Wylde - The antioxidant prescription: how to use the power of antioxidants to prevent disease and stay healthy for life

PART ONE:

CHAPTER 1 |

CHAPTER 2 |

CHAPTER 3 |

CHAPTER 4 |

CHAPTER 5 |

PART TWO:

CHAPTER 6 |

CHAPTER 7 |

CHAPTER 8 |

CHAPTER 9 |

CHAPTER 10 |

CHAPTER 11 |

CHAPTER 12 |

Appendices

W e live in an era strangely cursed and blessed. Were increasingly surrounded by invisible dangers our great-grandparents could not have dreamed of. In fact, until recently, most of us hardly dreamed of them ourselves. But what we once suspected or heard rumoured, we now know for certain: Our air, our water, our food and many of the everyday objects we employ are a constant threat to our health and safety. And yetand this is the blessed partthis same knowledge is our hope for a bright future for ourselves and for humanity at large.

The subject of human health is almost unimaginably vast, and our bodys interactions with our surroundings are almost too complex to grasp. But in this book Im going to zoom in and focus on the meaning of human health through the lens of a single natural phenomenonIm tempted to say dramathat plays out at a scale so tiny that ordinary microscopes cannot see its workings. There are villains in this drama but, as in any good story, these characters are dynamic. The fact is they often spend much of their time doing us a tremendous service. Even if we were able to round every one of them up and do them in, wed be the ones to suffer in the end. Thats why our task will be to understand them first, then deal with them wiselyperhaps I should say humanely, since theyre a necessary part of life.

This gang of wild molecules are called free radicals. Theyre notorious these days and almost everyone has heard their name. Wanted posters appear regularly advertising methods for their capture and execution. I recently saw a video game devoted to a free radical mission. Yet a great deal remains to be conveyed about their behaviour and how we need to respond to that behaviour in order to stay healthy or to regain our health. Much of this hasnt been conveyed, in part because its a breaking science story.

We hear even more these days about antioxidants, the molecules that neutralize free radicals and are supposed to be on our side in this battle. Are they the cure-alls theyre made out to be? Are some antioxidants better than others? Can we swallow too many antioxidants? To establish your knowledge level about both free radicals and antioxidants before you carry on, take a moment to do the quiz youll find in Appendix A.

In this book, Im going to set out what you need to know about free radicals. Im going to show you how and why free radicals lie at the root of all disease. Im not just talking here about chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and allergies. Im also talking about diseases that stem from infectious agentsbacteria, parasites and viruses. Im then going to show how and why the antioxidant family of molecules works to offset the destructive impact of free radicals. Finallybased on the latest scienceIm going to show you how you can determine your own free radical and antioxidant levels and provide you with a simple prescription for supplements, diet and lifestyle that will balance your bodys supplyor burdenof both these families of potent molecules.

I grew up in Toronto, Canada, a vegetarian and unvaccinated. I had the sort of mom who you could imagine treating the common cold by putting garlic between her sons toes, covering his feet with cold, wet socks to bring down a fever and maybe administering a twice-daily concoction of eye of newt and bat wing. In fact she did practise the cold-sock therapy and it turned out to be one of her good ideas. I also began every morning by swallowing ten vitamins and minerals. Our soaps and shampoos smelled of tea tree oil and were certainly free of harmful agents, though otherwise, er, not perfected. Junk food in my family was a sesame seed snap. Anything with sugar in it was considered to be deadly, and eating hotdogs was equivalent to swallowing poison. Birthday cakes were suspect. I went to school every day with a SoyPro, sprouts-and-tomato sandwich on thick German-style bread, the kind you could see the grains in. Needless to say, I kept this lunch hidden for fear of being ridiculed and possibly beaten. On occasion, I was able to misplace my lunch altogether and claim the peanut butter and jelly on soda crackers that the lunch room staff kept for those unfortunates who forgot their lunch.

Our family doctor, Dr. John McLean, was a chiropractor, a homeopath and a naturopath. Unless we were near death, my mother wouldnt bring us near the regular medical profession for fear its practitioners would fill us with antibiotics or surgically remove some vital organ wed most certainly need later in life. I should mention that my mothers view of the medical profession was very different then than mine is now.

When I grew older, I determined to become a clinical psychologist and spent a year volunteering at Torontos Queen Street Mental Health Centre. My first day there was spent talking to a schizophrenic man in the patient library who was threatening to inject himself with Javex. After a year or so of similar efforts, I came to the realization that we were trying to make a difference for people who were little more than pharmaceutical overdose cases. One afternoon I stumbled across some old patient files in the facilitys basement storage room. In them, I found evidence that, back in the early 1950s, some clinicians in that very institution had been incorporating homeopathic medicines with considerable success to treat mental illness. I decided that from that point forward, Id try to make a real difference in the lives of others, not simply struggle to supersede the side effects of powerful drugs. It would be my mission to prevent people from getting to the point of incarceration in one of these hellholes.

I went to the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine in Toronto to study homeopathy, nutrition and medical sciences. Id previously studied mainstream biology and psychology, so it was two years before I felt comfortable with the idea of homeopathyan alternative medical system with its roots in the late eighteenth century and its practice based on carefully diluted and natural medicines.

Then came an epiphany of sorts: homeopathy did indeed work in the student clinic. It was indeed scientifically validated. There were no real side effects from its treatments. But it also suffered from a great shortcoming: a homeopathic remedy never held its course of healing unless the patients case was resolved for what homeopathic practitioners know as obstacles to cure. These are the obstaclesobserved in almost every casepresented by diet, lifestyle and genetic code that impede the homeopathic medicine from having its full and lasting effect. Practitioners often seemed confused as to why a patients recovery was only temporary and the patients often judged homeopathy not to work. This insightthat homeopathic medicines, no matter how effective in the short term werent effective in the long term unless the practitioner addressed diet, lifestyle and constitutionled me to my passion for preventative nutrition, preventative antioxidant medicines and preventative vitamin/mineral supplementation. It was my search for the obstacles to cure that allowed me to grasp the idea that the actions of free radicals are the underlying cause of all disease. Ultimately, that insight led to my becoming a practitioner of what is now being called functional medicine as opposed to alternative medicine.