: Need for the Hygiene

Proper hygiene is as essential to optimum health as diet and exercise. Cleansing the body of toxins, pollutants, disease-causing germs and allergens can significantly reduce the number of infections, allergy attacks and other negative health conditions. There is a direct relationship between good hygiene and good health; the better one’s hygiene is, the better one’s overall health profile is likely to be.

The importance of good hygiene cannot be overstated. The first cure for cancer was hygiene. In the 18th century, London’s chimney sweeps had an extraordinarily high rate of scrotal cancer until a local surgeon, Dr. Potts, demonstrated that those who regularly washed away the carcinogenic soot that collected on their skin did not contract the disease.

A century later, when hundreds of thousands of European women were dying of childbirth fever, a Viennese obstetrician, Dr. Semmelweis, discovered that when doctors washed their hands between deliveries, the death rate dropped by 90%. Even into World War II, death from poor hygiene caused three times more deaths than battlefield wounds.

The body’s immune system is an autonomic function. Like breathing and blinking, one cannot prevent one’s immune system from reacting to what it interprets as an invasion of infection. Whether the environment is the home, the job, or the outdoors, it is infested with disease causing bacteria, fungi, viruses and allergens. These pathogens are looking for a host habitat to occupy. Human hands come in contact with hundreds of surfaces daily, including other hands, and items that have been touched by other hands. These hands may or may not have been washed prior to contact with other hands.

We now know that germs don’t fly. Germs hitchhike under and around the fingernails, where normal hand washing fails to reach. The germs that accumulate under the fingernails enter the body through the nasal passageway or the corner of the eyes (tear ducts) as we touch these areas. This process is part of human nature. We cannot alter it. People touch their eyes and nose at least twenty times each day! Over 12,500 times each year, individual’s fingertips come in contact with their eyes and nose. 12,500 times each year we auto-inoculate ourselves with germs, allergens, environmental toxins and viruses.

The immune system should be able to effectively fight these diseases. Unfortunately, in today’s world, where people are crowded in urban areas, where the environment is filled with chemicals, toxins, pollutants, and where mass transportation can carry new diseases around the world in a day, the immune system is simply overloaded. Advanced Health Products’ line of Advanced Hygiene products (Facial Solutions and Hand and Body Soap) are scientifically designed to remove the overload from the immune system and allow the body’s immune system to more effectively defend and protect itself against invasion from diseases. The result of a less stressed immune system is optimum health and maximum longevity.

Our mission is to enable people to achieve optimum health and longevity by providing the highest quality products that prevent disease and allergies and that help the body to defend and protect itself from pathogens.

Today’s society is focused on diet, nutrition and exercise as pathways to better health, totally ignoring the historic role improvements in hygiene have played over the course of human development. Improved hygiene techniques have led to more improvements in longevity and the quality of human life than improvements in either diet or exercise. The concepts of Advanced Hygiene represent the first real advancement in how we wash since the bar of soap was invented about 150 years ago. How we wash our hands is one of the few things that has not changed over the past hundred years. While it is true soap has been improved in regards to scent, ingredients and appearance, the basic mechanism of washing has stayed the same.

Most people are told when they are young to wash their hands to help stay healthy. However very few people know how germs, once they are on their hands, actually enter their body and make them sick. This is where the Advanced Hygiene story begins.

Right now if you were to do a microbiological study of your hands, you would find the palms and back of your hands relatively free of germs, allergens and environmental toxins. However, if you were to do the same study under your fingernails, you would discover a witches brew of germs, allergens, pieces of your own self (saliva, broken hair and skin cells, and other cells of bodily substance and fluids) combined with all sorts of environmental debris and toxins. Most of the germs (over 90%)on the hand reside under the fingernails where normal hand washing fails to reach. Today’s bar or liquid soap simply were not designed to cleanse this area.

"Most germs don’t fly, they hitchhike."

Most germs are not spread through the air. They travel by hand to hand contact or by hand to surface to hand. The same is true for allergens and environmental contaminants. And the same is true for how they enter the body. Germs hitchhike from our fingertips, under our fingernails, to the warm damp membranes in the corner of our eyes and in the front of the nasal passageway. Studies show that people touch their eyes and pick the dry mucosa from their noses over twenty five times a day. Even in their sleep, people touch their eyes and noses. It is part of the human condition and cannot be stopped.

Surprising to many, most germs and allergens enter the body through the membranes around the eyes and nasal passageway. They are placed there by auto-inoculation as our fingertips come in contact with these membranes. While some disease enters the body through the mouth, the fluids in the mouth and stomach are very effective with combating pathogens . The eyes and nose provide, not only a warm, damp breeding ground for germs, but also a direct pathway to the upper respiratory track. Upper respiratory problems (including sinus problems) account for a large portion (around 80%)of all visits to doctors’ offices.

Advance hygiene refers to the proper cleansing of the areas under the fingernails and the membranes around the eyes and nose. These are the areas where germs accumulate, enter the body and cause their damage. It is ironic, using today’s methods of hygiene these areas are totally neglected and not cleansed at all. Perhaps this explains why, on average adults have more that 4 colds per year (children having more than 6 colds per year) and why over 30% of the population has allergies.

: Stress & Immunity

The proper cleansing of the areas under the fingernails and the membranes around the eyes and nose through Advanced Hygiene techniques reduces stress on the immune system and the occurrence of infectious disease and allergies.

People experience a wide range of benefits from Advanced Hygiene techniques. Once the overload is removed from the immune system, the immune system can devote energy to and eliminate other infections that are present in the body. Lingering sinusitis is a common example of this. Without Advanced Hygiene techniques, the immune system is overloaded by the constant auto inoculation of germs, allergens and environmental toxins and simply cannot eliminate the sinusitis. Once the overload is removed, the immune system can efficiently deal with and cure this infection. This is true of many sub clinical conditions.

Like most human behavior, auto inoculation serves an important purpose. It is how the body’s immune system stays in touch with and adapts to the outside world. As a baby first touches its fingertips to its eyes and nose, it introduces its immune system to the outside world. With this first contact, the baby’s immune system begins to produce the appropriate antibodies to protect it and keep it healthy. This process continues all through life. Auto inoculation is the body’s way of keeping the immune system "tuned" to the outside world.

Advanced Hygiene recognizes the need to cleanse these areas to remove the overload from the immune system. However, Advanced Hygiene also recognizes the need for auto inoculation and the importance of working with the body’s own metabolism and natural defense abilities. For this reason, Advanced Hygiene techniques do not sterilize (non-antibacterial) the area under the fingernails and the membranes around the eyes and in the front of the nasal passageway. This would do more harm than good. It would prevent the immune system from adapting to and protecting the body from the outside environment.

:Drug-Free: Allergy-Ease

No discussion of advanced hygiene concepts and techniques is complete without commenting on allergies. It illustrates the simple, common sense approach taken by advanced hygiene concepts and their effectiveness and practicability.

Allergies are caused by an immune system response. For some reason, that research has failed to identify, the immune system mistakes a harmless substance for a pathogen and tries to kill it. These harmless substances are allergens like pollen, cat hair or dust mites. The allergic symptoms like runny noses and watering eyes are the direct result of the immune system trying to defend the body from these harmless substances.

The entire allergy industry is geared to treating allergies through the use of drugs. These drugs (either prescription or over the counter) either try to desensitize the immune system from the allergens or they try to suppress the immune system response. They have many side effects and are only marginally effective.

Many people suffer allergies. Over 50 million people have them. Many people have been to the allergist, taken the tests, tried the shots, taken prescription drugs and over the counter medications and still suffer from allergies. They are tired of the side effects from the drugs and constantly dealing with the lingering allergies and related sinus problems.

The concepts of advanced hygiene take a simple, low tech, common sense approach to this problem. If you are allergic to a substance, why not use better cleansing techniques to keep that substance away from your body and thereby not triggering an immune system response.

Some allergens are airborne and land on the mucus membranes around the eyes and in the nasal passageway. Many end up under the fingernails, as the fingertips come in contact with things containing the allergens, and are auto inoculated into the mucus membranes of the eyes and nose. As they land on the mucus membranes, an immune system response is triggered.

Albumin and Advanced Hygiene

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the concepts of Advanced Hygiene is the apparent relationship between an individual’s standard of hygiene and their serum albumin levels. One would assume that if you could lower the stress on an individuals immune system and significantly reduce the amount of infectious disease and allergies they experience, there would be something quantifiable, some measurable indicator showing an improved health status. Dr. Seaton’s research has identified this indictor. It is an important protein, common to all life, called albumin.

Albumin is a prominent protein in the blood and is responsible for many important functions. In recent years, the scientific community has established a direct correlation between risk of cancer, heart attack and overall longevity to a person’s albumin level. The higher a person’s albumin level, the less risk of cancer or heart attack, and the more likely they were to maintain disease free.

Dr. Julian Whitaker, as quoted below from "Shed 10 Years in 10 Weeks", gives a good explanation of the benefits of high levels of albumin and its relation to Advanced Hygiene:

"Each time we are exposed to a virus or bacteria, our immune system goes into action by producing antibodies in our bloodstream, where they circulate until the invader is repelled. These antibodies, collectively called immunoglobulins, are one of the two types of protein in your blood. The other is albumin.

"Albumin is involved in at least sixty-five different biological functions. It is our body’s main transport system, carrying vitamins, minerals, hormones, fatty acids, and other essential substances to their destinations. It is also one of our body’s most powerful - and by far its most voluminous - antioxidants. Given the fact that albumin is involved in so many essential functions, it is not surprising that there is a well-established correlation between low albumin levels and mortality. A large number of studies have identified low albumin levels as the most consistent marker for imminent death. The British Heart Study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1989, followed 7,735 middle-aged British men for 9.2 years. It found that men with the lowest albumin levels had the highest rates of death from many different causes.

"With a link this strong, researchers have been working on increasing albumin for several decades. Unfortunately, they’ve mostly struck out, except for Dr. Seaton who spent years tracking albumin and noticed whenever we get sick, our immunoglobulin levels rise and our albumin levels drop. This happens because they are competing for space in the bloodstream. When antibody levels rise, your body reduces its production of albumin. Even if you do not get sick, your immune system pumps out antibodies that crowd out albumin.

"Dr. Seaton reasoned that the only way to lower immunoglobulins in the blood and thus raise albumin is to reduce the viral and bacterial load entering the body. Subsequent studies bore out his theory: Careful washing with his High Performance Hygiene products not only lessened the frequency of infections and lowered immunoglobulin levels but also raised albumin levels by giving your immune system a much needed rest."

:Medication-Free: Soap for the Skin

The skin is not just a covering it is an organ, like the heart, liver or brain. In fact, it is the largest organ in the body, and one of the most complex. How would you wash your heart, liver or brain each day?

In reality the skin is an endocrine organ, a vital and integral part of the immune system itself. T cells, the master cells of the immune system, after passing through the thymus, migrate to the skin’s surface where, amazingly, they receive maturation hormones from skin cells (The Immunologic Function of Skin, Edelson, Fink. Sc.Am.June 1985, p46-53). Even tiny traces of chemicals can interfere with the skin cell’s ability to produce these complex hormones which are vital for maintaining the immune system throughout our life.

Fingertips

The sense of touch and blood flow and sensitivity of the fingertips is so extraordinary that a blind person can read by feeling. The fingertips are a real extension of our brain. Dolphins, with very large brains, can never build any civilization or even weapons to protect themselves. Our hands, with their opposable thumbs, are perhaps the most remarkable design in all of nature.

The area under the fingernail has no dead horny skin layer and is very thin. The blood flow to the nail bed is about the most complex of the entire body. Constant use of chemicals under and around the fingernails can cause those chemicals to be absorbed directly into the blood stream. One dangerous side effect of constantly applying antiseptics/disinfectants to the fingertips is the introduction of chemicals into the delicate tissues of the eyes, nose, skin, hair and food through touch.

Further, the skin, particularly of the fingernail area, is teeming with a wide variety of germs, something like the natural flora of South America. These germs should be in perfect balance, competing and producing complex chemicals that prevent colonization by pathogenic microbes. Amazingly, many people become sick because they do not have enough of the correct type of germs on their skin. We call this the "natural disinfecting power" of the skin. Natural oils, waxes and secretions should be on the skin and perhaps, are vital in the production of the hormones that cause T cells to mature.

Many native races living in natural, isolated conditions and who seldom bathe have beautiful, healthy skin and can run for hundreds of kilometers at 60 years of age. It is vital not to disturb the natural microflora and the amazing disinfecting power of the skin.

Antiseptics, Disinfectants & Preservatives Over the last 11 years, we have formulated and tested approximately 5,000 different soaps. For years we tried every type of antiseptic/disinfectant/preservative available. They ALL failed for the following reasons:

• free of any disturbance of the natural disinfecting power of the skin
• free of any disturbance of the immunologic function of skin cells producing these complex hormones
• free of any toxicity, no matter how many times it’s used, even on a new born baby.