles of that transmission; one an extremely powerful eBook on how to permanently heal your acid reflux, and of course the classic printed book, Performance Without Pain, from which this website derives its name. Get a hold of these sources of information while you are able, for you and your loved ones, for the good of all sentient beings ASAP! You will live much longer, stand much taller, and act forever out of Gratitude for your new found life of high nutrient assimilation!

And someday–in those very same moments in which we all realize together that WE are the Masters of our own Health (and not some corporation, government, pharmaceutical company, or fast food restaurant), with all the knowledge of our ancestors boundlessly alive within us– as a result of that Immense Supernova of Gratitude-in-Action which is on its way and already happening, a FR** TIB-ET (and maybe even a fully free Ch*na, for that matter) will fully return to their traditional, nutrient dense foods as Kathy and I have. 😉

Healing and Building Health with Nutrient-Dense Foods, Vegetarian Diets

Dietary Fetishisms of the Pop “New” Age

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Guest blog writer, Paul Yeager here. :)

As of late, a lot of folks I’ve run into seem to hold two predominating notions concerning diet (perhaps one more than the other in many populations of dietary thinkers): one is that raw veganism is the ultimate end-all of human diet, and the other is that cutting edge science is able to successfully dictate to us what we should eat based on accurate findings. I’d like to deal a little bit with both, although this could of course be an entire book (a book I happen to have written by the way, email me at paulchfs@gmail.com if you’re interested).

I myself used to be among the folks I describe above. I was a serious follower of Gabriel Cousens, David Wolfe, Victoras Kulvinskas, Anne Wigmore, and many of the other figure-head pioneers of the raw vegan movement. I almost even moved to Tree of Life in Arizona–Gabriel Cousens’ raw vegan retreat center–so I could live in the desert practicing shaktipat yoga, doing sweat lodges, and eating nothing but soaked and sprouted nuts, seeds, salads, etc. –the typical raw biogenic vegan diet. However, during my obsession with attempting to be a raw vegan (and I say attempting because it never did/could work for me!) the fact of the matter is: my health completely collapsed.

I trusted Cousens’ writings (i.e. “Conscious Eating”) because they seemed to present a merge of science and new age spiritual thinking about the Divine in a way which I felt was cozy and quite socially comfortable. It brought everything together into a unified ideology of community and a supposed return to “tribal” ways of doing things. And if I could just follow this ideology completely and 100% of the time, then I would finally heal my digestion and achieve the results Cousens’ scientific references and supposed sort-of-clinical observations seemed to describe. And yet, during this time my health completely collapsed. My gut was an absolute mess, and by the way: I had a serious sugar addiction (and I have since realized many vegetarians and vegans also have this problem, which makes perfect biochemical sense to me now since animal protein with its full complement of amino acids supports blood glucose regulation).

I’d like to point out something which I now realize in hind-sight, which I did not at the time, which I find rather interesting, and a very weak point of the supposed “new” age movement; that is that the “New Age” consistently identifies with indigenous elements, cultural, mystical, etc. and seems to be offering a sort of revival of archaic and/or tribal ways of doing things. In fact, it is not doing that in a dietary sense at all. And here is how I discovered that…

One fine day I came across a book by Weston A. Price called “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.” Weston A. Price was a dentist in the 1930’s who was interested in why so many of his Western patients were suddenly getting more and more (exponentially more) cavities. He had this hunch that isolated tribal peoples (which he, in our current politically [quite] incorrect language referred to as “primitive”) might have better teeth. He spent a decade visiting nearly all of the remaining completely isolated tribal societies he could find on the planet, and their non-isolated relatives (the ones nearby near train tracks who had access to modern transportation and commerce, where they could get white sugar, white flour, and processed and packaged foods which had only recently been invented by industrialization).

He of course found, not unsurprisingly to me today, that the isolated counterparts of each anthro-genetic set of peoples which were not exposed to white flour, white sugar, still drank their milk raw, did NOT have access to modern medicine, often did not brush their teeth, still fermented their grains in a community grainery, lacto-fermented their raw veggies, drank raw unpasteurized milk, etc etc. –these peoples had always nearly ZERO dental cavities, space for their wisdom teeth to come in, better dental arch spaces, better mental health, easier childbearing, longer lives, no death from cancer, no allergies, and the list goes on and on. He cataloged all of this data as a true scientist does, with charts of very precise figures based on population gradients and detailed survey reports.

Of key significance to all of his findings, and *much to his disappointment*: among all of the indigenous tribes with these remarkably resilient states of bone, teeth, mental, and reproductive health (most notably), not ONE of them ate a completely vegetarian–and certainly not a VEGAN–diet. The nearest thing to it was the African Dinka peoples who, although they did eat mostly raw milk, eggs, and mostly cooked vegetables, still did eat fish every so often as they loved to dwell near water for this purpose. The Dinka stands out quite rarely in this regard, however. The neighboring Masai for instance, which had nearly the same number of cavities per population (almost zero, as with the Dinka), ate an extremely primal diet of raw milk and raw blood, both of which are extremely high in catabolic-supportive amino acids which support bone growth, muscle/ligament/tendon repair, and immune reconstitution.

And another major commonality to ALL of the tribes Dr. Price studied with these remarkable states of health and longevity were consuming saturated animal fat high in vitamin A and D, which of course flies squarely in the face of the current supposed “scientific” thinking of our day about fat and cholesterol–to further this discord, one of Price’s findings was that these cultures had literally zero presence of death from cardiac arrest–which shouldn’t have been a possible finding according to our current prevalent, supposedly “scientific” dictates concerning cholesterol.

Why have our current researchers and others wearing white lab coats working in expensive university labs kept this *very scientific* research of Dr. Price’s from the public? Just as a simple potential explanation: it doesn’t keep the funding coming–medical academia is thoroughly enmeshed in the industrial-pharmaceutical complex, and knows little (although it often attempts to purport otherwise) about nutrition.

Again, Weston Price was *very disappointed* that he didn’t find more vegetarian indigenous cultures with remarkable health.  He too, even in the 1930’s, was of the popular persuasion that vegetarianism, being more “ethical” would of course naturally be supported by his investigation into indigenous cultures. But this was not what the data supported. And today, the data still falls squarely against veganism (for instance, with extremely high levels of osteoporosis in the elderly vegan population, since veganism is low in bone building amino acids and fat-soluble vitamins that support calcium metabolism–not to mention how veganism fails to properly limit harmful raw fiber intake [see Konstantin Monastyrsky’s truly cutting-edge research] and doesn’t provide enough fat altogether, and this is a giant subject on its own).

So, it’s interesting to me that everywhere we have a popular culture purporting to be part of a “new” age, consistently collectively claiming that it is supposedly reviving archaic or indigenous ways of doing things, when in fact the actual last recorded nutritional scientific observations (those of Dr. Weston Price) of archaic, indigenous societies are in direct contradiction with any semblance to this supposed “archaic revival”. We are what we eat, so the “new” age has certainly not succeeded at an archaic revival in the dietary sense, and I think that if it truly wants to be “new” then perhaps it could look more deeply and think farther outside the box in terms of exactly what the true archaic revival would really look like on an eating plane.

For more information on building health and healing with nutrient-dense foods see Performance without Pain and our new e-book on healing acid reflux.

Best in health,

Paul Yeager

Healing and Building Health with Nutrient-Dense Foods

Some Inspiring Thich Nhat Hanh to Inspire Mindfulness for Nutrient Dense Foods Daily Eating Discipline

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This being the 3rd of three days of your substitute blog writer’s (Paul Yeager’s) appearance, I thought I would just shortly share a powerful and inspiring quote from Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Peace is Every Step” which has helped me foster the energies of spiritual creativity, concentration, and gratitude necessary to maintain a diet of nutrient dense foods and to eat this way on a consistent basis, eating and living more fully in the present moment.

It’s no easy feat to resist the temptations of Standard American Diet at every turn, and running these thoughts through my head (and through my energy and heart) on occasion have really helped me return to my daily practice of eating according to nourishing principles, instead of sliding back into the “old way” of fast food, lousy restaurants, and inferior eating choices.

And eating in gratitude, aware of the immense fortune of being able to eat this way, and having that in perspective–I find this is the ultimate starting point for optimal digestion. I may often be eating nutrient dense, traditional food, but if I am not present to taste this food, which so few are able to have and eat, then it is not as nourishing.

On page 23 of “Peace is Every Step” in “Eating Mindfully,” Thich Nhat Hanh states:

“Eating a meal in mindfulness is an important practice. We turn off the TV, put down our newspaper, and work together for five or ten minutes, setting the table and finishing whatever needs to be done. During those few minutes, we can be very happy. When the food is on the table and everyone is seated, we practice breathing: ‘Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile,’ three times. We can recover ourselves completely after three breaths like this.”

Acid Reflux Healing, Digestive Disorders and Healing Diet, Healing and Building Health with Nutrient-Dense Foods

Just how erosive is erosive GERD / Acid Reflux? What can we do about this problem?

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Hi there. Kathy Pirtle’s substitute blog writer Paul Yeager has resurfaced for the 2nd of three days that Kathy Pirtle is away at the Weston A. Price Conference in Chicago!

Today I’d like to write about erosive gerd / acid reflux.

Just how erosive is erosive GERD? Is it really more erosive than nonerosive acid reflux? What defines it as more erosive? Is nonerosive gerd really *completely* nonerosive? Or is one just more erosive than the other? Just how advanced is modern science in making these kinds of distinctions? Well, I was interested in understanding the answers to these questions, so I started searching PubMed for some solid research literature.

Surprisingly like many things in modern science, I found the “most cutting-edge” answer I could find to be puzzlingly full of seemingly circular logic, with hordes of observations seeming to be made based on assumptions with little or no reference material. It surprises me that such studies even make it into PubMed, but then again, how scientific is science? Is science not based fundamentally on observations, or perhaps more often *our perceptions*?

For instance, Sir Isaac Newton and others found the acceleration rate of gravity to be quantifiable as 9.8 meters per second squared. He could throw an apple up into the air 10,000 times and predict with reasonable certainty that it was going to accelerate towards the earth at that rate. But then Einstein came along. And then Niels Bohr. And Schroedinger, etc. They–and then we (by going to space, studying eclipses, etc.)–discovered that that “law” had only been the result of living within the confines of our earth’s gravitational field–it still of course had an application, but it wasn’t *completely true* everywhere, all the time.

And such is HARDLY the case concerning distinctions such as those between erosive gerd and nonerosive gerd–here we’ll find that the conclusion simply completely contradicts the initial assumptions. At least with Newton, he started out with the “hunch” that there was something uniform about gravity and then found out he was pretty much right. Here we start out with the assumption that erosive gerd is more erosive than nonerosive gerd (or better yet that erosive gerd is just plain erosive and nonerosive isn’t) but we seem to find out, well… I won’t spoil it just yet. I’m just going to copy-paste the study I found below:

”

Relevance of ineffective esophageal motility with erosive and nonerosive gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Foroutan M, Doust HM, Jodeiri B, Derakhshan F, Mohaghegh H, Mousapour H, Poursaadati S, Kiarudi MY, Zali M.

Department of Gastroenterology, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. swt_f@yahoo.com

INTRODUCTION: Ineffective esophageal motility (IEM) is a frequent finding in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). It is responsible for delayed acid clearance as it affects esophageal emptying and saliva transport. Since erosive GERD is a more severe disease than nonerosive GERD, it may be associated with IEM, which delays esophageal clearance. Objective : We investigated the role of IEM in patients with erosive and nonerosive GERD. METHODS: We enrolled 100 patients with heartburn and a primary diagnosis of GERD referred to the GI motility department of RCGLD of Shahid Beheshti University between January 2002 and January 2005. Based on endoscopic findings, the patients were classified into two groups of erosive GERD and nonerosive GERD. Manometry and 24-hour ambulatory pH-metry was performed in all patients. RESULTS: Seventy-seven patients completed the study: 31 (40.3%) with erosive GERD and 46 (59.7%) with nonerosive GERD. IEM was present in 38.7% of patients with erosive GERD and in 28.3% of those with nonerosive GERD (p=0.18). A low lower esophageal sphincter pressure was present in 45.2% of patients with erosive GERD, and in 45.7% of those with nonerosive GERD (p=0.97). Abnormal acid reflux was present in 32.3% and 41.3% of patients with erosive and nonerosive GERD, respectively (p=0.42). CONCLUSION: There was no difference in the prevalence of IEM between patients with erosive and nonerosive GERD. IEM could be an integral part of GERD and may not always be associated with mucosal injury.
”

Now wait a minute. The study says at the top “Since erosive GERD is a more severe disease than nonerosive GERD, it may be associated with IEM, which delays esophageal clearance.” But WHY is erosive GERD a more severe disease than nonerosive GERD?! The study just assumed that was known right off the bat! And then after making such assumptions, the study actually winds up proving that this IEM (“ineffective esophageal motility”) is actually only a little more than 10% more prevalent in the erosive gerd control group?! So first we have an assumption that erosive gerd is more “erosive” than nonerosive gerd, and then we have evidence to show that nonerosive gerd is actually ALMOST AS EROSIVE AS EROSIVE GERD!

This is entirely broken circular logic!

Here’s why I suspect the logic is broken: because as the study clearly provides statistics to support (which is the statistic showing that 28.3% of the supposedly nonerosive gerd group HAD “ineffective esophageal motility” aka EROSION), nonerosive GERD is actually VERY EROSIVE!

And what would happen if that many more people with gerd (which we know from Kathy and John Turner’s ebook on a true diet for acid reflux make up 1 in 5 people in the population at large) were to be told by doctors that their “plain ol’ not-a-big-deal gerd” (which they’re currently happy swallowing a purple pill for) is in fact EROSIVE–yes, only 10% less erosive than “erosive GERD” (har har, yah whatever) but EROSIVE all the same? Actually, erosive would be a more apt description for GERD altogether…

They might think “woah, this is a serious disease!” And guess what? This IS ALREADY a serious disease, because as the above study clearly proves, nonerosive gerd is “erosive.” Just 10% less erosive than “erosive gerd.” 😉

So what can we do about this erosion, both of our GI tracts and of our ability to think clearly (with its attempted subversion by the poor logic in studies such as that above, AND by inferior food choices)? This is another reason many doctors might not want folks to think their gerd is creating erosion, because what we CAN do is change our diets.

We can start eating nutrient-dense, traditional foods consisting of the building blocks of optimal digestion and optimal assimilation, these being the true cornerstones of good health all around. These foods are the foods that countless ancestors of traditional isolated peoples have been eating for millenia: saturated animal fats high in cholesterol and therefore GOOD, bone-broth from cartilaginous and marrow-rich bones with its high content of colloidal stomach-acid-ATTRACTING (yes, that’s GOOD for gerd! not bad!) properties, truly lacto-fermented foods with its high content of probiotics, enzymes, and lactic acid, plenty of high-quality protein from pastured animals, and a wide array of plant-based vitamins and minerals from seasonally-attuned veggies like squash, zucchini, collards, kale, etc.

We can make these changes now, regardless of whether our acid reflux has been labeled erosive or nonerosive–which as we have seen, is largely a misnomer anyhow, possibly even designed simply to keep people thinking their nonerosive gerd is no big deal.

Acid Reflux Healing, Digestive Disorders and Healing Diet, Healing and Building Health with Nutrient-Dense Foods

What might GERD aka Acid Reflux, and Bad Breath have in common?

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Hi there. My name is Paul Yeager and I’m a close friend of Kathy Pirtle’s. I also happen to be the developer/webmaster for PerformanceWithoutPain.com. Both Kathy and I have been eating nutrient dense, traditional foods for years now and we in fact met initially over the Internet, as the result of our crossed healing paths. We also both happen to be classical musicians with an immense love for music.

Kathy asked me to do a little writing on the blog in her stead, as a result of her immense dedication to as-close-to-daily-as-possible blog writing. I have to say, in all my years of reading–and then developing–blogs of various sorts, I have NEVER in my almost 20 or so years of life on the Internet seen *anyone* write such high-quality material on such a constant basis, and on such an important issue as this one.

So, when she asked me to be her substitute blog writer, I was greatly humbled and made sure to tell her, as I am telling you, that I am not the kind of writer she is, but that I would try my best to measure up. However, having gone through quite a bit of health crisis and resulting healing crises of my own, I do feel qualified to write on a few things (just not as elegantly and clearly), so I went ahead and created myself another administrative blog account named paulchfs–chfs stands for Certified Healing Foods Specialist by the way–and so here I am.

I’ve learned from Kathy and others some remarkable things about acid reflux, and this has been an incredible learning curve for me, not only because I know what she and others are saying is strikingly true about powerful, traditional, nutrient-dense foods healing acid reflux–from first hand experience–but also because the new things she keeps telling me about this disease make me realize that to some very degree, I am very much STILL healing from it!

Not only that, but I think I, just like the rest of society to some degree, tend to disregard many of the facets of this disease as “normal” when such a state of health is in fact, not normal at all. Kathy’s work continues to guide me in this way.

One thing that continues to startle me is that 1 in 5 people have acid reflux disease; ONE IN FIVE. Go back and read that again, because it means there’s a one in five chance you have acid reflux disease! That’s just a “delicious hors d’ouevre” of the plethora of startling acid reflux facts and statistics Kathy’s got around. Another is that last year there were 470,000 hospitalizations and 1.9 million visits to the emergency room for this illness.

The last one doesn’t startle me quite as much because I am actually amongst those people; just three or four years ago, I went to the emergency room with this illness! My acid reflux had turned into what the ER doctor labeled “acute gastritis” and he just told me I had too much stress and to go home and take it easy. Let me tell you, there’s a lot more to this disease than “go home and take it easy.” I mean sure, the life of a professional violinist and computer coder geek is stressful, but if there are 1.9 million visits to the ER over this thing, than that obviously isn’t a complete explanation!

Thankfully, I started talking to people like Kathy more than ER doctors. Kathy has enlightened me also to the fact that asthma and ear infections are a symptom of gerd, and all throughout my childhood I suffered from chronic ear infections and asthma! (By the way. all of this incredible information and more, along with what kind of acid reflux diet to have on a regular basis, will soon be able to be found in her ebook via the previous link.)

In relation to acid reflux and these symptoms of it I now know about, my health-life begins to make a lot of sense. Basically, I realize now that I had BAD acid reflux all my life until, about five years ago, I found out about and started constantly consuming traditional foods like fermented cod liver oil, bone broth from cartilaginous and marrow bones from pastured animals, lacto-fermented sauerkraut and other fermented foods (fermented the way our great-great-grandparents made things like this, not just jars of pickles from off the store shelf), and powerful healing fermented drinks like beet kvass and kombucha.

Also incremental to healing my acid reflux was the fact that I realized, with Kathy’s help and the help of Sally Fallon and Mary Enig’s books and the Weston A. Price Foundation, that saturated animal fat is GOOD FOR ME! That’s a lengthy subject all on its own, and for another post.

By now you might be wondering OKAY OKAY so what might acid reflux and bad breath have in common? Well get this: there are approximately 20 people a day google-searching for “gerd bad breath” –advertisers are willing to pay OVER a dollar per click to get potentially interested buyers to find them via their google search for “gerd bad breath” (oh, being a web developer is fun stuff)!

Along with my asthma and chronic ear infections, all my life prior to beginning to heal my gerd/acid reflux, is it possible that this has been another of my symptoms as well?! My mother and sister have complained of my bad breath literally ALL my life, until the complaints began to finally sizzle out STARTING five years ago when I got on traditional foods and began to heal my gut.

And that is what acid reflux and bad breath seem to have in common: they are both results of poor digestion and malnourishment. Both occurred all MY life UNTIL I began to fix my digestion with traditional foods in the ways that Kathy Pirtle eBook describes. This ebook also described chronic belching and flatulence as a symptom of this disease, and these are things that I’m not afraid to admit largely healed as well when I stopped eating Standard American Diet and ultimately switched to a traditional foods, Weston Price diet.

And also admittedly, these things (chronic belching, flatulence, and bad breath) are things that will come back if I begin to fall off the wagon (i.e. I love to eat Thai food out at restaurants out on occasion, but I know that if I do, these signs–and eventually gerd itself–will return since my digestion is “sliding backwards”). And now I know I’m not alone on my thinking that gerd and bad breath have something to do with each other–I’m simply amongst a statistic to add to Kathy’s incredible acid reflux statistic-heap: 20 people a day are google searching for gerd bad breath! That’s 20 * 365 = 7300 people a year! Coincidence?

Ah, the beauty of the Internet.

Ciao, Paul