I have a confession to make. Although I’m one of the people that developed a diet to starve parasitic yeast from within our bodies, I am not as steadfast as one might believe. While traveling recently, a three-stack blueberry pancake breakfast stared me down, and it won. On that same trip, I tried a hamburger, complete with the bun. I had been off of grains for so long, I really wanted to see how I felt after these challenges. I felt horrible within 2 days of eating that way. It took me back to the old days when eating that way was commonplace, as were my many symptoms. There is one thing, however, that I committed to late last year that I vowed to keep throughout 2011, and thus far I have. Not a drop of alcohol will pass my lips in 2011.

We have the finest neighbors, friends and family members in the world. Some know the vintage of a fine wine simply by sniffing a glass with a small bit in it. Seriously! That is how much they love their wine. My post-Vietnam days were spent drinking Boone’s Farm, and I’ll bet I could still sniff a glass of that a block away. But I digress. Some men literally won’t drink any beer but their favorite, while others wouldn’t lower themselves to drinking beer, because fine, rare scotch is all that they will partake of. You get the point. We are a nation of alcohol drinkers.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) states that 65% of Americans over the age of 18 drink alcohol. That is about 200,000,000 of us. The costs are so staggering that money, lives and disease all seem to roll into one huge story that could never be fully told. In a 2006 Forbes Magazine article on alcoholism, the director of addiction recovery services at Mount Sinai Medical Center (Harris Stratyner) said that, “Alcohol is a worthless drug that affects every single cell in your body.” Ironically, even this article didn’t deter me from having that occasional drink with friends. What did finally open my eyes?

Bakers and brewers yeast is commonly called Saccharomyces cerevisiae. For thousands of years this species of yeast has been used to make breads and alcohol. In the case of alcohol, during a process called fermentation, yeast and carbohydrates are slowly converted to alcohol. Mind you, not only am I the guy to bring you “Phase 1” eating, but I’m also the guy who taught you to be very careful of eating, or drinking, yeast. I told you that way back in 1963, Dr. Svlia published an incredible article that taught us how brewers yeast produces the very caustic uric acid, purportedly the cause of gout (but now you know better since you know where the uric acid comes from). I taught you that Dr. Coleman gave rats diabetes by feeding them a diet that consisted of 10% brewers yeast. I taught that antibiotics were toxic fungal metabolites called “mycotoxins”, and that recently science has discovered that any type of alcohol intake increased a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer. What I read late last year, however, convinced me that drinking any alcohol was far more risky than I had previously understood. I was rereading a 1989 scientific publication called CAST (Council for Agricultural Science and Technology) out of Ames, Iowa and I literally could not believe my eyes. When moldy fruit or grains like corn, hops, malt and barley, are far too contaminated with mycotoxins to allow humans or animals to eat them, where do those foods go?

Remember that alcohol is a mycotoxin from brewers yeast. That alone should get you thinking. But as it turns out, other mycotoxins besides alcohol can also be introduced into these beverages through the use of mold-contaminated grains and fruits. Producers often use grains that are too contaminated with fungi and mycotoxins to be used for table foods, so the risk is higher that you are consuming more than just alcohol in your beverage.

Is it no wonder that these mycotoxins cause cirrhosis of the liver, or liver cancer, or breast cancer? Given that mycotoxins can cause high cholesterol, do you now know why statin drugs, used to lower cholesterol, are the rage? Did you also know that statins have anti-fungal properties? I’m guessing that most all diseases are intimately linked to mycotoxins in some way, shape or form, and alcohol and antibiotics are probably two of the most potent. The poor woman who is routinely on antibiotics for infections and who enjoys a glass of wine with dinner! WHY ISN’T THIS TALKED ABOUT MORE? Who will teach us? The distilleries? Our doctors? Perhaps the drug companies? I’m so glad you’re a subscriber to KNOW THIS!

Yes, the pancakes and hamburger bun likely had trace amounts of mycotoxins in them, but I avoid grains almost completely, so an occasional slip is probably fine. And that same logic probably flows into alcohol consumption also…not for me anymore, but for those of you who truly enjoy alcohol, keep it to a minimum when you’re not on antibiotics. To you….bottoms up! Bottoms down for me; it’s been easy! Blessings!