“To Stimulate Healing You Have To Eat Color”

We spoke with Dr. Karmelo Bizkarra about the subtle energies of food, basic to maintain balance and health but still very unknown, and about the art of healing with anthropophosical medicine and nutrition.

Karmelo Bizkarra is the medical director of the Zuhaizpe Vital Health Center, in Navarra. He is also the author of books such as The art of knowing how to feed yourself (ed. DDB) and a university professor of Naturopathic Medicine.

From Zuhaizpe, recognized as a Medical and Psychological Center by the Navarra Health Department, it proposes a hygienic vegetarian diet, cleansing diets or even controlled fasts, as well as deep emotional work.

Karmelo Bizcarra: the art of choosing food alive

At the Zuhaizpe Vital Health Center, directed by Karmelo Bizcarra, not only people who want to regain their health come, but also those who need a vital change. There, he and his team propose a personalized health program in which nutrition is essential …

–In addition to calories, proteins … do food contribute something that we are not aware of?
–Calories are an index of quantity, not quality. There are subtle energies in the shape and color of food. By ingesting them we extract those energies. I always recommend eating shape and, above all, color. In recent years it has been seen that antioxidants are found in food pigments, which prevent free radicals from stealing electrons from other substances in the body.

The shape is also important. For example, the pumpkin has more mass than it forms; On the other hand, a nut has a lot of shape and little mass, it is less expansive, more mineral. They express different things, like two opposite poles.

I like to say that when I eat an apple, in addition to sugars or calories, I am eating what makes it apple and not lettuce.

–What does the shape of food indicate about its health potential?
– We are at the beginning of all that knowledge. A shape like that of cauliflower, which expands, is not the same as that of sesame, almost without mass, more contracted and mineralized. The pumpkin has a lot of water and growth capacity.

This capacity, by incorporating it in us, helps the etheric body, also called the energy or vital body. Leaves an imprint different from that of a small seed.

–And when is a food recommended in one form or another?
–We are a mirror of everything in the universe and we are part of that universe. Something that is usually recommended in anthroposophic medicine is that in the meals there are root vegetables, stems and leaves, and flowers and fruits. Because each part of the plant acts on different areas of the body.

By eating plant foods we must realize that, ultimately, we are feeding on the sun.

The roots, for anthroposophic nutrition, act primarily in the neurosensory system, in the head and the sense organs. On the other hand, flowers and fruits act more on the metabolism, the digestive system. The middle part, the trunk and the leaves, affect the circulatory and respiratory systems.

– Can you give a concrete example?
-If a child is very metabolic and likes to fight and use force, but thinking abilities are not sufficiently developed, we would recommend root vegetables: carrot, red beet, radish … with all the energy of raw food that has not been detached with heat.

A roasted food is more like a mineral than the vegetable it comes from. There is a devitalization with excess heat. Although sometimes it is good: cooking cereals, potatoes or tubers facilitates their digestion.

– As for the colors, what makes them help to maintain health?
–The recommendation would be to eat all the colors of the rainbow. Introduce the range of reds, which is more physical, and that of blues and violets, the most ethereal and subtle.

Geologists say blues or purples do not appear in the lower strata of surveys. Those colors are the last to appear in nature.

If there are digestive problems, Brazilian doctors recommend papaya, which is orange. We use carrots and squash a lot, because they don’t have a lot of hard fiber and they are easier to digest.

“And the aroma?” Has the ability to associate aroma and quality been lost?
–If you go to a hypermarket, there are red lights that increase the color of oranges and strawberries. Substances that color the food are even added. With the color they manage to deceive us… But not with the smell.

I choose an apple or a pear for the smell and not for the appearance, because I know that there are techniques to make it appear prettier or shine more.

–According to Rudolf Steiner, vegetables have spiral energy fields that help us in healing…
– Romanesco cabbage, for example, reflects these spiral fields. Something that Steiner said very beautifully when he shaped biodynamic agriculture is that the lower part of the plants, the roots, are in contact with the earth and collect the mineral; the trunk has to do with the influx and path of water and sap; the leaf, with the light and the air; and the fruit, with the heat. We have there the four elements of nature.

Medicine has greatly developed the physical and biochemical knowledge of the organism, but for me the doctor of the future will work with the metabolism of light and energy. The day will come when we will apply the light of food to each disease or to each person according to their character.

– Eating vegetables is eating light?
–When I take a piece of wood and set it on fire it is as if I were giving off all the solar fire that it has collected in the tree. When eating food I must realize that, ultimately, it is solar.

Plants are tied to the earth by their roots, but their growth is the search for heat and sunlight. Aromatic oils are usually high in the plant, in fruits, seeds or flowers. The hardest and most condensed is on the ground, and the subtle in the upper zone. In the part close to the earth we have cellulose, lignin, the densest and hardest carbohydrates; in the middle part, starch; and above, in the fruits, the sugars ..

The roots stimulate the brain and make the sensorineural system organize the body in a healthier way.

–Does organically grown fruit have the same energy force as one from intensive agriculture?
-No. They may have calories and a similar biochemistry, but the energy they concentrate in those energy fields are very different for me.

The organic or biodynamic farmer treats plants differently. Someone with a small piece of land who waits for nature to bear fruit in due time is not the same as someone with 20 hectares on a farm who does not care about the rhythms of nature. The attitude is not one of respect but of expropriation of the land.

These two very different attitudes cannot give the same food, in the same way that a recipe will not come out the same for two cooks, because they impregnate the food they are preparing with their attitude.

–How do the stars influence vegetables? Does its content change according to the astral phase of the harvest?
-Yes, totally. In biodynamic agriculture there are times of planting roots or sowing or harvesting … I lived through that as a child because my father was a carpenter and he told me that the wood had to be cut down, with the decreasing moon, because that way it had less water. it rotted and cracked less.

Then I realized that in waxing, in full moon, the water of the earth rises towards the tree, towards the sap, and in decreasing that water goes back towards the earth. It’s like a big breath. The plant inspires in the first quarter and exhales in the last quarter.

Someday perhaps we will realize that in the body anabolism is possibly greater in the first quarter of the moon, and catabolism, or detoxification, in the last quarter.

It is possible that one day we will see that our metabolism is governed by the cycles of the moon.

– What are the “foods with life”, capable of regenerating us?
–Vegetables: fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, a certain amount of legumes… bearing in mind that in principle the raw must abound. Healthy foods must have a lot of water, because 70% of the body is water. And fruits and salads are the ones that have the most.

The ecological cost, in addition, is much lower when eating fruit or vegetables. In raising animals a lot of water is used, the land, water and air are polluted.

–When we feed ourselves with animals, do we incorporate their suffering?
– I lived in Durango and 200 meters had the municipal slaughterhouse. As a child, I would wake up at four thirty in the morning to the screeching of pigs that they were going to kill.

When we went to school in the morning, we knew that many cows, pigs and horses ran away because they smelled that they were not going to a good place, it was in their field of consciousness.

That meat is impregnated by adrenaline, corticosteroids, hormones that the animal secretes with the feeling that something bad is going to happen to it. Animals and human beings are sentient.

I consider that the meat is impregnated with these feelings and that the body is an energy expenditure to neutralize that meat that is not ours and remove the imprint of the memory of where it comes from.

– What basic changes can be made to promote healing?
–In food, the simplest change is to eat color, and this is concentrated in fruits and vegetables. There is hardly any in meat or fish. On the other hand, when a food is cooked it loses color.

If we eat raw – it would be my second recommendation – we will incorporate those antioxidant pigments.

Third, eat consciously, give yourself time, turn off the television, unplug the phone … With that, the subtle energies of food enter directly through your mouth.

– How do these subtle energies nourish us?
–The Bulgarian spiritual master Mikhaël Aïvanhov said that in the mouth there are organs capable of collecting the subtle energy of food.

It amazes me that after fasting for 20 days, when people start drinking watery fruit or juice, after two or three minutes they immediately feel energized. Where do they get it from? The food has barely reached the stomach, it has not passed into the blood or through the liver filter and it has not gone to the cells …

There is a subtle energy there that we collect the moment we are eating. Or like when you see a fountain and you are very thirsty. At the moment of drinking, the thirst disappears, but the dehydrated cells have not yet collected the water …

“Any more advice?”
–Eat hungry. Many times we eat out of anguish, worry, lack of love … but not because of nutritional needs. We eat after hours or in a meeting with all the tension. How we eat is important.

Many times we eat out of anguish, worry, lack of love … but not because of nutritional needs.

-People come to Zuhaizpe who have gone through several doctors before. Can you explain any cases in which there has been improvement?
– Last year a man came for COPD, a chronic alteration of the lung. He had been hospitalized about ten times in the previous months. At the center, he was eating fruits and vegetables and then fasting. When he returned this year, he had not required hospitalization and had stopped the bronchodilators.

We see this type of healing on a daily basis. When sausages, fried foods, preserves, vinegar, salt are eliminated … the body begins to regenerate and detoxify. A comprehensive and organic diet helps healing.

– What other therapies are applied in the center?
– We say that it is like a triangle. At the base is hygienic medicine, which promotes health factors: healthy eating, exercise, relaxation, contact with nature, emotional expression, mental stillness … All in an ecological environment that facilitates the reunion with oneself.

The other side of the triangle is the psycho-body part. We use therapies not from the psychological but also from the body. The body, like the mind, keeps the memory of what has been lived. You have to move it and unlock it.

“And the third side?”
–The Traditional Medicine of the West, which is specified in the spagyric, anthroposophic and homeopathic medicines. The human being has internalized in the form of organs the processes that in nature are found in the form of minerals, plants or animals.

If an organ becomes diseased, I will give the body as a model a mineral or plant, sometimes an animal substance, to help it awaken the model of organization or good physiological functioning of that organ.