How and When to Be Your Own Doctor
by
Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

Part 3 out of 6



uses the protein to heal or rebuild tissue. Sadly, the exact
opposite is the case. Disease organisms feed and multiply on the
toxic waste products of misdigestion, and the body is unable to
digest well when it is weak or ill.

There's an old saying about this: "feed a cold, starve a fever."
Most people think this saying means you should eat when you have a
cold. What the saying really means is if you feed a cold then you
will soon have to starve a fever. Protein foods especially are not
digested by a diseased body, and as mentioned before, the waste
products of protein indigestion are especially poisonous. That is
all the body needs when it is already down, another load of poison
which it can't eliminate due to weakness and enervation.

Weight loss is usually associated with illness, as it should be! In
times of acute illness an otherwise healthy body loses its appetite
for food because it is prosurvival to stop eating. It is very hard
to coax a sick animal to eat. Their bodies, not controlled by a mind
full of complex learned responses and false ideas, automatically
know that fasting is nature's method of healing. Contrary to popular
understanding, digestion, assimilation, and elimination require the
expenditure of considerable energy. This fact may contradict the
reader's experience because everyone has become tired when they have
worked a long time without eating, and then experienced the lift
after eating. But an ill body cannot digest efficiently so instead
of providing energy extracted from foods, the body is further
burdened by yet another load of toxic material produced by fermented
and putrefied food. This adds insult to injury in a sick body that
is already drowning in its own garbage.

Worse, during illness most available vital force is already
redirected into healing; it is not available for digestion. It is
important to allow a sick body to proceed with healing and not to
obstruct the process with unnecessary digestion or suppress the
symptoms (which actually are the healing efforts) with drugs. If you
have an acute illness, and you stop all food intake except for pure
water and herb teas, and perhaps some vegetable broth, or dilute
non-sweet juice, you have relieved your body of an immense effort.
Instead of digesting, the body goes to work on catching up on
healing. The body can and will almost inevitably heal itself if the
sick person will have faith in it, cooperate with the body's efforts
by allowing the symptoms of healing to exist, reduce or eliminate
the intake of food to allow the body to marshal its energies,
maintain a positive mental attitude and otherwise stay out of the
way.

Many people intensely dread missing even one meal. These folks
usually are and have been so toxic that their bodies had been
stashing uneliminated toxins in their fat for years. They are
usually so addicted to caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, and so forth,
that when they had fasted, even briefly, their bodies were forced to
dip into highly-polluted fat reserves while simultaneously the body
begins withdrawal. People like this who try to fast experience
highly unpleasant symptoms including headache, irritability,
inability to think or concentrate, blurred vision, profound fatigue,
aches, etc. Most of these symptoms come from low blood sugar, but
combined with the toxins being released from fat and combined with
going through multiple addictive withdrawals, the discomforts are
more than most people are willing to tolerate. Fasting on juice is
much more realistic for cases like this. It is little wonder that
when a hygienist suggests a fast to improve health, this type of
case asserts positively that fasting is quite impossible, they have
tried it, it is absolutely terrible and know that they can't do it.

This rejection is partly due to a cultural expectation (one
reinforced by western medicine) that all unpleasant symptoms should
be avoided or suppressed. To voluntarily experience unpleasant
sensations such as those mentioned above is more than the ordinary
timid person will subject themselves to, even in order to regain
health. They will allow surgery, drugs with violent and dangerous
side effects, painful and invasive testing procedures and
radiation--all unpleasant and sometimes extremely uncomfortable.
These therapies are accepted because someone else with authority is
doing it to them. And, they have been told that it they don't submit
they will not ever feel better and probably will die in the near
future. Also people think that they have no alternative, that the
expert in front of them knows what is best, so they feel relieved to
have been relieved of the responsibility for their own condition and
its treatment.

Preventative Fasting

During the years it takes for a body to degenerate enough to prompt
a fast, the body has been storing up large quantities of unprocessed
toxins in the cells, tissues, fat deposits, and organs. The body in
its wisdom will always choose to temporarily deposit overwhelming
amounts of toxins somewhere harmless rather than permit the blood
supply to become polluted or to use secondary elimination routes. A
body will use times when the liver is less burdened to eliminate
these stored toxic debris. The hygienists' paradigm asserts that the
manifestation of symptoms or illness are all by themselves,
absolute, unassailable proof that further storage of toxic wastes in
the cells, tissues, fat deposits, and organs is not possible and
that an effort toward elimination is absolutely necessary. Thus the
first time a person fasts a great quantity of toxins will normally
be released. Being the resident of a body when this is happening can
be quite uncomfortable. For this reason alone, preventative fasting
is a very wise idea.

Before the body becomes critically ill, clean up your reserve fuel
supply (fat deposits) by burning off some accumulated fat that is
rich in toxic deposits and then replace it with clean, non-toxic fat
that you will make while eating sensibly. If you had but fasted
prophylactically as a preventative or health-creating measure before
you became seriously ill, the initial detoxification of your body
could have been accomplished far more comfortably, while you were
healthy, while your vital force was high and while your body
otherwise more able to deal with detoxification.

Each time you fast, even if it is only one day, you allow your body
to go through a partial detox, and each time it becomes easier and
more comfortable than the last time. The body learns how to fast.
Each time you fast it, your body slips into a cleansing mode more
quickly, and each time you fast you lighten the load of stored
toxins. Perhaps you have already eliminated the caffeine your body
had stored, which frequently causes severe headaches on withdrawal,
not to mention fatigue. It certainly helps to have this behind you
before you go on to the elimination of other irritating substances.
Many people have gone through alcohol or tobacco withdrawal, and
understand that it is very unpleasant, and also that it must be done
in the pursuit of health. Why not withdraw from the rest of the
irritating and debilitating substances we take into our system on an
ongoing basis, and why not grit your way through the eliminative
process, withdraw, from food addictions such as sugar or salt, and
from foods that you may be allergic to like wheat, dairy products or
eggs.

It is very wise to invest in your own insurance plan by
systematically detoxifying while you are still healthy. Plan it into
your life, when it is convenient, such as once a week on Sunday, or
even once a month on a quiet day. Take a few days of vacation, go to
a warm, beautiful place and devote part or all of it to cleansing.
Treat yourself by taking an annual trip to Hawaii, fasting at a
hotel on the beach--do whatever it takes to motivate yourself. And
consider this: vacations are enormously cheaper when you stay out of
restaurants.

If you have accustomed your body to 24 hour fasts, then you can work
on 48 hour fasts, and over time work up to 72 hour fasts, all on a
continuum. You may find it becoming increasingly comfortable,
perhaps even pleasant, something you look forward to. Fasting a
relatively detoxified body feels good, and people eventually really
get into the clean, light, clear headed, perhaps spiritually aware
state that goes along with it.

By contrast, fasting when you are sick is much more difficult
because your vitality or vital force is very low, you already have
no energy, and probably have unpleasant symptoms that must be dealt
with at the same time. There may be the added stress of being forced
into a cleanse because you are too nauseous to eat. Most people let
their health go until they are forced into dealing with it; they are
too busy living, so why bother.

The truth is that our body does age, and over time becomes less able
to deal with insults; the accumulated effect of insults and aging
eventually leads most of us to some serious degenerative illness.
Normally this begins happening around age 50 if not sooner. Some of
us that were gifted with good genes or what I call "a good start"
may have reached the age of 60 or 75 or even 90 without serious
illness, but those people are few and far between. Why not tip the
scales in your favor by preventing or staving off health problems
with systematic detoxification at your own convenience.

Climb into the drivers seat and start to take control and gain
confidence in your own ability to deal with your body, your own
health, and your own life. When it gets right down to the bottom
line, there is really only one thing in the world that is really
yours, and that is your life. Take control and start managing it.
The reward will be a more qualitative life.






Chapter Four

Colon Cleansing





From The Hygienic Dictionary

Autointoxication. [1] the accumulations on the bowel wall become a
breeding ground for unhealthy bacterial life forms. The heavy mucus
coating in the colon thickens and becomes a host for putrefaction.
The blood capillaries to the colon begin to pick up the toxins,
poisons and noxious debris as it seeps through the bowel wall. All
tissues and organs of the body are now taking on toxic substances.
Here is the beginning of true autointoxication on a physiological
level. _Bernard Jensen, Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management._
[2] All maladies are due to the lack of certain food principles,
such as mineral salts or vitamins, or to the absence of the normal
defenses of the body, such as the natural protective flora. When
this occurs, toxic bacteria invade the lower alimentary canal, and
the poisons thus generated pollute the bloodstream and gradually
deteriorate and destroy every tissue, gland and organ of the body.
_Sir Arbuthnot Lane. _[3] The common cause of gastro-intestinal
indigestion is enervation and overeating When food is not digested,
it becomes a poison. Dr. John.H. Tilden, Impaired Health: Its Cause
and Cure, 1921. [4] a clogging up of the large intestine by a
building up (on) the bowel wall to such an extent that feces can
hardly pass through. autointoxication is a direct result of
intestinal constipation. Faulty nutrition is a major underlying
factor in constipation. The frequency or quantity of fecal
elimination is not an indication of the lack of constipation in the
bowel._ Bernard Jensen, Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management._

I am not a true believer in any single healing method or system. I
find much truth in many schools and use a wide variety of
techniques. The word for my inclination is eclectic.

The most effective medicine in my arsenal is water fasting followed
closely in potency by other, less rigorous detoxifying diets. Colon
cleansing ranks next in healing power. In fact it is difficult to
separate colon cleansing from fasting because detoxification
programs should always be accompanied by colon cleansing. Further
down the scale of efficatiousness comes dietary reform to eliminate
allergic reactions and to present the body with foods it is capable
of digesting without creating toxemia. Last, and usually least in
effectiveness in my arsenal, are orthotropic substances (in the form
of little pills and capsules) commonly known as vitamins or food
supplements.

Interestingly, acceptance of these methods by my clients runs in
exact opposition to their effectiveness. People prefer taking
vitamins because they seem like the allopaths' pills, taking pills
demands little or no responsibility for change. The least popular
prescription I can write is a monodiet of water for several weeks or
a month. Yet this is my most powerful medicine.

It is possible to resolve many health complaints without fasting,
simply by cleansing the colon and regaining normal lower bowel
function. Colonics take little personal effort and are much easier
to get people to accept than fasting. So I can fully understand how
perfectly honest and ethical naturopaths have developed obsessions
with colon cleansing. Some healers have loudly and repeatedly (and
wrongly) proclaimed that constipation is the sole cause of disease,
and thus, the only real cure for any illness is colon cleansing.

Even though it is possible to have a lot of successes with the
simple (though unpleasant to administer) technique of colon
cleansing, degenerated lower bowels are the only cause of disease. I
prefer to use bowel cleansing as an adjunct to more complete healing
programs. However, old classics of hygiene and even a few new books
strongly make the case for colonics. Some of these books are
entirely one-sided, single-cause single-cure approaches, and sound
convincing to the layperson. For this reason, I think I should take
a few paragraphs and explain why some otherwise well-intentioned
health professionals have overly-advocated colonics (and other
practices as well).

Most Diseases Cure Themselves

If you ask any honest medical doctor how they cure diseases, they
will tell you that most acute disease conditions and a smaller,
though significant percentage (probably a majority) of chronic
disease conditions are self-limiting and will, given time, get
better all by themselves. So for most complaints, the honest
allopathic doctor sees their job as giving comfort and easing the
severity of the symptoms until a cure happens.

This same scenario, when viewed from a hygienist's perspective, is
that almost all acute and many chronic conditions are simply the
body's attempt to handle a crisis of toxemia. For two reasons the
current crisis will probably go away by itself. The positive reason
is that the toxic overload will be resolved: the person changes
their dietary habits or the stressor that temporarily lowered their
vital force and produced enervation is removed, then digestion
improves and the level of self-generated toxins is reduced. The
negative reason for a complaint to "cure" itself is that the
suffering person's vital force drops below the level that the
symptom can be manifested and the complaint goes away because a new,
more serious disease is developing.

I view this second possibility as highly undesirable because strong,
healthy bodies possessing a high degree of vital force are able to
eliminate toxins rather violently, frequently producing very
uncomfortable symptoms that are not life-threatening. However, as
the vital force drops, the body changes its routes of secondary
elimination and begins using more centrally located vital organs and
systems to dispose of toxemia. This degeneration producing less
unpleasant symptoms, but in the long run, damages essential organs
and moves the person closer to their final disease.

A young vigorous body possessing a large degree of vital force will
almost always route surplus toxins through skin tissues and
skin-like mucus membranes, producing repeated bouts of sinusitis, or
asthma, or colds, or a combination of all these. Each acute
manifestation will "cure" itself by itself eventually. But
eventually the body's vital force can no longer create these
aggressive cleansing phenomena and the toxemia begins to go deeper.
When the allopathic doctor gets a patient complaining of sinusitis,
they know they will eventually get a cure. The "cure" however, might
well be a case of arthritis.

This unfortunate reality tends to make young, idealistic physicians
become rather disillusioned about treating degenerative conditions
because the end result of all their efforts is, in the end, death
anyway. The best they can do is to alleviate suffering and to a
degree, prolong life. The worst they can do is to prolong suffering.

Thus, the physicians main job is to get the patient to be patient,
to wait until the body corrects itself and stops manifesting the
undesired symptom. Thus comes the prime rule of all humane medicine:
first of all, do no harm! If the doctor simply refrains from making
the body worse, it will probably get better by itself. But the
patient, rarely resigned to quiet suffering, comes in demanding fast
relief, demanding a cure. In fact, if the patient were resigned to
quiet suffering they would not consult a doctor. So if the doctor
wants to keep this patient and make a living they must do something.
If that something the doctor must do does little or no harm and
better yet, can also alleviate the symptoms, the doctor is
practicing good medicine and will have a very high cure rate and be
financially successful if they have a good bedside manner. This kind
of doctor may be allopathic and/or "natural," may use herbs or
practice homeopathy.

The story of Dr. Jennings, a very successful and famous or infamous
(depending on your viewpoint) physician, who practiced in
Connecticut in the early 1800s exemplifies this type of approach.

Dr. Jennings had his own unique medicines. Their composition was of
his own devising, and were absolutely secret. He had pills and
colored bitter drops of various sorts that were compounded himself
in his own pharmacy. Dr. Jennings' patients generally recovered and
had few or no complications. This must be viewed in contrast to the
practices of his fellow doctors of that era, whose black bags were
full of mercury and arsenic and strychnine, whose practices included
obligatory bleeding. These techniques and medicines "worked" by
poisoning the body or by reducing its blood supply and thus lowering
its vital force, ending the body's ability to manifest the
undesirable symptom. If the poor patient survived being victimized
by their own physician, they were tough enough to survive both their
disease and the doctor's cure. Typically, the sick had many, lengthy
complications, long illnesses, and many "setbacks" requiring many
visits, earning the physician a great living.

Dr. Jennings operated differently. He would prescribe one or two
secret medicines from his black bag and instruct the patient to stay
in bed, get lots of rest, drink lots of water, eat little and
lightly, and continue taking the medicine until they were well. His
cure rate was phenomenal. Demand they might, but Dr. Jennings would
never reveal what was in his pills and vials. Finally at the end of
his career, to instruct his fellow man, Dr. Jennings confessed. His
pills were made from flour dough, various bitter but harmless herbal
substances, and a little sugar. His red and green and black
tinctures, prescribed five or ten drips at a time mixed in a glass
of water several times daily, were only water and alcohol, some
colorant and something bitter tasting, but harmless. Placebos in
other words.

Upon confessing, Dr. Jennings had to run for his life. I believe he
ended up retiring on the western frontier, in Indiana. Some of his
former patients were extremely angry because they had paid good
money, top dollar for "real" medicines, but were given only flour
and water. The fact that they got better didn't seem to count.

If the physicians curative procedure suppresses the symptom and/or
lowers the vital force with toxic drugs or surgery, (either result
will often as not end the complaint) the allopathic doctor is
practicing bad medicine. This doctor too will have a high cure rate
and a good business (if they have an effective bedside manner)
because their drugs really do make the current symptoms vanish very
rapidly. Additionally, their practice harmonizes with a common but
vicious dramatization of many people which goes: when a body is
malfunctioning, it is a bad body and needs to be punished. So lets
punish it with poisons and if that don't work, lets really punish it
by cutting out the offending part.

However, if the physician can do something that will do no harm but
raises the vital force and/or lowers the level of toxemia, this
doctor will have a genuine cure rate higher than either of the two
techniques. Why does raising the vital force help? Because it
reduces enervation, improves the digestion, lowers the creation of
new toxins and improves the function of the organs of elimination,
also reducing the toxic overload that is causing the complaint.

Techniques that temporarily and quickly raise the vital force
include homeopathy, chiropractic, vitamin therapy, massage,
acupuncture and acupressure and many more spiritually oriented
practices. Healers who use these approaches and have a good bedside
manner can have a very good business, they can have an
especially-profitable practice if they do nothing to lower the level
of toxemia being currently generated. Their patients do experience
prompt relief but must repeatedly take the remedy. This makes for
satisfied customers and a repeat business.

The best approach of all focuses on reducing the self-generated
level of toxemia, cleansing to remove deposits of old toxemia,
rebuilding the organs of elimination and digestion to prevent the
formation of new toxemia, and then, to alleviate the current
symptoms and make it easier for the patient to be patient while
their body heals, the healer raises artificially and temporarily the
vital force with vitamins, massage, acupressure, etc. This wise and
benevolent physician is going to have the highest cure rate among
those wise patients who will accept the prescription, but will not
make as much money because the patients permanently get better and
no longer need a physician. There's not nearly as much repeat
business.

Colonics are one of the best types of medicine. They clean up
deposits of old toxemia (though there are sure to be other deposits
in the body's tissues colonics do not touch). Colon cleansing
reduces the formation of new toxemia from putrefying fecal matter
(but dietary reform is necessary to maximize this benefit). Most
noticeable to the patient, a colonic immediately alleviates current
symptoms by almost instantly reducing the current toxic load. A
well-done enema or colonic is such a powerful technique that a
single one will often make a severe headache vanish, make an
onsetting cold go away, end a bout of sinusitis, end an asthmatic
attack, reduce the pain of acute arthritic inflammation, reduce or
stop an allergic reaction. Enemas are also thrifty: they are
self-administered and can prevent most doctor's visits seeking
relief for acute conditions.

Diseases of the colon itself, including chronic constipation,
colitis, diverteculitis, hemorrhoids, irritable bowel syndrome, and
mucous colitis, are often cured solely by an intensive series of
several dozen colonics given close together. Contrary to popular
belief, many people think that if they have dysentery or other forms
of loose stools that a colonic is the last thing they need.
Surprisingly, a series of colonics will eliminate many of these
conditions as well. People with chronic diarrhea or loose stools are
usually very badly constipated. This may seem a contradiction in
terms but it will be explained shortly.

A century ago there was much less scientific data about the
functioning of the human body. Then it was easy for a
hygienically-oriented physician to come to believe that colonics
were the single best medicine available. The doctor practicing
nothing but colonics will have a very high rate of cure and a lot of
very satisfied clients. Most importantly, this medicine will have
done no harm.

The Repugnant Bowel

I don't know why, but people of our culture have a deep-seated
reluctance to relate to the colon or it's functions. People don't
want to think about the colon or personally get involved with it by
giving themselves enemas or colonics. They become deeply embarrassed
at having someone else do it for them. People are also shy about
farts, and most Americans have a hard time not smiling or reacting
in some way when someone in their presence breaks wind, although the
polite amongst us pretend that we didn't notice. Comedians usually
succeed in getting a laugh out of an audience when they come up with
a fart or make reference to some other bowel function. People don't
react the same way to urinary functions or discharges, although
these also may have an unpleasant odor and originate from the same
"private" area.

When I first mention to clients that they need a minimum of 12
colonics or many more enemas than 12 during a fasting or cleansing
program they are inevitably shocked. To most it seems that no one in
their right mind would recommend such a treatment, and that I must
certainly be motivated by greed or some kind of a psychological
quirk. Then I routinely show them reproductions of X-rays of the
large intestine showing obvious loss of normal structure and
function resulting from a combination of constipation, the effects
of gravity, poor abdominal muscle tone, emotional stress, and poor
diet. In the average colon more than 50% of the hastrum (muscles
that impel fecal matter through the organ) are dysfunctional due to
loss of tone caused by impaction of fecal matter and/or constriction
of the large intestine secondary to stress (holding muscular tension
in the abdominal area) and straining during bowel movement.

A typical diseased colon

The average person also has a prolapsed (sagging) transverse colon,
and a distorted misplaced ascending and descending colon. I took a
course in colon therapy before purchasing my first colonic machine.
The chiropractor teaching the class required all of his patients
scheduled for colonics to take a barium enema followed by an X-ray
of their large intestine prior to having colonics and then make
subsequent X-rays after each series of 12 colonics. Most of his
patients experienced so much immediate relief they voluntarily took
at least four complete series, or 48 colonics, before their X-rays
began to look normal in terms of structure. It also took about the
same number, 48 colonics, for the patients to notice a significant
improvement in the function of the colon. In reviewing over 10,000
X-rays taken at his clinic prior to starting colonics, the
chiropractor had seen only two normal colon X-rays and these were
from farm boys who grew up eating simple foods from the garden and
doing lots of hard work.

The X-rays showed that it took a minimum of 12 colon treatments to
bring about a minimal but observable change in the structure of the
colon in the desired direction, and for the patient to begin to
notice that bowel function was improving, plus the fact that they
started to feel better.

A Healthy Colon

From my point of view the most amazing part of this whole experience
was that the chiropractor did not recommend any dietary changes
whatsoever. His patients were achieving great success from colonics
alone. I had thought dietary changes would be necessary to avoid
having the same dismal bowel condition return. I still think
colonics are far more effective if people are on a cleansing diet
too. However, I was delighted to see the potential for helping
people through colonics.

For me, the most interesting part of this colonic school was that I
personally was required to have my own barium enema and X-ray. I was
privately certain that mine would look normal, because after all, I
had been on a raw food diet for six years, and done considerable
amount of fasting, all of which was reputed to repair a civilized
colon. Much to my surprise my colon looked just as mangled and
dysfunctional as everyone else's', only somewhat worse because it
had a loop in the descending colon similar to a cursive letter "e"
which doctors call a volvulus. Surgeons like to cut volvululii out
because they frequently cause bowel obstructions. It seemed quite
unfair. All those other people with lousy looking colons had been
eating the average American diet their whole life, but I had been so
'pure!'

On further reflection I remembered that I had a tendency toward
constipation all through my childhood and young adulthood, and that
during my two pregnancies the pressure of the fetus on an already
constipated bowel had made it worse resulting in the distorted
structure seen in the X-ray. This experience made it very clear that
fasting, cleansing diets, and corrected diet would not reverse
damage already done. Proper diet and fasting would however, prevent
the condition of the colon from getting any worse than it already
was.

I then realized that I had just purchased the very tool I needed to
correct my own colon, and I was eager to get home to get started on
it. I had previously thought that I was just going to use this
machine for my patients, because they had been asking for this kind
of an adjunct to my services for some time. I ended up giving myself
over a hundred colonics at the rate of three a week over many
months. I then out of curiosity had another barium enema and X-ray
to validate my results. Sure enough the picture showed a colon that
looked far more 'normal' with no vulvulus. That little "e" had
disappeared.

What Is Constipation?

Most people think they are not constipated because they have a bowel
movement almost every day, accomplished without straining. I have
even had clients tell me that they have a bowel movement once a
week, and they are quite certain that they are not constipated. The
most surprising thing to novice fasters is that repeated enemas or
colonics during fasting begins to release many pounds of undeniably
real, old, caked fecal matter and/or huge mucus strings. The
first-time faster can hardly believe these were present. These old
fecal deposits do not come out the first time one has enemas or
necessarily the fifth time. And all of them will not be removed by
the tenth enema. But over the course of extended fasting or a long
spell of light raw food eating with repeated daily enemas, amazing
changes do begin to occur. It seems that no one who has eaten a
civilized diet has escaped the formation of caked deposits lining
the colon's walls, interfering with its function. This material does
not respond to laxatives or casually administered enemas.

Anyone who has not actually seen (and smelled) what comes out of an
"average" apparently healthy person during colonics will really
believe it could happen or can accurately imagine it. Often there
are dark black lumpy strings, lumps, or gravel, evil smelling discs
shaped like sculpted hemispheres similar to the pockets lining the
wall of the colon itself. These discs are rock-hard and may come out
looking like long black braids. There may also be long tangled
strings of gray/brown mucous, sheets and flakes of mucous, and worse
yet, an occasional worm (tape worm) or many smaller ones. Once
confronted however, it is not hard to imagine how these fecal rocks
and other obnoxious debris interfere with the proper function of the
colon. They make the colon's wall rigid and interfere with
peristalsis thus leading to further problems with constipation, and
interfere with adsorption of nutrients.

Our modern diet is by its "de-"nature, very constipating. In the
trenches of the First World War, cheese was given the name 'chokem
ass' because the soldiers eating this as a part of their daily
ration developed severe constipation. Eaten by itself or with other
whole foods, moderate amounts of cheese may not produce health
problems in people who are capable of digesting dairy products. But
cheese when combined with white flour becomes especially
constipating. White bread or most white-flour crackers contain a lot
of gluten, a very sticky wheat protein that makes the bread bind
together and raise well. But white flour is lacking the bran, where
most of the fiber is located. And many other processed foods are
missing their fiber.

In an earlier chapter I briefly showed how digestion works by
following food from the mouth to the large intestine. To fully grasp
why becoming constipated is almost a certainty in our civilization a
few more details are required. Food leaving the small intestine is
called chyme, a semi-liquid mixture of fiber, undigested bits,
indigestible bits, and the remains of digestive enzymes. Chyme is
propelled through the large intestine by muscular contractions. The
large intestine operates on what I dub the "chew chew train"
principle, where the most recent meal you ate enters the large
intestine as the caboose (the last car of a train) and helps to push
out the train engine (the car at the front that toots), which in a
healthy colon should represent the meal eaten perhaps twelve hours
earlier. The muscles in the colon only contract when they are
stretched, so it is the volume of the fecal matter stretching the
large intestine that triggers the muscles to push the waste material
along toward the rectum and anus.

Eating food lacking fiber greatly reduces the volume of the chyme
and slows peristalsis. But moving through fast or slow, the colon
still keeps on doing another of its jobs, which is to transfer the
water in the chime back into the bloodstream, reducing dehydration.
So the longer chime remains in the colon, the dryer and harder and
stickier it gets. That's why once arrived at the "end of the tracks"
fecal matter should be evacuated in a timely manner before it gets
to dry and too hard to be moved easily. Some constipated people do
have a bowel movement every day but are evacuating the meal eaten
many days or even a week previously.

Most hygienists believe that when the colon becomes lined with
hardened fecal matter it is permanently and by the very definition
of the word itself, constipated. This type of constipation is not
perceived as an uncomfortable or overly full feeling or a desire to
have a bowel movement that won't pass. But it has insidious effects.
Usually constipation delays transit time, increasing the adsorption
of toxins generated from misdigestion of food; by coating and
locking up significant portions of colon it also reduces the
adsorption of certain minerals and electrolytes.

Sometimes, extremely constipated people have almost constant runny
bowels because the colon has become so thickly and impenetrably
lined with old fecal matter that it no longer removes much moisture.
This condition is often misinterpreted as diarrhea. The large
intestine's most important task is to transfer water-soluble
minerals from digested food to the blood. When a significant part of
the colon's surface becomes coated with impermeable dried rigid
fecal matter or mucus it can no longer assimilate effectively and
the body begins to experience partial mineral starvation in the
presence of plenty. It is my observation from dozens of cases that
when the colon has been effectively cleansed the person has a
tendency to gain weight while eating amounts of food that before
only maintained body weight, while people who could not gain weight
or who were wasting away despite eating heavily begin to gain. And
problems like soft fingernails, bone loss around teeth or porous
bones tend to improve.

The Development Of My Own Constipation

The history of my own constipation, though it especially relates to
a very rustic childhood, is typical of many people. I was also
raised on a very constipating diet which consisted largely of
processed cheese and crackers. Mine was accelerated by shyness,
amplified by lack of comfortable facilities.

I spent my early years on the Canadian prairies, where everybody had
an outhouse. The fancy modern versions are frequently seen on
construction sites. These are chemical toilets, quiet different than
the ones I was raised with because somebody or something
mysteriously comes along, empties them and installs toilet paper.
The ones I'm familiar with quickly developed a bad-smelling steaming
mound in the center--or it was winter when the outhouse was so cold
that everything froze almost before it hit the ground in the hole
below. (And my rear end seemed to almost freeze to the seat!) The
toilet paper was usually an out of season issue of Eatons mail order
catalogue with crisp glossy paper. Perhaps it is a peculiarity of
the north country, but at night there are always monsters lurking
along the path to the outhouse, and darkness comes early and stays
late.

When nature called and it was daylight, and there was no blizzard
outside, the outhouse received a visit from me. If on the other
hand, when it was dark (we had no electricity), and there was a cold
wind creating huge banks of snow, I would 'just skip it,' because
the alternative--an indoor chamber pot, white enamel with a lid--was
worse. This potty had to be used more or less publicly because the
bedrooms were shared and there was no indoor bathroom. I was always
very modest about my private parts and private functions, and
potty's were only used in emergencies, and usually with considerable
embarrassment. No one ever explained to me that it was not good for
me to retain fecal matter, and I never thought about it unless my
movements became so hard that it was painful to eliminate.

Later in life, I continued this pattern of putting off bowel
movements, even though outhouses and potties were a thing of the
past. As a young adult I could always think of something more
interesting to do than sitting on a pot, besides it was messy and
sometimes accompanied by embarrassing sound effects which were
definitely not romantic if I was in the company of a young man.
During two pregnancies the tendency to constipation was aggravated
by the weight of the fetus resting on an already sluggish bowel, and
the discomfort of straining to pass my first hard bowel movement
after childbirth with a torn perineum I won't forget.

Rapid Relief From Colon Cleansing

During fasting the liver is hard at work processing toxins released
from fat and other body deposits. The liver still dumps its wastes
into the intestines through the bile duct. While eating normally,
bile, which contains highly toxic substances, is passed through the
intestines and is eliminated before too much is reabsorbed. (It is
the bile that usually makes the fecal matter so dark in color.)
However, reduction of food bulk reduces or completely eliminates
peristalsis, thus allowing intestinal contents to sit for extended
periods. And the toxins in the bile are readsorbed, forming a
continuous loop, further burdening the liver.

The mucus membranes lining the colon constantly secrete lubricants
to ease fecal matter through smoothly. This secretion does not stop
during fasting; in fact, it may increase because intestinal mucus
often becomes a secondary route of elimination. Allowed to remain in
the bowel, toxic mucus is an irritant while the toxins in it may be
reabsorbed, forming yet another closed loop and further burdening
the liver.

Daily enemas or colonics administered during fasting or while on
cleansing diets effectively remove old fecal material stored in the
colon and immediately ease the livers load, immediately relieve
discomfort by allowing the liver's efforts to further detoxify the
blood, and speed healing. Fasters cleansing on juice or raw food
should administer two or three enemas in short succession every day
for the first three days to get a good start on the cleansing
process, and then every other day or at very minimum, every few
days. Enemas or colonics should also be taken whenever symptoms
become uncomfortable, regardless of whether you have already cleaned
the colon that day or not. Once the faster has experienced the
relief from symptoms that usually comes from an enema they become
more than willing to repeat this mildly unpleasant experience.

Occasionally enemas, by filling the colon and making it press on the
liver, induce discharges of highly toxic bile that may cause
temporary nausea. Despite the induced nausea it is still far better
to continue with colonics because of the great relief experienced
after the treatment. If nausea exists or persists during colon
cleansing, consider trying slight modifications such as less or no
massage of the colon in the area of the gall bladder (abdominal area
close to the bottom of the right rib cage), and putting slightly
less water in the colon when filling it up. It also helps to make
sure that the stomach is empty of any fluid for one hour prior to
the colonic. Resume drinking after the colonic sessions is
completed. If you are one of these rare people who 'toss their
bile', just keep a plastic bucket handy and some water to rinse out
the mouth after, and carry on as usual.

Enemas Versus Colonics

People frequently wonder what is the difference between a colonic
and an enema.

First of all enemas are a lot cheaper because you give them to
yourself; an enema bag usually costs about ten dollars, is available
at any large drug store, and is indefinitely reusable. Colonics cost
anywhere from 30 to 75 dollars a session.

Chiropractors and naturopaths who offer this service hire a colonic
technician that may or may not be a skilled operator. It is a good
idea to find a person who has a very agreeable and professional
manner, who can make you feel at ease since relaxation is very
important. It is also beneficial to have a colonic therapist who
massages the abdomen and foot reflexes appropriately during the
session.

Enemas and colonics can accomplish exactly the same beneficial work.
But colonics accomplish more improvement in less time than enemas
for several reasons. During a colonic from 30 to 50 gallons of water
are flushed through the large intestines, usually in a repetitive
series of fill-ups followed by flushing with a continuous flow of
water. This efficiency cannot even be approached with an enema. But
by repeating the enema three times in close succession a
satisfactory cleanse can be achieved. Persisted with long enough,
enemas will clean the colon every bit as well as a colonic machine
can.

Enemas given at home take a lot less time than traveling to receive
a colonics at someone's clinic, and can be done entirely at you own
convenience--a great advantage when fasting because you can save
your energy for internal healing. But colonics are more appropriate
for some. There are fasters who are unable to give themselves an
enema either because their arms are too short and their body is too
long and they lack flexibility, or because of a physical handicap or
they can't confront their colon, so they let someone else do it.
Some don't have the motivation to give themselves a little
discomfort but are comfortable with someone else doing it to them.
Some very sick people are too weak to cleanse their own colon, so
they should find someone to assist them with an at-home enema or
have someone take them to a colonic therapist.

Few people these days have any idea how to properly give themselves
an enema. The practice has been discredited by traditional medical
doctors as slightly dangerous, perhaps addictive and a sign of
psychological weirdness. Yet Northamericans on their civilized, low
fiber, poorly combined diets suffer widely from constipation. One
proof of this is the fact that chemical laxatives, with their own
set of dangers and liabilities, occupy many feet of drug store shelf
space and are widely advertised. Is the medical profession's
disapproval of the enema related to the fact that once the initial
purchase of an enema bag has been made there are no further expenses
for laxatives? Or perhaps it might be that once a person discovers
they can cure a headache, stop a cold dead in its tracks with an
enema, they aren't visiting the M.D.s so often.

The enema has also been wrongly accused of causing a gradual loss of
colon muscle tone, eventually preventing bowel movements without the
stimulation of an enema, leading finally to flaccidity and
enlargement of the lower bowel. This actually can happen; when it
does occur it is the result of frequent administration of small
amounts of water (fleet enemas) for the purpose of stimulating a
normal bowel movement. The result is constant stretching of the
rectum without sufficient fluid to enter the descending colon. A
completely opposite, highly positive effect comes from properly
administered enemas while cleansing.

The difference between helpful and potentially harmful enemas lies
in the amount of water injected and the frequency of use. Using a
cup or two of water to induce a bowel movement may eventually cause
dependency, will not strengthen the colon and may after years of
this practice, result in distention and enlargement of the rectum or
sigmoid colon. However, a completely empty average-sized colon has
the capacity of about a gallon of water. When increasingly larger
enemas are administered until the colon is nearly emptied of fecal
matter and the injection of close to a gallon of water is achieved,
beneficial exercise and an increase in overall muscle tone are the
results.

Correctly given, enemas (and especially colonics) serve as
strengthening exercises for the colon. This long tubular muscle is
repeatedly and completely filled with water, inducing it to
vigorously exercise while evacuating itself multiple times. The
result is a great increase in muscle tone, acceleration of
peristalsis and eventually, after several dozens of repetitions, a
considerable reduction of transit time. Well-done enemas work the
colon somewhat less effectively and do not improve muscle tone quite
as much as colonics.

Injecting an entire gallon of water with an enema bag is very
impractical when a person is eating normally. But on a light
cleansing diet or while fasting the amount of new material passing
into the colon is small or negligible. During the first few days of
fasting if two or three enemas are administered each day in
immediate succession the colon is soon completely emptied of
recently eaten food and it becomes progressively easier to introduce
larger amounts of water. Within a few days of this regimen,
injecting half a gallon or more of water is easy and painless.

Probably for psychological reasons, some peoples' colons allow water
to be injected one time but then "freeze up" and resist successive
enemas. For this reason better results are often obtained by having
one enema, waiting a half hour, another enema, wait a half hour, and
have a final enema.

A colonic machine in the hands of an expert operator can administer
the equivalent of six or seven big enemas in less than one hour, and
do this without undue discomfort or effort from the person receiving
the colonic. However, the AMA has suppressed the use of colonics;
they are illegal to administer in many states. Where colonics are
legal, the chiropractors now consider this practice messy and not
very profitable compared to manipulations. So it is not easy to find
a skilled and willing colonic technician.

Anyone who plans to give themselves therapeutic enemas while fasting
would be well advised to first seek out a colonic therapist and
receive two or three colonics delivered one day apart while eating
lightly and then immediately begin the fast. Three colonics given on
three successive days of a light, raw food diet are sufficient to
empty all recently eaten food even from a very constipated,
distended and bloated colon, while acquainting a person with their
own bowel. Having an empty colon is actually a pleasant and to most
people a thoroughly novel experience. A few well-delivered colonics
can quickly accustom a person to the sensations accompanying the
enema and demonstrate the effect to be achieved by oneself with an
enema bag, something not quickly discoverable any other way.

How To Give Yourself An Enema

Enemas have been medically out of favor for a long time. Most people
have never had one. So here are simple directions to self-administer
an effective enema series.

The enema bag you select is important. It must hold at least two
quarts and be rapidly refillable. The best American-made brand is
made of rubber with about five feet of rubber hose ending in one of
two different white hard plastic insertion tips. The bag is designed
for either enemas or vaginal douches. It hangs from a detachable
plastic "S" hook. When filled to the brim it holds exactly one-half
gallon. The maker of this bag offers another model that costs about
a dollar more and also functions as a hot water bottle. A good
comforter it may make, but the dual purpose construction makes the
bag very awkward to rapidly refill. I recommend the inexpensive
model.

The plastic insertion tips vary somewhat. The straight tubular tip
is intended for enemas; the flared vaginal douche tip can be useful
for enemas too, in that it somewhat restrains unintentional
expulsion of the nozzle while filling the colon. However, its four
small holes do not allow a very rapid rate of flow.

To give yourself an enema, completely fill the bag with tepid water
that does not exceed body temperature. The rectum is surprisingly
sensitive to heat and you will flinch at temperatures only a degree
or two higher than 98 Fahrenheit. Cooler water is no problem; some
find the cold stimulating and invigorating. Fasters having
difficulty staying warm should be wary of cold water enemas. These
can drop core body temperature below the point of comfort.

Make sure the flow clamp on the tube is tightly shut and located a
few inches up the tube from the nozzle. Hang the filled bag from a
clothes or towel hook, shower nozzle, curtain rod, or other
convenient spot about four to five feet above the bathroom floor or
tub bottom. The higher the bag the greater the water pressure and
speed of filling. But too much pressure can also be uncomfortable.
You may have to experiment a bit with this.

Various body positions are possible for filling the colon. None is
correct or necessarily more effective than another. Experiment and
find the one you prefer. Some fill their colon kneeling and bending
forward in the bathtub or shower because there will likely be small
dribbles of water leaking from around the nozzle. Usually these
leaks do not contain fecal matter. Others prefer to use the bathroom
floor. For the bony, a little padding in the form of a folded towel
under knees and elbows may make the process more comfortable. You
may kneel and bend over while placing your elbows or hands on the
floor, reach behind yourself and insert the nozzle. You may also lie
on your back or on your side. Some think the left side is preferable
because the colon attaches to the rectum on the left side of the
body, ascends up the left side of the abdomen to a line almost as
high as the solar plexus, then transverses the body to the right
side where it descends again on the right almost to the groin. The
small intestine attaches to the colon near its lower-right
extremity. In fact these are the correct names given for the parts
of the colon: Ascending, Descending and Transverse Colon along with
the Sigmoid Colon or Rectum at the exit end.

As you become more expert at filling your colon with water you will
begin to become aware of its location by the weight, pressure and
sometimes temperature of the water you're injecting. You will come
to know how much of the colon has been filled by feel. You will also
become aware of peristalsis as the water is evacuated vigorously and
discover that sensations from a colon hard at work, though a bit
uncomfortable, are not necessarily pain.

Insertion of the nozzle is sometimes eased with a little lubricant.
A bit of soap or KY jelly is commonly used. If the nozzle can be
inserted without lubricant it will have less tendency to slip out.
However, do not tear or damage the anus by avoiding necessary
lubrication. After insertion, grip the clamp with one hand and open
it. The flow rate can be controlled with this clamp. Keeping a hand
on the clamp also prevents the nozzle from being expelled.

Water will begin flowing into the colon. Your goal is to empty the
entire bag into the colon before sensations of pressure or urgency
to evacuate the water force you to remove the nozzle and head for
the toilet. Relaxation of mind and body helps achieve this. You are
very unlikely to achieve a half-gallon fill up on the first attempt.
If painful pressure is experienced try closing the clamp for a
moment to allow the water to begin working its way around the
obstacle. Or, next time try hanging the bag lower, reducing its
height above the body and thus lowering the water pressure. Or, try
opening the clamp only partially. Or, try panting hard, so as to
make the abdomen move rapidly in and out, sort of shaking the colon.
This last technique is particularly good to get the water past a
blockage of intestinal gas.

It is especially important for Americans, whose culture does not
teach one to be tolerant of discomfort, to keep in mind that pain is
the body's warning that actual damage is being done to tissues.
Enemas can do no damage and pose no risk except to that rare
individual with weak spots in the colon's wall from cancers. When an
enema is momentarily perceived unpleasantly, the correct name for
the experience is a sensation, not pain. You may have to work at
increasing your tolerance for unpleasant sensations or it will take
you a long time to achieve the goal of totally filling the colon
with water. Be brave! And relax. A wise philosopher once said that
it is a rough Universe in which only the tigers survive--and
sometimes they have a hard time.

Eventually it will be time to remove the nozzle and evacuate the
water. Either a blockage (usually fecal matter, an air bubble, or a
tight 'U' turn in the colon, usually at either the splenetic, or
hepatic flexures located right below the rib cage) will prevent
further inflow (undesirable) or else the bag will completely empty
(good!) or the sensation of bursting will no longer be tolerable. Go
sit on the toilet and wait until all the water has passed. Then
refill the bag and repeat the process. Each time you fill the colon
it will allow more water to enter more easily with less
unpleasantness. Fasters and cleansers should make at least three
attempts at a complete fill-up each time they do an enema session.

Water and juice fasters will find that after the first few enemas,
it will become very easy to inject the entire half-gallon of water.
That is because there is little or no chime entering the colon.
After a few days the entire colon will seem (this is incorrect) to
be empty except when it is filled with water. This is the point to
learn an advanced self-administered enema technique. An average
colon empty of new food will usually hold about one gallon of water.
That is average. A small colon might only hold 3/4 gallon, a large
one might accept a gallon and a half, or even more. You'll need to
learn to simultaneously refill the bag while injecting water, so as
to achieve a complete irrigation of the whole colon. There are
several possible methods. You might try placing a pitcher or
half-gallon mason jar of tepid water next to the bag and after the
bag has emptied the first time, stand up while holding the tube in
the anus, refill the bag and then lie down again and continue
filling. You might have an assistant do this for you. You might try
hanging the bag from the shower head and direct a slow, continuous
dribble of lukewarm water from the shower into the bag while you
kneel or lie relaxed in the tub. This way the bag will never empty
and you stop filling only when you feel fullness and pressure all
the way back to the beginning of the ascending colon. Of course,
hanging from a slowly running shower head the bag will probably
overflow and you will get splashed and so will the bathroom floor
when your wet body moves rapidly from the tub to the toilet. I've
imagined making an enema bag from a two gallon plastic bucket with a
small plastic hose barb glued into a hole drilled in the bottom or
lower edge. If I were in the business of manufacturing enema bags
I'd make them hold at least one gallon.

A word of caution to those folks who have a pattern of overdoing it,
or tend to think that more is better. This is not true when it comes
to colon cleansing. Do not make more than three attempts to fill and
clean the colon with an enema bag. Usually the colon begins to
protest and won't accept any more fill-ups. When having colonics on
a colonic machine it is a good idea to continue until the water
comes back reasonably clear for that session. It is not a good idea
for a faster to have colonics that last more than three-quarters of
an hour to an hour maximum, or it will be too tiring. Even
non-fasters find colonics tiring. After all, the colon is basically
a big muscle that has become very lazy on a low-fiber diet.

I've personally administered over five thousand colonics, taught
several dozen fasters to self-administer their own and stood by
while they gave themselves one until they were quite expert. In all
that experience I've only seen one person have a seriously bad
result. This was a suicidally depressed water faster that I
(mistakenly) allowed to administer their own colonics with my
machine. This person not only took daily colonics, but allowed water
to flow through their colon for as long as two hours at a time.
Perhaps they were trying to wash out their mind? After several weeks
of this extreme excess, the faster became highly confused and
disoriented due to a severe electrolyte imbalance. They had to be
taken off water fasting immediately and recovered their mental
clarity in a few days. The loss of blood electrolytes happened
because during colonics there occurs a sort of low-grade very slow
reverse osmosis.

Curing With Enemas

It is not wise to continue regular colonics or enemas once a
detoxification program has been completed and you have returned to a
maintenance diet. The body should be allowed its regular
functioning.

But because enemas immediately lower the toxic load on the liver, I
do recommend people use them for prevention of an acute illness (you
feel like you are coming down with something), and for the treatment
of acute illnesses such as a cold. I also like to take one if I have
been away traveling for extended periods, eating carelessly. But do
not fall into a pattern of bingeing on bad food, and then trying to
get rid of it through colonics or laxative. This is bulimia, the
eating disorder discussed earlier.

The Sheltonite capital "N" Natural capital "H" Hygienists do not
recommend any colon cleansing, ever! They think that the colon will
spontaneously cleanse itself on a long water fast, but my experience
learned from monitoring hundreds of fasters is that it doesn't
really. Herbert Shelton also considered colon cleansing enervating
and therefore undesirable. Colon cleansing does use the faster's
energy but on the balance, colon cleansing saves more work on the
part of an overburdened liver than it uses up.






Chapter Five

Diet and Nutrition





From The Hygienic Dictionary

Food. [1] Life is a tragedy of nutrition. In food lies 99.99% of the
causes of all diseases and imperfect health of any kind. _Prof.
Arnold Ehret, Mucusless Diet Healing System._ [2] But elimination
will never heal perfectly just so long as you fail to discontinue
the supply of inside waste caused by eating and "wrong" eating. You
may clean and continue to clean indefinitely, but never with
complete results up to a perfect cleanliness, as long as the intake
of wrong or even too much right foods, is not stopped._ Prof. Arnold
Ehret, Mucusless Diet Healing System._ [3] Cooked food favors
bacterial, or organized, ferment preponderance, because cooking
kills the unorganized and organized ferments, and both are needed to
carry on the body's digestion. Raw foods--fruits and vegetables--favor
unorganized ferment digestion, because these foods carry vitamins,
which are unorganized ferments--enzymes. _Dr. John. H. Tilden,
Impaired Health: Its Cause and Cure, 1921._

Recently, my younger (adult) daughter asked my advice choosing
between a root canal or having a bridge made. This led to a
discussion of her eating habits in general. Defending her currently
less-than-optimum diet against my gentle criticism, she threw me a
tough riposte. "Why," she asked, when I was raised so perfectly as a
child, "when I ate only Organic food until I was ten and old enough
to make you send me to public school where I could eat those lousy
school lunches" (her unfeeling, heartless mother home-schooled her),
"why even at that young age, (before she spent her adolescent
rebellion eating junk food) why at that point did I still have a
mouthful of cavities?" And she did. At age ten my daughter needed
about ten fillings.

This beautiful daughter of a practicing naturopath had received
what, at the time, I considered virtually perfect nutrition. She
suckled hugely at her mother's abundant breast until age two. During
this time her mother ate a natural foods diet. After weaning my
daughter got only whole grains, a little fresh goat's milk from my
goat, fruits and lots of Organic vegetables. I started my spa when
my daughter was about five years old and from that point she was,
like it or not, a raw fooder. And all that raw food was Organic and
much of it from Great Oaks School's huge vegetable garden.

For my daughter to develop cavities on this diet is reminiscent of
Woody Allen's joke in his movie "Sleeper." Do you recall this one,
made about 1973? The plot is a take off on Rip Van Winkle. Woody
goes into the hospital for minor surgery. Unexpectedly he expires on
the operating table and his body is frozen in hopes that someday he
can be revived. One hundred and fifty years later he is revived.

The priceless scene I always think of takes place in his hospital
room immediately after he comes to consciousness. The doctor in
charge of his case is explaining to Woody what has happened. Woody
refuses to believe he died and was frozen, asserting that the whole
story is a put on. Woody insists that the 'doctor' is clearly an
actor hired by his friends! It absolutely can't be the year 2123.
'Oh, but it really is 2123,' insists the doctor. 'And it is no put
on by his friends; all his friends are long dead; Woody knows no one
at all in 2123 and had better prepare himself to start a new life.'

Woody still insists it is a put on. "I had a healthfood store," he
says, "and all my friends ate brown rice. They can't be dead!"

And my perfectly nourished daughter couldn't have developed
cavities! But she did. And if she cheated on her perfect diet, bad
food could not have amounted to more than two percent of her total
caloric intake from birth to age ten. I was a responsible mom and I
made sure she ate right! Now my daughter was demanding to know why
she had tooth decay. Fortunately, I now know the answer. The answer
is rather complex, but I can give a simplified explanation.

The Confusions About Diets and Foods

Like my daughter, many people of all ages are muddled about the
relationship between health and diet. Their confusions have created
a profitable market for health-related information. And equally,
their confusions have been created by books, magazine articles, and
TV news features. This avalanche of data is highly contradictory. In
fact, one reason I found it hard to make myself write my own book is
that I wondered if my book too would become just another part of the
confusion.

Few people are willing to tolerate very much uncertainty. Rather
than live with the discomfort of not knowing why, they will create
an explanation or find some answer, any answer, and then ever after,
assert its rightness like a shipwrecked person clings to a floating
spar in a storm. This is how I explain the genesis of many
contemporary food religions.

Appropriately new agey and spiritual, Macrobiotics teaches the way
to perfect health is to eat like a Japanese whole foods
vegetarian--the endless staple being brown rice, some cooked
vegetables and seaweeds, meanwhile balancing the "yin" and "yang" of
the foods. And Macrobiotics works great for a lot of people. But not
all people. Because there's next to nothing raw in the Macrobiotic
diet and some people are allergic to rice, or can get allergic to
rice on that diet.

Linda Clark's Diet for a Small Planet also has hundreds of thousands
of dedicated followers. This system balances the proportions of
essential amino acids at every, single meal and is vegetarian. This
diet also works and really helps some people, but not as well as
Macrobiotics in my opinion because obsessed with protein, Clark's
diet contains too many hard-to-digest soy products and makes poor
food combinations from the point of digestive capacity.

Then there are the raw fooders. Most of them are raw, Organic
fooders who go so far as to eat only unfired, unground cereals that
have been soaked in warm water (at less than 115 degrees or you'll
kill the enzymes) for many hours to soften the seeds up and start
them sprouting. This diet works and really helps a lot of people.
Raw organic foodism is especially good for "holy joes," a sort of
better-than-everyone-else person who enjoys great self-righteousness
by owning this system. But raw fooding does not help all people nor
solve all diseases because raw food irritates the digestive tracts
of some people and in northern climates it is hard to maintain body
heat on this diet because it is difficult to consume enough
concentrated vegetable food in a raw state. And some raw fooders eat
far too much fruit. I've seen them lose their teeth because of
fruit's low mineral content, high sugar level and constant fruit
acids in their mouths.

Then there are vegetarians of various varieties including vegans
(vegetarians that will not eat dairy products and eggs), and then,
there are their exact opposites, Atkins dieters focusing on protein
and eating lots of meat. There's the Adelle Davis school, people
eating whole grains, handfuls of vitamins, lots of dairy and brewers
yeast and wheat germ, and even raw liver. Then there's the Organic
school. These folks will eat anything in any combination, just so
long as it is organically produced, including organically raised
beef, chicken, lamb, eggs, rabbit, wild meats, milk and diary
products, natural sea salt in large quantities and of course,
organically grown fruits, vegetables grains and nuts. And what is
"Organic?" The word means food raised in compliance with a set of
rules contrived by a certification bureaucracy. When carefully
analyzed, the somewhat illogical rules are not all that different in
spirit than the rules of kashsruth or kosher. And the Organic
certification bureaucrats aren't all that different than the rabbis
who certify food as being kosher, either.

There are now millions of frightened Americans who, following the
advice of mainstream Authority, have eliminated red meat from their
diets and greatly reduced what they (mistakenly) understand as
high-cholesterol foods.

All these diets work too--or some--and all demonstrate some of the
truth.

The only area concerning health that contains more confusion and
contradictory data than diet is vitamins. What a rats nest that is!

The Fundamental Principle

If you are a true believer in any of the above food religions, I
expect that you will find my views unsettling. But what I consider
"good diet" results from my clinical work with thousands of cases.
It is what has worked with those cases. My eclectic views
incorporate bits and pieces of all the above. In my own case, I
started out by following the Organic school, and I was once a raw
food vegetarian who ate nothing but raw food for six years. I also
ate Macrobiotic for about one year until I became violently allergic
to rice.

I have arrived at a point where I understand that each person's
biochemistry is unique and each must work out their own diet to suit
their life goals, life style, genetic predisposition and current
state of health. There is no single, one, all-encompassing, correct
diet. But, there is a single, basic, underlying Principle of
Nutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified form, the
basic equation of human health goes: Health = Nutrition / Calories.
The equation falls far short of explaining the origin of each
individuals diseases or how to cure diseases but Health = Nutrition
/ Calories does show the general path toward healthful eating and
proper medicine.

All animals have the exact same dietary problem: finding enough
nutrition to build and maintain their bodies within the limits of
their digestive capacity. Rarely in nature (except for predatory
carnivores) is there any significant restriction on the number of
calories or serious limitation of the amount of low-nutrition foods
available to eat. There's rarely any shortage of natural junk food
on Earth. Except for domesticated house pets, animals are sensible
enough to prefer the most nutritional fare available and tend to
shun empty calories unless they are starving.

But humans are perverse, not sensible. Deciding on the basis of
artificially-created flavors, preferring incipid textures, we seem
to prefer junk food and become slaves to our food addictions. For
example, in tropical countries there is a widely grown root crop,
called in various places: tapioca, tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This
interesting plant produces the greatest tonnage of edible,
digestible, pleasant-tasting calories per acre compared to any other
food crop I know. Manioc might seem the answer to human starvation
because it will grow abundantly on tropical soils so infertile
and/or so droughty that no other food crop will succeed there.
Manioc will do this because it needs virtually nothing from the soil
to construct itself with. And consequently, manioc puts next to
nothing nourishing into its edible parts. The bland-tasting root is
virtually pure starch, a simple carbohydrate not much different than
pure corn starch. Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide gas
obtained the air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no
shortage ever of carbon from CO2 in the air and rarely a shortage of
hydrogen from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is
chewed, digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar.
Nutritionally there is virtually no difference between eating manioc
and eating white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.

If you made a scale from ideal to worst regarding the ratio of
nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc and most fats are at the
extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't know which single food
might lie at the extreme positive end of the scale. Close to perfect
might be certain leafy green vegetables that can be eaten raw. When
they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop 20 or
more percent completely digestible balanced protein with ideal
ratios of all the essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of
minerals, all sorts of enzymes and other nutritional elements--and
very few calories. You could continually fill your stomach to
bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard time sustaining
your body weight if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailorman
was right about eating spinach.

For the moment, lets ignore individual genetic inabilities to digest
specific foods and also ignore the effects stress and enervation can
have on our ability to extract nutrition out of the food we are
eating. Without those factors to consider, it is correct to say
that, to the extent one's diet contains the maximum potential amount
of nutrition relative to the number of calories you are eating, to
that extent a person will be healthy. To the extent the diet is
degraded from that ideal, to that extent, disease will develop.
Think about it!

Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology

The next logical pair of questions are: how healthy could good
nutrition make people be, and, how much deviation from ideal
nutrition could we allow ourselves before serious disease appears?
Luckily, earlier in this century we could observe living answers to
those questions (before the evidence disappeared). The answers are:
we could be amazingly healthy, and, if we wish to enjoy excellent
health we can afford to cut ourselves surprisingly little slack.

Prior to the Second World War there were several dozen sizable
groups of extraordinarily healthy humans remaining on Earth. Today,
their descendants are still in the same remote places, are speaking
the same languages and possess more or less the same cultures. Only
today they're watching satellite TV. wearing jeans, drinking
colas--and their superior health has evaporated.

During the early part of this century, at the same era vitamins and
other basic aspects of nutrition were being discovered, a few
farsighted medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places
with their legendarily healthy peoples to see what caused the
legendary well-being they'd heard of. Enough evidence was collected
and analyzed to derive some very valid principles.

First lets dismiss some apparently logical but incorrect
explanations for the unusually good health of these isolated
peoples. It wasn't racial, genetic superiority. There were
extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns, Orientals, Amerinds,
Caucasians. It wasn't living at high altitude; some lived at sea
level. It wasn't temperate climates, some lived in the tropics, some
in the tropics at sea level, a type of location generally thought to
be quite unhealthful. It wasn't a small collection of genetically
superior individuals, because when these peoples left their isolated
locale and moved to the city, they rapidly began to lose their
health. And it wasn't genetics because when a young couple from the
isolated healthy village moved to town, their children born in town
were as unhealthy as all the other kids.

And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote
village or a mountain valley or a far island settlement very
difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten
thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Among that small
population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs,
no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with
it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness of modern
science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And
this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these unprotected,
undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from
bacterial infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13
children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding age--almost all the
children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases. There
was also virtually no degenerative disease like heart attacks,
hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There were
few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any
aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little mortality
during childbirth, as little or less than we have today with all our
hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtually perfect teeth and
kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes nor any
notion of dental hygiene. Nor did they have dentists or physicians.
(Price, 1970)

And in those fortunate places the most common causes of death were
accident (trauma) and old age. The typical life span was long into
the 70s and in some places quite a bit longer. One fabled place,
Hunza, was renowned for having an extraordinarily high percentage of
vigorous and active people over 100 years old.

I hope I've made you curious. "How could this be?" you're asking.
Well, here's why. First, everyone of those groups lived in places so
entirely remote, so inaccessible that they were of necessity,
virtually self-sufficient. They hardly traded at all with the
outside world, and certainly they did not trade for bulky,
hard-to-transport bulk foodstuffs. Virtually everything they ate was
produced by themselves. If they were an agricultural people,
naturally, everything they ate was natural: organic, whole,
unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local materials seemed to
produce enhanced plant growth. And, if they were agricultural, they
lived on a soil body that possessed highly superior natural
fertility. If not an agricultural people they lived by the sea and
made a large portion of their diets sea foods. If their soil had not
been extraordinarily fertile, these groups would not have enjoyed
superior health and would have conformed to the currently
widely-believed notion that before the modern era, people's lives
were brutish, unhealthful, and short.

What is common between meat-eating Eskimos, isolated highland Swiss
living on rye bread, milk and cheese; isolated Scottish island Celts
with a dietary of oat porridge, kale and sea foods; highland central
Africans (Malawi) eating sorghum, millet tropical root crops and all
sorts of garden vegetables, plus a little meat and dairy; Fijians
living on small islands in the humid tropics at sea level eating sea
foods and garden vegetables. What they had in common was that their
foods were all were at the extreme positive end of the Health =
Nutrition / Calories scale. The agriculturists were on very fertile
soil that grew extraordinarily nutrient-rich food, the sea food
gatherers were obtaining their tucker from the place where all the
fertility that ever was in the soil had washed out of the land had
been transported--sea foods are also extraordinarily nutrient rich.

The group with the very best soil and consequently, the best health
of all were, by lucky accident, the Hunza. I say "lucky" and
"accident" because the Hunza and their resource base unknowingly
developed an agricultural system that produced the most nutritious
food that is possible to grow. The Hunza lived on what has been
called super food. There are a lot of interesting books about the
Hunza, some deserving of careful study. (Wrench, 1938; Rodale, 1949)

Finding Your Ideal Dietary

Anyone that is genuinely interested in having the best possible
health should make their own study of the titles listed in the
bibliography in the back of this book. After you do, award yourself
a BS nutrition. I draw certain conclusions from this body of data. I
think they help a person sort out the massive confusion that exists
today about proper diet.

First principle: Homo Sapiens clearly can posses extreme health
while eating very different dietary regimens. There is no one right
diet for humans.

Before the industrial era almost everyone on Earth ate what was
produced locally. Their dietary choices were pretty much restricted
to those foods that were well adapted and productive in their
region. Some places grew rye, others wheat, others millet, others
rice. Some places supported cows, others goats, others had few on no
domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot of fruits and
vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary, during
thousands of years of eating that dietary natural selection
prevailed; most babies that were allergic to or not able to thrive
on the available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhood
bacterial infections. The result of this weeding out process was a
population closely adapted to the available dietary of a particular
locale.

This has interesting implications for Americans, most of whose
ancestors immigrated from somewhere else; many of our ancestors also
"hybridized" or crossed with immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to
discover what dietary substances your particular genetic endowment
is adapted to can be difficult and confusing. If both your parents
were Italian and they were more or less pure Italian going way back,
you might start out trying to eat wheat, olives, garlic, fava beans,
grapes, figs, cow dairy. If pure German, try rye bread, cow dairy,
apples, cabbage family vegetables. If Scottish, try oats, mutton,
fish, sheep dairy and cabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat
dairy, wheat, olives and citrus. And certainly all the above ethnic
derivations will thrive on many kinds of vegetables. Afro-Americans,
especially dark-complexioned ones little mixed with Europeans, might
do well to avoid wheat and instead, try sorghum, millet or tropical
root crops like sweet potatoes, yams and taro.

Making it even more difficult for an individual to discover their
optimum diet is the existence of genetic-based allergies and worse,
developed allergies. Later in this chapter I will explain how a body
can develop an allergy to a food that is probably irreversible. A
weakened organ can also prevent digestion of a food or food group.

One more thing about adaptation to dietaries. Pre-industrial humans
could only be extraordinarily healthy on the dietary they were
adapted to if and only if that dietary also was extraordinarily high
in nutrients. Few places on earth have naturally rich soil. Food
grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition; that grown on rich soil is
high in nutrition. People do not realize that the charts and tables
in the backs of health books like Adelle Davis's Lets Cook It Right,
are not really true. They are statistics. It is vital to keep in
mind the old saying, "there are lies, there are damned lies, and
then there are statistics. The best way to lie is with statistics."

Statistical tables of the nutrient content of foods were developed
by averaging numerous samples of food from various soils and
regions. These tables basically lie because they do not show the
range of possibility between the different samples. A chart may
state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli contains so many
milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is that some broccoli
samples contain only half that amount or even less, while other
broccoli contains two or three times that amount. Since calcium is a
vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible form, the high calcium
broccoli is far better food than the low calcium sample. But both
samples of broccoli appear and taste more or less alike. Both could
even be organically grown. Yet one sample has a very positive ratio
of nutrition to calories, the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965)
Here's another example I hope will really dent the certainties the
Linda Clarkites. Potatoes can range in protein from eight to eleven
percent, depending on the soil that produced them and if they were
or were not irrigated. Grown dry (very low yielding) on semiarid
soils, potatoes can be a high-protein staff of life. Heavily
irrigated and fertilized so as to produce bulk yield instead of
nutrition, they'll produce two or three times the tonnage, but at 8
percent protein instead of 11 percent. Not only does the protein
content drop just as much as yield is boosted, the amino acid ratios
change markedly, the content of scarce nutritional minerals drops
massively, and the caloric content increases. In short, subsisting
on irrigated commercially-grown potatoes, or on those grown on
relatively infertile soils receiving abundant rainfall will make you
fat and sick. They're a lot like manioc.

Here's another. Wheat can range from 7 to 19 percent protein. Before
the industrial era ruined most wheat by turning it into white flour,
wheat-eating peoples from regions where the cereal naturally
contains abundant protein tended to be tall, healthy and long-lived.
Wheat-eating humans from regions that produce low protein grain
tended to be small, sickly and short-lived. (McCarrison, 1921, 1936,
1982; Albrecht, 1975)

Even cows have to pay attention to where their grass is coming from.
Some green grass is over 15 percent protein and contains lots of
calcium, phosphorus and magnesium to build strong bodies. Other
equally or even better looking green grass contains only six or
seven percent protein and contains little calcium, phosphorus or
magnesium. Cows forced to eat only this poor type of grass can
literally starve to death with full bellies. And they have a hard
time breeding successfully. The reason for the difference: different
soil fertility profiles. (Albrecht, 1975)

When people ate local, those living on fertile soils or getting a
significant portion of their diet from the sea and who because of
physical isolation from industrial foods did not make a practice of
eating empty calories tended to live a long time and be very
healthy. But those unfortunates on poor soils or with unwise
cultural life-styles tended to be short-lived, diseased, small,
weak, have bad teeth, and etc. The lesson here is that Homo Sapiens
can adapt to many different dietaries, but like any other animal,
the one thing we can't adapt to is a dietary deficient in nutrition.

So here's another "statistic" to reconsider. Most people believe
that due to modern medical wonders, we live longer than we used to.
Actually, that depends. Compared to badly nourished populations of a
century ago, yes! We do. Chemical medicine keeps sickly, poorly
nourished people going a lot longer (though one wonders about the
quality of their dreary existences.) I hypothesize that before the
time most farmers purchased and baked with white flour and sold
their whole, unground wheat, many rural Americans (the ones on good
soil, not all parts of North America have rich soil) eating from
their own self-sufficient farms, lived as long or even longer than
we do today. You also have to wonder who benefits from promulgating
this mistaken belief about longevity. Who gets rich when we are
sick? And what huge economic interests are getting rich helping make
us sick?

The Human Comedy

I know most of my readers have been heavily indoctrinated about food
and think they already know the truth about dietetics. I also know
that so much information (and misinformation) is coming out about
diet that most of my readers are massively confused about the
subject. These are two powerful reasons many readers will look with
disbelief at what this chapter has to say and take no action on my
data, even to prove me wrong.

Let me warn you. There is a deep-seated human tendency to put off
taking responsibilities, beautifully demonstrated by this old joke.

A 14 year old boy was discovered masturbating by his father, who
said, "son, you shouldn't do that! If you keep it up you'll
eventually go blind!"

"But father," came the boy's quick reply. "It feels good. How about
if I don't quit until I need to wear glasses?"

The Organic Versus Chemical Feud

Now, regrettably, and at great personal risk to my reputation, I
must try to puncture the very favorite belief of food religionists,
the doctrine that organically grown food is as nutritious as food
can possibly be, Like Woody Allen's brown-rice-eating friends,
people think if you eat Organic foods, you will inevitably live a
very long time and be very healthy. Actually, the Organic vs.
chemical feud is in many ways false. Many (not all) samples of
organically grown food are as low or lower in nutrition as foods
raised with chemical fertilizers. Conversely, wisely using chemical
fertilizers (not pesticides) can greatly increase the nutritional
value of food. Judiciously used Organic fertilizing substances can
also do that as well or better. And in either case, using chemical
fertilizers or so-called organic fertilizers, to maximize nutrition
the humus content of the soil must be maintained. But, raising soil
organic matter levels too high can result in a massive reduction in
the nutritional content of the food being grown--a very frequent
mistake on the part of Organic devotees. In other words, growing
nutrition is a science, and is not a matter of religion.

The food I fed to my daughter in childhood, though Organic according
to Rodale and the certification bureaucrats, though providing this
organic food to my family and clients gave me a feeling of
self-righteousness, was not grown with an understanding of the
nutritional consequences of electing to use one particular Organic
fertilizing substance over another. So we and a lot of regional
Organic market gardeners near us that we bought from, were raising
food that was far from ideally nutritious. At least though, our food
was free of pesticide residues.

The real dichotomy in food is not "chemical" fertilizer versus
"Organic," It is between industrial food and quality food. What I
mean by industrial food is that which is raised with the intention
of maximizing profit or yield. There is no contradiction between
raising food that the "rabbis" running Organic certification
bureaucracies would deem perfectly "kosher" and raising that same
food to make the most possible money or the biggest harvest. When a
farmer grows for money, they want to produce the largest number of
bushels, crates, tons, bales per acre. Their criteria for success is
primarily unit volume. Many gardeners think the same way. To
maximize bulk yield they build soil fertility in a certain direction
(organically or chemically) and choose varieties that produce
greater bulk. However, nature is ironic in this respect. The most
nutritious food is always lower yielding. The very soil management
practices that maximize production simultaneously reduce nutrition.

The real problem we are having about our health is not that there
are residues of pesticides in our food. The real problem is that
there are only residues of nutrition left in our foods. Until our
culture comes to understand this and realizes that the health costs
of accepting less than optimum food far exceeds the profits made by
growing bulk, it will not be possible to frequently find the
ultimate of food quality in the marketplace, organically grown or
not. It will not be possible to find food that is labeled or
identified according to its real nutritional value. The best I can
say about Organic food these days is that it probably is no less
nutritious than chemically-grown food while at least it is free of
pesticide residues.

The Poor Start

For this reason it makes sense to take vitamins and food
supplements, to be discussed in the next chapter. And because our
food supply, Organic or "conventional," is far from optimum, if a
person wants to be and remain healthy and have a life span that
approaches their genetic potential (and that potential, it seems,
approaches or exceeds a century), it is essential that empty
calories are rigorously avoided.

An accurate and quick-to-respond indicator of how well we are doing
in terms of getting enough nutrition is the state of our teeth. One
famous dentally-oriented nutritional doctor, Melvin Page, suggested
that as long as overall nutrition was at least 75 percent of
perfection, the body chemistry could support healthy teeth and gums
until death. By healthy here Page means free of cavities, no bone
loss around the teeth (no wobblers), no long-in-the-teeth mouths
from receding gums, no gum diseases at all. But when empty calories
or devitalized foods or misdigestion cuts our nutrient intake we
begin experiencing tooth decay, gum disease and bone loss in the
jaw. How are your teeth?

I suppose you could say that I have a food religion, but mine is to
eat so that the equation Nutrition = Health / Calories is strongly
in my favor.

Back to my daughter's teeth. Yes, I innocently fed her less than
ideally nutritious food, but at that time I couldn't buy ideal food
even had I known what I wanted, nor did I have any scientific idea
of how to produce ideal food, nor actually, could I have done so on
the impoverished, leached-out clay soil at Great Oaks School even
had I known how. The Organic doctrine says that you can build a
Garden of 'Eatin with large quantities of compost until any old clay
pit or gravel heap produces highly nutritious food. This idea is not
really true. Sadly, what is true about organic matter in soil is
that when it is increased very much above the natural level one
finds in untilled soil in the climate you're working with, the
nutritional content of the food begins to drop markedly. I know this
assertion is shocking and perhaps threatening to those who believe
in the Organic system; I am sorry.

But there is another reason my daughter's teeth were not perfect,
probably could not have been perfect no matter what we fed her, and
why she will probably have at least some health problems as she ages
no matter how perfectly she may choose to eat from here on. My
daughters had what Dr. G.T. Wrench called "a poor start." Not as
poor as it could have been by any means, but certainly less than
ideal.

You see, the father has very little to do with the health of the
child, unless he happens to carry some particularly undesirable
gene. It is the mother who has the job of constructing the fetus out
of prepartum nourishment and her own body's nutritional reserves.
The female body knows from trillenia of instinctual experience that
adequate nutrition from the current food supply during pregnancy can
not always be assured, so the female body stores up very large
quantities of minerals and vitamins and enzymes against that very
possibility. When forming a fetus these reserves are drawn down and
depleted. It is virtually impossible during the pregnancy itself for
a mother to extract sufficient nutrition from current food to build
a totally healthy fetus, no matter how nourishing the food she is
eating may be. Thus a mother-to-be needs to be spending her entire
childhood and her adolescence (and have adequate time between
babies), building and rebuilding her reserves.

A mother-to-be also started out at her own birth with a vitally
important stock of nutritional reserves, reserves put there during
her own fetal development. If that "start" was less than ideal, the
mother-to-be (as fetus) got "pinched" and nutritionally shortchanged
in certain, predictable ways. Even minor mineral fetal deficiencies
degrade the bone structure: the fetus knows it needs nutritional
reserves more than it needs to have a full-sized jaw bone or a wide
pelvic girdle, and when deprived of maximum fetal nourishment, these
non-vital bones become somewhat smaller. Permanently. If mineral
deficiencies continue into infancy and childhood, these same bones
continue to be shortchanged, and the child ends up with a very
narrow face, a jaw bone far too small to hold all the teeth, and in
women, a small oven that may have trouble baking babies. More
importantly, those nutrient reserves earmarked especially for making
babies are also deficient. So a deficient mother not only shows
certain structural evidence of physiological degeneration, but she
makes deficient babies. A deficient female baby at birth is unlikely
to completely overcome her bad start before she herself has
children.

So with females, the quality of a whole lifetime's nutrition, and
the life-nutrition of her mother (and of her mother's mother as
well) has a great deal to do with the outcome of a pregnancy. The
sins of the mother can really be visited unto the third and fourth
generation.

This reality was powerfully demonstrated in the 1920s by a medical
doctor, Francis Pottenger. He was not gifted with a good bedside
manner. Rather than struggling with an unsuccessful clinical
practice, Dr. Pottenger decided to make his living running a medical
testing laboratory in Pasadena, California. Dr. Pottenger earned his
daily bread performing a rather simple task, assaying the potency of
adrenal hormone extracts. At that time, adrenaline, a useful drug to
temporarily rescue people close to death, was extracted from the
adrenal glands of animals. However, the potency of these crude
extracts varied greatly. Being a very powerful drug, it was
essential to measure exactly how strong your extract was so its
dosage could be controlled.

Quantitative organic chemistry was rather crude in those days.
Instead of assaying in a test tube, Dr. Pottenger kept several big
cages full of cats that he had adrenalectomized. Without their own
adrenals, the cats could not live more than a short time By finding
out how much extract was required to keep the cats from failing, he
could measure the strength of the particular batch.

Dr. Pottenger's cats were economically valuable so he made every
effort to keep them healthy, something that proved to be
disappointingly difficult. He kept his cats clean, in airy, bright
quarters, fed them to the very best of his ability on pasteurized
whole milk, slaughterhouse meat and organs (cats in the wild eat
organ meats first and there are valuable vitamins and other
substances in organ meats that don't exist in muscle tissue). The
meat was carefully cooked to eliminate any parasites, and the diet
was supplemented with cod liver oil. However, try as he might,
Pottenger's cats were sickly, lived short and had to be frequently
replaced. Usually they bred poorly and died young of bacterial
infections, there being no antibiotics in the 1920s. I imagine Dr.
Pottenger was constantly visiting the animal shelter and perhaps
even paid quarters out the back door to a steady stream of young
boys who brought him cats in burlap sacks from who knows where, no
questions asked.

Dr. Pottenger's assays must have been accurate, for his business
grew and grew. Eventually he needed more cats than he had cages to
house, so he built a big, roofed, on-the-ground pen outdoors.
Because he was overworked, he was less careful about the feeding of
these extra animals. They got the same pasteurized milk and
cod-liver oil, but he did not bother to cook their slaughterhouse
meat. Then, a small miracle happened. This poorly cared for cage of
cats fed on uncooked meat became much healthier than the others,
suffering far fewer bacterial infections or other health problems.
Then another miracle happened. Dr. Pottenger began to meditate on
the first miracle.

It occurred to him that cats in the wild did not cook their food;
perhaps cats had a digestive system that couldn't process or
assimilate much out of cooked food. Perhaps the problem he had been
having was not because the cats were without adrenal glands but
because they were without sustenance, suffering a sort of slow
starvation in the midst of plenty. So Dr. Pottenger set up some cat
feeding experiments.

There were four possible combinations of his regimen: raw meat and
unpasteurized milk; raw meat and pasteurized milk; cooked meat and
raw milk; cooked meat and pasteurized milk, this last one being what
he had been feeding all along. So he divided his cats into four
groups and fed each group differently. The first results of
Pottenger's experiments were revealed quickly though the most
valuable results took longer to see. The cats on raw meat and raw
milk did best. The ones on raw meat and pasteurized milk did okay
but not as well. The ones on cooked meat and raw milk did even less
well and those on all cooked food continued to do as poorly as ever.

Clearly, cats can't digest cooked food; all animals do better fed on
what they can digest. A lot of people have taken Pottenger's data
and mistakenly concluded that humans also should eat only raw food.
This idea is debatable. However, the most important result of the
cat experiments took years to reveal itself and is not paid much
attention to, probably because its implications are very depressing.
Dr. Pottenger continued his experiments for several generations. It
was the transgenerational changes that showed the most valuable
lesson. Over several generations, the cats on all raw foods began to
alter their appearance. Their faces got wider, their pelvic girdles
broader, bones solider, teeth better. They began to breed very
successfully.

After quite a few generations, the healthiest group, the one on all
raw foods, seemed to have improved as much as it could. So Dr.
Pottenger took some of these cats and began feeding them only cooked
food to study the process of nutritional degeneration. After three
"de"generations on cooked fodder the group had deteriorated so much
that the animals could barely breed. Their faces had become narrow,
their teeth crooked, their pelvic girdles narrow, their bones and
body structure very small, and their dispositions poor. Mothers
wouldn't nurse their young and sometimes became cannibalistic. They
no longer lived very long.

Before the degenerating group completely lost the ability to breed,
Pottenger began to again feed them all raw food. It took four
generations on a perfect, raw food diet before some perfect
appearing individuals showed up in the group. It takes longer to
repair the damage than it does to cause it and it takes generations
of unflagging persistence.

I think much the same process has happened to humans in this
century. With the invention of the roller mill and the consequent
degradation of our daily bread to white flour; with the birth of
industrial farming and the generalized lowering of the nutritional
content of all of our crops; our overall ratio of nutrition to
calories worsened. Then it worsened again because we began to have
industrial food manufacturing and national brand prepared food
marketing systems; we began subsisting on devitalized, processed
foods. The result has been an even greater worsening of our ratio of
nutrition to calories.

And just like Pottenger's cats, we civilized humans in so-called
advanced countries are losing the ability to breed, our willingness
(or the energy) to mother our young; we're losing our good humor in
the same way Pottenger's degenerated cats became bad tempered. As a
group we feel so poorly that we desperately need to feel better
fast, and what better way to do that than with drugs. Is it any
wonder that the United States, the country furthest down the road of
industrial food degeneration, spends 14 percent of its gross
domestic product on medical services. Any wonder that so many babies
are born by Cesarean, any wonder that so many of our children have
crooked teeth needing an orthodontist? The most depressing aspect of
this comes into view when considering that Pottenger's cats took
four generations on perfect food to repair most of the nutritional
damage.

In the specific case of my daughter, I know somethings about the
nutritional history of her maternal ancestors. My daughter's
grandmother grew up on a Saskatchewan farm. Though they certainly
grew their own rich wheat on virgin semi-arid prairie soil, I'm sure
the family bought white flour at the store for daily use. Still,
there was a garden and a cow producing raw milk and free-range
fertile eggs and chicken and other animals. There probably were lots
of canned vegetables in winter, canned but still highly nutritious
because of the fertility of their prairie garden. My mother
consequently had perfect teeth until the Great Depression forced her
to live for too many years on lard and white bread.

During this time of severe malnutrition she had her three babies.
The first one got the best of her nutritional reserves. The second,
born after the worst of the malnutrition, was very small and weak
and had a hard time growing up. Fortunately for me, for a few years
before I (the last child) was born, the worst of the economic times
had past and the family had been living on a farm. There were
vegetables and fresh raw milk and fruit. My mother had two good
years to rebuild her nutritional reserves. But "Grannybell" did not
managed to replace enough. Shortly after I was born my mother lost
every one of her teeth all at once. The bone just disappeared around
them.

Thus, I was born deficient. And my childhood and adolescent
nutrition was poor too: soda crackers, pasteurized processed
artificial cheese, evaporated milk from cans, hotdogs and canned
beans, hotdogs and cabbage. It wasn't until I was pregnant with my
first baby that I started to straighten up my diet. I continued
eating very well after my first daughter, so my youngest daughter
had another three years of good diet to draw on. Thus both my own
daughters got a somewhat better start than I had had.

My teeth were not as good as my mother's had been before those years
of malnutrition took them all. Instead of perfect straight undecayed
teeth like a healthy farm girl should have, mine were somewhat
crowded, with numerous cavities. My jaw bone had not received enough
minerals to develop to its full size. My pelvic girdle also was
smaller than my mother's was. I had had a poor start.

My daughters did better. The older one (the first child typically
gets the best of the nutritional reserves) has such a wide jaw that
there are small spaces between her teeth. My second daughter has
only one crooked tooth, she has wider, more solid hips, stronger
bones and a broader face than I do. If my younger daughter will but
from this point in her life, eat perfectly and choose her food
wisely to responsibly avoid empty calories and maximize her ratio of
nutrition to calories, her daughter (if she gives us granddaughters
as her older sister already has done) may exhibit the perfect
physiology that her genes carry.

Along the lines of helping you avoid empty calories I will give you
some information about various common foods that most people don't
know and that most books about food and health don't tell, or
misunderstand.

Butter, Margarine and Fats in General.

Recently, enormous propaganda has been generated against eating
butter. Its been smeared in the health magazines as a saturated
animal fat, one containing that evil substance, cholesterol. Many
people are now avoiding it and instead, using margarine.

Composition of Oils

Saturated Monosaturated Unsaturated
Butter 66% 30% 4%
Coconut Oil 87% 6% 2%
Cottonseed Oil 26% 18% 52%
Olive Oil 13% 74% 8%
Palm Oil 49% 37% 9%
Soybean Oil 14% 24% 58%
Sunflower Oil 4% 8% 83%
Safflower Oil 3% 5% 87%
Sesame Oil 5% 9% 80%
Peanut Oil 6% 12% 76%
Corn Oil 3% 7% 84%

This is a major and serious misunderstanding. First of all,
margarine is almost indigestible, chemically very much like
shortening--an artificially saturated or hydrogenated vegetable fat.
Hydrogenated fats can't be properly broken down by the body's
digestive enzymes, adding to the body's toxic load. Margarine, being
a chemically-treated vegetable oil with artificial yellow color and
artificial flavorings to make it seem like butter, also releases
free radicals in the body that accelerate aging. So, to avoid the
dangers of eating cholesterol-containing butter, people eat
something far worse for them!

There are severe inconsistencies with the entire
"cholesterol-is-evil" theory. Ethnic groups like the Danes, who eat
enormous quantities of cholesterol-containing foods, have little
circulatory disease. Actually, the liver itself produces
cholesterol; it's presence in the blood is an important part of the
body chemistry. Cholesterol only becomes a problem because of
deranged body chemistry due to the kind of overall malnutrition
Americans usually experience on their junk food diets. Avoiding
cholesterol in foods does little good, but eating a low-fat,
low-sugar, complex-carbohydrate (whole foods) diet high in minerals
does lower blood cholesterol enormously.

Actually, high quality fresh (not rancid) butter in moderate
quantities is about the finest fat a person could eat. But high
quality butter is almost unobtainable. First of all, it has to be
raw, made from unpasteurized cream. Second, butter can contain very
high levels of fat-soluble vitamins, but doesn't have to.
Vitamin-rich butter's color is naturally bright yellow, almost
orange. This color does not come from a test tube. Pale yellow
butter as is found in the commercial trade was probably almost white
before it was artificially tinted. Butter from grass-pastured cows
naturally changes from yellow-orange to white and back again through
the year as the seasons change. Spring grass, growing in the most
intense sunlight of the year contains very high levels of
chlorophyll and vitamins. Cows eating this grass put high levels of
vitamins A and D into their cream, evidenced by the orange color of
vitamin A. By July, natural butter has degraded to medium-yellow in
color. By August, it is pale yellow. Industrial dairy cows fed
exclusively on hay or artificial, processed feeds (lacking in these
vitamins), produce butterfat that is almost white.

I prefer to obtain my butter from a neighbor who has several dairy
cows grazing on fertile bottom land pasture. We always freeze a
year's supply in late spring when butter is at its best.
Interestingly, that is also the time of year when my neighbor gets
the most production from her cows and is most willing to part with
25 pounds of extra butter.

In general, fats are poor foods that should be avoided. Their ratio
of nutrition to calories is absolutely the worst of all food types,
except perhaps for pure white sugar, which is all calories and
absolutely no nutrition (this is also true for other forms of sugar.
Honey, too, contains almost no nutrition.). Gram for gram, fats
contain many more calories than do sugars or starches. Yet gram for
gram, fats contain virtually no nutrition except for small
quantities of essential fatty acids.

The perverse reason people like to eat fats is that they are very
hard to digest and greatly slow the digestive action of the stomach.
Another way of saying that is that they have a very high satiety
value. Fats make a person feel full for a long time because their
presence in the stomach makes it churn and churn and churn. Fats
coat proteins and starches and delay their digestion, often causing
them to begin fermenting (starches) or putrefying (proteins) in the
digestive tract.

The best fats contain high levels of monosaturated vegetable oils
that have never been exposed to heat or chemicals--like virgin olive
oil. Use small quantities of olive oil for salad dressing.
Monosaturated fats also have far less tendency to go rancid than any
other type. Vegetable oils with high proportions of unsaturated
fats, the kind that all the authorities push because they contain no
cholesterol, go rancid rapidly upon very brief exposure to air. The
danger here is that rancidity in vegetable oil is virtually
unnoticeable. Rancid animal fat on the other hand, smells "off."
Eating rancid oil is a sure-fire way to accelerate aging, invite
degenerative conditions in general, and enhance the likelihood of
cancer. I recommend that you use only high-quality virgin olive oil,
the only generally-available fat that is largely monosaturated.
(Pearson and Shaw, 1983)

When you buy vegetable oil, even olive oil, get small bottles so you


 


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