How and When to Be Your Own Doctor - Moser and Solomon (simple ebook reader .txt) 📗

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