Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2011

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Forward to Zion

Reengineering Genetic Risk

Wes Youngberg

How to Turn Good Genes ON & Bad Genes OFF!

The series that I'm doing, this camp meeting, I've entitled Re-engineering Genetic Risk.

Transforming sickness into health, the transforming power of the health message.

There is no more important time for us as Seventh-day Adventists to understand the real purpose of our health message.

It's been unfortunate that in years and decades past, our health message has been either presented but oftentimes perceived in a very legalistic way.

You see, we've often heard about the health message is the what?

But in the past, it's often been used as the right fist of the gospel, where church members or others are telling others, like, right?

Now there are times where we need to Be assertive with each other, as good friends are assertive with each other, because we care about each other.

But if there's no love involved in that process, we actually miss really what the right arm of the gospel is all about, which is really the open hand of Jesus bidding us, do you wish to be healed?

Not just us, but asking us as a church to actually share that message with the world.

People all around the globe are seeking to be healed.

They are seeking answers for all kinds of infirmities.

And in our libraries at home, most of us have book after book after book that can guide people to healing and most importantly, the source of that healing.

White's counsel that there will come a day When the only form of ministry will be what?

Will be medical ministry, health ministry.

The only opportunity that we have to share God's word with other people will be if we're doing it in the context of a health or healing ministry.

That is why every church, every individual in every church needs to understand this great gift.

That's why God gave us the Sabbath, To build relationships through which we help restore emotional, mental, and physical healing.

All these messages that we have been called upon to share with the world.

It's about using this gift to share with the world that's looking for something that's real, not something that's fake.

Let me begin by sharing with you a passage from Desire of Ages, which has been the model that I have personally used in my lifestyle medicine practice.

I first read The Desire of Ages through, from cover to cover, when I was in junior high.

I fell in love with the inspiration of Ellen White by reading that book.

Because she was constantly open to the leading of the Holy Spirit and the angels that were with her guiding her writing process.

And As you look at the chapter in the Desire of Ages, and let me just look it up here.

Chapter 10, page 103, 104, It's a wonderful description of the work of John the Baptist.

Now, what does that immediately bring to mind?

That is an analogy of our work today in these last days.

That is what we have been called to do as John the Baptist was called to prepare the Jewish people for the first coming of Jesus Christ.

We as Seventh-day Adventists have been called to prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

And so Chapter 10, the voice in the wilderness.

Do you sometimes feel like your voice is crying out in the wilderness and nobody hears?

Do you have friends, do you have family members who when anything comes up relative to your beliefs, they kind of raise an eyebrow and look the other way.

I think we've all been in that situation.

But This paragraph that I'm about to read to you from page 104 of Desire of Ages really challenged me.

And it gave me an understanding of what needs to happen when we present the health message to other people.

We've heard this morning about the challenges with regards to spiritual formation and the call of peace and safety.

Let's just focus on the touchy feel good aspects of our religion.

But really, the voice in the wilderness wasn't touchy feely, was it?

He saw his people deceived, self-satisfied, and asleep in their sins.

He longed to rouse them to a holier life.

The message that God had given him to bear was designed to startle them from their lethargy.

Okay, so if you have a message to give, we need to understand that our message that we've been given is designed to startle people.

In other words, if you haven't seen anybody startled recently, maybe it's because we're not being assertive enough.

I have to read this frequently because it's easy for us in our society and our culture to shy away from this commission that we were given.

So the message that God had given him to bear was designed to startle them from their lethargy and cause them to tremble because of their great wickedness before the seed of the gospel could find a lodgement, the soil of the heart must be broken up.

If we have any hope to be successful in winning over these souls, we need to understand these principles.

Before they would seek healing from Jesus, they must be awakened to their danger from the wounds of sin.

You might be thinking, how does this relate to the health message?

Well, it has everything to do with the health message.

We're essentially, because the health message is the right arm of the gospel, this passage helps us understand how the health message is to be given out.

So my whole approach in clinical practice and doing seminars is to help people really understand what their risk is.

Not sugarcoat it, not to say, oh, everything's pretty good, don't worry about it.

How would you feel if you had a terminal disease or a near terminal disease and you went to the doctor and the doctor says, ah, I've seen worse, don't worry about it.

Well, wait a minute, what are we gonna do about this?

Oh, don't worry about it, I got a lot sicker patients waiting and why don't you come back in a month or 2?

You'd probably go find a different doctor, wouldn't you?

So the challenge that we have been given here is that we need to speak plainly as to what the risks are.

John McDougall, who's an internal medicine physician, who has a real passion for nutritional medicine, he would actually be invited to a lot of the Seventh-day Adventist camp meetings, even though he wasn't a Seventh Adventist himself.

And he would taunt certain Adventists in meetings, because he was kind of a hardcore guy, about certain things with regards to the diet, things that I wouldn't do.

But his whole focus was, if you tell somebody, if you think, if I just tell them to do this much, because I don't think they're going to really do everything that I know they need to do.

So I'm just going to give them maybe half of what they need to do.

Half of what they need to do is not going to get them a solution.

It's not going to get them to that tipping point to actually achieve healing.

It's in the direction of healing, but it's not healing.

And so if it takes this much to achieve healing, I want to get here to get that tipping point so that I can receive that full integrated gift so healing can take place, whatever it is.

And so he made a big point of that, this was over 20 years ago.

He said that we gotta give it straight or else people will walk away feeling pretty good about themselves because they're following all your recommendations.

All my recommendations are not going to heal anybody if it's not the total package.

We need to give out all the information, but it doesn't end there.

We always have to end with sharing the opportunity of healing, the hope that is available through the message that fully integrates all the steps that are not just beneficial but necessary to accomplish a given goal.

In fact, I'm just going to jump down briefly so I see what's happening here.

So our topic today is actually treating the cause of disease and low quality health.

See, a lot of us go, I'm not sick, why do I need to come to this talk?

How to Evaluate, Prevent & Reverse Diabetes and Pre-Diabetes Naturally

It has been my pleasure and opportunity to conduct diabetes management workshops and seminars now going on 20 years.

This began in Guam while I was a medical missionary with the Guam SDA Clinic and Wellness Center.

And around 1995, we had the privilege of convincing a doctor from California, Dr.

Charles Brinegar, who had been the director of the Diabetes Treatment Center at Loma Linda University for many, many years to come as a medical missionary to Guam.

And I remember I asked him once, I said, Dr.

Brinegar, what motivated you to become a medical missionary and come to Guam.

And it made me realize that we should never underestimate the power of simply asking people for help.

He'd been in Loma Linda very comfortably for decades, and then 1 day somebody called him up and said, hey, would you be interested in coming to Guam as a medical missionary?

So don't ever hesitate in asking people to get involved in programs, because many times they will come and they're waiting simply to be asked.

A cousin of mine who had left the church, and then after many, many years came back into the church, and now is a minister in the church, recalls that he went for many, many years without being asked if he wanted to come to church.

And he says, you know, I would have come if somebody would have just asked me.

So sometimes we second guess ourselves and second guess other individuals.

Well, at that time, we wanted to put together a strong diabetes management program.

All he did was see patients with diabetes.

And so we developed a comprehensive lifestyle medicine program that focused on diabetes.

So I had an opportunity to learn much from him.

And keeping up with the literature is, boy, that's a challenge in any field.

But in diet, there's so much information available to us in the area of diabetes, pre-diabetes, hypoglycemia, and all those conditions are very open to management.

The complications that arise from these conditions are entirely avoidable.

And many times, people with type 2 diabetes can actually reverse that condition and in the majority of cases, the vast majority of cases, individuals with pre-diabetes should be able to reverse those as well.

But the key is that most people don't know it.

And you'll see from statistics that after the age of 40, you're more likely to have pre-diabetes or diabetes than not have pre-diabetes or diabetes.

In other words, if you're 40 or over and you don't have pre-diabetes or diabetes, you are in the distinct minority of individuals.

Once again, the problem is that most people who have pre-diabetes in particular have no idea that they have it.

Just last week I was working with a patient in her early 50s who appeared to be very healthy and had actually come in to see me for other health concerns.

There was no concern about heart disease or diabetes or pre-diabetes or high blood pressure.

It was just some other concerns that she had.

And so as we talked, I became a little bit concerned that she might have problems with low blood sugar.

There's low blood sugars, depressed immune system, low blood sugars actually are associated with weakened adrenal glands, which then leads to increased risk of disease, of autoimmunity, and we feel really bad when we have low blood sugars.

And so I suggested that we do a glucose tolerance test, which we'll look at in a little bit.

And so where she would come into the laboratory, have blood drawn initially, and then after the fasting blood test, would drink a sweetened drink.

It's about twice as sweet as a regular soda.

About 75 grams of pure glucose that's carbonated and so it doesn't taste too bad, but it's, you know, it still takes a little effort to drink that down.

And then 1 hour later, we checked the sugar, the blood sugar again, 2 hours, 3 hours, and 4 hours.

I was expecting to see some potential low blood sugars, and we found them.

Dramatic drop in blood sugars at 3 and 4 hours, which was a key problem.

But what I hadn't expected to see was her blood sugars above 200 at the one-hour mark, which places her in advanced prediabetes.

Now, the 1 hour blood sugar is not diagnostic.

In other words, many times in medicine, they don't even measure the 1 hour blood sugar because it's not diagnostic.

The doctors and researchers who kind of came up with the rules of how do you diagnose the problem did not include the 1 hour.

But in doing so, they made a decision that greatly weakened the power of educating their patient because the most sensitive blood test for blood sugars is at 1 hour after consuming a food, 1 hour.

And I have many people that have patients who have a completely normal blood sugar before they eat.

Completely normal, I should say healthy, because normal is not the same thing as healthy.

Remember, I just got done saying that the majority of people 40 and over have prediabetes or diabetes.

So in a statistical sense, that's normal.

It's normal to have prediabetes and diabetes.

So at 2 hours, many people have Completely optimal blood sugars before and at 2 hours.

But the 1 hour can be sky high, can be at 200 or higher.

And in her case, even though she didn't have any of the other signs or indications of a metabolic problem, we caught that.

But we caught that early because she was willing to be evaluated.

She was willing to take a risk and be open to criticism, if you will.

You're opening yourself to criticism, constructive criticism.

But whenever we do these blood tests, whenever we do any medical evaluation, we're essentially experiencing a close evaluation, a close criticism of what's going on, right?

So it's very similar in our spiritual lives, as long as we're open to criticism.

When's the last time you've asked somebody, hey, you know, evaluate me, how am I doing?

You know, we don't tend to do that naturally.

But, done properly, especially with a close friend, especially with a spouse, with somebody that you spend time with.

Being willing to be constructively criticized can be very valuable, a learning experience for us.

And so this testing phase that she went through made her aware of something she had no idea was going on.

But as we looked at the data, we started putting the pieces together and recognizing that 1 and recognizing that 1 of the driving factors in migraine headaches actually is an abnormal blood sugar metabolism.

When was the last time you read anything about that?

I was seeing patients in Sun City, California once a week with Dr.

It was part of the Loma Linda Faculty Medical Group extended offices.

And while there, I had a neurologist from Europe come spend about a week with me.

She was working on a second doctoral degree at the School of Public Health at Loma Linda and wanted to just spend some time shadowing me.

And so I encouraged it and I had a wonderful time dialoguing with her, because being a neurologist, I was interested in what she could teach me as well.

But something interesting happened on the days that she was there.

I would work with patients who had diabetes or gout or high cholesterol or high blood pressure and go through a comprehensive lifestyle nutritional medicine strategy so that they could accomplish their goals.

And as they would come back after a month or 2 of following these strategies, they would see.

We'd criticize them, if you will, before and after.

And they could see, wow, when I actually followed this plan, my cholesterol dropped 50 points, my blood pressure dramatically improved, my blood sugars dropped substantially, everything was getting better.

And this 1 particular day, I was kind of bragging on these patients a little bit.

I said, wow, look at your cholesterol, look at your blood sugar, look at your uric acid and your gout's no longer there.

And 4 of the patients that I was kind of bragging on, 4 of them that very day that I was working with this neurologist said, we're kind of dismissing all that as if it was unimportant.

I would say like, aren't you excited about this?

I mean, I'm excited about what's happening to you, aren't you?" He says, well, yeah, no, no, this is good, but what I'm really happy about is that I'm not having those headaches anymore.

And at the time, I didn't get it, you know, Because I kind of knew that you do 1 thing right, everything tends to work better.

Susanna Bick, as a neurologist, she was intrigued.

Natural Ways to Optimize the Immune System

It is good to be here, enjoying some nice cool weather.

I was warned by my wife when she looked on the internet to see what the weather was going to be like this week.

She warned me that it was going to be a hot 1.

And I think we, God has blessed us with cool breeze.

I certainly expected it to be a lot hotter.

So I can actually enjoy wearing my suit coat today and not feel too bad.

I mentioned yesterday that what had turned my attention from normal childhood activities at a young age, the tender age of 11, was when my mother was diagnosed with cancer.

And that experience of watching her go through terminal cancer made me keenly aware of the value of good health, the value of quality health.

She was a mother that I adored and that I loved greatly.

And she was taken away from me by disease, died at the age of 39.

And ever since that time, my mind has been focused on trying to establish and figure out what the factors were that potentially lead to disease.

What are the factors in us, in each of us, that may predispose us towards different forms of disease?

And if we could figure that out, what are then the potential solutions, the multiple strategies that could alter that otherwise reality of premature death, premature disability, premature disease, premature dysfunction that takes away our potential to serve God and to serve each other.

That's the real value of our health message that we have available to share.

So as a young man, as I discussed this with my father, I became very interested in reading books on health.

And 1 of the books that I came across was Councils on Diets and Food, which is loaded with shotgun paragraphs of this and that and the other.

And very wisely, my father 1 day said to me, says, Wesley, why don't you read this book instead?

Same author on the cover, but what's the difference?

Instead of just a compilation of shotgun blasts of this and this and this and this and this, which is actually very useful if you're looking something up or want to get a broader context, but it's missing something very important.

It's missing the overall context of how we're to understand health and the value of following certain health principles.

And the book, The Ministry of Healing, not only attracted me to learning more about health and natural remedies, But it also attracted me to Jesus Christ as a young teenager.

And that's what the health message is all about.

If the health message that we give does not also at the same time attract us and those that we're sharing it with to Jesus Christ, the value becomes very, very limited.

We want a health that can lead to eternal life.

It's all about being able to recognize the true health gift that we've been given, which is the opportunity to live forever with Jesus Christ and be ambassadors to the worlds beyond forever.

That to me is exciting, that is worth whatever challenges we may have to go through in this life.

So today we're going to give part 2 of what we started yesterday on how to evaluate, prevent and reverse diabetes and prediabetes naturally.

Why are we doing actually 2 sections on this?

Because this is, in my opinion, by far the greatest health scourge in the world.

We mentioned yesterday that if you don't have prediabetes or diabetes, You are in the minority right now.

The vast majority of us have either prediabetes or diabetes.

Now, Over a half of people with diabetes know they have it.

About a third, up to a half, of people who right now have diabetes have no idea they have it.

The greatest problem with any disease is when you don't know you have it and therefore you're not paying attention to the cues, the clues of what to do about it.

The problem with prediabetes is that I'm estimating that over 90% of people with prediabetes don't have it.

So that's why it's critical that we understand this process.

So let's, let's bow our heads and praise we begin as we discuss this very important topic.

Father, you have provided us the great physician in your Son Jesus Christ.

We want to follow his medicine, we want to follow his prescription, And we want to allow his guidance so that we can better understand what we need to be in your will today.

All right, so We're basically expanding on this greater topic of reengineering genetic risk, how the transforming sickness into health, the transforming power of our health message.

Reviewing quickly what we discussed yesterday, what is diabetes?

Diabetes is a blood sugar that is so high, it's high enough to cause serious health complications.

Series

Reengineering Genetic Risk

Optimizing Brain Wellness: How to Promote Emotional and Neurologic Healing

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Faithful Talks

4. The Sons of God

1h 1m

ASI 2011 Seminar: Health

Energizing Your Witness: The Adventist Lifestyle Message Rightly Utilized

1h 19m

Is the Health Message Salvational?

39m

GYC 2013 Seminar: Triple A: "Angels, Apologetics, and Adventists"

01-Richard Dawkins and the Sabbath

40m

Plenary

Loving Service: The Heart of the Early Christian Faith

50m

Last Generation for Christ 2019 Weekend

Panel Q & A

1h 14m

Plenary

The Elusive Fountain of Youth, Part 1

1h

OYC 2011 Seminars

Kellogg vs. The Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

56m

WYC 2013 Seminar: Always Ready to Defend Adventism

Ellen White and Food Documentaries

47m

Norman McNulty Weekend

The Great Controversy Unmasked

51m

Advent HOPE - Adventist History Class

The Health Message and Kellogg

40m

GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Devotional Life

The Undoing of the Saints: A Testimony

43m

Sound Doctrine