Dr. John Kellogg, at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the earlier part of this century, said that 90 percent of the diseases of civilization are due to improper functioning of the colon. Dr. Kellogg thought everyone should eliminate the residual contents of a meal 15-18 hours after eating it; if you aren’t passing the residual contents within 15-18 hours, you’re constipated.
How can you tell if you’re constipated? Take the corn test. Eat corn along with a meal, noting the starting time you ate it. Examine each of your bowel movements until corn is visible and write down the time of day. Don’t stop timing yourself until you cannot find any more corn in your fecal material. When this occurs write down the time of the previous bowel movement when corn was seen, this is the finish time. The starting time to the finish time is called your bowel transit time. This will tell you how long it took to move through your system. If it’s more than 18 hours, you’re constipated, even if you have three bowel movements per day.
If you eat three times a day but only move your bowels once a day, there will be a backup, causing diverticulosis or bowel pockets. The backup forms pressure, which causes the lining of the bowel to herniate, or push through. If these diverticula are filled with fecal material, they do not pass it because it is not a movement pattern of the normal bowel peristalsis. It’s sort of like a creek of running water, with little inlets along the edges of the creek. Leaves and branches flow into the inlets and get stuck there, because they’re out of the creek’s normal flow pattern.
Once these bowel pockets form and fecal material sit in you for days, weeks, months and years, you have a slow release of toxins, poisons and inflammation of the colon, causing leaky gut.
The longer it takes to have a bowel movement, the worse the problem gets. For example, if one has a bowel movement every two days, that’s six or more meals being stored in the colon, causing back pressure, forcing fecal material into the diverticula causing diverticulosis. Eventually this causes overstretching of the bowel muscular lining, damaging muscles and their tone. This can become disastrous, if a person is regularly constipated. In this case, diverticulosis can lead to overstretching of the bowel lining, which can lead to an atonic bowel, or one that no longer has normal muscular peristalsis movement. This results in the inability to ever move the bowel normally without enemas. Needless to say, this person will always be toxic and will struggle greatly with their health.
Just a short note on the “itises” of the bowel, diverticulitis and colitis. The suffix -itis means inflammation, so these are inflammations of the bowel pockets and of the colon in general.
The list of things that cause inflammation is a long one:
•   constipation
•   poor diet (refined, processed, high protein, high fat, alcohol, coffee)
•   food sensitive
•   poor food combination
•   poor digestion
•   lack of proper chewing
•   lack of digestive enzymes
•   lack of HCl
•   diluted digestive (with water) enzymes
•   poor assimilation
•   bacteria, virus, parasites or candida
•   stress
•   fear, depression
•   anger, worry
•   bowel nerve pressure
•   structural subluxation of lower back
•   lack of exercise
•   lack of proper water intake (1 quart per 50 lbs. of body weight per day - not with meals)
•   medications
Colitis and diverticulitis cause a leaky gut and toxicity, as well as alternating diarrhea and constipation. We’ve already discussed some results of constipation; diarrhea, on the other hand, causes malnutrition, because your body never assimilates what it needs to sustain good health—the 90-plus nutrients needed daily. Without them, your body soon becomes tired and weaker, and sickness can set in.
Colitis, diverticulitis, and constipation can all cause the mucous lining of the bowel to become inflamed and damaged. This causes lack of normal mucous lubrication of the bowel and eventual thickening, which in turn causes more constipation and the possible formation of scar tissue and strictures. These cause permanent narrowing of the normal bowel in particular areas and in turn also leads to further backup and constipation.
 
I hope and pray you now understand that bowel health is one of the most important aspects of your total physical health picture. An abnormally functioning bowel will always lead to toxicity, which will eventually lead to disease.
If you could only detox one part of your body, it would be the bowel. And if this is all one detoxifies, 60 percent of people would be healed or greatly improved.
A bowel cleanse program will regularly purify your bowel. I recommend bowel cleansing at least every three months for healthy people, and more frequently for those trying to restore their health. Bowel cleansing programs include organic/wildcrafted herbs and possible high enemas. The herb program is easy and very effective, not only in getting rid of constipation, but also in ridding bacteria, yeast, parasites, as well as resorbing the impacted fecal material and its poisons, toxins and even radioactive materials. Bowel cleanse programs also helps tone and heal the bowel.

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