Jon Barron’s Personal Journey to Becoming the Health Renaissance Man

Friday, June 27, 2008 by: Kevin Gianni
Tags: Jon Barron, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at (http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) . In this excerpt, Jon Barron shares his personal journey to becoming The Health Renaissance Man and treating the whole body verses isolationist's medicine.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jon Barron, creator of Base Line Nutrition and author of Lessons from the Miracle Doctors.

Kevin: Let's start by just giving a brief introduction about yourself so everyone knows. Why don't I let you tell the story and then we'll move on to the real information.

Jon: All right, let me sort of keep it short. I've been involved in health and nutrition for over 40 years.

Kevin: Wow.

Jon: I actually started working with foods when I was like 16. My father was one of the first food technologists in the country and I actually worked with him designing some foods –- designing, of all things, an ice cream line at the age of 16.

Kevin: Okay.

Jon: When I went to college I was planning to become a doctor. I went in as premed. There were a couple of things; one is, I wasn't dedicated to it but the bigger problem was that I was becoming very disillusioned back in the mid 60's with where medicine was going. And, even at the age of 17 back then, I was writing the relationships with diet and ageing and supper foods that were available then, such as bee pollen –- how they could affect ageing. Along the way, I began to sort of search out the people who were doing it and these are people who I would call miracle doctors. Back then, if you want to learn alternative health, you didn't have all the choices you have now. You didn't have newsletters, you didn't have schools... the doctors who were doing it were all worried about getting thrown in jail. Even today in half the states in this country, it's illegal for even a medical doctor to prescribe alternative treatments for things like cancer.

Kevin: Wow.

Jon: So back then it was even worse to find these doctors. You had to find someone who knew someone, who knew the doctor because you were so paranoid, but the guys who were practicing back then were doing some amazing things and what I learned is that people who had been told they were going to die, were getting well. They base it on people who had gone through -- and cancer, of course is one of the big ones -- a round of chemo and surgery. Nothing worked and they had been sent home and would come to these doctors and were getting well. Were they all getting well? Of course not, but a significant percentage of those who were told they were going to die did recover.

A couple of interesting things that I noticed is it didn't matter which doctor that I was talking to, they were all doing variations on a theme and this became the essence of the base line of the health program is they tended not to treat disease in the same way medical doctors do. Medical doctors are into magic bullets. I think there is an outgrowth in the history of medicine and science in general where everything gets categorized and isolated and the body gets treated like an engine where you know, if something goes wrong with the carburetor, you swap out a part. So the idea of treating the body systemically is gone from medicine. It's all down to individual pieces, which works great if you're in an automobile accident or your name's John Wayne Bobbitt. If you're John Wayne Bobbitt, you are better off with a surgeon than an herbalist.

Kevin: Absolutely.

Jon: But when it comes to the major diseases we face where they tend to have multiple causes to be systemic in nature, that approach doesn't work as well. The standard treatment or one of the main standard treatments for cancer is chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is designed to kill a cancer, a particular manifestation of it, it doesn't get to the root cause unless you believe that you get cancer because you are suffering from a chemotherapy deficiency.

Kevin: Sure.

Jon: If you're not, it isn't doing it. In fact chemotherapy is a known carcinogen. The idea of medicine, of treating everything in isolation, in treating with bullets, doesn't work well. What the miracle doctors were doing is they would treat the body as a whole and I found it didn't matter if people were coming in with cancer or MS or whatever, they put them on essentially the same program which was designed to deal with the whole body at once. The theory is, they are not treating disease,
they are just trying to optimize the body's ability to do what it's designed to do and if you think about it, the body is actually a pretty remarkable machine, all the things it does. It's designed to stay healthy, to build, to rebuild and repair itself. That's what it does and it's only when you interfere with that that you start to run into problems. An interference is you either overload it with things that it can't handle (toxins) or you don't provide it with enough nutrients. A simple light on that is you can't build the same body out of pepperoni pizza, beer and ding dongs that you can out of real food.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jon: You get calories and that's again a sense of isolation. Anyone who thinks that doctors know nutrition or goes to doctors for nutritional advice, they don't study this. In medical school they either get no classes, none on nutrition or they get one and a class is one hour a week for six to eight weeks. That means your medical doctor, in general, has six to eight hours of nutrition. If you read two good books, you know more than your doctor.

Kevin: Yeah. That's the truth, isn't it?

Jon: All you have to do is look at hospital food and anyone who believes that promotes nutrition is out of their minds, but this is what doctors believe promotes nutrition and you are listening to these people for advise on nutrition –- big problem.

So coming back to my background, I learned from these guys that they treated the body as a whole. They didn't treat certain diseases. The other amazing thing that I learned from them is –- I found within 15 or 20 minutes of meeting people, and almost universally –- they would lean in and they would tell me who was going to get well. It didn't matter how ill they were and sometimes there were people who were really ill and were like days from death, they will get well. What would happen is everybody comes in saying the same thing, you know. I've been here –- dah, dah, dah –- does this happen, I've been told I'm going to die, I'll do anything it takes to get well and then these guys, the doctors, would lay out a program and this is a program that deals with the whole body –- the whole thing, you have to clean out, you have to detox, you have to change your diet, all these things and suddenly there would be a look that would come across people's faces. Some would say, "okay, I will do this better than anyone has ever done it before" but a large number of people would say, "wow, that's really complicated. I thought you were just going to give me an herb or something." It seems easier to have it cut out and that was an amazing attitude.

As I said, something that I would hear as I would go give lectures all around the country is that I would talk about the base line of health program doing all of this healing for the whole body –- don't treat specific diseases –- the whole thing. At the end, people would swarm up and they go, "wow, that's incredible! I'd never heard it phrased like that before. It makes so much sense. You've got to do the whole body right. Well, I have this condition, what pill should I take?"

Kevin: Yeah.

Jon: And they all go back to that magic bullet. So, what I learned is you have to deal with
the whole body and the people who get well are those people who understand that and make a commitment to do it. The more of a commitment you make, the better your odds are. No guarantees, only odds. I would joke –- we've all heard the story of the guy who lives 80 years, smoking and drinking every day and doesn't die of disease, he dies because he gets shot by a jealous husband who finds him in bed
with his 20 year old wife. It could happen and you hear about it occasionally, but the odds are, if you smoke and drink every day, you are basically going down in your 50s with lung cancer or cirrhosis. Those are the odds. You eat well every day, you can drop dead like Jim Fix the runner did. But in general, your odds are much better of living longer.

Anyway, back to my background –- I worked with these Miracle Doctors, I've studied with them –- I began to write down what they did and so for actually about 30 years, I've been putting out newsletters and trying to sort of document what I learned about treating the body as a whole and different programs they would use and also along the way –- about 20 years ago –- I began to formulate because these guys wanted to practice medicine, not make formulas. So I began to learn how to make the formulas that would be effective in treating these things and what I learned is, in most cases the problem with most formulas is they are not strong enough and people don't use enough. They are afraid of them. If you are using natural formulas, you have to use strong enough ones and then, you have to use enough and a lot of the reason people don't go strong enough is cost. Good quality herbs, for example, cost a lot more than bad ones. Herbs actually carry grades based on their quality.

It's a little like cooking herbs –- if anyone's done any cooking –- you can buy saffron, Mexican saffron –- get a big bag for about four or five dollars. You can get Spanish saffron –- you get a little vile with like 12 threads in it and that can cost you $18.00, a huge number. But the difference is it takes you a couple of teaspoons to flavor a dish with the Mexican saffron. One thread will flavor an entire dish –- one or two threads of the Spanish, it's that much more intense. Well you see the same kinds of things in herbs. You can buy ginseng for $5.00 a pound or $400 to $600 a pound for the organic wild crafted. That's a huge difference. Put them in your formula and on the label, they both say ginseng but which one actually works? So you have to use good enough quality, high strength and that's how you get results. That's really a round about sort of way of saying what do I do which is sort of like... I write about the things I've learned. We have a newsletter now on (www.jonbarron.org) . It's free and goes out around the world. It actually mails to virtually every country in the world and my favorite stat on that one is that I have six e-mail addresses that all end in fda.gov for subscribers.

To read the rest of this transcript as well as access more information on creating and living a healthy lifestyle and hear from other health experts just like Jon Baron please visit (http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) .

About the author

Kevin Gianni is a health advocate, author and speaker. He has helped thousands of people in over 85 countries learn how to take control of their health--and keep it. To view his popular internet TV Show "The Renegade Health Show" (and get a free gift!) with commentary on natural health issues, vegan and raw food diets, holistic nutrition and more click here.


His book, "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution," is a step-by-step guide to optimum health for the time and energy-strapped. To find out more about abundance, optimum health and self motivation click here... or you're interested in the vegan and raw food diet and cutting edge holistic nutrition click here. For access to free interviews, downloads and a complete bodyweight exercise archive visit www.LiveAwesome.com.