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

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 lifestyles 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