We Are Pioneers

Time to Toot Our Own Horn

That’s what a friend (who proofs some of our work here) has told us.

You see, our first website was up and running long before Mercola and WebMD ever hit the internet. First we found a little freebee site that allowed us to post a page or two or three. The internet was so young most everyone was on it either through Compuserve or through AOL. Then later, when I joined AOL, we moved our pages to Hometown AOL.

When we wrote our first article on Nutrition and Depression over 20 years ago, there were just a few small studies for us to reference, while a lot of people, people with MDs and PhDs behind their names, told us that there was NO connection WHATSOEVER between nutrition and mental health.

Today there is the term “nutritional psychiatry.” In fact, it’s more than a term; you can get a degree in it.

But 20 some years ago we were called quacks for suggesting that mental health could be tied to nutrition. In fact, one of my favorite quotations that I love to repeat is the following.

The biggest myth of all is that food has any connection to behavior.

Steven Pliszka, MD, professor of psychiatry, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

And we have responded to that statement with something often quoted by our readers:

The biggest myth of all is that doctors know anything about nutrition.

David Bonello, editor, investigative journalist, Wellness Journeys

Professionals kept describing mental illness and depression as “chemical imbalances.” Where do the chemicals in our bodies come from but on the end of our forks, as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine have taught us. (Do we need mention that these two forms of medicine combined have over 6,000 years behind them, yet they are not accepted by the elitists in our Western medicine?)

Thus it seemed quite obvious, at least to us, that nutrition had to have an influence on mental health.

We are what we eat. And we are what we eat, drink, and think.

Yes, think. We also have (minute) electrical charges surging through our bodies. Tai Chi, Qigong, and Yoga work with those energies. They build those energies (so does aromatherapy), and yet we forget we are energy, and we forget our thinking can build or diminish that energy. As for the frequencies of that energy, again this is ignored by Western medicine.

We have to remember that food has energy; live food having more than dead food.

If our digestive system has gone to hell, then much of what we eat just doesn’t get to where it’s supposed to go because, as we and others have said for years, “the inside of your digestive tract is still the outside of your body.” Nothing gets in unless it’s been properly broken down via digestion, and all the enzymes and acids and chemicals needed to break it down are there and working harmoniously.

Our earliest newsletters focused on proper food, healthy lifestyles, building “positive” energy, and detox/digestion. We were truly holistic (one of the most misused words on the Internet today) because we focused on the whole being.

So, our proof reader messaged me with:

When we first wrote the story of Anarcha, the slave girl who went under the knife some 30 times, we were the first website to actually dedicate an entire page/article to her and to her slave sisters. However, the information we had on her was slim. Today there are numerous references to her on the web, more documents showing up in archives and in Google Books, and we used all of that to correct our slant and deliver the truth to the world about her, her sisters, and the doctor who repaired her horrible condition. We even tossed in a tiny satirical editorial about the snowflakes protesting the statue of this superior physician because he used his white privilege to work on helpless slave girls. Apparently his curing them hasn’t quite made it into the conversation yet.

We were the first to list out a truckload of alternative cancer therapies, acknowledging the studies, if any, while informing readers if there was any hard evidence behind them or just rumor. In the end, we dug up a lot, and much of it was anecdotal at best. But if there were studies and if clinics could prove their successes, yes, we informed our readers.

We told the world that Vioxx was causing heart disease two years before the FDA came out admitting that there was a problem, and that the problem was 60,000 heart attacks in one year.

And, of course, our investigative report shut down a criminal operation that was reaping in half a million bucks a month defrauding cancer patients. (See below for some emails thanking us for that report.)

In journalism, one leads by a rigorous quest for the truth, as best as can be established, and publishing it in a readable, and sometimes enjoyable, manner. And when it comes to science, one leads by determining the validity of the studies involved, because conflicts of interest and fraud abound in a world where profits are the bottom line.

But right now I’d like you to go visit a page and see what they’ve got to offer; see what they’re selling, and see how they sell it. The link I was originally sent was to one of those “short” videos that takes up half your afternoon to watch, and really it’s not much of a video . . . just someone lecturing. I pulled out the text I’d love for you all to read, or at least skim.

This little demonstration will show you how we differ from others.

Because the original site won’t be up forever, we’ve taken the entire page and put it into the following PDF file to save for posterity: The Secret Salt That’s Death to Cancer

This entire piece is bullshit. The secrets they talk about have been at our website (our original website — they are not yet here at our site because all our pages must be updated first) since 1995. That was when we first started publishing these “secrets.”

Did you hear their brag that they are nearly 300,000 researchers, doctors, and health seekers like you?

I thought I’d show you their offices:

It’s the apartment on the right.
I’ll bet it gets crowded when all
those 280,000 people show up.

They are wolves being followed by sheep.

They make their money by taking advantage of people who might be very ill. They are borderline frauds.

Why?

There isn’t one thing on that page of secret, miracle cures that hasn’t been at our original site since the mid-nineties. They talk about secrets, but sorry; these secrets are all over the freakin web.

This is known as a hot sales pitch.

We here at Wellness Journeys are not 300,000 strong. We’re a handful of volunteers who want to do the right thing. We wanted to get people information they could trust.

And why trust us?

Because we have no conflicts of interest. We’re all unpaid volunteers. We started this operation just because the people deserved to hear it from journalists who didn’t have a stake in the outcome. We’re here just to help people.

And somehow that formula has made us pioneers.

I’d like you to read something recently received from a long time reader of ours. She wanted more info on BACO and since the website that sells it (Simply the Best) was hacked and we were locked out, I wrote out a little thing for her. This is her response.

Dear David,

 

     Thank you SO much for this story! It’s very meaningful to me to hear it. I know your time is valuable, and I didn’t mean to take so much of it, but I’m going to treasure the story. These beautiful souls who create and act from love are so precious, and the work is so much more pure because they are.

 

     For years I’ve appreciated your integrity and goodness, I just wanted you to know. You are a gift. So many lovely beings labor in relative obscurity simply because they insist on being involved with REAL things and acting in integrity and kindness. The ripple effect of who you are, what you do and how you do it, may not be visible, but it is out there. I’m sure that the gift of your approach to information and providing genuine products has touched very many. Simply acting in truth has a presence to it that ripples out, though its source may go unidentified. Know that you’ve made a huge contribution even if it doesn’t come back to you in money. This is what we take with us, right? Not the money. At the end of the day we are who we’ve been and our aspirations for even more purity. That all counts.

 

     Thank you, I will go to your website. I know you’ve published about this in the past, it just didn’t catch my attention in a personal way until yesterday.

 

 

With love,

Holland

Over a year ago when we decided to experiment with this combination in my kitchen, we searched the web. Nothing. We found nothing.

Today, you’ll find quite a few.

Oh, and one of our volunteers found out that when you mix milk and blueberries, they are no longer anti-oxidant, but they become anti-anti-oxidant. So we quickly created a salad dressing that substituted raspberries for the blueberries, and told readers that it just needed a bit more sweetener because raspberries are tarter than blueberries. You will find this statement and modifications in our recipes.

Has anyone noticed that recipes on the web now come with a dozen or so photographs? Do you know why? (Other than for aesthetic purposes?

To sell you more stuff. They've now got lots of room for posting ads. We treasure our charity status because we don't have to sell you a thing. You don't have popups everywhere asking if you want updates. We figure, if you want updates, you'll return. Right?

And then there’s our use of stevia and erythritol? We told our readers that the erythritol by itself has a tinny aftertaste, and can cause diarrhea, and stevia definitely has an aftertaste that has chased off a lot of people, but together they counter each others’ aftertaste and taste like sugar without the intestinal distress. We found this out (nearly ten years ago) by experimenting in my kitchen, and then we passed it on to our readers in the form of recipes.

Today there are companies making sweeteners who use that exact same combination of stevia and erythritol.

And everyone around us is getting rich.

Like I’ve always said, people have a right to make a living. But doing so at the expense of integrity? Nope. Can’t do it. We’ve got bills to pay. We’re hunting everywhere for fundraisers. We’re broke most of the time (or worse), but we’re not going to shed one nanogram of integrity to raise a penny, because then we will have just blended into the crowd, and like that crowd, we will have sold out.

We are going to remain leaders in our own little way.

Why we’ve been so lucky at accomplishing what others, fully funded, with hundreds of workers can’t do, I do not know. Why we’re broke, I know. Our focus was never to bring in the dough.

Some tell me our accomplishments came about because of my maverick attitude, how I can’t follow the rules, or I’m always bucking authority. Not really. There are rules in journalism.

Some say it’s my ridiculously competitive drive. And yes, get me on the tennis courts or in the boxing ring and I’m absurdly competitive, but then, at the end of the day, I just enjoyed playing. In tennis, I love to compete, but I’m just happy to be there, and I can laugh just as loudly at my goof-ups as everyone else does.

Maybe it’s this:

As I’ve told people from the beginning, it all started as my journey. And what I found for me might not work for everyone else, but I had to look at it objectively, research it all thoroughly, and then lay it out as if we’re sitting down over a cup of coffee. As for integrity, well, this was my journey. Why would I ever lie to myself?

I’m just happy to have you along for the ride, and I hope it’s enriched your lives a bit.

That’s all.

Another First (June 2019)

We began experimenting with chocolate a few years back because it is amazing health food: Benefits of Chocolate. We were quick to discover that every freaking pure chocolate recipe we found on the internet was bullhockey. You see, no matter what sweetener we added (from sugar to stevia to honey), none stayed in the heated concoction. So we did a bit of research and wrote and posted this: Why it is Impossible to Sweeten Chocolate.

But then came the fortuitous accident. We started experimenting and testing this latest fad diet, the ketogenic diet, and since MCT Oil (we now use fractionated coconut oil) is required on the diet, we added a half of cup of it to our chocolate recipe and bingo! when we added the sweetener (a mixture of erythritol and stevia) it stayed in the concoction. I immediately turned off the stove. Let it cool and harden, and then the next morning we warmed it up again, tested it, and YES! the sweetener stayed in the concoction.

Suddenly we were able to make chocolate candies (chocolate espresso beans, peanut butter cups, chocolate and sea salt, etc). Here is that recipe: Chocolate — Low Carb. And the really strange thing is, we’ve not found anyone on the web who has discovered this. We find a lot of comments about how the sweetener falls out of the concoction, but no one seems to realize how MCT oil can help. As an educational charity, we’ve even sent emails to websites telling them of this discovery, but so far, nobody’s believed us. Weird.

Letters

Here are a few emails we’ve received, thanking us for what we do. (Yes, we like positive feedback once in a while.) Oh, and we’re printing these as they were written. People make mistakes and if we modified their words, they wouldn’t be “their” words.

Hello! Thank you for the best article I have read on PTSD! It provided so many insights and so much useful information.

With gratitude,
Heather Colgin

Being a combat vet I often find myself involved with the symptoms of PTSD and could’nt explain what I was experiencing…especially to family…this article has opened a window of understanding to those around me ….I have sent each a link to it …now they see me as I am in my condition …well described on the pages and indisputable..So I want to thank the author for this blessing
My fog has been lifted a bit

Paul