" /> How the properties of the rhea meat were discovered
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It began in 1995 with a crock pot of rhea neck-bone soup……


Raising ostriches, emus, and rheas was all the rage in the burgeoning breeders’  market of the early 1990’s.  We always knew that we would be selling meat eventually but were as a group were clueless how to make the transition from breeders ’market to meat market. 


We were the first people in the US to process rheas at the Jones meats, the local meat market.  We soon discovered people were not interested in buying unfamiliar cuts of meat, like the necks.  Rather than let them go to waste we had a crockpot of neck-bone soup going at all times to keep with the surplus of neck-bone meat.   Neck-bone soup was a regular part of our daily diet.

It took a while to realize something was changing.  I noticed my skin tone improved, my chronic backaches and allergies had disappeared. My husband, who had been on allergy shot injections, noticed the same thing. He had let his allergy shots lapse with no return of the severe allergy symptoms.  Finally, he grew tired of soup and told me to put it into a pill. For two months our home reeked of my attempts. 


In an attempt to discover if the rhea meat was the reason for our imporved health I handed out samples of the extract to friends and asked for feedback. Expecting to hear about allergies, I was stunned at the range of positive effects people were reporting.


Over the course of the following months several things emerged:
  • Dose was important; people taking low dosages saw no difference. 
  • People with autoimmune disorders like Crohn’s, fibromyalgia, lupus, myasthenia gravis, arthritis, and asthma began sending cards and letters thanking me for giving their lives back.
Quite bewildered over the response, I returned to my notes to try to understand how this meat extract could have such a profound effect on so many conditions. These people were from all over the country and most had tried everything, so they had no reason to give unearned praises to a simple dietary supplement.

I found me answer on a complicated, hand-scrawled flow chart of me own design. There is a chemical in the body that is the body’s energy source, ATP, or the mouthful, adenosine triphosphate. In my attempt to understand the complex nature of ATP in the body, I had drawn a flow chart showing how ATP is made, used, degraded, and affected by hormones, fats, other proteins, and enzymes.

I had never seen the flow chart anywhere before and did not recognize its significance for a year or more.  It wasn’t until people were demanding an explanation on why this rheameat product had such an effect that I went back to my hand-drawn learning aid and saw what the common point to all these conditions could be.  (The formal versions are on in the patent “Ratite Extracts as Therapeutic Agents” as the ATP Pathways.)

There, on the bottom right hand corner of the messy diagram was a group of body building blocks that depended on a steady and adequate supply of ATP. These building blocks were critical in repairing very specific parts of joints, skin, intestinal tract, eyes, kidneys, and connective tissue. Sequestered in a spot all their own, unnoticed until this very moment, I saw that this was the basis of all autoimmune disorders: an ATP deficiency brought on when there isn’t enough ATP to detoxify and rebuild. Autoimmune disorders in humans were not the body attacking itself but rather the body needing those parts to use in detoxification. The body was choosing pain over poison.


After the initial "Aha!" faded, self-doubt and skepticism crept in. Repeating to myself over and over, "It can’t be this easy, why hasn’t someone else seen this?" I began to verify me initial hunch. The more I looked at the medical literature, the more I saw the similarity of these diseases and how ATP was a significant and unrecognized nutrient under assault by man-made chemicals.  According to my research, autoimmune disorders were similar to scurvy - just a nutritional deficiency disease. 

Filing a provisional patent in August of 1996, I began commercial preparation and selling Rhea Extract  

as a dietary supplement. The product was named “Rhea Extract” by the Illinois Meat Inspection Department because it didn’t fit any of their other categories.

That is it.  Rhea extract is just a meat product from a very special bird with an amazing energy capacity.  The difference you can feel.