tomroushonline.com

The advent of the scientific method has produced great human triumphs over the vagaries of nature, especially when it comes to healing sick bodies. Modern ‘healthcare’ is a miracle of human ingenuity and business innovation. However, many of the medical treatments on offer today and in the past are not based on any an ethical framework. Much of what the health industry and health authorities both advise and mandate does more harm than good. Money is a factor in the healthcare industry even if it’s offered by the government. In this series, I’m seeking to tell the stories of treatments that are miracle cures, incredible advances, and spectacular disasters. Negotiating the world of doctors, medicines, treatments, and bureaucracies is necessary if one wants to reap the benefits and avoid the disasters.

Over the course of my 20-year ad sales career, I sold a lot of TV ads to what was termed QSR companies, which stands for ‘quick serve restaurants’. Imagine Papa Johns Pizza, Church’s Chicken, etc. I also sold ads to weight loss clinics, and doctors who performed bariatric surgery which existed to surgically address the consequences of eating the QSR food unstrained for years. On occasion, I handled hospital accounts, and they would typically lead with ads for their cancer divisions.

Of course, all these advertisers are related, and not just because they all bought TV ads from me. They are related through the food, which makes a person fat, which causes unrestrained cellular growth, which causes, among other things, cancer.

Once a person enters this toxic realm, which starts with the QSR product, that unfortunate soul’s power over their own life diminishes until they are hostage to the whims of the medical system.

Here is a good place to insert some science about how the human body manages the cellular process. Why does so much food make you hostage to your doctor? Because the food creates cells that won’t die.

Cellular senescence establishes a limit to how many times a cell can replicate itself. Senescence is essentially cell death. Cells are the building blocks of the body, and they don’t last long; white blood cells are only around about 13 days. The cells replicate themselves, creating two daughter cells from each cell, but after several cell divisions, the ability of the cell to perfectly reproduce itself degrades, and in order not to proliferate broken or cancerous cells throughout the body, cells have limits as to how many times they can divide.

Programmed cell death protects life and allows for continuous bodily renewal. It is believed that cells have about 50 replicative events before they hit the Hayflick limit. Damage to the cells, including oxidative stress, can also cause cells to become senescent.

Autophagy is the process of cleaning up senescent cells and recycling cellular components. 

Senescence and autophagy have been studied extensively because of how they relate to cancer. A tumor is basically clumps of cells that are no longer doing what they are designed to do and have become a mass of useless tissues that grow unrestrained until the pressure they exert on the tissues and organs around them kills the whole person.

Cancer is not natural. It was not common among any people in the past. Cells should not grow unrestrained, and evolution would not do that. Dysfunctional cells should die, and the mess cleaned up, but if the system goes wrong, zombie cells start growing that have nothing to do with the function of the body.

In a sense, ageing can be accurately described as the mass proliferation of dead or dysfunctional cells. A young and beautiful person is a person with fully functional senescent and autophagy systems running in place. Cells must replicate, but eventually, they must die. Replacing, replicating, and cleaning up this process is vital to life, and if it goes wrong, the death clock has been set in motion.

Nutrient deprivation is the only known factor that increases autophagy. What this means in practice is fasting. There are many benefits to fasting, from weight loss to money savings, but the top benefit to fasting is that it allows the process of autophagy to run which cleans up the senescent cells in the body. Telomeres are a natural limit to senescence, and autophagy is what is supposed to take place next, but a body continuously fed is a body that can’t carry on the autophagy process normally. Inflammation and tumor formation comes next.

There are a few things that can be done to encourage this process to function normally. Fisetin is a polyphenol that comes from a variety of plants, and in addition to being a sirtuin activating compound like resveratrol, it has also been shown to be a senolytic agent and cytostatic agent, which both have to do with inhibiting cell growth. Such agents are part of the the chemistry of cellular growth. These agents are inhibitors to the formation of free radicals as they have been shown to have an electron donating capacity. But mostly what a person can do to survive, and stay out of the doctor’s office, is to cut back on the eating, and do not listen to any medical advice that offers radical interventions short of changes in behavior.

This is a pervasive problem in medicine; they offer solutions that allow a person to carry on the same destructive behaviors, and then the medical intervention begins to wrap itself around the behaviors, and soon enough, what is driving what becomes unknowable. More drugs follow, and then you die under their loving care. But it starts with the food, ‘as seen on TV.’