How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 12

The only area concerning health that contains more confusion and contradictory data than diet is vitamins. What a rats nest that is!

The Fundamental Principle

If you are a true believer in any of the above food religions, I expect that you will find my views unsettling. But what I consider "good diet" results from my clinical work with thousands of cases.

It is what has worked with those cases. My eclectic views incorporate bits and pieces of all the above. In my own case, I started out by following the Organic school, and I was once a raw food vegetarian who ate nothing but raw food for six years. I also ate Macrobiotic for about one year until I became violently allergic to rice.

I have arrived at a point where I understand that each person's biochemistry is unique and each must work out their own diet to suit their life goals, life style, genetic predisposition and current state of health. There is no single, one, all-encompa.s.sing, correct diet. But, there is a single, basic, underlying Principle of Nutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified form, the basic equation of human health goes: Health = Nutrition / Calories.

The equation falls far short of explaining the origin of each individuals diseases or how to cure diseases but Health = Nutrition / Calories does show the general path toward healthful eating and proper medicine.

All animals have the exact same dietary problem: finding enough nutrition to build and maintain their bodies within the limits of their digestive capacity. Rarely in nature (except for predatory carnivores) is there any significant restriction on the number of calories or serious limitation of the amount of low-nutrition foods available to eat. There's rarely any shortage of natural junk food on Earth. Except for domesticated house pets, animals are sensible enough to prefer the most nutritional fare available and tend to shun empty calories unless they are starving.

But humans are perverse, not sensible. Deciding on the basis of artificially-created flavors, preferring incipid textures, we seem to prefer junk food and become slaves to our food addictions. For example, in tropical countries there is a widely grown root crop, called in various places: tapioca, tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This interesting plant produces the greatest tonnage of edible, digestible, pleasant-tasting calories per acre compared to any other food crop I know. Manioc might seem the answer to human starvation because it will grow abundantly on tropical soils so infertile and/or so droughty that no other food crop will succeed there.

Manioc will do this because it needs virtually nothing from the soil to construct itself with. And consequently, manioc puts next to nothing nouris.h.i.+ng into its edible parts. The bland-tasting root is virtually pure starch, a simple carbohydrate not much different than pure corn starch. Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide gas obtained the air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no shortage ever of carbon from CO2 in the air and rarely a shortage of hydrogen from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is chewed, digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar.

Nutritionally there is virtually no difference between eating manioc and eating white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.

If you made a scale from ideal to worst regarding the ratio of nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc and most fats are at the extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't know which single food might lie at the extreme positive end of the scale. Close to perfect might be certain leafy green vegetables that can be eaten raw. When they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop 20 or more percent completely digestible balanced protein with ideal ratios of all the essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of minerals, all sorts of enzymes and other nutritional elements--and very few calories. You could continually fill your stomach to bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard time sustaining your body weight if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailorman was right about eating spinach.

For the moment, lets ignore individual genetic inabilities to digest specific foods and also ignore the effects stress and enervation can have on our ability to extract nutrition out of the food we are eating. Without those factors to consider, it is correct to say that, to the extent one's diet contains the maximum potential amount of nutrition relative to the number of calories you are eating, to that extent a person will be healthy. To the extent the diet is degraded from that ideal, to that extent, disease will develop.

Think about it!

Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology

The next logical pair of questions are: how healthy could good nutrition make people be, and, how much deviation from ideal nutrition could we allow ourselves before serious disease appears?

Luckily, earlier in this century we could observe living answers to those questions (before the evidence disappeared). The answers are: we could be amazingly healthy, and, if we wish to enjoy excellent health we can afford to cut ourselves surprisingly little slack.

Prior to the Second World War there were several dozen sizable groups of extraordinarily healthy humans remaining on Earth. Today, their descendants are still in the same remote places, are speaking the same languages and possess more or less the same cultures. Only today they're watching satellite TV. wearing jeans, drinking colas--and their superior health has evaporated.

During the early part of this century, at the same era vitamins and other basic aspects of nutrition were being discovered, a few farsighted medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places with their legendarily healthy peoples to see what caused the legendary well-being they'd heard of. Enough evidence was collected and a.n.a.lyzed to derive some very valid principles.

First lets dismiss some apparently logical but incorrect explanations for the unusually good health of these isolated peoples. It wasn't racial, genetic superiority. There were extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns, Orientals, Amerinds, Caucasians. It wasn't living at high alt.i.tude; some lived at sea level. It wasn't temperate climates, some lived in the tropics, some in the tropics at sea level, a type of location generally thought to be quite unhealthful. It wasn't a small collection of genetically superior individuals, because when these peoples left their isolated locale and moved to the city, they rapidly began to lose their health. And it wasn't genetics because when a young couple from the isolated healthy village moved to town, their children born in town were as unhealthy as all the other kids.

And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote village or a mountain valley or a far island settlement very difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Among that small population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs, no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness of modern science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these unprotected, undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from bacterial infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13 children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding age--almost all the children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases. There was also virtually no degenerative disease like heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There were few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little mortality during childbirth, as little or less than we have today with all our hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtually perfect teeth and kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes nor any notion of dental hygiene. Nor did they have dentists or physicians.

(Price, 1970)

And in those fortunate places the most common causes of death were accident (trauma) and old age. The typical life span was long into the 70s and in some places quite a bit longer. One fabled place, Hunza, was renowned for having an extraordinarily high percentage of vigorous and active people over 100 years old.

I hope I've made you curious. "How could this be?" you're asking.

Well, here's why. First, everyone of those groups lived in places so entirely remote, so inaccessible that they were of necessity, virtually self-sufficient. They hardly traded at all with the outside world, and certainly they did not trade for bulky, hard-to-transport bulk foodstuffs. Virtually everything they ate was produced by themselves. If they were an agricultural people, naturally, everything they ate was natural: organic, whole, unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local materials seemed to produce enhanced plant growth. And, if they were agricultural, they lived on a soil body that possessed highly superior natural fertility. If not an agricultural people they lived by the sea and made a large portion of their diets sea foods. If their soil had not been extraordinarily fertile, these groups would not have enjoyed superior health and would have conformed to the currently widely-believed notion that before the modern era, people's lives were brutish, unhealthful, and short.

What is common between meat-eating Eskimos, isolated highland Swiss living on rye bread, milk and cheese; isolated Scottish island Celts with a dietary of oat porridge, kale and sea foods; highland central Africans (Malawi) eating sorghum, millet tropical root crops and all sorts of garden vegetables, plus a little meat and dairy; Fijians living on small islands in the humid tropics at sea level eating sea foods and garden vegetables. What they had in common was that their foods were all were at the extreme positive end of the Health = Nutrition / Calories scale. The agriculturists were on very fertile soil that grew extraordinarily nutrient-rich food, the sea food gatherers were obtaining their tucker from the place where all the fertility that ever was in the soil had washed out of the land had been transported--sea foods are also extraordinarily nutrient rich.

The group with the very best soil and consequently, the best health of all were, by lucky accident, the Hunza. I say "lucky" and "accident" because the Hunza and their resource base unknowingly developed an agricultural system that produced the most nutritious food that is possible to grow. The Hunza lived on what has been called super food. There are a lot of interesting books about the Hunza, some deserving of careful study. (Wrench, 1938; Rodale, 1949)

Finding Your Ideal Dietary

Anyone that is genuinely interested in having the best possible health should make their own study of the t.i.tles listed in the bibliography in the back of this book. After you do, award yourself a BS nutrition. I draw certain conclusions from this body of data. I think they help a person sort out the ma.s.sive confusion that exists today about proper diet.

First principle: h.o.m.o Sapiens clearly can posses extreme health while eating very different dietary regimens. There is no one right diet for humans.

Before the industrial era almost everyone on Earth ate what was produced locally. Their dietary choices were pretty much restricted to those foods that were well adapted and productive in their region. Some places grew rye, others wheat, others millet, others rice. Some places supported cows, others goats, others had few on no domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot of fruits and vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary, during thousands of years of eating that dietary natural selection prevailed; most babies that were allergic to or not able to thrive on the available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhood bacterial infections. The result of this weeding out process was a population closely adapted to the available dietary of a particular locale.

This has interesting implications for Americans, most of whose ancestors immigrated from somewhere else; many of our ancestors also "hybridized" or crossed with immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to discover what dietary substances your particular genetic endowment is adapted to can be difficult and confusing. If both your parents were Italian and they were more or less pure Italian going way back, you might start out trying to eat wheat, olives, garlic, fava beans, grapes, figs, cow dairy. If pure German, try rye bread, cow dairy, apples, cabbage family vegetables. If Scottish, try oats, mutton, fish, sheep dairy and cabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat dairy, wheat, olives and citrus. And certainly all the above ethnic derivations will thrive on many kinds of vegetables. Afro-Americans, especially dark-complexioned ones little mixed with Europeans, might do well to avoid wheat and instead, try sorghum, millet or tropical root crops like sweet potatoes, yams and taro.

Making it even more difficult for an individual to discover their optimum diet is the existence of genetic-based allergies and worse, developed allergies. Later in this chapter I will explain how a body can develop an allergy to a food that is probably irreversible. A weakened organ can also prevent digestion of a food or food group.

One more thing about adaptation to dietaries. Pre-industrial humans could only be extraordinarily healthy on the dietary they were adapted to if and only if that dietary also was extraordinarily high in nutrients. Few places on earth have naturally rich soil. Food grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition; that grown on rich soil is high in nutrition. People do not realize that the charts and tables in the backs of health books like Adelle Davis's Lets Cook It Right, are not really true. They are statistics. It is vital to keep in mind the old saying, "there are lies, there are d.a.m.ned lies, and then there are statistics. The best way to lie is with statistics."

Statistical tables of the nutrient content of foods were developed by averaging numerous samples of food from various soils and regions. These tables basically lie because they do not show the range of possibility between the different samples. A chart may state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli contains so many milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is that some broccoli samples contain only half that amount or even less, while other broccoli contains two or three times that amount. Since calcium is a vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible form, the high calcium broccoli is far better food than the low calcium sample. But both samples of broccoli appear and taste more or less alike. Both could even be organically grown. Yet one sample has a very positive ratio of nutrition to calories, the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965) Here's another example I hope will really dent the certainties the Linda Clarkites. Potatoes can range in protein from eight to eleven percent, depending on the soil that produced them and if they were or were not irrigated. Grown dry (very low yielding) on semiarid soils, potatoes can be a high-protein staff of life. Heavily irrigated and fertilized so as to produce bulk yield instead of nutrition, they'll produce two or three times the tonnage, but at 8 percent protein instead of 11 percent. Not only does the protein content drop just as much as yield is boosted, the amino acid ratios change markedly, the content of scarce nutritional minerals drops ma.s.sively, and the caloric content increases. In short, subsisting on irrigated commercially-grown potatoes, or on those grown on relatively infertile soils receiving abundant rainfall will make you fat and sick. They're a lot like manioc.

Here's another. Wheat can range from 7 to 19 percent protein. Before the industrial era ruined most wheat by turning it into white flour, wheat-eating peoples from regions where the cereal naturally contains abundant protein tended to be tall, healthy and long-lived.

Wheat-eating humans from regions that produce low protein grain tended to be small, sickly and short-lived. (McCarrison, 1921, 1936, 1982; Albrecht, 1975)

Even cows have to pay attention to where their gra.s.s is coming from.

Some green gra.s.s is over 15 percent protein and contains lots of calcium, phosphorus and magnesium to build strong bodies. Other equally or even better looking green gra.s.s contains only six or seven percent protein and contains little calcium, phosphorus or magnesium. Cows forced to eat only this poor type of gra.s.s can literally starve to death with full bellies. And they have a hard time breeding successfully. The reason for the difference: different soil fertility profiles. (Albrecht, 1975)

When people ate local, those living on fertile soils or getting a significant portion of their diet from the sea and who because of physical isolation from industrial foods did not make a practice of eating empty calories tended to live a long time and be very healthy. But those unfortunates on poor soils or with unwise cultural life-styles tended to be short-lived, diseased, small, weak, have bad teeth, and etc. The lesson here is that h.o.m.o Sapiens can adapt to many different dietaries, but like any other animal, the one thing we can't adapt to is a dietary deficient in nutrition.

So here's another "statistic" to reconsider. Most people believe that due to modern medical wonders, we live longer than we used to.

Actually, that depends. Compared to badly nourished populations of a century ago, yes! We do. Chemical medicine keeps sickly, poorly nourished people going a lot longer (though one wonders about the quality of their dreary existences.) I hypothesize that before the time most farmers purchased and baked with white flour and sold their whole, unground wheat, many rural Americans (the ones on good soil, not all parts of North America have rich soil) eating from their own self-sufficient farms, lived as long or even longer than we do today. You also have to wonder who benefits from promulgating this mistaken belief about longevity. Who gets rich when we are sick? And what huge economic interests are getting rich helping make us sick?

The Human Comedy

I know most of my readers have been heavily indoctrinated about food and think they already know the truth about dietetics. I also know that so much information (and misinformation) is coming out about diet that most of my readers are ma.s.sively confused about the subject. These are two powerful reasons many readers will look with disbelief at what this chapter has to say and take no action on my data, even to prove me wrong.

Let me warn you. There is a deep-seated human tendency to put off taking responsibilities, beautifully demonstrated by this old joke.

A 14 year old boy was discovered masturbating by his father, who said, "son, you shouldn't do that! If you keep it up you'll eventually go blind!"

"But father," came the boy's quick reply. "It feels good. How about if I don't quit until I need to wear gla.s.ses?"

The Organic Versus Chemical Feud

Now, regrettably, and at great personal risk to my reputation, I must try to puncture the very favorite belief of food religionists, the doctrine that organically grown food is as nutritious as food can possibly be, Like Woody Allen's brown-rice-eating friends, people think if you eat Organic foods, you will inevitably live a very long time and be very healthy. Actually, the Organic vs.

chemical feud is in many ways false. Many (not all) samples of organically grown food are as low or lower in nutrition as foods raised with chemical fertilizers. Conversely, wisely using chemical fertilizers (not pesticides) can greatly increase the nutritional value of food. Judiciously used Organic fertilizing substances can also do that as well or better. And in either case, using chemical fertilizers or so-called organic fertilizers, to maximize nutrition the humus content of the soil must be maintained. But, raising soil organic matter levels too high can result in a ma.s.sive reduction in the nutritional content of the food being grown--a very frequent mistake on the part of Organic devotees. In other words, growing nutrition is a science, and is not a matter of religion.

The food I fed to my daughter in childhood, though Organic according to Rodale and the certification bureaucrats, though providing this organic food to my family and clients gave me a feeling of self-righteousness, was not grown with an understanding of the nutritional consequences of electing to use one particular Organic fertilizing substance over another. So we and a lot of regional Organic market gardeners near us that we bought from, were raising food that was far from ideally nutritious. At least though, our food was free of pesticide residues.

The real dichotomy in food is not "chemical" fertilizer versus "Organic," It is between industrial food and quality food. What I mean by industrial food is that which is raised with the intention of maximizing profit or yield. There is no contradiction between raising food that the "rabbis" running Organic certification bureaucracies would deem perfectly "kosher" and raising that same food to make the most possible money or the biggest harvest. When a farmer grows for money, they want to produce the largest number of bushels, crates, tons, bales per acre. Their criteria for success is primarily unit volume. Many gardeners think the same way. To maximize bulk yield they build soil fertility in a certain direction (organically or chemically) and choose varieties that produce greater bulk. However, nature is ironic in this respect. The most nutritious food is always lower yielding. The very soil management practices that maximize production simultaneously reduce nutrition.

The real problem we are having about our health is not that there are residues of pesticides in our food. The real problem is that there are only residues of nutrition left in our foods. Until our culture comes to understand this and realizes that the health costs of accepting less than optimum food far exceeds the profits made by growing bulk, it will not be possible to frequently find the ultimate of food quality in the marketplace, organically grown or not. It will not be possible to find food that is labeled or identified according to its real nutritional value. The best I can say about Organic food these days is that it probably is no less nutritious than chemically-grown food while at least it is free of pesticide residues.

The Poor Start

For this reason it makes sense to take vitamins and food supplements, to be discussed in the next chapter. And because our food supply, Organic or "conventional," is far from optimum, if a person wants to be and remain healthy and have a life span that approaches their genetic potential (and that potential, it seems, approaches or exceeds a century), it is essential that empty calories are rigorously avoided.

An accurate and quick-to-respond indicator of how well we are doing in terms of getting enough nutrition is the state of our teeth. One famous dentally-oriented nutritional doctor, Melvin Page, suggested that as long as overall nutrition was at least 75 percent of perfection, the body chemistry could support healthy teeth and gums until death. By healthy here Page means free of cavities, no bone loss around the teeth (no wobblers), no long-in-the-teeth mouths from receding gums, no gum diseases at all. But when empty calories or devitalized foods or misdigestion cuts our nutrient intake we begin experiencing tooth decay, gum disease and bone loss in the jaw. How are your teeth?

I suppose you could say that I have a food religion, but mine is to eat so that the equation Nutrition = Health / Calories is strongly in my favor.