(This blog is Part II of the Virus: A means of communication and evolution (Part I) BLOG).

The only way to make tomorrow as difficult as today is to drag the past forward.

What if we could all come to that point of humility where we die to ourselves today, and let go of everything in the past, our emotional traumas, our beliefs about what right/wrong was done to us, who we think we are and let it all die today so that we do not drag it into tomorrow.

Life is regenerating as such speed: the atoms in our bodies reorganize completely every 10th of a second; our genes are so plastic, listening to the genome, microbiome, and reshaping continuously that we have the genetic intelligence and flexibility to build 2 million different bodies from the genetics of Mom and Dad! What an invitation to start in a new direction!

If you don’t like your body right now? It’s because you dragged the past forward. When you try to heal from an illness, say cancer, an important step in the curative approach is to be willing to die to yourself completely, before you possibly physically die. You have to die in the spiritual and emotional plane, surrender everything as far as who you thought you were, why you thought you were here. All that has to die because that cancer showed up because you were who you were.

Cancer doesn’t happen easily. There are millions of checks and balances in place so that we don’t get cancer. We have to really mock up the field before cancer shows up. Cancer has exploded over the past 20 years in the United States. It’s terrifying. And one theory, in alignment with this series of blogs, is that we’re so isolated, we have destroyed the physics of life itself. But within each of us there’s the grace and intelligence to repair instantly if we stop dragging the past forward, and we can do this in many different ways.

This has been my personal journey with my two supposedly “incurable” auto-immune disorders. I healed then naturally when I let the old me die and discovered that anytime I’d flared up was when I let some parts of the old me or my old life creep back in.

We say that diabetes runs in the family, heart disease runs in the family, cancer runs in the family and yet we know that almost none of this is genetic. We know that over 98.5% of chronic illnesses, cancer included, are diet and lifestyle related. So how do we make sense of the concept of “passed on”? It’s because we’ve passed on the behaviors, that then coded the life that lives within these behaviors, that then gets repeated.

You learned the diseases of your parents. You didn’t inherit them. They were not genetic diseases. None of them are. Only 1.5% of cancers are genetics. That means these genes inherited from mom and dad were turned on (epigenetics). The 98.5% are from the perturbation of genetic information caused by environment, coded by our behavior. If your sister has PCOS and you’re afraid you may be infertile, remind yourself that your sister is your sister and that you’re your own ecosystem. You can reset your ecosystem and have a completely different opportunity to build one of those other 2 million bodies you have an option for (discussed in Blog Part I).

Could we reframe our understanding of virus as updates rather than infections?

We would not exist if it weren’t for virus infections/updates. Take the uterus for instance. There’s a gene, the hemo gene, that produces a protein that is extremely abundant in the human placenta. In fact, the placenta cannot form without this gene. The gene was implanted in our species by a retrovirus which made it possible to move from the egg in reptiles in the bird world into the human life birth phenomena. Without this retrovirus infection across the planet we could never have had the first life birth. Should we really call that an infection or an update?

We get viral updates all the time. Sometimes the update is so big that our system crashes, just like a computer software update would lead to a crash if the computer system as a whole didn’t have enough reserve to run the software. Sometimes our system crashes in light of a virus update when we don’t have enough reserve to handle it and we get sick. But it’s not the virus that makes us sick, it’s the inadequacy of our system.

You are the result of the genetic intelligence around you.

Which ties back to nutrition: An amazing scientific discovery in the past couple years taught us that at least 5% of the mRNA in your bloodstream right now came from the food that you just ate. The DNA within the kale, bean or cow that you consumed has passed its mRNA information into your bloodstream and is coding for who you become today.

What does this discovery really mean? It means that our physical, emotional and mental states partly reflect that of our food. The quality of the food you eat, if you’re aware and attuned to your body (few people are), will affect how you feel and think. The quality means the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual attributes of the food.

Take anxiety for instance. If you eat a chicken salad made with a conventionally handled chicken, separated from mama as it hatched (and killed within 6 weeks), put in a cage it cannot turn around in, kept in the dark, terrified with 7 floors of chicken above it pooping on it, it will scream out loud “doom is impending” in cheer panic and if you’re a sentient human, the strange feeling of unease, stress or anxiety you experience at 1:30-2PM as you drive back from lunch is the anxious scream contained in the chicken mRNA entering your bloodstream. This is what this discovery means (which was already understood in ancient Ayurveda and TCM, but only now being proven by science).

This is what integration and connection to nature in a planet ecosystem means: We will express the genome in relationship to what we eat. If we stress the animals and the plants in the ecosystem, we will feel stressed.

Plants are no different. They need a diverse ecosystem to thrive too. Think of the corn grown a few hundred years back by native Americans vs. the ones we grow today. No yellow corn back then, the corn was of many colors and raised in symbiosis with 2 other plants, peas and zucchinis. There was a huge variety of zucchinis too (not just the green and yellow kind you find in the supermarket). We have dumbed down our food so radically that as a result, our health is suffering. Notice how our children’s health has changed in the past 30years: the allergic reactions or growing sensitivity to food and more, acne problem, precocious puberty starting at 6 yo nowadays!

So what should we eat to heal?

1- As diverse a food as possible! Several of my teachers recommended 30 different types of food a day!

2- Eat foods further down in the food chain to reduce concentration of toxins, herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals, etc. The higher you go in the food chain the most toxic the food (your tortured conventional chicken is also fed GMO corn and plants loaded with herbicides accumulating toxins concentration on top of its suffering). Get away from the stress and get into the biodiversity by eating as low on the food system as possible. Grow a garden if you can or get to know the farmers at the farmers market, at the CSA. Get your nutrition rooted in the soil in the most bio-diverse fashion by eating the rainbow. Eat as much diversity as possible to get the bio-diversity within the plant. The plant is part of an ecosystem. The plant wants to feel part of the ecosystem and they support each other (have you read The Hidden Life of Trees?).

When you eat up on the food system, be aware of those stressors and know where your food comes from. Ask questions, read labels. Know who raised the animals. I always recommend when it comes to fish that my clients choose the ones with the least amount of mercury, because they are lower on the fish food chain (Black cod, Salmon (wild-caught only), Mackerel, Anchovies, Sardines, Herrings) and if farm-raised, look for sustainably farm raised and seek more information.

3- Knowing when enough is enough and respecting nature’s delicate balance. In the context of nature, there is self-regulation. When cows change pasture, in the first few minutes of entering a new field they run for the trees to eat the leaves which at first taste sweet. Then when more cows come to the tree, the tree changes the taste of its leaves to make them bitter and unpleasant so that the cows stop eating! The tree will share its leaves with the ecosystem but also knows when to stop to preserve its own life and to be able to feed future waves of animals.

Sadly, we, humans don’t do that but we need to move towards that. We need to move to a food system where we take what we need but not store it up for the years to come and instead of making processed foods commodities out of our food, we should eat what we eat today and see what nature has to offer tomorrow. It would force us into a seasonal way of eating.

How do we reach this state of rebuilding an ecosystem like that on a large scale? With boundaries. Our food production system has destroyed the boundaries of biology and for that we’re failing to be in a healthier relationship with one another. Why do we have 12,800 viral pandemics around the planet since 1976 (my year of birth)? You heard right! Every year hundred more viruses will go pandemics around the planet and causing respiratory illnesses and other things.

How did we fail our relationship with virum so severely in 1976? Never before did we have so many viruses in an imbalanced relationship to us. Remember they’re not living beings, just genetic information packages.

Humans are very vulnerable to the destruction of boundaries. We call them leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky kidney, etc. It’s when the tight-junction (the velcro-like protein within the gut, vascular lining, blood-brain barrier, etc.) starts to fail and the cells come apart and we no longer have an intelligent boundary. In that journey, we start to leak and our immune system starts to be triggered by everything. Now we’re becoming sensitive to our food, developing auto-immune disease, developing nutrient-deficiencies, and we’re on the chronic inflammation train for sure. Everything we eat is crossing the gut villi inappropriately and so everything is going to the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong form and so we no longer have an intelligent boundary managing the nutrients we’re eating.

When you have leaky gut, everything you’re eating becomes a stressor (story of the onset of the auto-immune disorders I had developed). Sidebar: Elimination diet, the GAP diet, should be band-aid approach, a temporary solution! I see people on elimination diets for years!!! No, we want to heal, close the gap and restore strong boundaries and get back to eating the rainbow! It may take time because it requires to rebuild the ecosystem but that is the goal one should march towards.

Coming back to the poor conventional chickens, one third of the chicken flocks die before the 6 weeks harvest because of e-coli, salmonella and other bacteria that are crossing their severely leaking guts! The food they’re given to eat is 400 times more toxic than the amount of chemicals needed to cause leaky gut in the first place… Those who survive are sick and going through the horrific ordeal mentioned above.

Remember from my first blog, you do not sit down to eat for you. You eat for your microbiome. That’s why we don’t understand nutrition well, we keep thinking we’re eating for the human body.

When you eat, the microbiome is communicating with the cell membrane, just like the tree is communicating back with the cow. The human body is telling the microbiome what it needs. So it will start grazing off the microbiome and if the human body gets too avid for something, the microbiome can tell the human body “no no no you’ve had enough, enough sugar, we’re gonna shift over here. What you need now are essential amino acids so we’re gonna break down protein and feed the amino acids to you”. The microbiome will do all it can to adapt to who you are in that moment and try to give you what you need. There’s an eloquent communication between the soil and the body across this intelligent boundary of the gut lining (billions and billions of cells. Its surface covers two tennis courts!).

Unless there’s glyphosate herbicide sitting in your food, the active chemical in the infamous Monsanto Roundup. This chemical was introduced in… 1976 and was the first to demonstrate the destruction of tight-junction. The firstcrisis with glyphosate is that it functions as an antibiotic that kills the bacteria in your gut (it also kills the bacteria in the soil it was spread in). Secondly, it’s a direct toxin to the tight-junction and so you fail at that tight-junction level. What this means is that the communications network internally is broken and so the relationships between cells and our health impaired, between you and your microbiome (the cow and the tree) and you’re starving for nutrition.

One needs to re-establishing the communications network, closing the gap by rebuilding the microbiome diversity through our wider and deeper connection with nature.

Our life is coded by the environment we live in. If our environment is diverse, we’ll have a more diverse microbiome. Let’s be radical! What if every time a woman was pregnant, we’d grow a garden and feed her the organic food from this garden, and the whole “tribe” would gather around her at the announcement of her pregnancy, from the grandparents, aunties, cousins and speak to the baby words of love through the womb. Then the baby would be born through the vaginal canal, inheriting all of mom’s bacterial intelligence, teaming with quadrillion of mitochondria, a diverse microbiome of bacteria, fungi, and the whole tribe would welcome the baby and say welcome, we love you and we’re here to support your journey. Quite radical in this day and age, isn’t it?

When did we lose this understanding that we are dependent on our ecosystem, on the love and support of all people? When did we start feeling so disconnected and fearful of each other? What if it started when we lost connection with our microbiome, isolating ourselves as a species? Before glyphosate which wreaks havoc our microbiome, there was another potent toxin that also contributed to our isolation and aggressive behavior towards one another: alcohol. Alcohol in any significant amount (yes, people’s system tolerance levels vary) starts to develop a toxin that attacks the tight-junction in the gut. Alcohol creates leaky gut and humans have been making alcohol from the beginning of time (and killing each other for a long time too!).

Another hypothesis, complementing the alcohol toxin, for the beginning of the breakdown of our connection with microbiome diversity and link to nature is land ownership. Owning land restricted the diversity and accessibility of food. The restricted access to the land and nature for people weakened Mother Nature. Mother Nature, as we are learning, needs full access to its earth to continue provide plenty.

Thanks to my continuing education this year in nutrition school, I came to understand that we need to reconnect with our ecosystems in order to heal illnesses and survive as a species. I tested this theory on myself and it works!

My role in this field of nutrition, as I’ve come to understand it, is to help my clients replant themselves into a new microbiome so that they can regenerate and create a brand new healthy body. We need to replant the garden of humanity. Nutrition in this context is both at the physical and spiritual level. I am an optimist and think we can get it right if we work together. Please feel free to share my blogs around so that the teachings I received and share can benefit the many.

Thank you and see you in my nutrition coaching programs!