Essentials of Nutrition: Good Nutrition Vs. Malnutrition

By Joel Bressler

This book is about the following:
Positive and negative aspects of nutrition
What to eat and drink and not to eat and drink
The importance of exercise
The necessity of vitamins, minerals, and water
The endocrine gland systems fight-or-flight reflex
Which solvents to avoid
How to prevent or treat diseases nutritionally, including the following:
1. Acne, allergies, arthritis, autism, gout, diabetes, Crohns, obesity, osteoporosis
2. Back trouble, bedsores, bipolar, cancer (brain, breast, lung, prostate, etc.), cardiovascular (cholesterol, heart problems, high blood pressure, sickle cell, stroke), mental (ADHD, alcoholism, depression, epilepsy, PTSD, schizophrenia, violence)
3. Neuromuscular (ALS, Alzheimers, fibromyalgia, MS, MD, MG, Parkinsons)
4. Respiratory (COPD, influenza, pneumonia), viral (Ebola, Shingles, Zika)
How the doctor and the educator will improve our health in the future

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514483701

Joel Bressler

The author, Joel Bressler, BS pharmacy, is a retired pharmacist and nutritionist. Almost forty years ago, when he was in active practice, Mr. Bressler became interested in nutrition as both adjunctive and alternative methods of treating various diseases. He read countless articles written by medical and nonmedical experts on the subject and began recommending nutritional substances to his clients, often achieving quite remarkable results over the years. He believes that doctors should use the benefits that nutrition has to offer in order to prevent all kinds of illness. This is the true meaning of health care. This is his second book on the subject.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Confessions of an Independent Pharmacist Turned Nutritionist

The summer of 1956 was a milestone in my life. I became a pharmacist. After four and a half years of university training, I was, at long last, sittin’ on top of the world, a skilled, licensed professional, able to manufacture capsules, lotions, ointments, pour liquids and count tablets. Little did I realize the path I would eventually pursue.

There are many choices of careers the graduates of a pharmacy college can make: They may become pharmacy college professors or deans of different pharmacy colleges. They may become manufacturing pharmacists, hospital pharmacists, or retail pharmacists, working in a chain drugstore, filling prescriptions on their shifts. They can also be independent pharmacy operators, responsible for every aspect of a retail drugstore, including changing lightbulbs, ordering prescription and over-the-counter medicines from wholesalers, hiring and firing employees, and oh, by the way, filling prescriptions when called upon to do so. I chose the latter for twenty-nine of the thirty-three years I was in practice.

It was from Pharmacy that I branched out into Nutrition, studying the art of using nonprescription items, such as vitamins, minerals, and other supplements, to assist clients in improving their health and modifying illnesses. Utilizing pharmacists to recommend these nonprescription items made their advice more believable than the employee who worked in a health food store without adequate training in what vitamins and minerals actually do for the body. For the final twelve years of my Pharmacy career, I studied Nutrition and counter-prescribed vitamins, minerals, and supplements every spare minute I had, becoming ever more proficient. I never attempted to diagnose clients’ illnesses—that was undeniably the job of the physician. When clients told me what the physician’s diagnosis was and that the prescriptions he had written weren’t helping them, I felt duty bound to help them any way I could, in this case, with vitamins, minerals, and other supplements, those items that didn’t need a prescription. Understand that I was not diagnosing their illness but merely choosing a different, proven method to help fellow human beings to improve their health.

That being the case, this book also voices the frustration and anger the public expresses against the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. The American public seeks curative care, not palliative care. One of the standard approaches to formal medical care teaches physicians to provide palliative care while the body goes about healing itself. Much of the American public resents non-curative approaches to health care.

Many members of the American public simply have not listened to or learned the basic lesson of good health: The human body is only as good as the chemicals put into it. Overwhelm the human body with unhealthy chemicals fed or poured into it, found in Chapter 4, and it will sicken. Americans are enamored by the germ theory. However, malnutrition is not to be cured by antibiotics or other drugs. Malnutrition gets reversed mainly by good Nutrition!

This book is about how to rebuild your body.

When I first became a pharmacist, almost sixty years ago, I strongly believed that it didn’t matter what I ate or drank, if I took a vitamin and mineral supplement along with it. I have since modified my thinking quite a bit. I quit smoking tobacco fifty-three years ago. Sometimes I try to cheat on my diet by having a small glass of wine or several pieces of non-chocolate cake. I usually live to regret it. About thirty-eight years ago, I quit all caffeine and most chocolate. I use a non-fluoridated toothpaste and a nonaluminum deodorant-antiperspirant made from two flowers. You’ll see why in Chapter 22.

I am in better physical and mental shape than ever before in my life. Here is my comprehensive metabolic panel blood test from January 2015 (see on page 4), showing almost every result to be in the normal range and two others to be very slightly above normal. I take no medications, and my EKG looks good, the same as it was twenty years ago. My Doppler carotid artery test shows no blood vessel blockage to the brain. Also, I have no stents in my heart. I believe that puts me in the 99.5th percentile of good health, not too bad for an eighty-two-year-old who eats right and moderately exercises every day.

Why have I bared all my personal health information to the world? Because I believe that most of us, with a little encouragement are capable of improving our health by following simple instructions concerning our diet and lifestyle. Medicare charges no deductible for a Wellness Exam once a year and gently scolds patients if they don’t have one, to emphasize the prevention of illness. I make sure to have this exam at my internist’s office once a year, and a back adjustment at my chiropractor’s once a month to stay in shape.

Am I trying to put my doctor out of business by teaching Nutrition to the world? No, but I do believe that our Health-Care system is extremely far from optimal, with there being more cases of diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer than ever before. Something must be done to reverse this trend. I would like to help lead the way. This book lists scores of diseases and how to treat them more effectively than is currently being done by using drugs and surgery alone.

In the last Chapter, I’ll suggest the way to avoid illness considerably. Meet you there.

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Chapter 2

Hoodwinked

To me, since the Holocaust, the destruction of the Twin Towers, the ISIS beheadings, the mass murders in schools, restaurants and movie theaters, all caused by mentally ill people who had guns, nothing is sadder than hearing about a 40-year old doctor dying of a heart attack, his wife dying of breast cancer, his son committing suicide from an overdose of drugs and his own parents of still other preventable diseases. Somehow I feel that the doctor should have been trained to detect these diseases and prevent their deaths.

For over a hundred years, the American public has been hoodwinked—that is, misled by trickery, or deceived. Who has hoodwinked them, and why? A cartel, which Webster’s Dictionary defines as an association of business firms for establishing a national or international monopoly. I prefer to call it an unholy alliance, because it is just that. What organizations are in the alliance? The Federal Government, Big Medicine, Big Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, insurance companies, advertising firms, the media (newspapers and TV networks), the oil companies that supply the raw products from which many drugs (including benzene derivatives) are made; sugar, coffee, tea, soft drinks, chocolate, alcohol, munitions, and tobacco manufacturers; also chemical manufacturers that grow nonrenewable plant seeds, which have been fixed so that farmers must buy new seeds every year from them. Finally, there are those chemical manufacturers that make fluorides and have misled the medical and dental practitioners into believing that fluorides are safe methods of preventing dental cavities.

To state that this unholy alliance is often harmful to our health is a mere understatement of their power. Big Government and Big Business continue to make fine bedfellows! Each washes the other’s back, making sure that the big boys are protected from the public and the courts. Those in power who agree to play the game are in the top 1 percent financially, and those who don’t, remain in the other 99 percent, the little guys. Many senators and congressmen are multimillionaires, interested only in remaining in office (read that Power) and getting reelected by playing the game. They don’t mind lying to the public to accomplish their goal. The NRA and the munitions makers, the drug companies, the sugar companies, the insurance companies, the tobacco companies, the oil companies, and the caffeine companies pay them well to do their bidding. The politicians don’t need us; they frankly don’t care if we live or die. Most of them don’t even care if their own relatives live or die. All they want is Money and Power.

Insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid, don’t pay for vitamins and minerals which the patient can buy without a prescription; therefore, doctors don’t even bother suggesting them to their patients, even if the vitamins and minerals may correct the chemical imbalance causing the illness. What’s more, the doctor doesn’t get paid unless he prescribes one or more of the dangerous drugs, often putting his patients at dire risk. I consider this system to be gross, horrible corruption!

Doctors are forbidden to prescribe items that may correct a chemical imbalance in the body and cure a patient, on the possibility of losing their medical license if they suggest an item that does not require a prescription. They are required to write prescriptions for drugs manufactured by drug companies that give free gifts and trips to doctors and sponsor pharmacist continuing education courses, those required by the state in which the pharmacists practice. Many of the prescription drugs are so dangerous that patients have to continue seeing a doctor forever in order to obtain a refill or adjust the dosage. Examples are insulin and cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Orthodox Medicine controls how physicians practice, drug manufacturers and the federal government bureau, the FDA, determine what drugs the doctor can prescribe, the state government determines who and how the practitioner will work, and the Federal Government and the insurance companies, by and large, determine how much he will be paid. I feel sorry for the physician who is caught in the middle of this dilemma. It is no wonder that there is a shortage of doctors and many doctors are retiring from practice earlier in life. It seems hopeless, but hold on—I’ve got the solution! Keep reading. The answer is in the last Chapter.

Some years ago, I met up with a husband-and-wife team of physicians who were learning how to cook (and eat) macrobiotically. I asked them whether they were going to teach their patients to eat this way, and they replied, as in one voice, Goodness, no! We’re not ready to buck the system yet! How tragic this is.

Let’s concentrate on the subjects at hand: Medicine, Science, Pharmacy, and Health. Our society has overemphasized the role of Science. Science runs the show on health. Everyone else must go along with Science, right or wrong. Science insists that everything must be proven, if possible, by utilizing double-blind studies; testimonial evidence is not satisfactory. It means that if, somehow, Science would be willing to try the nutritional approach toward treating cancer, in order to use the double-blind approach, they would first have to treat the patients with toxic chemotherapy and then switch to nutritional therapy, or vice versa. It becomes rather obvious that if a patient’s health were to markedly improve by using the nutritional approach first, he would not take it lightly to be switched to toxic chemotherapy—and quite often die—in order to become part of statistical data or to further scientific knowledge.

Many millions of people have lost their life’s savings trying to get well, to no avail. In reality, the information on the healing power of Nutrition has been purposely withheld from being taught to physicians, beginning in medical school, so they cannot reveal to their patients, to another doctor, or to themselves, the effective treatments that were not able to be scientifically proven and not patentable.

Why have only drugs and equipment been tested scientifically, and not fruits and vegetables? Because big companies can get patents worth many billions on drugs and equipment, to persuade investors to buy their stock, but companies can’t obtain a patent on fruits, vegetables, and most other nonprescription items. Stock investors who want to gain wealth are not inclined to buy stock in items that cannot possibly bring a vast financial profit, so their attitude is Let’s go with the patentable drug stocks! The rich still invest in tobacco stocks because cigarettes can be sold overseas without having to put those horrible danger warnings on the cigarette package labels if they were sold in this country.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The attitude that most medical students learned in medical school stays with them during the rest of their professional career. It is impossible for the student, in the three- or four-year limited curriculum of initial training, to learn what is necessary to treat each patient successfully. Some items simply had to be left out of the school curriculum, maybe to be taught later in specialty training or just omitted altogether. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, those in charge of medical school education decided that the study of Nutrition would become an item that the students would have very little knowledge. Instead, the professors would teach them the effectiveness of drugs in rapidly masking disease symptoms and relieving pain. Everything centered on this. Curing the patient was unimportant.

Because of certain political restraints, like not getting paid for services rendered, doctors are forced to choose only between which dangerous drugs, those that may cause serious or even fatal side effects, they may prescribe. That puts the American public up the creek without a paddle!

Advertisements for prescription drugs can be seen daily on evening television. After the manufacturer finishes bragging about how good his medicine is, he is forced to tell the viewers of the possible side effects it may cause, and believe me, some of these side effects are pretty horrible.

Chapter 3

What Food and Drink May We Use, and How Much?

Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins are the three types of foods utilized by the body as heat and work. All three can provide energy, if necessary, although carbohydrates, primarily, and fats, secondarily, usually are used for this purpose. Proteins are spared to become the body’s building blocks of muscles, blood, hair, nails, skin, hormones, and enzymes.

Carbohydrates produce immediate energy and heat (calories) in the body by combining carbon and oxygen in the bloodstream. The three types of carbohydrates found in food are

• sugars (monosaccharides, such as honey or those found in fruit, and disaccharides, such as refined or white sugar),

• starches (long-chain polysaccharides, which need enzymes to slowly break them down into simple sugars), and

• cellulose (the indigestible material found in the peel of fruit