Hildreth on Health: Keep your body healthy by using it

If every cell is happy by being healthy with balanced nutrition, relieved of toxins (exogenous and endogenous), and is shown by you that it is needed, its chances of becoming cancerous or premature degeneration is much less likely.

If it is to be, it is up to me, not the TV ads.

Most medications are temporary fixes. They are to be used until you, with the help of your doctor, fix the underlying problem.

Activate and use your brain first to understand just what changes take place in our bodies with age, with emotional and environmental stressors, with physical inactivity and nutritional excesses or deficiencies.

All components of our body are built to respond and strengthen with demand and use.

Our brain cells become more active, require more nutrition, and kick out more byproducts with use.

Demand causes an increase in blood supply to the brain by four to five times the resting state.

It reduces the chances of senility and Alzheimer’s. Healthy cells will regenerate and become more responsive.

This brain use must be in the tranquil, enjoyable way. Stress, worry, and revengeful mental activity are destructive and cause deterioration.

We require some form of spiritual attachment with a Higher Power to maintain mental stability. We generate energy by taking in. We strength and build by giving out or expressing.

That is limited only by our imaginations. Mental rest and sleep, if all aggravation and negative stressors have been released, will come when needed.

If all of the brain cells are in a chemical balance, have proper nutrition, clean from toxins and byproducts from use and not experiencing pain, they will relax and sleep.

We find it easier and apparently more appropriate to force our brains to go into a resting state with drugs and it does not take long for the brain to expect the drugs and depend upon them.

Most of our greatest scholars did not, or do not, worry about what time they go to bed or how much sleep they get. They are in a mental state of doing, not programming.

Our minds grow and maintain health by the use of imagination in a constructive, not destructive, way. Our minds are built to be leaders, not followers. That might mean only leaders of ourselves or the pets we enjoy.

Most of us don’t appreciate our potential for constructive, kind input.

I am sitting here looking at the last AARP bulletin, the one with the suitcase of pills on the front of it.

I just noticed a paragraph about the New England Journal of Medicine in which 94-plus percent of the doctors polled said they had direct ties with the drug industry.

In other words, the direction of the drug industry is more important to them than their concern for their patients, which is you.

More than 50 percent of the new drugs the FDA approved in the past few years were taken off the market before the end of their first year, either because of safety issues or ineffectiveness.

There is now a big push by some of the drug companies to put through a law banning all natural products like the chemicals our bodies produce, monetary driven, not health driven.

At least we all can be leaders in keeping our bodies healthy by use. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

I have spent some time over the past month expressing and demonstrating the importance of musculoskeletal use, not abuse.

In this case, it is very obvious to us all when we don’t maintain a good functional musculoskeletal system.

All we have to do is look in the mirror or try to get from here to there in a hurry.

Our musculoskeletal system has another challenge and that is to give us support against gravity.

As our brain cells deteriorate, they become dysfunctional and we cannot think well. As our bones and muscle cells deteriorate, they are not able to keep us erect against gravity. More about this later.

There is no place that if you don’t lose it you lose it is any more true than in the nutritional diet area.

Some of you gentleman may remember back when you were involved in World War II or another situation where you noticed someone or a group of people that had been on a starvation diet for a period of time and then had an opportunity to eat all they wanted.

Their gastrointestinal tract and digestive enzyme production simply lost the ability to handle the intake of good quality food.

Also, this is true with someone that has become accustomed to a junk-food diet and then tries to eat a well-rounded diet with lots of raw foods and bulk. They will also have trouble making the change because of past disuse.

If our intestinal tract is not accustomed to foods that require certain enzymes for digestive breakdown and assimilation, it shuts down because of disuse and may atrophy in time.

We have to get back to important nutritional food quality in a gradual way. This is the same as with exercise or wading through a good book.

The last example that I want to make is in the use of the reproductive organs as we age.

As with other examples that I have referred to, we lose enzymes and hormone production at about 1 percent per year after age 28 or 30.

You ladies may stay fairly even until about age 45 when things start to change.

The problem there is that the hormone changes do not always change at the same speed, thus creating all kinds of vague symptoms.

But that is not all. Getting back to our quote of if you don’t use it you lose it, life’s environmental changes, job changes, family changes, less physical activity or just sheer boredom with retirement, an apathy sets in.

Intimacy is an art that must be practiced. It is good for the soul, it is good for the relationship, and it is good for the mind and the physical body.

The body has to be relatively healthy otherwise and chemically balanced.

Mentally and physically you have to be active and do things together. Volunteer work may help considerably. You cannot play all of the time and expect things to stay as they were in the past.

Over the next while, I will break each of these down and be more specific as to what will reduce our chances of senility and Alzheimer’s, back and hip degeneration, and sexual dysfunction.

The nutritional aspect can be interspersed to support cellular growth and function. The next article will be on the gastrointestinal function from the mouth to the anus.

Make it a good weekend and keep smiling.

Contact Green Valley Dr. DeWall Hildreth at 625-1101 or cnhcgv@ yahoo.com. His column appears biweekly in the Green Valley News.