Chemical to Physical (exercise)
Some foods and chemicals we ingest even have a negative effect on our ability to exercise in order to remain healthy. The body treats white refined sugar as a stress, and our body responds to it with the stress adrenaline response previously described. Sustained ingestion of white refined sugar, then, can produce the symptoms of fatigue, sluggishness, and chronic tiredness. Needless to say, anyone feeling this way will not feel motivated to exercise much. So ingesting something that depletes your body of natural vitamins may cause a stress reaction, which results in altered blood flow to organs and can lead to chronic tiredness. It eventually stores in the body as fat, increasing blood pressure and the heart’s workload. One can see that what we eat not only affects our ability to exercise, but can also affect our total health = wholeness.
This is also true with dietary animal fat which, when consumed, slows blood circulation, causes potential blockages of small blood vessels, and can reduce the amount of circulating oxygen in the blood. Again, with lack of circulation, sluggishness leads to tiredness, which leads to no desire to exercise.
Many other chemicals and additives have a similar effect on the body. Caffeine, also a stimulant drug, causes a temporary increase in the activity of bodily systems until the adrenaline cycle is depleted; sluggishness and fatigue follow this cycle, creating the need for more caffeine to jump start the systems again. Prolonged use of this drug in this way throws the body into great imbalance. Caffeine also is linked with certain cancers, like breast and bladder cancer.
There are many such examples to illustrate how chemical health correlates with physical health and exercise. Suffice it to say that we must do our best to monitor what we eat, drink and breathe.
Chemical to Chemical
What we eat, drink and breathe can affect our ability to digest, assimilate and eliminate properly.
As we have already discussed, the ingestion of certain substances causes inflammation of the intestinal mucosal barrier (the screen or mesh), leading to increased intestinal permeability (the screen gets too large, letting toxins and allergens into the blood stream), causing a condition called “leaky gut”(see chapter 13). Leaky gut is a major cause of overburdened liver function and toxicity, which affects the whole system.
As we have shown, toxicity can cause a whole gamut of diseases due to its ability to suppress the immune system, overburden the liver, settle in brain and nervous tissue, and so on.
The medical publication Lancet (341:49 1993), American Journal of Physiology (258:603 1990) and the Annals Allergy (199) mention the following agents which can damage the gastrointestinal mucosa and enter our body through the damaged screen:
•  bacterial infection
•  alcohol
•  food allergy
•  drugs
•  toxic heavy metals (mercury, lead, etc.)
•  stress
•  poor diet
•  parasites
•  mycotoxins
•  viral infections
Almost all of these are taken into our bodies through food, water, or air. Regular exposure to fumes and smoke, including tobacco smoke, leads in time to lung tissue damage, emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia. When lung tissue is diseased or damaged, it impairs the body’s ability to take in the proper amount of oxygen and expel the built-up carbon dioxide byproduct. Again, this leads to a compromise of total health = wholeness.
Remember that anything that comes in contact with your skin — whether a hand lotion, shampoo, or oil and gas from working on a car — is absorbed through the skin and circulating through the blood in just 20 to 30 seconds. Be careful, therefore, about what you touch and what you let come in contact with your body. The general rule: If you can’t eat it, don’t put it on your hands or hair. This may cause you to consider using natural cosmetics and hair/skin care items.
Chemical to Mental
We can say that we are what we eat, drink and breathe. This can be taken a step further by saying that we act, behave and think as we eat, drink and breathe. There is a strong correlation between what goes into the body and our mental processes.
Dr. Ben Feingold postulates that additives, preservatives, and chemicals in food are the causes of many cases of hyperactivity. His clinic has had very good results putting hyperactive children on strict diets that limit artificial additives, preservatives, and chemicals.
A 1989 study on children’s behavior and diet studied 24 hyperactive boys ages 31⁄2 to 6. All of them had symptoms similar to food sensitivities, such as stuffy noses and stomachaches. Many also had sleep problems. In the study, the children were fed low-sugar, vitamin-rich diets that had no coloring, flavorings, MSG, caffeine, chocolate, preservatives, milk, or any other substance the parents thought might be contributing to the problem. After four weeks, almost half the boys showed almost 50 percent improvement.¹
Dr. Alan Goldstein, director of the Temple University Medical School Agoraphobia and Anxiety Center in Philadelphia, states, “The typical diet of someone who comes to see us includes 8-10 cups of coffee a day, lots of sweets, and very few slow-release high-protein foods. Diet changes have shown benefit in some cases.” One woman in Dr. Goldstein’s clinic stopped drinking coffee and ate many small meals rather than three large ones, and her anxiety levels dropped in half.²
Studies have also linked hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar (common in people who consume a lot of refined sugar and carbohydrates), to phobias and alcoholism.
Dr. Jan Bancroft, associate at the University of Toronto, was one of the first people to conduct studies on music and learning.  According to Dr. Bancoft “Right diet is one of the basics of good memory. If you don’t eat properly, you don’t nourish the brain”.³
 

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