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assessed for safety. ) started focusing on what I call the “four pillars Metabolic
Even with this improved approach, how- of health”: nutrition, hydration, movement and dysfunction
ever, something was still missing. Lowering peace.
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inflammation was helping some patients feel drives chronic
and do better, but others were not getting all THE CELL DANGER RESPONSE disease,
the way better or would get better only to get Over the past decade, San Diego researcher and illness
worse again. At that point, I began studying how Dr. Robert Naviaux and his colleagues have
our medical system’s commitment to Pasteur’s refined a theory—dubbed the “cell danger occurs
germ theory had taken us off course. (Consider response” (CDR)—that defines the healing because
that deaths from drug-resistant “superbugs” cycle in metabolic terms. The theory posits the body is
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are expected to become the top cause of death that “most chronic illnesses are caused by the
by 2050. ) I became interested in Claude Ber- biological reaction to an injury, not the initial in- unable to
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nard’s terrain theory, and when I read Suzanne jury or the agent of the injury.” In other words, complete
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Humphries’ book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, metabolic dysfunction drives chronic disease, the healing
Vaccines, and the Forgotten History —showing and “illness occurs because the body is unable process.
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the dramatic decline in infectious disease rates to complete the healing process.” 15
well before the introduction of vaccines—and One of the important observations un-
Dr. Tom Cowan’s book on vaccines and autoim- derpinning the CDR is that the mitochondria
munity, it became even clearer that it really is “change their function rapidly under stress,”
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the terrain that matters. with pro-inflammatory M1 mitochondria serv-
I also began learning how epigenetic factors ing a “battleship function” and anti-inflamma-
can turn genes on and off and affect mitochon- tory M2 mitochondria serving a “powerplant
drial functioning. Factors that we know can function” (see figure below). When a cell
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have epigenetic effects include the gut microbes, senses a stressor, it flips into M1 to deal with that
movement (sitting has been called “the new stressor, increasing free radicals and decreasing
smoking”), hydration, nature and even one’s energy production. Next, the cycle is supposed
thoughts. The amazing book by Richard Louv, to transition into M2, with energy increasing
Last Child in the Woods, proves how power- and oxidative stress going back down.
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ful it can be just to get outside. Or consider the This cycle probably worked well with the
importance of circadian rhythm: Dr. Satchin types of stressors encountered in Dr. Price’s
Panda’s book The Circadian Code shows that day (such as infectious diseases and trauma)
something like fifty chronic diseases begin to but is less suited to today’s continual onslaught
affect rats when you feed them on a schedule that of toxic exposures—pesticides, heavy metals,
disrupts their circadian rhythm! My practice wireless radiation, processed foods and so on.
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FALL 2020 Wise Traditions 19