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, ut never with

complete results up to a perfect cleanliness, as long as the intake

of wrong or even too much right foods, is not stopped._ Prof. Arnold

Ehret, Mucusless Diet Healing System._ [3] Cooked food favors

bacterial, or organized, ferment preponderance, because cooking

kills the unorganized and organized ferments, and both are needed to

carry on the body's digestion. Raw foods--fruits and vegetables--favor

unorganized ferment digestion, because these foods carry vitamins,

which are unorganized ferments--enzymes. _Dr. John. H. Tilden,

Impaired Health: Its Cause and Cure, 1921._



Recently, my younger (adult) daughter asked my advice choosing

between a root canal or having a bridge made. This led to a

discussion of her eating habits in general. Defending her currently

less-than-optimum diet against my gentle criticism, she threw me a

tough riposte. "Why," she asked, when I was raised so perfectly as a

child, "when I ate only Organic food until I was ten and old enough

to make you send me to public school where I could eat those lousy

school lunches" (her unfeeling, heartless mother home-schooled her),

"why even at that young age, (before she spent her adolescent

rebellion eating junk food) why at that point did I still have a

mouthful of cavities?" And she did. At age ten my daughter needed

about ten fillings.



This beautiful daughter of a practicing naturopath had received

what, at the time, I considered virtually perfect nutrition. She

suckled hugely at her mother's abundant breast until age two. During

this time her mother ate a natural foods diet. After weaning my

daughter got only whole grains, a little fresh goat's milk from my

goat, fruits and lots of Organic vegetables. I started my spa when

my daughter was about five years old and from that point she was,

like it or not, a raw fooder. And all that raw food was Organic and

much of it from Great Oaks School's huge vegetable garden.



For my daughter to develop cavities on this diet is reminiscent of

Woody Allen's joke in his movie "Sleeper." Do you recall this one,

made about 1973? The plot is a take off on Rip Van Winkle. Woody

goes into the hospital for minor surgery. Unexpectedly he expires on

the operating table and his body is frozen in hopes that someday he

can be revived. One hundred and fifty years later he is revived.



The priceless scene I always think of takes place in his hospital

room immediately after he comes to consciousness. The doctor in

charge of his case is explaining to Woody what has happened. Woody

refuses to believe he died and was frozen, asserting that the whole

story is a put on. Woody insists that the 'doctor' is clearly an

actor hired by his friends! It absolutely can't be the year 2123.

'Oh, but it really is 2123,' insists the doctor. 'And it is no put

on by his friends; all his friends are long dead; Woody knows no one

at all in 2123 and had better prepare himself to start a new life.'



Woody still insists it is a put on. "I had a healthfood store," he

says, "and all my friends ate brown rice. They can't be dead!"



And my perfectly nourished daughter couldn't have developed

cavities! But she did. And if she cheated on her perfect diet, bad

food could not have amounted to more than two percent of her total

caloric intake from birth to age ten. I was a responsible mom and I

made sure she ate right! Now my daughter was demanding to know why

she had tooth decay. Fortunately, I now know the answer. The answer

is rather complex, but I can give a simplified explanation.



The Confusions About Diets and Foods



Like my daughter, many people of all ages are muddled about the

relationship between health and diet. Their confusions have created

a profitable market for health-related information. And equally,

their confusions have been created by books, magazine articles, and

TV news features. This avalanche of data is highly contradictory. In

fact, one reason I found it hard to make myself write my own book is

that I wondered if my book too would become just another part of the

confusion.



Few people are willing to tolerate very much uncertainty. Rather

than live with the discomfort of not knowing why, they will create

an explanation or find some answer, any answer, and then ever after,

assert its rightness like a shipwrecked person clings to a floating

spar in a storm. This is how I explain the genesis of many

contemporary food religions.



Appropriately new agey and spiritual, Macrobiotics teaches the way

to perfect health is to eat like a Japanese whole foods

vegetarian--the endless staple being brown rice, some cooked

vegetables and seaweeds, meanwhile balancing the "yin" and "yang" of

the foods. And Macrobiotics works great for a lot of people. But not

all people. Because there's next to nothing raw in the Macrobiotic

diet and some people are allergic to rice, or can get allergic to

rice on that diet.



Linda Clark's Diet for a Small Planet also has hundreds of thousands

of dedicated followers. This system balances the proportions of

essential amino acids at every, single meal and is vegetarian. This

diet also works and really helps some people, but not as well as

Macrobiotics in my opinion because obsessed with protein, Clark's

diet contains too many hard-to-digest soy products and makes poor

food combinations from the point of digestive capacity.



Then there are the raw fooders. Most of them are raw, Organic

fooders who go so far as to eat only unfired, unground cereals that

have been soaked in warm water (at less than 115 degrees or you'll

kill the enzymes) for many hours to soften the seeds up and start

them sprouting. This diet works and really helps a lot of people.

Raw organic foodism is especially good for "holy joes," a sort of

better-than-everyone-else person who enjoys great self-righteousness

by owning this system. But raw fooding does not help all people nor

solve all diseases because raw food irritates the digestive tracts

of some people and in northern climates it is hard to maintain body

heat on this diet because it is difficult to consume enough

concentrated vegetable food in a raw state. And some raw fooders eat

far too much fruit. I've seen them lose their teeth because of

fruit's low mineral content, high sugar level and constant fruit

acids in their mouths.



Then there are vegetarians of various varieties including vegans

(vegetarians that will not eat dairy products and eggs), and then,

there are their exact opposites, Atkins dieters focusing on protein

and eating lots of meat. There's the Adelle Davis school, people

eating whole grains, handfuls of vitamins, lots of dairy and brewers

yeast and wheat germ, and even raw liver. Then there's the Organic

school. These folks will eat anything in any combination, just so

long as it is organically produced, including organically raised

beef, chicken, lamb, eggs, rabbit, wild meats, milk and diary

products, natural sea salt in large quantities and of course,

organically grown fruits, vegetables grains and nuts. And what is

"Organic?" The word means food raised in compliance with a set of

rules contrived by a certification bureaucracy. When carefully

analyzed, the somewhat illogical rules are not all that different in

spirit than the rules of kashsruth or kosher. And the Organic

certification bureaucrats aren't all that different than the rabbis

who certify food as being kosher, either.



There are now millions of frightened Americans who, following the

advice of mainstream Authority, have eliminated red meat from their

diets and greatly reduced what they (mistakenly) understand as

high-cholesterol foods.



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

truth.



The only area concerning health that contains more confusion and

contradictory data than diet is vitamins. What a rats nest that is!



The Fundamental Principle



If you are a true believer in any of the above food religions, I

expect that you will find my views unsettling. But what I consider

"good diet" results from my clinical work with thousands of cases.

It is what has worked with those cases. My eclectic views

incorporate bits and pieces of all the above. In my own case, I

started out by following the Organic school, and I was once a raw

food vegetarian who ate nothing but raw food for six years. I also

ate Macrobiotic for about one year until I became violently allergic

to rice.



I have arrived at a point where I understand that each person's

biochemistry is unique and each must work out their own diet to suit

their life goals, life style, genetic predisposition and current

state of health. There is no single, one, all-encompassing, correct

diet. But, there is a single, basic, underlying Principle of

Nutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified form, the

basic equation of human health goes: Health = Nutrition / Calories.

The equation falls far short of explaining the origin of each

individuals diseases or how to cure diseases but Health = Nutrition

/ Calories does show the general path toward healthful eating and

proper medicine.



All animals have the exact same dietary problem: finding enough

nutrition to build and maintain their bodies within the limits of

their digestive capacity. Rarely in nature (except for predatory

carnivores) is there any significant restriction on the number of

calories or serious limitation of the amount of low-nutrition foods

available to eat. There's rarely any shortage of natural junk food

on Earth. Except for domesticated house pets, animals are sensible

enough to prefer the most nutritional fare available and tend to

shun empty calories unless they are starving.



But humans are perverse, not sensible. Deciding on the basis of

artificially-created flavors, preferring incipid textures, we seem

to prefer junk food and become slaves to our food addictions. For

example, in tropical countries there is a widely grown root crop,

called in various places: tapioca, tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This

interesting plant produces the greatest tonnage of edible,

digestible, pleasant-tasting calories per acre compared to any other

food crop I know. Manioc might seem the answer to human starvation

because it will grow abundantly on tropical soils so infertile

and/or so droughty that no other food crop will succeed there.

Manioc will do this because it needs virtually nothing from the soil

to construct itself with. And consequently, manioc puts next to

nothing nourishing into its edible parts. The bland-tasting root is

virtually pure starch, a simple carbohydrate not much different than

pure corn starch. Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide gas

obtained the air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no

shortage ever of carbon from CO2 in the air and rarely a shortage of

hydrogen from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is

chewed, digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar.

Nutritionally there is virtually no difference between eating manioc

and eating white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.



If you made a scale from ideal to worst regarding the ratio of

nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc and most fats are at the

extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't know which single food

might lie at the extreme positive end of the scale. Close to perfect

might be certain leafy green vegetables that can be eaten raw. When

they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop 20 or

more percent completely digestible balanced protein with ideal

ratios of all the essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of

minerals, all sorts of enzymes and other nutritional elements--and

very few calories. You could continually fill your stomach to

bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard time sustaining

your body weight if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailorman

was right about eating spinach.



For the moment, lets ignore individual genetic inabilities to digest

specific foods and also ignore the effects stress and enervation can

have on our ability to extract nutrition out of the food we are

eating. Without those factors to consider, it is correct to say

that, to the extent one's diet contains the maximum potential amount

of nutrition relative to the number of calories you are eating, to

that extent a person will be healthy. To the extent the diet is

degraded from that ideal, to that extent, disease will develop.

Think about it!



Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology



The next logical pair of questions are: how healthy could good

nutrition make people be, and, how much deviation from ideal

nutrition could we allow ourselves before serious disease appears?

Luckily, earlier in this century we could observe living answers to

those questions (before the evidence disappeared). The answers are:

we could be amazingly healthy, and, if we wish to enjoy excellent

health we can afford to cut ourselves surprisingly little slack.



Prior to the Second World War there were several dozen sizable

groups of extraordinarily healthy humans remaining on Earth. Today,

their descendants are still in the same remote places, are speaking

the same languages and possess more or less the same cultures. Only

today they're watching satellite TV. wearing jeans, drinking

colas--and their superior health has evaporated.



During the early part of this century, at the same era vitamins and

other basic aspects of nutrition were being discovered, a few

farsighted medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places

with their legendarily healthy peoples to see what caused the

legendary well-being they'd heard of. Enough evidence was collected

and analyzed to derive some very valid principles.



First lets dismiss some apparently logical but incorrect

explanations for the unusually good health of these isolated

peoples. It wasn't racial, genetic superiority. There were

extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns, Orientals, Amerinds,

Caucasians. It wasn't living at high altitude; some lived at sea

level. It wasn't temperate climates, some lived in the tropics, some

in the tropics at sea level, a type of location generally thought to

be quite unhealthful. It wasn't a small collection of genetically

superior individuals, because when these peoples left their isolated

locale and moved to the city, they rapidly began to lose their

health. And it wasn't genetics because when a young couple from the

isolated healthy village moved to town, their children born in town

were as unhealthy as all the other kids.



And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote

village or a mountain valley or a far island settlement very

difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten

thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Among that small

population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs,

no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with

it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness of modern

science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And

this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these unprotected,

undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from

bacterial infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13

children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding age--almost all the

children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases. There

was also virtually no degenerative disease like heart attacks,

hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There were

few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any

aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little mortality

during childbirth, as little or less than we have today with all our

hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtually perfect teeth and

kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes nor any

notion of dental hygiene. Nor did they have dentists or physicians.

(Price, 1970)



And in those fortunate places the most common causes of death were

accident (trauma) and old age. The typical life span was long into

the 70s and in some places quite a bit longer. One fabled place,

Hunza, was renowned for having an extraordinarily high percentage of

vigorous and active people over 100 years old.



I hope I've made you curious. "How could this be?" you're asking.

Well, here's why. First, everyone of those groups lived in places so

entirely remote, so inaccessible that they were of necessity,

virtually self-sufficient. They hardly traded at all with the

outside world, and certainly they did not trade for bulky,

hard-to-transport bulk foodstuffs. Virtually everything they ate was

produced by themselves. If they were an agricultural people,

naturally, everything they ate was natural: organic, whole,

unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local materials seemed to

produce enhanced plant growth. And, if they were agricultural, they

lived on a soil body that possessed highly superior natural

fertility. If not an agricultural people they lived by the sea and

made a large portion of their diets sea foods. If their soil had not

been extraordinarily fertile, these groups would not have enjoyed

superior health and would have conformed to the currently

widely-believed notion that before the modern era, people's lives

were brutish, unhealthful, and short.



What is common between meat-eating Eskimos, isolated highland Swiss

living on rye bread, milk and cheese; isolated Scottish island Celts

with a dietary of oat porridge, kale and sea foods; highland central

Africans (Malawi) eating sorghum, millet tropical root crops and all

sorts of garden vegetables, plus a little meat and dairy; Fijians

living on small islands in the humid tropics at sea level eating sea

foods and garden vegetables. What they had in common was that their

foods were all were at the extreme positive end of the Health =

Nutrition / Calories scale. The agriculturists were on very fertile

soil that grew extraordinarily nutrient-rich food, the sea food

gatherers were obtaining their tucker from the place where all the

fertility that ever was in the soil had washed out of the land had

been transported--sea foods are also extraordinarily nutrient rich.



The group with the very best soil and consequently, the best health

of all were, by lucky accident, the Hunza. I say "lucky" and

"accident" because the Hunza and their resource base unknowingly

developed an agricultural system that produced the most nutritious

food that is possible to grow. The Hunza lived on what has been

called super food. There are a lot of interesting books about the

Hunza, some deserving of careful study. (Wrench, 1938; Rodale, 1949)



Finding Your Ideal Dietary



Anyone that is genuinely interested in having the best possible

health should make their own study of the titles listed in the

bibliography in the back of this book. After you do, award yourself

a BS nutrition. I draw certain conclusions from this body of data. I

think they help a person sort out the massive confusion that exists

today about proper diet.



First principle: Homo Sapiens clearly can posses extreme health

while eating very different dietary regimens. There is no one right

diet for humans.



Before the industrial era almost everyone on Earth ate what was

produced locally. Their dietary choices were pretty much restricted

to those foods that were well adapted and productive in their

region. Some places grew rye, others wheat, others millet, others

rice. Some places supported cows, others goats, others had few on no

domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot of fruits and

vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary, during

thousands of years of eating that dietary natural selection

prevailed; most babies that were allergic to or not able to thrive

on the available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhood

bacterial infections. The result of this weeding out process was a

population closely adapted to the available dietary of a particular

locale.



This has interesting implications for Americans, most of whose

ancestors immigrated from somewhere else; many of our ancestors also

"hybridized" or crossed with immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to

discover what dietary substances your particular genetic endowment

is adapted to can be difficult and confusing. If both your parents

were Italian and they were more or less pure Italian going way back,

you might start out trying to eat wheat, olives, garlic, fava beans,

grapes, figs, cow dairy. If pure German, try rye bread, cow dairy,

apples, cabbage family vegetables. If Scottish, try oats, mutton,

fish, sheep dairy and cabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat

dairy, wheat, olives and citrus. And certainly all the above ethnic

derivations will thrive on many kinds of vegetables. Afro-Americans,

especially dark-complexioned ones little mixed with Europeans, might

do well to avoid wheat and instead, try sorghum, millet or tropical

root crops like sweet potatoes, yams and taro.



Making it even more difficult for an individual to discover their

optimum diet is the existence of genetic-based allergies and worse,

developed allergies. Later in this chapter I will explain how a body

can develop an allergy to a food that is probably irreversible. A

weakened organ can also prevent digestion of a food or food group.



One more thing about adaptation to dietaries. Pre-industrial humans

could only be extraordinarily healthy on the dietary they were

adapted to if and only if that dietary also was extraordinarily high

in nutrients. Few places on earth have naturally rich soil. Food

grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition; that grown on rich soil is

high in nutrition. People do not realize that the charts and tables

in the backs of health books like Adelle Davis's Lets Cook It Right,

are not really true. They are statistics. It is vital to keep in

mind the old saying, "there are lies, there are damned lies, and

then there are statistics. The best way to lie is with statistics."



Statistical tables of the nutrient content of foods were developed

by averaging numerous samples of food from various soils and

regions. These tables basically lie because they do not show the

range of possibility between the different samples. A chart may

state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli contains so many

milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is that some broccoli

samples contain only half that amount or even less, while other

broccoli contains two or three times that amount. Since calcium is a

vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible form, the high calcium

broccoli is far better food than the low calcium sample. But both

samples of broccoli appear and taste more or less alike. Both could

even be organically grown. Yet one sample has a very positive ratio

of nutrition to calories, the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965)

Here's another example I hope will really dent the certainties the

Linda Clarkites. Potatoes can range in protein from eight to eleven

percent, depending on the soil that produced them and if they were

or were not irrigated. Grown dry (very low yielding) on semiarid

soils, potatoes can be a high-protein staff of life. Heavily

irrigated and fertilized so as to produce bulk yield instead of

nutrition, they'll produce two or three times the tonnage, but at 8

percent protein instead of 11 percent. Not only does the protein

content drop just as much as yield is boosted, the amino acid ratios

change markedly, the content of scarce nutritional minerals drops

massively, and the caloric content increases. In short, subsisting

on irrigated commercially-grown potatoes, or on those grown on

relatively infertile soils receiving abundant rainfall will make you

fat and sick. They're a lot like manioc.



Here's another. Wheat can range from 7 to 19 percent protein. Before

the industrial era ruined most wheat by turning it into white flour,

wheat-eating peoples from regions where the cereal naturally

contains abundant protein tended to be tall, healthy and long-lived.

Wheat-eating humans from regions that produce low protein grain

tended to be small, sickly and short-lived. (McCarrison, 1921, 1936,

1982; Albrecht, 1975)



Even cows have to pay attention to where their grass is coming from.

Some green grass is over 15 percent protein and contains lots of

calcium, phosphorus and magnesium to build strong bodies. Other

equally or even better looking green grass contains only six or

seven percent protein and contains little calcium, phosphorus or

magnesium. Cows forced to eat only this poor type of grass can

literally starve to death with full bellies. And they have a hard

time breeding successfully. The reason for the difference: different

soil fertility profiles. (Albrecht, 1975)



When people ate local, those living on fertile soils or getting a

significant portion of their diet from the sea and who because of

physical isolation from industrial foods did not make a practice of

eating empty calories tended to live a long time and be very

healthy. But those unfortunates on poor soils or with unwise

cultural life-styles tended to be short-lived, diseased, small,

weak, have bad teeth, and etc. The lesson here is that Homo Sapiens

can adapt to many different dietaries, but like any other animal,

the one thing we can't adapt to is a dietary deficient in nutrition.



So here's another "statistic" to reconsider. Most people believe

that due to modern medical wonders, we live longer than we used to.

Actually, that depends. Compared to badly nourished populations of a

century ago, yes! We do. Chemical medicine keeps sickly, poorly

nourished people going a lot longer (though one wonders about the

quality of their dreary existences.) I hypothesize that before the

time most farmers purchased and baked with white flour and sold

their whole, unground wheat, many rural Americans (the ones on good

soil, not all parts of North America have rich soil) eating from

their own self-sufficient farms, lived as long or even longer than

we do today. You also have to wonder who benefits from promulgating

this mistaken belief about longevity. Who gets rich when we are

sick? And what huge economic interests are getting rich helping make

us sick?



The Human Comedy



I know most of my readers have been heavily indoctrinated about food

and think they already know the truth about dietetics. I also know

that so much information (and misinformation) is coming out about

diet that most of my readers are massively confused about the

subject. These are two powerful reasons many readers will look with

disbelief at what this chapter has to say and take no action on my

data, even to prove me wrong.



Let me warn you. There is a deep-seated human tendency to put off

taking responsibilities, beautifully demonstrated by this old joke.



A 14 year old boy was discovered masturbating by his father, who

said, "son, you shouldn't do that! If you keep it up you'll

eventually go blind!"



"But father," came the boy's quick reply. "It feels good. How about

if I don't quit until I need to wear glasses?"



The Organic Versus Chemical Feud



Now, regrettably, and at great personal risk to my reputation, I

must try to puncture the very favorite belief of food religionists,

the doctrine that organically grown food is as nutritious as food

can possibly be, Like Woody Allen's brown-rice-eating friends,

people think if you eat Organic foods, you will inevitably live a

very long time and be very healthy. Actually, the Organic vs.

chemical feud is in many ways false. Many (not all) samples of

organically grown food are as low or lower in nutrition as foods

raised with chemical fertilizers. Conversely, wisely using chemical

fertilizers (not pesticides) can greatly increase the nutritional

value of food. Judiciously used Organic fertilizing substances can

also do that as well or better. And in either case, using chemical

fertilizers or so-called organic fertilizers, to maximize nutrition

the humus content of the soil must be maintained. But, raising soil

organic matter levels too high can result in a massive reduction in

the nutritional content of the food being grown--a very frequent

mistake on the part of Organic devotees. In other words, growing

nutrition is a science, and is not a matter of religion.



The food I fed to my daughter in childhood, though Organic according

to Rodale and the certification bureaucrats, though providing this

organic food to my family and clients gave me a feeling of

self-righteousness, was not grown with an understanding of the

nutritional consequences of electing to use one particular Organic

fertilizing substance over another. So we and a lot of regional

Organic market gardeners near us that we bought from, were raising

food that was far from ideally nutritious. At least though, our food

was free of pesticide residues.



The real dichotomy in food is not "chemical" fertilizer versus

"Organic," It is between industrial food and quality food. What I

mean by industrial food is that which is raised with the intention

of maximizing profit or yield. There is no contradiction between

raising food that the "rabbis" running Organic certification

bureaucracies would deem perfectly "kosher" and raising that same

food to make the most possible money or the biggest harvest. When a

farmer grows for money, they want to produce the largest number of

bushels, crates, tons, bales per acre. Their criteria for success is

primarily unit volume. Many gardeners think the same way. To

maximize bulk yield they build soil fertility in a certain direction

(organically or chemically) and choose varieties that produce

greater bulk. However, nature is ironic in this respect. The most

nutritious food is always lower yielding. The very soil management

practices that maximize production simultaneously reduce nutrition.



The real problem we are having about our health is not that there

are residues of pesticides in our food. The real problem is that

there are only residues of nutrition left in our foods. Until our

culture comes to understand this and realizes that the health costs

of accepting less than optimum food far exceeds the profits made by

growing bulk, it will not be possible to frequently find the

ultimate of food quality in the marketplace, organically grown or

not. It will not be possible to find food that is labeled or

identified according to its real nutritional value. The best I can

say about Organic food these days is that it probably is no less

nutritious than chemically-grown food while at least it is free of

pesticide residues.



The Poor Start



For this reason it makes sense to take vitamins and food

supplements, to be discussed in the next chapter. And because our

food supply, Organic or "conventional," is far from optimum, if a

person wants to be and remain healthy and have a life span that

approaches their genetic potential (and that potential, it seems,

approaches or exceeds a century), it is essential that empty

calories are rigorously avoided.



An accurate and quick-to-respond indicator of how well we are doing

in terms of getting enough nutrition is the state of our teeth. One

famous dentally-oriented nutritional doctor, Melvin Page, suggested

that as long as overall nutrition was at least 75 percent of

perfection, the body chemistry could support healthy teeth and gums

until death. By healthy here Page means free of cavities, no bone

loss around the teeth (no wobblers), no long-in-the-teeth mouths

from receding gums, no gum diseases at all. But when empty calories

or devitalized foods or misdigestion cuts our nutrient intake we

begin experiencing tooth decay, gum disease and bone loss in the

jaw. How are your teeth?



I suppose you could say that I have a food religion, but mine is to

eat so that the equation Nutrition = Health / Calories is strongly

in my favor.



Back to my daughter's teeth. Yes, I innocently fed her less than

ideally nutritious food, but at that time I couldn't buy ideal food

even had I known what I wanted, nor did I have any scientific idea

of how to produce ideal food, nor actually, could I have done so on

the impoverished, leached-out clay soil at Great Oaks School even

had I known how. The Organic doctrine says that you can build a

Garden of 'Eatin with large quantities of compost until any old clay

pit or gravel heap produces highly nutritious food. This idea is not

really true. Sadly, what is true about organic matter in soil is

that when it is increased very much above the natural level one

finds in untilled soil in the climate you're working with, the

nutritional content of the food begins to drop markedly. I know this

assertion is shocking and perhaps threatening to those who believe

in the Organic system; I am sorry.



But there is another reason my daughter's teeth were not perfect,

probably could not have been perfect no matter what we fed her, and

why she will probably have at least some health problems as she ages

no matter how perfectly she may choose to eat from here on. My

daughters had what Dr. G.T. Wrench called "a poor start." Not as

poor as it could have been by any means, but certainly less than

ideal.



You see, the father has very little to do with the health of the

child, unless he happens to carry some particularly undesirable

gene. It is the mother who has the job of constructing the fetus out

of prepartum nourishment and her own body's nutritional reserves.

The female body knows from trillenia of instinctual experience that

adequate nutrition from the current food supply during pregnancy can

not always be assured, so the female body stores up very large

quantities of minerals and vitamins and enzymes against that very

possibility. When forming a fetus these reserves are drawn down and

depleted. It is virtually impossible during the pregnancy itself for

a mother to extract sufficient nutrition from current food to build

a totally healthy fetus, no matter how nourishing the food she is

eating may be. Thus a mother-to-be needs to be spending her entire

childhood and her adolescence (and have adequate time between

babies), building and rebuilding her reserves.



A mother-to-be also started out at her own birth with a vitally

important stock of nutritional reserves, reserves put there during

her own fetal development. If that "start" was less than ideal, the

mother-to-be (as fetus) got "pinched" and nutritionally shortchanged

in certain, predictable ways. Even minor mineral fetal deficiencies

degrade the bone structure: the fetus knows it needs nutritional

reserves more than it needs to have a full-sized jaw bone or a wide

pelvic girdle, and when deprived of maximum fetal nourishment, these

non-vital bones become somewhat smaller. Permanently. If mineral

deficiencies continue into infancy and childhood, these same bones

continue to be shortchanged, and the child ends up with a very

narrow face, a jaw bone far too small to hold all the teeth, and in

women, a small oven that may have trouble baking babies. More

importantly, those nutrient reserves earmarked especially for making

babies are also deficient. So a deficient mother not only shows

certain structural evidence of physiological degeneration, but she

makes deficient babies. A deficient female baby at birth is unlikely

to completely overcome her bad start before she herself has

children.



So with females, the quality of a whole lifetime's nutrition, and

the life-nutrition of her mother (and of her mother's mother as

well) has a great deal to do with the outcome of a pregnancy. The

sins of the mother can really be visited unto the third and fourth

generation.



This reality was powerfully demonstrated in the 1920s by a medical

doctor, Francis Pottenger. He was not gifted with a good bedside

manner. Rather than struggling with an unsuccessful clinical

practice, Dr. Pottenger decided to make his living running a medical

testing laboratory in Pasadena, California. Dr. Pottenger earned his

daily bread performing a rather simple task, assaying the potency of

adrenal hormone extracts. At that time, adrenaline, a useful drug to

temporarily rescue people close to death, was extracted from the

adrenal glands of animals. However, the potency of these crude

extracts varied greatly. Being a very powerful drug, it was

essential to measure exactly how strong your extract was so its

dosage could be controlled.



Quantitative organic chemistry was rather crude in those days.

Instead of assaying in a test tube, Dr. Pottenger kept several big

cages full of cats that he had adrenalectomized. Without their own

adrenals, the cats could not live more than a short time By finding

out how much extract was required to keep the cats from failing, he

could measure the strength of the particular batch.



Dr. Pottenger's cats were economically valuable so he made every

effort to keep them healthy, something that proved to be

disappointingly difficult. He kept his cats clean, in airy, bright

quarters, fed them to the very best of his ability on pasteurized

whole milk, slaughterhouse meat and organs (cats in the wild eat

organ meats first and there are valuable vitamins and other

substances in organ meats that don't exist in muscle tissue). The

meat was carefully cooked to eliminate any parasites, and the diet

was supplemented with cod liver oil. However, try as he might,

Pottenger's cats were sickly, lived short and had to be frequently

replaced. Usually they bred poorly and died young of bacterial

infections, there being no antibiotics in the 1920s. I imagine Dr.

Pottenger was constantly visiting the animal shelter and perhaps

even paid quarters out the back door to a steady stream of young

boys who brought him cats in burlap sacks from who knows where, no

questions asked.



Dr. Pottenger's assays must have been accurate, for his business

grew and grew. Eventually he needed more cats than he had cages to

house, so he built a big, roofed, on-the-ground pen outdoors.

Because he was overworked, he was less careful about the feeding of

these extra animals. They got the same pasteurized milk and

cod-liver oil, but he did not bother to cook their slaughterhouse

meat. Then, a small miracle happened. This poorly cared for cage of

cats fed on uncooked meat became much healthier than the others,

suffering far fewer bacterial infections or other health problems.

Then another miracle happened. Dr. Pottenger began to meditate on

the first miracle.



It occurred to him that cats in the wild did not cook their food;

perhaps cats had a digestive system that couldn't process or

assimilate much out of cooked food. Perhaps the problem he had been

having was not because the cats were without adrenal glands but

because they were without sustenance, suffering a sort of slow

starvation in the midst of plenty. So Dr. Pottenger set up some cat

feeding experiments.



There were four possible combinations of his regimen: raw meat and

unpasteurized milk; raw meat and pasteurized milk; cooked meat and

raw milk; cooked meat and pasteurized milk, this last one being what

he had been feeding all along. So he divided his cats into four

groups and fed each group differently. The first results of

Pottenger's experiments were revealed quickly though the most

valuable results took longer to see. The cats on raw meat and raw

milk did best. The ones on raw meat and pasteurized milk did okay

but not as well. The ones on cooked meat and raw milk did even less

well and those on all cooked food continued to do as poorly as ever.



Clearly, cats can't digest cooked food; all animals do better fed on

what they can digest. A lot of people have taken Pottenger's data

and mistakenly concluded that humans also should eat only raw food.

This idea is debatable. However, the most important result of the

cat experiments took years to reveal itself and is not paid much

attention to, probably because its implications are very depressing.

Dr. Pottenger continued his experiments for several generations. It

was the transgenerational changes that showed the most valuable

lesson. Over several generations, the cats on all raw foods began to

alter their appearance. Their faces got wider, their pelvic girdles

broader, bones solider, teeth better. They began to breed very

successfully.



After quite a few generations, the healthiest group, the one on all

raw foods, seemed to have improved as much as it could. So Dr.

Pottenger took some of these cats and began feeding them only cooked

food to study the process of nutritional degeneration. After three

"de"generations on cooked fodder the group had deteriorated so much

that the animals could barely breed. Their faces had become narrow,

their teeth crooked, their pelvic girdles narrow, their bones and

body structure very small, and their dispositions poor. Mothers

wouldn't nurse their young and sometimes became cannibalistic. They

no longer lived very long.



Before the degenerating group completely lost the ability to breed,

Pottenger began to again feed them all raw food. It took four

generations on a perfect, raw food diet before some perfect

appearing individuals showed up in the group. It takes longer to

repair the damage than it does to cause it and it takes generations

of unflagging persistence.



I think much the same process has happened to humans in this

century. With the invention of the roller mill and the consequent

degradation of our daily bread to white flour; with the birth of

industrial farming and the generalized lowering of the nutritional

content of all of our crops; our overall ratio of nutrition to

calories worsened. Then it worsened again because we began to have

industrial food manufacturing and national brand prepared food

marketing systems; we began subsisting on devitalized, processed

foods. The result has been an even greater worsening of our ratio of

nutrition to calories.



And just like Pottenger's cats, we civilized humans in so-called

advanced countries are losing the ability to breed, our willingness

(or the energy) to mother our young; we're losing our good humor in

the same way Pottenger's degenerated cats became bad tempered. As a

group we feel so poorly that we desperately need to feel better

fast, and what better way to do that than with drugs. Is it any

wonder that the United States, the country furthest down the road of

industrial food degeneration, spends 14 percent of its gross

domestic product on medical services. Any wonder that so many babies

are born by Cesarean, any wonder that so many of our children have

crooked teeth needing an orthodontist? The most depressing aspect of

this comes into view when considering that Pottenger's cats took

four generations on perfect food to repair most of the nutritional

damage.



In the specific case of my daughter, I know somethings about the

nutritional history of her maternal ancestors. My daughter's

grandmother grew up on a Saskatchewan farm. Though they certainly

grew their own rich wheat on virgin semi-arid prairie soil, I'm sure

the family bought white flour at the store for daily use. Still,

there was a garden and a cow producing raw milk and free-range

fertile eggs and chicken and other animals. There probably were lots

of canned vegetables in winter, canned but still highly nutritious

because of the fertility of their prairie garden. My mother

consequently had perfect teeth until the Great Depression forced her

to live for too many years on lard and white bread.



During this time of severe malnutrition she had her three babies.

The first one got the best of her nutritional reserves. The second,

born after the worst of the malnutrition, was very small and weak

and had a hard time growing up. Fortunately for me, for a few years

before I (the last child) was born, the worst of the economic times

had past and the family had been living on a farm. There were

vegetables and fresh raw milk and fruit. My mother had two good

years to rebuild her nutritional reserves. But "Grannybell" did not

managed to replace enough. Shortly after I was born my mother lost

every one of her teeth all at once. The bone just disappeared around

them.



Thus, I was born deficient. And my childhood and adolescent

nutrition was poor too: soda crackers, pasteurized processed

artificial cheese, evaporated milk from cans, hotdogs and canned

beans, hotdogs and cabbage. It wasn't until I was pregnant with my

first baby that I started to straighten up my diet. I continued

eating very well after my first daughter, so my youngest daughter

had another three years of good diet to draw on. Thus both my own

daughters got a somewhat better start than I had had.



My teeth were not as good as my mother's had been before those years

of malnutrition took them all. Instead of perfect straight undecayed

teeth like a healthy farm girl should have, mine were somewhat

crowded, with numerous cavities. My jaw bone had not received enough

minerals to develop to its full size. My pelvic girdle also was

smaller than my mother's was. I had had a poor start.



My daughters did better. The older one (the first child typically

gets the best of the nutritional reserves) has such a wide jaw that

there are small spaces between her teeth. My second daughter has

only one crooked tooth, she has wider, more solid hips, stronger

bones and a broader face than I do. If my younger daughter will but

from this point in her life, eat perfectly and choose her food

wisely to responsibly avoid empty calories and maximize her ratio of

nutrition to calories, her daughter (if she gives us granddaughters

as her older sister already has done) may exhibit the perfect

physiology that her genes carry.



Along the lines of helping you avoid empty calories I will give you

some information about various common foods that most people don't

know and that most books about food and health don't tell, or

misunderstand.



Butter, Margarine and Fats in General.



Recently, enormous propaganda has been generated against eating

butter. Its been smeared in the health magazines as a saturated

animal fat, one containing that evil substance, cholesterol. Many

people are now avoiding it and instead, using margarine.



Composition of Oils



Saturated Monosaturated Unsaturated

Butter 66% 30% 4%

Coconut Oil 87% 6% 2%

Cottonseed Oil 26% 18% 52%

Olive Oil 13% 74% 8%

Palm Oil 49% 37% 9%

Soybean Oil 14% 24% 58%

Sunflower Oil 4% 8% 83%

Safflower Oil 3% 5% 87%

Sesame Oil 5% 9% 80%

Peanut Oil 6% 12% 76%

Corn Oil 3% 7% 84%



This is a major and serious misunderstanding. First of all,

margarine is almost indigestible, chemically very much like

shortening--an artificially saturated or hydrogenated vegetable fat.

Hydrogenated fats can't be properly broken down by the body's

digestive enzymes, adding to the body's toxic load. Margarine, being

a chemically-treated vegetable oil with artificial yellow color and

artificial flavorings to make it seem like butter, also releases

free radicals in the body that accelerate aging. So, to avoid the

dangers of eating cholesterol-containing butter, people eat

something far worse for them!



There are severe inconsistencies with the entire

"cholesterol-is-evil" theory. Ethnic groups like the Danes, who eat

enormous quantities of cholesterol-containing foods, have little

circulatory disease. Actually, the liver itself produces

cholesterol; it's presence in the blood is an important part of the

body chemistry. Cholesterol only becomes a problem because of

deranged body chemistry due to the kind of overall malnutrition

Americans usually experience on their junk food diets. Avoiding

cholesterol in foods does little good, but eating a low-fat,

low-sugar, complex-carbohydrate (whole foods) diet high in minerals

does lower blood cholesterol enormously.



Actually, high quality fresh (not rancid) butter in moderate

quantities is about the finest fat a person could eat. But high

quality butter is almost unobtainable. First of all, it has to be

raw, made from unpasteurized cream. Second, butter can contain very

high levels of fat-soluble vitamins, but doesn't have to.

Vitamin-rich butter's color is naturally bright yellow, almost

orange. This color does not come from a test tube. Pale yellow

butter as is found in the commercial trade was probably almost white

before it was artificially tinted. Butter from grass-pastured cows

naturally changes from yellow-orange to white and back again through

the year as the seasons change. Spring grass, growing in the most

intense sunlight of the year contains very high levels of

chlorophyll and vitamins. Cows eating this grass put high levels of

vitamins A and D into their cream, evidenced by the orange color of

vitamin A. By July, natural butter has degraded to medium-yellow in

color. By August, it is pale yellow. Industrial dairy cows fed

exclusively on hay or artificial, processed feeds (lacking in these

vitamins), produce butterfat that is almost white.



I prefer to obtain my butter from a neighbor who has several dairy

cows grazing on fertile bottom land pasture. We always freeze a

year's supply in late spring when butter is at its best.

Interestingly, that is also the time of year when my neighbor gets

the most production from her cows and is most willing to part with

25 pounds of extra butter.



In general, fats are poor foods that should be avoided. Their ratio

of nutrition to calories is absolutely the worst of all food types,

except perhaps for pure white sugar, which is all calories and

absolutely no nutrition (this is also true for other forms of sugar.

Honey, too, contains almost no nutrition.). Gram for gram, fats

contain many more calories than do sugars or starches. Yet gram for

gram, fats contain virtually no nutrition except for small

quantities of essential fatty acids.



The perverse reason people like to eat fats is that they are very

hard to digest and greatly slow the digestive action of the stomach.

Another way of saying that is that they have a very high satiety

value. Fats make a person feel full for a long time because their

presence in the stomach makes it churn and churn and churn. Fats

coat proteins and starches and delay their digestion, often causing

them to begin fermenting (starches) or putrefying (proteins) in the

digestive tract.



The best fats contain high levels of monosaturated vegetable oils

that have never been exposed to heat or chemicals--like virgin olive

oil. Use small quantities of olive oil for salad dressing.

Monosaturated fats also have far less tendency to go rancid than any

other type. Vegetable oils with high proportions of unsaturated

fats, the kind that all the authorities push because they contain no

cholesterol, go rancid rapidly upon very brief exposure to air. The

danger here is that rancidity in vegetable oil is virtually

unnoticeable. Rancid animal fat on the other hand, smells "off."

Eating rancid oil is a sure-fire way to accelerate aging, invite

degenerative conditions in general, and enhance the likelihood of

cancer. I recommend that you use only high-quality virgin olive oil,

the only generally-available fat that is largely monosaturated.

(Pearson and Shaw, 1983)



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

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 troub