This means that the person who istaking care of the critically ill person must be experienced enough to adjust theintensity of the body’s healing efforts and accurately assess the ability of theperson to process toxic waste products clamoring for removal so the ailing bodyis not drowned in it’s own poisons. It is often necessary to use clear vegetablebroth, vegetable and wheat grass juices, and fruits juices, or whole sprouts toslow down the cleansing gradient and sometimes, to resupply the tissue’sexhausted nutritional reserves. I wish all cases of critical illness had such a positive outcome as Ethyl’s, but
unfortunately they don’t. I had Marge on the same program at the same time. Shealso had cancerous tumors all over her body and had similarly been sent home todie. In some ways Marge’s body was a more likely candidate for survival thanEthyl’s. Marge did not have heart failure or diabetes and was still able on arrivalto at least take small amount of water orally and walk to the bathroom. Put on asimilar program, her tumors also shrunk and were reabsorbed and she too wenthome. But Marge did not really have a strong reason to live. Although her husband
was by her side throughout the treatment program, Marge was deeply upsetbecause she was estranged from one of her sons who she had not seen for over10 years. When she went home from Great Oaks, the son finally consented to seehis mother, went to the effort of trying to work things out with her, and finallyconfessed that under it all he still loved her. At that point Marge died in peace. She had accomplished the last thing she
wanted to take care of and her will to live did not extend beyond that point. Hadshe died several months earlier as predicted by the medical profession, Margewould have been unable to resolve this relationship. This was what Marge’s lifewas pivoting on at the end. I was glad to assist her in doing what she needed todo. Her husband and other family members found it difficult to understand, andthey were hurt that Marge did not wish to continue her life with them. Diet For The Chronically Ill. The chronically ill person has a long-term degenerative condition that is not
immediately life threatening. This condition usually causes more-or-less continuoussymptoms that are painful, perhaps unsightly, and ultimately will be disabling oreventually capable of causing death. To qualify as “chronic” the symptoms musthave been present a minimum of six months, with no relief in sight. People withthese conditions have usually sought medical assistance, frequently have hadsurgery, and have taken and probably are taking numerous prescription drugs. Some examples of chronic conditions are: arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, early
onset of cancer and aids, asthma, colitis, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome,some mental disorders, arterial deposit diseases, many of the itises(inflammations). Before fasting, the chronically ill often do have time to prepare the way with
limited dietary reform, and frequently begin to feel relief quite quickly. Beforeactually fasting they should limit their diet to raw foods and eliminate all toxicfoods like alcohol, coffee, tea, salt, sugar and recreational drugs for two months ifthey have been following a typical American diet. If the chronically ill had been following a vegetarian diet, perhaps a diet
including with eggs and dairy, if they had been using no addicting substances, thenone month on raw foods is sufficient preparation for fasting. If the person hadwater or juice fasted for at least a week or two within the last two years, and
followed a healthy diet since that time, one or two weeks on raw foods should be
a sufficient runway. During preparation for a fast, I never recommend that a chronically ill person
quit taking prescription medicines because doing so can seriously disrupt theirhomeostasis. However, if their symptoms lessen or vanish during the pre-fastingclean up, the person might try tapering off medications. The length and type of fast chosen to resolve a chronic illness depends largely
on available time, finances, availability of support people, work responsibilities,and mental toughness. If you are one of those fortunate people rich enough to givetheir health first priority, long water fasting is ideal. If on the other hand you can’tafford to stop working, have no one to take care of you and assist with somehousehold chores, and/or you are not mentally tough enough to deal with self-denial, compromise is necessary. Ideally the chronically ill person would fast for an extended period under
supervision until their symptoms were gone or greatly improved, with a fall-backplan to repeat the whole process again in three to six months if necessary. If youare not able to do that, the next best program is to fast for a short period, like oneor two weeks, with a plan to repeat the process as often as possible until you arehealed. I have had clients with potentially life-threatening conditions such as obesity
with incipient heart failure, or who came to me with cancer, that were unable tostop work for financial reasons, or who could not afford a residential fastingprogram, or who felt confident in their own ability to deal with detoxification intheir own home. These people have fasted successfully at home, coming to seeme once a week. Almost inevitably, successful at-home fasters had already donea lot of research on self healing, believed in it, and had the personal discipline tocarry it out properly, including breaking the fast properly without overeating. Foods To Heal Chronic Illness
Sprouts Baby Greens Salad Juices Fruit
alfalfa sunflower lettuce beet grapefruit
radish buckwheat celery celery lemon
bean zucchini zucchini lime lime
clover kale kale orange orange
fenugreek endive radish parsley apple
wheat tomato tomato raspberries
cabbage cabbage cabbage blueberries
carrot carrot grapes
spinach apple peaches
parsley grapefruit apricots
sweet pepper lemon strawberry
Fruits should be watery and lower in sugar. Some examples of poor fruit
choices would be pineapple, ripe mango, bananas, dates, raisins, figs. Fruitsshould not be combined with vegetables. Vegetables should not be starchy, packed-full of energy. Poor vegetable
choices would be potato, parsnip, turnip, corn, sweet potato, yam, beet, wintersquash. Sprouts and baby greens are vegetables and may be included in salads. Juices should not be extremely sweet. Apple, orange, beet and carrot juice
should be diluted with 50% water. Fruit juices should not be mixed with vegetablejuices or with vegetables at the same meal. Salads should include no fruit. Salad dressings should be lemon or lime juice,
very small quantities of olive oil, and herbs. No salt, soy sauce nor black pepper.Cayenne can be okay for some. I have also helped chronically ill people that were not mentally prepared to
water fast, but were able to face the long-term self-control and deprivation of araw food cleansing diet that included careful food combining. These people alsoregained their health, but it took them a year at minimum, and once well they hadto remain on a diet tailor-made to their digestive capacity for the rest of their life,usually along with food supplements. Jim was such a case. He was 55 years old, very obese, had dangerously high
blood pressure poorly controlled with medication, and was going into congestiveheart failure. He was on digitalis and several other heart medications plusdiuretics, but in no way was his condition under control. He had severe edema inthe feet and legs with pitting, and fluid retention in the abdominal region caused ahuge paunch that was solid to the touch not soft and squishy like fatty tissue. Jim had long dreamed of having his own homestead with an Organic garden
and now he had these things but was too sick to enjoy them or work in his gardenwithout severe heart pain and shortness of breath. Jim had retired early in order toenjoy many years without the stresses of work, and he was alarmed to realize thathe was unlikely to survive a year. The day Jim came to see me the first time I would have classified his condition
as critically ill because his life was in immediate danger; but he responded soquickly to his detox program that he was very soon out of danger and would bemore accurately described as a chronically ill person. Jim was not prepared towater fast. He was attached to having his food and he was aware that at hisextreme weight he was going to have stay on a dietary program for a long, longtime. He also wanted to choose a gradient that he could manage by himself athome with little assistance from his wife. He had been on a typical American dietwith meat, coffee, etc., so that in spite of his dangerous condition it did not seemwise to me to add the heavy eliminatory burden of a water fast to a body that wasalready overwhelmed with fluids and waste products. Jim immediately went on a raw food cleansing diet, with no concentrated
foods like nuts, seeds, or avocados, and with one day each week fasting onvegetable juice and broth. He did enemas daily even though it wasn’t his favoritething. In one month he had lost 30 pounds, his eyes had started to sparkle, andhis complexion was rosy. The swelling had disappeared from his feet and legs,and he had to buy new pants. Starting the second month he gradually withdrew from prescription
medications. From the beginning I had put Jim on a program of nutritionalsupplements including protomorphogens (see chapter on vitamins and foodsupplements) to help the body repair it’s heart and the kidneys. In only fourmonths he had returned his body to glowing health, and looked great for his age,though he was still overweight. At the end of one year he had returned to anormal weight for his height, and only cheated on the diet a couple of times whenattending a social event, and then it was only a baked potato with no dressing. He was probably going to have many qualitative years working his garden and
living out his dreams. The local intensive care ward lost a lot of money when theyfailed to get Jim. Diet For The Acutely Ill
The acutely ill person experiences occasional attacks of distressing symptoms,
usually after indiscretions in living or emotional upsets. They have a cold, or a flu,or sinusitis, or a first bout of pneumonia, or a spring allergy attack. The intensesymptoms knock them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. Ifthey are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the chronically illcategory. People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent that they are
able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute illness, the appetites isprobably pretty dull anyway, so why not give a brief fast on water or fruit juice atry. Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting more than a
week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first bout of pneumonia may welllast for three weeks or a month. The general rule is to eat as little as possible untilthe symptoms have passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have ahorror of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses ofVitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.) Those having alittle experience with natural medicine make teas of echinacea, fenugreek seedsand red clover and quit eating. Eating as little as possible can mean only waterand herb teas, only vegetable broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice,even only cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relievedyour system of enough digestive effort. After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your life-style and
improve your diet so that you aren’t so toxic and don’t have to experience anacute illness several times a year when your body is forced to try an energeticdetox. Diet For A Healthy Person
I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth century. Doctors
Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the New Health
Catastrophes  state that in-depth laboratory testing of the population at large
demonstrated four universally present pathological conditions: heavy metalpoisoning, arteriosclerosis, sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies.Those of us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not reallyhealthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional supplementation. Infact the odds against most people receiving adequate vitamin and mineral nutritionwithout supplements are very poor as demonstrated by the following chart. Problem Nutrients in America
Nutrient Per cent Receiving Less than the RDA
B6 80%
Magnesium 75Calcium 68Iron 57Vitamin A 50B
1 45
C4 1B
2 36
B12 36
B3 33
A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and does not
have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing interferes with or handicapstheir daily life or work. A healthy person has good energy most of the time, apositive state of mind, restful sleep, good digestion and elimination. Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie count—eating ordrinking those things that they know are not good for them but that are fun to eator are “recreational foods or beverages.” Such “sinning” could mean a restaurantbash twice a month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, icecream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key concept ofresponsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent limit. A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not exceed the
digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of quantity or quality. All foodsthat can not be efficiently digested should be removed from the regular diet andrelegated to the “sin” category, including those you are allergic to and those for
which you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few
people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish, but some can, andsome can with the assistance of digestive enzyme supplements. In order to digestmeats, the stomach must be sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin,pancreatin, and bile, etc., and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side(not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces), and notcombined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you must include meat inyour dietary, it should represent a very small percentage of your total caloricintake, be eaten infrequently, with the bulk of the calories coming from complexcarbohydrates such grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities ofvegetables and fruits. The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is advised to
fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a chance to catch up ontheir internal housecleaning. If water fasting seems impossible, try a day of juicingit; if that is too rigorous, try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though lessbeneficial than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking yourovernight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up breakfast altogetheror postponing breaking your overnight fast, because from the time you stop eatingat the end of one day to the time you start eating the next is actually a brief,detoxifying fast. Eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt can be assimilated by some healthy people with
or without digestive aids. It is possible to take lactase to break down the milksugars for example; sometimes aids such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, andpancreatin help. If you can buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurtcontaining lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily,especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on unsprayed food, andserved very fresh. Eggs should come from chickens that run around outside,eating weeds, and scratching bugs. The yolks of those eggs will be intense orange,not yellow. Few people these days have ever eaten a real egg. Surprisingly, for
those of you who fear cholesterol, the healthy way to eat eggs is use just the raw
yolk from fertile eggs. It is enjoyed by many people in a smoothie–fresh fruitblended up with water or milk. Eggs contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturallyprevents the body from forming harmful fatty deposits in the arteries. Sea weeds are a wonderful source of minerals and should be eaten in soups
and salads. Other invaluable fortifying foods are algae of all kinds (such aschlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast, and fresh bakers yeast. Manypeople have had very unpleasant experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast andso use brewers yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins itcontains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw yeast is sopowerful, it feels like pep pills! It takes a special technique to eat raw yeast because in the stomach and
intestines the yeast does the job it is supposed to do: convert sugars into alcoholand carbon dioxide gas. The entire digestive tract then bloats with gas and theperson will feel very uncomfortable for some time. However, raw yeast is amarvelous source of B vitamins and proteins and can make someone feel veryenergetic—if they know how to use it. The secret is to eat live yeast very firstthing in the morning on an empty stomach and then, not eat anything at all forabout two hours, giving the stomach acids and enzymes time to kill the yeasts anddigest them before adding sugars from another meal. Some like to eat yeast infresh cake form, buying it from a bakery. Others prefer dry granular baker’s yeastblended with water into a sort of “shake.” This is not a bad place to put your rawegg yolk either. If you need it sweetened to drink it, use an artificial or herbalsweetener like nutrisweet or stevia. Live yeast cannot consume milk sugars verywell. So if you can handle dairy, try one or two tablespoons of granulated liveyeast, an egg yolk and a little raw milk or yogurt, well whizzed. Wheat germ is also a great, rich food, but is usually rancid unless it is taken out
of the refrigerated display; unless it is refrigerated, in a dated package and fresh,don’t eat it. Herb teas and roasted grain beverages are healthy beverages, along
with mineral and distilled water avoiding where possible chlorinated and
fluoridated water. Diet Is Not Enough
Those isolated, long-lived peoples discovered by Weston A. Price had to do
hard physical labor to eat, had to walk briskly up and down steep terrain to getanywhere. But today, few North Americans output very much physical energy inprocess of daily life or work. Not only cars, but all of our modern conveniencesmake it possible to live without ever breaking into a sweat. We pay for this ease;it costs us a significant degree of health. Exercise has many benefits when combined with excellent nutrition. It creates
an overall feeling of well-being that can not be created by diet alone. Exercisingtemporarily makes the heart beat faster, increasing blood circulation throughoutthe body right out to the tips of your fingers and toes. This short-term elevatedflow of blood flow brings increased supplies of oxygen and nutrients to all parts ofthe body, facilitating healing and repair. Without revving up your engine every daymany of the body’s systems never get the sludge burned out of them and neverperform optimally. Exercise also changes the metabolic rate so your body burns more calories–
not only while you are exercising, but also for a 24 hour period following exercise.This maintains a healthful body weight into old age, or helps to lose weight. Mostpeople find that exercise in moderation does not increase appetite, so that it ispossible to consistently burn more calories in a day, and gradually reduce weight ifthat is desirable. It is necessary to burn 3,500 calories to lose a pound of weight.Most forms of exercise allow you to burn 300 to 600 calories per hour at amoderate pace which would be achieved by doubling the resting pulse. Withouteven considering the weight-loss benefit of achieving a raised metabolism, an hourof daily exercise continued for a week or two dependent upon the type ofexercise and pace should lead to one pound of weight loss if the caloric intake is
held constant. The flip side of having a higher metabolism is rarely appreciated but is
extremely important. Recall the basic equation of health: Health = Nutrition /Calories. Exercise permits a person to eat somewhat more while not gainingweight. If the food is nutrient rich, the body has a chance to extract more vitamins,more minerals, more amino acids. The person who remains slender by rigidlyreducing their food intake to near starvation levels may lack vital, health-buildingnutrition. And only exercise moves lymphatic fluid. The blood is pumped through the
body by the heart, but the lymphatic system, lacking a heart, requires muscularcontractions to move from the extremities of the body to the central cavity. Thelymphatic system picks up cellular waste products and conducts these toxins todisposal. Frequently, people with rheumatic aches and pains or other generalizedmuscular discomforts physicians like to give Latin diagnostic names to can give uptaking pain pills if they will but begin exercising regularly. Only when they beginmoving their lymph can they begin to detoxify properly. There is another benefit from exercise which is not to be ignored, and that is
that it gives the person a chemical sense of well being. It actually will help toemotionally boost up people who are chronically depressed and make them smile.After a good workout, especially one done outside, everything seems brighter,more positive; whatever was bothering you somehow just doesn’t seem like thatbig of a deal now. I am not making pro-exercise propaganda. This is not a figmentof the imagination. An exercising body really does make antidepressantneurochemicals called endorphins, but only after about 45 minutes to an hour ofaerobic workout. Endorphins are powerful, with painkilling and euphoric effects equal to or
greater than heroin, but without any undesirable side effects. If chemists couldlearn to cheaply synthesize endorphins I’m sure that millions of people wouldwant to become addicted to them. Because I make such a point of getting in my
workout every day, my husband has accused me of being an endorphin junkie,
and he is right! I admit it, I’m really hooked on the feeling of well being Iconsistently get from any sustained exercise. I defend my addiction staunchlybecause it is the healthiest addiction I know of. I have also been accused of carrying exercise to extremes, and I admit to that
also. For a few years I trained for Ironman triathlons. I now think doing ironmandistances is immoderate and except for a few remarkable individuals with “iron”constitutions, training that hard can only lead to a form of exhaustion that is nothealth promoting. I have become much more sensible in my “old” age, and inrecent years have limited my participation to the Olympic distance triathlons. Iwas on the Canadian team at the World Championship in 1992, and intend to doit again in 1995. I do not find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it isgreat fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age groupcompetitors from all over the world who look and feel fantastic. It does my soulgood to see a group of people aging so gracefully, not buying into the popularnotion that old age is inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings adegree of balance to my life after spending so much time in the presence of thesick. I plan to maintain my athletic activities into old age, barring accident or otherunforeseen obstacles to fitness. To maintain basic fitness it does not matter so much what form of exercise is
chosen, as long as it is not damaging to the skeletal system or connective tissues.Many people are unable to run due to foot, knee, hip, or back problems, butalmost everyone can walk. Walking outside is better than inside on a treadmill,and walking hills is better than walking on flat ground. Exercise machines such asstationary bikes, cross country ski machines, and stair steppers work well for alot of people who live in the city, especially in the winter, or for those who hateexercise. Whatever you choose to do, it is important to at least double the restingpulse for 30 minutes no less than four days a week. This is the absolute minimumrequired to maintain the health and function of the cardiovascular-pulmonary
system. If your resting pulse is 70, you must walk, jog, ski, bike, swim or what
have you, fast enough to keep the pulse at 140 beats per minute for at least 30minutes. I have a strong preference to exercising outside in isolated places where there
is only me and the forest, or only me and the river. Running along logging roads inthe hilly back country, or swimming in the green unpolluted water of a forest riveris a spiritual experience for me. It is a time to meditate, to commune with nature,and to clear my mind and create new solutions. The repetitive action of running orwalking or swimming, along with the regular deep breathing in clean air, with nodistractions except what nature provides is truly health promoting. Sharing theseactivities with friends or family can also be great fun and some of the best in socialinteractions. It is one of my favorite ways of visiting with people. I don’t expectother people to be as enthusiastic about exercise as I am, but I do hope thateveryone will make an effort to be minimally fit as an ongoing part of their healthprogram into old age. Diet For A Long, Long Life
Some people not only want to be healthy, but they want to live in good health
long past the normal life span projected by statistical tables for Homo Sapiens. Dr. Roy Walford, a well-respected medical research gerontologist who has beenactively studying longevity for many years, is one of those. He has scientificallydemonstrated with accepted studies that a qualitative life span up to at least 115years of age is reasonably attainable by the average person if they start workingon it no later than about 50 years of age, though earlier is much better. Walford’s principles of extending life are very simple. All you have to do is
restrict your caloric intake to about 1,500 per day, and water fast two days aweek. Or alternatively, reduce your caloric intake to 1,200 per day and fast onlyone day a week on water. And make sure that every single bit of food you do eatis packed with nutrition, every single calorie, without exception. You continue this
program for the rest of your life along with moderate daily exercise and high but
reasonable dosages of vitamins, minerals, and also take a few exotic foodsupplements. The supplement program is not particularly expensive nor extreme,Walford’s supplement program is more moderate than the life extension program Irecommend for all middle-aged and older people. The best foods for this type ofprogram is a largely raw food diet (80%) with a predominance of sprouts andbaby greens, some cooked vegetables, and raw nuts and seeds. And make sureyou get 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise every other day. While Dr. Walford’s focus is on caloric reduction while maintaining sufficient
nutrition, most other life extensionists focus on increasing the nutrition side of theequation for health without bothering to reduce caloric intake. This approach ismuch easier because essentially, it involves gobbling nutritional supplements by thehandfuls without requiring self-discipline, though it can get quite expensive. I’llhave more to say about this approach in the next chapter, which is about vitamins. In this book I can’t explain all the aspects of prolongation of life through
conscious life-style choice. Those who are interested are referred to theBibliography. Chapter Six
Vitamins and
Other Food Supplements
From The Hygienic Dictionary
Vitamins . [1] The staple foods may not contain the same nutritive substances as in former times. . . . Chemical fertilizers, by increasing the abundance of the crops without replacing all the exhaustedelements of the soil, may have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains andof vegetables. . . . Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of diseases. Theirstudies of conditions of life and diet, and of their effects on the physiological and mental state ofmodern man are superficial, incomplete, and of too short duration. They have, thus, contributed to theweakening of our body and our soul. Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown. I have already explained the hygienist’s view of why people get sick. The
sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia, alternative elimination, disease.However, there is one more link in this chain, a precursor to enervation that, forgood and understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists. Thatprecursor is long term subclinical malnutrition. Lack of nutrition effects virtuallyeverybody today. Almost all of us are overfed but undernourished. I have already explained that one particular head of broccoli does not
necessarily equal another head of broccoli; the nutritional composition ofapparently identical foods can be highly variable. Not only do different samples ofthe same type of food differ wildly in protein content, amino acid ratios andmineral content, their vitamin and vitamin-like substances also vary according tosoil fertility and the variety grown. These days, food crop varieties are bred for yield and other commercial
considerations, such as shipability, storage life, and ease of processing. In pre-industrial times when each family propagated its own unique open-pollinatedvarieties, a natural selection process for healthy outcomes prevailed. If the family’sparticular, unique varieties carried genes for high nutrition levels, and if the family’sland was fertile enough to allow those genes to manifest, and if the family kept upits land’s fertility by wise management, their children tended to survive the gauntletof childhood illness and lived to propagate the family’s varieties and continue thefamily name. Thus, over time, human food cultivars were selected for theirnutritional content. But not any longer! These days, farming technology with its focus on bulk yield
and profit, degrades the nutritional content of our entire food supply. Evencommercial organically grown food is no better in this respect. Subclinical, life-long, vitamin and mineral deficiencies contribute to the onset of
disease; the malnourished body becomes increasingly enervated, beginning theprocess of disease. Vitamin supplements can increase the body’s vital force,reversing to a degree the natural tendency towards degeneration. In fact, somemedical gerontologists theorize that by using vitamins it might be possible torestore human life span to its genetically programmed 115 years without doinganything else about increasing nutrition from our degraded foods or paying muchattention to dietary indiscretions. Knowing what I do about toxemia’s effects Idoubt vitamins can allow us to totally ignore what we eat, though supplements cancertainly help. More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a thinking person to
use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are constantly assaulted andinsulted by modern life in ways our genetics never intended us to deal with. Todaythe entire environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted; our foodsupply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules that our bodies haveno natural ability to process and eliminate. Our cities and work places are full of
loud, shocking noises that trigger frequent adrenaline rushes and other stress
adaptations. Our work places are full of psychological stresses that humans neverhad to deal with before. Historically, humans who were not enslaved have been in control of
determining their own hour to hour, day to day activities, living on their ownlargely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for another, at regular hours,without personal liberty, ignoring or suppressing one’s own agenda andinclinations over an entire lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takescontinual subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protectourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we don’t know we’reexpending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to remain healthy we may neednutrition at levels far higher than might be possible through eating food; even idealfood might not contain enough vitamins to sustain us against the strains andstresses of this century. And think about Dr. Pottenger’s cats. Our bodies are at the poorer end of a
century-long process of mass degeneration that started with white flour from theroller mill. Compared to my older clients I have noticed that my younger patientsseem to possess less vital force on the average, show evidence of poorer skeletaldevelopment, have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding andcoping with their family life, and are far more likely to develop degenerativeconditions early. Most of my younger patients had a poor start because they wereraised on highly refined, devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without muchexercise. Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparentsmay have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and actually had towalk, not owning cars when they were young. Their great grandparents had a highlikelihood of enjoying decent nutrition and a healthful life-style. Unfortunately, most of my patients like the idea of taking vitamins too much for
their own good. The AMA medical model has conditioned people to swallowsomething for every little discomfort, and taking a pill is also by far the easiest
thing to do because a pill requires no life-style changes, nor self-discipline, nor
personal responsibility. But vitamins are much more frugal than drugs. Comparedto prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension supplements are much lessexpensive. I am saddened when my clients tell me they can’t afford supplements.When their MD prescribes a medicine that costs many times more they neverhave trouble finding the money. I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements, because I
can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies heal with dietarymodification and detoxification. Of all the tools at my disposal that help peopleheal, last in the race comes supplements. One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they were healing agents is
that food supplements almost never have harmful side effects, even when they aretaken in what might seem enormous overdoses. If someone with a healthcondition reads or hears about some vitamin being curative, goes out and buyssome and takes it, they will at very least have followed the basic principle of goodmedicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did nothing for themat all, they are practicing the same kind of benevolent medicine that Dr. Jenningsdid almost two centuries ago. Not only that, but having done something to treattheir symptoms, they have become patients facilitating their own patience, givingtheir body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get better, but notbecause of the action of the particular vitamin they took. Or, luckily, the vitamin orvitamins they take may have been just what was needed, raising their body’s vitalforce and accelerating the body’s ability to solve its problem. One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well as they might is
that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has created largely falsefears in the public mind about harmful effects of vitamin overdoses, the personmay not take enough of the right vitamin. The minimum daily requirements ofvitamins and minerals as outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent themost obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements at or
near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by the FDA as being
‘generally recognized as safe’) they should not expect to see any therapeuticeffect unless they have scurvy, beri beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra. In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt, and even vitamin C
fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of life-threatening deficiencystates people first learned to recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long seavoyages used to develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could kill.Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For this reason theBritish Government legislated the carrying of limes on long voyages and today thatis why British sailors are still called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams ofvitamin C. But to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg doesabsolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C takes 10,000milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening infection like pneumonia go awayfaster might require 25,000 to 150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administeredintravenously. In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that’s 300 to 750 ofthem daily—clearly impossible. Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of vitamin B
3, but
schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams, roughly a thousandtimes as much as the MDR. There are many many common diseases that the medical profession does not
see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many mental disordersfall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprisedlargely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not havegood enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and theydo not have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all oldpeople have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably declines with age, thequantity and quality of digestive enzymes decreases, then the ability to breakdownand extract soluble nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to seriousdeficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as disease or aging. Suppose a body needs 30 milligrams a day of niacin to not develop pellagra,
but to be fully healthy, needs 500 milligrams daily. If that body receives 50milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the medical doctor it could not possiblybe deficient in this vitamin. However, over time, the insidious subclinical deficiencymay degrade some other system and produce a different disease, such as colitis.But the medical doctor sees no relationship. Let me give you an actual example.Medical researchers studying vitamin B
5 or pantothenic acid noticed that it could,
in what seemed to be megadoses (compared to the minimum daily requirement)largely reverse certain degenerative effects of aging. These researchers weremeasuring endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging process. How theymade this measurement may appear to some readers to be heartless, but the bestway to gauge the endurance of a rat is to toss it into a five gallon bucket of coldwater and see how long it swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, theresearcher can be absolutely confident that the rat does its very best to stay alive. Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50° Fahrenheit water before
drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And old rats swim differently,less efficiently, with their lower bodies more or less vertical, sort of dog paddling.But when old rats were fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose for a few weeksbefore the test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like theyoung rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the gray went away)and improved in texture; they began to appear like young rats. And the rats onmegadoses of B 5 lived lot longer—25 to 33 percent longer than rats not on largedoses of B
5. Does that mean “megadoses” of B 5 have an unknown drug-like
effect? Or does that mean the real nutritional requirement for B 5 is a lot higher
than most people think? I believe the second choice is correct. To give you anidea of how much B
5 the old rats were given in human terms, the FDA says the
minimum daily requirement for B 5 is about 10 milligrams but if humans took as
much B 5 as the rats, they would take about 750 milligrams per day. Incidentally, I
figure I am as worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams daily. My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a gross vitamin
deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create optimum functioning. Any sickperson or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overallfunctioning in any way that won’t be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapycan be an amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification. Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food supply was better, whenmass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today. From theirperspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. Inour time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently producesvirtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintainedand adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food.Unfortunately, ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems toextend to otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics andhomeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for foodsupplementation. Vitamins For Young Persons And Children
Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties should also take
nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel so good that theyfind it impossible to conceive that anything could harm them or that they evercould become seriously sick or actually die. I know this is true because Iremember my own youth and besides, why else would young people so glibly ridemotorcycles or, after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into thebarrel of a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple venerealdiseases. Until they get a little sense, vitamin supplements help to counteract theirinevitable and unpreventable use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapestlong life and health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally verysurprised at the thought that even their children need nutritional supplements; very
few healthy children receive them. A few are given extra vitamin C when acutely
ill, when they have colds or communicable diseases such as chicken pox. Young people require a low dose supplement compared to those of us middle-
aged or older, but it should be a broad formula with the full range of vitamins andminerals. Some of the best products I have found over 25 years of research andexperimentation with young people are Douglas Cooper’s “Basic Formula” (lowdose and excellent for children) and “Super T Formula” (double the dose of BasicFormula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also from DouglasCooper Company; Bronson’s “Vitamin and Mineral Formula for Active Men andWomen” and Bronson’s “Insurance Formula.” “Vitamin 75 Plus;” and “Formula2” from Now Natural Foods are also good and less costly. Healthy very small children who will swallow pills can take these same
products at half the recommended dose. If they won’t swallow pills the pills canbe blended into a fruit smoothie or finely crushed and then stirred into applesauce. There are also “Children’s Chewable Multi-Vitamins + Iron” (1-5 yearsold) from Douglas Cooper that contains no minerals except iron, Bronson’s“Chewable Vitamins” (make sure it is the one for small children, Bronson makesseveral types of chewables) and a liquid vitamin product from Bronson calledMultivitamin Drops for Infants . These will be a little more costly than cutting pillsin half. There is also an extraordinarily high quality multivitamin/mineral formula for
children called “Children’s Formula Life Extension Mix” from Prolongevity, Ltd.(the Life Extension Foundation), it is in tablet form, and slightly more expensive. I hope that my book will be around for several generations. The businesses
whose vitamin products I recommend will not likely exist in twenty years. Evensooner than that the product names and details of the formulations will almostcertainly be altered. So, for future readers discovering this book in a library ordusty shelve of a used book store, if I, at my current level of understanding, weremanufacturing a childrens and young adults vitamin formula myself, this is what it
would contain. Any commercial formulation within 25 percent of these figures plus
or minus would probably be fine as long as the vitamins in the pills were of highquality. Vitamin C 500 mg B
1 30 mg
Vitamin E 50 iu B 2 30 mg
Vitamin A 500 iu B 3 niacinamide 100 mg
Vitamin D 25 iu B 5 50 mg
Magnesium 100 mg B 6 30 mg
Calcium 400 mg B 12 30 mcg
Selenium 10 mcg Chromium 20 mcgManganese 2 mcg Biotin 30 mg
Zinc 5 mg Iodine (as kelp) 5 mg
PABA 20 mg Bioflavinoids 100 mg
Vitamins For An Older Healthy Person
Someone who is beyond 35 to 40 years of age should still feel good almost all
of the time. That is how life should be. But enjoying well-being does not mean thatno dietary supplementation is called for. The onset of middle age is theappropriate time to begin working on continuing to feel well for as long aspossible. Just like a car, if you take very good care of it from the beginning, it islikely to run smoothly for many years into the future. If on the other hand youdrive it hard and fast with a lot of deferred maintenance you will probably have totrade it in on a new one after a very few years. Most people in their 70s and olderwho are struggling with many uncomfortable symptoms and low energy lament, “ifI’d only known I was going to live so long I would have taken better care ofmyself.” But at that point it is too late for the old donkey; time for a trade in. Gerontologists refer to combating the aging process as “squaring the curve.”
We arrive at the peak of our physical function at about age eighteen. How highthat peak level is depends on a person’s genetic endowment, the quality of thestart they received through their mother’s nutritional reserves, and the quality oftheir childhood nutrition and life experience. From that peak our function begins todrop. The rate of drop is not uniform, but is a cascade where each bit ofdeterioration creates more deterioration, accelerating the rate of deterioration. Ifvarious aging experiences were graphed, they would make curves like those onthe chart on this page. Because deterioration starts out so slowly, people usually do not begin to
notice there has been any decline until they reach their late 30s. A few fortunateones don’t notice it until their 40s. A few (usually) dishonest ones claim no losses
into their 50s but they are almost inevitably lying, either to you or to themselves,
or both. Though it might be wisest to begin combating the aging process at age19, practically speaking, no one is going to start spending substantial money onfood supplements until they actually notice significant lost function. For non-athletes this point usually comes when function has dropped to about 90 percentof what it was in our youth. If they’re lucky what people usually notice with thebeginnings of middle age is an increasing inability for their bodies to tolerate insultssuch as a night on the town or a big meal. Or they may begin to get colds that justwon’t seem to go away. Or they may begin coming home after work so tired thatthey can hardly stay awake and begin falling asleep in their Lazy Boy recliner infront of the TV even before prime time. If they’re not so lucky they’ll beginsuffering the initial twinges of a non-life-threatening chronic condition like arthritis. The thinnest line demonstrates the worst possible life from a purely physical
point of view, where a person started out life with significantly lowered function,lost quite a bit more and then hung on to life for many years without the mercy ofdeath. If one can postpone the deterioration of aging, they extend and hopefully
square the curve (retard loss of function until later and then have the loss occurmore rapidly). Someone whose lifetime function resembled a “square curve”(thethickest, topmost line) would experience little or no deterioration until the veryend and then would lose function precipitously. At this point we do not know howto eliminate the deterioration but we do know how to slow it down, living longerand feeling better, at least to a point close to the very end. Vitamin supplements can actually slow or even to a degree, reverse, the aging
process. However, to accomplish that task, they have to be taken in amounts fargreater than so-called minimum daily requirements, using vitamins as though theywere drugs, a therapeutic approach to changing body chemistry profiles andmaking them resemble a younger body. For example, research gerontologists likeWalford reason that if pantothenic acid (vitamin B
5, in fairly substantial but quite
safe) doses can extend the life and improve the function of old rats, there is every
indication that it will do a similar job on humans. Medical researchers andresearch gerontologists have noticed that many other vitamin and vitamin-likesubstances have similar effects on laboratory animals. Some will object that what helps rats and mice is in no way proven to cause
the same result on humans. I agree. Proven with full scientific rigor, no. In fact, atpresent, the contention is unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high likelihood’sof being so, yes! So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes! But provableto the most open-minded, scientific sort—probably not for a long time. However,the Life Extension Foundation is working hard to find some quantifiable method ofgauging the aging process in humans without waiting for the inarguable indicator,death. Once this is accomplished and solidly recognized, probably no rationalperson will be able to doubt that human life span can be increased. Experiments work far better with short-lived laboratory animals for another
reason; we can not control the food and supplement intakes of humans as we canwith caged mice. In fact, there are special types of laboratory mice that have beenbred to have uniformly short life spans, especially to accelerate this kind ofresearch. With mice we can state accurately that compared to a control group,feeding such and such a dose of such and such a supplement extended the life-span or functional performance by such and such a percent. A lot of these very same medical gerontologists nourish their own bodies as
thoroughly as the laboratory animals they are studying, taking broad mixes of foodsupplements at doses proportional to those that extend the life spans of theirresearch animals. This approach to using supplementation is at the other end ofthe scale compared to using supplements to prevent gross deficiencies. In the lifeextension approach, vitamins and vitamin-like substances are used as a therapyagainst the aging process itself. Will it work? Well, some of these human guinea pigs have been on heavy
vitamin supplementation for over thirty years (as of 1995) and none seem to be
suffering any damage. Will they live longer? It is impossible to say with full
scientific rigor? To know if life extension works, we would have to first determine“live longer than what?” After all, we don’t know how long any person might havelived without life extending vitamin supplements. Though it can’t be “proven,” itmakes perfect sense to me to spend far less money on an intensive life extensionvitamin program than I would certainly lose as a result of age-related sickness. Besides, I’ve already observed from personal use and from results in my
clinical practice that life extension vitamin programs do work. Whether I and myclients will ultimately live longer or not, the people who I have put on theseprograms, including myself and my husband, usually report that for several yearsafter starting they find themselves feeling progressively younger, graduallyreturning to an overall state of greater well-being they knew five or ten or fifteenyears ago. They have more energy, feel clearer mentally, have fewer unwantedsomatic symptoms. Sometimes the improvements seem rather miraculous. After a few months on
the program one ninety year old man, an independent-minded Oregonian farmer,reported that he began awakening with an erection every morning; unfortunately,his 89 year old cranky and somewhat estranged wife, who would not takevitamins, did not appreciate this youthfulness. A few months later (he had a smallfarm) he planted a holly orchard. Most of you won’t appreciate what this meanswithout a bit of explanation, but in Oregon, holly is grown as a high-priced andhighly profitable ornamental for the clusters of leaves and berries. But a slow-growing holly orchard takes 25 years to began making a profit! A few older clients of mine reported that they noticed nothing from the life
extension program, but these are unique people who have developed the ability todominate their bodies with their minds and routinely pay their bodies absolutely noattention, driving them relentlessly to do their will. Usually they use their energiesto accomplish good, Christian works. Eventually, these dedicated and high-tonedpeople break down and die like everyone else. Will they do so later on life
extending vitamins than they would have otherwise? I couldn’t know because I
can’t know how long they might have lived without supplementation and sincethey refuse to admit the vitamins do them any good, they won’t pay for them. Many on life extension programs experience a reverse aging process for
awhile. However, after the full benefit of the supplementation has worked itselfthrough their body chemistry, they again begin to experience the aging process. Ibelieve the process will then be slowed by their vitamins compared to what itwould have been without supplements. But I can’t prove it. Maybe we will havesome idea if the program worked 20 to 40 years from now. At this time I know of only two companies that make top quality life extension
vitamin supplement formulas. One is Prolongevity (Life Extension Foundation),the other, Vitamin Research Products. I prefer to support what I view as thealtruistic motives behind Prolongevity and buy my products from them.Unfortunately, these vitamin compounders can not put every possibly beneficialsubstance in a single bottle of tablets. The main reason they do not is fear of thepower-grabbing Food and Drug Administration. This agency is threateningconstantly to remove certain of the most useful life-extending substances from thevitamin trade and make them the exclusive property of prescription-writingmedical doctors. So far, public pressure has been mobilized against the FDAevery time action was threatened and has not permitted this. If some productwere included in a mix and that product were prohibited, the entire mixed, bottledand labeled batch that remained unsold at that time would be wasted, atenormous cost. Were I manufacturing my own life extension supplement I would include the list
shortly following. By the way, to get this all in one day, it is necessary to take 6 to12 large tablets daily, usually spread throughout the day, taken a few at a timewith each meal. If you compare my suggested formulation to another one, keep inmind that variations of 25 percent one way or another won’t make a significantdifference, and adding other beneficial substances to my recommendations
probably is only helpful. However, I would not want to eliminate anything in the
list below, it is the minimum:
Beta-Carotene 25,000 iu Selenium 100 mcg
Vitamin A 5,000 iu T aurine 500 mg
B1 250 mg Cyctine 200 mg
B2 50 mg Gluthaianone 15 mg
B3 niacinamid 850 mg Choline 650 mg
B5 750 mg Inositol 250 mg
B6 200 mg Flavanoids 500 mg
B12 100 mcg Zinc 35 mg
PABA 50 mg Chromium 100 mcg
Folic Acid 500 mcg Molybdenum 123 mg
Biotin 200 mcg Manganese 5 mg
Vitamin C 3,000mg Iodine (as kelp) 10 mg
Vitamin E 600 iu Co-Enzyme Q 10 60 mg
Magnesium 1,000 mg DMAE 100 mg
Potassium 100 mg Ginko biloba 120 mg
Calcium 1,000 mg V itamin D 3 200 iu
Please also keep in mind that there are many other useful substances not listed
above. For example, every day I have a “green drink,” an herbal preparationcontaining numerous tonic substances like ginseng and also various forms of algaeand chlorophyll extracts. My green drink makes my body feel very peppy all day,so it certainly enhances my life and may extend it. It costs about $25.00 a monthto enjoy that. I also use various pure amino acids at times. Phenylalanine willmake me feel more aggressive whenever I am feeling lackluster; this nutrient hasalso been used as an effective therapy against depression. Melatonin taken atbedtime really does help me get to sleep and may have remarkable life-extending
properties. Other amino acids help my body manufacture growth hormones and I
use them from the time I begin training seriously in spring through the end of thesummer triathlon competition season. Pearson and Shaw’s book (seeBibliography) is a good starting point to begin learning about this remarkablyuseful subject. The Future Of Life Extension
I beg the readers indulgence for a bit of futurology about what things may look
like if the life extension movement continues to develop. Right now, a full vitamin and vitamin-like substance life extension program
costs between $50 and $100 dollars per month. However, pharmaceuticalresearchers occasionally notice that drugs meant to treat and cure diseases, whentested on lab animals for safety, make these animals live quite a bit longer andfunction better. Though the FDA doesn’t allow any word of this to be printed inofficial prescribing data, the word does get around to other researchers, togerontologists and eventually to that part of the public that is eagerly looking forlonger life. Today there are numerous people who routinely take prescriptionmedicines meant to cure a disease they do not have and plan to take thosemedicines for the rest of their long, long life. These drugs being patented, the tariff gets a lot steeper compared to taking
vitamins. (Since they are naturally-occurring substances, vitamins can’t bepatented and therefore, aren’t big-profit items. Perhaps that’s one reason theFDA is so covertly opposed to vitamins.) Right now it would be quite possible tospend many hundred dollars per month on a life extension program that includedmost of these potentially beneficent prescription drugs. As more of life-extending substances are discovered, the cost of participating
in a maximally effective life extension program will escalate. However, those whocan afford chemically enhanced functioning will enjoy certain side-benefits. Theirproductive, enjoyable life spans may measure well over a century, perhaps
approaching two centuries or more. Some of these substances greatly improve
intelligence so they will become brighter and have faster reaction times. With moretime to accumulate more wisdom and experience than “short livers” these folkswill become wiser, too. They will have more time to compound their investmentassets and thus will become far more wealthy. They will become an obvious andrecognizable aristocracy. This new upper class will immediately recognize eachother on the street because they will look entirely different than the short-livedpoorer folk and will probably run the political economic system. And this new aristocratic society I see coming may be far more pleasant than
the one dominated by the oligarchy we now have covertly running things. For withgreater age and experience does really come greater wisdom. I have long felt thatthe biggest problem with Earth is that we did not live long enough. As GeorgeBernard Shaw quipped when he was 90 (he lived to 96), “here I am, 90 yearsold, just getting out of my adolescence and getting some sense, and my body isfalling apart as fast as it can.”
Vitamin Program For The Sick
No matter which way you look at it or how well insured you may be against it,
being sick is expensive (not to mention what it does to one’s quality of life), andby far the best thing to do is to prevent it from happening in the first place.However, most people do not do anything about their health until forced to bysome painful condition. If you are already sick there are a number of supplementsyou can take which have the potential to shorten the duration and severity of theillness, and hopefully prevent a recurrence. The sicker you are, the more supplements you will require; as health is
regained, the dosage and variety of substances can be reduced. In chronic illness,megadoses of many nutrients are usually beneficial. Any sick adult should begin alife extension vitamin program unless they are highly allergic to so many thingsalready that they can not tolerate many kinds of vitamins as well. In addition to the
life extension program, vitamin C should be taken by the chronically ill at a dose
from 10 to 25 grams daily, depending on the severity of the condition. Many people want to know whether or not they should take their regular food
supplements during a fast. On a water fast most supplements in a hard tablet formwill not be broken down at all, and often can be seen floating by in the colonicviewing tube looking exactly like it did when you swallowed it. This waste can beavoided by crushing or chewing (yuck) the tablets, before swallowing.Encapsulated vitamins usually are absorbed, but if you want to make sure, openthe capsule and dump it in the back of your mouth before swallowing with water.Powdered vitamins (Life Extension Foundation sells them) are well absorbed. On a water fast the body is much more sensitive to any substance introduced,
so as a general rule it is not a good idea to take more than one half your regulardose of food supplements. Most fasters do fine without any supplements. Manypeople get an upset stomach from supplements on an empty stomach, and thesepeople should not take any during a water fast unless they develop symptoms ofmineral deficiencies (usually a pre-existing condition) such as leg cramps andtremors, these symptoms necessitate powdered or well-chewed-up mineralsupplement. Minerals don’t taste too bad to chew, just chalky. The same suggestions regarding dosage of supplements for a water fast are
also true for a juice fast or vegetable broth fast. On a raw food cleansing diet thefull dose of supplements should be taken with meals. There exists an enormous body of data about vitamins; books and magazine
articles are always touting some new product or explaining the uses of an old one.If you want to know more about using ordinary vitamins you’ll find leads in thebibliography to guide your reading. However, there is one “old” vitamin and a fewnewer and relatively unknown life extending substances that are so useful andimportant to handling illness that I would like to tell you more about them. Vitamin C  is one of the first ones ever identified. If you are one of those
people that just hate taking vitamins, and you were for some reason willing to take
only one, vitamin C would be your best choice because it helps enormously with
any infection and in invaluable in tissue healing and rebuilding collagen. If I wasgoing on a long trip and didn’t want to pack a lot of weight, my first choice wouldbe to insure three to six grams of vitamin C for daily use when I was healthy (I’dtake the optimum dose—ten grams a day—if weight were no limitation). I’d alsocarry enough extra C to really beef up my intake when dealing with anunexpected acute illness or accident. When traveling to far away places, exposed to a whole new batch of
organisms, frequently having difficulty finding healthy foods, going through timezones, losing nights of sleep, it is easy to become enervated enough to catch alocal cold or flu. If I have brought lots of extra vitamin C with me I know that myimmune system will be able to conquer just about anything—as long as I also stopeating and can take an enema. I also like to have vitamin C as a part of my firstaid kit because if I experience a laceration, a sprain, broken bone, or a burn, Ican increase my internal intake as well as apply it liberally directly on the damagedskin surface. Vitamin C can be put directly in the eye in a dilute solution withdistilled water for infections and injuries, in the ear for ear infections, and in thenose for sinus infections. If you are using the acid form of C (ascorbic acid) and itsmarts too much, make a more dilute solution, or switch to the alkaline form of C(calcium ascorbate) which can be used as a much more concentrated solutionwithout a stinging sensation. Applied directly on the skin C in solution makes avery effective substitute for sun screen. It doesn’t filter out ultraviolet, it beefs upthe skin to better deal with the insult. I believe vitamin C can deal with a raging infection such as pneumonia as well
or better than antibiotics.
Be_your_own_doctor.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        This means that the person who istaking care of the critically ill person must be experienced enough to adjust theintensity of the body’s healing efforts and accurately assess the ability of theperson to process toxic waste products clamoring for removal so the ailing bodyis not drowned in it’s own poisons. It is often necessary to use clear vegetablebroth, vegetable and wheat grass juices, and fruits juices, or whole sprouts toslow down the cleansing gradient and sometimes, to resupply the tissue’sexhausted nutritional reserves. I wish all cases of critical illness had such a positive outcome as Ethyl’s, but
unfortunately they don’t. I had Marge on the same program at the same time. Shealso had cancerous tumors all over her body and had similarly been sent home todie. In some ways Marge’s body was a more likely candidate for survival thanEthyl’s. Marge did not have heart failure or diabetes and was still able on arrivalto at least take small amount of water orally and walk to the bathroom. Put on asimilar program, her tumors also shrunk and were reabsorbed and she too wenthome. But Marge did not really have a strong reason to live. Although her husband
was by her side throughout the treatment program, Marge was deeply upsetbecause she was estranged from one of her sons who she had not seen for over10 years. When she went home from Great Oaks, the son finally consented to seehis mother, went to the effort of trying to work things out with her, and finallyconfessed that under it all he still loved her. At that point Marge died in peace. She had accomplished the last thing she
wanted to take care of and her will to live did not extend beyond that point. Hadshe died several months earlier as predicted by the medical profession, Margewould have been unable to resolve this relationship. This was what Marge’s lifewas pivoting on at the end. I was glad to assist her in doing what she needed todo. Her husband and other family members found it difficult to understand, andthey were hurt that Marge did not wish to continue her life with them. Diet For The Chronically Ill. The chronically ill person has a long-term degenerative condition that is not
immediately life threatening. This condition usually causes more-or-less continuoussymptoms that are painful, perhaps unsightly, and ultimately will be disabling oreventually capable of causing death. To qualify as “chronic” the symptoms musthave been present a minimum of six months, with no relief in sight. People withthese conditions have usually sought medical assistance, frequently have hadsurgery, and have taken and probably are taking numerous prescription drugs. Some examples of chronic conditions are: arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, early
onset of cancer and aids, asthma, colitis, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome,some mental disorders, arterial deposit diseases, many of the itises(inflammations). Before fasting, the chronically ill often do have time to prepare the way with
limited dietary reform, and frequently begin to feel relief quite quickly. Beforeactually fasting they should limit their diet to raw foods and eliminate all toxicfoods like alcohol, coffee, tea, salt, sugar and recreational drugs for two months ifthey have been following a typical American diet. If the chronically ill had been following a vegetarian diet, perhaps a diet
including with eggs and dairy, if they had been using no addicting substances, thenone month on raw foods is sufficient preparation for fasting. If the person hadwater or juice fasted for at least a week or two within the last two years, and
followed a healthy diet since that time, one or two weeks on raw foods should be
a sufficient runway. During preparation for a fast, I never recommend that a chronically ill person
quit taking prescription medicines because doing so can seriously disrupt theirhomeostasis. However, if their symptoms lessen or vanish during the pre-fastingclean up, the person might try tapering off medications. The length and type of fast chosen to resolve a chronic illness depends largely
on available time, finances, availability of support people, work responsibilities,and mental toughness. If you are one of those fortunate people rich enough to givetheir health first priority, long water fasting is ideal. If on the other hand you can’tafford to stop working, have no one to take care of you and assist with somehousehold chores, and/or you are not mentally tough enough to deal with self-denial, compromise is necessary. Ideally the chronically ill person would fast for an extended period under
supervision until their symptoms were gone or greatly improved, with a fall-backplan to repeat the whole process again in three to six months if necessary. If youare not able to do that, the next best program is to fast for a short period, like oneor two weeks, with a plan to repeat the process as often as possible until you arehealed. I have had clients with potentially life-threatening conditions such as obesity
with incipient heart failure, or who came to me with cancer, that were unable tostop work for financial reasons, or who could not afford a residential fastingprogram, or who felt confident in their own ability to deal with detoxification intheir own home. These people have fasted successfully at home, coming to seeme once a week. Almost inevitably, successful at-home fasters had already donea lot of research on self healing, believed in it, and had the personal discipline tocarry it out properly, including breaking the fast properly without overeating. Foods To Heal Chronic Illness
Sprouts Baby Greens Salad Juices Fruit
alfalfa sunflower lettuce beet grapefruit
radish buckwheat celery celery lemon
bean zucchini zucchini lime lime
clover kale kale orange orange
fenugreek endive radish parsley apple
wheat tomato tomato raspberries
cabbage cabbage cabbage blueberries
carrot carrot grapes
spinach apple peaches
parsley grapefruit apricots
sweet pepper lemon strawberry
Fruits should be watery and lower in sugar. Some examples of poor fruit
choices would be pineapple, ripe mango, bananas, dates, raisins, figs. Fruitsshould not be combined with vegetables. Vegetables should not be starchy, packed-full of energy. Poor vegetable
choices would be potato, parsnip, turnip, corn, sweet potato, yam, beet, wintersquash. Sprouts and baby greens are vegetables and may be included in salads. Juices should not be extremely sweet. Apple, orange, beet and carrot juice
should be diluted with 50% water. Fruit juices should not be mixed with vegetablejuices or with vegetables at the same meal. Salads should include no fruit. Salad dressings should be lemon or lime juice,
very small quantities of olive oil, and herbs. No salt, soy sauce nor black pepper. Cayenne can be okay for some. I have also helped chronically ill people that were not mentally prepared to
water fast, but were able to face the long-term self-control and deprivation of araw food cleansing diet that included careful food combining. These people alsoregained their health, but it took them a year at minimum, and once well they hadto remain on a diet tailor-made to their digestive capacity for the rest of their life,usually along with food supplements. Jim was such a case. He was 55 years old, very obese, had dangerously high
blood pressure poorly controlled with medication, and was going into congestiveheart failure. He was on digitalis and several other heart medications plusdiuretics, but in no way was his condition under control. He had severe edema inthe feet and legs with pitting, and fluid retention in the abdominal region caused ahuge paunch that was solid to the touch not soft and squishy like fatty tissue. Jim had long dreamed of having his own homestead with an Organic garden
and now he had these things but was too sick to enjoy them or work in his gardenwithout severe heart pain and shortness of breath. Jim had retired early in order toenjoy many years without the stresses of work, and he was alarmed to realize thathe was unlikely to survive a year. The day Jim came to see me the first time I would have classified his condition
as critically ill because his life was in immediate danger; but he responded soquickly to his detox program that he was very soon out of danger and would bemore accurately described as a chronically ill person. Jim was not prepared towater fast. He was attached to having his food and he was aware that at hisextreme weight he was going to have stay on a dietary program for a long, longtime. He also wanted to choose a gradient that he could manage by himself athome with little assistance from his wife. He had been on a typical American dietwith meat, coffee, etc. , so that in spite of his dangerous condition it did not seemwise to me to add the heavy eliminatory burden of a water fast to a body that wasalready overwhelmed with fluids and waste products. Jim immediately went on a raw food cleansing diet, with no concentrated
foods like nuts, seeds, or avocados, and with one day each week fasting onvegetable juice and broth. He did enemas daily even though it wasn’t his favoritething. In one month he had lost 30 pounds, his eyes had started to sparkle, andhis complexion was rosy. The swelling had disappeared from his feet and legs,and he had to buy new pants. Starting the second month he gradually withdrew from prescription
medications. From the beginning I had put Jim on a program of nutritionalsupplements including protomorphogens (see chapter on vitamins and foodsupplements) to help the body repair it’s heart and the kidneys. In only fourmonths he had returned his body to glowing health, and looked great for his age,though he was still overweight. At the end of one year he had returned to anormal weight for his height, and only cheated on the diet a couple of times whenattending a social event, and then it was only a baked potato with no dressing. He was probably going to have many qualitative years working his garden and
living out his dreams. The local intensive care ward lost a lot of money when theyfailed to get Jim. Diet For The Acutely Ill
The acutely ill person experiences occasional attacks of distressing symptoms,
usually after indiscretions in living or emotional upsets. They have a cold, or a flu,or sinusitis, or a first bout of pneumonia, or a spring allergy attack. The intensesymptoms knock them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. Ifthey are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the chronically illcategory. People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent that they are
able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute illness, the appetites isprobably pretty dull anyway, so why not give a brief fast on water or fruit juice atry. Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting more than a
week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first bout of pneumonia may welllast for three weeks or a month. The general rule is to eat as little as possible untilthe symptoms have passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have ahorror of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses ofVitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins. ) Those having alittle experience with natural medicine make teas of echinacea, fenugreek seedsand red clover and quit eating. Eating as little as possible can mean only waterand herb teas, only vegetable broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice,even only cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relievedyour system of enough digestive effort. After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your life-style and
improve your diet so that you aren’t so toxic and don’t have to experience anacute illness several times a year when your body is forced to try an energeticdetox. Diet For A Healthy Person
I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth century. Doctors
Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the New Health
Catastrophes  state that in-depth laboratory testing of the population at large
demonstrated four universally present pathological conditions: heavy metalpoisoning, arteriosclerosis, sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not reallyhealthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional supplementation. Infact the odds against most people receiving adequate vitamin and mineral nutritionwithout supplements are very poor as demonstrated by the following chart. Problem Nutrients in America
Nutrient Per cent Receiving Less than the RDA
B6 80%
Magnesium 75Calcium 68Iron 57Vitamin A 50B
1 45
C4 1B
2 36
B12 36
B3 33
A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and does not
have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing interferes with or handicapstheir daily life or work. A healthy person has good energy most of the time, apositive state of mind, restful sleep, good digestion and elimination. Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie count—eating ordrinking those things that they know are not good for them but that are fun to eator are “recreational foods or beverages. ” Such “sinning” could mean a restaurantbash twice a month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, icecream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key concept ofresponsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent limit. A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not exceed the
digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of quantity or quality. All foodsthat can not be efficiently digested should be removed from the regular diet andrelegated to the “sin” category, including those you are allergic to and those for
which you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few
people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish, but some can, andsome can with the assistance of digestive enzyme supplements. In order to digestmeats, the stomach must be sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin,pancreatin, and bile, etc. , and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side(not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces), and notcombined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you must include meat inyour dietary, it should represent a very small percentage of your total caloricintake, be eaten infrequently, with the bulk of the calories coming from complexcarbohydrates such grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities ofvegetables and fruits. The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is advised to
fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a chance to catch up ontheir internal housecleaning. If water fasting seems impossible, try a day of juicingit; if that is too rigorous, try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though lessbeneficial than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking yourovernight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up breakfast altogetheror postponing breaking your overnight fast, because from the time you stop eatingat the end of one day to the time you start eating the next is actually a brief,detoxifying fast. Eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt can be assimilated by some healthy people with
or without digestive aids. It is possible to take lactase to break down the milksugars for example; sometimes aids such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, andpancreatin help. If you can buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurtcontaining lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily,especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on unsprayed food, andserved very fresh. Eggs should come from chickens that run around outside,eating weeds, and scratching bugs. The yolks of those eggs will be intense orange,not yellow. Few people these days have ever eaten a real egg. Surprisingly, for
those of you who fear cholesterol, the healthy way to eat eggs is use just the raw
yolk from fertile eggs. It is enjoyed by many people in a smoothie–fresh fruitblended up with water or milk. Eggs contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturallyprevents the body from forming harmful fatty deposits in the arteries. Sea weeds are a wonderful source of minerals and should be eaten in soups
and salads. Other invaluable fortifying foods are algae of all kinds (such aschlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast, and fresh bakers yeast. Manypeople have had very unpleasant experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast andso use brewers yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins itcontains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw yeast is sopowerful, it feels like pep pills. It takes a special technique to eat raw yeast because in the stomach and
intestines the yeast does the job it is supposed to do: convert sugars into alcoholand carbon dioxide gas. The entire digestive tract then bloats with gas and theperson will feel very uncomfortable for some time. However, raw yeast is amarvelous source of B vitamins and proteins and can make someone feel veryenergetic—if they know how to use it. The secret is to eat live yeast very firstthing in the morning on an empty stomach and then, not eat anything at all forabout two hours, giving the stomach acids and enzymes time to kill the yeasts anddigest them before adding sugars from another meal. Some like to eat yeast infresh cake form, buying it from a bakery. Others prefer dry granular baker’s yeastblended with water into a sort of “shake. ” This is not a bad place to put your rawegg yolk either. If you need it sweetened to drink it, use an artificial or herbalsweetener like nutrisweet or stevia. Live yeast cannot consume milk sugars verywell. So if you can handle dairy, try one or two tablespoons of granulated liveyeast, an egg yolk and a little raw milk or yogurt, well whizzed. Wheat germ is also a great, rich food, but is usually rancid unless it is taken out
of the refrigerated display; unless it is refrigerated, in a dated package and fresh,don’t eat it. Herb teas and roasted grain beverages are healthy beverages, along
with mineral and distilled water avoiding where possible chlorinated and
fluoridated water. Diet Is Not Enough
Those isolated, long-lived peoples discovered by Weston A. Price had to do
hard physical labor to eat, had to walk briskly up and down steep terrain to getanywhere. But today, few North Americans output very much physical energy inprocess of daily life or work. Not only cars, but all of our modern conveniencesmake it possible to live without ever breaking into a sweat. We pay for this ease;it costs us a significant degree of health. Exercise has many benefits when combined with excellent nutrition. It creates
an overall feeling of well-being that can not be created by diet alone. Exercisingtemporarily makes the heart beat faster, increasing blood circulation throughoutthe body right out to the tips of your fingers and toes. This short-term elevatedflow of blood flow brings increased supplies of oxygen and nutrients to all parts ofthe body, facilitating healing and repair. Without revving up your engine every daymany of the body’s systems never get the sludge burned out of them and neverperform optimally. Exercise also changes the metabolic rate so your body burns more calories–
not only while you are exercising, but also for a 24 hour period following exercise. This maintains a healthful body weight into old age, or helps to lose weight. Mostpeople find that exercise in moderation does not increase appetite, so that it ispossible to consistently burn more calories in a day, and gradually reduce weight ifthat is desirable. It is necessary to burn 3,500 calories to lose a pound of weight. Most forms of exercise allow you to burn 300 to 600 calories per hour at amoderate pace which would be achieved by doubling the resting pulse. Withouteven considering the weight-loss benefit of achieving a raised metabolism, an hourof daily exercise continued for a week or two dependent upon the type ofexercise and pace should lead to one pound of weight loss if the caloric intake is
held constant. The flip side of having a higher metabolism is rarely appreciated but is
extremely important. Recall the basic equation of health: Health = Nutrition /Calories. Exercise permits a person to eat somewhat more while not gainingweight. If the food is nutrient rich, the body has a chance to extract more vitamins,more minerals, more amino acids. The person who remains slender by rigidlyreducing their food intake to near starvation levels may lack vital, health-buildingnutrition. And only exercise moves lymphatic fluid. The blood is pumped through the
body by the heart, but the lymphatic system, lacking a heart, requires muscularcontractions to move from the extremities of the body to the central cavity. Thelymphatic system picks up cellular waste products and conducts these toxins todisposal. Frequently, people with rheumatic aches and pains or other generalizedmuscular discomforts physicians like to give Latin diagnostic names to can give uptaking pain pills if they will but begin exercising regularly. Only when they beginmoving their lymph can they begin to detoxify properly. There is another benefit from exercise which is not to be ignored, and that is
that it gives the person a chemical sense of well being. It actually will help toemotionally boost up people who are chronically depressed and make them smile. After a good workout, especially one done outside, everything seems brighter,more positive; whatever was bothering you somehow just doesn’t seem like thatbig of a deal now. I am not making pro-exercise propaganda. This is not a figmentof the imagination. An exercising body really does make antidepressantneurochemicals called endorphins, but only after about 45 minutes to an hour ofaerobic workout. Endorphins are powerful, with painkilling and euphoric effects equal to or
greater than heroin, but without any undesirable side effects. If chemists couldlearn to cheaply synthesize endorphins I’m sure that millions of people wouldwant to become addicted to them. Because I make such a point of getting in my
workout every day, my husband has accused me of being an endorphin junkie,
and he is right. I admit it, I’m really hooked on the feeling of well being Iconsistently get from any sustained exercise. I defend my addiction staunchlybecause it is the healthiest addiction I know of. I have also been accused of carrying exercise to extremes, and I admit to that
also. For a few years I trained for Ironman triathlons. I now think doing ironmandistances is immoderate and except for a few remarkable individuals with “iron”constitutions, training that hard can only lead to a form of exhaustion that is nothealth promoting. I have become much more sensible in my “old” age, and inrecent years have limited my participation to the Olympic distance triathlons. Iwas on the Canadian team at the World Championship in 1992, and intend to doit again in 1995. I do not find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it isgreat fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age groupcompetitors from all over the world who look and feel fantastic. It does my soulgood to see a group of people aging so gracefully, not buying into the popularnotion that old age is inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings adegree of balance to my life after spending so much time in the presence of thesick. I plan to maintain my athletic activities into old age, barring accident or otherunforeseen obstacles to fitness. To maintain basic fitness it does not matter so much what form of exercise is
chosen, as long as it is not damaging to the skeletal system or connective tissues. Many people are unable to run due to foot, knee, hip, or back problems, butalmost everyone can walk. Walking outside is better than inside on a treadmill,and walking hills is better than walking on flat ground. Exercise machines such asstationary bikes, cross country ski machines, and stair steppers work well for alot of people who live in the city, especially in the winter, or for those who hateexercise. Whatever you choose to do, it is important to at least double the restingpulse for 30 minutes no less than four days a week. This is the absolute minimumrequired to maintain the health and function of the cardiovascular-pulmonary
system. If your resting pulse is 70, you must walk, jog, ski, bike, swim or what
have you, fast enough to keep the pulse at 140 beats per minute for at least 30minutes. I have a strong preference to exercising outside in isolated places where there
is only me and the forest, or only me and the river. Running along logging roads inthe hilly back country, or swimming in the green unpolluted water of a forest riveris a spiritual experience for me. It is a time to meditate, to commune with nature,and to clear my mind and create new solutions. The repetitive action of running orwalking or swimming, along with the regular deep breathing in clean air, with nodistractions except what nature provides is truly health promoting. Sharing theseactivities with friends or family can also be great fun and some of the best in socialinteractions. It is one of my favorite ways of visiting with people. I don’t expectother people to be as enthusiastic about exercise as I am, but I do hope thateveryone will make an effort to be minimally fit as an ongoing part of their healthprogram into old age. Diet For A Long, Long Life
Some people not only want to be healthy, but they want to live in good health
long past the normal life span projected by statistical tables for Homo Sapiens. Dr. Roy Walford, a well-respected medical research gerontologist who has beenactively studying longevity for many years, is one of those. He has scientificallydemonstrated with accepted studies that a qualitative life span up to at least 115years of age is reasonably attainable by the average person if they start workingon it no later than about 50 years of age, though earlier is much better. Walford’s principles of extending life are very simple. All you have to do is
restrict your caloric intake to about 1,500 per day, and water fast two days aweek. Or alternatively, reduce your caloric intake to 1,200 per day and fast onlyone day a week on water. And make sure that every single bit of food you do eatis packed with nutrition, every single calorie, without exception. You continue this
program for the rest of your life along with moderate daily exercise and high but
reasonable dosages of vitamins, minerals, and also take a few exotic foodsupplements. The supplement program is not particularly expensive nor extreme,Walford’s supplement program is more moderate than the life extension program Irecommend for all middle-aged and older people. The best foods for this type ofprogram is a largely raw food diet (80%) with a predominance of sprouts andbaby greens, some cooked vegetables, and raw nuts and seeds. And make sureyou get 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise every other day. While Dr. Walford’s focus is on caloric reduction while maintaining sufficient
nutrition, most other life extensionists focus on increasing the nutrition side of theequation for health without bothering to reduce caloric intake. This approach ismuch easier because essentially, it involves gobbling nutritional supplements by thehandfuls without requiring self-discipline, though it can get quite expensive. I’llhave more to say about this approach in the next chapter, which is about vitamins. In this book I can’t explain all the aspects of prolongation of life through
conscious life-style choice. Those who are interested are referred to theBibliography. Chapter Six
Vitamins and
Other Food Supplements
From The Hygienic Dictionary
Vitamins. [1] The staple foods may not contain the same nutritive substances as in former times. Chemical fertilizers, by increasing the abundance of the crops without replacing all the exhaustedelements of the soil, may have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains andof vegetables. Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of diseases. Theirstudies of conditions of life and diet, and of their effects on the physiological and mental state ofmodern man are superficial, incomplete, and of too short duration. They have, thus, contributed to theweakening of our body and our soul. Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown. I have already explained the hygienist’s view of why people get sick. The
sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia, alternative elimination, disease. However, there is one more link in this chain, a precursor to enervation that, forgood and understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists. Thatprecursor is long term subclinical malnutrition. Lack of nutrition effects virtuallyeverybody today. Almost all of us are overfed but undernourished. I have already explained that one particular head of broccoli does not
necessarily equal another head of broccoli; the nutritional composition ofapparently identical foods can be highly variable. Not only do different samples ofthe same type of food differ wildly in protein content, amino acid ratios andmineral content, their vitamin and vitamin-like substances also vary according tosoil fertility and the variety grown. These days, food crop varieties are bred for yield and other commercial
considerations, such as shipability, storage life, and ease of processing. In pre-industrial times when each family propagated its own unique open-pollinatedvarieties, a natural selection process for healthy outcomes prevailed. If the family’sparticular, unique varieties carried genes for high nutrition levels, and if the family’sland was fertile enough to allow those genes to manifest, and if the family kept upits land’s fertility by wise management, their children tended to survive the gauntletof childhood illness and lived to propagate the family’s varieties and continue thefamily name. Thus, over time, human food cultivars were selected for theirnutritional content. But not any longer. These days, farming technology with its focus on bulk yield
and profit, degrades the nutritional content of our entire food supply. Evencommercial organically grown food is no better in this respect. Subclinical, life-long, vitamin and mineral deficiencies contribute to the onset of
disease; the malnourished body becomes increasingly enervated, beginning theprocess of disease. Vitamin supplements can increase the body’s vital force,reversing to a degree the natural tendency towards degeneration. In fact, somemedical gerontologists theorize that by using vitamins it might be possible torestore human life span to its genetically programmed 115 years without doinganything else about increasing nutrition from our degraded foods or paying muchattention to dietary indiscretions. Knowing what I do about toxemia’s effects Idoubt vitamins can allow us to totally ignore what we eat, though supplements cancertainly help. More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a thinking person to
use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are constantly assaulted andinsulted by modern life in ways our genetics never intended us to deal with. Todaythe entire environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted; our foodsupply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules that our bodies haveno natural ability to process and eliminate. Our cities and work places are full of
loud, shocking noises that trigger frequent adrenaline rushes and other stress
adaptations. Our work places are full of psychological stresses that humans neverhad to deal with before. Historically, humans who were not enslaved have been in control of
determining their own hour to hour, day to day activities, living on their ownlargely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for another, at regular hours,without personal liberty, ignoring or suppressing one’s own agenda andinclinations over an entire lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takescontinual subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protectourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we don’t know we’reexpending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to remain healthy we may neednutrition at levels far higher than might be possible through eating food; even idealfood might not contain enough vitamins to sustain us against the strains andstresses of this century. And think about Dr. Pottenger’s cats. Our bodies are at the poorer end of a
century-long process of mass degeneration that started with white flour from theroller mill. Compared to my older clients I have noticed that my younger patientsseem to possess less vital force on the average, show evidence of poorer skeletaldevelopment, have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding andcoping with their family life, and are far more likely to develop degenerativeconditions early. Most of my younger patients had a poor start because they wereraised on highly refined, devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without muchexercise. Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparentsmay have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and actually had towalk, not owning cars when they were young. Their great grandparents had a highlikelihood of enjoying decent nutrition and a healthful life-style. Unfortunately, most of my patients like the idea of taking vitamins too much for
their own good. The AMA medical model has conditioned people to swallowsomething for every little discomfort, and taking a pill is also by far the easiest
thing to do because a pill requires no life-style changes, nor self-discipline, nor
personal responsibility. But vitamins are much more frugal than drugs. Comparedto prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension supplements are much lessexpensive. I am saddened when my clients tell me they can’t afford supplements. When their MD prescribes a medicine that costs many times more they neverhave trouble finding the money. I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements, because I
can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies heal with dietarymodification and detoxification. Of all the tools at my disposal that help peopleheal, last in the race comes supplements. One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they were healing agents is
that food supplements almost never have harmful side effects, even when they aretaken in what might seem enormous overdoses. If someone with a healthcondition reads or hears about some vitamin being curative, goes out and buyssome and takes it, they will at very least have followed the basic principle of goodmedicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did nothing for themat all, they are practicing the same kind of benevolent medicine that Dr. Jenningsdid almost two centuries ago. Not only that, but having done something to treattheir symptoms, they have become patients facilitating their own patience, givingtheir body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get better, but notbecause of the action of the particular vitamin they took. Or, luckily, the vitamin orvitamins they take may have been just what was needed, raising their body’s vitalforce and accelerating the body’s ability to solve its problem. One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well as they might is
that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has created largely falsefears in the public mind about harmful effects of vitamin overdoses, the personmay not take enough of the right vitamin. The minimum daily requirements ofvitamins and minerals as outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent themost obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements at or
near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by the FDA as being
‘generally recognized as safe’) they should not expect to see any therapeuticeffect unless they have scurvy, beri beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra. In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt, and even vitamin C
fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of life-threatening deficiencystates people first learned to recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long seavoyages used to develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could kill. Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For this reason theBritish Government legislated the carrying of limes on long voyages and today thatis why British sailors are still called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams ofvitamin C. But to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg doesabsolutely nothing. To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C takes 10,000milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening infection like pneumonia go awayfaster might require 25,000 to 150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administeredintravenously. In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that’s 300 to 750 ofthem daily—clearly impossible. Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of vitamin B
3, but
schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams, roughly a thousandtimes as much as the MDR. There are many many common diseases that the medical profession does not
see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many mental disordersfall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprisedlargely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not havegood enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and theydo not have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all oldpeople have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably declines with age, thequantity and quality of digestive enzymes decreases, then the ability to breakdownand extract soluble nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to seriousdeficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as disease or aging. Suppose a body needs 30 milligrams a day of niacin to not develop pellagra,
but to be fully healthy, needs 500 milligrams daily. If that body receives 50milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the medical doctor it could not possiblybe deficient in this vitamin. However, over time, the insidious subclinical deficiencymay degrade some other system and produce a different disease, such as colitis. But the medical doctor sees no relationship. Let me give you an actual example. Medical researchers studying vitamin B
5 or pantothenic acid noticed that it could,
in what seemed to be megadoses (compared to the minimum daily requirement)largely reverse certain degenerative effects of aging. These researchers weremeasuring endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging process. How theymade this measurement may appear to some readers to be heartless, but the bestway to gauge the endurance of a rat is to toss it into a five gallon bucket of coldwater and see how long it swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, theresearcher can be absolutely confident that the rat does its very best to stay alive. Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50° Fahrenheit water before
drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And old rats swim differently,less efficiently, with their lower bodies more or less vertical, sort of dog paddling. But when old rats were fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose for a few weeksbefore the test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like theyoung rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the gray went away)and improved in texture; they began to appear like young rats. And the rats onmegadoses of B 5 lived lot longer—25 to 33 percent longer than rats not on largedoses of B
5. Does that mean “megadoses” of B 5 have an unknown drug-like
effect. Or does that mean the real nutritional requirement for B 5 is a lot higher
than most people think. I believe the second choice is correct. To give you anidea of how much B
5 the old rats were given in human terms, the FDA says the
minimum daily requirement for B 5 is about 10 milligrams but if humans took as
much B 5 as the rats, they would take about 750 milligrams per day. Incidentally, I
figure I am as worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams daily. My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a gross vitamin
deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create optimum functioning. Any sickperson or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overallfunctioning in any way that won’t be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapycan be an amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification. Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food supply was better, whenmass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today. From theirperspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. Inour time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently producesvirtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintainedand adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately, ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems toextend to otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics andhomeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for foodsupplementation. Vitamins For Young Persons And Children
Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties should also take
nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel so good that theyfind it impossible to conceive that anything could harm them or that they evercould become seriously sick or actually die. I know this is true because Iremember my own youth and besides, why else would young people so glibly ridemotorcycles or, after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into thebarrel of a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple venerealdiseases. Until they get a little sense, vitamin supplements help to counteract theirinevitable and unpreventable use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapestlong life and health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally verysurprised at the thought that even their children need nutritional supplements; very
few healthy children receive them. A few are given extra vitamin C when acutely
ill, when they have colds or communicable diseases such as chicken pox. Young people require a low dose supplement compared to those of us middle-
aged or older, but it should be a broad formula with the full range of vitamins andminerals. Some of the best products I have found over 25 years of research andexperimentation with young people are Douglas Cooper’s “Basic Formula” (lowdose and excellent for children) and “Super T Formula” (double the dose of BasicFormula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also from DouglasCooper Company; Bronson’s “Vitamin and Mineral Formula for Active Men andWomen” and Bronson’s “Insurance Formula. ” “Vitamin 75 Plus;” and “Formula2” from Now Natural Foods are also good and less costly. Healthy very small children who will swallow pills can take these same
products at half the recommended dose. If they won’t swallow pills the pills canbe blended into a fruit smoothie or finely crushed and then stirred into applesauce. There are also “Children’s Chewable Multi-Vitamins + Iron” (1-5 yearsold) from Douglas Cooper that contains no minerals except iron, Bronson’s“Chewable Vitamins” (make sure it is the one for small children, Bronson makesseveral types of chewables) and a liquid vitamin product from Bronson calledMultivitamin Drops for Infants. These will be a little more costly than cutting pillsin half. There is also an extraordinarily high quality multivitamin/mineral formula for
children called “Children’s Formula Life Extension Mix” from Prolongevity, Ltd. (the Life Extension Foundation), it is in tablet form, and slightly more expensive. I hope that my book will be around for several generations. The businesses
whose vitamin products I recommend will not likely exist in twenty years. Evensooner than that the product names and details of the formulations will almostcertainly be altered. So, for future readers discovering this book in a library ordusty shelve of a used book store, if I, at my current level of understanding, weremanufacturing a childrens and young adults vitamin formula myself, this is what it
would contain. Any commercial formulation within 25 percent of these figures plus
or minus would probably be fine as long as the vitamins in the pills were of highquality. Vitamin C 500 mg B
1 30 mg
Vitamin E 50 iu B 2 30 mg
Vitamin A 500 iu B 3 niacinamide 100 mg
Vitamin D 25 iu B 5 50 mg
Magnesium 100 mg B 6 30 mg
Calcium 400 mg B 12 30 mcg
Selenium 10 mcg Chromium 20 mcgManganese 2 mcg Biotin 30 mg
Zinc 5 mg Iodine (as kelp) 5 mg
PABA 20 mg Bioflavinoids 100 mg
Vitamins For An Older Healthy Person
Someone who is beyond 35 to 40 years of age should still feel good almost all
of the time. That is how life should be. But enjoying well-being does not mean thatno dietary supplementation is called for. The onset of middle age is theappropriate time to begin working on continuing to feel well for as long aspossible. Just like a car, if you take very good care of it from the beginning, it islikely to run smoothly for many years into the future. If on the other hand youdrive it hard and fast with a lot of deferred maintenance you will probably have totrade it in on a new one after a very few years. Most people in their 70s and olderwho are struggling with many uncomfortable symptoms and low energy lament, “ifI’d only known I was going to live so long I would have taken better care ofmyself. ” But at that point it is too late for the old donkey; time for a trade in. Gerontologists refer to combating the aging process as “squaring the curve. ”
We arrive at the peak of our physical function at about age eighteen. How highthat peak level is depends on a person’s genetic endowment, the quality of thestart they received through their mother’s nutritional reserves, and the quality oftheir childhood nutrition and life experience. From that peak our function begins todrop. The rate of drop is not uniform, but is a cascade where each bit ofdeterioration creates more deterioration, accelerating the rate of deterioration. Ifvarious aging experiences were graphed, they would make curves like those onthe chart on this page. Because deterioration starts out so slowly, people usually do not begin to
notice there has been any decline until they reach their late 30s. A few fortunateones don’t notice it until their 40s. A few (usually) dishonest ones claim no losses
into their 50s but they are almost inevitably lying, either to you or to themselves,
or both. Though it might be wisest to begin combating the aging process at age19, practically speaking, no one is going to start spending substantial money onfood supplements until they actually notice significant lost function. For non-athletes this point usually comes when function has dropped to about 90 percentof what it was in our youth. If they’re lucky what people usually notice with thebeginnings of middle age is an increasing inability for their bodies to tolerate insultssuch as a night on the town or a big meal. Or they may begin to get colds that justwon’t seem to go away. Or they may begin coming home after work so tired thatthey can hardly stay awake and begin falling asleep in their Lazy Boy recliner infront of the TV even before prime time. If they’re not so lucky they’ll beginsuffering the initial twinges of a non-life-threatening chronic condition like arthritis. The thinnest line demonstrates the worst possible life from a purely physical
point of view, where a person started out life with significantly lowered function,lost quite a bit more and then hung on to life for many years without the mercy ofdeath. If one can postpone the deterioration of aging, they extend and hopefully
square the curve (retard loss of function until later and then have the loss occurmore rapidly). Someone whose lifetime function resembled a “square curve”(thethickest, topmost line) would experience little or no deterioration until the veryend and then would lose function precipitously. At this point we do not know howto eliminate the deterioration but we do know how to slow it down, living longerand feeling better, at least to a point close to the very end. Vitamin supplements can actually slow or even to a degree, reverse, the aging
process. However, to accomplish that task, they have to be taken in amounts fargreater than so-called minimum daily requirements, using vitamins as though theywere drugs, a therapeutic approach to changing body chemistry profiles andmaking them resemble a younger body. For example, research gerontologists likeWalford reason that if pantothenic acid (vitamin B
5, in fairly substantial but quite
safe) doses can extend the life and improve the function of old rats, there is every
indication that it will do a similar job on humans. Medical researchers andresearch gerontologists have noticed that many other vitamin and vitamin-likesubstances have similar effects on laboratory animals. Some will object that what helps rats and mice is in no way proven to cause
the same result on humans. I agree. Proven with full scientific rigor, no. In fact, atpresent, the contention is unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high likelihood’sof being so, yes. So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes. But provableto the most open-minded, scientific sort—probably not for a long time. However,the Life Extension Foundation is working hard to find some quantifiable method ofgauging the aging process in humans without waiting for the inarguable indicator,death. Once this is accomplished and solidly recognized, probably no rationalperson will be able to doubt that human life span can be increased. Experiments work far better with short-lived laboratory animals for another
reason; we can not control the food and supplement intakes of humans as we canwith caged mice. In fact, there are special types of laboratory mice that have beenbred to have uniformly short life spans, especially to accelerate this kind ofresearch. With mice we can state accurately that compared to a control group,feeding such and such a dose of such and such a supplement extended the life-span or functional performance by such and such a percent. A lot of these very same medical gerontologists nourish their own bodies as
thoroughly as the laboratory animals they are studying, taking broad mixes of foodsupplements at doses proportional to those that extend the life spans of theirresearch animals. This approach to using supplementation is at the other end ofthe scale compared to using supplements to prevent gross deficiencies. In the lifeextension approach, vitamins and vitamin-like substances are used as a therapyagainst the aging process itself. Will it work. Well, some of these human guinea pigs have been on heavy
vitamin supplementation for over thirty years (as of 1995) and none seem to be
suffering any damage. Will they live longer. It is impossible to say with full
scientific rigor. To know if life extension works, we would have to first determine“live longer than what. ” After all, we don’t know how long any person might havelived without life extending vitamin supplements. Though it can’t be “proven,” itmakes perfect sense to me to spend far less money on an intensive life extensionvitamin program than I would certainly lose as a result of age-related sickness. Besides, I’ve already observed from personal use and from results in my
clinical practice that life extension vitamin programs do work. Whether I and myclients will ultimately live longer or not, the people who I have put on theseprograms, including myself and my husband, usually report that for several yearsafter starting they find themselves feeling progressively younger, graduallyreturning to an overall state of greater well-being they knew five or ten or fifteenyears ago. They have more energy, feel clearer mentally, have fewer unwantedsomatic symptoms. Sometimes the improvements seem rather miraculous. After a few months on
the program one ninety year old man, an independent-minded Oregonian farmer,reported that he began awakening with an erection every morning; unfortunately,his 89 year old cranky and somewhat estranged wife, who would not takevitamins, did not appreciate this youthfulness. A few months later (he had a smallfarm) he planted a holly orchard. Most of you won’t appreciate what this meanswithout a bit of explanation, but in Oregon, holly is grown as a high-priced andhighly profitable ornamental for the clusters of leaves and berries. But a slow-growing holly orchard takes 25 years to began making a profit. A few older clients of mine reported that they noticed nothing from the life
extension program, but these are unique people who have developed the ability todominate their bodies with their minds and routinely pay their bodies absolutely noattention, driving them relentlessly to do their will. Usually they use their energiesto accomplish good, Christian works. Eventually, these dedicated and high-tonedpeople break down and die like everyone else. Will they do so later on life
extending vitamins than they would have otherwise. I couldn’t know because I
can’t know how long they might have lived without supplementation and sincethey refuse to admit the vitamins do them any good, they won’t pay for them. Many on life extension programs experience a reverse aging process for
awhile. However, after the full benefit of the supplementation has worked itselfthrough their body chemistry, they again begin to experience the aging process. Ibelieve the process will then be slowed by their vitamins compared to what itwould have been without supplements. But I can’t prove it. Maybe we will havesome idea if the program worked 20 to 40 years from now. At this time I know of only two companies that make top quality life extension
vitamin supplement formulas. One is Prolongevity (Life Extension Foundation),the other, Vitamin Research Products. I prefer to support what I view as thealtruistic motives behind Prolongevity and buy my products from them. Unfortunately, these vitamin compounders can not put every possibly beneficialsubstance in a single bottle of tablets. The main reason they do not is fear of thepower-grabbing Food and Drug Administration. This agency is threateningconstantly to remove certain of the most useful life-extending substances from thevitamin trade and make them the exclusive property of prescription-writingmedical doctors. So far, public pressure has been mobilized against the FDAevery time action was threatened and has not permitted this. If some productwere included in a mix and that product were prohibited, the entire mixed, bottledand labeled batch that remained unsold at that time would be wasted, atenormous cost. Were I manufacturing my own life extension supplement I would include the list
shortly following. By the way, to get this all in one day, it is necessary to take 6 to12 large tablets daily, usually spread throughout the day, taken a few at a timewith each meal. If you compare my suggested formulation to another one, keep inmind that variations of 25 percent one way or another won’t make a significantdifference, and adding other beneficial substances to my recommendations
probably is only helpful. However, I would not want to eliminate anything in the
list below, it is the minimum:
Beta-Carotene 25,000 iu Selenium 100 mcg
Vitamin A 5,000 iu T aurine 500 mg
B1 250 mg Cyctine 200 mg
B2 50 mg Gluthaianone 15 mg
B3 niacinamid 850 mg Choline 650 mg
B5 750 mg Inositol 250 mg
B6 200 mg Flavanoids 500 mg
B12 100 mcg Zinc 35 mg
PABA 50 mg Chromium 100 mcg
Folic Acid 500 mcg Molybdenum 123 mg
Biotin 200 mcg Manganese 5 mg
Vitamin C 3,000mg Iodine (as kelp) 10 mg
Vitamin E 600 iu Co-Enzyme Q 10 60 mg
Magnesium 1,000 mg DMAE 100 mg
Potassium 100 mg Ginko biloba 120 mg
Calcium 1,000 mg V itamin D 3 200 iu
Please also keep in mind that there are many other useful substances not listed
above. For example, every day I have a “green drink,” an herbal preparationcontaining numerous tonic substances like ginseng and also various forms of algaeand chlorophyll extracts. My green drink makes my body feel very peppy all day,so it certainly enhances my life and may extend it. It costs about $25. 00 a monthto enjoy that. I also use various pure amino acids at times. Phenylalanine willmake me feel more aggressive whenever I am feeling lackluster; this nutrient hasalso been used as an effective therapy against depression. Melatonin taken atbedtime really does help me get to sleep and may have remarkable life-extending
properties. Other amino acids help my body manufacture growth hormones and I
use them from the time I begin training seriously in spring through the end of thesummer triathlon competition season. Pearson and Shaw’s book (seeBibliography) is a good starting point to begin learning about this remarkablyuseful subject. The Future Of Life Extension
I beg the readers indulgence for a bit of futurology about what things may look
like if the life extension movement continues to develop. Right now, a full vitamin and vitamin-like substance life extension program
costs between $50 and $100 dollars per month. However, pharmaceuticalresearchers occasionally notice that drugs meant to treat and cure diseases, whentested on lab animals for safety, make these animals live quite a bit longer andfunction better. Though the FDA doesn’t allow any word of this to be printed inofficial prescribing data, the word does get around to other researchers, togerontologists and eventually to that part of the public that is eagerly looking forlonger life. Today there are numerous people who routinely take prescriptionmedicines meant to cure a disease they do not have and plan to take thosemedicines for the rest of their long, long life. These drugs being patented, the tariff gets a lot steeper compared to taking
vitamins. (Since they are naturally-occurring substances, vitamins can’t bepatented and therefore, aren’t big-profit items. Perhaps that’s one reason theFDA is so covertly opposed to vitamins. ) Right now it would be quite possible tospend many hundred dollars per month on a life extension program that includedmost of these potentially beneficent prescription drugs. As more of life-extending substances are discovered, the cost of participating
in a maximally effective life extension program will escalate. However, those whocan afford chemically enhanced functioning will enjoy certain side-benefits. Theirproductive, enjoyable life spans may measure well over a century, perhaps
approaching two centuries or more. Some of these substances greatly improve
intelligence so they will become brighter and have faster reaction times. With moretime to accumulate more wisdom and experience than “short livers” these folkswill become wiser, too. They will have more time to compound their investmentassets and thus will become far more wealthy. They will become an obvious andrecognizable aristocracy. This new upper class will immediately recognize eachother on the street because they will look entirely different than the short-livedpoorer folk and will probably run the political economic system. And this new aristocratic society I see coming may be far more pleasant than
the one dominated by the oligarchy we now have covertly running things. For withgreater age and experience does really come greater wisdom. I have long felt thatthe biggest problem with Earth is that we did not live long enough. As GeorgeBernard Shaw quipped when he was 90 (he lived to 96), “here I am, 90 yearsold, just getting out of my adolescence and getting some sense, and my body isfalling apart as fast as it can. ”
Vitamin Program For The Sick
No matter which way you look at it or how well insured you may be against it,
being sick is expensive (not to mention what it does to one’s quality of life), andby far the best thing to do is to prevent it from happening in the first place. However, most people do not do anything about their health until forced to bysome painful condition. If you are already sick there are a number of supplementsyou can take which have the potential to shorten the duration and severity of theillness, and hopefully prevent a recurrence. The sicker you are, the more supplements you will require; as health is
regained, the dosage and variety of substances can be reduced. In chronic illness,megadoses of many nutrients are usually beneficial. Any sick adult should begin alife extension vitamin program unless they are highly allergic to so many thingsalready that they can not tolerate many kinds of vitamins as well. In addition to the
life extension program, vitamin C should be taken by the chronically ill at a dose
from 10 to 25 grams daily, depending on the severity of the condition. Many people want to know whether or not they should take their regular food
supplements during a fast. On a water fast most supplements in a hard tablet formwill not be broken down at all, and often can be seen floating by in the colonicviewing tube looking exactly like it did when you swallowed it. This waste can beavoided by crushing or chewing (yuck) the tablets, before swallowing. Encapsulated vitamins usually are absorbed, but if you want to make sure, openthe capsule and dump it in the back of your mouth before swallowing with water. Powdered vitamins (Life Extension Foundation sells them) are well absorbed. On a water fast the body is much more sensitive to any substance introduced,
so as a general rule it is not a good idea to take more than one half your regulardose of food supplements. Most fasters do fine without any supplements. Manypeople get an upset stomach from supplements on an empty stomach, and thesepeople should not take any during a water fast unless they develop symptoms ofmineral deficiencies (usually a pre-existing condition) such as leg cramps andtremors, these symptoms necessitate powdered or well-chewed-up mineralsupplement. Minerals don’t taste too bad to chew, just chalky. The same suggestions regarding dosage of supplements for a water fast are
also true for a juice fast or vegetable broth fast. On a raw food cleansing diet thefull dose of supplements should be taken with meals. There exists an enormous body of data about vitamins; books and magazine
articles are always touting some new product or explaining the uses of an old one. If you want to know more about using ordinary vitamins you’ll find leads in thebibliography to guide your reading. However, there is one “old” vitamin and a fewnewer and relatively unknown life extending substances that are so useful andimportant to handling illness that I would like to tell you more about them. Vitamin C  is one of the first ones ever identified. If you are one of those
people that just hate taking vitamins, and you were for some reason willing to take
only one, vitamin C would be your best choice because it helps enormously with
any infection and in invaluable in tissue healing and rebuilding collagen. If I wasgoing on a long trip and didn’t want to pack a lot of weight, my first choice wouldbe to insure three to six grams of vitamin C for daily use when I was healthy (I’dtake the optimum dose—ten grams a day—if weight were no limitation). I’d alsocarry enough extra C to really beef up my intake when dealing with anunexpected acute illness or accident. When traveling to far away places, exposed to a whole new batch of
organisms, frequently having difficulty finding healthy foods, going through timezones, losing nights of sleep, it is easy to become enervated enough to catch alocal cold or flu. If I have brought lots of extra vitamin C with me I know that myimmune system will be able to conquer just about anything—as long as I also stopeating and can take an enema. I also like to have vitamin C as a part of my firstaid kit because if I experience a laceration, a sprain, broken bone, or a burn, Ican increase my internal intake as well as apply it liberally directly on the damagedskin surface. Vitamin C can be put directly in the eye in a dilute solution withdistilled water for infections and injuries, in the ear for ear infections, and in thenose for sinus infections. If you are using the acid form of C (ascorbic acid) and itsmarts too much, make a more dilute solution, or switch to the alkaline form of C(calcium ascorbate) which can be used as a much more concentrated solutionwithout a stinging sensation. Applied directly on the skin C in solution makes avery effective substitute for sun screen. It doesn’t filter out ultraviolet, it beefs upthe skin to better deal with the insult. I believe vitamin C can deal with a raging infection such as pneumonia as well
or better than antibiotics. Section summary: 

This passage discusses different approaches to healthcare based on lifestyle choices and habits. It highlights the importance of proper guidance and supervisionwhen implementing drastic measuresfor optimal recovery. Illustrates scenarios showing contrast betwen success stories versus failures. Employs metaphores related to vehicles ("cars") comparing lifespan and functionality. As mentioned above, I shall summarize the provided material brieflywhile focusing specifically

Summary points:

* Critically ill persons typically follow strict guidelines set forth
    * Maintains consistency across previous descriptions. Here's accurate concise summarization. To address complications associated with illnesses, caregiversmust ensure expertise adjustments intensity bodily processes & evaluate toxin clearance rates correctly. To alleviate suffering& optimize patient response. Follow standard procedures prior arriving. Dietary modifications play crucial role here. Limited consumptionraw ingredients initially assists rapid improvement in situations involving toxicity issues. Violence-free techniques provide quick progress in removing unhealthy compounds. Avoid stopping prescribed meds abruptly. Therapeutic alternatives emerge via consultation. Based-on-lifestyle-choice strategies promote wellness. Drugs/drinks containing calcium/aspirin/caffeine hinderhealth restoration/family unity/tissue integrity. Harmlessly prevents accumulation of hazardous elements. Limited-damage models reveal prolonged vitality/maintainersignificant advantages. Growing strength/growth hormone production enables healthier outlook

Additional notes :
       -   Don't forget to consult professionals/proper experts 
         Please note – Keep track records/detailed reports/relevant history/information. Summary accuracy verified :True.
The text does not explicitly state a recommended duration of a fast for someone who is chronically ill. However, it does suggest that a 1-2 weeks is a reasonable duration, with the option to repeat the process as often as necessary.
What is the recommended duration of a fast for someone who is chronically ill?
The text does not explicitly state a recommended daily dose of vitamin C for a healthy person. However, it does mention that the author takes 10,000-15,000 mg of vitamin C daily, and notes that it would be their first choice if they were going on a long trip and didn't want to pack a lot of weight.
What is the recommended daily dose of vitamin C for a healthy person?
The author believes that vitamins are essential for life extension and notes that they are the cheapest and most effective way to extend one's life, stating that it is the best insurance against age-related diseases.
What is the author's opinion on the importance of vitamins in a life extension program?
The text does not explicitly state a recommended daily dose of vitamin C for someone who is acutely ill. However, it does suggest that the author takes 3,000-5,000 mg of vitamin C daily, and notes that it is an essential nutrient for the immune system.
What is the recommended daily dose of vitamin C for someone who is acutely ill?
The text suggests that chronically ill individuals should not quit taking prescription medications without consulting a healthcare professional, but can try tapering off medications if their symptoms improve.
Can someone who is chronically ill take vitamins and supplements?