The Healthiest Year of Your Life Excerpt with Mike Adams, founder of the Consumer Wellness Center and on-line retailer, Better Life Goods. An author and speaker, Mike's mission is to spread the message of natural nutrition and healing.

Kevin: Here's what scares me a little bit here and let's start talking about dairy, because it's a big argument, or just even like people are almost dogmatically either believe dairy is what they need to eat, or they dogmatically believe that it's not something that you should eat at all. What are some other things that we should really be cautious about when dealing with milk and cheese and things like that?

Mike: Well, the first thing we should be cautious about is what you hinted at. There's sort of a psychological momentum. This is a well-known phenomenon in human psychology, which is that tend to find reasons to justify own behavior. So if we are drinking milk right now and we're enjoying it, we'll find reasons to support that and if we're not drinking milk and just avoiding all dairy products entirely, we tend to find reasons to support that and we tend to be dogmatic about that, too. So there are very few people in the center, but the first point is take a very close look at your own psychology and ask why am I supporting this, or not supporting it. What's behind my decisions? In other words, most people drinking milk should ask themselves why am I drinking milk. Why do we take the liquid from another species that is infant formula? Let's be clear about this. Milk is infant formula. Why are we taking that and processing it? We're homogenizing the milk fat. Why are we killing it? We're pasteurizing it to kill it, so that it can be put in the stores and then consumed by humans, adult humans.

In other words, why are we, as adult human beings, drinking infant formula for a furry, bovine species? That's the real question. You can honestly ask yourself that question and start investigating it and then you can make some progress into this issue, but if you have resistance to that very idea, because you're enjoying your milk with your cereal in the morning, then you're not ready to go down that path yet.

At some point, hopefully you'll be ready and you can check it out. You can start looking at the issue. Now, here's the conclusion that I've come to. I don't do any dairy at all anymore, other than fermented raw dairy. I only do that occasionally, but my conclusion is that processed milk is very dangerous for human health. I think the epidemiological studies have really shown that. There's a book called The China Study that's a good one to look at it that talks about that.

Secondly, raw milk that fresh, farm milk, right out of the cow, once it's fermented so that the proteins are more digestible and it's a living food that can be very beneficial to human health. So you see, you can't just say milk is this, or milk is bad. You have to look at different profiles of milk. There's living milk and then there's dead milk. Dead milk, dead, processed milk to me is just like dead, processed snack food. It's very dangerous to your health, but living milk is like eating sprouts in a way. It's alive. It's got friendly flora in there and it's more digestible in that way. Those are the conclusions that I came to, but I always invite others to draw their own conclusions. I drank milk most of my life, but I certainly don't touch it now unless it's fermented and raw and fresh milk. So how's that, Kevin?

Kevin: It sounds great. When it comes to dogmatism is just questioning the best way to get through to the answers, or just investigating more, because I see it across the board. I see it from people who eat steak and eggs for breakfast, to people who eat nothing but 100% raw food even to the point where they only eat one specific food at a time and they don't eat anything else. To me it seems that each side is almost too stiff.

Mike: I think the main thing that I encourage people to do is to be skeptical consumers and always question their own beliefs. So we need to have this philosophical flexibility. Otherwise, we too become stuck in our own ways and we become dogmatic and that drives everybody else nuts. No one likes a vegan that marches around insisting that everyone else has to be vegan just like them.

So I always encourage people to take their own journey discovering things on their own and in the meantime I'm happy to hear some of what I discovered. It doesn't mean that it necessarily is going to apply to you. The other thing, Kevin, is that we've got to be sensitive to what our bodies are telling us. If we are sensitive, then we can experiment with these dietary changes. We can try milk for 30 days, or try no milk for 30 days and see which one feels better. In fact, I used to do something. I would put this on the website and challenge people to a 30 day dairy free diet. Just challenge them. You're going to live many, many decades. Take 30 days and go without milk and see what happens. Find out if it's better, or worse and people would write me after the 30 days and say, "Wow. My sinuses cleared up. My constipation went away. My joints feel better. I have more energy. My acne disappeared." It's just one benefit after another and my answer back to them would be, "That's great. Now that you discovered that, which way do you want to live the rest of your life?" It's pretty simple at that point for those people. They chose to live without milk. There might be others out there who are immune to the negative effects of milk for some reason, so maybe they have no benefit and that's fine, too.

The important thing is to listen to your body and be aware of what kinds of effects you are getting. It's that feedback mechanism. If you have a health goal of where you want to get to, how do you know if you're getting there? You know by paying attention to what your body is telling you and then you can just start experimenting with your diet, or with nutritional supplements, or super foods, or exercise, or sunlight, or meditation, yoga, Pilates. You name it. You can put all these things in and find out what's working for me and that becomes the basis for personal growth.

Kevin: I think you've done a good job at providing information to people who don't necessarily have the time, or have not been able to justify the time to being able to really learn about their health and you have a few different resources. I just want to talk about them now, The Herb Reference Resource. Just why don't you run down a few of those where people can go? The Drug Side Effects Resource, as well that you're putting together. Let's just run down those and just tell everyone what they can see when they go to each one of those.

Mike: Oh, yeah. Well, there is a lot of information out there, but we've tried to condense it as much as possible. Herbreference.com gives you look at all the benefits of various herbs, all the health benefits and this is taken from dozens of different books. I've studied herbs. There are probably 10,000 scientific studies in all behind that information. Newstarget.com is the main website where we put up daily news about super food nutrients and how to prevent and reverse and even cure degenerative diseases. We also talk about the dangers of pharmaceuticals and the dangers of Western medicine and actually, if you go to newstarget.com it will actually be naturalnews.com. That's what we're shifting to. That's our long-term URL, naturalnews.com. You can find a lot of resources there. So I just encourage people to go there, register for the free e-mail newsletter and they'll be kept informed of what we're working on and I've approached this, by the way, Kevin, I want to mention I approach this from kind of a nonprofit standpoint.

I made my fortune in the software industry. I started a software company in 1993 and it earns millions of dollars a year. I took that money and the benefits from that and I put it into creating newstarget.com several years ago and so I do this without taking any money from supplement companies. I don't sell vitamins. I don't sell supplements, or herbs, or are herbs, or anything like that. I don't ask for money from these companies to write about their products. So that means I approach this from a really independent viewpoint and when I make a recommendation on a product out there that I really like, like Ron Teeguarden's Dragon Herbs, you know I'm making that recommendation with 100% objectivity. It's an honest, independent, genuine recommendation and that's why people like the website, because they know they can trust it. They may not always agree with everything I say and that's fine, but they know I'm not taking a bribe to push some junk product out there. I wouldn't do that just for my reputation. I wouldn't even think about pushing a junk product out there.

Kevin: We're shifting gears into supplements now. How do you know? There are hundreds out there and I know how easy it is to make a supplements lie. What kind of knowledge can you impart to everyone to explain the whole process and what it takes to make something really good?

Mike: Okay. I'm going to reveal a secret here and this is one of my little industry secrets of how I know who to trust and who to recommend. First off, you've got to look at the ingredients, but that's obvious. You look at what goes into the supplement. A lot of supplements are junk. The form of vitamin B12 they use, for example, is cyanocobalamin, which is a cyanide molecule combined with a cobalamin.

Kevin: Okay.

Mike: Not a good thing. So I can look at a label and see what level of quality they have for that supplement. The other is the source. If you're looking at herbs, like Chinese herbs in particular, you don't want them to be sourced from China probably, because I've been to China. I speak Chinese and I know what goes on over there and it's some scary stuff.

Kevin: Really? With mercury and lead right? That's two of the big issues.

Mike: Not only that, but I've even seen cases where, for example, black sesame seeds were not really roasted sesame seeds. They were just white sesame seeds that were coated with black ink. The stuff I've seen, you would not believe it.

The third thing is, this is a secret part. This is why I go to trade shows, because I can meet the person and when I see that person I'm assessing their health. That is, the founder of the company, the CEO. Are they healthy? Are they vibrant? Are their eyes clear? What is their level of health and if they're not healthy, I don't recommend their product. I'm looking for really healthy people with fantastic ingredients.