EWS #35: On Health, packaged food, milk, wheat and diabetes (2)
Aug 3, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu, on the issues of health, longevity and healing. I'm told that diabetes 1 is the, in children, is highest in all of India. I've also heard and you can elaborate on this if you will, that because most women are choosing C-sections, they don't lactate sufficiently and they give milk from a carton.
Sraddhalu (0:00:57):
Yes. Recently there was a news item in one of the national newspapers where the headline said Cancer cases in India have shot up 40% in the last 10 years and then the subhead said the cause is Indian heredity.
<Narad makes a face>
Sraddhalu (0:02:13):
I like the face you made. I made the same face. Most people, most people would not stop and think. It's ridiculous. It is false. It is utterly false. You can't have cancer shooting up 40% in 10 years because of heredity. What has happened in the last 10 years? Can anyone say what has changed in the last 10 years in India? Generally in the world let's say 20 years but in India last 10 years. Food. Increasing reliance on packaged foods. And fast foods. Fast foods. Eating out in restaurants where things are made in a different way, not necessarily fresh. So if you go to any airport restaurant, you have now a palette of 10 different kinds of cuisine. So you will have South Indian, North Indian and then pizzas and Mughlai and something, something. All types, all of them you will notice, they make from pre-packaged stored material. In order to store food, you have to use preservatives. In order to give you a liquid which has been mixed long ago you have to homogenise. Everywhere you have to put the worst of chemicals And then to standardise colour across all products, all versions of the product, when the base material is varying, you have to put colours and flavours. So increasingly what's happening is in the food, the actual thing that you have as a flavour, as a taste, as a colour or as a texture, because of the need to standardise is artificial. So you eat this delicious, let's say, burger, the colour has been controlled, the taste and flavour is controlled and the texture also and the more complex the material which is made, the more mixed these things are. So you'll find in the burger they'll put a slab of something which is the pre-packaged material and the whole thing is just heated and given to you there and then. Packaged food similarly, if they have to last on shelf, shelf life is a critical element. Again, they are built for storage and not for nutrition. And in order to store, to kill bacteria and prevent bacterial growth, you have to put chemicals which inhibit life. And those are the things which are going into you. You take sugar or salt, what you buy today, what can be wrong with sugar? It's plain sugar. There's no other content, right? Salt, no other content except it's free-flowing. What does that mean? It's been coated with a chemical that prevents it from melting in water. So you take the sugar or salt, earlier if you left the lid open the moisture in the air would make the salt or sugar soggy because it absorbs from the air moisture. Today you can leave it open, it doesn't get soggy because it is coated with a chemical. You put it into water or milk or whatever it is and it does not dissolve. What is this coating doing when it gets into your body? It's preventing hydration. If it gets into cells, it will prevent hydration of the cells. It's a repellent for water, isn't it? So we don't realise that all these processes, every single thing added in a process is actually getting into your body and doing to your body what it had to do to preserve the food. And then finally you have the specific results of these chemicals like the carton milk where you have added homogenizers which are carcinogenic that's your first cause of cancer straight away.
Everybody in India has been brought up because of Ayurveda tradition saying cow's milk is the most nutritious. What has happened meanwhile? So if you look at a traditional cow and measure the quantity of milk that comes from the cow, let's say you get two or three litres of milk at most maybe in a day after having given a little bit to the calf at least. On the other side you get the Jersey cows which are hybrids, they have been produced, genetically modified at the level of cows to produce 10 times more milk, some of them 100 times more I am told, than the traditional cows. Except, you get the whole pile of milk, you look at the nutritional content is 10 times lower than your regular milk from a regular cow. What's the point? Now you have to drink 10 times as much milk to get the same nutritional content which your body needs. The whole point of taking the original milk was it was concentrated nutrition. Now you've diluted the nutrition, made it 10 times weaker, and if you drink the same cup of milk, you don't get the nutrition at all. Wait, there's worse. In this process, you have effectively mixed water. Earlier you would mix water in the milk to increase the quantity. If you go to the dining room, they have a certain quantum of milk planned for a certain number of people. And then every now and then there would be a busload of people. This was in the earlier days when it was less controlled. So a busload of people would walk in, suddenly you have 20 people and they look at the milk, we don't have enough for 20, we just have enough for 10, put a little bit of water. And it's a normal joke that the milkman always puts water into the milk. The difference now is you're putting water inside the cow, right? Instead of putting water in the milk after milking, you put water, mix water in the cow. The cows are obese, gross, with large such heavy organs that they can't walk, they can't sit. They are in pain because their legs are not strong enough to support their weight. And they have been made into machines for mixing water in milk. That's what the machine is and then to be used for as meat for the meat industry.
Narad (0:08:46):
Let me pick up one point and ask you how much of this is the influence from the West?
Sraddhalu (0:08:52):
It's all from the West. The Jersey cow is a product of the West. And why? Because the whole focus shifted to how much money can you make, how much can you sell. Whereas earlier, the village life was not such. Again in the West it was not so. If you go back a couple of hundred years. It's recent, relatively, maybe 50-60 years, 100 years, but it's somewhere the mentality of maximising profit at any cost. It's this mentality which was the problem. And there's no problem with profit, you should be profitable. But maximising profit without thinking of the consequences of what you are minimising in the process. So here what you did was, you maximised the volume of milk production, not thinking of the person who's drinking milk who now gets less nutrition. So per nutrition cost is actually higher if you go through the Jersey cow process. You need to drink 10 times more and after that remember the cow if it has to produce 10 times more milk from a body which is so obese and unbalanced it's not just milk that it's doing, it's not just water it is mixing it is mixing into it a whole host of other chemicals, hormones which are being pumped into the cows because what you do in the milk industry is you can't wait for a cow to get pregnant, to give birth to a calf and then to start giving milk. It takes too long, it's not efficient. Maximising profit means cow should be giving milk all her life. What do you do for that? You inject a hormone as if she is pregnant, but the hormone is pumped in a volume which is so high that it gets into her bloodstream and gets into her milk. So the milk you are drinking has the hormone for lactation of the cow and that is going into a child which is newborn or into an adult for that matter. And then look at the same thing happening with other foods.
So in the South India for example, rice is a staple food. Almost every product is a variant of, mix of rice with other things. You have dosa, idli or simply rice. And rice traditionally was so nutritious. People would grow up on the staple of rice being strong warriors, not having eaten meat at any point. They had all the nutrition they needed with just basic mix of rice and dal. So as part of the Green Revolution which India inherited from the World Bank in attempt to boost production and ensure there's no hunger, they introduced a rice variety called R14. Now many other hybrids have come which are even more dramatic, which was growing twice as fast, giving twice as much rice by volume. Except that to trigger it, you have injected not only fertilisers, not only pesticides, but you have made these genetic changes through cross breeding and now through GMO that makes it boost volume. How can you boost rice volume rapidly by not focusing on the nutritional content but on the fibre content, which is the easiest thing to boost and you have the starch of the rice which is easiest to produce. And so the rice grows twice as fast now, five times as fast, the starch is five times more, the nutrition is five times less. The result is the child who is now eating rice, thinking it's a staple food for generations. Heredity now, let's talk about that. The body is hereditarily aligned to take all its nutrition from the rice, except the body discovers huge content of starch, practically no content of vitamins or other nutrition, no iron. Everybody, every child in Tamil Nadu today is iron deficient, because your diet has not changed, but the food being given is one fifth or at least one-half in terms of iron content. Exaggerated in terms of starch. Which starch goes and starts messing up with your biology functions and makes for you to have diabetes eventually. High carb, high starch, diabetes. So what does the government do? They say, we have to fix the problem. Rather than going back to the root cause, we say, this is the pharmaceutical industry, start distributing iron tablets to all the children. So here you have to eat rice, which is your staple food, along with an iron tablet. Except that's only taking care of one thing and it's not the best iron you could have, what about the other vitamins? Oh, now you have a whole industry to give you supplements. and your body is now being bombarded with all kinds of unnecessary content, unbalanced content and somehow having to manage it.
Coming to the milk, this is more serious and this connects to the diabetes straightaway again. The traditional cows produce milk which has a protein which is called A2 protein, whereas the Jersey cows have a protein that's called A1. A1 protein is known to create inflammatory reactions in many people. So you find a lot of people have milk allergies. They drink milk thinking it's good, it's good for health, so said Ayurveda. Except it's going into your gut and inside the gut it's creating allergies, inflammations. And when the gut inflames it's as if its ability to absorb food is affected in a way that the passages through which the healthy nutrition would be absorbed are now enlarged because of inflammation and micro particles of food get into your blood stream and trigger inflammation all over the body. The result is, you drink milk and you have an inflammation in the body and you're blaming the milk, milk is bad, Ayurveda was wrong. No that's not true, it's your milk that's poisoned. A2 protein is known to produce this, no, A1 protein is known to produce inflammation, A2 is not. So the same person who has an allergy to milk takes A2 milk, no problem. Now look at what's happening in the US, peanut allergies, now walnut allergies, various other nut allergies, they all started in the US. Now they're talking of wheat allergies in the US. In India, nobody had any such thing, except the last 10 years. Suddenly we discover people having peanut allergies and wheat allergies in India, which was never the case.
And rather than saying it's hereditary, you should recognize it is the genetically modified wheat, genetically modified peanut which is creating the allergy. How do you modify genes by the way when they do GMO products? You are inserting a gene into your let's say wheat. Which is the gene you got? Where did you get it from? Well it could be from another wheat or it could be from a completely different grain altogether or it could be from an animal. So if you take tomatoes and if you remember the old tomatoes they were so soft, the skin was so thin, if you press slightly it would crack. If you transported it more than a few kilometres just being bounced around was enough to make quite a few tomatoes crack. Look at today's tomatoes, you have to cut them with a knife and there's no juice inside. They're not tomatoes anymore. How did they happen? Well, they took a gene, now it may not be in this case, there were many things mixed in, but one of the experiments currently ongoing, you take a gene from pigs and introduce that, the element which makes the skin of the pig thick, introduce that into the tomato gene. The result is a tomato which has thick skin with the genetic content of the pig or other animal or other fruit or whatever it is you brought in and now it's no more tomato. To tell people you're buying tomato and eating tomato is a crime now. It's a deception. You are eating something totally different, give it a new name. It's not tomato and it's the same for so many other fruits and vegetables. But wait, it gets a little worse. Sorry. <laughs> How do you introduce the gene? You can't hold it with tweezers and insert it inside. So you use nature's most efficient genetic delivery mechanism. Do you know what that is? A virus. A virus is nature's machine which enters your cell, inserts its genes into your genes or into your cells and makes your cell produce its gene. So the mechanism of delivering a gene into your cell is a virus. So what you are doing is you are inserting with the genetic content, you are bringing in elements of the virus genes also. And when now this wheat is coming into your body, Your body is trying to assess what is this food? How should I digest or how should I break it down or process it? The body detects virus and starts an inflammation response. You take peanut the body detects virus starts inflammatory response, and that's how you get these allergies.
Narad (0:18:21):
I want to do a positive moment. There is a company in India who for years used the seeds in a seed pod of a plant and they are orange and they coloured butter with this. The plant is called Bixa Orellana. Mother's name, ‘The new world’. Very interesting. And have you ever broken open a pod and put your finger on it? Yeah. So there's one possibly, possibly positive aspect, but I'd like you to talk a bit about wheat. Because there's so much going on now about wheat.
Sraddhalu (0:19:24):
So what I came to know, and this was one of the benefits of that visit to the lab, which I spoke of last time. And I was speaking to some of the scientists and then some of the nutritionists and I came to recognize that the wheat which is today distributed, in India, starting just with India has two problems. First is the genetic modification side which is then shared with all over the world. You have a fast breed variety of wheat which has been genetically modified and the nutritional content in it tends to create an allergic reaction in many people at the gut level. Okay? But the wheat in India, almost all the wheat in India is grown in Punjab. And Punjab has a serious problem. When the Green Revolution was started in India, the biggest success story touted was Punjab. What happened was all these hybrid varieties were brought in and Punjab was the greenery for India. They dumped pesticides and growth accelerators of all kinds, poisons of all kinds to kill insects and to boost with fertilizers, the growth. And suddenly you had an abundance of volume with low nutrition and sometimes mixed other problems. But the poisons which are sprayed on the wheat, on the stalks, on the soil to kill insects are being absorbed inside also. And there is a point where the wheat begins to open up and that's the time when the insects come and that's the time when they spray the poison most strongly and the wheat soaks the poison straight. Now you can wash all you want, the poison is still inside. Now this is not specific to Punjab, it is specific to the whole world. But Punjab had one special feature. It also happened to be a centre for industrialization. And many of the industries there were processing heavy metals from the mines. And the waste product from the processing, what would you normally do? You should ensure the waste product is reprocessed to remove the poison. But well, this is third world country, there are no controls and World Bank had a specific declared policy to transfer poisonous industries to third world countries, including tanneries. So India was one of the dumping grounds for these poisonous industries. And what do you do? You dump the industrial waste into the rivers. So after a while the fish died. The fish became too poisonous, nobody spoke about that, but when the fish died, there were no fish, then people spoke up. And so the government passed a law saying, you cannot dump your industrial waste into the river. Of course, it still happens, but less. What did they do next? They said, okay, where do we dump it? So they dug a hole into the ground and started pumping the industrial waste deep down in the ground, where it vanishes from your sight. No government can check, nobody can know where you have dumped it. So inside the premises of the factory, you have just dug two wells and you have pumped all your waste down into the ground, where it goes into the groundwater. All of the water in Punjab is poisoned with the industrial waste and toxins. Not only in the deep wells which are poisoned, that is happening in the US through fracking, but the upper wells also eventually, all of them get poisoned. The ground itself, the soil going down many hundreds of metres poisoned and the result is the soil of Punjab is full of heavy metals. Now you can grow anything there, the food will have poisonous content and the wheat particularly in India has high heavy metal content. So this we discovered to be one of the main reasons why also you can have reactions of allergic or other types, animal illnesses and cancer. The American wheat is genetically modified but it may not have poisons in this form of heavy metals but they will have poisons which are sprayed on the wheat and one of the forms is what is called glyphosate, Roundup and that was for a long time promoted by Monsanto as very safe for humans, but neurotoxin for insects. So they would liberally spray it and it was also used for killing, I think, weeds, isn't it? But it has been found to be one of the most carcinogenic things. People who would spray it have got severe forms of cancer of a particular type which is now recognized to be connected to this glyphosate.
Narad (0:24:21):
If you live in the US or have visited the US and watch television you will see lawyers asking if you use Roundup that they will sue on your behalf. Thousands of cases.
Sraddhalu (0:24:32):
Yes, so it's - the problem of poisoning of food is everywhere in the world. The kinds of poison and degree of poisoning is varying and if you limit yourself to India, Punjab is the most poisonous and other states would be much less comparable, maybe to the US, but maybe worse. So for example, the US by law forbids use of DDT. DDT is a poison which is a neurotoxin, extremely dangerous and for a long time it was presented as safe, it was liberally used. Once they discovered how dangerous it was, the US banned its sale and use in the US but not banned its production. So the US is still the world's largest DDT producer exporting DDT to India and other third world countries. So in India we are still one of the largest consumers of DDT.
[Narad] I am told that the cashew farmers around Auroville spread DDT by hand on the plants.
[Sraddhalu] So imagine, they're taking it in the hand as a powder and throwing it like that. It seeps into the soil, into the groundwater, gets into your food chain. Now here's the interesting part. DDT to the body, the human body, is indistinguishable from fat. So when it gets into your food supply and gets into your body or gets into your water supply and gets into your body, the body thinks, ah this is fat and it starts storing it in your fat. So it accumulates DDT over the years which of course eventually has to lead to other illnesses, cancer and other nerve diseases. But it's part of your bloodstream now. And in Pondicherry this was one of the results which I saw. A mother who is feeding her newborn baby with her own body's milk has higher DDT content in her breastfed milk than is permissible by WHO standards. Now we are not talking of water you drink, we are not talking of food you eat, we are talking of what the body has taken through its most precious filtration process to give the safest milk to a newborn baby, it has too high a DDT level. Can you see the level of poisoning we have? The whole life cycle has been poisoned to such a degree. And so, one of the things I came back from this visit to the lab, which I spoke of last time, was not only sugar, which is a poison, accelerating ageing and various other illnesses. By the way, if you have cancer, sugar is the most intense feeder for cancerous cells. Cancer cells eat up sugar, they absorb sugar and one of the best ways to cut down cancer spread is to cut sugar completely. Not only sugar which you have ingested in form, but carbohydrates which translate into sugar, starches which translate into sugar once they are digested. You have to cut out all the sources of sugar and your cancer cells will start starving. They need high content of sugar. So this is one side of poisoning, but the other side of poisoning is this poison which are directly put into the food supply. And today we are unable to separate ourselves from it. Either the body adapts, which is a difficult process, or we have to start the cleanup and urgently.
Narad (0:28:04):
And I'd like to talk about that a bit. How can this process be reversed?
Sraddhalu (0:28:09):
You know, nature is so amazing. She has created bacteria which feed on what we would normally consider poisons to life. So if you go deep into the ocean, at the very base of the ocean where lava is emerging from the ground, the water is boiling, there is no sunlight, there is no oxygen and you will find a whole host of bacteria which have adapted to feeding on the heavy metals of the lava without oxygen, without sunlight and synthesising those metals into life processes. And then out of that worms or fish which live on that bacteria and so on, a whole chain, food chain which is built up. You take those bacteria out from the depths of the ocean, they come up, they die of cold and die of low pressure, die of exposure to sunlight or whatever it is. Nature at the level of, microscopic level of bacteria is able to create life structures which can take any material and bind them. Even there are plants which absorb, which are known to absorb heavy metals and bind them into the plant structure and then convert them into compounds which are harmless or reasonably harmless. So if you take for example mercury, it is extracted from nature and made into pure mercury where it becomes a nerve toxin. But if you bring it back to its original compound state, it is almost harmless. And so any of these toxins which are still there in the soil or in the water or even in the air, if nature can develop given enough time, she develops the bacteria which bind upon that and then modify it and turn it into compounds and then plants also can assist in the process. But the whole process takes, let's say a few hundred years at least to pick up. But we are destroying far more rapidly than nature can correct.
So there are two options, either the result will be a drastic drop of human lives, which will slow down our destructive process and then nature can pick up in time, or we collaborate with nature. So first, we stop all the poisoning and we have enough ways to grow the same plants, the same food with high nutrition and even with insects not eating or destroying them. There are ways, through breeding, through mixing crops and there are many ways and there are known ways, there have been traditional ways and without using fertilisers. If you look at India's records, I'm speaking of South India here in Tamil Nadu, there are records going back a hundred years of grain production. British records which describe or local Tamil records which describe production of wheat and they produce five times more wheat than the best of today with all our fertilisers. Five times more per hectare! How do you do that? Because they use traditional fertilisers, which is what, cow dung. So what did the Green Revolution do? It removed your traditional sources. Now suddenly the bulls and the cows are sent to the slaughterhouse for producing milk and suddenly you have no fertilisation taking place in the soil so you have to dump in these chemicals. And the moment you have that unique single crop monocultures, you have the insects and the pesticides required. So again for the pesticides we had very simple processes which were, just take for example neem extract, which can be sprayed, and it does no harm to any human being. It's not a poison, you can drink it, no problem. You can eat neem, but it is just enough to ensure that the plants are not attacked by certain insects. And a little bit you can share, it's not such a big deal. So all these technologies existed which gave better products than today's poisonous methods. So we have to stop that, revert to the original technologies, get back to food produced not for volume and weight but for nutritional content.
So if you go back to the traditional wheat varieties, and they are still available. In Tamil Nadu we had 120,000 varieties of rice and each with different medicinal properties. Most of them have been lost, but a few dozen remain still and they are quite interesting when you look at not only taste and flavour but even for their medicinal qualities. And they were bred for nutrition, they were bred for compactness of content. You can eat just a little bit and you have your meal for the day. So we have to get back to that kind of thinking, where you amplify the nutritional content and the medicinal content. And if we start this and then collaborate with nature on the removal of poisons, nature can give us the bacteria which will allow us to get rid of and remove the poisons from the soil.
[Narad] A very difficult challenge with the greed for money?
[Sraddhalu] The problem is not even that. The problem is at the common man's level we are helpless. Most good people do not have that problem of greed for money to that degree. If you tell them, look I'll give you lots of money but allow me to poison the milk that's given to your child. Every parent will say no thanks. At least most people all over the world, a few exceptions, forget them. The problem is this group which wants to do good does not have it in their control. The system has become multi-tiered and the decisions are made at a level where you do not have as a common man, you cannot influence. And you are isolated. The system has set you off from the source of the poisoning. So the only way it can happen and it's starting in a small way today is people going back to farming. They create their own farms. They run it with the best knowledge they have with organic agriculture and so on. Increasingly, it's a trend, but the numbers are very small. And so they take back control and prevent the poisoning. But wherever it has got mechanised and industrialised, the control has been separated. Decision-making is taking place at the top where you can do nothing. So if you look at the way it's working with the fast food chains, the people serving you food, they have no choice. They just mix things. Where is it produced? You don't know. It just comes in batches. If I go, I went to the source where McDonald's sources all their potatoes, in Peru. Is it McDonald's, one of these chains. All their sourcing of potato is, no it's Lay's chips. Lay's chips, all their potatoes are sourced from Peru. The farmer growing there may or may not use any number of toxin, whatever he may use. The processing that takes place after is by somebody else, then the packaging by somebody else, the distribution by somebody else and the consumer is on the end of the chain, the poisoning has taken place at earlier stages. You can do nothing except start your own and you don't have the necessary support for that. So it starts with farming where people are taking back land but if there was support, let's say from the banks, whatever form it may take, which readily give to these large chains which are responsible for the poisoning. They give the funds to the companies which produce the poisons, but they don't give funds to people who are willing to do it differently. So there has to be a reorientation of funding, which is again a decision making right at the top level of the structure of the economy. All people seizing, taking back and starting, not worrying too much about exaggerated profits, but being profitable and sustainable, which is an important necessity. And it can happen.
Narad (0:36:12):
But it seems like a many-year process, and I would like to ask you to speak a bit about what you once spoke about, the effect of the supramental and the changes it can effect in perhaps a shorter time than this could happen on a human level.
Sraddhalu (0:36:37):
The supramental consciousness being active still has to act through some agency and the first point of the agency is the human mind or human heart. It cannot or it cannot act directly on the material itself because then that would bypass the whole evolutionary process. So it has to act through the evolution, through the mind, through the heart, through life processes by assisting as I described, the new bacteria which are emerging and you can see in places which are heavily contaminated, you find bacteria which are now evolving to adapt to the contaminated space. Which means now they are able to manage to live in a highly poisonous space and synthesise the poisons and the toxins. But again this process by human participation could be accelerated. But still the key will be in the human receptivity. Because the human is the cause of the destruction and while the supramental can act through biological processes, there is still a time that it will take. And unless the human stops the pace of destruction, you will have to face that. And the supramental can again intervene on the human by increasing the pressure but at some point the pressure increased too much will break and that's not the way the supramental works. The vital force acts like that, it breaks things up but the supramental works through harmony and so its method is not breaking but making transitions and sometimes smooth and rapid transitions but it still needs the agency of the human consciousness. So to the extent that individuals or local collectives are beginning to take back the power of their food, of their lifestyle, even of their economy, it will assist that process. One of the signs that it is a form of the supramental influence, not a direct action, is that it is decentralised, it is grassroot, it is peer level, not centralised, not top-down, not hierarchical. And so when you see, and it's happening in India, and Sri Aurobindo observes that revolutions in India, you don't see on the surface, but it changes people internally. And it's happening with the correction in the food by the preference towards organic foods. And it is quietly happening behind the scenes and suddenly you will see the demand for organic food shooting up. And it's just building structures right now. So I just saw this morning a news item about a company which is specialising in organic food that they distribute, but they have now opened a little restaurant which is for them a prototype for making into a food chain. It's called Pure for Sure. They are very good products, I am happy to advertise them here because they are all organic and so many such will start and suddenly you will have a series of organic chains which will not be the multinational chains, they will be local, national chains. And at some point the multinational will say, ‘oh yeah, we need to get in there and own that also’, so that may also happen, but it will start from the grass root always.
Narad (0:40:09):
what does one do when one should not eat wheat, rice or drink milk?
Sraddhalu (0:40:16):
<laughs> So I have been exploring this last 6 months particularly and I discovered that you can buy online the traditional wheat and they call it, heritage wheat is one of the terms used and in Europe similarly there is a strong movement they call it, in Switzerland they call it Dunkel wheat, but what is found is that that wheat does not create those allergic reactions for people who have so-called wheat allergies. And so I've seen this happening and you are able to buy online. You're not dependent on local stores. And that's one of the ways by which we are bypassing the entrenched systems. See the local stores will not stock products like this because there's not enough demand. Because they don't stock there is not enough demand. So it's a vicious cycle. Someone has to start, and the way it starts is with the online shopping. And that's exploding in India. It's not bursting, it's exploding in India, like crazy. People increasingly are buying online, and especially these kinds of things which you don't get at local stores. And then very soon, the local stores will catch up and start stocking them and so on. So what we are going to see, and I expect this to happen in the next couple of years will be a sudden growth of organic and with it people who are producing organic foods. The problem with that of course is the certifying agency. How do you know what you're buying is organic? They tell you it's organic, how do you validate? And a friend of mine, who was, who turned his farm into organic, he wanted to certify and the guy who came to certify said, well, if you pay me 100,000 rupees I'll certify it without checking. So if it's as easy to buy a certification, what's your guarantee? But I suppose these are transitional issues. At some point there will have to be some mechanism.
Narad (0:42:16):
But another negative has been pricing. Organic foods have been much higher in price.
Sraddhalu (0:42:23):
Yes, and that's unfortunate because of the way the whole system works. But I would rather it's more expensive in eating than you pay a hundred thousand times more for the sickness that you have and the psychological and physical price you pay for the sickness. So I think most people who are conscious are willing to make that. The second problem though is of education. So I'm coming back to your first question about children having milk and if the mother is not able to give enough milk, they go or the advertising gets them to shift very quickly to the “healthy” baby foods. “Healthy”, I am putting in quote marks because that is what the baby food producer claims. Except they found in baby food high levels of lead. Johnson and Johnson baby powder was discovered to have huge quantities of asbestos, carcinogenic. You are having the child breathe it and it goes into your lungs and asbestos never comes out once it goes in and it creates cancer. And so there was a whole thing around with the government exposing it. But wait, that's not all. The baby food has, like all other packaged foods, the preservatives and all the other things and other chemicals and for the taste buds, they want to create an addiction to taste, early on. So this is part of the game in the food industry. You will see when they sell chips, they will say the potato chip challenge, you can't stop with just one. Well, it's a challenge where you will lose because they have put a chemical there to make you crave more. Now imagine the traditional food, you ate until you felt satiated and then your body told you to stop. Now what they do is they add an additive that makes you want more, that makes you crave more, that makes you salivate more. So you have eaten and your stomach is full but you don't feel satiated, you have to keep on eating. That's one of the tricks they play. Now they're doing that in baby food. They're doing that in any manufactured food because that's how you're going to sell more. People say, ‘oh it's so good I can't stop eating’, and they think it's because the food is good. No, it's because you're being programmed by the chemicals in the food and all many of those chemicals are carcinogenic, one of them being monosodium glutamate which is a known carcinogenic added for food to enhance flavour and to make you want more. And the justification from the food industry side is, you see old people lose the sense of taste and so they don't salivate and they can't eat enough because the saliva doesn't flow. By adding monosodium glutamate, the trigger for salivation takes place and so they can eat more. Now there are many other triggers you could have for salivation. You don't have to have a carcinogenic for it. But well that's how the game works. So the baby is being given baby food, powdered form or what tin form, which with all these chemicals triggers in the biology a certain response. And now there are studies which show all babies who were exposed to baby foods end up with obesity in later life. You can see straight away while they're babies that they're obese, but then later in life the obesity doesn't go even after you have stopped the baby food because it has affected you on a genetic level and an epigenetic level. It's not changed the genes but it's changed the activation of the genes and the body has now acquired the habit of exaggerated storage of fat and bloating of various other kinds and cravings which make for the bloating and so on. And so we have to be very conscious and we have to educate people about all this.
The research is out there, nobody tells you. I give one more example of wheat connected to diabetes. And remember when I'm criticising wheat, it's the new hybrid wheat, not the traditional wheat. So this is a study by NIH, National Institute of Health in the US, which is supposed to be standards body, which the highest standards of not only testing but credibility so they had a whole series of tests around wheat and in connection with diabetes they gave four different formulas of food to different control to different groups one of them had the wheat, that's the one which had the highest diabetes shoot, everybody else who didn't have wheat didn't have the diabetes sugar shoot up. Now you will never think of wheat as a trigger for diabetes because it's not sweet. It's not sweet, it's a staple food for centuries, but in India you see diabetes shooting up because of this modified wheat and the moment you cut the wheat out from people and the other carbs of course sugars and carbs, but the moment you cut that out, all these inflammations and the diabetes tendencies drop dramatically. And this is NIH which is telling you this except such studies are never popularised.
We had recently somebody who came, Sanjay Bhatnagar, who spoke with you, you mentioned last time. He has dedicated his life to curing diabetes and the stories I have to say about him will be astounding and I'm sure all of our viewers who have diabetes will want to contact him but well I'll just do a promotional indirectly. So what he did was he went through all the NIH studies. They found they had studies with 800 studies of Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine herbs in relation to diabetes control. So out of those 800, 400 have dramatic results. Out of which 10 have outstanding results. And which are very simple herbs, sometimes even common vegetables. So he built a mix, a formula mixing these 10. And all the studies, he puts it all out there on the public. He says, it's all in public domain, make your own formula. Eat these things, it's good for you. So he makes his own formula and he starts treating people with it. And the result is he is able to bring down blood sugar dramatically with combination of, of course you have to cut back on carbs and sugar, but with that he is able to get people off from medication. And in one case which I know, where the person was taking multiple tablets in a day and also having insulin injections, in 10 days she off all injections. She was hitting 60 units of injections per day of insulin. She was off all insulin. Of course there is diet control and this herbal powder mix which is there. The man visited the ashram in June. So I tried to arrange for him to give a lecture both in ashram and Auroville. So that he can present these things and his whole point was here we need to change this idea that diabetes cannot be cured. He has actually cured people of diabetes. So through this herbal process, first he gets you off the medicines and then the herbs are shown, NIH again, we are talking of NIH authority, herbs are shown to regenerate beta cells in the pancreas. What has happened with diabetes is your beta cells have died out and the more you have taken the medicines like metformin and all that, the more they are damaging the beta cells. So you are killing cells until eventually you have to inject insulin. He regenerates the cells through this process with the herbs, which are again known herbs. And the result is, two years down, the person is free of all medicine and even the Ayurvedic mix he stops, and the person is completely normal. Of course, you maintain your basic life routine, you don't go back to the old bad habits which triggered the diabetes in the first place but you're off everything and he has done that. And so I put him in touch with the lab and I said, well let's do a test. Traditionally, in allopathy they tell you type 2 diabetes can only be managed, it can never be cured. Type 1 diabetes is incurable because it's hereditary. So he was given a case of a child 5 years old who was on insulin injections with type 1 diabetes. In one week, he had the child off all the injections. Checked by a lab, an accredited and certified lab. So what he was able to produce is so dramatic. The knowledge is out there, the capacity is out there, but which industry, which pharmaceutical industry is going to say, ‘here, I am going to give you this herbal mix, which is known which you could make in your own house, which you don't need to buy from me but I will sell it to you anyway’. They are not going to invest in that. They would rather invest in things which others cannot reproduce, which they can patent and sell exclusively, which you can't make at home.
Narad (0:51:13):
Such as insulin produced only in America
Sraddhalu (0:51:18):
Yes. And they build monopolies. So the whole presentation by Sanjay Bhatnagar we have recorded and I want to upload it on our YouTube channel so that others can share in it. But the whole idea behind that is that type 1 diabetes also can be completely cured and you get people off from all these things. The difficulty though, he gave an example was a mother whose child has diabetes. Now increasingly we have children having diabetes and it's purely because of the packaged foods and the poisons coming in. So the child has diabetes, going to school and so he gets the person off from the diabetes medication but he has to maintain his, to stop eating wheat. The child goes to school and all the other children are eating pizza and the child says I cannot eat pizza, he feels so bad and the mother says, ‘I'm sorry, I have to give up your treatment and I'll go back to regular allopathic medication’, just so that he can continue to eat pizza. The mother makes the choice and the child of course at that age is slave of his instinct and desire to some extent. It's a difficult situation. But all of this is to make people conscious that we need to start taking steps. The change will not happen top down, it will happen bottom up. And all of us, wherever we are in our homes, start becoming conscious of what you are eating. Look at the packaging, look at the list of materials. If it has high content of sugar, avoid pre-packaged foods. Especially for diabetes and other illnesses, heart disease, a lot of it comes from what they call hydrogenated vegetable oils. It's an easy replacement for butter, pure butter or pure ghee. As a way of replacement of fat which is healthy, you get hydrogenated vegetable oil which is the thing which gets into your body and creates the coating and blocks your arteries. Cut that out completely. Any food which has that just eliminate it. Demand from your suppliers that they stop using this. If you are in the food industry start making foods which are like this. There's a very good brand again I am happy to promote these because it's good for the industry itself to grow. There's a brand called KetoFi in India. They take the term from keto diet where you cut out all carbohydrates and sugars and you only have proteins and fats which makes you much better in terms of health gets rid of even diabetic tendencies or brings it under control just with that so K2-5 brings out cookies which are delicious, they're little expensive but they're delicious and their carbs are something like 10 or 15 carbs for an entire cookie, you can eat it freely, no problem. And you do not trigger the diabetic responses or anything like that. So you do not have to cut down the quality of food, you do not have to stop eating delicious things even if you have removed that wheat. You can go to the traditional wheat or you can go to KetoFii and these which are mix of other grains and find such ways. And the methods increasingly are available to you, the means are available to you, the increasingly growing aware population.
Narad (0:54:57):
I have read about organic gardeners in South India here and in Auroville there are two big organic farms.
Sraddhalu (0:55:06):
Mother wanted this and Dhumen Bhai shared this story with us. He would grow tomatoes and other fruits for her, for her to have juice and one day he brought the juice, she took a sip and then she put it on the side and she said, ‘can you not bring me food which does not have poison in it?’ and he got the message, he went back and started his organic farming effort in Gloria farm. Unfortunately, the other ashram farms didn't pick up, which is strange. But she set the standard right then because that's when they were just introducing all the pesticides in the 60s, remember? So it had just started and she could taste it, she could feel what it was doing to her body. And so she started the reversal right there. We have not picked up enough. We have to. I would expect, I would demand that all our farms of people connected with Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo's work should be completely organic. And they should follow. Today the whole knowledge of this is being packaged under a particular brand name. What that they are promoting now. Permaculture. And you take the principles of permaculture, you do not need pesticides, you do not need any of the fertilisers, everything is internally tapping the processes of nature and sustaining itself, even managing all the pests and everything easily. And then if you tap into the traditional farming methods in India, we have this formula which if I remember right has five materials mixed into it starting with cow dung, a little bit of jaggery and other things and the mix of this is said to regenerate any soil. You can take barren soil, you take sea sand soil, okay, just wash out the salt from it, barren sand in which nothing can grow. And you mix this material, which is all organic, cow dung being a critical element of it. And within a year or two, you have a microbiome that builds up, and all the necessary nutrients for plant life to grow are there, and it becomes rich, fertile soil in a few years.
Narad (0:57:39):
In the early 1970s, a gentleman came from one of the islands. He was French and started working at one of the farms in Auroville. And he wrote to Mother and asked her about organic gardening. And Mother wrote the letter, and I still have it - “No, no, no”, about chemicals, “We must not repeat the mistakes of the past”.
Sraddhalu (0:58:16):
Thank you. Namaste.