7 Keys to UltraWellness Introduction Lesson 1: Environmental Inputs Lesson 2: Inflammation Lesson 3: Hormones Lesson 4: Gut & Digestive Health Lesson 5: Detoxification Lesson 6: Energy Lesson 7: Mind Body
Introduction: Discovering the Origin of Disease and the Source of Health... or How Your Body Really Works and How to Discover Why You are Sick and How You Can Achieve UltraWellness - January 2007 Mark Hyman, MD
“How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” T.H. Huxley's reaction to the reading of The Origin of Species
“I didn’t know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling better.”
That is what my patients tell me every day. They go from being ill, or just well to an experience of UltraWellness.
Most people don’t know how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact most of us don’t recognize that annoying symptoms of fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies, headaches, and more are simply early clues to impending disease that will disable and kill us.
Do you know that most heart disease starts in the womb, that you can detect brain changes in teenagers that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s, that blood tests in children can predict who will develop diabetes later in life, and that most cancers take over 30 years to grow to the size they can be detected? How can we address problems that we don’t even know we have?
One in three Americans has some type of chronic disease – and most of the rest of us are headed toward one. Most of us don’t feel as well as should or could if understood how to care for and feed our bodies the way they were designed.
Conventional medicine helps at the very end stage of disease. If you are very sick, have an emergency, break a bone or have a raging infection, then, yes, conventional acute care medicine is the right solution. As a former emergency room doctor and the husband of an orthopedic surgeon, I am glad we have this care when we need it.
But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt I was saving people just before (or sometimes after) they were washed DOWNSTREAM over the waterfall to their death. I began to ask what led them to this point –what happened UPSTREAM in the process of disease and illness. What were the real causes of disease? If I could answer that question, then I thought, I might be able to help prevent disease in the first place.
The early influences on my thinking - from Asian philosophy, to nutritional biochemistry, to the study of ecology and ecosystems – all helped me form a new different view of health and disease.
I am one doctor who is part of a movement that is on the leading edge of an entire shift in our scientific model of disease. It is called systems medicine or functional medicine.
It provides a way of understanding all the influences on our biology that are at the root of illness – and how our lifestyle and environment interact with our genes to create imbalance or balance that are the real determinants of disease or health.
This medical view does not reduce symptoms and diseases to their component parts and traditional specialties, but studies the entire ecology of the body and its environment.
I have practiced this model for over 12 years and seen miracle after miracle, day after day. People don’t only get relief from symptoms, they get truly well. That is why I have called this approach to health UltraWellness.
It is the answer to the crisis we find ourselves in - an increasing epidemic of chronic disease and an impending economic collapse as more of our resources are put toward caring for the chronically ill.
Today medicine is in a serious predicament. The way we understand health and disease no longer reflects biological reality, or the biological laws of nature. We need to understand that diseases are not fixed things that you catch or just show up out of context, but are related to the environment, your diet, your genes and lifestyle.
We need to understand that our body is an ecosystem and is part of a larger ecosystem – and understanding how all the parts relate and what disturbs our ecological balance is more important than naming the disease, then blaming the name for the problem and thinking a drug will fix the disease.
For example, depression does not cause depression and doesn’t just show up without cause or reason, but is related to a web of forces that we can influence and affect.
We are good at naming diseases, then blaming the name for the problem, then finding a drug that matches the name. I call this the “naming and blaming” game.
What systems medicine, functional medicine and UltraWellness is about is “thinking and linking” – seeing all the patterns and relationships that make sense of your whole story – your lifestyle, stresses, genes, environment and how they interact with your biology to create imbalances that lead to disease.
Our current way of thinking is outdated, wrong and will not help us address our declining health as individuals or a society.
That’s why we are making no progress and even backsliding when it comes to addressing chronic disease.
Let’s look at the data.
Chronic diseases affect 125 million Americans. That means in the average family of three, at least one person has a chronic disease. We are seeing an epidemic of autoimmune (24 million Americans), allergic (50 million Americans), and asthmatic (30 million Americans) diseases in this country. In addition, twenty percent of Americans (or about 60 million people) have irritable bowel syndrome.
In fact nearly every modern disease—from autoimmune diseases, to allergic diseases, to digestive problems, to heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and dementia—is increasing. One in 3 children born today will have type 2 diabetes. One in two people over 85 will develop dementia.
These problems are increasing in the population at a dramatic rate. And they affect everyone, either personally or through the suffering of someone close to them.
Every day in my office, I see patients who feel alive again after expecting to suffer their whole life from chronic problems- bad digestion, headaches, fatigue, arthritis, allergies, hormonal problems, obesity, heart disease, depression and more.
And within a few months (or even weeks), their lives open up again. This week alone, I spoke to a 27-year-old woman could not lose weight and was constantly tired, who finally effortlessly lost 20 pounds by getting treatment for her mercury toxicity.
And there was the 78 year old woman who felt she was on her way out with fatigue and memory loss and joint pains and bad digestion, who now works out every day, is full of energy. She has a whole new life by simply treating her nutritional deficiencies and helping her get back in balance.
Or the 30-year-old woman with PMS, migraines, stomachaches, acne and polycystic ovarian syndrome who is completely better after getting her system back in balance.
Or the 47-year-old woman with chronic sinus infections and fatigue who hasn’t had a problem all winter. And that was accomplished in just part of one day!
The reality is that most of us don’t know how bad we feel until we start feeling better. We accept chronic symptoms as a necessary part of life. That is just not necessary. We have solutions today that you are not hearing about.
What I have learned in the last 20 years of seeing patients, studying the scientific literature, combining my knowledge and observations with other doctors who are also practicing systems and functional medicine, and applying it in my practice, I am committed to sharing with you because it works.
It is not perfect, nor can it address 100% of health problems 100% of the time, but it is a better mousetrap!
This is the promise of UltraWellness – the opportunity to cure or dramatically improve chronic problems poorly addressed by conventional medicine, and to discover vital, vibrant good health at any age.
With my 7 Keys to UltraWellness educational lessons, I will cover each of the 7 fundamental new principles or concepts or systems that help me navigate to the underlying causes of disease and that will help you achieve UltraWellness.
These concepts are my new roadmap in the landscape of health and disease and I will share them with you so you can take advantage of them today. This is the future of medicine now and will help you transform your health, and contribute to the transformation of our sick care system to a health care system! In the first article, I will explain how everything in our environment interacts with our genes to create health or disease – our diet, nutritional status, air, water, microorganisms, exercise, trauma, psychosocial factors, environmental toxins and radiation. In the second article, I will explain how most of us have smoldering hidden inflammation that will kill you until you learn how to control it. In the third article, I will show you how your hormones and brain chemistry influence nearly every aspect of your health, why they get out of balance and how to get them back in balance. In the fourth article, I will review how your digestive system is at the core of your health, why it breaks down and how to repair it. In the fifth article, I will explain how toxins and problems with our detoxification or waste management systems lead to chronic health problems and how to optimize your detoxification system. In the sixth article, you will learn the importance of energy – how we make it, why we lose it and how to create more of it! And finally in the seventh article, we will focus on how the mind interacts with the body and the body interacts with the mind to influence and affect every other system in the body.
Remember – these are really not all separate systems. They are part of a web of function and physiology that is at the root of the way your feel, health and disease.
This revolutionary new way of thinking about health and disease will guide your toward something many of you have given up on experiencing – UltraWellness.
Once you achieve UltraWellness, you’ll never want to go back.
Lesson 1: Environmental Inputs
In our introduction, I explained how our current model of medicine ignores the real causes of disease and the source of health. Now I will review the first of the 7 roots of illness and the 7 keys to UltraWellness.
Our thinking about how we get sick is completely wrong.
You can’t “catch” disease. You can’t “get” cancer or heart disease, diabetes or dementia.
Our medical system is based on the idea that diseases just show up, like some unwanted visitor or unwelcome relative. It is something unpredictable, mysterious and we really don’t know why.
This may have seemed true 150 years ago when Lois Pasteur came up with the germ theory of disease – that there were germs out there that some people, by a stroke of bad luck, just “caught” and there was not much you could do except hope that the germ (or disease) didn’t show up on your doorstep.
We found a drug for the bug (antibiotics) – and voila – modern medicine could finally do something about disease.
So the last 70 years since the discovery of antibiotics has been a relentless search for a drug for every bug, a pill for every ill. Seems like a good idea – but it completely ignores the REAL cause of disease.
The ONLY way to get to the root of disease is to understand how YOUR environment (your diet, stress, exercise, toxins in food, air and water, radiation, and trauma) interacts with YOUR genes to determine your state of health or disease.
Your genes are fixed. You can’t change them. That is called your genotype. But which genes get turned on or off, and how that affects your physiology, you CAN change by changing those environmental inputs.
So your environment interacting with your genes creates who you are at this moment – your phenotype.
And that you CAN change!
You can move from disease to health, from illness to UltraWellness.
Every environmental input to your system --- from diet to toxins to stress -- all determine the healthiness of your biological terrain or internal milieu.
It is like the health of the soil. To have healthy plants you must have soil with the right amount of organic matter, the right pH balance, the right amount of nutrients as well as water and light and air.
We are the same – we need to have a healthy soil or terrain in order to be healthy.
In fact, Lois Pasteur on his deathbed realized this – and it is the terrain, NOT the germ, that is the most important determinant of health.
This explains why giving zinc to malnourished children in the third world can reduce death from infections by over 75% - it doesn’t stop exposure to the bugs, but zinc boosts immunity, helping the children stay healthy.
So by believing in this “germ theory” of disease, medicine has ignored one of the most important scientific ideas of the last century - that our health is determined by the interaction of our genes and our environment.
Environmental influences on our health control which genes get turned on or off, and which diseases emerge. Conversely the right inputs will create healthy patterns of biology.
In their article “Diet, Lifestyle and Longevity – The Next Steps?” in the Journal of the American Medical Association, two leading Harvard epidemiologists, Rim and Stampfer tell us that the benefits of studying and addressing fundamental dietary, lifestyle and environmental factors that influence disease is more effective and economically sound than trying to find the latest drug or surgical treatment for chronic diseases.
Although understanding of the relation of lifestyle and health outcomes will continue to be refined, information available now is sufficient to take action…a simple set of lifestyle practices that can reduce the mortality rate among elderly individuals by nearly two thirds.. As a society, the United States spends billions on chronic disease treatments and interventions for risk factors. Although these are useful and important, a fraction of that investment to promote healthful lifestyles for primary prevention among individuals at all ages would yield greater benefit.
When it comes to finding the answers to the resolving our chronic disease epidemic we do not need to look toward better medications or technological solutions, but simply to what we put in and around our bodies every day.
It will be much more effective and much cheaper. If the leading causes of death are smoking (435,000 deaths) and poor diet and lack of exercise (400,000 deaths), followed by alcohol, toxins, car accidents, sexual behaviors, and the use of illicit drugs, then that is where we should put our efforts as individuals and as a society.
So to every patient I ask detailed questions about all their environmental inputs:
What is the quality of their diet – do they have a health promoting whole foods, plant based diet, or are they eating a disease promoting SAD (Standard American Diet) that makes them malnourished and unable to self repair, regulate and heal?
What are the stressors in their lives – their relationships, work, societal pressures, family, or money?
Have they been exposed to toxins in the air, water or in food and has that disturbed the balance of their health?
Have they experienced physical trauma?
Do they misuse or under use their bodies and not provide the regular benefits of moving their bodies, stretching, and strengthening that allows their organs, joints and muscle to function as they were designed?
These are the real factors that influence and affect every system, function and process in our bodies. If we don’t deal with them directly we are just dealing with the effects – and not addressing the real causes of disease.
Getting to the root of the environmental influences on your health and your life is the beginning of the possibility of your achieving UltraWellness – something we all are capable of enjoying.
These environmental factors influence all of the core systems in the body.
Over the next 6 articles I will teach you how each of these core systems in your body holds the key to understanding why you are sick and how to navigate your way to UltraWellness.
Lesson 2: Inflammation and Immune Balance
A simple blood test can save your life.
It is called C-reactive protein.
It measures the degree of HIDDEN inflammation in your body.
It is important because almost every modern disease is caused by or affected by hidden inflammation – heart disease, cancer, obesity, and dementia – as well as things like arthritis, autoimmune disease, allergies, and digestive disorders.
If your immune system and your ability to balance the inflammatory and anti-inflammatory forces in your body are impaired, watch out. You are headed toward illness and premature aging.
But addressing the causes of inflammation and learning how to live an anti-inflammatory lifestyle can lead you to UltraWellness.
Later I will review the causes and tell you how to cool inflammation.
But first I want to help you understand more about inflammation.
Everyone who has had a sore throat, a rash, hives, or a sprained ankle knows about inflammation. Those are normal appropriate responses of our defense system to infection or trauma. We need it to survive, to help us determine friend from foe.
The trouble occurs when that defense system runs out of control, like a rebel army bent on destroying its own country. We are familiar with an overactive immune response and too much inflammation in common conditions like allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disease or asthma.
But few people know that hidden inflammation run amuck is at the root of all chronic illness we experience--things like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, dementia, depression, cancer and even autism.
A study of a generally “healthy” elderly population found that those with the highest levels of C-reactive protein and interleukin 6 (two markers of systemic inflammation) were 260% more likely to die during the next 4 years. The increase in deaths was due to both cardiovascular and other causes.
We may feel healthy, but if this inflammation is raging inside of us, then we are in trouble.
The real concern is not our acute response to injury, infection or insult, but the chronic smoldering inflammation that slowly destroys our organs, our ability for optimal functioning and leads to rapid aging.
Our common treatments such as anti-inflammatory drugs (ibuprofen or aspirin), or steroids like prednisone, though often useful for acute problems, interfere with the body’s own immune response and lead inevitably to serious and deadly side effects.
As many people die from taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen as die every year from asthma or leukemia – stopping these drugs would be the equivalent to finding the cure for asthma or leukemia.
The real effects of statin drugs like Lipitor in reducing heart disease may have nothing to do with lowering cholesterol, but to their unintended side effect of reducing inflammation.
But is that the right approach to addressing the problem? No. It is DOWNSTREAM medicine.
What is the UPSTREAM medicine point of view of thinking about inflammation?
First – identify the triggers and causes of inflammation, and then help the body’s natural immune balance reset by providing the right conditions for it to thrive.
So if inflammation and immune imbalances are at the root of most of modern disease, how do we find the causes and get the body back in balance?
Thankfully the list of things that cause inflammation is relatively short. Poor diet – mostly sugar, refined flours, processed food and inflammatory fats such as trans and saturated fats. Lack of exercise Stress Hidden or chronic infections with viruses, bacteria, yeasts or parasites Hidden allergens from food or the environment Toxins such as mercury and pesticides Mold toxins and allergens
My job is to find those inflammatory factors unique to each person, to see how various lifestyle, environment or infectious factors spin the immune system out of control leading to a host of chronic illnesses.
Carefully listening to a person’s story and a few specific tests help me find the cause in most people. I explain more about this in my books and audio programs.
It is important to understand that this concept of inflammation is not specific to any one organ or medical specialty. In fact, if you read a medical journal from any of the specialties you will find endless articles about how inflammation is at the root of problems with their organ.
The problem is there is almost no communication between specialties and everyone who is treating the downstream effects of inflammation, when addressing the cause could help people with multiple problems that are really linked together by inflammation.
Take for example, a man who came to see me who wanted to climb a mountain and asked for my help to get healthy. He was 57 years old and on about 15 medications for about 5 different inflammatory conditions – high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, colitis, reflux, asthma, and an autoimmune disease of his hair follicles called alopecia.
I asked him how he felt and he said great. I said, I am surprised because I see you are on so many medications.
Yes, he said, but everything was very well controlled with the latest medication given by the top specialists he saw in every field – the lung doctor for his asthma, the gastroenterologist for his colitis and reflux, the cardiologist for his high blood pressure, the endocrinologist for his pre-diabetes, the dermatologist for his hair loss.
I asked him with all these top specialists he saw, did anyone ask him why he had 5 different inflammatory diseases and why his immune system was so pissed off. Was it just bad luck that he “got” all these diseases or was there something connecting all these problems?
He looked puzzled and said no.
I then search for and found the cause of his problems – gluten. He had celiac disease, an autoimmune disease related to eating gluten – the protein found in wheat, barley, rye, spelt and oats.
Six months later he came back, had lost 25 pounds, had no more high blood pressure, asthma, reflux or colitis and said he had normal bowel movements for the first time in his life. And even his hair was growing back. And he was off nearly all his medications.
OK, so once you have figured out the cause, gotten rid of it, how do you live an anti-inflammatory lifestyle.
Here is what I recommend – disarmingly simple, but an extraordinarily effective way to achieve UltraWellness. Eat a whole foods, high fiber, plant based diet which is inherently anti-inflammatory – that means unprocessed, unrefined, real food – no things full of sugar, trans fats and low in powerful anti-inflammatory plant chemicals called phytonutrients. Get an oil change – eat healthy fats from olive oil, nuts, avocadoes and omega 3 fats from small fish like sardines, herring, sable, and wild salmon. Exercise. Do I need to say more? Learn to actively relax to engage your vagus nerve – the powerful nerve that relaxes your whole body and lowers inflammation by doing yoga, meditation, deep breathing or even taking a hot bath. If you have food allergies, find out what they are and get stop eating them. Take probiotics to help your digestion to improve the healthy bacteria in your gut, which reduces inflammation. Take a multi-vitamin and mineral which helps reduce inflammation.
Taking a comprehensive approach to inflammation and balancing your immune system is importance to help address one of the most important core systems of the body.
The future of medicine may no longer have specialties like cardiology or neurology or gastroenterology, but new specialists like “inflammaologists”.
But by understanding these concepts and these core systems that are the basis of UltraWellness, you don’t have to wait.
In the next lesson I will cover how hormones out of balance make us sick and how to get them back in balance.
Lesson 3: Hormones / Neurotransmitters Do you feel your life is a bad song played out of tune? Does your mood and energy swing up and down making your life crazy? Do you crave sugar or salt? Are you overweight and putting on more and more belly fat? If you are a woman do you have premenstrual syndrome, painful or heavy periods and low sex drive? Are you depressed? Do you sleep poorly? Do you feel tired but wired? Do you have to live on coffee in the morning and a few glasses of wine at night just to wake up and calm down every day?
If you do, you are not alone. In fact this is how most American’s feel because we are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms. This is because small molecules in our body, which we depend on to keep us in balance, are running haywire.
These messenger molecules are involved in almost every function of the body in one way or another, and they are critical to our well being.
They are our hormones-messenger molecules of our endocrine system, and neurotransmitters – messenger molecules of our brain and nervous system.
Understand how and why these systems get out of balance and you will go a long way toward understanding why Americans run around tired, depressed, and overweight!
Our hormone and neurotransmitter system is another one of the core systems of the body we must address to achieve UltraWellness.
I will explain why these systems get out of balance and how to get them back in balance a little later, but first let me review how they work and why so many of you may feel miserable.
All of our hormones and brain messenger chemicals work together in a symphony.
The command and control center for all our endocrine glands is in our brain – the hypothalamus and pituitary glands – and they send signals to distant parts of the body to control everything from our stress response through our adrenal glands, our blood sugar balance through our pancreas, our thyroid hormone via our thyroid gland, our sexual behavior and function through our reproductive organs. They also control growth, sleep, mood and much more.
They are like a finely orchestrated symphony that must work together to keep every thing in balance.
The brain chemicals or neurotransmitters send messages throughout the body to every cell, organ and tissue helping you do everything from move your arm to feel happy or sad. This is such a big subject, my next book is devoted to this – how our body affects our mind and our mind affects our body.
Then there are the three big epidemics of hormonal problems in American today – too much insulin (from sugar), too much cortisol and adrenalin (from stress), and not enough thyroid. While I will cover all of these over time, today I want to focus on the biggest of these – too much insulin.
Let me tell you a story of a man who came to me whose story may be all to familiar to you – and which can have a happy ending for all of you.
James was a 46-year-old Wall Street executive who came to me for a cardiac stress test. He was a hard driving; don’t-look-up type of guy who was convinced he was dying of heart disease.
Every day, sometime in the late afternoon, he would experience the sudden onset of sweating, a racing heart, anxiety, shortness of breath; in other words, he thought he was going to die!
He was thick around the middle and after listening to his story and taking one look at him, I said, “You don’t eat breakfast do you?”
“And you feel tired after eating so that is why you skip food during the day – to keep sharp for work, and when you feel like that you go for the vending machine or a soda and get a quick sugar fix and in a few minutes you feel better.”
Shocked, he said, “How did you know?”
I explained to him that he was fighting with his genes and was insulin resistant, leading to wide swings in blood sugar and low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) that was responsible for his symptoms.
In other words, his hormones were severely out of balance.
He couldn’t control his metabolism of carbohydrates because of too much insulin so his blood sugar was out of balance, leading to all his symptoms – and taking him down the slippery road toward high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, cancer, brain aging, dementia and more.
He is not alone.
80 million Americans suffer from this condition we call insulin resistance. It affects many varieties of people and is not exactly the same in everyone, but the ultimate consequences can be similar.
Most afflicted have extra fat around the middle (check your waist to hip ratio – a measurement around your belly button divided by the measurement around the hips – if it is greater than 0.8 you likely have insulin resistance).
You may be tall or thin, short or fat or any combination and still have insulin resistance.
The only sure way to know is with an insulin response test (measuring blood sugar and insulin fasting and 1 and 2 hours after a 75-gram sugar drink).
It is not a genetic defect, or an error in our development, or a mistake by God; it is the simple fact that we have strayed from eating in harmony with our genes. In other words, we do not fit into our genes.
Historically we ate the equivalent of only 20 teaspoons of sugar a year as a hunter/gatherer species, now we eat 150lbs per year per person, or about 1/2 pound each day. The average schoolboy has 34 teaspoons of sugar a day.
We evolved in a world without super grocery stores, convenience stores, and fast food restaurants. We had to work for our food and had limited access to refined foods or excess calories. In fact, our genes are pre-agricultural. We only started farming 10,000 years ago and only started refining flour about 200 years ago with the advent of the steam engine-powered flourmill.
With the advent of 15,000 low-fat foods (a/k/a high-sugar, high-calorie foods) on the market over the last 15-20 years, we have created an epidemic of increasing obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The scientific foundation for the low-fat movement was shaky from the start. Madison Avenue got ahead of medical science to the detriment of us all.
Our bodies normally produce insulin in response to food in our stomach, particularly sugar.
We once thought that insulin’s only role was to help the sugar enter the cells to be metabolized, transforming the stored energy of the sun (in plant foods) with the oxygen we breathe into the energy we use every day to run our bodies.
Here is what too much insulin really does to your body and health: Now we recognize insulin as a major switching station, or control hormone, for many processes. It is a major storage hormone – fat storage that is. Try as you may, as long as your insulin levels are high you will fight a losing battle for weight loss. It acts on your brain to increase appetite and specifically an appetite for sugar. It increases LDL cholesterol, lowers HDL cholesterol, raises triglycerides and increases your blood pressure. Insulin resistance causes 50% of all reported cases of high blood pressure. It makes your blood sticky and more likely to clot, leading to heart attacks and strokes. It stimulates the growth of cancer cells. It increases inflammation and oxidative stress and ages your brain. It even increases homocysteine because sugar consumption decreases B6 and folate. It also causes sex hormone problems and can lead to infertility, hair growth where you don’t want it, hair loss where you don’t want to lose it, acne, and low testosterone in men and more. It also leads to mood disturbances.
Balancing blood sugar and correcting insulin resistance is well within our reach.
Scientific advances of the last few decades point the way to managing this.
While there are some new medications that can help such as Glucophage, Avandia and Actos, they have side effects and are only a band-aid unless used with a comprehensive nutritional, exercise and stress management plan I describe in a moment.
My goal is to make your metabolism more efficient, to make your cells more intelligent and cooperative, not resistant. In other words, you will need much less insulin to accomplish the task of balancing your blood sugar.
While I want to tell you how to balance your stress hormones, thyroid function and all your sex hormones, and all your brain and mood chemicals that will take a few more lessons!
For now I want to show you how you can reset your metabolism of sugar and insulin by stopping the things that knock you off balance, and providing the things that put you balance in balance allowing you to thrive.
Here is what to do: Stop eating flour and sugar products, especially high fructose corn syrup. Don’t have liquid calories – your body doesn’t feel full from them so you eat more all day! Stop all processed, junk or packaged foods. If it doesn’t look like the food your great-great-great grandmother ate, then stay away. Stop eating trans or hydrogenated fats. Slow the rate of sugar uptake from the gut through balancing your meals (low glycemic load) with healthy protein (nuts, seeds, beans, small wild fish, organic chicken), healthy carbs (vegetables, fruit, beans, whole grains) and healthy fats (olive oil, nuts and seeds, avocadoes, fish oil) Rough it up: eat plenty of soluble fiber (30-50 grams a day) Eat smaller more frequent meals Get an oil change: Make your cells smarter by giving them an oil change with omega-3 fats – fixing the cell membranes so that they can more readily receive the messages from insulin. Move your body: exercise improves your cells ability to work better, respond to insulin better and burn sugar faster. Relax! Stress reduction also helps improved blood sugar control! Make your cells smarter through increasing specific nutrients such as chromium, vanadium, magnesium, vitamin E, biotin, the B vitamins, zinc, bioflavinoids and some newer compounds including alpha lipoic acid, arginine, and carnitine. Herbs may also be of benefit including Panax ginseng, ginkgo biloba, green tea, fenugreek and gymnena sylvestre, bitter melon and garlic.
Just balancing this one hormone – insulin – can have wide-ranging effects on all your other hormones and brain chemicals – so just start there.
UltraWellness is something you don’t have to wait for.
Read on, in the next lesson I explain why your gut is the foundation for your health.
Lesson 4: Gut & Digestive Health
Is something wrong with your inner tube?
The inner tube of life that is – your digestive system!
It is likely that you suffer from (or have suffered from) some type of digestive disorder – irritable bowel, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, heartburn, reflux, gas, and things too gross to mention in print.
And you are not alone – over 100 million Americans have digestive problems.
The number 3 and 7 top selling drugs in America are for digestive problems costing us billions and billions of dollars.
There are more than 200 over-the-counter (OTC) remedies for digestive disorders, many of which – most unfortunately – can create additional digestive problems.
Visits for intestinal disorders are among the most common to primary care physicians.
And that’s not even the worst news.
Most of us do not recognize or know (including most of your doctors) that digestive problems wreak havoc over your entire body leading to allergies, arthritis, autoimmune disease, rashes, acne, chronic fatigue, mood disorders, autism, dementia, cancer and more.
So having a healthy gut means more to you than just not being annoyed by a little bloating or heartburn! It is central to your entire health. It is connected to everything that happens in your body.
That’s why I almost always start helping people treat chronic health problems by fixing their gut. Later I will tell you how to find out if you have a problem with your gut (though many of you won’t need me to tell you – your gut will speak for itself), and how to create a healthy digestive system.
First let me explain why is your gut is so important?
The health of your gut determines what nutrients are absorbed and what toxins, allergens and microbes are kept out, and therefore it is directly linked to the health of the total organism.
Intestinal health could be defined as the optimal digestion, absorption and assimilation of food. But that is a big job that depends on many other factors.
For example….
The bugs in your gut are like a rainforest – a diverse and interdependent ecosystem. They must be in balance for you to be healthy.
The 500 species and 3 pounds of bacteria in your gut are a huge chemical factory that helps you digest your food, produces vitamins, helps regulate hormones, excrete toxins and produce healing compounds that keep your gut healthy.
Too many of the wrong ones like parasites, or yeasts or bad bacteria, or not enough of the good ones like lactobacillus or bifidobacteria can lead to serious damage to your health.
Your entire immune system and your body is protected from the toxic environment in the gut by only a ONE cell thick layer that covers a surface area the size of a tennis court covered with a sewer!
If that barrier is damaged, you will get sick and create an overactive immune system producing inflammation throughout the body.
And then there is your second brain – your gut nervous system. Your gut, in fact, contains more neurotransmitters that your brain. It is highly wired back to your brain and messages travel back and forth. When those messages altered for any reason in any direction – from the brain to the gut or the gut to the brain – your health will suffer.
Then, of course, your gut has to get rid of all the toxins produced as a byproduct of your metabolism that your liver dumps in through the bile, and if things get backed up, you will become toxic.
And in the midst of all of this, your gut must break down all the food you eat into its individual components, separate out all the vitamins and minerals and shuttle everything across that one cell thick layer into your bloodstream for you to stay healthy.
Even in perfect world our gut has a hard time keeping things balanced. But in our world there are many things that knock our digestive system off balance.
What are they? Our low fiber, high sugar, processed food, nutrient poor, high calorie diet that makes all the wrong bacteria and yeast grow in the gut leading to a damaged ecosystem. Overuse of medications that damage the gut or block normal digestive function – things like anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, acid blocking drugs, steroids. Chronic low grade infections or gut imbalances with overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine, or yeast overgrowth or parasites, or even more serious gut infections. Toxins damage the gut such as mercury and mold toxins. Lack of adequate digestive enzyme function – which can come from acid blocking medication use, or zinc deficiency. Stress can alter the gut nervous system causing a leaky gut and change the normal bacteria in the gut.
It is so important to understand that so many disease that seem to be totally unrelated to the gut – such as eczcema or psoriasis or arthritis are actually CAUSED by gut problems and by focusing on the gut you can get better.
One of my patients who suffered from eczema – a wheeping, red, oozing, scaly, itchy rash all over her body is perfect example of someone who saw doctor after doctor who put salves, lotions and potions on her skin and gave her steroids and antibiotics and never addressed the underlying cause of her problem.
This 57-year-old woman had severe, unrelenting eczema for 8 years. She ate a high sugar diet, and had a history of frequent vaginal yeast infections.
When I saw her, I check her gut – and found she had a leaky gut – the barrier was not working and she developed 24 IgG food allergies, and her stool had no healthy bacteria and an overgrowth of yeast. She also had very high blood antibodies against yeast.
So I just helped her gut improve by having her stop eating the foods she reacted to, told her to stop feeding the yeast by cutting out sugar and refined carbohydrates (which they thrive on) and killing the yeast in her gut with antifungal medications and herbs. Then I put back in healthy bacteria, and healing gut nutrients and her eczema disappeared for the first time in 8 years and stayed away!
So how do you keep your gut healthy? Eat whole unprocessed foods with plenty of fiber – vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Eat real food, mostly plants – as Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma so simply put it. If you think you have food sensitivities – try an elimination diet – cut out gluten, dairy, yeast, corn, soy and eggs for a week or two and see how your gut feels and what happens to your other symptoms. Treat any infections or overgrowth of bugs like parasites, small bowel bacteria or yeasts. Take digestive enzymes with your food. Take probiotics -healthy bacteria for your ecosystem. Take extra omega 3 fat supplements, which help cool inflammation in the gut. Use gut-healing nutrients such as glutamine and zinc.
This subject is so important and so ignored by medicine, that I have given you a list of scientific references that underscore the importance of this topic.
So if you want to be UltraWell, you have to get your gut working properly.
Next lesson I will help you understand why we are all so toxic and why learning to detoxify is central to creating UltraWellness.
Lesson 5: Detoxification
Why you are a toxic waste dump…. And what you can do about it!
In the last lesson you learned how why the digestive system is so important to creating UltraWellness.
The next step to UltraWellness is learning how to optimize your detoxification system.
The role of toxins and detoxification in health is ignored by medicine. Thankfully scientists and practitioners are starting to recognize its importance in health.
Last year I spoke at the 13th International Symposium on Functional Medicine on detoxification called Managing Biotransformation: The Metabolic, Genomic and Detoxification Balance Points. Leading experts from all over the globe came together to present the data on the role of toxins in health and how we can detoxify.
The entire proceedings and papers presented at this conference is available in the journal I edit called Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (March/April 2007). If you want all the scientific background (and there is more than you want to know), then read this.
But how do you know if you are toxic?
Many of you probably have symptoms of chronic toxicity that you don’t label as being toxic. Here is a list, and if any of these sound familiar, keep in mind that detoxifying might be critical for you to get healthy and feel good again. Fatigue Muscle aches Joint pain Sinus congestion Postnasal drip Excessive sinus problems Headaches Bloating Gas Constipation Diarrhea Foul-smelling stools Heartburn Sleep problems Difficulty concentrating Food cravings Water retention Trouble losing weight Rashes Skin problems Eczema Psoriasis Canker sores Acne Puffy, dark circles under your eyes Premenstrual syndrome Other menstrual disorders Bad breath
When you hear the word “detox” you might think drug detox or alcohol detox or wheatgrass enemas. That’s not what I am talking about.
I am referring to the science of how our bodies get rid of waste. If waste builds up, we get sick. And the key is to figure out how to enhance our body’s capacity to detoxify and get rid of waste while minimizing our exposure to toxins.
And why is this important?
It’s because many diseases of our society are actually related to toxicity. Here are some of the diseases that are linked to toxicity: Parkinson’s Alzheimer’s Dementia Heart disease Chronic fatigue syndrome Fibromyalgia syndrome Cancers Autoimmune diseases Food allergies Arthritis Digestive diseases, like Crohn’s disease, ulcers, colitis, inflammatory bowel Menstrual problems like heavy bleeding, cramps, PMS, menopausal symptoms, mood changes and hot flashes
It might seem that everyone is toxic. That may be true to differing degrees.
Problems with detoxification is one of the roots of illness and one of the core systems in the body that must be working well for you to be healthy. If you feel lousy, it’s likely you’re toxic.
If you answer yes to any of these questions you may be toxic. I have hard, difficult to pass movements every day or every other day I am constipated and only go every other day or less often I urinate small amounts of dark, strong smelling urine only a few times a day I almost never break a real sweat I have one or more of the following symptoms: fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, concentration and memory problems I have Fibromyalgia or Chronic fatigue syndrome I drink tap or well water I dry clean my clothes I work or live in a “tight” building with poor ventilation or windows that don’t open I live in a large urban or industrial area I use household or lawn garden chemicals or get my house or apartment treated for bugs by an exterminator I have more than 1-2 mercury amalgams I eat large fish (swordfish, tuna, shark, tilefish) more than once a week I am bothered by one or more of the following: Gasoline or diesel fumes, perfumes, new car smells, fabric stores, dry cleaning, hair spray or other strong odors, soaps, detergents, tobacco smoke, chlorinated water I have a negative reaction when I consume foods containing MSG, sulfites (wine, salad bars, dried fruit), sodium benzoate (preservative), red wine, cheese, bananas or chocolate, even a small amount of alcohol, eating food with garlic and onions When I drink coffee or caffeine containing substances I feel wired up, an increase in joint and muscle aching or have hypoglycemic symptoms (anxiety, palpitations, sweating, dizziness) I regularly consume any of the following substances or medications: acetaminophen (Tylenol), acid blocking drugs (Tagamet, Zantac, Pepcid, Prilosec, Prevacid), hormone modulating medications in pills, patches or creams (the pill, estrogen, progesterone, prostate medication), ibuprofen or naproxen, medications for Colitis or Crohn's disease, recurrent headaches, allergy symptoms, nausea, diarrhea or indigestion I have had jaundice (turning yellow) for any reason or I have been told I have Gilbert’s syndrome (an elevation of a liver test called bilirubin) I have a history of any of the following conditions: Breast cancer, smoking induced lung cancer, other type of cancer, prostate problems, food allergies, sensitivities or intolerances I have a family history of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or other motor neuron diseases, or multiple sclerosis
It is important to understand why we are toxic and how we can detoxify. I will explain how you can detoxify a little later, but first I want to tell you about where toxins come from and how we are overloaded.
To understand toxicity you must understand the concept of total load.
This is a total amount of stressors on your system at any one time and what happens like glass filling over with water. It takes a certain amount to fill the glass and then, after a certain point, you put more in and it overflows.
When our detoxification system is overwhelmed, is overloaded, that’s when we start getting symptoms and get sick, but it may take years of accumulated stress and toxins to get to that point. The total load includes the load of things like heavy metals, mercury and lead, petrochemicals, residues, pesticides and fertilizers. It includes food allergies, environmental allergies, molds and toxins from molds. It includes a SAD (standard American diet) diet. It includes stress -- the mental, emotional and spiritual toxins that affect us, the isolation, the loneliness, the anger, the jealousy, hostility, which all translate into toxins in our system. Medications can sometimes be toxins. Often we need medications, but the reality is that most of us are overmedicated and use medications for things for which there are better solutions such as lifestyle and diet. Lastly, there are internal toxins, things like bacteria, fungus, yeast, that are inside our gut that may be affecting us, as well as hormonal and metabolic toxins that we need to eliminate.
Now why aren’t we all sick given this incredible load of toxins?
It is because each of us is genetically and biochemically unique. Some of us are good at getting rid of toxins and waste, and others are not.
I am not. That is why I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
I became overloaded with mercury and I couldn’t get rid of it because I am missing a gene for GSTM1 – a critical detoxifying enzyme for mercury. But by learning to support my system and learning how to detoxify I was able to cure myself from an incurable condition.
There are five key steps to optimal detoxification. I outline all these in my Detox Box.
Here they are: Step One: Identify and Get Rid of Toxins Step Two: Fix Your Gut – a source of toxic load for many Step Three: Get Moving – to help your blood and lymphatic circulation do its job Step Four: Get Your Liver and Detox System Working Step Five: Detox your mind, heart and spirit
But let me make it more practical for you. I can summarize them into ten basic principles of healthy detoxification.
Here they are: Drink plenty of clean water, at least eight to ten glasses of filtered water a day. Keep your bowels moving, at least once or twice a day. And if you can’t get going, then you need some help and this can include taking two tablespoons of ground flax seeds, taking acidophilus and extra magnesium capsules in the form of magnesium citrate. If you have any chronic diseases or problems you have to be careful about taking supplements, you should work with your doctor. You should also eat organic produce and animal products to eliminate the toxins in our food. You should eat eight to ten servings of colorful fruits and vegetables and specifically include, every day, the family of the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, collards, kale, cabbage, Brussel sprouts, kohlrabi, as well as the garlic family, garlic and onions, which help increase sulfur in the body and help detoxification. Avoid stimulants, sedatives and drugs, such as caffeine, nicotine, and try to reduce alcohol intake. Exercise five days a week with focus on conditioning of your cardiovascular system, strengthening exercises and stretching exercises. Get rid of the white menace, which is white flour and white sugar. Sweat profusely at least three times a week, using a sauna, steam or a detox bath. Take a high-quality multivitamin and mineral. Relax deeply every day, to get your nervous system in a state of calm, rest and relaxation.
The comprehensive program outlined here will help to correct problems caused by toxicity, maximize your body’s own detoxification capacity, and help you safely eliminate stored toxins.
Depending on your symptoms, genetic predispositions and environmental exposures, you each may need different levels of nutrients and types of treatment.
But remember, getting rid of toxins and learning how to optimize your detoxification system is essential for creating UltraWellness.
Next lesson, I will explain why creating energy is something many of us have trouble with – and how to boost your energy metabolism!
Lesson 6: Energy / Mitochondria / Oxidative Stress
In the last lesson we reviewed the importance of optimal detoxification for UltraWellness.
Next we will review how you can turn up your metabolic engine and boost your energy.
Are you tired and worn out?
Do you feel burned out and have sore muscles, fatigue and brain fog?
You might have metabolic burnout!
Imagine if you could find a way to tune up your metabolism, to increase the amount of energy you have, to be able to think clearly and feel less achy!
Imagine if you could prevent diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s and dementia. Imagine if you could heal fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Imagine if you could get to the root of aging and slow the whole process down and eliminate most of the age related diseases.
All that is possible by giving yourself a metabolic makeover; a metabolic tune up.
You might have heard of the rats fed high doses of resveratrol, the red phytonutrient found in red wine. They lived 30% longer while eating a bad diet.
In fact they even became fitter and lost weight without changing their diet and eating the equivalent of the standard American poor quality diet.
How could they eat more, eat bad food, not exercise, become fitter AND live 30% longer than the average rat?
One word.
MITOCHONDRIA.
The resveratrol protected and improved the function of the mitochondria through its effects on special master aging genes.
OK, so what are mitochondria and what do they have to do with having more energy, losing weight and living to 120 years old without any disease?
It is a little tiny factory that turns food and oxygen into energy. In each cell there are hundreds to thousands of these little energy factories. They exist in greater amounts in active organs and tissues, like the muscles, heart and brain.
It is THE place where your metabolism is happening.
The role of your metabolism is to take the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat and process it to make energy, the fuel for life. (The fuel for your car is called gas. The fuel for your body is called ATP and it is produced from the combustion of food and oxygen.)
The place where we burn the oxygen and the food is in the mitochondria, the little factories in our cells that make energy for running everything in our body.
When they are not working properly, you suffer all the symptoms of low energy – fatigue, memory loss, pain, rapid aging and more.
Along the way, many things can go wrong that may impede your metabolism, make it run less efficiently, or practically shut it down.
Fatigue is the most common symptom of poorly functioning mitochondria. We need to keep them in top shape. The reason we poop out as we age is the constant insult and injury we give our mitochondria.
We have over 100,000 trillion of these powerhouses in our body, and each one contains 17,000 little assembly lines for making ATP, our major fuel.
They use over 90% of the oxygen we breathe.
They take up 40% of the space inside the heart cells. The only problem is they are very sensitive to damage.
And the injury is from uncontrolled oxidative stress, which results from toxic insults, infections, allergens, stress and just eating too much poor quality food.
Dr. Bruce Ames, the renowned scientist from the University of California at Berkeley, (www.bruceames.com) has spent the last decade discovering how we can give ourselves a metabolic tune up.
In one study he gave old rats who were tired, wouldn’t get on the treadmill anymore, and couldn’t find the cheese in the maze, or swim very far, two molecules that boost metabolism, that make the mitochondria run better.
They are alpha lipoic acid and acetyl-L-carnitine.
Overnight these rats became young rats. They got up on the treadmill themselves, swam long distances without fatiguing and could easily find the cheese in the maze like young healthy rats.
How could that happen?
Well, he simply gave the cells the raw materials they need for optimal function. As we age, our metabolism burns out from a lifetime of damage and insults.
So again, the way to get healthy, the way to UltraWellness is very simple.
Ultimately the goal of UltraWellness is to give everyone a metabolic tune up.
First, find the things that damage your metabolism and mitochondria.
And second, give your body the things that help the mitochondria function optimally.
What damages the mitochondria?
Well, these little energy factories are sensitive to insults. They are not well protected and easily damaged by toxins, infections, allergens, and stress.
But the biggest insult over time is eating too much food, too many “empty calories”.
When the food is burned or metabolized with oxygen in the mitochondria, waste is produced in the form of free radicals that create a chain reaction of rusting or oxidation.
Unless we have enough antioxidants in our diet or we make enough in our body, we can’t protect ourselves from the damage to our mitochondria.
So when we eat empty calories, meaning sugar, flour and processed foods that don’t have the antioxidant levels of colorful plant foods like fruits and vegetables, we produce too many free radicals that destroy our mitochondria and produce fatigue, metabolic burnout and all the diseases of aging.
Imagine that a slow, progressive process of deterioration that contributes to, or is the cause of, practically every known disease is occurring inside of you at this very moment.
It is the result of dietary choices, lifestyle habits, stress and environmental exposures.
Imagine also that you have the antidote.
This process of deterioration is called oxidative stress.
It is part of the inevitable entropy, or chaotic breakdown, that is the basic principle of life, like an orderly house that inevitably becomes disorganized, requiring regular attention.
We are familiar with the process – it is the rust on our car, the brown color that appears on an apple when opened and exposed to air, and the rancid vegetable oil in our cupboard, even the wrinkles that form on our skin and sunburn.
What we don’t realize is that our own tissues are rusting, our own fats are going rancid, and our brains are melting as we go about our daily life.
What starts this process is some insult – too many calories, smoking, a sunburn, exposure to toxins, anti-nutrients, sugar, and more – that tips the balance starting a chain reaction of cellular and tissue damage.
The good news is we have a built-in anti-rusting system and mitochondrial protection system, but it is overwhelmed by the work we ask of it. Like all the systems in the body, the problems arise when we are out of balance.
The system is called the REDOX system, after the chemical process of REDuction and OXidation.
Reduction is the neutralization of damage from oxidation or rusting.
11 November 2009, Pasay City – The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Literary Arts Division will launch Ani 35, The Pinoy as Asian issue, on November 26, 2009, 6:00 p.m., at the CCP Ramp with some of the featured authors reading from their works.
“Ani 35 is devoted to writings by Filipinos on their interaction with other Asian peoples and cultures. This may be interpreted as a response to the call of Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, National Artist, on the need to reconnect with Southeast Asian literary tradition if we are to survive in this age of globalization,” Herminio S. Beltran, Jr., Literary Arts Division chief and editor of the publication, wrote in the Introduction. “We hope this will inspire the birthing of mechanisms and eventually practices in the Philippine literary/publishing world that will start off a more dynamic interaction among Filipino writers and their counterparts in the Asian continent,” Beltran continued.
Ani 35 features 54 authors who contributed for three sections: poetry; prose (essay and fiction) based on the The Pinoy as Asian theme and; Malayang Haraya for poetry and prose contributions outside the theme.
The 54 authors included in Ani 35 are Mark Angeles, Lilia F. Antonio, G. Mae Aquino, Genevieve L. Asenjo, Abdon M. Balde, Jr., Janet Tauro Batuigas, Gil Beltran, Herminio S. Beltran, Jr., Kristoffer Berse, Jaime Jesus Borlagdan, Raymond Calbay, Catherine Candano, Nonon V. Carandang, Christoffer Mitch Cerda, Joey Stephanie Chua, Kristian S. Cordero, Genaro R. Gojo Cruz, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana, Arvin Tiong Ello, Dennis Espada, Rogerick Fontanilla Fernandez, Reparado Galos III, Dr. Luis Gatmaitan, Joscephine Gomez, Malou Jacob, Ferdinand Pisigan Jarin, Karla Javier, Phillip Kimpo, Jr., Ed Nelson R. Labao, Gexter Ocampo Lacambra, Erwin C. Lareza, Jeffrey A. Lubang, Glenn Sevilla Mas, Perry C. Mangilaya, Noahlyn Maranan, Francisco Arias Monteseña, Ruth V. Mostrales, Victor Emmanuel Nadera, Jose Velando Ogatis-I, Wilhelmina S. Orozco, H. Francisco V. Peñones, Jr., Scott Magkachi Sabóy, Judith Balares Salamat, Edgar Calabia Samar, Louie Jon A. Sanchez, Soliman Agulto Santos, Dinah Roma-Sianturi, Rakki E. Sison-Buban, Jason Tabinas, Vincent Lester G. Tan, Dolores R. Taylan, Rosario Torres-Yu, Betty Uy-Regala, and Camilo M. Villanueva, Jr.
For issues of Ani, please contact the CCP Marketing Department at 551-7930 or 832-11-25 locals 1800 to 1808. For authors who want to contribute for the next issue of Ani, please contact the CCP Literary Arts Division at 832-11-25 locals 1706 and 1707, or email aniyearbook@yahoo.com.
UPDATE: Veteran British actress Julie Walters won Best Actress (story here). Pero kahit na. To be one of the nominees is already an achievement. Galingan pa sa pag-arte!
There is a buzz about what Angel Locsin wore at the Emmy's. Bjork again?
Charles Dickens' timeless tale of an old
miser who must face Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet-to-Come
as rein-visioned by Robert Zemeckis and staring Jim Carrey.
Natutuwa ako para kay Mark Angeles na nagbebenta na ng kaniyang Patikim. Matagal na sanang nailabas ang libro niyang ito kung hindi lang nagkaproblema sa gustong mag-publish. After too much time contemplating, siya na mismo ang nag-publish ng kaniyang akda. Ngayon nga ay nagbebenta na siya, me kaakibat pang good cause.
Sa ngayon ay nawiwindang ako sa pag-aayos/pagbubuo ng manuskritong ipapakatay ipapabasa sa ilang miyembro ng Pinoypoets (pramis, nothing new grand sa manuskritong ito). Dagdag pa dito ang pustahan namin ni Xam na gumawa ng sampung bagong tula para sa taong ito. Ang matatalo ay manlilibre sa grupo. Gayong nakatutuwa na tapos ko ng bunuin ang sampung bagong tula na ito (yehey! yehey!), iilan lang ang maisasama kong mga tula sa binubuo kong koleksyon.
Hay hay sidhay. Napapalibutan na nga ako ng mga librong binabasa. Hindi ko na sila naibabalik sa kanilang maayos na pagkakasalansan. Parang Smokey Mountain ng mga libro ang kuwarto ko.
***
Noon sa lilim nito tayo madalas maglaro Lagi kang gumuguhit ng mga taong may malalapad na pakpak Hindi mga anghel Mga taong uwak
***
Ano ang pangalan ng pighati?
***
Ikinalulungkot kong sabihin na wala na, sinukuan na kita. Hindi mo man lang ako napapanaginipan.
Madalas mo man akong banggitin, subalit hungkag ang iyong inilalaan na kahulugan.
Unti-unti akong naglalandas palabas ng iyong kamalayan, hindi mo man lang namalayan.
Sapagkat inaakala mong napupuspos ang iyong labi ng kahiwagaan, hindi mo na pinangalanan akong nananalig sa iyo tuwina.
(CNN) -- Efren Peñaflorida, who started a "pushcart classroom" in the Philippines to bring education to poor children as an alternative to gang membership, has been named the 2009 CNN Hero of the Year. More here.
"Our planet is filled with heroes, young and old, rich and poor, man, woman of different colors, shapes and sizes. We are one great tapestry. Each person has a hidden hero within, you just have to look inside you and search it in your heart, and be the hero to the next one in need.
"So to each and every person inside in this theater and for those who are watching at home, the hero in you is waiting to be unleashed. Serve, serve well, serve others above yourself and be happy to serve. As I always tell to my co-volunteers ... you are the change that you dream as I am the change that I dream and collectively we are the change that this world needs to be. Mabuhay!"
About the group he started
Dynamic Teen Company (DTC) is a group of concerned young people with a mission of making a small yet significant difference in other people’s lives, particularly the small children in slum areas who have no access to education, basic hygiene and sometimes, even love from their families. The group was founded in August 1997 by four teenagers from Cavite National High School. The initial group made up of around 20 members started as a friendship club which aimed to divert the attention of students from joining violent gangs and notorious fraternities that were thriving on the campus. Their major platform then was to cater youth awareness projects, talent and self development activities, and community services. Today, the group holds different activities to address these issues.
Accomplishments
The fruits of their labor are slowly being reaped as former drug users and petty thieves who were reformed through their projects are now also serving as volunteers. Former scavengers are now in school and are helping to raise funds. Some of the children who remain unschooled are now able to read and write. DTC was able to reach thousands of children through their Mind Your Rights (MY RIGHTS) campaign and through their health-literacy work.
In 2007, they launched the “WE ARE THE CHANGE” campaign to inspire people to be the catalyst for change – in what they want to see in their home, community and the world we live in. For they believe that real change happens when we begin to touch one soul and change one heart at a time.
*Lifted from their official website. Know more about this amazing group here.
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