> Health and Disease > Immune System > AIDS

The number of people with AIDS is horrific. The number of people who have died or will die from so-called "opportunistic diseases" that the body cannot fight because of an "acquired immune deficiency" is even more horrific.

Traditional medical theory considers viruses to be only pathogenic (disease-causing); however, physicist and mathematician Guy-Claude Burger outlines on his website a new theoretical model of viruses: tierversuchsgegner.org/Impfen/virus.html. Burger has noticed "in several cases...that virus-infected people did not show any signs of the particular disease. They developed the typical symptoms only hours after their ingestion of ‘traditional foods." Burger said that he had observed this phenomenon in people for 20 years. The suggestion here is that the consumption of "traditional food" triggers viral diseases.

Burger is not the only one who has made such an observation. Dr Jay Levy of the University of California-San Francisco Medical School has written that "not everyone infected with HIV develops AIDS" (San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 2001). University of California Berkeley’s Nobel Laureate Dr Peter Duesberg thinks along the same lines. He explains in several books that no one dies from AIDS: people with an acquired immune deficiency die from so-called "opportunistic diseases." Duesberg is the foremost expert in retroviruses, including HIV. And now, Luc Montaigner, the French scientist who first isolated HIV in 1983, also believes that HIV alone cannot cause AIDS.

HIV works by becoming part of the cell. That explains why the virus can’t be "killed" by medications like antibiotics. No one has succeeded in shooting at HIV with drugs in an attempt to "cure" the acquired immune deficiency called AIDS. On the other hand, AIDS has been successfully treated by re-establishing a healthy body chemistry through healthy food. Healthy food establishes the healthy body chemistry that comes with a healthy immune system.

Burger’s HIV Theory

Burger concluded that a virus may not only be pathogenic: it may also have a metabolic function like the bacteria of the intestinal tract (also part of the immune system). The fact that a virus becomes a part of the "infected" cells supports Burger’s view that the virus is supposed to help the cells eliminate foreign molecules from food that has been degenerated by light, heat, oxidation or food processing, as well as foreign molecules from alcohol, tobacco and drugs that the cell’s own genes can’t eliminate. This metabolic function may also be the reason for viral multiplication and may result from the necessity to eliminate large quantities of foreign molecules. This reasoning would explain the genetic variety of many viruses as well.

Although Burger’s ideas are fundamentally different from traditional medicine, there are favourable voices supporting his work. Dr Jean Seignalet, senior lecturer of medicine at the University of Montpellier (France), says on his website, rawtimes.com/anopsy3.html, that Burger is not "an imposter." He writes, "I met Guy-Claude Burger while attending a lecture he gave in Montpellier. I was struck by his acumen, his knowledge, the soundness of his remarks. Five years later, and in spite of having since carefully gone over his writings with a fine-toothed comb, I still have not found the chink in his armour."

Presumably no one else would be able to find a chink in the armour of nutritionist Gary Null, PhD. On July 28, 1997 on the PBS television station, Null introduced former AIDS patients who had followed his advice for rebuilding a strong immune system by nutritional means. They had freed themselves from AIDS and no longer had HIV antibodies in their blood. But the belief that pills can cure AIDS continues.

Killer Drug Cocktails

Newsweek magazine illustrates the result of this way of thinking on the cover of the June 11, 2001 issue, which reads "Dying on the Cocktail." Obviously, the "cocktail" of drugs used to treat AIDS kills.

Newsweek’s sturdy belief is not even tested by its own admission: "In announcing the isolation of HIV, federal health officials famously predicted that a vaccine would enter clinical trials within two years and reach market within three. Seventeen years later experts still agree that a vaccine is our best hope of ending the pandemic."

In these past 17 years, more than 20 million people have died from AIDS. This number alone should be reason enough to start thinking and acting in a new way. Current treatment paths have not rendered the desired results.

Pills can’t cure AIDS by boosting the immune system because a strong and healthy immune system comes from healthy body chemistry. Both result from the right quality and right quantity of the nutrients in our food. It is a food-impaired immune system that allows HIV to do its destructive work. A strong immune system can handle all kinds of viruses. Meanwhile it is both too dangerous and too expensive to try to maintain or bring back health by ineffective conventional medical interventions.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that standard hospital therapy injured 98,609 patients in New York State in 1984. "Nearly 14 percent of these injuries (13,805) were fatal. If these rates are typical for the United States, then 180,000 people die each year partly as a result of iatrogenic [treatment induced] injury, the equivalent of three jumbo jet crashes every two days" (vol. 272, 1984). Similarly, Ralph Nader found in his three-year study published in 1996 that "300,000 Americans are killed each year in hospitals alone as a result of medical negligence."

We need to learn that our health is our own responsibility. There is only one place to practise real health care–in our kitchens. Eating natural whole foods as our genetic makeup requires does not cause side-effects. It does not kill like drug cocktails. Eating as we are designed to eat does come with the promise of better health.

Patrick Wright is director of the Institute for Research of Food-Related Disease and author of Food for Humans. He lives in San Rafael, CA.

Source: alive #230, December 2001