It Is Not Going To Kill You To Eat Corn!

As children, we all heard those words. As adults, we’re starting to realize that although mom was right about eating our vegetables and chicken soup, she might have missed the mark on corn. More on this later in the article…

Welcome to a brand new year and new information throughout the year on health-saving nutrition tips.

As we enter our 13th year on television and our 5th year of publishing this newsletter, Know This, we thank you, our loyal viewers and readers, for disseminating this information and helping so many of your friends and loved ones. Truly, our efforts to bring you information that has somehow eluded our medical schools have been successful. As we now launch an interactive Internet show and continue growing our television distribution, we intend to let the fungal education spread! Yes, it’s THAT important.

I’m from a different generation; I’m a “baby boomer”. Many of we soldiers came home from Vietnam with disbelief as we learned that some Americans were upset with us for going to war – as though most of us had any say in it! As harrowing as that was for all of us, I had other burdens to concern myself with when I came back to America. I didn’t feel well, and hecklers weren’t the cause. I began noticing strange symptoms: skin problems, stomach problems and brain problems. I sought professional help only to learn that I most assuredly suffered from a new disease called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. The recommended treatment was Valium for the brain and oral cortisone for the rest of my body. Recall that I was a medically trained Navy Corpsman who had been taught to respect medical protocol without question and do what the doctor ordered. Hearing about the negative side effects of Valium, I opted out. However, I took the cortisone pills, and within 5 days, I thought I’d found my answer, as many people do when reducing inflammation for the first time. What cortisone was doing for my skin was notable, but what it was doing to my liver was quite another story. Again, I opted out, hoping to find “the cause” of my misery rather than burying my symptoms 4 hours at a time with medications.

The Origin of The Kaufmann 1 Diet

The only clue I had as to the symptoms I was experiencing was that I felt like something was living inside my body and was taking over my brain. Have you ever felt that way? I left for Vietnam a perfectly healthy 20 year old and returned home a perfectly unhealthy 21 year old. Were the doctors right? Was this PTSD able to cause such bizarre symptoms? Rashes appeared over my body and the folds of my arms bled. I had other symptoms that were embarrassing, and I wouldn’t even tell my roommates. Does PTSD do that? As you might imagine, I heard it all from very caring doctors where I worked. I learned to live with these problems in a state of contention for a period of time, but as time progressed, I knew that I must do something about it. My first thought was, “These are graduates of medical schools! Surely, they’d know what was wrong with me if this wasn’t PTSD!” I recall remembering that although I was well trained as an emergency medical caregiver, once we hit the dirt in Vietnam, there was much we had to figure out on our own. The same would be true of this mysterious illness that I was suffering from; I was on my own. Relying on well-meaning, highly intelligent professionals to know what was wrong with me wasn’t working and, I just wasn’t buying that stress was the cause. I wasn’t going to take mind-altering drugs to fix my skin; it just didn’t make sense. Then, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

We didn’t have Google searches in 1972. Things were a bit slower then. We had library cards. While I was working with G. Howard Gottschalk, MD, an ENT doctor in Los Angeles, Dr. Everett Hughes (a USC Medical School ENT researcher) contacted me after hearing that I had taken a course in laboratory food allergy assessment at the Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Hughes was interested in finding out if this new generation of hyperactive children he was seeing might have food allergies, and he enlisted me to do some testing for him. As I went from his research offices to my parked car, I noticed a library at the university. I began going in to see if I could discover the cause of my own illness. Remember my one clue; it felt like a parasite had taken over my body. Off I went to begin studying parasitology.

Early in my research, I would discover that many things other than worms could infect human tissues. Although I was searching for “Vietnam Parasites”, I came across an interesting paper that revealed two things I had never learned; fungus is a human parasite, and it can live as a symbiont. This means that two separate living organisms (me and fungus) can live together and not become antagonists. So if I was exposed to fungus in Vietnam and it got inside my body (jungle rot enabled this in millions of soldiers, I am convinced), it could fly back to America onboard my body and live rent free inside of me only as long as I provided it with all of the resources it needed to thrive! Scary! Fungi don’t always contribute to symptoms, but the disease causing ones (pathogenic) might lay dormant for some time… until we awaken them. Not knowing this was slowing killing me. I suspect that this lack of knowledge is killing millions of people throughout the world today.

Recall that I was 21 years old. I rented a nice 3-bedroom apartment at the beach with two roommates and began doing what 21-year-old men do: eating every meal out, drinking beer and stocking the cupboards with sugary foods. I italicized the data in the previous paragraph for a reason. My self-education soon taught me that I was responsible for the worsening of my own illness! Fungi thrive in the presence of heat and sugar and proliferate when other fungi visit (this can begin when fungal byproducts called “mycotoxins” are added to these dormant fungi). We had some amazing parties in my early 20’s, yet little did I realize that my live-in fungi were also having some amazing parties inside me. My body was 98.6 degrees inside, and they loved that. All I had to do was feed them, which enabled their reproduction and spread. Apparently they’re more like us than I gave them credit for!

With beer and sugar, I have learned, come antibiotics. This is pure conjecture on my part, of course, but I now believe that our diet dictates our health. Whereas sugar feeds the yeasts and fungi (it is also a grain), my diet was guaranteeing that any symptoms they were responsible for would get worse. Sure enough, Sunday mornings were horrible for many months, until I figured out why. Friday night at our favorite beach Mexican food restaurant (3 corn tortillas, please) followed by Saturday night with my friends, food and fun and within 4 months, I had it figured out! I had a fungal infection; my diet and my lifestyle were responsible for it growing throughout my body! I learned what fungus ate the hard way. 40 years have taught me that fungus craves the very foods that you do. Few of us crave broccoli or brussels sprouts; neither do fungi. Although the subject of another newsletter article, fungi actually become dominant partners when living aboard man. It is a scary thought that your food cravings are not really yours; rather, they are fungi screaming to be fed! If you don’t feed them, they begin dying. They get very upset before they die – you might just feel their pain!

Armed with knowledge and some good early medical data on what fungi required to adapt and grow inside our bodies, the next obvious step for me was to assemble a diet that not only stopped feeding them, but also would starve them! They are living organisms and food is a prerequisite for their survival. So stop feeding them.

It is amazing how many of our ailments, dare I say our diseases, are intimately linked to our diets. But with so many diets on the market today, only this one makes scientific sense based on the ability of these disease-causing germs to so easily gain access to our tissues. This knowledge supports why so many grain free diets works, yet it does not support other researchers’ thoughts as to why grain free diets work. Many contend that since grains become sugars upon digesting them, they must elevate blood sugar levels and therefore cause every illness from obesity to diabetes. In fact, according to a respected medical researcher, our grain supply is commonly contaminated with mycotoxins. As my title suggests, the same article references that corn is universally contaminated with mycotoxins. It’s not the sugar that grains become… it’s the poison that it becomes! It is hard to believe that it is really this simple, yet most our doctors still do not understand it. Why? They don’t have library cards!

As our other brilliant writers will attest to in this issue of KNOW THIS, be committed and careful when making New Year’s resolutions dealing with weight loss. By making the right dietary and exercise choices for all the right reasons, you might find that the lost pounds were the easy part and the disappearing symptoms were the bonus! You now know why… HAPPY 2013 TO YOU ALL!

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