I want to talk about a concept that not many people are talking about and that is the concept of TERRAIN.
I watched a documentary movie with my daughter called the Biggest Little Farm, about a sustainable farm. They had to build an ecosystem of very diverse animals, microbes and crops in order for them to have this sustainable farm. And this is exactly what we try to produce in the human body.
The human body is a living ecosystem. We have a whole microbiology of microorganisms that react in a very specific way in our human ecology and when this is in balance then our system’s function really well and our system has self-healing, self-regulating mechanisms and our body is able to heal itself.
The terrain is the area around our cells, the area that our cells live in. It is a fluid medium, it’s biochemical in nature and structural in nature. It is where our cells and organs receive the nutrients they need and where toxins are removed. It is where our immune system live and our hormones live. This is where the communication happens between our cells. This terrain, or milieu or microenvironment needs to be really clean and needs to be working really well in order for our bodies to be healthy. Our cells need a healthy environment in order for them to be healthy. The analogy that I like to use is that the terrain is like the soil of our body. That the soil needs to be healthy to have healthy cells, in the same way that the soil needs to be healthy to have healthy plants. There is a whole system of regulation that needs to happen in order for our system to be really healthy. One of those regulatory systems is our immune system. Our immune system is our defence system. When our immune system is functioning well, a fully functioning immune system, then our immune system can take care of those pathogens that come into our environment.
This virus is an opportunistic pathogen. So what we need to do is change the environment so that it is an inhospitable environment for this virus.
If you go back in history to the 1800s there were great scientists having a debate. There was Pasteur who said ‘disease is caused by external pathogens’. Enderlein said ‘disease is caused with a disturbance in the internal milieu’. Bechamp said “The microbe is nothing, milieu is everything”. This demonstrates why the internal environment is the most important aspect to your overall health.
What this pandemic is really demonstrating is that we, as a population, have a disrupted internal terrain. We have terrains that foster the life of this virus. We need to work on our body’s internal terrain to ensure that our internal terrain is inhospitable to this virus or any external pathogen coming into the body.
This is why 2 people can come in contact with the virus and one person gets ill and the other person does not. And the difference between these two people is their internal terrain.
How healthy is your internal terrain?
When we have a virus in our system and we have an ill reaction, this is an indication that we have an imbalance in our internal terrain. It’s not about the external pathogen, it is about our internal terrain. The stronger we can make that internal terrain, the stronger we can make our immune system, the better able our body will be able to handle an external pathogen.
This is our opportunity to build a healthy terrain. This is what we need to focus on, making sure we improve our internal terrain. If we all work on improving our internal terrain we can create a collective evolution of health.
It’s not too late. We still have an opportunity to rebuild our body. We just need to make some better choices. Our body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding itself. We have new white blood cells every 3-4 days. And every time we give them a better environment, we build a stronger immune system. Every 5-7 days build a new gut lining. Therefore, as we improve our dietary choices, the stronger our system gets. Some of the ways we can make these better choices are from the foods that we are eating, because about 80% of our immune system is housed in our gut. The more we can improve our immune system, the healthier we can get. One of the greatest starting points in healing our gut.
I’ve created an e-course on Healing the Gut. Ensuring we are eating foods that balance our microbiome, healing the lining of the digestive tract, re-setting the immune system.
Our starting point to getting our system’s into balance is avoiding inflammatory foods including gluten, cow’s dairy, refined sugar, processed foods, fried foods. All of the foods that can be causing damage to our systems. The better able we are to build a stronger terrain, the stronger our systems will be.
