***** DISCLAIMER: As with all of our posts here at Pure Jeevan, and particularly those coming up over the next week and a half (which will all be tagged with a new term, "Nadi Balance"), please refer to the disclaimer that runs at the bottom of all Pure Jeevan Pages. Wendi and Jim are health researchers, educators, and extreme self-experimenters. ******

Nadi Balance: Part IV...

As you can see from the previous blog posts on this subject (and as we'll allude to in future posts), a significant amount of time and money was put into healing Wendi of Lyme disease. But, what were the options -- to let Wendi continue on this downward spiral? Our health is all we have. Without it, our lives are diminished (or worse). After previously regaining health and vibrancy on the raw food diet, having an understanding of what it's like to truly be alive and well, we knew what we were missing. It's unnatural to live a life with pain, low energy, depression, medical issues, etc. Our bodies are designed to function with ultimate vibrancy, energy, and long-term health.

As you're beginning to see, we at Pure Jeevan ask a lot of questions. We don't allow those questions to simply linger and fade unanswered. Instead, those questions fuel an inner detective of sorts -- one who makes it a mission to solve the mystery. We are researchers. If you're not a researcher, we strongly recommend that you consider becoming one! It is through research that we can help not only ourselves, but others as well.

Wendi's research in health began more than 30 years ago. At a young age, she had a knowledge that health, diet, and the natural environment were related in some way. Over the years, this passion for understanding diet, health, and the human body has never diminished. The areas she focused on over the years included diet (vegetarian, vegan), herbal medicine, aromatherapy, and conventional medical research into health challenges such as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), depression, heart health, and more.

Never in all our years together did either of us think that one day we'd be diving into medical text books covering such subjects as cellular biology, hematology, physiology, etc. But here we are researching and learning what those in medical school are taught, in addition to learning from (and working with) alternative health scientists. We've taken a diverse number of disciplines and combined this knowledge in a unique way to heal Wendi's body of Lyme. All that we've learned we've taken to an ultimate extreme and combined it with our knowledge and experience of the raw food lifestyle, using ourselves as test subjects.

When you contract a disease, the first thing you're interested in learning is: Is there a cure? And, if there is, you just need to go get it. For example, if you're bitten by a deadly snake, there's probably (hopefully) already an antidote available. You don'y need to reinvent the wheel in a case like that. But, there IS no wheel for many, many things still. A few people take matters into their own hands, while many fall into the trap of believing that they're helpless.

After the live blood experience, we thought we'd track Wendi's healing progress (because we knew we would not give up researching and experimenting until she was healed) on our own. For example, here's some detail on one of our early experiments that combines raw food nutrition knowledge with conventional scientific knowledge:

Just before we acquired the microscope (this process takes a while!), Wendi came up with the "Leukoctye experiment." As you may be aware from many of the studies cited by raw food nutritionists, when we eat cooked foods, our bodies react by producing more white blood cells. According to the prevailing theory, it does this because it sees cooked food as an unnatural foreign substance, and it wants to fight off any incoming toxicity. The phenomenon is known as digestive leukocytosis, and is still somewhat controversial in medical circles.

Regardless of the controversy, we viewed this as a pretty interesting thing to study as raw foodists. White blood cells, as you probably know, are the "good guys" in your blood; they fight bacteria and foreign invaders to keep your blood in its natural, healthy state. So, for example, if you have Lyme disease, you probably have a good deal of bacteria in your body that shouldn't be there. While the body certainly knows this, we wondered if purposely inducing the body to create more white blood cells could be helpful in such a case. So, we wondered: Might eating cooked food help?

Now, in case you're wondering -- no, we didn't send Wendi out to a McDonald's and have her start ordering the worst examples of cooked food imaginable. We in fact tried to accomplish the increase in white blood cells via the most healthy means we could imagine. Basically, we started with boiled vegetables such as peas, broccoli, and sweet potatoes.

As I said before, the objective was to track white blood cell counts using live blood as our measuring tool. However, by the time we obtained our equipment, she hadn't noticed any healing at all from this experiment. Making matters worse, she really only noticed additional discomfort. So, that experiment did not work. This is the nature of experiments, though -- sometimes they produce positive results, sometimes they do not. (We're still intrigued by the digestive leukocytosis idea, though! Perhaps it may yet benefit someone else, in some other situation.)

As a side note, we did learn something from the experiment. Wendi noted that cooked foods seemed to offer her no satisfaction after eating, as though her hunger had not been satiated. We both theorize that, with raw, there's a natural triggering mechanism that says to your body, "You're finished eating." But, this trigger does not happen when the food is cooked. In other words, you may feel full, but you may also, paradoxically, still feel hungry. This could actually be a very good explanation for why so many cooked-food-diet people easily over-eat and wind up gaining weight.

So, as you can see via this one early example, we've been taking diverse medical / health knowledge, coupling it with our knowledge of raw foods nutrition, and trying to understand healing through our own pioneering studies and experimentation. We've been researching topics such as:

• What makes the blood thick or thin?
• Why do bodily organs sometimes work well and sometimes work poorly?
• What are the "healthy" levels for various substances in the body?

We're going slow with all of this because this research is very intense, costly, and time-consuming. That said, we believe this is it -- the new frontier for disease-free living. (Please be sure to see our disclaimer, of course.)

What you should take away from this: In addition to asking questions, it's important to follow through with research (trying to find the answers).

Coming up next: Our research leads us to a delicate balancing act!

Nadi Balance Series: Part I, II, III, IV

***** DISCLAIMER: As with all of our posts here at Pure Jeevan, and particularly those coming up over the next week and a half (which will all be tagged with a new term, "Nadi Balance"), please refer to the disclaimer that runs at the bottom of all Pure Jeevan Pages. Wendi and Jim are health researchers, educators, and extreme self-experimenters. ******