Never Be Sick Again (17 page)

Shelves Stocked with Old Food

I can remember, as a child on my uncle's farm, picking ripe apples from the trees and eating them then and there. I can remember harvesting fresh peas, strawberries and sweet corn from our own garden and eating them raw within minutes of harvesting. Not only do fresh foods taste better; they are substantially better for health. Much of the food purchased in a standard supermarket today is old. Presumably fresh produce such as apples, oranges and cucumbers are put in cold storage and can be anywhere from months to years old. Supermarket eggs are commonly anywhere from six weeks to six months old, and they still can be labeled as “fresh.”

Food is reasonably hardy, but nutrients are not. Nutrients are quite fragile and are destroyed by heat, light, oxygen and overly long storage. The most fragile vitamins are C, B
₁
and B5. Unless you grow food yourself or obtain it freshly harvested from a local farmer, it's likely the food does not have the nutrition you think it has.

Irradiated foods may be years old before you eat them and thus completely devoid of vitamins. Fruits and vegetables undergo substantial destruction of nutrients in modern cold storage. In
The Kellogg Report,
Dr. Joseph Beasley offered examples of the nutritional loss that occurs after harvesting:

• Spinach and asparagus lose 50 to 70 percent of their folic acid when kept at room temperature for three days.

• Vegetables such as asparagus, broccoli and green beans typically lose 50 percent of their vitamin C before they reach the produce counter.

• Potatoes lose as much as 78 percent of their vitamin C during long-term storage at 36°F.

• Blanching of vegetables prior to freezing can destroy up to half of the vitamins.

• Freezing meat can destroy up to 70 percent of its vitamins.

Commercial, make-believe foods lack nutrients not only because of losses after harvest, but also because food is frequently harvested before it is ripe. This practice may be necessary for our modern distribution system (to bring food to the consumer before it rots), but early harvesting also reduces nutrition. The ripening process is critical to develop the full vitamin and mineral content of a food; vitamin and mineral content rise near the peak of ripeness. Also, flavor improves.

The carrots you buy in the supermarket may look ripe, but they frequently turn that bright orange (ripe) color during transit through the distribution system. If they are not ripened while still in the soil (and most are not), they will lack essential nutrients. Vine-ripened, freshly harvested tomatoes are loaded with vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients (natural chemicals in plants that benefit our health)—unlike commercial tomatoes that are picked green and artificially ripened with ethylene gas. Naturally ripened tomatoes were found to contain one-third more vitamin C than those harvested green and immature. Foods harvested before they are ripe never develop certain nutrients at all. Certain phytonutrients (substances found in ripe tomatoes known to help prevent diseases such as cataracts, macular degeneration and even cancer) are lacking in the typical supermarket tomato because these substances develop in the last stages of ripening.

While having all kinds of food available to us all year round is wonderful, we pay the price with our health because the food must often be harvested before it is ripe, transported long distances, stored for long periods and artificially ripened. Even though such foods may look and taste fine, they are substantially less nutritious. They are “make-believe” foods.

Beware of Food Guillotines

Even foods that are truly fresh and ripe can nevertheless be nutritionally destroyed if you prepare them improperly. Our biological ancestors usually did not cook or process their foods. Foods were eaten fresh and raw. The healthy Hunzas ate 80 percent of their diet raw. Their foods not only had more nutrition to begin with (because of traditional farming techniques and rich soils), they also did not typically diminish that nutrition by cooking. Nobel laureate Linus Pauling believed that the mostly raw, mostly vegetarian, unprocessed diet of our biological ancestors provided a level of nutritional quality far superior to the food supply available today.

The bulk of the modern American diet comes from processed foods that have been deliberately altered from the way nature provided. This altering includes trimming, peeling, chopping, blending, mashing, commercial refining and cooking. While some degree of processing may be necessary, there are many degrees of processing, from the simple slicing of a carrot for your salad all the way to the grinding and bleaching of wheat in order to make white flour. The most significant causes of malnutrition, other than commercial farming and distribution techniques, are cooking and processing.

In general, proteins in food are the most stable (less damaged by processing), while vitamins are the most easily damaged. A cucumber loses a quarter of its vitamin C just by slicing it to make a salad. If the salad stands around for an hour, the loss goes up to a third, and if it stands for three hours, half its vitamin C will be gone. Fresh orange juice loses almost a fifth of its vitamin B
₁
within twenty-four hours, even when refrigerated. Cooking and mashing a potato will diminish vitamin C by 80 percent.

The heat used in cooking foods damages nutrients and typically makes them more difficult to digest. Cooking even damages protein (the most hardy of nutrients). Consider oatmeal: In the
Food and Nutrition Encyclopedia,
Aubrey Ensminger reported that dry oatmeal contains 14 percent protein, but that figure drops to only 2 percent after it is cooked—a loss of 85 percent. Cooking common vegetables, such as carrots, can cause losses of 75 percent of the vitamin C, 70 percent of the vitamin B
₁
, 50 percent of the vitamin B
₂
and 60 percent of vitamin B
₃
.
The higher the heat and the longer the cooking
time, the more nutrients your food loses.

Heating food deactivates its enzymes (the cellular machinery that manufactures all the products our cells make). Although the human body is capable of making its own enzymes, we also receive enzymes directly from our food. Cooking destroys these enzymes. Eating cooked foods stresses the body, which must manufacture extra enzymes in order to digest food and compensate for enzymes lost in cooked food. By eating cooked foods, you can actually lose more nutrients than you gain. Consuming sufficient enzymes is one reason that eating raw foods is so important. Cooked foods contribute to our epidemic of chronic disease.

Although the health benefits of raw foods need emphasis, a few words of caution are important about raw animal products (such as eggs, meat, fish and poultry). Even though nature intended us to eat raw foods—animal products included— today's hazards of bacterial, viral and parasitic infections make raw animal foods dangerous. Also, raw animal foods must not touch other foods intended to be eaten raw.

Even just a few generations ago, people typically ate more raw food than they do now, and the trend toward cooked and processed foods appears to be worsening. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, over the last century average consumption of fresh apples declined by more than three-fourths, fresh cabbage by more than two-thirds and fresh fruit by more than one-third. During that same period, consumption of processed vegetables went up hundreds of percent and consumption of processed fruits went up by about 1,000 percent.
Eating processed fruits and vegetables
(canned, dried, frozen, etc.) is fundamentally inferior to eating
fresh fruits and vegetables.

Eat for Your Future, Too

The nutritionally deprived, cooked and processed foods you
eat today will damage your health tomorrow, as well as the
health of your unborn children and grandchildren in the years
to come.

This profound concept was demonstrated in the 1940s by Francis Pottenger Jr., M.D., and published in his book
Pottenger's Cats.
More than nine hundred cats, some fed a diet of raw food and some a cooked-food diet, showed striking differences in their own health as well as the health of their offspring. Within six months, the cats eating the cooked food developed numerous health problems. Subsequent generations suffered infections, dental problems, vision problems, skin problems, allergies, arthritis, miscarriages and behavioral changes—including nervousness, viciousness and violent behavior. Each new generation was sicker than the last. By the third generation, almost all the cats suffered from allergies and had trouble reproducing because of miscarriages and stillbirths. Meanwhile, the cats on the raw-food diet remained healthy and well-behaved, generation after generation. We have much to learn from Pottenger's work; the most significant (and ominous) implication is the impact of poor nutrition, supplied by cooked food, on the health of future generations.

Another case dramatically proves the need for raw, fresh foods. During World War I, sailors aboard a German cruiser,
Kronprinz Wilhelm,
ate beef, ham, bacon, cheese, potatoes, canned vegetables, dried peas/beans, white bread, margarine, tea, coffee, sugar, condensed milk, cake, champagne and beer. Their entire diet consisted of cooked and processed foods. After six months on this diet, the crew was experiencing shortness of breath, paralysis, atrophied muscles, enlarged hearts, constipation, anemia, and muscle and joint pain. Fifty men could no longer stand. After eight months, 500 were sick, 110 were bedridden, and they were falling at a rate of four per day. New symptoms included pleurisy, rheumatism, pneumonia and other infections, and fractures and wounds that would not heal.

An emergency stop in Virginia brought a new diet containing some raw fruits and vegetables. After ten days, the men stopped falling sick; forty-seven had been discharged. Conditions gradually improved thereafter. Access to fresh, raw food was all it took. Notably, the only people on the ship who did not get sick were the officers who had ongoing (if limited) access to raw fruits and vegetables, apparently providing just enough nutrition to make the difference between health and disease.

Think of all the people that you know who suffer from allergies, gum disease, heart problems, vision problems, arthritis, antisocial behavior, miscarriages and other health problems. Could malnutrition, perhaps even the malnutrition of their parents or grandparents before them, be contributing to their problems? Talk to those people you know who have lived in good health into their eighties, nineties or even older. Chances are they grew up on farms and ate plenty of raw, real food during their developmental years. By contrast, consider the deteriorating health of many people in the baby boomer generation—the first humans to develop eating processed, “TV dinner” diets starting in the 1950s.

Families today often have grandparents that lived (or are still living) into their nineties, while the next generation is getting sick and dying in their seventies or sixties. Today's young people are plagued with problems such as cancer, asthma, diabetes, allergies, obesity, poor eyesight, dyslexia, birth defects and other problems, and are likely to die at even younger ages. An epidemic of allergic disease is occurring in industrialized countries, especially in people born after 1960. The prevalence of asthma has quadrupled over the last two decades. Could something as simple as nutritional deficiency be a major contributor to violent behavior and vicious crimes? Many reasons exist to believe so. Many of our young people can no longer reproduce; some estimates are as high as one in five. These problems were rare just a few generations ago when our grandparents and great-grandparents were eating more organic, fresh, and unprocessed raw foods. These problems did not exist among well-nourished populations such as the Hunzas.

How You Eat Matters

Millions of Americans are plagued with heartburn, abdominal pain, bloating, gas, nausea, bowel difficulties and other digestive problems. Much more than inconvenient, these are telltale signs of poor digestion—resulting in deficiency and toxicity, i.e., disease. To eliminate these problems, follow a few simple guidelines, which will support healthy digestion. You can choose digestion habits that will bring nutrients into your cells and let wastes out of your body efficiently.

The basic steps of good digestion are as follows: First, eat the right combinations of foods, because certain foods digest better together than others. Next, chew your food well, to assist in the digestive process. Nutrients must be absorbed properly through your intestinal walls and transported throughout your body to all the cells that need them. Finally, wastes must excrete from the body. Any interference with any of these steps of the digestive process can cause both deficiency and toxicity. Deficiency may occur if food is not properly digested and absorbed. Toxicity occurs when undigested food “sits” too long, either in the stomach or in the intestines, where it rots, ferments and putrefies, creating toxins.

Although eating a variety of foods is a great idea, we are not designed to digest them all at the same time. Learning which foods go well with each other is what “food combining” is all about. Our digestive systems have adapted and evolved over many thousands of years; until recently humankind did not eat the combinations of foods that are now “normal” to us. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors often ate foods directly from their source, usually one at a time because there was no way to preserve or store them. Our ancestors certainly did not cook up three- or four-course meals that combine all sorts of different proteins, starches, sugars, fruits and vegetables.