(12th edition).
(Extracts continued from June issue).
“Milk, as used in cities, is never fresh. Very frequently it is quite stale. Often this stale milk is kept long in the home, sometimes over the day and night, during which times its vitalizing quality – not so much its body-building quality – is constantly retrograding or degenerating.
“In the second place, milk, especially as used in cities, is almost invariably sterilized or pasteurized, a process that is almost universally admitted to reduce the vitalizing or life- giving property in milk. So true is this that physicians frequently place devitalized infants upon raw milk instead of the pasteurized variety which has been fed to them while the process of devitalization was in progress.
“The excuse made for pasteurization is that it kills certain bacteria, but since it does not kill all bacteria, nor is it claimed to, but leaves still active some of the most virulent types, its value as a protective measure is often strongly disputed.
“Almost all observers admit that raw milk is far more vitalizing, that is, it builds up greater body resistance as against body size, and all prefer it if its cleanliness can be depended upon.
“What we have to concern ourselves with most, until the pros and cons finally have been thrashed out, is that milk is made unnatural when it is heated away above the body temperature for a half hour or more, since any unnaturalness in foods reduces their vitalizing quality.”.
“White Flour. – The deficiency of this food in cellulose, mineral salts and vitamins would be a sufficient condemnation of it as an unnatural food, but its shortcomings do not generally end there. Almost invariably the white bread habitue is also a fresh bread habitue. Bread must not be more than one day old. If it is but a few hours old, or just out of the oven, so much the better.
“It is an old story that such bread is indigestible. Almost everyone knows it is, but almost everyone eats it, nevertheless, one strong proof that we civilized people earn disease doing as we like, not doing as we ought. Here the staff of life of civilized peoples is robbed of its vitalizing properties to a large extent, and the poor remainder is made largely unavailable as nutrition, and is positively not vitalizing at all, by being eaten fresh, while it still contains a lot of the yeast gas and is in such a doughy condition that it is impossible to mix with it the saliva, in the absence of which it is never digested in the stomach at all.
“Fresh white bread, therefore, in all but the most vigorously acting digestive tract, in which digestion is speeded up so that it cannot occur, is largely broken down by fermentation of a non- digestive type into the products of degenerative fermentation – products that poison the body but do not feed it, do not build its tissues nor vitalize or give Life to its cells, but the reverse.
“Let not those who do not suffer the conscious pangs of indigestion after eating fresh white bread cozen themselves into believing they are unaffected by it. Not everyone who has indigestion has the good fortune to suffer local pain in the stomach. Only those with sensitive stomachs thus suffer. And they are often the more fortunate, since thus suffer. And they are often the more fortunate, since their sufferings make them respect that delicate organ, the stomach.
They are apt to learn to eat more rationally and live more secure from disease than those who can abuse their bodies with the most wretched food concoctions, yet not suffer in the digestive apparatus. These so careless feeders, however, ought to learn that the poisons resulting from wrong foods and feeding habits are taken into the blood and circulate among the bodily organs: the muscles, brain, nerves, heart and blood vessels, as irritants or depressants, and, in so doing, counteract the body-building and vitalizing benefits derived from those better foods that may be well digested.
Besides, these poisons must be carried out of the body by the excretory organs: the mucous lining of the digestive tract, the liver, kidneys, lungs and skin. The brain and nerves go to pieces or the kidneys fail or the lungs become diseased, and the mighty man who boasted that he could eat nails is a most pitiable wreck – and always the most self-pitying sinner that a physician sees. If he is religious, he wonders why the dear Lord afflicted him so”.
“While some, or any, of the above-mentioned organs may bear the brunt of the strain, it is more apt to be the heart and blood vessels. Who has not seen, among his mid-life friends, men stricken down apparently in the best of health, never having been sick a day?
They never knew what indigestion was, but they suffered form its systemic poisons, nevertheless, and they died early victims to heart and blood vessel disease caused by their senseless use of foods; diseases that belong only in very, very advanced human life, if, indeed, they belong to human bodies at any age which have been biologically fed and physiologically encouraged.
“Pastry, rich puddings, rich cakes or simple ones made from white flour, sugar, eggs, shortening, baking powder, fruit- preserves or jellies, fruits, fresh or dried, seasonings, etc., are as far from natural as the east is from the west. Let such foods seem to digest as they may, they cannot build natural human flesh nor vital human bodies, and, surely, if they cannot they do not.
Well, if they do not, what kind of human bodies do they build? Let the readers own intelligence answer that question and he or she will have learned the lesson I would get into his or her brain, so firmly rooted there that it can never get out again.
“Before I leave the white flour subject, I would add that digestibility and health-building value of fresh bread are not improved by being spread heavily with butter and conserve of some kind, to be rolled up in a doughy mass in the mouth by a few snappy chews, which such careless feeders are sure to be satisfied with, before bolting the mass.
Nor is fresh white bread improved as food by quickly toasting it to a thin scale of brown covering a doughy inner mass within the centre of the slice of bread, then covering the slice with butter to melt and saturate the starch granules with grease to an extent that makes it impossible for the digestive enzymes to reach these granules at all”.
“The moment the Life Principle departs from an animal body decomposition sets in. So that, in addition to the loss of vitalizing properties which is common to all foods some time separated from the Life Principle, but greater in flesh foods and increasing as the time increases during which they have been separated from the Life Principle, there is very quickly produced in flesh foods the poisons of decomposition. Such foods, whether chilled or not, within a few hours after death swarm with the micro-organisms of putrefaction.
These bacteria cannot possibly multiply without causing the poisons caused by the life processes of their putrefying kind. One cannot eat dead animal parts of any kind, even a few hours after the death of the animal, without eating myriads of these bacteria which cause dead flesh to quickly rot. In addition, one has to swallow the products of the rotting flesh which they immediately begin to cause.
“We must not forget that flesh has begun to rot long before we can detect it by our sense of smell. And, too, we must not forget that it is decay or rotting that makes well hung meat tender; and most civilized people like their meat tender.”.
“Arctic explorers have proved that canned meats, or meats of any kind other than fresh, unsalted flesh, will not prevent scurvy. Newly killed, unsalted animal flesh will not only prevent scurvy from developing, but will quickly cure an already far advanced scurvy.
“Thus animal flesh, while it may be said to be natural food, therefore a vitalizing food, if only recently killed, not well bled and eaten almost, if not quite, raw, with a portion of the internal organs, as the liver, heart brain, etc., is about the most unnatural, therefore non-vitalizing, human food conceivable, when it is eaten as most civilized races eat it.
“Meat broths, meat soups, meat extracts, however highly advertised, cannot possibly contain an iota of nutritional or body-building properties, and under no circumstances can they be conceived of as vitalizers of the human body, since the meat protein cannot be dissolved by heat and any soluble mineral salts that are dissolved out into the broth or extract are destroyed by the long application of heat.
A famous English physician and physiologist, Dr. Abernethy, asked what he thought of good meat broth as a human food, replied that it has about as much food value as good urine. And this is actually true. The analysis of meat broth is very similar to that of urine. and why should it not be? Urine is a watery solution of the used-up mineral salts and proteins of the body, also some of the end products of the digestion of our foods, especially our meat or other protein foods. Broths are a watery solution of extractives, largely consisting of the waste products of protein metabolism and used- up mineral salts which the animal had not excreted before death.
In 1914, when Dr. Robert G. Jackson M.D. was in his 40s, he developed a severe case of arthritis (probably rheumatoid arthritis) and when he was 49, his doctors gave him four years to live. He refused to accept the diagnosis and began to exercise more and sleep with his bedroom windows open. Long before such things were popular, he developed a health food diet of fruits, vegetables and his own line of health foods including Roman Meal bread. This bread was fashioned after the multi-grain bread ate by the Roman legions and included wheat, barley, oats, spelt and rye. Disease,” he said, “was due solely to man’s stupidity.”
Jackson started the Roman Meal Co. to manufacture his special diet foods. He went on lecture tours where he attracted large audiences. He bragged that “I am growing younger every year.” By 1930, at age 72, and in good health, he was a millionaire. He died in 1941 from complications of a broken hip. Roman Meal bread is still available in the United States.