Scott J. Banks

The natural cures approach to healing and wellness relies primarily on nutrition, nutritional supplements, and herbs to give the body what it needs to achieve optimal health and to prevent and fight illness. This cheat sheet brings you up to speed on the fundamentals of natural medicine, recommends which foods to eliminate and add to your diet, and provides protocols you can follow to maintain healthy digestion, prevent or cure leaky gut syndrome, and fight off infection.

A natural cures approach to health and healing offers numerous benefits. Before investing time, effort, and money in any endeavor, it’s a good idea to weigh the pros and cons so that you can make a well‐informed decision regarding the type of healthcare you want. Provides a user‐friendly alternative to the typical doctor‐patient interaction.

Rosacea is a chronic inflammatory condition characterized by facial redness most prevalent on the cheeks, nose, forehead, and around the eyes. It affects women three times more than men. Although rosacea appears on the surface of the body, its causes usually run deeper: food allergies or intolerances; leaky gut; foods that contain high levels of histamine; small‐intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO); and alcohol, spicy foods, and hot beverages.

People generally don’t want to think about the critters living inside of them, feasting on their food and leaving toxic waste behind. The good news is that some of these microorganisms live symbiotically with your body, performing essential biological processes that keep you healthy. The bad news is that some of these microorganisms are parasites — living in you at the expense of your health.

Eating junk foods isn’t simply a matter of “garbage in, garbage out.” The natural cures approach encourages you to think about the effect this food has on your body. Junk food is bad for your body and your health because of the long-term and possibly irreversible damage it can do to your body as it passes through your system.

Natural cures can help with lots of different ailments. Leaky gut syndrome is a condition in which the small intestine becomes more porous and permeable than normal, allowing irritants, such as toxins, undigested food particles, waste products, and microbes, to leak into surrounding areas where these substances shouldn’t be.

Natural cures can help fight infections. Conventional treatments for the common cold and other infections target symptoms and tend to impair the body’s own defense mechanisms. These mechanisms are designed to purge the viruses or bacteria from the body. Although you may need to alleviate symptoms to make it through the day at work or school, you can speed your recovery by giving your immune system a boost.

The term natural cures includes many different approaches to health and wellness — everything from aromatherapy and homeopathy to massage and nutritional medicine — but all the methodologies that fall under the natural cures umbrella reflect the following seven core principles: Treat the cause, not the symptoms.

Most diets recommend some form of calorie counting, the natural cures approach included, but foods are more than merely energy that your body either burns or stores as fat. Food also provides the building blocks for every cell in your body and conveys crucial information that your DNA uses to help your body adapt to the environment in which it lives.