VEGANISM AND HEALING

Talk by vegan herbalist Helen Bagadon to 6th Dec 2003 vegan meeting in
Dublin

Hello, I'd like to welcome everybody for coming today. My name is Helen
Bagadon. I'm an herbalist and iridologist and I chair an association of
master herbalists of Ireland. We have also begun a four-year course in
herbal medicine run out of Maynooth University.

The reason I'm speaking about veganism today is that it is a very important
subject to me and I pride myself in being an herbalist for whom what we eat
is terribly important. Many doctors are trained like allopathic doctors, so
they give you an herb instead of a drug when you go to them, but they do not
look at your diet in any great depth and in my experience diet is terribly
important in healing. It is probably about 80% of healing.

Anyway, my story for what it's worth is a bit interesting. I've been vegan
for twenty years and when I was twenty-one I had an injury where I broke a
disk in my back. I broke a cartridge. That was the diagnosis anyway. It was
quite badly broken and doctors abroad told me that I would probably be in a
wheelchair. So I was shocked and dismayed by that.

I was brought up in a family where my mother always made herbal remedies and
tinctures and alcoholic beverages from everything that grew. I was never
vaccinated and I had never been to a doctor and was brought up with a
terrible fear of the medics swell. So I was traumatised more at the thought
of going to the hospital again than the wheelchair even.

I had no knowledge of natural healing but that was twenty years ago in
Ireland and there was not a lot going on here at the time. I had one memory
of being in Denmark just a couple of months earlier with a friend of mine. I
slept in her father's clinic.

He had a small house and a clinic and I remember that he did something with
feet. There was a chart on the wall with diagrams on it and organs and your
feet. I thought that's got to be an alternative. I was really desperate so I
flew from the Middle East over to him in Denmark. He treated me with his own
therapy very hard for six weeks.

When I got to the Airport I was not able to walk. I had to take a
taxi to my friend's house. I could only barely shuffle around such were the
injuries. His theory was that indeed you do have an injury, but you are
twenty-one years of age, you are young and healthy and the body always seeks
to heal itself. So, you have a lot of inflammation around your spine that is
damaged, but given the proper diet and detoxification your body will heal
itself.

So, I went from drinking six cups of coffee a day, cream buns and ham and
cheese sandwiches every day to a vegan raw food diet overnight. It was not
very nice.

I went through an incredible healing crisis, a healing crisis from hell.
Those of you who know about "healing crises" will know that the healthier
you are the quicker you have a healing crisis. So I had it the next day. A
healing crisis is basically where your body is given a chance to dump its
toxins.Depending on the strength of your vital force; if you are young and
healthy you will have a big healing crisis that means a lot of bowel
movement and maybe vomiting and sweating- a big clean out.

So I went from a very bad diet to a very good diet overnight. I went into a
strong healing crisis and it was very difficult and the gentleman who
treated me did not speak any English to make it worse.

I stayed with his programme mainly because I was desperate. I had no
interest in vegetarianism or veganism whatsoever. I simply stayed with it
because when I deviated from it I felt ill. For instance my legs worked
better on days that I ate better. It was as simple as that. I didn't have a
vocation in healing; I was forced into it really.

Obviously I developed a great interest in what I ate because it affected my
legs in how they worked or did not work. I found that the worst offenders
for me were animal foods, any kind of meat, chicken or fish- these seemed to
have the worst affect on my health. I started to study reflexology and I
began to research into healing generally.

I don't know if any of you have come across a man called Arnold Errit. He
was a bit of a nut case who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century;
an extreme vegan raw food eater. He lived to be very old and looked amazing
at fifty. He was one of the first "hygienists" or "detox" people.

I was inspired by what he wrote so I began to introduce more and more of
his principles into my diet and what I found after about six months was that
living on a vegan diet with a high content of raw food, my perception of the
physical world became enhanced. I began to see colours more clearly and to
hear sounds in much more detail and to have a heightened awareness of my own
feelings and the feelings of others. I began to develop an almost psychic
sensibility and it became more and more interesting for me.

Through the years I studied herbal medecine and then iridology and I have
treated many, many people. I noticed after a few years that what I was
saying to people was the same and I came to the conclusion that if I could
get people to give up eating animal foods especially meat, chicken and fish,
but especially meat that that alone, even if I never touched their feet or
ever gave them any herbs, that that alone would bring about a huge healing
in most people.

If you look at the planetery implications of how the planet is being
destroyed by the animal farming industry, you begin to understand that world
hunger is really about a misunderstanding of how we eat rather than lack of
food. It is also about money, of course and huge interests.

In our course we went on to develop a school of natural healing. Just four
years ago we started teaching iridology and herbal medicine. We teach in the
tradition of John Ray Christopher, an American herbalist. Now the reason I
was drawn to his form of herbalism is that he puts a huge emphasis on vegan
detox and he does not treat people unless they are willing to change their
way of eating. We are having his son come over and teach for us in April.
This is a big event for us.

You probably all know this, but I will say it again; you can never hear it
too often. The most common question I get asked by people is " How will I
get my protein and how will I get my calcium" and " If I do not have meat,
I will get weak and will not be able to do all the hard work that I normally
do".

Last year I went out to visit Florida. A place called Hippocrates Health
Centre. I'm sure you have heard of it. It is a healing centre where they
get results with advanced cancers based on wheat grass juice therapy and
juicing, using a lot of live- food. Mohammad Ali the boxer actually trained
for his final fights using that programme.

If you want to be very physically active for instance, the missing link is
protein and there is a misconception how we get protein. By far the best
source of protein is non-animal protein and anything that is enzyme rich.
So, live food and sprouts are by far the best source.

So for most of us living on a vegan diet we can get by on fruit and veg.
and lots of greens. But, if you want to look like Mister and Missus Universe
you can do so very efficiently using sprouts. (Sprouted seeds, grains and
nuts are very high in protein). The thing about sprouts is that all the
amino acids are available. So, we do not need protein as much as we need
amino acids. We can synthesise protein ourselves given the right amount of
amino acids.

So many of the theories we are brought up with are outdated, research into
nutrition with athletes is finding that they are getting better results (for
example; long distance runners) on vegan diets than was ever believed
possible. And the old theory that you need to combine your proteins e.g.
(bread with humus, rice and beans etc.) is also not true. You can live very
efficiently once you get a good range or a well thought out simple diet. I
have always been very busy and have never eaten anything more complex than
fruit for breakfast, a baked potato and salad for lunch and a bowl of soup
in the evening and I am still in one piece.

People ask me how I get my protein. Well I am living proof. We had a
teacher in Abbeyleix, where I went to school who used to say " You have to
have your protein or you will"...and together we all had to answer "DIE" So
there was deep, deep brain washing.

But to get back to the fears people have about "veganism and healing" or
veganism and health" I should say. The first one is "How do I get my
protein". The second is "How do I get my calcium"? Now, the main problem
with nutrition is not the unavailability of it but how we absorb it. To
explain.a human being is designed like a gorilla. Gorillas live to be
ancient. They have very long digestive tracts just like our own. So animals
that eat meat usually have fangs, run around on all fours, kill the animal
and eat it raw. They do very well at it and they have short digestive tracts
with a different digestive function to ours completely.

So we are designed basically like gorillas and gorillas thrive on bananas
and nuts as you know. But the main problem that I have come across as an
Herbalist is that people have toxic bowels and toxic colons from meat, dairy
and cheese consumption and if you can get their colons cleaned out by
changing their diets and getting them to drink water and sometimes taking a
few herbs and then whatever calcium or protein is readily available and
easily absorbed. So the problem is not lack of nutrition but lack of
absorption, which is a very different thing.

Just to say a few words about the calcium issue: People say "Sure, for
years, my father and his father had cows milk" and that we are "genetically
programmed". to look like cows almost at this stage. We are the only animals
to drink the milk of another mammal. It is a very unnatural thing to do.
Milk is really quite undigestable for humans no matter what way it is
produced: even if it is organic milk and the cow is happy out in the fields.
It is still designed for calves. It is still designed to build a big heavy
animal. It is not for human consumption. We can see the proof of this in the
amount of children that have asthma, mucus conditions and cystitis also
congestion conditions of the respiratory tract. There is a very well proven
link between breast cancer and dairy food. It is like as if someone woke up
about two years ago and said " How come that there is a very low incidence
of cancer in China, Japan and Korea. Could it be that they do not have
dairy?

The reason for this, I think, is that dairy is not really designed for
human consumption and so it clogs up the lymphatic system. One of the parts
of the body that has to work very hard to get rid of toxins is the lymphatic
system. So, if you have dairy in your diet your lymph nodes swell up and
block. That is the first stage of the slowing down of energy that can give
rise to cancer in the future. That is another reason not to eat dairy. The
biggest fear women have these days is that when they reach their forties or
fifties they will disintegrate and fall to pieces from osteoporosis due to a
lack of calcium. That is one of the biggest marketing myths, one of the
biggest money- spinners around. But in fact the opposite is true. Dairy food
has been proven to contribute to osteoporosis rather than heal it.

What happens again with dairy food with osteoporosis is that we in the west
suffer from it in mid life. Western men suffer from it as well. It is
primarily because of our high protein diet that is animal protein, i.e.
rashers and sausages for breakfast, meat sandwiches for lunch and steak or
bacon for dinner.

So we have so much protein in the body with all the modern processed food
containing high levels of animal protein, pizza with cheese and all that
sort of thing.

We must eliminate protein from our bodies daily. We cannot store it in the
body. So, whatever protein we don't need and there is usually lots of it, is
eliminated through the kidneys, binding with calcium and then draining
calcium out of the bones and teeth and eventually out of the reserves in the
body. Osteoporosis is rather a result of our over consumption of protein
than our under consumption of calcium.

How I understand it, having been in the business for twenty years and
treated thousands of people. I treat four - five people a day on average so
I have treated an awful lot of people and have come to the conclusion that
we are the victims of money interests and a lot of what we have been
educated is misinformation. It is basically lies.

Unfortunately, the Pharmatutical industry is the most powerful industry in
the world. It is the oil industry really and you do not get much higher than
that.

Herbalists have all come across horror stories about other herbalists who
have been put out of work or sent to jail or worse still when they come out
against the dairy industry and the meat industry.

One more aspect I would like to mention about veganism, before I finish,
which is very important is that for a spiritual way of life eating dead
animals is about as bad as it gets. It is no coincidence that people from
all religious traditions like Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, all
the major religions advocate at least sometimes fasting and preferably being
vegetarian. The reason is that when you have your body full of dead animal
produce, it is very hard for the way you process energy to be any way subtle
or enlightened. And so you do not get in touch with your higher self or your
subtle feelings as long as you are carrying dead flesh around in your colon.
Animals suffer so much in their being killed these days that they suffer
unbearable fear. I come from a town called Rathdowney in County Laois and
you know you are there when you drive in by the smell because there is a
meat factory there. Every morning I used to wake up in my apartment and hear
the cattle being driven to the factory. The way they cry and moan when they
smell the blood of the other animals is just heart breaking. You can imagine
the fear they experience and the way their bodies produce toxins related to
dread and terror. All those toxins are in the blood and that is on a totally
physically level. But on an emotional or spiritual level the emotions that
are given rise to by that type of fear and resentment are detrimental to us
as humans who are on some kind of spiritual journey or towards some kind of
awareness or enlightenment.

So at this stage of my life the single greatest ( I hate the smell of meat
or the taste of meat or anything like that.) The single greatest reason that
I don't even consider ever again eating meat or dairy food is that it would
damage my spirituality and to me it feels like cannibalism. I love animals
and I work a lot with horses, healing horses. I feel a deep affinity with
animals and the idea of eating mammals that are designed in a similar way to
us is abhorrent. That's my spiel. If any one would like to ask questions.
Thank you.

[Thanks to Joe Dempsey for transcribing the recording of Helen's talk]