Fasting and Eating for Health (9 page)

2. Adopt a vegetarian diet, if possible. If you continue to eat animal foods, limit the quantity to less than 3.5 ounces every other day. This includes fish, fowl, meat, and low-fat dairy foods. Unprocessed complex carbohydrates such as baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, and squash should be a daily staple in your diet.

3. Severely limit or eliminate sweets, except for fresh fruit. Fried, salted, pickled, and barbecued foods should also be eliminated from your diet.

4. Drink purified or distilled water, not tap water, which contains chlorine.

If you are seriously interested in your health and longevity, the answers are here for you in this book. But it is pertinent to ask how many people would voluntarily restrict their diet in order to prolong life or lessen the risk of disease? Many believe that people would prefer to satisfy their food desires, rather than live a long life.

When I give presentations on nutrition to hospital staffs or physician groups, a typical statement I receive from someone in the crowd is, ―I could never get 48

my patients to do that.‖ This person also is probably thinking, ―I don't want to eat like that either.‖

My response to these doctors is, regardless of the percentage of individuals who would be willing to eat a healthy diet; the least a responsible physician should do is present the option to those who seek advice and treatment about a significant medical problem. To do less is to sell the patient short. With an accurate presentation, the number of people willing to make significant changes might prove surprising.

In my practice I routinely see patients who are desperately seeking a way to recover their health. It is rare that they aren't willing to make the necessary changes when they are given the opportunity to get well and avoid a lifetime of taking drugs to control symptoms.

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The ideas presented in this book are centuries old, yet are increasingly supported by new research on human nutrition. It should not be forgotten that today's discoveries and ideas were founded on a long history of scientific effort by physicians who considered nutrition the most critical part of their practice.

As early as 400 B.C. the Greek physician Hippocrates used nutrition as his chief therapy. His favorite healing foods were barley mush, apples, and dates.

He paid strict attention to the dietary needs of his patients and stated,

―Whoever gives these things [food] no consideration, and is ignorant of them, how can he understand the diseases of man?‖

Today the health of our society is poor, specifically because today's physicians know little of human nutrition and the power of optimal nutrition in restoring health. In fact, some of the most respected physicians in history who are remembered because of their success in the treatment of the ill have been all but ignored by the conventional medical community, which bases its practice on giving drugs to the sick.

Isaac Jennings, M.D. (1788-1874),1 spent 20 years adhering to the regular drugging and bleeding practices of the time, but gradually lost confidence in those procedures and methods. He noticed that he was not helping his patients and found that they did better with fewer drugs. He decided to change his methods. Instead of furnishing his patients with drugs, he gave them
placebos
, pills and liquids he concocted out of bits of food and water. At the same time, he gave them advice on diet and rest. He often instructed his patients to use the ―medicine‖ for the first week with water and no food. He told them the medicine would not be effective if they did not follow his instructions. He usually continued the plan for a few more days after their next visit. Diseases vanished, and his fame spread. People thought his ―medicines‖

were magical and he became known as the greatest healer of his day.

Early in this century, John Tilden, M.D. (1851–1940), built on the work of other pioneering physicians such as Jennings and devoted his life to teaching the public how to maintain health. He stated, Nature returns to normal when enervating habits are given up. There are no ―cures‖ in the sense generally understood. If one has a tobacco heart, what is the remedy? Stop the tobacco of course . . .

What will cure? Drugs? No! Removing the cause. Every so called disease is built within the mind and body by enervating habits. A fast, rest in bed and the giving up of enervating habits, mental and physical, will allow nature to eliminate the accumulated toxin; then, if 50

enervating habits are given up, and rational living habits adopted, health will come back to stay . . . The medical world has been looking for a remedy to cure disease, notwithstanding the obvious fact that nature needs no remedy—she only needs an opportunity to exercise her own prerogative of selfhealing.2

Herbert Shelton, D.C., N.D. (1895-1985), built on the works of these early medical doctors and wrote prolifically from the 1920s on, in his own self-published magazines and through his publication of 12 books on the subject of health and healing. Dr. Shelton's Health School in San Antonio, Texas, improved and restored the health of more than thirty thousand people through fasting and natural food diets. Both my father, who twice fasted 21 days, and I (who fasted 46 days), were among those thirty thousand patients who fasted at Dr. Shelton's Health School.

To this day, the mainstream of modern medicine and the alternative health-care movement, both fueled by a remedy mentality that dominates our society combined with the financial incentive to make profits selling cures and drugs, has generally ignored this minimalist school of healing. Until recently, little scientific research has been done in this field.

In the last ten years, however, there has been a significant upswing in research on the causes of various diseases. The knowledge gained from these studies, when applied to chronic ailments, will have a major impact on future medical care. It has also lent credence to those ―medical heretics‖ of the past who championed natural food diets and fasting as a means of preventing and treating disease.

The body can heal itself when the proper environment for healing is established and all obstacles to healing, or stressors, are removed. When people live in harmony with their physiological needs, health is the inevitable result. By supplying the organism with its basic requirements—natural unadulterated food, clean water, and appropriate physical, mental, and emotional activities—while simultaneously eliminating all harmful factors and influences, the self-constructing, self-regulating, self-repairing qualities of the body are given full rein. The same innate wisdom that constructed our bodies from two cells at conception is always there to restore the body to health if we let it.

Understanding why we have a health care crisis in this country involves more than looking at political and economic concerns. The primary reason we spend a large proportion of our income on health care is that our population is chronically ill and growing sicker. The ―Band-Aid‖ approach offered by the conventional physician can do. little to stop this epidemic of sick people from needing medical care. Unfortunately, legislation will never be able to curtail the runaway medical costs because ―disease care,‖ as it should be called, does not lead to a healthier society with fewer medical needs.

Our bodies were designed to function from birth to an uneventful natural death. But our chance of living in our modern society and then dying from the 51

natural aging process is close to zero. Disease is so much a part of the American way of life that it is considered normal. People do not develop chronic degenerative illnesses through bad luck. Disease develops through years and years of nutritional and other stresses on the human system. When these causes are sufficiently removed, people can get well, throw away their medications, and avoid unnecessary, expensive, and invasive medical care. It is not aging that makes us sick; it is the stresses we place on ourselves that continue their insidious work over the years and eventually cause damage to the body.

Just because you are ignorant of the harmful stresses that you are placing on your system doesn't make them less injurious. If you drink 6 cups of coffee a day, snort cocaine, and eat fast foods and sweets, it is ludicrous to expect health to evolve from the addition of more drugs in an attempt to lessen the symptoms that arise from the daily abuses that are placed on the body. If the poisoning stops, however, the body has the ability to heal itself and restore normalcy. Clearly, consuming coffee, cocaine, and junk food are examples of practices recognized as obvious stresses to many people, but hundreds of other stressful lifestyle and dietary practices that are also injurious are generally not recognized as so.

Degenerative or chronic disease is earned. Our bodies follow strict biological laws of causation. If we feed ourselves the wrong fuel, or are exposed to toxic substances, if we do not get sufficient rest and sleep, are chronically unhappy or under chronic emotional stress, our bodies will inevitably express some malfunction called disease.

These avoidable chronic illnesses encompass almost every condition that a doctor sees every day. They include acne and other skin diseases, allergies, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, headaches, heartburn, fatigue, indigestion, psoriasis, high blood pressure, recurrent viral infections, and more.

Unfortunately, all patients get when they seek help is more poisons in the form of drugs to consume. These drugs only add to the toxic insults the body must bear, thus further contributing to ill health. Neither the medical community nor the public has understood the simple concept that the body will not function normally if injurious substances are consumed.

It is rare that even years of self-abuse and destruction of the body due to the disease process will cause irreversible damage. When the cause of disease is removed, the rejuvenating effects of the human system are astounding.

Toxicosis Is a Common Cause of Disease

In order to understand the nature of the disease process one must first define
toxicosis
. Toxicosis means nothing more than the retention of elements within our system that are foreign to normal cellular function. It could also refer to the retention of an increased quantity of a substance that would be normal in small amounts but irritating or toxic in higher quantities.

Each cell is like a little factory. It takes in raw materials, processes them into 52

some usable product, and produces waste. This cellular or self-produced waste is called endogenous waste. Endogenous wastes are the metabolic wastes produced within our own body, the by-products of cellular metabolism.

Many are familiar with the concept of free radicals, a major
endogenous
waste whose amount and location in the cell must be tightly controlled to avoid cellular damage. Even the free radical has a positive function within the cell. It is used there as part of the garbage disposal system helping to chew up and destroy other waste products. Only when the amount of free radicals becomes excessive or they escape their normal confines within specific cellular organelles do they become a harmful element.

Exogenous
wastes are those toxins taken in from outside the body—usually from our food supply. They include chemicals, pesticides, and other obvious pollutants. These wastes also include excesses of elements that may be nutritive in normal amounts but produce toxic by-products when consumed in larger amounts. Toxins may also be elaborated from bacteria residing within the digestive tract.

Of course, the body has mechanisms to process and eliminate toxins and protect itself from their damage. This occurs mostly through the breakdown of toxins in the liver and elimination via the kidney. However, the body's ability to process and remove toxic material has many limitations. Given the typical modern diet and environment, our detoxification mechanisms are under stress.

They are often chronically unable to keep up with the excessive demand for removal of toxins and other wastes.

Toxins also may be eliminated through the skin and mucous membranes. For example, a skin rash may occur as the body's attempt to rid itself of some offensive substance, or one's nose may produce excessive mucus as the body attempts to channel irritating substances or dead cells through mucosal eliminative channels.

If you were a fireman who entered a burning building and inhaled the acrid smoke, your nose would run, your eyes would tear, and you would begin to cough. Why? Because your body would be making an effort to protect itself from the damage of the toxic smoke.

Your system has means to protect itself from irritants. Is this a sign of illness or of health? Coughing is a sign of health; the body produces a cough as an effort to keep the lungs clear. A healthy body offers a vigorous response when we try to poison it. The body may cough, sneeze, develop a fever or a rash, and even produce mucus or diarrhea in its attempt to rid the system of unwanted retained waste.

It is easy for most people to see how the body can attempt to wash away or push out a toxin such as smoke, but difficult for most to grasp the concept of elimination when there is an invisible irritant coming from within. Waste usually causes no symptoms, just painless cellular damage, unless the body has the means to try to rid itself of the waste. Symptoms occur as the body tries to rid 53

itself of these internalized substances, and excess mucus or inflammatory pain results.

Trying to suppress these symptoms with medication is not a good thing if it enables the body to tolerate more waste products or toxins within it without reacting to them.

In itself, the absence of symptoms is not the same as good health. Like the smoker who continues to inhale noxious smoke on a continuous basis but feels fine, most Americans are poisoning themselves daily in one form or another, yet they feel healthy. Frequently these people feel bad only after they attempt to quit smoking and the body gains the ability to attempt to rid itself of the toxins. Only after quitting smoking does the body begin to repair damage and attempt to remove abnormal cells that have been damaged from years of abuse. So often I hear the complaint, ―I felt fine before, but now that I quit smoking, I am coughing and bringing up mucus like I never did before.― These symptoms may indicate that the body is moving in the direction of better health.