Front matter (continued 5)

My clients almost never believe me when I first explain the idea of food combining. They think if it goes in one end, comes out the other, and they don't feel any unpleasant symptoms in between, then it was digested. But bad food combinations have a cumulative degenerative effect over a long period of time. When the symptoms arrive the victim never associates the food combination with the symptom because it seems to them that they've always been eating the food.

Mainstream nutritionists have brainwashed the public into thinking that we should have a representative serving from each of the "four basic food groups" at each and every meal, plus a beverage and a desert. Or, as my husband Steve is fond of quipping, a "balanced meal" has four colors on every plate: something red, something green, something white and something yellow. But the balanced meal is a gastronomic catastrophe that can only be processed by the very young with high digestive vitality, the exceptionally vital of any age, people with cast iron stomachs which usually refers to their good heredity, and those who are very physically active.

Few seem to realize that each type of food requires specific and different digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach, and intestine. Carbohydrates, fats, proteins--each requires differing acid or alkaline environments in order to be digested. Proteins require an acid environment. Starch digestion requires an alkaline environment. When foods in complex combinations are presented to the stomach all together, like a meal with meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, bread, butter, a glass of milk, plus a starchy sweet desert, followed by coffee or tea, the stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine are overwhelmed, resulting in the fermentation of the sugars and starches, and the putrefaction of the proteins, and poor digestion of the whole. It is little wonder that most people feel so tired after a large meal and need several cups of strong coffee to be able to even get up from the table. They have just presented their digestive tract with an immensely difficult and for some an impossible task.

For the most efficient digestion, the body should be presented with one simple food at a time, the one bowl concept, easily achieved by adherence to the old saying, "one food at a meal is the ideal." An example of this approach would be eating fruits for breakfast, a plain cereal grain for lunch, and vegetables for supper. If you can't eat quite that simply, then proper food combining rules should be followed to minimize digestive difficulty, maximize the adsorption of nutrients from your food, and reduce or eliminate the formation of toxemia, and of course foul gas.

In general, fruit should be eaten alone unless you happen to be hypoglycemic or diabetic in which case fruit should be eaten with small quantities of a vegetable protein such as nuts, or yogurt and/or cheese if able to digest dairy. Starches should be eaten with vegetables, which means that a well combined meal would include a grain such as rice, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, corn, wheat, rye, oats, spelt, potatoes, or starchy winter squash combined with raw or cooked vegetables. Protein foods such as meat, eggs, beans, lentils, tofu, split peas, should be combined with vegetables, raw or cooked. But protein should never be combined with starches. The most popular North American snacks and meals always have a starch/protein combination, for example: meat and potatoes, hamburger in a bun, hot dog with bun, burrito with meat or cheese, meat sandwiches, etc. It is little wonder that intestinal gas is accepted as normal, and that over time these hard to digest combinations eventually cause health problems that demand attention.

Another sure fire way to ruin any food, including the very best available is to eat in the presence of negative emotions generated by yourself or others. Negative emotions include fear, anger, frustration, envy, resentment, etc. The digestive tract is immediately responsive to stress and or negative thoughts. It becomes paralyzed in negative emotional states; any foods eaten are poorly digested, causing toxemia.

It is natural for a person who has lost a loved one or suffered a great loss of any kind to lose their appetite for a period of time. This reaction is pro-survival, because while grieving, the body is griped by powerful negative emotions. There are people who, under stress or when experiencing a loss, eat ravenously in an attempt to comfort themselves. If this goes on for long the person can expect to create a serious illness of some kind.

Individual sensitivity to this type of overeating is dependent upon genetics and personality and who is generating the negative emotions. Self generated negative emotions are very difficult to avoid. If you are unable to change your own emotional tone or that of others around you, then it is important to eat very lightly, eat only easily digested foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, raw juices, steamed vegetables, and small servings of whole grains, nuts and seeds.

Diets To Heal The Critically Ill

A critically ill person is someone who could expire at any moment; therapeutic interventions are racing against death. Can the body repair itself enough before some essential function ceases altogether? If there already exists too much damage to vital organs the person will die. If there remains sufficient organ function to support life, enough vital force to power those functions, and a will to live, the body may heal itself if helped by the correct therapeutic approach. But the therapy does not do the healing; the body does that by itself--if it can. This reality is also true of allopathic medicine.

I believe fasting is the therapy that almost invariably gives a critically ill person their very best chance of recovery. If a patient dies while fasting they almost certainly would have died anyway, and if death comes while fasting, it will be more comfortable, with less pain, and with more mental clarity.

Critically ill people may have, among other things, any of the following diagnoses: advanced cancer, advanced aids, heart failure, very high blood pressure, kidney failure, advanced liver disease, advanced emphysema, pneumonia or other catastrophic infections, especially those that seem unresponsive to antibiotics, strokes, emboli, sclerotic vessels as found in arteriosclerosis, severe nerve degeneration interfering with nerve transmission to vital organs.

Treating the critically ill does not have to be an all or nothing, ideological choice between holistic medicine and AMA style medicine. It is important for the critically ill and their families to know that if they use standard medical treatment such as drugs or surgery, these measures can and should be combined with natural healing methods. It is always desirable to quit all addicting substances, start a whole foods diet, (as light as possible), and add meganutrition (supplements) to the medical doctor's treatments. Few medical doctors are so arrogantly partisan as to assert that natural measures will do any harm as long as the MD is still allowed to prescribe as they please.

Holistic support will not only lessen the side effects of the medical treatments but will speed up healing and often reduce the required dose of prescribed drugs. I have had several clients with cancer who chose to have surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but stayed on a raw food diet and took high doses of supplements throughout the treatment. These people amazed the attending physician by feeling good with little if any fatigue, no hair loss, or flu symptoms. The same can be true of other conditions.

Food In The Order Of Digestive Difficulty

Individual digestive weaknesses and allergies are not taken into account in this list.

Hard To Digest: Meat, fish, chicken, eggs (if cooked), all legumes including soy products, peanuts and peanut butter, beans, split peas, lentils, chick peas, dairy products such as cheese, milk, butter milk, nuts and seeds and their butters.

Intermediate: all grains--quinoa, amaranth, millet, spelt, rye, wheat, oats, barley.

Fairly Easy: Brussels sprouts, green beans, green peas, broccoli, cauliflower, raw cultured milk products, asparagus, cabbage, sprouts especially bean sprouts, kale, other leafy greens.

Very Easy: fruits, vegetable juices, fruit juices, broth (clear).

No Effort: herb tea, water.

Ethyl always comes to my mind when I think of how much healing power can still be left in a dying body. She (accompanied by her husband for support) came to Great Oaks School with terminal cancer, heart failure, advanced diabetes, extreme weakness, and complete inability to digest. Any food ingested just came back up immediately. Ethyl had large tumors taking over the breast, sticking out from her skull, and protruding from her body in general. The largest was the one in the left breast which was the size of a big man's fist. She did have one crucial thing going for her, Ethyl was a feisty Irish red head who still had a will to live, and a reason to do so. She and her husband, who had just retired, had dreamed their whole life of touring the US and Canada in their own RV the minute he retired. The time had finally arrived but Ethyl was too ill to support her own weight (only 90 pounds) and to top it off was blind from diabetic retinopathy. The doctors had done everything they could to her, and now judged her too weak to withstand any more surgery (she had already had her right breast removed). Radiation or chemotherapy were also considered impossible due to heart failure. They sent Ethyl home to die, giving her a few days to a month at most. Any sensible hygienist trying to stay out of jail would have refused to take on this type of case because it was a cancer case where death was likely. Treatment of this highly lucrative disease is considered the AMA's exclusive franchise, even when the medical doctors have given up after having done everything to a body the family can pay for or owe for. Whenever a person dies under the care of any person who is not a licensed M.D. there must be an autopsy and a criminal investigation in search of negligence. If the person dies under the care of an M.D. the sheriff's assumption is that the doctor most assuredly did everything he could and should have done and death was inevitable. By accepting Ethyl I had a reasonable likelihood of ending up in trouble; but being foolish, brave and (stupidly) feeling relatively immune to such consequences (I was under 40 at the time), it seemed important to try to help her. So, undaunted by the task, regardless of the outcome, I proceeded logically, one step at a time. Today, with more experience and a modest net worth I wouldn't want to have to defend in a lawsuit, and at age 55. possessing no spare five to ten years to give to the State to "pay" for my bravery, I would probably refuse such a case. Fortunately I have not been confronted with this problem lately. Since Ethyl was unable to digest anything given by mouth, she was fed rectally with wheat grass juice implants three times a day. She was carried to the colonic table for a daily colonic. Wheat grass and clay poultices were applied to her tumors three times a day. She received an acupressure massage and reflexology treatments during the day, plus a lot of tender loving care. This program continued for a month during which the tumors were being reabsorbed by the body, including the large, extremely hard tumor sticking out the flesh of the right breast. Ethyl complained of severe pain as the large tumor in her breast shrank. While it had been getting larger and pressing ever harder on all the nerves, she had little or no sensation, but as it shrank, the nerves were reactivated. Most people think that a growing tumor would cause more pain than a shrinking one. Often the opposite is true. Pain can be a good sign that the body is winning, an indicator to proceed. By the second month, Ethyl, gradually gaining strength, was able to take wheat grass and carrot juice orally, and gradually eased into raw foods, mostly sprouts and leafy greens such as sunflower and buckwheat greens grown in trays. She started to walk with assistance up and down the halls, no longer experiencing the intense pain formerly caused by a failing heart, and most surprising of all, her eyesight returned, at first seeing only outlines, and then details. The third month Ethyl enlarged her food intake to include raw foods as well as the carrot and wheat grass juice and sprouts, plus vitamin and mineral supplements to help support her immune system and the healing process. All the tumors had been reabsorbed by her body and were no longer visible, her heart was able to support normal activity such as walking, and nonstrenuous household chores, and her diabetes had corrected itself to the point that she no longer required insulin and was able to control her blood sugar with diet. Her husband was then instructed in her maintenance and they went home to continue the program. The last I heard from them they had made two lengthy trips around the US in their RV and were enjoying their retirement together after all. My treatment worked because the most important factor in the healing of the critically ill person is not give them more nourishment than their body is able to process. The moment the digestive capacity of the sick person is exceeded, the condition will be exacerbated and in a critically illness, the person is likely to die. If the body still has sufficient organ integrity and vital force to heal itself, it will do so only if given the least possible nourishment that will support life--provided no essential organs are hopelessly damaged. If the liver and kidneys are functional, and the person has done some previous dietary improvement and/or cleansing, success is likely, especially if the person wants to live. A person in critical condition does not have time to ease into fasting by first spending a month or two on a raw foods diet. This means that the person who is taking care of the critically ill person must be experienced enough to adjust the intensity of the body's healing efforts and accurately assess the ability of the person to process toxic waste products clamoring for removal so the ailing body is not drowned in it's own poisons. It is often necessary to use clear vegetable broth, vegetable and wheat grass juices, and fruits juices, or whole sprouts to slow down the cleansing gradient and sometimes, to resupply the tissue's exhausted 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. She also had cancerous tumors all over her body and had similarly been sent home to die. In some ways Marge's body was a more likely candidate for survival than Ethyl's. Marge did not have heart failure or diabetes and was still able on arrival to at least take small amount of water orally and walk to the bathroom. Put on a similar program, her tumors also shrunk and were reabsorbed and she too went home. 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 upset because she was estranged from one of her sons who she had not seen for over 10 years. When she went home from Great Oaks, the son finally consented to see his mother, went to the effort of trying to work things out with her, and finally confessed 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. Had she died several months earlier as predicted by the medical profession, Marge would have been unable to resolve this relationship. This was what Marge's life was pivoting on at the end. I was glad to assist her in doing what she needed to do. Her husband and other family members found it difficult to understand, and they 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 continuous symptoms that are painful, perhaps unsightly, and ultimately will be disabling or eventually capable of causing death. To qualify as "chronic" the symptoms must have been present a minimum of six months, with no relief in sight. People with these conditions have usually sought medical assistance, frequently have had surgery, 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, most 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. Before actually fasting they should limit their diet to raw foods and eliminate all toxic foods like alcohol, coffee, tea, salt, sugar and recreational drugs for two months if they 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, then one month on raw foods is sufficient preparation for fasting. If the person had water 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 their homeostasis. However, if their symptoms lessen or vanish during the pre-fasting clean 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 give their health first priority, long water fasting is ideal. If on the other hand you can't afford to stop working, have no one to take care of you and assist with some household 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-back plan to repeat the whole process again in three to six months if necessary. If you are not able to do that, the next best program is to fast for a short period, like one or two weeks, with a plan to repeat the process as often as possible until you are healed. 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 to stop work for financial reasons, or who could not afford a residential fasting program, or who felt confident in their own ability to deal with detoxification in their own home. These people have fasted successfully at home, coming to see me once a week. Almost inevitably, successful at-home fasters had already done a lot of research on self healing, believed in it, and had the personal discipline to carry 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. Fruits should 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, winter squash. 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 vegetable juices 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 a raw food cleansing diet that included careful food combining. These people also regained their health, but it took them a year at minimum, and once well they had to 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 congestive heart failure. He was on digitalis and several other heart medications plus diuretics, but in no way was his condition under control. He had severe edema in the feet and legs with pitting, and fluid retention in the abdominal region caused a huge paunch that was solid to the touch not soft and squishy like fatty tissue.

Jim had dreamed of having his own homestead with an Organic garden, now he had these things but was too sick to enjoy them or work in his garden without severe heart pain and shortness of breath. Jim had retired early in order to enjoy many years without the stresses of work, and he was alarmed to realize that he 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 so quickly to his detox program that he was very soon out of danger and would be more accurately described as a chronically ill person. Jim was not prepared to water fast. He was attached to having his food and he was aware that at his extreme weight he was going to have stay on a dietary program for a long, long time. He also wanted to choose a gradient that he could manage by himself at home with little assistance from his wife. He had been on a typical American diet with meat, coffee, etc., so that in spite of his dangerous condition it did not seem wise to me to add the heavy eliminatory burden of a water fast to a body that was already 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 on vegetable juice and broth. He did enemas daily even though it wasn't his favorite thing. In one month he had lost 30 pounds, his eyes had started to sparkle, and his 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 nutritional supplements including protomorphogens (see chapter on vitamins and food supplements) to help the body repair it's heart and the kidneys. In only four months 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 a normal weight for his height, and only cheated on the diet a couple of times when attending 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 they failed 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 intense symptoms knock them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. If they are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the chronically ill category.

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 is probably pretty dull anyway, so why not give a brief fast on water or fruit juice a try.

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 well last for three weeks or a month. The general rule is to eat as little as possible until the symptoms have passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have a horror of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses of Vitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.) Those having a little experience with natural medicine make teas of echinacea, fenugreek seeds and red clover and quit eating. Eating as little as possible can mean only water and 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 relieved your 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 an acute illness several times a year when your body is forced to try an energetic detox.

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 metal poisoning, arteriosclerosis, sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not really healthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional supplementation. In fact the odds against most people receiving adequate vitamin and mineral nutrition without supplements are very poor as demonstrated by the following chart.

Problem Nutrients in America

Nutrient Percent Receiving Less than the RDA

B-6 80%

Magnesium 75

Calcium 68

Iron 57

Vitamin A 50

B-1 45

C 41

B-2 36

B-12 36

B-3 33

A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and does not have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing interferes with or handicaps their daily life or work. A healthy person has good energy most of the time, a positive 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 or drinking those things that they know are not good for them but that are fun to eat or are "recreational foods or beverages." Such "sinning" could mean a restaurant bash twice a month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, ice cream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key concept of responsible 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 foods that can not be efficiently digested should be removed from the regular diet and relegated 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, and some can with the assistance of digestive enzyme supplements. In order to digest meats, 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 not combined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you must include meat in your dietary, it should represent a very small percentage of your total caloric intake, be eaten infrequently, with the bulk of the calories coming from complex carbohydrates such grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities of vegetables 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 on their internal housecleaning. If water fasting seems impossible, try a day of juicing it; if that is too rigorous, try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though less beneficial than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking your overnight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up breakfast altogether or postponing breaking your overnight fast, because from the time you stop eating at 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 milk sugars for example; sometimes aids such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and pancreatin help. If you can buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurt containing lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily, especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on unsprayed food, and served very fresh. Eggs should come from chickens that run around outside, eating weeds, and scratching bugs. The yokes 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 fruit blended up with water or milk. Eggs contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturally prevents 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 as chlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast, and fresh bakers yeast. Many people have had very unpleasant experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast and so use brewers yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins it contains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw yeast is so powerful, 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 alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The entire digestive tract then bloats with gas and the person will feel very uncomfortable for some time. However, raw yeast is a marvelous source of B vitamins and proteins and can make someone feel very energetic--if they know how to use it. The secret is to eat live yeast very first thing in the morning on an empty stomach and then, not eat anything at all for about two hours, giving the stomach acids and enzymes time to kill the yeasts and digest them before adding sugars from another meal. Some like to eat yeast in fresh cake form, buying it from a bakery. Others prefer dry granular baker's yeast blended with water into a sort of "shake." This is not a bad place to put your raw egg yoke either. If you need it sweetened to drink it, use an artificial or herbal sweetener like nutrisweet or stevia. Live yeast cannot consume milk sugars very well. So if you can handle dairy, try one or two tablespoons of granulated live yeast, an egg yoke 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 get anywhere. But today, few North Americans output very much physical energy in process of daily life or work. Not only cars, but all of our modern conveniences make 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. Exercising temporarily makes the heart beat faster, increasing blood circulation throughout the body right out to the tips of your fingers and toes. This short-term elevated flow of blood flow brings increased supplies of oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body, facilitating healing and repair. Without revving up your engine every day many of the body's systems never get the sludge burned out of them and never perform 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. Most people find that exercise in moderation does not increase appetite, so that it is possible to consistently burn more calories in a day, and gradually reduce weight if that 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 a moderate pace which would be achieved by doubling the resting pulse. Without even considering the weight-loss benefit of achieving a raised metabolism, an hour of daily exercise continued for a week or two dependent upon the type of exercise 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 gaining weight. 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 rigidly reducing their food intake to near starvation levels may lack vital, health-building nutrition.

And only exercise moves lymphatic fluid. The blood is pumped through the body by the heart, but the lymphatic system, lacking a heart, requires muscular contractions to move from the extremities of the body to the central cavity. The lymphatic system picks up cellular waste products and conducts these toxins to disposal. Frequently, people with rheumatic aches and pains or other generalized muscular discomforts physicians like to give Latin diagnostic names to can give up taking pain pills if they will but begin exercising regularly. Only when they begin moving 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 to emotionally 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 that big of a deal now. I am not making pro-exercise propaganda. This is not a figment of the imagination. An exercising body really does make antidepressant neurochemicals called endorphins, but only after about 45 minutes to an hour of aerobic workout.

Endorphins are powerful, with painkilling and euphoric effects equal to or greater than heroin, but without any undesirable side effects. If chemists could learn to cheaply synthesize endorphins I'm sure that millions of people would want 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 I consistently get from any sustained exercise. I defend my addiction staunchly because 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 ironman distances 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 not health promoting. I have become much more sensible in my "old" age, and in recent years have limited my participation to the Olympic distance triathlons. I was on the Canadian team at the World Championship in 1992, and intend to do it again in 1995. I do not find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it is great fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age group competitors from all over the world who look and feel fantastic. It does my soul good to see a group of people aging so gracefully, not buying into the popular notion that old age is inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings a degree of balance to my life after spending so much time in the presence of the sick. I plan to maintain my athletic activities into old age, barring accident or other unforeseen 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, but almost 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 as stationary bikes, cross country ski machines, and stair steppers work well for a lot of people who live in the city, especially in the winter, or for those who hate exercise. Whatever you choose to do, it is important to at least double the resting pulse for 30 minutes no less than four days a week. This is the absolute minimum required 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 30 minutes.

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 in the hilly back country, or swimming in the green unpolluted water of a forest river is 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 or walking or swimming, along with the regular deep breathing in clean air, with no distractions except what nature provides is truly health promoting. Sharing these activities with friends or family can also be great fun and some of the best in social interactions. It is one of my favorite ways of visiting with people. I don't expect other people to be as enthusiastic about exercise as I am, but I do hope that everyone will make an effort to be minimally fit as an ongoing part of their health program 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 been actively studying longevity for many years, is one of those. He has scientifically demonstrated with accepted studies that a qualitative life span up to at least 115 years of age is reasonably attainable by the average person if they start working on 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 a week. Or alternatively, reduce your caloric intake to 1,200 per day and fast only one day a week on water. And make sure that every single bit of food you do eat is 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 food supplements. The supplement program is not particularly expensive nor extreme, Walford's supplement program is more moderate than the life extension program I recommend for all middle-aged and older people. The best foods for this type of program is a largely raw food diet (80%) with a predominance of sprouts and baby greens, some cooked vegetables, and raw nuts and seeds. And make sure you 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 the equation for health without bothering to reduce caloric intake. This approach is much easier because essentially, it involves gobbling nutritional supplements by the handfuls without requiring self-discipline, though it can get quite expensive. I'll have 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 the Bibliography.

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 exhausted elements of the soil, may have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains and of vegetables. . . . Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of diseases. Their studies of conditions of life and diet, and of their effects on the physiological and mental state of modern man are superficial, incomplete, and of too short duration. They have, thus, contributed to the weakening 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, for good and understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists. That precursor is long term sub-clinical malnutrition. Lack of nutrition effects virtually everybody 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 of apparently identical foods can be highly variable. Not only do different samples of the same type of food differ wildly in protein content, amino acid ratios and mineral content, their vitamin and vitamin-like substances also vary according to soil 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-pollinated varieties, a natural selection process for healthy outcomes prevailed. If the family's particular, unique varieties carried genes for highly nutritious food, and if the family's land was fertile enough to allow those genes to manifest, and if the family kept up its land's fertility by wise management, their children tended to survive the gauntlet of childhood illness and lived to propagate the family's varieties and continue the family name. Thus, over time, human food cultivars were selected for their nutritional 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. Even commercial organically grown food is no better in this respect.

Sub-clinical, life-long, vitamin and mineral deficiencies contribute to the onset of disease; the malnourished body becomes increasingly enervated, beginning the process of disease. Vitamin supplements can increase the body's vital force, reversing to a degree the natural tendency towards degeneration. In fact, some medical gerontologists theorize that by using vitamins it might be possible to restore human life span to its genetically programmed 115 years without doing anything else about increasing nutrition from our degraded foods or paying much attention to dietary indiscretions. Knowing what I do about toxemia's effects I doubt vitamins can allow us to totally ignore what we eat, though supplements can certainly help.

More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a thinking person to use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are constantly assaulted and insulted by modern life in ways our genetics never intended us to deal with. Today the entire environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted; our food supply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules that our bodies have no 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 never had 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 own largely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for another, at regular hours, without personal liberty, ignoring or suppressing one's own agenda and inclinations over an entire lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takes continual subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protect ourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we don't know we're expending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to remain healthy we may need nutrition at levels far higher than might be possible through eating food; even ideal food might not contain enough vitamins to sustain us against the strains and stresses 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 the roller mill. Compared to my older clients I have noticed that my younger patients seem to possess less vital force on the average, show evidence of poorer skeletal development, have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding and coping with their family life, and are far more likely to develop degenerative conditions early. Most of my younger patients had a poor start because they were raised on highly refined, devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without much exercise. Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparents may have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and actually had to walk, not owning cars when they were young. Their great grandparents had a high likelihood 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 swallow something 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. Compared to prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension supplements are much less expensive. 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 never have 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 dietary modification and detoxification. Of all the tools at my disposal that help people heal, 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 are taken in what might seem enormous overdoses. If someone with a health condition reads or hears about some vitamin being curative, goes out and buys some and takes it, they will at very least have followed the basic principle of good medicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did nothing for them at all, they are practicing the same kind of benevolent medicine that Dr. Jennings did almost two centuries ago. Not only that, but having done something to treat their symptoms, they have become patients facilitating their own patience, giving their body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get better, but not because of the action of the particular vitamin they took. Or, luckily, the vitamin or vitamins they take may have been just what was needed, raising their body's vital force 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 false fears in the public mind about harmful effects of vitamin overdoses, the person may not take enough of the right vitamin. The minimum daily requirements of vitamins and minerals as outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent the most 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 therapeutic effect 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 deficiency states people first learned to recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long sea voyages 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 the British Government legislated the carrying of limes on long voyages and today that is why British sailors are still called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams of vitamin C. But to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg does absolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C takes 10,000 milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening infection like pneumonia go away faster might require 25,000 to 150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administered intravenously. In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that's 300 to 750 of them 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 thousand times 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 disorders fall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprised largely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have good enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all old people have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably declines with age, the quantity and quality of digestive enzymes decreases, then the ability to breakdown and extract soluble nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to serious deficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as disease and as 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 50 milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the medical doctor it could not possibly be deficient in this vitamin. However, over time, the insidious sub-clinical deficiency may 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 were measuring endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging process. How they made this measurement may appear to some readers to be heartless, but the best way to gauge the endurance of a rat is to toss it into a five gallon bucket of cold water and see how long it swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, the researcher 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 weeks before the test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like the young 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 on megadoses of B 5 lived lot longer--25 to 33 percent longer than rats not on large doses 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 an idea 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 sick person or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overall functioning in any way that won't be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapy can 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, when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today. From their perspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. In our time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces virtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintained and adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately, ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and homeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for food supplementation.

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 they find it impossible to conceive that anything could harm them or that they ever could become seriously sick or actually die. I know this is true because I remember my own youth and besides, why else would young people so glibly ride motorcycles or, after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into the barrel of a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple venereal diseases. Until they get a little sense, vitamin supplements help to counteract their inevitable and unpreventable use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapest long life and health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally very surprised 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 and minerals. Some of the best products I have found over 25 years of research and experimentation with young people are Douglas Cooper's "Basic Formula" (low dose and excellent for children) and "Super T Formula" (double the dose of Basic Formula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also from Douglas Cooper Company; Bronson's "Vitamin and Mineral Formula for Active Men and Women" and Bronson's "Insurance Formula." "Vitamin 75 Plus;" and "Formula 2" 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 can be blended into a fruit smoothie or finely crushed and then stirred into apple sauce. There are also "Children's Chewable Multi-Vitamins + Iron" (1-5 years old) from Douglas Cooper that contains no minerals except iron, Bronson's "Chewable Vitamins" (make sure it is the one for small children, Bronson makes several types of chewables) and a liquid vitamin product from Bronson called Multivitamin Drops for Infants . These will be a little more costly than cutting pills in 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. Even sooner than that the product names and details of the formulations will almost certainly be altered. So, for future readers discovering this book in a library or dusty shelve of a used book store, if I, at my current level of understanding, were manufacturing 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 high quality.

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 mcg

Manganese 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 that no dietary supplementation is called for. The onset of middle age is the appropriate time to begin working on continuing to feel well for as long as possible. Just like a car, if you take very good care of it from the beginning, it is likely to run smoothly for many years into the future. If on the other hand you drive it hard and fast with a lot of deferred maintenance you will probably have to trade it in on a new one after a very few years. Most people in their 70s and older who are struggling with many uncomfortable symptoms and low energy lament, 'if I'd only known I was going to live so long I would have taken better care of myself.' 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 high that peak level is depends on a person's genetic endowment, the quality of the start they received through their mother's nutritional reserves, and the quality of their childhood nutrition and life experience. From that peak our function begins to drop. The rate of drop is not uniform, but is a cascade where each bit of deterioration creates more deterioration, accelerating the rate of deterioration. If various aging experiences were graphed, they would make curves like those on the 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 fortunate ones 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 age 19, practically speaking, no one is going to start spending substantial money on food supplements until they actually notice significant lost function. For non-athletes this point usually comes when function has dropped to about 90 percent of what it was in our youth. If they're lucky what people usually notice with the beginnings of middle age is an increasing inability for their bodies to tolerate insults such as a night on the town or a big meal. Or they may begin to get colds that just won't seem to go away. Or they may begin coming home after work so tired that they can hardly stay awake and begin falling asleep in their Lazy Boy recliner in front of the TV even before prime time. If they're not so lucky they'll begin suffering 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 of death. 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 occur more rapidly). Someone whose lifetime function resembled a "square curve"(the thickest, topmost line) would experience little or no deterioration until the very end and then would lose function precipitously. At this point we do not know how to eliminate the deterioration but we do know how to slow it down, living longer and 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 far greater than so-called minimum daily requirements, using vitamins as though they were drugs, a therapeutic approach to changing body chemistry profiles and making them resemble a younger body. For example, research gerontologists like Walford 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 and research gerontologists have noticed that many other vitamin and vitamin-like substances 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, at present, the contention is unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high likelihood's of being so, yes! So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes! But provable to 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 of gauging the aging process in humans without waiting for the inarguable indicator, death. Once this is accomplished and solidly recognized, probably no rational person 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 can with caged mice. In fact, there are special types of laboratory mice that have been bred to have uniformly short life spans, especially to accelerate this kind of research. 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 food supplements at doses proportional to those that extend the life spans of their research animals. This approach to using supplementation is at the other end of the scale compared to using supplements to prevent gross deficiencies. In the life extension approach, vitamins and vitamin-like substances are used as a therapy against 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 have lived without life extending vitamin supplements. Though it can't be "proven," it makes perfect sense to me to spend far less money on an intensive life extension vitamin 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 my clients will ultimately live longer or not, the people who I have put on these programs, including myself and my husband, usually report that for several years after starting they find themselves feeling progressively younger, gradually returning to an overall state of greater well-being they knew five or ten or fifteen years ago. They have more energy, feel clearer mentally, have fewer unwanted somatic 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 take vitamins, did not appreciate this youthfulness. A few months later (he had a small farm) he planted a holly orchard. Most of you won't appreciate what this means without a bit of explanation, but in Oregon, holly is grown as a high-priced and highly 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 to dominate their bodies with their minds and routinely pay their bodies absolutely no attention, driving them relentlessly to do their will. Usually they use their energies to accomplish good, Christian works. Eventually, these dedicated and high-toned people 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 since they 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 itself through their body chemistry, they again begin to experience the aging process. I believe the process will then be slowed by their vitamins compared to what it would have been without supplements. But I can't prove it. Maybe we will have some 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 the altruistic motives behind Prolongevity and buy my products from them. Unfortunately, these vitamin compounders can not put every possibly beneficial substance in a single bottle of tablets. The main reason they do not is fear of the power-grabbing Food and Drug Administration. This agency is threatening constantly to remove certain of the most useful life-extending substances from the vitamin trade and make them the exclusive property of prescription-writing medical doctors. So far, public pressure has been mobilized against the FDA every time action was threatened and has not permitted this. If some product were included in a mix and that product were prohibited, the entire mixed, bottled and labeled batch that remained unsold at that time would be wasted, at enormous cost. Were I manufacturing my own life extension supplement I would include the following. By the way, to get this all in one day, it is necessary to take 6 to 12 large tablets daily, usually spread throughout the day, taken a few at a time with each meal. If you compare my suggested formulation to another one, keep in mind that variations of 25 percent one way or another won't make a significant difference, 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 Taurine 500 mg

B-1 250 mg Cyctine 200 mg

B-2 50 mg Gluthaianone 15 mg

B-3 niacinamid 850 mg Choline 650 mg

B-5 750 mg Inositol 250 mg

B-6 200 mg Flavanoids 500 mg

B-12 100 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 Vitamin 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 preparation containing numerous tonic substances like ginseng and also various forms of algae and 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 month to enjoy that. I also use various pure amino acids at times. Phenylalyanine will make me get more aggressive whenever I am feeling a little lackluster; this nutrient has also been used as an effective therapy against depression. Melatonin taken at bedtime 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 the summer triathlon competition season. Pearson and Shaw's book (see Bibliography) is a good starting point to begin learning about this remarkably useful 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, pharmaceutical researchers occasionally notice that drugs meant to treat and cure diseases, when tested on lab animals for safety, make these animals live quite a bit longer and function better. Though the FDA doesn't allow any word of this to be printed in official prescribing data, the word does get around to other researchers, to gerontologists and eventually to that part of the public that is eagerly looking for longer life. Today there are numerous people who routinely take prescription medicines meant to cure a disease they do not have and plan to take those medicines 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 be patented and therefore, aren't big-profit items. Perhaps that's one reason the FDA is so covertly opposed to vitamins.) Right now it would be quite possible to spend many hundred dollars per month on a life extension program that included most 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 who can afford chemically enhanced functioning will enjoy certain side-benefits. Their productive, 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 more time to accumulate more wisdom and experience than "short livers" these folks will become wiser, too. They will have more time to compound their investment assets and thus will become far more wealthy. They will become an obvious and recognizable aristocracy. This new upper class will immediately recognize each other on the street because they will look entirely different than the short-lived poorer 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 with greater age and experience does really come greater wisdom. I have long felt that the biggest problem with Earth is that we did not live long enough. As George Bernard Shaw quipped when he was 90 (he lived to 96), "here I am, 90 years old, just getting out of my adolescence and getting some sense, and my body is falling 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), and by 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 by some painful condition. If you are already sick there are a number of supplements you can take which have the potential to shorten the duration and severity of the illness, 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 a life extension vitamin program unless they are highly allergic to so many things already 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 form will not be broken down at all, and often can be seen floating by in the colonic viewing tube looking exactly like it did when you swallowed it. This waste can be avoided by crushing or chewing (yuck) the tablets, before swallowing. Encapsulated vitamins usually are absorbed, but if you want to make sure, open the capsule and dump it in the back of your mouth before swallowing with water. Powdered vitamins 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 regular dose of food supplements. Most fasters do fine without any supplements. Many people get an upset stomach from supplements on an empty stomach, and these people should not take any during a water fast unless they develop symptoms of mineral deficiencies (usually a pre-existing condition) such as leg cramps and tremors, these symptoms necessitate powdered or well-chewed-up mineral supplement. 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 the full 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 the bibliography to guide your reading. However, there is one "old" vitamin and a few newer and relatively unknown life extending substances that are so useful and important to handling illness that I would like to tell you more about them.

Vitamin C

is not a newly discovered vitamin, but was one of the first 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. Vitamin C would be the clear winner because it helps enormously with any infection and in invaluable in tissue healing and rebuilding collagen. If I was going on a long trip and didn't want to pack a lot of weight, my first choice would be to insure three to six grams of vitamin C for daily use when I was healthy (I'd take the optimum dose--ten grams a day--if weight were no limitation). I'd also carry enough extra C to really beef up my intake when dealing with an unexpected 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 time zones, losing nights of sleep, it is easy to become enervated enough to catch a local cold or flu. If I have brought lots of extra vitamin C with me I know that my immune system will be able to conquer just about anything--as long as I also stop eating and can take an enema. I also like to have vitamin C as a part of my first aid kit because if I experience a laceration, a sprain, broken bone, or a burn, I can increase my internal intake as well as apply it liberally directly on the damaged skin surface. Vitamin C can be put directly in the eye in a dilute solution with distilled water for infections and injuries, in the ear for ear infections, and in the nose for sinus infections. If you are using the acid form of C (ascorbic acid) and it smarts 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 solution without a stinging sensation. Applied directly on the skin C in solution makes a very effective substitute for sun screen. It doesn't filter out ultraviolet, it beefs up the 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. But to do that, C is going to have to be administered at the maximum dose the body can process. This is easily discoverable by a 'bowel tolerance test' which basically means you keep taking two or three grams of C each hour, (preferably in the powdered, most rapidly assimilable form) until you get a runny stool (the trots). The loose stool happens when there is so much C entering the small intestine that it is not all absorbed, but is instead, passed through to the large intestine. At that point cut back just enough that the stool is only a little loose, not runny. At this dose, your blood stream will be as saturated by vitamin C as you can achieve by oral ingestion.

It can make an important difference which type of vitamin C is taken because many people are unable to tolerate the acid form of C beyond 8 or 10 grams a day, but they can achieve a therapeutic dose without discomfort with the alkaline (buffered) vitamin C products such as calcium ascorbate, sodium ascorbate, or magnesium-potassium ascorbates.

Vitamin C also speeds up the healing of internal tissues and damaged connective tissue. Damaged internal tissues might include stomach ulcers (use the alkaline form of vitamin C only), bladder and kidney infections (acid form usually best), arthritic disorders with damage to joints and connective tissue (alkaline form usually best). Sports injuries heal up a lot faster with a therapeutic dose of vitamin C. As medicine, vitamin C should be taken at the rate of one or two grams every two hours (depending on the severity of the condition), spaced out to avoid unnecessary losses in the urine which happens if it were taken ten grams at a time. If you regularly use the acid form of vitamin C powder, which is the cheapest, be sure to use a straw and dissolve it in water or juice so that the acid does not dissolve the enamel on your teeth over time.

And this is as good a point as any to mention that just like broccoli is not broccoli, a vitamin is not necessarily a vitamin. Vitamins are made by chemical and pharmaceutical companies. To make this confusion even more interesting, the business names that appear on vitamin bottles are not the real manufacturers. Bronson's Pharmaceuticals is a distributor and marketer, not a manufacturer. The same is true of every vitamin company I know of. These companies buy bulk product by the barrel or sack; then encapsulate, blend and roll pills, bottle and label, advertise and make profit. The point of all this is that some actual vitamin manufacturers produce very high quality products and others shortcut. Vitamin distributors must make ethical (or unethical) choices about their suppliers.

It is beyond the scope of this book to be a manual for going into the vitamin business. However, there are big differences in how effective vitamins with the same chemical name are and the differences hinge on who actually brewed them up.

For example, there are at least two quality levels of vitamin C on the market right now. The pharmaceutical grade is made by Roche or BASF. Another form, it could be called "the bargain barrel brew," is made in China. Top quality vitamin C is quite a bit more costly; as I write this, the price differential is about 40 percent between the cheap stuff and the best. This can make a big difference in bottle price and profit. Most of the discount retail vitamin companies use the Chinese product.

There's more than a price difference. The vitamin C from China contains measurable levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, iron and other toxic metals. The FDA allows this slightly contaminated product to be sold in the US because the Recommended Daily Allowance for vitamin C is a mere 60 milligrams per day. Taken at that level, the toxic metals would, as the FDA sees it, do no harm. However, many users of vitamin C take 100 -200 times the RDA. The cheap form of C would expose them to potentially toxic levels of heavy metal poisons. The highly refined top-quality product removes impurities to a virtually undetectable level.

I buy my C from Bronson who ethically gives me the quality stuff. I know for a fact that the vitamin C sold by Prolongevity is also top quality. I've had clients who bought cheaper C than Bronson's and discovered it was not quite like Bronson's in appearance or taste. More importantly, it did not seem to have the same therapeutic effect.

The distributors I've mentioned so far, Bronson, NOW, Cooper, Prolongevity and Vitamin Research Products are all knowledgeable about differences between actual manufacturers and are ethical, buying and reselling only high quality products. Other distributors I believe to be reputable include Twin Labs, Schiff and Plus. I know there are many other distributors with high ethic levels but I can not evaluate all their product lines. And as I've mentioned earlier, businesses come and go rather quickly, but I hope my book will be read for decades. I do know that I would be very reluctant to buy my vitamins at a discount department store or supermarket; when experimenting with new suppliers I have at times been severely disappointed.

Co-enzyme Q-10.

This substance is normally manufactured in the human body and is also found in minuscule amounts in almost every cell on Earth. For that reason it is also called "ubiquinone." But this vitamin has been only recently discovered, so as I write this book Co-enzyme Q-10 is not widely known.

Q-10 is essential to the functioning of the mitochondria, that part of the cell that produces energy. With less Q-10 in heart cells, for example, the heart has less energy and pumps less. The same is true of the immune system cells, the liver cells, every cell. As we age the body is able to make less and less Q-10, contributing to the loss of energy frequently experienced with age, as well as the diminished effectiveness of the immune system, and a shortened life span.

Q-10 was first used for its ability to revitalize heart cells. It was a prescription medicine in Japan. But unlike other drugs used to stimulate the heart, at any reasonable dose Q-10 has no harmful side effects. It also tends to give people the extra pick up they are trying to get out of a cup of coffee. But Q-10 does so by improving the function of every cell in the body, not by whipping exhausted adrenals like caffeine does. Q-10 is becoming very popular with athletes who measure their overall cellular output against known standards.

Besides acting as a general tonic, when fed to lab animals, Co-Enzyme Q-10 makes them live 33 to 45 percent longer!

DMAE

is another extremely valuable vitamin-like substance that is not widely known. It is a basic building material that the body uses to make acetylcholine, the most generalized neurotransmitter in the body. Small quantities of DMAE are found in fish, but the body usually makes it in a multi-stage synthesis that starts with the amino acid choline, arrives at DMAE at about step number three and ends up finally with acetylcholine.

The body's nerves are wrapped in fatty tissue that should be saturated with acetylcholine. Every time a nerve impulse is transmitted from one nerve cell to the next, a molecule of acetylcholine is consumed. Thus acetylcholine has to be constantly replaced. As the body ages, levels of acetylcholine surrounding the nerves drop and in consequence, the nerves begin to deteriorate. DMAE is rapidly and easily converted into acetylcholine and helps maintain acetylcholine levels in older people at a youthful level.

When laboratory rats are fed DMAE they solve mazes more rapidly, remember better, live about 40 percent longer than rats not fed DMAE and most interestingly, when autopsied, their nervous systems resemble those of a young rat, without any evidence of the usual deterioration of aging. Human nervous systems also deteriorate with age, especially those of people suffering from senility. It is highly probable that DMAE will do the same thing to us. DMAE also smoothes out mood swings in humans and seems to help my husband, Steve, when he has a big writing project. He can keep working without getting 'writers block', fogged out, or rollercoastering.

DMAE is a little hard to find. Prolongevity and VRP sell it in powder form. Since the FDA doesn't know any MDR and since the product is not capped up, the bottle of powder sagely states that one-quarter teaspoonful contains 333 milligrams. Get the hint? DMAE tastes a little like sour salt and one-quarter teaspoonful dissolves readily in water every morning before breakfast, or anytime for that matter. DMAE is also very inexpensive considering what it does. A year's supply costs about $20.

Lecithin

is a highly tonic and inexpensive food supplement that is underutilized by many people even though it is easily obtainable in healthfood stores. It is an emulsifier, breaking fats down into small separate particles, keeping blood cholesterol emulsified to prevent arterial deposits. Taken persistently, lecithin partially and slowly eliminates existing cholesterol deposits from the circulatory system.

In our cholesterol-frightened society lecithin should be a far more popular supplement than it currently is. It is easy to take either as a food in the granular form or when encapsulated. Lecithin granules have very little flavor and can be added to a home-made vinegar and oil salad dressing, where they emulsify the oil and make it blend with the vinegar, thickening the mixture and causing it to stick to the salad better. Lecithin can also be put in a fruits smoothie. A scant tablespoon a day is sufficient. Try to buy the kind of lecithin that has the highest phosphatidyl choline content because this substance is the second benefit of taking lecithin. Phosphatidyl choline is another precursor used by the body to build acetylcholine and helps maintain the nervous system.

Algae

. Spirulina or sun dried chlorella are also great food supplements. Both make many people feel energized, pepped-up. It is possible to fast on either product and still maintain sufficient energy levels to take of minimal work responsibilities. Algae reduces appetite and as a dietary supplement can assist in weight loss. It contains large amounts of highly-assimilable protein due to it's high chlorophyll content, as well as a large amount of beta carotene. It also assists in detoxification of the lymphatic system. It can be purchased as tablets or powder. Take a heaping teaspoon daily, or at least six tablets.

Chapter Seven

The Analysis of Disease States: Helping the Body Recover

From the Hygienic Dictionary

Diagnosis. [1] In the United States, making a diagnosis implies that you are a doctor duly licensed to engage in diagnostic function. . . . The making of a diagnosis is reserved only for doctors. . . . The term "analysis" does not have such an explicit legal definition. Thus, it is the term of choice of iridologists and the one most often used by them. It is essential for the survival and promotion of iridology that those who choose to engage in its practice avoid naming any disease condition. As we have seen, to do so is to infringe on rights reserved exclusively for doctors and can land the iridologist, sooner or later, in a snarl of legal troubles.

It is better for the iridologist to refrain from suggesting to a person that he has any particular disease, letting such diagnostics remain the province of licensed doctors. In so doing, the iridologist will avoid transgressing the law and stepping on the toes of those who are legally qualified to diagnose.

It is indeed unfortunate that one of the greatest pitfalls awaiting the iridologist is the temptation to name diseases. The feelings of satisfaction and power resulting from conferring a name are deeply rooted in the human psyche. For example, the Bible tells us that man's first task on Earth was to name the animals, thus giving him power and dominion over them.

Strong is the temptation to name diseases because nearly everyone has come to expect that his malady has a name. Patients have come to expect, and doctors have been trained to make, a diagnosis. . . . "After all," the patient may reason, "how can you hope to deal with my condition if you aren't knowledgeable enough to call it by name?"

It is not necessary to name diseases in order to exercise dominion over them. Dr. Bernard Jensen, Visions of Health.

In self defense, I must make it very clear from the first word that hygienists and most other naturopaths of various persuasions, and especially I myself, have never in the past, never!, and do not now, diagnose, treat or offer to cure, disease or illness. Diagnosis and curing are sole, exclusive privileges of certified, duly-licensed medical doctors and may only be done with a grant of Authority to do so from the State. Should an unlicensed person diagnose, offer to treat or attempt to cure disease or illness, they will have committed a felonious act. With big penalties. Therefore, I do not do it.

When one of my clients comes to me and says that a medical doctor says they have some disease or other, I agree that the medical doctor says they have some disease or other, and I never dare say that they don't. Or even confirm on my own authority that I think they do have some disease or other.

What I can legally do for a client is to analyze the state of their body and its organs, looking for weaknesses and apparent allergies. I can lawfully state that I think their liver tests weak, the pancreas appears not to be functioning well in terms of handling meat digestion, that the kidney is having a hard time of it. I can say I see a lump sticking out of their body when one is obviously sticking out of their body; I can not say that lump is cancerous but I can state that the cells in that lump test overly strong and that if I myself had a mass of growing cells testing overly strong and if I believed in the standard medical model, then I would be rushing my overly strong testing cells to an oncologist. But I don't dare say the person has a cancer. Or diabetes. Or is getting close to kidney failure. That is a diagnosis.

To me, diagnosis is a form of magic rite in which the physician discovers the secret name of the devil that is inhabiting one's body and then, knowing that secret name, performs the correct rite and ritual to cast that demon out. I don't know why people are made so happy knowing the name of their condition! Does it really matter? Either the body can heal the condition or it can't. If it can, you will recover (especially if you give the body a little help). If the body can't heal a condition you will die or live a long time being miserable. No "scientific" medical magic can do better than that.