let food be thy medicine…it’ll do a better job than a prescription :)

What a bloody awesome time I had at Dr. Brian Clement’s talk last night in Glasgow.  For anyone that doesn’t know who he is, he runs the Hippocrates Health Centre in Florida where he’s worked for 40 years teaching people about the benefits of LIVING raw food nutrition, healing thousands and thousands of people from cancer and degenerative diseases.  I have to say I had a lot of preconceived ideas about what the talk was going to be about.  I figured he’d just spend a couple hours talking about sprouts but he actually is a very entertaining speaker and talked about literally a million different things.  I left feeling really motivated and inspired and in love with it all…

At the end he took a Q&A session and was able to answer very in-depth people’s questions about their own health conditions and advice on the raw food diet.  His knowledge base is immense.  I took hundreds of notes, some of the things I took away with me:

• Pesticides on clothing – I had literally no idea 25% of pesticides are used on cotton production! wowza I thought I was doing good with linen and cotton clothing but now I’m going to look in to organic stuff.  He talked about how these synthetic chemicals on clothing affect our hormone production and cause disorder in cells.  Apparently there are 2% more girls born than boys due to the increase in estrogen in our systems.  Bad news for single ladies in the next century 😉  So males are becoming more feminised and women are over-producing testosterone to make up for the estrogen and become more masculinised (is that even a word?) so it’s like we’re all gonna change sex or something. Nice one!
• Plants have been around for 450 million years, they have substances in them that can cure diseases of humans who didn’t even exist when plants were created – that’s pretty mind-blowing to me.  we didn’t arrive until millions of years after plants yet they can cure us of all these ailments…too cool for evolution school!
• Cancer rates have gone from 1 in 7 people in 1970 to 1 in 2 now…1 in 2, that is a plague! – ok so I already knew that but for anyone that didn’t know I think it’s worthy of mentioning.  oh no! “let’s find a cure, let’s find a cure, there’s got to be a cure somewhere” – fuck the cure, hello? what’s causing it? oh yes, lack of exercise, decent nutrition, fresh air, clean water… Brian gave the percentage failure rate for ‘conventional’ cancer treatment, I can’t remember what it was but even when someone is ‘cured’ the cancer inevitably comes back in the majority of people.  You can’t keep doing what you’re doing and expect to get different results (result being cancer), that’s the definition of insanity.  A lot of people want to kick my head in when I have this conversation because cancer is such an emotive subject.  I’ve had personal experience with pre-cancerous cervical cells back just before I went raw and I was scared shitless and had an operation to remove them.  In retrospect I did that at the time because I didn’t know any better but needless to say it made me realise you’ve only got one body, you gotta look after it or you’re gonna die early and horrid – that’s what they call ‘the facts’. la la la rant over…
  
• Brian recommends weight lifting exercise 3 times a week to be fully healthy as well as aerobic exercise for 35 mins a day 5 days a week.  Need to get back on that bloody rebounder, not been on it in yonks.
• 40% of greenhouse gasses are produced from meat and dairy industry, only 17% from cars!
• He mentioned about the preconceived ideas people have around hot food warming you up and that this is psychological because the body won’t actually process the food until it’s cooled it down to 97degreesF – I didn’t know that!
• He talked alot about supplementation and not to ingest anything unless it’s a wholefood supplement because most supplements are full of synthetic shit (not literally) and are actually damaging to the body.  For example synthetic vitamin  C will not prevent scurvy!   Wholefoods are the way to go!  Ones that he recommends are pollen, algae, kelp and sea vegetables – woo!  Unfortunately a lot of synthetic supplements are added to food including cereal and bakery products…
• And lastly he was talking about supplementation due to depleted soils. Apparently 90 of the ESSENTIAL nutrients for the body are no longer in the soil which is why he recommends supplementation.  I reckon that is of course a very valid point but I also think when we pick wild foods we don’t have to worry so much about soil depletion.

Which leads me very nicely to my bloody amazing VID i DID this morning early doors in my pyjamas and looking like stig of the dump hence you can’t see me in it.  Anyway it’s me wandering around the garden picking my wild greens for my juice.  Here is a BIG FAT DISCLAIMER WARNING MESSAGE please, please, please don’t be a dumbass and just take my word for it and go out and pick loads of stuff without first checking an authority on wild foods be it a book or a person!  I have done a foraging course and I still get it wrong a couple of times so please be careful and check stuff before you juice, drink or eat it!!

There, disclaimer done, if you die don’t blame me 🙂

I have been thoroughly inspired and motivated now to sprout more of my seeds and nuts.  So today I went a bit sprout mental and have got alfalfa, almonds, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds on the go.  I also have some hemp I sprouted last night for a lush hemp milk later.  Sprouterrific 🙂

I’ll make sure I do blog posts each day this week to let you know how the sprout thing is going.  I’ll call it sprout-watch!  Sprouting is stupidly easy and ridiculously nutritious and is the true essence of LIVING food cos it’s actually properly alive and growing as you eat it.  Cosmic!

So what else? Er, my classes on Monday went amazingly.  I taught 40 people in all including an old teacher of mine!  Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and took a lot from it even though I think some people were a bit overwhelmed by all the information!  Such a great mix of people all from different backgrounds and interests in healthy eating and not having to cook.  I’ve got a 6 week ‘Forget Cooking’ course starting at Strathclyde Uni on 4th October and then one in January and one in April!  I’m going to be a busy gal 🙂

That’s enough of my nonsense for today. I bloody LOVE this!