HOME HYGIENIC LIBRARY CATALOG
Go To Chapter Six
How and When to Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
Chapter Five
Diet and Nutrition
From The Hygienic Dictionary
Food. [1] Life
is a tragedy of nutrition. In food lies 99.99% of the causes of
all diseases and imperfect health of any kind. Prof. Arnold
Ehret, Mucusless Diet Healing System. [2] But elimination
will never heal perfectly just so long as you fail to discontinue
the supply of inside waste caused by eating and "wrong"
eating. You may clean and continue to clean indefinitely, but
never with complete results up to a perfect cleanliness, as long
as the intake of wrong or even too much right foods, is not stopped.
Prof. Arnold Ehret, Mucusless Diet Healing System. [3] Cooked
food favors bacterial, or organized, ferment preponderance, because
cooking kills the unorganized and organized ferments, and both
are needed to carry on the body's digestion. Raw foods–fruits
and vegetables–favor unorganized ferment digestion, because
these foods carry vitamins, which are unorganized ferments–enzymes.
Dr. John.H. Tllden, Impaired Health: Its Cause and Cure, 1921.
Recently, my younger (adult) daughter
asked my advice choosing between a root canal or having a bridge
made. This led to a discussion of her eating habits in general.
Defending her currently less-than-optimum diet against my gentle
criticism, she threw me a tough riposte. "Why," she
asked, when I was raised so perfectly as a child, "when I
ate only Organic food until I was ten and old enough to make you
send me to public school where I could eat those lousy school
lunches" (her unfeeling, heartless mother home-schooled her),
"why even at that young age, (before she spent her adolescent
rebellion eating junk food) why at that point did I still have
a mouthful of cavities?" And she did. At age ten my daughter
needed about ten fillings.
This beautiful daughter of a practicing
naturopath had received what, at the time, I considered virtually
perfect nutrition. She suckled hugely at her mother's abundant
breast until age two. During this time her mother ate a natural
foods diet. After weaning my daughter got only whole grains, a
little fresh goat's milk from my goat, fruits and lots of Organic
vegetables. I started my spa when my daughter was about five years
old and from that point she was, like it or not, a raw fooder.
And all that raw food was Organic and much of it from Great Oaks
School's huge vegetable garden.
For my daughter to develop cavities on
this diet is reminiscent of Woody Allen's joke in his movie "Sleeper."
Do you recall this one, made about 1973? The plot is a take off
on Rip Van Winkle. Woody goes into the hospital for minor surgery.
Unexpectedly he expires on the operating table and his body is
frozen in hopes that someday he can be revived. One hundred and
fifty years later he is revived.
The priceless scene I always think of
takes place in his hospital room immediately after he comes to
consciousness. The doctor in charge of his case is explaining
to Woody what has happened. Woody refuses to believe he died and
was frozen, asserting that the whole story is a put on. Woody
insists that the 'doctor' is clearly an actor hired by his friends!
It absolutely can't be the year 2123. 'Oh, but it really is 2123,'
insists the doctor. 'And it is no put on by his friends; all his
friends are long dead; Woody knows no one at all in 2123 and had
better prepare himself to start a new life.'
Woody still insists it is a put on. "I
had a healthfood store," he says, "and all my friends
ate brown rice. They can't be dead!"
And my perfectly nourished daughter couldn't
have developed cavities! But she did. And if she cheated on her
perfect diet, bad food could not have amounted to more than two
percent of her total caloric intake from birth to age ten. I was
a responsible mom and I made sure she ate right! Now my daughter
was demanding to know why she had tooth decay. Fortunately, I
now know the answer. The answer is rather complex, but I can give
a simplified explanation.
The Confusions About Diets and Foods
Like my daughter, many people of all ages
are muddled about the relationship between health and diet. Their
confusions have created a profitable market for health-related
information. And equally, their confusions have been created by
books, magazine articles, and TV news features. This avalanche
of data is highly contradictory. In fact, one reason I found it
hard to make myself write my own book is that I wondered if my
book too would become just another part of the confusion.
Few people are willing to tolerate very
much uncertainty. Rather than live with the discomfort of not
knowing why, they will create an explanation or find some answer,
any answer, and then ever after, assert its rightness like a shipwrecked
person clings to a floating spar in a storm. This is how I explain
the genesis of many contemporary food religions.
Appropriately new agey and spiritual,
Macrobiotics teaches the way to perfect health is to eat like
a Japanese whole foods vegetarian–the endless staple being
brown rice, some cooked vegetables and seaweeds, meanwhile balancing
the "yin" and "yang" of the foods. And Macrobiotics
works great for a lot of people. But not all people. Because there's
next to nothing raw in the Macrobiotic diet and some people are
allergic to rice, or can get allergic to rice on that diet.
Linda Clark's Diet for a Small Planet
also has hundreds of thousands of dedicated followers. This system
balances the proportions of essential amino acids at every, single
meal and is vegetarian. This diet also works and really helps
some people, but not as well as Macrobiotics in my opinion because
obsessed with protein, Clark's diet contains too many hard-to-digest
soy products and makes poor food combinations from the point of
digestive capacity.
Then there are the raw fooders. Most of
them are raw, Organic fooders who go so far as to eat only unfired,
unground cereals that have been soaked in warm water (at less
than 115 degrees or you'll kill the enzymes) for many hours to
soften the seeds up and start them sprouting. This diet works
and really helps a lot of people. Raw organic foodism is especially
good for "holy joes," a sort of better-than-everyone-else
person who enjoys great self-righteousness by owning this system.
But raw fooding does not help all people nor solve all diseases
because raw food irritates the digestive tracts of some people
and in northern climates it is hard to maintain body heat on this
diet because it is difficult to consume enough concentrated vegetable
food in a raw state. And some raw fooders eat far too much fruit.
I've seen them lose their teeth because of fruit's low mineral
content, high sugar level and constant fruit acids in their mouths.
Then there are vegetarians of various
varieties including vegans (vegetarians that will not eat dairy
products and eggs), and then, there are their exact opposites,
Atkins dieters focusing on protein and eating lots of meat. There's
the Adelle Davis school, people eating whole grains, handfuls
of vitamins, lots of dairy and brewers yeast and wheat germ, and
even raw liver. Then there's the Organic school. These folks will
eat anything in any combination, just so long as it is organically
produced, including organically raised beef, chicken, lamb, eggs,
rabbit, wild meats, milk and diary products, natural sea salt
in large quantities and of course, organically grown fruits, vegetables
grains and nuts. And what is "Organic?" The word means
food raised in compliance with a set of rules contrived by a certification
bureaucracy. When carefully analyzed, the somewhat illogical rules
are not all that different in spirit than the rules of kashsruth
or kosher. And the Organic certification bureaucrats aren't all
that different than the rabbis who certify food as being kosher,
either.
There are now millions of frightened Americans
who, following the advice of mainstream Authority, have eliminated
red meat from their diets and greatly reduced what they (mistakenly)
understand as high-cholesterol foods.
All these diets work too–or some–and
all demonstrate some of the truth.
The only area concerning health that contains
more confusion and contradictory data than diet is vitamins. What
a rats nest that is!
The Fundamental Principle
If you are a true believer in any of the
above food religions, I expect that you will find my views unsettling.
But what I consider "good diet" results from my clinical
work with thousands of cases. It is what has worked with those
cases. My eclectic views incorporate bits and pieces of all the
above. In my own case, I started out by following the Organic
school, and I was once a raw food vegetarian who ate nothing but
raw food for six years. I also ate Macrobiotic for about one year
until I became violently allergic to rice.
I have arrived at a point where I understand
that each person's biochemistry is unique and each must work out
their own diet to suit their life goals, life style, genetic predisposition
and current state of health. There is no single, one, all-encompassing,
correct diet. But, there is a single, basic, underlying Principle
of Nutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified
form, the basic equation of human health goes: Health = Nutrition
/ Calories. The equation falls far short of explaining the origin
of each individuals diseases or how to cure diseases but Health
= Nutrition / Calories does show the general path toward healthful
eating and proper medicine.
All animals have the exact same dietary
problem: finding enough nutrition to build and maintain their
bodies within the limits of their digestive capacity. Rarely in
nature (except for predatory carnivores) is there any significant
restriction on the number of calories or serious limitation of
the amount of low-nutrition foods available to eat. There's rarely
any shortage of natural junk food on Earth. Except for domesticated
house pets, animals are sensible enough to prefer the most nutritional
fare available and tend to shun empty calories unless they are
starving.
But humans are perverse, not sensible.
Deciding on the basis of artificially-created flavors, preferring
incipid textures, we seem to prefer junk food and become slaves
to our food addictions. For example, in tropical countries there
is a widely grown root crop, called in various places: tapioca,
tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This interesting plant produces the
greatest tonnage of edible, digestible, pleasant-tasting calories
per acre compared to any other food crop I know. Manioc might
seem the answer to human starvation because it will grow abundantly
on tropical soils so infertile and/or so droughty that no other
food crop will succeed there. Manioc will do this because it needs
virtually nothing from the soil to construct itself with. And
consequently, manioc puts next to nothing nourishing into its
edible parts. The bland-tasting root is virtually pure starch,
a simple carbohydrate not much different than pure corn starch.
Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide gas obtained the
air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no shortage ever
of carbon from CO2 in the air and rarely a shortage of hydrogen
from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is chewed,
digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar. Nutritionally
there is virtually no difference between eating manioc and eating
white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.
If you made a scale from ideal to worst
regarding the ratio of nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc
and most fats are at the extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't
know which single food might lie at the extreme positive end of
the scale. Close to perfect might be certain leafy green vegetables
that can be eaten raw. When they are grown on extremely fertile
soil, some greens develop 20 or more percent completely digestible
balanced protein with ideal ratios of all the essential amino
acids, lots of vitamins, tons of minerals, all sorts of enzymes
and other nutritional elements–and very few calories. You
could continually fill your stomach to bursting with raw leafy
greens and still have a hard time sustaining your body weight
if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailorman was right
about eating spinach.
For the moment, lets ignore individual
genetic inabilities to digest specific foods and also ignore the
effects stress and enervation can have on our ability to extract
nutrition out of the food we are eating. Without those factors
to consider, it is correct to say that, to the extent one's diet
contains the maximum potential amount of nutrition relative to
the number of calories you are eating, to that extent a person
will be healthy. To the extent the diet is degraded from that
ideal, to that extent, disease will develop. Think about it!
Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology
The next logical pair of questions are:
how healthy could good nutrition make people be, and, how much
deviation from ideal nutrition could we allow ourselves before
serious disease appears? Luckily, earlier in this century we could
observe living answers to those questions (before the evidence
disappeared). The answers are: we could be amazingly healthy,
and, if we wish to enjoy excellent health we can afford to cut
ourselves surprisingly little slack.
Prior to the Second World War there were
several dozen sizable groups of extraordinarily healthy humans
remaining on Earth. Today, their descendants are still in the
same remote places, are speaking the same languages and possess
more or less the same cultures. Only today they're watching satellite
TV. wearing jeans, drinking colas–and their superior health
has evaporated.
During the early part of this century,
at the same era vitamins and other basic aspects of nutrition
were being discovered, a few farsighted medical explorers sought
out these hard-to-reach places with their legendarily healthy
peoples to see what caused the legendary well-being they'd heard
of. Enough evidence was collected and analyzed to derive some
very valid principles.
First lets dismiss some apparently logical
but incorrect explanations for the unusually good health of these
isolated peoples. It wasn't racial, genetic superiority. There
were extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns, Orientals, Amerinds,
Caucasians. It wasn't living at high altitude; some lived at sea
level. It wasn't temperate climates, some lived in the tropics,
some in the tropics at sea level, a type of location generally
thought to be quite unhealthful. It wasn't a small collection
of genetically superior individuals, because when these peoples
left their isolated locale and moved to the city, they rapidly
began to lose their health. And it wasn't genetics because when
a young couple from the isolated healthy village moved to town,
their children born in town were as unhealthy as all the other
kids.
And what do I mean by genuinely healthy?
Well, imagine a remote village or a mountain valley or a far island
settlement very difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand
or perhaps ten thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Among
that small population there were no medical doctors and no dentists,
no drugs, no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation
carried with it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness
of modern science, so there was little or no notion of public
hygiene. And this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these
unprotected, undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and
die from bacterial infections; and the women did not have to give
birth to 13 children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding age–almost
all the children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases.
There was also virtually no degenerative disease like heart attacks,
hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There
were few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't
any aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little
mortality during childbirth, as little or less than we have today
with all our hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtually
perfect teeth and kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes
nor any notion of dental hygiene. Nor did they have dentists or
physicians. (Price, 1970)
And in those fortunate places the most
common causes of death were accident (trauma) and old age. The
typical life span was long into the 70s and in some places quite
a bit longer. One fabled place, Hunza, was renowned for having
an extraordinarily high percentage of vigorous and active people
over 100 years old.
I hope I've made you curious. "How
could this be?" you're asking. Well, here's why. First, everyone
of those groups lived in places so entirely remote, so inaccessible
that they were of necessity, virtually self-sufficient. They hardly
traded at all with the outside world, and certainly they did not
trade for bulky, hard-to-transport bulk foodstuffs. Virtually
everything they ate was produced by themselves. If they were an
agricultural people, naturally, everything they ate was natural:
organic, whole, unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local
materials seemed to produce enhanced plant growth. And, if they
were agricultural, they lived on a soil body that possessed highly
superior natural fertility. If not an agricultural people they
lived by the sea and made a large portion of their diets sea foods.
If their soil had not been extraordinarily fertile, these groups
would not have enjoyed superior health and would have conformed
to the currently widely-believed notion that before the modern
era, people's lives were brutish, unhealthful, and short.
What is common between meat-eating Eskimos,
isolated highland Swiss living on rye bread, milk and cheese;
isolated Scottish island Celts with a dietary of oat porridge,
kale and sea foods; highland central Africans (Malawi) eating
sorghum, millet tropical root crops and all sorts of garden vegetables,
plus a little meat and dairy; Fijians living on small islands
in the humid tropics at sea level eating sea foods and garden
vegetables. What they had in common was that their foods were
all were at the extreme positive end of the Health = Nutrition
/ Calories scale. The agriculturists were on very fertile soil
that grew extraordinarily nutrient-rich food, the sea food gatherers
were obtaining their tucker from the place where all the fertility
that ever was in the soil had washed out of the land had been
transported–sea foods are also extraordinarily nutrient rich.
The group with the very best soil and
consequently, the best health of all were, by lucky accident,
the Hunza. I say "lucky" and "accident" because
the Hunza and their resource base unknowingly developed an agricultural
system that produced the most nutritious food that is possible
to grow. The Hunza lived on what has been called super food. There
are a lot of interesting books about the Hunza, some deserving
of careful study. (Wrench, 1938; Rodale, 1949)
Finding Your Ideal Dietary
Anyone that is genuinely interested in
having the best possible health should make their own study of
the titles listed in the bibliography in the back of this book.
After you do, award yourself a BS nutrition. I draw certain conclusions
from this body of data. I think they help a person sort out the
massive confusion that exists today about proper diet.
First principle: Homo Sapiens clearly
can posses extreme health while eating very different dietary
regimens. There is no one right diet for humans.
Before the industrial era almost everyone
on Earth ate what was produced locally. Their dietary choices
were pretty much restricted to those foods that were well adapted
and productive in their region. Some places grew rye, others wheat,
others millet, others rice. Some places supported cows, others
goats, others had few on no domesticated animals. Some places
produced a lot of fruits and vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever
the local dietary, during thousands of years of eating that dietary
natural selection prevailed; most babies that were allergic to
or not able to thrive on the available dietary, died quickly.
Probably of childhood bacterial infections. The result of this
weeding out process was a population closely adapted to the available
dietary of a particular locale.
This has interesting implications for
Americans, most of whose ancestors immigrated from somewhere else;
many of our ancestors also "hybridized" or crossed with
immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to discover what dietary substances
your particular genetic endowment is adapted to can be difficult
and confusing. If both your parents were Italian and they were
more or less pure Italian going way back, you might start out
trying to eat wheat, olives, garlic, fava beans, grapes, figs,
cow dairy. If pure German, try rye bread, cow dairy, apples, cabbage
family vegetables. If Scottish, try oats, mutton, fish, sheep
dairy and cabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat dairy,
wheat, olives and citrus. And certainly all the above ethnic derivations
will thrive on many kinds of vegetables. Afro-Americans, especially
dark-complexioned ones little mixed with Europeans, might do well
to avoid wheat and instead, try sorghum, millet or tropical root
crops like sweet potatoes, yams and taro.
Making it even more difficult for an individual
to discover their optimum diet is the existence of genetic-based
allergies and worse, developed allergies. Later in this chapter
I will explain how a body can develop an allergy to a food that
is probably irreversible. A weakened organ can also prevent digestion
of a food or food group.
One more thing about adaptation to dietaries.
Pre-industrial humans could only be extraordinarily healthy on
the dietary they were adapted to if and only if that dietary also
was extraordinarily high in nutrients. Few places on earth have
naturally rich soil. Food grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition;
that grown on rich soil is high in nutrition. People do not realize
that the charts and tables in the backs of health books like Adelle
Davis's Lets Cook It Right, are not really true. They are statistics.
It is vital to keep in mind the old saying, "there are lies,
there are damned lies, and then there are statistics. The best
way to lie is with statistics."
Statistical tables of the nutrient content
of foods were developed by averaging numerous samples of food
from various soils and regions. These tables basically lie because
they do not show the range of possibility between the different
samples. A chart may state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli
contains so many milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is
that some broccoli samples contain only half that amount or even
less, while other broccoli contains two or three times that amount.
Since calcium is a vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible
form, the high calcium broccoli is far better food than the low
calcium sample. But both samples of broccoli appear and taste
more or less alike. Both could even be organically grown. Yet
one sample has a very positive ratio of nutrition to calories,
the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965) Here's another example
I hope will really dent the certainties the Linda Clarkites. Potatoes
can range in protein from eight to eleven percent, depending on
the soil that produced them and if they were or were not irrigated.
Grown dry (very low yielding) on semiarid soils, potatoes can
be a high-protein staff of life. Heavily irrigated and fertilized
so as to produce bulk yield instead of nutrition, they'll produce
two or three times the tonnage, but at 8 percent protein instead
of 11 percent. Not only does the protein content drop just as
much as yield is boosted, the amino acid ratios change markedly,
the content of scarce nutritional minerals drops massively, and
the caloric content increases. In short, subsisting on irrigated
commercially-grown potatoes, or on those grown on relatively infertile
soils receiving abundant rainfall will make you fat and sick.
They're a lot like manioc.
Here's another. Wheat can range from 7
to 19 percent protein. Before the industrial era ruined most wheat
by turning it into white flour, wheat-eating peoples from regions
where the cereal naturally contains abundant protein tended to
be tall, healthy and long-lived. Wheat-eating humans from regions
that produce low protein grain tended to be small, sickly and
short-lived. (McCarrison, 1921, 1936, 1982; Albrecht, 1975)
Even cows have to pay attention to where
their grass is coming from. Some green grass is over 15 percent
protein and contains lots of calcium, phosphorus and magnesium
to build strong bodies. Other equally or even better looking green
grass contains only six or seven percent protein and contains
little calcium, phosphorus or magnesium. Cows forced to eat only
this poor type of grass can literally starve to death with full
bellies. And they have a hard time breeding successfully. The
reason for the difference: different soil fertility profiles.
(Albrecht, 1975)
When people ate local, those living on
fertile soils or getting a significant portion of their diet from
the sea and who because of physical isolation from industrial
foods did not make a practice of eating empty calories tended
to live a long time and be very healthy. But those unfortunates
on poor soils or with unwise cultural life-styles tended to be
short-lived, diseased, small, weak, have bad teeth, and etc. The
lesson here is that Homo Sapiens can adapt to many different dietaries,
but like any other animal, the one thing we can't adapt to is
a dietary deficient in nutrition.
So here's another "statistic"
to reconsider. Most people believe that due to modern medical
wonders, we live longer than we used to. Actually, that depends.
Compared to badly nourished populations of a century ago, yes!
We do. Chemical medicine keeps sickly, poorly nourished people
going a lot longer (though one wonders about the quality of their
dreary existences.) I hypothesize that before the time most farmers
purchased and baked with white flour and sold their whole, unground
wheat, many rural Americans (the ones on good soil, not all parts
of North America have rich soil) eating from their own self-sufficient
farms, lived as long or even longer than we do today. You also
have to wonder who benefits from promulgating this mistaken belief
about longevity. Who gets rich when we are sick? And what huge
economic interests are getting rich helping make us sick?
The Human Comedy
I know most of my readers have been heavily indoctrinated about
food and think they already know the truth about dietetics. I
also know that so much information (and misinformation) is coming
out about diet that most of my readers are massively confused
about the subject. These are two powerful reasons many readers
will look with disbelief at what this chapter has to say and
take no action on my data, even to prove me wrong.
Let me warn you. There is a deep-seated
human tendency to put off taking responsibilities, beautifully
demonstrated by this old joke.
A 14 year old boy was discovered masturbating
by his father, who said, "son, you shouldn't do that! If
you keep it up you'll eventually go blind!" ` "But
father, came the boy's quick reply. "It feels good. How
about if I don't quit until I need to wear glasses?" |
The Organic Versus Chemical Feud
Now, regrettably, and at great personal
risk to my reputation, I must try to puncture the very favorite
belief of food religionists, the doctrine that organically grown
food is as nutritious as food can possibly be, Like Woody Allen's
brown-rice-eating friends, people think if you eat Organic foods,
you will inevitably live a very long time and be very healthy.
Actually, the Organic vs. chemical feud is in many ways false.
Many (not all) samples of organically grown food are as low or
lower in nutrition as foods raised with chemical fertilizers.
Conversely, wisely using chemical fertilizers (not pesticides)
can greatly increase the nutritional value of food. Judiciously
used Organic fertilizing substances can also do that as well or
better. And in either case, using chemical fertilizers or so-called
organic fertilizers, to maximize nutrition the humus content of
the soil must be maintained. But, raising soil organic matter
levels too high can result in a massive reduction in the nutritional
content of the food being grown–a very frequent mistake on
the part of Organic devotees. In other words, growing nutrition
is a science, and is not a matter of religion.
The food I fed to my daughter in childhood,
though Organic according to Rodale and the certification bureaucrats,
though providing this organic food to my family and clients gave
me a feeling of self-righteousness, was not grown with an understanding
of the nutritional consequences of electing to use one particular
Organic fertilizing substance over another. So we and a lot of
regional Organic market gardeners near us that we bought from,
were raising food that was far from ideally nutritious. At least
though, our food was free of pesticide residues.
The real dichotomy in food is not "chemical"
fertilizer versus "Organic," It is between industrial
food and quality food. What I mean by industrial food is that
which is raised with the intention of maximizing profit or yield.
There is no contradiction between raising food that the "rabbis"
running Organic certification bureaucracies would deem perfectly
"kosher" and raising that same food to make the most
possible money or the biggest harvest. When a farmer grows for
money, they want to produce the largest number of bushels, crates,
tons, bales per acre. Their criteria for success is primarily
unit volume. Many gardeners think the same way. To maximize bulk
yield they build soil fertility in a certain direction (organically
or chemically) and choose varieties that produce greater bulk.
However, nature is ironic in this respect. The most nutritious
food is always lower yielding. The very soil management practices
that maximize production simultaneously reduce nutrition.
The real problem we are having about our
health is not that there are residues of pesticides in our food.
The real problem is that there are only residues of nutrition
left in our foods. Until our culture comes to understand this
and realizes that the health costs of accepting less than optimum
food far exceeds the profits made by growing bulk, it will not
be possible to frequently find the ultimate of food quality in
the marketplace, organically grown or not. It will not be possible
to find food that is labeled or identified according to its real
nutritional value. The best I can say about Organic food these
days is that it probably is no less nutritious than chemically-grown
food while at least it is free of pesticide residues.
The Poor Start
For this reason it makes sense to take
vitamins and food supplements, to be discussed in the next chapter.
And because our food supply, Organic or "conventional,"
is far from optimum, if a person wants to be and remain healthy
and have a life span that approaches their genetic potential (and
that potential, it seems, approaches or exceeds a century), it
is essential that empty calories are rigorously avoided.
An accurate and quick-to-respond indicator
of how well we are doing in terms of getting enough nutrition
is the state of our teeth. One famous dentally-oriented nutritional
doctor, Melvin Page, suggested that as long as overall nutrition
was at least 75 percent of perfection, the body chemistry could
support healthy teeth and gums until death. By healthy here Page
means free of cavities, no bone loss around the teeth (no wobblers),
no long-in-the-teeth mouths from receding gums, no gum diseases
at all. But when empty calories or devitalized foods or misdigestion
cuts our nutrient intake we begin experiencing tooth decay, gum
disease and bone loss in the jaw. How are your teeth?
I suppose you could say that I have a
food religion, but mine is to eat so that the equation Nutrition
= Health / Calories is strongly in my favor.
Back to my daughter's teeth. Yes, I innocently
fed her less than ideally nutritious food, but at that time I
couldn't buy ideal food even had I known what I wanted, nor did
I have any scientific idea of how to produce ideal food, nor actually,
could I have done so on the impoverished, leached-out clay soil
at Great Oaks School even had I known how. The Organic doctrine
says that you can build a Garden of 'Eatin with large quantities
of compost until any old clay pit or gravel heap produces highly
nutritious food. This idea is not really true. Sadly, what is
true about organic matter in soil is that when it is increased
very much above the natural level one finds in untilled soil in
the climate you're working with, the nutritional content of the
food begins to drop markedly. I know this assertion is shocking
and perhaps threatening to those who believe in the Organic system;
I am sorry.
But there is another reason my daughter's
teeth were not perfect, probably could not have been perfect no
matter what we fed her, and why she will probably have at least
some health problems as she ages no matter how perfectly she may
choose to eat from here on. My daughters had what Dr. G.T. Wrench
called "a poor start." Not as poor as it could have
been by any means, but certainly less than ideal.
You see, the father has very little to
do with the health of the child, unless he happens to carry some
particularly undesirable gene. It is the mother who has the job
of constructing the fetus out of prepartum nourishment and her
own body's nutritional reserves. The female body knows from trillenia
of instinctual experience that adequate nutrition from the current
food supply during pregnancy can not always be assured, so the
female body stores up very large quantities of minerals and vitamins
and enzymes against that very possibility. When forming a fetus
these reserves are drawn down and depleted. It is virtually impossible
during the pregnancy itself for a mother to extract sufficient
nutrition from current food to build a totally healthy fetus,
no matter how nourishing the food she is eating may be. Thus a
mother-to-be needs to be spending her entire childhood and her
adolescence (and have adequate time between babies), building
and rebuilding her reserves.
A mother-to-be also started out at her
own birth with a vitally important stock of nutritional reserves,
reserves put there during her own fetal development. If that "start"
was less than ideal, the mother-to-be (as fetus) got "pinched"
and nutritionally shortchanged in certain, predictable ways. Even
minor mineral fetal deficiencies degrade the bone structure: the
fetus knows it needs nutritional reserves more than it needs to
have a full-sized jaw bone or a wide pelvic girdle, and when deprived
of maximum fetal nourishment, these non-vital bones become somewhat
smaller. Permanently. If mineral deficiencies continue into infancy
and childhood, these same bones continue to be shortchanged, and
the child ends up with a very narrow face, a jaw bone far too
small to hold all the teeth, and in women, a small oven that may
have trouble baking babies. More importantly, those nutrient reserves
earmarked especially for making babies are also deficient. So
a deficient mother not only shows certain structural evidence
of physiological degeneration, but she makes deficient babies.
A deficient female baby at birth is unlikely to completely overcome
her bad start before she herself has children.
So with females, the quality of a whole
lifetime's nutrition, and the life-nutrition of her mother (and
of her mother's mother as well) has a great deal to do with the
outcome of a pregnancy. The sins of the mother can really be visited
unto the third and fourth generation.
This reality was powerfully demonstrated
in the 1920s by a medical doctor, Francis Pottenger. He was not
gifted with a good bedside manner. Rather than struggling with
an unsuccessful clinical practice, Dr. Pottenger decided to make
his living running a medical testing laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Dr. Pottenger earned his daily bread performing a rather simple
task, assaying the potency of adrenal hormone extracts. At that
time, adrenaline, a useful drug to temporarily rescue people close
to death, was extracted from the adrenal glands of animals. However,
the potency of these crude extracts varied greatly. Being a very
powerful drug, it was essential to measure exactly how strong
your extract was so its dosage could be controlled.
Quantitative organic chemistry was rather
crude in those days. Instead of assaying in a test tube, Dr. Pottenger
kept several big cages full of cats that he had adrenalectomized.
Without their own adrenals, the cats could not live more than
a short time By finding out how much extract was required to keep
the cats from failing, he could measure the strength of the particular
batch.
Dr. Pottenger's cats were economically
valuable so he made every effort to keep them healthy, something
that proved to be disappointingly difficult. He kept his cats
clean, in airy, bright quarters, fed them to the very best of
his ability on pasteurized whole milk, slaughterhouse meat and
organs (cats in the wild eat organ meats first and there are valuable
vitamins and other substances in organ meats that don't exist
in muscle tissue). The meat was carefully cooked to eliminate
any parasites, and the diet was supplemented with cod liver oil.
However, try as he might, Pottenger's cats were sickly, lived
short and had to be frequently replaced. Usually they bred poorly
and died young of bacterial infections, there being no antibiotics
in the 1920s. I imagine Dr. Pottenger was constantly visiting
the animal shelter and perhaps even paid quarters out the back
door to a steady stream of young boys who brought him cats in
burlap sacks from who knows where, no questions asked.
Dr. Pottenger's assays must have been
accurate, for his business grew and grew. Eventually he needed
more cats than he had cages to house, so he built a big, roofed,
on-the-ground pen outdoors. Because he was overworked, he was
less careful about the feeding of these extra animals. They got
the same pasteurized milk and cod-liver oil, but he did not bother
to cook their slaughterhouse meat. Then, a small miracle happened.
This poorly cared for cage of cats fed on uncooked meat became
much healthier than the others, suffering far fewer bacterial
infections or other health problems. Then another miracle happened.
Dr. Pottenger began to meditate on the first miracle.
It occurred to him that cats in the wild
did not cook their food; perhaps cats had a digestive system that
couldn't process or assimilate much out of cooked food. Perhaps
the problem he had been having was not because the cats were without
adrenal glands but because they were without sustenance, suffering
a sort of slow starvation in the midst of plenty. So Dr. Pottenger
set up some cat feeding experiments.
There were four possible combinations
of his regimen: raw meat and unpasteurized milk; raw meat and
pasteurized milk; cooked meat and raw milk; cooked meat and pasteurized
milk, this last one being what he had been feeding all along.
So he divided his cats into four groups and fed each group differently.
The first results of Pottenger's experiments were revealed quickly
though the most valuable results took longer to see. The cats
on raw meat and raw milk did best. The ones on raw meat and pasteurized
milk did okay but not as well. The ones on cooked meat and raw
milk did even less well and those on all cooked food continued
to do as poorly as ever.
Clearly, cats can't digest cooked food;
all animals do better fed on what they can digest. A lot of people
have taken Pottenger's data and mistakenly concluded that humans
also should eat only raw food. This idea is debatable. However,
the most important result of the cat experiments took years to
reveal itself and is not paid much attention to, probably because
its implications are very depressing. Dr. Pottenger continued
his experiments for several generations. It was the transgenerational
changes that showed the most valuable lesson. Over several generations,
the cats on all raw foods began to alter their appearance. Their
faces got wider, their pelvic girdles broader, bones solider,
teeth better. They began to breed very successfully.
After quite a few generations, the healthiest
group, the one on all raw foods, seemed to have improved as much
as it could. So Dr. Pottenger took some of these cats and began
feeding them only cooked food to study the process of nutritional
degeneration. After three "de"generations on cooked
fodder the group had deteriorated so much that the animals could
barely breed. Their faces had become narrow, their teeth crooked,
their pelvic girdles narrow, their bones and body structure very
small, and their dispositions poor. Mothers wouldn't nurse their
young and sometimes became cannibalistic. They no longer lived
very long.
Before the degenerating group completely
lost the ability to breed, Pottenger began to again feed them
all raw food. It took four generations on a perfect, raw food
diet before some perfect appearing individuals showed up in the
group. It takes longer to repair the damage than it does to cause
it and it takes generations of unflagging persistence.
I think much the same process has happened
to humans in this century. With the invention of the roller mill
and the consequent degradation of our daily bread to white flour;
with the birth of industrial farming and the generalized lowering
of the nutritional content of all of our crops; our overall ratio
of nutrition to calories worsened. Then it worsened again because
we began to have industrial food manufacturing and national brand
prepared food marketing systems; we began subsisting on devitalized,
processed foods. The result has been an even greater worsening
of our ratio of nutrition to calories.
And just like Pottenger's cats, we civilized
humans in so-called advanced countries are losing the ability
to breed, our willingness (or the energy) to mother our young;
we're losing our good humor in the same way Pottenger's degenerated
cats became bad tempered. As a group we feel so poorly that we
desperately need to feel better fast, and what better way to do
that than with drugs. Is it any wonder that the United States,
the country furthest down the road of industrial food degeneration,
spends 14 percent of its gross domestic product on medical services.
Any wonder that so many babies are born by Cesarean, any wonder
that so many of our children have crooked teeth needing an orthodontist?
The most depressing aspect of this comes into view when considering
that Pottenger's cats took four generations on perfect food to
repair most of the nutritional damage.
In the specific case of my daughter, I
know somethings about the nutritional history of her maternal
ancestors. My daughter's grandmother grew up on a Saskatchewan
farm. Though they certainly grew their own rich wheat on virgin
semi-arid prairie soil, I'm sure the family bought white flour
at the store for daily use. Still, there was a garden and a cow
producing raw milk and free-range fertile eggs and chicken and
other animals. There probably were lots of canned vegetables in
winter, canned but still highly nutritious because of the fertility
of their prairie garden. My mother consequently had perfect teeth
until the Great Depression forced her to live for too many years
on lard and white bread.
During this time of severe malnutrition
she had her three babies. The first one got the best of her nutritional
reserves. The second, born after the worst of the malnutrition,
was very small and weak and had a hard time growing up. Fortunately
for me, for a few years before I (the last child) was born, the
worst of the economic times had past and the family had been living
on a farm. There were vegetables and fresh raw milk and fruit.
My mother had two good years to rebuild her nutritional reserves.
But "Grannybell" did not managed to replace enough.
Shortly after I was born my mother lost every one of her teeth
all at once. The bone just disappeared around them.
Thus, I was born deficient. And my childhood
and adolescent nutrition was poor too: soda crackers, pasteurized
processed artificial cheese, evaporated milk from cans, hotdogs
and canned beans, hotdogs and cabbage. It wasn't until I was pregnant
with my first baby that I started to straighten up my diet. I
continued eating very well after my first daughter, so my youngest
daughter had another three years of good diet to draw on. Thus
both my own daughters got a somewhat better start than I had had.
My teeth were not as good as my mother's
had been before those years of malnutrition took them all. Instead
of perfect straight undecayed teeth like a healthy farm girl should
have, mine were somewhat crowded, with numerous cavities. My jaw
bone had not received enough minerals to develop to its full size.
My pelvic girdle also was smaller than my mother's was. I had
had a poor start.
My daughters did better. The older one
(the first child typically gets the best of the nutritional reserves)
has such a wide jaw that there are small spaces between her teeth.
My second daughter has only one crooked tooth, she has wider,
more solid hips, stronger bones and a broader face than I do.
If my younger daughter will but from this point in her life, eat
perfectly and choose her food wisely to responsibly avoid empty
calories and maximize her ratio of nutrition to calories, her
daughter (if she gives us granddaughters as her older sister already
has done) may exhibit the perfect physiology that her genes carry.
Along the lines of helping you avoid empty
calories I will give you some information about various common
foods that most people don't know and that most books about food
and health don't tell, or misunderstand.
Butter, Margarine and Fats in General.
Recently, enormous propaganda has been
generated against eating butter. Its been smeared in the health
magazines as a saturated animal fat, one containing that evil
substance, cholesterol. Many people are now avoiding it and instead,
using margarine.
Composition of Oils
|
|
Saturated |
Monosaturated |
Unsaturated |
|
Butter |
66% |
30% |
4% |
|
Coconut Oil |
87% |
6% |
2% |
|
Cottonseed Oil |
26% |
18% |
52% |
|
Olive Oil |
13% |
74% |
8% |
|
Palm Oil |
49% |
37% |
9% |
|
Soybean Oil |
14% |
24% |
58% |
|
Sunflower Oil |
4% |
8% |
83% |
|
Safflower Oil |
3% |
5% |
87% |
|
Sesame Oil |
5% |
9% |
80% |
|
Peanut Oil |
6% |
12% |
76% |
|
Corn Oil |
3% |
7% |
84% |
This is a major and serious misunderstanding.
First of all, margarine is almost indigestible, chemically very
much like shortening–an artificially saturated or hydrogenated
vegetable fat. Hydrogenated fats can't be properly broken down
by the body's digestive enzymes, adding to the body's toxic load.
Margarine, being a chemically-treated vegetable oil with artificial
yellow color and artificial flavorings to make it seem like butter,
also releases free radicals in the body that accelerate aging.
So, to avoid the dangers of eating cholesterol-containing butter,
people eat something far worse for them!
There are severe inconsistencies with
the entire "cholesterol-is-evil" theory. Ethnic groups
like the Danes, who eat enormous quantities of cholesterol-containing
foods, have little circulatory disease. Actually, the liver itself
produces cholesterol; it's presence in the blood is an important
part of the body chemistry. Cholesterol only becomes a problem
because of deranged body chemistry due to the kind of overall
malnutrition Americans usually experience on their junk food diets.
Avoiding cholesterol in foods does little good, but eating a low-fat,
low-sugar, complex-carbohydrate (whole foods) diet high in minerals
does lower blood cholesterol enormously.
Actually, high quality fresh (not rancid)
butter in moderate quantities is about the finest fat a person
could eat. But high quality butter is almost unobtainable. First
of all, it has to be raw, made from unpasteurized cream. Second,
butter can contain very high levels of fat-soluble vitamins, but
doesn't have to. Vitamin-rich butter's color is naturally bright
yellow, almost orange. This color does not come from a test tube.
Pale yellow butter as is found in the commercial trade was probably
almost white before it was artificially tinted. Butter from grass-pastured
cows naturally changes from yellow-orange to white and back again
through the year as the seasons change. Spring grass, growing
in the most intense sunlight of the year contains very high levels
of chlorophyll and vitamins. Cows eating this grass put high levels
of vitamins A and D into their cream, evidenced by the orange
color of vitamin A. By July, natural butter has degraded to medium-yellow
in color. By August, it is pale yellow. Industrial dairy cows
fed exclusively on hay or artificial, processed feeds (lacking
in these vitamins), produce butterfat that is almost white.
I prefer to obtain my butter from a neighbor
who has several dairy cows grazing on fertile bottom land pasture.
We always freeze a year's supply in late spring when butter is
at its best. Interestingly, that is also the time of year when
my neighbor gets the most production from her cows and is most
willing to part with 25 pounds of extra butter.
In general, fats are poor foods that should
be avoided. Their ratio of nutrition to calories is absolutely
the worst of all food types, except perhaps for pure white sugar,
which is all calories and absolutely no nutrition (this is also
true for other forms of sugar. Honey, too, contains almost no
nutrition.). Gram for gram, fats contain many more calories than
do sugars or starches. Yet gram for gram, fats contain virtually
no nutrition except for small quantities of essential fatty acids.
The perverse reason people like to eat
fats is that they are very hard to digest and greatly slow the
digestive action of the stomach. Another way of saying that is
that they have a very high satiety value. Fats make a person feel
full for a long time because their presence in the stomach makes
it churn and churn and churn. Fats coat proteins and starches
and delay their digestion, often causing them to begin fermenting
(starches) or putrefying (proteins) in the digestive tract.
The best fats contain high levels of monosaturated
vegetable oils that have never been exposed to heat or chemicals–like
virgin olive oil. Use small quantities of olive oil for salad
dressing. Monosaturated fats also have far less tendency to go
rancid than any other type. Vegetable oils with high proportions
of unsaturated fats, the kind that all the authorities push because
they contain no cholesterol, go rancid rapidly upon very brief
exposure to air. The danger here is that rancidity in vegetable
oil is virtually unnoticeable. Rancid animal fat on the other
hand, smells "off." Eating rancid oil is a sure-fire
way to accelerate aging, invite degenerative conditions in general,
and enhance the likelihood of cancer. I recommend that you use
only high-quality virgin olive oil, the only generally-available
fat that is largely monosaturated. (Pearson and Shaw, 1983)
When you buy vegetable oil, even olive
oil, get small bottles so you 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 |
|
Fruits |
|
Vegetables |
|
|
all bran |
51 |
apples |
39 |
baked beans |
40 |
|
brown rice |
66 |
bananas |
62 |
beets |
64 |
|
buckwheat |
54 |
cherries |
23 |
black-eyed peas |
33 |
|
cornflakes |
80 |
grapefruit |
26 |
carrots |
92 |
|
oatmeal |
49 |
grapes |
45 |
chic peas |
36 |
|
shred. wheat |
67 |
orange juice |
46 |
parsnips |
97 |
|
muesli |
66 |
peach |
29 |
potato chips |
51 |
|
white rice |
72 |
orange |
40 |
baked potato |
98 |
|
white spagetti |
50 |
pear |
34 |
sweet potato |
48 |
|
whole wheat spagetti |
42 |
plum |
25 |
yams |
51 |
|
sweet corn |
59 |
raisins |
64 |
peas |
51 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Nuts |
|
Baked Goods |
|
Sugars |
|
|
peanuts |
13 |
pastry |
59 |
fructose |
20 |
|
|
|
sponge cake |
46 |
glucose |
100 |
|
Meats |
|
white bread |
69 |
honey |
87 |
|
sausage |
28 |
w/w bread |
72 |
maltose |
110 |
|
fish sticks |
38 |
whole rye bread |
42 |
sucrose |
59 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 th