First, a quick answer because a couple of you have commented on this from the last newsletter:

Q: 1. I thought you guys said that the mycotoxins settle in the liver (the filter) as well as the fat of the animal… 2. Why would you leave LIVER in a list a foods that are good to eat? …and this is what is catching and holding all the parasites and mycotoxins…

A: Nope, that’s not what we said. We said that “Your liver cleanses the blood and processes nutritional molecules” (see page 2 of issue 3 for complete list of liver processes). The next thing is that it dumps the waste into the gall bladder (for those who still have one), which then dumps it into the duodenum to be run back through the intestines (which, hopefully, does not reabsorb the bad stuff) and on out of the body. Note, it does not hold the toxins. There would be no point in Nature making an organ that will fill up with bad stuff and never get emptied unless you can take it out and flush it every now and then – and before you even make a comment on that, those supposed Liver Cleanse formulas were not around during the last four million years of human existence. A natural diet can take care of that without swallowing a bunch of soapy goop. Doctors, of course, often disagree, simply because liver-specific tests (and they are not perfectly liver-specific) say the liver is full of toxins (especially if you imbibe a lot of alcohol). It is only full when the body is going through a major flush of its own (like if you spend a couple weeks eating only antifungals, the liver will appear to be overloaded because the body is processing and disposing of huge amounts of terminated toxins).

The other side of the coin for liver is that it can become damaged by mycotoxins (specifically, aflatoxin), so even if the liver is currently free of toxins, that does not mean the liver itself is free of defects. For humans, there is an antioxidant herb, Milk Thistle, which contains silymarin, and that protects against aflatoxin-B1-induced liver damage. Cattle eat that like crazy whenever they find it in their pastures (do you suppose they know?), but the bottom line here is that cattle raised to become meat doesn’t live more than a couple years before showing up in your grocer’s meat case, so they aren’t really around long enough to develop bad cases of liver damage.

Would I eat liver? No. Not just no, but hell no. I think it is about the foulest tasting meat ever to touch my tongue (and not very long on my tongue at that – ptooie!). But, truth be told, for a reasonably healthy animal, the liver has no more toxins than any other meat (which, when you really analyze it, is only a pile of bloody muscles, and whatever is in the blood is in the meat). I will not tell you not to eat meat. God gave you canine teeth, which implies, biologically, you are a carnivore (omnivore actually), so the decision to eat it or not is yours.

You might note also that the kidney, which is also a filtering organ and is constantly being filled with toxins and emptied, is also one of the most sanitary, though I refuse to eat those either (it’s a matter of personal taste). As gross as this might sound, peeing on a wound is one of the best ways of disinfecting it – if you don’t have any rubbing alcohol or other disinfectant handy.

Now, let’s talk about a possible cure to lung cancer. Hey, what exactly does that word mean?

Cancer: Any malignant growth or tumor caused by abnormal and uncontrolled cell division; it might spread to other parts of the body through the lymphatic system or the blood stream.

Ah, so cancer is not a specific thing. When someone says, “He’s got cancer,” I had always thought that meant there is a specific disease called cancer, a thing unto itself, especially given that doctors (and pharmaceutical corporations) claim there are hundreds of specific types of cancer. And the reality is, by definition, cancer is just an abnormal cell division resulting in a malignant growth… it forms a sac or tumor… but what caused that to happen?

You might remember that I said in a previous issue that mycotoxins, like the Borg, try to rearrange things in your body to fit their rules of order, not yours (“You will be assimilated!”). Now these little suckers get into your blood, run all around your body, and burrow into anything that doesn’t resist them (or can’t because it’s too weak). What do you suppose they want to do that for? They are attempting to gain control of your systems so that you will do what they want (need) you to do. Primarily, that is as simple as making you crave certain foods. Those are always the foods that feed them… sugars, starches, carbohydrate-laden foods, fats, candy (more sugars), chocolate (more sugars), donuts (more sugars and more mycotoxins – calling up reserve troops for the battle). Got that picture firmly in your mind? OK, hold onto that one for the remainder of this issue.

Occasionally, some of these mycotoxins, especially the nastiest of them, aflatoxin, can get into the cell and break a DNA strand. What happens when you get screwed up DNA within your own cells? Pause here for a minute. Trust me, we will come back to this.

How many of you have a scar on your body that you’ve had since childhood? Why do you still have that? Most of you are aware that your body renews all of its cells regularly over time. For example, your stomach grows an entirely new lining every three days. Why? The acid used to turn your food into a digestible pulp is so strong that it also eats away at the very tissue that is supposed to contain it. Now, don’t go to the bathroom cabinet to get an antacid tablet; it’s supposed to be that way. The list of times on cell renewal varies all over the body, but the longest, seven years, sets the stage for this discussion. Your entire body is brand new every seven years! So why do you still have that scar? Because of a thing called cellular memory.

Damage to your cells, if severe enough, will alter your original template, and the cell will reproduce in a new pattern after the damaged cell it is replacing. That is, the scar tissue thinks it is supposed to be that way, so the skin rebuilds the scar rather than making it go away by replacing it with new “normal” skin. It has forgotten the original template on which your body was created. That happens because somehow the DNA was altered.

What happens if the DNA change also includes a directive to multiply before it is time to multiply? Another phrase to describe that would be “malignant growth.” Ah, cancer. So what causes cancer? Anything than is capable of altering your cellular DNA, such as aflatoxin. With me so far?

Now, go back to issues 2-5 and re-read that anatomy lesson. How do you take external objects, which includes tiny things as well as food, into your body? You put it in your mouth, or it enters through your skin, or you breathe it in. Aflatoxin… um, some come in on moldy foods, the two worst being peanuts and corn. What about mold spores in the air? Yup. Unless you live in the Antarctic or the middle of the Sahara desert, you are breathing mold spores all day long. This crap is everywhere! Look up the method for making sourdough bread – you do not add yeast, yet it rises anyway. It uses free-air yeasts (making sourdough is a multiple-day process). But most mold is a simpler mycotoxin than that nasty Borg-like aflatoxin. You just end up with skin rashes (allergies) and fungal issues like eczema and psoriasis, or by breathing it in, allergies, asthma, etc., when you live in “sick buildings.” And, folks, even a brand new house has molds in the air. Those who have the most problems with this have had flood damage, leaking appliances, cracks that let rain water in to keep the walls and carpet damp, and, uh, everyone who lives in high humidity areas. I was born and raised in Soggy Valley, Orygun. I thought that it was a worldwide condition that when you went to the closet to get a clean shirt, it was already damp. It’s no wonder the natives of the Amazon don’t wear clothes… J

So here’s one you probably didn’t expect to ever be in our newsletter: Cigarette Smoking Causes Cancer. Yup, it does (for manufactured cigarettes anyway). But not for the reason that the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, etc., say. It is not the tobacco’s fault. Ha! See, you knew he would defend his habit! Nope, I’m not.

We’ve been researching more than just foods. Tobacco is a plant, right? Tobacco is stored and gets moldy, right? (Cigarette companies in this country currently have over 195 million tons of tobacco in warehouses waiting to be made into cigarettes, and the longer it waits, the more Aspergillus mold grows on it.) Wait. There’s more. Yeah, I know you’ve all read about the over-900-chemicals that get added to the cigarettes (usually no more than a couple hundred for any given brand of cigarette flavor, but a total of over 900 used in all the different brands/types of cigarettes made in North America and probably Europe too), but oddly enough, even though many of those are toxic by themselves, that is not the main reason. It starts right after the tobacco leaves are delivered to the factory.

You see, back in the good old days (long before I was born), many smokers had a tobacco plant growing right in their own backyard. They rolled their own in plain paper (i.e., no added chemicals, like saltpeter to make it burn even when you set it down) and were still smoking at 90 years old and never got lung cancer. Today, not only are we dropping like flies from lung cancer, but all those poor non-smokers seem to be dropping right alongside of us from the latest new danger: second-hand smoke.

But, along about the 1930s, factories to make cigarettes started springing up like crazy, and the capitalist routine of making a more desirable, better selling product caught on, so we came up with many brands and many different flavors. How? One of the first things the factory does with those tobacco leaves is to dip them in fermented sugar. That makes them taste better. But wait… fermented sugar? Absolutely chock full of aflatoxins!!! So to smoke a cigarette is to breathe in aflatoxins? No, not really. The cigarette, when sucked on, heats up above 269 ºF, which makes aflatoxins inert.(1) So, then what’s all this BS about? Second-hand smoke.

When a cigarette is idling J… sitting on the edge of the ashtray with smoke rolling off its tip, the temperature is not that high and the aflatoxin-laden smoke floats around the room and is breathed in, not only by the smoker, but by everyone else in the room. And, as we said above, aflatoxins are capable (that means they can, not that they definitely will) of altering DNA and causing a runaway cellular growth – cancer.

Why lung cancer? Why not stomach cancer? Well, some people have become toxin resistant because they have spent their whole life in toxic environments (spray painting for a living, using toxic chemicals, etc.) and have a high resistance to the toxins they breathe in, but as a general statement, Mother Nature forgot to account for capitalist industrialism when designing lungs and they are very sensitive to anything getting inside them besides good clean air. They are very susceptible to chemicals and molds and all those other nasties that simply weren’t a problem to those ancient hunter-gatherer societies. We are still evolving, but we aren’t there yet.

And what goes with cigarettes? Coffee! Mine has cream and sugar in it. I use powdered cream, but most don’t. Cream comes from milk and, if you remember, contains whatever the rancher put in the cow: hormones, antibiotics, and bad grains. Before you scream, “Wait a minute! It’s pasteurized!”, I have to warn you, milk is heated, not boiled to over 269 ºF. Sugar (2) is also in the grain class (stored and moldy) as well as being the favorite sweet food of mycotoxins. OK, so I smoke and drink things that support the nasties. What else is a drink that causes you to light a cigarette? Beer! Wine! Yup, they’re both full of yeast (i.e., more mycotoxins). But I only drink whiskey! Sorry, that’s made from grains and at least a quarter of the world’s supply of grains is mold-contaminated (World Health Organization) and, therefore, full of mycotoxins. Do you know any smoker who ever grabbed a glass of fresh spring water and said, “This drink makes me want a cigarette.”? I doubt it.

The point here is that these mycotoxins, embedded in your tissues and in contact with your body’s communication system, tell your nervous system to send signals to your brain that make it want to put those things in your body that will support them. Mycotoxins want more mycotoxins and all the foods that either have mycotoxins in them or simply feed them. So, when you eat or drink certain foods regularly, you will crave the things those mycotoxins want. The more you try to resist those foods, or cigarettes, the harder the craving hits you. You just gotta have that candy bar! You just gotta have a nice piece of peach pie with cream or ice cream on it! “Tell Saint Peter at the golden Gate that I hate to make him wait, but I just gotta have another cigarette!”

Can we do anything about it? Yes. All smokers could grow their own tobacco and roll their own cigarettes with no long-term storage, no chemical additives, no sugar dips, and this one problem would go away. No, buying prepackaged tobacco to roll your own won’t do it because even that tobacco has at least some of this problem (long-term storage and molds). Of course that idea isn’t ever going to happen because we are a lazy society. “Convenience” dictates that someone else make our drugs, whether that be a cigarette, a drink, a food, or a pill, then all we have to do is use it. Lazy…

You could also eat tons of broccoli (gag!). “A chemical agent in broccoli, sulfurophane, gives broccoli its protective effects against cancer (not just lung cancer). It is also an anti-mycotoxin: it blocks aflatoxin, made by Aspergillus molds, from binding to and damaging our DNA.” – Council for Agricultural Science and Technology – 1989

Also, there’s a thing Doug Kaufmann calls a “Phase I Diet,” which you stay on for only two weeks before you switch to the Phase II Diet (which we all should be on for life). If you stick religiously to the Phase I Diet, your cravings for those bad foods will stop. Maybe even your desire for cigarettes (assuming you really do want to quit). It is not easy, because all of us will be tempted to cheat. If you cheat, you likely will fail, and you are not helping yourself at all. Can you do it for just two weeks? That is entirely up to you.

Think long and hard on this. It is a major lifestyle change, but if you decide you want to do it, let me know. I’ll type the entire thing in here for you if you say, “yes.”

Note 1: Earlier I said mycotoxins were heat stable, so how can aflatoxins become inert at only 269 ºF? I do not know if they are totally destroyed at this temperature. And the temperature of your food when cooking only gets that high when you burn the roast beyond wanting to eat it. “OH yeah? My oven was set at 350 degrees!” So? That might be the temperature of the air in the oven, but the center of your meat doesn’t get that high. It rarely is over 200 inside that Sunday roast.

Note 2: Cane sugar is considered a grain. Sugar Beets, if you can even find beet sugar, is made from an antifungal veggie, but it still serves as food for mycotoxins in its finished “manufactured” form.