Balanced Feeding Habits and Allergy Under the
Biblical Perspective
In this article we will be approaching concepts derived from
biblical texts that are often read but without the full realization of
their vital importance.
The first and major concept is about the necessary equilibrium
in food habits, reducing the excess of carbohydrates (sugars and flours),
fats and fibers. This concept is relative: the more we use balanced foods,
the closer we will be to the initial plan of the Creator. The second major
concept is absolute: we should not even touch the forbidden products lest
we shall have to face hard consequences, especially in the area of allergic
diseases.
Genesis 1.29-30
Daniel 1.11-17
The basic concept is to make us use living foods (seed and
fruit), meant for promoting life.
The intrinsic balance between their components (proteins,
vitamins, salts, fats, carbohydrates and fibers) induce our metabolism
to the same plane, whereas products with a predominance of fibers (vegetables)
would be meant for animals.
Leviticus 3.14-17
Fat, oil, butter, mayonnaise and similar products are fuel
and not food; at most they would be suited for being applied to skin and
hair.
Leviticus 11.02-43
To leave alone pork meat in general!... including all the
variety of swine by products; from the sliced stuffed processed pork meat
to one’s everyday bacon. To leave alone fish with skin such the dogfish
and our river fish pintado. To leave alone the poor coprophagous shrimps
and shellfish in general.
Leviticus 19.19
Deuteronomy 22.09
Hybrids and transgenics produce foreign proteins with allergenic
potential. This would be one of the explanations for not planting different
seed in the same field, for the crossed pollination can originate hybrids.
After this initial presentation, we will start analyzing some aspects,
as an attempt to clarify them, getting rid of cultural concepts deeply
rooted among us.
Seeds and Fruits
The main thing is in Genesis 1.29 in the first ordinance
after creation: to eat seeds and fruits and leave the vegetables and pastures
to animals.
Seeds and fruits... the elements of nature designed to promote
life, in all the dimensions of its meaning.
In their essence seeds contain all the elements necessary
to the formation of a new life interlinked among themselves in such a perfectly
balanced form: fats, proteins, sugars, salts and vitamins (and probably
even some other elements unknown to us) in their due proportions. Balance
is essential for the seed to develop. Should some nanograms of one single
ion be missing the seed would have difficulty to shoot forth.
Seeking this level of balance in eating we will be respecting
the divine orientation expressed in the first page of the bible, and several
aspects of the resulting well being can be evidenced.
· physical balance: where fat people tend to
lose weight and thin ones tend to gain, hormones tend to an equilibrium
in their extremely variable dynamics.
· emotional balance: the body tends to be less
acid, making people less irritable, with a greater capacity of concentration
and perception and more apt to learning (Daniel 1.17)
· spiritual balance: for, above the cultural
and momentary concepts about foods, one is aware that divine orientation
is superior, respecting both the aspects of grace proceeding from the sacrifice
of Jesus and the eternal orientations given from the beginning.
Seeds come out of flowers, scented, in their own time, forming
the ecological equilibrium in perfect harmony with insects and animals.
It is impossible to imagine a more sublime thing to feed beings created
according to the divine image and similarity.
Leaves, stems, roots... are animal food. The predominance
of fibers makes them soak up nutrients, hormones, in short, the most varied
elements, hindering their absorption through our intestinal walls. Cellulose,
a predominant element in vegetables can not be digested by human intestine,
working only as a “sponge”. Leaves, stems, roots are far more exposed to
agrotoxins than seeds and fruit that germinate in the interior of a plant.
Genesis 3.17 rates vegetables as a curse.
Fats
This focus on equilibrium should be extended to all the foods
we eat, avoiding processed products that excessively increase one or other
nutrient or present it disengaged from other elements that make it balanced.
Among the most representative examples of this unbalance are sugar, salt
and oil. As to sugar and salt many are able to understand the metabolic
damages they cause and there are no direct biblical references to them.
Fats, however are literally cited.
The concept is that fat, oil, butter, mayonnaise and similar
products are fuel and not food; at most they would be suitable to be used
on one’s skin or hair.
In several passages it is quite clear that these products
can not be ingested, as in Leviticus 3.17; and they are mentioned as a
skin and hair hydrating and softening product or as a symbol for demonstrating
divine choice; or as fuel for illumination. Anyone who knows what the fats
chemical structure is like understands that they can not be used in an
isolated form in foods, but rather diluted amongst starches and proteins
and linked to ions in due proportion, in order to promote life, as it happens
in a bean seed (3% of fat). Let’s imagine a practical example: draining
all oil used in the preparation of a plate of food, we will have approximately
one spoon of liquid oil; this equals to approximately the oil content of
500g of beans; in short, the effort to be made by the body to digest that
soupspoon of oil will be equivalent to digesting half a kilo of beans;
plus the plate of food... adding all the food ingested during the day we
will have eaten approximately two kilos of beans a day... 365 days a year.
Imagine the effort made by the body to break down the fat we consume during
a period of 40 years... Diseases do not show up without a reason. This
effort is better understood soon after a fatty meal, when we feel listless,
lethargic: the blood is preferentially distributed through the digestive
tract in restriction to the brains and muscles.
After their absorption these fats, in the form of greasy
acids, will participate in different metabolic processes, from the transport
of most elements diluted in the blood (linked to proteins these fats take
hormones, drugs, nutrients, antibodies, etc.) right up to the formation
of essential substances such as sexual hormones or tissues, like the subcutaneous
tissue. The accumulation of circulating fats helps the formation of plaques
on the blood vessels walls, progressively obstructing them and culminating
with infarcts that will be more evident on noble tissues such as the heart
and the brain.
The fact of transporting chemical products produce a metabolic
“delay” when they are in excess. The dimensions of this transport are extraordinary
seldom realized by health professionals. Let’s see an example in order
to be able to understand these dimensions: Testosterone is a male hormone
existing in large quantity in men, determining their physical and behavioral
characteristics and in small quantity in women. The quantity of testosterone
that is linked to the circulating fats and the free quantity “loose” in
the blood are possible to measure. In an adult man free testosterone is
in average 0,03 nanograms per deciliters of blood, whereas the average
of the testosterone linked to the fats in an adult man is 600,0 nanograms
per deciliter of blood.
The realization of this proportion of 1/20.000 helps us to
understand the following situation: At a given time we need a certain hormone.
With its self-regulation mechanisms the body transmits orders for this
hormone to be injected in the blood stream through its producing organ
(e.g. the supra-renal glands). For this hormone to go from the producing
organ to the effecting organ (e.g. the iris muscles) it must link itself
to blood fats. Should these fats be increased, the effecting organ will
receive less hormones than necessary, for they will be attached to the
circulating fats. Thus the body will send another order to release more
hormones into circulation to reach the level suited to the effecting organ.
After its use, the presence of hormone is not required anymore and an order
to stop injecting hormone into the blood circulation is issued. However,
as there is too much circulating fat, with the consequent adhesion of the
hormone glued to the fat, the effecting organ continues to receive these
hormones. In synthesis, at the time it was required, the hormone sent was
retained in the circulating fats and when it was no longer required, the
hormone that was glued to the fats kept coming. This metabolic delay has
reflections in practically all the chemical reactions of the body, from
the antibodies action to the quantity of nutrients absorbed by the intestine.
Having too much circulating fat is like being “dull”, with all the meanings
this expression may have.
After this explanation people say: “then one should use very
little oil in the preparation of food”, and we say: “it would be good not
to use ANY oil at all in food preparation, not even olive oil,” and we
repeat: OIL IS FUEL, not food, at most it could be applied to one’s skin
and hair.
To conclude our argument against oil, we could not help but
mention what has been abundantly documented in medical literature for decades
that - the ingestion of oil is directly proportional to the emergence of
cancer in all the digestive tube. It is easy to understand why: if oil
irritates the skin that is hard and thick, imagine the intestine that is
thin and delicate... it simply burns it. The body has to heal this burn,
creating a new skin. Once or twice this is done without problem, but every
day, several times a day... one day it begins to heal without stopping,
the healing tissues growing without control, this is cancer. It is not
without reason that we were oriented not to use this kind of product as
food some 3.500 years ago. ( Leviticus 3.17).
Allergy To Animals
Although this approach on fats is new from the theological
point of view, it is very understandable scientifically. Now the question
of prohibited animal is new even scientifically, for exhaustive bibliographic
research has not evidenced any work with this view. The concept from biblical
texts is to not even touch the bodies of the prohibited animals. Not even
touch? This seems too radical..., but if we heed this advice, we will see
that there are products that one must not touch, for a red rash followed
by swelling and an itch will appear, expanding to several areas of the
body. They are the products that cause allergy. We have seen people that
do not even have to touch shrimps for example: just to smell shrimp is
enough for them to begin to swell. Reports of anaphylactic shocks with
shrimp that evolve to obit in a few seconds have been frequent.
Then, that “not to touch” contained in the Leviticus 11 when
speaking of prohibited animal is a precise and necessary orientation, not
something dogmatic, but immunological! This holistic focus is very little
understood. The bible states that individuals that were reacting with antibodies
to the necrophagous animals they had touched would be so modified in all
their essence, including in the moral aspects, that they were forbidden
to participate in religious assemblies or in battles, lest all would be
harmed. When will we develop cultural elements to understand this?
It is interesting to note that these concepts written some
three thousand years ago, are the most known texts in the history of mankind.
Since the beginning of history, there have been ethnic groups committed
to the preservation and the divulgation of these concepts. It has been
the first book to be printed 500 years ago and, to this day, it has always
been the best selling book around the world. Nowadays we have bibles available
in the form of data base accessible on Internet in several languages. Nevertheless,
we certify how distant we are from understanding the most simple concepts
contained in this book.
Clinically we have watched allergy to prohibited animals
by measuring the levels of antibodies ASLO, Ab-TPO, Ab-TG and we have registered
its clinical symptoms before and after excluding prohibited animals in
Leviticus 11 (swine byproducts, fish with skin and shellfish). Along with
our patients, we are fascinated when we see a disease that, until then,
was considered incurable or of difficult control, quickly disappearing,
or even when we watch the involution of simple “little problems” such as
an eye itch or a rhinitis that had been bothering for decades.
The dimension and implications of immunologic and allergic
reactions are completely unimaginable. Let us see some characteristics,
being aware that all of them are mediated by antibodies (proteins built
according to a spatial, electrical and chemical “mold” with the intention
of deactivating foreign bodies that enter in contact with our organism).
When these antibodies are in large numbers they end up by “deactivating”
the tissues of our own bodies, especially if the “mold” was constituted
of animal proteins, like ourselves.
In the first year of life we take three doses of a certain
vaccine and, for the rest of our lives, we can get in contact with people
that have that specific disease without becoming ill. From the other extreme,
entering in contact with a known allergen, we can have a fulminating reaction
with death by asphyxiation caused by a sudden swelling of tissues in our
throat. Obscure sufferings as “cerebral allergy” that daily torment us
as “that little headache” or the intellectual confusion that we only notice
when it disappears without any causal factor very well defined.
We have noticed that immunologic reactions take place practically
in all tissues of out body, from a pilous follicle to endocrine cells,
there being an hierarchy of attacks. This hierarchy respects the basic
function of our defense system, which is the identification of foreign
products that are potentially aggressive to our body. These products can
be viruses, bacteria, protozoa, inert tissues, chemical substances (especially
paints and solvents) and some others that we do not understand very well
as, for example, the ionic crystallization of the alcohol-water dipole
constituent of homeopathic medicaments.
This identification first occurs in the superficial tissues
that have contact with these products (skin, respiratory tree and digestive
tube) and after the identification, a reaction and an attempt to “deactivate”
the product take place. Thus these reactions are noticed on the skin through
swelling, red rashes, itches and secretions: in the respiratory tree, they
start from the nose and advance through the eyes, cheeks of the face, ears,
throat, bronchi, bronchioli and alveoli, bringing the respective diseases
to these tissues; and in the intestine tube they start from the lips, advance
through the throat, esophagus, stomach, intestines, annexed organs such
as the liver and pancreas, reaching the anus and having a greater incidence
in the large intestine where the products stay deposited for a longer period.
These are the localized reactions, but the antibodies keep
circulating through the blood throughout the body tissues and end up by
unchaining reactions wherever it is more propitious in the individual,
either by genetic or environmental factors and localized stresses. Thus
we will have deposition of antibodies linked to allergens in glands such
as the thyroids causing thyroiditis, in cartilage such as the articular
cartilages, causing arthritis, in internal “skins”, like inside the heart
causing the “pleating” of the valves and, consequently, a regurgitation
of blood by theses valves known as “murmurs”.
We have noticed that when we reduce the grossest food allergens
described in Leviticus 11, practically all theses allergic inflammations
distributed throughout the body tend to disappear, the diseases get better
and the people show a better disposition and intellectual vivacity.
To avoid the prohibited animals is a basic concept that the
humanity should have observed in the past. Now we are in a calamitous situation
even with the permitted animals.
The emergence of the “prions” (a chain of amino-acids with
infectious behavior) in herbivores treated with animal protein (ration)
is a concrete evidence of the deleterious effect of this practice assumed
by the majority of commercial breeders.
The strongest trumpet was the “mad cow’s disease”. Here,
instead of ground lamb, we give fish and chicken to our cattle, whereas
to chicken we give cattle and swine bones (remember that a large part of
the bones is composed of proteic-antigenic matrix), and to the confined
fish (like the trout and in some fishing places) we give chicken and pig
manure. These procedures end up by promoting a daily food immunization
in animals for slaughter, leaving them with their circulating antibodies
also hundreds of times above the normal rate. These antibodies end up by
increasing the deposition of the immuno-complexes in us, increasing all
the allergic and self immune symptoms. This explains why people allergic
to cow milk do not develop symptoms when taking goat milk, for it is not
usual to offer ration to goats, especially to goats raised in small scale.
This way, besides the sinister consequences from the chemical products
widely used (agrotoxins in forages, hormones, antibiotics and chemotherapics),
animal products commercialized nowadays also bring on the induction of
the most diversified allergic and self immune attacks, where the allergy
to cow milk is the master flag.
Mixture of Species and Allergy
Still under this immune system focus we should be mindful
of the orientations given in Leviticus 19.19 and Deuteronomy 22.09. This
concept comprises the possible reaction to foreign protein from hybrids
and transgenics.
Hybrids basically obtained by means of crossed pollination
between different species; transgenics obtained through genetic engineering
from “transplants” of DNA segments, not only between different species
but also between genders, groups... for example: fish and plant genes,
human and pig genes..., etc.
The hybrids and transgenics produce proteins foreign to nature
(sequence of amino acids complementary to the sequence of nucleotides of
altered DNA) and our immunologic system can recognize them as foreign bodies
that must be deactivated, thus developing potentially allergic reactions.
Crossed pollination ( that takes place in mixed fields) is a technique
mostly used at present for the development of hybrids.
This issue assumes calamitous dimensions when we verify that
most of our agricultural products are derived from hybrid seeds, such as
wheat, corn, coffee, orange, marrow, green pepper, cauliflower, etc. What
is hard is to know which products do not come from mixed species. This
helps to understand the frightening advance that allergic diseases have
been presenting lately.
This perspective could explain allergy to pollen and to gluten,
as well as several immunologic phenomena incomprehensible until now. Gluten
( a cereal proteic fraction) and pollen are natural products, perfectly
harmonic to nature, why should they induce allergies? Only if they were
altered. Wheat is often mixed with rye, originating the “Triticale”, widely
used as flour in the preparation of biscuits, pasta and bakery products
all over the world. And, as to pollen with allergic effect, the largest
quantity is due to the gramineous plants that surely have suffered processes
of crossed pollination, due to the distribution of pastures or intentionally
to attain species with greater cattle raising yields.
It falls to us to highlight the ecological unbalances of
incommensurable dimensions coming from these agricultural practices, both
in the aspects of relationship between populations of insects and animals,
and the incentive in the use of agrotoxins, for a large part of the researches
with hybrids and transgenics are geared towards the development of resistance
to agrotoxins.
In medical literature we notice references to allergies especially
to the transgenics (where the genetic adulteration is less subtle than
in the hybrids). Among specimens liberated for commercialization by the
FDA-USA we find products common to corn and canola. It is also worth remembering
the therapeutic products that use this genetic engineering technique, like
the so called human insulin, but that is synthesized by transgenic bacteria
with human genes, or like the food vaccines that are being tested with
transgenic bananas. In this area the researches have been the most showy
as possible and, surely, very few will have the discernment to qualify
them as antagonic to the divine laws and to human nature.
Biblical Diet
After this explanation the comment: “Well, we can not eat
anything, then!” is inevitable. As a reply we propose some simple postures
that surely prevent most diseases and raise the quality of life to a level
closer to the “life of abundance” promised to us;
1. Give preference to seeds and fruits in the form
of cereals, nuts, and vegetables (that have seeds).
2. Reduce fats progressively, sugars and greens, amounting
to just their sporadic use.
3. Absolutely exclude all the prohibited animals (including
their byproducts).
4. Without delay start the cultivation of wild species,
starting with the cereals and fruit, even if on a household scale, and
supply them with priority to allergic people with a greater risk of anaphylactic
shock.
5. When using animal products, they must come from animal
breeders that use healthy foods, including wild grass (not hybrid).
Allergic People
We would like to end this with a new definition of an allergic
person, for it will surely contribute to the comprehension of the facts
and the consequent decision taking regarding them.
“Allergic people are highly refined environmental sensors”
Besides reacting easily to gross antigens (necrophagous animals
and fungi), they are able to identify the most subtle chemical substances
as well as discrete genetic changes in food products.
These concepts are exhibited on our homepage at www.aleph.com.br/~luizmeira
where they are available for direct access teaching and research centers
on food allergy, as well as bibliographic references specific to the approached
subjects.
Translated by
Maria Kenney rua Vicente Stancato, 550
Barao Geraldo / Campinas / SP, Brazil
Phone/Fax +55 19 3287 5304
