What Are Degenerative Diseases?

What Are Degenerative Diseases?
An Excerpt from Nutrition Really Works.

This article is written to make you aware of what degenerative diseases are, how they are different from, and how they are similar to, infectious diseases. Please bear with me as it is somewhat complex, but I have tried to make it as understandable as possible. When you get to the end you will be able to understand degenerative diseases, their cause, and what you can do about them.
On one hand, both infectious and degenerative diseases are initiated from an outside source, whether bacteria, viruses, yeasts, fungi, or other pathogenic organisms in the case of infectious diseases, or toxic substances, free radicals, and acids, (including those produced by pathogens) in the case of degenerative diseases.
On the other hand, perhaps more importantly—the quality of the cells, the nutrition we are getting on a daily basis, and the state of the immune system will determine how our body reacts to the test. From the moment we are conceived the processes of life are carried out under the governing factor of our DNA. The DNA holds the genetic code for our life, health, and for the physical features of our bodies. The DNA has the blueprint for our body in the perfected state and our cells are always striving for it—total health from birth to our physical death. Included also in the DNA is the aging process which is not a degenerative disease.
The aging process is normal—a part of perfect health. Stop and think about what would happen to a child who had a genetic defect that would not let her body age! She would remain a child forever! Humans are looking for a way to stop the aging process, but that’s impossible!. The length of our lives is determined by our creator. We cannot lengthen our lives, but we shorten them by our neglect! Instead of looking to stop the aging process we should be looking for a way to stop the acceleration of the process. Toxins, especially acids, speed up our biological clock, causing us to die of old age at a younger age. Instead of the 120 years the human body is designed to live, Americans are dying at the average age of 74, a little more than half their potential.

The Problem is Acid!
What is an acid? According to the Brønsted definition, “an acid is a substance that liberates hydrogen ions (H+) or protons in solution.” Acids are virtually synonymous with free radicals. Free radicals are atoms or groups of atoms which have single unpaired electrons which while in that state are not bound to another chemical compound. The difference is; acids contain positively charged hydrogen ions, and free radicals contain unbalanced positively charged ions of any element. One of the most damaging free radicals is the positively charged oxygen radical. The term antioxidant came into being because of it. An antioxidant is a substance that neutralizes the oxygen radical although the term is now generally used to indicate a substance that neutralizes any free radical.
Now, what do acids and free radicals do? Both acids and free radicals are atoms with positive electrical charges, that is, their atoms are missing a single electron each. In this state those atoms will seek to neutralize their charge by stealing electrons that are weakly held by other stable atoms. Most often this occurs near the DNA of the cells. Once an electron gets stolen from an atom, that once stable atom now becomes a positively charged free radical which in turn will seek to neutralize itself by stealing atoms from other stable atoms. This process will go on and on unless it is stopped by an antioxidant. So what you have a chain reaction of electron stealing.
The damage that occurs from free radicals and acids is due to the fact that whenever an atom or molecule is split, energy is released. This is the same principle our body uses to produce energy from the breakdown, or splitting, of the molecules from the nutrition we provide, but that is done in a controlled environment within the mitochondria in the interior of the cells. The energy release is channeled for use by the body. Conversely, the energy released when electrons are ripped from atoms due to exposure to acids or free radicals produces small atomic explosions that damages or
Free Radical Damage
kills the cells. If they survive they are likely to mutate. When the mutated cells replicate themselves, the daughter cells produced have the same genetic defect as the original cell. They will most likely develop into cancer unless the body’s immune system destroys them. You can clearly see the damage done by free radicals in a live blood cell analysis. The normally round blood corpuscles look like Oreo cookies with bites taken out of them.
The damage associated with acids does not come only from the direct effect. Whenever any of the body’s fluids are acidic, the ability of the fluid to carry oxygen molecules is severely diminished. This is something that compounds the degeneration problem.
Every cell of the body needs oxygen continuously. For example, when a person has a heart attack it’s because the cells that make up the heart muscle have been deprived of oxygen and can no longer function. The same is true of every organ, gland, and cell in our bodies. To make this point; no matter how healthy you are, if someone held your head under water for just a few minutes every cell in your body would die! It’s the same with acidosis except it’s happening more slowly; your cells are dying from lack of oxygen.
Here’s the way acidosis contributes to degenerative disease:
 Damages and kills cells directly.
 Depletes the oxygen content of the body’s fluids.
 Hinders the circulation and subsequently the immune and hormone system.
When you combine all these effects you have a serious condition and it will never get better; it will always get worse until you change the situation.
Damage to the body by Free Radical Acids
It is very well known that free radical damage is the leading cause of cancer, whether by tobacco smoke, overexposure to the sun, eating burned foods, or the acquiring of any toxic substance through the diet, the air, or absorbed through the skin. Also some acids and radicals are produced naturally as a byproduct of the body’s own metabolism.
Some acids are necessary; life would be impossible without them. Even DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid. The metabolization of all foods produces an acidic substance of one kind or another. Proteins are broken down into amino acids, fats are broken down into fatty acids, and sugars and other carbohydrates go through the Krebs ( citric acid ) cycle before the fuel for energy (ATP) can be produced.
Stress will also make our bodies acidic due to the acid nature of the hormones associated with the “fight or flight” response. Adrenaline dissolves bone and initiates cell mutations. So there is a direct physiological link with stress, cancer, and heart attacks, not just psychological, the way some people might have you think.
The body has a system to deal with these acids but only when proper minerals and other nutrients are included in the diet. If they’re not, the body will pull the minerals out of the bones to keep the pH of the body at the proper level.
To prove this to yourself place a chicken bone in some vinegar and leave it there for a while. The acid will leach the minerals out of the bone so that you could eventually take it out and tie a knot in it. Acidosis has the same effects on our bones and it’s called osteoporosis.
When I tell people at seminars that osteoporosis is a good thing the women usually give me a blank look and then tell me I’m crazy.
Then I explain to them how the leaching of minerals from the bones has saved their lives. I tell them that if they didn’t have what is called a “buffer reserve” of minerals in their bones to neutralize acids, the homeostasis of the acid-alkaline balance would fall below the level that supports their life and they would die!
The body’s fluids must remain between 7.0 and 7.8 pH to sustain life and the levels of the blood must remain between 7.35 and 7.45 pH, a remarkably narrow range. So the body fluids, with a few exceptions, must remain alkaline and at no time become even slightly acidic, no small feat when we are surrounded by free radicals in our environment and nearly everything we do and everything we eat causes acids to be produced in our bodies.
Your Body’s Keys to Healing Itself
The body can heal itself only when the internal terrain is balanced and when proper nutrients are included in the diet. What I just said about the process of osteoporosis saving your life is not the body healing itself. Osteoporosis is a degenerative disease. The body is merely prioritizing its use of minerals to keep you alive. You are not being healed. It’s more important to neutralize the acids even at the expense of the bones than to compromise your whole existence and your subconscious brain is wise enough to make that distinction.
Here’s another example to make it even clearer:
Suppose while you were out working in your garden you got a cut on the tip of your finger. It was so slight you didn’t bother bandaging it or even bothering to wash it. In most instances the body will clean, disinfect, and heal the wound so completely that in a short time you will not even know that you had a cut. Even the fingerprints will grow back exactly the way they were before! The code for your fingerprints is stored in your DNA and when your immune system and other cells go to work to repair the damage they work to bring you back to perfection according to the plan.
Now suppose you had heart disease. Why wouldn’t the same process work and the body heal itself from that disease? Doesn’t the DNA include the code for the heart? Charles Simon, who has been studying nutrition for as many years as I have been alive put it this way: “Degenerative disease is a continual wounding.” Simply put; if every time the cut on your finger began to heal you opened it up with a razor blade... again and again, it would never heal. So the first principle in healing is: You have to get rid of the cause of the injury before any healing can take place!
That’s exactly what you must do if you have a degenerative disease.
Your body is regenerating and rebuilding itself every minute you are alive, but if the wounding or the destruction of the cells is happening at a faster rate than they are being replaced... that’s exactly the definition of degeneration. You are slowly dying.
When people tell me that they don’t need nutritional supplementation, they’re doing pretty well, but they do have a little arthritis, but they’re not concerned about it. I tell them they don’t have a little arthritis; they have the beginning of the disease that’s eventually going to kill them, and they should do something about it while it’s still in the early stage. The same acid degeneration process destroying their joints is slowly working on all their organs, muscles, nerves, and on all the cells in their body.
Now go back to the example of the heart. If you had heart disease you would have to get rid of the cause of the disease before any healing could take place. The body is desperately trying to regenerate the damaged areas of the heart but the acid that caused the degeneration is also destroying the new cells now being created. In this condition the heart can never heal and there is not a single herb, drug, diet, treatment, or therapy that can initiate regeneration until you balance the internal environment. You do it through your diet. You are what you eat.
The Three Principles of Health
So, the three principles to follow to allow the body to heal itself are straightforward:
 Cleanse—Provide the proper internal environment for the cells, which is the maintenance of the alkalinity in our body fluids and the removal of toxins.
 Nourish—Provide the proper nutritional building blocks because you really are what you eat and assimilate.
 Balance—Take all the biological factors (side effects) into consideration.
As you look through this site you will hear me repeating these principles over and over because they are the basis of health. All cures must come from the body itself. There is no life in the point of an acupuncture needle or in a prescription drug. These methods can be used to temporarily save a life in a life-threatening situation, but no one should stop there. After the crisis is over we need to look very closely at the cause of the degeneration and correct the imbalance that caused it. Otherwise, as I have seen so many times, the patient winds up using so many drugs that a chemical imbalance is created, the body stops functioning, and death is the result.
Look at the common approaches for cancer treatment: when you use chemotherapy or radiation, or even a natural method to destroy cancer cells... even if you were to destroy every cancer cell in the body, if you did not change the internal environment from its acidic state you would get cancer again. Why is this?
The answer is simple. Acids or free radicals initiated the cancer and the immune system was not strong enough to detect and destroy the cancerous cells. These cells mutated, multiplied, and that’s what cancer is. Now when you go in and destroy the cancer cells with chemo or radiation the treatment destroys other cells also, especially those of the immune system... but you did nothing to change the internal environment that caused the cancer! Now you’re back to square one with a weaker body and a weaker immune system and with the same polluted internal environment, and you start the process all over again! You didn’t cure anything. Knowledgeable doctors (?) are hesitant to use chemo or radiation on a relapse because the devastating effects on the body result in a very high percentage of deaths.
For those who have already had a degenerative disease, armed with this knowledge, whenever you get a second chance, I believe you should do all we can to change the situation that led to the degenerative disease. That’s why we all should be wise and start making corrections at the onset of any problem and not wait until it becomes a full-blown disease. There is no such thing as a little bit of arthritis!
The most beneficial approach is one where all of the systems of the body are cleansed, nourished, and balanced simultaneously. In my study of degenerative disease it’s the one that makes the most sense and is the most effective.
This is a natural approach to health and disease. When you give the body what it requires health can be the only outcome. Disease is not part of the genetic code! Health is not the absence of disease, but disease is the absence of health. Think on that concept for a long while.
http://www.nutritionreallyworks.com/What-Is-Degeneration.html
 This document is supplied for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to recommend or prescribe any treatment for any condition or illness. Contact a doctor or medical professional who is trained in the use of natural nutritional supplements before adding any new protocol or when starting any health or exercise program.
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