HEALTH WARS

Health Wars

Health Wars

Introduction

Health Wars by Phillip Day is an informative, impassioned plea to the public to practice disease prevention through awareness of nutrition and the body. The book seeks to expose many dangers that befall one when navigating the modern world of healthcare, illness and diet, and offers some simple and cost-effective solutions to the ills that plague us.

The author draws on the statistics of many native societies with members who live to be over the age of one hundred, delving into the practices that helped achieve this longevity. He tries to lay bare the iatrogenic nature of the allopathic medical community and warn the reader against placing too much trust in the flawed and in many cases, barbaric system of healthcare that currently reigns supreme (Harrison, 2007).

Discussion

The first section of the book is devoted to some of the biggest issues and problems we face concerning our health. However, some of the main concerns that learnt from this book are discussed below;Heart Disease:

Heart disease is one of the leading killers in our part of the world. The author explains how curing heart disease with methods such as surgery and anti-cholesterol drugs is a billion dollar business and how keeping people sick is of great value to those that would profit in the healthcare industry.

The author goes on to reveal the relationship of heart disease to vitamin C deficiency. Since humans cannot manufacture this important nutrient in their bodies, they must absorb it from food or supplements. But in the last 150 years, humans have made a dramatic shift from a vegetarian diet to a diet high in animal consumption. It is this poor diet over time that causes the collagen in the arterial walls to disintegrate. The body then compensates by producing lipoproteins, which are sticky band-aid like substances. These band-aids clog the arteries and prevent normal blood flow, causing a host of heart problems (Biran, 2009).

Other factors contributing to heart problems are exposure to smoking, car exhausts, pollution and smog, all of which damage the collagen in the artery walls and trigger the body to make more lipoprotein. Stress also plays a role by producing the hormone adrenaline, which requires vitamin C molecules to be effective and contributes to a vitamin C deficiency.Cancer:

The second leading cause of death in many Western nations is cancer. This appears to be another area in which natural cures and solutions are suppressed in order to keep the billion-dollar industry going full steam ahead. Chemotherapy and radiation continue to be suggested even though they are toxic to the body and counterproductive (Harrison, 2007).

The author points out that cancer results from environmental or lifestyle causes and that several cultures in the world have never known a single case of cancer. Thus it is not this inevitable burden that people must bear just by being alive, but something preventable and in many cases, reversible.

Day calls cancer a 'rouge healing process'. That is, when a mass of trophoblastic cells originally intended to repair continue to proliferate ...