From the Blog Journal: 4 August, 2008

Here we are, Baby Boomers. How’s your health?
I’ve attributed my good health to a hardy genotype (Nomad), compliant diet/supplementation, and use of pure essential oils in every possible way. I’m finding out, as I look around at my ailing peers, however, that there are a few VERY high risk factors.

One is the regular/frequent use of distilled spirits. People who enjoy cocktails show far more wear and tear in their fifties than the rest of us do. You’d think it’s mostly liver ailments, but I notice that their overall immunity stinks, they can’t sleep, and they don’t manage stress well. And that’s just the beginning. If you drink, switch to a bloodtype/genotype-compliant wine or beer. If you really miss the cocktails, you can cut back gradually by using water/soda more liberally at cocktail hour, enjoying that ONE diluted drink, switching to wine at dinnertime. (Eventually take wine-only at cocktail hour if you maintain that tradition.) If you’re under fifty, start now so you won’t be using spirits at all in midlife, or you’ll be sicklier than necessary, for sure.

Another risk factor is chemicals, such as those found in diet foods/diet sodas. Rather than find yourself a plaintiff in some class action suit in midlife, or wondering why you have undiagnosible vertigo (often reversible when NutraSweet usage is stopped), switch to healthy sweeteners, for instance, recommended for your blood- or geno-type.

Third: Piling up Rx meds is an American pastime. On any given day, a Baby Boomer might be taking drugs for several conditions, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, ulcers, menopause, a cold (wrongly taking antibiotics), and insomnia.
This is NOT to be compared to the healthy person’s taking numerous supplements every day such as multivitamins, multiminerals, fiber, omega oils and a probiotic. Rx drugs come with numerous side effects, nutrient depletions, possible adverse reactions, warnings and contraindications. There could be a piper to be paid for this layering of powerful synthetic chemicals, with conditions that most MD’s will never take the time to associate with multiple medication use.

My advice is (1) that you research, yourself, each and every med you’re prescribed, and, if it fits and you end up taking it, that you use supplements to amply replenish whichever nutrients are depleted by the drug in question. (2) If you experience side effects from a medication, do NOT unquestionably take another Rx drug to reduce these effects. You might ask your MD to simply lower the dosage of the original drug, switch you to another drug, or time the drug’s administration differently; or you might investigate or use nutritional supplements to quell the side effects. Take the time, people. That “innocent” second drug will have its own side effects and depletions…and it’s a never-ending pile-up your pharmaceutically-oriented MD may not be inclined to prevent. (3) Once your condition is stabilized on a given Rx med, look into nutrient (i.e., diet and supplements) and lifestyle changes that might enable you to take a lower dosage or to eventually wean yourself completely. Many Boomers are amazed at how much slack, for instance, a good multimineral, Stress-B-Complex and melatonin can take up! If you cannot, however, forego a given medication, it’s understandable. But try to keep the number of Rx’s to a minimum.

Fourth is the obvious cigarette smoking. I’ll say no more than that it’s like drinking dirty, poisoned water --- only it’s what you put in your lungs. Who doesn’t know this?

Fifth is sexual stupidity. Maybe it was years ago. Sometimes it’s ongoing. I live in San Francisco where some people do/have done dumb stuff. There are consequences.

Sixth is Bad Parenting. If your parenting was lazy, you may now have teenaged or young adult children with knotty problems that stress you out beyond measure. “Good-enough” parenting yields the more normal “stressful-enough” result, but those midlifers who’d cut corners as disciplinarians have unruly progeny and all sorts of stress-caused conditions, all of which are serious quality-of-life destroyers. No one put it to us correctly when we were in our twenties and thirties. No one warned us: “If you don’t stick to your highest principles here, you may think the consequences will come home to roost when you’re still feeling as vibrant and energetic as you do now, but: They’ll hit you when your joints creak and you’re career-exhausted and you don’t have the resilience you now do. You’ve GOT to raise responsible, respectful adults for THAT day.”

You may find yourself described in only one of the above categories: See what you can do about it. We’re all going to die – some of us young, some of us old. If you can live without myriad health conditions until you die, wouldn’t that be easier? If your lifestyle is high-flying, high-rolling, on the edge, and you like it that way, then someone probably made you read this. Think it over.

Not everyone cares a whole lot about his/her health; a reality many health-conscious people find shocking, even unbelievable. But it’s a fact. If you know someone who mocks the natural approach of diet/supplement/herb/lifestyle/fitness or any element thereof, don’t nag. Accept. In our fifties we understand my late grandmother’s saying, “A leopard don’t change its spots,” with regard to some of our peers’ ways (and some of our own).

Oh, and see Death differently, too: Somewhat more matter-of-factly. Some of us check out sooner, some later. People make choices and – another old saying - that’s what makes horse racing.

In earlier columns I've demonstrated, with respect to food, my concern with both the distinction and interface between:

Physical Life: What we eat, how we exercise, where we go, our state of health, how we support ourselves, gestation-birth-maturity, unto death: That which in Greek would be signified by the word βιος (Bios), hence our word "biology": The study of physical life, and

Spiritual Life: That which infuses the heart, mind, and spirit of the human, rather than the animal, and which is granted through means other than physical, signified by the Greek word Ζωη (Zoé), whence our English word "zoology", actually erroneously signifying specifically animal, as opposed to more general life forms.

Let me state at the outset that the Blood Type Diet cannot bring you any closer to spiritual life (Zoé) than can any other diet, whether "kosher" or "halal" or vegan or raw or whatever else. Nor can fasting entirely, i.e., deliberately countering Bios, serve as one's "ticket to heaven". So if anyone following Dr. D'Adamo's teaching fancies him/herself a more "evolved" spiritual being than those outside this particular fold, s/he is in dire need of an understanding of this very distinction: What, for the sake of the English reader, I'm here calling Zoé vs. Bios.

In our Western tradition, we are familiar with some key Bible stories treating of diet:

1. The almost unrestricted diet permitted Adam
2. The fateful disobedient act of eating that brought about the Fall of humankind
3. The vegetarian diet prescribed Noah
4. The dietary guidelines delivered to the Hebrews via Moses on Mount Sinai and recorded in the Pentateuch
5. The miraculous bread (מנה "Manna": Hebrew for "What is it?") supplied from heaven to those Hebrews for their 40 years of desert sojourning (of which their later Levitical pre- and pro-scriptions said nothing)
6. Food offerings in the Jerusalem Temple, restricted to all but the priests (except for David and his men, as Type of the Messiah and His followers)
7. The food miracles of Jesus (5 loaves and 2 fishes feeding 5000 men plus women and children, and other events like it), as recorded in the Gospels, and
8. The True Bread from heaven, as Jesus called Himself in John 6 and as He explained more fully at the "Last Supper" and as the Apostle expounded later, etc.: The spiritual food to remove the curse that had fallen upon all descendants of Adam (partaker of the Forbidden Food) and to bestow Zoé, the life of the Spirit.

Jesus said, "Labour not for the food which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto Life (Zoé) of the Age, which the Son of Man shall give unto you." And, "The Bread of God is the One descended out of heaven and giving Life (Zoé) unto the world."
He explains, "I am the Bread of Life (Zoé): The one coming to Me will not hunger, and the one believing in Me will never thirst."
BOTTOM LINE: To the religious leaders, He said, "Your fathers ate Manna in the wilderness and died", and, "I am the Bread of Life (Zoé) giving Himself for the Life (Zoé) of the world."
The religious leaders couldn't understand: "How can this one give us [His] flesh to eat?" Such an earthy density of understanding was that also of a specific religious teacher named Nicodemus, who earlier had visited Jesus privately and who could not understand how someone could be "born a second time of his mother's womb". Christ had explained to him, "That born of the flesh is flesh, and that born of the Spirit is spirit...everyone believing in [the Son of Man] shall not perish but have Life (Zoé) of the Age." He spoke of a heavenly food - affording Zoé, Life of ANOTHER (non-Bios) ORDER entirely. The Bios-focussed could not, and cannot, taste of it!

* * * * *

Ah, diets come and diets go.
Are we "majoring on minors" when it comes to reaching out to others and to judging ourselves? If others ask us questions specifically about diet or physical health, sure, we can share of what we believe and practice. If others mock our ways of eating, we need not retaliate or even respond. Why?

Because Diet pertains to the oh-so-fleeting Bios, the animal life and lifespan of that which returneth to the dust: Not a one of us will perfect a physical body that shall live more than, approximately and at best, one lousy century.

For my part, I would sooner, on a diet of DOG CHOW, uplift the spirits of others and help to turn one soul from cruelty or despair to the Light of Truth and Zoé, than live (Bios) to be 150 on a micro-compliant, Tier THREE, B-hypersecretor Diet at the top of my Ivory Tower. As I wrote last month in another column ("Vers Une Santé Totale: Les Maladies, Amies de l'Esprit", 2 January 2006)[Reprise on 23 November 2010]:

(English translation): "The knowledge of BTD science serves a purpose. And the health of all the world's population, were it possible, would serve this same purpose."

Think about that purpose! If everyone on earth "ate according to their type", we'd perhaps have a biologically healthier species: Better (and, dangerously, more prideful) Bios.-----------------------SO WHAT?

If we need to be healthy, WHY is that? To use our good health unto the goal of...a more just world? Well? Do it NOW! Be there NOW! or never. Perfectly healthy people perfectly proving their perfect health would not necessarily constitute that perfect, just and peaceful society: Do you see it? In fact, legal self-righteousness in hyper-refined Bio-dietary obedience ran absolutely counter to, and blinded many against, Zoé two millennia ago (Its very Temple was ground to dust!) BTD notwithstanding, it still does today.

"For the mind of the flesh is Death; but the mind of the Spirit is Life (Zoé) and Peace." (Romans 8:6)

"If there had been a law given which could have given Life (Zoé), verily righteousness should have been of the Law." (Gal. 3:21)

Remember the Manna: It temporarily ministered unto the needs of Bios, the physical organism, about which Christ had this to say: "Your fathers ate Manna in the wilderness and died." (John 6:49)

Is the BTD, or any Diet whatsoever, more evolved, more spiritual than the Manna sent from God? Will it bring you at all closer to Zoé, True Life?