“Eat Well, Play Often, Live Fully”
– Your Pathway to Holistic Wellness –
“Ninety-five percent of all diseases are caused by a build-up of acid in our bodies. We need to cleanse our bodies regularly, just like a car. We need to clean our bodies to make sure they work properly so we don’t get diseases like cancer and diabetes. By cleansing our bodies we will become more fit and our metabolism will increase and we will lose weight, especially in all those tough spots: the arms, the belly, and the bum.”
“If you eat meat and don’t cleanse on a regular basis (i.e., “irrigate” your bowels), it begins to putrefy and rot inside us and the lower colon gets clogged with an immovable, thick, toxic sludge that causes many serious diseases. Many of us are carrying around as much as 10 pounds of this disgusting stuff.”
“You can’t blame aging for this, you can only blame yourself. Do you want to be healthy? You must take control and detoxify your body. An acidity and toxicity assessment only costs eighty dollars. Isn’t your health worth this much?”
Unless you’ve been living totally off the grid for a very long time, chances are you have come across similar advertisements, either in magazines, on TV, or increasingly, social media. Apart from the “toxicity” assessment, there is almost certainly some service or a miraculous product that will instantly cure all your ailments, and at a discounted price if you reply swiftly (usually within 24 hours for TV ads), which is typically only revealed right at the end of an incredibly captivating sales pitch.
I can assure you absolutely every statement made in the fictitious example above is either an oversimplication, incorrect or grossly misleading. There is no need to regularly “detoxify” and “cleanse” our bodies as promoted above. Detoxification will not result in weight loss. There is no way to make a particular part of your body lose weight by consuming a specially formulated “fat-melting algae” potion, or a “secret herbal remedy”, which will magically eliminate the “flab”.
These ads typically feature fit, attractive actors and use a mix of over-the-top fear-mongering and faith-healing proselytizing, with an impressive dose of pseudoscientific jargon thrown into the mix to create a sense of urgency and credibility.
The EPL website is about health and well-being. More particularly, it’s aiming to reveal proven facts associated with good health. I will also use the term wellness throughout this website – a broad term that is mainly used in relation to holistic health therapies. Sadly, the term is often misused to promote unproven medical therapies. As the detoxifying story (sales pitch) above demonstrates, there is a considerable amount of strange and bizarre information out there. Almost daily we are showered with advice about our health. We are told what to eat. We are told what not to eat. We are told to take supplements. We are told we need exercise. We are told to stretch. We are told to take pharmaceuticals. We are told to avoid pharmaceuticals. We are told to cleanse. We are told get our meridians centred. We are told to get healthy! So, what are you waiting for?
My aim is to shed light on this wellness landscape and uncover some of the factors that obscure it. I will try to strip away the hype and the agendas to reveal the sound evidence where it exists, and its absence when the research hasn’t been done (or remains inconclusive). In addition, I will provide practical guidance (and cautions) for those wishing to navigate the churning sea of facts, findings, fiction, fallacies, and unfounded fears associated with navigating the intricate world of health and wellness advice.
The path to good health is actually much more straightforward than we are often led to believe. Ninety percent of a healthy lifestyle is associated with a few simple truths. I won’t claim that this is always an easy path to follow, but if you can parse the twisted messages that bombard us daily, you will find the journey to better health can be surprisingly direct.
Throughout history, medical evidence has consistently shown that the main causes of un-wellness (disease) are:
Conventional medicine operates within a genetic predisposition paradigm, whereby chronic and degenerative diseases are commonly attributed to genomic factors, while incorporating pathogenic and psychological disorder in some situations. Toxic exposures and nutrient deficiencies are generally overlooked as common underlying causes of chronic disease. However, recent research in various health disciplines like molecular medicine, epigenetics, and environmental health sciences shows strong evidence that deficiency and toxicity states are major underlying causes in many health problems.