Dr Eric Berg On Beetroot
One reason beetroot features in my Liver Detox Blend: https://www.healthelicious.com.au/NutriBlast_Liver_Blend.html
Your Lymphatic System
Your heart pumps blood. But who pumps your lymph? You do.
The Lymphatic System is your body’s sewage treatment plant. It collects cellular waste, viruses, and bacteria. Unlike blood, lymph has no pump. It relies on Muscle Contraction and Diaphragmatic Breathing to move against gravity. If you sit all day, the sewage stagnates. This causes brain fog, swollen ankles, and low immunity.
The “Big 6” Routine (Dr. Perry Nickelston): You must open the drains in a specific order (from the exit backwards).
Collarbones (The Terminus): Tap or rub above/below the collarbone. This is the main drain where lymph dumps into the blood. If this is clogged, nothing moves.
Neck: Rub down the sides of the neck.
Armpits (Axilla): Slap or rub your armpits.
Abdomen: Rub the belly button area.
Groin (Inguinal): Tap the crease of your hips.
Knees: Rub behind the knees.
Vital Advice: Do it in the Shower: Takes 30 seconds. Start at the collarbones. Always clear the exit first. If you feel a metallic taste in your mouth or get a runny nose immediately after, congratulations: You just flushed the toilet.
Source: Journal of Physiology, “Lymphatic pumping: mechanics, mechanisms and malfunction”, Review.
Eating Sequence
It’s not just what you eat; it’s when you eat it. Even within the same meal.
This is the biochemistry of Gastric Emptying. If you eat carbohydrates (bread, rice, fruit) first on an empty stomach, they pass through the pyloric valve into the small intestine almost instantly. Result: Rapid absorption -> Massive Glucose Spike -> Massive Insulin Spike -> Fat Storage -> Crash.
But if you use the “Fiber Firewall” strategy, you change the physics.
1. Fiber First (Vegetables): Fiber does not digest. When eaten first, it forms a viscous mesh/gel that coats the lining of the upper intestine. It physically blocks the absorption sites.
2. Protein/Fat Second (Meat/Eggs): Protein slows down gastric emptying. It tells the stomach: “Keep the door closed, we are working here.”
3. Carbs Last (Starch/Sugar): When the carbs finally arrive, they hit the fiber mesh. They enter the bloodstream as a slow trickle instead of a tsunami.
A study in Diabetes Care showed that eating vegetables and protein before carbs reduced post-meal glucose spikes by 73% and insulin spikes by 48%—comparable to the effect of some diabetes drugs.
You can eat the exact same calories, but the hormonal impact is completely different.
Vital Advice: The Restaurant Protocol:
Don’t touch the bread basket when you sit down.
Order a side salad or broccoli appetizer. Eat that first.
Eat your steak/fish.
Then eat the bread or the mashed potatoes. You will feel full sooner, and you won’t fall into a “food coma” afterward.
Source: Diabetes Care, “Food Order Has a Significant Impact on Postprandial Glucose and Insulin Levels”, Cornell University Study.
No Cure – Wrong Doctor!
I have said for years that if your have a chronic condition not being resolved, find someone who has a track record of curing that condition. Here is the same principle phrased differently.
Dr Barry Marshall
(Tom: This is a prime example of having the courage of your convictions!)
Some truths are too dangerous to ignore.
In 1982, a young gastroenterologist in Perth stared at his microscope and saw something that shouldn’t exist. Barry Marshall had been examining stomach biopsies from ulcer patients for months. Every single one showed the same thing.
Curved, spiral bacteria. Living in the stomach.
His medical textbooks were clear. The human stomach is sterile. Acid strong enough to dissolve metal kills everything. Bacteria cannot survive there.
But Marshall could see them. His colleague Robin Warren had been documenting them for months. Nearly every ulcer patient had these bacteria. Patients without ulcers rarely did.
The pattern was undeniable.
Marshall and Warren formed a hypothesis that would change medicine forever. What if bacteria caused stomach ulcers? What if the answer had been there all along, invisible because everyone knew it was impossible?
The medical establishment’s response came swift and merciless.
In the early 1980s, ulcer science was settled. Stress caused ulcers. Spicy food caused ulcers. Excess stomach acid caused ulcers. Lifestyle choices caused ulcers.
Treatment was equally certain. Lifelong antacids. Acid-suppressing drugs. Bland diets. Stress management. When those failed, surgery. Cutting parts of the stomach. Severing nerves to reduce acid production.
Ulcers were chronic conditions. Patients managed them forever.
Pharmaceutical companies earned billions selling acid reducers. Surgeons performed thousands of ulcer operations annually. The system worked. The science was settled.
Then two unknown doctors in Australia claimed they could cure ulcers with antibiotics in two weeks.
The medical community dismissed them as cranks.
Marshall and Warren tried everything to prove their case. They submitted papers to journals. Rejected. They presented at medical conferences. Audiences were skeptical at best, contemptuous at worst.
They attempted animal studies. The bacteria only infected primates, and ethical guidelines made human trials impossible for an unproven theory.
Marshall was trapped. He had evidence he knew was correct. He had observational data. But without proving causation, the establishment would never listen.
For those who remember fighting against systems that refused to see the truth, you understand what came next.
In 1984, Barry Marshall did something either brilliantly desperate or completely insane. He decided to infect himself.
No formal ethical approval. No hospital committee permission. He told his wife. She was horrified. He proceeded anyway.
Marshall prepared a culture of the bacteria from a patient with severe gastritis. He grew it in a petri dish until he had concentrated bacterial soup.
Then, on an empty stomach, he drank it.
Billions of live bacteria that supposedly couldn’t survive in the human stomach. He later described the taste as swamp water.
For two days, nothing happened.
Marshall worried his experiment had failed. Maybe his stomach acid had killed the bacteria after all. Maybe the textbooks were right and he was wrong.
Day three, he started feeling sick.
Day five, he was violently ill. Nausea. Vomiting. His wife noticed his breath had become unbearably foul.
Ten days after drinking the bacteria, Marshall underwent endoscopy. The results were undeniable.
His previously healthy stomach was inflamed, red, swollen. He had developed acute gastritis. Biopsies showed massive colonization of the bacteria that couldn’t survive stomach acid.
He had proven the bacteria could infect a healthy human and cause disease.
Marshall treated himself with antibiotics and bismuth. Within weeks, his symptoms vanished. Follow-up endoscopy showed his stomach healed, bacteria gone.
He had infected himself, made himself sick, documented everything with biopsies and photographs, then cured himself. One of the most dramatic self-experiments in modern medical history.
And the medical establishment still didn’t believe him.
Critics argued gastritis wasn’t ulcers. His experiment was uncontrolled. Correlation wasn’t causation. The resistance continued.
But Marshall and Warren kept fighting. They published case studies. They documented successful antibiotic treatments. They showed that eradicating the bacteria prevented ulcer recurrence, something acid drugs couldn’t do.
Slowly, grudgingly, the evidence became impossible to ignore.
By the early 1990s, medical consensus began shifting. Studies from multiple countries confirmed their findings. In 1994, the National Institutes of Health issued a consensus statement.
The bacteria caused most stomach ulcers. Treatment should be antibiotics.
Within a decade, ulcer treatment transformed completely. Before, patients faced lifelong medication, dietary restrictions, sometimes surgery. After, two weeks of antibiotics produced permanent cures.
Ulcer surgery rates plummeted. Chronic ulcer disease nearly disappeared. Millions were cured of a condition they’d been told was incurable.
In 2005, twenty-one years after Barry Marshall drank that petri dish of bacteria, he and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The Nobel Committee stated their discovery led to a revolutionary change in treatment and improved the quality of life for millions.
Two researchers working far from prestigious medical centers had overturned one hundred years of medical consensus. They were ridiculed. Rejected. Dismissed. They couldn’t get published in major journals. They couldn’t get funding.
The entire weight of established medicine said they were wrong.
And they were right.
When asked if he regrets the self-experiment, Marshall’s answer was immediate. Not for a second.
He had tried everything else. Proper channels. Submitted papers. Given presentations. All rejected. The self-experiment was a last resort, and the thing that finally broke through decades of dogma.
We like to think science follows evidence. That good ideas triumph through rational debate.
Reality is messier.
Scientific consensus can become entrenched. Established researchers protect territory. Journals prefer papers confirming existing theories. Pharmaceutical companies have financial interests in maintaining the status quo.
Revolutionary ideas, even correct ones, face enormous resistance.
Marshall and Warren’s discovery should have been accepted within months. The evidence was clear. The implications were enormous. Instead, it took over a decade of fighting, plus a dramatic self-experiment, plus mounting evidence from multiple countries before medicine admitted it had been wrong for a century.
Today, the bacteria is recognized as the cause of most stomach ulcers, many cases of gastritis, and some stomach cancers. Testing for and eradicating it is standard medical practice worldwide.
The bacteria that couldn’t exist in the stomach is now one of the most well-studied pathogens in medicine.
Barry Marshall, the gastroenterologist told he didn’t understand basic biology, has a Nobel Prize on his shelf. Because he refused to give up, millions of people were cured of a disease they’d been told was incurable.
Sometimes being right isn’t enough.
Sometimes you have to be willing to risk everything to prove it.
Life Without Bread – Dr Lutz
He removed sugar. His patients got better. Medicine looked away.
1950s Austria.
Dr. Wolfgang Lutz is doing everything right.
Prescribing approved drugs. Following modern guidelines. Trusting the science of his time.
His patients keep coming back.
Diabetes controlled, not reversed.
Pain managed, not resolved.
Chronic disease after chronic disease.
So Lutz does something risky.
He thinks.
He digs into old medical literature. Before processed food. Before pharmaceutical dominance. Before calories became doctrine. One idea keeps reappearing.
Low carbohydrate eating.
He is skeptical. But honest. So he tries it on patients who have failed everything else.
His rules are simple.
Under 72 grams of carbohydrates per day.
No limits on meat, eggs, cheese, or butter.
Real food. No sugar. Minimal starch.
The results shock him.
Blood sugar normalizes.
Weight drops without hunger.
Inflammation fades.
Digestive disorders disappear.
Arthritis improves.
People do not just comply.
They recover.
So he keeps going. For decades. Thousands of patients. Same result every time.
Remove sugar and starch. Health returns.
In 1967, he publishes Leben Ohne Brot.
Life Without Bread.
Real patients. Real outcomes. Clear instructions.
Medicine ignores it.
This is the age of low-fat dogma. Margarine. Vegetable oils. Carbs as salvation. A doctor prescribing butter and steak is labeled as dangerous.
Lutz keeps going anyway.
He has something stronger than consensus.
He has results.
In 2000, at age 89, he publishes follow-up data. Patients low carb for over 30 years. Healthy. No early death. No arterial collapse. No cholesterol catastrophe.
He dies at 97.
Still low carb.
Still right.
We did not lack evidence.
We lacked courage.
You Are Cause
Ellen McKenzie
Four armed men came to take her home while her husband was gone. She gave them one warning, then reached for the rifle.
Montana Territory, October 1889.
The sound of approaching horses made Ellen McKenzie’s hands pause mid-stir over the stew pot. Her husband, James, had left two days earlier, driving their small herd to market. Their nearest neighbor lived four miles away through dense pine forest. And she was alone with their eight-month-old daughter, sleeping peacefully in a wooden cradle beside the stone fireplace.
Through the cabin’s single window, Ellen watched four riders emerge from the tree line.
No territorial badges. No official authority. Just the kind of men who knew exactly when homestead husbands left their claims unguarded.
Land grabbers.
They moved through the territory with ruthless efficiency—filing fraudulent claims while owners were away, counting on isolated wives to flee rather than fight. Most families couldn’t afford lawyers. The nearest marshal was three days’ ride. By the time disputes reached court, the land was usually sold and the men long gone.
They’d made a calculation about Ellen McKenzie.
They were wrong.
She lifted her daughter from the cradle, breathing in the soft scent of her hair, feeling the tiny heartbeat against her chest. Then she carried her down to the root cellar, wrapped her in quilts, and laid her gently on grain sacks among the potatoes and preserves.
“ Mama’s right upstairs, sweetheart,” she whispered. “I won’t let them take what’s ours.”
She bolted the cellar door from above.
Then she reached for her husband’s Winchester rifle and checked the chamber.
Six rounds loaded. A full box of ammunition on the shelf.
Her father had fought at Antietam as a Union sharpshooter. When she was seven, he’d handed her a rifle and said, “The frontier doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It asks if you can shoot straight when it matters.”
She could.
The first knock came—almost polite.
“Ma’am, we’re from the Territorial Land Office. There’s been a filing error on your claim—”
Ellen’s voice carried through the thick log door, steady as iron.
“The only error is you thinking I’ll open this door.”
Low laughter followed. The sound of men who had done this many times and never been challenged.
“Now, Mrs. McKenzie, there’s no need for trouble—”
The Winchester cracked once.
The bullet tore into the doorframe six inches from the speaker’s head, close enough for him to feel the air rush past.
The laughter stopped.
“That was your warning,” Ellen called. “Next man who steps on my property gets the bullet. And I don’t miss when I’m aiming to hit.”
For five hours, Ellen McKenzie held the cabin alone.
Every shadow crossing a window, the rifle tracked it.
Every boot on the porch, she drove them back.
Every attempt to circle behind the house, she was already there, having memorized every sightline around her home.
They tried bargaining. Threats. Waiting her out.
Nothing worked.
When her baby’s cries rose through the floorboards, Ellen knelt and whispered through the cracks in the planks:
“I hear you, my love. I know you’re scared. But we’re McKenzies. We don’t abandon what’s ours.”
The crying softened, as if her daughter understood.
As the Montana sky darkened to purple with approaching dusk, the men began to grasp something that defied everything they believed:
This woman wasn’t stalling for rescue.
She was the fortress.
Then—distant thunder rolled across the valley.
James appeared over the ridge with three neighboring ranchers he’d wired from town, a sudden unease having sent him racing home.
The land grabbers scattered like startled crows.
When James burst through the door, he found Ellen calm and steady, rifle still ready, their daughter on her hip, nursing peacefully as if nothing extraordinary had happened.
Ellen didn’t collapse in relief.
She simply met his eyes and said, “They thought I’d be easy.”
The story spread across Montana Territory faster than telegraph wire.
Within three weeks, two other homestead women successfully defended their claims while their husbands were away—both citing Ellen McKenzie’s stand as proof that being alone didn’t mean being helpless.
Territorial newspapers picked it up. Women’s groups in Helena and Butte referenced it in their organizing. The four would-be claim jumpers were quietly identified and encouraged to leave the territory.
Years later, when their daughter traced her fingers over the bullet scar still visible in the doorframe, James placed his weathered hand over the mark and said:
“Your mother taught grown men something they’d forgotten: kindness isn’t weakness. Mercy isn’t surrender. And a woman protecting her family is the most dangerous force on the frontier.”
Ellen didn’t answer. She simply smiled—the smile of someone who knows exactly who she is and what she’s capable of.
Because the frontier had its own lessons, harsh and unforgiving:
You could wait for someone to save you.
Or you could load the rifle, secure the door, and become your own salvation.
When frontier women faced that choice, they chose the rifle.
And the frontier learned to respect them for it.
(Tom: As a rule, the only thing that has ever stopped an armed, bad intentioned person is an armed, well intentioned person. Don’t ever forget that.)
Pasteurized vs Raw Milk
For decades, the “Food Police” told us that raw milk was dangerous and that skim milk was healthy. In 2026, the script has flipped.
With the new “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” signed this month, the war on dairy fat is ending. But the real revolution is happening underground: the deregulation of Raw Milk.
Why does this matter? It’s about Lactase.
When you pasteurize milk (heat it to 161°F), you kill bacteria, yes. But you also destroy the enzyme Lactase, which is naturally present in milk to help you digest lactose. This is why millions of people think they are “lactose intolerant.” They aren’t intolerant to milk; they are intolerant to dead milk.
Raw milk is a bioactive food. It contains:
Bioavailable Calcium: Not the chalky stuff added to almond milk.
Immunoglobulins: Antibodies that support your immune system.
Butterfat: Essential for absorbing Vitamin A and D.
The establishment called it “risky.” Biohackers call it “liquid gold.” The freedom to choose what you put in your body is the ultimate health metric.
Vital Advice: If you can’t access raw milk (check local laws), do the next best thing: Grass-Fed, Vat-Pasteurized, Non-Homogenized milk. If the cream doesn’t rise to the top, it’s not real food.
Source: “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” (2026 Policy Update) /McAfee, M. “The Safety of Raw Milk”.
Peter Rost
The pharmaceutical industry has long been criticized for its approach to chronic disease management. Peter Rost, a former Pfizer executive, revealed that the real focus is not on curing diseases, but on creating lifelong markets for drugs. The truth is that chronic diseases, which require ongoing medication, are far more profitable for drug companies than curing the condition.
Many chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, are largely preventable with lifestyle changes, yet the healthcare system often focuses on symptom management rather than finding cures. This has led to a pharmaceutical monopoly, where companies profit from keeping patients dependent on their medications.
Understanding this truth about big pharma can help us make better health decisions. Prevention, rather than long-term medication, should be a priority for healthcare. It’s time to take control of our health and make informed choices.