How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 13

Back to my daughter's teeth. Yes, I innocently fed her less than ideally nutritious food, but at that time I couldn't buy ideal food even had I known what I wanted, nor did I have any scientific idea of how to produce ideal food, nor actually, could I have done so on the impoverished, leached-out clay soil at Great Oaks School even had I known how. The Organic doctrine says that you can build a Garden of 'Eatin with large quant.i.ties of compost until any old clay pit or gravel heap produces highly nutritious food. This idea is not really true. Sadly, what is true about organic matter in soil is that when it is increased very much above the natural level one finds in untilled soil in the climate you're working with, the nutritional content of the food begins to drop markedly. I know this a.s.sertion is shocking and perhaps threatening to those who believe in the Organic system; I am sorry.

But there is another reason my daughter's teeth were not perfect, probably could not have been perfect no matter what we fed her, and why she will probably have at least some health problems as she ages no matter how perfectly she may choose to eat from here on. My daughters had what Dr. G.T. Wrench called "a poor start." Not as poor as it could have been by any means, but certainly less than ideal.

You see, the father has very little to do with the health of the child, unless he happens to carry some particularly undesirable gene. It is the mother who has the job of constructing the fetus out of prepartum nourishment and her own body's nutritional reserves.

The female body knows from trillenia of instinctual experience that adequate nutrition from the current food supply during pregnancy can not always be a.s.sured, so the female body stores up very large quant.i.ties of minerals and vitamins and enzymes against that very possibility. When forming a fetus these reserves are drawn down and depleted. It is virtually impossible during the pregnancy itself for a mother to extract sufficient nutrition from current food to build a totally healthy fetus, no matter how nouris.h.i.+ng the food she is eating may be. Thus a mother-to-be needs to be spending her entire childhood and her adolescence (and have adequate time between babies), building and rebuilding her reserves.

A mother-to-be also started out at her own birth with a vitally important stock of nutritional reserves, reserves put there during her own fetal development. If that "start" was less than ideal, the mother-to-be (as fetus) got "pinched" and nutritionally shortchanged in certain, predictable ways. Even minor mineral fetal deficiencies degrade the bone structure: the fetus knows it needs nutritional reserves more than it needs to have a full-sized jaw bone or a wide pelvic girdle, and when deprived of maximum fetal nourishment, these non-vital bones become somewhat smaller. Permanently. If mineral deficiencies continue into infancy and childhood, these same bones continue to be shortchanged, and the child ends up with a very narrow face, a jaw bone far too small to hold all the teeth, and in women, a small oven that may have trouble baking babies. More importantly, those nutrient reserves earmarked especially for making babies are also deficient. So a deficient mother not only shows certain structural evidence of physiological degeneration, but she makes deficient babies. A deficient female baby at birth is unlikely to completely overcome her bad start before she herself has children.

So with females, the quality of a whole lifetime's nutrition, and the life-nutrition of her mother (and of her mother's mother as well) has a great deal to do with the outcome of a pregnancy. The sins of the mother can really be visited unto the third and fourth generation.

This reality was powerfully demonstrated in the 1920s by a medical doctor, Francis Pottenger. He was not gifted with a good bedside manner. Rather than struggling with an unsuccessful clinical practice, Dr. Pottenger decided to make his living running a medical testing laboratory in Pasadena, California. Dr. Pottenger earned his daily bread performing a rather simple task, a.s.saying the potency of adrenal hormone extracts. At that time, adrenaline, a useful drug to temporarily rescue people close to death, was extracted from the adrenal glands of animals. However, the potency of these crude extracts varied greatly. Being a very powerful drug, it was essential to measure exactly how strong your extract was so its dosage could be controlled.

Quant.i.tative organic chemistry was rather crude in those days.

Instead of a.s.saying in a test tube, Dr. Pottenger kept several big cages full of cats that he had adrenalectomized. Without their own adrenals, the cats could not live more than a short time By finding out how much extract was required to keep the cats from failing, he could measure the strength of the particular batch.

Dr. Pottenger's cats were economically valuable so he made every effort to keep them healthy, something that proved to be disappointingly difficult. He kept his cats clean, in airy, bright quarters, fed them to the very best of his ability on pasteurized whole milk, slaughterhouse meat and organs (cats in the wild eat organ meats first and there are valuable vitamins and other substances in organ meats that don't exist in muscle tissue). The meat was carefully cooked to eliminate any parasites, and the diet was supplemented with cod liver oil. However, try as he might, Pottenger's cats were sickly, lived short and had to be frequently replaced. Usually they bred poorly and died young of bacterial infections, there being no antibiotics in the 1920s. I imagine Dr.

Pottenger was constantly visiting the animal shelter and perhaps even paid quarters out the back door to a steady stream of young boys who brought him cats in burlap sacks from who knows where, no questions asked.

Dr. Pottenger's a.s.says must have been accurate, for his business grew and grew. Eventually he needed more cats than he had cages to house, so he built a big, roofed, on-the-ground pen outdoors.

Because he was overworked, he was less careful about the feeding of these extra animals. They got the same pasteurized milk and cod-liver oil, but he did not bother to cook their slaughterhouse meat. Then, a small miracle happened. This poorly cared for cage of cats fed on uncooked meat became much healthier than the others, suffering far fewer bacterial infections or other health problems.

Then another miracle happened. Dr. Pottenger began to meditate on the first miracle.

It occurred to him that cats in the wild did not cook their food; perhaps cats had a digestive system that couldn't process or a.s.similate much out of cooked food. Perhaps the problem he had been having was not because the cats were without adrenal glands but because they were without sustenance, suffering a sort of slow starvation in the midst of plenty. So Dr. Pottenger set up some cat feeding experiments.

There were four possible combinations of his regimen: raw meat and unpasteurized milk; raw meat and pasteurized milk; cooked meat and raw milk; cooked meat and pasteurized milk, this last one being what he had been feeding all along. So he divided his cats into four groups and fed each group differently. The first results of Pottenger's experiments were revealed quickly though the most valuable results took longer to see. The cats on raw meat and raw milk did best. The ones on raw meat and pasteurized milk did okay but not as well. The ones on cooked meat and raw milk did even less well and those on all cooked food continued to do as poorly as ever.

Clearly, cats can't digest cooked food; all animals do better fed on what they can digest. A lot of people have taken Pottenger's data and mistakenly concluded that humans also should eat only raw food.

This idea is debatable. However, the most important result of the cat experiments took years to reveal itself and is not paid much attention to, probably because its implications are very depressing.

Dr. Pottenger continued his experiments for several generations. It was the transgenerational changes that showed the most valuable lesson. Over several generations, the cats on all raw foods began to alter their appearance. Their faces got wider, their pelvic girdles broader, bones solider, teeth better. They began to breed very successfully.

After quite a few generations, the healthiest group, the one on all raw foods, seemed to have improved as much as it could. So Dr.

Pottenger took some of these cats and began feeding them only cooked food to study the process of nutritional degeneration. After three "de"generations on cooked fodder the group had deteriorated so much that the animals could barely breed. Their faces had become narrow, their teeth crooked, their pelvic girdles narrow, their bones and body structure very small, and their dispositions poor. Mothers wouldn't nurse their young and sometimes became cannibalistic. They no longer lived very long.

Before the degenerating group completely lost the ability to breed, Pottenger began to again feed them all raw food. It took four generations on a perfect, raw food diet before some perfect appearing individuals showed up in the group. It takes longer to repair the damage than it does to cause it and it takes generations of unflagging persistence.

I think much the same process has happened to humans in this century. With the invention of the roller mill and the consequent degradation of our daily bread to white flour; with the birth of industrial farming and the generalized lowering of the nutritional content of all of our crops; our overall ratio of nutrition to calories worsened. Then it worsened again because we began to have industrial food manufacturing and national brand prepared food marketing systems; we began subsisting on devitalized, processed foods. The result has been an even greater worsening of our ratio of nutrition to calories.

And just like Pottenger's cats, we civilized humans in so-called advanced countries are losing the ability to breed, our willingness (or the energy) to mother our young; we're losing our good humor in the same way Pottenger's degenerated cats became bad tempered. As a group we feel so poorly that we desperately need to feel better fast, and what better way to do that than with drugs. Is it any wonder that the United States, the country furthest down the road of industrial food degeneration, spends 14 percent of its gross domestic product on medical services. Any wonder that so many babies are born by Cesarean, any wonder that so many of our children have crooked teeth needing an orthodontist? The most depressing aspect of this comes into view when considering that Pottenger's cats took four generations on perfect food to repair most of the nutritional damage.

In the specific case of my daughter, I know somethings about the nutritional history of her maternal ancestors. My daughter's grandmother grew up on a Saskatchewan farm. Though they certainly grew their own rich wheat on virgin semi-arid prairie soil, I'm sure the family bought white flour at the store for daily use. Still, there was a garden and a cow producing raw milk and free-range fertile eggs and chicken and other animals. There probably were lots of canned vegetables in winter, canned but still highly nutritious because of the fertility of their prairie garden. My mother consequently had perfect teeth until the Great Depression forced her to live for too many years on lard and white bread.

During this time of severe malnutrition she had her three babies.

The first one got the best of her nutritional reserves. The second, born after the worst of the malnutrition, was very small and weak and had a hard time growing up. Fortunately for me, for a few years before I (the last child) was born, the worst of the economic times had past and the family had been living on a farm. There were vegetables and fresh raw milk and fruit. My mother had two good years to rebuild her nutritional reserves. But "Grannybell" did not managed to replace enough. Shortly after I was born my mother lost every one of her teeth all at once. The bone just disappeared around them.

Thus, I was born deficient. And my childhood and adolescent nutrition was poor too: soda crackers, pasteurized processed artificial cheese, evaporated milk from cans, hotdogs and canned beans, hotdogs and cabbage. It wasn't until I was pregnant with my first baby that I started to straighten up my diet. I continued eating very well after my first daughter, so my youngest daughter had another three years of good diet to draw on. Thus both my own daughters got a somewhat better start than I had had.

My teeth were not as good as my mother's had been before those years of malnutrition took them all. Instead of perfect straight undecayed teeth like a healthy farm girl should have, mine were somewhat crowded, with numerous cavities. My jaw bone had not received enough minerals to develop to its full size. My pelvic girdle also was smaller than my mother's was. I had had a poor start.

My daughters did better. The older one (the first child typically gets the best of the nutritional reserves) has such a wide jaw that there are small s.p.a.ces between her teeth. My second daughter has only one crooked tooth, she has wider, more solid hips, stronger bones and a broader face than I do. If my younger daughter will but from this point in her life, eat perfectly and choose her food wisely to responsibly avoid empty calories and maximize her ratio of nutrition to calories, her daughter (if she gives us granddaughters as her older sister already has done) may exhibit the perfect physiology that her genes carry.

Along the lines of helping you avoid empty calories I will give you some information about various common foods that most people don't know and that most books about food and health don't tell, or misunderstand.

b.u.t.ter, Margarine and Fats in General.

Recently, enormous propaganda has been generated against eating b.u.t.ter. Its been smeared in the health magazines as a saturated animal fat, one containing that evil substance, cholesterol. Many people are now avoiding it and instead, using margarine.

Composition of Oils

Saturated Monosaturated Unsaturated b.u.t.ter 66% 30% 4% Coconut Oil 87% 6% 2% Cottonseed Oil 26% 18% 52% Olive Oil 13% 74% 8% Palm Oil 49% 37% 9% Soybean Oil 14% 24% 58% Sunflower Oil 4% 8% 83% Safflower Oil 3% 5% 87% Sesame Oil 5% 9% 80% Peanut Oil 6% 12% 76% Corn Oil 3% 7% 84%

This is a major and serious misunderstanding. First of all, margarine is almost indigestible, chemically very much like shortening--an artificially saturated or hydrogenated vegetable fat.

Hydrogenated fats can't be properly broken down by the body's digestive enzymes, adding to the body's toxic load. Margarine, being a chemically-treated vegetable oil with artificial yellow color and artificial flavorings to make it seem like b.u.t.ter, also releases free radicals in the body that accelerate aging. So, to avoid the dangers of eating cholesterol-containing b.u.t.ter, people eat something far worse for them!

There are severe inconsistencies with the entire "cholesterol-is-evil" theory. Ethnic groups like the Danes, who eat enormous quant.i.ties of cholesterol-containing foods, have little circulatory disease. Actually, the liver itself produces cholesterol; it's presence in the blood is an important part of the body chemistry. Cholesterol only becomes a problem because of deranged body chemistry due to the kind of overall malnutrition Americans usually experience on their junk food diets. Avoiding cholesterol in foods does little good, but eating a low-fat, low-sugar, complex-carbohydrate (whole foods) diet high in minerals does lower blood cholesterol enormously.

Actually, high quality fresh (not rancid) b.u.t.ter in moderate quant.i.ties is about the finest fat a person could eat. But high quality b.u.t.ter is almost un.o.btainable. First of all, it has to be raw, made from unpasteurized cream. Second, b.u.t.ter can contain very high levels of fat-soluble vitamins, but doesn't have to.

Vitamin-rich b.u.t.ter's color is naturally bright yellow, almost orange. This color does not come from a test tube. Pale yellow b.u.t.ter as is found in the commercial trade was probably almost white before it was artificially tinted. b.u.t.ter from gra.s.s-pastured cows naturally changes from yellow-orange to white and back again through the year as the seasons change. Spring gra.s.s, growing in the most intense sunlight of the year contains very high levels of chlorophyll and vitamins. Cows eating this gra.s.s put high levels of vitamins A and D into their cream, evidenced by the orange color of vitamin A. By July, natural b.u.t.ter has degraded to medium-yellow in color. By August, it is pale yellow. Industrial dairy cows fed exclusively on hay or artificial, processed feeds (lacking in these vitamins), produce b.u.t.terfat that is almost white.

I prefer to obtain my b.u.t.ter from a neighbor who has several dairy cows grazing on fertile bottom land pasture. We always freeze a year's supply in late spring when b.u.t.ter is at its best.

Interestingly, that is also the time of year when my neighbor gets the most production from her cows and is most willing to part with 25 pounds of extra b.u.t.ter.

In general, fats are poor foods that should be avoided. Their ratio of nutrition to calories is absolutely the worst of all food types, except perhaps for pure white sugar, which is all calories and absolutely no nutrition (this is also true for other forms of sugar.

Honey, too, contains almost no nutrition.). Gram for gram, fats contain many more calories than do sugars or starches. Yet gram for gram, fats contain virtually no nutrition except for small quant.i.ties of essential fatty acids.

The perverse reason people like to eat fats is that they are very hard to digest and greatly slow the digestive action of the stomach.

Another way of saying that is that they have a very high satiety value. Fats make a person feel full for a long time because their presence in the stomach makes it churn and churn and churn. Fats coat proteins and starches and delay their digestion, often causing them to begin fermenting (starches) or putrefying (proteins) in the digestive tract.

The best fats contain high levels of monosaturated vegetable oils that have never been exposed to heat or chemicals--like virgin olive oil. Use small quant.i.ties of olive oil for salad dressing.

Monosaturated fats also have far less tendency to go rancid than any other type. Vegetable oils with high proportions of unsaturated fats, the kind that all the authorities push because they contain no cholesterol, go rancid rapidly upon very brief exposure to air. The danger here is that rancidity in vegetable oil is virtually unnoticeable. Rancid animal fat on the other hand, smells "off."

Eating rancid oil is a sure-fire way to accelerate aging, invite degenerative conditions in general, and enhance the likelihood of cancer. I recommend that you use only high-quality virgin olive oil, the only generally-available fat that is largely monosaturated.

(Pearson and Shaw, 1983)

When you buy vegetable oil, even olive oil, get small bottles so you use them up before the oil has much time being exposed to air (as you use the oil air fills the bottle) or, if you buy olive oil in a large can to save money, immediately upon opening it, transfer the oil to pint jars filled to the very brim to exclude virtually all air, and seal the jars securely. In either case, keep now-opened, in-use small bottles of oil in the refrigerator because rancidity is simply the combination of oil with oxygen from the air and this chemical reaction is accelerated at warmer temperatures and slowed greatly at cold ones.

Chemical reactions typically double in speed with every 10 degrees C. increase in temperature. So oil goes rancid about six times faster at normal room temperature than it does in the fridge. If you'll think about the implications of this data you'll see there are two powerful reasons not to fry food. One, the food is coated with oil and gains in satiety value at the expense of becoming relatively indigestible and productive of toxemia. Secondly, if frying occurs at 150 degrees Centigrade and normal room temperature is 20 degrees Centigrade, then oil goes rancid 2 to the 13th power faster in the frying pan, or about 8,200 times faster. Heating oil for only ten minutes in a hot skillet induces as much rancidity as about 6 weeks of sitting open and exposed to air at room temperature. Think about that the next time you're tempted to eat something from a fast food restaurant where the hot fat in the deep fryer has been reacting with oxygen all day, or even for several days.

Back to b.u.t.ter, where we started. If you must have something traditionally northern European on your bread, you are far better off to use b.u.t.ter, not margarine. However, Mediterranean peoples traditionally dip their bread in high-quality extra-virgin olive oil that smells and tastes like olives. Its delicious, why not try it.

But best yet, put low-sugar fruit preserves on your toast or develop a taste for dry toast. Probably the finest use for b.u.t.ter is melted over steamed vegetables. This way only small quant.i.ties are needed and the fat goes on something that is otherwise very easy to digest so its presence will not produce as many toxins in the digestive tract.

Milk, Meat, And Other Protein Foods

Speaking of b.u.t.ter, how about milk? The dairy lobby is very powerful in North America. Its political clout and campaign contributions have the governments of both the United States and especially that of Canada eating out of its hand (literally), providing the dairy industry with price supports. Because of these price supports, in Canada cheese costs half again more than it does in the United States. The dairy lobby is also very cozy with the medical profession so licensed nutritionists constantly bombard us with "drink milk" and "cheese is good for you" propaganda.

And people naturally like dairy foods. They taste good and are fat-rich with a high satiety value. Dairy makes you feel full for a long time. Dairy is also high in protein; protein is hard to digest and this too keeps one feeling full for a long time. But many people, especially those from cultures who traditionally (genetically) didn't have dairy cows, particularly Africans, Asians and Jews, just do not produce the enzymes necessary to digest cows milk. Some individuals belonging to these groups can digest goats milk. Some can't digest any kind except human breast milk. And some can digest fermented milk products like yogurt and kiefer. Whenever one eats a protein food that is not fully digestible, it putrefies in the digestive tract, with all the bad consequences previously described.

But no one, absolutely no one can fully digest pasteurized cows milk, which is what most people use because they have been made to fear cow-transmitted diseases and/or they are forced to use pasteurized dairy products by health authorities. I suspect drinking pasteurized milk or eating cheese made from pasteurized milk is one of the reasons so many people develop allergic reactions to milk.

Yet many states do not allow unpasteurized dairy to be sold, even privately between neighbors. To explain all this, I first have to explain a bit more about protein digestion in general and then talk about allergies and how they can be created.