A more in depth look at the 3 causes of disease and illness.
Let's hold hands as we walk through the terrain of disease.
It’s April 2020 and I’m just learning my first bits about Terrain Theory. Yep. I’m sold. The Earth isn’t round and “germs” aren’t real— at least not in the way we’ve been taught to think of them. They don’t actually cause disease or sickness. ~ Is there anything we haven’t been lied to about? ~
Down the rabbit hole I went.
Terrain theory is the proven theory that germs aren’t the instigators of illness, but rather the janitors, firefighters and first responders to it.
Meaning that just because they show up at the scene of the crime doesn’t mean they committed the crime, but rather they are there to assist in putting out the proverbial fires and cleaning up the leftover debris. Terrain theory shows through valid scientific measures, carried out by Bechamp and others, that fungus and bacteria are pleomorphic, meaning they change based on their environment. Meaning it is not the “germ” that determines the disease but rather the particular flavor of toxicity, malnourishment, or dehydration of the terrain that determines the direction the “germ” will shapeshift.
So while we may have been taught that there are several thousands, perhaps millions of strains of bacteria, and fungus, and molds and that some are “good” and some are “bad”—a far more accurate and repeatable observation is that bacteria are the shapeshifting home managers of the body. They work closely with your body and brain, but also live off of it. This is called symbiosis. And perhaps most importantly, microbes are scavengers, denoting they only eat dead
tissues, meaning they can’t kill your cells to make dinner for themselves, they have to be more creative; so they shape shift based on the needs of your body and the food available in the terrain (your body is the terrain) they find themselves in. Unlike the presumed existence of “viruses” from the prevailing germ theory we have replicable proof that microbes shape-shift to suit their environment.
Therefore if the terrain is full of heavy metals, endocrine disrupters, and other toxins plus lots of fiber, then you’re going to “breed” the version of microbe (perhaps a fungus or a parasite) who eats heavy metals as well as a bacteria that ferments fiber, among other things. This is happening intelligently based on the conditions of your body.
If we feel worse while this is happening it’s a function of the metabolites from the microbes needing to be detoxed. When they consume toxins, they metabolize them into easier to expel toxins, but toxins that must be expelled nonetheless. Whether this process will happen all at once for a few days to a week (getting “sick”), or slowly throughout many days without conscious awareness (developing a chronic dis-ease) depends on many factors.
Toxins make us sick and cause some diseases, but how?
Well, what do toxins do? They poison the body of course.
How does the poison affect you? By stealing nutrients in order to neutralize the threat, whether by energy expenditure or by chelation. Either way, you’re out nutrients, mostly minerals. And if you don’t have a perfect, over abundant diet then this will likely cause a deficiency. And if you’re alive today you likely don’t have a perfect diet.
What kind of nutrients do I need to protect myself from this?
Well, mostly minerals, but also vitamins (which are found in fats) and also amino acids, and a few other things.
Which minerals?
All kinds! Depending on the toxin and level of exposure, but common known ones, big players are magnesium, sodium chloride, potassium, copper, zinc, iodine, selenium, and calcium. To complicate things further all of these nutrients need to be in a proper balance with each other.
For example, calcium should be in balance with magnesium 1:1 or 1:2 (ca:mg); magnesium binds to aluminum. Iodine is needed to produce thyroid hormones but it needs to be balanced with selenium; selenium binds to mercury and cadmium. Zinc and copper antagonize or balance each other and they both help the brain in big ways; potassium to hydrate your cells, but only if it’s balanced with sodium and that balance must be further balanced with magnesium, calcium, phosphate and bicarbonate. This is just a taste of why we always have to consider mineral balance when we supplement, and why it’s never a good idea to simply high dose a single supplement or mineral in order to correct a perceived deficiency.
For this reason, I prefer to get most of my nutrients through food, and use supplements as a back up plan in reasonable amounts.
But in order to utilize those balanced minerals you also need plenty of vitamins!
Just as with our mineral examples, vitamins interact with other nutrients and make them more or less bioavailable to you.
Here are some examples:
You need vitamin A to process zinc and copper, and a little extra to store in your liver. Vitamin K2 is required to have healthy kidneys to process waste. Vitamin C is an antioxidant, which reduces damage from certain oxidative toxins and also works synergistically with protein. You need B vitamins for your brain function and to make melatonin with copper which helps you detox through the glymphatic system while we sleep. Vitamin (hormone) D is needed for energy production, because detoxing requires a lot of energy; it’s mostly made in the body but only when the body has enough cholesterol, which we get through eating enough animal fats. The more cholesterol foods you eat the better your body will be at balancing your cholesterol levels, and in turn, your hormones.
That sounds great, where can I get those vitamins?
Almost exclusively from animal foods!
Which animal foods? Well, vitamin A comes from beef fat, raw milk, cod liver oil, liver, bone marrow, raw butter, and eggs.
Vitamin K2 from fermented cabbage, duck, chicken and their livers, raw butter, some raw cheese like parmesan, some yogurts.
Vitamin C you can get from meat, especially liver or certain raw fruits and properly prepared veg, especially fermented cabbage.
B vitamins generally come from liver, kidney, bone marrow, red meats, fish and seafood, some cheeses and nutritional yeast.
To make vitamin D you need cholesterol, which is a type of fat; to eat vitamin D you need to eat fatty animal foods raised under the sun. In fact all the vitamins save for the B’s come from fatty animal foods.
The B’s come from muscles and organs as well as some fatty areas, though they are water soluble. Technically some B’s occur in plants, but they are less bioavailable to humans, and mostly in the inactive forms. Your gut bugs are also capable of creating B vitamins as a metabolite of what you feed them.
No matter how you slice it you need fats to get rid of toxins too.
I’m down to eat more fat! Where do I get the good stuff?
It stands to reason that we should try to eat foods with the most nutrient density we can find at any given time to offer us the best chance of survival (and thriving), right?; so the fats we eat should be the most nutritionally dense type. We know from the work of Weston A. Price that those are animal fats, and a few fruit fats. Not “vegetable” or seed fats.
So the gold standard of healthy fats today are the same as they’ve ever been: chicken fat, duck fat, tallow, suet, lard, coconut, olive and palm; milk, butter, dairy products of all ilk, and eggs, including fish eggs, and bone marrow. Bonus points when eaten raw. Any fruit fats should be cold pressed and organic, and preferably unheated.
Do any of those foods have any minerals?
Yes! All of them in fact!!
What other foods have minerals?
Technically, all foods contain minerals, but they are most abundant and bioavailable in these foods: Organs, meat, milks/dairy, broths, raw fruit, and properly prepared vegetables.
Water also has minerals— in it’s natural state. So mineral water, spring water or glacier water/glacial milk—also discovered by Weston A. Price and later brought back into collective consciousness by Joel Wallach. Fruit has the most bioavailable minerals when it’s fresh, in the beginning/middle of the season, and when eaten raw.
PRO TIP: Cooking your vegetables and grains in mineral rich water or bone broth after soaking them in spring water with an acid raises the bioavailable mineral content considerably. Antinutrients in grains are further reduced by pressure cooking after an overnight or all day soak.
Another good way to help get rid of toxins is by staying hydrated. Your body can carry more toxins out when it is hydrated and it’s not just because it made the sea inside you bigger which dilutes the perceived toxic load, but because hydration requires minerals, and minerals act like the little boats floating the toxins out to drainage organs, as well as little batteries that facilitate cellular communication.
So what are our drainage organs?
The liver, the kidneys, the gallbladder, the colon, and our sweat glands in our skin (which is our biggest organ [no matter what he says]).
How else do we get rid of waste?
Through the glymphatic system which drains your head, brain and neck while you sleep, and the lymphatic system which drains waste from everywhere else in your body. I learned about these two from reading books on neuroscience and sleep while trying to heal my own migraines, cPTSD and decades of insomnia.
All of these detox pathways require hydration and energy.
So, where do we get proper hydration and energy? From food, ideally. And water, sunlight, and grounding.
Which foods?
The ones that contain both vitamins and minerals, because vitamins and minerals are synergistic. Even better if they contain the right ratios of them, or can be paired with other foods to create a more sustainable ratio, or if they just come in great excess and bioavailability. Foods routinely test better than supplements for bioavailability of nutrients, which is a good enough reason for me to always start there
.
But specifically, what foods are hydrating?
Hydrating foods would be:
raw dairy; including kefir, milk, butter, yogurt, ice cream, sour cream, even some cheeses
raw meat
raw fish
fish eggs
bone marrow, especially raw
fruits
some properly prepared veg; including ferments
sweet fermented drinks, salted teas, etc.
Things that are mostly nose-to-tail and raw, y’know the natural human diet.
The crux of it is, if you’re not hydrating abundantly then you’re not able to detox properly
which leads to a buildup of toxins, which leads to toxins getting stored in your fat, which eventually leads to disease states, or the up regulation of desperate detox pathways, like your sweat glands.
When this happens your body has options on how to deal.
Your body may spike a fever in order to induce sweating, or to temporarily alter it’s terrain as some microbes are sensitive to temperatures and shapeshift accordingly. Or it may ramp up mucous production, give you diarrhea, or make you vomit. Your muscles might ache because resources have been redirected towards detoxing, and so they are either undernourished or being broken down for fuel and hydration; since muscles are the only place your body “stores” potassium and it’s a good source of amino acids. All in all this might drain your energy, your life-force and leave you feeling bedridden and flu-like.
Ancestral wisdom tells us that when we are sick we need to focus on hydration more than anything, so it stands to reason that if sickness requires an intense focus on re-hydrating, then maybe sickness is inherently dehydrating.
So what are the symptoms of dehydration? And what are the symptoms of “cold + flu”? And what happens when you remain dehydrated for long periods of time?
When we’re sick, what’s the number one thing recommended? Stay hydrated!
You know, like your grandma used to say, or maybe even your mom. I remember my mom would let us drink Sprite or Ginger Ale when we were sick, which was exciting because we were not a soda household. Little did I know just how much wisdom would be held in that advice, now that it’s come to light that soda and milk are more hydrating than water, due to their sugar and mineral content. *not that I recommend soda, unless it’s like a homemade herbal one*
If you observe the development of disease in anything in the natural world, you’ll see evidence for terrain theory.
I remember observing my houseplants and noticing that some of them were developing a fungus and some were not, despite being in the same room, or nearby, or even touching one another. So I looked up what could be causing it and found that plants are more susceptible to disease when they are dehydrated. (DUH) This made sense to me as the plants that were developing fungus were my jungle origin plants that were definitely being under watered. So I began watering them more consistently and thoroughly, along with a “worm food” mineral solution and a few drops of copper, and they recovered nicely.
Later I learned that there is evidence that humans “photosynthesize” some of our energy in the sense that we are transforming the light waves from the sun into useable nutrients (Ayyy neurotransmitters!!), as well as using sunlight to create nutrients and hormones (Ayyy vitamin D!!), much like plants. This process requires hydration, of course! Water + sunlight. But just like with the plants, water alone isn’t enough. Plants are actually creating matter through sunlight + water + minerals that they take from the soil. When they are lacking this combo they get progressively dehydrated, then sick, then die if nothing is done to prevent that.
Could it be that this is also a function of human susceptibility to illness?
I began searching, “the link between dehydration and illness.”And that is how I found the work of Dr. Zac Bush. After reading lots of things on his website about the role of dehydration in every disease that exists, I looked up the symptoms of dehydration and compared them to “cold and flu” symptoms. Bingo! I already knew the toxin connection from reading books like Detoxify or Die by Sheri Rogers, The Truth about Contagion by Thomas Cowen, MD and the complete works of Forrest Maready on the dangers of vaccinations, and others.
I knew that toxins in the body require minerals, water, healthy fats, and small amounts of sugars to mobilize and remove them from reading books like Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, as well as the Nourishing Traditions collection by Sally Fallon Morrell, and most of Dr. Joel Wallach and Ma Lan’s books, and others. The tricky part is that those same minerals and nutrients are needed to chelate toxins— especially heavy metals, but they are also a good chunk of your electrolyte minerals. And to make matters worse— many popular detox recommendations waste minerals from your body, like with infrared saunas, juice cleanses, vegetable based diets and fasting.
This means that if your body has a high toxic load that it is attempting to take care of it will use more of your electrolyte minerals to do so than if you were perfectly healthy, hydrated and toxin free. Most people nowadays don’t get enough electrolytes as it is and are already in a deficit for normal functioning (leading to lower body function), which means that having a heavy toxic load (as seen in all
disease states) is almost guaranteed to waste the short supply of electrolytes you do have and to increase inflammation. When this happens you become dehydrated.
When you are dehydrated a few important things happen.
First, cellular communication slows down as electrolytes and structured water are necessary for those functions. When you are deficient in electrolytes your body is not able to drive enough hydration into the cells which means it either struggles to hold onto water, or it hordes water in the wrong places (water weight) depending on a few factors. This also means that the water in your body loses its crystalline structure that is needed for cellular cohesion, hydration and detox. When you lose the structured water within your body, you also drastically slow down—or in serious cases stop—detoxing depending on the severity of the loss.
This means that toxins may be circulating unbound within your blood and body and your detox organs, like your liver and your lymphatic system, which may become “clogged up” causing unpleasant puffiness, fluid retention and inflammation.
In addition, your kidneys slow their release of minerals in order to compensate for the loss you are experiencing through other means, which requires extra energy—up to 60% of basal energy—leading to symptoms like fatigue, brain fog and depression. So all in all, when you are unable to detox you are at a greater risk of “becoming sick” because you are adding toxins into your system quicker than they are being removed
.
And on and on the cascade of effects goes…
So let’s break this down further, explaining each symptom.
First, an overabundance of toxins has used up your electrolytes and slowed your detox capacity. In order to compensate your body begins cannibalizing itself— meaning it breaks down muscles to get amino acids and potassium— leading to body aches.
Next it breaks down bones to retrieve calcium, phosphorous, magnesium and other minerals in order to enhance detox capacity.
Then it alters your hormones to conserve salt (raising aldosterone), which causes stress (high cortisol, and for women higher androgens, meaning lower progesterone, and possibly lower estrogens), and it slows all strictly unnecessary bodily functions in order to conserve energy, leading to brain fog, fatigue, and perhaps even a loss of appetite, due to down-regulating digestion.
It then raises your body temperature by a number of degrees (a fever) in order to encourage the formation of structured water (i.e. EZ water) which contributes to hydration and cellular communication, but also requires a good amount of energy.
Building up your internal EZ also helps your body to form more mucous in which it can “wrap up” toxins inside of you and expel them through your mouth or nose (coughing and sneezing).
You may also begin to sweat, as the skin is a fundamental detox organ, and your body is trying to get toxins out anyway it can, which may be another function of fevers. You may also experience various rashes, flakiness, peeling, bumps, etc.
In addition, diarrhea is the body’s defense against ingesting something poisonous by expelling it quickly. Vomiting may serve the same purpose or it may be a function of down-regulated metabolism making it difficult or impossible to break down food, thus forcing your body to expel undigested meals, up and out.
Finally, when your body is unable to do away with toxins its backup plan is to store them in your fat. This is why eating a good amount of nutrient dense animal fats is necessary when you are feeling under the weather, because they can prove hugely protective against many toxins, and the fat soluble vitamins contained within are necessary for the use of many minerals.
That is how dehydration whether from toxin overload without proper nutrient replenishment, or by way of neglecting your needs may result in what we think of as “sickness, cold, or flu.”
This is how I came to the conclusion that the 3 causes of sickness are: dehydration, toxicity, or malnutrition
.
Since, if you were perfectly hydrated, perfectly fed, and perfectly defended you wouldn’t fall ill.
And each item plays into next since hydration cannot be maintained without proper nourishment, and proper nourishment is not maintained when toxicity is higher than nutrient intake, and when toxicity is higher than nutrient intake it leads to dehydration, and round and round the merry-go-round we go.
What we call “disease” in this modern age is simply the manifestation of dehydration, malnourishment and a burdensome toxic load. The way those states play out in your body is what we pathologize and label as disease. This is one reason why there are endless combinations of symptoms and why so many diseases share a high degree of symptomology with other diseases.
The difference between a quick illness and a long term (chronic) disease state is your capacity to detox and care for yourself. When your body has what it needs to detox it simply gears up it’s detox pathways and expels large amounts of toxins at once— we call this “the flu” or “getting a cold.” This is also why the goal shouldn’t be to never “get sick” but to know the tools to use to support your body in detoxifying when you do. Because sickness is a first line defense against chronic illness. The “it gets worse before it gets better” doctrine doesn’t fit everywhere and is often misused, but here it stands strong, detoxing is not always a pleasant experience, but we should be grateful to go through it because it’s how we get back to a state of thriving health.
When your body is forced to maintain itself without the proper tools (hydration, nourishment, environment) for an extended period of time (often decades) it makes intelligent choices to down-regulate certain systems and functions in order to redirect resources to more crucial systems and organs. For example, skin conditions often co-occur with a sick liver because it’s more crucial to your survival to have a functioning liver than it is to have clear skin so your body chooses to sacrifice your skin’s integrity rather than your liver’s.
I hope this explanation was illuminating to you on the causes of illness. Please feel free to let me know your thoughts or questions below and thanks for reading!
And remember:
References:
Crooked: Man-made diseases by Forrest Marready
Dead Doctors Don’t Lie! by Dr. Joel Wallach and Ma Lan
Detoxify or Die by Sherri A. Rogers
Good-Bye Germ Theory: Ending a century of Medical Fraud by Dr. William P. Trebing
Nourishing Fats: Why we need animal fats for health and happiness by Sally Fallon Morell
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price
Pasteur or Bechamp? by Ethel Hume
The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (including “coronavirus”) are not the cause of disease by Thomas S. Cowan, M.D. and Sally Fallon Morell
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Dr. Gabor Mate
Water: The cure for everything by Dr. F. Batmanghelidj
You’re not sick, you’re thirsty! by Dr. F. Batmanghelidj