Book Review: Defeating Obesity, Diabetes and High Blood Pressure – The Metabolic Syndrome

Author: Charlotte Gerson
Publisher: Gerson Health Media
Book Publication: 2010

Readers who have had the uplifting experience of hearing Charlotte Gerson speak at previous Whole Life Expo events in Toronto, and who are familiar with the excellent results produced by the Gerson Therapy for almost all forms of cancer and chronic diseases, will be as delighted as I am that she has done it again!  Gerson has produced a fabulous little book about how to heal metabolic syndrome. This “little” book is not only stuffed with immensely helpful information, but is backed by a vast amount of very big and rapidly accumulating mainstream research that has yet to make it into clinical use by mainstream doctors.

Most of us cannot wait until our medical schools graduate young doctors who will know and apply all of this new research – which they inevitably will do in another decade or so. Currently, cutting-edge research in medicine is generally met with hostility by those who are making comfortable incomes with outdated treatments and lucrative toxic drugs. It has been said that politics is too important to leave to politicians. The same is true for medicine: it is potentially fatal to leave medicine to the doctors; the patient must take charge, and to do so, this book is key.

What medicine currently calls the “metabolic syndrome” comprises a set of pathologies that specifically include obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. While one symptom may affect a person by itself, the others will soon follow and they will all escalate into central nervous system damage and disrupt DNA repair function. Metabolic syndrome finally escalates to a cancer diagnosis. Within two decades, two-thirds of Americans have become clinically obese, the diabetes stats are no better, and everybody seems to have high blood pressure these days – even children are receiving treatment.

One of the main causes for this total system breakdown is “fake food” that does not properly nourish because it was grown according to corporate agricultural cost-benefit mantras, is loaded with salt and sugar beyond the body’s capacity to absorb, is spiked with toxic additives, and has been made toxic itself through genetic engineering – some 19 health conditions are now known to be directly associated with genetically engineered foods in animals and humans. How metabolic syndrome develops and can be totally reversed was most dramatically documented in the movie, Supersize Me, in which we observe Morgan Spurlock eating nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days. To the life-disrupting effects of junk food we can now add the discovery made by Canadian researcher, Magda Havas, that metabolic syndrome, and especially diabetes, can be triggered directly through the harmful radiation coming from cell phones and computer-embedded Wi-Fi technology, because its primary target is our insulin metabolism.

As usual, Charlotte Gerson offers compelling mainstream statistics and research sources. The treatment required to reverse these conditions appears deceptively simple: detox and eat right. There is no magic pill, no trendy genetic therapy, nor any expensive intervention that is known to deal with metabolic syndrome successfully. However, the deceptive simplicity of the Gerson approach is proven to work time and again.

Cutting-edge medical research is only just beginning to catch up with the Gerson Therapy. Since the publication of this book, a lot more has appeared. In March, it was reported that the entire sugar metabolism, which is the source of the body’s energy derived from food and which metabolic syndrome renders dysfunctional, is controlled by the same genetic mechanisms that prevent cancer from developing during cell repair. Furthermore, last month a finding was published explaining how high salt intake causes hypertension, even among healthy people – salt prevents the cardiovascular system from controlling both blood pressure regulation and body temperature simultaneously. Metabolic syndrome is characterized as causing generalized inflammation, and exactly how that causes pancreatic cancer, for example, is now also understood. Most important is the finding that foods act like hormones – our cells can directly understand the chemical nature of the foods we eat and rapidly act on that information. Dinner does not just wind up in the stomach, where it gets broken down into sugar, but communicates with (mostly frustrated and outraged) cells that expect real food to sustain real life.

I was delighted to learn from research published this year how apples extend life in animals by 10%. It was through experimenting with apples to treat his migraines (a cardiovascular/metabolic syndrome condition) that Dr. Max Gerson started on his path to nutritional medicine in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the big Adventist Study 2, published this April, confirmed that the Gerson-type nutritional wisdom prevents metabolic syndrome.

The simple, verifiable, and demonstrated fact is that health depends on eating “food from which nothing has been removed, to which nothing has been added, and which would go bad if you didn’t eat it immediately.” In the meantime, while mainstream science is catching up to this insight and doctors learn to apply it, treat yourself to this book and adjust your current stressed-out life to a healthy alternative that will make your body enthusiastically thank you.

Available at https://gersonmedia.com/Books.html

Resources:

J. P. Thaler & D. E. Cummings, Food Alert, Nature, vol. 452, April 24, 2008, p. 941 ff

P. Jiang et al. P53 regulates biosynthesis through direct inactivation of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, Nature Cell Biology 2011

N.S. Rizzo et al. Vegetarian dietary patterns are associated with a lower risk of Metabolic Syndrome: The Adventist Health Study 2. Diabetes Care, 2011

C. Peng et al. Apple polyphenols extend the mean lifespan of Drosophilia melanogaster. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2011

Van Zeebroeck et al. Transport and signaling via the amino acid building site of the yeast Gap1 amino acid transceptor. Nature Chemical Biology, Dec. 7, 2008

Xiantao Wang et al. Selective depletion of Mutant p53 by cancer chemopreventive isothiocynanates and their Structure-Activity Relationships. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 2011

A. Fukuda et al. Stat3 and MMP7 contribute to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma initiation and progression. Cancer Cell, 2011 vol 19/4:441ff

M. D. Muller et al. Effect of acute salt ingestion upon core temperature in healthy men. Hypertension Research 2011

For information on insulin regulation being disrupted by electromagnetic fields, microwave radiation etc., see the work of Magda Havas (Google her website and see literature available on that site) and surf www.livestrong.com, www.naturalnews.com entry for July 31 2010; read Helke Ferrie’s lead article in Vitality April 2011, “The Damaging Effects of Electropollution.”