by Phillip Day

In Health Wars, we looked at some of the chal­lenges and pit­falls that affect human longevity. As we start to assem­ble the com­plete pic­ture that might give us the best shot at the Queen’s telegram (or your face on an Amer­i­can jam jar, cour­tesy of Willard Scott), it is very clear that your eat­ing and lifestyle habits will make or break you. The cleaner you eat, the cleaner you’ll be. If you don’t want to change, that’s fine too. You have a per­fect right in a free soci­ety to live how you want (so long as it’s legal), and expect all the com­men­su­rate ben­e­fits or down­sides. Health author Steve Meyerowitz writes:

“The path to health starts with a major clean­ing. If there is infes­ta­tion, you have to con­trol it. If there is dam­age, you have to recon­struct. First stop the poi­son­ing of the blood and tis­sues from acid­i­fy­ing diet, bac­te­ria, yeast, gia­r­dia and par­a­sites. Reverse the trend of acid­i­fi­ca­tion and alka­lize with wheat­grass juice and an enzyme-rich living-foods diet. Take noth­ing from a box or can. Eat from the gar­den. Elim­i­nate sugar except when it comes inside a fruit. Throw out the espresso machine and the microwave and put a juicer and blender in their place.

Clear the block­ages, empty the garbage and rein­vig­o­rate the elim­i­na­tion sys­tem with colon hydrother­apy. Jump-start the liver with a mas­sage and wheat­grass implant. You can change. Your body is a milky-way of tril­lions of cells which com­bine to make up tis­sues and glands. But every minute we breathe in new atoms and exhale the old. In six weeks, every atom in your liver is replaced. Renewal is a con­stant. What foods will you renew with? Stop treat­ing your stom­ach like a com­post heap and start treat­ing it like a gar­den. Set in motion an upward cycle of reju­ve­na­tion that leads to bal­anced health. The sign­posts are: trim­mer weight, clearer mind, brighter eyes, bet­ter con­cen­tra­tion, more energy and vitality!”

In the UK we are now watch­ing 26 hours of TV a week, twice as much as the 1960’s. By the time the aver­age Brit gets to 75 years of age, if he ever does, he will have watched 12.5 years of tele­vi­sion. Almost all of our young­sters between age 7 and 18 are clas­si­fied as ‘inac­tive’. If you’re not wor­ried about what your lifestyle is doing to your own health, con­sider what it’s doing to those you love. Chil­dren fol­low the wis­dom passed on by their par­ents. What legacy are you leav­ing yours? 1 in 5 of our under-15’s is clin­i­cally obese, and 1 in 10 of Britain’s under-4s is now clin­i­cally obese, with recent stud­ies show­ing a dou­bling of chil­dren with weight prob­lems.¹ In Eng­land, the adult trend is no less alarm­ing. In 1980, 8% of women and 6% of men were obese. By 1998, these fig­ures had grown to 21% and 17%, involv­ing over 8 mil­lion adults. A fur­ther 32% of women and 46% of men are now classed as over­weight in the United King­dom.²

The bill for treat­ing Britain’s obe­sity and asso­ci­ated mal­adies cur­rently costs the National Health Ser­vice £500 mil­lion in drugs and surgery. How much would it cost if pre­ven­tion were exer­cised and these peo­ple thinned down through proper edu­ca­tion? Sadly many do not want to change or, through addic­tive ties to their food, can­not. They eat when they want to as opposed to eat­ing what their bod­ies need. Adver­tis­ing teaches what tastes best rather than what we need most. We think we’re in con­trol but we’re not.

That’s not to say good health pro­grams do not appear – they do. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver did some­thing about the woe­ful state of school din­ners and was accused of nan­ny­ing. Who can for­get the photo of those fat mums push­ing fast food through the school gates so their winkies wouldn’t have to encounter spinach. When we did get around to dis­cussing over­weight on TV, we came face-to-face with Vanessa Feltz, who told the doubters ‘you can be fat and sexy, fat and suc­cess­ful, and fat and happy’. I remem­ber cring­ing at how Vanessa was fail­ing to con­vince even her­self with that pitch. The TV com­pany appar­ently agreed. Shortly after com­ing out of the food closet, Ms Feltz’s exist­ing con­tract was not renewed.

Today how­ever, I am happy to report (at the time of writ­ing) that Vanessa is back in the spot­light, 84 lbs lighter, trim­mer in the stir­rup and leap­ing bux­omly for­ward like a Royal Navy frigate on Cus­toms duty. She has shed her weight apolo­get­ics for a min­istry of con­tri­tion and Thin­ity. She no longer makes excuses for hav­ing, or need­ing to be overweight:

“Lord knows I know what it’s like to be obese. I was size 24 and on tele­vi­sion. A vast sit­ting tar­get in a fuchsia-pink suit. I’ve been called every­thing from ‘Mrs Blobby on rein­forced stilet­tos’ to ‘the woman who ate her audi­ence’. I know I now sound like an evan­gel­i­cal con­vert, but please let’s stop and think about what we are doing to our­selves. Obe­sity lev­els have tripled in 20 years. Do we really want to breed another gen­er­a­tion of fatties?

We don’t have to accept fat as our fate. There’s no need to slide into being a sta­tis­tic. Weight loss isn’t rocket sci­ence. Eat health­ily. Don’t diet. Diets don’t work. Sim­ply find an eat­ing pro­gram you can tol­er­ate and be a grown-up.” ³

Sen­ti­ments forged in the fire of tri­als – good for you, Vanessa. The good news is, we can do some­thing about almost all the health prob­lems killing or inca­pac­i­tat­ing us today. But we have to want to do something.

Meta­bolic dis­eases are dis­eases that are wed­ded to our diet and lifestyle. They chiefly arise because of chronic mal­nu­tri­tion, which exists due to over-consumption of cooked, processed, dena­tured food. Exam­ples of these are heart dis­ease, can­cer, stroke, dia­betes, arthri­tis, Alzheimer’s, scurvy, pel­la­gra, beriberi, per­ni­cious anaemia, rick­ets, etc. Meta­bolic dis­eases can­not be solved by any­thing other than the miss­ing meta­bolic pre­ven­ta­tives which, apart from vit­a­min D, are always food fac­tors.⁴ Which means, in case you didn’t pick up on it ear­lier, that drugs for­eign to the bio­log­i­cal expe­ri­ence of the human organ­ism can never cure a meta­bolic dis­ease. What’s cur­rently being used by the estab­lish­ment to halt meta­bolic dis­eases? Drugs.

Toxin dis­eases arise due to poi­sons in our food, envi­ron­ment or those gen­er­ated within us (auto-intoxication). Often these dis­eases have a shared prob­lem with meta­bolic nutri­tional defi­ciency. Exam­ples are heart dis­ease and can­cer (again), osteo­poro­sis, diver­tic­u­lo­sis, mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis, dia­betes, lupus, ME, chronic fatigue syn­drome, fibromyal­gia, sci­at­ica, pso­ri­a­sis, Crohn’s, arthri­tis, Bell’s Palsy and so on. Toxin-related prob­lems are solved by remov­ing the toxin antagonist(s), and flush­ing the poi­sons out of the body, all the while nour­ish­ing the sys­tem with key nutri­tional fac­tors and a full-spectrum diet. Toxin dis­eases can never be cured by intro­duc­ing more tox­ins in the form of drugs.

Healthcare-related prob­lems include poi­son­ing from pre­scrip­tion drugs, botched or unnec­es­sary med­ical pro­ce­dures and deaths aris­ing from infec­tions in hos­pi­tals. Iatro­genic prob­lems are solved by avoid­ing unnec­es­sary health­care. Many ill­nesses aris­ing from health­care are often treated with fur­ther health­care (drugs and pro­ce­dures), exac­er­bat­ing the problem.

It’s clear all three cat­e­gories are pre­ventable so long as we under­stand there is the prob­lem in the first place. A stub­born Uncle Joe drifts into dis­ease and a bad death through not under­stand­ing that he became the sum total of every­thing he ever did to him­self. Old habits die hard but if we don’t change those bad habits, we can’t be sur­prised when Nature sharp­ens her sword for us.

Right, let’s get on with it.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Health Wars by Phillip Day

Elim­i­nat­ing the Pied Piper

The Sci­ence of Nat­ural Hygiene

Dr Her­bert M Shel­ton, one of Nat­ural Hygiene‘s lead­ing pro­po­nents, described this sci­ence as

“…that branch of biol­ogy which inves­ti­gates and applies the con­di­tions upon which life and health depend, and the means by which health is sus­tained in all its virtue and purity, and restored when it has been lost or impaired.”

Nat­ural Hygiene recog­nises that the human body in all its won­der is con­stantly striv­ing for well­ness. The words ‘Nat­ural Hygiene’ imply a clean­li­ness achieved through non-contrived meth­ods. No patented potions, no weird rit­u­als, no monop­oly on hid­den or arcane knowl­edge. Nat­ural Hygiene is a way of eat­ing and liv­ing prac­tised by mil­lions around the world who enjoy disease-free lives as a result. Har­vey Dia­mond, whose Fit for Life series pop­u­larised the lifestyle in the 1980’s, gives his own summation:

‘The under­ly­ing basis of Nat­ural Hygiene is that the body is self-cleansing, self-healing and self main­tain­ing. Nat­ural Hygiene is based on the idea that all the heal­ing power of the uni­verse is within the human body; that nature is always cor­rect and can­not be improved upon. There­fore nature does not seek to thwart its own devices. We expe­ri­ence prob­lems of ill-health (i.e. excess weight, pain, stress) only when we break the nat­ural laws of life.’⁵

Nat­ural Hygiene revolves around the following:

• Under­stand­ing the body’s nat­ural diges­tive cycles
• Cor­rect con­sump­tion of fruit
• The con­cept of high water-content food
• Cor­rect food combining
• Detox­i­fi­ca­tion

The body’s nat­ural diges­tive cycles

Nat­ural Hygiene teaches that the human body’s diges­tive sys­tem goes through three eight-hour cycles every twenty-four hours:

Noon – 8pm: Appro­pri­a­tion of food (eat­ing and digestion)

8pm – 4am: Assim­i­la­tion of food (absorp­tion and use)

4am – Noon: Elim­i­na­tion (excre­tion of waste products)

It is not hard to see these cycles in action. It is also uncom­fort­ably clear when these cycles are thrown into con­fu­sion and tur­moil by, for exam­ple, eat­ing a pizza late at night or hav­ing a large breakfast.

Appro­pri­a­tion

The body prefers the Appro­pri­a­tion Cycle to hap­pen on time, com­menc­ing at noon. Most can make it through to twelve with­out any food because the body is cur­rently in the Elim­i­na­tion Cycle and not yet ready for food. After com­mence­ment of Appro­pri­a­tion, how­ever, once after­noon arrives, we become uncom­fort­able if we do not eat any­thing. Our body craves nour­ish­ment and will let us know in no uncer­tain terms if we are remiss in sup­ply­ing the nec­es­sary fod­der. The most impor­tant rule dur­ing Appro­pri­a­tion is to eat only when your body is hungry.

Assim­i­la­tion

The Assim­i­la­tion Cycle mostly occurs at night while we’re rest­ing and the diges­tive sys­tem can crank into gear with the min­i­mum of dis­rup­tion. Night-time is nat­u­rally not a good time for Appro­pri­a­tion (eat­ing and diges­tion) because of the hor­i­zon­tal angles involved. Dur­ing Assim­i­la­tion the body extracts nutri­ents in our intestines, which are twelve times the length of our trunks, designed to keep high-water-content, unre­fined plant dietary food in their clutches until all the nutri­ents are with­drawn. If you leave three hours between your last meal and when you go to bed, a prop­erly com­bined sup­per (along the lines we will be exam­in­ing) will already have left the stom­ach and be well on its way through the ali­men­tary tract for its squeez­ing and extract­ing by the time you go to bed. Dur­ing the night, your body is putting all those nutri­ents to work replen­ish­ing your sys­tems, replac­ing dam­aged cells and allow­ing the blood and lymph to pick up waste and take it to the garbage col­lec­tion points for the truck the fol­low­ing morning.

Notice if you wolf down a cheese and pineap­ple pizza with oblig­a­tory jalapenos imme­di­ately prior to sleep­ing, you’ll feel like you’ve swal­lowed a bar­bell. Your body is hor­i­zon­tal, which means grav­ity is work­ing against your stom­ach and every­thing therein, result­ing in the des­per­ate need to throw down half a bucket of antacids at 2:30 am to douse the con­fla­gra­tion, or else prop your head up on a pil­low to stop the resul­tant hydrochlo­ric acid bring­ing those jalapenos up for a chat.

Elim­i­na­tion

At around 4am the third cycle, Elim­i­na­tion, cuts in to take out the junk. Your body has sorted through the food it has processed and rejected any food debris that can­not be sat­is­fac­to­rily metabolised into more bits of you. Elim­i­na­tion is the removal of waste from the body, be it from fibrous, non-metabolised food or other waste prod­ucts we’ll exam­ine in a minute. The human body has very effi­cient sys­tems designed to shed waste, using the bowel and urine to excrete the junk it no longer requires. The body also elim­i­nates meta­bolic tox­ins, shunt­ing them out via the under­arm, bowel, urine, glands at the backs of the knees, glands behind the ears, from the groin area, from the nose, the mouth, the ears and skin.

Emer­gency elim­i­na­tion can be dra­matic and is car­ried out when time is of the essence in get­ting rid of toxic mate­r­ial. Exam­ples are eczema, diar­rhoea, skin rashes, a water­fall of a nose dur­ing colds and vom­it­ing. Or my favourite, which can often be seen out­side The Pig and Whis­tle Pub in South Lon­don a few min­utes past mid­night – pro­jec­tile vomiting.

Elim­i­na­tion is the most thwarted cycle of the three — an abuse that has led to chronic obe­sity and ill-health. The rea­son is because the Elim­i­na­tion Cycle is almost always sab­o­taged by us unwit­tingly eat­ing big, badly com­bined break­fasts, pre­vent­ing the body from exe­cut­ing its essen­tial daily func­tion of rid­ding the body of waste. Thus the junk stays put and gets filed in all the parts where it can do the least harm. Except to our vanity.

Bod­ily waste products

These include:

• Food detri­tus
• Toxic food metabo­lites and mucoid plaque
• Cata­bolic cel­lu­lar debris
• Chem­i­cal toxins

Food detri­tus

…we have already looked at. It’s the fibrous waste the body can­not absorb to make cell struc­ture. This fibre is extremely ben­e­fi­cial in adding bulk to diges­tion, reduc­ing insulin lev­els, and giv­ing you that ‘full’ feel­ing, enabling the colon to move every­thing along. Fibre scours the diges­tive tract of impacted fae­cal mat­ter (mucoid plaque) and cleans every­thing with its Brillo-pad action. This assists in pre­vent­ing diverticulosis/itis and bowel cancer.

Toxic food metabo­lites and mucoid plaque

…are more dan­ger­ous and include the mess of par­tially processed com­plex ani­mal pro­teins, the acidic gunk result­ing from bad food com­bin­ing and uric acid from chronic meat-eating unable to be bro­ken down. The dan­ger of toxic food metabo­lites is that, with a junk diet, these poi­sons can accu­mu­late faster than the body elim­i­nates them. This con­di­tion is some­times referred to as tox­emia or aci­do­sis. If you drink milk and con­sume sugar, toxic metabo­lites are cre­ated since the body lacks renin and lac­tase to break down the milk, and also the vit­a­mins and min­er­als nec­es­sary to process sucrose. These tox­ins are acidic and endan­ger the body. Colic is tor­tur­ing your two-year-old with cow pro­teins, which sleep­less con­di­tion for the entire neigh­bour­hood can often be alle­vi­ated when con­sump­tion of cow’s milk is halted.⁶

Clogged colons are a major cause of dis­ease, not least since a clogged colon can­not absorb nutri­ents from the food it is pro­cess­ing. Mois­ture is also extracted from food dur­ing diges­tion and the resul­tant mass can become gluey and adhe­sive, coat­ing the walls of the colon and intestines with mucoid plaque. Meat, milk and processed foods are the worst for accom­plish­ing this.

It has been esti­mated that an adult con­sum­ing the aver­age, fibre-poor, ani­mal protein-heavy, Western-style diet dur­ing their life can accu­mu­late between 7 to 25 pounds or more (3 to 10 kilos) of lay­ered, impacted fae­cal mat­ter in the diges­tive sys­tem. Many of us faith­fully hold eight full meals inside us at any one time, backed up like the approach to Gatwick air­port. Mucoid plaque can be rub­bery or hard­ened mate­r­ial unable to pass through the intestines, which starts to rot, pro­duc­ing foul odours and gases. This decom­pos­ing mate­r­ial is a haven for germs and bac­te­ria which quickly thrive, pro­duc­ing tox­ins that can enter the blood­stream and affect the entire body.

Cata­bolic cel­lu­lar debris

…is toxic waste result­ing from the ongo­ing replen­ish­ment of cells as tis­sue is built up (anabolism) or bro­ken down (catab­o­lism). There is a new ‘you’ being pro­duced every seven years or so. If you want to have the body of Aphrodite or Zeus, then sup­ply your body with first-class Olympian plant-based raw mate­r­ial and help it jet­ti­son the old bricks and mor­tar. If you don’t, then expect the body of Bac­chus (does the body of Mars come from eat­ing same?).

It has been esti­mated that old cells are being replaced by new cells at the rate of three hun­dred to eight hun­dred bil­lion a day. Har­vey Dia­mond explains meta­bolic imbalance:

“Old cells are toxic (poi­so­nous) and must be removed from your sys­tem as soon as pos­si­ble by one of four chan­nels of elim­i­na­tion: bow­els, blad­der, lungs and skin. This is a nor­mal, nat­ural process of the body and is not some­thing with which to con­cern your­self, unless for some rea­son this toxic waste mate­r­ial is not elim­i­nated at the same rate that it is being pro­duced. As long as there is a suf­fi­cient amount of energy at the body’s dis­posal, this waste is elim­i­nated properly.

The sec­ond way tox­emia is pro­duced in the sys­tem is from the by-products of foods that are not prop­erly digested, assim­i­lated and incor­po­rated into cell struc­ture. As far as your weight is con­cerned, com­mon sense will tell you that if more of this toxic waste is built than is elim­i­nated, there is going to be a build-up of the excess. This trans­lates as ‘over­weight’. Adding to the prob­lem, tox­ins are of an acid nature. When there is an acid build-up in the body, the sys­tem retains water to neu­tral­ize it, adding even more weight and bloat.’⁷

When acidic, the body uses retained water and min­er­als like sodium, mag­ne­sium, boron and cal­cium to ren­der the sys­tem alkali (pH 7.4). Cal­cium and boron can be leached from the skele­ton, result­ing in weak­ened bones, poor teeth and a break­down in car­ti­lage and con­nec­tive tis­sue. These prob­lems can lead to osteo­poro­sis and var­i­ous forms of arthri­tis. As pre­vi­ously seen, heavy con­sump­tion of ani­mal prod­ucts can lose the con­sumer up to 90 – 100 mg of cal­cium a day as the body attempts to main­tain the alkali balance.

Some acidic indi­ca­tors to look for:

• A con­stant feel­ing of slug­gish­ness and being ‘off-colour’
• Chronic tired­ness or chronic fatigue syndrome
• A sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to infec­tions, colds and flu
• Diges­tive reflux
• Stom­ach and diges­tive problems
• Bad breath unre­lated to den­tal problems
• Body odour that per­sists after bathing
• A coated tongue in the morning
• Poor wound healing
• Aches and pains or the start of rheuma­toid arthritis
• Suf­fer­ing from a degen­er­a­tive disease

Envi­ron­men­tal toxins

The last cat­e­gory of waste are the envi­ron­men­tal tox­ins we looked at ear­lier. These include chem­i­cals in per­sonal care and house­hold items absorbed through skin and mouth, which accu­mu­late in tis­sues and organs. Other tox­ins will be tar, nico­tine and poi­sons from cig­a­rettes, alco­hol metabo­lites from drinks, drug residues (phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and recre­ational), vac­cine tox­ins such as alu­minium hydrox­ide and formalde­hyde, air pol­lu­tants, water pol­lu­tants, food pol­lu­tants such as chem­i­cals, pes­ti­cides, drugs and hor­mones fed to ani­mals we later eat, cos­mic radi­a­tion, ter­res­trial radi­a­tion, mobile phone radi­a­tion and chem­i­cal residues and hor­monal ana­bol­ics absorbed through our skin by the man-made prod­ucts we touch and use.

It goes with­out say­ing that such prob­lems are absent from the envi­ron­ments of those tra­di­tion­ally long-lived cul­tures. This does not mean we’re all doomed to an early death in an indus­trial soci­ety. It does mean we have to com­pen­sate, clean up our per­sonal envi­ron­ment, use safe prod­ucts free of prob­lem chem­i­cals, and see the garbage safely onto the Elim­i­na­tion Truck when it calls every morn­ing. At the moment, because of our mon­strous break­fasts, Garbage Elim­i­na­tion Inc. for most of us isn’t call­ing at all.

Opti­mis­ing the energy system

The body expends a great deal of energy pro­cess­ing food and detox­i­fy­ing com­pounds, so the human body is essen­tially an energy sys­tem that needs to be cal­i­brated effi­ciently. You can give your body an easy time by prop­erly com­bin­ing foods (which frees up energy for detox­i­fi­ca­tion duties), or you can be a beast and slap together all man­ner of gut-warping culi­nary trea­sons. The body is self-calibrating but you might not like the results! Your great­est weapon in assist­ing the body to cleanse itself cen­tres around –

The cor­rect con­sump­tion of fruit

Nat­ural Hygiene is the sci­ence of energy. You can manip­u­late your energy usage by the food choices you make. Dur­ing elim­i­na­tion the idea is not to intro­duce any­thing that diverts the body from its life-saving house­work. No tra­di­tional break­fasts. No Aunt Lily’s Arkansas Pan­cakes. No grits or muesli. No British Heart-Attack-on-a-Plate with the fried eggs, fried bread, sausages, toma­toes, and bacon.

Eat fruit in the morn­ing instead. Clean, light and more mobile than an SAS infil­tra­tion unit, fruit makes scant demand on resources, breaks down in the intesti­nal tract and charges through your sys­tem like the 5:15 pm from Padding­ton. Fruits con­tain the mono­sac­cha­ride sugar fruc­tose which con­verts directly to energy. Fruit con­sump­tion dis­cour­ages binge-eating as blood sugar lev­els nor­malise after con­sump­tion, turn­ing off your hunger switch so you eat less food.

Organic fruit is rich in hard-working enzymes, vit­a­mins, min­er­als and fibre and is a low-taxing amino acid source in the morn­ing. And what do amino acids build? That’s right, pro­teins. Fruit is allur­ing in all its shapes and colours, has the most exotic taste, and is loved by almost every­body. Fruit has been described as the per­fect food since humans have been found to sur­vive indef­i­nitely on it. All nutri­ents required can be found in a diet of var­ied fruits which grow on six out of the seven con­ti­nents. The bad news is, over the past sev­enty years many crops have lost sig­nif­i­cant min­eral con­tent due to over­farm­ing.⁸ This defi­ciency can be reme­died by sup­ple­men­ta­tion, which shall be dis­cussed later.

The ten fruit commandments

• Eat fruit on an empty stom­ach any time dur­ing the day
• Always leave 30 min­utes after fruit con­sump­tion before eat­ing foods other than fruit
• Leave at least 3 hours after a prop­erly com­bined meal before con­sum­ing fruit. This allows the pre­vi­ous meal to leave the stom­ach and avoids putre­fac­tion and fermentation
• Before noon, con­sume only fruit
• Never com­bine fruit with any other foods
• Never eat fruit AFTER a meal as a dessert
• Steer clear of bananas, avo­ca­dos and dates in the morn­ing. These are more heavy on the diges­tion but can be eaten, prop­erly com­bined, dur­ing the Appro­pri­a­tion Cycle after noon
• If you get hun­gry dur­ing the morn­ing, eat another piece of fruit and keep munch­ing until the blood sugar lev­els nor­malise and your hunger abates
• Eat organic fruit only where possible
• Do not eat or drink processed, canned or cooked fruit or fruit drinks, which can con­tain high-fructose corn syrup, e-additives and other aliens

Fruit is per­fect when eaten alone as break­fast. Although most fruit seems acidic going in (malic acid, for exam­ple, in apples), they con­vert to an alkali ‘ash’ unless com­bined with other foods which can fer­ment or putrefy. Fruit helps elim­i­na­tion with its high-enzyme action. Fol­low­ing the above rules, you will expe­ri­ence a return of energy, a steady, sat­is­fy­ing weight-loss and an over­all feel­ing of health and well-being.

Water intake

The adult body requires in excess of four pints daily (2 litres). A good rule of thumb for water intake is to cal­cu­late body­weight in pounds and then drink half that fig­ure in ounces of water a day. Water is used for diges­tion, detox­i­fy­ing cells, water­ing the lungs, alka­lis­ing the body and a host of clean­ing duties. Water expert Dr Fer­ey­doon Bat­manghe­lidj main­tains that asth­mas, aller­gies, dia­betes, arthri­tis, angina, stom­ach upsets, chronic intesti­nal com­plaints and other degen­er­a­tive ill­nesses are the body’s many cries for water – com­plaints often dra­mat­i­cally improved with a con­sis­tent intake of fresh water.⁹ The Essen­tial Guide to Water and Salt, which I co-wrote with Dr Bat­man, has helped thou­sands quash long-term health prob­lems effort­lessly and inex­pen­sively. Cof­fee, tea, diet sodas, beer and other com­mer­cial tot­ties do not qual­ify as ‘fresh water’ and should be avoided. Most are diuretic (water-expelling) by nature because of their chem­i­cal com­po­si­tions. ¹⁰

Your main food intake – Take the raw challenge

My empha­sis through­out Heath Wars has been on a dietary intake high in plant foods, almost all eaten raw. This is undoubt­edly an alien con­cept to those addicted to cooked, processed animal-protein-heavy diets – I make no excuses. If you want to avoid what every­one else is get­ting, ani­mal prod­ucts need to come down to under 5%, and the raw com­po­nent of your food needs to be above 80%. I can throw all the sci­ence in the world at you on the ben­e­fits of eat­ing a major­ity plant-based diet in this way but if you really won’t, you will ful­fil your part in the sta­tis­tics which make up the West­ern dis­ease scourge. Here are some points to con­sider by way of review:

• You do not need to eat ani­mal pro­tein to gen­er­ate human pro­tein. Ani­mal pro­tein can­not be directly used as human pro­tein, it needs to be decon­structed into its com­po­nent amino acids and then recon­structed using DNA/RNA tran­scrip­tion into the required pro­tein pecu­liar to the par­tic­u­lar task in your par­tic­u­lar body. The ani­mal pro­tein we ingest is invari­ably cooked and thus much of its use­able pro­tein com­po­nent is use­less and worse, now toxic junk.
• To make pro­teins, you need amino acids. The most plen­ti­ful source of amino acids on Earth is the plant kingdom.
• Cow’s milk is unnec­es­sary for human health and is poten­tially harm­ful and even dan­ger­ous to many humans. Cow’s milk is for baby cows.
• The ‘eat right for your blood type’ farce is based on the faulty premise of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion (though even evo­lu­tion­ist sci­en­tists have shot it out of the sky). Any­one who tells you to eat a high level of ani­mal prod­ucts ‘because you are a blood group O hunter type’ has been get­ting high on their own sup­ply and not read­ing the sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture.¹¹
• The argu­ment is not about whether to eat ani­mal prod­ucts or not, it’s a ques­tion of degree and qual­ity. Humans are omni­vores and can eat some meat. Sci­ence has shown, how­ever, that a cumu­la­tive con­sump­tion of ani­mal prod­ucts in excess of 10% will con­tribute to the West­ern dis­ease pro­file.¹²
• Humans are also suf­fer­ing because of an over-consumption of grain prod­ucts, specif­i­cally wheat, bar­ley, rye and oats – the gluten-predominant grains. These foods can cause seri­ous diges­tive issues but are flogged off to the pub­lic as break­fast cere­als and health foods because they are cheap to pro­duce and highly prof­itable. Many of these prod­ucts are con­t­a­m­i­nated with aspergilus moulds or fungi due to long-term stor­age issues.
• Cooked food doesn’t keep you warm in win­ter beyond the ini­tial heat ingested from the cook­ing appli­ance. Tremen­dous inter­nal heat, on the other hand, is gen­er­ated from the con­sump­tion of real, liv­ing raw plant dietary since this is the fuel the body uses to make more of you with. You have men­tally con­di­tioned your­self to believe that cooked food nour­ishes and keeps you warm. Try a pro­lific salad on a snowy day and judge the results hon­estly — you will be sur­prised. And by the way, no-one’s say­ing you can’t have a cooked meal now and then or briefly steam your food if you wish. Don’t mur­der it.
• Switch­ing to a major­ity plant-based diet requires a lit­tle organisation:
• Locate a good com­pany which can sup­ply organic pro­duce to your door with­out you even need­ing to get in the car. There are many ben­e­fits to West­ern civil­i­sa­tion and this is one of them. In Britain, I use www.riverford.co.uk. Take a look at their site and see if you have an equiv­a­lent in your area/country.
• Famil­iarise your­self with the foods in the Cre­dence UK store at www.credence.org to give you ideas on what to add to make your food spe­cial and highly nutritious.
• Make use of a juicer to make deli­cious veg­etable juices. Use organic veg­etable pow­der mixes like Nature’s Liv­ing Super­food and Credence’s Green Phyto­foods to top up. I also use trop­i­cal super­food juices such as man­gos­teen, goji, noni and acai to boost phy­tonu­tri­ent payload.
• Avoid soy milk and meats. Unfer­mented soy is bad news because it is an endocrine (hor­mone) dis­rupter. For a thor­ough treat­ment of this sub­ject, log on to www.soyonlineservice.co.nz.
• Visit spe­cialty organic food stores and give them your busi­ness. Become an expert at prepar­ing food the nat­ural way. There are sim­ply hun­dreds of organic and raw food sites spe­cial­is­ing in pro­mot­ing this way of eat­ing. My food choices are now so wide, I view hotel menus with a mix­ture of dis­gust and with­er­ing pity when­ever I’m on tour – pretty much the same emo­tions I level at TV celebrity chefs like Gor­don Ram­sey, whose diet has turned him into a rag­ing, potty-mouthed incubus of the fallen order, or Nigella Law­son, Britain’s ever expand­ing kitchen sex-Valkyrie. Lis­ten, it’s your body, you feed it.

Con­clu­sion

Fruit before noon on an empty stom­ach assists Elim­i­na­tion. Big break­fasts thwart it. Try this regime for five days and notice how dif­fer­ent the body feels. A diet com­pris­ing 80–85% unre­fined plant dietary (unadul­ter­ated fruit and veg­gies) will ensure a body sat­u­rated in highly bio-available, water­borne nutri­tion. A body well-watered in this way can expect Appro­pri­a­tion, Assim­i­la­tion and Elim­i­na­tion to work with con­sum­mate ease. High water-content foods rich in fibre will fill you for less, leave you sat­is­fied with sta­bilised blood sugar, increased energy, bet­ter clar­ity of thought, fewer mood swings and a twin­kle in your eye.