Questions About The Lesson

8. Questions & Answers

You have given a very low rating to vegetables and even suggest that we limit our intake to about 2 to 5 %. You’ve said before we eat vegetables as insurance or protective foods. If they’re such good protective foods why not make them half of our food intake? If they really protect us, I think they’re good for a bigger share of our dietary intake.

Vegetables rate much lower since, in examining the charts, it is obvious that they lack many qualities of prime foods. Many vegetables have some toxic factors. They are not savored as are exquisite fruits. They are not digested with the ease and efficiency of fruits. They furnish us no energy at all in most cases. Some actually use more of our energy to process than we can get from them! I calculate that 90% of our eating should be involved in obtaining fuel values. The other 10% should be in association and would be proteins, fat, and minerals with vitamins and other food factors included. Foods such as vegetables fail to furnish caloric values. Nutrient insurance s all they can possibly furnish. Even in this consideration, we really don’t need them.

You equate protein with vitamins, minerals and fatty acids. Isn’t protein more important than that?

Proteins are the building stones of all living beings. They compose some part of every living cell, fruits included. Yet protein is not more important than other food factors that we ingest, neither relatively nor absolutely, infants thrive on mothers milk which is about 1.2% protein. As long as we get that amount of protein with all essential amino acids amply represented, we’re getting as much as we need.
I don’t think we need as much protein as a growing baby. If we get 1% protein from a diet that averages seven pounds of food a day we’ll be getting 32 grams of protein, though this represents about 50% less than the U.S. RDA, it is still more than a healthy body can make use of. It is wise to point out that the body is capable of meeting about 70% of its protein needs by recycling its own protein wastes. There are thriving pockets of people in the Caribbean who are superb specimens of healthy humans lat have an intake of only 15 to 20 grams of protein daily.

What should we do if a client comes to us who is overly thin and on a protein-deficient diet?

In the field of practice, you’ll have many clients that are deficient in many ways, proteins included. One person can have a well rounded diet on a single food and get all he or she needs of every food factor. Another person might subsist on a diet which supplies four or five times our protein needs but, if the diet is cooked or fed to a metabolic cripple, the protein may be largely unavailable. You will not be dealing with deficiencies, per se. In most cases where there are some body reserves you’ll advise the client to fast as long as indicated and then realiment the client on a diet of proper foods prepared and served in a
manner we have taught you to observe. Your clients’ bodies are their sole remedial means. If the conditions for healing and regeneration are established, you must leave them entirely alone. Anything other than this practice will constitute interference. Protein deficiencies are not nearly as likely as other deficiencies and none of these are as likely as toxemia. Toxemia will be the condition of nearly every client you’ll get.

How do you determine which nutritive factors a client is deficient in? If most Americans are sick in some way and malnourished, how would I tell what is wrong or what the deficiency is?

In view of my previous response I think the question should be declared already answered. But I bid you, as professional health practitioners, not to get into diagnosing. You don’t have to know, in most cases, the particulars of a client’s deficiencies. These deficiencies may actually be the result of chronic toxemia that has lowered the person’s capacity for assimilation and utilization of foods. If the client is thin, start him out on a diet of easily digested fruits, especially melons, oranges, grapes and other succulent fruit fare. A mono diet of a single fruit would be in order, or at the very least, mono meals. A simple diet of proper foods will give the body some surcease and enable it to purify itself of its toxic burden and to repair damage and rebuild tissues. Don’t expect instant results or miracles, because it’s often a slow process. The client should take little food while in the eliminative state. When hunger increases, the diet should have its caloric values increased by greater intake or by more concentrated foods such as bananas, figs, dates, or raisins.
Should a client have reserves of fat, and most of your clients will be either normal or overweight, induce them to undertake a fast so the body can eject its toxic load with more facility. Then, after an appropriate period of fasting, start feeding them on a small amount of a single fruit and increase that as indicated.
You’ll learn more about these methods in our lessons on fasting as a part of nutrition. Further, you’ll learn that your response to all deficiencies, illnesses, and morbid blood and tissues will be much the same. You’ll vary your guidance and establish healthful conditions for your client in accord with his physiological circumstances. The variations will be very few. Just a few patterns will emerge that you can master thoroughly.

You’ve got a great idea about rating foods as you have. But you give some very low ratings to some good things, especially to lettuce and celery, which you praise so much. Below what rating would you refuse to eat a given food?

Keep in mind that this chart is primarily intended to appraise the value of a food in the human diet on its merits when eaten alone. There are some fine complementary foods such as lettuce and celery that may be added to other foods to achieve certain nutritional objectives. For instance, when lettuce and celery are added to an apple meal, the combination supplies needed additional protein and mineral salts. These two vegetables do not interfere significantly in the digestion of many fruits. Ideally, we should eat primarily foods of the highest rating with some secondarily-rated food. A few nuts should be eaten on occasion. The avocado is a fruit of nut-like consistency that is extraordinarily wholesome. I would say that I would refuse to eat anything rated below 30 and I would not eat higher-rated cooked items. Further, I would be cautious about eating some highly rated foods that had toxic materials in them. This especially applies to cooked foods where an inorganic mineral complement has been created, and where food derangements have taken place that will give the body digestive problems additional to those encountered in the finest foods.

I’d like to know more about the unprocessed mineralized water in vegetables. Why is this so harmful?

Our bodies cannot use inorganic minerals. The body treats inorganic minerals as poisons and utilizes its energies in trying to expel them. Whether the raw minerals come from hard water, from fresh leaves, stems and stalks or from the by-products of cooking decomposition, the body cannot use them. Instead, they create an eliminative problem. If uneliminated these minerals are likely to combine with fatty substances and harden, thus ossifying the brain and clogging arteries and veins. It is said that herbivores are short-lived because of the abundance of inorganic minerals in their food.

What do you have against spinach to rate it so low? I’d rather eat raw spinach than a cooked potato, which you rate much higher.

Spinach contains oxalic acid and unprocessed raw minerals, like all other leaves. Fruits, on the other hand, have pure water — they are finished products. Oxalic acid cannot be metabolized with any degree of facility by the body. To neutralize it, the body draws upon calcium supplies, even calcium from the bones if necessary. Oxalic acid gives a peculiar taste that is readily recognized. I know of no normal palate that can abide it. The calcium of spinach is more than offset by its oxalic acid content. Spinach is not a food you can live on. You’d have a calorie deficit with every meal of it. If a few leaves of it were added to a salad or to some starch, fat or protein meal, there is little to object to.

Dr. William Howard Hay said all diseases are the result of acid-alkaline imbalance. Why don’t you tell us which foods are acid-forming and which are acid-binding? Think how important that is if a client is suffering acidosis.

If a client suffered true acidosis he would be dead. Over-acidity is readily corrected by fasting or by a simple diet of mono fruit meals. Causes of acid-alkaline imbalance are eating foods that are predominantly acid-forming, notably cereal foods, meats, dairy and poultry products, seafood and even nuts.
Within a day or two of going on a proper diet, the acidotic condition is corrected. Celery happens to be a heavily alkaline food that helps a lot. So, too, are figs which are rich in alkaline salts. The worst thing that can happen is to use drugs or antacids. This does not solve the problem. While relief may ensue, the cause, an acid-forming diet, yet remains. Fruits and vegetables quickly establish an alkaline balance.

I’ve heard so much about how important salt is in the diet. You give it all zeros and give it a minus 100. Does this apply to sea salt or vegetable salts too?

You can readily determine just how important salt is in the diet when you see physicians in this country putting hundreds of thousands on salt-free diets. If salt were essential, no one could do without it. Salt is not digestible or usable. It stays in our bodies until we can in some way eliminate it. The body takes on extra water to hold it in suspension so it offers less harm to cells. It deserves all zeros for, in addition to rating all zeros, it has harmful effects that create disease, notably congestion, high blood pressure, edema and other conditions that earn it a big minus rating.
Sea salt is equally as poisonous as the refined variety. It is extracted from sea water and, in addition to salt, it contains other minerals that are in an inorganic and unusable state. As you perhaps know, sailors prefer death through dehydration rather than death from drinking sea water.
Vegetable salts are dehydrated vegetables that are ground up and are often mixed with additional salt. These are also unwholesome in the diet.

You gave honey a good rating in every department except nutrient content and toxicity. Why did you do this?

The bee laces its honey with several acids, some for which only the bee has enzymes for reconversion. Such acids are poisonous to bacteria and humans alike. That’s one of the bee’s ways of preserving its food supply. Those acids earn the toxicity rating even though, of its six acids, about half are metabolizable. If you tried to make a meal of honey only, you’d find it tasty and fully calorie sufficient. But you’d probably get a bellyache unlike any you’ve ever had in your life. You would probably get other problems too. Honey is very poor in nutrients right down the line. It has practically no protein, vitamins, minerals or essential fatty acids. Only the pollen that is incidentally in the honey has any appreciable amount of nutrients. Honey is, literally, sugar water the bee has obtained from flowers as its reward for performing a service. The sugars in honey are primarily levulose and fructose. The bee dehydrates and thus concentrates them. Honey is developed by bees for bees. Nature did not make us dependent upon the industriousness of bees for our sustenance.

I love turnip greens in my salad. You have given them a zero rating in the diet, which means they’re worthless. How do you come to that? There are some northern peoples, especially in Northern Europe, who practically live on turnip greens and turnips.

Turnip greens will not long sustain life. They are one of the richest green leaves in nutrients, yet they furnish no calories. Further, they contain unprocessed mineral water and mustard oil that makes them toxic in the diet. Turnips have relatively little mustard oil and are rather wholesome in the diet. They contain a complex sugar instead of starch as their fuel component. A meal can be made of turnips and relative good health will result compared to a conventional diet. Yet by no means are they an excellent food. There are many other foods that are better.

You gave oranges a nearly perfect rating. As far as I know, oranges are a high water content, low calorie food. How many oranges would you have to eat a day to live on them?

That is a most appropriate question since we have rated this as a food you could fare well on in and of itself. To illustrate this point, a Florida man lived on oranges and only on oranges without ill effect for six years. In fact he was described as being robust in health all the while. The weight of the oranges you should consume to sustain yourself would have to be about 10 pounds of peeled oranges daily. That is about 20 oranges. That would give you 2,250 calories, 45 grams of protein, 1800 milligrams of calcium, 2,250 milligrams of vitamin C, 9 grams of fats, 18 milligrams of iron—in short, a surfeit of all our needed nutrients. As a great lover of oranges I can’t consider such a diet as being unpleasant. I’ve consumed a mono diet of oranges myself for periods of up to two weeks and find them a most excellent food. I was coming off a fast at the time and gained almost ten pounds of weight on them.

How can you rate fruits so high when it is aid we can’t get enough protein, calcium or iron out of them?

I think I just indicated the falsity of your statement by citing oranges as being more than replete with the nutrient needs of life. Oranges furnish about twice our real protein needs, ten times our iron needs, about 100 times our real Vitamin C needs, and about 9 times our calcium needs. Keep in mind that the Recommended Daily Allowance is usually from 100% to 500% higher than our real needs in a healthy condition. Almost any fruit you can name, when eaten in an amount sufficient to supply your caloric needs, also supplies you amply with other nutrient needs.

That is surprising, but my question is along the same lines. Why do you give the same fuel value rating to dates and watermelons? According to my food composition handbook, a 100 gram serving of dates has 274 calories and a 100 gram portion of watermelon contains only 26 calories. How can a 90% difference end up with the same fuel value rating? Also, this same book shows turnip greens as having 28 calories per 100 gram serving, more than watermelon, yet you give turnip greens a zero fuel value rating. Can you explain these discrepancies?

There are reasons that our ratings are more or less correct despite these apparent discrepancies.
Keep in mind that water is a neutral factor in foods. If you took all the water out of watermelon, 100 grams of its residue would contain about 340 calories. This corresponds to
the caloric content of 100 grams of dates without water content. Watermelon has about 13 parts water for each part of solid. Five pounds of watermelon contains about 600 calories, which is about the same as eight ounces of dates. Both would be considered ample servings.
In the summer you need more water and less calories. Watermelon fills the bill well in that regard. In the winter, you need more calories and less water. Dates are a valuable addition to the diet at that time.
Turnip greens occasion the use of more body energy in processing and expelling than can be appropriated from them. Most of their calories are in cellulose. True, they yield 28 calories of heat when burned in a firebox. Humans can’t get all of that energy out of turnip greens. Watermelon, on the other hand, is composed of simple sugars which we can make 100% use of. There is a greater than 900% energy gain over the energy expended in digestion and appropriation of watermelon.
I hope this response clears up the seeming discrepancies in our ratings chart.

How would you rate brewers yeast as a food?

I’d rate it below zero. It loses out on every count, even though it has lots of protein and nutrients. Unless disguised, brewer’s yeast is repulsive stuff. Even if disguised, it is indigestible. When we eat brewer’s yeast, bacteria decompose it resulting in the formation of gases and poisonous by-products of protein decomposition. Your urine will turn yellow within an hour of taking it, showing that it has been excreted rather than digested and used. Because it is not digested, it can furnish no nutrients. It gives, instead, drug effects which many mistake for nutrient effects. Keep your clients off this junk the brewers industry has foisted off on health seekers as a food.

Dr. Airola says that garlic is a real miracle food with great healing properties. Many other health authorities say the same thing. You classify it as very toxic from the beginning. In fact you give it ten rating points as a food and 80 demerit points as a poison! Who am I to believe, you or Dr. Airola? He’s a well known authority on nutrition and, until my introduction here, I’d never heard of you. I’ve always heard garlic is a wonderful medicinal food, not a poison. It is usually recommended as one of the first foods to add to the diets of sick people. Can you justify your stand?

I imagine Copernicus had an extremly hard time about his concept that the world was round in an age when all the authorities said it was flat and when everyone believed it was flat. But we know valuable truths arise first in the minds of a few and gradually spread to the masses.
Garlic is treasured for its drug effects, not its nutritional effects. It contains two potent poisons, mustard oil and allicin. These poisons earn garlic its minus rating.
As a food, I doubt that anyone can manage to eat a single bulb of garlic by itself. Consider garlic as a food in itself. If you tried to eat enough to obtain the fuel values you needed, presuming of course an amount of garlic was eaten to represent our caloric needs, you’d probably not survive the ordeal!
When anyone praises the medicinal value of something, they’re talking about drug effects, not nutritional effects. It is absurd to speak of anything as having healing properties. Healing is totally, exclusively and only a faculty of the organism and belongs to absolutely nothing outside of the organism. Dr. Airola is praising a drug as a food and in matters of healing, does not seem to understand physiology.
I would advise you to believe no one. Investigate matters for yourself. To believe is to be credulous. To know is to be virtuous. Learn the “nitty-gritty” of everything. Don’t rely on so-called authorities. Remember, every wrong system of the past and present had and has its authorities. Don’t trade on authority. Trade only on the truth you can ascertain.
I don’t ask you to believe me. I ask you to examine everything I say and question it just as you are now doing. Put everything to the test. You’ll betray the trust of your clients if you guide them wrongly. Learn the truth so that you may truly help them.

Isn’t it possible, in view of our knowledge of nutrients and tasty natural foods that combine well, that we can create meals far more wholesome and delicious than just any single food item? For instance, an avocado with greens and tomatoes really tastes great and gives us a complete range of our needs.

Yes, we can construct meals. The rating charts are based on the outlook that, in nature, we were adapted to certain fare and that we ate primarily or only of that fare during its season as is the case with present day animals. But the fact that we can construct well-rounded meals does not mean they are more wholesome than a single food with a high rating. The meal you suggest is an excellent one. However I would advise not to eat an oil/protein salad meal such as you suggested more often than once every other day. The body is very provident and conserving. It’s a lot wiser than our wildest imaginations can lead us to contemplate. For instance, if you’re having steamed potatoes, then the addition of such auxiliary fare as cucumbers, bell peppers, broccoli, lettuce, and celery is judicious. If you’re having nuts or avocadoes the addition of the same salad fare plus tomatoes is also justified. Our bodies usually handle vegetable fare rather easily. Yet our bodies are inefficient at getting much food value from vegetables other than a goodly part of their rich nutrient load.

Isn’t it unhealthy to eat only one food at a meal? The law of the minimum says we must get all our nutritional needs in each meal for that meat to do us good. Why not balance out every meal as recognized nutritionists recommend?

I assure you that our “recognized” nutritionists are about as far off in this matter as in the foods they’re placing their stamp of approval on in America today. I presume you’ve heard of Dr. Frederic Stare who chairs the department of nutrition at Harvard. He claims we should eat for enjoyment. He says such a practice is the healthiest thing to do, and has renamed junk foods joy foods. I hope you aren’t giving credence to these “recognized” nutritionists who’re busily engaged in selling our health down the river—for a price of course.
The balanced meal concept is based on ignorance and assumptions. The law of the minimum has nothing to do with what we eat at a given meal. I repeat that the body is immensely wise, provident and conservative. Did you know that about 95% of our iron needs can be met from recycled iron? That about 70% of our protein needs can be met from recycled proteins? That the body, contrary to what nutritionists tell you, maintains amino acid pools? That, contrary to what we’re told, it stores vitamin C in the adrenales? That the body carries about a five year supply of Vitamin B-12 and receives its supply from bacterial activity in the lower intestine just as is the case with other animals? The law of the minimum applies to the least available needed nutrient at time of synthesis.
When you recognize these factors you begin to realize that the balanced meal concept is incorrect and unnecessary. It gets us into eating protein/carbohydrate/oil and other incompatible combinations at the same meal. Instead of getting a “balanced” meal we get an indigestible mess. In fact, about half of America’s meals end up with some degree of indigestion, from mild to severe. That’s why the makers of antacids are so many and so rich that they can advertise widely on TV, radio and in other media. If we don’t digest our meals, it should be obvious we’re not going to get the nutrients we need from them either. Obviously the balanced meal concept is a fallacy.
On the other hand, the foods of our adaptation are the building blocks of balanced meals. These foods give us nutrients in proportion to our ability to handle them. Our development in nature has been built around the foods that best serve us. It might be said we adjusted so as to thrive on them. While the proteins, fats and starches as may exist in fruits are, in a sense, incompatible, they are so organized and our adaptations are so tailored that we handle them with ease and efficiency. Thereby we receive their full goodness while getting our primary need, calorie-rich carbohydrates.
If we get less than our needs of a nutrient at one meal, the body’s reserves and providence will carry us on stored past surpluses. Until another meal is indulged that again furnishes us a surfeit of that nutrient, our reserves will cc less, that’s all. We’d best eat of foods of our adaptation as do the animals in nature and worry not. That is the message you have to get across to your clients as well.
Our nutrient needs are much smaller than the world at large wants to admit. This “the more the better” philosophy has sabotaged our collective health. When we get all we need of anything, that is enough. Enough is all we need. Surpluses of proper foods eaten in the regular course will cause problems. If we overeat on wrong foods and foods incompatible with each other we compound the problem immeasurably. Because this is so often the case, it’s no wonder that America is such a sick nation! More than 80% of our ill health is attributable to dietary indiscretions. If we corrected our dietary errors alone the health of this country would improve by more than 80%. That’s because our dietary fare represents the ever-whelming burden that breaks the camel’s back of health, so to speak.