Almost daily, I receive a letter or package in the mail asking me to look at a new product that someone thinks I should know about and promote through Back to the Garden. I have huge files containing hundreds of these letters and enclosed literature, along with many boxes of audio and video tapes.

Checking out all these new products can be a time-consuming effort. Rarely do we run across an item that we feel can genuinely improve our health, but when we do, we will use it personally and likewise, we feel an obligation to make it available to our readers.

With most of these new products, however, following our initial investigation and sampling, we find the best course of action is to ignore them because they are of little or no benefit. This is understandable, because there are so many people out there trying to make a profit in the field of health, while there are so few people who understand the very simple principles of natural health and healing. And then, occasionally, we run across a "health" product or advice that is so unhealthy that we feel an obligation to warn our readers against it.

Such is the case with the recent craze of a mineral supplement being promoted with an audio tape by a Dr. Joel Wallach titled "Dead Doctors Don't Lie."  I have received dozens of these tapes from various people and many have called to ask my opinion. So let me share my thoughts:

I have listened to the "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" audio tape several times and I believe it is one of the most destructive, counter-productive, and contradictory tapes on nutrition I have ever listened to. It is inconsistent with almost everything we teach here at Hallelujah Acres.  Through the first part of the tape you would think you were listening to a vitamin commercial as Dr. Wallach promotes vitamin supplementation, rather than food, as the means we should use to nourish our bodies. 

We disagree. I do not believe God ever intended us to receive our nutrients in mega-doses or in pill form -- but rather I feel that "vitamins" in this form are actually harmful drugs and are received as foreign substances by our bodies. 

Dr. Wallach mocks those who advocate a good diet and teach against the use of such products as salt and butter. Then he claims those who use butter and rock salt live long lives while those who avoid them die young. Later in the tape he goes into a long discourse stating that almost all of our physical problems are caused by a mineral deficiency -- from diabetes to arthritis to you name it. Never once does he state that improper diet or lifestyle has anything whatsoever to do with our physical problems. Dr. Wallach states it is impossible to get the nutrients our bodies need from food, therefore he concludes proper diet is irrelevant to maintaining proper health.

At the end of his discourse, he contradicts most of what he has said throughout the tape by saying we must receive our minerals in colloidal form and that only the living plant is capable of creating what he calls a colloidal mineral. He then tells about this recently found mineral deposit that contains some 60 trace minerals he claims are in colloidal form. The conclusion to be drawn is that only by purchasing and using this product can we be nourished properly and experience health.

Here at Hallelujah Acres, ever since our beginning, our emphasis has been on nourishing our body with the nutrients God originally intended to sustain us in perfect health, which, of course, is the Genesis 1:29 diet of raw fruits and vegetables. We teach that minerals from living plants are the only form of minerals that can be used by our living cells for building material. Minerals found in the Earth are inorganic, and cannot be used by our bodies. In fact, inorganic minerals are harmful in our bodies.

For example, calcium (limestone) in drinking water, which is absorbed from the Earth, is not the same as the calcium in a fresh stalk of broccoli or a carrot. Plants absorb inorganic minerals from the Earth, and through the process of photosynthesis, transform them into living, organic minerals that can be used as fuel and building material by the 100 trillion living cells in our body. Since our living cells cannot use dead inorganic minerals, these minerals from the powdered rock in drinking water must be dealt with and eliminated by the body as a foreign substance. Most of the calcium in non-distilled drinking water is eliminated as waste, but that which is not eliminated is left behind in the body's connective tissues, causing arthritis in the joints, kidney stones, gallstones and hardening of the arteries with calcium deposits in our veins.

We also teach that because of soil erosion and non-organic growing methods, most of our soil has been depleted to the point that our food is deficient in many minerals. So, even though raw fruits and vegetables provide our only usable source of nutrition, eating raw fruits and vegetables will still not necessarily provide the optimum level of nutrition originally intended for our bodies simply because the mineral content of the soil in which they were grown has been depleted.

That is why we recommend drinking freshly-extracted vegetable juice (especially carrot juice made from California juicing carrots). The advantage of drinking fresh carrot juice is that you can consume the nutrients from a whole pound of carrots in one eight-ounce glass of carrot juice. That is more carrots (and nutrients) than you could ever consume in one meal by eating carrots. The other big advantage to fresh juice is that because the pulp (fiber) has been removed, all these nutrients can be in the blood stream and on their way to feeding the cells in just a few minutes, without the time-consuming and energy-depleting process of digestion. This is the reason we teach that fresh vegetable juice is the fastest way of nourishing the body's cells and immune system, which boosts the body's self-healing capabilities to enable the body to heal diseases and disorders. With this understanding, it should come as no surprise when we see people healing all types of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and many other diseases after switching to a vegetarian diet with an emphasis on raw foods and fresh vegetable juices.

Some will tell you the solution to the problem of not being able to obtain optimum levels of nutrition from the food we eat is to take synthetic vitamins, mineral supplements, protein powders, etc. This message is very prominent in the world, mainly because of the tremendous amount of money to be made from synthetic vitamins and processed foods. Messages like that of Dr. Wallach can often gain quick popularity because people love to be told that they don't have to change their diet, eliminate harmful foods or habits, or even exercise to maintain proper health... all they have to do is take a magic pill or potient that will give them all the nutrients they need.

At Hallelujah Acres, we reject this message because these are not the substances by which our Creator intended our bodies to be nourished. And they do not produce healthful results. On the average, people who consume megadoses of synthetic vitamins, mineral supplements and protein powders along with their processed foods, meat, dairy, white flour and sugar are just as sick and die just as early as the rest of our unhealthy population.

We teach that the only way to eliminate sickness and reach our ultimate level of health is to quit consuming the above-mentioned harmful substances, which caused or contributed to the sickness, and begin nourishing our body's living cells with the nutrients by which our Creator intended us to be sustained.

The reason fresh vegetable juice makes such a difference in our body's health and self-healing ability is that this process begins with nutrients in the form we were intended to consume (raw vegetables), and produces a liquid that offers more of these nutrients than we would otherwise be able to consume by eating the vegetable. And this is without cooking, freeze-drying or any other process that changes the basic structure of these nutrients.

Anyone who has ever given fresh vegetable juice (from a good quality juicer) a serious try knows that it produces healthful results. The man who developed the process of juicing, Dr. Norman W. Walker, lived to be over 100 years old, and wrote his last book when he had passed the century mark. This is even more impressive when you consider that Dr. Walker was seriously ill and dying in his early 40s when he was persuaded to try natural healing rather than the medical route.

Fresh vegetable juice could be categorized as a nutritional supplement, because it is a means of supplementing the nutrition we receive from the food we eat. We would be equally justified in categorizing fresh vegetable juice as a natural food because its essential nutrients (vitamins, minerals, protein and enzymes) are in the same form as they were in the raw vegetable created by God for our sustenance. Just as a raw carrot, carrot juice is actually alive as it enters your body, bringing living nutrition to your living cells.

Contrast this with other forms of vitamins, minerals, protein powders, enzymes, etc., which either start with a substance never intended as food for humans (such as vitamins from coal tar or minerals derived from rock), or else they start with a natural food and process it by cooking or freeze-drying, so that its nutrients are no longer in their original, natural, raw form that we can utilize.

So, fresh carrot juice is clearly superior to run-of-the-mill vitamin pills, mineral supplements, protein powders, enzymes, etc. In this comparison, the number of milligrams of a vitamin or mineral is irrelevant because one milligram of a nutrient in its natural form is better than ten pounds of that nutrient in an unnatural form that must be eliminated by the body as a foreign substance.

There is, however, one nutritional supplement on the market today that I would put in the same category as fresh carrot juice. BarleyGreen is a powder derived primarily from the juice of young barley plants. This juice is spray-dried into a powder in a patented process in which no heat above body temperature is used. Because of this juicing process, BarleyGreen has the same advantage as fresh vegetable juice in that its nutrients can go directly into the bloodstream and to the cells without digesting fiber. And because no heat or freeze-drying is involved in the processing, the nutrients in BarleyGreen are still in their live, raw, natural form.

The reason young leaves of barley are the main ingredient in BarleyGreen is that barley has been determined to have the widest spectrum of all the necessary vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins and chlorophyll of any source on Earth. The grain of barley has been used as a staple of human nutrition for thousands of years, but the peak of nutritional value of the barley plant is reached when the young plant leaf is about 10 to 12 inches tall, the stage at which it is harvested to produce BarleyGreen. 

And even more nutritional value is gained with the addition of kelp to BarleyGreen. When Dr. Hagiwara brought his green barley powder to the United States some 14 years ago, he brought a product that had been developed for the Japanese people. But he quickly realized that the American people were extremely deficient in trace minerals and so he added kelp to his green barley powder. Kelp contains every known (and some still to be discovered) mineral that exists on the Earth -- possibly as many as 100.  Why does kelp contain so many minerals?  Because the ocean is the repository of all minerals on Earth as minerals have washed down the streams and rivers into the oceans for thousands of years. Ocean plants, living in this sea of minerals, are able to take these inorganic minerals from the sea water and change them to an organic form.

You can still buy the original green powder product Dr. Hagiwara developed for the Japanese people in health food stores under the label "Green Magma," but it does not contain kelp and thus will not give the same results as his BarleyGreen product, which is marketed exclusively by American Image Marketing (AIM).  There is no product on Earth, of which I am aware, that will provide the body the vast array of nutrients in such high and dense form as BarleyGreen offers. 

There are many reason why BarleyGreen stands head and shoulders above all other green powder products on the market today:

• Other than Green Magma, which we just discussed, BarleyGreen is the only green powder product on the market that contains maltodextrin, a complex carbohydrate made from pine nuts and corn. Competitors call it a filler, but maltodextrin serves a vital purpose as a water-soluble fiber to stabilize the nutrients and prevent oxidation! Without this stabilizer, the product would oxidize (just like any other form of vegetable juice) and have an extremely limited shelf life. Beware of any green powder on the market today if it does not contain maltodextrin, as it will oxidize and not give the same results!
   
• BarleyGreen is organically grown and harvested at the peak of its nutritional value. The juice is separated from the fiber in a juicing machine, and the juice is spray-dried to a powder in a vacuum in two to three seconds at less than body temperature. This is a patented process no other company is allowed to use. Because of the stabilizing (bonding the juice to maltodextrin) and the no-heat processing, BarleyGreen remains a raw product with enzymes still alive for three to five years in dry powder form. Yes, BarleyGreen is a live, raw food. Even after sitting on a shelf for three to five years, the chlorophyll in BarleyGreen is still capable of conducting photosynthesis in sun light, meaning that it is still alive.
   
• When it comes to nutrients, no product on the market can begin to compare.  BarleyGreen is the most nutritionally dense food that has ever been found... providing the widest spectrum of naturally occurring nutrients available in a single source on the Earth today! It contains all the known minerals on Earth, almost every vitamin ever discovered, plus enzymes, chlorophyll, antioxidants and all of the essential amino acids. And BarleyGreen is alkaline in pH, which helps neutralize the acidity of a meat and grain based diet. Because of the incredible density of nutrients and its unique processing that maintains these nutrients in their natural form, BarleyGreen is a product without equal.

We have been conditioned to judge a product by the amount of specific vitamins and minerals, such as vitamin C or calcium, rather than considering its nutritional content as a whole, and how all these nutrients work together. Nutrients do not work alone, so it is useless to buy a pill containing nothing but vitamin C or nothing but calcium. As Dr. Hagiwara explains: "Barley Green makes such a difference because it is a whole food.  A food such as BarleyGreen should not be recognized by discussing only the amount of its vitamins and minerals. The era of focusing on a single vitamin or mineral is gone in the field of the most vanguarded research, and much more attention is being focused on biological phenomena."

But when all is said and done, I am a bottom liner! I do not care what the claims are for a product or how long the list of nutrients on the label. What I want to know is DOES IT WORK?  As I listen to and read the thousands of testimonies that pour into Hallelujah Acres from all over the world as people describe all the physical problems they have been able to heal, and the excellent health they are experiencing, I am convinced that BarleyGreen and the Hallelujah Diet are the solution to the misery and sickness so many people are suffering in the world today. 

But as important as BarleyGreen is, we must remember this supplement is just one part of the diet we recommend. Unlike the promoters of some other supplements, we do not claim this one substance will solve all physical problems without any other dietary and lifestyle changes. We encourage people to adapt the entire Hallelujah Diet, which means 75 to 85 percent raw fruits and vegetables, and the elimination of harmful substances such as meat, dairy, drugs, processed foods, white flour and sugar. Sunshine and daily exercise such as vigorous walking also is essential. People willing to make these changes usually see amazing improvement in their health.

Another reason this entire program is important is that there are actually two elements to proper diet. The first element is taking in the nutrients our body needs. The second element, which most people neglect, is eating food that helps us get the toxic waste out of our body. All disease is the result of not getting the proper nutrients into the body and/or not getting the waste out.

Every cell and organ produces waste that must be eliminated from the body, but people who eat a low-fiber diet of meat, dairy, white flour and processed foods, and get little exercise, are unable to completely eliminate this toxic waste. Fiber is important because it acts as an "intestinal broom" to clean out the toxic waste from our colon. Animal products, white flour and most processed foods have zero fiber, which is even worse when you consider all the toxins these foods add to the body that also need to be eliminated.

 That is why people need to replace their meat, dairy and white flour with raw fruits and vegetables and whole grains, which provide the fiber to keep our colon clean and improve the waste elimination of every cell in our body. That is also why we are highly skeptical of anyone, including Dr. Wallach, who tells people they can solve their physical problems by taking a nutritional supplement, without a need to change their diet.

The reason people achieve such dramatic results on the Hallelujah Diet is that this program offers everything the body needs -- proper nutrition, high fiber and regular exercise. And although raw fruits and vegetables are an excellent source of fiber, we have found that another AIM product, Herbal Fiberblend, can make a noticeable improvement in waste elimination even for people with a good diet. And for people with constipation or other elimination problems, Herbal Fiberblend can make a tremendous difference. 

In addition to the fiber, Herbal Fiberblend provides a combination of 17 herbs that help to reduce mucous and eliminate harmful parasites in our body, among other benefits. And, like BarleyGreen, Herbal Fiberblend is a raw, uncooked, unprocessed product, meaning the nutrients it offers are in a form our body can use. Rhonda and I use Herbal Fiberblend every day, and we have seen many people with serious colon problems helped by this product. Both Herbal Fiberblend and BarleyGreen are all-natural, raw products. We don't like to be product-oriented, but when we find a natural product that is this beneficial to people's health, we feel an obligation to recommend it.

For this reason, BarleyGreen and Herbal Fiberblend were the only dietary supplements we consumed or recommended for several years. We have sampled and tested many other products during this time to determine if they were beneficial, because we try to keep an open mind on this subject. We continue checking into other products, simply because if we were to find a product that offered a significant healthful benefit above and beyond that offered by the Hallelujah Diet, we would feel an obligation to let people know about it.

That is what we did last summer when we heard numerous reports about the amazing benefits of a powerful antioxidant known as proanthocyanidins. We heard reports of people who took this product receiving relief from heart and circulatory problems (such as varicose veins), arthritis, asthma and numerous other conditions. We also found it can provide an extra energy boost, it can improve vision and it appears to speed the healing of injuries.

Proanthocyanidins are not a vitamin, but they are an antioxidant that increases the efficiency of other antioxidant vitamins, such as vitamins C and E. The proanthocyanidins in the AIM product Proancynol are derived from green tea, grape seed and pine bark. These are all natural sources, but we must acknowledge that because this product has been processed with heat and put into capsule form, it is not as natural as BarleyGreen or Herbal Fiberblend. Thus, here was our dilemma: Do we promote Proancynol because it can be beneficial to many people's health, or do we ignore this product because it is not as natural as the other elements of the Hallelujah Diet? We want to help people, but we also want to remain consistent. After much consideration, our decision was to continue to make it available to people who want it, but not to actively promote it.

I view Wild Yam Cream products in a similar manner when it comes to problems with PMS and menopause. The Genesis 1:29 Diet will usually correct PMS and menopause-related problems and normalize hormone levels. However, there are some women who want to see more rapid results, while others have had hysterectomies or other surgical procedures that interfere with normal hormone production. In those cases, a good Wild Yam Product  can be extremely helpful. Again, this is somewhat of a compromise to the Genesis 1:29 Diet (because it is a processed product and a symptomatic approach), but external application of this product (containing progesterone) is so much better than the dangerous Estrogen Replacement Therapy used by many doctors that we recommend our Wild Yam Cream to anyone with problems in this area.

Now, let's look at some of the other nutritional products that are quite popular today:

* Super Blue-Green Algae is a product I have known about for many years and dozens of people have tried to get me involved in marketing it. I have researched the product quite extensively and Rhonda and I have personally tried the product on several occasions. I cannot endorse Super Blue Green Algae for several reasons.

Blue Green Algae is taken from Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon which is touted as being so pristine in the company literature, yet the August 1995 issue of Vegetarian Times spent almost a full page telling how polluted the lake was and that local residents wouldn't even swim in the lake because of this pollution. After being told that this just wasn't so, I personally inquired of locals while in southern Oregon this past fall and received confirmation of the lake's pollution.

Another shortcoming of Blue Green Algae is that it is processed by freeze-drying. This is an inferior process that causes a loss of up to 25% of the nutrients, including the loss of some enzymes.

* Juice Plus has become very popular and I have been inundated with distributors wanting me to endorse, promote and sell this product. I have personally tried the product and researched the product quite extensively and found several reasons why I cannot endorse it.

Juice Plus contains fiber which defeats the very purpose of juicing. Because the fiber has been added back after juicing, this product must go through the digestive process rather than being able to directly enter the blood stream. This drastically reduces the percentage of nutrients reaching cellular level. And Juice Plus is not organically grown.

As you are confronted by new products -- and you will be -- never evaluate a new product by the list of nutrients on the label or the claims made by the person promoting the product! If the product is in powder form, first check into the processing of the product to see if it has a stabilizer (maltodextrin) to prevent oxidation. If it does not, it will have a very short shelf life. Second, make sure no heat is used in its processing. Remember that enzymes, the life force, start to die at 107 degrees and are completely gone by 122 degrees Fahrenheit. If the product has been freeze-dried you know the process is an inferior one, and once again look for a stabilizer. Try also to determine if the product has fiber, or whether it has been juiced to remove this fiber. Remember, if a product has fiber, it must be digested, which means you must expend energy before it is assimilated and many nutrients will be lost.

And especially beware of any product being promoted with the promise that all you have to do to solve your health problems is to take this pill (or powder or whatever) without changing your diet or lifestyle. If anyone suggests you can solve your health problems without giving up the harmful substances that caused those health problems, they are wrong. That's a lie many people would like to believe, but it's still a lie. It's similar to the same lie being told every day by doctors who earn a living by telling people that drugs, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, etc. can solve health problems with no need for a change in diet.

Here at Hallelujah Acres, our primary goal is to encourage people to return to the diet God handed down to mankind in Genesis 1:29. We agree that because our soil has lost much of its mineral content, some form of nutritional supplement is beneficial. But this nutritional supplement must come from a natural source and it must not be processed in a way that leaves a product with lifeless nutrients in a form totally different from that by which our Creator designed our bodies to be sustained in perfect health.

If we can focus on the goal of encouraging people to return to the diet and lifestyle God originally intended for mankind, we will see healthful results in people that will far exceed anything that can ever be obtained by pill poppers, product promoters and medical doctors.

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