Aukerman's Integrated Approach

[BigDog]

So, yea, I've been not been doing much health-wise. I was walking 2 miles every morning (yea!) until cliffy broke his toe and it's been hard to do it when he can't come along. Still, this morning I did it with the other dogs.

This morning I went with Vickie to her dr appt with a fellow named Dr. Glen Aukerman. He's nationally ranked as one of the best doctors and he runs OSU's Center for Integrated Medicine. I was very impressed. His basic spiel was that what we eat is the cause of most of our problems and that what we "think" we know about eating well isn't right. Some examples:

1. All nuts are bad for the body.
2. Bananas, avacados, and <something> contain latex in them. Other plants do too if you harvest them at the wrong time. Latex is toxic to the body.
3. Heirloom plants (tomatoes, etc.) have vastly more nutritional value than the modern, bred-to-look-good-after-1,000-miles-in-a-truck. The value of such produce hadn't been tested since 1950 and there is an effort now to go find the heirloom seeds as the basis of a renewed national food stock (tough climb against the major business interests)

Dr. Aukerman could look at Vickie and myself and point out the signs of various toxins and deprivations of key nutrients. Lines around our elbows were related to latex the body couldn't process. Rippling on the sides of our tongue meant something as well as many things that we just chalk up to 'aging' but are nothing of the sort.

4. The 2004 Food Pyramid by the FDA was put out before the research was completed. The 43 fruits and vegetables on the list all lack 6 basic Vitamin Bs the deprivation of which causes all sorts of symptoms in the human body: pain, calcium deposits, memory loss, fatigue, stiff joints, etc.

That's what I remember off the top of my head. He gave Vickie copies of all her bloodwork, etc. as well as a stack of sheets detailing what is essentially a plan to try to get the body back to optimum state by avoiding the toxic* foods (hummus can't be processed by the body and Dr. Aukerman doesn't consider it a food) and focusing on the foods that supply us with what we need, in addition to key supplements.

Now some of this might sound 'same old, same old' but he presented a lot of research to back these things up. And as you all know Vickie, she is a demon at research so if these things don't hold up, we'll know it.

In ways it aligns to what sort of makes common sense and what Vickie has been doing for herself and myself for years. We just aren't educated enough to make the correct choices we want to make. For example, she's really stuck with as much organic as we can get, but now Aukerman has said that while you do avoid some pesticides, just buying organic doesn't solve the problem of which foods are actually detrimental to the body, which foods help the body, and how many foods are misconceived as one or the other.

I bring this up not to proselytize Dr. Aukerman's way (I hate it when people try to convert me on something) but to just let the folks on this sub-forum hear what Vickie and I are up to. If you're interested, I can certainly share more along with the many web-links Dr. Aukerman provided. (I think there is a set of lectures online that address what he's trying to say, so they might be a good overview). It looks like we'll be starting this new approach to food and we'll have the yardstick of Vickie's bloodwork in about 90 days. Dr. Aukerman says that he gets good results from people in 90-180 days who work to change their diet and take the recommended supplementation. That, of course, simply strengthens your basic body and reduces the body issue noise around real diseases or conditions. He's correlated these changes to reduced incidence of a long list of diseases like cancer, diabetes, etc. Makes sense. If you're harming the body in general, it isn't going to be able to resist or fight off real problems as well.

[Sin]

BigDog,

Sounds very interesting. I'll be interested to hear how it goes, what was hard to do, what was easier than expected, etc.

It's funny about bananas - we tend to eat a fair amount of them and I have preached to the kids ad nausea how healthy they are.

Keep us informed.

- G$

[BigDog]

After a couple weeks, Vickie has gone gluten-free as it seems pretty clear she has Celiac. She's adjusted her supplments to better align with Aukerman's list. I've adjusted my supplements to meet his list, but haven't changed my eating habits too much, though we both eat gluten-free meals when she cooks now. So vickie is doing better at working the program but I'm trying to get there, adding or eliminating food types one at a time as I shift my intake.