Health Expert Jon Barron Speaks On Herbs, Supplements, Food And Disease

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife. com. In this excerpt, Jon Barron shares on herbs, supplementation and the scary truths about today's foods and disease.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jon Barron, creator of Base Line Nutrition and author of Lessons from the Miracle Doctors.

Kevin: Sure, you talked about disease and using herbs to help. When does someone know they need to have herbs? I mean, is it just for disease or can people use these things for cleansing? I mean, I think a lot of people get confused as to when they should cleanse or when they should take herbal supplements.

Jon: Okay. Let's actually give a quick look at the base line of health program. The base line of health is sort of a summary of what I learned from virtually all of the doctors. Doctors like Dr. Christopher and Dr. Shultz and guys like that who are doing programs that basically treat people as a whole entity and where it starts is you have to remove the toxins from the body. Basically we are being poisoned all the time now by choices we make and by things we have no control over. There are over a 100,000 new chemicals that are brand new, never existed before that have been introduced into the environment in the last hundred years and they are out of control. You get them in your water, your drinking water. Here's something a lot of people don't know is that virtually all tap water that you drink contains traces of pharmaceutical drugs.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jon: All of the heart medication and cancer medications, so on, and people getting chemo when they urinate it goes out into the water. There is nothing in the treatment system that is designed now to remove those things. The amounts are small and authorities say that they shouldn't effect you they are so small, but no one really knows what the effect is of having these things every day for years is.

Kevin: And, we don't know if they have a half life or anything like that, do we?

Jon: No, we know nothing. It's like a grand experiment going on right now. I think we are getting strong indications of what the results of that experiment are, but number one is you've got to clean those things out and that starts for most people with intestinal cleansing and detoxification. Not because it's most important, but it' s sort of for two reasons. One, it's the area that we tend to focus the most abuse of the foods we eat. I'll give you one great example of that. When I was giving a talk, a pro bono talk in the Virgin Islands a few years back to high school kids, I was trying to talk about health and nutrition and I could see their eyes just rolling up into the back of their heads. They were bored out of their minds. I said, all right, let's give you a different example guys, how many of you eat pizza? The whole crowd said yeah. Have you ever thought about what you eat? Huh? Okay, have any of you ever helped your parents put up wallpaper? About half of them had and I said, what did you make the wallpaper paste from? It's made from white flour and water. Okay. So you're crust is basically wallpaper paste. Let's talk about the cheese. Have any of you ever used Elmer's glue? Whose picture is on the front of Elmer's glue? Elmer the bull.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jon: Why? Because all of the forerunners to Elmer's glue is now made from synthetics but in the early days, all of the glue similar to Elmer's was basically made from casing, the stuff that makes cheese stringy. So when you eat pizza you are eating wallpaper paste and Elmer's glue. What do you think the odds of that coming out cleanly are? That's one of the reasons we have to do intestinal cleansing. Over the years we so abuse that intestinal tract. You've got to clean it out and all the other cleans depend on it. Because things like the liver cleans dump out to the bile duct and if you have any blockage in the intestinal tract, the toxins you flush from the liver can't make it out through the bile duct. They back up into the blood stream and make you feel really ill. After you clean out, you need to do things like rebuild the beneficial bacteria. Beneficial bacteria provide huge functions. Not only in terms of digestion, but they're actually responsible for about 60% of your immune function. The simple fact is most people have almost none left.

Kevin: Wow.

Jon: Why? Antibiotics and chlorine primarily. You drink tap water and you get chlorine in the water. What is the purpose in the chlorine? To kill bacteria. When you drink, it does kill the bacteria in your gut and makes your pores a vacuum and it tends to fill that space with bad guys. The other is antibiotics. If you are buying commercial dairy or meat, it's packed with antibiotics. That's designed to, by its name, kill bacteria. So most people are in a state of disbiosis where the beneficial bacteria is virtually gone and they have large amounts of ecoli and other things that at least all the conditions, such as Crohn's Disease, IVS, ulcer and colitis, colon cancer. Colon cancer virtually unknown 60 or 70 years ago and today it's the second leading cancer among men and women combined, after lung cancer. The next thing you need to do, you want to start supplementing with enzymes because most people eat - man is the only animal that eats cooked processed food at sustained temperatures of over 118 degrees to destroy enzymes. You have to make up that loss, because food is designed - all food that you eat, if it's in a raw state, has enzymes necessary for some digestion in the food. You cook it, their gone. You have to make up the difference. What happens is you tend to bump high amounts of stomach acid to compensate and with high amounts your pancreas goes into overdrive to produce digestive enzymes. In the end you burn out your ability to produce hydrochloric acid. That's of course, along the way, having produced so much that you burned your gut out and had acid reflux and you burn out your pancreas' ability to produce enzymes. You basically lose the ability to digest food over time. That's one reason people, as they get older and don't get nutrition out of their food. You have to change your diet. You cannot keep eating the same stuff that people are eating and think you are going to be well. Most diseases today are self inflicted. One of the great ones is diabetes. Diabetes is a huge, huge epidemic right now. A couple of years ago the U.S. Government came out with a stat, a prediction that said that every child born in the United States today and that was from 2003 I think they did this - that any child born today - would have been 2003 - their odds of being diabetic are 50%. All right so one in three, 50% is either black or Hispanic.

Jon: Type two diabetes used to be called adult onset. They got rid of the adult onset, because of diet - kids are getting it now. You're finding kids - 16, 17, 18 - diabetic and pre-diabetic. All you have to do is understand a sugar soda is just under a teaspoon of sugar for every ounce. So, when you see those kids walking around - 10 year olds with those 32 oz big gulp sodas from the AMP and mini marts and Seven Eleven. There is just under a cup of sugar in that thing. Kids are having one or two of those a day.

Kevin: That's amazing.

Jon: A diet needs to change. There are so many things about a diet we can talk about - supplementation. I've heard doctors say that you don't need to supplement if you just eat a balanced diet but what diet are they talking about? Are they talking about the foods that are grown today or that were grown 50 years ago, because there is a huge difference? The green revolution certainly has produced more food but there is a simple logic of mathematics here. You can't grow more food out of the same land without thinking you are going to trade something off. What we are doing, we are trading off quality for quantity. Foods today don't have the same amount of vitamins and minerals they had 80 years ago. In fact, it takes you 80 cups of spinach to get the same amount of iron that you use to get from one cup of spinach.

Wheat has half the protein it once had. So a lot of the nutrients are going out of food that were once there.

Kevin: Is this for organics, as well?

Jon: Organic is an interesting animal. All organic means is that they are using organic fertilizers and they are not using pesticides, but it doesn't tell you how much organic fertilizer is being used on a field or whether there remineralizing the soil and there are farms that they use five tons of organic fertilizer on an acre and there are those that I call super organic that use up to a hundred tons.