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 greatadvantage when fasting because you can save your energy for internal healing. Butcolonics are more appropriate for some. There are fasters who are unable to givethemselves an enema either because their arms are too short and their body is toolong and they lack flexibility, or because of a physical handicap or they can’tconfront their colon, so they let someone else do it. Some don’t have themotivation to give themselves a little discomfort but are comfortable with someoneelse doing it to them. Some very sick people are too weak to cleanse their owncolon, so they should find someone to assist them with an at-home enema or havesomeone 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 asslightly dangerous, perhaps addictive and a sign of psychological weirdness. YetNorthamericans on their civilized, low fiber, poorly combined diets suffer widelyfrom constipation. One proof of this is the fact that chemical laxatives, with theirown set of dangers and liabilities, occupy many feet of drug store shelf space andare widely advertised. Is the medical profession’s disapproval of the enemarelated to the fact that once the initial purchase of an enema bag has been madethere are no further expenses for laxatives? Or perhaps it might be that once aperson discovers they can cure a headache, stop a cold dead in its tracks with anenema, 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 anenema, leading finally to flaccidity and enlargement of the lower bowel. Thisactually can happen; when it does occur it is the result of frequent administrationof small amounts of water (fleet enemas) for the purpose of stimulating a normalbowel movement. The result is constant stretching of the rectum without sufficientfluid to enter the descending colon. A completely opposite, highly positive effectcomes 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 waterto induce a bowel movement may eventually cause dependency, will notstrengthen the colon and may after years of this practice, result in distention andenlargement of the rectum or sigmoid colon. However, a completely emptyaverage-sized colon has the capacity of about a gallon of water. Whenincreasingly larger enemas are administered until the colon is nearly emptied offecal matter and the injection of close to a gallon of water is achieved, beneficialexercise 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 completelyfilled with water, inducing it to vigorously exercise while evacuating itself multipletimes. The result is a great increase in muscle tone, acceleration of peristalsis andeventually, after several dozens of repetitions, a considerable reduction of transittime. Well-done enemas work the colon somewhat less effectively and do notimprove 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 theamount of new material passing into the colon is small or negligible. During thefirst few days of fasting if two or three enemas are administered each day inimmediate 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 andpainless. Probably for psychological reasons, some peoples’ colons allow water to be
injected one time but then “freeze up” and resist successive enemas. For thisreason 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 withoutundue discomfort or effort from the person receiving the colonic. However, theAMA has suppressed the use of colonics; they are illegal to administer in manystates. Where colonics are legal, the chiropractors now consider this practicemessy and not very profitable compared to manipulations. So it is not easy to finda 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 threecolonics delivered one day apart while eating lightly and then immediately beginthe fast. Three colonics given on three successive days of a light, raw food dietare 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 thoroughlynovel experience. A few well-delivered colonics can quickly accustom a personto the sensations accompanying the enema and demonstrate the effect to beachieved by oneself with an enema bag, something not quickly discoverable anyother 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 enemaseries. 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 aboutfive feet of rubber hose ending in one of two different white hard plastic insertiontips. The bag is designed for either enemas or vaginal douches. It hangs from adetachable plastic “S” hook. When filled to the brim it holds exactly one-halfgallon. The maker of this bag offers another model that costs about a dollar moreand also functions as a hot water bottle. A good comforter it may make, but thedual purpose construction makes the bag very awkward to rapidly refill. Irecommend 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 itsomewhat 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 youwill flinch at temperatures only a degree or two higher than 98 Fahrenheit. Coolerwater is no problem; some find the cold stimulating and invigorating. Fastershaving difficulty staying warm should be wary of cold water enemas. These candrop 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 abovethe bathroom floor or tub bottom. The higher the bag the greater the waterpressure 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 showerbecause 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 underknees and elbows may make the process more comfortable. You may kneel andbend over while placing your elbows or hands on the floor, reach behind yourselfand insert the nozzle. You may also lie on your back or on your side. Some thinkthe left side is preferable because the colon attaches to the rectum on the left sideof the body, ascends up the left side of the abdomen to a line almost as high as thesolar plexus, then transverses the body to the right side where it descends againon the right almost to the groin. The small intestine attaches to the colon near itslower-right extremity. In fact these are the correct names given for the parts of thecolon: Ascending, Descending and Transverse Colon along with the SigmoidColon 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 temperatureof the water you’re injecting. You will come to know how much of the colon hasbeen filled by feel. You will also become aware of peristalsis as the water isevacuated 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 itwill have less tendency to slip out. However, do not tear or damage the anus byavoiding necessary lubrication. After insertion, grip the clamp with one hand andopen it. The flow rate can be controlled with this clamp. Keeping a hand on theclamp 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 waterforce you to remove the nozzle and head for the toilet. Relaxation of mind andbody helps achieve this. You are very unlikely to achieve a half-gallon fill up onthe 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 thuslowering the water pressure. Or, try opening the clamp only partially. Or, trypanting hard, so as to make the abdomen move rapidly in and out, sort of shakingthe colon. This last technique is particularly good to get the water past a blockageof 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 thatactual damage is being done to tissues. Enemas can do no damage and pose norisk except to that rare individual with weak spots in the colon’s wall fromcancers. When an enema is momentarily perceived unpleasantly, the correct namefor the experience is a sensation, not pain. You may have to work at increasingyour tolerance for unpleasant sensations or it will take you a long time to achievethe goal of totally filling the colon with water. Be brave! And relax. A wisephilosopher 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 toiletand 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 lessunpleasantness. Fasters and cleansers should make at least three attempts at acomplete 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 orno chime entering the colon. After a few days the entire colon will seem (this isincorrect) 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 colonmight only hold ¾ gallon, a large one might accept a gallon and a half, or evenmore. You’ll need to learn to simultaneously refill the bag while injecting water, soas to achieve a complete irrigation of the whole colon. There are several possiblemethods. You might try placing a pitcher or half-gallon mason jar of tepid waternext to the bag and after the bag has emptied the first time, stand up while holdingthe tube in the anus, refill the bag and then lie down again and continue filling. Youmight have an assistant do this for you. You might try hanging the bag from theshower head and direct a slow, continuous dribble of lukewarm water from theshower into the bag while you kneel or lie relaxed in the tub. This way the bag willnever empty and you stop filling only when you feel fullness and pressure all theway back to the beginning of the ascending colon. Of course, hanging from aslowly running shower head the bag will probably overflow and you will getsplashed and so will the bathroom floor when your wet body moves rapidly fromthe tub to the toilet. I’ve imagined making an enema bag from a two gallon plasticbucket with a small plastic hose barb glued into a hole drilled in the bottom orlower edge. If I were in the business of manufacturing enema bags I’d make themhold 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 notmake 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. Whenhaving colonics on a colonic machine it is a good idea to continue until the watercomes back reasonably clear for that session. It is not a good idea for a faster tohave 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 isbasically 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 havea seriously bad result. This was a suicidally depressed water faster that I(mistakenly) allowed to administer their own colonics with my machine. Thisperson not only took daily colonics, but allowed water to flow through their colonfor as long as two hours at a time. Perhaps they were trying to wash out theirmind? After several weeks of this extreme excess, the faster became highlyconfused and disoriented due to a severe electrolyte imbalance. They had to betaken off water fasting immediately and recovered their mental clarity in a fewdays. The loss of blood electrolytes happened because during colonics thereoccurs 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. Thebody 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 youare coming down with something), and for the treatment of acute illnesses such asa 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 thentrying to get rid of it through colonics or laxative. This is bulimia, the eatingdisorder discussed earlier. The Sheltonite capital “N” Natural capital “H” Hygienists do not recommend
any colon cleansing, ever!. They think that the colon will spontaneously cleanseitself on a long water fast, but my experience learned from monitoring hundreds offasters is that it doesn’t really. Herbert Shelton also considered colon cleansingenervating and therefore undesirable. Colon cleansing does use the faster’s energybut on the balance, colon cleansing saves more work on the part of anoverburdened 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 upto 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 areneeded to carry on the body’s digestion. Raw foods—fruits and vegetables—favor unorganizedferment digestion, because these foods carry vitamins, which are unorganized ferments—enzymes. Dr.John. H. Tllden, 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 ingeneral. Defending her currently less-than-optimum diet against my gentlecriticism, she threw me a tough riposte. “Why,” she asked, when I was raised soperfectly as a child, “when I ate only Organic food until I was ten and old enoughto make you send me to public school where I could eat those lousy schoollunches” (her unfeeling, heartless mother home-schooled her), “why even at thatyoung age, (before she spent her adolescent rebellion eating junk food) why atthat point did I still have a mouthful of cavities?” And she did. At age ten mydaughter 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 frommy goat, fruits and lots of Organic vegetables. I started my spa when my daughterwas 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’shuge 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 minorsurgery. Unexpectedly he expires on the operating table and his body is frozen inhopes that someday he can be revived. One hundred and fifty years later he isrevived. 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 isexplaining to Woody what has happened. Woody refuses to believe he died andwas 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 year2123. “Oh, but it really is 2123,” insists the doctor. “And it is no put on by hisfriends; all his friends are long dead; Woody knows no one at all in 2123 and hadbetter 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 haveamounted to more than two percent of her total caloric intake from birth to ageten. I was a responsible mom and I made sure she ate right! Now my daughterwas demanding to know why she had tooth decay. Fortunately, I now know theanswer. 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 forhealth-related information. And equally, their confusions have been created bybooks, magazine articles, and TV news features. This avalanche of data is highlycontradictory. In fact, one reason I found it hard to make myself write my ownbook is that I wondered if my book too would become just another part of theconfusion. 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 someanswer, any answer, and then ever after, assert its rightness like a shipwreckedperson clings to a floating spar in a storm. This is how I explain the genesis ofmany 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 beingbrown 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 dietand 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 aminoacids at every, single meal and is vegetarian. This diet also works and really helpssome people, but not as well as Macrobiotics in my opinion because obsessedwith protein, Clark’s diet contains too many hard-to-digest soy products andmakes 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 warmwater (at less than 115 degrees or you’ll kill the enzymes) for many hours tosoften 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 owningthis system. But raw fooding does not help all people nor solve all diseasesbecause raw food irritates the digestive tracts of some people and in northernclimates it is hard to maintain body heat on this diet because it is difficult toconsume enough concentrated vegetable food in a raw state. And some rawfooders eat far too much fruit. I’ve seen them lose their teeth because of fruit’slow 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 exactopposites, Atkins dieters focusing on protein and eating lots of meat. There’s theAdelle Davis school, people eating whole grains, handfuls of vitamins, lots of dairyand brewers yeast and wheat germ, and even raw liver. Then there’s the Organicschool. These folks will eat anything in any combination, just so long as it isorganically produced, including organically raised beef, chicken, lamb, eggs,rabbit, wild meats, milk and diary products, natural sea salt in large quantities andof course, organically grown fruits, vegetables grains and nuts. And what is“Organic?” The word means food raised in compliance with a set of rulescontrived by a certification bureaucracy. When carefully analyzed, the somewhatillogical 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 rabbiswho 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 greatlyreduced what they (mistakenly) understand as high-cholesterol foods. All these diets work too—for 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 myclinical work with thousands of cases. It is what has worked with those cases. Myeclectic views incorporate bits and pieces of all the above. In my own case, Istarted out by following the Organic school, and I was once a raw foodvegetarian who ate nothing but raw food for six years. I also ate Macrobiotic forabout 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 ofNutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified form, the basic equation ofhuman health goes: Health = Nutrition / Calories. The equation falls far short ofexplaining the origin of each individuals diseases or how to cure diseases butHealth = Nutrition / Calories does show the general path toward healthful eatingand 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. Rarelyin nature (except for predatory carnivores) is there any significant restriction onthe number of calories or serious limitation of the amount of low-nutrition foodsavailable to eat. There’s rarely any shortage of natural junk food on Earth. Exceptfor domesticated house pets, animals are sensible enough to prefer the mostnutritional 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 insipid textures, we seem to prefer junk food andbecome slaves to our food addictions. For example, in tropical countries there isa widely grown root crop, called in various places: tapioca, tavioca, manioc, oryuca. 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 growabundantly on tropical soils so infertile and/or so droughty that no other food cropwill succeed there. Manioc will do this because it needs virtually nothing from thesoil to construct itself with. And consequently, manioc puts next to nothingnourishing into its edible parts. The bland-tasting root is virtually pure starch, asimple carbohydrate not much different than pure corn starch. Plants constructstarches from carbon dioxide gas obtained the air and hydrogen obtained fromwater. There is no shortage ever of carbon from CO
2 in the air and rarely a
shortage of hydrogen from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc ischewed, digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar. Nutritionally there isvirtually no difference between eating manioc and eating white sugar. Both areentirely 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 ofthe scale. Close to perfect might be certain leafy green vegetables that can beeaten raw. When they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop20 or more percent completely digestible balanced protein with ideal ratios of allthe essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of minerals, all sorts of enzymesand other nutritional elements–and very few calories. You could continually fillyour stomach to bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard timesustaining your body weight if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailormanwas 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 extractnutrition out of the food we are eating. Without those factors to consider, it iscorrect to say that, to the extent one’s diet contains the maximum potentialamount 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 ourselvesbefore serious disease appears? Luckily, earlier in this century we could observeliving answers to those questions (before the evidence disappeared). The answersare: we could be amazingly healthy, and, if we wish to enjoy excellent health wecan 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 arestill in the same remote places, are speaking the same languages and possessmore or less the same cultures. Only today they’re watching satellite TV wearingjeans, 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 explorerssought out these hard-to-reach places with their legendary healthy peoples to seewhat caused the legendary well-being they’d heard of. Enough evidence wascollected 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, geneticsuperiority. There were extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns, Orientals,Amerinds, Caucasians. It wasn’t living at high altitude; some lived at sea level. Itwasn’t temperate climates, some lived in the tropics, some in the tropics at sealevel, a type of location generally thought to be quite unhealthful. It wasn’t a smallcollection of genetically superior individuals, because when these peoples left theirisolated locale and moved to the city, they rapidly began to lose their health. Andit wasn’t genetics because when a young couple from the isolated healthy villagemoved 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 liveda thousand or perhaps ten thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Amongthat small population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs, novaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with it illiteracy andprecluded contact with or awareness of modern science, so there was little or nonotion of public hygiene. And this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet theseunprotected, undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die frombacterial infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13 children to get2.4 to survive to breeding age—almost all the children made it through thegauntlet of childhood diseases. There was also virtually no degenerative diseaselike heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There werefew if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren’t any aspirin in the entireplace. Oh, and there was very little mortality during childbirth, as little or less thanwe have today with all our hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtuallyperfect teeth and kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes nor anynotion 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 someplaces quite a bit longer. One fabled place, Hunza, was renowned for having anextraordinarily 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, soinaccessible that they were of necessity, virtually self-sufficient. They hardly tradedat all with the outside world, and certainly they did not trade for hard-to-transportbulk foodstuffs. Virtually everything they ate was produced by themselves. If theywere an agricultural people, naturally, everything they ate was natural: organic,whole, unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local materials seemed to produceenhanced 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 hadnot been extraordinarily fertile, these groups would not have enjoyed superiorhealth and would have conformed to the currently widely-believed notion thatbefore 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 oatporridge, kale and sea foods; highland central Africans (Malawi) eating sorghum,millet tropical root crops and all sorts of garden vegetables, plus a little meat anddairy; Fijians living on small islands in the humid tropics at sea level eating seafoods and garden vegetables. What they had in common was that their foodswere all were at the extreme positive end of the Health = Nutrition / Caloriesscale. The agriculturists were on very fertile soil that grew extraordinarily nutrient-rich food, the sea food gatherers were obtaining their tucker from the sea—theplace where all the fertility that ever was in the soil had washed out of the landhad been transported. Sea foods are 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 Hunzaunknowingly developed an agricultural system that produced the most nutritiousfood that is possible to grow. The Hunza lived on what has been called superfood. There are a lot of interesting books about the Hunza, some deserving ofcareful study. (Wrench, 1938; Rodale, 1949)
Finding Y our 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 thisbook. After you do, award yourself a BS nutrition. I draw certain conclusionsfrom this body of data. I think they help a person sort out the massive confusionthat 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 werewell adapted and productive in their region. Some places grew rye, others wheat,others millet, others rice. Some places supported cows, others goats, others hadfew on no domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot of fruits andvegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary, during thousands of yearsof eating that dietary natural selection prevailed; most babies that were allergic toor not able to thrive on the available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhoodbacterial infections. The result of this weeding out process was a populationclosely 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” orcrossed with immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to discover what dietarysubstances your particular genetic endowment is adapted to can be difficult andconfusing. If both your parents were Italian and they were more or less pureItalian going way back, you might start out trying to eat wheat, olives, garlic, favabeans, grapes, figs, cow dairy. If pure German, try rye bread, cow dairy, apples,cabbage family vegetables. If Scottish, try oats, mutton, fish, sheep dairy andcabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat dairy, wheat, olives and citrus. Andcertainly 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 rootcrops 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 inthis chapter I will explain how a body can develop an allergy to a food that isprobably 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 thatdietary also was extraordinarily high in nutrients. Few places on earth havenaturally rich soil. Food grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition; that grown on richsoil is high in nutrition. People do not realize that the charts and tables in the backsof 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 aredamned 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 basicallylie because they do not show the range of possibility between the differentsamples. A chart may state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli contains somany milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is that some broccoli samplescontain only half that amount or even less, while other broccoli contains two orthree times that amount. Since calcium is a vital nutrient hard to come by indigestible form, the high calcium broccoli is far better food than the low calciumsample. But both samples of broccoli appear and taste more or less alike. Bothcould even be organically grown. Yet one sample has a very positive ratio ofnutrition to calories, the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965) Here’s anotherexample I hope will really dent the certainties the Linda Clarkites. Potatoes canrange in protein from eight to eleven percent, depending on the soil that producedthem and if they were or were not irrigated. Grown dry (very low yielding) onsemiarid soils, potatoes can be a high-protein staff of life. Heavily irrigated andfertilized so as to produce bulk yield instead of nutrition, they’ll produce two orthree times the tonnage, but at 8 percent protein instead of 11 percent. Not onlydoes the protein content drop just as much as yield is boosted, the amino acidratios 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-eatingpeoples from regions where the cereal naturally contains abundant protein tendedto be tall, healthy and long-lived. Wheat-eating humans from regions that producelow 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, phosphorusand magnesium to build strong bodies. Other equally or even better looking greengrass contains only six or seven percent protein and contains little calcium,phosphorus or magnesium. Cows forced to eat only this poor type of grass canliterally starve to death with full bellies. And they have a hard time breedingsuccessfully. 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 fromindustrial foods did not make a practice of eating empty calories tended to live along time and be very healthy. But those unfortunates on poor soils or with unwisecultural 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 differentdietaries, but like any other animal, the one thing we can’t adapt to is a dietarydeficient 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 allparts 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 whobenefits from promulgating this mistaken belief about longevity. Who gets richwhen we are sick? And what huge economic interests are getting rich helpingmake 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 somuch information (and misinformation) is coming out about diet that most ofmy readers are massively confused about the subject. These are twopowerful reasons many readers will look with disbelief at what this chapterhas 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 when Iget to the point that I need to wear glasses I’ll do it less often.”
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 organicallygrown food is as nutritious as food can possibly be. Like Woody Allen’s brown-rice-eating friends, some think if you eat Organic foods, you will inevitably live avery 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 usingchemical fertilizers (not pesticides) can greatly increase the nutritional value offood. Judiciously used Organic fertilizing substances can also do that as well orbetter. 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, raisingsoil organic matter levels too high can result in a massive reduction in thenutritional content of the food being grown—a very frequent mistake on the partof Organic devotees. In other words, growing nutrition is a science, and is not amatter 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 myfamily and clients gave me a feeling of self-righteousness, was not grown with anunderstanding of the nutritional consequences of electing to use one particularOrganic fertilizing substance over another. So we and a lot of regional Organicmarket gardeners near us that we bought from, were raising food that was farfrom 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 thatwhich is raised with the intention of maximizing profit or yield. There is nocontradiction between raising food that the “rabbis” running Organic certificationbureaucracies would deem perfectly “kosher” and raising that same food to makethe 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 sameway. 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 loweryielding. The very soil management practices that maximize productionsimultaneously 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 ofnutrition left in our foods. Until our culture comes to understand this and realizesthat the health costs of accepting less than optimum food far exceeds the profitsmade by growing bulk, it will not be possible to frequently find the ultimate offood quality in the marketplace, organically grown or not. It will not be possible tofind food that is labeled or identified according to its real nutritional value. Thebest I can say about Organic food these days is that it probably is no lessnutritious 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 healthyand have a life span that approaches their genetic potential (and that potential, itseems, approaches or exceeds a century), it is essential that empty calories arerigorously 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-orientednutritional doctor, Melvin Page, suggested that as long as overall nutrition was atleast 75 percent of perfection, the body chemistry could support healthy teeth andgums until death. By healthy here Page means free of cavities, no bone lossaround the teeth (no wobblers), no long-in-the-teeth mouths from receedinggums, no gum diseases at all. But when empty calories or devitalized foods ormisdigestion cuts our nutrient intake we begin experiencing tooth decay, gumdisease 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, noractually, could I have done so on the impoverished, leached-out clay soil at GreatOaks School even had I known how. The Organic doctrine says that you canbuild a Garden of ‘Eatin with large quantities of compost until any old clay pit orgravel 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 muchabove 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 assertionis shocking and perhaps threatening to those who believe in the Organic system; Iam 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 willprobably have at least some health problems as she ages no matter how perfectlyshe may choose to eat from here on. My daughters had what Dr. G .T. Wrenchcalled “a poor start.” Not as poor as it could have been by any means, butcertainly 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 thejob of constructing the fetus out of prepartum nourishment and her own body’snutritional reserves. The female body knows from trillenia of instinctual experiencethat adequate nutrition from the current food supply during pregnancy can notalways be assured, so the female body stores up very large quantities of mineralsand vitamins and enzymes against that very possibility. When forming a fetus thesereserves are drawn down and depleted. It is virtually impossible during thepregnancy itself for a mother to extract sufficient nutrition from current food tobuild a totally healthy fetus, no matter how nourishing the food she is eating maybe. Thus a mother-to-be needs to be spending her entire childhood and heradolescence (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” andnutritionally shortchanged in certain, predictable ways. Even minor mineral fetaldeficiencies degrade the bone structure: the fetus knows it needs nutritionalreserves 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 becomesomewhat smaller. Permanently. If mineral deficiencies continue into infancy andchildhood, these same bones continue to be shortchanged, and the child ends upwith a very narrow face, a jaw bone far too small to hold all the teeth, and inwomen, 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 physiologicaldegeneration, but she makes deficient babies. A deficient female baby at birth isunlikely 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 theoutcome of a pregnancy. The sins of the mother can really be visited unto the thirdand 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 thanstruggling with an unsuccessful clinical practice, Dr. Pottenger decided to make hisliving running a medical testing laboratory. He earned his daily bread performing arather simple task, assaying the potency of adrenal hormone extracts. At thattime, adrenaline, a useful drug to temporarily rescue people close to death, wasextracted from the adrenal glands of animals. However, the potency of thesecrude extracts varied greatly. Being a very powerful drug, it was essential tomeasure 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 hadadrenalectomized. Without their own adrenals, the cats could not live more than ashort time By finding out how much extract was required to keep the cats fromfailing, 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 kepthis cats clean, in airy, bright quarters, fed them to the very best of his ability onpasteurized whole milk, slaughterhouse meat and organs (cats in the wild eatorgan meats first and there are valuable vitamins and other substances in organmeats that don’t exist in muscle tissue). The meat was carefully cooked toeliminate 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 befrequently replaced. Usually they bred poorly and died young of bacterialinfections, there being no antibiotics in the 1920s. I imagine Dr. Pottenger wasconstantly visiting the animal shelter and perhaps even paid quarters out the backdoor to a steady stream of young boys who brought him cats in burlap sacks fromwho 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 abig, roofed, on-the-ground pen outdoors. Because he was overworked, he wasless careful about the feeding of these extra animals. They got the samepasteurized milk and cod-liver oil, but he did not bother to cook theirslaughterhouse meat. Then, a small miracle happened. This poorly cared for cageof cats fed on uncooked meat became much healthier than the others, suffering farfewer bacterial infections or other health problems. Then another miraclehappened. 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 sortof slow starvation in the midst of plenty. So Dr. Pottenger set up some cat feedingexperiments. 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 feedingall 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 mostvaluable 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 oncooked meat and raw milk did even less well and those on all cooked foodcontinued 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 concludedthat humans also should eat only raw food. This idea is debatable. However, themost important result of the cat experiments took years to reveal itself and is notpaid much attention to, probably because its implications are very depressing. Dr.Pottenger continued his experiments for several generations. It was thetransgenerational changes that showed the most valuable lesson. Over severalgenerations, the cats on all raw foods began to alter their appearance. Their facesgot wider, their pelvic girdles broader, bones solider, teeth better. They began tobreed 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 ofthese cats and began feeding them only cooked food to study the process ofnutritional degeneration. After three “de”generations on cooked fodder the grouphad deteriorated so much that the animals could barely breed. Their faces hadbecome 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, rawfood diet before some perfect appearing individuals showed up in the group. Ittakes longer to repair the damage than it does to cause it and it takes generationsof 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 breadto white flour; with the birth of industrial farming and the generalized lowering ofthe nutritional content of all of our crops; our overall ratio of nutrition to caloriesworsened. Then it worsened again because we began to have industrial foodmanufacturing and national brand prepared food marketing systems; we begansubsisting on devitalized, processed foods. The result has been an even greaterworsening 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 motherour young; we’re losing our good humor in the same way Pottenger’sdegenerated cats became bad tempered. As a group we feel so poorly that wedesperately need to feel better fast, and what better way to do that than withdrugs. Is it any wonder that the United States, the country furthest down the roadof industrial food degeneration, spends 14 percent of its gross domestic producton medical services. Any wonder that so many babies are born by Cesarean, anywonder that so many of our children have crooked teeth needing an orthodontist?The most depressing aspect of this comes into view when considering thatPottenger’s cats took four generations on perfect food to repair most of thenutritional 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 dailyuse. Still, there was a garden and a cow producing raw milk and free-range fertileeggs and chicken and other animals. There probably were lots of cannedvegetables in winter, canned but still highly nutritious because of the fertility of theirprairie garden. My mother consequently had perfect teeth until the GreatDepression 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 themalnutrition, 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 ofthe economic times had past and the family had been living on a farm. There werevegetables and fresh raw milk and fruit. My mother had two good years to rebuildher 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. Thebone 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 milkfrom cans, hotdogs and canned beans, hotdogs and cabbage. It wasn’t until I waspregnant with my first baby that I started to straighten up my diet. I continuedeating very well after my first daughter, so my youngest daughter had anotherthree years of good diet to draw on. Thus both my own daughters got asomewhat 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 ahealthy farm girl should have, mine were somewhat crowded, with numerouscavities. 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, moresolid hips, stronger bones and a broader face than I do. If my younger daughterwill but from this point in her life, eat perfectly and choose her food wisely toresponsibly 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 thatmost 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 containingthat evil substance, cholesterol. Many people are now avoiding it and instead,using margarine. 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 orhydrogenated vegetable fat. Hydrogenated fats can’t be properly broken downby the body’s digestive enzymes, adding to the body’s toxic load. Margarine,being a chemically-treated vegetable oil with artificial yellow color and artificialflavorings to make it seem like butter, also releases free radicals in the body thataccelerate 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 producescholesterol; 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 tothe kind of overall malnutrition Americans usually experience on their junk fooddiets. Avoiding cholesterol in foods does little good, but eating a low-fat, low-sugar, complex-carbohydrate (whole foods) diet high in minerals does lowerblood 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 cancontain very high levels of fat-soluble vitamins, but doesn’t have to. Vitamin-richbutter’s color is naturally bright yellow, almost orange. This color does not comefrom a test tube. Pale yellow butter as is found in the commercial trade wasprobably almost white before it was artificially tinted. Butter from grass-pasturedcows naturally changes from yellow-orange to white and back again through theyear as the seasons change. Spring grass, growing in the most intense sunlight ofthe year contains very high levels of chlorophyll and vitamins. Cows eating thisgrass put high levels of vitamins A and D into their cream, evidenced by theorange 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 isalmost 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 latespring when butter is at its best.
Be_your_own_doctor.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        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 greatadvantage when fasting because you can save your energy for internal healing. Butcolonics are more appropriate for some. There are fasters who are unable to givethemselves an enema either because their arms are too short and their body is toolong and they lack flexibility, or because of a physical handicap or they can’tconfront their colon, so they let someone else do it. Some don’t have themotivation to give themselves a little discomfort but are comfortable with someoneelse doing it to them. Some very sick people are too weak to cleanse their owncolon, so they should find someone to assist them with an at-home enema or havesomeone 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 asslightly dangerous, perhaps addictive and a sign of psychological weirdness. YetNorthamericans on their civilized, low fiber, poorly combined diets suffer widelyfrom constipation. One proof of this is the fact that chemical laxatives, with theirown set of dangers and liabilities, occupy many feet of drug store shelf space andare widely advertised. Is the medical profession’s disapproval of the enemarelated to the fact that once the initial purchase of an enema bag has been madethere are no further expenses for laxatives. Or perhaps it might be that once aperson discovers they can cure a headache, stop a cold dead in its tracks with anenema, 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 anenema, leading finally to flaccidity and enlargement of the lower bowel. Thisactually can happen; when it does occur it is the result of frequent administrationof small amounts of water (fleet enemas) for the purpose of stimulating a normalbowel movement. The result is constant stretching of the rectum without sufficientfluid to enter the descending colon. A completely opposite, highly positive effectcomes 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 waterto induce a bowel movement may eventually cause dependency, will notstrengthen the colon and may after years of this practice, result in distention andenlargement of the rectum or sigmoid colon. However, a completely emptyaverage-sized colon has the capacity of about a gallon of water. Whenincreasingly larger enemas are administered until the colon is nearly emptied offecal matter and the injection of close to a gallon of water is achieved, beneficialexercise 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 completelyfilled with water, inducing it to vigorously exercise while evacuating itself multipletimes. The result is a great increase in muscle tone, acceleration of peristalsis andeventually, after several dozens of repetitions, a considerable reduction of transittime. Well-done enemas work the colon somewhat less effectively and do notimprove 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 theamount of new material passing into the colon is small or negligible. During thefirst few days of fasting if two or three enemas are administered each day inimmediate 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 andpainless. Probably for psychological reasons, some peoples’ colons allow water to be
injected one time but then “freeze up” and resist successive enemas. For thisreason 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 withoutundue discomfort or effort from the person receiving the colonic. However, theAMA has suppressed the use of colonics; they are illegal to administer in manystates. Where colonics are legal, the chiropractors now consider this practicemessy and not very profitable compared to manipulations. So it is not easy to finda 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 threecolonics delivered one day apart while eating lightly and then immediately beginthe fast. Three colonics given on three successive days of a light, raw food dietare 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 thoroughlynovel experience. A few well-delivered colonics can quickly accustom a personto the sensations accompanying the enema and demonstrate the effect to beachieved by oneself with an enema bag, something not quickly discoverable anyother 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 enemaseries. 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 aboutfive feet of rubber hose ending in one of two different white hard plastic insertiontips. The bag is designed for either enemas or vaginal douches. It hangs from adetachable plastic “S” hook. When filled to the brim it holds exactly one-halfgallon. The maker of this bag offers another model that costs about a dollar moreand also functions as a hot water bottle. A good comforter it may make, but thedual purpose construction makes the bag very awkward to rapidly refill. Irecommend 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 itsomewhat 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 youwill flinch at temperatures only a degree or two higher than 98 Fahrenheit. Coolerwater is no problem; some find the cold stimulating and invigorating. Fastershaving difficulty staying warm should be wary of cold water enemas. These candrop 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 abovethe bathroom floor or tub bottom. The higher the bag the greater the waterpressure 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 showerbecause 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 underknees and elbows may make the process more comfortable. You may kneel andbend over while placing your elbows or hands on the floor, reach behind yourselfand insert the nozzle. You may also lie on your back or on your side. Some thinkthe left side is preferable because the colon attaches to the rectum on the left sideof the body, ascends up the left side of the abdomen to a line almost as high as thesolar plexus, then transverses the body to the right side where it descends againon the right almost to the groin. The small intestine attaches to the colon near itslower-right extremity. In fact these are the correct names given for the parts of thecolon: Ascending, Descending and Transverse Colon along with the SigmoidColon 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 temperatureof the water you’re injecting. You will come to know how much of the colon hasbeen filled by feel. You will also become aware of peristalsis as the water isevacuated 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 itwill have less tendency to slip out. However, do not tear or damage the anus byavoiding necessary lubrication. After insertion, grip the clamp with one hand andopen it. The flow rate can be controlled with this clamp. Keeping a hand on theclamp 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 waterforce you to remove the nozzle and head for the toilet. Relaxation of mind andbody helps achieve this. You are very unlikely to achieve a half-gallon fill up onthe 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 thuslowering the water pressure. Or, try opening the clamp only partially. Or, trypanting hard, so as to make the abdomen move rapidly in and out, sort of shakingthe colon. This last technique is particularly good to get the water past a blockageof 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 thatactual damage is being done to tissues. Enemas can do no damage and pose norisk except to that rare individual with weak spots in the colon’s wall fromcancers. When an enema is momentarily perceived unpleasantly, the correct namefor the experience is a sensation, not pain. You may have to work at increasingyour tolerance for unpleasant sensations or it will take you a long time to achievethe goal of totally filling the colon with water. Be brave. And relax. A wisephilosopher 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 toiletand 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 lessunpleasantness. Fasters and cleansers should make at least three attempts at acomplete 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 orno chime entering the colon. After a few days the entire colon will seem (this isincorrect) 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 colonmight only hold ¾ gallon, a large one might accept a gallon and a half, or evenmore. You’ll need to learn to simultaneously refill the bag while injecting water, soas to achieve a complete irrigation of the whole colon. There are several possiblemethods. You might try placing a pitcher or half-gallon mason jar of tepid waternext to the bag and after the bag has emptied the first time, stand up while holdingthe tube in the anus, refill the bag and then lie down again and continue filling. Youmight have an assistant do this for you. You might try hanging the bag from theshower head and direct a slow, continuous dribble of lukewarm water from theshower into the bag while you kneel or lie relaxed in the tub. This way the bag willnever empty and you stop filling only when you feel fullness and pressure all theway back to the beginning of the ascending colon. Of course, hanging from aslowly running shower head the bag will probably overflow and you will getsplashed and so will the bathroom floor when your wet body moves rapidly fromthe tub to the toilet. I’ve imagined making an enema bag from a two gallon plasticbucket with a small plastic hose barb glued into a hole drilled in the bottom orlower edge. If I were in the business of manufacturing enema bags I’d make themhold 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 notmake 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. Whenhaving colonics on a colonic machine it is a good idea to continue until the watercomes back reasonably clear for that session. It is not a good idea for a faster tohave 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 isbasically 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 havea seriously bad result. This was a suicidally depressed water faster that I(mistakenly) allowed to administer their own colonics with my machine. Thisperson not only took daily colonics, but allowed water to flow through their colonfor as long as two hours at a time. Perhaps they were trying to wash out theirmind. After several weeks of this extreme excess, the faster became highlyconfused and disoriented due to a severe electrolyte imbalance. They had to betaken off water fasting immediately and recovered their mental clarity in a fewdays. The loss of blood electrolytes happened because during colonics thereoccurs 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. Thebody 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 youare coming down with something), and for the treatment of acute illnesses such asa 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 thentrying to get rid of it through colonics or laxative. This is bulimia, the eatingdisorder discussed earlier. The Sheltonite capital “N” Natural capital “H” Hygienists do not recommend
any colon cleansing, ever. They think that the colon will spontaneously cleanseitself on a long water fast, but my experience learned from monitoring hundreds offasters is that it doesn’t really. Herbert Shelton also considered colon cleansingenervating and therefore undesirable. Colon cleansing does use the faster’s energybut on the balance, colon cleansing saves more work on the part of anoverburdened 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 upto a perfect cleanliness, as long as the intake of wrong or even too much right foods, is not stopped.
According to the text, giving enemas at home can save time and energy for internal healing during fasting, as one can focus on healing instead of spending time traveling to a clinic.
What are the benefits of giving enemas at home?
The text mentions that some people may not be able to give themselves enemas due to physical limitations or lack of motivation, and some may be too weak to cleanse their own colon.
What are some of the limitations of self-administered enemas?
The author argues that there is no single "right" diet for everyone, and that each person must find their own optimal diet through experimentation and self-study.
What is the author's opinion on the topic of diet and nutrition?
The author suggests that organic fertilizers can also be detrimental to nutrition, as excessive use can lead to a reduction in nutritional content. The author emphasizes the importance of focusing on avoiding empty calories and maximizing nutrition.
What is the author's stance on the topic of organic and chemical fertilizers?
The author argues that a diet that is low in nutrition and high in empty calories can lead to a range of health problems, including tooth decay, poor dental health, and reduced fertility.
What is the author's view on the relationship between diet and health?