MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
It is a great privilege and a genuine pleasure to me to be allowed to address so large a meeting, and I hope that I may be able not only to tell you something interesting, but also something practically useful so that from this day onward you may benefit in health. There is an old saying “Health is better than wealth”. Health can be converted into wealth. A sick or seedy man is crippled physically and mentally.
Very often food is the best medicine. With food alone one can work true miracles of healing. That is proclaimed by all creation. You know quite well that the health of plants and trees depends on their food, contained in the soil. Transfer a flourishing plant to an unsuitable soil and it will wither, get ill and die. Transfer an ailing plant from an unsuitable soil to a soil which gives it the nutrition which it needs and it will prosper. One can at will make non-poisonous plants poisonous and poisonous plants non-poisonous by changing the soil. In the far North it happens that you have to feed your horses on fish.
The result is, of course, disastrous. Mr. Cook, whose happy, smiling countenance is in front of you, is a great bee keeper. He will bear me out that the quality of the honey depends on the flowers visited by his bees. Wholesome food produces delicious honey. Unsuitable food produces honey which is inferior or uneatable and occasionally poisonous. Not only that. Bees have it in their power by nutrition alone to convert their bee babies into males, females or neuters.
Food obviously can produce miracles in plants and animals and, therefore, also in men. I would illustrate my assertion by one or two examples. There sits Mr. Cook with his smiling happy countenance, the picture of health, with rosy cheeks and clear eyes, and no one would believe that he is sixty-eight years young. Yet, half a century ago he was in desperate state of health, was given up by the doctors, and was told him that he suffered from incurable heart disease.
No insurance company would insure his life. His instinct told him that diet would insure his life. His instinct told him that diet might be better than drugs, that Nature can cure health troubles which no doctor can cure. He simplified his diet, lived on natural food, became a vegetarian, buried many of the friends of his youth, who were naturally strong but who had lived injudiciously, and is able to work twelve hours or more a day and does so, and he works for the benefit of those who would follow his example and acquire health and strength by right living.
Twenty odd years ago I was a chronic invalid. I had been an invalid for years. My condition had become worse and worse. Doctors and health resorts had failed. My clothes and boots had become worn out, but I refused to have new ones. I thought they would last me out. A walk of a few minutes exhausted me. I could no longer sign my name, and had hysterical crying fits.
In my desperation I thought I would try a simplified and more natural diet, as the usual strengthening foods, meat, Wine, etc., had failed to benefit me. I am in my sixty-fourth year, on sundays I go for a thirty mile walk, a thing which I never could do when I was a youngster, my mental capacity is greater than ever, I dictate a volume of 500 pages in three or four weeks.
With food alone one can produce health and ill-health. We live directly or indirectly on earth, water and sunlight. The plants draw their nutriment from the soil, the air, and the sun, and in due course they are eaten by cows, sheep, poultry and by human beings. A few decades ago we were taught that the value of our foods depends on their three principal constituents, protein, carbohydrates and fat. Scientists established the value of our foods by their content of these three elements.
Thy burned foods for chemical analysis, and told us that certain foodstuffs contained so much protein, so much carbo-hydrates, so much fat and so much ash. The ash was considered more or less worthless. However, in the ash are contained the mineral elements which the plants draw from the soil and elaborate by the most wonderful chemistry, of which laboratory men have no conception. Besides, they create mysterious and wonderful food factors called vitamins, hormones, etc.
If you feed a cage full of rats or other animals on a de-vitaminized and de-mineralized diet, such as white bread, peeled boiled potatoes, vegetables cooked with soda, they will sicken and die of what is called deficiency diseases from which most civilized men suffer. You can produce in such animals gastritis, gastric and duodenal ulcer, appendicitis, colitis, chronic constipation, eye diseases, paralysis, skin diseases, insanity, etc. These poor laboratory animals know that their illness is due to their food, and in their desperation they will eat their excreta.
Give these animals a small quantity of food rich in vitamins, such as milk, which contains all the vitamins, or bran, and they will rapidly recover and be healthy and happy once more, provided, of course, the cruel experiment of keeping them on the diet of civilization has not been continued too long. You can produce with the greatest ease in faultily-fed animals most of the diseases which plague us. Food and health obviously go together. By faulty diet you can make animals sterile. Give animals the diet which they need and the sterile ones will multiply and produce healthy offspring.
One can divide the human race into two large classes: the civilized and the uncivilized, the naturally-living and the unnaturally-living or the scientifically-living. These two classes die of two entirely different sets of diseases. Savages die of exposure, want, violence and dirt diseases, which we have eliminated from our midst. As a rule they are healthy, and they die suddenly from want, exposure, typhoid due to dirty water, cholera, measles or something of the kind.
Chronic diseases are practically unknown to them. We unfortunate civilized people are mostly ailing, are chronic invalids, and we die of diseases of the food tract, consumption, heart disease, arterio-sclerosis, cancer, etc., which are quite unknown among the primitively and naturally-living.
The condition of the food tract of the civilized from the mouth to the bowel opening is a disgrace. The civilized have rotten teeth, mouths and nose passages which are too small, and which degenerate, producing diseased tonsils and adenoids, and the unhealthy noise and throat naturally affect the organs of hearing and sight.
Indigestion among the civilized is general, although they live on the softest, most carefully cooked and pre-digested foods. Constipation is general and so are the numerous and terrible diseases created by constipation, for bowel stagnation produces putrefaction and the poisoning of the blood stream, which nourishes every organ and every structure of the body. Naturally the weakest organs break down first. After all, every chain breaks at the weakest link. The lunatic asylums are filled with the victims of chronic constipation. Chronic constipation creates numerous diseases, and aggravates, of course, every diseases and every disorder known to medical science.
If one wishes to cure a disease, it is not sufficient to examine the suffering organ or organs and to make a scientific diagnosis. One must discover the cause of the disease and deal with that cause. I would give you a few examples from my experience. Some years ago I was visited on the same day by two ladies. The one looked very healthy, but had a huge goitre. The other was terribly anaemic and weak.
The goitre lady told me that she lived on concentrated foods and took practically no liquid. the anaemic lady informed me that she lived on a purifying diet, chiefly vegetables and fruit and that she drank huge quantities of water, but that she had never been able to purify her blood sufficiently to get rid of her anaemia. I told Lady No. 1 that the most perfect drainage system will get clogged if it is never flushed, I reduced and normalized her food, and gave her an abundance of liquid.
I told Lady No.2 that human beings cannot obtain health and strength from a diet suitable for caterpillars and butterflies, gave her a substantial nourishing diet, and told her that she was washing out of her system the food she had been taking before it had had time to be absorbed by the body. Both improved rapidly.
Cancer, the most terrible disease of all, is a disease of civilization. It is practically unknown among primitive races and among naturally-living animals. It is largely, or rather chiefly, due to our food. It is worth noting that most cancers attack the alimentary canal. The most frequent cancers are cancers of the stomach and of the bowel, of the swallowing tube, mouth and tongue.
Thousands of researchers all over the world waste heir time in searching for the microscopic organism of cancer. They hope to find a cure for cancer by discovering “guilty microbe”. There is no guilty microbe. The causation of cancer is plain to all who have eyes to see and to read. Cancer is twice as frequent percentually in the towns as in the country districts. It is principally a town disease. It is approximately three times as deadly to butchers, public-house workers, hotel workers and sailors as it is to agricultural labourers and clergymen. That has been shown by Government statistics.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.