Originally published August 25 2008
Stop the Signs of Aging Naturally With a Healthful Approach to Food
by Kal Sellers
(NaturalNews) The search for the fountain of youth goes on... like something new will be discovered. Maybe it will, but the truth is that several very effective fountains of youth have been discovered. These really do not stop aging, but they turn a train wreck (typical aging) into an elegant work of art that improves each year, adding grace and beauty with the brush strokes of time.
Compared to what aging is experienced as today, one might get the idea that these techniques actually stop aging, or even reverse it, but this is not true, it is just that these fountains of youth take the "old" out of "old age."
In societies where people die in relatively good health at very advanced ages, there are a few things that are always present. One of these is the belief that one does not get "old," rather, one adds years to life. A life with accumulated years is a goldmine, and separate from all other sense of accomplishment, achievement or perceived success in life, there is innate value to a life with more years in it.
This is more than a mere proverb to be forgotten except for on special occasions, rather this is an actual day to day experience, witnessed in the behaviors of all people in that culture.
This, more than any other single element changes the process of aging. Applying this to our society can be hit and miss, but I will take a few hits, versus none at all.
The second element of timeless youth and adding years to life is the attitude around food. Notice, I said attitude around food, not the food itself. Food choices come in here, but only secondary to attitude. Actually, it is a cause and effect relationship where the food choices are better because of a different attitude around food.
This is one of the greatest understandings of all time as it relates to health and diet.
Let me explain:
In societies where life is long and comparatively healthy, food is treated with gratitude. In our society (and I am very sad to report that every good and brilliant book that gets written about diet seems to make this situation grow worse) food is an enemy.
Even when the purest of raw food diets is chosen, it is a wrestle, and the person must wrestle with others to maintain that standard. Foods avoided are seen as enemies. This is made worse by the disagreement that is present in leading diet programs. Rarely is food treated with peace and gratitude.
In societies where healthy longevity is enjoyed, food is eaten in a certain meditative state. One has gratitude, yes, and also ideas about what they feel that food would best do to serve him or her. The person believes, very intuitively, that those benefits will come from eating and "nourishing" his or her body.
In those societies, eating becomes restrictive by virtue of the fact that some foods only exist for gluttony -- for indulging taste buds or filling the belly and have none of the authentic flavors of life.
Because of the Americanizing and Westernizing of the world, these societies are a dying breed. Around the world, addiction and neurosis invite hamburgers, processed meats and macaroni and cheese that are always eaten in haste.
Even so, where this element of life has been preserved, even the advent of relatively toxic chemicals and foodstuffs has had almost no health impact. The use of MSG in Asia is one example of this. Every third person in the U.S. gets a headache or diarrhea or some such symptom from eating MSG, but in some parts of Asia, where they eat five times as much as we do, it causes no symptoms at all.
Someone sent me an email a year or so ago that listed several different cultures that had very low cancer rates and pointed out that many of them absolutely contradicted each other in their dietary choices. Finally, this humorous email concluded that living in the U.S. was what caused cancer, so you might as well eat whatever you want!
While I disagree that we should eat whatever we want, I agree with the other sentiments of this email. It is true, there is no food or drink or miracle supplement explanation for longevity. These things can be helpful, but ultimately fruitless in a loveless society that eats in fear and haste without gratitude or clear intention.
A healthy, peaceful attitude at meals is something that is vital, and yet it is poorly understood. It is something that comes after one has worked at cultivating him or her self for a while.
Personal cultivation is the art of developing in one's self the harmonious attributes of the microcosm, macrocosm and the very best of humanity. It is the art of becoming the change you wish to see, as Gandhi put it. It is the art of becoming health, abundance, peace, goodness, harmony, free energy or whatever.
The most basic form of cultivation is done with food. There are many ways to do it, but they all involve restriction and discipline of some sort. The rewards are immediate, but deceptive... deceptive because the real rewards come when you have cultivated yourself to a point that you can eat whatever you want in peace and it does you nothing but good. Of course, you tend to only choose foods that are whole and harmonious in nature.
On (www.kalsschool.com) you can find a whole coursework, entitled, "Freedom from Bondage," which is a system that teaches the art and science of personal cultivation, from food to Chi Gong, to the cultivation of one's inner self to become harmonious and whole.
Indeed, any dietary program, any health program, any healing program, any living conditions on the planet, or that could be invented for this planet would be faulty and ultimately pointless unless personal cultivation is embraced and wholly followed.
When it is followed, all the rewards possible to imagine are found in it. They cannot be taken from it -- like when you go and work a job so you can take money away; but they are found in it -- like when you go climbing because you love to climb but find treasures of heart and hearth along the way.
Before we leave diet, let me just say that Traci's Transformational Health Principles book is one of the best books of its kind ever written, largely because it teaches idealism without instructing anyone to be rigidly idealistic. It allows for eating in gratitude what you are ready for and feel best about. It allows you to make very good, whole food choices joyfully, easily and while still maintaining a standard that is comfortable for you, whether you are a raw foodist or whether you ate fast food earlier today.
The third element of timeless youth and adding years to life and life to years, is social usefulness.
This is forever linked to the first discussion about viewing a life of many years as innately and intrinsically more valuable than a life with fewer years. When one sees him or herself that way, usefulness will morph and change and may actually grow, but will never wane or disappear.
People who do not see themselves this way and do not see any evidence of others seeing them this way, become neurotic, depressed and even spiteful as they age. These people will develop a sense of desperation or despondency that their usefulness has, or is about to come to an end. However someone aged physically, this seals the tomb, so to speak, on their lives.
It is sort of a test offered to the youth and those in their prime in each generation. You get to see how you score in treating those who handed the world to you as though they are becoming more valuable as they age.
If you fail the test, you will inadvertently create a world where you are even more certain to be treated as valueless as you age. Changing this trend is a lot of work. It requires one generation to not only honor their parents in spite of their parents' failure to honor the last generation and to also become the sort of people that ought to be honored when they age.
The final element of timeless youth and adding years to life, I have already mentioned twice. This is personal cultivation.
Not only is this vital to staying at peace with food and society and adding years to your life, it is also needed if you expect the next generation to have a reason to honor you. This not only will insure your longevity, but theirs, since they will perpetuate the pattern of treating those with more years to their life as increasingly valuable, and honor the useful and vital elements of a whole and healthy life.
In conclusion, because I am an herbalist, and because it is one of my mission statements to, "relieve suffering," I want to discuss just a few herbs and foods that will ease the suffering due to aging that many experience.
The first is my favorite brain food formula in the world. When people age, instead of adding years to their life, the stress of it causes many distortions in the brain and these must be helped and healed in order to promote happiness and well being and the mental energy needed to make other positive changes as life changes.
I have used many brain food formulas and there is one that is so much better than the rest that it bears emphasizing. It was, interestingly, not made originally as a brain food, but as a heart and circulatory aid. The same company makes a brain food formula that was intended for a brain food, but it is not nearly as good.
This formula is called, Ginger-Ginkgo Blend, and it is sold by Wind River Herbs, whom you can find on line at (www.windriverherbs.com) .
In addition to feeding blood and neural energy to the brain, it is also important to normalize brain chemistry, increase serotonin and improve mood. To do this, I use St. John's Wort tincture (I like Herb Pharm or Herbs Etc.) and Rosemary tincture. These herbs can and probably should be taken with the Ginger-Ginkgo Blend. Usually, twice a day (mid morning and mid afternoon) will make such a profound difference in how someone feels and thinks that they will wonder how they ever lived without it.
One should be careful when using St. John's wort with drugs known as MAO inhibitors. St. John's wort probably will not, but potentially could cause an overdose of MAO inhibitors, since it also has that action. St. John's wort may also decrease the activity of some drugs and so should be used with caution if you are on a lot of medications. See a natural-remedy savvy practitioner or herb-friendly physician for help here.
One of the champion anti-aging herbs of all time is turmeric. It can be taken in capsules with its close relative and partner in anti-aging activities -- ginger. I often recommend as much as ten to fifteen capsules per day for someone in pain or with poor digestion, but just two capsules twice daily will reduce inflammation protein markers in the blood, leading to slowed aging, particularly of the cardiovascular system. Both of these herbs have a long list of anti-cancer properties. I do not think either of them would be stand alone cures (although I am aware of turmeric studies that suggest it sometimes might be) but as preventatives, they rank high on my list.
When people age, the endocrine system shuts down in many ways. One of the herbs that improves endocrine communication we have already mentioned: St. John's wort, but there are other helpful aids that are very effective at taking the age out of the endocrine system.
One of the best is Goji (lycii) Berries. I have been using a goji juice by Genesis, and I find it good to very good. It has none of the preservatives or diluting additional juices found in most/all of the brands sold by network marketing companies.
Another important step is to heal the adrenal glands in order to maintain vigor and energy. I recently healed my own after a stretch of uncommon stress in my life. My adrenal glands were completely exhausted and I felt like I was dying. I used my own adrenal formula, which is found on the downloads page for free on (www.kalsschool.com) , and had my adrenal glands fully rebuilt in less than a month.
The next herb on my list is in every house in the country, probably. It is celery seed. So often, mild deposits of gout will plague people who have no idea that it is there. It never accumulates into full-blown gout, and so it never gets diagnosed or treated.
Fortunately, mild cases can be treated and prevented naturally. The best herb for my money is celery seed. I find that it takes about two capsules of ground celery seed per day to make a significant difference in kidney health, nitrogenous waste removal and more flexible joints in the lower extremities.
The end of this list includes foods that can be used together. These are parsley, carrots and beets. In fact, ginger can be added to the pot too, instead of taking capsules. This requires a juicer. If you are living in today's culture of toxicity and stress and you do not have a juicer... well, you are hereby assigned. Any juicer will do, but for my money the Champion is the best.
It has been observed that two weeks of a pint of carrot juice per day will take ten years off of most people's faces. This may have to do with the way carrot juice feeds the pituitary gland and causes an upsurge in HGH to a healthier and more youthful level.
In my program, a dime-sized bundle of parsley sprigs, one-two inches of ginger root and one small beet with its top (or you can use Swiss chard) are juiced into that one pint of freshly juiced carrot juice. This can be drunk at any time during the day, but the best time is late afternoon when a little extra supercharge is needed to feed the body when it might prematurely shut down and go to bed toxic and with incomplete digestion. Organic, of course, is best.
The number of systems fed by this juice are too numerous to explain, but suffice it to say that it really does do the body good!
One warning, parsley juice is generally not recommended for nursing mothers as it often dries up the milk.
With these tools, you can make a great difference in your health and aging trajectory. These are not the only tools, they may not even be the best tools in every case, but they are very, very good tools and they will be effective for most people. A month of this program, and eating according to the minimum standards taught in Traci's Transformational Health Principles, will prove itself to anyone who uses it.
Thanks, my friends, for reading.
Until next time,
Kal Sellers, MH
About the author
Kal Sellers, MH currently operates KalsSchool.com and teaches a 2-year curriculum for Natural Medicine, via live teleclasses.
Kal is a Master Herbalist and holds several other certificates and licenses for hands-on healing modalities. He maintains a current practice in the Atlanta area.
Kal and Traci have six children, the last four of which were delivered at home. They live now in Powder Springs, GA where they teach live classes on food and medicine. Kal is also a full time Chiropractic student.
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml