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Holistic appreciation and treatment of the physical systems of the body

Holistic appreciation, care and treatment of physical, mental, emotional, psychological, psychic and spiritual health

Holistic appreciation, study and application of various modalities of health care and of medicine

Holistic appreciation of synergies among various roles of healers and care-givers in an effort centered on empowered patients.

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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General Health Means
Proper Nutrition: An Overview*

By By Purificacion Lahoz-Verzosa, M.D.

Dr. Lahoz-Verzosa is a pioneering expert on Orthomolecular medicine.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Right Molecule, published in Quezon City, Philippines, by New Day Publishers in 1986. The author uses the pronoun “he” in its various forms to generically refer to both man and woman; same with the term “man.”

THE HUMAN BODY, the most singular masterpiece on earth unrivalled in its beauty and complexity, is too often unappreciated. Indeed, not everyone takes seriously enough his role as the custodian of his body. Few feel responsible for what they eat, drink or brethe. Yet health – man’s most precious wealth – is and should be everyone’s own responsibility.

Tolerated carelessness

The trouble lies in the fact that doctors, the guardians of personal health, have allowed us for the past 50 years or so to be careless in our food and liquid intake.

This has led to two things: one, proper nutrition has not been taught in schools; two, the use, nay, the abuse, of drugs, has become rampant. The body, therefore, has lost its immunity to diseases as to the efficacy of its self-healing and self-regulating systems has deteriorated. Some chronic diseases are directly the result of the failure of the natural self-healing systems of the body. The body has built-in natural systems that, when tampered with, disregarded or ignored, makes us all feel anything from the mildest to the severest body discomforts.

The key to the alleviation of chronic disease, then, is the restoration of the body’s proper homeostatic functioning. In short, we should not simply treat the disease; instead, we must restore the body’s natural ability to maintain its own health. The key to the success of this process is within the person afflicted by the disease. Hope, willingness to change, growing self-knowledge and new sensitivity to stressful facts of life, can change the world for the sufferer of a chronic disorder. After changing the individual’s attitude, Orthomolecular Medicine proposes to remove from a sick or debilitated person’s diet those foods his body cannot tolerate – and then support his metabolic system with balanced nutrition and healthful exercises, such that he can gain a new leasehold of health.

Orthomolecular Medicine is the branch of the medical profession that has sprung up of late which seeks to cure diseases by providing a sick person optimum nutrition – to allow the body to function optimally. It is essentially the treatment and prevention of disease of disease by the expert adjustment of the natural constituents of the body.

When we talk about the body, we denote, of course, the body’s individual cells, those inside as well as those exposed, as those in skin, nails and hair. This theory, now a cornerstone of Orthomolecular Medicine, was propounded by Dr. Roger Williams (1977), the well-known nutritionist:

Every cell has its own power plant from which it derives its energy. The burning process through which energy is derived is a highly ordered, many-steps process in which many different catalysts are involved. Each catalyst (enzyme) is protein in nature and is made up of hundreds of amino acids (and often, vitamins) put together in exactly the right way. The power plant makes it possible for every cell to be highly dynamic. Something is happening every microsecond. Complex transformation – filtering, ultra-filtering, emulsifying, dispersion, aggregation, absorption – are continually in progress. Tearing down, building up and repairing are constantly going on.

Cells have their own way of designing and making blueprints; “printing” and duplicating are very much in evidence. Cells have also their versions of assembly lines. They have transportation systems, sorting, pumping, and streamlining – molecules riding piggyback on others are common processes. Intricate mechanisms including feedbacks are used by cells to regulate their numerous activities.

Cells have communication systems – messages and messengers. They have the equivalent of both an intercom system and devices for sending and receiving messages to and from the outside. Electrical activities are continually manifest. Cells are equipped with sewerage and disposal systems. They even have in effect pollution control mechanisms whereby toxic chemicals are converted into forms which are relatively harmless. Obviously, every cell is a miraculous creation in itself. It is precisely this complexity of cellular organizations that subjects each part of the of the mechanism to disorder. Indeed, should a cell become deranged, its entire function may be seriously impaired. Multiplied a couple of hundred million times, the deranged cell leads to what modern medicine calls a degenerative disease.

To understand the root of such diseases, scientists must recognize that all sorts of cellular derangements are possible. They must also accept that there is no hope of control unless the fundamental mechanism of cellular activity is thoroughly understood. Orthomolecular medicine seeks such an understanding by postulating that if the biochemical individual integrity of each cell is functioning, then our internal environment can be brought into line with individual human needs and all forms of diseases eventually controlled. To be sure, the list of necessary nutrients may be the same for every human being, but the amount needed may vary distinctly from one person to another. This is where orthomolecular physicians come to the front lines in the battle against disease. Orthomolecular physicians emphasize nutrition, aware that it is not easy for a person to be fully well-nourished throughout his life, with the poor economic conditions in the country and elsewhere. At this point, definitions (of nutrition, malnutrition and undernutrition) are in order.

Nutrition is the process of assimilating food. Malnutrition, on the other hand, is defined in the Webster dictionary as “faulty or inadequate nutrition, undernutrition, resulting from insufficient food, improper diet, etc.” Dorland’s Medical Dictionary uses only four words: “Imperfect assimilation and nutrition.”

One might ask, does any creature enjoy perfect assimilation and nutrition? If not, using the latter definition. Are we all malmourished?

The definition of nutrition as “the process by which an organism takes in and assimilates food for promoting growth and replacing worn out tissues” suggests that if a person does not heal properly and cannot replace its injured tissues, it suffers from malnutrition. Nutrition is also directly related to the recovery from diseases as well as the promotion of general well-being.

Some of the diseases resulting from malnutrition are: obesity (depending upon definition and percent of overweight or height-weight ratio); asthma and allergic conditions; cardio-vascular diseases and hypertension; blood diseases, cancer and the benign growth, the schizophrenias, mental and emotional problems including mental retardation, hyperactivity and slow learning problems among children; diabetes, hypoclycemia; arthritis and related problems, as well as muscular problems; neurological diseases, peptic ulcers and gastro-intestinal problems like gall stones; kidney stones; paoriasis; collagen diseases; and tuberculosis, etc.

Fifty to 100 years ago, when the food of our ancestors were simple, these diseases were not so rampant. Can we say that our ancestors ate better food? At present more than 3,000 chemicals are added to our food to enhance palatability, shelf life, coloring for attractiveness, consistency, preservatives, etc., to the detriment of food consumers. Advertising has become a tool, together with the mass media, to promote the habit of buying what is easy and attractive to buy and ingest instead of purchasing nutritious and wholesome food.

Renaissance of nutritional sciences

There is a wide spectrum of uninformed opinion regarding the practical importance of quality nutrition in our daily lives. At one extreme are the food enthusiasm, including faddists; at the other end are the majority of practicing physicians who, through the fault of our medical school training, tend to ignore all but the elementary aspects of nutrition, and to avoid becoming involved in a field characterized by intricacies, uncertainties, and ignorance.

Doctors should be concerned about the relation of nutrition to disease and health. It is ironic that in the course of our medical studies, we doctors were not and are not trained on the more detailed aspects of the nutrition. Hopefully, therefore, the comprehensive study of nutrients will be added to the curriculum of medical schools.

This should entail the teaching of a sophisticated and well-rounded nutritional science cutting across biochemistry, physiology and pathology. And it should enable medical graduates to deal in-depth with the functioning and interrelationship of all the nutrients – minerals, trace minerals, amino acids, vitamins, etc. It must also encompass the biological nature of the human beings who need better nutrition including the inheritance factors which affect their nutrition.

Nutrition is important for various reasons. 1. Food is part of our environment. We get oxygen from the air we breathe, water from the fluid we drink, and an assortment of more than 40 essential nutrients from the food we consume. These all become part of our internal environment.

2. Sub-optimal nutrition prevails in nature. Because nutritional science has been neglected, another crucial consideration has not been grasped: that it is common indeed for organisms in nature to live continuously nder sub-optimal nutritional conditions/ This may happen during the embryonic stage of development, and it is most certainly the rule during the post-embryonic stage of life.

3. Individuality is a crucial factor in nutrition. An excerpt from the Heinz Handbook of Nutrition written 13 years ago states that “individual organisms differ in their genetic makeuo and also in morphologic and physiologic aspects, including their endocrine activity, metabolic efficiency and nutritional requirements. It is usually taken for granted that the human population is made up of individuals who exhibit average physiologic requirements. And that a minor proportion of the population is composed of those whose requirements may be considered to deviate excessively. Actually, there is little justification (among nutritionists) for the concept that the representative prototype is one who has average requirements with respect to all essential nutrients and thus has no unusually high or low needs. In the light of contemporary genetic and physiologic knowledge and the statistical interpretations thereof, the typical individual is more likely to be one who has average needs with respect to many essential nutrients but who exhibits some nutritional requirements for a few nutriants which are far from average….”

4. In nutrition, teamwork is essential. Those who would lightly dismiss the teamwork principle as exemplifying the “shotgun” approach fail to appreciate that biologically, every kind of organism in existence derives from its environment all its nutritional essentials as a team. An organism derives whatever nutrients it needs simultaneously, not sequentially (or one after the other). If the teamwork principle exemplifies the “shotgun” approach, it can hardly be condemned on this basis. It has been used consistently and universally ever since life on earth began.

Nutrients as physiological agents must be judged in concert; as a team. A substance suspected of having an indispensable nutrient cannot be excluded from a person’s diet because of its effectiveness. Nutrients can be extremely valuable, particularly in preventive medicine. But unless they are used with intelligent appreciation, they will be of no avail.

Obstacles to Overcome

To preserve health and maintain one’s physical well-being through Preventive and Orthomolecular Medicine requires five key balancing and vitalizing factors. As explained earlier, a person must follow and support the self-healing and self-regulating system of the body. Five key elements appear to set off the gradual deterioration leading to chronic diseases. Dr. Arthur L. Kaslow’s book. You Can Achieve Freedom from Chronic Disease (1979), emphasizes the importance of these factors.

First of these key factors is metabolic rejectivity. It it my clinical experience that most people who experience chronic physical and mental problems eat foods that their bodies cannot assimilate or metabolize. These foods, normally considered nutritious and beneficial, are rejected by the body each time they are eaten, thereby overloading the body’s immunity system and distorting self-regulation. This results unlimately in the failure of important maintenance processes in the various body organs, such as the heart, lungs, nervous systems and muscles.

The second vital factor is nutritional balance. In addition to identifying the foods his body rejects, each person must learn to establish a nutritious diet that will supply all his body’s needs for action energy, tissue maintenance and continuing regulation.
Unresolved stress constitutes the third key factor. An accumulated effect of events in one’s life or a continuing unreseolved conflict, can cause a chronic distortion of many of the body’s routine maintenance processes. After some time, a person’s habitual life style or choices can cause the malfunction of the body’s self-regulation system.

If one knew the consequences of one’s choices, he no doubt would not have made them. Our general ignorance of how our body works, our dependence on medical professionals to maintain our health, and our lack of attention to basic practices that maintain good health, have all contributed to the problem.

Chronic diseases can be reversed and significant results can be achieved through personal actions. It is a matter of self-knowledge and education. Our body can heal itself if we will give it nourishment and support. It has to be treated as a good friend if we must help it. Our body is our friend, not the enemy to be conquered.

The fourth factor is lack of exercise and oxygen. This may be due to the convenience-oriented sedentary lifestyle that limits the activity of the body. People who experience serious illnesses become even more inactive than usual. The body needs movement, oxygen and fresh water to function at the level of wellness.

Without continuing body movement which stimulates the muscular heart-lung system, gradual decline of the body would result from inadequate oxygen utilization.

The last point to consider is a helpless or a powerless attitude. The most serious obstacle to overcome as part of chronic illnesses is the impression of patients that they have no power to change the situation that they find themselves in.

The feeling of helplessness stems from the current medical view of disease which places all power in the hands of the professional. But we must consider that diseases come or are built into the habits and choices of the individual. Therefore, they can all be changed once one starts thinking of wellness rather than illness.

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