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Podcast 121: Obesity and Mental Health in America

Newsweek headline… “A Fatter, Sadder America” – The American’s BMI (body mass index) is on the rise.

A Promise of Hope author, Autumn Stringam, suffered from bipolar disorder for years, and after the suicides of her grandfather and mother, expected that the disease would also take her life. Then her father found the miracle that saved her.

A Promise of Hope is the personal story of Autumn’s flight from madness to wellness, all due to the vitamin and mineral supplement that works on the premise that many forms of mental illness are caused by nutritional deficiencies. An honest book that exposes the hidden torment of bipolar disorder, it is the story of a daughter seeking to forgive her mother. A Promise of Hope is also an astonishing scientific account that moves from a kitchen table in Alberta to the treatment offices of a distinguished Harvard psychiatrist and into the labs of a skeptical medical establishment. It climaxes in a bitter–but eventually triumphant–battle with Health Canada, in which the tiny micronutrient treatment company is exonerated and praised for saving the lives of thousands of Canadians previously thought lost to mental illness. More than anything, A Promise of Hope is a powerful story and a call for a new understanding of the causes of mental illness and its treatments.

Podcast 121: Obesity and Mental Health in America

Scott: Welcome back everybody you are listening to Life Enthusiast co-op online radio network restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I am your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela. Hey Martin how are you doing today?

Martin: Contemplating my navel I would say not all days are designed for dancing in the streets.

Scott: Well there is somebody who probably is not going to be dancing in the street today, hot off the press the governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took a pot shot at another commentator that has had a radio show and TV show forever and Arnold Schwarzenegger today called Rush Limbaugh the six hundred pound gorilla during what they call the dig dialog and I don’t know what caused that to happen but I thought it was kind of funny until I was looking at a headline from news week that said a fatter sadder America and there was a massive poll conducted by Gallup Health Ways and they asked people to self report what their BMI or body mass index was and basically if your BMI is thirty or more you are considered obese and the people that self reported so you can assume that they understated it increased two percent over the last twelve months from 24.4 percent to 26.8 percent and that means over 5.5 million more Americans now qualify as obese. I don’t know about this qualifying as obese thing but in addition to the 54 million obese American estimated by Gallup health ways when the poll began so basically when they started 54 million obese Americans yearly and a year later 59.5 million and Martin we are not doing a very good job here.

Martin: I think it is my fault truly because there still are vending machines with chocolate bars and soda pops out there it is absolutely my mission to eliminate everyone of those and I think there is still Krispy Kream in business, all Kentucky fried chicken is still in business and i don’t mean to single anyone of them out they all deserve to stay in business but what they don’t deserve is serving the stuff they serve.

Scott: yeah the other part of this survey that was done was do you consider yourself thriving, struggling or suffering and the suffering didn’t make much difference but the struggling went up a couple percent and basically crossed over with the thriving so basically struggling and thriving was around 47 or 48 percent each but now we see this uptick in the struggling which probably could be the environment you know the economic environment like the recession we are in but when you have 2 percent more of the population obese a year later that to me is not good. So you have bad attitudes and you have bad eating habits ad you have a bad waist.

Martin: Well you know we have already talked about this but it is worth repeating a lot of people who are depressed will use food as a pacifier and eat all the more you know most of us eat for the wrong reasons we eat when we want to celebrate and we eat when we want to numb the pain you know some people reach for cigarettes and some for alcohol but many, many reach for food.

Scott: You have often said off the air that the hardest addiction to get over is the addiction to cooked food and I thought that was absolutely fascinating and I think the next thing we should be doing in the next few weeks is talking about some of these diets and in terms of being a bit more specific what can we have in the house and put in our mouths that will help reverse this trend because a little bit of planning I think can go a long way.

Martin: Well you know just a bit of a highlight and one of the most ubiquitous and most under handed moves by the food processing industry has been the use of MSG you know mono sodium glutamate and hydrolyzed proteins and hydrolyzed vegetable proteins otherwise known as spices and other ways they describe and hide it but the point is this MSG is a neurotoxin it has actually disrupted about forty percent of the population and stimulating to most. It causes you to become addicted to the food you are eating.

Scott: Oh I didn’t know that.

Martin: It is stimulating and it stimulates you to eat more and the more you eat the more you want and the more you want the more you eat it is a vicious cycle so any way MSG is your best friend it is used in many places hidden ways. You know you can say don’t serve me MSG you know when I go to a family gathering or we go to a Chinese restraint that I am forced to eat that horrendous cooked food I at least ask for no MSG because if I forget all of a sudden my lips are numb and my tongue is kind of fuzzy and I am noticing that all of a sudden my thinking is affected and the reason this all happens is that I am cleaned out and I am sensitive.

Scott: That is the thing you notice this stuff when you are not around it for a while like a friend of mine her daughter got her juicing and now that she is juicing she is finding that she can’t eat stuff and it is not that she can’t eat it, it is that she is noticing what happens to her body when she does eat this stuff and before she was sort of numb to it and put it all in her mouth and oh I feel a little sleepy and whatever and have a nap and now she is putting all this enzyme rich stuff into her body and her body says hey we like this and then you stick stuff in that your body doesn’t like and it is going like whoa dude quit it what are you doing to me?

Marin: Well Scott I think we just put out the advertisement that I don’t think we want to get on this healthy food kick it is just a valley of pain and inconvenience so I just want to say if you don’t what waits on the other side a world of pain, decline, decay I don’t even want to well maybe I should want to get into describing what it looks like when you are older, obese, diabetic with ulcers on your legs that won’t heal with sugar highs and lows that make your brain fog so bad that you can’t think straight that you are essentially feeling stoned or really stoned all the time.

Scott: The thing is that ignoring this doesn’t make it go away and we are not doing this because we want to make anyone’s life miserable in fact part of the problem is that we see the miserable life and you way more than me because you are in it every day we see the impact and the miserable things that happen to people because they have had twenty or thirty or forty years of bad habits and it is not necessary and that is part of the reason that we do this call all the time because holy smokes it is pretty sad.

Martin: Right so hopefully we are getting some new listeners and we will get to gain a few converts to eating right.

Scott: Yeah so one of the things that we are doing is we are going through the health education co-op website and starting today we are going to be taking on probably the biggest section when it comes to health education and that is like diets and what you stick in your mouth.

Martin: Yeah premise number one are you digging your grave with your teeth? I mean honestly…

Scott: Yeah if you are living in North America or Europe the answer is yes if you are wondering.

Martin: Well it is everywhere truly there are sick people everywhere who are not getting enough nutrients and there are sick people because they don’t have enough calories I mean you can be getting scurvy because you don’t have enough vitamin C or be getting Beriberi because you don’t have enough vitamin B, I think. I remember it is just in the back of my brain somewhere. The people in the south that were living mainly on corn were missing a few nutrients and it is causing particular illnesses so we need the right kind of diet and it doesn’t take a lot to do it because it is available but it is not readily available.

Scott: Right it take a little bit of effort so some of the things that we are going to be talking about in the coming shows are going to be things like the all raw primal diet and we are going to talk about meat versus non meat and different types of blood types and eating programs and lemon water and zone diets and Maker diet and vegan versus meat and bean diets and wheat and all sorts of different things. We are going to get into it in all sorts of detail just because we feel it is so important and a lot of times when people have things happen to them they don’t realize it is diet related. I recently read a book by this woman who was bi-polar, her mom was bi-polar and her mom committed suicide and her brother was bi-polar and suicidal and she was suicidal and her dad couldn’t understand he loved her mom and was totally faithful and yet she would be accusing him of having affairs and all the rest of it and had a suspicious mind and her dad was talking to a friend of theirs and he was describing the symptoms of his family and the guy said it sounds like and it was some name that they had for pigs. This guy who was a friend supplied feed for pigs and he said pigs act like that all the time and the father was like what and the guy said I know exactly what you are talking about and he said what well what do you do and the guy said no problem we just make a mixture of vitamin C, vitamin D I don’t know what it was right but that sort of thing and we put it in their feed and they are fine no big deal.

Well bi-polar is a huge deal and so the father went with this guy and started making concoctions I will just say vitamin C, B and E and they would try it out and try it out and finally hit it and all of a sudden the daughter has this experience of not being bi-polar anymore right and like any normal human being once something goes away you forget about it right so she got off the diet and there was certain eating things and certain drinking things and certain vitamins and between the combination there of she was fine and so she stopped doing all of them and within two or three days she was bi-polar big time. Her husband is wondering oh my god what happened to my wife and the father is like what? and she is depressed and he is like are you taking it and she said no and he was like get back on it and she would and she would be better again. There was no doubt in any of their minds that the combination of nutrition and supplementation was basically preventing her from being bi-polar anymore.

Martin: Scott a side bar you are going to have to go find this you can’t just put it out on the air and then not tell people.

Scott: I will find the name of the book and we will put it up and let everybody know. What happened because this was a Canadian story and they lived in Alberta and other people started hearing about it and they started supplying people with it and you know what happens with Health Canada or the FDA when you start having results and they ended up going to court and at one point and this was the part that got to me the most was there they were in court and I think the defense lawyer asked one of Health Canada people because they were stopping it from coming across because there are certain things that you need to cross the board in order to get it and they were stopping them specifically like this particular product stop everything from coming across and they asked the bureaucrats that if something that you didn’t approve of was pretty well guaranteed to save someone’s life but it hadn’t been approved yet then you would not let them have it even if they ended up dying and they said yeah of course we wouldn’t let them have it. Even if the person was going to die without it, yup because we haven’t approved it.

Martin: Yes I remember that this is what the bureaucrat says because if it’s not in the policy I cannot approve it and this is the kind of people that get into jobs and they don’t have an appreciation for anything other than the rules.

Scott: The funny thing about this too is that when they were asked the question their lawyer objected so you picture this Perry Mason thing where the guy is talking to the government official and the government lawyer says objection your honor and the judge says over ruled I want to know what the answer is to this question is and he was like I have to know what you guys think too right. It was so funny and tragic at the same time. I just happened to remember that one thing and I was like oh my goodness and so I think we need to keep hammering this message that what you put into your mouth like you said are you digging your grave with your teeth? Because so many of us are.

Martin: Yes, now what?

Scott: Well we are going to talk about diet so why don’t we talk about some of these issues around diets and when we talk about diets we are really talking about the totality of what you put in your mouth as opposed to a weight loss diet or something like that.

Martin: Well they are important and they are targeted right. I mean weight loss or weight management is important because being out of shape is usually a result of a mismanaged lifestyle and the word diet itself is awful because as soon as you go on a diet as opposed to changing your lifestyle you are in trouble. If your lifestyle has created a situation that you find yourself in and you hate it or find it needs changing going on a two week or three week kick that is usually the diet program like you change your habits for a little bit and then you go back to whatever you were doing before that guaranteed doesn’t work and that is what is wrong with all of this diet industry. All of it, because living in a particular way gets you the results that you don’t like then you need to change the way you are living not just doing a quickie fix. So we are going right back to the society that we live in like my favorite is the war on drugs like we are filling jails with entrepreneurs because that’s what a drug dealer really is. You know here is a guy that has nothing better to do and he has figured out that there is a market and he can get in on it. I mean he is an entrepreneur, illegal but still he wouldn’t be in business if there weren’t people clamoring for his goods. Why is that, why do people need drugs? They want to change how they feel right. I mean you wouldn’t want to be stuffing things up your nose if your didn’t want to change how you feel. well food is another one of those drugs, sugar definitely is, coffee definitely is or caffeine and there we are we just take these hits to change our state. Hey you have been to Tony Robbins’s seminars right?

Scott: Yep I have that’s right.

Martin: State management right.

Scott: Yeah state management and changing states all the time you know he will have everyone up and dancing and screaming and then he will have everyone crying and then he will have them doing something else and then he will have them thinking and writing and it just goes on and on.

Martin: And the bottom line to that is if you can manage your states your emotional state you will get the outcomes that you desire if you get on this roller coaster of unmanaged mental and emotional states you are at the mercy of whatever. You are like a car with no driver and food has been used as one of those types of tools that we use for state management.

Scott: It is a major tool for state management you know you come home and you’re not happy and you have a beer or some chips or you are rushing home and stuck in rush hour traffic and you are feeling kind of hungry and you see the golden arches so you go have a big Mac.

Martin: Yeah so one is the compulsive eating where we eat for the wrong reasons and the other one of course is eating the wrong stuff so which of these two are we going to focus on first? Well I guess Life Enthusiast co-op has been mainly in the business of dealing with the right stuff as opposed to the right reasons and one of these days we are going to have to cross over to help people manage their states. For right now I would like to deal with what you should eat as opposed to why you should eat it. Well here is a big one if you find yourself in a hole first stop digging.

Scott: That’s right, don’t make it any worse.

Martin: So this is where if you find yourself forty pounds overweight let’s pull Tony Robbins into this one more time and Tony says if you want something that other people have you need to emulate their behavior you need to I think it’s called mapping if you map the strategy.

Scott: Model.

Martin: Yes that’s right model, you follow the model so if you want to be an overweight person than you get together with other overweight people and you do exactly what they do because that’s how you build it. If on the other hand you want to be like the other, let’s just say the fit, trim, healthy, vigorous, flexible, full of life people you are going to have to start doing things that they do.

Scott: And who you hang out with just to take this to the next step too makes a huge difference like if you are hanging out with people who are going to the bar and partying out till two in the morning well as social people we tend to do what the people around us are doing. It is kind of like a herd mentality but that is the way it is but if you want to be healthy and fit hang out with people who are healthy and fit don’t hang out with people who aren’t. The hard part of that is we look at our families and friends and if your friends all have eighty inch waists don’t think that there is any way that you are not going to have an eighty inch waist too because it will be oh try this chocolate or do this or do that and you are going to be hanging out and doing stuff that is not that active which is one of the requirements to being healthy and you are going to be eating stuff that you shouldn’t be eating so look at your environment and is it conducive to the type of lifestyle that you want and sometimes you have to make some hard changes and join the fitness club or join a running group or ski club or some activity club.

Martin: Bird watching would do it you know. Just get out there once a day for a half an hour and just walk up that hill.

Scott: But if you don’t have someone to do it with you sometimes that’s hard to do and that’s my point right. I go to hot yoga and I have two buddies and we are going to hot yoga today at four and I never say no.

Martin: Yeah because if you turn down and cop out of that relationship soon enough the calls will stop coming.

Scott: Yeah and soon enough they will be saying that spare tire is getting a little pumped up Scott but they know I have made that commitment right so they are working with me on that and it is a conscious decision that was made amongst us all as opposed to the unconscious decisions that we often make that cause us to have the problems that we have.

Martin: So visualize this dynamic you have four guys and two of them are fit and two of them are not so now we have this dynamic, the emotional seesaw and who is going to win out, Are we going to play a game of poker and down six bags of chips and two cases of beer or are we going to go for a hike on the mountain you know which is it going to be and who is going to win out. This happens in many relationships right it could be one on one and husband and wife and the wife is like oh honey I am tired let’s take a car or vice versa I don’t know which of the two that is going to be the one that is going to be on the lazy side or on the less healthy side or whatever but it is the lowest common denominator that will prevail and it is going to be the one with the emotional strength and greater commitment that is going to win out so if your commitment is stronger towards laziness or comfort or pain free it’s going to win out but it will be a loss in the long run.

Scott: Well also it is just that knowledge that you are making that decision right.

Martin: Awareness is important.

Scott: Like if you are not aware like we have a friend that was a bodybuilder type and very much into fitness and everything else and he had a fiancé and he would come home from work and she would have a three course meal cream sauce and all the rest of it and he would drool and then eat and after he was done eating she would say oh come sit by the TV and watch this show with me and cuddle me and he would be like all drained and his stomach was trying to deal with all this garbage in his stomach and he would go sit down with her and then it’s like ten o’clock time for bed and he put on a lot of weight and then one day he just woke up and said this is all wrong and he said this isn’t what I want to do and everything else and he started going about changing it but it is a very easy thing to get into. Particularly when the other person thinks oh I have made this nice dinner for you.

Martin: Actually she was probably just expressing her love.

Scott: Exactly.

Martin: It probably was her honoring him and she wanted to be a great mate and putting up good meals but that good meal may not necessarily mean healthy.

Scott: That’s right but to be quite honest if you didn’t make a salad for me I wouldn’t eat it sorry I am human but the gal I am with right now when she cooks a dinner for me the plate is three quarters green you know not cooked and the dressing is off to the side so I can put a little bit of dressing on if I want or not and if there is some of it that is cooked like three quarters of it is salad and the quarter that is left is a cooked vegetable I don’t think there is usually meat there but a little bit of meat and she knows and her daughter is very much like that and her daughter is helping her learn how to cook differently but she knows how important that is to me so she is making some big changes and stuff so there is hope.

Martin: So there is hope and the company that we were talking about I went and was searching around because I wanted to find what that is and the company is called True Hope they are from Alberta Canada and I actually found a video too on U-Tube.

Scott: The book is called the Astonishing True story by a women inflicted by bi-polar disorder and the miraculous treatment that cured her and it was published in September of 2007 and as you can imagine that is just causing a huge ruckus because we are not allowed to cure anything right.

Martin: Well first of all the bi-polar industry the psychiatry the most fraudulent of all medical branches or sub-branches I mean absolutely without question the most fraudulent, perverted I mean the words escape me I have for them.

Scott: You cannot slam them hard enough is that what you are telling us?

Martin: It’s built on a lie, it is delivered through deception and it is just so wrong I mean all the suffering of the people who are on Prozac or never mind just one drug all the antidepressants and mood changers and social anxiety issues and depression and schizophrenia and all of those crazy things that people have been medicated into a stupor with but there are natural healing solutions available.

Scott: And that’s the key isn’t it that there are natural healing solutions available.

Martin: Abraham Hofer a fellow who formulated the orthomolecular healing for schizophrenia, he died just last week in Victoria at an advanced age, he was eighty something but anyway here is a doctor who started back in the sixties in Saskatchewan and he figured out that he could heal people and manage their schizophrenia naturally and have them in remission and have them living normal lives and yet he has been fought every step of the way, ostracized and marginalized by this industry of lies. You know the cornucopia of pharmaceutical wins, once you get a person medicated the person will never stop.

Scott: Yeah it is hard to get them off.

Martin: Oh gosh I get so wound up about this you know like the high school shootings like the famous Colorado shootings.

Scott: Yes that’s very sad.

Martin: Withdrawals from SSRI reuptake inhibitors you know SSRI, serotonin selective reuptake inhibitor it is messing enough with your brain to the point where either you want to kill yourself or kill yourself by taking out everybody you can think of with you. I mean the suicides of the teenagers just don’t end I mean the numbers are so huge. I mean if anyone of you is contemplating these SSRI’s please look at some other options.

Scott: Give us a call.

Martin: Yeah these are really hard to get off once you start and the withdrawals are just awful just ask the guys in Columbine.

Scott: Well Martin I want to read just a little bit about the book for everybody because whether you are bi-polar or not bi-polar I think that well I have read the book and it is absolutely amazing and I think it is hard to read in some places because it is so awful right and then it gets kind of good and oh thank-god she is through this and then it gets worse I mean they should make a movie out of it. A promise of Hope and it’s by Autumn Stringam and she suffered from a bi-polar disorder for years and after the suicides of her grandfather and mother she expected that the disease would also take her life and than her father found the miracle that saved her. A promise of hope is a personal story of all Autumn’s flight from madness to wellness and it was all due to the vitamin mineral supplements that works on the premise that many forms of mental illness are caused by nutritional deficiencies. An honest book that exposes the hidden torment of bi-polar disorder and it is story of a daughter seeking to forgive her mother. A promise of hope is also a scientific account from the kitchen table in Alberta to the treatment offices of a distinguished Harvard psychiatrist and into the labs of a skeptical medical establishment it climaxes with a bitter but eventually a triumphant battle with Canada in which the tiny micro nutrient treatment company is exonerated and praised for saving the lives of thousands of Canadians previously thought to be lost to mental illness and thousands of Americans to because a lot of Americans got on this program. More than anything a Promise of hope is a powerful story and a call for a new understanding of the causes of mental illness and its treatment and I think you could substitute mental illness with obesity, cancer, heart disease and you name it.

Martin: If you find a combination, this is a key right this manic bi-polar disorder is triggered by a particular chemical imbalance in the body which is going to be genetic you know there is always a genetic predisposition but then there is going to be a nutritional imbalance that could be corrected but isn’t. Once you correct it than the problem goes away if you don’t correct it you are sick and you try to chemically control it and you know your body never has a deficiency of aspirin or Tylenol or Prozac it is not like that. It is a nutritional deficiency or toxicity. Anyway go back to your story.

Scott: Well that is basically what they say and they have a few reviews and I had forgot about this too but they had a Harvard PhD professor top person looking at this and supporting it and everything else and they were going after him like crazy too and finally they asked him in court will this cure and he said well it is kind of hard to answer that particular question but if I had bi-polar I would be on this stuff right.

Martin: And when you look at the list of ingredients right of the empower plus which is what I am doing right now you know vitamin A, C, D and E and B 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, you know vitamin B12 is four thousand percent of DV which is the daily value meaning you have to take forty times as much as recommended to achieve this sort of balance you require but the other things in there like magnesium, potassium, iodine, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese chromium, molybdenum like a lot of things you would find in basic trace mineral stuff, just basic trace mineral, and then they have other things like phenylalanine, glutamine, bioflavonoids, grape seed extract, choline bitartrate, inositol, gingko biloba, methionine, germanium, boron, vanadium, nickel you know just basic trace minerals. You know I think everything I have mentioned here is in the Exsula Iridesca so I could even make a statement here that is you are on Exsula Iridesca you probably would not need this supplement.

Scott: There you go.

Martin: Interesting, very interesting you know here is another interesting thing that at the true hope store they sell a few other things, phosphatidyl choline and phosphatidyl serine those are the two most obvious ingredients of lecithin which again we put both into the Exsula Superfoods and we sell the lecithin the stand alone so instead of having to pay seventy dollars for a bottle of phosphatidyl choline and phosphatidyl serine isolated you just buy the raw ingredient and let your body sort it out. it is just amazing.

Scott: Yeah it is and it just goes to show you what happens when you get the right nutrients into your body so we have just begun to scratch the surface of food and nutrients and diets and we are going to be continuing through that and if you want to get a little bit of a head start you can head over to www.Life-Enthusiast.com to the health education section and nutrition and you will see diets and those are some of the things we are going to be talking about in more depth as we go through this section and it is important that you are not one of the ones that have a BMI of thirty or more and right now you have almost a hundred and sixty million peers in North America or well just in the United States because I am sure there’s tens of millions in Canada as well to say nothing of Europe so we are going to have to do something about this stuff so that is our mission for the next couple of weeks.

Martin: Oh for the rest of my life.

Scott: Specifically the mission of the show.

Martin: As I said at the opening my job is not done as long as there is one chocolate bar factory left standing or as long as there is a soda pop vending machine somewhere in a school or as long as there is a place that serves dead food to semi-dead people then we are not done.

Scott: No that’s right we are not done. So Martin if someone wanted to talk to you at more length at some of these things, some of these topics or specific issues that they have how can they get a hold of you?

Martin: For a full on rant about nutrition please contact Martin at 1-866-543-3388 and it is on the website at www.life-enthusiast.com where you can also find a link to our blog, our podcast and all of these articles that we are talking about which is in a section called health education. So here we are this is Martin from Life Enthusiast co-op and we are trying to restore vitality to you and to the planet, thank-you for listening.