Title: How and When to Be Your Own Doctor
Author: Moser, Isabel A., Solomon, Steve
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.

*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "How and When to Be Your Own Doctor" ***
DOCTOR ***



How and When to Be Your Own Doctor

by Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

Steve Solomon, June, 1997.



Table of Contents

Forward by Steve Solomon
Chapter One: How I Became a Hygienist
Chapter Two: The Nature and Cause of Disease
Chapter Three: Fasting
Chapter Four: Colon Cleansing
Chapter Five: Diet and Nutrition
Chapter Six: Vitamins and Other Food Supplements
Chapter Seven: The Analysis of Disease States--Helping the Body
Recover
Appendices



Forward

_Tis a gift to be simple
Tis a gift to be free,
Tis a gift to come down
Where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves
In a place just right,
It will be in the valley
Of love and delight._

Old Shaker Hymn

Favorite of Dr. Isabelle Moser



I was a physically tough, happy-go-lucky fellow until I reached my
late thirties. Then I began to experience more and more off days
when I did not feel quite right. I thought I possessed an iron
constitution. Although I grew a big food garden and ate mostly
"vegetablitarian" I thought I could eat anything with impunity. I
had been fond of drinking beer with my friends while nibbling on
salty snacks or heavy foods late into the night. And until my health
began to weaken I could still get up the next morning after several
homebrewed beers, feeling good, and would put in a solid day's work.

When my health began to slip I went looking for a cure. Up to that
time the only use I'd had for doctors was to fix a few traumatic
injuries. The only preventative health care I concerned myself with
was to take a multivitamin pill during those rare spells when I felt
a bit run down and to eat lots of vegetables. So I'd not learned
much about alternative health care.

Naturally, my first stop was a local general practitioner/MD. He
gave me his usual half-hour get-acquainted checkout and opined that
there almost certainly was nothing wrong with me. I suspect I had
the good fortune to encounter an honest doctor, because he also said
if it were my wish he could send me around for numerous tests but
most likely these would not reveal anything either. More than
likely, all that was wrong was that I was approaching 40; with the
onset of middle age I would naturally have more aches and pains.
'Take some aspirin and get used to it,' was his advice. 'It'll only
get worse.'

Not satisfied with his dismal prognosis I asked an energetic old guy
I knew named Paul, an '80-something homesteader who was renowned for
his organic garden and his good health. Paul referred me to his
doctor, Isabelle Moser, who at that time was running the Great Oaks
School of Health, a residential and out-patient spa nearby at
Creswell, Oregon.

Dr. Moser had very different methods of analysis than the medicos,
was warmly personal and seemed very safe to talk to. She looked me
over, did some strange magical thing she called muscle testing and
concluded that I still had a very strong constitution. If I would
eliminate certain "bad" foods from my diet, eliminate some generally
healthful foods that, unfortunately, I was allergic to, if I would
reduce my alcohol intake greatly and take some food supplements,
then gradually my symptoms would abate. With the persistent
application of a little self-discipline over several months, maybe
six months, I could feel really well again almost all the time and
would probably continue that way for many years to come. This was
good news, though the need to apply personal responsibility toward
the solution of my problem seemed a little sobering.

But I could also see that Dr. Moser was obviously not telling me
something. So I gently pressed her for the rest. A little shyly,
reluctantly, as though she were used to being rebuffed for making
such suggestions, Isabelle asked me if I had ever heard of fasting?
"Yes," I said. "I had. Once when I was about twenty and staying at a
farm in Missouri, during a bad flu I actually did fast, mainly
because I was too sick to take anything but water for nearly one
week."

"Why do you ask?" I demanded.

"If you would fast, you will start feeling really good as soon as
the fast is over." she said.

"Fast? How long?"

"Some have fasted for a month or even longer," she said. Then she
observed my crestfallen expression and added, "Even a couple of
weeks would make an enormous difference."

It just so happened that I was in between set-up stages for a new
mail-order business I was starting and right then I did have a
couple of weeks when I was virtually free of responsibility. I could
also face the idea of not eating for a couple of weeks. "Okay!" I
said somewhat impulsively. "I could fast for two weeks. If I start
right now maybe even three weeks, depending on how my schedule works
out."

So in short order I was given several small books about fasting to
read at home and was mentally preparing myself for several weeks of
severe privation, my only sustenance to be water and herb tea
without sweetener. And then came the clinker.

"Have you ever heard of colonics?" she asked sweetly.

"Yes. Weird practice, akin to anal sex or something?"

"Not at all," she responded. "Colonics are essential during fasting
or you will have spells when you'll feel terrible. Only colonics
make water fasting comfortable and safe."

Then followed some explanation about bowel cleansing (and another
little book to take home) and soon I was agreeing to get my body
over to her place for a colonic every two or three days during the
fasting period, the first colonic scheduled for the next afternoon.
I'll spare you a detailed description of my first fast with
colonics; you'll read about others shortly. In the end I withstood
the boredom of water fasting for 17 days. During the fast I had
about 7 colonics. I ended up feeling great, much trimmer, with an
enormous rebirth of energy. And when I resumed eating it turned out
to be slightly easier to control my dietary habits and appetites.

Thus began my practice of an annual health-building water fast. Once
a year, at whatever season it seemed propitious, I'd set aside a
couple of weeks to heal my body. While fasting I'd slowly drive
myself over to Great Oaks School for colonics every other day. By
the end of my third annual fast in 1981, Isabelle and I had become
great friends. About this same time Isabelle's relationship with her
first husband, Douglas Moser, had disintegrated. Some months later,
Isabelle and I became partners. And then we married.

My regular fasts continued through 1984, by which time I had
recovered my fundamental organic vigor and had retrained my dietary
habits. About 1983 Isabelle and I also began using Life Extension
megavitamins as a therapy against the aging process. Feeling so much
better I began to find the incredibly boring weeks of prophylactic
fasting too difficult to motivate myself to do, and I stopped. Since
that time I fast only when acutely ill. Generally less than one week
on water handles any non-optimum health condition I've had since
'84. I am only 54 years old as I write these words, so I hope it
will be many, many years before I find myself in the position where
I have to fast for an extended period to deal with a serious or
life-threatening condition.

I am a kind of person the Spanish call _autodidactico,_ meaning that
I prefer to teach myself. I had already learned the fine art of
self-employment and general small-business practice that way, as
well as radio and electronic theory, typography and graphic design,
the garden seed business, horticulture, and agronomy. When Isabelle
moved in with me she also brought most of Great Oak's extensive
library, including very hard to obtain copies of the works of the
early hygienic doctors. Naturally I studied her books intensely.

Isabelle also brought her medical practice into our house. At first
it was only a few loyal local clients who continued to consult with
her on an out-patient basis, but after a few years, the demands for
residential care from people who were seriously and sometimes
life-threateningly sick grew irresistibly, and I found myself
sharing our family house with a parade of really sick people. True,
I was not their doctor, but because her residential clients became
temporary parts of our family, I helped support and encourage our
residents through their fasting process. I'm a natural teacher (and
how-to-do-it writer), so I found myself explaining many aspects of
hygienic medicine to Isabelle's clients, while having a first-hand
opportunity to observe for myself the healing process at work. Thus
it was that I became the doctor's assistant and came to practice
second-hand hygienic medicine.

In 1994, when Isabelle had reached the age of 54, she began to think
about passing on her life's accumulation of healing wisdom by
writing a book. She had no experience at writing for the popular
market, her only major writing being a Ph.D. dissertation. I on the
other hand had published seven books about vegetable gardening. And
I grasped the essentials of her wisdom as well as any
non-practitioner could. So we took a summer off and rented a house
in rural Costa Rica, where I helped Isabelle put down her thoughts
on a cheap word-processing typewriter. When we returned to the
States, I fired-up my "big-mac" and composed this manuscript into a
rough book format that was given to some of her clients to get what
is trendily called these days, "feedback."

But before we could completely finish her book, Isabelle became
dangerously ill and after a long, painful struggle with abdominal
cancer, she died. After I resurfaced from the worst of my grief and
loss, I decided to finish her book. Fortunately, the manuscript
needed little more than polishing. I am telling the reader these
things because many ghost-written books end up having little direct
connection with the originator of the thoughts. Not so in this case.
And unlike many ghost writers, I had a long and loving
apprenticeship with the author. At every step of our colaboration on
this book I have made every effort to communicate Isabelle's
viewpoints in the way she would speak, not my own. Dr. Isabelle
Moser was for many years my dearest friend. I have worked on this
book to help her pass her understanding on.

Many people consider death to be a complete invalidation of a
healing arts practitioner. I don't. Coping with her own dicey health
had been a major motivator for Isabelle's interest in healing
others. She will tell you more about it in the chapters to come.
Isabelle had been fending off cancer since its first blow up when
she was 26 years old. I view that 30 plus years of defeating Death
as a great success rather than consider her ultimate defeat as a
failure.

Isabelle Moser was born in 1940 and died in 1996. I think the
greatest accomplishment of her 56 years was to meld virtually all
available knowledge about health and healing into a workable and
most importantly, a simple model that allowed her to have amazing
success. Her "system" is simple enough that even a generally
well-educated non-medico like me can grasp it. And use it without
consulting a doctor every time a symptom appears.

Finally, I should mention that over the years since this book was
written I have discovered contains some significant errors of
anatomical or psysiological detail. Most of these happened because
the book was written "off the top of Isabelle's head," without any
reference materials at hand, not even an anatomy text. I have not
fixed these goofs as I am not even qualified to find them all. Thus,
when the reader reads such as 'the pancreas secreates enzymes into
the stomach,' (actually and correctly, the duodenum) I hope they
will understand and not invalidate the entire book.



Chapter One

How I Became a Hygienist



From The Hygienic Dictionary

Doctors. [1] In the matter of disease and healing, the people have
been treated as serfs. The doctor is a dictator who knows it all,
and the people are stupid, dumb, driven cattle, fit for nothing
except to be herded together, bucked and gagged when necessary to
force medical opinion down their throats or under their skins. I
found that professional dignity was more often pomposity, sordid
bigotry and gilded ignorance. The average physician is a
fear-monger, if he is anything. He goes about like a roaring lion,
seeking whom he may scare to death. _Dr. John. H. Tilden, Impaired
Health: Its Cause and Cure, Vol. 1, 1921._ [2] Today we are not only
in the Nuclear Age but also the Antibiotic Age. Unhappily, too, this
is the Dark Age of Medicine--an age in which many of my colleagues,
when confronted with a patient, consult a volume which rivals the
Manhattan telephone directory in size. This book contains the names
of thousands upon thousands of drugs used to alleviate the
distressing symptoms of a host of diseased states of the body. The
doctor then decides which pink or purple or baby-blue pill to
prescribe for the patient. This is not, in my opinion, the practice
of medicine. Far too many of these new "miracle" drugs are
introduced with fanfare and then reveled as lethal in character, to
be silently discarded for newer and more powerful drugs. _Dr. Henry
Bieler: Food is Your Best Medicine; 1965._

I have two reasons for writing this book. One, to help educate the
general public about the virtues of natural medicine. The second, to
encourage the next generation of natural healers. Especially the
second because it is not easy to become a natural hygienist; there
is no school or college or licensing board.

Most AMA-affiliated physicians follow predictable career paths,
straight well-marked roads, climbing through apprenticeships in
established institutions to high financial rewards and social
status. Practitioners of natural medicine are not awarded equally
high status, rarely do we become wealthy, and often, naturopaths
arrive at their profession rather late in life after following the
tangled web of their own inner light. So I think it is worth a few
pages to explain how I came to practice a dangerous profession and
why I have accepted the daily risks of police prosecution and civil
liability without possibility of insurance.

Sometimes it seems to me that I began this lifetime powerfully
predisposed to heal others. So, just for childhood warm-ups I was
born into a family that would be much in need of my help. As I've
always disliked an easy win, to make rendering that help even more
difficult, I decided to be the youngest child, with two older
brothers.

A pair of big, capable brothers might have guided and shielded me.
But my life did not work out that way. The younger of my two
brothers, three years ahead of me, was born with many health
problems. He was weak, small, always ill, and in need of protection
from other children, who are generally rough and cruel. My father
abandoned our family shortly after I was born; it fell to my mother
to work to help support us. Before I was adolescent my older brother
left home to pursue a career in the Canadian Air Force.

Though I was the youngest, I was by far the healthiest.
Consequently, I had to pretty much raise myself while my single
mother struggled to earn a living in rural western Canada. This
circumstance probably reinforced my constitutional predilection for
independent thought and action. Early on I started to protect my
"little" brother, making sure the local bullies didn't take
advantage of him. I learned to fight big boys and win. I also helped
him acquire simple skills, ones that most kids grasp without
difficulty, such as swimming, bike riding, tree climbing, etc.

And though not yet adolescent, I had to function as a responsible
adult in our household. Stressed by anger over her situation and the
difficulties of earning our living as a country school teacher
(usually in remote one-room schools), my mother's health
deteriorated rapidly. As she steadily lost energy and became less
able to take care of the home, I took over more and more of the
cleaning, cooking, and learned how to manage her--a person who feels
terrible but must work to survive.

During school hours my mother was able to present a positive
attitude, and was truly a gifted teacher. However, she had a
personality quirk. She obstinately preferred to help the most able
students become even more able, but she had little desire to help
those with marginal mentalities. This predilection got her into no
end of trouble with local school boards; inevitably it seemed the
District Chairman would have a stupid, badly-behaved child that my
mother refused to cater to. Several times we had to move in the
middle of the school year when she was dismissed without notice for
"insubordination." This would inevitably happen on the frigid
Canadian Prairies during mid-winter.

At night, exhausted by the day's efforts, my mother's positiveness
dissipated and she allowed her mind to drift into negative thoughts,
complaining endlessly about my irresponsible father and about how
much she disliked him for treating her so badly. These emotions and
their irresponsible expression were very difficult for me to deal
with as a child, but it taught me to work on diverting someone's
negative thoughts, and to avoid getting dragged into them myself,
skills I had to use continually much later on when I began to manage
mentally and physically ill clients on a residential basis.

My own personal health problems had their genesis long before my own
birth. Our diet was awful, with very little fresh fruit or
vegetables. We normally had canned, evaporated milk, though there
were a few rare times when raw milk and free-range fertile farm eggs
were available from neighbors. Most of my foods were heavily salted
or sugared, and we ate a great deal of fat in the form of lard. My
mother had little money but she had no idea that some of the most
nutritious foods are also the least expensive.

It is no surprise to me that considering her nutrient-poor,
fat-laden diet and stressful life, my mother eventually developed
severe gall bladder problems. Her degeneration caused progressively
more and more severe pain until she had a cholecystectomy. The
gallbladder's profound deterioration had damaged her liver as well,
seeming to her surgeon to require the removal of half her liver.
After this surgical insult she had to stop working and never
regained her health. Fortunately, by this time all her children were
independent.

I had still more to overcome. My eldest brother had a nervous
breakdown while working on the DEW Line (he was posted on the Arctic
Circle watching radar screens for a possible incoming attack from
Russia). I believe his collapse actually began with our childhood
nutrition. While in the Arctic all his foods came from cans. He also
was working long hours in extremely cramped quarters with no leave
for months in a row, never going outside because of the cold, or
having the benefit of natural daylight.

When he was still in the acute stage of his illness (I was still a
teenager myself) I went to the hospital where my bother was being
held, and talked the attending psychiatrist into immediately
discharging him into my care. The physician also agreed to refrain
from giving him electroshock therapy, a commonly used treatment for
mental conditions in Canadian hospitals at that time. Somehow I knew
the treatment they were using was wrong.

I brought my brother home still on heavy doses of thorazine. The
side effects of this drug were so severe he could barely exist:
blurred vision, clenched jaw, trembling hands, and restless feet
that could not be kept still. These are common problems with the
older generation of psycho tropic medications, generally controlled
to some extent with still other drugs like cogentin (which he was
taking too).

My brother steadily reduced his tranquilizers until he was able to
think and do a few things. On his own he started taking a lot of B
vitamins and eating whole grains. I do not know exactly why he did
this, but I believe he was following his intuition. (I personally
did not know enough to suggest a natural approach at that time.) In
any case after three months on vitamins and an improved diet he no
long needed any medication, and was delighted to be free of their
side effects. He remained somewhat emotionally fragile for a few
more months but he soon returned to work, and has had no mental
trouble from that time to this day. This was the beginning of my
interest in mental illness, and my first exposure to the limitations
of 'modern' psychiatry.

I always preferred self-discipline to being directed by others. So I
took every advantage of having a teacher for a mother and studied at
home instead of being bored silly in a classroom. In Canada of that
era you didn't have to go to high school to enter university, you
only had to pass the written government entrance exams. At age 16,
never having spent a single day in high school, I passed the
university entrance exams with a grade of 97 percent. At that point
in my life I really wanted to go to medical school and become a
doctor, but I didn't have the financial backing to embark on such a
long and costly course of study, so I settled on a four year nursing
course at the University of Alberta, with all my expenses paid in
exchange for work at the university teaching hospital.

At the start of my nurses training I was intensely curious about
everything in the hospital: birth, death, surgery, illness, etc. I
found most births to be joyful, at least when everything came out
all right. Most people died very alone in the hospital, terrified if
they were conscious, and all seemed totally unprepared for death,
emotionally or spiritually. None of the hospital staff wanted to be
with a dying person except me; most hospital staff were unable to
confront death any more bravely than those who were dying. So I made
it a point of being at the death bed. The doctors and nurses found
it extremely unpleasant to have to deal with the preparation of the
dead body for the morgue; this chore usually fell to me also. I did
not mind dead bodies. They certainly did not mind me!

I had the most difficulty accepting surgery. There were times when
surgery was clearly a life saving intervention, particularly when
the person had incurred a traumatic injury, but there were many
other cases when, though the knife was the treatment of choice, the
results were disastrous.

Whenever I think of surgery, my recollections always go to a man
with cancer of the larynx. At that time the University of Alberta
had the most respected surgeons and cancer specialists in the
country. To treat cancer they invariably did surgery, plus radiation
and chemotherapy to eradicate all traces of cancerous tissue in the
body, but they seemed to forget there also was a human being
residing in that very same cancerous body. This particularly
unfortunate man came into our hospital as a whole human being,
though sick with cancer. He could still speak, eat, swallow, and
looked normal. But after surgery he had no larynx, nor esophagus,
nor tongue, and no lower jaw.

The head surgeon, who, by the way, was considered to be a virtual
god amongst gods, came back from the operating room smiling from ear
to ear, announcing proudly that he had 'got all the cancer'. But
when I saw the result I thought he'd done a butcher's job. The
victim couldn't speak at all, nor eat except through a tube, and he
looked grotesque. Worst, he had lost all will to live. I thought the
man would have been much better off to keep his body parts as long
as he could, and die a whole person able to speak, eating if he felt
like it, being with friends and family without inspiring a gasp of
horror.

I was sure there must be better ways of dealing with degenerative
conditions such as cancer, but I had no idea what they might be or
how to find out. There was no literature on medical alternatives in
the university library, and no one in the medical school ever hinted
at the possibility except when the doctors took jabs at
chiropractors. Since no one else viewed the situation as I did I
started to think I might be in the wrong profession.

It also bothered me that patients were not respected, were not
people; they were considered a "case" or a "condition." I was
frequently reprimanded for wasting time talking to patients, trying
to get acquainted. The only place in the hospital where human
contact was acceptable was the psychiatric ward. So I enjoyed the
rotation to psychiatry for that reason, and decided that I would
like to make psychiatry or psychology my specialty.

By the time I finished nursing school, it was clear that the
hospital was not for me. I especially didn't like its rigid
hierarchical system, where all bowed down to the doctors. The very
first week in school we were taught that when entering a elevator,
make sure that the doctor entered first, then the intern, then the
charge nurse. Followed by, in declining order of status: graduate
nurses, third year nurses, second year nurses, first year nurses,
then nursing aids, then orderlies, then ward clerks, and only then,
the cleaning staff. No matter what the doctor said, the nurse was
supposed to do it immediately without question--a very military sort
of organization.

Nursing school wasn't all bad. I learned how to take care of all
kinds of people with every variety of illness. I demonstrated for
myself that simple nursing care could support a struggling body
through its natural healing process. But the doctor-gods tended to
belittle and denigrate nurses. No wonder--so much of nursing care
consists of unpleasant chores like bed baths, giving enemas and
dealing with other bodily functions.

I also studied the state-of-the-art science concerning every
conceivable medical condition, its symptoms, and treatment. At the
university hospital nurses were required to take the same pre-med
courses as the doctors--including anatomy, physiology, biochemistry,
and pharmacology. Consequently, I think it is essential for holistic
healers to first ground themselves in the basic sciences of the
body's physiological systems. There is also much valuable data in
standard medical texts about the digestion, assimilation, and
elimination. To really understand illness, the alternative
practitioner must be fully aware of the proper functioning of the
cardiovascular/pulmonary system, the autonomic and voluntary nervous
system, the endocrine system, plus the mechanics and detailed
nomenclature of the skeleton, muscles, tendons and ligaments. Also
it is helpful to know the conventional medical models for treating
various disorders, because they do appear to work well for some
people, and should not be totally invalidated simply on the basis of
one's philosophical or religious viewpoints.

Many otherwise well-meaning holistic practitioners, lacking an
honest grounding in science, sometimes express their understanding
of the human body in non-scientific, metaphysical terms that can
seem absurd to the well-instructed. I am not denying here that there
is a spiritual aspect to health and illness; I believe there are
energy flows in and around the body that can effect physiological
functioning. I am only suggesting that to discuss illness without
hard science is like calling oneself a abstract artist because the
painter has no ability to even do a simple, accurate
representational drawing of a human figure.

Though hospital life had already become distasteful to me I was
young and poor when I graduated. So after nursing school I buckled
down and worked just long enough to save enough money to obtain a
masters degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of British
Columbia. Then I started working at Riverview Hospital in Vancouver,
B.C., doing diagnostic testing, and group therapy, mostly with
psychotic people. At Riverview I had a three-year-long opportunity
to observe the results of conventional psychiatric treatment.

The first thing I noticed was the 'revolving door' phenomena. That
is, people go out, and then they're back in, over and over again,
demonstrating that standard treatment--drugs, electroshock and group
therapy--had been ineffective. Worse, the treatments given at
Riverside were dangerous, often with long term side effects that
were more damaging than the disease being treated. It felt like
nursing school all over again; in the core of my being I somehow
knew there was a better way, a more effective way of helping people
to regain their mental health. Feeling like an outsider, I started
investigating the hospital's nooks and crannies. Much to my
surprise, in a back ward, one not open to the public, I noticed a
number of people with bright purple skins.

I asked the staff about this and every one of the psychiatrists
denied these patients existed. This outright and widely-agreed-upon
lie really raised my curiosity. Finally after pouring through the
journals in the hospital library I found an article describing
psycho tropic-drug-induced disruptions of melanin (the dark skin
pigment). Thorazine, a commonly used psychiatric drug, when taken in
high doses over a long period of time would do this. Excess melanin
eventually was deposited in vital organs such as the heart and the
liver, causing death.

I found it especially upsetting to see patients receive electroshock
treatments. These violent, physician-induced traumas did seem to
disrupt dysfunctional thought patterns such as an impulse to commit
suicide, but afterwards the victim couldn't remember huge parts of
their life or even recall who they were. Like many other dangerous
medical treatments, electroshock can save life but it can also take
life away by obliterating identity.

According the Hippocratic Oath, the first criteria of a treatment is
that it should do no harm. Once again I found myself trapped in a
system that made me feel severe protest. Yet none of these
specialists or university professors, or academic libraries had any
information about alternatives. Worse, none of these mind-doctor-gods
were even looking for better treatments.

Though unpleasant and profoundly disappointing, my experience as a
mental hospital psychologist was, like being in nursing school, also
very valuable. Not only did I learn how to diagnose, and evaluate
the severity of mental illness and assess the dangerousness of the
mentally ill, I learned to understand them, to feel comfortable with
them, and found that I was never afraid of them. Fearlessness is a
huge advantage. The mentally ill seem to have a heightened ability
to spot fear in others. If they sense that you are afraid they
frequently enjoy terrorizing you. When psychotic people know you
feel comfortable with them, and probably understand a great deal of
what they are experiencing, when they know that you can and intend
to control them, they experience a huge sense of relief. I could
always get mentally ill people to tell me what was really going on
in their heads when no one else could get them to communicate.

A few years later I married an American and became the Mental Health
Coordinator for Whatcom County, the northwestern corner of
Washington State. I handled all the legal proceedings in the county
for mentally ill people. After treatment in the state mental
hospital I supervised their reentry into the community, and
attempted to provide some follow up. This work further confirmed my
conclusions that in most cases the mentally ill weren't helped by
conventional treatment. Most of them rapidly became social problems
after discharge. It seemed the mental hospital's only ethically
defensible function was incarceration--providing temporary relief
for the family and community from the mentally ill person's
destructiveness.

I did see a few people recover in the mental health system.
Inevitably these were young, and had not yet become
institutionalized, a term describing someone who comes to like being
in the hospital because confinement feels safe. Hospitalization can
mean three square meals and a bed. It frequently means an
opportunity to have a sex life (many female inmates are highly
promiscuous). Many psychotics are also criminal; the hospital seems
far better to them than jail. Many chronically mentally ill are also
experts at manipulating the system. When homeless, they deliberately
get hospitalized for some outrageous deed just before winter. They
then "recover" when the fine weather of spring returns.

After a year as Mental Health Co-ordinator, I had enough of the
"system" and decided that it was as good a time as any to return to
school for a Ph.D., this time at University. of Oregon where I
studied clinical and counseling psychology and gerontology. While in
graduate school I became pregnant and had my first child. Not
surprisingly, this experience profoundly changed my consciousness. I
realized that it had perhaps been all right for me to be somewhat
irresponsible about my own nutrition and health, but that it was not
okay to inflict poor nutrition on my unborn child. At that time I
was addicted to salty, deep-fat fried corn chips and a diet pop. I
thought I had to have these so-called foods every day. I tended to
eat for taste, in other words, what I liked, not necessarily what
would give me the best nutrition. I was also eating a lot of what
most people would consider healthy food: meat, cheese, milk, whole
grains, nuts, vegetables, and fruits.

My constitution had seemed strong and vital enough through my
twenties to allow this level of dietary irresponsibility. During my
early 20s I had even recovered from a breast cancer by sheer will
power. (I will discuss this later.) So before my pregnancy I had not
questioned my eating habits.

As my body changed and adapted itself to it's new purpose I began
visiting the libraries and voraciously read everything obtainable
under the topic of nutrition--all the texts, current magazines,
nutritional journals, and health newsletters. My childhood habit of
self-directed study paid off. I discovered alternative health
magazines like Let's Live, Prevention, Organic Gardening, and Best
Ways, and promptly obtained every back issue since they were first
published. Along the way I ran into articles by Linus Pauling on
vitamin C, and sent away for all of his books, one of these was
co-authored with David Hawkins, called The Orthomolecular Approach
to Mental Disorders.

This book had a profound effect on me. I instantly recognized that
it was Truth with a capital "T", although the orthomolecular
approach was clearly in opposition to the established medical model
and contradicted everything I had ever learned as a student or
professional. Here at last was the exciting alternative approach to
treating mental disorders I had so long sought. I filed this
information away, waiting for an opportunity to use it. And I began
to study all the references in The Orthomolecular Approach to Mental
Disorders dealing with correcting the perceptual functioning of
psychotic people using natural substances.

In the course of delving through libraries and book stores, I also
came across the Mokelumne Hill Publishing Company (now defunct).
This obscure publisher reprinted many unusual and generally crudely
reproduced out-of-print books about raw foods diets, hygienic
medicine, fruitarianism, fasting, breathairianism, plus some works
discussing spiritual aspects of living that were far more esoteric
than I had ever thought existed. I decided that weird or not, I
might as well find out everything potentially useful. So I spent a
lot of money ordering their books. Some of Mokelumne Hill's material
really expanded my thoughts. Though much of it seemed totally
outrageous, in every book there usually was one line, one paragraph,
or if I was lucky one whole chapter that rang true for me.

Recognizing capital "T" Truth when one sees it is one of the most
important abilities a person can have. Unfortunately, every aspect
of our mass educational system attempts to invalidate this skill.
Students are repeatedly told that derivation from recognized
authority and/or the scientific method are the only valid means to
assess the validity of data. But there is another parallel method to
determine the truth or falsehood of information: Knowing. We Know by
the simple method of looking at something and recognizing its
correctness. It is a spiritual ability. I believe we all have it.
But in my case, I never lost the ability to Know because I almost
never attended school.

Thus it is that I am absolutely certain How and When to Be Your Own
Doctor will be recognized as Truth by some of my readers and
rejected as unscientific, unsubstantiated, or anecdotal information
by others. I accept this limitation on my ability to teach. If what
you read in the following pages seems True for you, great! If it
doesn't, there is little or nothing I could do to further convince.

I return now to the time of my first pregnancy. In the face of all
these new Truths I was discovering concerning health and nutrition,
I made immediate changes in my diet. I severely reduced my animal
protein intake and limited cooked food in general. I began taking
vitamin and mineral supplements. I also choose a highly atypical
Ph.D. dissertation topic, "The Orthomolecular Treatment of Mental
Disorders." This fifty cent word, orthomolecular, basically means
readjusting the body chemistry by providing unusually large amounts
of specific nutrient substances normally found in the human body
(vitamins and minerals). Orthomolecular therapy for mental disorders
is supported by good diet, by removal of allergy-producing
substances, by control of hypoglycemia, plus counseling, and
provision of a therapeutic environment.

My proposed dissertation topic met with nothing but opposition. The
professors on my doctoral committee had never heard of the word
orthomolecular, and all of them were certain it wasn't an accepted,
traditional area of research. Research in academia is supposed to be
based on the works of a previous researchers who arrived at
hypothesis based on data obtained by strictly following scientific
methodology. "Scientific" data requires control groups, matched
populations, statistical analysis, etc. In my case there was no
previous work my dissertation committee would accept, because the
available data did not originate from a medical school or psychology
department they recognized.

Due to a lot of determination and perseverance I finally did succeed
in getting my thesis accepted, and triumphed over my doctoral
committee. And I graduated with a dual Ph.D. in both counseling
psychology and gerontology. My ambition was to establish the
orthomolecular approach on the west coast. At that time I knew of
only two clinics in the world actively using nutritional therapy.
One was in New York and the other, was a Russian experimental
fasting program for schizophrenics. Doctors Hoffer and Osmond had
used orthomolecular therapy in a Canadian mental hospital as early
as 1950, but they had both gone on to other things.

The newly graduated Dr. Isabelle Moser, Ph.D. was at this point
actually an unemployed mother, renting an old, end-of-the-road,
far-in-the-country farmhouse; by then I had two small daughters. I
strongly preferred to take care of my own children instead of
turning them over to a baby sitter. My location and my children made
it difficult for me to work any place but at home. So naturally, I
made my family home into a hospital for psychotic individuals. I
started out with one resident patient at a time, using no
psychiatric drugs. I had very good results and learned a tremendous
amount with each client, because each one was different and each was
my first of each type.

With any psychotic residing in your home it is foolhardy to become
inattentive even for one hour, including what are normally
considered sleeping hours. I have found the most profoundly ill
mentally ill person still to be very crafty and aware even though
they may appear to be unconscious or nonresponsive. Psychotics are
also generally very intuitive, using faculties most of us use very
little or not at all. For example one of my first patients,
Christine, believed that I was trying to electrocute her. Though she
would not talk, she repeatedly drew pictures depicting this. She
had, quite logically within her own reality, decided to kill me with
a butcher knife in self-defense before I succeeded in killing her. I
had to disarm Christine several times, hide all the household
knives, change my sleeping spot frequently, and generally stay
sufficiently awake at night to respond to slight, creaky sounds that
could indicate the approach of stealthily placed small bare feet.

With orthomolecular treatment Christine improved but also became
more difficult to live with as she got better. For example, when she
came out of catatonic-like immobility, she became extremely
promiscuous, and was determined to sleep with my husband. In fact
she kept crawling into bed with him with no clothes on. Either we
had to forcefully remove her or the bed would be handed over to
her--without a resident man. Christine then decided (logically) that
I was an obstacle to her sex life, and once more set out to kill me.
This stage also passed, eventually and Christine got tolerably well.

Christine's healing process is quite typical and demonstrates why
orthomolecular treatment is not popular. As a psychotic genuinely
improves, their aberrated behavior often becomes more aggressive
initially and thus, harder to control. It seems far more convenient
for all concerned to suppress psychotic behavior with stupefying
drugs. A drugged person can be controlled when they're in a sort of
perpetual sedation but then, they never get genuinely well, either.

Another early patient, Elizabeth, gave me a particularly valuable
lesson, one that changed the direction of my career away from curing
insanity and toward regular medicine. Elizabeth was a catatonic
schizophrenic who did not speak or move, except for some waxy
posturing. She had to be fed, dressed and pottied. Elizabeth was a
pretty little brunette who got through a couple of years of college
and then spent several years in a state mental hospital. She had
recently run away from a hospital, and had been found wandering
aimlessly or standing rigidly, apparently staring fixedly at
nothing. The emergency mental health facility in a small city nearby
called me up and asked if I would take her. I said I would, and
drove into town to pick her up. I found Elizabeth in someone's back
yard staring at a bush. It took me three hours to persuade her to
get in my car, but that effort turned out to be the easiest part of
the next months.

Elizabeth would do nothing for herself, including going to the
bathroom. I managed to get some nutrition into her, and change her
clothes, but that was about all I could do. Eventually she wore me
down; I drifted off for an hour's nap instead of watching her all
night. Elizabeth slipped away in the autumn darkness and vanished.
Needless to say, when daylight came I desperately searched the
buildings, the yard, gardens, woods, and even the nearby river. I
called in a missing person report and the police looked as well. We
stopped searching after a week because there just wasn't any place
else to look. Then, into my kitchen, right in front of our round
eyes and gaping mouths, walked a smiling, pleasant, talkative young
woman who was quite sane.

She said, "Hello I'm Elizabeth! I'm sorry I was such a hassle last
week, and thank you for trying to take care of me so well. I was too
sick to know any better." She said she had gone out our back door
the week before and crawled under a pile of fallen leaves on the
ground in our back yard with a black tarp over them. We had looked
under the tarp at least fifty times during the days past, but never
thought to look under the leaves as well.

This amazing occurrence made my head go bong to say the least; it
was obvious that Elizabeth had not been 'schizophrenic' because of
her genetics, nor because of stress, nor malnutrition, nor
hypoglycemia, nor because of any of the causes of mental illness I
had previously learned to identify and rectify, but because of food
allergies. Elizabeth was spontaneously cured because she'd had
nothing to eat for a week. The composting pile of leaves hiding her
had produced enough heat to keep her warm at night and the heap
contained sufficient moisture to keep her from getting too
dehydrated. She looked wonderful, with clear shiny blue eyes, clear
skin with good color, though she was slightly slimmer than when I
had last seen her.

I then administered Coca's Pulse Test (see the Appendix) and quickly
discovered Elizabeth was wildly intolerant to wheat and dairy
products. Following the well known health gurus of that time like
Adelle Davis, I had self-righteously been feeding her home-made
whole wheat bread from hand-ground Organic wheat, and home-made
cultured yogurt from our own organically-fed goats. But by doing
this I had only maintained her insanity. Elizabeth was an
intelligent young woman, and once she understood what was causing
her problems, she had no trouble completely eliminating certain
foods from her diet. She shuddered at the thought that had she not
come to my place and discovered the problem, she would probably have
died on the back ward of some institution for the chronically
mentally ill.

As for me, I will always be grateful to her for opening my eyes and
mind a little wider. Elizabeth's case showed me why Russian
schizophrenics put on a 30 day water fast had such a high recovery
rate. I also remembered all the esoteric books I had read extolling
the benefits of fasting. I also remembered two occasions during my
own youth when I had eaten little or nothing for approximately a
month each without realizing that I was "fasting." And doing this
had done me nothing but good.

Once when I was thirteen my mother sent my "little" brother and I to
a residential fundamentalist bible school. I did not want to go
there, although my brother did; he had decided he wanted to be a
evangelical minister. I hated bible school because I was allowed
absolutely no independence of action. We were required to attend
church services three times a day during the week, and five services
on Sunday. As I became more and more unhappy, I ate less and less;
in short order I wasn't eating at all. The school administration
became concerned after I had dropped about 30 pounds in two months,
notified my mother and sent me home. I returned to at-home
schooling. I also resumed eating.

I fasted one other time for about a month when I was 21. It happened
because I had nothing to do while visiting my mother before
returning to University except help with housework and prepare
meals. The food available in the backwoods of central B.C. didn't
appeal to me because it was mostly canned vegetables, canned milk,
canned moose meat and bear meat stews with lots of gravy and greasy
potatoes. I decided to pass on it altogether. I remember rather
enjoying that time as a fine rest and I left feeling very good ready
to take on the world full force ahead. At that time I didn't know
there was such a thing as fasting, it just happened that way.

After Elizabeth went on her way, I decided to experimentally fast
myself. I consumed only water for two weeks. But I must have had
counter intentions to this fast because I found myself frequently
having dreams about sugared plums, and egg omelets, etc. And I
didn't end up feeling much better after this fast was over (although
I didn't feel any worse either), because I foolishly broke the fast
with one of my dream omelets. And I knew better! Every book I'd ever
read on fasting stated how important it is to break a fast
gradually, eating only easy-to-digest foods for days or weeks before
resuming one's regular diet.

From this experiment I painfully learned how important it is to
break a fast properly. Those eggs just didn't feel right, like I had
an indigestible stone in my belly. I felt very tired after the
omelet, not energized one bit by the food. I immediately cut back my
intake to raw fruits and vegetables while the eggs cleared out of my
system. After a few days on raw food I felt okay, but I never did
regain the shine I had achieved just before I resumed eating.

This is one of the many fine things about fasting, it allows you to
get in much better communication with your own body, so that you can
hear it when it objects to something you're putting in it or doing
to it. It is not easy to acquire this degree of sensitivity to your
body unless you remove all food for a sufficiently long period; this
allows the body to get a word in edgewise that we are willing and
able to listen to. Even when we do hear the body protesting, we
frequently decide to turn a deaf ear, at least until the body starts
producing severe pain or some other symptom that we can't ignore.

Within a few years after Elizabeth's cure I had handily repaired
quite a few mentally ill people in a harmless way no one had heard
of; many new people were knocking at my door wanting to be admitted
to my drug free, home-based treatment program. So many in fact that
my ability to accommodate them was overwhelmed. I decided that it
was necessary to move to a larger facility and we bought an old,
somewhat run-down estate that I called Great Oaks School of Health
because of the magnificent oak trees growing in the front yard.

At Great Oaks initially I continued working with psychotics,
employing fasting as a tool, especially in those cases with obvious
food allergies as identified by Coca's Pulse Test, because it only
takes five days for a fasting body to eliminate all traces of an
allergic food substance and return to normal functioning. If the
person was so severely hypoglycemic that they were unable to
tolerate a water fast, an elimination diet (to be described in
detail later) was employed, while stringently avoiding all foods
usually found to be allergy producing.

I also decided that if I was going to employ fasting as my primary
medicine, it was important for me to have a more intense personal
experience with it, because in the process of reviewing the
literature on fasting I saw that there were many different
approaches, each one staunchly defended by highly partisan
advocates. For example, the capital "N" Natural, capital "H"
Hygienists, such a Herbert Shelton, aggressively assert that only a
pure water fast can be called a fast. Sheltonites contend that juice
fasting as advocated by Paavo Airola, for example, is not a fast but
rather a modified diet without the benefits of real fasting. Colon
cleansing was another area of profound disagreement among the
authorities. Shelton strongly insisted that enemas and colonics
should not be employed; the juice advocates tend to strongly
recommend intestinal cleansing.

To be able to intelligently take a position in this maze of conflict
I decided to first try every system on myself. It seems to me that
if I can be said to really own anything in this life it is my own
body, and I have the absolute right to experiment with it as long as
I'm not irresponsible about important things such as care of my
kids. I also feel strongly that it was unethical to ask anyone to do
anything that I was not willing or able to do myself. Just imagine
what would happen if all medical doctors applied this principal in
their practice of medicine, if all surgeons did it too!

I set out to do a complete and fully rigorous water fast according
to the Natural Hygiene model--only pure water and bed rest (with no
colon cleansing) until hunger returns, something the hygienists all
assured me would happen when the body had completed its
detoxification process. The only aspect of a hygienic fast I could
not fulfill properly was the bed rest part; unfortunately I was in
sole charge of a busy holistic treatment center (and two little
girls); there were things I had to do, though I did my chores and
duties at a very slow pace with many rest periods.

I water fasted for 42 days dropping from 135 pounds to 85 pounds on
a 5' 7" frame. At the end I looked like a Nazi concentration camp
victim. I tended to hide when people came to the door, because the
sight of all my bones scared them to death. Despite my assurances
visitors assumed I was trying to commit suicide. In any case I
persevered, watching my body change, observing my emotions, my
mental functioning, and my spiritual awareness. I thought, if Moses
could fast for 42 days so can I, even though the average length of a
full water fast to skeletal weight for a person that is not
overweight is more in the order of 30 days. I broke the fast with
small amounts of carrot juice diluted 50/50 with water and stayed on
that regimen for two more weeks.

After I resumed eating solid food it took six weeks to regain enough
strength to be able to run the same distance in the same time I had
before fasting, and it took me about six months to regain my
previous weight. My eyes and skin had become exceptionally clear,
and some damaged areas of my body such as my twice-broken shoulder
had undergone considerable healing. I ate far smaller meals after
the fast, but food was so much more efficiently absorbed that I got
a lot more miles to the gallon from what I did eat. I also became
more aware when my body did not want me to eat something. After the
fast, if I ignored my body's protest and persisted, it would
immediately create some unpleasant sensation that quickly persuaded
me to curb my appetite.

I later experimented with other approaches to fasting, with juice
fasts, with colon cleansing, and began to establish my own eclectic
approach to fasting and detoxification, using different types of
programs for different conditions and adjusting for psychological
tolerances. I'll have a lot more to say about fasting.

After my own rigorous fasting experience I felt capable of
supervising extended fasts on very ill or very overweight people.
Great Oaks was gradually shifting from being a place that mentally
ill people came to regain their sanity to being a spa where anyone
who wanted to improve their health could come for a few days, some
weeks or even a few months. It had been my observation from the
beginning that the mentally ill people in my program also improved
remarkably in physical health; it was obvious that my method was
good for anyone. Even people with good health could feel better.

By this time I'd also had enough of psychotic people anyway, and
longed for sane, responsible company.

So people started to come to Great Oaks School of Health to rest up
from a demanding job, to drop some excess weight, and generally to
eliminate the adverse effects of destructive living and eating
habits. I also began to get cancer patients, ranging from those who
had just been diagnosed and did not wish to go the AMA-approved
medical route of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, to those with
well-advanced cancer who had been sent home to die after receiving
all of the above treatments and were now ready to give alternative
therapies a try since they expected to die anyway. I also had a few
people who were beyond help because their vital organs had been so
badly damaged that they knew they were dying, and they wanted to die
in peace without medical intervention, in a supportive hospice cared
for by people who could confront death.

Great Oaks School was intentionally named a "school" of health
partially to deflect the attentions of the AMA. It is, after all,
entirely legal to teach about how to maintain health, about how to
prevent illness, and how to go about making yourself well once you
were sick. Education could not be called "practicing medicine
without a license." Great Oaks was also structured as a school
because I wanted to both learn and teach. Toward this end we started
putting out a holistic health newsletter and offering classes and
seminars to the public on various aspects of holistic health. From
the early 1970s through the early 1980s I invited a succession of
holistic specialists to reside at GOSH, or to teach at Great Oaks
while living elsewhere. These teachers not only provided a service
to the community, but they all became my teachers as well. I
apprenticed myself to each one in turn.

There came and went a steady parade of alternative practitioners of
the healing arts and assorted forms of metapsychology:
acupuncturists, acupressurists, reflexologists, polarity therapists,
massage therapists, postural integrationists, Rolfers, Feldenkries
therapists, neurolinguistic programmers, biokinesiologists,
iridologists, psychic healers, laying on of handsers, past life
readers, crystal therapists, toning therapists in the person of
Patricia Sun, color therapy with lamps and different colored lenses
a la Stanley Bourroughs, Bach Flower therapists, aroma therapists,
herbalists, homeopaths, Tai Chi classes, yoga classes, Arica
classes, Guergieff and Ouspensky fourth-way study groups, EST
workshops, Zen Meditation classes. Refugee Lamas from Tibet gave
lectures on The Book of the Dead and led meditation and chanting
sessions, and we held communication classes using Scientology
techniques. There were anatomy and physiology classes, classes on
nutrition and the orthomolecular approach to treating mental
disorders (given by me of course); there were chiropractors teaching
adjustment techniques, even first aid classes. And we even had a few
medical doctors of the alternative ilk who were interested in life
style changes as an approach to maintaining health.

Classes were also offered on colon health including herbs, clays,
enemas, and colonics. So many of my client at Great Oaks were
demanding colonics in conjunction with their cleansing programs,
that I took time out to go to Indio, Calif. to take a course in
colon therapy from a chiropractor, and purchase a state of the art
colonic machine featuring all the gauges, electric water solenoids
and stainless steel knobs one could ask for.

During this period almost all alternative therapists and their
specialties were very interesting to me, but I found that most of
the approaches they advocated did not suit my personality. For
example, I think that acupuncture is a very useful tool, but I
personally did not want to use needles. Similarly I thought that
Rolfing was a very effective tool but I did not enjoy administering
that much pain, although a significant number of the clients really
wanted pain. Some of the techniques appealed to me in the beginning,
and I used them frequently with good results but over time I decided
to abandon them, mostly because of a desire to simplify and lighten
up my bag of tricks.

Because of my enthusiasm and successes Great Oaks kept on growing.
Originally the estate served as both the offices of the Holt
Adoption Agency and the Holt family mansion. The Holt family had
consisted of Harry and Bertha Holt, six of their biological
children, and eight adopted Korean orphans. For this reason the ten
thousand square foot two story house had large common rooms, and
lots and lots of bedrooms. It was ideal for housing spa clients and
my own family. The adjoining Holt Adoption Agency office building
was also very large with a multitude of rooms. It became living
space for those helpers and hangers-on we came to refer to as
"community members." My first husband added even more to the
physical plant constructing a large, rustic gym and workshop.

Many "alternative" people visited and then begged to stay on with
room and board provided in exchange for their work. A few of these
people made a significant contribution such as cooking, child care,
gardening, tending the ever-ravenous wood-fired boiler we used to
keep the huge concrete mansion heated, or doing general cleaning.
But the majority of the 'work exchangers' did not really understand
what work really was, or didn't have sufficient ethical presence to
uphold the principle of fair exchange, which is basically giving
something of equal value for getting something of value and, perhaps
more importantly, giving in exchange what is needed and asked for.

I also found that community members, once in residence, were very
difficult to dislodge. My healing services were supporting far too
much dead wood. This was basically my own fault, my own poor
management.

Still, I learned a great deal from all of this waste. First of all
it is not a genuine service to another human being to give them
something for nothing. If a fair exchange is expected and received,
positive ethical behavior is strengthened, allowing the individual
to maintain their self-respect. I also came to realize what an
important factor conducting one's life ethically is in the
individual healing process. Those patients who were out exchange in
their relationships with others in one or more areas of their life
frequently did not get well until they changed these behaviors.

Toward the end of 1982, after providing a decade of services to a
great many clients, many of these in critical condition, I reached
to point where I was physically, mentally, and spiritually drained.
I needed a vacation desperately but no one, including my first
husband, could run Great Oaks in my absence much less cover the
heavy mortgage. So I decided to sell it. This decision stunned the
community members and shocked the clientele who had become dependent
on my services. I also got a divorce at this time. In fact I went
through quite a dramatic life change in many areas--true to pattern,
a classic mid-life crisis. All I kept from these years was my two
daughters, my life experiences, and far too many books from the
enormous Great Oaks library.

These changes were however, necessary for my survival. Any person
who works with, yes, lives on a day-to-day basis with sick people
and who is constantly giving or outflowing must take time out to
refill their vessel so that they can give again. Failure to do this
can result in a serious loss of health, or death. Most healers are
empathic people who feel other peoples' pains and stresses and
sometimes have difficulty determining exactly what is their own
personal 'baggage' and what belongs to the clients. This is
especially difficult when the therapy involves a lot of 'hands on'
techniques.

After leaving Great Oaks it took me a couple of years to rest up
enough to want to resume practicing again. This time, instead of
creating a substantial institution, Steve, my second husband and my
best friend, built a tiny office next to our family home. I had a
guest room that I would use for occasional residential patients.
Usually these were people I had known from Great Oaks days or were
people I particularly liked and wanted to help through a life
crisis.

At the time I am writing this book over ten years have passed since
I sold Great Oaks. I continue to have an active outpatient practice,
preferring to protect the privacy of my home and family life since I
was remarried by limiting inpatients to a special few who required
more intensive care, and then, only one at a time, and then, with
long spells without a resident.



Chapter Two

The Nature and Cause of Disease



From The Hygienic Dictionary

Toxemia. [1] "Toxemia is the basic cause of all so-called diseases.
In the process of tissue-building (metabolism), there is
cell-building (anabolism) and cell destruction (catabolism). The
broken-down tissue is toxic. In the healthy body (when nerve energy
is normal), this toxic material is eliminated from the blood as fast
as it is evolved. But when nerve energy is dissipated from any cause
(such as physical or mental excitement or bad habits) the body
becomes weakened or enervated. When the body is enervated,
elimination is checked. This, in turn, results in a retention of
toxins in the blood--the condition which we speak of as toxemia.
This state produces a crisis which is nothing more than heroic or
extraordinary efforts by the body to eliminate waste or toxin from
the blood. It is this crisis which we term disease. Such
accumulation of toxin when once established, will continue until
nerve energy has been restored to normal by removing the cause.
So-called disease is nature's effort to eliminate toxin from the
blood. All so-called diseases are crises of toxemia." _John H.
Tilden, M.D., Toxemia Explained._ [2] Toxins are divided into two
groups; namely exogenous, those formed in the alimentary canal from
fermentation and decomposition following imperfect or faulty
digestion. If the fermentation is of vegetables or fruit, the toxins
are irritating, stimulating and enervating, but not so dangerous or
destructive to organic life as putrefaction, which is a fermentation
set up in nitrogenous matter--protein-bearing foods, but
particularly animal foods. Endogenous toxins are autogenerated. They
are the waste products of metabolism. _Dr. John. H. Tilden, Impaired
Health: Its Cause and Cure, 1921._

Suppose a fast-growing city is having traffic jams. "We don't like
it!" protest the voters. "Why are these problems happening?" asks
the city council, trying to look like they are doing something about
it.

Experts then proffer answers. "Because there are too many cars,"
says the Get A Horse Society. The auto makers suggest it is because
there are uncoordinated traffic lights and because almost all the
businesses send their employees home at the same time. Easy to fix!
And no reason whatsoever to limit the number of cars. The asphalt
industry suggests it is because the size and amount of roads is
inadequate.

What do we do then? Tax cars severely until few can afford them?
Legislate opening and closing hours of businesses to stagger to'ing
and fro'ing? Hire a smarter municipal highway engineer to
synchronize the traffic lights? Build larger and more efficient
streets? Demand that auto companies make cars smaller so more can
fit the existing roads? Tax gasoline prohibitively, pass out and
give away free bicycles in virtually unlimited quantities while
simultaneously building mass rail systems? What? Which?

When we settle on a solution we have simultaneously chosen what we
consider the real, underlying cause of the problem. If our chosen
reason was the real reason. then our solution results in a real
cure. If we picked wrongly, our attempt at solution may result in no
cure, or create a worse situation than we had before.

The American Medical Association style of medicine (a philosophy I
will henceforth call allopathic) has a model that explains the
causes of illness. It suggests that anyone who is sick is a victim.
Either they were attacked by a "bad" organism--virus, bacteria,
yeast, pollen, cancer cell, etc.--or they have a "bad" organ--liver,
kidney, gall bladder, even brain. Or, the victim may also have been
cursed by bad genes. In any case, the cause of the disease is not
the person and the person is neither responsible for creating their
own complaint nor is the victim capable of making it go away. This
institutionalized irresponsibility seems useful for both parties to
the illness, doctor and patient. The patient is not required to do
anything about their complaint except pay (a lot) and obediently
follow the instructions of the doctor, submitting unquestioningly to
their drugs and surgeries. The physician then acquires a role of
being considered vital to the survival of others and thus obtains
great status, prestige, authority, and financial remuneration.

Perhaps because the sick person is seen to have been victimized, and
it is logically impossible to consider a victimizer as anything but
something evil, the physician's cure is often violent,
confrontational. Powerful poisons are used to rejigger body
chemistry or to arrest the multiplication of disease bacteria or to
suppress symptoms; if it is possible to sustain life without them,
"bad," poorly-functioning organs are cut out.

I've had a lot of trouble with the medical profession. Over the
years doctors have made attempts to put me in jail and keep me in
fear. But they never stopped me. When I've had a client die there
has been an almost inevitable coroner's investigation, complete with
detectives and the sheriff. Fortunately, I practice in rural Oregon,
where the local people have a deeply-held belief in individual
liberty and where the authorities know they would have had a very
hard time finding a jury to convict me. Had I chosen to practice
with a high profile and had I located Great Oaks School of Health in
a major market area where the physicians were able to charge top
dollar, I probably would have spent years behind bars as did other
heroes of my profession such as Linda Hazzard and Royal Lee.

So I have acquired an uncomplimentary attitude about medical
doctors, a viewpoint I am going to share with you ungently, despite
the fact that doing so will alienate some of my readers. But I do so
because most Americans are entirely enthralled by doctors, and this
doctor-god worship kills a lot of them.

However, before I get started on the medicos, let me state that one
area exists where I do have fundamental admiration for allopathic
medicine. This is its handling of trauma. I agree that a body can
become the genuine victim of fast moving bullets. It can be
innocently cut, smashed, burned, crushed and broken. Trauma are not
diseases and modern medicine has become quite skilled at putting
traumatized bodies back together. Genetic abnormality may be another
undesirable physical condition that is beyond the purview of natural
medicine. However, the expression of contra-survival genetics can
often be controlled by nutrition. And the expression of poor
genetics often results from poor nutrition, and thus is similar to a
degenerative disease condition, and thus is well within the scope of
natural medicine.

Today's suffering American public is firmly in the AMA's grip.
People have been effectively prevented from learning much about
medical alternatives, have been virtually brainwashed by clever
media management that portrays other medical models as dangerous
and/or ineffective. Legislation influenced by the allopathic
doctors' union, the American Medical Association, severely limits or
prohibits the practice of holistic health. People are repeatedly
directed by those with authority to an allopathic doctor whenever
they have a health problem, question or confusion. Other types of
healers are considered to be at best harmless as long as they
confine themselves to minor complaints; at worst, when naturopaths,
hygienists, or homeopaths seek to treat serious disease conditions
they are called quacks, accused of unlicensed practice of medicine
and if they persist or develop a broad, successful, high-profile and
(this is the very worst) profitable practice, they are frequently
jailed.

Even licensed MDs are crushed by the authorities if they offer
non-standard treatments. So when anyone seeks an alternative health
approach it is usually because their complaint has already failed to
vanish after consulting a whole series of allopathic doctors. This
highly unfortunate kind of sufferer not only has a degenerative
condition to rectify, they may have been further damaged by harsh
medical treatments and additionally, they have a considerable amount
of brainwashing to overcome.

The AMA has succeeded at making their influence over information and
media so pervasive that most people do not even realize that the
doctors' union is the source of their medical outlook. Whenever an
American complains of some malady, a concerned and honestly caring
friend will demand to know have they yet consulted a medical doctor.
Failure to do so on one's own behalf is considered highly
irresponsible. Concerned relatives of seriously ill adults who
decline standard medical therapy may, with a great show of
self-righteousness, have the sick person judged mentally incompetent
so that treatment can be forced upon them. When a parent fails to
seek standard medical treatment for their child, the adult may well
be found guilty of criminal negligence, raising the interesting
issue of who "owns" the child, the parents or the State.

It is perfectly acceptable to die while under conventional medical
care. Happens all the time, in fact. But holistic alternatives are
represented as stupidly risky, especially for serious conditions
such as cancer. People with cancer see no choice but to do
chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery because this is the
current allopathic medical approach. On some level people may know
that these remedies are highly dangerous but they have been told by
their attending oncologist that violent therapies are their only
hope of survival, however poor that may be. If a cancer victim
doesn't proceed immediately with such treatment their official
prognosis becomes worse by the hour. Such scare tactics are common
amongst the medical profession, and they leave the recipient so
terrified that they meekly and obediently give up all
self-determinism, sign the liability waiver, and submit, no
questions asked. Many then die after suffering intensely from the
therapy, long before the so-called disease could have actually
caused their demise. I will later offer alternative and frequently
successful (but not guaranteed) approaches to treating cancer that
do not require the earliest-possible detection, surgery or poisons.

If holistic practitioners were to apply painful treatments like
allopaths use, ones with such poor statistical outcomes like
allopaths use, there would most certainly be witch hunts and all
such irresponsible, greedy quacks would be safely imprisoned. I find
it highly ironic that for at least the past twenty five hundred
years the basic principle of good medicine has been that the
treatment must first do no harm. This is such an obvious truism that
even the AMA doctors pledge to do the same thing when they take the
Hippocratic Oath. Yet virtually every action taken by the allopath
is a conscious compromise between the potential harm of the therapy
and its potential benefit.

In absolute contrast, if a person dies while on a natural hygiene
program, they died because their end was inevitable no matter what
therapy was attempted. Almost certainly receiving hygienic therapy
contributed to making their last days far more comfortable and
relatively freer of pain without using opiates. I have personally
taken on clients sent home to die after they had suffered everything
the doctors could do to them, told they had only a few days, weeks,
or months to live. Some of these clients survived as a result of
hygienic programs even at that late date. And some didn't. The
amazing thing was that any of them survived at all, because the best
time to begin a hygienic program is as early in the degenerative
process as possible, not after the body has been drastically
weakened by invasive and toxic treatments. Later on, I'll tell you
about some of these cases.

Something I consider especially ironic is that when the patient of a
medical doctor dies, it is inevitably thought that the blessed
doctor did all that could be done; rarely is any blame laid. If the
physician was especially careless or stupid, their fault can only
result in a civil suit, covered by malpractice insurance. But let a
holistic practitioner treat a sick person and have that person
follow any of their suggestions or take any natural remedies and
have that person die or worsen and it instantly becomes the natural
doctor's fault. Great blame is placed and the practitioner faces
inquests, grand juries, manslaughter charges, jail time and civil
suits that can't be insured against.

Allopathic medicine rarely makes a connection between the real
causes of a degenerative or infectious disease and its cure. The
causes are usually considered mysterious: we don't know why the
pancreas is acting up, etc. The sick are sympathized with as victims
who did nothing to contribute to their condition. The cure is a
highly technical battle against the illness, whose weapons are
defined in Latin and far beyond the understanding of a layperson.

Hygienic medicine presents an opposite view. To the naturopath,
illness is not a perplexing and mysterious occurrence over which you
have no control or understanding. The causes of disease are clear
and simple, the sick person is rarely a victim of circumstance and
the cure is obvious and within the competence of a moderately
intelligent sick person themselves to understand and help
administer. In natural medicine, disease is a part of living that
you are responsible for, and quite capable of handling.

Asserting that the sick are pitiable victims is financially
beneficial to doctors. It makes medical intervention seem a vital
necessity for every ache and pain. It makes the sick become
dependent. I'm not implying that most doctors knowingly are
conniving extortionists. Actually most medical doctors are genuinely
well-intentioned. I've also noticed that most medical doctors are at
heart very timid individuals who consider that possession of a MD
degree and license proves that they are very important, proves them
to be highly intelligent, even makes them fully qualified to
pontificate on many subjects not related to medicine at all.

Doctors obtain an enormous sense of self-importance at medical
school, where they proudly endured the high pressure weeding out of
any free spirit unwilling to grind away into the night for seven or
more years. Anyone incapable of absorbing and regurgitating huge
amounts of rote information; anyone with a disrespectful or
irreverent attitude toward the senior doctor-gods who arrogantly
serve as med school professors, anyone like this was eliminated with
especial rapidity. When the thoroughly submissive, homogenized
survivors are finally licensed, they assume the status of junior
doctor-gods.

But becoming an official medical deity doesn't permit one to create
their own methods. No no, the AMA's professional oversight and
control system makes continued possession of the license to practice
(and the high income that usually comes with it) entirely dependent
on continued conformity to what is defined by the AMA as "correct
practice." Any doctor who innovates beyond strict limits or uses
non-standard treatments is in real danger of losing their livelihood
and status.

Not only are licensed graduates of AMA-sanctioned medical schools
kept on a very tight leash, doctors of other persuasions who use
other methods to heal the sick or help them heal themselves are
persecuted and prosecuted. Extension of the AMA's control through
regulatory law and police power is justified in the name of
preventing quackery and making sure the ignorant and gullible public
receives only scientifically proven effective medical care.

Those on the other side of the fence view the AMA's oppression as an
effective way to make sure the public has no real choices but to use
union doctors, pay their high fees and suffer greatly by
misunderstanding of the true cause of disease and its proper cure.
If there are any actual villains responsible for this suppressive
tragedy some of them are to be found in the inner core of the AMA,
officials who may perhaps fully and consciously comprehend the
suppressive system they promulgate.

Hygienists usually inform the patient quite clearly and directly
that the practitioner has no ability to heal them or cure their
condition and that no doctor of any type actually is able to heal.
Only the body can heal itself, something it is eager and usually
very able to do if only given the chance. One pithy old saying among
hygienists goes, "if the body can't heal itself, nothing can heal
it." The primary job of the hygienic practitioner is to reeducate
the patient by conducting them through their first natural healing
process. If this is done well the sick person learns how to get out
of their own body's way and permit its native healing power to
manifest. Unless later the victim of severe traumatic injury, never
again will that person need obscenely expensive medical procedures.
Hygienists rarely make six figure incomes from regular, repeat
business.

This aspect of hygienic medicine makes it different than almost all
the others, even most other holistic methods. Hygiene is the only
system that does not interpose the assumed healing power of a doctor
between the patient and wellness. When I was younger and less
experienced I thought that the main reason traditional medical
practice did not stress the body's own healing power and represented
the doctor as a necessary intervention was for profit. But after
practicing for over twenty years I now understand that the last
thing most people want to hear is that their own habits, especially
their eating patterns and food choices, are responsible for their
disease and that their cure is to only be accomplished through
dietary reform, which means unremittingly applied self-discipline.

One of the hardest things to ask of a person is to change a habit.
The reason that AMA doctors have most of the patients is they're
giving the patients exactly what they want, which is to be allowed
to continue in their unconscious irresponsibility.

The Cause Of Disease

Ever since natural medicine arose in opposition to the violence of
so-called scientific medicine, every book on the subject of hygiene,
once it gets past its obligatory introductions and warm ups, must
address The Cause of Disease. This is a required step because we see
the cause of disease and its consequent cure in a very different
manner than the allopath. Instead of many causes, we see one basic
reason why. Instead of many unrelated cures, we have basically one
approach to fix all ills that can be fixed.

A beautiful fifty cent word that means a system for explaining
something is paradigm, pronounced para-dime. I am fond of this word
because it admits the possibility of many differing yet equally true
explanations for the same reality. Of all available paradigms,
Natural Hygiene suits me best and has been the one I've used for
most of my career.

The Natural Hygienist's paradigm for the cause of both degenerative
and infectious disease is called the Theory of Toxemia, or
"self-poisoning."

Before explaining this theory it will help many readers if I digress
a brief moment about the nature and validity of alternative
paradigms. Not too many decades ago, scientists thought that reality
was a singular, real, perpetual--that Natural Law existed much as a
tree or a rock existed. In physics, for example, the mechanics of
Newton were considered capital "T" True, the only possible paradigm.
Any other view, not being True, was False. There was capital "N"
natural capital "L" law.

More recently, great uncertainty has entered science; it has become
indisputable that a theory or explanation of reality is only true
only to the degree it seems to work; conflicting or various
explanations can all work, all can be "true." At least, this
uncertainty has overtaken the hard, physical sciences. It has not
yet done so with medicine. The AMA is convinced (or is working hard
to convince everyone else) that its paradigm, the allopathic
approach, is Truth, is scientific, and therefore, anything else is
Falsehood, is irresponsibility, is a crime against the sick.

But the actual worth or truth of any paradigm is found not in its
"reality," but in its utility. Does an explanation or theory allow a
person to manipulate experience and create a desired outcome. To the
extent a paradigm does that, it can be considered valuable. Judged
by this standard, the Theory of Toxemia must be far truer than the
hodgepodge of psuedoscience taught in medical schools. Keep that in
mind the next time some officious medical doctor disdainfully
informs you that Theory of Toxemia was disproven in 1927 by Doctors
Jeckel and Hyde.

Why People Get Sick

This is the Theory of Toxemia. A healthy body struggles continually
to purify itself of poisons that are inevitably produced while going
about its business of digesting food, moving about, and repairing
itself. The body is a marvelous creation, a carbon, oxygen
combustion machine, constantly burning fuel, disposing of the waste
products of combustion, and constantly rebuilding tissue by
replacing worn out, dead cells with new, fresh ones. Every seven
years virtually every cell in the body is replaced, some types of
cells having a faster turnover rate than others, which means that
over a seven year period several hundred pounds of dead cells must
be digested (autolyzed) and eliminated. All by itself this would be
a lot of waste disposal for the body to handle. Added to that waste
load are numerous mild poisons created during proper digestion. And
added to that can be an enormous burden of waste products created as
the body's attempts to digest the indigestible, or those tasty items
I've heard called "fun food." Add to that burden the ruinous effects
of just plain overeating.

The waste products of digestion, of indigestion, of cellular
breakdown and the general metabolism are all poisonous to one degree
or another. Another word for this is toxic. If these toxins were
allowed to remain and accumulate in the body, it would poison itself
and die in agony. So the body has a processing system to eliminate
toxins. And when that system does break down the body does die in
agony, as from liver or kidney failure.

The organs of detoxification remove things from the body's system,
but these two vital organs should not be confused with what
hygienists call the secondary organs of elimination, such as the
large intestine, lungs, bladder and the skin, because none of these
other eliminatory organs are supposed to purify the body of toxins.
But when the body is faced with toxemia, the secondary organs of
elimination are frequently pressed into this duty and the
consequences are the symptoms we call illness.

The lungs are supposed to eliminate only carbon dioxide gas; not
self-generated toxic substances. The large intestine is supposed to
pass only insoluble food solids (and some nasty stuff dumped into
the small intestine by the liver). Skin eliminates in the form of
sweat (which contains mineral salts) to cool the body, but the skin
is not supposed to move toxins outside the system. But when toxins
are flowed out through secondary organs of elimination these areas
become inflamed, irritated, weakened. The results can be skin
irritations, sinusitis or a whole host of other "itises" depending
on the area involved, bacterial or viral infections, asthma. When
excess toxemia is deposited instead of eliminated, the results can
be arthritis if toxins are stored in joints, rheumatism if in muscle
tissues, cysts and benign tumors. And if toxins weaken the body's
immune response, cancer.

The liver and the kidneys, the two heroic organs of detoxification,
are the most important ones; these jointly act as filters to purify
the blood. Hygienists pay a lot of attention to these organs, the
liver especially.

In an ideal world, the liver and kidneys would keep up with their
job for 80 years or more before even beginning to tire. In this
ideal world, the food would of course, be very nutritious and free
of pesticide residues, the air and water would be pure, people would
not denature their food and turn it into junk. In this perfect world
everyone would get moderate exercise into old age, and live
virtually without stress. In this utopian vision, the average
healthy productive life span would approach a century, entirely
without using food supplements or vitamins. In this world doctors
would have next to no work other than repairing traumatic injuries,
because everyone would be healthy. But this is not the way it is.

In our less-than-ideal world virtually everything we eat is
denatured, processed, fried, salted, sweetened, preserved; thus more
stress is placed on the liver and kidneys than nature designed them
to handle. Except for a few highly fortunate individuals blessed
with an incredible genetic endowment that permits them to live to
age 99 on moose meat, well-larded white flour biscuits, coffee with
evaporated milk and sugar, brandy and cigarettes (we've all heard of
someone like this), most peoples' liver and kidneys begin to break
down prematurely. Thus doctoring has become a financially rewarding
profession.

Most people overburden their organs of elimination by eating
whatever they feel like eating whenever they feel like it. Or, they
irresponsibly eat whatever is served to them by a mother, wife,
institution or cook because doing so is easy or expected. Eating is
a very habitual and unconscious activity; frequently we continue to
eat as adults whatever our mother fed us as a child. I consider it
unsurprising that when people develop the very same disease
conditions as their parents. they wrongly assume the cause is
genetic inheritance, when actually it was just because they were
putting their feet under the same table as their parents.

Toxemia also comes about from following the wrongheaded
recommendations of allopathic-inspired nutritional texts and
licensed dietitians. For example, people believe they should eat one
food from each of the four so-called basic food groups at each meal,
thinking they are doing the right thing for their health by having
four colors of food on every plate, when they really aren't. What
they have actually done is force their bodies to attempt the
digestion of indigestible food combinations, and the resulting
indigestion creates massive doses of toxins. I'll have a lot more to
say about that later when I discuss the art of food combining.

Table 1: The Actual Food Groups

Starches       Proteins          Fats    Sugars       Watery Vegetables
bread          meats             butter  honey        zucchini
potatoes       eggs              oils    fruit        green beans
noodles        fish              lard    sugar        tomatoes
manioc/yuca    most nuts         nuts    molassas     peppers
baked goods    dry beans         avocado malt syrup   eggplant
grains         nut butters               maple syrup  radish
winter squash  split peas                dried fruit  rutabaga
parsnips       lentils                   melons       turnips
sweet potatoes soybeans                  carrot juice Brussels sprouts
yams           tofu                      beet juice   celery
taro root      tempeh                                 cauliflower
plantains      wheat grass juice                      broccoli
beets          "green" drinks                         okra
               spirulina                              lettuce
               algae                                  endive
               yeast                                  cabbage
               dairy                                  carrots

Standard dietitians divide our foods into four basic food groups
and recommend the ridiculous practice of mixing them at every meal.
This guarantees indigestion and lots of business for the medical
profession. This chart illustrates the actual food groups. It is
usually a poor practice to mix different foods from one group with
those from another.

The Digestive Process

After we have eaten our four-color meal--often we do this in a
hurry, without much chewing, under a lot of stress, or in the
presence of negative emotions--we give no thought to what becomes of
our food once it has been swallowed. We have been led to assume that
anything put in the mouth automatically gets digested flawlessly, is
efficiently absorbed into the body where it nourishes our cells,
with the waste products being eliminated completely by the large
intestine. This vision of efficiency may exist in the best cases but
for most there is many a slip between the table and the toilet. Most
bodies are not optimally efficient at performing all the required
functions, especially after years of poor living habits, stress,
fatigue, and aging. To the Natural Hygienist, most disease begins
and ends with our food; most of our healing efforts are focused on
improving the process of digestion.

Digestion means chemically changing the foods we eat into substances
that can pass into the blood stream and circulate through the body
where nutrition is used for bodily functions. Our bodies use
nutritional substances for fuel, for repair and rebuilding, and to
conduct an incredibly complex biochemistry. Scientists are still
busily engaged in trying to understand the chemical mysteries of our
bodies. But as bewildering as the chemistry of life is, the
chemistry of digestion itself is actually a relatively simple
process, and one doctors have had a fairly good understanding of for
many decades.

Though relatively straightforward, a lot can and does go wrong with
digestion. The body breaks down foods with a series of different
enzymes that are mixed with food at various points as it passes from
mouth to stomach to small intestine. An enzyme is a large, complex
molecule that has the ability to chemically change other large,
complex molecules without being changed itself. Digestive enzymes
perform relatively simple functions--breaking large molecules into
smaller parts that can dissolve in water.

Digestion starts in the mouth when food is mixed with ptyalin, an
enzyme secreted by the salivary glands. Pylatin converts insoluble
starches into simple sugars. If the digestion of starchy foods is
impaired, the body is less able to extract the energy contained in
our foods, while far worse from the point of view of the genesis of
diseases, undigested starches pass through the stomach and into the
gut where they ferment and thereby create an additional toxic burden
for the liver to process. And fermenting starches also create gas.

As we chew our food it gets mixed with saliva; as we continue to
chew the starches in the food are converted into sugar. There is a
very simple experiment you can conduct to prove to yourself how this
works. Get a plain piece of bread, no jam, no butter, plain, and
without swallowing it or allowing much of it to pass down the
throat, begin to chew it until it seems to literally dissolve.
Pylatin works fast in our mouths so you may be surprised at how
sweet the taste gets. As important as chewing is, I have only run
into about one client in a hundred that actually makes an effort to
consciously chew their food.

Horace Fletcher, whose name has become synonymous with the
importance of chewing food well (Fletcherizing), ran an experiment
on a military population in Canada. He required half his
experimental group to chew thoroughly, and the other half to gulp
things down as usual. His study reports significant improvement in
the overall health and performance of the group that persistently
chewed. Fletcher's report recommended that every mouthful be chewed
50 times for half a minute before being swallowed. Try it, you might
be very surprised at what a beneficial effect such a simple change
in your approach to eating can make. Not only will you have less
intestinal gas, if overweight you will probably find yourself
getting smaller because your blood sugar will elevate quicker as you
are eating and thus your sense of hunger will go away sooner. If you
are very thin and have difficulty gaining weight you may find that
the pounds go on easier because chewing well makes your body more
capable of actually assimilating the calories you are consuming.

A logical conclusion from this data is that anything that would
prevent or reduce chewing would be unhealthful. For example, food
eaten when too hot tends to be gulped down. The same tends to happen
when food is seasoned with fresh Jalapeno or habaneo peppers.
People with poor teeth should blend or mash starchy foods and then
gum them thoroughly to mix them with saliva. Keep in mind that even
so-called protein foods such as beans often contain large quantities
of starches and the starch portion of protein foods is also digested
in the mouth.

Once the food is in the stomach, it is mixed with hydrochloric acid,
secreted by the stomach itself, and pepsin, an enzyme. Together
these break proteins down into water-soluble amino acids. To
accomplish this the stomach muscles agitate the food continuously,
somewhat like a washing machine. This extended churning forms a kind
of ball in the stomach called a bolis.

Many things can and frequently do go wrong at this stage of the
digestive process. First, the stomach's very acid environment
inactivates pylatin, so any starch not converted to sugar in the
mouth does not get properly processed thereafter. And the most
dangerous misdigetion comes from the sad fact that cooked proteins
are relatively indigestible no matter how strong the constitution,
no matter how concentrated the stomach acid or how many enzymes
present. It is quite understandable to me that people do not wish to
accept this fact. After all, cooked proteins are so delicious,
especially cooked red meats and the harder, more flavorful fishes.

To appreciate this, consider how those enzymes that digest proteins
work. A protein molecule is a large, complex string of amino acids,
each linked to the next in a specific order. Suppose there are only
six amino acids: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. So a particular (imaginary)
protein could be structured: 1, 4, 4, 6, 2, 3, 5, 4, 2, 3, 6, 1, 1,
2, 3, etc. Thus you should see that by combining a limited number of
amino acids there can be a virtually infinite number of proteins.

But proteins are rarely water soluble. As I said a few paragraphs
back, digestion consists of rendering insoluble foods into
water-soluble substances so they can pass into the blood stream and
be used by the body's chemistry. To make them soluble, enzymes break
down the proteins, separating the individual amino acids one from
the other, because amino acids are soluble. Enzymes that digest
proteins work as though they are mirror images of a particular amino
acid. They fit against a particular amino acid like a key fits into
a lock. Then they break the bonds holding that amino acid to others
in the protein chain, and then, what I find so miraculous about this
process, the enzyme is capable of finding yet another amino acid to
free, and then yet another.

So with sufficient churning in an acid environment, with enough time
(a few hours), and enough enzymes, all the recently eaten proteins
are decomposed into amino acids and these amino acids pass into the
blood where the body recombines them into structures it wants to
make. And we have health. But when protein chains are heated, the
protein structures are altered into physical shapes that the enzymes
can't "latch" on to. The perfect example of this is when an egg is
fried. The eggwhite is albumen, a kind of protein. When it is
heated, it shrivels up and gets hard. While raw and liquid, it is
easily digestable. When cooked, largely indigestable.

Stress also inhibits the churning action in the stomach so that
otherwise digestible foods may not be mixed efficiently with
digestive enzymes. For all these reasons, undigested proteins may
pass into the gut.

Along with undigested starches. When starches convert best to sugars
under the alkaline conditions found in the mouth. Once they pass
into the acid stomach starch digestion is not as efficient. If
starches reach the small intestine they are fermented by yeasts. The
products of starch fermentation are only mildly toxic. The gases
produced by yeast fermentations usually don't smell particularly
bad; bodies that regularly contain starch fermentation usually don't
smell particularly bad either. In otherwise healthy people it can
take many years of exposure to starch fermentation toxins to produce
a life-threatening disease.

But undigested proteins aren't fermented by yeasts, they putrefy in
the gut (are attacked by anaerobic bacteria). Many of the waste
products of anaerobic putrefaction are highly toxic and evil
smelling; when these toxins are absorbed through the small or large
intestines they are very irritating to the mucous membranes,
frequently contributing to or causing cancer of the colon. Protein
putrefaction may even cause psychotic symptoms in some individuals.
Meat eaters often have a very unpleasant body odor even when they
are not releasing intestinal gasses.

Adding a heavy toxic burden from misdigested foods to the normal
toxic load a body already has to handle creates a myriad of
unpleasant symptoms, and greatly shortens life. But misdigestion
also carries with it a double whammy; fermenting and/or putrefying
foods immediately interfere with the functioning of another vital
organ--the large intestine--and cause constipation.

Most people don't know what the word constipation really means. Not
being able to move one's bowels is only the most elementary type of
constipation. A more accurate definition of constipation is "the
retention of waste products in the large intestine beyond the time
that is conducive to health." Properly digested food is not sticky
and exits the large intestine quickly. But improperly digested food
(or indigestible food) gradually coats the large intestine, making
an ever-thicker lining that interferes with the intestine's
functioning. Far worse, this coating steadily putrefies, creating
additional highly-potent toxins. Lining the colon with undigested
food can be compared to the mineral deposits filling in the inside
of an old water pipe, gradually choking off the flow. In the colon,
this deposit can become rock-hard, just like water pipe scale.

Since the large intestine is also an organ that removes moisture and
water-soluble minerals from the food and moves them into the blood
stream, when the large intestine is lined with putrefying undigested
food waste, the toxins of this putrefaction are also steadily moved
into the bloodstream and place an even greater burden on the liver
and kidneys, accelerating their breakdown, accelerating the aging
process and contributing to a lot of interesting and unpleasant
symptoms that keep doctors busy and financially solvent. I'll have
quite a bit more to say about colon cleansing later.

The Progress Of Disease: Irritation, Enervation, Toxemia

Disease routinely lies at the end of a three-part chain that goes:
irritation or sub-clinical malnutrition, enervation, toxemia.
Irritations are something the person does to themselves or something
that happens around them. Stresses, in other words.

Mental stressors include strong negative emotional states such as
anger, fear, resentment, hopelessness, etc. Behind most diseases it
is common to find a problematic mind churning in profound confusion,
one generated by a character that avoids responsibility. There may
also be job stress or ongoing hostile relationships, often within
the family.

Indigestible foods and misdigestion are also stressful irritations,
as are mild recreational poisons such as "soft" drugs, tobacco and
alcohol. Opiates are somewhat more toxifying, primarily because they
paralyze the gut and induce profound constipation. Stimulants like
cocaine and amphetamines are the most damaging recreational drugs;
these are highly toxic and rapidly shorten life.

Repeated irritations and/or malnutrition eventually produce
enervation. The old-time hygienists defined enervation as a lack of
or decline in an unmeasurable phenomena, "nerve energy." They viewed
the functioning of vital organs as being controlled by or driven by
nerve force, sometimes called life force or elan vital.
Whatever this vital force actually is, it can be observed and
subjectively measured by comparing one person with another. Some
people are full of it and literally sparkle with overflowing energy.
Beings like this make everyone around them feel good because they
somehow momentarily give energy to those endowed with less. Others
possess very little and dully plod through life.

As vital force drops, the overall efficiency of all the body's
organs correspondingly decline. The pancreas creates less digestive
enzymes; the thymus secretes less of its vital hormones that
mobilize the immune system; the pituitary makes less growth hormone
so the overall repair and rebuilding of cells and tissues slows
correspondingly; and so forth. It does not really matter if there is
or is not something called nerve energy that can or cannot be
measured in a laboratory. Vital force is observable to many people.
However, it is measurable by laboratory test that after repeated
irritation the overall functioning of the essential organs and
glands does deteriorate.

Enervation may develop so gradually that it progresses below the
level of awareness of the person, or times of increased enervation
can be experienced as a complaint--as a lack of energy, as
tiredness, as difficulties digesting, as a new inability to handle a
previously-tolerated insult like alcohol.

Long-term consumption of poor-quality food causes enervation. The
body is a carbon/oxygen engine designed to run efficiently only on
highly nutritious food and this aspect of human genetic programming
cannot be changed significantly by adaptation. Given enough
generations a human gene pool can adapt to extracting its nutrition
from a different group of foods. For example, a group of isolated
Fijians currently enjoying long healthy lives eating a diet of
seafoods and tropical root crops could suddenly be moved to the
highlands of Switzerland and forced to eat the local fare or starve.
But most of the Fijians would not have systems adept at making those
enzymes necessary to digest cows milk. So the transplanted Fijians
would experience many generations of poorer health and shorter life
spans until their genes had been selected for adaptation to the new
dietary. Ultimately their descendants could become uniformly healthy
on rye bread and dairy products just like the highland Swiss were.

However, modern industrial farming and processing of foodstuffs
significantly contributes to mass, widespread enervation in two
ways. Humans will probably adjust to the first; the second will, I'm
sure, prove insurmountable. First, industrially processed foods are
a recent invention and our bodies have not yet adapted to digesting
them. In a few more generations humans might be able to accomplish
that and public health could improve on factory food. In the
meanwhile, the health of humans has declined. Industrially farmed
foods have also been lowered in nutritional content compared to what
food could be. I gravely doubt if any biological organism can ever
adapt to an overall dietary that contains significantly lowered
levels of nutrition. I will explain this more fully in the chapter
on diet.

Secondary Eliminations Are Disease

However the exact form the chain from irritation or malnutrition to
enervation progresses, the ultimate result is an increased level of
toxemia, placing an eliminatory burden on the liver and kidneys in
excess of their ability. Eventually these organs begin to weaken.
Decline of liver and/or kidney function threatens the stability and
purity of blood chemistry. Rather than risk complete incapacitation
or death from self-poisoning, the overloaded, toxic body, guided by
its genetic predisposition and the nature of the toxins (what was
eaten, in what state of stress), cleverly channels surplus toxins
into its first line of defense--alternative or secondary elimination
systems.

Most non-life-threatening yet highly annoying disease conditions
originate as secondary eliminations. For example, the skin was
designed to sweat, elimination of fluids. Toxemia is often pushed
out the sweat glands and is recognized as an unpleasant body odor. A
healthy, non-toxic body smells sweet and pleasant (like a newborn
baby's body) even after exercise when it has been sweating heavily.
Other skin-like organs such as the sinus tissues, were designed to
secrete small amounts of mucus for lubrication. The lungs eliminate
used air and the tissues are lubricated with mucus-like secretions
too. These secretions are types of eliminations, but are not
intended for the elimination of toxins. When toxins are discharged
in mucus through tissues not designed to handle them, the tissues
themselves become irritated, inflamed, weakened and thus much more
subject to bacterial or viral infection. Despite this danger, not
eliminating surplus toxins carries with it the greater penalty of
serious disability or death. Because of this liability, the body, in
its wisdom, initially chooses secondary elimination routes as far
from vital tissues and organs as possible. Almost inevitably the
skin or skin-like mucus membranes such as the sinuses, or lung
tissues become the first line of defense.

Thus the average person's disease history begins with colds, flu,
sinusitis, bronchitis, chronic cough, asthma, rashes, acne, eczema,
psoriasis. If these secondary eliminations are suppressed with drugs
(either from the medical doctor or with over the counter remedies),
if the eating or lifestyle habits that created the toxemia are not
changed, or if the toxic load increases beyond the limits of this
technique, the body then begins to store toxins in fat or muscle
tissues or the joint cavities, overburdens the kidneys, creates
cysts, fibroids, and benign tumors to store those toxins. If toxic
overload continues over a longer time the body will eventually have
to permit damages to vital tissues, and life-threatening conditions
develop.

Hygienic doctors always stress that disease is remedial effort.
Illness comes from the body's best attempt to lighten its toxic load
without immediately threatening its survival. The body always does
the very best it can to remedy toxemia given its circumstances, and
it should be commended for these efforts regardless of how
uncomfortable they might be to the person inhabiting the body.
Symptoms of secondary elimination are actually a positive thing
because they are the body's efforts to lessen a dangerously toxic
condition. Secondary eliminations shouldn't be treated immediately
with a drug to suppress the process. If you squelch the bodies best
and least-life-threatening method to eliminate toxins, the body will
ultimately have to resort to another more dangerous though probably
less immediately uncomfortable channel.

The conventional medical model does not view disease this way and
sees the symptoms of secondary elimination as the disease itself. So
the conventional doctor takes steps to halt the body's remedial
efforts, thus stopping the undesirable symptom and then, the symptom
gone, proclaims the patient cured. Actually, the disease is the
cure.

A common pattern of symptom suppression under the contemporary
medical model is this progression: treat colds with antihistamines
until the body gets influenza; suppress a flu repeatedly with
antibiotics and eventually you get pneumonia. Or, suppress eczema
with cortisone ointment repeatedly, and eventually you develop
kidney disease. Or, suppress asthma with bronkiodialators and
eventually you need cortisone to suppress it. Continue treating
asthma with steroids and you destroy the adrenals; now the body has
become allergic to virtually everything.

The presence of toxins in an organ of secondary elimination is
frequently the cause of infection. Sinuses and lungs, inflamed by
secondary eliminations, are attacked by viruses or bacteria;
infectious diseases of the skin result from pushing toxins out of
the skin. More generalized infections also result from toxemia; in
this case the immune system has become compromised and the body is
overwhelmed by an organism that it normally should be able to resist
easily. The wise cure of infections is not to use antibiotics to
suppress the bacteria while simultaneously whipping the immune
system; most people, including most medical doctors, do not realize
that antibiotics also goose the immune system into super efforts.
But when one chooses to whip a tired horse, eventually the exhausted
animal collapses and cannot rise again no matter how vigorously it
is beaten. The wise cure is to detoxify the body, a step that
simultaneously eliminates secondary eliminations and rebuilds the
immune system.

The wise way to deal with the body's eliminative efforts is to
accept that disease is an opportunity to pay the piper for past
indiscretions. You should go to bed, rest, and drink nothing but
water or dilute juice until the condition has passed. This allows
the body to conserve its vital energy, direct this energy toward
healing the disordered body part, and catch up on its waste
disposal. In this way you can help your body, be in harmony with its
efforts instead of working against it which is what most people do.

Please forgive another semi-political polemic here, but in my
practice I have often been amazed to hear my clients complain that
they have not the time nor the ability to be patient with their
body, to rest it through an illness because they have a job they
can't afford to miss or responsibilities they can't put down. This
is a sad commentary on the supposed wealth and prosperity of the
United States. In our country most people are enslaved by their
debts, incurred because they had been enthralled by the illusion of
happiness secured by the possession of material things. Debt slaves
believe they cannot miss a week of work. People who feel they can't
afford to be sick think they can afford to live on pills. So people
push through their symptoms by sheer grit for years on end, and keep
that up until their exhausted horse of a body breaks down totally
and they find themselves in the hospital running up bills to the
tune of several thousand dollars a day. But these very same people
do not think they can afford the loss of a few hundred dollars of
current income undertaking some virtually harmless preventative
maintenance on their bodies.

Given half a chance the body will throw off toxic overburdens and
cleanse itself. And once the body has been cleansed of toxemia,
disagreeable symptoms usually cease. This means that to make
relatively mild but unwanted symptoms lessen and ultimately stop it
is merely necessary to temporarily cut back food intake, eating only
what does not cause toxemia. These foods I classify as cleansing,
such as raw fruits and vegetables and their juices. If the symptoms
are extreme, are perceived as overwhelming or are actually
life-threatening, detoxification can be speeded up by dropping back
to only dilute raw juices or vegetable broth made only from greens,
without eating the solids. In the most extreme cases hygienists use
their most powerful medicine: a long fast on herb teas, or just
water. I will have a lot to say about fasting, later.

When acutely ill, the most important thing to do is to just get out
of the body's way, and let it heal itself. In our ignorance we are
usually our own worst enemy in this regard. We have been very
successfully conditioned to think that all symptoms are bad. But I
know from experience that people can and do learn a new way of
viewing the body, an understanding that puts them at cause over
their own body. It allows you to be empowered in one more area of
life instead of being dependent and at the mercy of other peoples
decisions about your body.

Finally, and this is why natural medicine is doubly unpopular, to
prevent the recurrence of toxemia and acute disease states, person
must discover what they are doing wrong and change their life. Often
as not this means elimination of the person's favorite
(indigestible) foods and/or (stress-producing) bad habits.
Naturally, I will have a lot more to say about this later, too.



Chapter Three

Fasting



From The Hygienic Dictionary

Cure. [1] There is no "cure" for disease; fasting is not a cure.
Fasting facilitates natural healing processes. Foods do not cure.
Until we have discarded our faith in cures, there can be no
intelligent approach to the problems presented by suffering and no
proper use of foods by those who are ill. _Herbert Shelton, The
Hygienic System, v. 3, Fasting and Sunbathing._ [2] All cure starts
from within out and from the head down and in reverse order as the
symptoms have appeared._ Hering's Law of Cure._ [3] Life is made up
of crises. The individual establishes a standard of health
peculiarly his own, which must vary from all other standards as
greatly as his personality varies from others. The individual
standard may be such as to favor the development of indigestion,
catarrh, gout, rheumatic and glandular inflammations, tubercular
developments, congestions, sluggish secretions and excretions, or
inhibitions of various functions, both mental and physical, wherever
the environmental or habit strain is greater than usual. The
standard of resistance may be opposed so strenuously by habits and
unusual physical agencies--that the body breaks down under the
strain. This is a crisis. Appetite fails, discomfort or pain forces
rest, and, as a result of physiological rest (fasting) and physical
rest (rest from daily work and habits), a readjustment takes place,
and the patient is "cured." This is what the profession and the
people call a cure, and it is for the time being--until an unusual
enervation is brought on from accident or dissipation; then another
crisis. These crises are the ordinary sickness of all communities--
all catalogued diseases. When the cold is gone or the hay-fever
fully relieved, it does not mean the patient is cured. Indeed, he
is as much diseased as before he suffered the attack--the
crisis--and he never will be cured until the habits of life that keep
up toxin poisoning are corrected. To recover from a crisis is not a
cure; the tendency is back to the individual standard; hence all
crises are self-limited, unless nature by maltreatment is prevented
from reacting. All so-called healing systems ride to glory on the
backs of self-limited crises, and the self-deluded doctors and their
credulous clients, believe, when the crises are past, that a cure
has been wrought, whereas the real truth is that the treatment may
have delayed reaction. This is largely true of anything that has
been done except rest. A cure consists in changing the manner of
living to such a rational standard that full resistance and a
balanced metabolism is established. I suppose it is not quite human
to expect those of a standardized school of healing to give
utterance to discovered truth which, if accepted by the people,
would rob them of the glory of being curers of disease. Indeed,
nature, and nature only, cures; and as for crises, they come and go,
whether or not there is a doctor or healer within a thousand miles.
_Dr. John. H. Tilden, Impaired Health: Its Cause and Cure, 1921._

The accelerated healing process that occurs during fasting can
scarcely be believed by a person who has not fasted. No matter how
gifted the writer, the experiential reality of fasting cannot be
communicated. The great novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book about
fasting and it failed to convince the multitudes. But once a person
has fasted long enough to be certain of what their own body can do
to fix itself, they acquire a degree of independence little known
today. Many of those experienced with fasting no longer dread being
without health insurance and feel far less need for a doctor or of
having a regular checkup. They know with certainty that if something
degenerates in their body, their own body can fix it by itself.

Like Upton Sinclair and many others who largely failed before me, I
am going to try to convince you of the virtues of fasting by urging
you to try fasting yourself. If you will but try you will be changed
for the better for the rest of your life. If you do not try, you
will never Know.

To prompt your first step on this health-freedom road, I ask you to
please carefully consider the importance of this fact: the body's
routine energy budget includes a very large allocation for the daily
digestion and assimilation of the food you eat. You may find my
estimate surprising, but about one-third of a fairly sedentary
person's entire energy consumption goes into food processing. Other
uses for the body's energy include the creation or rebuilding of
tissues, detoxification, moving (walking, running, etc.), talking,
producing hormones, etc. Digestion is one aspect of the body's
efforts that we can readily control, it is the key to having or
losing health.

The Effort Of Digestion

Digestion is a huge, unappreciated task, unappreciated because few
of us are aware of its happening in the same way we are aware of
making efforts to use our voluntary muscles when working or
exercising. Digestion begins in the mouth with thorough chewing. If
you don't think chewing is effort, try making coleslaw in your own
mouth. Chew up at least half a big head of cabbage and three big
carrots that have not been shredded. Grind each bit until it
liquefies and has been thoroughly mixed with saliva. I guarantee
that if you even finish the chore your jaw will be tired and you
will have lost all desire to eat anything else, especially if it
requires chewing.

Making the saliva you just used while chewing the cabbage is by
itself, a huge and unappreciated chemical effort.

Once in the stomach, chewed food has to be churned in order to mix
it with hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and other digestive enzymes.
Manufacturing these enzymes is also considerable work! Churning is
even harder work than chewing but normally, people are unaware of
its happening. While the stomach is churning (like a washing
machine) a large portion of the blood supply is redirected from the
muscles in the extremities to the stomach and intestines to aid in
this process. Anyone who has tried to go for a run, or take part in
any other strenuous physical activity immediately after a large meal
feels like a slug and wonders why they just can't make their legs
move the way they usually do. So, to assist the body while it is
digesting, it is wise to take a siesta as los Latinos do instead of
expecting the blood to be two places at once like los
norteamericanos.

After the stomach is through churning, the partially digested food
is moved into the small intestine where it is mixed with more
pancreatin secreted by the pancreas, and with bile from the gall
bladder. Pancreatin further solubilizes proteins. Bile aids in the
digestion of fatty foods. Manufacturing bile and pancreatic enzymes
is also a lot of effort. Only after the carbohydrates (starches and
sugars), proteins and fats have been broken down into simpler water
soluble food units such as simple sugars, amino acids and fatty
acids, can the body pass these nutrients into the blood thorough the
little projections in the small intestines called villi.

The leftovers, elements of the food that can't be solubilized plus
some remaining liquids, are passed into the large intestine. There,
water and the vital mineral salts dissolved in that water, are
extracted and absorbed into the blood stream through thin permeable
membranes. Mucous is also secreted in the large intestine to
facilitate passage of the dryish remains. This is an effort.
(Intestinal mucous can become a route of secondary elimination,
especially during fasting. While fasting, it is essential to take
steps to expel toxic mucous in the colon before the poisons are re
adsorbed.) The final residue, now called fecal matter, is squeezed
along the length of the large intestines and passes out the rectum.

If all the digestive processes have been efficient there now are an
abundance of soluble nutrients for the blood stream to distribute to
hungry cells throughout the body. It is important to understand the
process at least on the level of oversimplification just presented
in order to begin to understand better how health is lost or
regained through eating, digestion, and elimination. And most
importantly, through not eating.

How Fasting Heals

Its an old hygienic maxim that the doctor does not heal, the
medicines do not heal, only the body heals itself. If the body can't
heal then nothing can heal it. The body always knows best what it
needs and what to do.

But healing means repairing damaged organs and tissues and this
takes energy, while a sick body is already enervated, weakened and
not coping with its current stressors. If the sick person could but
somehow increase the body's energy resources sufficiently, then a
slowly healing body could heal faster while a worsening one, or one
that was failing or one that was not getting better might heal.

Fasting does just that. To whatever degree food intake is reduced
the body's digestive workload is proportionately reduced and it will
naturally, and far more intelligently than any physician could
order, redirect energy to wherever it decides that energy is most
needed. A fasting body begins accessing nutritional reserves
(vitamins and minerals) previously stored in the tissues and starts
converting body fat into sugar for energy fuel. During a time of
water fasting, sustaining the body's entire energy and nutritional
needs from reserves and fat does require a small effort, but far
less effort than eating. I would guess a fasting body used about
five percent of its normal daily energy budget on nutritional
concerns rather than the 33 percent it needs to process new food.
Thus, water fasting puts something like 28 percent more energy at
the body's disposal. This is true even though the water faster may
feel weak, energyless.

I would worry if sick or toxic fasters did not complain about their
weakness. They should expect to feel energyless. In fact, the more
internal healing and detoxification the body requires, the tireder
the faster feels because the body is very hard at work internally. A
great deal of the body's energy will go toward boosting the immune
system if the problem is an infection. Liberated energy can also be
used for healing damaged parts, rebuilding failing organs, for
breaking down and eliminating deposits of toxic materials. Only
after most of the healing has occurred does a faster begin to feel
energetic again. Don't expect to feel anything but tired and weak.

The only exception to this would be a person who has already
significantly detoxified and healed their body by previous fasting,
or the rare soul that has gone from birth through adulthood enjoying
extraordinarily good nutrition and without experiencing the
stressors of improper digestion. When one experienced faster I know
finds himself getting "run down" or catching a cold, he quits eating
until he feels really well. Instead of feeling weak as most fasters
do, as each of the first four or five days of water fasting pass, he
experiences a resurgence of more and more energy. On the first
fasting day he would usually feel rotten, which was why he started
fasting in the first place. On the second fasting day he'd feel more
alert and catch up on his paper work. By his third day on only water
he would be out doing hard physical chores like cutting the grass,
splitting wood or weeding his vegetable garden. Day four would also
be an energetic one, but if the fast extended beyond that, lowering
blood sugar would begin to make him tired and he'd feel forced to
begin laying down.

After a day of water fasting the average person's blood sugar level
naturally drops; making a faster feel somewhat tired and "spacey,"
so a typical faster usually begins to spend much more time resting,
further reducing the amount of energy being expended on moving the
body around, serendipitously redirecting even more of the body's
energy budget toward healing. By the end of five or six days on
water, I estimate that from 40 to 50 percent of the body's available
energy is being used for healing, repair and detoxification.

The amount of work that a fasting body's own healing energy can do
and what it feels like to be there when it is happening is
incredible. But you can't know it if you haven't felt it. So hardly
anyone in our present culture knows.

As I mentioned in the first chapter, at Great Oaks School I
apprenticed myself to the traveling masters of virtually every
system of natural healing that existed during the '70s. I observed
every one of them at work and tried most of them on my clients.
After all that I can say with experience that I am not aware of any
other healing tool that can be so effective as the fast.

Essentials of a Successful, Safe Fast

1. Fast in a bright airy room, with exceptionally good ventilation,
because fasters not only need a lot of fresh air; their bodies give
off powerfully offensive odors. 2. Sun bathe if possible in warm
climates for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning before the sun gets too
strong. 3. Scrub/massage the skin with a dry brush, stroking toward
the heart, followed by a warm water shower two to four times a day
to assist the skin in eliminating toxins. If you are too weak to do
this, have an assisted bed bath. 4. Have two enemas daily for the
first week of a fast and then once daily until the fast is
terminated. 5. Insure a harmonious environment with supportive
people or else fast alone if you are experienced. Avoid well-meaning
interference or anxious criticism at all cost. The faster becomes
hypersensitive to others' emotions. 6. Rest profoundly except for a
short walk of about 200 yards morning and night. 7. Drink water! At
least three quarts every day. Do not allow yourself to become
dehydrated! 8. Control yourself! Break a long fast on diluted
non-sweet fruit juice such as grapefruit juice, sipped a teaspoon at
a time, no more than eight ounces at a time no oftener than every 2
or 3 hours. The second day you eat, add small quantities of fresh
juicy fruit to the same amount of juice you took the day before no
oftener than every 3 hours. By small quantities I mean half an apple
or the equivalent. On the third day of eating, add small quantities
of vegetable juice and juicy vegetables such as tomatoes and
cucumbers. Control yourself! The second week after eating resumed
add complex vegetable salads plus more complex fruit salads. Do not
mix fruit and vegetables at meals. The third week add raw nuts and
seeds no more than 1/2 ounce three times daily. Add 1/4 avocado
daily. Fourth week increase to 3 ounces of raw soaked nuts and seeds
daily and 1/2 avocado daily. Cooked grains may also be added, along
with steamed vegetables and vegetable soups.

The Prime Rules Of Fasting

Another truism of natural hygiene is that we dig our own graves with
our teeth. It is sad but true that almost all eat too much quantity
of too little quality. Dietary excesses are the main cause of death
in North America. Fasting balances these excesses. If people were to
eat a perfect diet and not overeat, fasting would rarely be
necessary.

There are two essential rules of fasting. If these rules are ignored
or broken, fasting itself can be life threatening. But if the rules
are followed, fasting presents far less risk than any other
important medical procedure with a far greater likelihood of a
positive outcome. And let me stress here, there is no medical
procedure without risk. Life itself is fraught with risk, it is a
one-way ticket from birth to death, with no certainty as to when the
end of the line will be reached. But in my opinion, when handling
degenerative illness and infections, natural hygiene and fasting
usually offer the best hope of healing with the least possible risk.

The first vital concern is the duration of the fast. Two eliminatory
processes go on simultaneously while fasting. One is the dissolving
and elimination of the excess, toxic or dysfunctional deposits in
the body, and second process, the gradual exhaustion of the body's
stored nutritional reserves. The fasting body first consumes those
parts of the body that are unhealthy; eventually these are all gone.
Simultaneously the body uses up stored fat and other reserve
nutritional elements. A well-fed reasonably healthy body usually has
enough stored nutrition to fast for quite a bit longer than it takes
to "clean house."

While house cleaning is going on the body uses its reserves to
rebuild organs and rejuvenate itself. Rebuilding starts out very
slowly but the repairs increase at an ever-accelerating rate. The
"overhaul" can last only until the body has no more reserves.
Because several weeks of fasting must pass by before the "overhaul"
gets going full speed, it is wise to continue fasting as long as
possible so as to benefit from as much rejuvenation as possible.

It is best not to end the fast before all toxic or dysfunctional
deposits are eliminated, or before the infection is overcome, or
before the cause for complaint has been healed. The fast must be
ended when most of the body's essential-to-life stored nutritional
reserves are exhausted. If the fast goes beyond this point,
starvation begins. Then, fasting-induced organic damage can occur,
and death can follow, usually several weeks later. Almost anyone not
immediately close to death has enough stored nutrition to water fast
for ten days to two weeks. Most reasonably healthy people have
sufficient reserves to water fast for a month. Later I will explain
how a faster can somewhat resupply their nutritional reserves while
continuing to fast, and thus safely extend the fasting period.

The second essential concern has to do with adjusting the intensity
of the fast. Some individuals are so toxic that the waste products
released during a fast are too strong, too concentrated or too
poisonous for the organs of elimination to handle safely, or to be
handled within the willingness of the faster to tolerate the
discomforts that toxic releases generate. The highly-toxic faster
may even experience life-threatening symptoms such as violent asthma
attacks. This kind of faster has almost certainly been dangerously
ill before the fast began. Others, though not dangerously sick prior
to fasting, may be nearly as toxic and though not in danger of
death, they may not be willing to tolerate the degree of discomfort
fasting can trigger. For this reason I recommend that if at all
possible, before undertaking a fast the person eat mostly raw foods
for two months and clean up all addictions. This will give the body
a chance to detoxify significantly before the water fast is started,
and will make water fasting much more comfortable. Seriously,
dangerously ill people should only fast with experienced guidance,
so the rapidity of their detoxification process may be adjusted to a
lower level if necessary.

A fast of only one week can accomplish a significant amount of
healing. Slight healing does occur on shorter fasts, but it is much
more difficult to see or feel the results. Many people experience
rapid relief from acute headache pain or digestive distress such as
gas attacks, mild gallbladder pain, stomach aches, etc., after only
one day's abstention from food. In one week of fasting a person can
relieve more dangerous conditions such as arthritic pain,
rheumatism, kidney pain, and many symptoms associated with allergic
reactions. But even more fasting time is generally needed for the
body to completely heal serious diseases. That's because eliminating
life-threatening problems usually involve rebuilding organs that
aren't functioning too well. Major rebuilding begins only after
major detoxification has been accomplished, and this takes time.

Yes, even lost organ function can be partially or completely
restored by fasting. Aging and age-related degeneration is
progressive, diminishing organ functioning. Organs that make
digestive enzymes secrete less enzymes. The degenerated immune
system loses the ability to mobilize as effectively when the body is
attacked. Liver and kidney efficiency declines. The adrenals tire,
becoming incapable of dumping massive amounts of stress-handling
hormones or of repeating that effort time after time without
considerable rest in between. The consequences of these
inter-dependent deterioration's is a cascade of deterioration that
contributes to even more rapid deterioration's. The name for this
cascading process is aging. Its inevitable result--death.

Fasting can, to a degree, reverse aging. Because fasting improves
organ functioning, it can slow down aging.

Fasters are often surprised that intensified healing can be
uncomfortable. They have been programmed by our culture and by
allopathic doctors to think that if they are doing the right thing
for their bodies they should feel better immediately. I wish it
weren't so, but most people have to pay the piper for their dietary
indiscretions and other errors in living. There will be aches and
minor pains and uncomfortable sensations. More about that later. A
rare faster does feel immediately better, and continues to feel ever
better by the day, and even has incredible energy while eating
nothing, but the majority of us folks just have to tough it out,
keeping in mind that the way out is the way through. It is important
to remind yourself at times that even with some discomfort and
considering the inconvenience of fasting that you are getting off
easy--one month of self-denial pays for those years of indulgence and
buys a regenerated body.

Length Of The Fast

How long should a person fast? In cases where there are serious
complaints to remedy but where there are no life threatening disease
conditions, a good rule of thumb is to fast on water for one
complete day (24 hours) for each year that the person has lived. If
you are 30 years old, it will take 30 consecutive days of fasting to
restore complete health. However, thirty fasting days, done a few
days here and a few there won't equal a month of steady fasting; the
body accomplishes enormously more in 7 or l4 days of consecutive
fasting, than 7 or 14 days of fasting accumulated sporadically, such
as one day a week. This is not to say that regular short fasts are
not useful medicine. Periodic day-long fasts have been incorporated
into many religious traditions, and for good reason; it gives the
body one day a week to rest, to be free of digestive obligations,
and to catch up on garbage disposal. I heartily recommend it. But it
takes many years of unfailingly regular brief fasting to equal the
benefits of one, intensive experience.

Fasting on water much longer than fifteen consecutive days may be
dangerous for the very sick, (unless under experienced supervision)
or too intense for those who are not motivated by severe illness to
withstand the discomfort and boredom. However, it is possible to
finish a healing process initiated by one long water fast by
repeating the fast later. My husband's healing is a good example of
this. His health began to noticeably decline about age 38 and he
started fasting. He fasted on water 14 to 18 days at a time, once a
year, for five consecutive years before most of his complaints and
problems entirely vanished.

The longest fast I ever supervised was a 90 day water fast on an
extraordinarily obese woman, who at 5' 2" weighed close to 400
pounds. She was a Mormon; generally members of the LDS Church eat a
healthier diet than most Americans, but her's included far too much
of what I call "healthfood junkfood," in the form of whole grain
cakes and cookies, lots of granola made with lots of honey, oil, and
dried fruit, lots of honey heaped atop heavily buttered whole grain
bread. (I will explain more about the trap of healthfood junkfood
later on.) A whole foods relatively meatless diet is far superior to
its refined white flour, white sugar and white grease (lard)
counterpart, but it still produced a serious heath problem in just
30 years of life. Like many women, she expressed love-for-family in
the kitchen by serving too-much too-tasty food. The Mormons have a
very strong family orientation and this lady was no exception, but
she was insecure and unhappy in her marriage and sought consolation
in food, eaten far in excess of what her body needed.

On her 90 day water fast she lost about 150 pounds, but was still
grossly overweight when the fast ended. Toward the end it became
clear that it was unrealistic to try to shrink this woman any closer
to normal body weight because to her, fat represented an invaluable
insulation or buffer that she was not prepared to give up. As the
weight melted away on the fast and she was able to actually feel the
outline of a hip bone her neurosis became more and more apparent,
and the ability to feel a part of her skeleton was so upsetting to
her that her choice was between life threatening obesity and
pervasive anxiety.

Her weight was still excessive but the solace of eating was even
more important. This woman needed intensive counseling not more
fasting. Unfortunately, at the end she choose to remain obese. Fat
was much less frightening to her than confronting her emotions and
fears. The positive side was that after the fast she was able to
maintain her weight at 225 instead of 375 which was an enormous
relief to her exhausted heart.

Another client I fasted for 90 days was a 6' 1" tall, chronic
schizophrenic man who weighed in at 400 pounds. He was so big he
could barely get through my front door, and mine was an
extraordinarily wide door in what had been an upper-class mansion.
This man, now in his mid twenties, had spent his last seven years in
a mental institution before his parents decided to give him one last
chance by sending to Great Oaks School. The state mental hospitals
at that time provided the mentally ill with cigarettes, coffee, and
lots of sugary treats, but none of these substances were part of my
treatment program so he had a lot of immediate withdrawal to go
through. The quickest and easiest way to get him through it was to
put him on a water fast after a few days of preparation on raw food.

This was not an easily managed case! He was wildly psychotic, on
heavy doses of chloropromazine, with many bizarre behaviors. Besides
talking to himself continuously in gibberish, he collected bugs,
moss, sticks, piles or dirt, and switched to smoking oak leaves
instead of cigarettes. He was such a fire hazard that I had to move
him to a downstairs room with concrete floor. Even in the basement
he was a fire hazard with his smoking and piles of sticks and other
inflammables next to his bed, but all of this debris was his
"precious." I knew that I was in for trouble if I disturbed his
precious, but the insects and dirt piles seemed to be expanding
exponentially.

One day the dirt exceeded my tolerance level. To make a long story
short he caught me in the act of cleaning up his precious. Was he
furious! All 350 pounds of him! (By this time he had lost 50
pounds.) He barreled into me, fists flying, and knocked me into the
pipes next to the furnace and seemed ready to really teach me what
was what. I prefer to avoid fights, but if they are inevitable, I
can really get into the spirit of the thing. I'd had lots of
childhood practice defending myself because I was an incurable
tomboy who loved to wrestle; I could usually pin big boys who
considered themselves tough. So I began using my fists and what
little martial arts training I had to good use. After I hurt him a
bit he realized that I was not going to be easily intimidated, and
that in fact he was in danger of getting seriously damaged. So he
called a truce before either of us were badly beaten up. He had only
a few bruises and welts, nothing serious.

After that he refrained from collecting things inside the building
(he continued to collect outside). This compromise was fine with me,
and the incident allowed me to maintain the authority I needed to
bully him into co-operating with the program: taking his vitamins,
and sticking to his fast until he finally reached 200 pounds. After
90 days on water he actually looked quite handsome, he no longer
smoked, he was off psychotropic medication, and his behaviors were
within an acceptable range as long as your expectations were not too
high.

He was well enough to live outside a hospital and also clear-headed
enough to know that if he let too many people know how well he
really was, he might have to give up his mental disability pension
and actually become responsible for himself. No way, Jose! This
fellow knew a good thing when he saw it. So he continued to pull
bizarre stunts just often enough in front of the right audience to
keep his disability checks coming in, while managing to act sane
enough to be allowed to live comfortably at home instead of in the
hospital. By keeping to my program he could stay off mind-numbing
psychotropic medication if he kept up his megavitamins and minerals.
This compromise was tolerable from his point of view, because there
were no side effects like he experienced from his tranquilizers.

It is very rare for a mentally ill person who has spent more than a
few months in a mental hospital to ever usefully return to society
because they find "mental illness" too rewarding.

My Own 56 Day Long Fast

Fasters go through a lot of different emotional states, these can
get intense and do change quite rapidly. The physical body, too,
will manifest transitory conditions. Some can be quite
uncomfortable. But, I don't want to leave the reader with the
impression that fasting is inevitably painful. So I will now recount
my own longest fast in detail.

When I did my own 42 day water fast followed by two weeks on carrot
juice diluted 50/50 with water, which really amounted to 56
consecutive days, my predominant sensation for the first three days
was a desire to eat that was mostly a mental condition, and a lot of
rumbling and growling from my stomach. This is not real hunger, just
the sounds the stomach likes to make when it is shrinking. After
all, this organ is accustomed to being filled at regular intervals,
and then, all of a sudden, it gets nothing, so naturally the stomach
wants to know what is going on. Once it realizes it is on temporary
vacation, the stomach wisely decides to reduce itself to a size
suitable for a retired organ. And it shuts up. This process usually
takes three to five days and for most people, no further "hunger
pangs" are felt until the fast is over.

Real hunger comes only when the body is actually starving. The
intense discomforts many people experience upon missing a meal are
frequently interpreted as hunger but they aren't. What is actually
happening is that their highly toxic bodies are taking the
opportunity presented by having missed a meal or two to begin to
cleanse. The toxins being released and processed make assorted
unpleasant symptoms such as headaches and inability to think
clearly. These symptoms can be instantly eliminated by the intake of
a bit of food, bringing the detox to a screeching halt.

Two weeks into the fast I experienced sharp abdominal pains that
felt like I imagine appendicitis feels, which compelled me toward
the nearest toilet in a state of great urgency where I productively
busied myself for about half an hour. As I mentioned earlier, I was
experimentally adhering to a rigid type of fast of the sort
recommended by Dr. Herbert Shelton, a famous advocate of the Natural
Hygiene school. Shelton was such a powerful writer and personality
that there still exists a Natural Hygiene Society that keeps his
books in print and maintains his library. The words "Natural
Hygiene" are almost owned by the society like a trademark and they
object when anyone describes themselves as a hygienist and then
advocates any practice that Dr. Shelton did not approve of.

Per Dr. Shelton, I was going to fast from the time hunger left until
the time it returned and I was not going to use any form of colon
cleansing. Shelton strongly opposed bowel cleansing so I did no
enemas nor colonics, nor herbs, nor clays, nor psyllium seed
designed to clean the bowel, etc. Obviously at day 14 the bowel
said, enough is enough of this crap, and initiated a goods house
cleaning session. When I saw what was eliminated I was horrified to
think that I had left that stuff in there for two weeks. I then
started to wonder if the Sheltonites were mistaken about this aspect
of fasting. Nonetheless, I persevered on the same regimen because my
hunger had not returned, my tongue was still thickly coated with
foul-smelling, foul-tasting mucus and I still had some fat on my
feet that had not been metabolized.

Shelton said that cleansing is not complete until a skeletal
condition is reached--that is, absolutely no fat reserves are left.
Up until that time I did not even know that I had fat on my feet,
but much to my surprise, as the weeks went on, not only did my
breasts disappear except for a couple of land marks well-known to my
babies, but my ribs and hip bones became positively dangerous to
passersby, and my shoes would not stay on my feet. This was not all
that surprising because I went from 135 pounds down to 85 on a 5' 7"
frame with substantial bone structure.

Toward the end of the fast my eyes became brighter and clearer blue,
my skin took on a good texture, my breath finally became sweet, my
tongue cleared up and became pink, my mind was clear, and my
spiritual awareness and sensitivity was heightened. In other words,
I was no longer a walking hulk of stored-up toxemia. I also felt
quite weak and had to rest for ten minutes out every hour in
horizontal position. (I should have rested much more.) I also
required very little sleep, although it felt good to just lie
quietly and rest, being aware of what was going on in various parts
of my body.

During the last few weeks on water I became very attentive to my
right shoulder. Two separate times in the past, while flying head
first over the handlebars of my bicycle I had broken my shoulder
with considerable tearing of ligaments and tendons. At night when I
was totally still I felt a whole crew of pixies and brownies with
picks and shovels at work in the joint doing major repair work. This
activity was not entirely comfortable, but I knew it was
constructive work, not destructive, so I joined the work crew with
my mind's eye and helped the work along.

It seemed my visualizations actually did help. Ever since, I've had
the fasters I supervised use creative imagery or write affirmations
to help their bodies heal. There are lots of books on this subject.
I've found that the techniques work far better on a faster than when
a person is eating normally.

After breaking the fast it took me six weeks to regain enough
strength that I could run my usual distance in my regular time; it
took me six months to regain my full 135 pound weight because I was
very careful to break the fast slowly and correctly. Coming off
water with two weeks on dilute carrot juice I then added small
portions of raw food such as apples, raw vegetables, sprouts,
vegetable juices, and finally in the fourth week after I began
drinking dilute carrot juice, I added seven daily well-chewed
almonds to my rebuilding diet. Much later I increased to 14 almonds,
but that was the maximum amount of such highly concentrated fare my
body wanted digest at one time for over one year. I found I got a
lot more miles to the gallon out of the food that I did eat, and did
not crave recreational foods. Overall I was very pleased with my
educational fast, it had taught me a great deal.

If I had undertaken such a lengthy fast at a time when I was
actually ill, and therefore had felt forced into it, my experience
could have been different. A positive mental attitude is an
essential part of the healing process so fasting should not be
undertaken in a negative, protesting mental state. The mind is so
powerful that fear or the resistance fear generates can override the
healing capacity of the body. For that reason I always recommend
that people who consider themselves to be healthy, who have no
serious complaints, but who are interested in water fasting, should
limit themselves to ten consecutive days or so, certainly never more
than 14. Few healthy people, even those with a deep interest in the
process, can find enough personal motivation to overcome the extreme
boredom of water fasting for longer than that. Healthy people
usually begin protesting severely after about two weeks. If there is
any one vital rule of fasting, one never should fast over strong,
personal protest. Anytime you're fasting and you really desire to
quit, you probably should. Unless, of course, you are critically
ill. Then you may have no choice--its fast or die.

Common Fasting Complaints And Discomforts

The most frequently heard complaints of fasters are headaches, dry,
cracked lips, dizziness, blurred vision with black spots that float,
skin rashes, and weakness in the first few days plus what they think
is intense hunger. The dizziness and weakness are really real, and
are due to increased levels of toxins circulating in the blood and
from unavoidably low blood sugar which is a natural consequence of
the cessation of eating. The blood sugar does reestablish a new
equilibrium in the second and third week of the fast and then, the
dizziness may cease, but still, it is important to expect dizziness
at the beginning.

It always takes more time for the blood to reach the head on a fast
because everything has slowed down, including the rate of the heart
beat, so blood pressure probably has dropped as well. If you stand
up very quickly you may faint. I repetitively instruct all of my
clients to stand up very slowly, moving from a lying to a sitting
position, pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then rising
slowly from a sitting to a standing position. They are told that at
the first sign of dizziness they must immediately put their head
between their knees so that the head is lower than the heart, or
squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a faster who forgot to obey
my frequent warnings. About two weeks into a long fast, she got up
rapidly from the toilet and felt dizzy. The obvious thing to do was
to sit back down on the toilet or lie down on the bath rug on the
floor, but no, she decided that because she was dizzy she should
rush back to her bed in the adjoining room. She made it as far as
the bathroom door and fainted, out cold, putting a deep grove into
the drywall with her pretty nose on the way down. We then had to
make an unscheduled visit to a nose specialist, who calmly put a
tape-wrapped spoon inside her bent-over nose and pried it back to
dead center. This was not much fun for either of us; it is well
worthwhile preventing such complications.

Other common complaints during the fast include coldness, due to low
blood sugar as well as a consequence of weight loss and slowed
circulation due to lessened physical activity. People also dislike
inactivity which seems excruciatingly boring, and some are upset by
weight loss itself. Coldness is best handled with lots of clothes,
bedding, hot water bottles or hot pads, and warm baths. Great Oaks
School of Health was in Oregon, where the endlessly rainy winters
are chilly and the concrete building never seemed to get really
warm. I used to dream of moving my fasters to a tropical climate
where I could also get the best, ripest fruits to wean them back on
to food.

If the fast goes on for more than a week or ten days, many people
complain of back discomfort, usually caused by over-worked kidneys.
This passes. Hot baths or hot water bottles provide some relief.
Drinking more fluids may also help a bit. Nausea is fairly common
too, due to toxic discharges from the gall bladder. Drinking lots of
water or herbal tea dilutes toxic bile in the stomach and makes it
more tolerable.

Very few fasters sleep well and for some reason they expect to,
certainly fasters hope to, because they think that if they sleep all
night they will better survive one more deadly dull day in a state
of relative unconsciousness. They find out much to their displeasure
that very little sleep is required on a fast because the body is at
rest already. Many fasters sleep only two to four hours but doze
frequently and require a great deal of rest. Being mentally prepared
for this change of habit is the best handling. Generalized low-grade
aches and pains in the area of the diseased organs or body parts are
common and can often be alleviated with hot water bottles, warm but
not hot bath water and massage. If this type of discomfort exists,
it usually lessens with each passing day until it disappears
altogether.

Many fasters complain that their vision is blurred, and that they
are unable to concentrate. These are really major inconveniences
because then fasters can't read or even pay close attention to
video-taped movies, and if they can't divert themselves some fasters
think they will go stir crazy. They are so addicted to a hectic
schedule of doingness, and/or being entertained that they just can't
stand just being with themselves, forced to confront and deal with
the sensations of their own body, forced to face their own thoughts,
to confront their own emotions, many of which are negative. People
who are fasting release a lot of mental/emotional garbage at the
same time as they let go of old physical garbage. Usually the
psychological stuff contributed greatly to their illness and just
like the physical garbage and degenerated organs, it all needs to be
processed.

One of the most distressing experiences that happen occasionally is
hair loss. Deprived of adequate nutrition, the follicles can not
keep growing hair, and the existing hair dies. However, the
follicles themselves do not die and once the fast has ended and
sufficient nutrition is forthcoming, hair will regrow as well or
better than before.

There are also complaints that occur after the fast has been broken.
Post-fast cravings, even after only two weeks of deprivation, are to
be expected. These may take the form of desires for sweet, sour,
salt, or a specific food dreamed of while fasting, like chocolate
fudge sundays or just plain toast. Food cravings must be controlled
at all costs because if acted upon, each indulgence chips away the
health gains of the previous weeks. A single indulgence can be
remedied by a day of restricting the diet to juice or raw food.
After the repair, the person feels as good as they did when the fast
ended. Repeated indulgences will require another extended bout of
fasting to repair. It is far better to learn self-control.

The Healing Crisis And Retracing

Certain unpleasant somatics that occur while fasting (or while on a
healing diet) may not be dangerous or "bad." Two types, the healing
crisis, and retracing, are almost inevitable. A well-educated faster
should welcome these discomforts when they happen. The healing
crisis (but not retracing) also occurs on a healing diet.

The healing crisis can seem a big surprise to a faster who has been
progressing wonderfully. Suddenly, usually after a few days of
noticeably increased well-being, they suddenly experience a set of
severe symptoms and feel just awful. This is not a setback, not
something to be upset or disappointed about, but a healing crisis,
actually a positive sign

Healing crises always occur after a period of marked improvement. As
the vital force builds up during the healing process, the body
decides it now has obtained enough energy to throw off some
accumulated toxins, and forcefully pushes them out through a typical
and usually previously used route of secondary elimination, such as
the nose, lungs, stomach, intestines, skin, or perhaps produces a
flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches and pains, etc.
Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has
merely accelerated its elimination process. Do not attempt to
suppress any of these symptoms, don't even try to moderate fever,
which is the body's effective way to burn out a virus or bacteria
infection, unless it is a dangerously high fever (over 102 degree
Fahrenheit). Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the
person into a cool/cold bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold
water sponge baths. The good news is that healing crises usually do
not last long, and when they are past you feel better than you did
before the crisis.

Asthmatics seem to have the worst crises. I have had asthmatics
bring up a quart of obnoxious mucous from their lungs every night
for weeks. They have stayed awake all night for three nights
continuously coughing and choking on the material that was being
eliminated. After that clearing-out process they were able to breath
much more freely. Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitis
have nothing but non-stop pussy discharge from their sinuses for
three weeks. Some of this would run down the throat and cause
nausea. All I could say to encourage the sufferer was that it needed
to come out and to please stand aside and let the body work its
magic. These fasters were not grateful until the sinus problem that
had plagued them since childhood disappeared.

The interesting thing about healing crises are that the symptoms
produced retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something
entirely unknown to the patient. Usually they are old, familiar
somatics, often complaints that haven't bothered the faster for many
years. The reason the symptom is familiar but is not currently a
problem is because as the body degenerates it loses vital force;
with less vital force it loses the ability to create such acute
detoxification episodes in non-life-threatening secondary
elimination routes. The degenerated body makes less violent efforts
to cleanse, efforts that aren't as uncomfortable. The negative side
of this is that instead of creating acute discomfort in peripheral
systems, the toxemia goes to more vital organs where it hastens the
formation of life-threatening conditions.

There is a very normal and typical progress for each person's fatal
illness. Their ultimate disease starts out in childhood or
adolescence as acute inflammations of skin-like organs, viral or
bacterial infections of the same. Then, as vital force weakens,
secondary eliminations are shifted to more vital organs. Allergies
or colds stop happening so frequently; the person becomes rheumatic,
arthritic or experience weakness in joints, tendons, ligaments, or
to have back pains, or to have digestive upsets. These new symptoms
are more constant but usually less acute. Ultimately, vital organs
begin to malfunction, and serious disease develop. But a hygienist
sees the beginning of fatal diseases such as cancer in adolescent
infections and allergies.

Retracing is generally seen only on water fasts, not on extended
cleansing diets. The body begins to repair itself by healing
conditions in the reverse order to that which they occurred
originally. This means that the body would first direct healing
toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was an attack
of pneumonia six months previously. In this case you would expect to
quickly and intensely experience a mini-case of pneumonia while the
body eliminates residues in the lungs that were not completely
discharged at the time. Next the body might take you through a
period of depression that you had experienced five years in the
past. The faster may be profoundly depressed for a few days and come
out of it feeling much better. You could then reexperience
sensation-states like those caused by recreational drugs you had
playfully experimented with ten years previously along with the
"trippiness" if it were a hallucinogen, speediness if it was "speed"
or the dopiness if it was heroin. Retracing further, the faster
might then experience something similar to a raging attack of
tonsillitis which you vaguely remember having when you were five
years old, but fortunately this time it passes in three days (or
maybe six hours), instead of three weeks. This is retracing.

Please do not be surprised or alarmed if it happens to you on a
fast, and immediately throw out the baby with the bath water
thinking that you are doing the wrong thing because all those old
illnesses are coming back to haunt you. It is the body's magnificent
healing effort working on your behalf, and for doing it your body
deserves lots of "well done", "good body" thoughts rather than
gnashing of teeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this. The
body won't tell you what you did to deserve this, but it knows and
is trying its darndest to undo it.

The Unrelenting Boredom Of Fasting

Then there's the unrelenting boredom of fasting. Most people have
been media junkies since they were kids; the only way they believe
they can survive another day of fasting is by diverting their minds
with TV. This is far from ideal because often the emotions of a
faster are like an open wound and when they resonate with the
emotions portrayed on most TV shows, the faster gets into some very
unpleasant states that interfere with healing. And the emotions many
movies prompt people to sympathetically generate are powerful ones,
often highly negative, and contrary to healing. Especially unhelpful
are the adrenaline rushes in action movies. But if TV is the best a
faster can do, it is far better that someone fast with television
programming filling their minds than to not fast at all. I keep a
library of positive VHS tapes for these addicts--comedies, stories of
heroic over-comings, depiction's of humans at their best.

Boredom is probably the most limiting factor to fasting a long time.
That is because boredom is progressive, it gets worse with each
slowly-passing day. But concurrently, the rate of healing is
accelerating with each slowly-passing day. Every day the faster gets
through does them considerably more good than the previous day.
However, fasters rarely are motivated enough to overcome boredom for
more than two weeks or so, unless they started the fast to solve a
very serious or life-threatening condition. For this reason,
basically well people should not expect to be able to fast for more
than a couple of weeks every six months or year, no matter how much
good a longer fast might do.

Exercise While Fasting

The issue of how much activity is called for on a fast is
controversial. Natural Hygienists in the Herbert Shelton tradition
insist that all fasters absolutely must have complete bed rest, with
no books, no TV, no visitors, no enemas, no exercise, no music, and
of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea. In my many years of
conducting people through fasts, I have yet to meet an individual
that could mentally tolerate this degree of nothingness. It is too
drastic a withdrawal from all the stimulation people are used to in
the twentieth century. I still don't know how Shelton managed to
make his patients do it, but my guess is that he must have been a
very intimidating guy. Shelton was a body builder of some renown in
his day. I bet Shelton's patients kept a few books and magazines
under their mattress and only took them out when he wasn't looking.
If I had tried to enforced this type of sensory deprivation, I know
my patients would have grabbed their clothes and run, vowing never
to fast again. I think it is most important that people fast, and
that they feel so good about the experience that they want to do it
again, and talk all their sick friends into doing the same thing.

In contrast to enforced inactivity, Russian researchers who
supervised schizophrenics on 30 day water fasts insisted that they
walk for three hours every day, without stopping. I would like to
have been there to see how they managed to enforce that. I suspect
some patients cheated. I lived with schizophrenics enough years to
know that it is very difficult to get them to do anything that they
don't want to do, and very few of them are into exercise, especially
when fasting.

In my experience both of these approaches to activity during the
fast are extremes. The correct activity level should be arrived at
on an individual basis. I have had clients who walked six miles a
day during an extended water fast, but they were not feeling very
sick when they started the fast, and they were also physically fit.
In contrast I have had people on extended fasts who were unable to
walk for exercise, or so weak they were unable to even walk to the
bathroom, but these people were critically ill when they started
fasting, and desperately needed to conserve what little vital force
they had for healing.

Most people who are not critically ill need to walk at least 200
yards twice a day, with assistance if necessary, if only to move the
lymph through the system. The lymphatic system is a network of ducts
and nodes which are distributed throughout the body, with high
concentrations of nodes in the neck, chest, arm pits, and groin. Its
job is to carry waste products from the extremities to the center of
the body where they can be eliminated. The blood is circulated
through the arteries and veins in the body by the contractions of
the heart, but the lymphatic system does not have a pump. Lymphatic
fluid is moved by the contractions of the muscles, primarily those
of the arms and legs. If the faster is too weak to move, massage and
assisted movements are essential.

Lymph nodes are also a part of our immune system and produce white
blood cells to help control invading organisms. When the lymph is
overloaded with waste products the ducts and nodes swell, and until
the source of the local irritation is removed, are incapable of
handling further debris. If left in this condition for years they
become so hard they feel like rocks under the skin. Lumps in the
armpits or the groin are prime sites for the future development of a
cancer. Fasting, massage, and poultices will often soften overloaded
lymph nodes and coax them back into operation.

The Stages Of Fasting

The best way to understand what happens when we fast is to break up
the process into six stages: preparation for the fast, loss of
hunger, acidosis, normalization, healing, and breaking the fast.

A person that has consumed the typical American diet most of their
life and whose life is not in immediate danger would be very wise to
gently prepare their body for the fast. Two weeks would be a minimum
amount of time, and if the prospective faster wants an easier time
of it, they should allow a month or even two for preliminary
housecleaning. During this time, eliminate all meat, fish, dairy
products, eggs, coffee, black tea, salt, sugar, alcohol, drugs,
cigarettes, and greasy foods. This de-addiction will make the
process of fasting much more pleasant, and is strongly recommended.
However, eliminating all these harmful substances is withdrawal from
addictive substances and will not be easy for most. I have more to
say about this later when I talk about allergies and addictions.

The second stage, psychological hunger, usually is felt as an
intense desire for food. This passes within three or four days of
not eating anything. Psychological hunger usually begins with the
first missed meal. If the faster seems to be losing their resolve, I
have them drink unlimited quantities of good-tasting herb teas,
(sweetened--only if absolutely necessary--with nutrisweet). Salt-free
broths made from meatless instant powder (obtainable at the health
food store) can also fend off the desire to eat until the stage of
hunger has passed.

Acidosis, the third stage, usually begins a couple of days after the
last meal and lasts about one week. During acidosis the body
vigorously throws off acid waste products. Most people starting a
fast begin with an overly acid blood pH from the typical American
diet that contains a predominance of acid-forming foods. Switching
over to burning fat for fuel triggers the release of even more
acidic substances. Acidosis is usually accompanied by fatigue,
blurred vision, and possibly dizziness. The breath smells very bad,
the tongue is coated with bad-tasting dryish mucus, and the urine
may be concentrated and foul unless a good deal of water is taken
daily. Two to three quarts a day is a reasonable amount.

Mild states of acidosis are a common occurrence. While sleeping
after the last meal of the day is digested bodies normally work very
hard trying to detoxify from yesterday's abuses. So people routinely
awaken in a state of acidosis. Their tongue is coated, their breath
foul and they feel poorly. They end their brief overnight fast with
breakfast, bringing the detoxification process to a screeching halt
and feel much better. Many people think they awaken hungry and don't
feel well until they eat. They confuse acidosis with hunger when
most have never experienced real hunger in their entire lives. If
you typically awaken in acidosis, you are being given a strong sign
by your body that it would like to continue fasting far beyond
breakfast. In fact, it probably would enjoy fasting long beyond the
end of acidosis.

Most fasters feel much more comfortable by the end of the first
seven to ten days, when they enter the normalization phase; here the
acidic blood chemistry is gradually corrected. This sets the stage
for serious healing of body tissues and organs. Normalization may
take one or two more weeks depending on how badly the body was out
of balance. As the blood chemistry steadily approaches perfection,
the faster usually feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken
by short spells of discomfort that are usually healing crises or
retracings.

The next stage, accelerated healing, can take one or many weeks
more, again depending on how badly the body has been damaged.
Healing proceeds rapidly after the blood chemistry has been
stabilized, the person is usually in a state of profound rest and
the maximum amount of vital force can be directed toward repair and
regeneration of tissues. This is a miraculous time when tumors are
metabolized as food for the body, when arthritic deposits dissolve,
when scar tissues tend to disappear, when damaged organs regain lost
function (if they can). Seriously ill people who never fast long
enough to get into this stage (usually it takes about ten days to
two weeks of water fasting to seriously begin healing) never find
out what fasting can really do for them.

Breaking the fast is equally or more important a stage than the fast
itself. It is the most dangerous time in the entire fast. If you
stop fasting prematurely, that is, before the body has completed
detoxification and healing, expect the body to reject food when you
try to make it eat, even if you introduce foods very gradually. The
faster, the spiritual being running the body, may have become bored
and want some action, but the faster's body hasn't finished. The
body wants to continue healing.

By rejection, I mean that food may not digest, may feel like a stone
in your stomach, make you feel terrible. If that happens and if,
despite that clear signal you refuse to return to fasting, you
should go on a juice diet, take as little as possible, sip it slowly
(almost chew it) and stay on juice until you find yourself digesting
it easily. Then and only then, reintroduce a little solid raw food
like a green salad.

Weaning yourself back on to food should last just as long as the
fast. Your first tentative meals should be dilute, raw juices. After
several days of slowly building up to solid raw fruit, small amounts
of raw vegetable foods should be added. If it has been a long fast,
say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be done gingerly
over a few weeks. If this stage is poorly managed or ignored you may
become acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while
dangerously ill, loss of self control and impulsive eating could
prove fatal. Even for those fasting to cure non-life-threatening
illnesses it is pointless to go through the effort and discipline of
a long fast without carefully establishing a correct diet after the
fast ends, or the effort will have largely been wasted.

Foods For Monodiet, Juice or Broth Fasting

zucchini, garlic, onion, green beans, kale, celery, beet greens and
root, cabbage, carrot, wheat grass juice, alfalfa juice, barley
green juice, parsley juice, lemon/lime juice, grapefruit juice,
apples (not juice, too sweet), diluted orange juice, diluted grape
juice

Less-Rigorous-Than-Water Fasts

There are gradations of fasting measures ranging from rigorous to
relatively casual. Water fasting is the most rapid and effective
one. Other methods have been created by grasping the underlying
truth of fasting, namely whenever the digestive effort can be
reduced, by whatever degree, whenever the formation of the toxins of
misdigestion can be reduced or prevented, to that extent the body
can divert energy to the healing process. Thus comes about assorted
famous and sometimes notorious monodiet semi-fasts like the grape
cure where the faster eats only grapes for a month or so, or the
lemon cure, where the juice of one or more lemons is added to water
and nothing else is consumed for weeks on end. Here I should also
mention the "lemon juice/cayenne pepper/maple syrup cure," the
various green drink cures using spirulina, chlorella, barley green
or wheat grass, and the famous Bieler broths--vegetable soups made of
overcooked green beans or zucchini.

I do not believe that monodiets work because of some magical
property of a particular food used. They work because they are
semi-fasts and may be extremely useful, especially for those
individuals who can not or will not tolerate a water fast.

The best foods for monodiet fasting are the easiest ones digest:
juices of raw fruits and nonstarchy vegetables with all solids
strained out. Strained mineral broths made of long-simmered
non-starchy vegetables (the best of them made of leafy green
vegetables) fall in the same category. So if you are highly partial
to the flavor of grapes or lemons or cayenne and (highly diluted)
maple syrup, a long fast on one of these would do you a world of
good, just not quite as much good as the same amount of time spent
on water alone. If you select something more "solid" for a long
monodiet fast, like pureed zucchini, it is essential that you not
overeat. Dr. Bieler gave his fasting patients only one pint of
zucchini soup three or four times a day. The way to evaluate how
much to eat is by how much weight you are losing. When fasting, you
must lose weight! And the faster the better.

Pure absolute water fasting while not taking any vitamins or other
nutritional supplementation has a very limited maximum duration,
perhaps 45 days. The key concept here is nutritional reserves. Body
fat is stored, surplus energy fuel. But energy alone cannot keep a
body going. It needs much more than fuel to rebuild and repair and
maintain its systems. So the body in its wisdom also stores up
vitamins and minerals and other essential substances in and
in-between all its cells. Bodies that have been very well nourished
for a long time have very large reserves; poorly nourished ones may
have very little set aside for a rainy day. And it is almost a
truism that a sick person has, for quite some time, been a poorly
nourished one. With low nutritional reserves. This fact alone can
make it difficult for a sick person to water fast for enough time to
completely heal their damaged organs and other systems.

Obese people have fat reserves sufficient to provide energy for long
periods, but rarely can any body, no matter how complete its
nutrition was for years previously, contain sufficient nutritional
reserves to support a water fast of over six weeks. To water fast
the very obese down to normal weight can take months but to make
this possible, rather diverse and concentrated nutrition containing
few calories must be given. It is possible to fast even a very slim
a person for quite a bit longer than a month when their body is
receiving easily assimilable vitamins and minerals and small amounts
of sugars or other simple carbohydrates.

I estimate that fasting on raw juices and mineral broths will result
in healing at 25 to 75 percent of the efficiency of water fasting,
depending on the amount of nutrition taken and the amount the juices
or broths are diluted. But juice fasting can permit healing to go on
several times longer than water might.

Fasting on dilute juice and broth can also save the life of someone
whose organs of elimination are insufficiently strong to withstand
the work load created by water fasting. In this sense, juices can be
regarded as similar to the moderators in a nuclear reactor, slowing
the process down so it won't destroy the container. On a fast of
undiluted juice, the healing power drops considerably, but a person
on this regimen, if not sick, is usually capable of working.

Duration of juice fasts can vary greatly. Most of the time there is
no need to continue fasting after the symptoms causing concern have
been eliminated, and this could happen as quickly as one week or
take as long as 60 days if the person is very obese. Fasters also
lose their motivation once the complaint has vanished. But feeling
better is no certain indication that the need to fast has ended.
This points up one of the liabilities of juice fasting; the person
is already eating, their digestive system never shut down and
consequently, it is much easier for them to resume eating. The thing
to keep in mind is that if the symptoms return, the fast was not
long enough or the diet was not properly reformed after the fast.

During a long fast on water or dilute juice, if the body has used up
all of it's reserves and/or the body has reached skeletal condition,
and the condition or symptoms being addressed persists the fast
should be ended, the person should go on a raw food healing diet. If
three to six months on raw food don't solve the complaint then
another spell of water or dilute juice fasting should be attempted.
Most fasters are incapable of persisting until the body reserves
have been used up because social conditioning is telling them their
emaciated-looking body must be dying when it is actually far from
death, but return of true hunger is the critical indicator that must
not be ignored. True hunger is not what most people think of when
they think they are hungry. Few Americans have ever experienced true
hunger. It is not a rumbling in the stomach or a set of
uncomfortable sensations (caused by the beginning of detoxification)
you know will go away after eating. True hunger is an animal,
instinctual feeling in the back of one's throat (not in the stomach)
that demands you eat something, anything, even grass or shoe
leather.

Seriously ill people inevitably start the cleansing process with a
pre-existing and serious mineral deficiencies. I say inevitably
because they likely would not have become ill had they been properly
nourished. Sick fasters may be wise to take in minerals from thin
vegetable broths or vitamin-like supplements in order to prevent
uncomfortable deficiency states. For example calcium or magnesium
deficiencies can make water fasters experience unpleasant symptoms
such as hand tremors, stiff muscles, cramps in the hands, feet, and
legs, and difficulty relaxing. I want to stress here that fasting
itself does not create deficiencies. But a person already deficient
in minerals should watch for these symptoms and take steps to remedy
the deficiencies if necessary.

Raw Food Healing Diets

Next in declining order of healing effectiveness is what I call a
raw food healing diet or cleansing diet. It consists of those very
same watery fruits and nonstarchy vegetables one juices or makes
into vegetable broths, but eaten whole and raw. Heating food does
two harmful things: it destroys many vitamins, enzymes and other
nutritional elements and it makes many foods much harder to digest.
So no cooked vegetables or fruits are allowed because to maintain
health on this limited regimen it is essential that every possible
vitamin and enzyme present in the food be available for digestion.
Even though still raw, no starchy or fatty vegetables or fruits are
allowed that contain concentrated calories like potatoes, winter
squash, avocados, sweet potatoes, fresh raw corn, dates, figs,
raisins, or bananas. And naturally, no salad dressings containing
vegetable oils or (raw) ground seeds are allowed. Nor are raw grains
or other raw concentrated energy sources.

When a person starts this diet they will at first experience
considerable weight loss because it is difficult to extract a large
number of calories from these foods (though I have seen people
actually gain weight on a pure melon diet, so much sugar do these
fruits have, and well-chewed watermelon seeds are very nourishing).
Eating even large quantities of only raw fruit and raw non-starchy
vegetables results in a slow but steady healing process about 10 to
20 percent as rapid as water fasting.

A raw food cleansing diet has several huge advantages. It is
possible to maintain this regimen and regularly do non-strenuous
work for many months, even a year or more without experiencing
massive weight loss and, more important to some people, without
suffering the extremes of low blood sugar, weakness and loss of
ability to concentrate that happen when water fasting. Someone on a
raw food cleanse will have periods of lowered energy and strong
cravings for more concentrated foods, but if they have the
self-discipline to not break their cleansing process they can
accomplish a great deal of healing while still maintaining more or
less normal (though slower paced) life activities. However, almost
no one on this diet is able to sustain an extremely active
life-style involving hard physical labor or competitive sports. And
from the very beginning someone on a raw food cleanse must be
willing and able to lie down and rest any time they feel tired or
unable to face their responsibilities. Otherwise they will
inevitably succumb to the mental certainty that their feelings of
exhaustion or overwhelm can be immediately solved by eating some
concentrated food to "give them energy." Such low-energy states
will, however, pass quickly after a brief nap or rest.

Something else gradually happens to a body when on such a diet. Do
you recall that I mentioned that after my own long fast I began to
get more "mileage" out of my food. A cleansed, healed body becomes
far more efficient at digestion and assimilation; a body that is
kept on a raw food cleansing diet will initially lose weight
rapidly, but eventually weight loss slows to virtually nothing and
then stabilizes. However, long-term raw fooders are usually thin as
toothpicks.

Once starchy vegetables like potatoes or winter squash, raw or
cooked, or any cereals, raw or cooked, are added to a cleansing
diet, the detoxification and healing virtually ceases and it becomes
very easy to maintain or even gain weight, particularly if larger
quantities of more concentrated foods like seeds and nuts are eaten.
Though this diet has ceased to be cleansing, few if any toxins from
misdigestion will be produced and health is easy to maintain.

"Raw fooders" are usually people who have healed themselves of a
serious diseases and ever after continue to maintain themselves on
unfired food, almost as a matter of religious belief. They have
become convinced that eating only raw, unfired food is the key to
extraordinarily long life and supreme good health. When raw fooders
wish to perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they'll
consume raw nuts and some raw grains such as finely-ground oats
soaked overnight in warm water or deliciously sweet "Essene bread,"
made from slightly sprouted wheat that is then ground wet, made into
cakes, and sun baked at temperatures below about 115 degrees
Fahrenheit. Essene bread can be purchased in some health food
stores. However, little or no healing or detoxification can happen
once concentrated energy sources are added to the diet, even raw
ones.

During my days at Great Oaks School I was a raw fooder for some
years, though I found it very difficult to maintain body heat on raw
food during chilly, rainy Oregon winters and eventually struck a
personal compromise where I ate about half my diet raw and the rest
fired. I have listed some books by raw fooders in the Bibliography.
Joe Alexander's is the most fun.

Complete Recovery Of The Seriously Ill

Its a virtual certainty that to fully recover, a seriously ill
person will have to significantly rebuild numerous organs. They have
a hard choice: to accept a life of misery, one that the medical
doctors with drugs and surgery may be able to prolong into an
interminable hell on earth, or, spend several years working on
really healing their body, rotating between water fasting, juice or
broth fasting, extended periods on a cleansing raw food diet, and
periods of no-cleansing on a more complete diet that includes
moderate amounts of cooked vegetables and small quantities of cooked
cereals. And even after recovery someone who was quite ill may have
to live the rest of their life on a rather restricted regimen.

It is unrealistic to expect one fast to fix everything. The body
will heal as much as it can in the allotted time, but if a dangerous
illness has not been fully remedied by the first intense fast, a raw
food diet must be followed for three to six months until weight has
been regained, nutritional reserves have been rebuilt and it is safe
to undertake another extended fast. More than two water or juice
fasts a year of thirty continuous days are not recommended nor
should they be necessary unless the life is in imminent danger and
there is no other option.

The story of Jake's catastrophic illness and almost-cure is a good
example of this type of program. Jake was from back East. He phoned
me because he had read a health magazine article I had written, his
weak voice faintly describing a desperate condition. He was in a
wheelchair unable to walk, unable to control his legs or arms very
well, was unable to control his bladder and required a catheter. He
had poor bowel control, had not the strength to talk much or loudly
and most frightening to him, he was steadily losing weight although
he was eating large amounts of cooked vegetables and grains. Jake
had wasted away to 90 pounds at 5' 10" and looked pathetic when I
first saw him wheeled off an airplane at my local airport.

Jake had seen a lot of medical doctors and had variously been
diagnosed as having chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic (whatever that
is) meningitis, and multiple sclerosis. He had been treated by
virtually every medical expert and many famous alternative
practitioners, utilizing a host of old and new techniques, all to no
avail. He had even tried intravenous chelation therapy and colonics.
It had also been suggested that he enter a hospital for the
treatment of eating disorders and/or see a psychiatrist. He had
tried to gain admittance to a number of holistic fasting
institutions back east, but they all refused him because they
considered the risk was too high to fast a person at such a low body
weight. But I had previously fasted emaciated people like Jake, and
there was something I liked about his telephone presence. Perhaps
this is why I foolishly decided I knew better than the other
experts.

People commonly waste away and die while eating large amounts of
food. Obviously they are unable to digest or assimilate nutrients or
they wouldn't be wasting. Eating further increases their toxic
burden from undigested meals, further worsening their already
failing organs. The real solution is to stop feeding them altogether
so that their digestive functions can heal. In Jake's case, his
body's nutritional reserves had already become sadly depleted due to
poor absorption over such an extended period, so I could not fast
him on water. I immediately put Jake on a rich mineral broth
prepared from everything left alive in our garden at the end of
winter--leaves of kale, endive plants, whole huge splitting Savoy
cabbages, garlic, huge leeks including their green tops, the whole
stew fortified with sea weed. It did not matter too much what
vegetables I used as long as there were lots of leafy greens
containing lots of chlorophyll (where the most concentrated mineral
nutrition is located).

Jake was given colonics every day, but had to be carried to the
colonic table because he could not support his own weight. Whoever
had given him colonics previously had not accomplished much for I
must say that Jake had the most foul smelling discharges that I had
ever encountered in administering over 6,000 colonics over many
years. It was as if his body was literally rotting from the inside
out.

After 30 days on mineral broth Jake, who really did weigh 90 pounds
when he arrived, was only down to 85! When a person already close to
skeletal weight starts fasting, to conserve vital tissue the body
goes rapidly into a state of profound rest so it uses very little
energy, thus it loses very little weight each day. This degree of
resting also helps heal abnormal body parts earlier. After one month
on mineral broth Jake began to show signs of mineral deficiencies in
the form of a fine tremor of the hands, and cramps in the feet, so I
put him on mineral supplements too.

Jake was in my house for a long time. At the end of the second month
on broth he started two weeks on raw carrot juice with a lot of
chlorophyll added from sources such as algae (spirulina), wheat
grass juice, alfalfa, etc.. This was followed by two more weeks on
small quantities of raw fruits and vegetables, and then followed by
two weeks with added steamed vegetables, and finally, he achieved a
diet which included small amounts of grain, cooked legumes and raw
nuts, plus the fruits and vegetables previously mentioned. Jake
health steadily improved. He gained control of his bladder, bowels,
speech, hands, and legs. He began to exercise in the living room on
a stationary bike, and walked slowly up and down our long driveway,
picking daffodils in the beautiful spring weather.

Sadly, though I could help his body to heal it was next to
impossible to stem the tides of Jake's appetites or to pleasantly
withstand his tantrums when he was denied; he always wanted more in
terms of quantity, more in terms of variety, and at more frequent
intervals. Though his organs had healed significantly, his digestive
capacity was not nearly as large as he remembered himself enjoying
before he got sick. And never would be. Jake was not happy about the
dietary restrictions necessary for him to retain his newly attained
health, and unwilling to stay within the limits of his digestive
system's ability to process foods. He had gained weight and was back
up to 120 pounds. It was time for him to go home before I lost my
good humor.

Jake left with a lot of "good lucks" and stern admonitions to stick
to his stringent diet and supplement program. It was a big moment
for Jake. He had arrived in a wheelchair three months before. Now he
walked unaided to the airplane, something he had not been able to do
for two years.

Back at home Jake had no one courageous enough to set limits for
him. His immediate family and every one of his brow beaten
associates were compelled to give him everything that he wanted. So
his appetite and lack of personal discipline got the better of him.
He started eating lots of dates and figs. These had been eliminated
from his diet because he was unable to process foods which such a
high sugar content. He also ate larger and larger quantities of
grains, nuts and avocados, although I had warned him of specific
quantity limits on rich foods. Most sadly, he returned to enjoying
spaghetti with lots of cheese grated on top. Within months of
leaving my care his paralysis and weakness returned, except that
unfortunately for him, he still retained the ability to assimilate
food and maintain his body weight. Ironically, the only ultimate
benefit of his fasting with me was to permit him to suffer a far
longer existence in a wheelchair without wasting away and escaping
into death.

I would be failing my readers if I did not explain why Jake became
ill in the first place. Jake had started what grew to become a very
successful chain of spaghetti restaurants with a unique noodles and
sauces made to his own formula. He ate a lot of his own spaghetti
over the years, and had been reared in a good Italian family with
lots of other kinds of rich food. Jake had a reputation for being
able to outeat everybody in terms of quantity and in the amount of
time spent eating. In childhood, this ability had made his Italian
mother very happy because it showed appreciation for her great
culinary skill.

Secondly, Jake the adult was still at his core, Jake the spoiled
brat child, with a bad, unregulated temper. He was in the habit of
dumping his temper on other people whether they needed a helping of
his angry emotions or not. A lot of people in his employ and in his
extended family tiptoed around Jake, always careful of triggering
his wrath. At my place as Jake began to get well he began to use his
increased energy and much stronger voice to demonstrate his poor
character. At meal times Jake would bang the table with a fork hard
enough to leave dents in the wood table top while yelling for more,
complaining loudly about the lack of rich sauces and other culinary
delights he craved. This was a character problem that Jake could not
seem to overcome, even with a lot of intervention from the local
minister on his behalf and my counseling. Jake was a Catholic who
went to church regularly, but acted like a Christian only while he
was in church. On some level Jake knew that he was not treating
others fairly, but he would not change his habitual responses. His
negative thoughts and actions interfered with his digestive capacity
to the extent that his gluttonous eating habits produced illness, a
vegetative paralyzing illness, but not death. To me this seems
almost a form of karmic justice.

It is common for people who have been very ill for extended periods
of time to realize what a wonderful gift life is and arrive at a
willingness to do almost anything to have a second chance at doing
"life" right. Some succeed with their second chance and some don't.
If they don't succeed in changing their life and relationships, they
frequently relapse.

Luigi Cornaro's left the world his story of sickness and
rejuvenation. His little book may be the world's first alternative
healing text. It is a classic example of the value of
abstentousness. Had Jake taken this story to heart he would have
totally recovered. Cornaro was a sixteenth century Venetian
nobleman. He, like Jake the spaghetti baron, was near death at the
young age of forty. (Jake was also in his early 40s when he broke
down.) Cornaro's many doctors were unable to cure him. Finally he
saw a doctor who understood the principles of natural healing. This
wise physician determined that this illness was caused by a mismatch
between Cornaro's limited digestive capacity and the excessive
amount of food he was eating. So Cornaro was put on a diet of only
12 ounces of solid food and fourteen ounces of liquid a day. Any
twelve ounces of any solids he wanted and any fourteen ounces of
liquid. It could be meat and wine, salad or orange juice, no matter.

Cornaro soon regained his health and he continued to follow the diet
until the age of 78. His health was so outstanding during this
period that people who were much younger in terms of years were
unable to keep up with him. At 78 his friends, worried about how
thin he was (doesn't it always seem that it is your so-called
friends who always ruin a natural cure) persuaded him to increase
his daily ration by two ounces a day. His delicate and weak
digestive system, which had operated perfectly for many years, was
unable to deal with the additional two ounces, and he became very
ill after a very short period of over eating.

Worse, his recent indulgence had even further damaged the organs of
digestion and to survive Cornaro had to cut his daily ration to
eight ounces of solid food and eleven of liquids. On this reduced
dietary he again regained his health and lived to be 100. Cornaro
wrote four books on the value of abstinence or "sober living" as he
called it, writing the last and perhaps the most interesting at 96
years of age. Had my patient Jake been able to confine his food
intake to the level of his body's ability to digest, he might still
be walking and enjoying life. But try as I might I could not make
him understand. Perhaps he enjoys doing penance in his wheel chair
more than he would enjoy health and life.

Tissue Losses at Death By Starvation

Fat                   97%
Muscles               31
Blood                 27
Liver                 54
Spleen                67
Pancreas              17
Skin                  21
Intestines            18
Kidneys               26
Lungs                 18
Testes                40
Heart                  3
Brain and Spinal Cord  3
Nerves                 3
Bone                  14

From Keys, Ancel, Joseph Brozek, Austin Henchel, Olaf Mickelson
and Henry L. Taylor, (1950)_ The Biology of Human Starvation._ Two
Vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Starvation

It is true that ethical medical doctors use the least-risky
procedure they are allowed to use. But this does not mean there are
no risks to allopathic treatment. The medical doctor justifies
taking the risks by saying that the risk/reward ratio is the best
possible. Any sick person is already at risk. Life comes with only
one guarantee: that none of us gets out of it alive.

Compared to the risks of allopathic medicine, fasting is a far safer
method of treating disease. The oft-repeated scare stories medical
doctors and their allies circulate about fasting are not true, and
it is important to remember that none of these people portraying
fasting as evil and dangerous have ever fasted themselves--I'll put
money on that one. Or, on the slim possibility that someone telling
fasting horror stories did actually not eat for 24 hours (probably
because some accident or acute illness prevented them), they had a
terrible experience because they didn't understand the process, were
highly toxic, and were scared to death the whole time.

Or worse yet they fasted for a short period with an "open mind"--a
very dangerous state in which to approach anything new. I have found
through considerable experience with people professing to have open
minds that the expression "I'm open minded" usually means that
someone has already made up their mind and new data just passes
straight through their open mind--in one ear and out the other. Or
sometimes, the phrase "open mind" means a person that does not
believe any information has reality and is entirely unable to make
up their mind.

The most commonly leveled criticism of fasting is that in its
efforts to survive self-imposed starvation the body metabolizes
vital tissue, not just fat, and therefore, fasting is damaging,
potentially fatally damaging. People who tell you this will also
tell you that fasters have destroyed their heart muscle or ruined
their nervous system permanently. But this kind of damage happen
only when a person starves to death or starves to a point very close
to death, not when someone fasts.

There is a huge difference between fasting and starvation. Someone
starving is usually eating, but eating poorly and inadequately,
eating scraps of whatever is available such as sugar, white flour,
rancid grease, shoe leather, or even dirt. Frequently a starving
person is forced to exercise a great deal as they struggle to
survive and additionally is highly apprehensive. Or someone starving
to death is confined to a small space, may become severely
dehydrated too and is in terror. Fear is very damaging to the
digestive process, and to the body in general; fear speeds up the
destruction of vital tissue. People starve when trekking vast
distances through wastelands without food to eat, they starved in
concentration camps, buried in mind disasters, they starve during
famines and starve while being tortured in prisons.

Until water fasting goes on past the point where all fatty tissues
and all abnormal deposits have been burned for fuel and recycled for
the nutritional elements they contain, vital muscle tissues and
organs are not consumed. And as long as the body contains sufficient
nutritional reserves, vital organs and essential tissues are rebuilt
and maintained. In fact the body has a great deal of intelligence
that we don't give it credit for. It knows exactly which cells are
essential to survival, which ones are not. The body knows which
cells are abnormal deposits, and it goes to work to metabolize them
first. For example, the body recognizes arthritic deposits, cysts,
fibroids, and tumors as offensive parts of the landscape, and
obligingly uses them for foods in preference to anything else. A
starving (not fasting) body also knows precisely in what order of
priority body cells should be metabolized to minimize risk of death
or permanent disability.

After a starving body has reached skeletal condition, or where some
small amount of fat remains but nutritional reserves (vitamins and
minerals) are exhausted and there is insufficient nourishment
forthcoming, the body begins to consume nutrient-rich muscle and
organ tissue in a last-ditch effort to stay alive. Under these dire
circumstances, the least essential muscles and organs from the
standpoint of survival are metabolized first. For example, muscles
in the arms and legs would be consumed early in the process, the
heart muscle used only toward the very end. The very last part of
the body to be metabolized when one is starving and as has come very
close to death would be the brain and the nervous system.

Starvation begins where fasting ends, which is when real hunger
begins. If the return of hunger is ignored whenever it takes place,
whether it is in 30, 60, or 90 days depending upon body weight and
type of fast, at that point exactly, not a day before, starvation
begins very slowly. Usually it takes a considerable period of time
after that before death occurs. It is important to note that this
discussion applies only to the abstention from food, not water.
Death takes place very quickly in the absence of water.

The chart on the previous page shows numerically the phenomenal
ability of the body to protect the most essential tissues of the
body right up to the time of death. If a person fasted for 30 days,
the average time it takes for the return of hunger in a person that
is not overweight, and then ignored the return of hunger, and
continued to abstain from food--if the person could avoid forced
exercise, keep warm, and had enough hydration, it could take as much
as an additional 20 to 60 days to die of starvation! At death the
body would have experienced losses of 40 to 60 percent of its
starting body weight. (Ancel Keys et al, 1950) A emaciated person
can not afford to lose nearly as much weight as an obese person, and
death under conditions of starvation will occur earlier. In all
cases of starvation the brain, nerves, heart, lungs, kidneys and
liver remain largely intact and functional to the very end. During a
fast, it is almost impossible to damage essential organs, unless of
course the person creates the damage by fears about the process, or
by internalizing the fears of others. If those fears are present,
the fast should not be attempted.

Weight Loss By Fasting

Loss of weight indicates, almost guarantees, that detoxification and
healing is occurring. I can't stress this too much. Of all the
things I find my patients seem to misunderstand or forget after
being told, it is that they can't heal in a rapid manner without
getting smaller. This reality is especially hard for the family and
friends of someone who is fasting, who will say, "you're looking
terrible dear, so thin. Your skin is hanging on your bones. You're
not eating enough protein or nutrient food to be healthy and you
must eat more or you're going to develop serious deficiencies. You
don't have any energy, you must be getting sicker. You're doing the
wrong thing, obviously. You have less energy and look worse every
day. Go and see a doctor before it is too late." To succeed with
friends like this, a faster has to be a mighty self-determined
person with a powerful ability to disagree with others.

Medical personnel claim that rapid weight loss often causes
dangerous deficiencies; these deficiencies force the person to
overeat and regain even more weight afterward. This is largely
untrue, though there is one true aspect to it: a fasted, detoxified
body becomes a much more efficient digester and assimilator,
extracting a lot more nutrition from the same amount food is used to
eat. If, after extended fasting a person returns to eating the same
number of calories as they did before; they will gain weight even
more rapidly than before they stated fasting. When fasting for
weight loss, the only way to keep the weight off is to greatly
reform the diet; to go on, and stay on, a diet made up largely of
non-starchy, watery fruits and vegetables, limited quantities of
cooked food, and very limited amounts of highly concentrated food
sources like cereals and cooked legumes. Unless, of course, after
fasting, one's lifestyle involves much very hard physical labor or
exercise. I've had a few obese fasters become quite angry with me
for this reason; they hoped to get thin through fasting and after
the fast, to resume overeating with complete irresponsibility as
before, without weight gain.

People also fear weight loss during fasting because they fear
becoming anorexic or bulimic. They won't! A person who abstains from
eating for the purpose of improving their health, in order to
prevent or treat illness, or even one who fasts for weight loss will
not develop an eating disorder. Eating disorders mean eating
compulsively because of a distorted body image. Anorexics and
bulimics have obsessions with the thinner-is-better school of
thought. The anorexic looks at their emaciated frame in the mirror
and thinks they are fat! This is the distorted perception of a very
insecure person badly in need of therapy. A bulimic, on the other
hand stuffs themselves, usually with bad food, and then purges it by
vomiting, or with laxatives. Anorexics and bulimics are not
accelerating the healing potential of their bodies; these are life
threatening conditions. Fasters are genuinely trying to enhance
their survival potential.

Occasionally a neurotic individual with a pre-existing eating
disorder will become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a
justification to legitimize their compulsion. During my career while
monitoring hundreds of fasters, I've known two of these. I
discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to
assist them, because they carry the practices to absurd extremes,
and contribute to bad press about natural medicine by ending up in
the emergency ward of a hospital with an intravenous feeding tube in
their arm.

Cases Beyond The Remedy Of Fasting

Occasionally, very ill people have a liver that has become so
degenerated it cannot sustain the burden of detoxification. This
organ is as vital to survival as the brain, heart and lungs. We can
get along with only one kidney, we can live with no spleen, with no
gallbladder, with only small parts of the stomach and intestines,
but we can not survive without a liver for more than a day or so.
The liver is the most active organ in the body during
detoxification. To reach an understanding of detoxification, it
helps to know just what the liver does for us on an ongoing basis.

The liver is a powerful chemical filter where blood is refined and
purified. The liver passes this cleansed blood out through the
superior vena cava, directly to the heart. The blood is then pumped
into general and systemic circulation, where it reaches all parts of
the body, delivering nutrition and oxygen at a cellular level. On
its return flow, a large proportion of the depleted blood is
collected by the gastric, splenic and superior and inferior
mesenteric veins that converge to form the large portal vein which
enters the liver. Thus a massive flow of waste from all the cells of
the body is constantly flowing into the liver. The huge hepatic
artery also enters the liver to supply oxygen and nutrients with
which to sustain the liver cells themselves.

The liver is constantly at work refining the blood. It is
synthesizing, purifying, renovating, washing, filtering, separating,
and detoxifying. It works day and night without stopping. Many
toxins are broken down by enzymes and their component parts are
efficiently reused in various parts of the body. Some impurities are
filtered out and held back from the general circulation. These
debris are collected and stored in the gall bladder, which is a
little sack appended to the liver. After a meal, the contents of the
gall bladder (bile) are discharged into the duodenum, the upper part
of the small intestine just beyond the stomach. This bile also
contains digestive enzymes produced by the liver that permit the
breakdown of fatty foods in the small intestine.

Sometimes a large flow of bile finds its way into the stomach by
pressure or is sucked into the stomach by vomiting. Excessive
biliary secretion and excretion can also result from overeating,
which overcrowds the area. Sometimes colonics or massage can also
stimulate a massive flow of bile. Extremely bitter and irritating,
when bile gets into the stomach the person either vomits or wishes
they could. And after vomiting and experiencing the taste of bile,
wishes they hadn't.

When no food at all enters the system, the blood keeps right on
passing through the liver/filter just as it does when we are eating.
When the liver does not have to take care of toxins generated by the
current food intake, each passage through the liver results in a
cleaner blood stream, with the debris decreasing in quantity,
viscosity, and toxicity, until the blood becomes normalized. During
fasting, debris from the gall bladder still pass through the small
intestine and into the large intestine. However, if the bowels do
not move the toxins in the bile are readsorbed into the blood stream
and get recirculated in an endless loop. This toxic recycling makes
a faster feel just terrible, like they had a flu or worse!

The bowels rarely move while fasting. During fasting only enemas or
colonics permit elimination from the large intestine. If done
effectively and frequently, enemas will greatly add to the well
being and comfort of the faster. Many times when a faster seems to
be retracing or experiencing a sudden onset of acute discomfort or
symptoms, these can be almost immediately relieved by an enema or
colonic.

A person with major liver degeneration inevitably dies, with or
without fasting, with or without traditional medicine. Significantly
impaired kidney function can also bring about this same result.
Mercifully, death while fasting is usually accomplished relatively
free of pain, clear of mind and with dignity. That often can not be
said of death in a hospital. There are much worse experiences than
death.

Fasting is not a cure-all. There are some conditions that are beyond
the ability of the body to heal. Ultimately, old age gets us all.

Dr. Linda Hazzard, one of the greats of natural hygiene, who
practiced Osteopathic medicine in the 1920s, had a useful way of
categorizing conditions that respond well to fasting. These she
labeled "acute conditions," and "chronic degenerative conditions." A
third classification, "chronic conditions with organic damage," does
not respond to fasting. Acute conditions, are usually inflammations
or infections with irritated tissue, with swelling, redness, and
often copious secretions of mucous and pus, such as colds, flu, a
first time case of pneumonia, inflamed joints as in the early stages
of arthritis, etc. These acute conditions usually remedy in one to
three weeks of fasting. Acute conditions are excellent candidates
for self-doctoring. Chronic degenerative conditions are more serious
and the patient usually requires supervision. These include
conditions such as cancer, aids, chronic arthritis, chronic
pneumonia, emphysema and asthma. Chronic degenerative conditions
usually respond within a month to three months of fasting. The
fasting should be broken up into two or three sessions if the
condition has not been relieved in one stint of supervised fasting.
Each successive fast will produce some improvement and if a light,
largely raw-food diet is adhered to between fasts the patient should
not worsen and should be fairly comfortable between fastings.

If there has been major functional damage to an organ as a result of
any of these degenerative conditions, healing will not be complete,
or may be impossible. By organic damage, I mean that a vital part of
the body has ceased to function due to some degenerative process,
injury, or surgery--so badly damaged that the cells that make up the
organ can not be replaced.

I once had a twenty five year old man come to my spa to die in peace
because he had been through enough diagnostic procedures in three
hospitals to know that his liver was beyond repair. He had been
working on an apple farm in between terms at university when he was
poisoned several times with insecticide from an aerial spray on the
whole orchard. He absorbed so much insecticide that his liver
incurred massive organic damage.

When he came to me his body had reached the point where it was
incapable of digesting, and because of lack of liver function, it
was incapable of healing while fasting, a condition in which death
is a certainty. He was a Buddhist, did not fear death and did not
want to be kept alive in agony or in prolonged unconsciousness by
any extraordinary means, nor did he want to die with tubes in every
orifice. I was honored to be a supportive participant in his
passing. He died fasting, in peace, and without pain, with a clear
mind that allowed him to consciously prepare for the experience. He
was not in a state of denial or fear, and made no frantic attempts
to escape the inevitable. He went quietly into that still dark night
with a tranquil demeanor and a slight smile.

Fortunately, in my many years of practice I had the pleasure of
seeing the majority of the people totally regain their health or at
least greatly improve it by means of the fasting and healing diets.
Many cancer patients watched with amazement as their tumors
disappeared before their eyes, many arthritics regained their
function, serious skin conditions such as psoriasis disappeared,
mental conditions improved, addictions vanished, fatigue was
replaced by energy, and fat dissolved revealing the hidden sculpture
beneath. I will talk more about procedures and the particular
reasons bodies develop specific conditions in later chapters.

Social/Cultural/Psychological Obstacles To Fasting

Numerous attitudes make it difficult to fast or to provide moral
support to friends or loved ones that are fasting. Many people
harbor fears of losing weight because they think that if times were
really tough, if there was a famine or they became ill and lost a
lot of weight they would have no reserves and would certainly
perish. These people have no idea how much fat can be concealed on
an even skinny body, nor of how slowly a skinny body loses weight
while fasting. Substantial fat reserves are helpful as
heat-retaining insulation in those rare accidents when someone is
dropped into a cold ocean and must survive until the rescue boat
arrives. Being fat might keep a person alive longer who is lost in
the wilderness awaiting rescue with no supplies, no means of
procuring food, and no means of keeping warm. On the other hand, fat
people would have a far harder time walking out of the wilderness.
And extensive fat deposits are merely fuel and do not contain
extensive nutritional reserves. An obese person fasting without
significant nutritional supplementation would begin starving long
before they became really skinny. On the balance, carrying excess
weight is a far greater liability than any potential prosurvival
aspects it might have.

There are other attitudes associated with weight loss that make it
difficult for people to fast. People hold rather stereotypical
notions about what constitutes an attractive person; usually it
involves having some meat on ones bones. Hollywood and Hugh Hefner
have both influenced the masses to think that women should have
hourglass figures with large, upthrust, firm breasts. Since breasts
are almost all useless fatty tissue supporting some milk-producing
glands that do not give a breast much volume except when engorged,
most women fasters loose a good percentage of their breast mass. If
the fast is extensive, there should also develop an impressive
showing of ribs and hip bones; these are not soft and cuddly.
Husbands, lovers, parents, and friends frequently point out that you
don't look good this way and exhort you to put on weight. Most
people think pleasantly plump is healthy.

Skinny men, especially those who had lost a lot of weight during an
illness, are pressured by associates to put on weight to prove that
they are healthy. I had a client who was formerly a college varsity
football player. Before his illness he had lifted weights and looked
like a hunk. His family and friends liked to see him that way and
justifiably so. Then he got seriously ill. On a long extended
healing diet he lost a significant amount of weight and seemed down
right skinny, causing all who knew him well and cared about him to
tempt him with all kinds of scrumptious delicacies from the best of
kitchens. But this case was like Luigi Cornaro, a man who never
again could look like a hunk. His "friends" made an absolutely
necessary change in life style and appearance far more difficult
than it was already. My client was torn between a desire to please
others, and a desire to regain and retain his health. This problem a
sick person doesn't need.

If you have the independence to consider following an alternative
medical program in a culture that highly values conformity and
agreement, you are also going to have to defend your own course of
self-determined action based on the best available data that you
have. But fasters are usually in fragile emotional condition, so I
advise my clients who are subjected to this kind of pressure to beg
their friends and associates to refrain from saying anything if they
can't support the course of action you have chosen. After this, if
friends or relatives are still incapable of saying nothing (even
non-verbally), it is important to exclude them from your life until
you have accomplished your health goals, have regained some weight
and have returned to eating a maintenance diet, rather than getting
skinnier on a healing one.

The very worst aspect of our culture's eating programming is that
people have been wrongfully taught that when ill they must eat to
keep up their strength. Inherent in this recommendation is an
unstated belief that when the body is weakened by a disease state,
the weakness can somehow be overcome with food, and that the body
needs this food to kill the virus, bacteria, or invading yeast, and
uses the protein to heal or rebuild tissue. Sadly, the exact
opposite is the case. Disease organisms feed and multiply on the
toxic waste products of misdigestion, and the body is unable to
digest well when it is weak or ill.

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

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

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

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

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

Preventative Fasting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Chapter Four

Colon Cleansing



From The Hygienic Dictionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most Diseases Cure Themselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Repugnant Bowel

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

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

A typical diseased colon

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

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

A Healthy Colon

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

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

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

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

What Is Constipation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Development Of My Own Constipation

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

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

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

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

Rapid Relief From Colon Cleansing

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

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

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

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

Enemas Versus Colonics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Give Yourself An Enema

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curing With Enemas

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

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

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



Chapter Five

Diet and Nutrition



From The Hygienic Dictionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Confusions About Diets and Foods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fundamental Principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Your Ideal Dietary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Comedy

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

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

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

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

The Organic Versus Chemical Feud

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

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

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

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

The Poor Start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butter, Margarine and Fats in General.

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

Composition of Oils

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you buy vegetable oil, even olive oil, get small bottles so you
use them up before the oil has much time being exposed to air (as
you use the oil air fills the bottle) or, if you buy olive oil in a
large can to save money, immediately upon opening it, transfer the
oil to pint jars filled to the very brim to exclude virtually all
air, and seal the jars securely. In either case, keep now-opened,
in-use small bottles of oil in the refrigerator because rancidity is
simply the combination of oil with oxygen from the air and this
chemical reaction is accelerated at warmer temperatures and slowed
greatly at cold ones.

Chemical reactions typically double in speed with every 10 degrees
C. increase in temperature. So oil goes rancid about six times
faster at normal room temperature than it does in the fridge. If
you'll think about the implications of this data you'll see there
are two powerful reasons not to fry food. One, the food is coated
with oil and gains in satiety value at the expense of becoming
relatively indigestible and productive of toxemia. Secondly, if
frying occurs at 150 degrees Centigrade and normal room temperature
is 20 degrees Centigrade, then oil goes rancid 2 to the 13th power
faster in the frying pan, or about 8,200 times faster. Heating oil
for only ten minutes in a hot skillet induces as much rancidity as
about 6 weeks of sitting open and exposed to air at room
temperature. Think about that the next time you're tempted to eat
something from a fast food restaurant where the hot fat in the deep
fryer has been reacting with oxygen all day, or even for several
days.

Back to butter, where we started. If you must have something
traditionally northern European on your bread, you are far better
off to use butter, not margarine. However, Mediterranean peoples
traditionally dip their bread in high-quality extra-virgin olive oil
that smells and tastes like olives. Its delicious, why not try it.
But best yet, put low-sugar fruit preserves on your toast or develop
a taste for dry toast. Probably the finest use for butter is melted
over steamed vegetables. This way only small quantities are needed
and the fat goes on something that is otherwise very easy to digest
so its presence will not produce as many toxins in the digestive
tract.

Milk, Meat, And Other Protein Foods

Speaking of butter, how about milk? The dairy lobby is very powerful
in North America. Its political clout and campaign contributions
have the governments of both the United States and especially that
of Canada eating out of its hand (literally), providing the dairy
industry with price supports. Because of these price supports, in
Canada cheese costs half again more than it does in the United
States. The dairy lobby is also very cozy with the medical
profession so licensed nutritionists constantly bombard us with
"drink milk" and "cheese is good for you" propaganda.

And people naturally like dairy foods. They taste good and are
fat-rich with a high satiety value. Dairy makes you feel full for a
long time. Dairy is also high in protein; protein is hard to digest
and this too keeps one feeling full for a long time. But many
people, especially those from cultures who traditionally
(genetically) didn't have dairy cows, particularly Africans, Asians
and Jews, just do not produce the enzymes necessary to digest cows
milk. Some individuals belonging to these groups can digest goats
milk. Some can't digest any kind except human breast milk. And some
can digest fermented milk products like yogurt and kiefer. Whenever
one eats a protein food that is not fully digestible, it putrefies
in the digestive tract, with all the bad consequences previously
described.

But no one, absolutely no one can fully digest pasteurized cows
milk, which is what most people use because they have been made to
fear cow-transmitted diseases and/or they are forced to use
pasteurized dairy products by health authorities. I suspect drinking
pasteurized milk or eating cheese made from pasteurized milk is one
of the reasons so many people develop allergic reactions to milk.
Yet many states do not allow unpasteurized dairy to be sold, even
privately between neighbors. To explain all this, I first have to
explain a bit more about protein digestion in general and then talk
about allergies and how they can be created.

Proteins are long, complex molecules, intricate chains whose
individual links are amino acids. Proteins are the very stuff of
life. All living protoplasm, animal or plant, is largely composed of
proteins. There are virtually an infinite number of different
proteins but all are composed of the same few dozen amino acids
hooked together in highly variable patterns. Amino acids themselves
are highly complex organic molecules too. The human body
custom-assembles all its proteins from amino acids derived from
digesting protein foods, and can also manufacture small quantities
of certain of its own amino acids to order, but there are eight
amino acids it cannot make and these are for that reason called
essential amino acids. Essential amino acids must be contained in
the food we eat. .

Few proteins are water soluble. When we eat proteins the digestive
apparatus must first break them down into their water-soluble
components, amino acids, so these can pass into the blood and then
be reassembled into the various proteins the body uses. The body has
an interesting mechanism to digest proteins; it uses enzymes. An
enzyme is like the key for a lock. It is a complex molecule that
latches to a protein molecule and then breaks it apart into amino
acids. Then the enzyme finds yet another protein molecule to free.
Enzymes are efficient, reusable many many times.

Enzymes that digest proteins are effective only in the very acid
environment of the stomach, are manufactured by the pancreas and are
released when protein foods are present. The stomach then releases
hydrochloric acid and churns away like a washing machine, mixing the
enzymes and the acid with the proteins until everything has
digested.

So far so good. That's how its supposed to be. But. Dr. Henry
Bieler, who wrote Food Is Your Best Medicine, came up with the
finest metaphor I know of to explain how protein digestion goes
wrong. He compared all proteins to the white of an egg (which is
actually a form of protein). When raw and liquid, the long chains of
albumen (egg white) proteins are in their natural form. However,
cook the egg and the egg white both solidifies and becomes smaller.
What has happened is that the protein chains have shriveled and
literally tied themselves into knots. Once this happens, pancreatic
enzymes no longer fit and cannot separate all the amino acids.
Cooked proteins may churn and churn and churn in the presence of
acid and pancreatic enzymes but they will not digest completely.
Part becomes water soluble; part does not.

But, indigestible protein is still subject to an undesirable form of
consumption in the gut. Various bacteria make their home in our
airless, warm intestines. Some of these live on protein. In the
process of consuming undigested proteins, they release highly toxic
substances. They poison us.

What is true of the white of an egg is also true of flesh foods and
dairy. Raw meat and raw fish are actually easily digestible foods
and if not wrongly combined will not produce toxemia in a person
that still has a strong pancreas. However, eating raw meat and fish
can be a dicey proposition, both for reasons of cultural sensibility
(people think it is disgusting) and because there may be living
parasites in uncooked flesh that can attack, sicken and even kill
people. It has been argued that a healthy stomach containing its
proper degree of acidity provides an impenetrable barrier to
parasites. Perhaps. But how many of us are that healthy these days?
Cooked flesh and fish seems more delicious to our refined, civilized
sensibilities, but are a poor food.

In my household we have no moral objection to eating meat. We do
have an ethical objection in that meat eating does not contribute to
our health. But still, we do eat it. A few times a year, for
traditional celebrations we may invite the children over and cook a
turkey. A few times for Thanksgiving when the children were going
through their holier-than-thou vegetarian stage, I purchased the
largest, thickest porterhouse steak I could find at the natural meat
store and ate it medium-rare, with relish. It was delicious. It made
me feel full for hours and hours and hours. I stayed flat on the
couch and groggily worked on digesting it all evening. After that
I'd had enough of meat to last for six months.

When milk is pasteurized, the proteins in it are also altered in
structure. Not so severely as egg white is altered by cooking
because pasteurization happens at a lower temperature. But altered
none the less. And made less digestible. Pasteurizing also makes
milk calcium far less assimilable. That's ironic because so many
people are drinking milk because they fear they need more calcium to
avoid osteoporosis and to give their children good teeth. What
pasteurized milk actually does to their children is make them
calcium deficient and makes the children toxic, provoking many
colds, ear infections, sinusitis, inflammations of the tonsils and
lung infections, and, induces an allergy to milk in the children.

The Development Of Allergies

There are three ways a body can become allergic. (1) It can have a
genetic predisposition for a specific allergy to start with. (2) It
can be repeatedly exposed to an irritating substance such as pollen
when, at the same time, the body's mechanism for dealing with
irritations is weakened. Generally weak adrenals causes this because
the adrenal's job is to produce hormones that reduce inflammation.
Once the irritating substance succeeds at producing a significant
inflammation, a secondary reaction may be set up, called an allergy.
Once established, an allergy is very hard to get rid of.

(3) in a way very similar to the second, but instead of being
irritated by an external substance, it is irritated by repeatedly
failing to properly, fully digest something. Pasteurized milk for
example, basically impossible to completely digest even in its
low-fat form, often sets up an allergy that applies to other forms
of cows milk, even raw, unpasteurized cows milk or yogurt. Eating
too much white flour can eventually set off a wheat allergy. My
husband developed a severe allergy to barley after drinking too much
home-brewed beer; he also became highly intolerant to alcohol. Now
he has allergic reactions to both alcohol and barley. And gets far
sicker from drinking beer (two separate allergies) than from wheat
beer, hard liquor or wine (only one allergy).

Eating too much of any single food, or repeatedly eating too much of
an otherwise very good food at one time, can eventually overwhelm
the body's ability to digest it fully. Then, the finest whole food
products may set up an allergic reaction. Worse, this allergic
reaction itself subsequently prevents proper digestion even when
only moderate quantities are eaten.

An allergy may not be recognized as an allergy because it may not
manifest as the instant skin rash or stuffy nose or swollen glands
or sticky eyes. that people usually think of when they think
"allergic reaction." Food allergies can cause many kinds of
symptoms, from sinusitis to psychosis, from asthma to arthritis,
from hyperactivity to depression, insomnia to narcolepsy--and
commonly the symptoms don't manifest immediately after eating.
Frequently, allergic reactions are so low grade as to be
unnoticeable and may not produce an observable condition until many
years of their grinding down the vital force has passed. When the
condition finally appears it is hard to associate it with some food
that has been consumed for years, apparently with impunity.

Thus it is that many North Americans have developed allergies to
wheat, dairy, soy products (because many soy foods are very hard to
digest), corn and eggs. These are such common, widespread,
frequently found allergies that anyone considering a dietary cause
of their complaints might just cut all these foods out of the diet
for a few weeks just to see what happens. And individuals may be
allergic to anything from broccoli to bacon, strawberries to bean
sprouts. Unraveling food allergies sometimes requires the deductions
of a Sherlock Holmes.

However, food allergies are very easy to cure if you can get the
suffered to take the medicine. Inevitably, allergic reactions vanish
in about five days of abstinence. Anyone with sufficient
self-discipline to water fast for five days can cure themselves of
all food allergies at one step. Then, by a controlled, gradual
reintroduction of foods, they can discover which individual items
cause trouble. See Coca's Pulse Test in the Appendix where you'll
find step-by-step instructions for allergy testing that are less
rigorous, not requiring a preliminary fast.

Flour, And Other Matters Relating To Seeds

One of the largest degradations to human health was caused by the
roller mill. This apparently profitable machine permitted the miller
to efficiently separate wheat flour into three components: bran,
germ and endosperm. Since bread made without bran and germ is
lighter and appears more "upper class" it became instantly popular.
Flour without germ and bran also had an industrial application--it
could be stored virtually forever without being infested by insects
because white flour does not contain enough nutrition to support
life. Most health conscious people are aware that white flour
products won't support healthful human life either.

Essentially, white flour's effect on humans is another demonstration
of Health = Nutrition / Calories. When the bran and germ are
discarded, remaining are the calories and much of the protein,
lacking are many vitamins and minerals and other vital nutritional
substances.

Whole wheat bread has been called the staff of life. In ages past,
healthy cultures have made bread the predominant staple in their
diet. Does that mean you can just go to the bakery and buy whole
grain bread, or go to the healthfood store and buy organically grown
whole wheat flour, bake your own, and be as healthy as the ancients?
Sorry, the answer is almost certainly no. There are pitfalls, many
of them, waiting for the unwary.

White flour has one other advantage over whole wheat flour. It not
only remains free of insect infestation, it doesn't become stale
(meaning rancid). In the wheat germ (where the embryo resides) there
is considerable oil, containing among other things, about the best
natural source of vitamin E. This oil is highly unsaturated and once
the seed is ground the oil goes rancid in a matter of days. Whole
wheat flour kept on the unrefrigerated shelf of the store is almost
certainly rancid. A lot of its other vitamin content has been
oxidized too. If the wheat flour had flowed directly from the
grinder into an airtight sack and from there directly to the
freezer, if it had been flash frozen and kept extremely cold, it
might have a storage life of some months. Of course that was not the
case. Maybe you're lucky and your healthfood store is one of the
very few that has its own small-scale flour mill and grinds daily.
Probably not.

How about your baker's whole wheat bread? Where does the baker get
flour? From the wholesaler's or distributor's warehouse! In fifty
pound kraftpaper sacks! How much time had elapsed from milling to
wholesaler to baker to baking? The answer has to be in the order of
magnitude of weeks. And it might be months. Was the flour stored
frozen? Or airtight? Of course not.

If you want bread made from freshly ground flour you are almost
certainly have to grind and bake it yourself. Is it worth the
trouble? You bet. Once you've tasted real bread you'll instantly see
by comparison what stale, rancid whole wheat flour tastes like.
Freshly ground flour makes bread that can be the staff of life and
can enormously upgrade your health--if the wheat you use is any good.

But before we talk about wheat quality, a more few words of warning.
If you think wheat goes rancid rapidly, rye is even worse. Rye flour
goes bad so fast that when you buy it in the store it usually is the
rye equivalent of white wheat flour. The germ has been removed. The
bag may not say so. But it probably has. If you are going to make
rye breads, even more reason to grind your own. Corn meal from the
grocery store has usually been degerminated too. If it hasn't been,
the oil in the seed's germ has probably gone rancid.

Grinding flour at home is easy these days. There is an abundance of
at-home milling products and no shortage of hype about them. You'll
find staunch advocates of stone mills. These produce the
finest-textured flour, but are costly. The sales pitch is that
stones grind at low temperature and do not damage the oils (remember
the development of rancidity is a function of temperature) or the
vitamins, which are also destroyed at high temperature. This
assertion is half true. If you are going to store your flour it is
far better to grind it cool. However, if you are, as we do, going to
immediately bake your flour, what difference does it make if it gets
a little warm before baking. That only accelerates the action of the
yeast.

On the negative side, stone mills grind slowly and are very fussy
about which grains they will grind. If the cereal is a bit moist or
if the seed being ground is a little bit oily, the mill becomes
instantly blocked.

Steel burr mills grind fast and coarsely and are inexpensive. Coarse
flour makes heavy bread. The metal grinding faces tend to wear out
and have to be replaced occasionally--if they can be replaced. Breads
on the heavy side are still delicious; for many years I made bread
with an inexpensive steel burr mill attachment that came with my
juicer.

Some steel burr mills will also grind oily seed like sesame and
sunflower. However, oily seeds can be ground far more easily
half-a-cup at a time in a little inexpensive electric spice/coffee
mill, the sort with a single fast-spinning propeller.

I currently think the best compromise are hammermills. The grain
dribbles into a chamber full of fast-spinning teeth that literally
pound the grain into powder. Since air flows through with the grain
the flour is not heated very much. This type of mill is small, very
fast, intermediate in price between steel mills and stone mill,
lasts a long time, but when grinding, sounds like a Boeing 747 about
to take off. It is essential to wear hearing protectors when using
it.

Awareness of bread quality is growing. One excellent new U.S.
business, called Great Harvest Bakery is a fast-growing national
franchise chain. They bake and sell only whole grain breads; all
their wheat flour is freshly ground daily on the premises in the
back. Unfortunately, as of the writing of this book, they do not
grind their rye flour but bring it in sacks. I can't recommend their
rye breads. The founder of Great Harvest is a knowledgeable buyer
who fully understands my next topic, which is that wheat is not
wheat.

There are great differences between hard bread wheats; being
organically grown is no cure all for making good or nutritious
bread. Great Harvest understands this and uses top quality grain
that is also Organic.

When I first stated making my own bread from my own at-home-ground
flour I was puzzled by variations in the dough. Sometimes the bread
rose well and was spongy after baking like I wanted it to be.
Sometimes it kneaded stickily and ended up flat and crumbly like a
cake. Since I had done everything the same way except that I may
have bought my wheat berries from different healthfood stores, I
began to investigate the subject of wheat quality.

The element in the cereal that forms the rubbery sponge in risen
bread so it doesn't crumble and rises high without collapsing, is
gluten. The word glue derives from gluten. The gluten content of
various wheats varies. Bread bakers use "hard wheat" because of its
high gluten content. Gluten is a protein and gluten comprises most
of the protein in bread wheat; the protein content and the gluten
content are almost identical.

Try this. Ask your healthfood store buyer or owner what the protein
content is of the hard red wheat seeds they're selling. You'll
almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost
certainly be, "we have Organic and conventional." Demand that the
store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and
then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the
answer will be the same--I sell Organic or conventional hard red
wheat. Period. When I got these non-answers I looked further and
discovered that hard bread wheats run from about 12 percent protein
to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do with
the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during
the season), and almost nothing to do with Organic or conventional.

This difference also has everything to do with how your dough
behaves and how your bread comes out. And how well your bread
nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent
loaf--fourteen percent is generally considered #2 quality and
comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the
financial news that a bushel of wheat is selling for a certain
price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots and pay
far higher prices for more protein.

We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at
all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent wheat flour and the
dough becomes very heavy, won't rise, and after baking, crumbles. So
I kept looking for better grain and finally discovered a
knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious
baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an
assayed protein content and sold it by the 50 pound sack. When I
asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or
seventeen percent protein depending on whether you wanted hard red
spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. Organic or conventional? I
persisted. No, she said. High protein!

So, I said to myself, since protein content is a function of soil
fertility and since my body needs protein, I figured I am better off
eating the best quality wheat, pesticide/herbicide residues (if
there are any) be damned. Think about it! The difference between
seventeen percent and fourteen percent protein is about 25 percent.
That percentage difference is the key threshold of nutritional
deficiency that makes teeth fall out. We can't afford to accept 25%
degradations in our nutritional quality in something that we eat
every day and that forms the very basis of our dietary.

Please understand here that I am not saying that high protein wheats
can't be grown organically. They certainly can. The founder of Great
Harvest Bakery performs a valuable service locating and securing
high-protein lots of organically grown wheats for his outlets. But
often as not Organic products are no more nourishing than those
grown with chemicals. Until the buyers at Organic whole food
wholesalers get better educated about grain, obtaining one's
personal milling stock from them will be a dicey proposition.

Sometimes Organic cereal can be far worse than conventional. To make
a cereal Organic is a negative definition; if it hasn't had
chemicals, then its Organic. Grain is one of the few foods that will
still produce economic yields of low quality seed on extremely
infertile soil or when half-smothered in weeds because herbicides
weren't used for reasons of ideological purity. Vegetables will
hardly produce anything under those conditions; carelessly grown
fruits and vegetables are inevitably small, misshapen, unmarketable.
But seed cleaning equipment can remove the contamination of weed
seeds in cereal grains (at a cost.)

The price the farmer receives for Organic cereal grain is much
higher, so it is possible to accept rather low yields or expend more
money for cleaning out high levels of weed seeds from the field-run
harvest, and still make a good profit. A lousy Organic cereal crop
like this might even make a higher profit because the farmer has
been spared the expense of fertilization, of rotation, of weed
control. I remember once I bought a sack of Organic whole oats that
were the smallest, most shriveled, bitterest oats I've ever tried to
eat. We ended up throwing out that tiny, light (lacking density)
seed in favor of using the "conventional" whole oats that were
plump, heavy and sweet.

Wheat is not the only cereal that is damaged by industrial milling.
So are oats. Most consumers have never seen whole oats; they look
very much like wheat berries. But rolled oats become rancid and
stale on the shelf much like wheat flour on the shelf.

Another pitfall about using whole grains is that to be nutritious
they must still be fresh enough to sprout vigorously. A seed is a
package of food surrounding an embryo. The living embryo is waiting
for the right conditions (temperature and moisture) to begin
sprouting. Sprouting means the embryo begins eating up stored food
and making a plant out of it. All foods are damaged by exposure to
oxygen, so to protect the embryo's food supply, the seed is
surrounded by a virtually airtight seed coat that permits only
enough oxygen to enter for the embryo's respiration (yes, seed
breaths slowly). Often the embryo is located at the edge of the seed
and has its own air intake port. When the seed coat is removed or
damaged, the innards are exposed to air and begin deteriorating
rapidly. In the case of oats, especially rapidly, because oats are
the only grass-based cereal that contains large quantities of
oil--five percent oil, more or less. That's why oats "stick to your
ribs." Rolled oats become stale and lose their flavor (and
nutritional content) and perhaps become rancid very rapidly. So we
make porridge from whole oat groats that we coarsely grind to grits
(steel-cut oats) in an electric seed/spice mill just before cooking.

It is not easy to cook oat grits. They take a lot longer than rolled
oats and if not done exactly to the recipe I'm about to give you,
will almost inevitably stick to the pot badly and may also froth
over and mess the stove. Here's how to cook them. Coarsely grind
(like corn meal) your whole oats until you have one cup of oat
grits. Bring exactly four cups of water (no salt) to a very hard
boil at your highest heat. You may add a handful of raisins. Light
or turn on a second, small-sized burner on the stove and set it as
low as possible. Into the fast boiling water, slowly pour the ground
oats, stirring continuously. Take about 30 seconds to pour it all or
you'll make clumps. Keep on the high heat until the water again
boils vigorously. Suddenly, the mixture will begin rising in the pot
and will try to pour all over the stove. This means it is all at
boiling temperature again. Quickly move the pot to the low burner;
that instantly stops the frothing. Then cover. Let the porridge cook
for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent sticking. Then,
keeping it covered, turn off the heat. They can be eaten at this
point but I think it is better to let the oats finish soaking on the
stove for at least two to four hours. Then reheat in a double
boiler, or warm in a microwave.

We usually start a pot of oats at bedtime for the next morning. See
why people prefer the convenience of using rolled oats? But once
you've eaten oats made right, you'll never prefer the flavor of
rolled oats again. And if the human body has any natural method of
assaying nutritional content, it is flavor.

Nutritionally, millet is almost the same story as oats. Millet seed
is protected by a very hard hull. Cooking unhulled millet is almost
impossible. After hours of boiling the small round seeds will still
be hard and the hulls remain entirely indigestible. Worse, the
half-round hulls (they split eventually) stick in your teeth. But
prehulled millet, sitting in the sack for weeks and months, loses a
lot of nutrition and tastes very second-rate compared to
freshly-hulled millet. It is possible to buy unhulled millet,
usually by special order from the health food distributor--if you'll
take a whole sack. Millet can be hulled at home in small batches.
Here's how we figured out how to do it. There probably are better
ways.

Using a cheap steel-burr flour mill, set the burrs just far enough
apart that the seed is ground to grits, but not flour. This pops the
hulls loose. An old mill with worn-out burrs works great for this
job. Then you have to get some hand seed cleaning screens just large
enough to pass the grits but not pass the hulls (most of them).
Window screen or other hardware cloths won't work. Seed cleaning
screens come in increments of 1/128 inch; we use a 6/64" round
screen. Other batches of millet might work better with a screen one
step larger or smaller. It will take you a little ingenuity to find
hand-held screens. They're used by seed companies and farmers to
clean small batches of seed for inspection and are usually about one
square foot in size with a quality wooden frame. Larger frames made
of the same screening material are used in big seed cleaning
machines. (The hulls could also be winnowed out by repeatedly
pouring the grit/hulls mixture back and forth between two buckets in
a gentle breeze.)

After you've screened out most of the hulls, the rest will rinse
out, floating off as you wash the grain prior to cooking. We never
hull more than enough millet for two or three meals and keep the
uncooked (unwashed) millet in the freezer in an airtight jar. It is
interesting how people will accept poor nutrition and its consequent
sickness as the price of convenience.

If you eat much buckwheat you should also figure out how to hull
(sometimes called groating) it yourself. Someone should write a
thorough book on the home milling of cereals. And perhaps sell the
equipment by mail. Probably would be a good little homestead
business.

Something else you need to keep in mind about seed. Even though the
embryo's food supply is protected by the seed coat, it still slowly
deteriorates, steadily oxidizing and losing nutritional value.
Eventually old seed looses the ability to sprout. The decline in
germination ability matches a decline in nutritional quality. Any
seed you are going to use for eating should possess the ability to
sprout, strongly and rapidly. (After you've comparatively sprouted a
few grain samples, you'll know what I mean by this.) Fortunately,
cereal grains usually sprout well for quite a few years after
harvest if they have been stored cool and dry. Eating dead or
near-dead seeds will help move you closer to the same condition
yourself.

Finally, one more warning about buying store bread. Salt-free bread
tastes "funny" to most people. It bakes fine, salt is not necessary
to the leavening process, but no bakery could stay in business
without salting their bread. The standard level of salt is two
percent by weight. That is quite a lot! Two percent equals one
teaspoonful per pound. I'll have more to say about the evils of salt
later on.

I imagine some of my readers are feeling a little overwhelmed by all
these warnings and "bewares ofs," and intricacies. They are used to
taking no responsibility for securing their own food supply quality
and have come to expect the "system" to protect them. I believe it
is not because of lack of government intervention, but because of
government intervention itself, our food system is very perverse.
Until our mass consciousness changes, if you wish to make yourself
and your family truly healthy, you are going to have to take charge
and become quite a discriminating shopper. Unconscious consumers are
on a rapid road to the total unconsciousness of death.

And again, let me remind you here that this one small book cannot
contain everything you should know. The bibliography at the end of
should become your guide to earning your post-graduate education in
nutritional health.

Freshness Of Fruits And Vegetables

Most people do not realize the crucial importance of freshness when
it comes to produce. In the same way that seeds gradually die,
fruits and vegetables go through a similar process as their
nutritional content gradually oxidizes or is broken down by the
vegetables own enzymes, but vegetables lose nutrition hundreds of
times more rapidly than cereals. Produce was recently part of a
living plant. It was connected to the vascular system of a plant and
with few exceptions, is not intended by nature to remain intact
after being cut. A lettuce or a zucchini was entirely alive at the
moment of harvest, but from that point, its cells begin to die. Even
if it is not yet attacked by bacteria, molds and fungi, its own
internal enzymes have begun breaking down its own substances.

Vegetables, especially leafy vegetables, are far more critical in
this respect than most ripe fruits. All, however, deteriorate much
like radioactive material; they have a sort of half-life. The
mineral content is stable, but in respect to the vitamins and
enzymes and other complex organic components, each time period or
"half life" results in the loss of half the nutrition. Suppose a
lettuce has a half life of 48 hours, two days after harvest only 50
percent of the original nutrition remains. After two more days, half
the remaining half is gone and only 25 percent is left. After two
more days half of that 25 percent is lost. Thus six days after
harvest and a lettuce contains only bout 12 percent of its original
nutrition. A two day half-life is only hypothetical. Those types of
produce I classify as very perishable probably do have a half-life
of from 36 to 48 hours. Moderately perishable produce has a half
life of about 72 hours; durable types of produce have half lives of
96 hours or longer.

Vegetable Storage Potential

Very Perishable   Moderately Perishable   Durable
lettuce           zucchini                apple
spinach           eggplant                squash
Chinese cabbage   sweet peppers           oranges
kale              broccoli                cabbage
endive            cauliflower             carrot
peaches           apricots                lemons
parsley                                   beets

The half life of produce can be lengthened by lowering its
temperature. For that reason, sophisticated produce growers usually
use hydrocooling. This process dumps a just-cut vegetable into icy
water within minutes of being harvested, lowering core temperature
to a few degrees above freezing almost immediately. When cut
vegetables are crated up at field temperatures, and stacks of those
crates are put in a cooler, it can take the inside of the stack 24
hours, or longer, to become chilled. Home gardeners should also
practice hydrocooling. Fill your sink with cold water and wash/soak
your harvest until it is thoroughly chilled before draining and
refrigerating it. Or, harvest your garden early in the morning when
temperatures are lowest.

Still, when you buy produce in the store it may have been sitting at
room temperature for hours or possibly days.

The bottom line here: fresh is equally as important as unsprayed or
organically grown!

The Real Truth About Salt And Sugar

First, let me remind certain food religionists: salt is salt is salt
is salt and sugar is sugar is sugar. There are no good forms of salt
and no good forms of sugar. Salt from a mine and salt from the sea
both have the same harmful effect; white sugar, natural brown sugar,
honey, molasses, corn syrup, maple syrup, whatever sweet have you.
All are sugars and all have the similar harmful effects. I know of
no harmless salt substitute that really tastes salty. Nutrisweet is
basically harmless to most people and can be used as a very
satisfactory replacement for sugars. A few people are unable to
tolerate nutrisweet, causing the anti-chemicalists to circulate much
anti-nutrisweet propaganda, but you should carefully consider this
thought before dismissing nutrisweet--there is almost no food
substance that some people are not allergic to or unable to digest.
The fact that nutrisweet is made in a chemical vat and the fact that
some cannot handle nutrisweet does not make it "of the devil."

And its not all black and white with the other items either. Sea
salt does have certain redeeming qualities not found in mined salt
and under certain very special conditions, eating small quantities
of salt may be acceptable. Similarly, some forms of sugar are not
quite as harmful as other forms, though all are harmful.

The primary health problem caused by table salt is not that it
contributes to high blood pressure in people with poor kidneys,
though it does that. It is not that eating salt ruins the kidneys;
salt probably does not do that. The real problem with salt is that
sodium chloride is an adrenal stimulant, triggering the release of
adrenal hormones, especially natural steroids that resist
inflammation. When these hormones are at high levels in the blood,
the person often feels very good, has a sense of well-being. Thus
salt is a drug! And like many drugs of its type, salt is a
habituating drug. However, we are so used to whipping our adrenals
with salt that we don't notice it. What we do notice is that we
think we like the taste of salted food and consider that food tastes
flat without it. But take away a person's salt shaker and they
become very uncomfortable. That's because the addict isn't getting
their regular dose.

What's wrong with repetitive adrenal whipping is that adrenal
fortitude is variable; many people's adrenals eventually fail to
respond to the prod of salt and the body begins to suffer from a
lack of adrenal hormones. Often those inheriting weak adrenals
manifest semi-failure in childhood. The consequence is that
ordinary, irritating substances begin causing severe irritation. The
person becomes allergic to pollen, dust, foods, animal danders, etc.
We see asthma, hay fever, sinusitis, etc. Though one can then
discover specific allergens and try to remove them from the
environment or diet, often this case can be solved far more easily
by complete withdrawal from all salt. This rests the adrenals and
they may recover their full function; almost certainly their
function will improve. The asthma, allergies and etc., gradually
vanish.

Most of us don't need to eat salt as a nutrient. There's enough
sodium in one dill pickle to run a human body for a year. There's
enough natural sodium in many types of vegetables to supply normal
needs without using table salt. Perhaps athletes or other hard
working people in the tropics eating deficient food grown on
leached-out depleted soils, people that sweat buckets day after day
may need a little extra sodium. Perhaps. Not having practiced in the
humid tropics myself, I have no definitive answer about this.

Unfortunately, the average American is entirely addicted to salt and
thinks food tastes lousy without it. To please the average consumer,
almost all prepared foods contain far too much salt for someone
suffering from exhausted adrenals. Interestingly, Canadians do not
like their foods nearly as salty as Americans, and prepared foods
like soups and the like in cans and packages that look just like the
ones in American supermarkets (though with French on the back panel)
have to be reformulated for our northern neighbors. I've observed
that Canadians are generally healthier than Americans in many
respects.

We would all be far better off consuming no salt at all. Those with
allergies or asthma should completely eliminate it for a month or
two and discover if that simple step doesn't pretty much cure them.
The trouble is that bakery bread is routinely two percent salt by
weight. Cheese is equally salted or even more so. Canned and frozen
prepared food products are all heavily salted. Restaurant meals are
always highly salted in the kitchen. If you want to avoid salt you
almost have to prepare everything yourself, bake your own bread,
abstain from cheese (though there are unsalted cheeses but even I
don't like the flavor of these), and abstain from restaurants. My
family has managed to eliminate all salt from our own kitchen except
for that in cheese, and we eat cheese rather moderately.

Sugar is a high-caloric non-food with enormous liabilities. First,
from the viewpoint of the universal formula for health, no form of
non-artificial sweetener carries enough nutrients with it to justify
the number of calories it contains, not even malt extract. White
refined sugar contains absolutely no nutrients at all; the "good" or
"natural" sweets also carry so little nutrition as to be next to
useless. Sweets are so far over on the bad end of the Health =
Nutrition / Calories scale that for this reason alone they should be
avoided.

However, healthy people can usually afford a small amount of sin;
why not make it sweets? In small quantity, sugars are probably the
easiest indiscretion to digest and the least damaging to the organ
systems. Although, speaking of sin, as Edgar Guest, the peoples'
poet, once so wisely quipped, (and my husband agrees) "Candy is
dandy, but liquor is quicker." Sugar is a powerful drug! People who
abuse sweets set up a cycle of addiction that can be very hard to
break. It starts when the body tries to regulate blood sugar. Kicked
up to high levels by eating sugar, the pancreas releases insulin.
But that is not the end of the chain reaction. Insulin regulates
blood sugar levels but also raises brain levels of an amino acid
called tryptophan. Tryptophan is the raw material the brain uses to
manufacture a neurotransmitter called serotonin. And serotonin plays
a huge role in regulating mood. Higher brain levels of serotonin
create a feeling of well-being. Eating sugar gives a person a
chemical jolt of happiness. Heavy hits of high-glycemic index starch
foods are also rapidly converted to sugar. So don't give your kids
sweets! Or huge servings of starch to mellow them out. It is wise
not to start out life a happiness addict with a severe weight
problem.

Now that the chemistry of sugar addiction is understood, there
currently is a movement afoot to cast the obese as helpless victims
of serotonin imbalances and to "treat" them with the same kinds of
serotonin-increasing happy drugs (like Prozac) that are becoming so
popular with the psychiatric set. This promises to be a multiple
billion dollar business that will capture all the money currently
flowing into other dieting systems and bring it right back to the
AMA/drug company/FDA nexus. The pitch is that when serotonin levels
are upped, the desire to eat drops and so is weight. This approach
is popular with the obese because it requires no personal
responsibility other than taking a pill that really does make them
feel happy. However, the same benefit can be had by strict adherence
to a low-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Eventually, the brain chemistry
rebalances itself and serotonin levels stabilize.

Glycemic Index

(compared to glucose, which is 100)

Grains
all bran             51
brown rice           66
buckwheat            54
cornflakes           80
oatmeal              49
shred. wheat         67
muesli               66
white rice           72
white spagetti       50
whole wheat spagetti 42
sweet corn           59

Fruits
apples               39
bananas              62
cherries             23
grapefruit           26
grapes               45
orange juice         46
peach                29
orange               40
pear                 34
plum                 25
raisins              64

Vegetables

baked beans          40
beets                64
black-eyed peas      33
carrots              92
chic peas            36
parsnips             97
potato chips         51
baked potato         98
sweet potato         48
yams                 51
peas                 51

Baked Goods
pastry               59
sponge cake          46
white bread          69
w/w bread            72
whole rye bread      42

Sugars
fructose             20
glucose             100
honey                87
maltose             110
sucrose              59

Nuts
peanuts              13

Meats
sausage              28
fish sticks          38

Dairy Products
yogurt               36
whole milk           34
skim milk            32

Remember, the pancreas has another major service to perform for the
body: secreting digestive enzymes to aid in the digestion of
proteins. When the diet contains either too much protein or too much
sugar and/or high-glycemic index starch foods, the overworked
pancreas begins to be less and less efficient at maintaining both of
these functions.

Sometimes a stressed-out pancreas gets overactive and does too good
a job lowering the blood sugar, producing hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia
is generally accompanied by unpleasant symptoms such as fatigue,
dizziness, blurred vision, irritability, confusion, headache, etc.
This condition is typically alleviated by yet another hit of sugar
which builds an addiction not only to sugar, but to food in general.
If the hypoglycemic then keeps on eating sugar to relieve the
symptoms of sugar ingestion, eventually the pancreas becomes
exhausted, producing an insulin deficiency, called diabetes. Medical
doctors treat diabetes with insulin supplements either oral or
intramuscular plus a careful diet with very low and measured amounts
of sugar and starch for the remainder of the persons inevitably
shortened and far less pleasant life. However, sometimes diabetes
can be controlled with diet alone, though medical doctors have not
had nearly as much success with this approach as talented
naturopaths. Sometimes, long fasting can regenerate a pancreas. It
is far better to avoid creating this disease!

The dietary management of hypoglycemia requires that not only
refined but also unrefined sugars and starches with a high glycemic
index be removed from the diet. (The glycemic index measures the
ease with which the starch is converted into glucose in the body,
and estimates the amount of insulin needed to balance it out.) This
means no sugar, no honey, no white flour, no whole grains sweetened
with honey, no sweet fruits such as watermelons, bananas, raisins,
dates or figs. Potatoes are too readily converted into sugar.
Jerusalem artichokes are a good substitute.

People with hypoglycemia can often control their symptoms with
frequent small meals containing vegetable protein every two hours.
When a non-sweet fruit is eaten such as an apple, it should be eaten
with some almonds or other nut or seed that slows the absorption of
fruit sugar. Hypoglycemics can improve their condition with vitamins
and food supplements. See the next chapter.

Allergies to foods and environmental irritants are frequently
triggered by low blood sugar. Mental conditions are also triggered
by low blood sugar levels, frequently contributing to or causing a
cycle of acting out behavior accompanied by destruction of property
and interpersonal violence, as well as psychosis and bouts of
depression. It is not possible to easily deal with the resulting
behavior problems unless the hypoglycemia is controlled.
Unfortunately most institutions such as mental hospitals and jails
serve large amounts of sugar and starch and usually caffeinated
beverages, with a high availability of soda pop, candy, and
cigarettes at concessions. If the diet were drastically improved,
the drugs given to control behavior in mental hospitals would be
much more effective at a lower dose, or unnecessary.

The insulin-cycle overworked pancreas may eventually not be able to
secrete enough enzymes to allow for the efficient digestion of foods
high in protein. As stated earlier, poor protein digestion leads to
a highly toxic condition from putrefied protein in the intestines.
This condition is alleviated by eliminating animal proteins from the
diet and taking digestive aids such as pancreatin pills with meals
to assist in the digestion of vegetable proteins.

Food Combining And "Healthfood Junkfood."

This brings us to a topic I call healthfood junkfood. Many people
improve their diet, eliminating meat and chemicalized food in favor
of whole grains and organically grown foods, but they then proceed
to make these otherwise good foods into virtual junkfood by
preparing them incorrectly. In my travels, I've noticed this same
thing happens everywhere on Earth. What should be health-producing
dietaries are ruined by frying, salting and sugaring.

Healthfood junkfoods include organically grown potato chips deep
fried in cold pressed organic unsaturated canola oil (made rancid by
frying) sprinkled with natural sea salt; organically grown oat and
nut granola roasted with cold-pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid
by roasting) hideously sweetened with honey; carrot cake made with
rancid whole wheat flour, cold pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid
by baking), honey, and cream cheese (salted); whole wheat cookies
(stale, rancid flour) sweetened with honey, made with vegetable oil
baked at high heat (rancid); whole wheat pizza vegetarian style with
lots of soy cheese; whole wheat pizza vegan style with lots of real
raw milk cheese; organically grown corn chips deep fried in cold
pressed vegetable oil with or without natural sea salt, yogurts made
from powdered milk without an active culture of beneficial bacteria
and covered with highly sugared fruits, etc. These foods may well
represent an improvement over the average American diet, but they
still are not healthy foods, and should never be used in a diet for
a sick person. Nor are they worthy of a person attempting to
maximize health.

The problem with healthfood junkfoods is not their major
ingredients, but how they were combined and processed and
adulterated. Remember, fats, animal or vegetable, subjected to high
heat become indigestible and toxic and make anything they're cooked
with indigestible; salt is a toxic drug; cheese, hard enough to
digest as it is, when raised to high temperatures as it is when
making pizza, becomes virtually indigestible and cheese inevitably
contains a lot of butterfat which, though saturated animal fat, when
raised to high temperatures, still becomes slightly rancid. And all
these foods represent indigestible combinations.

My clients almost never believe me when I first explain the idea of
food combining. They think if it goes in one end, comes out the
other, and they don't feel any unpleasant symptoms in between, then
it was digested. But bad food combinations have a cumulative
degenerative effect over a long period of time. When the symptoms
arrive the victim never associates the food combination with the
symptom because it seems to them that they've always been eating the
food.

Mainstream nutritionists have brainwashed the public into thinking
that we should have a representative serving from each of the "four
basic food groups" at each and every meal, plus a beverage and a
desert. Or, as my husband Steve is fond of quipping, a "balanced
meal" has four colors on every plate: something red, something
green, something white and something yellow. But the balanced meal
is a gastronomic catastrophe that can only be processed by the very
young with high digestive vitality, the exceptionally vital of any
age, people with cast iron stomachs which usually refers to their
good heredity, and those who are very physically active.

Few seem to realize that each type of food requires specific and
different digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach, and intestine.
Carbohydrates, fats, proteins--each requires differing acid or
alkaline environments in order to be digested. Proteins require an
acid environment. Starch digestion requires an alkaline environment.
When foods in complex combinations are presented to the stomach all
together, like a meal with meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, bread,
butter, a glass of milk, plus a starchy sweet desert, followed by
coffee or tea, the stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine are
overwhelmed, resulting in the fermentation of the sugars and
starches, and the putrefaction of the proteins, and poor digestion
of the whole. It is little wonder that most people feel so tired
after a large meal and need several cups of strong coffee to be able
to even get up from the table. They have just presented their
digestive tract with an immensely difficult and for some an
impossible task.

For the most efficient digestion, the body should be presented with
one simple food at a time, the one bowl concept, easily achieved by
adherence to the old saying, "one food at a meal is the ideal." An
example of this approach would be eating fruits for breakfast, a
plain cereal grain for lunch, and vegetables for supper. If you
can't eat quite that simply, then proper food combining rules should
be followed to minimize digestive difficulty, maximize the
adsorption of nutrients from your food, and reduce or eliminate the
formation of toxemia, and of course foul gas.

In general, fruit should be eaten alone unless you happen to be
hypoglycemic or diabetic in which case fruit should be eaten with
small quantities of a vegetable protein such as nuts, or yogurt
and/or cheese if able to digest dairy. Starches should be eaten with
vegetables, which means that a well combined meal would include a
grain such as rice, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, corn,
wheat, rye, oats, spelt, potatoes, or starchy winter squash combined
with raw or cooked vegetables. Protein foods such as meat, eggs,
beans, lentils, tofu, split peas, should be combined with
vegetables, raw or cooked. But protein should never be combined with
starches. The most popular North American snacks and meals always
have a starch/protein combination, for example: meat and potatoes,
hamburger in a bun, hot dog with bun, burrito with meat or cheese,
meat sandwiches, etc. It is little wonder that intestinal gas is
accepted as normal, and that over time these hard to digest
combinations eventually cause health problems that demand attention.

Another sure fire way to ruin any food, including the very best
available is to eat in the presence of negative emotions generated
by yourself or others. Negative emotions include fear, anger,
frustration, envy, resentment, etc. The digestive tract is
immediately responsive to stress and or negative thoughts. It
becomes paralyzed in negative emotional states; any foods eaten are
poorly digested, causing toxemia.

It is natural for a person who has lost a loved one or suffered a
great loss of any kind to lose their appetite for a period of time.
This reaction is pro-survival, because while grieving, the body is
griped by powerful negative emotions. There are people who, under
stress or when experiencing a loss, eat ravenously in an attempt to
comfort themselves. If this goes on for long the person can expect
to create a serious illness of some kind.

Individual sensitivity to this type of overeating is dependent upon
genetics and personality and who is generating the negative
emotions. Self generated negative emotions are very difficult to
avoid. If you are unable to change your own emotional tone or that
of others around you, then it is important to eat very lightly, eat
only easily digested foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, raw
juices, steamed vegetables, and small servings of whole grains, nuts
and seeds.

Diets To Heal The Critically Ill

A critically ill person is someone who could expire at any moment;
therapeutic interventions are racing against death. Can the body
repair itself enough before some essential function ceases
altogether? If there already exists too much damage to vital organs
the person will die. If there remains sufficient organ function to
support life, enough vital force to power those functions, and a
will to live, the body may heal itself if helped by the correct
therapeutic approach. But the therapy does not do the healing; the
body does that by itself--if it can. This reality is also true of
allopathic medicine.

I believe fasting is the therapy that almost invariably gives a
critically ill person their very best chance of recovery. If a
patient dies while fasting they almost certainly would have died
anyway, and if death comes while fasting, it will be more
comfortable, with less pain, and with more mental clarity.

Critically ill people may have, among other things, any of the
following diagnoses: advanced cancer, advanced aids, heart failure,
very high blood pressure, kidney failure, advanced liver disease,
advanced emphysema, pneumonia or other catastrophic infections,
especially those that seem unresponsive to antibiotics, strokes,
emboli, sclerotic vessels as found in arteriosclerosis, severe nerve
degeneration interfering with nerve transmission to vital organs.

Treating the critically ill does not have to be an all or nothing,
ideological choice between holistic medicine and AMA style medicine.
It is important for the critically ill and their families to know
that if they use standard medical treatment such as drugs or
surgery, these measures can and should be combined with natural
healing methods. It is always desirable to quit all addicting
substances, start a whole foods diet, (as light as possible), and
add meganutrition (supplements) to the medical doctor's treatments.
Few medical doctors are so arrogantly partisan as to assert that
natural measures will do any harm as long as the MD is still allowed
to prescribe as they please.

Holistic support will not only lessen the side effects of the
medical treatments but will speed up healing and often reduce the
required dose of prescribed drugs. I have had several clients with
cancer who chose to have surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but
stayed on a raw food diet and took high doses of supplements
throughout the treatment. These people amazed the attending
physician by feeling good with little if any fatigue, no hair loss,
or flu symptoms. The same can be true of other conditions.

Food In The Order Of Digestive Difficulty

Individual digestive weaknesses and allergies are not taken into
account in this list.

Hard To Digest: Meat, fish, chicken, eggs (if cooked), all legumes
including soy products, peanuts and peanut butter, beans, split
peas, lentils, chick peas, dairy products such as cheese, milk,
butter milk, nuts and seeds and their butters.

Intermediate: all grains--quinoa, amaranth, millet, spelt, rye,
wheat, oats, barley.

Fairly Easy: Brussels sprouts, green beans, green peas, broccoli,
cauliflower, raw cultured milk products, asparagus, cabbage, sprouts
especially bean sprouts, kale, other leafy greens.

Very Easy: fruits, vegetable juices, fruit juices, broth (clear).

No Effort: herb tea, water.

Ethyl always comes to my mind when I think of how much healing power
can still be left in a dying body. She (accompanied by her husband
for support) came to Great Oaks School with terminal cancer, heart
failure, advanced diabetes, extreme weakness, and complete inability
to digest. Any food ingested just came back up immediately. Ethyl
had large tumors taking over the breast, sticking out from her
skull, and protruding from her body in general. The largest was the
one in the left breast which was the size of a big man's fist.

She did have one crucial thing going for her, Ethyl was a feisty
Irish red head who still had a will to live, and a reason to do so.
She and her husband, who had just retired, had dreamed their whole
life of touring the US and Canada in their own RV the minute he
retired. The time had finally arrived but Ethyl was too ill to
support her own weight (only 90 pounds) and to top it off was blind
from diabetic retinopathy. The doctors had done everything they
could to her, and now judged her too weak to withstand any more
surgery (she had already had her right breast removed). Radiation or
chemotherapy were also considered impossible due to heart failure.
They sent Ethyl home to die, giving her a few days to a month at
most.

Any sensible hygienist trying to stay out of jail would have refused
to take on this type of case because it was a cancer case where
death was likely. Treatment of this highly lucrative disease is
considered the AMA's exclusive franchise, even when the medical
doctors have given up after having done everything to a body the
family can pay for or owe for. Whenever a person dies under the care
of any person who is not a licensed M.D. there must be an autopsy
and a criminal investigation in search of negligence. If the person
dies under the care of an M.D. the sheriff's assumption is that the
doctor most assuredly did everything he could and should have done
and death was inevitable. By accepting Ethyl I had a reasonable
likelihood of ending up in trouble; but being foolish, brave and
(stupidly) feeling relatively immune to such consequences (I was
under 40 at the time), it seemed important to try to help her. So,
undaunted by the task, regardless of the outcome, I proceeded
logically, one step at a time. Today, with more experience and a
modest net worth I wouldn't want to have to defend in a lawsuit, and
at age 55. possessing no spare five to ten years to give to the
State to "pay" for my bravery, I would probably refuse such a case.
Fortunately I have not been confronted with this problem lately.

Since Ethyl was unable to digest anything given by mouth, she was
fed rectally with wheat grass juice implants three times a day. She
was carried to the colonic table for a daily colonic. Wheat grass
and clay poultices were applied to her tumors three times a day. She
received an acupressure massage and reflexology treatments during
the day, plus a lot of tender loving care. This program continued
for a month during which the tumors were being reabsorbed by the
body, including the large, extremely hard tumor sticking out the
flesh of the right breast.

Ethyl complained of severe pain as the large tumor in her breast
shrank. While it had been getting larger and pressing ever harder on
all the nerves, she had little or no sensation, but as it shrank,
the nerves were reactivated. Most people think that a growing tumor
would cause more pain than a shrinking one. Often the opposite is
true. Pain can be a good sign that the body is winning, an indicator
to proceed.

By the second month, Ethyl, gradually gaining strength, was able to
take wheat grass and carrot juice orally, and gradually eased into
raw foods, mostly sprouts and leafy greens such as sunflower and
buckwheat greens grown in trays. She started to walk with assistance
up and down the halls, no longer experiencing the intense pain
formerly caused by a failing heart, and most surprising of all, her
eyesight returned, at first seeing only outlines, and then details.

The third month Ethyl enlarged her food intake to include raw foods
as well as the carrot and wheat grass juice and sprouts, plus
vitamin and mineral supplements to help support her immune system
and the healing process. All the tumors had been reabsorbed by her
body and were no longer visible, her heart was able to support
normal activity such as walking, and nonstrenuous household chores,
and her diabetes had corrected itself to the point that she no
longer required insulin and was able to control her blood sugar with
diet.

Her husband was then instructed in her maintenance and they went
home to continue the program. The last I heard from them they had
made two lengthy trips around the US in their RV and were enjoying
their retirement together after all.

My treatment worked because the most important factor in the healing
of the critically ill person is not give them more nourishment than
their body is able to process. The moment the digestive capacity of
the sick person is exceeded, the condition will be exacerbated and
in a critically illness, the person is likely to die. If the body
still has sufficient organ integrity and vital force to heal itself,
it will do so only if given the least possible nourishment that will
support life--provided no essential organs are hopelessly damaged. If
the liver and kidneys are functional, and the person has done some
previous dietary improvement and/or cleansing, success is likely,
especially if the person wants to live.

A person in critical condition does not have time to ease into
fasting by first spending a month or two on a raw foods diet. This
means that the person who is taking care of the critically ill
person must be experienced enough to adjust the intensity of the
body's healing efforts and accurately assess the ability of the
person to process toxic waste products clamoring for removal so the
ailing body is not drowned in it's own poisons. It is often
necessary to use clear vegetable broth, vegetable and wheat grass
juices, and fruits juices, or whole sprouts to slow down the
cleansing gradient and sometimes, to resupply the tissue's exhausted
nutritional reserves.

I wish all cases of critical illness had such a positive outcome as
Ethyl's, but unfortunately they don't. I had Marge on the same
program at the same time. She also had cancerous tumors all over her
body and had similarly been sent home to die. In some ways Marge's
body was a more likely candidate for survival than Ethyl's. Marge
did not have heart failure or diabetes and was still able on arrival
to at least take small amount of water orally and walk to the
bathroom. Put on a similar program, her tumors also shrunk and were
reabsorbed and she too went home.

But Marge did not really have a strong reason to live. Although her
husband was by her side throughout the treatment program, Marge was
deeply upset because she was estranged from one of her sons who she
had not seen for over 10 years. When she went home from Great Oaks,
the son finally consented to see his mother, went to the effort of
trying to work things out with her, and finally confessed that under
it all he still loved her.

At that point Marge died in peace. She had accomplished the last
thing she wanted to take care of and her will to live did not extend
beyond that point. Had she died several months earlier as predicted
by the medical profession, Marge would have been unable to resolve
this relationship. This was what Marge's life was pivoting on at the
end. I was glad to assist her in doing what she needed to do. Her
husband and other family members found it difficult to understand,
and they were hurt that Marge did not wish to continue her life with
them.

Diet For The Chronically Ill.

The chronically ill person has a long-term degenerative condition
that is not immediately life threatening. This condition usually
causes more-or-less continuous symptoms that are painful, perhaps
unsightly, and ultimately will be disabling or eventually capable of
causing death. To qualify as "chronic" the symptoms must have been
present a minimum of six months, with no relief in sight. People
with these conditions have usually sought medical assistance,
frequently have had surgery, and have taken and probably are taking
numerous prescription drugs.

Some examples of chronic conditions are: arthritis, rheumatism,
diabetes, early onset of cancer and aids, asthma, colitis,
diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome, some mental disorders,
arterial deposit diseases, most of the itises (inflammations).

Before fasting, the chronically ill often do have time to prepare
the way with limited dietary reform, and frequently begin to feel
relief quite quickly. Before actually fasting they should limit
their diet to raw foods and eliminate all toxic foods like alcohol,
coffee, tea, salt, sugar and recreational drugs for two months if
they have been following a typical American diet.

If the chronically ill had been following a vegetarian diet, perhaps
a diet including with eggs and dairy, if they had been using no
addicting substances, then one month on raw foods is sufficient
preparation for fasting. If the person had water or juice fasted for
at least a week or two within the last two years, and followed a
healthy diet since that time, one or two weeks on raw foods should
be a sufficient runway.

During preparation for a fast, I never recommend that a chronically
ill person quit taking prescription medicines because doing so can
seriously disrupt their homeostasis. However, if their symptoms
lessen or vanish during the pre-fasting clean up, the person might
try tapering off medications.

The length and type of fast chosen to resolve a chronic illness
depends largely on available time, finances, availability of support
people, work responsibilities, and mental toughness. If you are one
of those fortunate people 'rich' enough to give their health first
priority, long water fasting is ideal. If on the other hand you
can't afford to stop working, have no one to take care of you and
assist with some household chores, and/or you are not mentally tough
enough to deal with self-denial, compromise is necessary.

Ideally the chronically ill person would fast for an extended period
under supervision until their symptoms were gone or greatly
improved, with a fall-back plan to repeat the whole process again in
three to six months if necessary. If you are not able to do that,
the next best program is to fast for a short period, like one or two
weeks, with a plan to repeat the process as often as possible until
you are healed.

I have had clients with potentially life-threatening conditions such
as obesity with incipient heart failure, or who came to me with
cancer, that were unable to stop work for financial reasons, or who
could not afford a residential fasting program, or who felt
confident in their own ability to deal with detoxification in their
own home. These people have fasted successfully at home, coming to
see me once a week. Almost inevitably, successful at-home fasters
had already done a lot of research on self healing, believed in it,
and had the personal discipline to carry it out properly, including
breaking the fast properly without overeating.

Foods To Heal Chronic Illness

Sprouts     Baby Greens    Salad        Juices     Fruit
alfalfa     sunflower      lettuce      beet       grapefruit
radish      buckwheat      celery       celery     lemon
bean        zucchini       zucchini     lime       lime
clover      kale           kale         orange     orange
fenugreek   endive         radish       parsley    apple
wheat                      tomato       tomato     raspberries
cabbage                    cabbage      cabbage    blueberries
                           carrot       carrot     grapes
                           spinach      apple      peaches
                           parsley      grapefruit apricots
                           sweet pepper lemon      strawberry

Fruits should be watery and lower in sugar. Some examples of poor
fruit choices would be pineapple, ripe mango, bananas, dates,
raisins, figs. Fruits should not be combined with vegetables.

Vegetables should not be starchy, packed-full of energy. Poor
vegetable choices would be potato, parsnip, turnip, corn, sweet
potato, yam, beet, winter squash. Sprouts and baby greens are
vegetables and may be included in salads.

Juices should not be extremely sweet. Apple, orange, beet and carrot
juice should be diluted with 50% water. Fruit juices should not be
mixed with vegetable juices or with vegetables at the same meal.

Salads should include no fruit. Salad dressings should be lemon or
lime juice, very small quantities of olive oil, and herbs. No salt,
soy sauce nor black pepper. Cayenne can be okay for some.

I have also helped chronically ill people that were not mentally
prepared to water fast, but were able to face the long-term
self-control and deprivation of a raw food cleansing diet that
included careful food combining. These people also regained their
health, but it took them a year at minimum, and once well they had
to remain on a diet tailor-made to their digestive capacity for the
rest of their life, usually along with food supplements.

Jim was such a case. He was 55 years old, very obese, had
dangerously high blood pressure poorly controlled with medication,
and was going into congestive heart failure. He was on digitalis and
several other heart medications plus diuretics, but in no way was
his condition under control. He had severe edema in the feet and
legs with pitting, and fluid retention in the abdominal region
caused a huge paunch that was solid to the touch not soft and
squishy like fatty tissue.

Jim had dreamed of having his own homestead with an Organic garden,
now he had these things but was too sick to enjoy them or work in
his garden without severe heart pain and shortness of breath. Jim
had retired early in order to enjoy many years without the stresses
of work, and he was alarmed to realize that he was unlikely to
survive a year.

The day Jim came to see me the first time I would have classified
his condition as critically ill because his life was in immediate
danger; but he responded so quickly to his detox program that he was
very soon out of danger and would be more accurately described as a
chronically ill person. Jim was not prepared to water fast. He was
attached to having his food and he was aware that at his extreme
weight he was going to have stay on a dietary program for a long,
long time. He also wanted to choose a gradient that he could manage
by himself at home with little assistance from his wife. He had been
on a typical American diet with meat, coffee, etc., so that in spite
of his dangerous condition it did not seem wise to me to add the
heavy eliminatory burden of a water fast to a body that was already
overwhelmed with fluids and waste products.

Jim immediately went on a raw food cleansing diet, with no
concentrated foods like nuts, seeds, or avocados, and with one day
each week fasting on vegetable juice and broth. He did enemas daily
even though it wasn't his favorite thing. In one month he had lost
30 pounds, his eyes had started to sparkle, and his complexion was
rosy. The swelling had disappeared from his feet and legs, and he
had to buy new pants.

Starting the second month he gradually withdrew from prescription
medications. From the beginning I had put Jim on a program of
nutritional supplements including protomorphogens (see chapter on
vitamins and food supplements) to help the body repair it's heart
and the kidneys. In only four months he had returned his body to
glowing health, and looked great for his age, though he was still
overweight. At the end of one year he had returned to a normal
weight for his height, and only cheated on the diet a couple of
times when attending a social event, and then it was only a baked
potato with no dressing.

He was probably going to have many qualitative years working his
garden and living out his dreams. The local intensive care ward lost
a lot of money when they failed to get Jim.

Diet For The Acutely Ill

The acutely ill person experiences occasional attacks of distressing
symptoms, usually after indiscretions in living or emotional upsets.
They have a cold, or a flu, or sinusitis, or a first bout of
pneumonia, or a spring allergy attack. The intense symptoms knock
them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. If they
are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the
chronically ill category.

People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent
that they are able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute
illness, the appetites is probably pretty dull anyway, so why not
give a brief fast on water or fruit juice a try.

Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting
more than a week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first
bout of pneumonia may well last for three weeks or a month. The
general rule is to eat as little as possible until the symptoms have
passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have a horror
of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses of
Vitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.)
Those having a little experience with natural medicine make teas of
echinacea, fenugreek seeds and red clover and quit eating. Eating as
little as possible can mean only water and herb teas, only vegetable
broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice, even only
cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relieved
your system of enough digestive effort.

After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your
life-style and improve your diet so that you aren't so toxic and
don't have to experience an acute illness several times a year when
your body is forced to try an energetic detox.

Diet For A Healthy Person

I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth
century. Doctors Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the
New Health Catastrophes state that in-depth laboratory testing of
the population at large demonstrated four universally present
pathological conditions: heavy metal poisoning, arteriosclerosis,
sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of
us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not
really healthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional
supplementation. In fact the odds against most people receiving
adequate vitamin and mineral nutrition without supplements are very
poor as demonstrated by the following chart.

Problem Nutrients in America

Nutrient     Percent Receiving Less than the RDA
B-6          80%
Magnesium    75
Calcium      68
Iron         57
Vitamin A    50
B-1          45
C            41
B-2          36
B-12         36
B-3          33

A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and
does not have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing
interferes with or handicaps their daily life or work. A healthy
person has good energy most of the time, a positive state of mind,
restful sleep, good digestion and elimination.

Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that
way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie
count--eating or drinking those things that they know are not good
for them but that are fun to eat or are "recreational foods or
beverages." Such "sinning" could mean a restaurant bash twice a
month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, ice
cream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key
concept of responsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent
limit.

A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not
exceed the digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of
quantity or quality. All foods that can not be efficiently digested
should be removed from the regular diet and relegated to the "sin"
category, including those you are allergic to and those for which
you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few
people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish,
but some can, and some can with the assistance of digestive enzyme
supplements. In order to digest meats, the stomach must be
sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin, pancreatin, and
bile, etc., and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side
(not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces),
and not combined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you
must include meat in your dietary, it should represent a very small
percentage of your total caloric intake, be eaten infrequently, with
the bulk of the calories coming from complex carbohydrates such
grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities of vegetables
and fruits.

The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is
advised to fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a
chance to catch up on their internal housecleaning. If water fasting
seems impossible, try a day of juicing it; if that is too rigorous,
try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though less beneficial
than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking
your overnight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up
breakfast altogether or postponing breaking your overnight fast,
because from the time you stop eating at the end of one day to the
time you start eating the next is actually a brief, detoxifying
fast.

Eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt can be assimilated by some healthy
people with or without digestive aids. It is possible to take
lactase to break down the milk sugars for example; sometimes aids
such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and pancreatin help. If you can
buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurt containing
lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily,
especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on
unsprayed food, and served very fresh. Eggs should come from
chickens that run around outside, eating weeds, and scratching bugs.
The yokes of those eggs will be intense orange, not yellow. Few
people these days have ever eaten a real egg. Surprisingly, for
those of you who fear cholesterol, the healthy way to eat eggs is
use just the raw yolk from fertile eggs. It is enjoyed by many
people in a smoothie--fresh fruit blended up with water or milk. Eggs
contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturally prevents the body from
forming harmful fatty deposits in the arteries.

Sea weeds are a wonderful source of minerals and should be eaten in
soups and salads. Other invaluable fortifying foods are algae of all
kinds (such as chlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast,
and fresh bakers yeast. Many people have had very unpleasant
experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast and so use brewers
yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins it
contains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw
yeast is so powerful, it feels like pep pills!

It takes a special technique to eat raw yeast because in the stomach
and intestines the yeast does the job it is supposed to do: convert
sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The entire digestive
tract then bloats with gas and the person will feel very
uncomfortable for some time. However, raw yeast is a marvelous
source of B vitamins and proteins and can make someone feel very
energetic--if they know how to use it. The secret is to eat live
yeast very first thing in the morning on an empty stomach and then,
not eat anything at all for about two hours, giving the stomach
acids and enzymes time to kill the yeasts and digest them before
adding sugars from another meal. Some like to eat yeast in fresh
cake form, buying it from a bakery. Others prefer dry granular
baker's yeast blended with water into a sort of "shake." This is not
a bad place to put your raw egg yoke either. If you need it
sweetened to drink it, use an artificial or herbal sweetener like
nutrisweet or stevia. Live yeast cannot consume milk sugars very
well. So if you can handle dairy, try one or two tablespoons of
granulated live yeast, an egg yoke and a little raw milk or yogurt,
well whizzed.

Wheat germ is also a great, rich food, but is usually rancid unless
it is taken out of the refrigerated display; unless it is
refrigerated, in a dated package and fresh, don't eat it. Herb teas
and roasted grain beverages are healthy beverages, along with
mineral and distilled water avoiding where possible chlorinated and
fluoridated water.

Diet Is Not Enough

Those isolated, long-lived peoples discovered by Weston A. Price had
to do hard physical labor to eat, had to walk briskly up and down
steep terrain to get anywhere. But today, few North Americans output
very much physical energy in process of daily life or work. Not only
cars, but all of our modern conveniences make it possible to live
without ever breaking into a sweat. We pay for this ease; it costs
us a significant degree of health.

Exercise has many benefits when combined with excellent nutrition.
It creates an overall feeling of well-being that can not be created
by diet alone. Exercising temporarily makes the heart beat faster,
increasing blood circulation throughout the body right out to the
tips of your fingers and toes. This short-term elevated flow of
blood flow brings increased supplies of oxygen and nutrients to all
parts of the body, facilitating healing and repair. Without revving
up your engine every day many of the body's systems never get the
sludge burned out of them and never perform optimally.

Exercise also changes the metabolic rate so your body burns more
calories--not only while you are exercising, but also for a 24 hour
period following exercise. This maintains a healthful body weight
into old age, or helps to lose weight. Most people find that
exercise in moderation does not increase appetite, so that it is
possible to consistently burn more calories in a day, and gradually
reduce weight if that is desirable. It is necessary to burn 3,500
calories to lose a pound of weight. Most forms of exercise allow you
to burn 300 to 600 calories per hour at a moderate pace which would
be achieved by doubling the resting pulse. Without even considering
the weight-loss benefit of achieving a raised metabolism, an hour of
daily exercise continued for a week or two dependent upon the type
of exercise and pace should lead to one pound of weight loss if the
caloric intake is held constant.

The flip side of having a higher metabolism is rarely appreciated
but is extremely important. Recall the basic equation of health:
Health = Nutrition / Calories. Exercise permits a person to eat
somewhat more while not gaining weight. If the food is nutrient
rich, the body has a chance to extract more vitamins, more minerals,
more amino acids. The person who remains slender by rigidly reducing
their food intake to near starvation levels may lack vital,
health-building nutrition.

And only exercise moves lymphatic fluid. The blood is pumped through
the body by the heart, but the lymphatic system, lacking a heart,
requires muscular contractions to move from the extremities of the
body to the central cavity. The lymphatic system picks up cellular
waste products and conducts these toxins to disposal. Frequently,
people with rheumatic aches and pains or other generalized muscular
discomforts physicians like to give Latin diagnostic names to can
give up taking pain pills if they will but begin exercising
regularly. Only when they begin moving their lymph can they begin to
detoxify properly.

There is another benefit from exercise which is not to be ignored,
and that is that it gives the person a chemical sense of well being.
It actually will help to emotionally boost up people who are
chronically depressed and make them smile. After a good workout,
especially one done outside, everything seems brighter, more
positive; whatever was bothering you somehow just doesn't seem like
that big of a deal now. I am not making pro-exercise propaganda.
This is not a figment of the imagination. An exercising body really
does make antidepressant neurochemicals called endorphins, but only
after about 45 minutes to an hour of aerobic workout.

Endorphins are powerful, with painkilling and euphoric effects equal
to or greater than heroin, but without any undesirable side effects.
If chemists could learn to cheaply synthesize endorphins I'm sure
that millions of people would want to become addicted to them.
Because I make such a point of getting in my workout every day, my
husband has accused me of being an endorphin junkie, and he is
right! I admit it, I'm really hooked on the feeling of well being I
consistently get from any sustained exercise. I defend my addiction
staunchly because it is the healthiest addiction I know of.

I have also been accused of carrying exercise to extremes, and I
admit to that also. For a few years I trained for Ironman
triathlons. I now think doing ironman distances is immoderate and
except for a few remarkable individuals with "iron" constitutions,
training that hard can only lead to a form of exhaustion that is not
health promoting. I have become much more sensible in my "old" age,
and in recent years have limited my participation to the Olympic
distance triathlons. I was on the Canadian team at the World
Championship in 1992, and intend to do it again in 1995. I do not
find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it is great
fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age
group competitors from all over the world who look and feel
fantastic. It does my soul good to see a group of people aging so
gracefully, not buying into the popular notion that old age is
inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings a degree of
balance to my life after spending so much time in the presence of
the sick. I plan to maintain my athletic activities into old age,
barring accident or other unforeseen obstacles to fitness.

To maintain basic fitness it does not matter so much what form of
exercise is chosen, as long as it is not damaging to the skeletal
system or connective tissues. Many people are unable to run due to
foot, knee, hip, or back problems, but almost everyone can walk.
Walking outside is better than inside on a treadmill, and walking
hills is better than walking on flat ground. Exercise machines such
as stationary bikes, cross country ski machines, and stair steppers
work well for a lot of people who live in the city, especially in
the winter, or for those who hate exercise. Whatever you choose to
do, it is important to at least double the resting pulse for 30
minutes no less than four days a week. This is the absolute minimum
required to maintain the health and function of the
cardiovascular-pulmonary system. If your resting pulse is 70, you
must walk, jog, ski, bike, swim or what have you, fast enough to
keep the pulse at 140 beats per minute for at least 30 minutes.

I have a strong preference to exercising outside in isolated places
where there is only me and the forest, or only me and the river.
Running along logging roads in the hilly back country, or swimming
in the green unpolluted water of a forest river is a spiritual
experience for me. It is a time to meditate, to commune with nature,
and to clear my mind and create new solutions. The repetitive action
of running or walking or swimming, along with the regular deep
breathing in clean air, with no distractions except what nature
provides is truly health promoting. Sharing these activities with
friends or family can also be great fun and some of the best in
social interactions. It is one of my favorite ways of visiting with
people. I don't expect other people to be as enthusiastic about
exercise as I am, but I do hope that everyone will make an effort to
be minimally fit as an ongoing part of their health program into old
age.

Diet For A Long, Long Life

Some people not only want to be healthy, but they want to live in
good health long past the normal life span projected by statistical
tables for Homo Sapiens. Dr. Roy Walford, a well-respected medical
research gerontologist who has been actively studying longevity for
many years, is one of those. He has scientifically demonstrated with
accepted studies that a qualitative life span up to at least 115
years of age is reasonably attainable by the average person if they
start working on it no later than about 50 years of age, though
earlier is much better.

Walford's principles of extending life are very simple. All you have
to do is restrict your caloric intake to about 1,500 per day, and
water fast two days a week. Or alternatively, reduce your caloric
intake to 1,200 per day and fast only one day a week on water. And
make sure that every single bit of food you do eat is packed with
nutrition, every single calorie, without exception. You continue
this program for the rest of your life along with moderate daily
exercise and high but reasonable dosages of vitamins, minerals, and
also take a few exotic food supplements. The supplement program is
not particularly expensive nor extreme, Walford's supplement program
is more moderate than the life extension program I recommend for all
middle-aged and older people. The best foods for this type of
program is a largely raw food diet (80%) with a predominance of
sprouts and baby greens, some cooked vegetables, and raw nuts and
seeds. And make sure you get 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise
every other day.

While Dr. Walford's focus is on caloric reduction while maintaining
sufficient nutrition, most other life extensionists focus on
increasing the nutrition side of the equation for health without
bothering to reduce caloric intake. This approach is much easier
because essentially, it involves gobbling nutritional supplements by
the handfuls without requiring self-discipline, though it can get
quite expensive. I'll have more to say about this approach in the
next chapter, which is about vitamins.

In this book I can't explain all the aspects of prolongation of life
through conscious life-style choice. Those who are interested are
referred to the Bibliography.



Chapter Six

Vitamins and Other Food Supplements



From The Hygienic Dictionary

Vitamins. [1] The staple foods may not contain the same nutritive
substances as in former times. . . . Chemical fertilizers, by
increasing the abundance of the crops without replacing all the
exhausted elements of the soil, may have indirectly contributed to
change the nutritive value of cereal grains and of vegetables. . . .
Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of
diseases. Their studies of conditions of life and diet, and of their
effects on the physiological and mental state of modern man are
superficial, incomplete, and of too short duration. They have, thus,
contributed to the weakening of our body and our soul. _Alexis
Carrel, Man the Unknown._

I have already explained the hygienist's view of why people get
sick. The sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia,
alternative elimination, disease. However, there is one more link in
this chain, a precursor to enervation that, for good and
understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists.
That precursor is long term sub-clinical malnutrition. Lack of
nutrition effects virtually everybody today. Almost all of us are
overfed but undernourished.

I have already explained that one particular head of broccoli does
not necessarily equal another head of broccoli; the nutritional
composition of apparently identical foods can be highly variable.
Not only do different samples of the same type of food differ wildly
in protein content, amino acid ratios and mineral content, their
vitamin and vitamin-like substances also vary according to soil
fertility and the variety grown.

These days, food crop varieties are bred for yield and other
commercial considerations, such as shipability, storage life, and
ease of processing. In pre-industrial times when each family
propagated its own unique open-pollinated varieties, a natural
selection process for healthy outcomes prevailed. If the family's
particular, unique varieties carried genes for highly nutritious
food, and if the family's land was fertile enough to allow those
genes to manifest, and if the family kept up its land's fertility by
wise management, their children tended to survive the gauntlet of
childhood illness and lived to propagate the family's varieties and
continue the family name. Thus, over time, human food cultivars were
selected for their nutritional content.

But not any longer! These days, farming technology with its focus on
bulk yield and profit, degrades the nutritional content of our
entire food supply. Even commercial organically grown food is no
better in this respect.

Sub-clinical, life-long, vitamin and mineral deficiencies contribute
to the onset of disease; the malnourished body becomes increasingly
enervated, beginning the process of disease. Vitamin supplements can
increase the body's vital force, reversing to a degree the natural
tendency towards degeneration. In fact, some medical gerontologists
theorize that by using vitamins it might be possible to restore
human life span to its genetically programmed 115 years without
doing anything else about increasing nutrition from our degraded
foods or paying much attention to dietary indiscretions. Knowing
what I do about toxemia's effects I doubt vitamins can allow us to
totally ignore what we eat, though supplements can certainly help.

More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a thinking
person to use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are
constantly assaulted and insulted by modern life in ways our
genetics never intended us to deal with. Today the entire
environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted; our
food supply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules
that our bodies have no natural ability to process and eliminate.
Our cities and work places are full of loud, shocking noises that
trigger frequent adrenaline rushes and other stress adaptations. Our
work places are full of psychological stresses that humans never had
to deal with before.

Historically, humans who were not enslaved have been in control of
determining their own hour to hour, day to day activities, living on
their own largely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for
another, at regular hours, without personal liberty, ignoring or
suppressing one's own agenda and inclinations over an entire
lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takes continual
subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protect
ourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we
don't know we're expending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to
remain healthy we may need nutrition at levels far higher than might
be possible through eating food; even ideal food might not contain
enough vitamins to sustain us against the strains and stresses of
this century.

And think about Dr. Pottenger's cats. Our bodies are at the poorer
end of a century-long process of mass degeneration that started with
white flour from the roller mill. Compared to my older clients I
have noticed that my younger patients seem to possess less vital
force on the average, show evidence of poorer skeletal development,
have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding
and coping with their family life, and are far more likely to
develop degenerative conditions early. Most of my younger patients
had a poor start because they were raised on highly refined,
devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without much exercise.
Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparents
may have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and
actually had to walk, not owning cars when they were young. Their
great grandparents had a high likelihood of enjoying decent
nutrition and a healthful life-style.

Unfortunately, most of my patients like the idea of taking vitamins
too much for their own good. The AMA medical model has conditioned
people to swallow something for every little discomfort, and taking
a pill is also by far the easiest thing to do because a pill
requires no life-style changes, nor self-discipline, nor personal
responsibility. But vitamins are much more frugal than drugs.
Compared to prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension
supplements are much less expensive. I am saddened when my clients
tell me they can't afford supplements. When their MD prescribes a
medicine that costs many times more they never have trouble finding
the money.

I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements,
because I can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies
heal with dietary modification and detoxification. Of all the tools
at my disposal that help people heal, last in the race comes
supplements.

One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they were
healing agents is that food supplements almost never have harmful
side effects, even when they are taken in what might seem enormous
overdoses. If someone with a health condition reads or hears about
some vitamin being curative, goes out and buys some and takes it,
they will at very least have followed the basic principle of good
medicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did
nothing for them at all, they are practicing the same kind of
benevolent medicine that Dr. Jennings did almost two centuries ago.
Not only that, but having done something to treat their symptoms,
they have become patients facilitating their own patience, giving
their body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get
better, but not because of the action of the particular vitamin they
took. Or, luckily, the vitamin or vitamins they take may have been
just what was needed, raising their body's vital force and
accelerating the body's ability to solve its problem.

One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well as they
might is that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has
created largely false fears in the public mind about harmful effects
of vitamin overdoses, the person may not take enough of the right
vitamin. The minimum daily requirements of vitamins and minerals as
outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent the most
obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements
at or near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by
the FDA as being 'generally recognized as safe') they should not
expect to see any therapeutic effect unless they have scurvy, beri
beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra.

In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt, and even
vitamin C fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of
life-threatening deficiency states people first learned to
recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long sea voyages used to
develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could kill.
Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For
this reason the British Government legislated the carrying of limes
on long voyages and today that is why British sailors are still
called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams of vitamin C. But
to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg does
absolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C
takes 10,000 milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening
infection like pneumonia go away faster might require 25,000 to
150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administered intravenously.
In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that's 300 to 750 of
them daily--clearly impossible.

Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of vitamin
B3, but schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams,
roughly a thousand times as much as the MDR.

There are many many common diseases that the medical profession does
not see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many
mental disorders fall in this category. Many old people live on
extremely deficient diets comprised largely of devitalized starches,
sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have good enough teeth
to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not
have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually
all old people have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably
declines with age, the quantity and quality of digestive enzymes
decreases, then the ability to breakdown and extract soluble
nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to serious
deficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as
disease and as aging.

Suppose a body needs 30 milligrams a day of niacin to not develop
pellagra, but to be fully healthy, needs 500 milligrams daily. If
that body receives 50 milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the
medical doctor it could not possibly be deficient in this vitamin.
However, over time, the insidious sub-clinical deficiency may
degrade some other system and produce a different disease, such as
colitis. But the medical doctor sees no relationship. Let me give
you an actual example. Medical researchers studying vitamin B5 or
pantothenic acid noticed that it could, in what seemed to be
megadoses (compared to the minimum daily requirement) largely
reverse certain degenerative effects of aging. These researchers
were measuring endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging
process. How they made this measurement may appear to some readers
to be heartless, but the best way to gauge the endurance of a rat is
to toss it into a five gallon bucket of cold water and see how long
it swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, the researcher
can be absolutely confident that the rat does its very best to stay
alive.

Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50 degree Fahrenheit
water before drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And
old rats swim differently, less efficiently, with their lower bodies
more or less vertical, sort of dog paddling. But when old rats were
fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose for a few weeks before the
test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like the
young rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the
gray went away) and improved in texture; they began to appear like
young rats. And the rats on megadoses of B5 lived lot longer--25 to
33 percent longer than rats not on large doses of B5. Does that mean
"megadoses" of B5 have an unknown drug-like effect? Or does that
mean the real nutritional requirement for B5 is a lot higher than
most people think? I believe the second choice is correct. To give
you an idea of how much B5 the old rats were given in human terms,
the FDA says the minimum daily requirement for B5 is about 10
milligrams but if humans took as much B5 as the rats, they would
take about 750 milligrams per day. Incidentally, I figure I am as
worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams daily.

My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a
gross vitamin deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create
optimum functioning. Any sick person or anyone with a health
complaint needs to improve their overall functioning in any way that
won't be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapy can be an
amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification.

Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using
vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food
supply was better, when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as
far as it has today. From their perspective, it was possible to
obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. In our time this is
unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces
virtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose
fertility is maintained and adjusted with a conscious intent to
maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately, ignorance
of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to
otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and
homeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for food
supplementation.

Vitamins For Young Persons And Children

Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties should also
take nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel
so good that they find it impossible to conceive that anything could
harm them or that they ever could become seriously sick or actually
die. I know this is true because I remember my own youth and
besides, why else would young people so glibly ride motorcycles or,
after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into the
barrel of a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple
venereal diseases. Until they get a little sense, vitamin
supplements help to counteract their inevitable and unpreventable
use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapest long life and
health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally very
surprised at the thought that even their children need nutritional
supplements; very few healthy children receive them. A few are given
extra vitamin C when acutely ill, when they have colds or
communicable diseases such as chicken pox.

Young people require a low dose supplement compared to those of us
middle-aged or older, but it should be a broad formula with the full
range of vitamins and minerals. Some of the best products I have
found over 25 years of research and experimentation with young
people are Douglas Cooper's "Basic Formula" (low dose and excellent
for children) and "Super T Formula" (double the dose of Basic
Formula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also
from Douglas Cooper Company; Bronson's "Vitamin and Mineral Formula
for Active Men and Women" and Bronson's "Insurance Formula."
"Vitamin 75 Plus;" and "Formula 2" from Now Natural Foods are also
good and less costly.

Healthy very small children who will swallow pills can take these
same products at half the recommended dose. If they won't swallow
pills the pills can be blended into a fruit smoothie or finely
crushed and then stirred into apple sauce. There are also
"Children's Chewable Multi-Vitamins + Iron" (1-5 years old) from
Douglas Cooper that contains no minerals except iron, Bronson's
"Chewable Vitamins" (make sure it is the one for small children,
Bronson makes several types of chewables) and a liquid vitamin
product from Bronson called Multivitamin Drops for Infants. These
will be a little more costly than cutting pills in half.

There is also an extraordinarily high quality multivitamin/mineral
formula for children called "Children's Formula Life Extension Mix"
from Prolongevity, Ltd. (the Life Extension Foundation), it is in
tablet form, and slightly more expensive.

I hope that my book will be around for several generations. The
businesses whose vitamin products I recommend will not likely exist
in twenty years. Even sooner than that the product names and details
of the formulations will almost certainly be altered. So, for future
readers discovering this book in a library or dusty shelve of a used
book store, if I, at my current level of understanding, were
manufacturing a childrens and young adults vitamin formula myself,
this is what it would contain. Any commercial formulation within 25
percent of these figures plus or minus would probably be fine as
long as the vitamins in the pills were of high quality.

Vitamin C   500 mg  B-1              30 mg
Vitamin E   50 iu   B-2              30 mg
Vitamin A   500 iu  B-3 niacinamide  100 mg
Vitamin D   25 iu   B-5              50 mg
Magnesium   100 mg  B-6              30 mg
Calcium     400 mg  B-12             30 mcg
Selenium    10 mcg  Chromium         20 mcg
Manganese   2 mcg   Biotin           30 mg
Zinc        5 mg    Iodine (as kelp) 5 mg
PABA        20 mg   Bioflavinoids    100 mg

Vitamins For An Older Healthy Person

Someone who is beyond 35 to 40 years of age should still feel good
almost all of the time. That is how life should be. But enjoying
well-being does not mean that no dietary supplementation is called
for. The onset of middle age is the appropriate time to begin
working on continuing to feel well for as long as possible. Just
like a car, if you take very good care of it from the beginning, it
is likely to run smoothly for many years into the future. If on the
other hand you drive it hard and fast with a lot of deferred
maintenance you will probably have to trade it in on a new one after
a very few years. Most people in their 70s and older who are
struggling with many uncomfortable symptoms and low energy lament,
'if I'd only known I was going to live so long I would have taken
better care of myself.' But at that point it is too late for the old
donkey; time for a trade in.

Gerontologists refer to combating the aging process as "squaring the
curve." We arrive at the peak of our physical function at about age
eighteen. How high that peak level is depends on a person's genetic
endowment, the quality of the start they received through their
mother's nutritional reserves, and the quality of their childhood
nutrition and life experience. From that peak our function begins to
drop. The rate of drop is not uniform, but is a cascade where each
bit of deterioration creates more deterioration, accelerating the
rate of deterioration. If various aging experiences were graphed,
they would make curves like those on the chart on this page.

Because deterioration starts out so slowly, people usually do not
begin to notice there has been any decline until they reach their
late 30s. A few fortunate ones don't notice it until their 40s. A
few (usually) dishonest ones claim no losses into their 50s but they
are almost inevitably lying, either to you or to themselves, or
both. Though it might be wisest to begin combating the aging process
at age 19, practically speaking, no one is going to start spending
substantial money on food supplements until they actually notice
significant lost function. For non-athletes this point usually comes
when function has dropped to about 90 percent of what it was in our
youth. If they're lucky what people usually notice with the
beginnings of middle age is an increasing inability for their bodies
to tolerate insults such as a night on the town or a big meal. Or
they may begin to get colds that just won't seem to go away. Or they
may begin coming home after work so tired that they can hardly stay
awake and begin falling asleep in their Lazy Boy recliner in front
of the TV even before prime time. If they're not so lucky they'll
begin suffering the initial twinges of a non-life-threatening
chronic condition like arthritis.

The thinnest line demonstrates the worst possible life from a purely
physical point of view, where a person started out life with
significantly lowered function, lost quite a bit more and then hung
on to life for many years without the mercy of death.

If one can postpone the deterioration of aging, they extend and
hopefully square the curve (retard loss of function until later and
then have the loss occur more rapidly). Someone whose lifetime
function resembled a "square curve"(the thickest, topmost line)
would experience little or no deterioration until the very end and
then would lose function precipitously. At this point we do not know
how to eliminate the deterioration but we do know how to slow it
down, living longer and feeling better, at least to a point close to
the very end.

Vitamin supplements can actually slow or even to a degree, reverse,
the aging process. However, to accomplish that task, they have to be
taken in amounts far greater than so-called minimum daily
requirements, using vitamins as though they were drugs, a
therapeutic approach to changing body chemistry profiles and making
them resemble a younger body. For example, research gerontologists
like Walford reason that if pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), in fairly
substantial (but quite safe) doses can extend the life and improve
the function of old rats, there is every indication that it will do
a similar job on humans. Medical researchers and research
gerontologists have noticed that many other vitamin and vitamin-like
substances have similar effects on laboratory animals.

Some will object that what helps rats and mice is in no way proven
to cause the same result on humans. I agree. Proven with full
scientific rigor, no. In fact, at present, the contention is
unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high likelihood's of being so,
yes! So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes! But
provable to the most open-minded, scientific sort--probably not for a
long time. However, the Life Extension Foundation is working hard to
find some quantifiable method of gauging the aging process in humans
without waiting for the inarguable indicator, death. Once this is
accomplished and solidly recognized, probably no rational person
will be able to doubt that human life span can be increased.

Experiments work far better with short-lived laboratory animals for
another reason; we can not control the food and supplement intakes
of humans as we can with caged mice. In fact, there are special
types of laboratory mice that have been bred to have uniformly short
life spans, especially to accelerate this kind of research. With
mice we can state accurately that compared to a control group,
feeding such and such a dose of such and such a supplement extended
the life-span or functional performance by such and such a percent.

A lot of these very same medical gerontologists nourish their own
bodies as thoroughly as the laboratory animals they are studying,
taking broad mixes of food supplements at doses proportional to
those that extend the life spans of their research animals. This
approach to using supplementation is at the other end of the scale
compared to using supplements to prevent gross deficiencies. In the
life extension approach, vitamins and vitamin-like substances are
used as a therapy against the aging process itself.

Will it work? Well, some of these human guinea pigs have been on
heavy vitamin supplementation for over thirty years (as of 1995) and
none seem to be suffering any damage. Will they live longer? It is
impossible to say with full scientific rigor? To know if life
extension works, we would have to first determine "live longer than
what?" After all, we don't know how long any person might have lived
without life extending vitamin supplements. Though it can't be
"proven," it makes perfect sense to me to spend far less money on an
intensive life extension vitamin program than I would certainly lose
as a result of age-related sickness.

Besides, I've already observed from personal use and from results in
my clinical practice that life extension vitamin programs do work.
Whether I and my clients will ultimately live longer or not, the
people who I have put on these programs, including myself and my
husband, usually report that for several years after starting they
find themselves feeling progressively younger, gradually returning
to an overall state of greater well-being they knew five or ten or
fifteen years ago. They have more energy, feel clearer mentally,
have fewer unwanted somatic symptoms.

Sometimes the improvements seem rather miraculous. After a few
months on the program one ninety year old man, an independent-minded
Oregonian farmer, reported that he began awakening with an erection
every morning; unfortunately, his 89 year old cranky and somewhat
estranged wife, who would not take vitamins, did not appreciate this
youthfulness. A few months later (he had a small farm) he planted a
holly orchard. Most of you won't appreciate what this means without
a bit of explanation, but in Oregon, holly is grown as a high-priced
and highly profitable ornamental for the clusters of leaves and
berries. But a slow-growing holly orchard takes 25 years to began
making a profit!

A few older clients of mine reported that they noticed nothing from
the life extension program, but these are unique people who have
developed the ability to dominate their bodies with their minds and
routinely pay their bodies absolutely no attention, driving them
relentlessly to do their will. Usually they use their energies to
accomplish good, Christian works. Eventually, these dedicated and
high-toned people break down and die like everyone else. Will they
do so later on life extending vitamins than they would have
otherwise? I couldn't know because I can't know how long they might
have lived without supplementation and since they refuse to admit
the vitamins do them any good, they won't pay for them.

Many on life extension programs experience a reverse aging process
for awhile. However, after the full benefit of the supplementation
has worked itself through their body chemistry, they again begin to
experience the aging process. I believe the process will then be
slowed by their vitamins compared to what it would have been without
supplements. But I can't prove it. Maybe we will have some idea if
the program worked 20 to 40 years from now.

At this time I know of only two companies that make top quality life
extension vitamin supplement formulas. One is Prolongevity (Life
Extension Foundation), the other, Vitamin Research Products. I
prefer to support what I view as the altruistic motives behind
Prolongevity and buy my products from them. Unfortunately, these
vitamin compounders can not put every possibly beneficial substance
in a single bottle of tablets. The main reason they do not is fear
of the power-grabbing Food and Drug Administration. This agency is
threatening constantly to remove certain of the most useful
life-extending substances from the vitamin trade and make them the
exclusive property of prescription-writing medical doctors. So far,
public pressure has been mobilized against the FDA every time action
was threatened and has not permitted this. If some product were
included in a mix and that product were prohibited, the entire
mixed, bottled and labeled batch that remained unsold at that time
would be wasted, at enormous cost.

Were I manufacturing my own life extension supplement I would
include the following. By the way, to get this all in one day, it is
necessary to take 6 to 12 large tablets daily, usually spread
throughout the day, taken a few at a time with each meal. If you
compare my suggested formulation to another one, keep in mind that
variations of 25 percent one way or another won't make a significant
difference, and adding other beneficial substances to my
recommendations probably is only helpful. However, I would not want
to eliminate anything in the list below, it is the minimum:

Beta-Carotene 25,000 iu Selenium 100 mcg

Vitamin A 5,000 iu Taurine 500 mg

B-1 250 mg Cyctine 200 mg

B-2 50 mg Gluthaianone 15 mg

B-3 niacinamid 850 mg Choline 650 mg

B-5 750 mg Inositol 250 mg

B-6 200 mg Flavanoids 500 mg

B-12 100 mcg Zinc 35 mg

PABA 50 mg Chromium 100 mcg

Folic Acid 500 mcg Molybdenum 123 mg

Biotin 200 mcg Manganese 5 mg

Vitamin C 3,000 mg Iodine (as kelp) 10 mg

Vitamin E 600 iu Co-Enzyme Q-10 60 mg

Magnesium 1,000 mg DMAE 100 mg

Potassium 100 mg Ginko biloba 120 mg

Calcium 1,000 mg Vitamin D-3 200 iu

Please also keep in mind that there are many other useful substances
not listed above. For example, every day I have a "green drink," an
herbal preparation containing numerous tonic substances like ginseng
and also various forms of algae and chlorophyll extracts. My green
drink makes my body feel very peppy all day, so it certainly
enhances my life and may extend it. It costs about $25,00 a month to
enjoy that. I also use various pure amino acids at times.
Phenylalyanine will make me get more aggressive whenever I am
feeling a little lackluster; this nutrient has also been used as an
effective therapy against depression. Melatonin taken at bedtime
really does help me get to sleep and may have remarkable
life-extending properties. Other amino acids help my body
manufacture growth hormones and I use them from the time I begin
training seriously in spring through the end of the summer triathlon
competition season. Pearson and Shaw's book (see Bibliography) is a
good starting point to begin learning about this remarkably useful
subject.

The Future Of Life Extension

I beg the readers indulgence for a bit of futurology about what
things may look like if the life extension movement continues to
develop.

Right now, a full vitamin and vitamin-like substance life extension
program costs between $50 and $100 dollars per month. However,
pharmaceutical researchers occasionally notice that drugs meant to
treat and cure diseases, when tested on lab animals for safety, make
these animals live quite a bit longer and function better. Though
the FDA doesn't allow any word of this to be printed in official
prescribing data, the word does get around to other researchers, to
gerontologists and eventually to that part of the public that is
eagerly looking for longer life. Today there are numerous people who
routinely take prescription medicines meant to cure a disease they
do not have and plan to take those medicines for the rest of their
long, long life.

These drugs being patented, the tariff gets a lot steeper compared
to taking vitamins. (Since they are naturally-occurring substances,
vitamins can't be patented and therefore, aren't big-profit items.
Perhaps that's one reason the FDA is so covertly opposed to
vitamins.) Right now it would be quite possible to spend many
hundred dollars per month on a life extension program that included
most of these potentially beneficent prescription drugs.

As more of life-extending substances are discovered, the cost of
participating in a maximally effective life extension program will
escalate. However, those who can afford chemically enhanced
functioning will enjoy certain side-benefits. Their productive,
enjoyable life spans may measure well over a century, perhaps
approaching two centuries or more. Some of these substances greatly
improve intelligence so they will become brighter and have faster
reaction times. With more time to accumulate more wisdom and
experience than "short livers" these folks will become wiser, too.
They will have more time to compound their investment assets and
thus will become far more wealthy. They will become an obvious and
recognizable aristocracy. This new upper class will immediately
recognize each other on the street because they will look entirely
different than the short-lived poorer folk and will probably run the
political economic system.

And this new aristocratic society I see coming may be far more
pleasant than the one dominated by the oligarchy we now have
covertly running things. For with greater age and experience does
really come greater wisdom. I have long felt that the biggest
problem with Earth is that we did not live long enough. As George
Bernard Shaw quipped when he was 90 (he lived to 96), "here I am, 90
years old, just getting out of my adolescence and getting some
sense, and my body is falling apart as fast as it can."

Vitamin Program For The Sick

No matter which way you look at it or how well insured you may be
against it, being sick is expensive (not to mention what it does to
one's quality of life), and by far the best thing to do is to
prevent it from happening in the first place. However, most people
do not do anything about their health until forced to by some
painful condition. If you are already sick there are a number of
supplements you can take which have the potential to shorten the
duration and severity of the illness, and hopefully prevent a
recurrence.

The sicker you are, the more supplements you will require; as health
is regained, the dosage and variety of substances can be reduced. In
chronic illness, megadoses of many nutrients are usually beneficial.
Any sick adult should begin a life extension vitamin program unless
they are highly allergic to so many things already that they can not
tolerate many kinds of vitamins as well. In addition to the life
extension program, vitamin C should be taken by the chronically ill
at a dose from 10 to 25 grams daily, depending on the severity of
the condition.

Many people want to know whether or not they should take their
regular food supplements during a fast. On a water fast most
supplements in a hard tablet form will not be broken down at all,
and often can be seen floating by in the colonic viewing tube
looking exactly like it did when you swallowed it. This waste can be
avoided by crushing or chewing (yuck) the tablets, before
swallowing. Encapsulated vitamins usually are absorbed, but if you
want to make sure, open the capsule and dump it in the back of your
mouth before swallowing with water. Powdered vitamins are well
absorbed.

On a water fast the body is much more sensitive to any substance
introduced, so as a general rule it is not a good idea to take more
than one half your regular dose of food supplements. Most fasters do
fine without any supplements. Many people get an upset stomach from
supplements on an empty stomach, and these people should not take
any during a water fast unless they develop symptoms of mineral
deficiencies (usually a pre-existing condition) such as leg cramps
and tremors, these symptoms necessitate powdered or well-chewed-up
mineral supplement. Minerals don't taste too bad to chew, just
chalky.

The same suggestions regarding dosage of supplements for a water
fast are also true for a juice fast or vegetable broth fast. On a
raw food cleansing diet the full dose of supplements should be taken
with meals.

There exists an enormous body of data about vitamins; books and
magazine articles are always touting some new product or explaining
the uses of an old one. If you want to know more about using
ordinary vitamins you'll find leads in the bibliography to guide
your reading. However, there is one "old" vitamin and a few newer
and relatively unknown life extending substances that are so useful
and important to handling illness that I would like to tell you more
about them.

Vitamin C is not a newly discovered vitamin, but was one of the
first ever identified. If you are one of those people that just hate
taking vitamins, and you were for some reason willing to take only
one, vitamin C would be your best choice. Vitamin C would be the
clear winner because it helps enormously with any infection and in
invaluable in tissue healing and rebuilding collagen. If I was going
on a long trip and didn't want to pack a lot of weight, my first
choice would be to insure three to six grams of vitamin C for daily
use when I was healthy (I'd take the optimum dose--ten grams a day--if
weight were no limitation). I'd also carry enough extra C to really
beef up my intake when dealing with an unexpected acute illness or
accident.

When traveling to far away places, exposed to a whole new batch of
organisms, frequently having difficulty finding healthy foods, going
through time zones, losing nights of sleep, it is easy to become
enervated enough to catch a local cold or flu. If I have brought
lots of extra vitamin C with me I know that my immune system will be
able to conquer just about anything--as long as I also stop eating
and can take an enema. I also like to have vitamin C as a part of my
first aid kit because if I experience a laceration, a sprain, broken
bone, or a burn, I can increase my internal intake as well as apply
it liberally directly on the damaged skin surface. Vitamin C can be
put directly in the eye in a dilute solution with distilled water
for infections and injuries, in the ear for ear infections, and in
the nose for sinus infections. If you are using the acid form of C
(ascorbic acid) and it smarts too much, make a more dilute solution,
or switch to the alkaline form of C (calcium ascorbate) which can be
used as a much more concentrated solution without a stinging
sensation. Applied directly on the skin C in solution makes a very
effective substitute for sun screen. It doesn't filter out
ultraviolet, it beefs up the skin to better deal with the insult.

I believe vitamin C can deal with a raging infection such as
pneumonia as well or better than antibiotics. But to do that, C is
going to have to be administered at the maximum dose the body can
process. This is easily discoverable by a 'bowel tolerance test'
which basically means you keep taking two or three grams of C each
hour, (preferably in the powdered, most rapidly assimilable form)
until you get a runny stool (the trots). The loose stool happens
when there is so much C entering the small intestine that it is not
all absorbed, but is instead, passed through to the large intestine.
At that point cut back just enough that the stool is only a little
loose, not runny. At this dose, your blood stream will be as
saturated by vitamin C as you can achieve by oral ingestion.

It can make an important difference which type of vitamin C is taken
because many people are unable to tolerate the acid form of C beyond
8 or 10 grams a day, but they can achieve a therapeutic dose without
discomfort with the alkaline (buffered) vitamin C products such as
calcium ascorbate, sodium ascorbate, or magnesium-potassium
ascorbates.

Vitamin C also speeds up the healing of internal tissues and damaged
connective tissue. Damaged internal tissues might include stomach
ulcers (use the alkaline form of vitamin C only), bladder and kidney
infections (acid form usually best), arthritic disorders with damage
to joints and connective tissue (alkaline form usually best). Sports
injuries heal up a lot faster with a therapeutic dose of vitamin C.
As medicine, vitamin C should be taken at the rate of one or two
grams every two hours (depending on the severity of the condition),
spaced out to avoid unnecessary losses in the urine which happens if
it were taken ten grams at a time. If you regularly use the acid
form of vitamin C powder, which is the cheapest, be sure to use a
straw and dissolve it in water or juice so that the acid does not
dissolve the enamel on your teeth over time.

And this is as good a point as any to mention that just like
broccoli is not broccoli, a vitamin is not necessarily a vitamin.
Vitamins are made by chemical and pharmaceutical companies. To make
this confusion even more interesting, the business names that appear
on vitamin bottles are not the real manufacturers. Bronson's
Pharmaceuticals is a distributor and marketer, not a manufacturer.
The same is true of every vitamin company I know of. These companies
buy bulk product by the barrel or sack; then encapsulate, blend and
roll pills, bottle and label, advertise and make profit. The point
of all this is that some actual vitamin manufacturers produce very
high quality products and others shortcut. Vitamin distributors must
make ethical (or unethical) choices about their suppliers.

It is beyond the scope of this book to be a manual for going into
the vitamin business. However, there are big differences in how
effective vitamins with the same chemical name are and the
differences hinge on who actually brewed them up.

For example, there are at least two quality levels of vitamin C on
the market right now. The pharmaceutical grade is made by Roche or
BASF. Another form, it could be called "the bargain barrel brew," is
made in China. Top quality vitamin C is quite a bit more costly; as
I write this, the price differential is about 40 percent between the
cheap stuff and the best. This can make a big difference in bottle
price and profit. Most of the discount retail vitamin companies use
the Chinese product.

There's more than a price difference. The vitamin C from China
contains measurable levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, iron and other
toxic metals. The FDA allows this slightly contaminated product to
be sold in the US because the Recommended Daily Allowance for
vitamin C is a mere 60 milligrams per day. Taken at that level, the
toxic metals would, as the FDA sees it, do no harm. However, many
users of vitamin C take 100--200 times the RDA. The cheap form of C
would expose them to potentially toxic levels of heavy metal
poisons. The highly refined top-quality product removes impurities
to a virtually undetectable level.

I buy my C from Bronson who ethically gives me the quality stuff. I
know for a fact that the vitamin C sold by Prolongevity is also top
quality. I've had clients who bought cheaper C than Bronson's and
discovered it was not quite like Bronson's in appearance or taste.
More importantly, it did not seem to have the same therapeutic
effect.

The distributors I've mentioned so far, Bronson, NOW, Cooper,
Prolongevity and Vitamin Research Products are all knowledgeable
about differences between actual manufacturers and are ethical,
buying and reselling only high quality products. Other distributors
I believe to be reputable include Twin Labs, Schiff and Plus. I know
there are many other distributors with high ethic levels but I can
not evaluate all their product lines. And as I've mentioned earlier,
businesses come and go rather quickly, but I hope my book will be
read for decades. I do know that I would be very reluctant to buy my
vitamins at a discount department store or supermarket; when
experimenting with new suppliers I have at times been severely
disappointed.

Co-enzyme Q-10. This substance is normally manufactured in the human
body and is also found in minuscule amounts in almost every cell on
Earth. For that reason it is also called "ubiquinone." But this
vitamin has been only recently discovered, so as I write this book
Co-enzyme Q-10 is not widely known.

Q-10 is essential to the functioning of the mitochondria, that part
of the cell that produces energy. With less Q-10 in heart cells, for
example, the heart has less energy and pumps less. The same is true
of the immune system cells, the liver cells, every cell. As we age
the body is able to make less and less Q-10, contributing to the
loss of energy frequently experienced with age, as well as the
diminished effectiveness of the immune system, and a shortened life
span.

Q-10 was first used for its ability to revitalize heart cells. It
was a prescription medicine in Japan. But unlike other drugs used to
stimulate the heart, at any reasonable dose Q-10 has no harmful side
effects. It also tends to give people the extra pick up they are
trying to get out of a cup of coffee. But Q-10 does so by improving
the function of every cell in the body, not by whipping exhausted
adrenals like caffeine does. Q-10 is becoming very popular with
athletes who measure their overall cellular output against known
standards.

Besides acting as a general tonic, when fed to lab animals,
Co-Enzyme Q-10 makes them live 33 to 45 percent longer!

DMAE is another extremely valuable vitamin-like substance that is
not widely known. It is a basic building material that the body uses
to make acetylcholine, the most generalized neurotransmitter in the
body. Small quantities of DMAE are found in fish, but the body
usually makes it in a multi-stage synthesis that starts with the
amino acid choline, arrives at DMAE at about step number three and
ends up finally with acetylcholine.

The body's nerves are wrapped in fatty tissue that should be
saturated with acetylcholine. Every time a nerve impulse is
transmitted from one nerve cell to the next, a molecule of
acetylcholine is consumed. Thus acetylcholine has to be constantly
replaced. As the body ages, levels of acetylcholine surrounding the
nerves drop and in consequence, the nerves begin to deteriorate.
DMAE is rapidly and easily converted into acetylcholine and helps
maintain acetylcholine levels in older people at a youthful level.

When laboratory rats are fed DMAE they solve mazes more rapidly,
remember better, live about 40 percent longer than rats not fed DMAE
and most interestingly, when autopsied, their nervous systems
resemble those of a young rat, without any evidence of the usual
deterioration of aging. Human nervous systems also deteriorate with
age, especially those of people suffering from senility. It is
highly probable that DMAE will do the same thing to us. DMAE also
smoothes out mood swings in humans and seems to help my husband,
Steve, when he has a big writing project. He can keep working
without getting 'writers block', fogged out, or rollercoastering.

DMAE is a little hard to find. Prolongevity and VRP sell it in
powder form. Since the FDA doesn't know any MDR and since the
product is not capped up, the bottle of powder sagely states that
one-quarter teaspoonful contains 333 milligrams. Get the hint? DMAE
tastes a little like sour salt and one-quarter teaspoonful dissolves
readily in water every morning before breakfast, or anytime for that
matter. DMAE is also very inexpensive considering what it does. A
year's supply costs about $20.

Lecithin is a highly tonic and inexpensive food supplement that is
underutilized by many people even though it is easily obtainable in
healthfood stores. It is an emulsifier, breaking fats down into
small separate particles, keeping blood cholesterol emulsified to
prevent arterial deposits. Taken persistently, lecithin partially
and slowly eliminates existing cholesterol deposits from the
circulatory system.

In our cholesterol-frightened society lecithin should be a far more
popular supplement than it currently is. It is easy to take either
as a food in the granular form or when encapsulated. Lecithin
granules have very little flavor and can be added to a home-made
vinegar and oil salad dressing, where they emulsify the oil and make
it blend with the vinegar, thickening the mixture and causing it to
stick to the salad better. Lecithin can also be put in a fruits
smoothie. A scant tablespoon a day is sufficient. Try to buy the
kind of lecithin that has the highest phosphatidyl choline content
because this substance is the second benefit of taking lecithin.
Phosphatidyl choline is another precursor used by the body to build
acetylcholine and helps maintain the nervous system.

Algae. Spirulina or sun dried chlorella are also great food
supplements. Both make many people feel energized, pepped-up. It is
possible to fast on either product and still maintain sufficient
energy levels to take of minimal work responsibilities. Algae
reduces appetite and as a dietary supplement can assist in weight
loss. It contains large amounts of highly-assimilable protein due to
it's high chlorophyll content, as well as a large amount of beta
carotene. It also assists in detoxification of the lymphatic system.
It can be purchased as tablets or powder. Take a heaping teaspoon
daily, or at least six tablets.



Chapter Seven

The Analysis of Disease States: Helping the Body Recover



From the Hygienic Dictionary

Diagnosis. [1] In the United States, making a diagnosis implies that
you are a doctor duly licensed to engage in diagnostic function....
The making of a diagnosis is reserved only for doctors.... The
term "analysis" does not have such an explicit legal definition.
Thus, it is the term of choice of iridologists and the one most
often used by them. It is essential for the survival and promotion
of iridology that those who choose to engage in its practice avoid
naming any disease condition. As we have seen, to do so is to
infringe on rights reserved exclusively for doctors and can land the
iridologist, sooner or later, in a snarl of legal troubles.

It is better for the iridologist to refrain from suggesting to a
person that he has any particular disease, letting such diagnostics
remain the province of licensed doctors. In so doing, the
iridologist will avoid transgressing the law and stepping on the
toes of those who are legally qualified to diagnose.

It is indeed unfortunate that one of the greatest pitfalls awaiting
the iridologist is the temptation to name diseases. The feelings of
satisfaction and power resulting from conferring a name are deeply
rooted in the human psyche. For example, the Bible tells us that
man's first task on Earth was to name the animals, thus giving him
power and dominion over them.

Strong is the temptation to name diseases because nearly everyone
has come to expect that his malady has a name. Patients have come to
expect, and doctors have been trained to make, a diagnosis. . . .
"After all," the patient may reason, "how can you hope to deal with
my condition if you aren't knowledgeable enough to call it by name?"

It is not necessary to name diseases in order to exercise dominion
over them. _Dr. Bernard Jensen, Visions of Health._

In self defense, I must make it very clear from the first word that
hygienists and most other naturopaths of various persuasions, and
especially I myself, have never in the past, never!, and do not now,
diagnose, treat or offer to cure, disease or illness. Diagnosis and
curing are sole, exclusive privileges of certified, duly-licensed
medical doctors and may only be done with a grant of Authority to do
so from the State. Should an unlicensed person diagnose, offer to
treat or attempt to cure disease or illness, they will have
committed a felonious act. With big penalties. Therefore, I do not
do it.

When one of my clients comes to me and says that a medical doctor
says they have some disease or other, I agree that the medical
doctor says they have some disease or other, and I never dare say
that they don't. Or even confirm on my own authority that I think
they do have some disease or other.

What I can legally do for a client is to analyze the state of their
body and its organs, looking for weaknesses and apparent allergies.
I can lawfully state that I think their liver tests weak, the
pancreas appears not to be functioning well in terms of handling
meat digestion, that the kidney is having a hard time of it. I can
say I see a lump sticking out of their body when one is obviously
sticking out of their body; I can not say that lump is cancerous but
I can state that the cells in that lump test overly strong and that
if I myself had a mass of growing cells testing overly strong and if
I believed in the standard medical model, then I would be rushing my
overly strong testing cells to an oncologist. But I don't dare say
the person has a cancer. Or diabetes. Or is getting close to kidney
failure. That is a diagnosis.

To me, diagnosis is a form of magic rite in which the physician
discovers the secret name of the devil that is inhabiting one's body
and then, knowing that secret name, performs the correct rite and
ritual to cast that demon out. I don't know why people are made so
happy knowing the name of their condition! Does it really matter?
Either the body can heal the condition or it can't. If it can, you
will recover (especially if you give the body a little help). If the
body can't heal a condition you will die or live a long time being
miserable. No "scientific" medical magic can do better than that.

By describing a disease in terms of its related organ weaknesses,
instead of pinning a Latin name on it, I am able to assist the body
to achieve recovery in a superior way that the physician rarely
does. By discovering that the body with the lump of overly strong
cells also has a weak spleen, liver and thymus gland, I can take
actions to strengthen the spleen, liver and thymus. If the body can
strengthen its spleen, liver and thymus, then the overly strong
cells miraculously vanish. But of course I and what I did did not
cure any disease. Any improvements that happen I assign (correctly)
to the body's own healing power.

The way I analyze the organic integrity of the body is through a
number of related methods, including the general appearance of the
body, the patient's health history, various clues such as body and
breath odor, skin color and tone, and especially, biokinesiology,
the applied science of muscle testing. Biokinesiology can be used to
test the strength or weakness of specific organs and their function.
A weak latissimus dorsi muscle indicates a weak pancreas, for
example. Specific acupuncture points can be tested in conjunction
with muscle strength to indicate the condition of specific organs or
glands. The strength of the arm's resistance to downward pressure
could be calibrated with a spring scale and precisely gauged, but
experienced practitioners have no need for this bother, because they
are able to pick up subtle changes in the arms resistance that are
not apparent to the testee. Thus muscle testing becomes an art
form, and becomes as effective as the person using it is sensitive
and aware.

Biokinesiology works because every organ and gland in the body is
interconnected with other parts of the body through nerve pathways
and nerve transmissions, which are electrical and can be measured
through muscle testing. This may seem too esoteric for the
"scientific" among you, but acupuncture points and energy
manifestations around and in the body--are now accepted phenomena,
their reality demonstrated by special kinds of photography.
Acupuncturists, who heal by manipulating the body's energy field
with metal needles, are now widely accepted in the western
hemisphere. Kinesiology utilizes the same acupuncture points (and
some others too) for analytic purposes so it is sometimes called
"contact reflex analysis."

I have studied and used Kinesiology for 25 years with the majority
of my clients with very good success. There are some few people who
are very difficult to test because they are either too debilitated,
lack electrical conductivity, or their state of mind is so skeptical
and negative about this type of approach that they put up an
impenetrable mental barrier and/or hold their body so rigidly that I
can hardly determine a response. A skilled can overcome the obstacle
of a weak body that can barely respond, but the person who is
mentally opposed and determined to prove you wrong should not be
tested. If you proceed it is sure to have an unsatisfactory outcome
for all concerned. For even if I manage to accurately analyze the
condition of a skeptical client, they will never believe the
analysis and will not follow suggestions.

The "scientific," open-minded, "reasonable" client can be better
approached using an academic-like discussion based on published
literature that demonstrates how people with similar symptoms and
complaints do very well on a particular dietary regimen and
supplements. This type of person will sometimes follow dietary
recommendations to the last letter, because their scientific
background has trained them to be obedient.

When a client comes to me, I like to take a real good look at who is
sitting in front of me. I take my leisure to find out all about
their history, their complaints, their motivation to change, their
experience with natural healing, their level of personal
responsibility, whether or not they have to work, whether or not
they can take time out to heal, will they fast or take supplements,
do they have sufficient finances to carry a program through to a
successful completion, do they have people closely connected to them
that are strongly opposed to alternative approaches, can they
withstand some discomfort and self-denial, do they have toxic
relationships with other people that are contributing to their
condition, are they willing to read and educate themselves in
greater depth about natural healing, etc. I need to know the answers
to these questions in order to help them choose a program which is
most likely to succeed.

Even though fasting is the most effective method I know of, it is
not for people who are compelled to keep up a work schedule, nor is
it for people who are very ill and do not have anyone to assist them
and supervise them. Nor is it for people who do not understand
fasting and are afraid of it. People who have associates that are
opposed to it, and people who do not have a strongly-functioning
liver or kidneys should not fast either. Seriously ill people that
have been on a meat-heavy diet with lots of addicting substances
need a long runway into a fast so as to not overwhelm their organs
of elimination. Does the person in front of me have an eating
disorder, or an otherwise suicidal approach to fasting, etc. Clearly
fasting is not for everyone, and if I recommend it to the wrong
person, the result will be a bad reputation for a marvelous tool.

Given that many clients can not fast without a lot of preparation,
the majority of my clients start out with a gentle detox program
that takes considerably more time, but works. These gradients have
been outlined under the healing programs for the chronically ill,
acutely ill, etc.

To help rebuild poorly functioning organs, I sometimes use a
specialized group of food supplements called protomorphogens. These
are not readily available to the general public and perhaps should
not be casually purchasable like vitamins, because, as with many
prescription drugs, supervision is usually necessary for their
successful use. If the FDA ever succeeds at making protomorphogens
unavailable to me, I could still have very good results. (At this
time the Canadian authorities do not allow importation of
protomorphogens for resale, though individuals can usually clear
small shipments through Canada Customs if for their own personal
use.) But protomorphogens do facilitate healing and sometimes permit
healing to occur at a lower gradient of handling. Without them a
body might have to fast to heal, with the aid of protomorphogens a
person might be able to get better without fasting. And if
protomorphogens are used (chewed up--ugh!) while fasting, healing is
accelerated.

Protomorphogens are made from freeze-dried, organically-raised
animal organ meats (usually calf or lamb) combined with very
specific vitamins, herbs and other co-factors to potentiate the
effect. I view protomorphogens as containing nutritional
supplementation specific for the rebuilding of the damaged organ.

Doctor Royal Lee, a medical genius who developed protomorphogens
therapy in the 50s and who spent several stints in prison in
exchange for his benevolence and concern for human well-being, also
founded the company that has supplied me with protomorphogens. After
decades of official persecution and denial of the efficacy of
protomorphogens by the power structure, it looks like they are about
to finally have their day. As I write this book cutting-edge medical
research companies are developing therapies using concentrated
animal proteins (protomorphogens) to treat arthritis, multiple
sclerosis, eye inflamations and juvenile diabetes. The researchers
talk as though they are highly praiseworthy for "discovering" this
approach.

Unfortunately, this development is likely to cut two ways. On one
hand, it vindicates Dr. Lee; on the other, when these drug companies
find a way to patent their materials, they may finally succeed at
forcing protomorphogens (currently quite inexpensive) off the
non-prescription market and into the restricted and profitable
province of the MD.

I divide clients into two basic types: simple cases and complex
ones. When I was treating mental illness, occasionally I had a
client who had not been sick for too long. I could usually make this
client well quite easily. But if the person had already become
institutionalized, had been psychotic for many years, had received
much prior treatment, then their case had been made much more
difficult. This sort had a poor prognosis. A very similar situation
exists with physical illnesses. Many people get sick only because
they lack information about how to keep themselves healthy and about
what made them sick. Once they find out the truth, they take my
medicine without complaint and almost inevitably get better very
rapidly. Some of these people can be quite ill when they first come
to me but usually they have not been sick for very long. Their
intention when coming into my office is very positive and have no
counter intentions to getting better. There are no spiritual or
psychological reasons that they deserve to be sick. If this person
had not found me, they almost certainly would have found some other
practitioner who would have made them well. This type of person
honestly feels they are entitled to wellness. And they are.

However, some of the sick are not sick for lack of life-style
information; they suffer from a mental/spiritual malady as well, one
that inevitably preceded their illness by many years. In fact, their
physical ailments are merely reflections of underlying problems.
This patient's life is usually a snarl of upsets, problems, and
guilty secrets. Their key relationships are usually vicious or
unhealthy. Their level of interpersonal honesty may be poor. There
are usually many things about their lives they do not confront and
so, can not change. With this type of case, all the physical healing
in the world will not make them permanently better because the
mental and emotional stresses they live under serve as a constant
source of enervation.

Cases like this usually do not have only one thing wrong with them.
They almost always have been sick for a long time; most have been
what I call "doctor hoppers," confused by contrary diagnoses and
conflicting MD opinions. When I get a case like this I know from the
first that healing is going to be a long process, and a dubious one
at that. On the physical level, their body will only repair one
aspect of their multiple illnesses at a time. Simultaneously, they
must be urged to confront their life on a gentle gradient. There is
usually a lot of backsliding and rollercoastering. The
detoxification process, physical and psychological, can take several
years and must happen on all the levels of their life. This kind of
case sees only gradual improvement interspersed with periods of
worsening that indicate there remains yet another level of mental
unawareness that has to be unraveled.

Few medical doctors or holistic therapists really understand or can
help this kind of case. To do so, the doctor has to be in touch with
their own reactive mind and their own negative, evil impulses (which
virtually all humans have). Few people, including therapists, are
willing to be aware of their own dark side. But when we deny it in
ourselves, we must pretend it doesn't exist in others, and become
its victim instead of conquering it. Anyone who denies that they
have or are influenced by their own darker aspects who seem to be
totally sweet and light, is lying; proof of this is that they still
are here on Earth.

All this generalizing about diagnostic methods and clinical
approaches could go on for chapters and more chapters, and writing
them would be fine if I were teaching a group of health clinicians
that were reading this book to become better practitioners. But I'm
sure most of my readers are far more interested in some complaint of
their own or in the health problem of a loved one, and are intensely
interested in one might go about handling various conditions and
complaints, what types of organ weaknesses are typically associated
with them, and what approaches I usually recommend to encourage
healing. And, most importantly, what kind of success or lack of it
have I had over the past twenty five years, encouraging the healing
of various conditions with hygienic methods.

In the case studies that follow I will mostly report the simpler,
easier-to-fix problems because that is what most people have; still,
many of these involve life-threatening or quality-of-life-destroying
illnesses. I will tell the success story of one very complicated,
long-suffering case that involved multiple levels of psychological
and spiritual handling as well as considerable physical healing.

Arthritis

Some years back my 70 years old mother came from the family
homestead in the wilds of northern British Columbia to visit me at
the Great Oaks School. She had gotten into pathetic physical
condition. Fifteen years previously she had remarried. Tom, her new
husband, had been a gold prospector and general mountain man, a
wonderfully independent and cantankerous cuss, a great hunter and
wood chopper and all around good-natured backwoods homestead
handyman. Tom had tired of solitary log cabin life and to solve his
problem had taken on the care and feeding of a needy widow, my mom.
He began doing the cooking and menu planning. Tom, a little older
than my mother, had no sense about eating but could still shoot
game. Ever since their marriage she had been living on moose meat
stews with potatoes and gravy, white flour bread with jam, black tea
with canned milk, a ritual glass of brandy at bedtime, and almost no
fresh fruit or vegetables.

In her youth, my mother had been a concert pianist; now she had such
large arthritic knobs on all of her knuckles that her hands had
become claws. Though there was still that very same fine upright in
the cabin that I had learned to play as a child, she had long since
given up the piano. Her knees also had large arthritic knobs; this
proud woman with a straight back and long, flowing strides was bent
over, limping along with a cane. She was also 30 pounds overweight
and her blood pressure was a very dangerous 210 over 140, just
asking for a stroke.

Instead of a welcoming feast, the usual greeting offered to a loved
one who has not been seen for a few years, I immediately started her
on a juice fast. I gave her freshly prepared carrot juice (one quart
daily) mixed with wheat grass juice (three ounces daily) plus daily
colonics. She had no previous experience with these techniques but
she gamely accepted everything I threw her way because she knew I
was doing it because I loved her and wanted to see her in better
condition. She also received a daily full body massage with
particular attention to the hand and knees, stimulating the
circulation to the area and speeding the removal of wastes. Every
night her hands and knees were wrapped in warm castor oil compresses
held in place with old sheeting.

I did not use any vitamins or food supplements in her case. I did
give her flavorful herbal teas made of peppermint and chamomile
because she needed the comfort of a hot cupa; but these teas were in
no way medicinal except for her morale.

In three weeks on this program, Grannybelle, as I and my daughters
called her, had no unsightly knobs remaining on either her knuckles
or knees and she could walk and move her fingers without pain within
a normal range of movement. The big payoff for me besides seeing her
look so wonderful (20 years younger and 20 pounds lighter) was to
hear her sit down and treat us to a Beethoven recital. And her blood
pressure was 130 over 90.

Breast Cancer

I have worked with many young women with breast cancer; so many in
fact, that their faces and cases tend to blur. But whenever I think
about them, Kelly inevitably comes to mind because we became such
good friends. Like me, Kelly was an independent-minded back country
Canuck. At the age 26, she received a medical diagnosis of breast
cancer. Kelly had already permitted a lumpectomy and biopsy, but had
studied the statistical outcomes and did not want to treat her
illness with radical mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy because
she knew her odds of long-term survival without radical medical
treatment were equal to or better than allowing the doctors to do
everything possible. Nor did she want to lose even one of her
breasts. She knew how useful her breasts were because she had
already suckled one child, not to mention their contribution to
one's own self-image as a whole person. I admired Kelly's unusual
independent-mindedness because she comes from a country where
universal health coverage is in place; her insurance would have paid
all the costs had she been willing to accept conventional medicine,
but Canadian national health insurance does not cover alternative
therapy.

Kelly stayed with me for nearly two months as a residential faster,
because she needed to be far from the distractions of a troubled
family life. With financial support from her parents and child-care
from her friends she was able to take time out to give the recovery
of health top priority in her life without worrying about whether
her small son was being well cared for. This peace of mind was also
very important to her recovery.

Analysis with biokinesiology showed a pervasively weak immune
system, including a weak thymus gland, spleen, and an overloaded
lymphatic system. Her liver was weak, but not as weak as it might
have been, because she had become a vegetarian, and had been working
on her health in a haphazard fashion for a few years. Kelly's body
also showed weaknesses in pancreatic and adrenal function as well as
a toxic colon. Most immediately worrisome to her, biokinesiology
testing showed several over-strong testing lumpy areas in the
breasts and over-strong testing lumpy lymph nodes in the armpits.
Cancerous tumors always test overly strong

Kelly's earlier life-style had contributed to her condition in
several ways. She had worked for years in a forestry tree nursery
handling seedling trees treated with highly toxic chemicals. She had
worked as a cook in a logging camp for several seasons, eating too
much meat and greasy food. And she had also spent the usual number
of adolescent and young adult years deeply involved in recreational
drug use and the bad diet that went with it.

Kelly started right in on a rigorous water fast that lasted for one
entire month. She had a colonic every day, plus body work including
reflexology, holding and massage of neurolymphatic and neurovascular
points, and stimulation of acupuncture points related to weak organ
systems and general massage to stimulate overall circulation and
lymphatic drainage. She took protomorphogens to help rebuild her
weakened organs; she took ten grams of vitamin C every day and a
half-dose of life extension vitamin mix in assimilable powdered
form; she drank herbal teas of echinacea and fenugreek seeds and
several ounces of freshly squeezed wheat grass juice every day.
Twice each day she made poultices out of clay and the pulp left over
from making her wheat grass juice, filled an old bra with this
mixture and pressed it to her breast for several hours until the
clay dried. Shortly, I will explain all the measures in some detail.

These physical therapies were accompanied by counseling sessions
dealing with some severe and long-unresolved problems, response
patterns and relationships that triggered her present illness. Her
son's father (Kelly's ex) was suppressive and highly intimidating.
Fearful of him, Kelly seemed unable to successfully extricate
herself from the relationship due to the ongoing contact which
revolved over visitation and care of their son. But Kelly had grit!
While fasting, she confronted these tough issues in her life and
unflinchingly made the necessary decisions. When she returned to
Canada she absolutely decided, without any nagging doubts,
reservations or qualifications, to make any changes necessary to
ensure her survival. Only after having made these hard choices could
she heal.

I one respect, Kelly was a highly unusual faster. Throughout the
entire month on water, Kelly took daily long walks, frequently
stopping to lie down and rest in the sun on the way. She would climb
to or from the top of a very large and steep hill nearby. She never
missed a day, rain or shine.

At the end of her month on water Kelly's remaining breast lumps had
disappeared, the lymphatic system and immune system tested strong,
as well as the liver, pancreas, adrenals, and large intestine. No
areas tested overly strong.

She broke the fast with the same discipline she had conducted it, on
carrot juice, a cup every two hours. After three days on juice she
began a raw food diet with small servings of greens and sprouts well
chewed, interspersed at two hour intervals with fresh juicy fruits.
After about ten days on "rabbit food," she eased into avocados,
cooked vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains and then went home.

As I write this, it is eight years since Kelly's long fast. She
still comes to see me every few years to check out her diet and just
say hello. She has had two more children by a new, and thoroughly
wonderful husband and suckled them both for two years each; her
peaceful rural life centers around this new, happy family and the
big, Organic garden she grows. She religiously takes her life
extension vitamins and keeps her dietary and life-style
indiscretions small and infrequent. She is probably going to live a
long, time.

I consider Kelly's cluster of organ weaknesses very typical of all
cancers regardless of type or location, as well as being typical of
AIDS and other critical infections by organisms that usually reside
in the human body without causing trouble (called "opportunistic").
All these diseases are varieties of immune system failure. All of
these conditions present a similar pattern of immune system
weaknesses. They all center around what I call the "deadly
triangle," comprised of a weak thymus gland, weak spleen, and a weak
liver. The thymus and spleen form the core of the body's immune
system. The weak liver contributes to a highly toxic system that
further weakens the immune system. To top it off, people with cancer
invariably have a poor ability to digest cooked protein (animal or
vegetable) (usually from a weak pancreas unable to make enough
digestive enzymes) and eat too much of it, giving them a very toxic
colon, and an overloaded lymphatic system.

Whenever I analyze someone with this pattern, especially the entire
deadly triangle, I let the person know that if I had those
particular weaknesses I would consider my survival to be at
immediate risk I'd consider it an emergency situation demanding
vigorous attention. It does not matter if they don't yet have a
tumor, or fibroid, or opportunistic infection; if they don't already
have something of that nature they soon will.

Here's yet another example of why I disapprove of diagnosis. By
giving the condition a name like "lymphoma" or "melanoma", "chronic
fatigue syndrome" "Epstein-Barr syndrome" or "AIDS," "systemic yeast
infection", "hepatitis" or what have, people think the doctor then
understands their disease. But the doctor rarely understands that
all these seemingly different diseases are essentially the same
disease--a toxic body with a dysfunctional immune system. What is
relevant is that a person with the deadly triangle must strengthen
their immune system, and their pancreas, and their liver, and
detoxify their body immediately. If these repairs are accomplished
in time, the condition goes away, whatever its Latin name may have
been.

Now, about some of the adjuncts to Kelly's healing. Let me stress
here that had none of these substances or practices been used, she
probably still would have recovered. Perhaps a bit more slowly.
Perhaps a bit less comfortably. Conversely, had Kelly treated her
cancer with every herb, poultice and vitamin known to man but had
neglected fasting and colonics, she might well have died. It has
been wisely said that intelligence may be defined as the ability to
correctly determine differences, similarities, and importances. I
want my readers to be intelligent about understanding the relative
importances of different hygienic treatment and useful supporting
practices.

Echinacea and chaparral leaves, red clover flowers, and fenugreek
seeds are made into medicinal teas that I find very helpful in
detoxification programs, because they all are aggressive blood or
lymph cleansers and boost the immune response. These same teas can
be used to help the body throw off a cold, flu, or other acute
illness but they have a much more powerful effect on a fasting body
than on one that is eating. Echinacea and chaparral are
extraordinarily bitter and may be better accepted if ground up and
encapsulated, or mixed with other teas with pleasant flavors such as
peppermint or lemon grass. These teas should be simmered until they
are at the strongest concentration palatable, drinking three or four
cups of this concentrate a day. If you use echinacea, then chaparral
probably isn't necessary and visa versa. Red clover is another blood
cleanser, perhaps a little less effective but it has a pleasant,
sweet taste and may be better accepted by the squeamish.

If there is lymphatic congestion I always include fenugreek seed tea
brewed at the strength of approximately one tablespoon of seeds to a
quart of water. Expect the tea to be brown, thick and mucilaginous,
with a reasonably pleasant taste reminiscent of maple syrup.

Kelly used poultices of clay and wheat grass pulp on her lumps,
somewhat like the warm castor oil poultices I used on my mother's
arthritic deposits. Poultices not only feel very comforting, but
they have the effect of softening up deposits and tumors so that a
detoxifying, fasting body is more able to re absorb them. Poultices
draw, pulling toxins out through the skin, unburdening the liver.
Clay (freshly-mixed potters clay I purchase from a potters' guild),
mixed with finely chopped or blended young wheat grass (in
emergencies I've even used lawn grasses) makes excellent drawing
poultices. Without clay, I've also used vegetable poultices made of
chopped or blended comfrey leaves, comfrey root, slightly cooked
(barely wilted) cabbage leaves, slightly steamed onion or garlic
(cooked just enough to soften it). These are very effective to
soften tumors, abscesses and ulcers. Aloe poultices are good on
burns. Poultices should be thought of as helpful adjuncts to other,
more powerful healing techniques and not as remedies all by
themselves, except for minor skin problems.

Poultices, to be effective, need to be troweled on half an inch
thick, extending far beyond the effected area, covered with cheese
cloth or rags torn from old cotton sheets so they don't dry out too
fast. Fresh poultices needs to be applied several times daily. They
also need to be left on the body until they do dry. Then poultices
are thrown away, to be followed by another as often as patience will
allow. Do not cover poultices tightly with plastic because if they
don't dry out they won't draw much. The drawing is in the drying.

Sometimes poultices cause a tumor or deposit to be expelled through
the skin rather than being adsorbed, all with rather spectacular pus
and gore. This phenomena is actually beneficial and should be
welcomed because anytime the body can push toxins out through the
skin, the burden on the organs of elimination are lessened.

Wheat grass juice has a powerful anti-tumor effect, is very
perishable, is laborious to make, but is worth the effort because it
contains powerful enzymes and nutrients that help detoxify and heal
when taken internally or applied to the skin. As a last resort with
dying patients who can no longer digest anything taken by mouth I've
implanted wheat grass juice rectally (in a cleansed colon). Some of
them haven't died. You probably can't buy wheat grass juice that
retains much medicinal effect because it needs to be very fresh and
should be drunk within minutes of squeezing. Chilled sharply and
immediately after squeezing it might maintain some potency for an
hour or two. Extracting juice from grass takes a special press that
resembles a meat grinder.

The wheat is grown in transplant or seedling trays in bright light.
I know someone who uses old plastic cafeteria trays for this. The
seed is soaked overnight, spread densely atop a tray, covered
shallowly with fine soil, kept moist but not soggy. When the grass
is about four inches high, begin harvesting by cutting off the
leaves with a scissors and juicing them. If the tray contains
several inches of soil you usually get a second cutting of leaves.
You need to start a new tray every few days; one tray can be cut for
three or four days. (Kulvinskas, 1975)

More wheat grass juice is not better than just enough; three ounces
a day is plenty! It is a very powerful substance! The flavor of
wheat grass juice is so intense that some people have to mix it with
carrot juice to get it down. DO NOT OVERUSE. The energizing effects
of wheat grass can be so powerful that some people make a regular
practice of drinking it. However, I've seen many people who use
wheat grass juice as a tonic become allergic to it much as
antibiotic dependent people do to antibiotics. Better to save wheat
grass for emergencies.

I also have treated my own breast cancers--twice. The first time I
was only 23 years old. One night I noticed that it hurt to sleep the
way I usually did on my left side because there was a hard lump in
my left breast. It was quite large--about the size of a goose egg.
Having just completed RN training two years prior, I had been well
brain washed about my poor prognosis and knew exactly what requisite
actions must taken.

I scheduled a biopsy under anesthetic, so that if the tumor was
malignant they could proceed to full mastectomy without delay. I was
ignorant of any alternative course of action at the time.

I might add that before I grew my first tumor I had been consuming
large amounts of red meat in a mistaken understanding gained in
nursing school that a good diet contained large amounts of animal
protein. In addition to the stress of being a full time psychology
graduate student existing on a very low budget, I was experiencing I
very frustrating relationship with a young man that left me
constantly off center and confused.

A biopsy was promptly performed. The university hospital's SOP
required that three pathologists make an independent decision about
the nature of a tumor before proceeding with radical surgery. Two of
the pathologist agreed that my tumor was malignant, which
represented the required majority vote. But the surgeon removed only
the lump, which he said was well encapsulated and for some reason
did not proceed with a radical mastectomy. These days many surgeons
routinely limit themselves to lumpectomies.

I never did find out why I awakened from general anesthetic with two
breasts, but I have since supposed that due to my tender age the
surgeon was reluctant to disfigure me without at least asking me for
permission, or giving me some time to prepare psychologically. When
I came out of anesthesia he told me that the lump was malignant, and
that he had removed it, and that he needed to do a radical
mastectomy to improve my prognosis over the next few years. He asked
me to think it over, but he signed me up on his surgery list for the
following Monday.

I did think it over and found I was profoundly annoyed at the idea
of being treated like I was just a statistic, so I decided that I
would be unique. I made a firm decision that I would be well and
stay well--and I was for the next fifteen years. The decision healed
me.

When I was 37 I had a recurrence. At the time I had in residence
Ethyl and Marge, the two far-gone breast cancer cases I already told
you about. I also had in residence a young woman with a breast tumor
who had not undergone any medical treatment, not even a lumpectomy.
(I will relate her case in detail shortly.) I was too identified
emotionally with helping these three, overly-empathetic due to my
own history. I found myself taking on their symptoms and their pain.
I went so far into sympathy as to grow back my tumor--just as it had
the first time--a lump mushroomed from nothing to the size of a goose
egg in only three weeks in exactly the same place as the first one.
Just out of curiosity I went in for a needle biopsy. Once again it
was judged to be malignant, and I got the same pressure from the
surgeon for immediate surgery. This time, however, I had an
alternative system of healing that I believed in. So I went home,
continued to care for my very sick residents, and began to work on
myself.

The first thing I had to confront about myself was that I was being
a compassionate fool. I needed to learn how to maintain my own
personal boundaries, and clearly delineate what stuff in my mind and
my body was really mine and what was another's. I needed to apply
certain mental techniques of self-protection known to and practiced
by many healers. I knew beyond doubt that I had developed
sympathetic breast cancer because a similar phenomena had happened
to me before. Once, when I had previously been working on a person
with very severe back pain with hands-on techniques, I suddenly had
the pain, and the client was totally free of it. So I protected
myself when working with sick people. I would wash my hands and arms
thoroughly with cold water, or with water and vinegar after contact.
I would shake off their "energy," have a cold shower, walk bare foot
on the grass, and visualize myself well with intact boundaries.
These prophylaxes had been working for me, but I was particularly
vulnerable to people with breast cancer.

I also began detoxification dieting, took more supplements, and used
acupressure and reflexology as my main lines of attack. My healing
diet consisted of raw food exclusively. I allowed myself fruits (not
sweet fruits) and vegetables (including a lot of raw cabbage because
vegetables in the cabbage family such as cauliflower and broccoli
are known to have a healing effect on cancer), raw almonds, raw
apricot kernels, and some sprouted grains and legumes. I drank
diluted carrot juice, and a chlorophyll drink made up of wheat grass
and barley green and aloe vera juice. I took echinaechia, red
clover, and fenugreek seeds. I worked all the acupuncture points on
my body that strengthen the immune system, including the thymus
gland, lymph nodes, and spleen. I also worked the meridians, and
reflex points for the liver, and large intestine. I massaged the
breast along the natural lines of lymphatic drainage from the area.

Last, and of great importance, I knew that the treatment would work,
and that the tumor would quickly disappear. It did vanish totally in
three months. It would have gone away quicker if I had water fasted,
but I was unable to do this because I needed physical strength to
care for my resident patients and family.

Eighteen years have passed since that episode, and I have had no
further reappearance of breast tumors. At age 55 I still have all my
body parts, and have had no surgery except the original lumpectomy.
Many, viewing my muscles and athletic performance, would say my
health is exceptional but I know my own frailties and make sure I do
not aggravate them. I still have exactly the same organ deficiencies
as other cancer patients and must keep a very short leash on my
lifestyle.

If for some reason I wanted to make my life very short, all I would
have to do would be to abandon my diet, stop taking supplements, eat
red meat and ice cream every day and be unhappy about something.
Incidentally, I have had many residential clients with breast cancer
since then, and have not taken on their symptoms, so I can assume
that I have safely passed that hurdle.

I've helped dozens of cases of simple breast cancer where my
treatment began before the cancer broadly spread. Kelly's case was
not the easiest of this group, nor the hardest. Sometimes there was
lymphatic involvement that the medical doctors had not yet treated
in any way. All but one of my early-onset breast cancer cases
recovered. I believe those are far better results than achieved by
AMA treatment.

Before I crow too much, let me stress that every one of these women
was a good candidate for recovery--under 40 years old, ambulatory and
did not feel very sick. And most importantly, every one of them had
received no other debilitating medical treatment except a needle
biopsy or simple lumpectomy. None of these women had old tumors
(known about for more than six months) and none of the tumors were
enormous (nothing larger than a walnut).

Clearly, this group is not representative of the average breast
cancer case. Hygienic therapy for cancer is a radical idea these
days and tends to attract younger people, or older, desperate people
who have already been through the works. In every one of my simple
cases the tumors were reabsorbed by the body during the thirty days
of water fasting and the client left happy.

Except one. I think I should describe this unsuccessful case, this
"dirty case," so my readers get a more balanced idea of how fearsome
cancer really isn't if the sick person can clearly resolve to get
better and has no problem about achieving wellness.

Marie was an artisan and musician from Seattle who grew up back East
in an upper-middle class dysfunctional family. She was in her late
twenties. She had been sexually abused by an older brother, was
highly reactive, and had never been able to communicate honestly
with anyone except her lesbian lover (maybe, about some things).

Three years prior to coming to see me Marie had been medically
diagnosed as having breast cancer and had been advised to have
immediate surgery. She ignored this advice; Marie never told her
friends, said nothing to her family and tried to conceal it from her
lover because she did not want to disrupt their life together.

On her own, she did begin eating a Macrobiotic diet. In spite of
this diet, the tumor grew, but grew very slowly. After two years the
tumor was discovered by her lover, who after a year of exhausting
and upsetting arguments, forced Marie to seek treatment. Since Marie
adamantly refused to go the conventional medical route, she ended up
on my doorstep as a compromise.

By this time the tumor was the size of a fist and had broken through
the skin of the left breast. It was very ugly, very hard.
Biokinesiology showed the usual deadly triangle and other associated
organ weakneses typical of cancer. Marie began fasting on water with
colonics and poultices and bodywork and counseling and supplements.
At the end of the water fast, Marie looked much healthier, with
clear eyes and clear skin and had a sort of shine about her, but the
tumor had only receded enough for the skin to close over it; it was
still large, and very hard. To fully heal, Marie probably needed at
least two more water fasts of equal length interspersed with a few
months on a raw food diet. But she lacked the personal toughness to
confront another fast in the near future. Nor was she emotionally up
to what she regarded as the deprivation of a long-term raw foods
healing diet.

So I advised her to seek other treatment. Still unwilling to accept
standard medical management of her case, Marie chose to go to the
Philippines to have "psychic surgery." She was excited and
optimistic about this; I was interested myself because I was dubious
about this magical procedure; if Marie went I would have a chance to
see the results (if any) on a person I was very familiar with. Marie
had her tickets and was due to leave in days when her lover, against
Marie's directly-stated wishes, called her parents and informed them
of what was happening.

The parents had known nothing of Marie's cancer and were shocked,
upset, outraged! They had not known Marie was a lesbian, much less
that their daughter was flirting with (from their view) obvious
quackery. Their daughter needed immediate saving and her parents and
brother (the one who had abused her) flew to Oregon and surprisingly
appeared the next day in a state of violent rage. They threatened
lawsuits, police, incarceration, they threatened to have their
daughter civilly committed as unable to take care of herself. They
thought everything Marie had done for the last three years was my
fault. I was lucky to stay out of jail. Of course, all of this was
why Marie had not told them in the first place; she had wanted to
avoid this kind of a scene.

Marie did not have enough personal integrity to withstand the
domination of her immediate family. They put her in a hospital,
where Marie had a radical mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation.
Assured that they had done everything that should have been done,
the self-righteous parents went back home. Marie never recovered
from chemotherapy and radiation. She died in the hospital surrounded
by her lesbian friends who took dedicated, ever-so-sympathetic turns
maintaining an emotional round-the-clock vigil.

Marie's death was partly my fault. She was an early case of mine. At
the time I did not yet understand the total effect of lack of ethics
and irresponsibility on illness. Had Marie really wanted to live in
the first place, she would have sought treatment three years
earlier. In our counseling sessions she always evaded this question
and I had not been wise enough to pin her down with my knee on her
chest and make her answer up. Marie had too many secrets from
everybody and was never fully honest in any of her relationships,
including with me. I think she only came to Great Oaks at her
lover's insistence and to the day she died was trying to pretend
that nothing was wrong.

All Marie really wanted from her life was to be loved and have a lot
of loving attention. In the end, her dramatic death scene gave her
that, which is probably why she manifested cancer and kept it and
eventually, died from it.

The name for this game is "secondary gain." A lot of sick people are
playing it. Their illness lets them win their deepest desire; they
get love, attention, revenge, sympathy, complete service, pampering,
create guilt in others. When sick people receive too much secondary
gain they never get well.

One of the hardest things about being a healer is that one
accumulates an ever-enlarging series of dirty, failed cases like
this one. It is depressing and makes a person want to quit
doctoring. Whenever I get involved with a case I really want them to
get better. My life is put entirely out of joint for several months
dealing with a residential faster. My schedule is disrupted; my
family life suffers; my personal health suffers. No amount of mere
money could pay for this. And then some of these people go and waste
all my help to accomplish some discreditable secret agenda that they
have never really admitted to themselves or others.

Constant Complaints

Alice was a middle-aged woman who couldn't understand why she had
always felt tired, even when she was young. Her life had been this
way ever since she could remember. Most puzzling to her was why her
life was so Job-like. She did everything the proper way. Doing
things correctly was important to her, and fitted her Puritan
background. Alice supported all the right causes, did good works,
was active in a Unitarian church and bought all her food at the
healthfood store--and made sure it was organically grown.

But in spite of Alice's righteous living, her existence was a
treadmill of constant, minor complaints. She was constantly
exhausted, so much so she had difficulty getting up in the morning
and feared she might have chronic fatigue syndrome (whatever that
is). Alice suffered bouts of depression over thoughts like these,
and had many acute illnesses like colds that hung on interminably
and would not go away. She had a constant post-nasal drip. Though
she enjoyed life, her body was a millstone around her neck.

I've had a lot of clients exactly like Alice. Sometimes they
complain of headaches; sometimes constant yeast or bladder
infections. Whatever the complaints, the symptoms are rarely severe
enough to classify themselves as someone who is seriously ill, but
their symptoms rarely go away and they almost never feel good.
Medical doctors rarely find anything wrong with them, though they
will frequently prescribe an antibiotic to treat a somewhat constant
infection, or an antihistamine for sinus symptoms. Getting a new
prescription drug makes the complaint go away for a short time until
their resistance is lowered again and the very same complaint
returns. These people frequently depend on over the counter pills
and are routinely prescribed sleeping remedies and antidepressants.
If instead of this route they will but take my medicine they are
usually easy to fix and afterwards are amazed that it was all that
simple and that so much of their life has been less than it could
have been.

Alice had been through the medical doctor route. She had become
quite familiar with antibiotics for her colds and flu, and also took
synthetic thyroid hormone--the doctor had diagnosed her fatigue as
being caused by an underactive thyroid, which was partly correct--but
the thyroid medication didn't give her much more energy. Alice had
been supporting this medical doctor in grand style for over thirty
years but never obtained the relief she sought.

I put Alice through my usual two hour first-time-visit thorough
analysis. For two weeks before coming to see me she had saved tiny
samples of everything she ate, wrapped them in plastic film,
carefully labeled, and put them in the freezer. Along with these
food samples and a typed list of all these foods, she brought a big
box full of her condiments, herb teas, vitamins, spices,
prescription medications, over the counter drugs, oils, grains,
breads, crackers and small samples of her usual fresh vegetables and
fruits. Even her water. Her entire kitchen! By biokinesiology we
proceeded to test all of her foods for allergic reactions. I also
tested the integrity of her organs and glands and in the process,
got a detailed medical history and list of her complaints.

Alice had exhausted adrenals, and they probably had been that way
for thirty years. Her pancreas was now too weak to digest the
legumes that made up a large part of her vegetarian diet. She was
allergic to wheat, soy, and dairy products and had especially been
eating dairy in the mistaken notion that it was necessary to keep up
her protein intake. Really very typical. So many health food store
shoppers these days mistakenly believe that, because they are
vegetarian and do not eat meat, they especially need to boost their
protein intake with dairy and soy. Unfortunately, so many North
Americans are highly allergic to dairy and unfortunately, soy
products are as hard or harder to digest than cooked meats.

Alice was especially shocked to discover that she was allergic to
such foods as cabbage family vegetables, alfalfa sprouts and citrus.
Most people don't think that anyone could be allergic to something
as healthy as alfalfa sprouts. The doctor was right about one thing;
her thyroid was underperforming. He had not noticed that her heart
was weak.

Medical doctors rarely discover an organ weakness until that organ
actually begins to catastrophically fail. A busy honest doctor will
usually tell the complaining patient there is nothing wrong with
them: go home, take two aspirin, accept the fact that your body is
not perfect and don't worry about it. A hungry doctor will be
delighted to perform countless lab tests, seeking any possible
reason for the complaint. This can go on as long as the patient has
money or as long as the insurance company will pay. They rarely find
anything "wrong" and the patient is far better off if the doctor
doesn't discover something "serious" to treat because their
treatment may carry with it consequences far more severe than the
complaint. For example, I have seen dozens of people whose lives
were virtually ruined after surgical treatment for chronic back
pain.

Biokinesiology is actually a far more sensitive system of analysis
than lab tests. It picks up weaknesses at a very early stage so
total organ failure can be prevented. Rarely will any of the organ
weaknesses I discover be confirmed by a medical doctor. First I put
Alice on a six week cleanse. She did one week on fresh, raw food;
one week on dilute carrot juice with some green leafy vegetables
juice too; one week on water fasting; and then she repeated the
series. After six weeks of detoxification, I gave Alice a life
extension megavitamin formula, discovered she could not handle the
acid form of vitamin C (that she had already been taking) and had
her start on protomorphogens to rebuild her weakened endocrine
system, her exhausted adrenals and weak pancreas. She also began
taking pancreatic enzymes when she ate vegetable protein. She was
put on a maintenance diet that eliminated foods she was allergic to;
the diet primarily consisted of whole grains, nuts, cooked and raw
vegetables, and raw fruits. On her maintenance diet Alice had a
profound resurgence of energy and rediscovered a sense of well-being
she had not known for decades. She began to feel like she had when
she was a child. Her constant sinus drip was gone. She was able to
stop taking synthetic thyroid hormones and instead, supported her
endocrine system with protomorphogens.

A Rampaging Infection

At the age of 40, John, an old bohemian client of mine, came into a
moderate inheritance and went "native" in the Fiji Islands in the
South Pacific. He spent about four months hanging out with the
locals. Life there was so much fun that John completely forgot that
his body was actually rather delicate, that many of his organs were
weak, and that to feel good, he had to live a fairly simon-pure
life.

But the jovial, accepting, devil-may-care Fijians enjoyed a constant
party, even more so because John's money allowed the Fijians to
manifest powerful, tropical, home-grown strains of recreational
herbs to smoke in abundance, beer and rum and worse, the Fijians
(and John) constantly used a very toxic though only mildly-euphoric
narcotic called kava, something Europeans usually have no genetic
resistance to. The Fijians (and John) also ate a lot of
freshly-caught fish fried in grease, well-salted, and huge,
brain-numbing bowls of greasy starches, foods that they call i'coi,
or "real food" as opposed to things like fruit and vegetables that
aren't real food because they don't knock you to the floor for hours
trying to digest them in a somnambulant doze.

John miraculously kept up with this party for a few months and then,
while scuba diving, got some small coral scratches on his leg. These
got infected. The infections got worse. Soon he had several huge,
suppurating, ulcerous sores on his legs and worse, the infections
became systemic and began spreading rapidly. He was running a fever
and was in considerable pain. So John booked an emergency ticket
home and fled to find Doctor Isabelle. When I met his plane he was
rolled out in a wheelchair, unable to walk because of pain and
swelling in his legs.

John was violently opposed to ordinary medical treatment; he
especially would not have taken antibiotics even if he had died
without them because previous courses of antibiotics had been the
precipitant of life-threatening conditions that first brought John
to my care. John used his last strength to get to me because he knew
that had a hospital gotten its clutches on him the medical doctors
would have done exactly as they pleased.

I gave John a colonic, a gentle, mental spanking, and put him to bed
without any supper. He started water fasting and did colonics every
day. He began gobbling vitamin C (as calcium ascorbate) a few grams
every hour. I put huge poultices on his sores made of clay and
chopped lawn grass (we needed a week or so before a tray of wheat
grass would be ready). John's sores were amazing. Every day a new
one seemed to appear on a different part of the body. The old ones
kept getting bigger and deeper. The largest original ones were about
three inches in diameter, smelled horribly and had almost eaten the
flesh down to the bone. His pain was severe; there was no position
John could assume that didn't irritate one sore or another, and it
was a good thing my house was remote because John frequently
relieved his pain by screaming. John was never delirious, but he was
always original. He did not have to scream, but enjoyed its relief
and howled quite dramatically. I wore earplugs.

After about two weeks of water fasting, John counted up the total of
his sores. There were forty three. Seven or eight of them were
enormous, two or three inches in diameter and well into the flesh,
but the last ones to appear were shallow, small and stayed small.
After that point no more new ones showed up and the body began to
make visible headway against the infection. Very slowly and then
more and more rapidly, the sores began to close up and heal from the
edges. John's fever began to drop. And he had less pain. I should
mention that John brought an extremely virulent and aggressive
pathogenic organism into our house to which we Americans had no
resistance. Both my husband and I were attacked where the skin had
been broken. However, unlike John, in our cases, our healthy bodies
immediately walled-off the organism and the small, reddened
pustules, though painful, did not grow and within a week, had been
conquered by our immune systems. And after that we had an immunity.

After about three weeks of his fasting we were thoroughly tired of
hearing John's cathartic howls, tired of nursing a sick person. We
needed a break. John at this point could walk a bit and was feeling
a lot better. John had previously water fasted for 30 days and knew
the drill very well. So we stocked up the vitamin C bottle by his
bed and went to town for the weekend to stay in a motel and see a
movie. As they say in the Canadian backwoods, we were bushed.

John had promised to be good. But as soon as we left he decided that
since he felt so very much better, he could break his fast. He knew
how to do this and fortunately for him, (it was very much premature
for John to eat) did it more or less correctly, only eating small
quantities of raw fruits and vegetables. But by the time we got back
home three days later, John had relapsed. The pain was rapidly
getting much worse; the sores were growing again and a few small new
ones appeared. Dr. Isabelle again took away his food and gave him
another verbal spanking a little more severe than the one he'd had a
few weeks earlier and put him to bed again without his supper.

After two more weeks on water, John had gained a great deal on the
sores. They were filling in and weren't oozing pus, looked clean and
the new forming meat looked a healthy pink instead of purple-black.
But John had been very slender to start with and by now he was
getting near the end of his food reserves. He probably couldn't have
fasted on water for more than one more week without starvation
beginning. But this time, when he broke his fast, it was under close
supervision. I gave him dilute juice only, introduced other
sustenance very cautiously and made absolutely sure that
reintroducing nourishment would not permit the organism to gain.
This time it didn't. John's own immune system, beefed up by fasting,
had conquered a virulent organism that could have easily killed him.

Before the era of antibiotics, before immunizations to the common
childhood illnesses, people frequently died of infections as
virulent as the one that attacked John. They usually died because
they "ate to keep up their strength." Most of these deaths were
unnecessary, caused by ignorance and poor nursing care. For example,
standard medical treatment for typhoid fever used to consist of
spoon-fed milk--sure to kill all but the strongest constitution. Even
without the assistance of massive doses of vitamin C, if people
would but fast away infections they could cure themselves of almost
all of them with little danger, without the side effects of
antibiotics or creating mutated antibiotic-resistant strains of
bacteria.

Dr. John Tilden, a hygienist who practiced in the '20s, before the
era of antibiotics, routinely fasted patients with infectious
illnesses. Supporting the sick body with wise nursing, he routinely
healed scarlet fever, whopping cough, typhoid, typhus, pneumonia,
peritonitis, Rocky Mountain fever, tuberculosis, gonorrhea,
syphilis, cholera, and rheumatic fever. The one common infection he
could not cure was diphtheria involving the throat. (Tilden,
Impaired Health, Vol. II).

Recently, medical gerontologists have discovered another reason that
fasting heals infections. One body function that deteriorates during
the aging process is the production of growth hormone so the effects
of growth hormone have been studied. This hormone also stimulates
the body to heal wounds and burns, repair broken bones, generally
replace any tissues that have been destroyed and, growth hormone
stimulates the immune response. Growth hormone also maintains muscle
tone and its presence generally slows the aging process.

Growth hormone might make a wonderful life-extension supplement; on
it a middle-aged person might readily maintain the muscle tone of
youth while slowing aging in general. Unfortunately, growth hormone
cannot at this time be inexpensively synthesized and is still far
too costly to be used therapeutically except to prevent dwarfism.
However, any technique that encourages a body to produce more of
this hormone would be of great interest to life extensionists.

The body only produces growth hormone at certain times and only when
certain nutrients are present in the blood. Gerontologists call
these nutrients "precursors." The precursors are two essential amino
acids, argenine and ornithine and certain vitamins such as C and B6.
But having the precursors present is not enough. Growth hormone is
only manufactured under certain, specific circumstances: for about
one hour immediately after going to sleep and then only if the blood
supply is rich with argenine and ornithine but contains few other
amino acids; it is also manufactured during heavy aerobic exercise
that goes on for more than thirty minutes; and growth hormone is
produced at an accelerated rate when fasting. (Pearson and Shaw,
1983). I did not know this when I was fasting John, but now, I would
give argenine and ornithine to someone with a serious infection as
well as massive quantities of vitamin C.

Chronic Back Pain

Barry was a carpenter who couldn't afford to lose work because he
was unable to bend or twist or lift. He frequently had bouts of
severe back pain that made working almost impossible. Upon analysis
by biokinesiology I found that he had a major problem with large
intestine weakness and secondarily, adrenal weakness.

Constipation frequently causes back pain. The muscles of the back
have nerve pathway connections to the large intestines; weakness in
the intestine causes weakness of the back and makes it prone to
injury. But the problem is the intestine, not the back. And the only
way to make the back stay better is to heal the intestine. Many
athletes have very similar problems. For example, they get knee
injuries and think there is something wrong with their knee. Or they
get shoulder injuries and think their shoulder is weak. These people
are only half right. Yes, their knee or their shoulder is weak. But
it could become strong and almost uninjurable if the underlying
cause of the weakness is corrected.

The knee for example, has nerve pathway connections to the adrenal
glands and kidneys. The shoulder has similar connections to the
thyroid. The foot is weakened by the bladder. The treatment should
first be on the weakened gland or organ and secondarily, on the
damaged muscle tissue. I have solved numerous sports-related knee
problems with protomorphogens for the adrenals and elimination of
food allergies that make the adrenals work overtime. I have fixed
bad shoulders by rebuilding the thyroid.

In Barry's case, it was the intestine. I asked him about his bowel
function and he said that he was never constipated, had "a daily
bowel movement without a lot of straining." But having given some
6,000 colonics, I knew better. There should have been no straining;
Barry was trying very hard to be regular--he should not have had to
effort. Fortunately, it struck him as true that he needed to
detoxify and I managed to convince him to water fast. He probably
figured, why not since he couldn't work anyway. Barry was a tall,
skinny man to start with and you would think he hardly carried any
fat at all, but he fasted on water for 30 days, receiving a colonic
every day, while I did bodywork on his damaged back. He sure was
constipated and couldn't deny the evidence that floated by through
the sight tube of the colonic machine. By the end of the fast his
colon was fairly repaired and free of old fecal material. And Barry
had become a tall, gaunt-looking guy who had lost about 20 pounds
you wouldn't think he had to spare.

After a few weeks of careful weaning back on to food, Barry felt
pretty good, terrific even. He had no back pain and found out for
the first time what not being constipated meant. It no longer took
"not very much effort" to move his bowels; they moved themselves.
That was ten years ago. A few months ago, Barry looked me up, just
to say thanks and to let me know that he had not had any more back
problems and had generally felt good because he had more or less
stayed on the improved diet I had instructed him about during his
fast.

Painful Menstruation

Elsie was twenty. She came to see me because I had helped Elsie's
mother overcome breast cancer many years earlier. Elsie began to
have very painful periods with profuse bleeding and abdominal pain.
Her nutrition had been generally good because her mother couldn't
survive on the average American diet and had long ago converted her
family to vegetarianism. And like her mother, Elsie had been taking
vitamins for many years.

A medical doctor diagnosed Elsie as having endometriosis, meaning,
the lining of her uterus had migrated to the fallopian tubes, where
it continued to bleed regularly into the abdominal cavity, following
the same hormonal cycle as the endometritial tissue that lines the
uterus. The doctor offered to try hormonal manipulation and if this
proved unsuccessful, offered a hysterectomy. That would certainly
eliminate the symptoms!

But Elsie did not wish to eliminate her ability to have children and
preferred not to risk throwing her hormones off balance. So she came
to me. My analysis showed that she had weak ovaries and weak uterus.
These were secondary to a toxic colon, toxic because she had a weak
gall bladder and weak pancreas that reduced her digestive capacity
and turned her improperly combined Organic, vegetarian legume-rich
diet into toxemia. Checking her foods for allergies I discovered the
normal pattern: Elsie was intolerant to dairy, wheat, eggs, corn,
soy and concentrated sugars.

Being no stranger to fasting (her mother had fasted at length ten
years previously) Elsie undertook a 30 day cleanse on vegetable
juice with daily enemas, taking vitamins in powdered form. After the
fast I put her on protomorphogens for her reproductive organs and
pancreas. The gall bladder had healed by itself during fasting--gall
bladders usually heal easily. Her maintenance diet included using
pancreatic enzyme supplements when eating vegetable proteins and
Elsie eliminated most fats so her gall bladder would not be
stressed. The fasting also overcame her allergic reactions to corn
and wheat but she was still unable to handle soy products, eggs or
dairy. After six months Elsie no longer needed protomorphogens, had
no abdominal pain and her periods were normal.

You may well be wondering how or why detoxification of the bowels
allowed the body to repair the uterus. The large intestine is a sort
of nest that cradles the reproductive organs, including the ovaries,
uterus, and in the case of the male, the prostate gland. A toxic
colon is like having one rotten apple in a basket, it contaminates
the whole batch. Many problems in the abdominal area are caused by a
toxic colon, including chronic back pain, ovarian cysts,
infertility, birth abnormalities, bladder infections and bladder
cancer, painful menstruation, fibroids and other benign growths as
well as malignant ones, and prostatitis or prostate cancer. Detoxing
the body and cleaning out the colon should be a part of the healing
of all of these conditions.

Irritable Bowels

Some peoples' lives don't run smoothly. Jeanne's certainly didn't.
She was abandoned to raise three little kids on welfare. Her college
diploma turned out to be useless. Jeanne used to help me at Great
Oaks in exchange for treatment. During those early years she had
done a 30 day juice fast with colonics. Twenty years later at age
60, having survived three children's growing up, surviving the
profound, enduring loss of one who died as an adult, after starting
up and running a small business that for many years barely paid its
way, and experiencing an uninsured fire that took her house, she
began to develop abdominal pains the doctors named "irritable bowel
syndrome" or "colitis." The MD offered antibiotics and
antispasmodics but Jeanne had no insurance, the remedies were
unaffordable. She also retained considerable affinity for natural
medicine.

Prior to these symptoms her diet had been vegetarian, and had
included large quantities of raw fruits and vegetables and whole
grains. But the bran in bread was irritating to her bowels, she
could no longer digest raw vegetables or most raw fruit.

Jeanne's vital force was low; her healing took time. She started on
a long fast supported by powdered vitamins, vegetable broth and herb
teas, but after three weeks was too weak to do her own enemas at
home and could not shop for vegetables to cook into broth. So she
had to add one small serving of cooked vegetable per day, usually
broccoli or steamed kale. This lasted for one more week but Jeanne,
having no financial reserves, had to return to work, and needed to
regain energy quickly. Though not totally healed, she progressed to
a maintenance diet of cooked grains and vegetables and food
supplements, very much like a Macrobiotic diet. She felt better for
awhile but wore down again after another stressful year.

Her abdominal pains gradually returned though this time she noticed
they were closely associated with her stresses. About one year after
ending her first fast, as soon as she could arrange to take time
off, she began another. This time to avoid extreme weakness, she
took vegetable broth from the outset, as well as small amounts of
carrot juice and one small serving of cooked vegetable a day for
three weeks. Again, this rest allowed the digestive tract to heal
and the pain went away. She returned to her Macrobiotic diet with
selected raw foods that she could now handle without irritating her
bowel.

She was now healthier then she had been in many years. With improved
energy and a more positive attitude, Jeanne returned to University
at age 65 and obtained a teaching certificate. Now she is making
good money, doing work she enjoys for the first time in 35 years. I
hope she has a long and happy life. She is entitled to one!

A Collection of Gallbladders

Gallbladder cases are rather ho-hum to me; they are quick to respond
to hygienic treatment and easy to resolve. I've fixed lots of them.
But an inflamed gallbladder is in no way ho-hum to the person
afflicted with it. I've been frequently told that there are no worse
pains a body can create than an inflamed gallbladder or the
sensations accompanying the passing of a gall stone. I hear from
kidney patients that passing a kidney stone is worse but I've never
had a patient who experienced both kinds of stones to give me an
honest comparative evaluation.

The only thing dangerous about simple gallbladder problems is
ignoring them (between the bouts of severe pain they can cause)
because then the inflamed gallbladder can involve the liver. I
already told the story of how my own mother lost half her liver this
way.

The condition is usually caused by a combination of hereditary
tendency, general toxemia, and/or a high-fat diet, especially one
high in animal fats. The liver makes bile that is stored in the
gallbladder, to be released on demand into the small intestine to
digest fat. A toxic, overloaded liver makes irritating
sediment-containing bile that inflames the gallbladder and forms
stones. A high-fat diet forces the liver to make even more of this
irritant.

A toxic, overloaded, inflamed, blocked gallbladder is capable of
causing an enormous array of symptoms that can seem to have no
connection at all to their cause. In part these same symptoms are
caused by a toxic, constipated colon that, in part, got that way
because of poor fat digestion over a long time. These symptoms
include: severe back pain; headache; bloating; burping; nausea;
insomnia; intestinal gas; generalized aches and pains.

Medical doctors used to remove a troublesome gallbladder without
hesitation; it was an organ they considered to be highly
dispensable. Without one, the bile duct takes over as a bladder but
its capacity is much smaller so the person's ability to digest fats
has been permanently crippled, leading to increased toxemia and
earlier aging if fats are not eliminated from the diet. These days
the medicos have a new, less invasive procedure to eliminate stones;
they are vibrated and broken-up by ultrasonics without major
surgery. Inflamed gallbladders are usually removed because
gallbladder inflammations resist treatment by antibiotics.

There are several very effective natural gallbladder remedies. The
best is a three week fast, taking the juice of one or two lemons
every day, along with colonics. The lemon juice tends to clear the
bile duct. The fast allows the gallbladder to heal from
inflammation. In cases that aren't too severe I have had very good
results simply eliminating fats from the diet and using a food
supplement derived from beet tops called AF Betafood. However, in
all these cases, once the gallbladder is no longer "acting up," the
person must stay on a low fat diet. Any fats they do eat must be
vegetable and in small quantities.

By healing their gallbladders and cleansing their colons, several of
my clients have resolved severe, debilitating back pain, pain so
severe that the suffers were becoming bedridden. Medical doctors
don't associate gallbladder disease with back pain.

The Frightening Heart

Heart disease is one of the major causes of death among North
Americans. It evokes images of resuscitation, of desperate races
against time, trying to restart an arrested heart before the brain
dies. It makes people think of horribly expensive surgery, last
wills and testaments, terrible, paralyzing pain. Heart disease is a
great profit center for the medical profession.

Most heart problems are very easy to fix by holistic approaches,
even many hereditary weaknesses and malfunctions can be healed, if
the work is done before too much organic damage occurs. But it
rarely is easy to get the people to take the necessary medicine;
everything in their lives must change--and fast.

First of all, people with heart problems must rapidly reach and
maintain normal weight. This can be done by fasting or by dietary
change, usually by eliminating all fats, sugars and refined
starches. Alcohol and tobacco must instantly and forever become only
past memories. It is almost as essential to eliminate flesh protein
foods and dairy. Should that prove entirely too painful, fish in
small quantities and only one or two times a week is tolerable.

For starters, a long fast, especially one involving lots of bed
rest, is ideal. This gives the heart a chance to heal while the body
weight is adjusted. A period of intense rest even without water
fasting will accomplish almost as much. Even someone with the
potential for heart disease who has not yet had a heart attack would
be well-served to spend a month in bed, losing weight on juice, or
sitting in a rocker on the porch eating only raw foods. After the
weight is down to normal or close to normal and the heart tests
stronger, an exercise program should be started.

Exercise has to become a religion. A daily aerobic program must be
started on a carefully managed gradient, using the pulse rate as an
regulator, at first raising their maximum heart rate to a point just
below 150 percent of its resting pulse and keeping it there for
thirty minutes. One can walk, jog, ride a bicycle or use an exercise
machine. Actually, everyone should do this, even those with no heart
problems. My husband, who hates the boredom of exercise, enjoys a
ski machine in front of the TV while the stock market program is on.
He finds the TV interesting enough that he pays no attention to his
workout. Daily aerobic exercise will strengthen the heart, gradually
slowing the heart's resting pulse rate, indicating that the heart
has become much stronger, pumping more blood with each pulse. As the
resting pulse drops the exercising heartbeat can be increased to
double the resting rate.

Highly aggressive, competitive, stress-oriented people have to give
up being adrenaline junkies and learn to relax and assume a
laid-back approach to living. Or die soon. An adrenaline junkie is
someone that enjoys the feeling they get when operating under
stress. Stress and the adrenaline it releases produce a kind of a
drug-high. Many stressaholics cannot give up their adrenaline
addiction while maintaining their previous employment and
life-style, even though their life is at stake. In this sense they
are like alcoholics, who should not take employment tending bar. To
survive for long these people may have to retire or change
professions. Stockbrokers may have to become Organic farmers;
journalists may have to operate a news stand or bookstore, or work
part-time covering the society page and dog shows. Women frequently
turn their family life into a stress-filled drama too.

With heart problems a life extension megavitamin program is
essential, even for twenty somethings if they have heart disease.
The sixty milligrams of Co-Enzyme Q-10 I recommend for the average
middle aged person will not be enough for heart cases; they should
take at least 120 milligrams daily and consider up to 250 mg. This
much Q-10 greatly boosts the energy output of the heart on a
cellular level. Vitamin E should also be increased, to between 600
and 2,000 iu daily. I also rebuild diseased hearts with
protomorphogens; usually they must stay on protomorphogens for the
rest of their lives. Niacin taken several times a day in doses,
sufficient to dilate the capillaries and cause a skin flush (50 to
200 milligrams), increases the blood flow to nourish the heart. The
amino acid L. Carnitine is also useful by increasing the energy
output of the heart much like Co-Enzyme Q-10.

When I put people on this program, the supplements and other
measures gradually take effect, and over months the patient begins
to feel enormously better. Inevitably they come to dislike the
side-effects of the various medications their medical doctor has put
them on and they begin to wean themselves off of heart-stimulating
poisons like digitalis. Another benefit of my program is that
inevitably, blood pressure also drops to a normal range so if they
have been on blood pressure medication they quit that too. Their
diuretics also become unnecessary. The money they save more than
pays for their supplements and the sense of well-being they feel is
beyond value.

Other Kinds Of Cancer

There seem to be many other kinds of cancer, at least if you believe
the medical doctors. They divide up cancers and their treatments by
their location in the body and by the type of cancer cells present.
I do not see it that way. To me, a cancer is a cancer is a cancer,
and there is only one kind: it is an immune system collapse,
consequence of the deadly triangle of weak spleen, thymus and liver,
plus a toxic large intestine and weak pancreas. That organ profile
is found in skin cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia, brain cancer,
cancer of what have you. How fast or how slowly the cells multiply
or spread, where they are located, what the cancer cells look like
in a microscope, these are irrelevant factors compared to the body's
ability to conquer the disease. Or die from it.

If the body's immune system can stop the growth of the cancers and
begin to turn them back before the cancer cells impinge
catastrophically on some vital function, the person can usually
survive. Even if the body cannot completely eliminate all the cancer
cells, but regains enough immune function to keep the existing
cancers in permanent check, a person can survive many years with an
existing, stable cancer without undue pain or discomfort. Still
having a non-growing tumor after a long fast indicates that a person
is a lot better than they were before fasting.

I believe that virtually everyone has cancer cells in their body,
just like viruses and bacteria. But most people do not develop
cancer as a disease because their immune function is strong so these
misbehaving cells are destroyed as fast as they appear. Mutated,
freely-multiplying cells are caused by peroxidized fats, by free
radicals in the body, by radiation (there has always been background
radiation on Earth), by chance mutation. There are naturally
occurring highly carcinogenic substances in ordinary foods that are
unavoidable. In fact some of these naturally occurring substances
are far more dangerous than the toxic residues of pesticides in our
foods. The body is supposed to deal with all these things; they are
all called insults. It is rarely the insult, but the failure of the
body to eliminate cancerous cells promptly that causes the disease
called cancer. So the treatment I recommend for cancer in general is
the same as the one described for breast cancer cases. Restore the
immune function.

However, as much as I lack respect for conventional medical cancer
therapies, I do think surgery can have a useful place in cancer
treatment along with hygienic methods. Some people just cannot
confront the lump(s). Or they are so terrified of having a cancer in
their body that their emotions suppresses their own immune function.
Even though surgery prompts a cancer to spread more rapidly, without
their lumps some cancer patients feel more positive. If surgery is
done in conjunction with rebuilding the immune system, the body will
prevent new cancers from forming.

Removal of a large mass of cancer cells can also lighten the immune
system's task. Not having to kill off and reabsorb all those cells
one-by-one from a huge cancer mass, the body can better conquer
smaller groups of cancer cells. And the die-off of large cancers
produces a lot of toxins, burdening the organs of elimination. This
is an argument for the potential benefit of a lumpectomy. However, I
do not support mastectomies, or the type of surgery that cause
massive damage to the body in a foolish attempt to remove every last
cancer cell, as though the cells themselves were the disease.

Sometimes cancer tumors are well-encapsulated, walled off and can be
easily removed without prompting metastasis. This type of tumor may
not be completely reabsorbed by the body in any case; though the
immune system may have killed it, an empty shell remains, like a
peanut shell. Sometimes the judgment calls about surgery can get
dicey. When surgery involves removing an organ. I oppose the loss of
useful body parts.

I have also known and helped people who believed they couldn't
recover without radiation and chemotherapy. What people believe is,
is. The emotions generated when a personal reality is suppressed,
ignored or invalidated will overwhelm an immune system. I always
tell those people who sincerely believe in it to go ahead with
standard medical treatment (while I'm privately praying the doctors
won't cause too much damage). However, when I am supporting a body
with supplements and dietary reform, have put that body on a
raw-food cleansing diet or even a raw food diet with nuts and grains
that hardly detoxifies, and then the person has had chemotherapy and
radiation, the medical doctors in attendance are inevitably amazed
that the side effects are much milder than anticipated, or
non-existent. And fewer courses of chemotherapy are needed than the
doctors expected.

For example, I worked with a little boy with leukemia. His mother
brought him to me while trying to resolve a conflict with her
ex-husband about the boy's treatment. The father demanded the
standard medical route; the mother was for natural therapy.
Eventually the father won in court, but I had the boy on my program
for three months before the doctors got their hands on him. Even
during chemotherapy and radiation the mother kept the boy on my
program. Throughout the doctors' treatment he had so few bad side
effects that he was able to continue in school and play with the
other children; he did not lose his hair (which would have made him
feel like a freak). He recovered. I don't mind that the medical
doctors took credit, but to my thinking, he recovered despite their
therapy.

Onion Cases

All too many of my cases are what I privately refer to as onion
cases. By this I mean the opposite of a simple case. There are
multiple complaints. I call them onion cases because these people
get better in layers, like pealing an onion. As each skin comes off,
the next becomes visible. Sometimes when the patient overcomes an
existing complaint, another appears that was not there in the
beginning, probably this new one is a complaint that they had at an
earlier point in their life, one that had gone away. Onion cases
take a long time to completely heal, sometimes years. There
frequently are psychological aspects to the case that surface with
different physical problems. If I were not an effective psychologist
I could not succeed with most of them. The average medical doctor
probably considers onion cases to be hypochondriacs, but they
usually are not.

Almost always the first symptoms that demand attention are the most
life-threatening, like immune system failures, liver failures,
pancreatic failures, nervous system failures and heart failures.
With these eliminated, new complaints appear. Often these are
endocrine system imbalances or weak endocrine glands, anemias, mild
heart conditions. Then it gets down to eye or ear infections,
muscular or skeletal weaknesses, mild skin problems, sinusitis,
teeth problems; things that aren't serious but that do degrade the
quality of life. Each one of these layers also carries with it a
psychological component; each of these layers can take three to six
months to resolve.

I had a pretty good idea from the first visit that Daniel, not yet
30, was going to take some time to get well. He already had a
degenerative condition not usually seen until middle age--crippling
gout and arthritis. He had badly distorted joints, walked with
considerable pain, lacked a full range of movement, had enormous
fatigue and consequently, a well-justified depression. Daniel was
about to give up working as no longer possible, but he liked his
job. And he certainly needed it.

Daniel's analysis showed massive allergies to foods, a systemic
yeast and multiple virus infections and multiple organ weaknesses: a
life-threateningly weak immune system, weak pancreas, weak adrenals,
weak large intestine. Because he could hardly accept anything he
wasn't allergic to and because he could not afford to quit working
even for a few weeks (though he was about to be forced into complete
disability) I put him on a Bieler fast. This is a monodiet of fairly
substantial quantities of either well-cooked green beans or
well-cooked zucchini, the choice between these two foods depending
on the acid-base balance of the blood. (Henry Bieler, 1965) In
Daniel's case my choice was zucchini, one pint of plain zucchini
puree with a little kelp and garlic added (no salt, no butter, no
nothing else) every few hours. I also put him on heavy vitamin
support and protomorphogens for his desperate immune system. While
on the Bieler fast he did daily enemas at home. Had colonics been
available to him, Daniel couldn't have afforded them.

Within three weeks he was far more comfortable, had less pain, more
energy even though he was still eating nothing but zucchini, had
less swelling in his joints. During the first month he lost about
ten pounds and had been skinny to start with. I then added other
cooked nonstarchy vegetables to his diet and we continued the same
protomorphogen and supplement program for another month.

Once each month Daniel came to see me. Each time he had slightly
improved organ strength and was able to tolerate a few more foods.
By the third month he stopped losing weight because we added small
quantities of cooked rice and millet to his diet. However, to
continue his detox, I had him water fast one day a week, staying in
bed and resting all day. At the start and end of the fasting day he
also took an enema. He continued a weekly one-day fast for many
months. By the fourth month, his immune system testing stronger, a
new problem appeared. Daniel had intestinal parasites. So I also put
him on a six month program to eliminate those.

Daniel required monthly dietary adjustments because he quickly
became allergic if he ate very much of anything very often--broccoli
or rice for example. During this time he became aware of many
negative emotions associated with childhood, of young adult
frustrations and disappointments. He was really very angry about
many things in his life, even though he had for many years
maintained an invariably pleasant social veneer. But now he began
expressing some of these feelings to me and to his associates.

Daniel had an abusive girlfriend, but as he improved this
relationship became insufferable. So he broke off with this woman
and found a new relationship that was much more positive, one based
on mutual respect and admiration. There are frequently strong
connections between repressed anger and depository diseases like
arthritis and gout. Daniel could not permit himself to constantly be
made angry and still get well.

His next layer of symptoms did not appear until nearly eighteen
months after he had first come to see me. By this time he had good
energy, had returned to hiking and skiing, camping and canoeing. He
had worked as a printer but was now bootstrapping his own print shop
on a shoestring, and became entirely self-employed. He had a good
romantic relationship. The parasites were gone; his gout and
arthritis was virtually gone; many of his food allergies were gone.
Now his body was demanding that its acid/base balance be adjusted
and he began to pay attention to the minor back problems he had all
along. Daniel had also developed a new problem--inflammation of the
eye. It was so severe that he went to an opthamologist seeking
immediate relief because he could hardly see. I put him on massive
doses of vitamin C and protomorphogens for the eye and we attacked
the other problems.

Now I still see Daniel every three months for minor dietary and
supplement adjustments. His emotional space is very positive. His
business is doing well. His love life is doing well. He has
developed no new problems and all the old ones are under control.
His organ systems, though better, will never tolerate many insults,
physical or mental, but if he lives within his limits, he has every
chance of a long and happy life.

Daniel has become a friend of mine by now and I like to see him but
I expect I won't see Daniel very much at all any more. He has
learned what he needs to know to take care of himself. This is a
typical onion case that resolved successfully. However this case
might not have worked out so well had Daniel not possessed a high
degree of personal integrity and bravery, had he not faced and
resolved his emotional conflicts. Fortunately, Daniel had always
conducted an ethical life, without dishonesty or a secret collection
of disreputable acts. Bodies are easy to fix; they are carbon oxygen
engines that work on chemistry and respond unfailingly to physical
measures. But the entity that runs the body is not so simple. The
thoughts and emotions of the spirit impinge on a body as powerfully
or more powerfully than all the vitamins, dietary reform or
protomorphogens I can provide. The mind, and the spirit behind that
mind, can make a body sick or can prevent it from getting well or
staying well despite everything I do.

Unethical Illness

I see a lot of spiritually-induced physical illness in my practice.
Maybe more than my share. Maybe its karmic; it tends to find me
because I understand it. And it comes up my driveway because people
who have it often become doctor shoppers, and seek out a naturopath
as a last resort after exhausting everything that modern medical
science has to offer. I have had large numbers of undiagnosable
people that suffer greatly but who medical doctors can find nothing
wrong with and label psychosomatic. I have also repaired people
given specific medical diagnoses that standard physical remedies
cannot make better.

In most of these cases, the physical illness is secondary to, is an
overlay of a more fundamental spiritual cause. On this type of case
there are inevitably severe problems connected with close friends,
relatives and business associates. The sick person inevitably blames
the friends, relatives and business associates and takes no
responsibility. The problems seem unresolvable. When I probe deeply
enough into these problems, I begin to discover the real infection
below. The sick person, so fond of complaining about all the
terrible things done to them by the people they have or have had
problems with, or sometimes, so proud of not complaining about all
the terrible things done to them. Actually, almost inevitably this
person has committed a huge mass of secret crimes, viciousness and
betrayals, rarely indictable felonious acts, but crimes none the
less, disreputable deeds that must be kept secret.

These deeds are always completely justified; the sick person always
claims to have been right for having done them and it is next to
impossible for me as a therapist to get them to take responsibility
for their sins. But at the deep, center of almost all people is an
honest, decent soul that knows what it has really done and feels
guilty and judges itself. That is why it says in the Bible, 'judge
not, lest you be judged'. It is not the judgment of the Deity we
have so much to fear; we are own worst judge, jury, and executioner,
and eventually extract from ourselves full payment with compound
interest for all harmful acts.

People frequently punish themselves with severe, incapacitating
illness or even death. A spiritual illness will not respond very
well to physical treatment until the spiritual malaise's is
resolved. This case has to find enough courage to become honest with
themselves, to admit their deeds in all their disgusting detail and
then to make amends, or if amends are not possible, to at least
cease and desist. They have to take personal responsibly for what
they really are being and what they have really done and most
importantly, accept that they are responsible for creating their own
illness. It is not a virus, a cancer cell or something that just
fell out of the universe and struck them, innocent victims that they
are. They have made their illness and only they can uncreate it.

Unfortunately, few people who have spent a lifetime indulging
themselves in this degree of irresponsibility have the integrity to
change. This is a tough case. Especially so because they think they
are physically ill, they did not come to me to be defined as a
"mental" case and tend to reject such approaches.

There is no shortage of additional degenerative conditions that I
could describe. There are eating disorders, shingles, skin problems,
kidney disease, Alzheimer's, senility, mental illness, addictions,
chronic fatigue syndrome, aids. There's macular degeneration, carpal
tunnel syndrome, chronic ear infections (especially in children),
tonsillitis, bronchitis, pancreatitis, cystitis, urethritis,
prostatitis, colitis, sinusitis, osteomyelitis and a dozen other
itises, including appendicitis. There's algias (itises of the
nerves): neuralgia, fibromyalgia. There's ism's (really itises of
the muscles). There are 'onias like pneumonia; omas like carcinoma,
melanoma and lymphoma.

I could (but won't) write a page or two on every one of these
conditions and turn this book into an encyclopedia. After twenty
five years of practice, there is little I have not seen. Or helped a
body repair. Generally, everyone of those following pages I'm not
going to bother to write would repeat the same message. That the
medical profession has little understanding of the real causes or
cures of disease; that the world is full of unnecessary suffering;
that there are simple, painless, effective, harmless approaches to
eliminating most of the ailments of mankind except the ultimate
ailment, old age, the thing that takes us all eventually; that
essentially all the diseases resolve from the same approach.

But I have already explained the theoretical basis of natural
hygiene, the key role of toxemia, enervation, constipation, the
essentials of good diet, fasting and colon cleansing, the importance
of regular exercise, and the rational for vitamin supplementation. I
have revealed a lot of the secrets in my bag of tricks, like my
favorite herbs, poultices and wheat grass.

What concerns me most about medicine today is that there seems to be
ever fewer hygienists practicing. The young holistic practitioner is
overwhelmed with confusing data and approaches and is increasingly
less able to discern what is really important and what is
distraction, and is increasingly intimidated by the AMA, made
fearful of accepting people with serious conditions. Too many young
practitioners become ideologues, clinging to the rightness of a
single rigid discipline, missing the truths that exist in other
approaches and worse, missing the limitations that exist in their
own personal healing methods.

The current concern about the cost of medical care and resorting to
government-run insurance programs and regulations will do little or
nothing to reverse the trend to more and more sickness that costs
more and more to treat. The root causes of our current crisis are
two fold. One, our food, just as it comes off the farm, is getting
ever worse. This is not even recognized as a problem. After we
process it for an industrial food distribution system, much
nutrition is lost too. This is barely recognized as a problem. Until
we are better nourished, we will be ever sicker and each generation
will become a degeneration. Secondly, our society is suffering from
all the evils of monopoly medicine. This is barely recognized. The
AMA has a stranglehold on the sick. There is no effective
competition for its methods. Alternatives are suppressed. In my
version of a better world, if anyone that wanted to could hang out a
shingle and offer to diagnose, treat and cure disease, a few quacks
would really hurt a few people. But many genuine therapies would
appear and the public would be exposed to workable alternatives. If
anyone that wanted to market it could put a label on a bottle of
pills, power or tincture that said its contents would heal or cure
disease, yes, a few people would be poisoned. And a few would die
needlessly by failing to get the right treatment. But on the
positive side, all this liberty would result in countless new
therapies being rediscovered and many new uses for existing
substances would appear.

Fundamentally, this is the issue of liberty. I believe it is better
to allow choice and options, to permit the dangers that go with
liberty to exist. And to allow unfortunate outcomes to occur without
intervention into individual lack of intelligence and
irresponsibilities. The opposite is our current path--an attempt to
regulate and control away all dangers. But this overcontrol results
in institutionalized violence and cruelty, inefficiency that is not
checked or exposed by the bright light of a better way. As Churchill
said, 'democracy is the worst form of government there is--except for
all the others.' What he meant is that we must accept that this is
an imperfect world. The best this planet can be is when it is at its
freest, when restrictions are minimized and when people are allowed
to make their own choices, be responsible for their own outcomes and
experience the consequences of their own stupidities.



Appendix



Pulse Testing For Allergies

Coca's Pulse Tests are extraordinarily useful and simple tools for
at-home allergy detection. My clients have succeeded at using this
approach without supervision. Coca's test works on this simple
principle: pulse elevations are caused by any allergic reaction. If
you know what your normal range of pulse rates are, you can isolate
an offending food or substance and eliminate it. Success with Coca's
Pulse Test requires only motivation and a little perseverance,
because in order to test for food allergies, the diet must be
restricted for a few days and your pulse must be accurately taken at
specific intervals during the testing period.

The test is based on measurement of the resting pulse rate,
something most people have no difficulty learning how to do. The
resting rate is how fast the heart beats after a person has been
sitting still, comfortably relaxing for three to five minutes. When
a person is active the heart beats faster than the resting rate. One
measure of aerobic fitness is how quickly the heart is able to
return to its resting rate. Well-trained athletes' hearts can adjust
from working very hard to a resting rate in only a minute or so;
those who are deconditioned can take three to five minutes for their
heart to slow from even mild exertion to its stable, resting pace.
Those who cannot readily find their own pulse on their wrist or
throat can inexpensively purchase a digital watch that gives a pulse
reading; this kind of watch is used by athletes to make sure their
training pulse is in an acceptable range.

Preparatory to doing Coca's Pulse Test it is necessary to as much as
possible eliminate allergic food reactions. This requires the
application of discipline for a few days before testing begins.
Allergic reactions can go on for several days after a food has been
eaten and if you are having a reaction to something eaten many hours
or several days previously, it may obscure a reaction to a food just
eaten.

1. Stop smoking entirely for at least five days before you do a
cigarette test; allergies to cigarettes can take five days to clear.
Besides, you shouldn't smoke, anyway!

2. For the first three days, count your resting pulse immediately
after awakening in the morning (for one entire minute), and record
the reading.

3. During the first three days, take your resting pulse half an hour
and again one hour after each meal. It if has elevated more than 12
beats above the resting rate you found upon arising that morning,
you may assume that some food at the meal you just ate was an
allergen. Temporarily, eliminate from your diet all the foods eaten
at the previous meal until you can check them one-by-one a few days
later. At the end of these first three days you may not have many
foods left that you can eat. That is okay and to be expected; it is
time to begin adding foods back to the diet.

4. Most people who are allergic to foods are allergic to one or more
of the following: corn, wheat, milk and cheese, yogurt, meat,
alcohol, tobacco. It would be very wise to eliminate these foods too
for the first three days, until they are tested.

After three days on this regimen, you can assume that many of your
usual allergic food reactions have ceased or at least diminished
significantly and that you probably can get reasonably accurate
testing results on individual foods. A good indicator of having
problems with food allergies in general can also show up during
these initial days. If you have eliminated a large number of foods
and your resting pulse upon awakening has slowed down by several
beats, you can assume you are allergic to foods you were eating.

I would not be at all surprised that by the end of the third day you
were only eating a very few fruits and vegetables and had eliminated
everything else. A more effective variant of the testing procedure
calls for a three or four day water fast to clear all allergies with
absolute certainty, and then to introduce foods one at a time as
described below.

On the fourth and subsequent few days, take your resting pulse upon
arising and then eat a modest quantity of a single food: for
example, eat a slice of bread, or a medium sized glass of milk, or
an orange, or two tablespoons sugar in dissolved in water, or a few
dried prunes, or a peach, or an egg, or a medium-sized potato, or a
cup of black coffee without sweetener, or a few ounces of meat, or a
stick of celery, or half a cup of raw cabbage, or an onion, or a
date, or a few hazelnuts, etc. Count the pulse one half hour later
and again one hour after eating the test item.

If any food raises the resting pulse over 12 beats per minute above
your morning resting pulse, that food should be eliminated; you are
certainly allergic to it or can't digest that much of it. If your
pulse has not returned to its morning resting rate one hour later,
you are still having an allergic reaction to the food you ate
previously and cannot get a decent result on another food until
either your pulse slows again or until the next morning. You may,
however, continue to eat other foods that you know do not provoke
allergic reactions. Because reactions to a food may not clear for
many hours, it is wise to eat only small quantities of individual
foods if you wish to test many of them in a single day. If a food
causes no acceleration of pulse (at least 6 beats above your
estimated normal maximal) that food can be tentatively labeled
non-allergenic.

After a few days of testing one food an hour, you will become weary
of the routine and wish to eat more normally. It may also occur that
you cannot test more than one or two foods a day from the very first
day because allergic reactions do not clear quickly enough. No
problem, the testing period can go on at a lower level of intensity
for many weeks, trying one new food each morning upon arising. As
you eliminate allergens from your diet one by one, your resting
pulse should drop somewhat and it should be easier to discern
allergic reactions. After you have worked through all the items in
your normal dietary, it would be wise to retest the foods a second
time, breaking your fast with one different test item each morning.
This second testing round may reveal a few more allergic reactions
that were obscured by other allergic reactions the first time
through.

Vitamin and Supplement Suppliers

Bronson Pharmaceutical
1945 Craig Road
P.O. Box 46903
St. Louis, MO 63146
[800] 525-8466

Douglas Cooper Products
Box 65976
Los Angeles, CA 90065
[800] 234-8686

Prolongevity, Ltd.
10 Alden Road, Unit 6
Markham, Ontario L3R 2S1
Canada
[800] 544-4440

Prolongevity, Inc.
1142 W. Indian School Road
Phoenix, AZ 85013
[800] 544-4440

Vitamin Research Products
3579 Hwy. 50 E.
Carson City, NV 89701
[800] 877-2447

Publishers Of Books Not Readily Findable

Life Extension Foundation
2835 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, Florida 33020
[800] 544-0577

I strongly recommend joining and regularly studying their
newsletter. Besides, when you do, Prolongevity will give you a
significant discount that amounts to far more than the cost of a
membership if you use many food supplements.

Health Research Publishing
P.O. Box 70
Mokelumne Hill, CA 95245

Find here reprints of all the old classics of natural hygiene.

American Natural Hygiene Society
Herbert Shelton Library
P.O. Box 30630
Tampa, Florida 33630

Find here all of Herbert Shelton's works.



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