This
exceptional man with clear aims is himself a shining example of what he
lectures about at world universities. And that is his conviction that balance
is the most important in life and sport. According to his opinion, contemporary
sport isn’t any more what it used to be twenty years ago. And Josef Šmarda
claims: ‘We are babies, not hard boys.’ However, he is trying to help top
sportsmen to achieve the maximum performance.
His personal charm, common sense and enthusiasm for sport will lead you
to the reflection on how you treat your own body as it happened to me during
our inspirational interview for my magazine.
Photo: Lenka Hatašová
You have
become a freelancer in the field of immunology. What has led you to such a
change in your life?
It seems to me that some people have seen the light a
bit and started to pay more attention to their health and performance. I
reacted to that demand very promptly and started to devote considerably my time
to private consultancy. I cooperate mainly with sportsmen and I have also
started cooperation with a health centre in Portugal where the best medical
centre for sportsmen in the world should be established. This clinic will join
together specialists ranging from the best holistic doctors to the most
experienced dentists.
How will a
dentist help to a top sportsman to the top performance?
A dentist will reveal a lot. A sportsman can suffer
from so called silent infections on the root of a tooth or around the gums. Imagine
such infection on the upper right sixth tooth. Because of this, the whole right
meridian (energetic route- editorial note)
doesn‘t work the way it should, thus in this case gall bladder and liver. The
performance of the whole organism is naturally going down because everything is
related to everything. This is the basis for holistic medicine.
Are you
yourself guided by holistic approach, you- an excellent sportsman?
The future of sport is based on the cooperation of a
holistic dentist, internist, immunologist and chiropractor. I am a clear example of the fact that you can
do top-level sport when you are fifty eight. I have been looking properly after
my body for the whole life. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink alcohol. I sleep
little but I am a heavy sleeper as I tend to work sixteen hours a day. I want
to show people that it is still possible. The whole science is about how you
take care of your physical side.
Consequently
are you going to move to a sunny Portugal?
That won’t be necessary. I am going to fly over there
regularly and stay faithful to our country. I love it here. And I also have
here sports base.
Do you also cooperate
with top Czech sportsmen?
I was trying to. I am Czech and I am proud of it. I am
delighted with all the medals being obtained by our sportsmen on the world
sports grounds. Unfortunately, I have come across the same problem as with the
autistic people that I had devoted intensively my care to. This is finance. Our
sportsmen are not get used to investing into their health. They also don’t have
support for healthcare from the state and other institutions. I have seen the
cases of top sportsmen. Although they were led very well from nutrition and
fitness point of view, they ate head cheese and drank beer after their sporting
performance. That was a complete nonsense against their organism.
Such head
cheese must be yummy……..
I agree totally. However, that is not only the
question of discipline but also the question of personal attitude towards one‘s
health and above all the question of sportsmen attitude towards their performance.
Have a look at a tennis player Novak Djokovic. He decided to invest into his
performance and that paid off thousand times. The intolerance food test
revealed that he is hindered by gluten on the tennis court. He started
eliminating it from his diet and that brought him to the first place of the
world tennis players.
Photo: Lenka Hatašová
What does
this testing consist of and how demanding it is time wise?
To do detailed tests, we only need to take blood,
urine and stools. It’s not time demanding, question of only a few minutes.
Eighty per cent of the immunity is located in the gastrointestinal system,
therefore the analysis of the stools is vital. If some malfunction is found, it
will affect mainly lungs and brain. I can’t imagine a sportsman with bad lungs
as they are the main carrier of performance. We hadn’t known for a long time
that the hormone of happiness serotonin is exclusively produced in the
gastrointestinal system. The main evidence of this is the fact that people who
digest well are usually very happy and in good temper. A person that doesn’t
digest well is definitely not happy.
How costly is
such a testing?
Everything depends on what you want to achieve. We are
in the range of sixty thousand crowns up to million crowns. That is naturally
an extreme sum of money. A client demanding very deep analysis reaches such sum
and I have to travel abroad to see him. Therefore the cost rises. The most
common test with fifty pages of my detailed analysis costs hundred thousand
crowns.
We often hear
from sportsmen and coaches that ‘it is in our head’. Is that therefore false
assumption?
Exactly! If a sportsman has bare surface of his nerves
due to inappropriate diet, he can’t do anything about it. The brain transmits
signals into muscular system and into all other organs. If brain transmits
these incorrectly, in short, a sportsman can’t reach maximum results as his
body reacts more slowly. The approach to sport is more detailed nowadays.
Unfortunately, in our country sportsmen constantly neglect this fact. But as a
matter of fact, the Czechs are sportsmen and warriors in their nature. We often
see a sportsman having a break down during a race or a match and that is exactly
the consequence of wrong diet. For example the above mentioned gluten slows
down this reaction. There is a significant amount of food that can slow down
these transmissions. Milk, egg white and a lot of others, specifically called mucosal food.
Does that
mean that we should eliminate so popular eggs from our diet?
That depends on an individual. Did you know that for
example approximately ninety per cent of the population has food intolerance to
egg white? It is basically something like glue. Try to apply it on your fingers
and you will see how sticky it is. And now imagine how it reacts inside your
body, mainly in the case when white egg and its components such as ovomucoid aren’t digestible. Simply
said, if you have brain cells ‘sticky’ with such mucosal and adhesive
components that are for example opioid peptides casomorphin, gluten exorphin
and gluteomorphin/ gliadorphin (coming
from gluten and milk), brain will never function the way it should.
However, most
sportsmen have their own nutritional consultants. Don’t therefore these
consultants work effectively enough?
Of course these consultants are important for
development and performance of sportsmen. Unfortunately they don’t go into such
details and they don’t test individual sportsmen the way we do. Only some
templates usually follow. Every organism is different and also its diet needs
to be specially tailored. For example nutritional consultants don’t usually
test blood groups and hand in hand with them genetically designated differences
in digestion or food allergies or food intolerance. Specialists don’t look after sportsmen in
accordance with the world standards and that might exactly be the reason for
not having so many top sportsmen.
Photo: Lenka Hatašová
It seems to
me that we have quite a few of them for such a small country. Do you want to
say that these are rather accidental examples?
Yes, in my opinion, all of them are exceptions from
Jan Železný and his successor Vítězslav Veselý to canoeists or footballers. We
have a lot of excellent sportsmen but only the minimum is on the absolute top.
And it might be sufficient to do what a tennis player Djokovic did. Thus think
about where you want to head to and do maximum for it. You know, in the past
ice hockey players used to play over a thousand matches during one season
without any break, under much harder conditions and without helmets. Nowadays
one can’t see anything like that. At present there are babies in full armour,
with plexiglas on their face. That was
because so called ‘ironmen’ were fed in a different environment and they were
hard not only on themselves but also on their rival. Nowadays environment is
worse, nutrients in food are more diluted than they used to be in the past- in
comparison with the seventies of the last century of about forty per cent! We
don’t have any ironmen.
You have
mentioned a tennis player Djokovic. Another tennis player Roger Federer is not
an iron man but definitely a man with a long- term high performance. Do you
also consider him to be an exception? He has been holding on the top for many
years. How is that possible?
Roger Federer certainly must have been studying
thoroughly his health and carries on with that and I think he has had
conditions for it in Switzerland. It is important that a sportsman is led to
that approach by his sporting organisation or during his youth by his parents
or youth coaches. For example a star Martina Higgins, his compatriot, faded
away very early because she hadn’t been looking after her health thoroughly.
Nowadays she is suffering from various autoimmune diseases. Have a look around.
Sportsmen are often injured, ill, non- functional, underperforming. I wouldn’t
like to be in their skin when they finish their career. Only after that their
real serious health problems will start.
What minimum
can we do for our health bearing in mind our lack of finance or unwillingness
to invest into our health?
At least we can stop ‘being those that we read about’.
For example in spring pharmaceutical companies announce the allergy season and
half of us start immediately sneezing. Let’s admit how ridiculous that is! A
human being has lost an ability to be himself.
It seems that
recently we have been living in hysterical ‘organic’ times. What’s your opinion
of organic food?
Organic food is not exposed to poisonous substances in
comparison with regular food. Apparently that is the only advantage. Organic
food is also exposed to environment, solar radiation of different intensity of
what was fifty years ago and to acid rain.
In short you can’t escape that. I’d definitely recommend organic food.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be too obsessed about it.
Vegetarianism,
veganism, fruitism and far more others. What’s your view on these, at present popular
eating habits?
I am not against it. However, certain food has to be
suitable for a particular individual. If a person chooses to eat like that, he
has to be very interested in all supplements. For example it is necessary to
supply body with iron in case of vegetarianism and veganism.
We have been
constantly bombarded with commercials and billboards offering various supplements
such as vitamins, minerals. Are they really that important or is this just as
people say a waste of money?
The best scientists in the world say that those people
who don’t take any supplements in the form of vitamins and minerals to balance the
lack of these substances in their body, which is caused by bad environment, have
been committing a slow suicide. I absolutely identify with this opinion.
Photo: Lenka Hatašová
Each
supplement is like a medicine that puts burden on our liver. On top of that,
most of us have no idea what our organism is lacking exactly. Where to look for
solution?
That is the reason for having a consultant. Everybody
who is interested in their health and has possibilities should have at least
some kind of testing done. Of course a sportsman aiming to achieve a world
champion title must take care of his health with a million times better
attention. Regarding liver, it is very complicated. If a supplement is taken
incorrectly, it can put a big burden on the organ.
The market is
flooded with various products of various prices. How should one be guided in
their choice?
The price of the final product depends on the
ingredients used. Low price really corresponds with its quality. I myself use
supplements from high price range because I can be sure of their quality. As an
example I will give you difference between inorganic supplements such as iron
sulphate used in cheap tablets and in chelate of iron that is used purely in
organic supplements. The difference in price can be ten times higher. Nevertheless,
organic chelate forms are wildly available and they have zero side effects.
The state of
the organism is dependent on the state of the environment. Is it possible to
say which nation is the healthiest one?
The worst risks for organism are acid rainfall and
solar radiation. There is no escape from these factors. If you had asked this
question forty years ago, I would have answered that the healthiest nation were
inhabitants of tropical rainforest and Inuits who live farthest away from industrial
zones. Nowadays the exposure to these factors in these regions is much higher
than in the past. However, we can always agree that these people are better off
than the inhabitants of Ostrava or Linz with the concentration of chemical
industry.
Photo: Lenka Hatašová
‘You Are What
You Eat’ is not only a popular TV show. You can work on your eating habits.
However, you can hardly escape the environment. How to get out of that vicious
circle?
We Czechs and Moravians have zero respect to health.
We prefer going to a fast food restaurant spending two hundred crowns on a
burger and French fries while we could order a beautiful spinach salad in a
luxurious hotel for a half price. That is also pure fact. Moving to a place
with better environment won’t help us with such an attitude.
Until
recently you were involved in work with autistic people. Now you have focused on complex autoimmune
diseases such as multiple sclerosis. How can you help patients who have been
condemned too easily by doctors?
A human being is treated by his own body. Doctors only
suppress these diseases, they don’t treat them. In my care a client is
measured, tested and then he goes home for a home treatment with supplements
which I professionally put together. I have clients with terminal Parkinson who
weren’t able to hold a fork in their hand. Nowadays they lift hundred kilogram
dumbbells. I also have clients with multiple sclerosis who had reports written
by their doctors saying that they wouldn’t walk in the future and now they walk
and enjoy their life. I only add lacking and non- toxic substances to their
bodies. Treatment based on balance is something that the world has to arrive
at.
Photo: Lenka Hatašová
It almost
looks like that people should see you straight away before going to their
general practitioner. Is that right?
You know, not only that I give lectures about balance
to my patients, in firms or at universities but I am also a convincing evidence
of that. The worst is to take advice from a doctor who weighs hundred kilos and
smokes fifty cigarettes a day. I don’t distinguish between a word healthy and
ill. Only deviation from balance exists and in that case a person is ill.
Your exciting
sporting career and interesting life full of travelling certainly fulfils you
but also exhausts you. We haven’t mentioned correct regeneration which is also
very important for the organism. How do you relax and how one should rest
correctly?
That is a very complex question to finish with. My
work, my sport, my love for people and my love for scientific field of applied
immunology fulfil me and therefore it never exhausts me. On average I work 16
hours a day, that means that over the last 33 years of my professional life I
have had two eight- hour shifts a day. I regard the first shift as a life
necessity that every person has to go through. Nevertheless, the second shift
is devoted fully to work for a success of what I do. It’s completely up to me
which shift I start my day with. I do sport one to two hours a day, I only
sleep five or six hours. I sleep hard with the help of balancing supplements
and I regenerate very quickly. Travelling and time changes in time zones put a
big burden on organs such as liver and kidneys. Thus I take intensively these
supplements that support cleansing of those key organs and their activity. I
also fully devote my time to the cell energetic activity. And if I travel, I
pay bigger attention to the cell matters.
Thank you for the interview.
Text: Hana Robinson
Photo: Lenka Hatašová www.lenkahatasova.com
Joseph Šmarda – kontakt: E: joe@smarda.org T: 420-603-276743
Radisson Blu
Alcron www.alcron.cz
Produkce: Michaela Lejsková
Publisher: magazín Best of www.ibestof.cz