by Ibrahim Asad’s PHotography

CONSTIPATION AND THE LINK WITH CHRONIC DISEASES.

This concerns a lot of people in the United States who are eating the common American diet.  If you believe that eating French Fries and having fruit added to your Blizzard dessert are enough vegetables and fruits in your diet, that is why you are reading this chapter.  People could easily go weeks without eating anything alive and they still think they are fed well and healthy.  They think so until something gives out and disease occurs.  

If one thinks constipation is the cause of bowel problems; take a laxative, right?  Wrong.  Laxatives only liquify the last things eaten.  They do not remove fecal material because there is nothing solid to dislodge it.  In that jar of fiber that dissolves in liquid; where’s the mass of natural fiber, not this pudding, that will remove built up sludge? Psyllium can cause gas and bloating to make matters worse.  Oat Bran, flax and acacia are more effective forms of fiber to take to get the colon cleared of debris adhering to the  walls.

Let’s go back to the days of yore and observe how the medical profession treated bowel trouble, Diverticulitis.  They told patients to abstain from nuts, seeds, head lettuce most real foods and things that could get caught in the wrinkles of her intestines.  This was called a bland diet.    Everything had to be soft and lacking in fiber.  That made things worse.  Eventually, doctors removed a section of bowel.

More recently, my Mother was diagnosed with the same thing and given the same diet.  I remember using a vegetable peeler to remove the seeds from strawberries for her because she loved strawberries.   You see, the seeds get trapped and fester (rot) in the wrinkled digestive tract and cause a deadly infection.
Today, prevention is valued,  I gave a friend two packs of hot oat bran cereal that has no small seeds to get caught and fester.  It was natural fiber and would move the contents of the colon, taking old debris with it. Happy ending. This was a reasonable alternative to surgery and a lifetime of bland, unhealthy diet.  
Prunes were also the standard relief for sluggish elimination and caster oil if badly constipated, was recommended even by a doctor.  Laxatives were not store-bought  when people had the knowledge to fix mundane problems like this at home.

Once cleaned out, a person needs to eat sufficient fiber to keep the intestines rounded like a sausage.  Eat a salad or fruit dish with each meal.  Try salads such as tossed or chef or Waldorf or three-bean salad. Also, eat fruits in or out of salads, beans of all sorts, vegetables like corn, peas, carrots and broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, beets, leafy greens of all sorts, not just head lettuce. Try new fruits for variety.  Popcorn, with or without a movie, has fiber and not a huge amount of calories either.  Even sprouts on a sandwich are full of  fiber.  There are lots of fibrous foods to choose from and ways to ingest them.  

This way of eating should restore the proper shape.  And all those foods are water-bearing.  This is also a necessary feature and just drinking water doesn’t seem to be sufficient; water has to be obtained from food, as well.  An immediate sign that you need more water is constipation.  Sugar-free gum in excess will cure constipation too, but not in a healthy way.  The sugar-free part gives a person diarrhea.

After this living food approach is working, a person should be having larger, smoother bowel movements three times a day.  Assuming s/he is eating more fibrous foods.    It is a temporary repair to eat a single bowel-cleansing bowl of oat bran and not change to eating more high fiber foods to perpetuate the good work accomplished.  
Start with half a bowl of this high fiber oat bran cereal  and work up to a whole bowl.  Eat salads as a daily feature of your food intake to keep the relief as a permanent remedy. The cereal has nothing to get caught in the wrinkles such as seeds and nuts furnish. Add them later yourself  when your system is working.

It is rather rough having the accumulated fecal material rooted out after years of being settled in.  Take it slowly.  If we take the wrinkles out of the digestive tract, there are no more pockets to become infected and one’s nutrition will be absorbed more completely.  The real trick is to not allow the intestines to atrophy in the first place.

I dare say that eating sufficient fiber with the water content in it, could prevent Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  This is now a disease because there are patented drugs to treat it.

The doctor on PBS confirmed my guess.  Dr. Mark Hyman, M. D. explained that the body was meant to work on digesting  whole foods with the water in them.  The body was mean to eat toxin- free foods, that came from the ground, or tree or bush.  Humans are not geared to eat foods cooked poorly (fried), or that come in cans packed months ago, nor from foods that are dead like sugar and flour and fake foods in boxes capable of lasting on a shelf for years.  

Food is all the drugs a body really needs until something goes wrong such as gangrene in a wound.  More right eating decreases the things that go wrong in the disease grouping of possibilities.

Gelatins became a “drug” when it was noted that gelatin helped relieve Rheumatoid Arthritis.  Oat Bran is a drug when it is eaten to clean out a putrid colon.  Eating ginger, turmeric, and rosemary and spicy foods help our metabolism and relieve constipation.  That’s good to know.  More so, eating fresh foods, still alive, will aid the body to resist inflammatory diseases caused by being constipated.  Eating foods with live enzymes helps the body digest better and metabolize.  Fruits and vegetables have water in it them and fiber and taste good.  Dry, artificial foods with toxins put in to sell more product fails to have the body thrive.  And what collects in the colon is just asking for a disease.

Think about it, food rejected for digestion is not useful anymore.  If it stays in the body  too many hours, not to mentions, days, it becomes a toxic condition.  We are poisoning ourselves.  That has to go.  That sludge is restricting our good food from being absorbed and used.  This adds to the problem.  Chronic diseases of all sorts are directly related to this and the inflammation it causes.  

To aid digestion and help thwart constipation, chew your food because saliva is part of the
process.  This can help with overall health and is well mannered as well.  Put your fork down between bites and chew twenty times or until the food is a paste before swallowing.  This will relax your body because slowing down does that.  It’s all good.

This last fifty years has seen more fake foods being produced than ever before.  Observe the public and personally see that the vast majority of Americans, including kids, are fat.  Thirty percent are obese.  We don’t exercise enough which allows the body to become sluggish.  Digestion is not getting help from the action of the body in motion.  Then it just gets worse as we age that way, losing muscle mass and bone mass.  Eating wrongly with not enough motion is just aging us to decrepitude.

Dr. Hyman, on his PBS special, asserts that we can retrain our bodies to function.  The genes will help.  This is how we adapt as a survival mechanism.  We can retrain our bodies to be healthy and useful, instead of having them work against us.  Eat alive real foods, ingest supplements to feed our bodies what is missing from food grown in poor, nutritionally deprived soil.   Eat the foods that tell our genes to thrive and avoid the fake foods that send false messages to our engineers, the genes.  Those fake messages cause us to get fat and have abnormal conditions in our bodies.  Constipation is only one symptom to tell us we are eating WRONGLY.

If  people can’t eat chilies without pain, they are Yankees, not diseased.  People here in New Mexico eat them and pride themselves on growing hot plants. Chiles are a natural laxative.

Avoid much of the food that is too irritating until you work up to it.  I’m from Michigan and I eat chili foods now and enjoy them.  I also eat oat bran often. Daily fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans and  sprouts are better laxatives.   Keeping the small intestine and colon clean and working will help prevent aging and the diseases  associated with being elderly.  

To aid the digestion and move the contents of the intestines trough thy this: three carrots, a three inch wedge of cabbage and half an apple.  I use a whole apple just because it is just as easy and sweeter.  If you can’t juice it, eat it raw.  This means you can eat, say, steal-cut oats as oatmeal with coconut and slivered almonds for great nutrition and have a good drink like soy milk or juice to go with it.  Yummy and filling.

A word on commercial laxatives: Addictive. Taking laxatives for constipation causes the body to become dependent on them to function. The same is true for diuretics.  Both products are bad medicine because they create a chemical addiction or bad side effect.  You wouldn’t set about making a family member addicted to something if you knew that’s what would happen.  That should apply to over-the-counter (OTC) medicines as well as drugs or gambling.  

Diuretics are also not meant to be a permanent medication and often are just badly prescribed..  Eat celery, cucumber and greens such as kale, collards, spinach to eliminate excess water safely.  You need the water for good blood but too much can short-circuit your electrolytes.  A college frat made the news for having a hazing involving a drinking-of-water  contest.  One student died from it.  Nothing in excess: The ancient philosophers were right with that advice.

Diuretics thin the amount of blood stream volume and that’s supposed to reduce the strain on the heart and veins.  LOSE THE LARD and really give your heart a break because excess weight is detrimental. You need the water and essential oils and Vitamin E to keep a healthy blood stream without clotting.  Drink  filtered  water and eat water-bearing foods. Let Nature’s diuretic foods do their cleansing job.

Daily, feed your intestines fiber and water.  Both are provided by fibrous vegetables and fruit.  Constipation is telling you that there isn’t enough water in your system to flush toxins and debris out.  It is also telling you that not enough real foods are being consumed to be healthy. Heart burn is a common side effect of eating too much prepared and complicated non-foods.

That’s why constipated people don’t feel good.  They are sluggish, out of sorts, and bloated.  The proponents of a colon cleanse formula claim in the advertisement that John Wayne’s intestines weighed 45 pounds at autopsy time.  That’s terrible.  A bowl of hot oat bran with or without fruits in it, would have helped him clear out his G. I. tract.  He should have had a bowel movement after every meal to be actually regular.  Wasn’t Elvis straining on the throne when he passed away?  Learn from other’s mistakes so you don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way.

Good bowel health without laxatives is important at all ages.  Keep an eye on your children’s bowel health to prevent toxicity, hemorrhoids, dependence on laxatives and diverticulitis in later life.  It can be handled privately but needs to be attended to.  

If a constipated kid has problems the medical profession can do the child real harm because it is the prescribed reginime. A whole food diet could save all that heartache.  (Ritalin is mostly cocaine!  Verify it  for yourself.)
Further, I seriously believe bad bowel health aids in developing other diseases from lack of water and lack of detoxification through the elimination organs.  That’s poison stuck in there.
Get rid of it before it gets rid of you.  After seeing Dr. Hyman’s broadcast on PBS, I am proven right.
Gaining muscle will add weight but look so much better than fat.  Don’t get hung up on the scale’s readings.  Move your body to stimulate elimination and more muscle tissue.

Further, we are mislead by diet fads and even some really good diet plans because no one knows it all.  For instance, the diet soda permitted on Atkins’s Diet plan is a bad move. The diet is fine but not with soda that eats the bones with phosphoric acid and has phenylanalanine in it.  This ingredient comes with warning labels.  Any diet that promotes vegetables is good. Fruits are needed, too, but refrain from the sugar.  Eat blueberries, not blueberry pie, to keep your weight down and the intestines in better shape.

Also, a carrot is a high glycemic food, but you have to eat two pounds of carrots to get the bad result of spiking blood sugar.  Real food isn’t going to hurt you.  Eating for health will reduce blood pressure, cholesterol and resist diabetes, cancer, lupus and heart disease, dementia and all causes of aging prematurely.  As for stress.  Relax on purpose.  Breath slower and rhythmically to reduce stress in the body and relax. Qi gong is excellent.  I downloaded a copy of that from PBS one Saturday.  For twenty-three minutes a session, it is a complete workout without machines and, expensive gym clothes and stimulated the organs of elimination.  What’s not to like? * * *

select: More Chronic Heart Disease Articles