Douglas J. Lisle, Ph.D. and Alan Goldhamer, D.C.
Foreword
Eating the wrong kinds of food is the leading cause of death and disability in the western world, resulting in obesity, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, stomach pains, headaches, and Constipation.
Telling the Truth
New scientific information is not always well received, especially when it challenges the view or threatens the self-interests of powerful individuals in groups. Those in power rarely rushed to embrace superior new ideas.
People are being denied access to vital information–information that could save your life
The Biological Purpose of Life
Minds of all creatures are designed for the same purpose—for survival and reproduction.
In fact, the purpose of all of our various actions seems to be something entirely different. The purpose seems to be to feel good (and to avoid feeling bad) as much of the time as possible.
Bad feelings are unpleasant but valuable signals that important life goals have been threatened, and they encourage us to do something about it
the motivational system is a three-part mechanism that encourage us to 1) seek pleasure, 2) avoid pain, and 3) conserve energy.
We call these inducements moods and they come in two basic types—happiness and unhappiness. These mood systems work in conjunction with the pleasure seeking and pain avoidance systems to encourage affective behavior.
Nature needs an additional and related system, a set of signals to let pleasure-seeking animals know whether they are on the right path, the path to survival and reproduction. Those signals are the moods of happiness and unhappiness, and they work like the clues in the treasure hunt.
Pleasure responses are the end points. The moods of happiness are the subtle reinforcing experiences along the way.
The Pleasure Trap
Today, the workings of that internal compass are being disrupted so that it is no longer fully reliable. You must now learn to recognize when it is failing to point us in the right direction, and when to act against start instincts if necessary.
The Miracle and Madness of Modern Medicine
Armed with potent pain reducing medications, the physician often avoids the time and energy consuming task of learning more about the healing goal and what it entails.
Looking for Health in All the Wrong Places
The truth is often difficult to grasp. The difficulty is the result of a natural human problem-solving blind spot, and innate limitation of our psychology. It is precisely this type of human limitation that Arthur Doyle was so adept at noticing. And it is this type of limitation that results in the majority of our society remaining blind to the key facts regarding their health, though the facts are crystal clear once seen from the proper perspective.
The real culprits in most modern day health problems are excess, not deficiencies.
the subtraction of excess is nearly always more effective at restoring health than is the addition of anything, be it dietary supplements or medications.
Reducing fat intake from about 40% to about 10% of calories consumed, the body will soon begin to reverse atherosclerosis.
grasping that the major key to health is mostly about subtraction and not addition is a major conceptual leap. Although seemingly simple, this connection is perhaps the most difficult principle in modern Health Science to understand. Once seen from the proper perspective, it is simple. But achieving this understanding can be a challenging task.
We suspect that the human brain is biased against accepting that dietary excesses are the root of most health problems, and thus the difficulty grasping this truth despite the scientific evidence. Conversely, the idea that some sort of deficiency is responsible continues to be popular. This is probably because such a concept has intuitive appeal.
human brains are not impartial judges of the facts.
People who walk the earth today are all descendants of those who face the problem of getting enough as opposed to worrying about getting too much. As such the neurological circuits that make up the human mind are naturally concerned with deficiency.
Getting Along Without Going Along
Status can be lost or gained in a variety of ways, but an important issue is one reputation for self-discipline and integrity. In a social setting where unhealthy food and drink are present the opportunity for losses in status or blatant. If you choose to remain on healthy course while others choose to indulge, they know that you are observing them breaching their integrity through their unwillingness to exercise restraint. They know further that if you maintain your integrity, they lose status with you! And when they lose status, they experience embarrassment. They are hurt, and subsequently irritated… They might attempt to pierce your integrity and thus boost their own status by comparison.