Posted in Your Doctor
When irritable bowel symptoms first surface, a doctor will focus on the following question: Is something dangerous causing these symptoms? Once irritable bowel is diagnosed, the focus turns to managing those symptoms and responding to any problems.
In many ways, having irritable bowel forces you to become your own doctor. It is up to you to control your symptoms, to choose what you eat, when you eat, and how you act and react to life’s daily stresses. Your physician will be the person you turn to for expert advice and to decide if symptom changes warrant more tests.
Few doctors receive much training in managing irritable bowel, and most can’t advise you about specific nutrition strategies (that’s why this site is so important).
Posted in Healthy Eating Adjustments
Abdominal pain is associated with a number of other symptoms. Pain is related to constipation or diarrhea or to the sensation that gases are being trapped in the intestines. Irritable bowel may react with abdominal pain to caffeine intake or high-fat foods that are hard to digest. Based on the four potential nutrition-related causes, there are four potential diet adjustments to consider that minimize abdominal pain. Fiber can help if your pain symptoms are related to constipation or to alternating constipation and diarrhea. If abdominal pain is due to gas, then a low gassy foods diet relieves discomfort caused by gas - producing foods.
Posted in Sub-Par Supplements
One of the premises of this site is that eating a primitive diet along with taking selected whole-food supplements provides nutrients in
their most accessible form. The foods in the primitive diet are pure, whole foods. They have not been refined. They present nutrients to the body in such a way that the body recognizes them and can take full advantage of their nutritional power. Obviously, our primitive ancestors did not take the powders, capsules, and pills that we call “supplements.” They obtained their nutrients from lean meat, fruit, and vegetables in their natural state. Practitioners of alternative and complementary medicine often claim that supplements are completely natural preparations. By contrast to pharmaceutical drugs they may seem natural, but most supplements are not truly natural. The isolated materials from plants, herbs, fungi, and other organic materials that go into supplements are inert. They are devoid of the cofactors - the enzymes, minerals, and other components - that synergistically give whole food its dynamic nutritional properties. The body does not recognize most supplements as food. As food goes through the digestive process, the body selects and extracts the nutrients it needs.
Posted in The Primitive Lifestyle
P
rimitive hunter-gatherers had no conception of exercise. The idea of going for a jog around the lake or along the beach was unknown to them. They didn’t have time to exercise because they were too busy moving around. Their very survival depended on hunting and foraging. By contrast, we live in the most sedentary time in human history. The farm has been mechanized and machines such as leaf blowers have taken the sting out of manual labor. Our bodies, however, were made for vigorous activity, which in our day means exercise. The notion that you should exercise for health dates back to the time of Hippocrates in 400 b. c. Exercising tones the muscles and improves cardiovascular function. It increases your stamina and gives you a feeling of well-being. It is one of the best ways to alleviate stress. Exercise is even an effective antidepressant. Recent studies have demonstrated that moderate exercise is equivalent to drug therapy in the treatment of mild to moderate depression.
Posted in Tenuous Techniques
Many laboratories, including the Great Smokies Diagnostic Laboratory of Asheville, North Carolina, offer a comprehensive digestive stool analysis (CDSA) that consists of eighteen different tests. The analysis is very popular with complementary and alternative practitioners. It measures absorption, the intestinal environment, digestion, and intestinal function. For an extra fee, the analysis also tests for parasites. The analysis is meant to help physicians identify and treat gastrointestinal diseases. The CDSA includes tests in these broad categories:
Posted in The Primitive Diet
Conventional wisdom says that primitive humans were undernourished and plagued by illness. They died young, if not by violent death then by infectious disease. They were dirty and infested with lice. The Neanderthal hovering by the fire in his sooty, smoke-filled cave, his body wracked by disease, is a stock figure in popular movies and the funny articles. Most people accept at face value the English social philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s well-known description of primitive humans: “No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
