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Prayer
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The effects of prayer on the physical body have long been recognized by people of faith.  We have Biblical promises of healing by prayer, such as James 5:13-16: (NIV)

"Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.  Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.  And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.  Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."

This belief in prayer, so thoroughly embraced by the Christian community, has mostly been regarded by the scientific community with skepticism.  But even to a trained scientist, seeing is believing, and there have been studies on this subject with amazing results.

An article on a major website (http://onhealth.webmd.com/alternative/columnist/item,75975.asp) cited a study, published in the Southern Medical Journal, July 1988.  It was indicated that patients in a cardiac intensive care unit had better medical outcomes when prayed for than those patients who received no prayers.  These patients did not even know they were being prayed for!  These findings were duplicated in a study published in 1999 in the Western Journal of Medicine.

This same article states that health and medical educators are taking the role of religion, prayer and spirituality quite seriously.  Courses on religion and healing are now being offered in many major academic medical centers, including Harvard Medical School's continuing education course, "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine."

Another article from the same website, entitled, "Can You Be Healed by Internet Prayer?" by Barbara Boughton (http://onhealth.webmd.com/alternative/in-depth/item/item,85605_1_1.asp), cites another such case.  In this study, performed by researchers at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, MO, and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 484 heart patients in intensive care were prayed for by volunteers.  These praying volunteers did not personally know the patients, just the facts of their illness.  It was found that the "prayed for" group used fewer drugs, had fewer complications, and, once again, fared better overall than a control group.

Also mentioned in the above article is the results of an "Online Health" poll.  9,158 people responded to the question, "Will praying for someone's health help them heal?"  88% said "yes" while only 12% answered "no."

The skeptics will always exist, but the power of prayer is being acknowledged.

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Care and Feeding of the Human Body
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We certainly believe in the power of prayer.  Say you are a recipient of wonderfully answered prayer for the healing of your body; now what?  Do you return to the lifestyle that may have contributed to your illness in the first place?

Or perhaps you are ill.  You want to get well, of course.  You want, at least, to do all you can to maximize your health.  What would that be?

From our experience, and the experiences of many others, we have found proper nutrition, along with a healthy mental attitude and a strong spiritual relationship with God (through Jesus Christ) to be the foundation stone of total health.

As for the feeding of the human body, I defer to the words of experts.

Highly respected medical doctors in the field of nutrition, John McDougall and Dean Ornish, participated in a Nutrition Debate at the United States Department of Agriculture on February 24, 2000.  Following are excerpts from the transcript of this symposium.  (You may read the entire transcript at http://www.usda.gov/cnpp/Seminars/GND/Proceedings.txt - The transcript can also be accessed through Dr. McDougall's website at http://www.drmcdougall.com)

Dr. John McDougall:

The diet I recommend is a starch based diet with the addition of fruits and vegetables.  It's a traditional diet.  It's what most people who have ever walked this planet have consumed, a diet of rice for Asia, a diet of pasta for southern Europe, a diet of breads for northern Europe, a starch based diet with the addition of fruit and vegetables.  Now, throughout history this is what most people consumed, except on special days, on holidays, on festival days.  Then they celebrated.  They danced in the street.  They took the day off work, and maybe they would roast a pig and have a feast.  Now, most people could only do this on occasion, but in every society there were some rich people.  They had so much fun at that party that they took that idea up the hill and up to their castle, and they feasted three times a day, seven days a week.  Do you remember what this aristocrats, kings and queens looked like?  They looked like Americans.  That's what they looked like.

 (Laughter.)

That's how I was raised.  I started out every morning with Easter.  I went on to Thanksgiving and Christmas for lunch and dinner.  Every night after dinner I had a birthday party, and that is the problem.

 (Laughter.)

We need to put rich foods back into special occasions.  If you're tired of looking like a king and queen, then what you need to do is eat a starch based diet, as the humankind has for millions of years.

Dr. Dean Ornish:

...If you actually look at all of the data, what you find is really not how conflicted, but how consistent it is that a meat-based diet is not as healthful as a plant-based diet, and here are just some of the reasons.

First of all, you only find cholesterol in meat,  which tends to be high in saturated fat, total fat and oxidants, whereas a plant-based diet has no cholesterol, low in saturated fat, low in oxidants, high in antioxidants, high in fiber... and there's literally a thousand substances that Dr. McDougall alluded to earlier that have anti-cancer, anti-heart disease and even anti-aging properties.  Where do you find them?  You find them in a plant-based diet.  -- Phytochemicals, bioflavonoids,  carotenoids, retinols, isoflavums, leucopoines, guanosine, -- There's a whole alphabet soup of these and they're powerful, so when you switch from a meat-based diet to a plant-based diet, in short you get a double benefit.  You stop eating those foods that cause disease, and you also start eating foods that are actually protective....

Heart disease is as rare [in Japan and Africa] as malaria is here until they move here, and they begin eating and living like we do.  It's not just heart disease.  It's breast cancer in women, prostate cancer,  colon cancer.  You find the same patterns there as well.  In fact, you can graph intake of dietary fat on the X axis against the incidence of breast and prostate cancer by country, and you find the same patterns.  The highest intake of saturated fat and cholesterol like in the United States, in the U.K., the Scandinavian countries, are the highest.  The eastern European countries and the Mediterranean diets are in the middle, and on the lowest end of the spectrum are the Asian countries.  Now that's changing, and there's a globalization of illness that's occurring as people begin to -- you know,  they see the United States as a superpower.  They want to live like us, and now they're starting to die like us, and it's all avoidable and really unfortunate.  I think we can get a globalization of health instead of a globalization of illness.

You can look at a number of animal studies.  For example, in this one they actually injected carcinogens into rats, and they found when they put them on a typical American high protein diet, the higher the dose of the carcinogen, the more cancer they got.  That's what you'd expect.  But look at the rats that were fed a low animal protein diet.  They didn't respond to the carcinogens in the same way because there are protective elements in a plant-based diet that help to prevent that.  The cartoon says, "My only consolation is that by eating us, they're killing themselves."

 (Laughter.)

All right.  So I recommend a whole food, low fat, plant-based diet.  You can actually lose even more weight, lower your cholesterol even more than on the high protein diets.  You don't get the exaggerated insulin response that we talked about earlier.  There's strong science not only from our work, but from many others, to back it up.  As I mentioned, it's low in the substances that  cause disease and high in the ones that are protective.

Another noted expert on health and nutrition is George Malkmus of Hallelujah Acres.  The following is an excerpt from his article entitled, "God's Original Diet."  This article may be read in its entirety at http://www.hacres.com/html/orgdiet.html.
 

So if someone were to ask me, "What is the ideal diet?" I would have to answer, "Based upon all my personal experiences and research over these 20+ years, without hesitation, I would have to say raw fruits and vegetables!"

This was the diet God originally gave to man. This was the diet that restored me to health over 20 years ago, and has sustained me ever since. And this is the diet we see people turning to after they attend our seminars. Usually it takes only a short while before they return to tell us that their physical problems are "much better" or "totally gone."

Why did I and why do others experience such wonderful results after adopting a raw fruit and vegetable diet? Let me give an illustration that I hope will make it more understandable.  Most people drive an automobile and realize they must put the proper grade of gasoline in the gas tank if it is going to run properly. If a low-grade fuel is used, it will ping and knock. If sugar is put in the gas tank, it will destroy the engine. Why? Because the engine was designed to run on a certain grade of fuel. We seem to understand that our car requires the proper grade of fuel in order to run properly, and so most people are very careful to put in good fuel.

Well, what about our body? Certainly, it is much more complex than any automobile engine. But what most people fail to realize is that God designed the human body to run on a certain grade of fuel also! If we give our bodies a low-grade fuel, or the wrong fuel, they won't run properly either.

Here's why: Our body is made up of approximately one hundred trillion cells. Each of these cells has a DNA or blueprint of the cell that will replace it.  As our cells die and are replaced by new cells, the new cell is totally dependent  on the building materials available (the food we have been putting into our body). If the building materials have been poor, the new cell will be weaker than the cell it is replacing. If the building materials have been good, the new cell will be as strong as the cell it is replacing. If the building materials are superior, then the new cell will be stronger than the cell it is replacing. It is that basic and simple.  We literally become what we eat!

Most people do not seem to realize that when food is cooked, almost all the nutritional value of the food is destroyed. All enzymes are destroyed by cooking. Approximately 83 percent of all vitamins are destroyed by cooking. The heat  changes the protein into an unassimilable form, while the organic minerals our body so desperately needs are reduced to an inorganic, unusable form! Many put drugs in their body in the form of alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, all strong poisons! Then there are those who put drugs in the form of medicine into their bodies in an effort to try to correct physical problems caused by these low-grade fuels or poisons. But all these drugs do is mask the real problem and create new problems for which another  drug must be taken. Every one of these drugs, even aspirin, is liver toxic . .  . it damages the liver. It is a miracle our bodies  survive as long as they do, with the abuses we heap upon them. Fortunately, there is a better answer to our physical problems.

Here at Hallelujah Acres, we teach that almost all our physical problems are caused by improper diet and lifestyle... and that if we will but change to a higher grade of fuel -- raw food -- the body will usually heal itself of whatever ails it!

Let's all work toward total health in this new century.  If we can be of any help or encouragement to you, please contact us at russell@healthyperspective.com.

God bless you,
-Rev. Clarence Russell, Kimberly and Nicole
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