April 1 2005

THE STAFF OF LIFE*

BREAD: the half-baked truth revealed

More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.

Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.

In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.

Every piece of bread you eat brings you nearer to death.

Bread is associated with all the major diseases of the body. For example, nearly all sick people have eaten bread. The effects are obviously cumulative:
99.9 percent of all people who die from cancer have eaten bread

99.7 percent of the people involved in air and auto accidents ate bread within 6 months preceding the accident

93.1 percent of juvenile delinquents came from homes where bread is served frequently

Evidence points to the long-term effects of bread eating: Of all the people born since 1839 who later dined on bread, there has been a 100% mortality rate.

Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as a teaspoon of dough can be used to suffocate a lab rat. The average American eats more bread than that in one day!

Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.

Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.

Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.

Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 80 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.

Newborn babies can choke on bread.

Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.

Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:

No sale of bread to minors.

A nationwide "Just Say No To Toast" campaign complete celebrity TV spots and bumper stickers.

A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.

No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.

The establishment of "Bread-free" zones around schools.

It's April Fool's day and I hope the offering above from Robert Mercola might put a smile of your face.

I think you'll like Mercola's site www.mercola.com as a place where you get a different slant on health matters. His newsletter's good, if not predictable after you've been receiving it for a while. It's got a good search mechanism for articles on a wide range of health topics.

Mercola is an acknowledged opponent of grains in people's diets, particularly that ground into a white powder

Mercola writes in his latest newsletter

'Edging toward a more serious side now, if you are a regular reader of the newsletter, you know that probably over 85 percent of Americans are best served by avoiding grains. Especially if they struggle with:
- Weight control
- Diabetes
- High blood pressure
- High cholesterol
- Or are a Protein Metabolic Type'

If you fit that bill, conduct an experiment. Steer clear of anything baked up with wheat flour for a month and see what happens to you.

A couple of things Mercola forget to add to his list are

- lack of energy
- headaches and a
- crook guts.

If you feel tired all the time, get frequent headaches or have a crook guts, try the no white powder experiment for a month. This means no bread, pasta, breakfast biscuits, biscuits or cake or anything else made out of wheat flour. You might get a big surprise.

If you still feel crook it may be due to a lack of milk and medicine, in which case you'll need to go to the NSW Guts Foundation for better advice

www.gut.nsw.edu.au/sponsor.htm

Mercola goes on to say

'Moreover, though whole-grains are called "complex" carbohydrates, clinically they do not function like them. They function more like simple sugars. The biochemically authentic complex carbohydrates are the above ground vegetables.

They are also made from simple sugars, but the linking in the vegetables is far more interlinked - these different links require a large number of protein enzymes in order to break.

The large number of different links delays the release of the sugars from the vegetables into your blood stream, thus minimizing insulin release into your blood. It's these elevated insulin levels that appear to be the cause of most chronic diseases. Therefore, if you can manage to keep your insulin levels low, then you will increase your chances of staying healthy.'

You'll get a different opinion if you read what the doctors and dieticians have to say. In fact the dieticians are so in love with bread they've even set the low glycemic index bar high enough (55) to get bread in under it. If you're thinking of using the glycemic index as a guide to healthy eating, set the low GI bar at 35 (or certainly less than 45) and then see what your diet looks like.

Anyway, don't just take Mercola's or my word for it, conduct an experiment for yourself. You've got nothing to lose, except a crook guts, fat guts, headaches, lethargy and high blood pressure.

A FINAL RIDER

I took my Auntie May out for tea a couple of weeks ago. Spend a few moments in her flat going over family photos and then I'm in the passenger's seat of her Barina being whizzed off to Sizzlers, with May doing her Fangio impersonation. As we're accelerating out of one corner she leans over and says, 'double de-clutch, how 'bout that', which is pretty cool for a 90 year old.

Anyway, to cut a long story short she suggested Sizzlers because it catered for her 'Eat Right Diet'. It didn't twig until later in the evening that she was referring to Peter D'Adamo's Eat Right for Your Blood Type Diet. When the penny dropped I asked her what had been the effect of the diet and she just opened her arms out wide and said 'Look at me!' And I have to say she looks a picture of radiant good health, sharp as a tack, energy to burn - on the phone you'd think you were talking to a 30 year old she's got so much vitality.

Just about anyone with a very serious reputation on diet reckons the Eat Right for your Blood Type diet is phony. Strange really when just about everyone I've met who's confessed they felt the better for being on it. Maybe it's just another placebo!

If you've been on it or are on it, why don't you drop me a line and let me know what happened to you.

In the meantime, stay tuned, highly tuned and remember, it's a big ask expecting to get better by having someone do something to you.


John Miller
 

* Bread is the staff of life: the life of our staff is one long loaf.