How To Renew Your Body

Most of the 37 trillion tiny cells that make up your body’s tissues and organs are continually dying off as they age, are injured or become defective, and are replaced by brand-new ones. By facilitating this innate natural regenerative process, you can renew your body.

- Linda Moon

In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker’s critically injured body is regenerated in a “bacta tank”. You might not be out fighting aliens but your body cops a regular beating from environmental toxins, modern diets, stress, infections, negative emotions and other figurative baddies.

Four years ago, Jennifer Green (real name protected for legal reasons) was bedridden for months after exposure to neurotoxic chemicals. Formerly fit and healthy, Green developed potentially fatal damage to all her body systems, including liver and brain tumours, neurological impairment, gallstones, chronic fatigue, skin lesions, a compromised immune system, dental damage and reduced fertility. Determined to recover, she healed her body using largely natural therapies.

In The Miracle of Regenerative Medicine (2017), author Elisa Lottor says you can heal yourself, reverse the ageing process and improve the quality of your life by tapping into your body’s natural regenerative potential. Central to this is improving the efficiency of your biochemistry and cell functions, she writes. Mounting research suggests this involves following a diet and lifestyle that suit the body you’ve inherited from your ancestors.

The five pillars of body renewal

The evolutionary diet Tim Altman, a Melbourne-based naturopath and producer of the Take A Breath podcast (Health and Lifestyle Show), says genetic and anthropological research suggests “at the level of DNA, our body still thinks we live the way we did 40,000 years ago, which means [when] we were hunter-gatherers. I would have hunted animals, eaten vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds and drunk water. There was no such thing as getting a bread roll.