Eating Alive: Prevention thru good Digestion by Dr Jonn Matsen
A quote from the book about the stomach: (pg 12)
“So we can see that the stomach is extremely important for absorbtion of nutrients, especially of the building materials: amino acids and minerals. The stomach is also an important defence organ and provides the spark for the rest of the digestive system. It’s no wonder that the stomach is found at the centre of the body or solar plexus, as it is truly the center of our physical universe”
Filed under: Events & conferences
15th June 06 – Pavilion conference - A national conference on nutritional interventions for tackling depression 15th (free place)
Filed under: General discussion
About nutrition
Someone asked a question about a particular piece of advice he had been given by someone (non qualified in nutrition) about his diet, which I can’t remember what it was but do remember it sounded slightly strange and questionable. Ute’s diplomatic answer was firstly ‘Well if it worked it worked, and that’s good’ but she also made the point that nutrition is not like religion, it should not be based on beliefs, but rather understanding. That is if we can’t understand something on a scientific level then we cannot be sure about it. I liked that very much.
An analogy for the importance of good nutrition for good health – cars and computers…
When explaining the importance of nutrition to the smooth running of our bodies’ systems Ute used a computer as an analogy to illustrate this; that is you can have a very sophisticated computer, with sophisticated hardware and software, but it would not even switch on without a supply of the right kind of electric current. My own analogy (which I have had in my head for years but not sure where I got it from) involves a car, and putting the right kind of good quality fuel in it. And when the engine is not clean, the car does not run well and eventually it gets more and more damaged internally.
An analogy for the importance of fasting for allowing out bodies to heal – a companies’ HQ
Ute mentioned briefly that she fasts for 10 days at a time once a year, and that she considers it most important for her well being and health. She only touched very briefly on this subject but had another great analogy to illustrate the importance of fasting for effective running of the bodies systems. That is, imagine an office, an HQ of a company, and this HQ is open to the public, and each worker has a direct phone line for enquiries. Every day the employees of this company are bombarded with people calling them, visiting, requesting information and needing to be processed in some way. But these workers also have other work they need to be getting on with – important background work, admin tasks, and maintenance, that they continually get behind on because of all these interruptions from outside. If the bosses of this company were to one day close the door to reception and cut off all the phone lines, that would allow the workers to get on with their other essential work and catch up on what they need to do. Our bodies are like this office, that is continually we pour in things from outside that need to be processed – food. If we stop in taking for a number of days our bodies can get on with the process of healing itself, which the next story is a great illustration of, and that also the fact that children and animals, when ill, will often refuse food.
A Victorian fasting tale…
My retelling of this may be a little hazy – I don’t remember names or anything – but the general gist is as follows:
As recently as the Victorian times, the belief was that if human beings were starved of food for 2 days we would die. There was a man who suffered with bad rheumatoid pains, so bad, that he felt he would rather die than suffer any longer. He decided he would simply starve himself, and he thought that would mean he could be gone within 2 days. So he stopped eating, and 2 days passed, then 3, then 4 and 5… and he wasn’t dieing, in fact he was feeling pretty good, and his pains had completely disappeared. He had finally given his body the space is needed to heal itself, by not bombarding it with food to process for a few days.
Filed under: General discussion
Last night I attended the open evening of the course I am starting this autumn at the Falmer campus of the University of Brighton. The evening just confirmed and added to my excitement about starting this course and a career in Nutrition. Ute Allison, the Naturopath and Nutritionist who will be teaching our first year (which is the Medicine year) gave us a taster lecture on detoxing. She was a fascinating and engaging woman, a German woman with over 18 years of teaching experience and what looks like many years of experience as a practitioner and therapist. She was charming, funny, and explained complicated scientific processes in an accessible and simple way and using interesting analogies that made the information somehow stick in your head. I am very much looking forward to learning from Ute, especially seeing as I was looking forward to the first medicine year a little less than the other two more seemingly ‘practical’ years, which cover Nutrition. But just from the small time Ute spoke with us, I realised how important the medicine year will be to my knowledge and understanding as a practitioner – for how can I truly understand nutrition as medicine for the body when I don’t fully understand the body itself?
