How and When to Be Your Own Doctor
by
Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
Part 4 out of 6
use them up before the oil has much time being exposed to air (as
you use the oil air fills the bottle) or, if you buy olive oil in a
large can to save money, immediately upon opening it, transfer the
oil to pint jars filled to the very brim to exclude virtually all
air, and seal the jars securely. In either case, keep now-opened,
in-use small bottles of oil in the refrigerator because rancidity is
simply the combination of oil with oxygen from the air and this
chemical reaction is accelerated at warmer temperatures and slowed
greatly at cold ones.
Chemical reactions typically double in speed with every 10 degrees
C. increase in temperature. So oil goes rancid about six times
faster at normal room temperature than it does in the fridge. If
you'll think about the implications of this data you'll see there
are two powerful reasons not to fry food. One, the food is coated
with oil and gains in satiety value at the expense of becoming
relatively indigestible and productive of toxemia. Secondly, if
frying occurs at 150 degrees Centigrade and normal room temperature
is 20 degrees Centigrade, then oil goes rancid 2 to the 13th power
faster in the frying pan, or about 8,200 times faster. Heating oil
for only ten minutes in a hot skillet induces as much rancidity as
about 6 weeks of sitting open and exposed to air at room
temperature. Think about that the next time you're tempted to eat
something from a fast food restaurant where the hot fat in the deep
fryer has been reacting with oxygen all day, or even for several
days.
Back to butter, where we started. If you must have something
traditionally northern European on your bread, you are far better
off to use butter, not margarine. However, Mediterranean peoples
traditionally dip their bread in high-quality extra-virgin olive oil
that smells and tastes like olives. Its delicious, why not try it.
But best yet, put low-sugar fruit preserves on your toast or develop
a taste for dry toast. Probably the finest use for butter is melted
over steamed vegetables. This way only small quantities are needed
and the fat goes on something that is otherwise very easy to digest
so its presence will not produce as many toxins in the digestive
tract.
Milk, Meat, And Other Protein Foods
Speaking of butter, how about milk? The dairy lobby is very powerful
in North America. Its political clout and campaign contributions
have the governments of both the United States and especially that
of Canada eating out of its hand (literally), providing the dairy
industry with price supports. Because of these price supports, in
Canada cheese costs half again more than it does in the United
States. The dairy lobby is also very cozy with the medical
profession so licensed nutritionists constantly bombard us with
"drink milk" and "cheese is good for you" propaganda.
And people naturally like dairy foods. They taste good and are
fat-rich with a high satiety value. Dairy makes you feel full for a
long time. Dairy is also high in protein; protein is hard to digest
and this too keeps one feeling full for a long time. But many
people, especially those from cultures who traditionally
(genetically) didn't have dairy cows, particularly Africans, Asians
and Jews, just do not produce the enzymes necessary to digest cows
milk. Some individuals belonging to these groups can digest goats
milk. Some can't digest any kind except human breast milk. And some
can digest fermented milk products like yogurt and kiefer. Whenever
one eats a protein food that is not fully digestible, it putrefies
in the digestive tract, with all the bad consequences previously
described.
But no one, absolutely no one can fully digest pasteurized cows
milk, which is what most people use because they have been made to
fear cow-transmitted diseases and/or they are forced to use
pasteurized dairy products by health authorities. I suspect drinking
pasteurized milk or eating cheese made from pasteurized milk is one
of the reasons so many people develop allergic reactions to milk.
Yet many states do not allow unpasteurized dairy to be sold, even
privately between neighbors. To explain all this, I first have to
explain a bit more about protein digestion in general and then talk
about allergies and how they can be created.
Proteins are long, complex molecules, intricate chains whose
individual links are amino acids. Proteins are the very stuff of
life. All living protoplasm, animal or plant, is largely composed of
proteins. There are virtually an infinite number of different
proteins but all are composed of the same few dozen amino acids
hooked together in highly variable patterns. Amino acids themselves
are highly complex organic molecules too. The human body
custom-assembles all its proteins from amino acids derived from
digesting protein foods, and can also manufacture small quantities
of certain of its own amino acids to order, but there are eight
amino acids it cannot make and these are for that reason called
essential amino acids. Essential amino acids must be contained in
the food we eat. .
Few proteins are water soluble. When we eat proteins the digestive
apparatus must first break them down into their water-soluble
components, amino acids, so these can pass into the blood and then
be reassembled into the various proteins the body uses. The body has
an interesting mechanism to digest proteins; it uses enzymes. An
enzyme is like the key for a lock. It is a complex molecule that
latches to a protein molecule and then breaks it apart into amino
acids. Then the enzyme finds yet another protein molecule to free.
Enzymes are efficient, reusable many many times.
Enzymes that digest proteins are effective only in the very acid
environment of the stomach, are manufactured by the pancreas and are
released when protein foods are present. The stomach then releases
hydrochloric acid and churns away like a washing machine, mixing the
enzymes and the acid with the proteins until everything has
digested.
So far so good. That's how its supposed to be. But. Dr. Henry
Bieler, who wrote Food Is Your Best Medicine, came up with the
finest metaphor I know of to explain how protein digestion goes
wrong. He compared all proteins to the white of an egg (which is
actually a form of protein). When raw and liquid, the long chains of
albumen (egg white) proteins are in their natural form. However,
cook the egg and the egg white both solidifies and becomes smaller.
What has happened is that the protein chains have shriveled and
literally tied themselves into knots. Once this happens, pancreatic
enzymes no longer fit and cannot separate all the amino acids.
Cooked proteins may churn and churn and churn in the presence of
acid and pancreatic enzymes but they will not digest completely.
Part becomes water soluble; part does not.
But, indigestible protein is still subject to an undesirable form of
consumption in the gut. Various bacteria make their home in our
airless, warm intestines. Some of these live on protein. In the
process of consuming undigested proteins, they release highly toxic
substances. They poison us.
What is true of the white of an egg is also true of flesh foods and
dairy. Raw meat and raw fish are actually easily digestible foods
and if not wrongly combined will not produce toxemia in a person
that still has a strong pancreas. However, eating raw meat and fish
can be a dicey proposition, both for reasons of cultural sensibility
(people think it is disgusting) and because there may be living
parasites in uncooked flesh that can attack, sicken and even kill
people. It has been argued that a healthy stomach containing its
proper degree of acidity provides an impenetrable barrier to
parasites. Perhaps. But how many of us are that healthy these days?
Cooked flesh and fish seems more delicious to our refined, civilized
sensibilities, but are a poor food.
In my household we have no moral objection to eating meat. We do
have an ethical objection in that meat eating does not contribute to
our health. But still, we do eat it. A few times a year, for
traditional celebrations we may invite the children over and cook a
turkey. A few times for Thanksgiving when the children were going
through their holier-than-thou vegetarian stage, I purchased the
largest, thickest porterhouse steak I could find at the natural meat
store and ate it medium-rare, with relish. It was delicious. It made
me feel full for hours and hours and hours. I stayed flat on the
couch and groggily worked on digesting it all evening. After that
I'd had enough of meat to last for six months.
When milk is pasteurized, the proteins in it are also altered in
structure. Not so severely as egg white is altered by cooking
because pasteurization happens at a lower temperature. But altered
none the less. And made less digestible. Pasteurizing also makes
milk calcium far less assimilable. That's ironic because so many
people are drinking milk because they fear they need more calcium to
avoid osteoporosis and to give their children good teeth. What
pasteurized milk actually does to their children is make them
calcium deficient and makes the children toxic, provoking many
colds, ear infections, sinusitis, inflammations of the tonsils and
lung infections, and, induces an allergy to milk in the children.
The Development Of Allergies
There are three ways a body can become allergic. (1) It can have a
genetic predisposition for a specific allergy to start with. (2) It
can be repeatedly exposed to an irritating substance such as pollen
when, at the same time, the body's mechanism for dealing with
irritations is weakened. Generally weak adrenals causes this because
the adrenal's job is to produce hormones that reduce inflammation.
Once the irritating substance succeeds at producing a significant
inflammation, a secondary reaction may be set up, called an allergy.
Once established, an allergy is very hard to get rid of.
(3) in a way very similar to the second, but instead of being
irritated by an external substance, it is irritated by repeatedly
failing to properly, fully digest something. Pasteurized milk for
example, basically impossible to completely digest even in its
low-fat form, often sets up an allergy that applies to other forms
of cows milk, even raw, unpasteurized cows milk or yogurt. Eating
too much white flour can eventually set off a wheat allergy. My
husband developed a severe allergy to barley after drinking too much
home-brewed beer; he also became highly intolerant to alcohol. Now
he has allergic reactions to both alcohol and barley. And gets far
sicker from drinking beer (two separate allergies) than from wheat
beer, hard liquor or wine (only one allergy).
Eating too much of any single food, or repeatedly eating too much of
an otherwise very good food at one time, can eventually overwhelm
the body's ability to digest it fully. Then, the finest whole food
products may set up an allergic reaction. Worse, this allergic
reaction itself subsequently prevents proper digestion even when
only moderate quantities are eaten.
An allergy may not be recognized as an allergy because it may not
manifest as the instant skin rash or stuffy nose or swollen glands
or sticky eyes. that people usually think of when they think
"allergic reaction." Food allergies can cause many kinds of
symptoms, from sinusitis to psychosis, from asthma to arthritis,
from hyperactivity to depression, insomnia to narcolepsy--and
commonly the symptoms don't manifest immediately after eating.
Frequently, allergic reactions are so low grade as to be
unnoticeable and may not produce an observable condition until many
years of their grinding down the vital force has passed. When the
condition finally appears it is hard to associate it with some food
that has been consumed for years, apparently with impunity.
Thus it is that many North Americans have developed allergies to
wheat, dairy, soy products (because many soy foods are very hard to
digest), corn and eggs. These are such common, widespread,
frequently found allergies that anyone considering a dietary cause
of their complaints might just cut all these foods out of the diet
for a few weeks just to see what happens. And individuals may be
allergic to anything from broccoli to bacon, strawberries to bean
sprouts. Unraveling food allergies sometimes requires the deductions
of a Sherlock Holmes.
However, food allergies are very easy to cure if you can get the
suffered to take the medicine. Inevitably, allergic reactions vanish
in about five days of abstinence. Anyone with sufficient
self-discipline to water fast for five days can cure themselves of
all food allergies at one step. Then, by a controlled, gradual
reintroduction of foods, they can discover which individual items
cause trouble. See Coca's Pulse Test in the Appendix where you'll
find step-by-step instructions for allergy testing that are less
rigorous, not requiring a preliminary fast.
Flour, And Other Matters Relating To Seeds
One of the largest degradations to human health was caused by the
roller mill. This apparently profitable machine permitted the miller
to efficiently separate wheat flour into three components: bran,
germ and endosperm. Since bread made without bran and germ is
lighter and appears more "upper class" it became instantly popular.
Flour without germ and bran also had an industrial application--it
could be stored virtually forever without being infested by insects
because white flour does not contain enough nutrition to support
life. Most health conscious people are aware that white flour
products won't support healthful human life either.
Essentially, white flour's effect on humans is another demonstration
of Health = Nutrition / Calories. When the bran and germ are
discarded, remaining are the calories and much of the protein,
lacking are many vitamins and minerals and other vital nutritional
substances.
Whole wheat bread has been called the staff of life. In ages past,
healthy cultures have made bread the predominant staple in their
diet. Does that mean you can just go to the bakery and buy whole
grain bread, or go to the healthfood store and buy organically grown
whole wheat flour, bake your own, and be as healthy as the ancients?
Sorry, the answer is almost certainly no. There are pitfalls, many
of them, waiting for the unwary.
White flour has one other advantage over whole wheat flour. It not
only remains free of insect infestation, it doesn't become stale
(meaning rancid). In the wheat germ (where the embryo resides) there
is considerable oil, containing among other things, about the best
natural source of vitamin E. This oil is highly unsaturated and once
the seed is ground the oil goes rancid in a matter of days. Whole
wheat flour kept on the unrefrigerated shelf of the store is almost
certainly rancid. A lot of its other vitamin content has been
oxidized too. If the wheat flour had flowed directly from the
grinder into an airtight sack and from there directly to the
freezer, if it had been flash frozen and kept extremely cold, it
might have a storage life of some months. Of course that was not the
case. Maybe you're lucky and your healthfood store is one of the
very few that has its own small-scale flour mill and grinds daily.
Probably not.
How about your baker's whole wheat bread? Where does the baker get
flour? From the wholesaler's or distributor's warehouse! In fifty
pound kraftpaper sacks! How much time had elapsed from milling to
wholesaler to baker to baking? The answer has to be in the order of
magnitude of weeks. And it might be months. Was the flour stored
frozen? Or airtight? Of course not.
If you want bread made from freshly ground flour you are almost
certainly have to grind and bake it yourself. Is it worth the
trouble? You bet. Once you've tasted real bread you'll instantly see
by comparison what stale, rancid whole wheat flour tastes like.
Freshly ground flour makes bread that can be the staff of life and
can enormously upgrade your health--if the wheat you use is any good.
But before we talk about wheat quality, a more few words of warning.
If you think wheat goes rancid rapidly, rye is even worse. Rye flour
goes bad so fast that when you buy it in the store it usually is the
rye equivalent of white wheat flour. The germ has been removed. The
bag may not say so. But it probably has. If you are going to make
rye breads, even more reason to grind your own. Corn meal from the
grocery store has usually been degerminated too. If it hasn't been,
the oil in the seed's germ has probably gone rancid.
Grinding flour at home is easy these days. There is an abundance of
at-home milling products and no shortage of hype about them. You'll
find staunch advocates of stone mills. These produce the
finest-textured flour, but are costly. The sales pitch is that
stones grind at low temperature and do not damage the oils (remember
the development of rancidity is a function of temperature) or the
vitamins, which are also destroyed at high temperature. This
assertion is half true. If you are going to store your flour it is
far better to grind it cool. However, if you are, as we do, going to
immediately bake your flour, what difference does it make if it gets
a little warm before baking. That only accelerates the action of the
yeast.
On the negative side, stone mills grind slowly and are very fussy
about which grains they will grind. If the cereal is a bit moist or
if the seed being ground is a little bit oily, the mill becomes
instantly blocked.
Steel burr mills grind fast and coarsely and are inexpensive. Coarse
flour makes heavy bread. The metal grinding faces tend to wear out
and have to be replaced occasionally--if they can be replaced. Breads
on the heavy side are still delicious; for many years I made bread
with an inexpensive steel burr mill attachment that came with my
juicer.
Some steel burr mills will also grind oily seed like sesame and
sunflower. However, oily seeds can be ground far more easily
half-a-cup at a time in a little inexpensive electric spice/coffee
mill, the sort with a single fast-spinning propeller.
I currently think the best compromise are hammermills. The grain
dribbles into a chamber full of fast-spinning teeth that literally
pound the grain into powder. Since air flows through with the grain
the flour is not heated very much. This type of mill is small, very
fast, intermediate in price between steel mills and stone mill,
lasts a long time, but when grinding, sounds like a Boeing 747 about
to take off. It is essential to wear hearing protectors when using
it.
Awareness of bread quality is growing. One excellent new U.S.
business, called Great Harvest Bakery is a fast-growing national
franchise chain. They bake and sell only whole grain breads; all
their wheat flour is freshly ground daily on the premises in the
back. Unfortunately, as of the writing of this book, they do not
grind their rye flour but bring it in sacks. I can't recommend their
rye breads. The founder of Great Harvest is a knowledgeable buyer
who fully understands my next topic, which is that wheat is not
wheat.
There are great differences between hard bread wheats; being
organically grown is no cure all for making good or nutritious
bread. Great Harvest understands this and uses top quality grain
that is also Organic.
When I first stated making my own bread from my own at-home-ground
flour I was puzzled by variations in the dough. Sometimes the bread
rose well and was spongy after baking like I wanted it to be.
Sometimes it kneaded stickily and ended up flat and crumbly like a
cake. Since I had done everything the same way except that I may
have bought my wheat berries from different healthfood stores, I
began to investigate the subject of wheat quality.
The element in the cereal that forms the rubbery sponge in risen
bread so it doesn't crumble and rises high without collapsing, is
gluten. The word glue derives from gluten. The gluten content of
various wheats varies. Bread bakers use "hard wheat" because of its
high gluten content. Gluten is a protein and gluten comprises most
of the protein in bread wheat; the protein content and the gluten
content are almost identical.
Try this. Ask your healthfood store buyer or owner what the protein
content is of the hard red wheat seeds they're selling. You'll
almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost
certainly be, "we have Organic and conventional." Demand that the
store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and
then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the
answer will be the same--I sell Organic or conventional hard red
wheat. Period. When I got these non-answers I looked further and
discovered that hard bread wheats run from about 12 percent protein
to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do with
the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during
the season), and almost nothing to do with Organic or conventional.
This difference also has everything to do with how your dough
behaves and how your bread comes out. And how well your bread
nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent
loaf--fourteen percent is generally considered #2 quality and
comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the
financial news that a bushel of wheat is selling for a certain
price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots and pay
far higher prices for more protein.
We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at
all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent wheat flour and the
dough becomes very heavy, won't rise, and after baking, crumbles. So
I kept looking for better grain and finally discovered a
knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious
baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an
assayed protein content and sold it by the 50 pound sack. When I
asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or
seventeen percent protein depending on whether you wanted hard red
spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. Organic or conventional? I
persisted. No, she said. High protein!
So, I said to myself, since protein content is a function of soil
fertility and since my body needs protein, I figured I am better off
eating the best quality wheat, pesticide/herbicide residues (if
there are any) be damned. Think about it! The difference between
seventeen percent and fourteen percent protein is about 25 percent.
That percentage difference is the key threshold of nutritional
deficiency that makes teeth fall out. We can't afford to accept 25%
degradations in our nutritional quality in something that we eat
every day and that forms the very basis of our dietary.
Please understand here that I am not saying that high protein wheats
can't be grown organically. They certainly can. The founder of Great
Harvest Bakery performs a valuable service locating and securing
high-protein lots of organically grown wheats for his outlets. But
often as not Organic products are no more nourishing than those
grown with chemicals. Until the buyers at Organic whole food
wholesalers get better educated about grain, obtaining one's
personal milling stock from them will be a dicey proposition.
Sometimes Organic cereal can be far worse than conventional. To make
a cereal Organic is a negative definition; if it hasn't had
chemicals, then its Organic. Grain is one of the few foods that will
still produce economic yields of low quality seed on extremely
infertile soil or when half-smothered in weeds because herbicides
weren't used for reasons of ideological purity. Vegetables will
hardly produce anything under those conditions; carelessly grown
fruits and vegetables are inevitably small, misshapen, unmarketable.
But seed cleaning equipment can remove the contamination of weed
seeds in cereal grains (at a cost.)
The price the farmer receives for Organic cereal grain is much
higher, so it is possible to accept rather low yields or expend more
money for cleaning out high levels of weed seeds from the field-run
harvest, and still make a good profit. A lousy Organic cereal crop
like this might even make a higher profit because the farmer has
been spared the expense of fertilization, of rotation, of weed
control. I remember once I bought a sack of Organic whole oats that
were the smallest, most shriveled, bitterest oats I've ever tried to
eat. We ended up throwing out that tiny, light (lacking density)
seed in favor of using the "conventional" whole oats that were
plump, heavy and sweet.
Wheat is not the only cereal that is damaged by industrial milling.
So are oats. Most consumers have never seen whole oats; they look
very much like wheat berries. But rolled oats become rancid and
stale on the shelf much like wheat flour on the shelf.
Another pitfall about using whole grains is that to be nutritious
they must still be fresh enough to sprout vigorously. A seed is a
package of food surrounding an embryo. The living embryo is waiting
for the right conditions (temperature and moisture) to begin
sprouting. Sprouting means the embryo begins eating up stored food
and making a plant out of it. All foods are damaged by exposure to
oxygen, so to protect the embryo's food supply, the seed is
surrounded by a virtually airtight seed coat that permits only
enough oxygen to enter for the embryo's respiration (yes, seed
breaths slowly). Often the embryo is located at the edge of the seed
and has its own air intake port. When the seed coat is removed or
damaged, the innards are exposed to air and begin deteriorating
rapidly. In the case of oats, especially rapidly, because oats are
the only grass-based cereal that contains large quantities of
oil--five percent oil, more or less. That's why oats "stick to your
ribs." Rolled oats become stale and lose their flavor (and
nutritional content) and perhaps become rancid very rapidly. So we
make porridge from whole oat groats that we coarsely grind to grits
(steel-cut oats) in an electric seed/spice mill just before cooking.
It is not easy to cook oat grits. They take a lot longer than rolled
oats and if not done exactly to the recipe I'm about to give you,
will almost inevitably stick to the pot badly and may also froth
over and mess the stove. Here's how to cook them. Coarsely grind
(like corn meal) your whole oats until you have one cup of oat
grits. Bring exactly four cups of water (no salt) to a very hard
boil at your highest heat. You may add a handful of raisins. Light
or turn on a second, small-sized burner on the stove and set it as
low as possible. Into the fast boiling water, slowly pour the ground
oats, stirring continuously. Take about 30 seconds to pour it all or
you'll make clumps. Keep on the high heat until the water again
boils vigorously. Suddenly, the mixture will begin rising in the pot
and will try to pour all over the stove. This means it is all at
boiling temperature again. Quickly move the pot to the low burner;
that instantly stops the frothing. Then cover. Let the porridge cook
for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent sticking. Then,
keeping it covered, turn off the heat. They can be eaten at this
point but I think it is better to let the oats finish soaking on the
stove for at least two to four hours. Then reheat in a double
boiler, or warm in a microwave.
We usually start a pot of oats at bedtime for the next morning. See
why people prefer the convenience of using rolled oats? But once
you've eaten oats made right, you'll never prefer the flavor of
rolled oats again. And if the human body has any natural method of
assaying nutritional content, it is flavor.
Nutritionally, millet is almost the same story as oats. Millet seed
is protected by a very hard hull. Cooking unhulled millet is almost
impossible. After hours of boiling the small round seeds will still
be hard and the hulls remain entirely indigestible. Worse, the
half-round hulls (they split eventually) stick in your teeth. But
prehulled millet, sitting in the sack for weeks and months, loses a
lot of nutrition and tastes very second-rate compared to
freshly-hulled millet. It is possible to buy unhulled millet,
usually by special order from the health food distributor--if you'll
take a whole sack. Millet can be hulled at home in small batches.
Here's how we figured out how to do it. There probably are better
ways.
Using a cheap steel-burr flour mill, set the burrs just far enough
apart that the seed is ground to grits, but not flour. This pops the
hulls loose. An old mill with worn-out burrs works great for this
job. Then you have to get some hand seed cleaning screens just large
enough to pass the grits but not pass the hulls (most of them).
Window screen or other hardware cloths won't work. Seed cleaning
screens come in increments of 1/128 inch; we use a 6/64" round
screen. Other batches of millet might work better with a screen one
step larger or smaller. It will take you a little ingenuity to find
hand-held screens. They're used by seed companies and farmers to
clean small batches of seed for inspection and are usually about one
square foot in size with a quality wooden frame. Larger frames made
of the same screening material are used in big seed cleaning
machines. (The hulls could also be winnowed out by repeatedly
pouring the grit/hulls mixture back and forth between two buckets in
a gentle breeze.)
After you've screened out most of the hulls, the rest will rinse
out, floating off as you wash the grain prior to cooking. We never
hull more than enough millet for two or three meals and keep the
uncooked (unwashed) millet in the freezer in an airtight jar. It is
interesting how people will accept poor nutrition and its consequent
sickness as the price of convenience.
If you eat much buckwheat you should also figure out how to hull
(sometimes called groating) it yourself. Someone should write a
thorough book on the home milling of cereals. And perhaps sell the
equipment by mail. Probably would be a good little homestead
business.
Something else you need to keep in mind about seed. Even though the
embryo's food supply is protected by the seed coat, it still slowly
deteriorates, steadily oxidizing and losing nutritional value.
Eventually old seed looses the ability to sprout. The decline in
germination ability matches a decline in nutritional quality. Any
seed you are going to use for eating should possess the ability to
sprout, strongly and rapidly. (After you've comparatively sprouted a
few grain samples, you'll know what I mean by this.) Fortunately,
cereal grains usually sprout well for quite a few years after
harvest if they have been stored cool and dry. Eating dead or
near-dead seeds will help move you closer to the same condition
yourself.
Finally, one more warning about buying store bread. Salt-free bread
tastes "funny" to most people. It bakes fine, salt is not necessary
to the leavening process, but no bakery could stay in business
without salting their bread. The standard level of salt is two
percent by weight. That is quite a lot! Two percent equals one
teaspoonful per pound. I'll have more to say about the evils of salt
later on.
I imagine some of my readers are feeling a little overwhelmed by all
these warnings and "bewares ofs," and intricacies. They are used to
taking no responsibility for securing their own food supply quality
and have come to expect the "system" to protect them. I believe it
is not because of lack of government intervention, but because of
government intervention itself, our food system is very perverse.
Until our mass consciousness changes, if you wish to make yourself
and your family truly healthy, you are going to have to take charge
and become quite a discriminating shopper. Unconscious consumers are
on a rapid road to the total unconsciousness of death.
And again, let me remind you here that this one small book cannot
contain everything you should know. The bibliography at the end of
should become your guide to earning your post-graduate education in
nutritional health.
Freshness Of Fruits And Vegetables
Most people do not realize the crucial importance of freshness when
it comes to produce. In the same way that seeds gradually die,
fruits and vegetables go through a similar process as their
nutritional content gradually oxidizes or is broken down by the
vegetables own enzymes, but vegetables lose nutrition hundreds of
times more rapidly than cereals. Produce was recently part of a
living plant. It was connected to the vascular system of a plant and
with few exceptions, is not intended by nature to remain intact
after being cut. A lettuce or a zucchini was entirely alive at the
moment of harvest, but from that point, its cells begin to die. Even
if it is not yet attacked by bacteria, molds and fungi, its own
internal enzymes have begun breaking down its own substances.
Vegetables, especially leafy vegetables, are far more critical in
this respect than most ripe fruits. All, however, deteriorate much
like radioactive material; they have a sort of half-life. The
mineral content is stable, but in respect to the vitamins and
enzymes and other complex organic components, each time period or
"half life" results in the loss of half the nutrition. Suppose a
lettuce has a half life of 48 hours, two days after harvest only 50
percent of the original nutrition remains. After two more days, half
the remaining half is gone and only 25 percent is left. After two
more days half of that 25 percent is lost. Thus six days after
harvest and a lettuce contains only bout 12 percent of its original
nutrition. A two day half-life is only hypothetical. Those types of
produce I classify as very perishable probably do have a half-life
of from 36 to 48 hours. Moderately perishable produce has a half
life of about 72 hours; durable types of produce have half lives of
96 hours or longer.
Vegetable Storage Potential
Very Perishable Moderately Perishable Durable
lettuce zucchini apple
spinach eggplant squash
Chinese cabbage sweet peppers oranges
kale broccoli cabbage
endive cauliflower carrot
peaches apricots lemons
parsley beets
The half life of produce can be lengthened by lowering its
temperature. For that reason, sophisticated produce growers usually
use hydrocooling. This process dumps a just-cut vegetable into icy
water within minutes of being harvested, lowering core temperature
to a few degrees above freezing almost immediately. When cut
vegetables are crated up at field temperatures, and stacks of those
crates are put in a cooler, it can take the inside of the stack 24
hours, or longer, to become chilled. Home gardeners should also
practice hydrocooling. Fill your sink with cold water and wash/soak
your harvest until it is thoroughly chilled before draining and
refrigerating it. Or, harvest your garden early in the morning when
temperatures are lowest.
Still, when you buy produce in the store it may have been sitting at
room temperature for hours or possibly days.
The bottom line here: fresh is equally as important as unsprayed or
organically grown!
The Real Truth About Salt And Sugar
First, let me remind certain food religionists: salt is salt is salt
is salt and sugar is sugar is sugar. There are no good forms of salt
and no good forms of sugar. Salt from a mine and salt from the sea
both have the same harmful effect; white sugar, natural brown sugar,
honey, molasses, corn syrup, maple syrup, whatever sweet have you.
All are sugars and all have the similar harmful effects. I know of
no harmless salt substitute that really tastes salty. Nutrisweet is
basically harmless to most people and can be used as a very
satisfactory replacement for sugars. A few people are unable to
tolerate nutrisweet, causing the anti-chemicalists to circulate much
anti-nutrisweet propaganda, but you should carefully consider this
thought before dismissing nutrisweet--there is almost no food
substance that some people are not allergic to or unable to digest.
The fact that nutrisweet is made in a chemical vat and the fact that
some cannot handle nutrisweet does not make it "of the devil."
And its not all black and white with the other items either. Sea
salt does have certain redeeming qualities not found in mined salt
and under certain very special conditions, eating small quantities
of salt may be acceptable. Similarly, some forms of sugar are not
quite as harmful as other forms, though all are harmful.
The primary health problem caused by table salt is not that it
contributes to high blood pressure in people with poor kidneys,
though it does that. It is not that eating salt ruins the kidneys;
salt probably does not do that. The real problem with salt is that
sodium chloride is an adrenal stimulant, triggering the release of
adrenal hormones, especially natural steroids that resist
inflammation. When these hormones are at high levels in the blood,
the person often feels very good, has a sense of well-being. Thus
salt is a drug! And like many drugs of its type, salt is a
habituating drug. However, we are so used to whipping our adrenals
with salt that we don't notice it. What we do notice is that we
think we like the taste of salted food and consider that food tastes
flat without it. But take away a person's salt shaker and they
become very uncomfortable. That's because the addict isn't getting
their regular dose.
What's wrong with repetitive adrenal whipping is that adrenal
fortitude is variable; many people's adrenals eventually fail to
respond to the prod of salt and the body begins to suffer from a
lack of adrenal hormones. Often those inheriting weak adrenals
manifest semi-failure in childhood. The consequence is that
ordinary, irritating substances begin causing severe irritation. The
person becomes allergic to pollen, dust, foods, animal danders, etc.
We see asthma, hay fever, sinusitis, etc. Though one can then
discover specific allergens and try to remove them from the
environment or diet, often this case can be solved far more easily
by complete withdrawal from all salt. This rests the adrenals and
they may recover their full function; almost certainly their
function will improve. The asthma, allergies and etc., gradually
vanish.
Most of us don't need to eat salt as a nutrient. There's enough
sodium in one dill pickle to run a human body for a year. There's
enough natural sodium in many types of vegetables to supply normal
needs without using table salt. Perhaps athletes or other hard
working people in the tropics eating deficient food grown on
leached-out depleted soils, people that sweat buckets day after day
may need a little extra sodium. Perhaps. Not having practiced in the
humid tropics myself, I have no definitive answer about this.
Unfortunately, the average American is entirely addicted to salt and
thinks food tastes lousy without it. To please the average consumer,
almost all prepared foods contain far too much salt for someone
suffering from exhausted adrenals. Interestingly, Canadians do not
like their foods nearly as salty as Americans, and prepared foods
like soups and the like in cans and packages that look just like the
ones in American supermarkets (though with French on the back panel)
have to be reformulated for our northern neighbors. I've observed
that Canadians are generally healthier than Americans in many
respects.
We would all be far better off consuming no salt at all. Those with
allergies or asthma should completely eliminate it for a month or
two and discover if that simple step doesn't pretty much cure them.
The trouble is that bakery bread is routinely two percent salt by
weight. Cheese is equally salted or even more so. Canned and frozen
prepared food products are all heavily salted. Restaurant meals are
always highly salted in the kitchen. If you want to avoid salt you
almost have to prepare everything yourself, bake your own bread,
abstain from cheese (though there are unsalted cheeses but even I
don't like the flavor of these), and abstain from restaurants. My
family has managed to eliminate all salt from our own kitchen except
for that in cheese, and we eat cheese rather moderately.
Sugar is a high-caloric non-food with enormous liabilities. First,
from the viewpoint of the universal formula for health, no form of
non-artificial sweetener carries enough nutrients with it to justify
the number of calories it contains, not even malt extract. White
refined sugar contains absolutely no nutrients at all; the "good" or
"natural" sweets also carry so little nutrition as to be next to
useless. Sweets are so far over on the bad end of the Health =
Nutrition / Calories scale that for this reason alone they should be
avoided.
However, healthy people can usually afford a small amount of sin;
why not make it sweets? In small quantity, sugars are probably the
easiest indiscretion to digest and the least damaging to the organ
systems. Although, speaking of sin, as Edgar Guest, the peoples'
poet, once so wisely quipped, (and my husband agrees) "Candy is
dandy, but liquor is quicker." Sugar is a powerful drug! People who
abuse sweets set up a cycle of addiction that can be very hard to
break. It starts when the body tries to regulate blood sugar. Kicked
up to high levels by eating sugar, the pancreas releases insulin.
But that is not the end of the chain reaction. Insulin regulates
blood sugar levels but also raises brain levels of an amino acid
called tryptophan. Tryptophan is the raw material the brain uses to
manufacture a neurotransmitter called serotonin. And serotonin plays
a huge role in regulating mood. Higher brain levels of serotonin
create a feeling of well-being. Eating sugar gives a person a
chemical jolt of happiness. Heavy hits of high-glycemic index starch
foods are also rapidly converted to sugar. So don't give your kids
sweets! Or huge servings of starch to mellow them out. It is wise
not to start out life a happiness addict with a severe weight
problem.
Now that the chemistry of sugar addiction is understood, there
currently is a movement afoot to cast the obese as helpless victims
of serotonin imbalances and to "treat" them with the same kinds of
serotonin-increasing happy drugs (like Prozac) that are becoming so
popular with the psychiatric set. This promises to be a multiple
billion dollar business that will capture all the money currently
flowing into other dieting systems and bring it right back to the
AMA/drug company/FDA nexus. The pitch is that when serotonin levels
are upped, the desire to eat drops and so is weight. This approach
is popular with the obese because it requires no personal
responsibility other than taking a pill that really does make them
feel happy. However, the same benefit can be had by strict adherence
to a low-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Eventually, the brain chemistry
rebalances itself and serotonin levels stabilize.
Glycemic Index
(compared to glucose, which is 100)
Grains
all bran 51
brown rice 66
buckwheat 54
cornflakes 80
oatmeal 49
shred. wheat 67
muesli 66
white rice 72
white spagetti 50
whole wheat spagetti 42
sweet corn 59
Fruits
apples 39
bananas 62
cherries 23
grapefruit 26
grapes 45
orange juice 46
peach 29
orange 40
pear 34
plum 25
raisins 64
Vegetables
baked beans 40
beets 64
black-eyed peas 33
carrots 92
chic peas 36
parsnips 97
potato chips 51
baked potato 98
sweet potato 48
yams 51
peas 51
Baked Goods
pastry 59
sponge cake 46
white bread 69
w/w bread 72
whole rye bread 42
Sugars
fructose 20
glucose 100
honey 87
maltose 110
sucrose 59
Nuts
peanuts 13
Meats
sausage 28
fish sticks 38
Dairy Products
yogurt 36
whole milk 34
skim milk 32
Remember, the pancreas has another major service to perform for the
body: secreting digestive enzymes to aid in the digestion of
proteins. When the diet contains either too much protein or too much
sugar and/or high-glycemic index starch foods, the overworked
pancreas begins to be less and less efficient at maintaining both of
these functions.
Sometimes a stressed-out pancreas gets overactive and does too good
a job lowering the blood sugar, producing hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia
is generally accompanied by unpleasant symptoms such as fatigue,
dizziness, blurred vision, irritability, confusion, headache, etc.
This condition is typically alleviated by yet another hit of sugar
which builds an addiction not only to sugar, but to food in general.
If the hypoglycemic then keeps on eating sugar to relieve the
symptoms of sugar ingestion, eventually the pancreas becomes
exhausted, producing an insulin deficiency, called diabetes. Medical
doctors treat diabetes with insulin supplements either oral or
intramuscular plus a careful diet with very low and measured amounts
of sugar and starch for the remainder of the persons inevitably
shortened and far less pleasant life. However, sometimes diabetes
can be controlled with diet alone, though medical doctors have not
had nearly as much success with this approach as talented
naturopaths. Sometimes, long fasting can regenerate a pancreas. It
is far better to avoid creating this disease!
The dietary management of hypoglycemia requires that not only
refined but also unrefined sugars and starches with a high glycemic
index be removed from the diet. (The glycemic index measures the
ease with which the starch is converted into glucose in the body,
and estimates the amount of insulin needed to balance it out.) This
means no sugar, no honey, no white flour, no whole grains sweetened
with honey, no sweet fruits such as watermelons, bananas, raisins,
dates or figs. Potatoes are too readily converted into sugar.
Jerusalem artichokes are a good substitute.
People with hypoglycemia can often control their symptoms with
frequent small meals containing vegetable protein every two hours.
When a non-sweet fruit is eaten such as an apple, it should be eaten
with some almonds or other nut or seed that slows the absorption of
fruit sugar. Hypoglycemics can improve their condition with vitamins
and food supplements. See the next chapter.
Allergies to foods and environmental irritants are frequently
triggered by low blood sugar. Mental conditions are also triggered
by low blood sugar levels, frequently contributing to or causing a
cycle of acting out behavior accompanied by destruction of property
and interpersonal violence, as well as psychosis and bouts of
depression. It is not possible to easily deal with the resulting
behavior problems unless the hypoglycemia is controlled.
Unfortunately most institutions such as mental hospitals and jails
serve large amounts of sugar and starch and usually caffeinated
beverages, with a high availability of soda pop, candy, and
cigarettes at concessions. If the diet were drastically improved,
the drugs given to control behavior in mental hospitals would be
much more effective at a lower dose, or unnecessary.
The insulin-cycle overworked pancreas may eventually not be able to
secrete enough enzymes to allow for the efficient digestion of foods
high in protein. As stated earlier, poor protein digestion leads to
a highly toxic condition from putrefied protein in the intestines.
This condition is alleviated by eliminating animal proteins from the
diet and taking digestive aids such as pancreatin pills with meals
to assist in the digestion of vegetable proteins.
Food Combining And "Healthfood Junkfood."
This brings us to a topic I call healthfood junkfood. Many people
improve their diet, eliminating meat and chemicalized food in favor
of whole grains and organically grown foods, but they then proceed
to make these otherwise good foods into virtual junkfood by
preparing them incorrectly. In my travels, I've noticed this same
thing happens everywhere on Earth. What should be health-producing
dietaries are ruined by frying, salting and sugaring.
Healthfood junkfoods include organically grown potato chips deep
fried in cold pressed organic unsaturated canola oil (made rancid by
frying) sprinkled with natural sea salt; organically grown oat and
nut granola roasted with cold-pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid
by roasting) hideously sweetened with honey; carrot cake made with
rancid whole wheat flour, cold pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid
by baking), honey, and cream cheese (salted); whole wheat cookies
(stale, rancid flour) sweetened with honey, made with vegetable oil
baked at high heat (rancid); whole wheat pizza vegetarian style with
lots of soy cheese; whole wheat pizza vegan style with lots of real
raw milk cheese; organically grown corn chips deep fried in cold
pressed vegetable oil with or without natural sea salt, yogurts made
from powdered milk without an active culture of beneficial bacteria
and covered with highly sugared fruits, etc. These foods may well
represent an improvement over the average American diet, but they
still are not healthy foods, and should never be used in a diet for
a sick person. Nor are they worthy of a person attempting to
maximize health.
The problem with healthfood junkfoods is not their major
ingredients, but how they were combined and processed and
adulterated. Remember, fats, animal or vegetable, subjected to high
heat become indigestible and toxic and make anything they're cooked
with indigestible; salt is a toxic drug; cheese, hard enough to
digest as it is, when raised to high temperatures as it is when
making pizza, becomes virtually indigestible and cheese inevitably
contains a lot of butterfat which, though saturated animal fat, when
raised to high temperatures, still becomes slightly rancid. And all
these foods represent indigestible combinations.
My clients almost never believe me when I first explain the idea of
food combining. They think if it goes in one end, comes out the
other, and they don't feel any unpleasant symptoms in between, then
it was digested. But bad food combinations have a cumulative
degenerative effect over a long period of time. When the symptoms
arrive the victim never associates the food combination with the
symptom because it seems to them that they've always been eating the
food.
Mainstream nutritionists have brainwashed the public into thinking
that we should have a representative serving from each of the "four
basic food groups" at each and every meal, plus a beverage and a
desert. Or, as my husband Steve is fond of quipping, a "balanced
meal" has four colors on every plate: something red, something
green, something white and something yellow. But the balanced meal
is a gastronomic catastrophe that can only be processed by the very
young with high digestive vitality, the exceptionally vital of any
age, people with cast iron stomachs which usually refers to their
good heredity, and those who are very physically active.
Few seem to realize that each type of food requires specific and
different digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach, and intestine.
Carbohydrates, fats, proteins--each requires differing acid or
alkaline environments in order to be digested. Proteins require an
acid environment. Starch digestion requires an alkaline environment.
When foods in complex combinations are presented to the stomach all
together, like a meal with meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, bread,
butter, a glass of milk, plus a starchy sweet desert, followed by
coffee or tea, the stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine are
overwhelmed, resulting in the fermentation of the sugars and
starches, and the putrefaction of the proteins, and poor digestion
of the whole. It is little wonder that most people feel so tired
after a large meal and need several cups of strong coffee to be able
to even get up from the table. They have just presented their
digestive tract with an immensely difficult and for some an
impossible task.
For the most efficient digestion, the body should be presented with
one simple food at a time, the one bowl concept, easily achieved by
adherence to the old saying, "one food at a meal is the ideal." An
example of this approach would be eating fruits for breakfast, a
plain cereal grain for lunch, and vegetables for supper. If you
can't eat quite that simply, then proper food combining rules should
be followed to minimize digestive difficulty, maximize the
adsorption of nutrients from your food, and reduce or eliminate the
formation of toxemia, and of course foul gas.
In general, fruit should be eaten alone unless you happen to be
hypoglycemic or diabetic in which case fruit should be eaten with
small quantities of a vegetable protein such as nuts, or yogurt
and/or cheese if able to digest dairy. Starches should be eaten with
vegetables, which means that a well combined meal would include a
grain such as rice, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, corn,
wheat, rye, oats, spelt, potatoes, or starchy winter squash combined
with raw or cooked vegetables. Protein foods such as meat, eggs,
beans, lentils, tofu, split peas, should be combined with
vegetables, raw or cooked. But protein should never be combined with
starches. The most popular North American snacks and meals always
have a starch/protein combination, for example: meat and potatoes,
hamburger in a bun, hot dog with bun, burrito with meat or cheese,
meat sandwiches, etc. It is little wonder that intestinal gas is
accepted as normal, and that over time these hard to digest
combinations eventually cause health problems that demand attention.
Another sure fire way to ruin any food, including the very best
available is to eat in the presence of negative emotions generated
by yourself or others. Negative emotions include fear, anger,
frustration, envy, resentment, etc. The digestive tract is
immediately responsive to stress and or negative thoughts. It
becomes paralyzed in negative emotional states; any foods eaten are
poorly digested, causing toxemia.
It is natural for a person who has lost a loved one or suffered a
great loss of any kind to lose their appetite for a period of time.
This reaction is pro-survival, because while grieving, the body is
griped by powerful negative emotions. There are people who, under
stress or when experiencing a loss, eat ravenously in an attempt to
comfort themselves. If this goes on for long the person can expect
to create a serious illness of some kind.
Individual sensitivity to this type of overeating is dependent upon
genetics and personality and who is generating the negative
emotions. Self generated negative emotions are very difficult to
avoid. If you are unable to change your own emotional tone or that
of others around you, then it is important to eat very lightly, eat
only easily digested foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, raw
juices, steamed vegetables, and small servings of whole grains, nuts
and seeds.
Diets To Heal The Critically Ill
A critically ill person is someone who could expire at any moment;
therapeutic interventions are racing against death. Can the body
repair itself enough before some essential function ceases
altogether? If there already exists too much damage to vital organs
the person will die. If there remains sufficient organ function to
support life, enough vital force to power those functions, and a
will to live, the body may heal itself if helped by the correct
therapeutic approach. But the therapy does not do the healing; the
body does that by itself--if it can. This reality is also true of
allopathic medicine.
I believe fasting is the therapy that almost invariably gives a
critically ill person their very best chance of recovery. If a
patient dies while fasting they almost certainly would have died
anyway, and if death comes while fasting, it will be more
comfortable, with less pain, and with more mental clarity.
Critically ill people may have, among other things, any of the
following diagnoses: advanced cancer, advanced aids, heart failure,
very high blood pressure, kidney failure, advanced liver disease,
advanced emphysema, pneumonia or other catastrophic infections,
especially those that seem unresponsive to antibiotics, strokes,
emboli, sclerotic vessels as found in arteriosclerosis, severe nerve
degeneration interfering with nerve transmission to vital organs.
Treating the critically ill does not have to be an all or nothing,
ideological choice between holistic medicine and AMA style medicine.
It is important for the critically ill and their families to know
that if they use standard medical treatment such as drugs or
surgery, these measures can and should be combined with natural
healing methods. It is always desirable to quit all addicting
substances, start a whole foods diet, (as light as possible), and
add meganutrition (supplements) to the medical doctor's treatments.
Few medical doctors are so arrogantly partisan as to assert that
natural measures will do any harm as long as the MD is still allowed
to prescribe as they please.
Holistic support will not only lessen the side effects of the
medical treatments but will speed up healing and often reduce the
required dose of prescribed drugs. I have had several clients with
cancer who chose to have surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but
stayed on a raw food diet and took high doses of supplements
throughout the treatment. These people amazed the attending
physician by feeling good with little if any fatigue, no hair loss,
or flu symptoms. The same can be true of other conditions.
Food In The Order Of Digestive Difficulty
Individual digestive weaknesses and allergies are not taken into
account in this list.
Hard To Digest: Meat, fish, chicken, eggs (if cooked), all legumes
including soy products, peanuts and peanut butter, beans, split
peas, lentils, chick peas, dairy products such as cheese, milk,
butter milk, nuts and seeds and their butters.
Intermediate: all grains--quinoa, amaranth, millet, spelt, rye,
wheat, oats, barley.
Fairly Easy: Brussels sprouts, green beans, green peas, broccoli,
cauliflower, raw cultured milk products, asparagus, cabbage, sprouts
especially bean sprouts, kale, other leafy greens.
Very Easy: fruits, vegetable juices, fruit juices, broth (clear).
No Effort: herb tea, water.
Ethyl always comes to my mind when I think of how much healing power
can still be left in a dying body. She (accompanied by her husband
for support) came to Great Oaks School with terminal cancer, heart
failure, advanced diabetes, extreme weakness, and complete inability
to digest. Any food ingested just came back up immediately. Ethyl
had large tumors taking over the breast, sticking out from her
skull, and protruding from her body in general. The largest was the
one in the left breast which was the size of a big man's fist.
She did have one crucial thing going for her, Ethyl was a feisty
Irish red head who still had a will to live, and a reason to do so.
She and her husband, who had just retired, had dreamed their whole
life of touring the US and Canada in their own RV the minute he
retired. The time had finally arrived but Ethyl was too ill to
support her own weight (only 90 pounds) and to top it off was blind
from diabetic retinopathy. The doctors had done everything they
could to her, and now judged her too weak to withstand any more
surgery (she had already had her right breast removed). Radiation or
chemotherapy were also considered impossible due to heart failure.
They sent Ethyl home to die, giving her a few days to a month at
most.
Any sensible hygienist trying to stay out of jail would have refused
to take on this type of case because it was a cancer case where
death was likely. Treatment of this highly lucrative disease is
considered the AMA's exclusive franchise, even when the medical
doctors have given up after having done everything to a body the
family can pay for or owe for. Whenever a person dies under the care
of any person who is not a licensed M.D. there must be an autopsy
and a criminal investigation in search of negligence. If the person
dies under the care of an M.D. the sheriff's assumption is that the
doctor most assuredly did everything he could and should have done
and death was inevitable. By accepting Ethyl I had a reasonable
likelihood of ending up in trouble; but being foolish, brave and
(stupidly) feeling relatively immune to such consequences (I was
under 40 at the time), it seemed important to try to help her. So,
undaunted by the task, regardless of the outcome, I proceeded
logically, one step at a time. Today, with more experience and a
modest net worth I wouldn't want to have to defend in a lawsuit, and
at age 55. possessing no spare five to ten years to give to the
State to "pay" for my bravery, I would probably refuse such a case.
Fortunately I have not been confronted with this problem lately.
Since Ethyl was unable to digest anything given by mouth, she was
fed rectally with wheat grass juice implants three times a day. She
was carried to the colonic table for a daily colonic. Wheat grass
and clay poultices were applied to her tumors three times a day. She
received an acupressure massage and reflexology treatments during
the day, plus a lot of tender loving care. This program continued
for a month during which the tumors were being reabsorbed by the
body, including the large, extremely hard tumor sticking out the
flesh of the right breast.
Ethyl complained of severe pain as the large tumor in her breast
shrank. While it had been getting larger and pressing ever harder on
all the nerves, she had little or no sensation, but as it shrank,
the nerves were reactivated. Most people think that a growing tumor
would cause more pain than a shrinking one. Often the opposite is
true. Pain can be a good sign that the body is winning, an indicator
to proceed.
By the second month, Ethyl, gradually gaining strength, was able to
take wheat grass and carrot juice orally, and gradually eased into
raw foods, mostly sprouts and leafy greens such as sunflower and
buckwheat greens grown in trays. She started to walk with assistance
up and down the halls, no longer experiencing the intense pain
formerly caused by a failing heart, and most surprising of all, her
eyesight returned, at first seeing only outlines, and then details.
The third month Ethyl enlarged her food intake to include raw foods
as well as the carrot and wheat grass juice and sprouts, plus
vitamin and mineral supplements to help support her immune system
and the healing process. All the tumors had been reabsorbed by her
body and were no longer visible, her heart was able to support
normal activity such as walking, and nonstrenuous household chores,
and her diabetes had corrected itself to the point that she no
longer required insulin and was able to control her blood sugar with
diet.
Her husband was then instructed in her maintenance and they went
home to continue the program. The last I heard from them they had
made two lengthy trips around the US in their RV and were enjoying
their retirement together after all.
My treatment worked because the most important factor in the healing
of the critically ill person is not give them more nourishment than
their body is able to process. The moment the digestive capacity of
the sick person is exceeded, the condition will be exacerbated and
in a critically illness, the person is likely to die. If the body
still has sufficient organ integrity and vital force to heal itself,
it will do so only if given the least possible nourishment that will
support life--provided no essential organs are hopelessly damaged. If
the liver and kidneys are functional, and the person has done some
previous dietary improvement and/or cleansing, success is likely,
especially if the person wants to live.
A person in critical condition does not have time to ease into
fasting by first spending a month or two on a raw foods diet. This
means that the person who is taking care of the critically ill
person must be experienced enough to adjust the intensity of the
body's healing efforts and accurately assess the ability of the
person to process toxic waste products clamoring for removal so the
ailing body is not drowned in it's own poisons. It is often
necessary to use clear vegetable broth, vegetable and wheat grass
juices, and fruits juices, or whole sprouts to slow down the
cleansing gradient and sometimes, to resupply the tissue's exhausted
nutritional reserves.
I wish all cases of critical illness had such a positive outcome as
Ethyl's, but unfortunately they don't. I had Marge on the same
program at the same time. She also had cancerous tumors all over her
body and had similarly been sent home to die. In some ways Marge's
body was a more likely candidate for survival than Ethyl's. Marge
did not have heart failure or diabetes and was still able on arrival
to at least take small amount of water orally and walk to the
bathroom. Put on a similar program, her tumors also shrunk and were
reabsorbed and she too went home.
But Marge did not really have a strong reason to live. Although her
husband was by her side throughout the treatment program, Marge was
deeply upset because she was estranged from one of her sons who she
had not seen for over 10 years. When she went home from Great Oaks,
the son finally consented to see his mother, went to the effort of
trying to work things out with her, and finally confessed that under
it all he still loved her.
At that point Marge died in peace. She had accomplished the last
thing she wanted to take care of and her will to live did not extend
beyond that point. Had she died several months earlier as predicted
by the medical profession, Marge would have been unable to resolve
this relationship. This was what Marge's life was pivoting on at the
end. I was glad to assist her in doing what she needed to do. Her
husband and other family members found it difficult to understand,
and they were hurt that Marge did not wish to continue her life with
them.
Diet For The Chronically Ill.
The chronically ill person has a long-term degenerative condition
that is not immediately life threatening. This condition usually
causes more-or-less continuous symptoms that are painful, perhaps
unsightly, and ultimately will be disabling or eventually capable of
causing death. To qualify as "chronic" the symptoms must have been
present a minimum of six months, with no relief in sight. People
with these conditions have usually sought medical assistance,
frequently have had surgery, and have taken and probably are taking
numerous prescription drugs.
Some examples of chronic conditions are: arthritis, rheumatism,
diabetes, early onset of cancer and aids, asthma, colitis,
diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome, some mental disorders,
arterial deposit diseases, most of the itises (inflammations).
Before fasting, the chronically ill often do have time to prepare
the way with limited dietary reform, and frequently begin to feel
relief quite quickly. Before actually fasting they should limit
their diet to raw foods and eliminate all toxic foods like alcohol,
coffee, tea, salt, sugar and recreational drugs for two months if
they have been following a typical American diet.
If the chronically ill had been following a vegetarian diet, perhaps
a diet including with eggs and dairy, if they had been using no
addicting substances, then one month on raw foods is sufficient
preparation for fasting. If the person had water or juice fasted for
at least a week or two within the last two years, and followed a
healthy diet since that time, one or two weeks on raw foods should
be a sufficient runway.
During preparation for a fast, I never recommend that a chronically
ill person quit taking prescription medicines because doing so can
seriously disrupt their homeostasis. However, if their symptoms
lessen or vanish during the pre-fasting clean up, the person might
try tapering off medications.
The length and type of fast chosen to resolve a chronic illness
depends largely on available time, finances, availability of support
people, work responsibilities, and mental toughness. If you are one
of those fortunate people 'rich' enough to give their health first
priority, long water fasting is ideal. If on the other hand you
can't afford to stop working, have no one to take care of you and
assist with some household chores, and/or you are not mentally tough
enough to deal with self-denial, compromise is necessary.
Ideally the chronically ill person would fast for an extended period
under supervision until their symptoms were gone or greatly
improved, with a fall-back plan to repeat the whole process again in
three to six months if necessary. If you are not able to do that,
the next best program is to fast for a short period, like one or two
weeks, with a plan to repeat the process as often as possible until
you are healed.
I have had clients with potentially life-threatening conditions such
as obesity with incipient heart failure, or who came to me with
cancer, that were unable to stop work for financial reasons, or who
could not afford a residential fasting program, or who felt
confident in their own ability to deal with detoxification in their
own home. These people have fasted successfully at home, coming to
see me once a week. Almost inevitably, successful at-home fasters
had already done a lot of research on self healing, believed in it,
and had the personal discipline to carry it out properly, including
breaking the fast properly without overeating.
Foods To Heal Chronic Illness
Sprouts Baby Greens Salad Juices Fruit
alfalfa sunflower lettuce beet grapefruit
radish buckwheat celery celery lemon
bean zucchini zucchini lime lime
clover kale kale orange orange
fenugreek endive radish parsley apple
wheat tomato tomato raspberries
cabbage cabbage cabbage blueberries
carrot carrot grapes
spinach apple peaches
parsley grapefruit apricots
sweet pepper lemon strawberry
Fruits should be watery and lower in sugar. Some examples of poor
fruit choices would be pineapple, ripe mango, bananas, dates,
raisins, figs. Fruits should not be combined with vegetables.
Vegetables should not be starchy, packed-full of energy. Poor
vegetable choices would be potato, parsnip, turnip, corn, sweet
potato, yam, beet, winter squash. Sprouts and baby greens are
vegetables and may be included in salads.
Juices should not be extremely sweet. Apple, orange, beet and carrot
juice should be diluted with 50% water. Fruit juices should not be
mixed with vegetable juices or with vegetables at the same meal.
Salads should include no fruit. Salad dressings should be lemon or
lime juice, very small quantities of olive oil, and herbs. No salt,
soy sauce nor black pepper. Cayenne can be okay for some.
I have also helped chronically ill people that were not mentally
prepared to water fast, but were able to face the long-term
self-control and deprivation of a raw food cleansing diet that
included careful food combining. These people also regained their
health, but it took them a year at minimum, and once well they had
to remain on a diet tailor-made to their digestive capacity for the
rest of their life, usually along with food supplements.
Jim was such a case. He was 55 years old, very obese, had
dangerously high blood pressure poorly controlled with medication,
and was going into congestive heart failure. He was on digitalis and
several other heart medications plus diuretics, but in no way was
his condition under control. He had severe edema in the feet and
legs with pitting, and fluid retention in the abdominal region
caused a huge paunch that was solid to the touch not soft and
squishy like fatty tissue.
Jim had dreamed of having his own homestead with an Organic garden,
now he had these things but was too sick to enjoy them or work in
his garden without severe heart pain and shortness of breath. Jim
had retired early in order to enjoy many years without the stresses
of work, and he was alarmed to realize that he was unlikely to
survive a year.
The day Jim came to see me the first time I would have classified
his condition as critically ill because his life was in immediate
danger; but he responded so quickly to his detox program that he was
very soon out of danger and would be more accurately described as a
chronically ill person. Jim was not prepared to water fast. He was
attached to having his food and he was aware that at his extreme
weight he was going to have stay on a dietary program for a long,
long time. He also wanted to choose a gradient that he could manage
by himself at home with little assistance from his wife. He had been
on a typical American diet with meat, coffee, etc., so that in spite
of his dangerous condition it did not seem wise to me to add the
heavy eliminatory burden of a water fast to a body that was already
overwhelmed with fluids and waste products.
Jim immediately went on a raw food cleansing diet, with no
concentrated foods like nuts, seeds, or avocados, and with one day
each week fasting on vegetable juice and broth. He did enemas daily
even though it wasn't his favorite thing. In one month he had lost
30 pounds, his eyes had started to sparkle, and his complexion was
rosy. The swelling had disappeared from his feet and legs, and he
had to buy new pants.
Starting the second month he gradually withdrew from prescription
medications. From the beginning I had put Jim on a program of
nutritional supplements including protomorphogens (see chapter on
vitamins and food supplements) to help the body repair it's heart
and the kidneys. In only four months he had returned his body to
glowing health, and looked great for his age, though he was still
overweight. At the end of one year he had returned to a normal
weight for his height, and only cheated on the diet a couple of
times when attending a social event, and then it was only a baked
potato with no dressing.
He was probably going to have many qualitative years working his
garden and living out his dreams. The local intensive care ward lost
a lot of money when they failed to get Jim.
Diet For The Acutely Ill
The acutely ill person experiences occasional attacks of distressing
symptoms, usually after indiscretions in living or emotional upsets.
They have a cold, or a flu, or sinusitis, or a first bout of
pneumonia, or a spring allergy attack. The intense symptoms knock
them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. If they
are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the
chronically ill category.
People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent
that they are able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute
illness, the appetites is probably pretty dull anyway, so why not
give a brief fast on water or fruit juice a try.
Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting
more than a week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first
bout of pneumonia may well last for three weeks or a month. The
general rule is to eat as little as possible until the symptoms have
passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have a horror
of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses of
Vitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.)
Those having a little experience with natural medicine make teas of
echinacea, fenugreek seeds and red clover and quit eating. Eating as
little as possible can mean only water and herb teas, only vegetable
broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice, even only
cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relieved
your system of enough digestive effort.
After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your
life-style and improve your diet so that you aren't so toxic and
don't have to experience an acute illness several times a year when
your body is forced to try an energetic detox.
Diet For A Healthy Person
I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth
century. Doctors Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the
New Health Catastrophes state that in-depth laboratory testing of
the population at large demonstrated four universally present
pathological conditions: heavy metal poisoning, arteriosclerosis,
sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of
us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not
really healthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional
supplementation. In fact the odds against most people receiving
adequate vitamin and mineral nutrition without supplements are very
poor as demonstrated by the following chart.
Problem Nutrients in America
Nutrient Percent Receiving Less than the RDA
B-6 80%
Magnesium 75
Calcium 68
Iron 57
Vitamin A 50
B-1 45
C 41
B-2 36
B-12 36
B-3 33
A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and
does not have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing
interferes with or handicaps their daily life or work. A healthy
person has good energy most of the time, a positive state of mind,
restful sleep, good digestion and elimination.
Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that
way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie
count--eating or drinking those things that they know are not good
for them but that are fun to eat or are "recreational foods or
beverages." Such "sinning" could mean a restaurant bash twice a
month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, ice
cream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key
concept of responsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent
limit.
A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not
exceed the digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of
quantity or quality. All foods that can not be efficiently digested
should be removed from the regular diet and relegated to the "sin"
category, including those you are allergic to and those for which
you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few
people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish,
but some can, and some can with the assistance of digestive enzyme
supplements. In order to digest meats, the stomach must be
sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin, pancreatin, and
bile, etc., and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side
(not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces),
and not combined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you
must include meat in your dietary, it should represent a very small
percentage of your total caloric intake, be eaten infrequently, with
the bulk of the calories coming from complex carbohydrates such
grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities of vegetables
and fruits.
The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is
advised to fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a
chance to catch up on their internal housecleaning. If water fasting
seems impossible, try a day of juicing it; if that is too rigorous,
try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though less beneficial
than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking
your overnight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up
breakfast altogether or postponing breaking your overnight fast,
because from the time you stop eating at the end of one day to the
time you start eating the next is actually a brief, detoxifying
fast.
Eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt can be assimilated by some healthy
people with or without digestive aids. It is possible to take
lactase to break down the milk sugars for example; sometimes aids
such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and pancreatin help. If you can
buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurt containing
lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily,
especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on
unsprayed food, and served very fresh. Eggs should come from
chickens that run around outside, eating weeds, and scratching bugs.
The yokes of those eggs will be intense orange, not yellow. Few
people these days have ever eaten a real egg. Surprisingly, for
those of you who fear cholesterol, the healthy way to eat eggs is
use just the raw yolk from fertile eggs. It is enjoyed by many
people in a smoothie--fresh fruit blended up with water or milk. Eggs
contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturally prevents the body from
forming harmful fatty deposits in the arteries.
Sea weeds are a wonderful source of minerals and should be eaten in
soups and salads. Other invaluable fortifying foods are algae of all
kinds (such as chlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast,
and fresh bakers yeast. Many people have had very unpleasant
experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast and so use brewers
yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins it
contains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw
yeast is so powerful, it feels like pep pills!
It takes a special technique to eat raw yeast because in the stomach
and intestines the yeast does the job it is supposed to do: convert
sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The entire digestive
tract then bloats with gas and the person will feel very
uncomfortable for some time. However, raw yeast is a marvelous
source of B vitamins and proteins and can make someone feel very
energetic--if they know how to use it. The secret is to eat live
yeast very first thing in the morning on an empty stomach and then,
not eat anything at all for about two hours, giving the stomach
acids and enzymes time to kill the yeasts and digest them before
adding sugars from another meal. Some like to eat yeast in fresh
cake form, buying it from a bakery. Others prefer dry granular
baker's yeast blended with water into a sort of "shake." This is not
a bad place to put your raw egg yoke either. If you need it
sweetened to drink it, use an artificial or herbal sweetener like
nutrisweet or stevia. Live yeast cannot consume milk sugars very
well. So if you can handle dairy, try one or two tablespoons of
granulated live yeast, an egg yoke and a little raw milk or yogurt,
well whizzed.
Wheat germ is also a great, rich food, but is usually rancid unless
it is taken out of the refrigerated display; unless it is
refrigerated, in a dated package and fresh, don't eat it. Herb teas
and roasted grain beverages are healthy beverages, along with
mineral and distilled water avoiding where possible chlorinated and
fluoridated water.
Diet Is Not Enough
Those isolated, long-lived peoples discovered by Weston A. Price had
to do hard physical labor to eat, had to walk briskly up and down
steep terrain to get anywhere. But today, few North Americans output
very much physical energy in process of daily life or work. Not only
cars, but all of our modern conveniences make it possible to live
without ever breaking into a sweat. We pay for this ease; it costs
us a significant degree of health.
Exercise has many benefits when combined with excellent nutrition.
It creates an overall feeling of well-being that can not be created
by diet alone. Exercising temporarily makes the heart beat faster,
increasing blood circulation throughout the body right out to the
tips of your fingers and toes. This short-term elevated flow of
blood flow brings increased supplies of oxygen and nutrients to all
parts of the body, facilitating healing and repair. Without revving
up your engine every day many of the body's systems never get the
sludge burned out of them and never perform optimally.
Exercise also changes the metabolic rate so your body burns more
calories--not only while you are exercising, but also for a 24 hour
period following exercise. This maintains a healthful body weight
into old age, or helps to lose weight. Most people find that
exercise in moderation does not increase appetite, so that it is
possible to consistently burn more calories in a day, and gradually
reduce weight if that is desirable. It is necessary to burn 3,500
calories to lose a pound of weight. Most forms of exercise allow you
to burn 300 to 600 calories per hour at a moderate pace which would
be achieved by doubling the resting pulse. Without even considering
the weight-loss benefit of achieving a raised metabolism, an hour of
daily exercise continued for a week or two dependent upon the type
of exercise and pace should lead to one pound of weight loss if the
caloric intake is held constant.
The flip side of having a higher metabolism is rarely appreciated
but is extremely important. Recall the basic equation of health:
Health = Nutrition / Calories. Exercise permits a person to eat
somewhat more while not gaining weight. If the food is nutrient
rich, the body has a chance to extract more vitamins, more minerals,
more amino acids. The person who remains slender by rigidly reducing
their food intake to near starvation levels may lack vital,
health-building nutrition.
And only exercise moves lymphatic fluid. The blood is pumped through
the body by the heart, but the lymphatic system, lacking a heart,
requires muscular contractions to move from the extremities of the
body to the central cavity. The lymphatic system picks up cellular
waste products and conducts these toxins to disposal. Frequently,
people with rheumatic aches and pains or other generalized muscular
discomforts physicians like to give Latin diagnostic names to can
give up taking pain pills if they will but begin exercising
regularly. Only when they begin moving their lymph can they begin to
detoxify properly.
There is another benefit from exercise which is not to be ignored,
and that is that it gives the person a chemical sense of well being.
It actually will help to emotionally boost up people who are
chronically depressed and make them smile. After a good workout,
especially one done outside, everything seems brighter, more
positive; whatever was bothering you somehow just doesn't seem like
that big of a deal now. I am not making pro-exercise propaganda.
This is not a figment of the imagination. An exercising body really
does make antidepressant neurochemicals called endorphins, but only
after about 45 minutes to an hour of aerobic workout.
Endorphins are powerful, with painkilling and euphoric effects equal
to or greater than heroin, but without any undesirable side effects.
If chemists could learn to cheaply synthesize endorphins I'm sure
that millions of people would want to become addicted to them.
Because I make such a point of getting in my workout every day, my
husband has accused me of being an endorphin junkie, and he is
right! I admit it, I'm really hooked on the feeling of well being I
consistently get from any sustained exercise. I defend my addiction
staunchly because it is the healthiest addiction I know of.
I have also been accused of carrying exercise to extremes, and I
admit to that also. For a few years I trained for Ironman
triathlons. I now think doing ironman distances is immoderate and
except for a few remarkable individuals with "iron" constitutions,
training that hard can only lead to a form of exhaustion that is not
health promoting. I have become much more sensible in my "old" age,
and in recent years have limited my participation to the Olympic
distance triathlons. I was on the Canadian team at the World
Championship in 1992, and intend to do it again in 1995. I do not
find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it is great
fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age
group competitors from all over the world who look and feel
fantastic. It does my soul good to see a group of people aging so
gracefully, not buying into the popular notion that old age is
inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings a degree of
balance to my life after spending so much time in the presence of
the sick. I plan to maintain my athletic activities into old age,
barring accident or other unforeseen obstacles to fitness.
To maintain basic fitness it does not matter so much what form of
exercise is chosen, as long as it is not damaging to the skeletal
system or connective tissues. Many people are unable to run due to
foot, knee, hip, or back problems, but almost everyone can walk.
Walking outside is better than inside on a treadmill, and walking
hills is better than walking on flat ground. Exercise machines such
as stationary bikes, cross country ski machines, and stair steppers
work well for a lot of people who live in the city, especially in
the winter, or for those who hate exercise. Whatever you choose to
do, it is important to at least double the resting pulse for 30
minutes no less than four days a week. This is the absolute minimum
required to maintain the health and function of the
cardiovascular-pulmonary system. If your resting pulse is 70, you
must walk, jog, ski, bike, swim or what have you, fast enough to
keep the pulse at 140 beats per minute for at least 30 minutes.
I have a strong preference to exercising outside in isolated places
where there is only me and the forest, or only me and the river.
Running along logging roads in the hilly back country, or swimming
in the green unpolluted water of a forest river is a spiritual
experience for me. It is a time to meditate, to commune with nature,
and to clear my mind and create new solutions. The repetitive action
of running or walking or swimming, along with the regular deep
breathing in clean air, with no distractions except what nature
provides is truly health promoting. Sharing these activities with
friends or family can also be great fun and some of the best in
social interactions. It is one of my favorite ways of visiting with
people. I don't expect other people to be as enthusiastic about
exercise as I am, but I do hope that everyone will make an effort to
be minimally fit as an ongoing part of their health program into old
age.
Diet For A Long, Long Life
Some people not only want to be healthy, but they want to live in
good health long past the normal life span projected by statistical
tables for Homo Sapiens. Dr. Roy Walford, a well-respected medical
research gerontologist who has been actively studying longevity for
many years, is one of those. He has scientifically demonstrated with
accepted studies that a qualitative life span up to at least 115
years of age is reasonably attainable by the average person if they
start working on it no later than about 50 years of age, though
earlier is much better.
Walford's principles of extending life are very simple. All you have
to do is restrict your caloric intake to about 1,500 per day, and
water fast two days a week. Or alternatively, reduce your caloric
intake to 1,200 per day and fast only one day a week on water. And
make sure that every single bit of food you do eat is packed with
nutrition, every single calorie, without exception. You continue
this program for the rest of your life along with moderate daily
exercise and high but reasonable dosages of vitamins, minerals, and
also take a few exotic food supplements. The supplement program is
not particularly expensive nor extreme, Walford's supplement program
is more moderate than the life extension program I recommend for all
middle-aged and older people. The best foods for this type of
program is a largely raw food diet (80%) with a predominance of
sprouts and baby greens, some cooked vegetables, and raw nuts and
seeds. And make sure you get 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise
every other day.
While Dr. Walford's focus is on caloric reduction while maintaining
sufficient nutrition, most other life extensionists focus on
increasing the nutrition side of the equation for health without
bothering to reduce caloric intake. This approach is much easier
because essentially, it involves gobbling nutritional supplements by
the handfuls without requiring self-discipline, though it can get
quite expensive. I'll have more to say about this approach in the
next chapter, which is about vitamins.
In this book I can't explain all the aspects of prolongation of life
through conscious life-style choice. Those who are interested are
referred to the Bibliography.
Chapter Six
Vitamins and Other Food Supplements
From The Hygienic Dictionary
Vitamins. [1] The staple foods may not contain the same nutritive
substances as in former times. . . . Chemical fertilizers, by
increasing the abundance of the crops without replacing all the
exhausted elements of the soil, may have indirectly contributed to
change the nutritive value of cereal grains and of vegetables. . . .
Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of
diseases. Their studies of conditions of life and diet, and of their
effects on the physiological and mental state of modern man are
superficial, incomplete, and of too short duration. They have, thus,
contributed to the weakening of our body and our soul. _Alexis
Carrel, Man the Unknown._
I have already explained the hygienist's view of why people get
sick. The sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia,
alternative elimination, disease. However, there is one more link in
this chain, a precursor to enervation that, for good and
understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists.
That precursor is long term sub-clinical malnutrition. Lack of
nutrition effects virtually everybody today. Almost all of us are
overfed but undernourished.
I have already explained that one particular head of broccoli does
not necessarily equal another head of broccoli; the nutritional
composition of apparently identical foods can be highly variable.
Not only do different samples of the same type of food differ wildly
in protein content, amino acid ratios and mineral content, their
vitamin and vitamin-like substances also vary according to soil
fertility and the variety grown.
These days, food crop varieties are bred for yield and other
commercial considerations, such as shipability, storage life, and
ease of processing. In pre-industrial times when each family
propagated its own unique open-pollinated varieties, a natural
selection process for healthy outcomes prevailed. If the family's
particular, unique varieties carried genes for highly nutritious
food, and if the family's land was fertile enough to allow those
genes to manifest, and if the family kept up its land's fertility by
wise management, their children tended to survive the gauntlet of
childhood illness and lived to propagate the family's varieties and
continue the family name. Thus, over time, human food cultivars were
selected for their nutritional content.
But not any longer! These days, farming technology with its focus on
bulk yield and profit, degrades the nutritional content of our
entire food supply. Even commercial organically grown food is no
better in this respect.
Sub-clinical, life-long, vitamin and mineral deficiencies contribute
to the onset of disease; the malnourished body becomes increasingly
enervated, beginning the process of disease. Vitamin supplements can
increase the body's vital force, reversing to a degree the natural
tendency towards degeneration. In fact, some medical gerontologists
theorize that by using vitamins it might be possible to restore
human life span to its genetically programmed 115 years without
doing anything else about increasing nutrition from our degraded
foods or paying much attention to dietary indiscretions. Knowing
what I do about toxemia's effects I doubt vitamins can allow us to
totally ignore what we eat, though supplements can certainly help.
More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a thinking
person to use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are
constantly assaulted and insulted by modern life in ways our
genetics never intended us to deal with. Today the entire
environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted; our
food supply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules
that our bodies have no natural ability to process and eliminate.
Our cities and work places are full of loud, shocking noises that
trigger frequent adrenaline rushes and other stress adaptations. Our
work places are full of psychological stresses that humans never had
to deal with before.
Historically, humans who were not enslaved have been in control of
determining their own hour to hour, day to day activities, living on
their own largely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for
another, at regular hours, without personal liberty, ignoring or
suppressing one's own agenda and inclinations over an entire
lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takes continual
subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protect
ourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we
don't know we're expending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to
remain healthy we may need nutrition at levels far higher than might
be possible through eating food; even ideal food might not contain
enough vitamins to sustain us against the strains and stresses of
this century.
And think about Dr. Pottenger's cats. Our bodies are at the poorer
end of a century-long process of mass degeneration that started with
white flour from the roller mill. Compared to my older clients I
have noticed that my younger patients seem to possess less vital
force on the average, show evidence of poorer skeletal development,
have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding
and coping with their family life, and are far more likely to
develop degenerative conditions early. Most of my younger patients
had a poor start because they were raised on highly refined,
devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without much exercise.
Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparents
may have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and
actually had to walk, not owning cars when they were young. Their
great grandparents had a high likelihood of enjoying decent
nutrition and a healthful life-style.
Unfortunately, most of my patients like the idea of taking vitamins
too much for their own good. The AMA medical model has conditioned
people to swallow something for every little discomfort, and taking
a pill is also by far the easiest thing to do because a pill
requires no life-style changes, nor self-discipline, nor personal
responsibility. But vitamins are much more frugal than drugs.
Compared to prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension
supplements are much less expensive. I am saddened when my clients
tell me they can't afford supplements. When their MD prescribes a
medicine that costs many times more they never have trouble finding
the money.
I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements,
because I can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies
heal with dietary modification and detoxification. Of all the tools
at my disposal that help people heal, last in the race comes
supplements.
One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they were
healing agents is that food supplements almost never have harmful
side effects, even when they are taken in what might seem enormous
overdoses. If someone with a health condition reads or hears about
some vitamin being curative, goes out and buys some and takes it,
they will at very least have followed the basic principle of good
medicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did
nothing for them at all, they are practicing the same kind of
benevolent medicine that Dr. Jennings did almost two centuries ago.
Not only that, but having done something to treat their symptoms,
they have become patients facilitating their own patience, giving
their body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get
better, but not because of the action of the particular vitamin they
took. Or, luckily, the vitamin or vitamins they take may have been
just what was needed, raising their body's vital force and
accelerating the body's ability to solve its problem.
One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well as they
might is that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has
created largely false fears in the public mind about harmful effects
of vitamin overdoses, the person may not take enough of the right
vitamin. The minimum daily requirements of vitamins and minerals as
outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent the most
obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements
at or near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by
the FDA as being 'generally recognized as safe') they should not
expect to see any therapeutic effect unless they have scurvy, beri
beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra.
In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt, and even
vitamin C fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of
life-threatening deficiency states people first learned to
recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long sea voyages used to
develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could kill.
Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For
this reason the British Government legislated the carrying of limes
on long voyages and today that is why British sailors are still
called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams of vitamin C. But
to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg does
absolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C
takes 10,000 milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening
infection like pneumonia go away faster might require 25,000 to
150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administered intravenously.
In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that's 300 to 750 of
them daily--clearly impossible.
Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of vitamin
B3, but schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams,
roughly a thousand times as much as the MDR.
There are many many common diseases that the medical profession does
not see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many
mental disorders fall in this category. Many old people live on
extremely deficient diets comprised largely of devitalized starches,
sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have good enough teeth
to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not
have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually
all old people have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably
declines with age, the quantity and quality of digestive enzymes
decreases, then the ability to breakdown and extract soluble
nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to serious
deficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as
disease and as aging.
Suppose a body needs 30 milligrams a day of niacin to not develop
pellagra, but to be fully healthy, needs 500 milligrams daily. If
that body receives 50 milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the
medical doctor it could not possibly be deficient in this vitamin.
However, over time, the insidious sub-clinical deficiency may
degrade some other system and produce a different disease, such as
colitis. But the medical doctor sees no relationship. Let me give
you an actual example. Medical researchers studying vitamin B5 or
pantothenic acid noticed that it could, in what seemed to be
megadoses (compared to the minimum daily requirement) largely
reverse certain degenerative effects of aging. These researchers
were measuring endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging
process. How they made this measurement may appear to some readers
to be heartless, but the best way to gauge the endurance of a rat is
to toss it into a five gallon bucket of cold water and see how long
it swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, the researcher
can be absolutely confident that the rat does its very best to stay
alive.
Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50 degree Fahrenheit
water before drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And
old rats swim differently, less efficiently, with their lower bodies
more or less vertical, sort of dog paddling. But when old rats were
fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose for a few weeks before the
test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like the
young rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the
gray went away) and improved in texture; they began to appear like
young rats. And the rats on megadoses of B5 lived lot longer--25 to
33 percent longer than rats not on large doses of B5. Does that mean
"megadoses" of B5 have an unknown drug-like effect? Or does that
mean the real nutritional requirement for B5 is a lot higher than
most people think? I believe the second choice is correct. To give
you an idea of how much B5 the old rats were given in human terms,
the FDA says the minimum daily requirement for B5 is about 10
milligrams but if humans took as much B5 as the rats, they would
take about 750 milligrams per day. Incidentally, I figure I am as
worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams daily.
My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a
gross vitamin deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create
optimum functioning. Any sick person or anyone with a health
complaint needs to improve their overall functioning in any way that
won't be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapy can be an
amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification.
Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using
vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food
supply was better, when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as
far as it has today. From their perspective, it was possible to
obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. In our time this is
unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces
virtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose
fertility is maintained and adjusted with a conscious intent to
maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately, ignorance
of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to
otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and
homeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for food
supplementation.
Vitamins For Young Persons And Children
Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties should also
take nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel
so good that they find it impossible to conceive that anything could
harm them or that they ever could become seriously sick or actually
die. I know this is true because I remember my own youth and
besides, why else would young people so glibly ride motorcycles or,
after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into the
barrel of a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple
venereal diseases. Until they get a little sense, vitamin
supplements help to counteract their inevitable and unpreventable
use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapest long life and
health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally very
surprised at the thought that even their children need nutritional
supplements; very few healthy children receive them. A few are given
Back to Full Books
|