earthing - a missing link to health and sanity

Earthing, sometimes known as grounding, is one of the most significant yet simplest steps you can take, living in civilisation in a modern life, to improve your health and enhance your well-being, mental function and everyday experience of life. Of all the healthy lifestyle practices you can engage in,  earthing requires the least effort and time commitment yet it maximises results.

Here is our interview with Dr John Kelsey explaining in wonderful depth about the use of earthing devices and their benefits.



Personally I feel an intense desire to live as immersed in nature and as close to the Earth as possible. For the moment the things I need to do to fulfil my purpose keep me living and working in a house much of the time and I am immensely grateful for this very simple technology.  It does not replace getting out into nature and going barefoot on the Earth rather it fills in the gaps when we can't do this.

Putting it in basic terms, our body metabolism , by its very nature produces free radicals.  These need to be counteracted by antioxidants or electrons, which we get to some degree from foods such as fruit and vegetables and also the hormone melatonin.  However we were designed to run in physical connection with the earth, without any insulating materials between us, such as rubber soles, carpets and floorboards.  From the Earth comes a flow of electrons which naturally balance the effects of metabolism.

Earthing sheets are cotton sheets with silver threads running through them. You just put one on the bed on top of your normal sheet and plug into the socket.  The plug does not make a connection with the live part of the mains, just the earthing connection which runs down into the ground.  So the socket does not need to be on and an earthing sheet is not an electrical device in the sense that we normally understand. Through  the moisture that comes out of our bodies we connect electrically to the sheet and through that to the Earth.

The change to sleeping on an earthing sheet was a profound experience for us.  For the first week we actually felt fuzzy headed and found that difficult to deal with.  After those effects had waned we noticed how well we were sleeping and how refreshed we felt when we woke up. I think it has made us feel closer too.  One of the effects of grounding is to increase melatonin levels and even this by itself is known to increase the levels of harmony between people. The more of the time we are earthed the better. As Dr John Kelsey explains in our recent interview with him, even if we are earthed at night, we will get more benefit if we are also earthed before we go to bed. In the day we regularly use earthing throws and mats as well as walking barefoot in nature.  Users report that earthing for two hours before bed helps them sleep.  It is possible that the Earth is able to communicate to us the rhythms we need to function optimally.

Earthing also tends to balance brain hemisphere function.  Speaking to Tony Wright on the subject he hypothesises that what is actually happening is the right hemisphere has the capacity to respond to the improved conditions and becomes more active thus ameliorating to some degree cerebral dominance of the left hemisphere.

Recently I have got to the point of recommending earthing in nature and through earthing devices above any other health practice so it made sense to stock these products for sale.  We chose the convenient half sheet, the mat and grounding rod as the most popular products and the ones we have found most useful.  It's a one off investment which can last for years.  You could think of it as a device to harvest electrons.  Generations of humans  preceding the industrial revolution were conceived , born and grew up, worked and played in direct physical connection with the Earth. I personally think that beginning to re-establish this vital connection to our life source is fundamental to turning us into the sane and harmonious humans of the future.

raw dairy, health and ethics

Here's an audio piece I did talking about the role of dairy products in a raw food lifestyle for health and also putting the ethics into perspective hopefully!  Underneath is the basic flow of my thoughts on this subject:

1.  It seems that most people need to consume some animal material for fat soluble vitamins or bring in some processed fortified foods.

I am not talking about the exceptions that prove the rule here but am concerned with the majority.  It seems that in the long term most people need to consume animal fats in order to obtain the fat soluble vitamins A,D nad K in the form that the body can use; in the case of vitamin A this is retinol and in the case of vitamin D, D3.  All traditional cultures that we know of and as studied by Weston Price consumed at least some animal products, in general the further they were from the equator, the higher the ratio of animal to plant foods.

If at some point we lived a frugivorous diet in the forest, this would have included all kinds of insect material.

Grazing animals such as cows, goats and sheep not only consume insects along with a great variety of grasses and herbs, they are also out naked absorbing sunlight while we are indoors.  These animals can absorb the nutrients they need from the vegetation insects and sunlight in latitudes where humans need to clothe themselves, house themselves and cannot absorb the vitamin D they need from the sun.  We have traditionally piggybacked in this way off animals indigenous to these climates, whether we have used their milk or eaten their flesh.

2. So, given our current circumstances what are the healthiest, most efficient and ethical ways of taking in the fats we need?

Looking at flesh foods, apart from even the various ethical questions around the meat and fishing industries, meat and fish are actually quite difficult foods for us to digest.  Most of us would not be willing to spend our days foraging for insect filled fruit and it could even be that our digestive systems could no longer extract what we need from such a  diet.  It could  be argued that we are not designed to drink the milk of another animal or drink milk after childhood but at least we do have a an inherent capacity to digest mammal milk in our design because we are designed to drink our mother's milk as children.   We then can apply techniques of fermentation to make these milks even more digestible for us. For example the kefir culture breaks down casein, and lactose and changes the ratios of the amino acids in the milk to be more suitable for humans.

3. What are the broader ethical issues?

As a  species we have kept domesticated animals for a long time and have developed an interdependent relationship with them.  We have also developed a three way interdependence, a symbiotic relationship between ourselves, the animals, and the organisms in the cultures such as kefir used to ferment the milk. This is an ecosystem in itself. worthy of sustaining.  The cultures and animals that have been domesticated for so many years would not fare well if we abandoned them.  The damage to the planetary ecosystem and thus indirect harm to animals may actually be greater by the manufacturing or importing of other foods that we might use to replace dairy products.

We cannot separate out plant and animal life.  Even plants are feeding off soil which includes broken down animal waste.  The compassionate way is not to try to remove animal input but to avoid animal cruelty and connect to the animals.  A lot of this is about economics. Now, economic demand is leading  some farms to treat milking animals in much more caring ways such as letting calves stay with their mothers and keeping on  cows who have stopped milking to retire gracefully in the fields.  An example of such a dairy is the Calf at Foot Dairy. http://www.the-calf-at-foot-dairy.co.uk/  The milk from such dairies is noticeably more delicious.

4.  Why is this such a significant issue?

The question of whether it is acceptable to eat animal products seems to be a perennial one in the raw food scene and people get very heated about it, to an extraordinary degree.  I feel passionately about it for several reasons - health, freedom and reaching our full potential. Firstly I want people to be healthy, secondly because I want people to be free of imposed anti-human beliefs and thirdly I passionately believe that eating natural raw foods that fit our biology as a species is an integral part of us reaching our full potential and I don't like seeing this being undermined.

I have covered the issue of health above in connection with fat soluble vitamins, we also need to think about where we get omega 3 fatty acids DHA and EPA, there are other factors in animal foods too.

Then we come to the imposed beliefs.  Animal and plant life, not to mention human life is intertwined on this planet, that's just the way it works.  The idea of not in any way consuming anything that has at some point come from an animal is just a concept with no genuine reality.  It is something very different to the genuine connection and compassion that humans naturally feel towards other mammals.  A disconnected belief that makes it difficult for humans and especially the young to get the nutrition that they need really is anti-human.

And thirdly about human potential, getting undamaged (i.e. not heated above biological temperature) nutritional components can rebuild our neurological system to another level.  Essentially this means a nutrient dense predominantly raw and predominantly but not exclusively plant based diet.  To sabotage this with another contradictory thought stream which suggests it is wrong to do what we need to do to get vital nutrients seems to me unwise to say the least and thoroughly confusing and unproductive for someone who is improving their diet with a view to fulfilling their potential.  As so much on this planet hangs on humans coming out of their stupor and reaching towards their divine endowment, it seems ethical in the deepest sense to obtain whatever nutrition we need to take from other animals in the most respectful way possible.