Nourishment

ANDREW AND GRACE WRITE:

"A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones." ~Prov 17:22

God has really blessed Grace and I beyond what we could have imagined the past few weeks. Many have been fervently praying for us and fasting every Wednesday to Thursday and God has been answering. To sum up, the past few weeks has been physical and spiritual nourishment. For the past 8 months my body has been in a downward spiral from surgeries, to radiation and chemo, to pain and narcotics, to infections and pneumonia. Grace just kept begging God specifically for relief and that He would relent from the continual onslaught of difficulty, and the Lord has answered in abundance. Since we have been in California God has broken that downward spiral with these nutritional treatments, education, sunshine, laughter, rest and exercise.

Here is a short list of answered prayers:

1) Praise God that my pain has greatly decreased. I thought it would be impossible to get off narcotics just a few months ago, but now I'm off! In addition, I don't need that much over the counter stuff since I now have learned some effective natural ways of dealing with the pain. The only time I really struggle with pain now is when I sleep. It is hard for me to lie down comfortably and rest at night, due to coughing bouts and soreness in my neck and shoulders. Please pray for relief from discomfort at night and restful sleep.

2) Grace and I are encouraged spiritually. We've really seen God do so much around us lately, and we're amazed at His power. He is answering prayer after prayer from providing for all our needs here in CA from accommodations, to babysitting, to help making my labor-intensive special diet, to cleaning, to providing spiritual nourishment when we need it, even though we are away from our church family in MN, to providing exactly the amount of financial support we need to do this.

Because the winter is so hard on my body and I'm prone to pneumonia, we're thinking of actually staying here in Southern California for a few months and wait out the winter, while we continue the therapy on our own. Please pray for wisdom whether we should stay here and that God would provide a private place to sublet and the help we need to continue this labor-intensive cancer therapy.

3) God is providing physical rest and nourishment. Even though I have some pain and tumors that are attacking my body, I feel very refreshed and nourished. In the past I've shared that I struggle to desire to eat through a tube in my stomach, but God is really changing the way I see food and my appetite has increased greatly. I think my food intake has doubled since we've been here at the treatment center.

4) The Gerson Therapy is going really well. We're totally enjoying it and it is definitely helping me feel better. Praise God for providing the wisdom and the means to do this. To be honest, Grace kept doing research and telling me about all these things she was reading about, but I was skeptical because I didn't really understand the science behind these treatments. We are so thankful that the Lord has lead us here.

Grace and I are learning so much here at the treatment center. The man who leads it is a licensed Gerson practicioner and has his PhD in nutrition. He lectures us after breakfast each day so that we can understand the science behind everything we are doing.

The Gerson Therapy was developed by Dr. Max Gerson in the 1940s. Dr. Gerson was an MD who treated and cured many patients from "incurable" diseases, including Nobel prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his wife.

Everybody in both the conventional and alternative medical industries agree with Dr. Gerson's basic theory behind treatment of degenerative diseases - use the body's natural immune response to cure disease. Yet, radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery actually destroy the immune system. In fact, cancer surgeries often include removing lymph nodes, essential parts of the body to fighting off infection and disease. Cutting-edge cancer research has begun to realize this downfall of conventional cancer treatment. The newest wave of developments, known as immunotherapy, which is still in clinical trials, tries to enhance the body's immune response to cancer by harvesting proteins and antibodies and reinjecting them into your system. 70 years after Dr. Gerson, conventional medicine has come full circle and now has the same goal as Dr. Gerson, using the body's own immune system to kill off cancer, but uses a different method.

The Gerson method seeks to naturally restore the body to a healthy state so that it can stage its own immune response to the disease the way it is supposed to. The human body is so amazingly powerful and complex, wouldn't it do a better job of creating white blood cells to kill cancer than a laboratory? This has huge benefits for not only long-term cure, but for current quality of life. It uses real nutrients the way God originally designed food, grown off of trees or out of the ground, and uses the food as medicine to flood the body with the nutrients and enzymes it needs to function normally so that the immune system can attack disease the way it was meant to. If these real foods had been nourishing the body all along, the body's systems and immune system would not have been in a compromised state and would have killed the cancer cells off before anyone had ever detected them.

In America we tend to see food as entertainment, rather than nourishment and medicine. Advertising, marketing, and billboards from the food industry tell us that food is supremely to satisfy our pleasures. While eating is one of the great pleasures of life, it can also be good for us rather than toxic to us.

The nutritional statements on food packaging shows us little or no information about the true benefit - or lack thereof - of our food. In America, we emphasize calories, fat, and protein, which can be important but good nutrition surpasses those descriptions. Today's food labeling is a gimmick that oversimplifies the science of nutrition and allows food sellers to market their products as good for us when they truly are not. Most of what we eat in an American diet is not real food at all, but food-like things synthesized, genetically altered, processed, salted and thrown in a box. You could look at the back of a bag of carrots and then pick up a bag of crackers enriched with synthetic vitamins and minerals and leave the store thinking the crackers might be better for you as a snack.

Fresh fruits and vegetables have natural versions of the vitamins and minerals that are inserted into processed foods synthetically. Synthesized vitamins often cannot be absorbed into our bodies the way they can in their natural state in foods. They also do not have the same benefit as vitamins in produce and can even be harmful at times.

More than that, food labeling says nothing of the many enzymes that exist in fruit and vegetables. Enzymes are the key to any metabolic reaction in the human body and can only be found in raw fruits and vegetables. Processing and heating foods kills the all essential enzymes. Without these enzymes, life would cease to exist.

The reason why Americans are so hungry all the time to the point that they often become overweight is because their body is crying out for real nourishment - vitamins from fresh fruit and vegetables and live enzymes. Unlike processed foods, you cannot overeat fruit and vegetables, which are really satisfying when eaten in good quantities. In fact, the more you eat, the more nutrition you receive. We're a country that can afford to eat hearty meals, but we're starving just like the rest of the world. Our bodies have plenty of calories, fat, sugars and protein, but we're starving for the real nutrition and live enzymes so essential to our bodies for real nourishment.

"Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food" - Hippocrates, c.400 BC

The Gerson Therapy is extremely intense and time consuming but simple and not very expensive. It consists of a combination of fresh carrot and green juices 10 times a day over a 12 hour period and a vegan, low sodium, high potassium breakfast, lunch, and dinner that equals 2,000-3,000 calories a day. In the standard American diet, meat and table salt leach potassium from the body. But potassium is what is needed to break down the cancer cell's outer layer, which disguises it from the immune system. The goal is to aggressively flood the system with nutrient-rich alkaline foods, which will bring your body's pH to optimal levels to allow normal metabolic functions to occur, as well as to consume huge amounts of enzyme-rich, raw vegetable juices to stimulate the immune system and help kill cancer cells.

In addition, the therapy includes a handful of carefully chosen inexpensive supplements and enzymes that the body uses in normal metabolic processes. The supplements are so natural that you couldn't even overdose on them if you tried, just like you couldn't overdose on vegetables. They provide the same things found in the foods we are eating, but because of the dire state a cancerous body is in, the supplements allow us to ramp up even more what we are getting.

The most invasive part of this therapy is a vitamin B-12 shot I give myself every other day. What a big step away from the list of 100 perscription drugs that I was on in March when I was in ICU, not to mention the $500,000 that went into somebody's pocket for all my treatments.

I'm thankful to my doctors for their help and I know that God is sovereign over all those events in my life, but after all of that I don't have much to show for it but a list of pains and disabilities and a poor prognosis.

I'm not saying that if you do something like the Gerson Therapy you'll suddenly be healed of all your ailments (but many many many people have been and case studies prove it), I'm simply saying that perhaps preventative medicine and non-invasive treatments such as the Gerson Therapy should be a normal part of our lives and endorsed by our government rather than the use of toxic drugs, scaples and processed foods. Each year the FDA approves food coloring after food coloring, and artificial flavor A, B, and Z, and new genetically modified foods void of nutrition, and sets the safe levels of lead and arsenic and pesticides that can be in our foods. And who sits on the boards of the FDA and the National Cancer Institute? The advisory committees for these agencies have ties to the most powerful petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and food companies. Check out the FDA website, you'll see that the ONLY two experts in nutrition on the science board are from Coca Cola, Inc. and Mars, Inc.

My hope is that each of us when we do research about health can see past the superficial layer of marketing, propoganda, and skewed statistics that pervades our society, and make informed decisions based on how our unique, individual body actually works. My hope is that others would be able to discover this sooner than we did. We are not a statistic and our individual and family's needs are not the same as our neighbors. There is great information out there, but we tend to not see it unless we're really looking, particularly because culturally we are so accustomed to eating the standard American diet and taking a pill for everything. God is teaching Grace and I more every day. If we pray with faith in God rather than in doctors or ourselves, and beg Him for wisdom, He will answer.

Prayer Requests:

1) That God would continue to nurse me back to health and heal me completely of cancer.

2) For wisdom about treatments. We're taking the Gerson Therapy one month at a time. After each month we're going to reevaluate its effectiveness and whether or not we should add/subtract something, or go in a different direction. The great thing is that as we learn more about our bodies, we can take control of our healthcare and make decisions on our own. Since we've been here, my health has been very stable, and my energy and spirits are way up!

3) For wisdom whether or not to stay in CA for the winter. After having pneumonia practically the entire month of September you can probably imagine that I am hesitant to return to the harsh winter in MN, especially with the amount of sickness my kids bring home. Plus, with the sunshine and the warm weather I can get fresh air and exercise, so essential to good health, everyday outside. Please pray for wisdom about this and that God will provide a place to sublet for a few months if He leads us to stay.

We've made new friends! It is much more enjoyable to share this treatment experience with really cool people. They skipped conventional treatments and are not enduring the pain and stress (which totally obstructs healing) brought on by chemo, radiation, or surgery, so it is a really positive, hopeful atmosphere filled with laughter. We cannot help but see each other as not having that dreadful word, "cancer," but rather people who have something in their bodies that they want to get rid of and get healthy in the process.

The juicing station.

The really nice people running the therapy do all the work, providing me with 20 lbs of enzyme and nutrient-rich vegetables per day. The grind and press method using a Norwalk juicer is the most effective juicing method and provides predigested juice that can be quickly absorbed into my blood stream (by the way, Dr. Norman Walker who invented this juicer lived to be really old, despite originally having gotten into nutrition due to bad health). That juice is incredibly rich in chlorophyll.

My meal.

What you see above are four cups of food blended in a Vita-Mix for insertion into my tube. Usually there is a mixture of potatoes, salad, veggies, Hippocrates soup, raw garlic, flax oil and a handful of supplements. Before I came here, I was only able to get 2 cups into my stomach before feeling nauseous and giving up on eating. When I got here I started at 3 cups. Now I can get at least 4 cups in at each meal plus 10 cups of juice per day! This in itself is a huge praise because my weight is so low.

Salads and raw vegetables are the norm.

A cup of carrot juice. I get a total of 10-11 fresh juices per day.

The ancient Hippocrates soup!

The Lord paints the gospel and His characteristics throughout all creation. What a picture of the gospel real food is that God made. How despite how we don't deserve it, within a matter of less than two years, even the most physically bad off, can still have everything reversed and be to better health than ever. His mercy is over all of His creation!