The Immune System

Content

1. First off, a quick word on oxidation
2. The medicinal argument is beyond, er, argument
3. The environment

First off, a quick word on oxidation

Oxidation? That'll be rust then. Basically oxidation is when something turns to rust - it's the process when oxygen combines with an element, in this case a body's cell, and causes a chemical reaction that involves changing it. You've probably heard the term 'free radical'; typically, a free radical is a previously healthy cell which has had its electron taken by a bad cell, which means it’s become oxidized, and is now an unstable, harmful cell. Free radicals will then continue this cycle of damaging healthy cells.

All is not lost though - cue our friends, antioxidants. Antioxidants protect the body from damage caused by free radicals; they're one of the first lines of defence that the body employs to keep free radicals in check and prevent them from causing their chain reaction of damage to other cells. Even better, antioxidant compounds can donate electrons to unstable free radicals so they don't have to snatch electrons from unsuspecting nearby healthy cells. Importantly, antioxidants also stimulate apoptosis (from the previous chapter) into action.

And the best news? Nature provides us with the whole spectrum of nutrients to keep an organism healthy - whether human or horse - via its own bio-intelligence, and antioxidants are one of these amazing nutrients. Constituents such as vitamins C & E are powerful antioxidant substances that can prevent oxidation happening.

Plants also very cleverly have their own immune system - they literally make their own amazing, natural pesticide. Bugs and fungus want to eat the plant’s sugar, yet plants are clever enough to make their own protection via their sugar - not daft, these plants. The plant creates a substance called resveratrol (resveratrol is a member of a group of plant compounds called polyphenols, which are powerful antioxidants), which kills the bug if it eats it - clever! You've no doubt heard that red grapes are especially high in resveratrol, and red wine is just one perk giving us plenty of this potent nutrient. 😉

In nature, plants thrive because of a symbiotic relationship with their surrounding environment, including micro-organisms in the soil, which means, if we feed the soil, the plants feed us right back. Plants natural green chlorophyll takes the sun’s energy, combined with water and Co2, to make its own natural sugar, and from this it makes proteins and numerous other phytochemicals which, when we consume them protect us from disease.

The beauty of this whole business is that in the middle of the chlorophyll molecule is magnesium, but there’s a bit of a dark side here. Our UK soil is well known for being deficient in minerals, especially magnesium, and if the plant doesn’t get enough magnesium from the soil to grow, it won’t make chlorophyll, so it won’t make enough of its own sugar energy fuel and its other chemicals, in order to grow and thrive.

The medicinal argument is beyond, er, argument

Take the fructose and other natural sugars sitting in the plant matrix, from the middle of the natural plant’s cell membrane with the fibre and phytochemicals around it, and it gives health for free. But switch from untampered plant sugar to refined and processed sugar, and the only thing you'll get for free is disease; obesity, diabetes, depression, heart disease and cancer, amongst all the other diseases that come with refined sugar.

Put simple, nature gives us natural medicine. We’re all made from the earth’s energy and substances (unless you’re an alien, of course), and our grandmothers knew this and passed it down. So, what’s going to work best in a broken body? Nature’s remedies of course 😉. But - modern medicine has taken a little bit from plants, twisted it around a bit, patented it, told us it's the only medicine we're allowed to use, then charged us a fortune to use it. We trust the supposed experts in white lab coats that it'll fixe our bodies, except it doesn't. What it does is patch us up and covers up the symptoms short-term, which means we keep having to go back for more, which puts even more more money in BigPharma's pockets. Ker-ching.

Back to our car to the garage, where the mechanic says, “So turn up the radio. Can you hear it now?” Hmmm.

The environment

“When we feed the soil with artificials, it creates artificial plants, which make artificial animals, which make artificial people, and they’re all kept alive by artificial medicine”.

Sir Albert Howard, the Godfather of Modern Scientific Aerobic Composting, “An Agricultural Testament”, 1943

It's said that genetics may load the gun but there's no doubt that the environment pulls the trigger. Now we get to environmental pollutants that we’re not even aware we're taking, because we have no control over them. We’re living in a toxic world; everything from chlorine and fluoride in our water to pasteurisation and homogenisation of our foods. Then there's crop spraying, chemtrails, irradiation, electro-smog (think cell phones and their towers which emit radiation). Our water and air are contaminated and our soil is sick - you only have to look at what's happened to our elm and ash trees to see our trees in general are gradually dying. The list goes on.

Our exposure to chemical pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins simply throws more bad fuel on the fire; for example, pesticides and fungicides have a hormonal effect which can damage cell DNA and make mutant cells grow. Our bodies are simply not designed to be ingesting, or be exposed to, molecules that aren’t from nature. Put simply, toxins kill healthy cells, which has the knock on effect of damaging the immune system.

It's not all gloom though. We can take the control back through species-appropriate, unprocessed, unrefined, uncontaminated nutrition, alongside nutritional therapy to keep the body’s healing mechanism strong. The only way to do this on a permanent basis is to keep the body clean by way of regular detoxification. As the saying goes, "Perfect practice makes perfect prevention."

I'll end this page on a positive note. Unbeknownst to many, there's an amazing little-known mechanism that’s hidden in the body - it's a built-in, and very sophisticated, detoxification system that directly protects the body against toxins, and it’s all natural. Meet the liver, the kidneys and the lymph nodes, or as I call them, the '3-Amigos'. All we have to do is activate it 😉.