Raw Food Explained: Life Science
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Article #1: Coryza, The Common Cold by Virginia Vetrano, B.S., D.C.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young lady with golden red hair down to her slender waist, and long and shapely legs. Her eyes were a beautiful blue, that scintillated when she laughed. She was lithesome as the fawn in the morning. Her personality sparkled like the cool clear waters of a bubbling spring. There was but one thing that marred the radiant beauty of this lovely young lady. She was continually blowing her nose.
The young lady was well educated. In fact so well “educated” that she could no longer understand the simple things of life. Every new fact or thought had to present itself to her clothed in such heavy scientific garb that anyone trying to comprehend the muss had to peel off layer after layer of nonsense to reach but the core of fallacy. But this type of presentation pleased her. It was scientific, with theory piled upon theory to support a theory, in a long drawn out complicated web of fallacy. It would be highly unbecoming for a woman working on a doctors degree to support or follow any doctrine so simple a child could understand it, even if it would obviate the necessity for rubbing her nose raw blowing all the time.
Let us hope that by the time she receives her doctorate, by wasting so much time with unimportant nonsense such as “proving in what ways mathematically a donut is like a cup,” that she will realize that much nonsense passes for science. Let us hope that after so many years of cramming gobbledegook into her head that she will be able to think. Unless she learns that all true sciences always simplify life and thought, instead of complicating them, she is destined to be a snorting horse until some more formidable disease helps her into the henceforth, her life a wasted travesty of education.
We would like to help Miss Nasal Drip but the time is not ripe. She suffers with chronic rhinitis, marked by frequent acute exacerbations, or the common cold. The common cold is an acute rhinitis, or inflammation of the nasal cavities. She suffers with it so often and so long at a time that one can almost say she has a perpetual cold. Her symptoms are typical; rhinorrhea or nasal discharge, nasal obstruction (due to swelling or edema of the mucous membranes of the nasal passages) and sneezing. A disease that may and should abort after twenty-four to forty-eight hours lasts for many weary weeks in this young lady.
In former years Miss Nasal Drip would have said that she “caught” a germ, were it not for the fact that she has learned that the nasal secretions are completely void of bacteria during the early stages of a cold. Many ciliated epithelial cells desquamate and are found in the thin watery secretion the first 2 or 3 days of the cold, but no bacteria make their appearance until the discharge becomes thick and purulent. When the thick purulent secretion begins then pneumococci, staphylococci, or streptococci arrive upon the scene.
Since bacteria are so conspicuously absent at the beginning of a cold, another cause had to be found. The unpopular idea that a person could change his life habits and not develop colds was too preposterous to entertain. The virus saved the day. Miss Nasal Drip doesn’t have to change her way of life as long as she believes she “picked up” a very malignant virus. This time her cold happens to be a very tenacious one, and it is progressing into bronchitis. Her medically-oriented mind attributes this to secondary invaders, not to her continual overeating of starches and sugars.
If all the Miss Nasal Drips in the world could understand that they do not have to develop colds any more than they had to develop measles, chicken pox or any other childhood disease. The simple expedient of refusing to eat at the first sign of a stuffy nose would not only abort colds, but all other acute diseases as well. Since laboratory experiments have demonstrated that in such simple diseases as coryza (common cold) digestion is impaired, it would seem that logic would proscribe eating, when indigestion and decomposition are inevitable.
Since the incipient stages of the childhood diseases (rubella, measles, chickenpox, and whooping-cough) are indistinguishable from the ordinary common cold, if one followed the rule to never eat when he has symptoms of a cold, these and other childhood diseases would never develop. Feeding in a cold, when indigestion is inevitable, insures that putrefactive poisons will be absorbed into the system, where they increase toxemia. Continued eating when there is no power of digestion necessitates a supplementary eliminating crisis to expel the noxious material before vital tissues are harmed. Hence, a common cold may develop into other more serious disease if eating is continued.
Miss Nasal Drip thinks she can’t breathe because her nose is obstructed with secretion. She blows all the harder to empty it. Actually in the early stages of her cold, the nasal mucosa is red and swollen due to the inflammatory condition. The choanae (the posterior openings of the nasal cavity into the nasal part of the pharynx) are very narrow. The slightest swelling causes difficult breathing. Also due to the fact that the nasal passages are very narrow interiorly, when the nasal cavities are inflamed, and the membranes are swollen (edematous), Miss Drip’s nose feels clogged, even though she empties it every few minutes.
Because of the continuity of mucous membranes, each time Miss Nasal Drip develops a spread to adjoining organs. The nasal cavity communicates with the frontal, ethmoidal, sphenoidal and maxillary sinuses, to which the inflammation may spread. This particular cold of Miss Drip spreads downward to the bronchi, also by way of continuous mucous membranes, and she developed the unpleasant symptom of coughing all night, thus preventing sleep.
Her chest became painful, frightening her, so that she listened to me a slight bit, and stopped eating potatoes swarming in butter one evening for dinner. I couldn’t get her to quit drinking milk every morning and noon but she did substitute grapefruit for some of the heavier foods she was eating. On the day she omitted potatoes and butter her symptoms abated markedly and she slept better that
night. But the next day with the chest pains gone, she lost her fear and resumed her bad eating habits!
We must be patient, she has a lot to unlearn. Just yesterday, she requested the microscope to analyze the water, because the idea came to her that everytime she visits us she “catches” a cold, so “it’s due to bacteria in the water here, to which I am unaccustomed.” “You don’t ‘catch’ the cold,” she said, “because you are adapted to these bacteria.”
Adults generally feel lethargic several days before developing a cold, and may have aches in the limbs or back. Children have a tendency to develop more severe symptoms, with a temperature around 102 degrees F and sometimes higher. They are not hungry generally but are encouraged to eat by their parents, hence the frequent development of more formidable disease in children.
Colds may develop at any time of the year, and do not necessarily develop when a person has been chilled or in a draft. When “epidemics” of colds arise, some extra enervating cause happens to be present in the lives of the people of the epidemic area. When large masses of people are surveyed, the summer months show fewer colds. Most people get plenty of fresh air, sunshine, and more exercise, which are highly beneficial to digestion and excretion, and commonly eat less during the summer months. Autumn brings less activity, less fresh air and sunshine, and increased eating, so there is an outburst of colds to rid the system of toxic matter. When midwinter comes, around Christmas and New Year’s, cold statistics mount again. Toxemia rises to above the toleration point, due to improper living, excessive eating and drinking and late hours. Therefore, more noses start running, more chests begin coughing, and more eyes turn red.
Miss Drip will argue that colds develop in the autumn because of reopening of schools with the massing together of children indoors. How does she explain the development of colds at Christmas vacation when most children are out of school for about 12 to 14 days? As the incubation period for colds is 12 to 48 hours, the germ and virus theory simply does not account for all the facts.
The fact that chilling does not cause colds has been repeatedly demonstrated to physicians who have observed the so-called immunity of travellers in the Arctic and of men compelled to spend many weeks at sea on rafts or in open boats and who never ‘caught’ cold. This leads the research workers to believe that “in the absence of the virus no amount of chilling can cause a cold.” Since viruses are ubiquitous, it cannot be said that there were no viruses present. They are everywhere. Was it too cold or too hot for the activity of viruses under those conditions? Or was it, that there was a scarcity of food, hence, the men couldn’t eat their way into a cold?
We are taught that a number of viruses, or a number of strains, cause the common cold. This should lead us to refine the diagnosis still more, to cold type a, type b, type c, etc. The old theory was that there is a specific cause for each specific disease if we could find it. Not so with colds. A number of viruses are said to be guilty. Those infected may be re-infected with the same virus within three weeks after recovery. The so-called immunity is short-lived. Colds cannot be induced experimentally in most animals.
In 1914, the virus theory of the etiology of colds was introduced by Druse, who it was said repeatedly demonstrated that ”filterable agents in throat washings obtained from adult patients with acute coryza were capable of producing colds when introduced into anthropoid apes or susceptible human volunteers.”
Volunteers, we are told, developed colds when infected by filtrates of nose and throat washings from those who had colds. A poison, a virus is a poison, or any foreign agent, in contact with the nasal mucous membranes, occasions inflammation, rhinorrhea (running of the nose) redness and swelling, and fever in children. An example of which you can perform yourself, is to run a match stick up into the nostril. The nose will begin to run, sneezing will commence, and if kept there longer inflammation will develop to rid the body of the foreign agent.
Another example is the true story of a child who at three years of age repeatedly developed a high fever, and a cold—one right after the other. Her mother took her to a physician each time the cold developed, and the symptoms were quashed by penicillin injections. Two or three days after the supressive effects of the drug wore off, the cold, high fever and running nose would redevelop. This worried the mother, so she continued taking her child to the pediatrician for more shots. Finally old mother nature won. Despite the continued suppression which interrupted her work, she kept initiating elimination processes until one day, as the child was feverish and nose running still more, the child began picking at her nose in the presence of her mother. To the mother’s surprise, a much frayed, and bloody piece of kleenex was pulled out. This was the occasion for the inflammation, fever and runny nose. The three-year-old had undoubtedly pushed the kleenex up her nose at some time in the past and it remained there until the body excreted it. The human organism just doesn’t like foreign things in the vital domain, and stubbornly keeps working until it rids itself of them. The child’s fever subsided and did not recur.
When viruses are injected to cause colds in “susceptible” invidividuals, it must be remembered that only certain individuals develop symptoms of coryza, and that the great numbers of viruses present are treated as foreign agents and expelled by the only method the nose knows—inflammation and sneezing.
So many viruses have been incriminated as causes of colds that research workers are really very puzzled. After a long discussion of the causative agents of colds, they conclude: “From the foregoing it may be concluded that there is no single viral agent to be incriminated in adult colds and that a variety of agents which produce fairly severe disease in non-immune infants may also occasionally cause coryza in adults.”
From the foregoing, it appears, that any virus or bacteria that is present when a cold develops is the guilty party. It is stated in Cecil and Loeb’s Textbook of Medicine that, “It cannot be said with absolute certainty that under certain conditions the common respiratory pathogenic bacteria do not initiate colds, although the evidence is against this possibility.” Paul and Freese who conducted studies in isolated communities in Spitzbergen, implied that, in the absence of the virus, colds “almost wholly disappear. “He is saying colds almost disappear in the absence of viruses, but they don’t actually do so because some colds still exist; these he attributes to bacterial infection as follows: It is then presumed that “the residuum of sporadic, noncommunicable colds may be due to bacterial infection.” What sophistry! The colds are gone, and they are still there! The remaining colds are of bacterial origin; but are noncommunicable.
Clinical investigators are still puzzled over the role that bacterial inhabitants of the nasopharynx play in the development of colds. Most of the “basal flora” of the upper respiratory tract, they think, consists of nonpathogenic and inconsequential agents. But since such agents that are thought to be true pathogens are often found in the throat washing of patients with colds this leads them to wonder if they do not play some sort of role in the disease known as coryza, or the common cold. “On the other hand,” they reason, “hemolytic streptococci, pneumococci, and hemophilus influenzae are recovered in considerable numbers from a patient with a cold, it is tempting to assume that they are playing a role of some sort.”
Were Miss Nasal Drip a diligent student she would see how confused and frustrated the laboratory men really are. One time a bacteria is a proved pathogen and yet the next time it doesn’t cause symptoms. With only the germ theory from which to reason, no wonder the confusion. The confusion itself would lead intelligent men to start searching in another direction, were they not so deeply rutted in the germ theory. The surmizing continues: “On the other hand, any of these organisms (Group A hemolytic streptococci and h. influenza) may appear in the normal nasopharynx without causing symptoms, and the mere recovery of one of them from a case of coryza may be of little significance. Most authors tend to designate them as ‘secondary invaders,’ assuming that the cold virus paves the way for their entry into the mucous membranes.”
To further befuddle the physicians, when they give antibiotics to kill the germ invaders, it doesn’t shorten the course of the disease one bit. Yale Kneeland, Jr. in Cecil and Loeb’s Textbook of Medicine states, “Yet when effective antibacterial agents have been used in large-scale controlled experiments on adults with colds, there is little evidence that suppression of the bacterial component alters the average duration of the disease.”
Let us review what the physicians are admitting. First, it is not known exactly which virus ’causes’ colds. Indeed, it may be numerous ones. Chilling doesn’t cause colds in the absence of the virus, yet viruses are ubiquitous. If the virus is sprayed into throats, it causes inflammation in “susceptible” hosts only. The disease doesn’t run the same course as it does in those individuals who really develop a cold and whose tissues are not made irritable by foreign agents. So-called respiratory pathogenic bacteria are present in the throat washings of people who never develop symptoms of disease. They are present in some who have colds, but killing them doesn’t shorten the period of sickness of the individual. What a mish-mash of contradictions upon which to base a practice.
Yale Kneeland, Jr. sums up the medical viewpoint in the following manner: “It can be stated that the common cold is due to one or more filterable viruses and that only in highly susceptible persons is there an ‘etiologic complex,’ i.e., a bacterium acting in concert with a virus. The bacterial effect may be either the general intensification of symptoms already referred to or a clear-cut complication, such as purulent sinusitis or otitis.”
How much simpler if physicians’ befuddled brains could be washed clean of viruses and bacteria or if they could recognize the beneficial effects of bacteria. How lucid would their day be when they would know the truth. Colds develop and are not “caught.” Bacteria and viruses have nothing to do with the development of coryza. They may be complicating features or function as saphrophytes feeding on the debris. They arrive on the scene when tissues and fluids are abnormal and survive as long as the tissues remain abnormal. They help clean up the debris. Our enervating way of life is the true cause of colds.
Let us look at the life of Miss Nasal Drip. She is a heavy milk drinker. Never does a day pass that she doesn’t drink at least six or more glasses of milk. She is an “early” sleeper, never going to bed before 3 a.m. She overeats on starches, shunning all salads and taking very few fresh fruits. She avoids the sun because it makes her freckle. In general, she leads a very enervating life. When toxemia mounts to above her established tolerance level, which it does quite often, then her nose, like a steam valve, lets out the excess. As she never ceases her heavy starch eating even while she has a cold, but seems to eat even more, sometimes taking as many as eight small red potatoes at a time, and gulping more milk to “soothe” her irritated throat, her colds last anywhere from three to four weeks. They run on and on because cause persists. The fact that her symptoms abated markedly when she ate less food did not teach her anything. Germs and viruses have her complete attention.
When we can control the eating of anyone developing a cold—either get them to cut down or to take only water for a few days—and the symptoms of coryza invariably subside, are we to believe that this invariable phenomenon of nature is due to the whim of a virus? Or, can we safely assume that when you rid the body of the cause, the effect will cease? When favorable results invariably occur, can we not say that we have a truth, or a law of nature? Or, must we continue to bury our heads in the sand and refuse to see the truth because it is not in accord with “scientific” thought?
Shelton, eloquently, gives us the cause of colds: “Toxemia from enervation and excess is the cause of local inflammations. Any enervating influence, any influence that lowers nerve energy, will inhibit elimination and produce toxemia. For this reason, worry or overwork, jealousy or lack of rest and sleep, apprehension or excesses, may help to produce rhinitis.
“Excessive food intake is one of the basic causes of toxemia and its effects. Excesses of starches, sugars, fats and milk are especially likely to result in rhinitis and similar supplementary eliminating processes. Indigestion, whether from food excess, wrong combinations of food, eating when fatigued, eating when worried or under other emotional strain, or eating under other physical, emotional and physiological conditions that inhibit digestion, will produce toxemia.”
It is often difficult for people to realize that from their first cold in infancy their tissues and fluids have been saturated with an excessive amount of metabolic wastes. Their way of life prepares their body for a long list of diseases that grow out of an established toxemia. A cold does not eliminate all the toxemia, it only brings it down to a level at which the body has become adapted to functioning.
To make this Hygienic knowledge more clear, let us designate the normal amount of waste products in the body of the nontoxic healthy baby as 1. As the baby grows and is fed improperly, and gets too little sleep and rest, is overclothed, isn’t permitted to play in the sun, he becomes toxemic. When toxic material mounts to 1 1/4, the baby develops a cold to eliminate this excess waste material.
As time goes on and enervating habits continue, the baby learns to tolerate more and more toxins in the system. His established toxemia mounts to 2, and he develops a cold only when it rises above 2, then a crisis brings this back to 2, his new toleration point. As he grows older his toleration point continues to mount. He develops fewer and fewer colds and fevers but is paving the way for the development of degenerative diseases. Unfortunately for him, his bad habits of living have forced his system to learn to live with poisons, and only when toxic material rises above his toleration point will he develop a cold. This reduces toxemia to the toleration point or slightly below but doesn’t eliminate it completely.
Hence the waste products remain to impair and damage structures. Only by fasting and changing the way of life can the toleration point be returned to its pristine low.
We should not fear colds in the sense that we fear to sit in a draft, or fear to go swimming, or get our feet wet, lest we “catch” cold, but we should not take the fact that we develop frequent colds too lightly. Once we have an established “toleration” for excess toxic material in the system we are paving the road for the development of more serious forms of disease, unless we change our mode of life radically. An excess of waste material produces pathology, even though it is tolerated. Such waste material causes changes in and about vital organs which are away from the ideal and decidedly detrimental to the welfare of the organism. Toleration is passive resistance. The tissues are forced to live in a state of constant toxic saturation and must resist this in the fashion that tissues do. Hardening of tissues develops and other pathologies which lower the level of health of the individual, eventually leading to disease and death.
Under the present system of medical care, cause is not understood, hence the treatment is directed at palliating symptoms, instead of eliminating cause and supplying the body with the conditions of health.
Fasting must be instituted immediately upon the first symptoms of a cold and should proceed much further than the time it takes for the symptoms to subside. In this manner the tissues will be washed sweet and clean and the long-established toxemia will be eliminated, thus raising the standard of health of the individual. Dr. Shelton states: “We should not be satisfied with a mere disappearance of symptoms. Nothing short of a complete elimination of accumulated toxins, full restoration of nerve energy and a thoroughgoing correction of the mode of living should satisfy the intelligent. This will result in genuine health.”
Medical treatment is admittedly suppressive and leads to immediate complications. It lowers the body’s functioning powers, causing the retention and toleration of more and more toxic wastes. Kneeland, admits that “Up to the present no specific agent has been developed which is effective against the viruses of the common cold. In consequence, therapy is directed at general management, relief of symptoms and the control of complications.”
Under medical care, complications are so common that they are expected. The suppressive treatment is a direct cause of these complications. About ten years ago anti-histimenic drugs were introduced and it was claimed that if used early enough, the disease could be aborted. Kneeland states of these drugs: “Subsequent carefully controlled studies have quite failed to substantiate the original claims.
Fortunately these drugs, in the dosages employed, have been singularly innocuous as far as untoward side effects are concerned. Nevertheless, they are not recommended unless there is an allergic element present.”
The fact that they are no longer recommended “unless there is an allergic element present” indicates these drugs were not completely harmless. For symptomatic relief, acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) is used for the very young. In adults, when the cough is troublesome, codeine is added and administered in the form of a cough mixture or in the form of the traditional “grippe capsule” which contains “codeine sulfate, acetylsalicylic acid, phenacetin, and caffeine citrate.” Not one of these substances helps eliminate cause. All are directed at suppressing symptoms, and therefore impair and impede the body’s efforts at cleansing itself. With such suppressive treatment of colds, is there any wonder that complications such as laryngitis, tracheitis, tracheobronchitis, sinusitis, or otitis media regularly occur?
Hygiene is so much more simple, direct and effective that it is a wonder that people still run to the physician for his bag of poisons, which only increase suffering and disease. When the living habits of the individual arc corrected, he ceases to develop colds. If one feels out of sorts, and thinks a cold may be developing the thing to do is to institute a fast immediately. He should secure more rest, and reassess his way of life. He should try to conform more to the laws of life. In doing this, he is eliminating cause, not suppressing symptoms. By eliminating cause, he obviates the necessity for future colds, and future development of more formidable diseases.
It is hoped that Miss Nasal Drip will see the fallacy of the germ theory and change her mode of living so that she will not be a T.B., asthmatic, or cancer statistic in the future.
- 1. The Common Cold
- 2. Influenza
- 3. Other Upper Respiratory Problems
- 4. The Hygienic Rationale
- 5. Questions & Answers
- Article #1: Coryza, The Common Cold By Virginia Vetrano, B.S., D.C.
- Article #2: What To Do In a Cold By Dr. Herbert M. Shelton
- Article #3: Influenza
Raw Food Explained: Life Science
Today only $37 (discounted from $197)