Most people suppose that nutrition is now an exact science which we thoroughly understand. Do not believe it! What we have now is a rather dull technology designed to help us balance the nutrients in artificially refined, processed and preserved food. If your food were whole, natural and fresh, your appetite could do all that without any help at all.
Nutritional science has declined ever since biochemists started to study it with test-tubes. Its heyday was fifty years ago, when biologists still studied whole diets in whole live animals and people. The best of these were McCarrison’s experiments in which healthy animals had to satisfy their appetites from the usual food of a particular group of people. The test animals, who enjoyed otherwise ideal conditions of life, fell for exactly the same diseases as the people whose diet they were eating.
Meanwhile Dr Max Bircher-Benner was setting up in Zurich a revolutionary healing centre that is now world famous. He could see how important sunlight energy is to human beings and realized that only fresh live vegetation made this available to us in its full power. Animals grown for food draw their own energy from eating vegetation, so that their flesh is a less efficient source of sunlight energy, and must usually be cooked to be digestible at all. He demonstrated in practice the healing power of fresh raw vegetables and fruit over a wide range of serious diseases, and so established the principles of biological treatment on a scientific basis.
His findings were confirmed, with regard to the cure of rheumatoid arthritis, by Dr Dorothy Hare at the Royal Free Hospital in London during 1936-7, and her findings were in turn published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. But these sank without trace because the medical profession as a whole has never taken nutrition seriously, have no training or feeling for it, and are not in general competent to give opinions or advice about it.
So it is left to bodies such as The British Nutrition Foundation, the Food and Drink Federation, and official marketing boards for commodities such as dairy produce and meat, to provide the bulk of the nutritional information available to the general public. Consequently this information is strongly biased in favour of food industry preferences, at the expense of nutritional facts that are uncomfortable for them. Nevertheless you can quite safely explore the facts for yourself.
In the first place, recognise the four different forms in which plants contribute to your nourishment:-
What to do
1. Realize first that doctors do not in general understand nutrition, having been taught very little about it. Do not expect them to be interested in it or advise you well.
2. Then restore your natural appetite, using the freshest foods you can get, whole from nature and unadulterated with chemicals. Some food grown without chemicals to ’organic’ or ’biodynamic’ standards is now available in supermarkets and wholefood shops; this gives far better value for money.
3. Take advantage of vegetables and fruit in season locally, and grow them organically in your own garden or window-box. Eat them as fresh as possible, and have a portion raw as the first course of every meal.
4. Cook everything else as little as possible, avoiding unnecessarily high temperatures. Eat it fresh from the cooker; do not habitually save food, frozen or otherwise, for eating later.
5. Sprout seedlings to supplement your raw food. Stored raw carrots, potatoes and onions are good winter reserves of live food.
6. Chew everything carefully and well, to savour all its quality and give digestion time to work properly. Postpone a meal rather than eat in haste.
7. Most people thrive best on a wide variety of vegetables, cereals and fruit garnished with much smaller quantities of eggs, fish and dairy products. Animal food of any kind is inessential, and meat presents digestive difficulties and hazards for some. As the quality and range of your plant foods increases your craving for animal foods will decline.
8. People worry that without meat they will not get enough protein. This fear is quite groundless, and originates from attempts to market meat on its principle merit, which is its high protein content. Infants feeding only from their mothers’ milk, at a time of very rapid and important growth, only receive 1.5% protein in their food. Most vegetables contain more, and cereals run up to 11% protein. Meat can get up to 30% or so — far higher than most of us can ever need. Fear not: vegetables contain plenty of protein, and enough of everything else.
9. Be careful to eat sparingly of foods scarce in nature but plentiful in Europe — butter, oils, honey, and all animal products. Animal fats from modern farms are particularly hazardous, and reduce the benefit of vegetable oils. Nevertheless a little butter from healthy cows is still preferable to lots of vegetable margarine, if you work hard enough to burn it off.
10. Always separate cereals from protein food, eating the protein as your second course (after raw vegetables) and the cereal last (see Digestion).