“There are 49 million people in the US without health insurance. We've added a new subject page for "health insurance deprived" individuals. We want to hear from you if you are in that category. How do you cope?” Around 1980 I graduated into the “health insurance deprived.” As many others, it was not by my choice; although I was a semi-pioneer I am merely a fly-speck on the deprived landscape.

They say that The Almighty will not test you beyond your levels of endurance, and in my case He gave me an overflowing of answers; not handed to me on a silver platter, but as long as I worked at hunting for the answers, they certainly flowed to me abundantly. This is not an essay on The Almighty, although you may benefit from the answers I received. After 10 years of searching for answers to bewildering problems with my wife; I was advised to place her in our state mental institution if events became a crisis again; all of which transpired. I shared my suspicions with the administration every time I visited and they assured me that it would be looked into; yet no change transpired. By chance on one visit I met the person assigned to care for my wife. I discussed the possibility of coffee being the culprit. The lady was of the persuasion that “in this business you get so you are willing to try anything.” Two weeks later my wife was released! In retrospect it was the sugar in the coffee and not the coffee itself, but that is another story. As with everything in life, you don’t get any free rides, my wife just knew that she shouldn’t have been institutionalized; and the marriage suffered badly. The night she “came home” I got on my knees and really learned how to pray! The next day “Low Blood Sugar and You” by Carlton Fredericks was placed in my hands.

That was the start of years of learning and applying principles learned. In fact in the 30+ years interim I haven’t seen a doctor except for 2 dire emergencies (false heart attack and cut off fingers). I will try to share my condensed version of 30 years of “learning” with you the reader hoping it can help you to survive without health insurance. The first step one needs to take on this strange road is the understanding that back in the first few decades of this last century, medicine took a wrong turn and the turns and errors have been compounding ever since. I’ll avoid the conspiracy theory possibility and try to stick to the basics. In the prior century (mid to late 1800s) many doctors and surgeons gave up the methods of practice that they learned “in school.” They each individually learned how to reinvent the wheel, meaning that they all came to the same conclusion that it is the body that heals, overcomes and cures all the body’s problems, illnesses and diseases. In mid-practice surgeons gave up using the knife and spent the remainder of their careers teaching people how to maintain their health and cure themselves. That is the foundation to understanding how to live without insurance – the body in its wisdom knows how to cure itself.

Every cell has a map of the entire body with a circle stating: “You Are Here.” The problem is that we overload the body with non-foods, toxins and poisons. One might wonder “I’m not that bad off, how can that be?” The body adjusts to poisons and toxins for example: in the high mountains of Asia, the porters and human beasts of burden chew enough arsenic in one day (to kill the pain of lack of oxygen at high altitudes) to kill a horse, yet these individuals would pass a health checkup with flying colors! We are no different, the difference being the unseen poisons and toxins that we eat and generate. So, it becomes obvious (from understanding the prior paragraph) that removing non-foods, toxins and poisons from our diets is one of the first steps to surviving life without health insurance. With all the pollution going on it is not as dismal as it may appear. One of the surprising things I’ve learned along the way are the facts that the body has a schedule of replacing worn out parts, and it is quite an amazing, interesting and surprising schedule. The stomach lining is replaced completely every 7 days. How many people do you know of who have suffered with ulcers for years? Basically we have a new stomach lining 52 times per year! If a medication does not do something within 4 new linings, something is drastically wrong; might it be the medication, the medical approach or the diet? The blood is completely, 100% replaced every 10 days! I experimented on myself by removing what I thought was all the man-processed sugars from my diet; 10 days later I woke up rested for the first time in 10 years. It was nothing more than removing negative foods which then allowed the body to produce “real” blood. By the way, as marvelous and astounding as science, chemistry and technicians have learned today, they still cannot identify the difference between tired and healthy blood; both analyze identically. The major organs are completely, 100% replaced, every last cell on a continual basis every 3 months. How many people have you heard of with heart problems or kidney problems that goes on for years and years? We have 4 new hearts every year! The nerves and bones take longer to be completely replaced, around 3 to 4 years; yet they too are completely replaced to the last itty-bitty cell. When you celebrate your 50th birthday you have worn out 2,600 stomachs, the blood has been replaced 1,800 times, we’ve had 200 hearts, kidneys, pancreases, etc., and had 12 to 17 brains, spinal columns and complete skeletons! Fantastic isn’t it? Why hasn’t it been taught along with the ABCs?

The total picture is not beyond the comprehension of a grade school dropout, so it is learnable. It takes pages and pages to explain simple things because we have been taught to think complexly. Thusly I will try to write this as a series of ongoing articles to avoid mental overload; the articles will make the most sense if read in sequence, although most will be stand-alone in nature.

One of the first questions you might ask me is: what is a “non-food”? Food marketing has been changing gradually as long as I can remember. What I ate 70 years ago as Puffed Wheat tastes and looks the same today but is an entirely different “animal.” Paul Stitts in his second edition of “Fighting The Food Giants” tells of General Foods (or is it Quaker Foods?) taking him to court about including in his book the research work that proved: rats fed a starvation diet lived longer than rats fed puffed cereals! The prosecution claimed that the report did not exist. Stitts rebutted: It may have been shredded or burned but I remember clearly reading it in your own research library! When I was a boy puffed cereals were created via a vacuum process. A large “vat” was pumped to negative atmosphere, gradually the grains puffed. Today that “vat” is pressurized to several thousands of pounds pressure and nearly instantly the pressure is released which does the puffing. Stitts believes that this method changes the molecular structure so that it becomes a poison to any living animals, man included. You have to be careful even in a health food store, you can buy “toasted” puffed cereal; yes, but nobody is telling how it became puffed in the first place!

The fast food industry makes use of a little known regulator in the human brain known as the “ap-stat”; this is a contraction of appetite and thermostat. This mechanism monitors some 20 odd constituents in the blood for “balance.” Any one being low, it turns on this ap-stat by turning on the hunger sensation which is only over-ridden by a full stomach (you can’t pack anything more into an already full stomach). Because all the fun-foods, popped-snarled-crackled foods, and fried foods start with overly-processed-lop-sided concoctions that they cannot possibly contribute anything to bodily nutrition and end up being negative foods. Who was it that advertised “Bet you can’t eat just one”? Just one will upset blood chemistry enough so that it turns on the ap-stat. I’ll bet you that they knew all about the ap-stat when they created that catchy add.

A rule of thumb you can use is an old one: how do you build a live body with dead foods? The foods you buy in a box have to pass the test of a minimum of 3 years shelf-life. To accomplish that all the live parts of the food have been removed to prevent spoilage and most of the time preservatives are added and those preservatives are not health enhancing. War is a terrible thing, but we can learn from them. In the tropical to semi-tropical zones of VietNam a dead native’s body would start to decompose before the end of the day; American casualties did not start to decompose for 2 to 3 days because of all the preservatives from our foods that were embalming living bodies before they became casualties. You will have to do some research or hunting on your own because I’ve simplified my diet so much that I haven’t read a label in decades. Read labels; the things that sound like chemistry quizzes most likely are the preservatives, but you will have to search the internet to make certain for yourself.

None of this is going to fall into your lap! There is only one person who can take care of yourself and that is YOU. Nobody can do it for you. It is that simple and cut and dried. The response I get from this article will determine whether the series will be on-going.