Nutrition And Medicine

If you look at almost any other system of medicine besides the Western, you'll find a heavy reliance on food. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, after whom the Hippocratic oath was named, taught, "let food be thy medicine." The "foods" of modern medicine, however are drugs. The typical American doctor completely disregards nutrition. Those who are concerned with nutrition are labeled as faddists, freaks, extremists, radicals and quacks. Why aren't our doctors telling us about these things and trying to do something to change it? Many people think that medical physicians are experts in nutrition because they seem to know some things about the human body. Well, physicians may be great at saving lives in an emergency or for relieving pain temporarily, but very few are taught to prevent illness. Hard-working and dedicated, they are highly trained to diagnose illness (symptoms), administer drugs and perform surgical procedures. Their schooling demands so much time for pharmacology (drug therapy) that they have little time for studying nutrition. What scant information they do receive is usually outdated and less detailed than that which nurses and technicians receive in their training.

When the average physician is asked, "What should I eat?" The typical answer is "Just eat a balanced diet." If you want to know what an average physician thinks a balanced diet is, look at any hospital food fed to patients, doctors, staff and visitors. The mutually-exclusive roles of dietician and cook are nowhere more apparent than in such institutions. All are identical. Iceberg lettuce, with a glob of cottage cheese, and a wedge of canned pineapple. Slices of overdone and warmed-over beef that have suffered for hours in some electronic purgatory, coated with gravy made of water, library paste, and bouillon cubes. Peas, corn, and carrots--boiled. The pie is a sickening slab of beige goo, flavored with artificial maple sugar, in a crust of reconstituted cardboard, topped with sweetened shaving cream squirted from an aerosol bomb. The problem is that the dieticians who actually supervise such "cooking"--as well as the hapless agents of the FDA and the USDA who inspect the forced and faked-up products that go into it--can indeed prove that it contains the proper amount of protein, carbohydrate, minerals and vitamins. But this is like judging the worth of music in terms of decibels and wave frequencies.

George Blackburn, M.D., an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said that 5% of all patients who die in American hospitals--50,000 people--starve to death, and their doctors don't realize it. Less extreme malnutrition hastens death in 160,000 cases and delays recovery in 330,000 cases, Dr. Blackburn said. In other studies on hospital nutrition, it was revealed that malnutrition is one of the most common causes of death among elderly people in hospitals. Then there's the soft drink, candy and cigarette vending machines strategically placed throughout the hospital. The hospital gets a percentage of everything sold in these machines.

In 1970, Professor Richard Ahrens of the University of Maryland School of Nutrition proposed more nutrition courses for the School of Medicine and was turned down on the grounds that the medical students needed to devote still more time in their crowded schedules to learn the latest information about more and more drugs. A very small percentage of doctors specialize in preventive medicine, but most better fit the description given by Dr. Julian B. Schorr of the New York Blood Center, in a January 1971 Wall Street Journal article by Mary Bralove: "Often doctors are trained in nutrition by doctors who heard it from another doctor who made it up." Yet they believe what they say is true and get upset when they're contradicted.

The average physician is not a nutrition imbecile, he can recognize overweight, gross malnutrition and other nutritional problems. But physicians usually get out of their area of expertise when they talk about dietary cholesterol, subclinical scurvy and long-term dietary studies. Time (December 18, 1972, p. 75) quoted Dr. Michael Latham of Cornell University's Graduate School of Nutrition: "Nine out of ten doctors in New York City would give wrong answers to dietary questions."

Senator Richard S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania, a member of the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, said (in Prevention October, 1972) "I am particularly concerned about the need for better practical nutrition education for our doctors." "The advice of family doctors carries a great deal of weight with most people. But, unfortunately, most doctors simply do not receive sufficient training in nutrition while they are at medical school to enable them to give sound advice on nutrition that we urgently need..."

The 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health concluded, "The effectiveness of physicians in providing optimal care for the many patients who have diseases with an important nutritional component is dependent in considerable part on the kind of nutrition teaching offered them at medical school and thereafter. At the present time, nutrition teaching in medical schools and in teaching hospitals is woefully inadequate." Medical schools with nutrition departments are rare. Most don"t even offer separate courses in nutrition but mingle what little they do offer in an elementary chemistry course. Not one medical school can honestly say it teaches nutrition seriously. An open mind is needed by all, not dogmatic opinions from out-of-date "experts."

Nicolas Wade, in New Republic Magazine, wrote: "The scientific enterprise is one of the few American institutions whose inner workings have never been subjected to close public scrutiny. It has been protected by the perceived idealism of scientists and by the belief that science and technology are the engines of progress. But the cases of fraud that seem to be popping up every month or so raise uncomfortable questions about whether all is well in the scientific realm." Wade then briefly describes fabrications of research data, forged laboratory results, results of research not even conducted, dishonesty, cheating and plagiarism by leading medical researchers. Named are: J.H. Cort of Mount Sinai School of Medicine; J. Darsee at Harvard Medical School; H. Levin of Philadelphia doing clinical trials for several drug companies and used by FDA to evaluate safety and efficacy; W. Aronow, chief of cardiovascular diseases at V.A. Medical Center, Long Beach. Aronow was also Professor of Medicine, University of California; an unnamed research fellow at Harvard Medical School; A. Rincover of the Psychology Dept., University of North Carolina, found guilty of plagiarism and Industrial Bio-Test (IBT), one of the countries largest testing laboratories.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, studies for 737 safety tests of herbicides and pesticides were found invalid. Sadly, of those "safe" chemicals represented, 15% of the pesticides were on the market...212 to be exact. J. Darsee who was found guilty of research fraud at Harvard Medical School was many years at Emory University where he was also faking research data. "His career of successful fakery spanned 14 years..." He concludes, "All of the premises of this comfortably insulating hypothesis are seriously flawed. The scientific enterprise is supposed to consist of communities of scholars who rigorously check each other's work...but...the standard checking mechanism in detecting fraud is virtually nonexistent."

From the book Confessions of a Medical Heretic, the late Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D., 1980: "Dr. Leroy Wolins, a psychologist at Iowa State University, had a student write to 37 authors of scientific reports asking for the raw data on which they based their conclusions. Of the 32 who replied, 21 said their data either had been lost or accidentally destroyed. Dr. Wolins analyzed 7 sets of data that did come in and found errors in 3, significant enough to invalidate what had been passed off as scientific fact."

The difference between orthodoxy and the naturalist is as pronounced as the difference between black and white. The orthodox health practitioner embraces all theories of health and disease that further the interests of the food, dairy, chemical, pharmaceutical and medical-care delivery systems. This acceptance does not imply individual physician dishonesty or corruption--rather--it denotes a very good four to six years of brainwashing in a "higher institute of learning," where a preponderance of inaccurate, deceptive instruction is passed on by equally "brainwashed" professors. When a college professor diverges from the party line demanded by the school's patrons, he suddenly finds himself in want of tenure. When such inaccurate information appears repetitively in the news media, it becomes factual. As a result of unsurpassed human greed, chronic poisoning and malnutrition lead to sickness and premature death by destroying biochemical equilibrium.

Stages Of Dietary Transition

Two thirds of Americans die from diseases caused by a poor diet. It is difficult to change a dietary pattern, even if it is unhealthy, when it means swimming upstream against social pressure and our old, programmed habits and belief systems. Nevertheless, it is necessary to examine one's programming and be willing to abandon what is no longer appropriate for maintaining one's state of total well-being of body, mind, and spirit. In this unfolding process, one learns to abandon what does not keep one in health and harmony. There are several major stages of dietary transition. Each stage may take as little as one season in a yearly cycle. The concept of transitioning allows one to be receptive to the continued progress of one's evolutionary growth no matter what the time frame. Stage one is a transition from all biocidic foods to natural, whole, organic foods. This means letting go of all processed, irradiated, chemicalized, pesticide-ridden and fungicide-containing, adulterated, fast and junk foods. In this stage we also give up red meats. The second stage is letting go of all flesh foods including poultry and fish. It also includes not eating eggs. Stage three is a vegetarian diet with the inclusion of dairy at the beginning and the moving to an 80% live food intake by the end. Stage four is vegetarian without dairy and may be as much as 95 - 100% live foods by the end of stage four.

Stage One

The first stage in the transition process is the mental acceptance and understanding that a dietary change is necessary. It involves becoming conscious of what one is eating, from pesticides to nitrates. This means significantly dropping one's intake of health-destroying, biocidic foods. Giving up these processed, commercially grown, fast food and junk foods means no longer offering oneself up as a sacrificial guinea pig to the pesticide, herbicide, additive, fungicide, food processing, irradiating, microwaving, fast food, and junk food industries for experimentation. It is a time to learn to read labels and ask the right questions to protect you. Stage one involves not drinking municipal tap water or well water and instead drinking and cooking with reverse osmosis filtered water. Stage one eliminates such deleterious foods as white sugar, white bread, candy, T.V. dinners, soft drinks, and meats that have been treated with nitrites and nitrates, pasteurized milk and cheeses, baked goods containing refined or hydrogenated oils, foods containing additives, and prepared foods that have been stored in the refrigerator for more than two or three days.

Actually, almost all cooked foods become biocidic approximately twenty-four hours after preparation. Whether it takes one to four days to become contaminated with bacteria or mold is not the point, for all stored foods have lost their vital energy even if kept in the refrigerator. This is significantly less so if the food is quick frozen. These foods, when eaten, cause an increase in the white blood cell count in the blood, the same as in an infection. They are linked with cancer, weakened immune system, allergies, neurotoxicity, hyperactivity in children, and brain allergies. These substances also reduce mental functioning, decrease mental clarity and give poor concentration. This stage is the time for action to begin. It is the first step in your commitment.

Stage Two

The stage two diet increases the amount of organic, health-promoting foods to about 90% and phases out fish and chicken from the diet. There are no nutrients found in fish, which cannot be found in safer and healthier vegetarian sources. What fish have in abundance as compared to vegetarian food is mercury, PCBs, salmonella and hepatitis virus found in polluted waters. The toxicity in fish is so serious that some studies have found that babies whose mothers have eaten fish from Lake Michigan have lower birth weight and more neurological problems. There are no good reasons for hanging on to old habitual food patterns by continuing to eat toxic fish and many reasons for letting go. This is the last step in the transition to a vegetarian diet.

Stage Three

Stage three is the first step into vegetarianism. It is a major lifestyle change and needs to be experienced in that light. There may be some minor psychological shifts as well as a slow detoxification process that is initialized. By moving into it slowly and peacefully, these changes will have a minimal impact. This stage takes you a little further toward optimal health and allows you to build or clean and balance. At this stage one's awareness of the acid-alkaline balance, food combining, low protein intake, and organic foods becomes more refined. One develops sprouting skills and uses more rejuvenating foods. One will shift to 60-80% biogenic and bioactive foods and 20 - 40% cooked foods. Fruits and vegetables become a larger part of the diet, and the grains, especially cooked grains diminish in quantity. About 30 - 40% of the diet is fruit, and 30 - 40% vegetables nuts, seeds and grains. There's a tendency for some to think that because they stopped eating the highly concentrated protein of flesh foods, they can begin eating large amounts of dairy, oily foods, tofu, and roasted nuts and seeds. These are high in cooked fats and protein and shouldn't be eaten in excess either.

A diet high in natural complex carbohydrates and low in protein creates the best health, vitality, and longevity. Many of the cultures, which are noted for their longevity, eat only one-half to one-third the protein that the western nations eat. Americans, who are the world leaders in cancer, heart disease, arthritis, obesity, high blood pressure, multiple sclerosis, mortality rates, miscarriages and birth deformities, eat more meat, more protein, and probably more cooked fat than any other nation. A stage three diet will adequately support all one's nutritional needs and provide a gradual detoxification over the years, so one's body will progressively become healthier and more in tune with nature and one's spiritual self.

Stage Four

This is the stage that accelerates the sensitivity and spiritualizing process in many people. It is a diet for spiritual athletes. The people who do best on it are those who have reached a certain amount of stability and harmony in their lives and are already experienced vegetarians. It is a 95% or more live food diet with about 50% biogenic food 50% bioactive food, and 0 to 5% cooked foods, like potatoes, or slightly cooked, fibrous vegetables. Although you may not feel it is time to try a Stage four diet, its principles are worth understanding and applying to your diet. In stage four, you reach a level of refinement; our ability to absorb nutrients is continually improving. A high-protein diet clogs the basement membrane, and as eating less protein and no flesh food eliminates the excess protein, the basement membrane becomes more and more porous.

On a 95% live food diet, this process of clearing the basement membrane occurs more quickly than on other diets so that less and less food is needed to give the same amount of nutrients Eventually one discovers one does not need to eat three meals per day. The digestive system is able to rest and is more efficient in absorbing more nutrients from what one eats. Eating two, or perhaps even one, meal per day may be more closely aligned with what a healthy organism actually needs, although this will vary with one's constitution. As health improves, enough life force is created to regenerate damaged and exhausted enzyme systems or even develop new enzyme systems. The body can make specific enzymes that can actually transmute one mineral into another.

Our enzyme systems are constantly improving, so one needs to eat less and less in order to assimilate the same amount of nutrients. This might explain how some people have been observed to live on water alone. A potential obstacle of the 95 -100% raw food diet is the tendency to follow it as some sort of obsessive, self-righteous, self-centered ritual in the hope of achieving happiness, purity, or God just from the diet alone. One cannot eat one's way to God or even personal happiness. They are a state of awareness in which there is no ego to claim ownership. The secret to making changes is to go slowly, patiently, and with a great gentleness on oneself. Forcing changes in diet too quickly often results in reversals that are self-defeating. The more refined our bodies become, and the more structured our body fluids become, and the more bio-electricity we generate, we become a superconductor for the cosmic energy passing through. We experience Divine energy, which helps us feel connected, and a part of the flow of the universe.