8. Questions & Answers

There is no proof that a raw food diet of fruits and certain vegetables, seeds and nuts, in correct combination, without herbs and spices, promotes health and longevity. Show me a group of people over the age of 100 who have been living according to your principles.

In situations like these you can put the onus of the negative on the questioner. You can haul out such statistics as presented in The Myth of Health In America and show that these problems are caused by cooked foods, condiments, wrong foods, etc. Better yet, ask the questioner why this should be so. You can point out Kouchakoff's experiments that show cooked foods to be pathological because they cause leukocytosis.
But, of course, you can get books about the Hunza and Abkhasia. These are mostly raw food eating people, especially the Hunzas living where they have no fuel to speak of. Hunzas are a healthy long-lived people with a great percentage of their population over 100 years of age. Their primary fare consists of apricots, apples, mulberries, peaches, grapes and other fruits with some vegetables, pulses and grains. For practical purposes, the Hunzas are fruitarians.
Ask your questioners what cooking does to food. Ask them if it enhances their nutritive qualities or destroys it. If it enhances it, then the more you cook food, the better its quality, of course, and ashes would be best of all.
Quote number one from Bragg is idiotic. "Even our best organically grown foods are deficient in many nutrients. That is why I eat cooked foods and use natural food supplements to get nutrients into my body to withstand all the pressures which all of us must endure in this decaying super-civilization."
If the best foods are deficient, then cooking them only makes them all the more deficient and adds the dimension of toxicity from whence arises leukocytosis. Food supplements are a dangerous delusion for they do not supplement. They are mostly synthetic and unusable. Even if they were usable, they are useless out of context from the foods in which they're normally found. Dr. Roger Williams of the University of Texas has pointed out that vitamins do not work in isolation but must all be brought together to work as a team. Fractionated vitamins are impotent and synthetic vitamins are never usable.
Fruits and vegetables, even if lower in nutrients than centuries ago, still have far more vitamins and minerals than humans need.
The question states there is no proof that raw foods without herbs and spices promotes health and longevity. The question is asked from a stance of prevalent cooked food eating and condiment usage as if, a priori, these are the foods of health and longevity but there is plenty of proof that they are the articles of disease and shortened life.

Early man, living in a pristine environment, even if he did eat ONLY raw fruits and vegetables, seeds and nuts, did NOT carry around a food combining chart. Ho w did he get so far?

Living in a pristine environment, humans ate their meals at the source, that is, directly from tree, vine and stalk. Eating their fill of the fruit or fruits that were in season did not involve food combining. Most meals were mono-meals and even the fare for a whole day consisted of all fruits—our ancestors were total fruitarians as scientific evidence has shown.
Food combining is basically unnecessary to those who are eating properly—food combining is for those who mix food, something humans did not do in the beginning. Combining fruits according to their character comes rather naturally. We do not desire to eat bananas and grapefruit together—today, we tend to eat bananas with other sweet fruits despite our unnatural perversions that subvert natural inclinations.

How can you say that your principles are correct when "long-lived peoples" of the world eat a diet in opposition to those principles?

How can you ask such a question and offer in evidence testimony that confirms those very principles? There is practically no food processing, cooking or otherwise in Hunza. The testimony shows that fruits and selected vegetables are eaten raw and fruits constitute the bulk of their diet. Because of their isolated situation they are not subjected to the junk foods of commerce. The Hunzas, Abkhasians and Vilcabambians of Peru live healthfully in most aspects of their being, food being but one primary facet of healthful living.
Long life and health comes from what people do right, not what they do wrong. To the extent that we indulge in healthful practices, only to that extent do we enjoy health. Disease and ailments are an evidence of error and anyone who suffers colds, headaches, constipation and other problems is an example of the error of living. There is no defense for dietary and other perversions for a person who is suffering because of those very perversions.
Depriving yourself of junk foods and nonfoods is like depriving yourself of hell. What do we seek, hell or heaven? We make our own.

People have been using garlic and onions for thousands of years. They have hastened healing with them. If, when seriously ill, garlic is given and the patient recovers, why then does not the disease return when the patient recovers?

Yes, people have been eating garlic and onions for thousands of years. People have been sick and diseased for thousands of years and continue to be so despite all the garlic and onions eaten. You can demonstrate to yourself that the primary "medicinal" factors of garlic are mustard oil and allicin. These substances are indigestible. They readily permeate tissues and cells. They are excreted through the lungs and kidneys as the same substances that enter the body—as mustard oil and allicin. If they were digested and used, those who eat these obnoxious lily family members would not stink to high heaven. If you crush a clove of garlic in your hand and hold it a few minutes you'll have garlic breath within ten to fifteen minutes, demonstrating the permeability of cells and tissues by these pernicious substances. Use and control of anything that gets into the body which it cannot digest, is difficult.
We don't need penicillin or bactericides in our bodies. Killing off our symbiotic bacterial flora is harmful, not helpful. TB is a disease wherein the body dumps its toxic materials into the lungs in the same way that asthmatics have their extraordinary toxicity exuded through the bronchioles or the sinus sufferer excretes toxins through the sinuses. Garlic has no intelligence at all and could not heal TB under any circumstances inasmuch as TB is a body-instituted measure to cope with body toxicity. Garlic will so drug the body as to reduce, its vitality and increase its accommodation to both the garlic and the toxicity. But we're less healthy for that, not more healthy. It is a fabrication to say the body will be free of disease if its causes are still indulged.
Fasting enables the body to speedily eject its toxic load whereas drugs, including garlic's allicin and mustard oil, tend to suppress elimination.

Why are dairy products bad when almost everyone who is long-lived uses them?

This is not true, of course. The Hunzas do not use milk except for children and this is from mother's breasts. The Vilcabambians do not use dairy products. Among the world's longest-lived peoples, only the Eastern Europeans use dairy products. And to attribute their long life to these products is like attributing their long life to the wine and tobacco many of them also use. The fact is they have long life not because of these things but despite them. It's what they're doing right, not what they're doing wrong, that keeps them alive so long. Undoubtedly they'd live much healthier and longer if they did everything right.
We have humans living to be in excess of 100 years on fruits alone. We have Orangutans living to be 125 to 150 years on fruits alone. Is not this an argument for eating fruits alone?
Regaining health while on goat's milk means, if we study such cases, that all those dietary practices which contributed to previous pathology were dropped—causes were discontinued. Suckling goats is not as healthy as eating fruits. Shouldn't we take two groups of individuals as controls, put one on a mono diet of goat's milk and the Mother on a diet of fruits and see how they fare?
Because most humans lose the ability to secrete lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose, and because almost all lose the ability to secrete rennin, the enzyme that breaks down casein, we cannot thrive on milk. Please note that those long-lived peoples did not use fresh milk but fermented milks. Those who take fresh milks, raw or pasteurized, suffer much disease.
Dairy products are not wholesome. America consumes more milk and milk products than all the rest of the world combined. By all standards we should be the healthiest but, on the contrary, we're the most diseased, as statistics attest.

How can grains, especially breads and cereals, be bad, when almost all the centenarians use them in one way or another?

This is not true. The Vilcabambians eat only corn of all the grains and little of this—their primary foods are fruits and potatoes. The Hunzas eat very little grain because they have little room for growing grain. Fruit trees are the most productive of food and the Hunzas eat a preponderance of fruit.
A characteristic of all centenarians is that they are not gluttonous eaters of anything—they eat abstemiously.
Americans are among the biggest grain and meat eaters in the world. Why aren't we or the Canadians or Australians or other grain-eating countries noted for longevity? The Chinese and Japanese live heavily on rice but their longevity hardly exceeds ours. What are the supposed virtues of grain? It must be eaten cooked and largely devitalized. It furnishes calories and most of its products are deficient unless eaten with lots of raw greens and vegetables.
The Finns are a vigorous but not a long-lived people. They are heavy fat and grain eaters and have disease conditions rivaling our own country. More Finns die of heart attacks than do Americans. Whoever holds up the Finns as examples of healthy long-lived peoples is awry in the belfry.

What possible reason can you give for advocating water fasts as opposed to juice fasting?

Fasting involves a diet of only water, whereas a better term for juice fasting might be "juice feasting."
In the water diet, the body shuts down the digestive tract and devotes its energies to bodily rehabilitation. On the juice diet, it must continue to carry on digestive and eliminative functions in the intestinal tract.
Under a complete fast, beneficial results are obtained quicker by a ratio of three to five to one over that of juice dieting. Further, cleansing and healing can be accomplished on the water diet that cannot be accomplished at all on a juice diet.
Juices are fragmented and incomplete foods and fail to furnish many of the needed nutrients that are bountiful in the whole foods. Further, juices exposed to oxygen rapidly oxidize with the result that their nutrients are lost. Moreover, those oxidized nutrients are transformed into toxic products, especially the minerals which are often largely returned to an inorganic state.
The body greatly improves on a simple diet but, I repeat, improvement is much quicker and more profound on a water diet with benefits being realized that may not be realized at all on a juice diet.
A juice diet for 20 to 40 days is of immense benefit but 10 to 12 days on a water diet will yield even greater benefits. The lies about fasting are many and the supposed advantages of juice dieting are nonexistent. Because of their oxidized and deficient nature, the juice dieter may suffer drug effects which are often confused with beneficial effects.
When we modify our diets or fast, we seek maximum benefits and water dieting is superior to everything else. After a few days on the water diet, hunger goes away and we have no urge to eat. On the juice diet, there are periods of intense hunger and periods when hunger is absent. If juices are not taken when hunger is absent and water taken instead, the fast is great. But if foods are taken when hunger disappears, even be it juices, the purposes of the body are thwarted.

How can you say that too much starch and protein is bad when the Irish people use them in large amounts and suffer no ill effects?

The Irish live mostly on potatoes with some fish. They are not gluttons as are Americans and they conservatively cook their foods. They are not noted for their longevity and few centenarians are among them. In fact, their health is hardly better than our own. They are vigorous outdoor people. Most heavy laborers are. But how many athletes are really healthy people in this country? Athletes die young like most other Americans because hey partake of about the same diet as most Americans.
In reading the book you submitted, it would appear almost everyone in the world is healthy but we Americans. The truth is that most of the world is unhealthy except for little pockets of people here and there who enjoy relatively better health.
There are a multitude of factors that contribute to health and food is only one. While food can undermine health no matter how good other practices are, it cannot assure health no matter how perfect if all other practices are bad.
Starch must be cooked to be eaten. We cannot handle raw starch except in small quantities. Cooking dextrinizes starches. All starches must be converted to simple glucose and fructose before it can be absorbed. This is done at great expense to the body. Why not take fruits that are glucose and fructose to begin with? There are no good arguments for starch-eating.
What goes for starches goes three-fold for proteins. While there are proteins in every food, most human protein eaters cook and degenerate the protein content anyway. The proteins are coagulated and the amino acids deaminized. The body is only about 30% efficient in using protein as energy whereas it is about 90 to 95% efficient in converting fruits. And as far as the protein needs of the body go, about 70% can be secured from recycling our own metabolic wastes whereas actual needs are met amply from fruits. Proteins in excess of our needs putrefy in the digestive tract and, if absorbed as amino acids and are excessive, the body must tax itself greatly in decomposing them and ridding itself of the toxic by-products.
Those who insist on their perversions to the point of being hopeless are choosing a life of suffering.

If mineral waters are harmful, the Hunzas would have been dead a long time ago.

This, of course, is the most idiotic of all conclusions. First, inorganic minerals cannot be used by the body. Iodine and many other minerals are absolutely essential in human nutrition but, in inorganic form, are rank poisons. The body can use them only in organic context.
The Hunzas are not great water drinkers, their diet being mostly water sufficient. Secondly, their water starts out as pure a short distance from their uptake of it and it is full mostly of sediment, not minerals in solution. They settle out the sediment just as any sane person would—who wants to drink sand and minute rock debris? Who wants to drink soil?
During the brief run down the mountains, the water picks up lots of sediment but few minerals in solution. And, to top it off, Hunzans drink very little water anyway. Certainly, raw materials and rock are not healthful.
Human mineral needs are only about 8 grams daily by the doubled and tripled standards of RDAs. Yet a normal diet of raw foods furnish intact about 20 to 25 grams of organic minerals daily which the body can use.
Be it noted that the fabulous waters the Hunzas get from their glacial runoff is available only for a few hours a day during the warm months, being totally unavailable most of the year.

Why are herbs so harmful? If so, how did Li Chung Yun live to be 256 years old?

If Gotu-kola and Ginseng teas were the only vice of this long-lived sage, then we should not marvel at his longevity. Little is said about his diet except that it was vegetarian. Does it not sound reasonable to attribute health and longevity to healthful living instead of to wines, cigarettes, fermented and rotted products, teas, toxic botanicals (both these herbs are listed in books on botanical medicines as possessing toxic substances).
Those who continue to indulge in their vices under the purblind rationalization that long-lived peoples had this or that vice usually end up with heart conditions and/or cancer which do them in at an early age. Rationalizing our vices and perversions will not deliver health.

Why do Bulgarians live so long when they do everything you advise against?

This question embodies a falsehood. They do not do everything I advise against. On the contrary, their lives are far more healthful than that of the average American. Your documentation of what they're doing wrong indicates they're doing mostly right. Only about 3 to 4% even partake of meat at all. Most live on fresh fruits and vegetables according to the published material you sent. Especially stressed was their consumption of sunflower seeds. Bulgarians do partake of fermented milks but it is not by any means the predominant part of their diet. Their hard work in the out of doors and their relatively stress-free society are not debilitating but, on the contrary, very healthful.
Beware of people and writers who want to credit health and longevity to the oddball perversions people may have rather than to their preponderance of healthful living practices which are the only basis for health and longevity.