One question we get quite a bit is about the amount of juice that Sy drinks on his therapy. His schedule now requires him to drink 2 green, 2 carrot, and 6 carrot/apple juices each day. That's a lot of liquid!
One of the two main facets of the therapy is correcting any nutritional deficiencies and providing the cells of the body with more than enough of what they need to do their jobs the best they can. In Sy's case, we have been slowly trying to correct the fact that his immune system sees food as a foreign invader. If we can help support the body as a whole, we hope to encourage Sy's immunity system to focus more on attacking the right things. As you made have seen from a past post, Sy's endoscopy last November was well within normal ranges...something we have never seen with him before. With other chronic diseases, the Gerson Therapy looks to practice the same principle and support the body to heal itself (like it was designed to do), unhindered.
After many years of trials and research, Dr. Gerson found that these particular kinds of juices made the biggest impact on improving health. It's not to say that other kinds of fresh juices aren't great (as long as the amount of fruit is limited) but when you are focusing on healing through therapy, stick with what's been proven.
The reason that the fresh produce is juiced is for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that your body does not have to do all the work of breaking down the foods to get the nutrients out. Our digestive systems are set to absorb the nutrients we give it, so if it's already broken down, you're going to get even more bang for your buck. The Hallelujah Acres site wrote a great article on this:
According to Dr. Kirschner (M.D.) in his book Live Food Juices, eating a carrot forces your digestive system to separate the carrot fiber from the carrot juice. This uses a lot of energy and destroys over 65% of the nutrients in the process.
Dr. Kirschner goes on to say that juicing carrots before consuming them is a different story. The juicing machine removes the pulp for you, eliminating much of the digestive process. As a result, 92% of the nutrients are available at cellular level for almost immediate use.
Another thing that people often ask is why Gerson doesn't stress drinking water when on the FULL therapy. Does this mean that you should never drink pure water and that it's bad for you? No way. Sy is an active little guy and definitely needs his water when playing in the nasty Florida summer weather. Anyone would tell you that dehydration is not a good thing and causes the body to do goofy things; however, if you consider the amount of liquid you are consuming on the therapy, you would understand that you are getting plenty of healthy hydration. Sy makes plenty of trips to the bathroom with just drinking juices and his output shows that he is staying plenty hydrated. If Sy drinks tons of water on top of his juices, he will float away!
I hope this post gives you a little insight to the ideas that have been researched and documented with Gerson. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments.
Do you juice? If so, have you seen benefits in your own health? Post us a comment and let us know!
