BY ANTHONY WILLIAM

Celery is one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory foods because it starves unproductive bacteria, yeast, mold, fungi, and viruses that are present in the body and flushes their toxins and debris out of the intestinal tract and liver. Pathogens like these are so often the underlying cause of inflammation—in their absence, your body is much better able to handle whatever life throws your way. At the same time, celery helps good bacteria thrive.

Consuming celery is the most powerful way to alkalize the gut. That’s in part because celery (which is technically an herb, not a vegetable) is high in bioactive sodium. It also contains cofactor micro-trace mineral salts. These are varieties of sodium and other trace minerals (more than 60) that work symbiotically and systematically with each other and with celery’s regular sodium to raise your body’s pH and rid toxic acids from every crevice of your body, including your gut. This process is ideal to cleanse and repair intestinal linings.

At the same time, celery offers enzymes and coenzymes, and it raises hydrochloric acid in the stomach so that food digests with ease and doesn’t putrefy. This helps prevent a multitude of gastrointestinal disorders. Adding celery juice to your diet is the best way to resolve ammonia permeability, an unrecognized condition in which ammonia gas seeps through the intestinal lining and causes health issues such as dental rot and brain fog. (You can read more on ammonia permeability and the misunderstood leaky gut syndrome in my first book.)

While celery may seem to some like a bland, boring food, it is anything but. In addition to the above, celery improves kidney function, helps restore the adrenals, and can even bring ease to one’s mind and thought patterns, with its mineral salts feeding electrical impulse activity and supporting neuron function, which is key if you suffer with ADHD, brain fog, or memory loss.

When it comes to celery, think electrolytes. It hydrates on a deep cellular level, lessening your chances of suffering from migraines. Celery also offers stress assistance and repairs your DNA. I could go on and on about the benefits of celery juice for all manner of ills. It is one of the greatest healing tonics of all time.

Emotional Support

We tend to hold a lot of fear in our guts. Nervousness causes those sensations we know as tummy flips or butterflies in the stomach, and anxiety can run deep through the nervous system, putting our guts in knots. Celery restores the entire digestive system. Use it for its calming effects when you are feeling frightened, panicky, shocked, fretful, nervous, threatened, unsure, or defensive.

Spiritual Lesson

All too often, we make life more complicated than it needs to be—or else we oversimplify what’s truly a complex issue. This push-and-pull happens in all areas of life, especially health. In one approach, people overthink health problems and throw all kinds of potential solutions at them. In the other approach, people take a health challenge that’s actually a delicate interplay of many factors and try to make it seem like it’s just a simple case of the body going haywire out of the blue.

For true healing to occur, we have to embrace a balance of the simple and the complex, and celery teaches us to. Drinking celery juice is the simplest of measures—so simple that people often write it off as too easy to make a difference in how they feel. They figure that adding several other ingredients to their green juice will add that many more nutrients. While green-juice blends can be very healing, there is nothing that equals the simple power of pure celery juice. It is as healing, transformational, and life-changing as it gets—and that’s due to its complex nutritional makeup, which needs to be left undisturbed to work its magic. It’s an important reminder for other areas of life. Where else do we need to have an intricate understanding of a situation to conclude that the simplest approach is the best?

Tips

» To press the reset button on your body, juice celery by itself. For the full effect, drink a full 16 ounces of fresh celery juice daily—and make sure it’s on an empty stomach to raise hydrochloric acid levels most efficiently. For dramatic results, drink two 16-ounce glasses of fresh celery juice a day.

» If your goal is to cleanse your body of toxic heavy metals such as mercury, aluminum, lead, copper, cadmium, nickel, and arsenic, add a half cup of fresh cilantro when you’re juicing your celery.

» An easy way to get more celery into your diet is to add two to four stalks of it when blending the smoothie of your choice.

Excerpted from Medical Medium: LifeChanging Food (Hay House, November 2016) by Anthony William. MedicalMedium.com