Interview between Kaylene Peoples, Editor in Chief, Agenda Magazine and Melanie Wise

Kaylene – Melanie, I’d love to hear your take on immune system maintenance and repair.

Melanie – There is no such thing as maintenance when it comes to health. That’s the thing, in terms of physical capacity, we’re either getting better or we’re sliding downward. I would suggest that maintenance is an improper goal simply because, over time, factors affecting health change. ‘Maintenance’ assumes no factors in your world changed. Do we come up with things that help us operate well for a while? All the time. And you use those while they work, and you also have to be very flexible. Let’s say you’re eating something you know is good for you, whether you’re a vegetarian, carnivore, or a bit of both. If you’re a carnivore, and protein agrees with you . . . if you’re eating the same thing day in and day out, there’s a very good chance that your immune system isn’t going to function as robustly as it should. Women are luckier than men because we require less variety. Even if you’re eating the best food on the planet, if you have less of a variety of that food, you can run into problems. Here’s something else to really consider, when you go back in time about 20 or 30 years – for example, spinach, which had a very robust profile of nutrition was packed in every little leaf. The nutritional profile, even in food if you’re eating organic, those profiles bear no resemblance to what it was 20 or 30 years ago. We have to look at just how much nutrition is in our food. Given the things that we’ve done to the earth, how we farm with the proliferation of GMO, and many other factors, you are going to have to combat inherent deficiencies because the food doesn’t have as much nutrition as it used to. But also, if you look over that same time period, step back in time 30 years ago, the entire world was much healthier than we are now.

I can appreciate the fact that we have become an instant gratification society. I can also appreciate the fact that we no longer read; we want little blurbs and snippets and instant answers. But health does not come easy. If you wish to master your domain, it is going to require effort and observation on everyone’s part. The foundation of having a robustly functioning immune system is always going to be three things.

Melanie (cont.)

1) Movement
This is not a requirement, but remember, bodies were meant to move. They were not meant to sit still all day long every day. They were meant to be dancing, running, lifting weights, doing exercise—this is the natural state. If you step back 200 years, most people were laborers of some kind (like farmers); bodies are meant for hard work, and that is a foundation of remaining healthy.

2) Food
If you want to impact what you visually look like, it’s going to happen by altering what you put into your mouth. Ann Wigmore, the mother of sprouting or, more specifically, the mother of the rebirth of sprouting (sprouting is actually biblical), said, “let food be your medicine.” Ann Wigmore is telling us that you can eat your way to health. Let’s look at the size – the actual amount – of a pill compared to how much food you might consume in a day. Which do you think is going to have more impact on your body? Food will win every time.

3) Stress
The third ingredient that is so key to robust immune function is the two-fold factor of stress. I began studying nutrition from the standpoint of better athletic function, from the perspective of strength conditioning and creating an injury-proof body. A lot of those things that you use to create this really solid physical form, 25 big pharma research years later, turned out to be the very supplements used to alter brain chemistry and suppress cortisol levels which keeps us happy. Cortisol is really important. It is a catabolic steroid that breaks down muscle tissue. Your body is going to lose muscle mass the second you’re overproducing cortisol, especially if you do it repeatedly and all day long. Fast forward 25 years, they’re finding high cortisol levels are a staple of every major disease. So that tells us something. We overproduce cortisol for a number of reasons, but especially because of emotional and dietary (overproduction due to lack of protein) stress.

We all have a body that is blood and bones, and if you want to be vegetarian and have a very solid protein intake, my suggestion for the longest time has been to eat sprouted grains, beans, seeds, and legumes. Those are so rich in amino acids; you’ll run circles around amino acid supplements. And what are amino acids? The building blocks of protein. You don’t have to be a meat eater to make sure you’re getting protein. A lot of people confuse sprouting with soaking for 8 or 24 hours and then cooking. Sprouting is a soaking cycle and a growing cycle. Sprouts of all kinds are great when sprinkled into salads. If you experiment with eating sprouted food, you are going to watch your body get greedy for nutrition. And you’ll find that when you deprive yourself of that nutrition, you consume more food.

Kaylene – If nutrition has degraded from years ago, are sprouts degraded as well? Everything coming out of the ground is pretty much degraded. How do we find quality nutrition in our food?

Melanie – If you’re buying organic fruits and vegetables, etc., you are putting a dent in the amount of some of the potentially toxins that you are ingesting. Many people who want to sprout, go to sellers of sprouting seeds. The prices are just eye-popping. However, I have spent more than 20 years sprouting, and I would simply purchase heirloom grains, legumes beans from famers at Farmers Markets and they sprouted perfectly.

When you get into heirloom grains, beans, and legumes, you have a farmer that is saving a portion of his seeds every year so he can plant the next crop. What you create is a very strong, surviving strain. It’s hearty. We trained our farmers out of saving a portion of the crops for seeds. Big Ag(riculture) did this so they could control the seed supply. The stuff that people are buying just grow once, those seeds will not even reproduce itself. And when someone offers you seedless watermelon, get the watermelon with the seed. It’s a bitch to spit out the seeds, but your body wants the strongest variety (the one with the capacity to reproduce itself), which yields more nutrition.

Kaylene – So the seeds inside of the fruit and vegetables are really more potent.

Melanie – If a plant is unable to reproduce itself, it is naturally weaker than the plant that is able to reproduce itself. In one generation, the plant would cease to exist, save the fact that Big Ag is selling the seed each year. The ability to reproduce is a sign of health, of robustness. And plants that can reproduce themselves provide more nutrition than those that cannot. Not to mention, when farmers grow those hybridized and/or genetically modified plants that are unable to reproduce themselves, the bugs and the bees are cross pollinating that weaker gene into strains that are not modified, thereby weakening heirloom crops.

As an example of robustness, let’s just restrict this to the United States. Infertility rates now are up so high that we are not even reproducing ourselves enough to replenish the population. We are also the sickest we’ve ever been.

So when you’re choosing your food, go “whole.” Skip over the cans and the bags and the boxes. Get to real food.

Kaylene – Summing up in regards to immune health . . .

Melanie – You’re looking at the foundation of a robust immune function. Even allergies. Your body is trying to tell you that your immune system is a little bit challenged. Because when people who have allergies get healthier, those allergies disappear.

Kaylene – Is that across the board? All allergies?

Melanie – I have seen people with very prodigious allergies refrain from actually addressing the problem (changing their habits). No, the allergies never went away. Those who were adaptable, I saw miraculous things. I know somebody who had horrible allergies with sneezing fits, a perpetual runny nose. I asked him what he was using to blow his nose. He used Kleenex. I suggested he get organic cotton and stop using Kleenex. Within one day, his years of a runny nose and sneezing fits were done. Those Kleenex, paper towels, toilet paper, etc. have allergens in them. This is no different than in the 1930’s when they began putting asbestos in sanitary products for women.

Kaylene – Why would they do such a thing?

Melanie – They put asbestos in women’s sanitary products so they would bleed more. They sold more product.

Kaylene – Unbelievable. My jaw just dropped. What?!

Melanie – Yeah, a lot of people don’t believe me. I’ve seen people just blow that right off. I say, at your own peril. But yes. I haven’t checked into it in a while, but the last time I looked, unless you were buying 100 percent organic cotton tampons and pads, they had asbestos. You must realize, asbestos will make you bleed more, but guess what? It’s also really poisonous!

Kaylene – I guess the bottom line is going back to nature.

Melanie – 100 percent. That is the timbre of the message that I have been saying with all of these points. Find something that you love and hang onto it dearly. Whether it’s an animal, a person, a significant other, a pizza box on the counter, do something to keep yourself out of stress every day by having a focal point that causes you joy. Eat well. Move.

Here’s the part that sucks about not moving. Some people do not spend physical energy – at least some kind of daily motion. Then, what they do is they take all of that energy which should have been used for physical activity and they spend it emotionally. What do you think that does to their stress level based on what unpleasantness is happening around us in the world? Given that we have all this stress around us, we have to work harder to stay happy too.

Getting back to substance. When we buy garbage-y food, there’s no substance in the food to actually feeds the body. We’re spending our time on emotional shenanigans, mashugana, mental masturbation, there’s no substance there. So we need to get back to basics and substance.

If you’re interested in sprouting, Ann Wigmore’s books of which she has a vast number are jaw-droppingly intelligent. I have a lot of her books and I have read everything I could get my hands on. She is a wealth of information as it comes to nutrition from fruits and vegetables. My recommendation for the meat eaters is keep it simple. Definitely restrict the amount of sugary stuff you’re eating. We’re talking broad strokes here that include breads, pastas, crackers, cereals, etc. So if we are having too much sugar, that really sets us off balance. And we have to establish those happy mediums for ourselves and our body’s preferences.

Kaylene – Sugar was the beginning of the degradation of health, anyway, when it was introduced.

Melanie – And the fad diets that they’ve circulated: no fat, no this, no that! I’ll be honest with you, people who do low fat diets if they stick to it for a while, they all get sick.

Kaylene – People I know in the past (including me) who have done diet sodas and low to no fat milks, etc. are struggling with their weight today.

Melanie – Here’s the problem, you strip all the fat out of it, and the only way to make it literally and even minimally palatable is to pump it full of flavorings. And God only knows what that is. There is a certain percentage of dust they can sweep off the floor and legally stick into your food product. And they can even label it spices. AND IT’S LEGAL!! The bottom line is . . . get right back to substance.

You can just google “Ann Wigmore” books and countless books come up.

Reading Suggestion:  A more recent publication in 2012: Rebuild Your Health: with Dr. Ann Wigmore’s Living Foods Lifestyle can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Rebuild-Your-Health-Wigmores-Lifestyle/dp/1424320240

Short description of this book:
“Ann Wigmore is known as the mother of living foods for her pioneering work using wheatgrass, sprouts, and a living-foods diet for detoxification and healing. She led countless individuals to wellness with the Living Foods Lifestyle that she developed and recommends for total health. Rebuild Your Health presents Ann’s beliefs about disease and healing and explains all the components of the Living Foods Lifestyle in detail. You’ll find primers on indoor gardening and composting, a discussion of colon health, instructions for making your own Rejuvelac, Energy Soup, and wheatgrass juice, and an emphasis on relaxation and positivity. A section of simple recipes for raw food dishes is also included.”

Originally published in Agenda Magazine, Issue #18, September 2022