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G R E E N Revolu on The 'soil' is your body The 'harvest' is your new found energy The 'feast' is life with op mal health B r o k e n H e a r t s : We s t e r n M e d i c i n e ' s L o v e A f f a i r w i t h t h e P h a r m a c e u t i c a l I n d u s t r y B e g i n s t o S o u r Over the last 170 years we have seen the birth and development of "Western medicine". The founda onal arguments of Antoine Bechamp (champion of the body's innate capacity for immunity) and Louis Pasteur (champion of the study and treatment of disease) defined the path of what would become Western medicine. Pasteur won the a en on of the field, and the great work of the anatomists, chemists, and biologists that followed pioneered an astonishing journey into our understanding of human disease. The discovery of penicillin in the 1940's marked the end of Western medicine's adolescence and ushered in an era of unprecedented discoveries in human biology and disease. Emboldened by the success of vaccines for polio, tetanus, and diphtheria, and later by the apparent success of insertable devices and machines (cardiac stents, pacemakers, automated insulin pumps), the confidence of the field reached a fevered pitch by the end of the century. As the human genome was unraveled over the course of the 1990's we were hearing bold predic ons about the end of infec ous diseases, cancer, and heart disease, and were given visions of a new era of 'personalized medicine' in which we would be able to just scan your DNA to predict what diseases you will become afflicted with, and iden fy the perfect drug therapy for your future cancer, demen a, or stroke. Unfortunately, over these same decades we produced and consumed the most unnatural and toxic foods in the history of mankind. The immediate and long term consequences have, at the cellular level, changed the way that our genes are func oning. We are proving that we are what we eat at the DNA level. It is not your genes that predict your health, but your bodies capacity to translate those genes in a healthy fashion that predict your life outcomes. Your environment determines what your genes do. Those heady decades of grand predic ons of pharmaceu cal 'magic bullets' were fueled by seemingly fantas c new drugs like the new genera on antacids, and an bio cs for everything from your in-grown toenail to your tuberculosis, an virals for everything from influenza to HIV, chemotherapies for everything from acne to your breast cancer. Many of these drugs have been consistently shown to change the course of human disease, but the word 'cure' has been elusive in Western medicine. At their best, these pharmaceu cals help blunt the symptoms and progression of disease long enough for your body to achieve real healing through the miraculous immune system and the machinery of cell repair. At their worst, they ameliorate the symptoms of a toxic lifestyle and allow us to con nue the systemic damage sustained from con nued consump on of this lifestyle. The last 20 years have allowed us to begin to study the long term effects of these super-drugs. The track record is discouraging. More than 60 years into the an bio c era we now have higher rates of tuberculosis in endemic areas of the world than we did 100 years ago - and most of it is now more aggressive and highly resistant to drugs. The HIV epidemic now cons tutes the largest infec ous epidemic in the history of mankind; despite 10's of billions of dollars in research and drug development, HIV now infects 1 in Revolu on Page 36 | Abby's Magazine - www.AbbysMag.com