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Chapter 20
Introduction to Nutrition and Diet

     TO BEGIN with, I would like to describe a few observations and experiments which demonstrate the importance of proper nutrition to general health and prove faulty nutrition as being an underlying cause of disease.

     Several authors on nutrition think that, in modern times, cattle are better fed than people. Without knowing it, many vegetarians today are "starving". The protein content of most vegetables and fruits went down in the last ten to twenty years and we would have to make great efforts to bring it back to normal or even near normal. Here is an example: Corn has been allowed to fall in its protein content from 9.5 to 8.5 per cent in the last ten years. A few examinations of various vegetables have shown that by the use of artificial fertilizer and DDT spraying, the K-content as well as the protein content went down considerably while the sodium content increased. On the other hand, agricultural experts have raised the protein content of clover and alfalfa on a pilot farm in Vista, California; the protein percentage of alfalfa was raised from 12[1/2] per cent to 32 per cent - equal almost to meat.

     The diminution of proteins in fruits and vegetables necessitated the addition of animal proteins to the diet, as the patients weakened after four to six weeks, especially those with cancer in the intestinal tract, those in the advanced age groups and those who were very far reduced in their body substance, especially the muscular system.

     I do not intend to discuss all problematic questions of the dietary regime, such as, for instance, the intake of sufficient protein to cover the increased loss of that substance. In practice, I have seen that most of the advanced or terminal cases refuse a higher intake of protein, especially cooked meats, fish, eggs, etc. Many of them have a special desire for raw food, but refuse even finely chopped raw meat or fresh raw egg stirred in orange juice. I observed that almost all patients with a higher protein intake could not be saved. In some cases I observed a much quicker growth of the cancer or metastases.

     It seems that cattle fodder is supervised more carefully than human nutrition. There are interesting experiments made on rats, which show the following: When rats are feeding from organically grown soil, they have perfectly healthy organs through many generations. Other groups of rats, living on ordinary food in the United States and Britain developed, within one generation, all the degenerative diseases and pathology known in human beings.¹⁴¹

     Rats feeding on large quantities of organically grown substances have been found to have better fur, to be more peaceful among themselves and less aggressive towards other animals. Other experiments showed that rats susceptible to cancer showed a decline in incidence of cancer when given proper nutrition from the time of their birth.

     Dr. Pottenger's experiments on cats showed that cats fed common food, without raw substances and raw milk, became nervous, sick and even homosexual. Several weeks' treatment with raw milk and raw vegetables returned them to normalcy!

     Dr. Biskind¹⁴² made a special study on DDT wherever it is used and presented in detail the damages on the human body. "We have found as much as 18 parts per million in butter on the New York market and Department of Agriculture reports indicate that very much higher values are not at all improbable. In addition, I have seen several instances in which exposures to DDT sharply increased the insulin requirements of diabetes." (This refers to the impairment of liver and pancreas.)

     Among other clinical symptoms of poisonings, he reported: "one patient had signs of severe liver involvement - was completely improved when all DDT-containing foods were removed."

     Dr. Biskind's and D. F. M. Pottenger, Jr.'s observations showed that in the years from 1945 to 1950, blood cholesterol in his patients "was increased", actually caused by newer insecticides.

     In experiments of the Federal Food and Drug Administration with insecticides "five days after feeding showed the insecticides in the gizzard, the liver and the kidney, the tissues of the heart and brain and sciatic nerve fibre."

     With larger doses, F.D.A. scientists have also shown that it is possible to store many times the amount in the body-fat that would be acutely fatal intravenously in a single dose. Since DDT mobilizes from the body fat into the blood stream, the intravenous dose is the logical comparative one. Cumulative intoxication from extremely small amounts in food can thus be as dangerous as direct exposure to much larger amounts.

     "The soil is the meeting place of the living matter at the surface and of the mineral matter beneath the surface, and of the atmosphere above and the solid rock underneath. Essentially all living matter depends upon it, directly or indirectly - is, in fact, a part of those very processes that produce the soil upon which life depends. Plants and soils have grown up together, each partly a cause of the other. Man has somewhat the same relationship to the soils. He finds some are better suited to his needs than others. He may change them either for better or for worse."¹⁴³

     Soil science has a contribution to make toward the future, but certainly not by itself. Since science itself has become so specialized, it is difficult to see science as a whole and its relationship to politics, art, business, and agriculture. More and more, modern education seems to make people specialists - members of a group or clique - and leads them away from the masses, from real democracy. The kind of science that is super-specialized cannot lead people to better relationships with each other and the land, nor can so-called "pure" science, which is too cold or too snobbish to face the real problems. Some see a danger that farmers as well as other people may turn their problems over to some special group, some special bureaucracy, rather than to think out the problems for themselves and make their decisions by the democratic method.

     There exist abundant supplies of nearly all natural resources in the United States and especially of soil. Enough injury to the soil has taken place to indicate a pressing need for adjustments of agricultural people to the soil upon which they live. Since there are many soils these relationships are too complicated to be resolved by a few simple slogans or programs.

     The modern technique of canned food goes back to the application of heat by the attempts of Apperts who tried to gain the award, established by Napoleon in 1795, for the best plan for "food conservation for his army". In 1804, he published his work. In 1810, Peter Durand received the first English patent for the metal can. In 1841 the first factory for canned food was founded in Norway. Later in 1845 the first factory in Dessau, Germany, was established. In 1873, Robert Koch introduced the autoclave. In 1859, factories for canned food were set up in the United States. In 1879, the first cans for sardines were made in Stavanger, Norway. In 1937, the production of canned vegetables in the United States amounted to 189,919,000 crates; there also were 63,744,000 crates of fruits and 12,300,000 crates of fish. The technique of frozen food was introduced by C. von Linde (1931). The technique of conservation is ancient. It begins with the use of salt for meat and fish and vegetables, and the use of sugar for fruit. It became more developed in our modern biochemistry.¹⁴⁴

     The canned food industry has grown into an importarit factor in our modern civilization. Thus, the nutrition and feeding of families has been put on a mass production basis. The cans stay in the foreground and the mistakes in that respect, no matter how insignificant they may appear, became an ever-increasing calamity in our present day society.

     W. C. Kinney, of Vista, California, recently produced on his organic farm apricots on composted, mineralized soil that contain the following analysis:

     The increased protein content also has many disadvantages.¹⁴⁵ Economic pressure, in terms of lower actual cash returns for the farmer's crops, has brought a new element into the planning and thinking of some of our top agronomists. The grower's pay for his year's work is being considerably reduced through the toll taken by pests and disease. So the emphasis is being shifted, at least in some quarters, to the development of resistant plants and to biological controls instead of poisons.

     Along with this trend there is just beginning to be a realization of the fact that increasing numbers of consumers are willing to pay top prices for really high quality foods. In this regard, the most advanced research shows that "high protein content" by itself is not necessarily the answer. Work with the amino acids has shown, among other things, that high protein brought about by excessive nitrogen fertilizing can actually lessen rather than increase the nutritional value of grains and vegetables. At the same time, scentifically managed organic fertilizing can give better results, in terms of food values, even with a relatively lower protein content.

     In the New York World-Telegram & Sun, May 8, 1957, an article reported that "Rockland County's strawberry crop is ruined, the rest of the county's $2,000,000 fruit crop is threatened and virtually every bee in the county has been killed by the Department of Agriculture's massive aerial spray of DDT, the state agriculture agent of the county charged today."

     In my opinion, it was not the one spraying that caused such disastrous damage, as the previous 12 years of increased spraying with increased poisons produced an accumulated toxic and pathological condition in soil, animals and human beings. I called it: "our External Metabolism" (See page 15, line 1).

     The article concluded as follows: "DDT is, and is recognized and admitted by the defendants to be, a delayed-action, cumulative poison such as will inevitably cause irreparable injury and death to all living things, including human beings, animals, birds, insects and the predators and parasites of harmful insects, if ingested, inhaled or brought into contact therewith in sufficient quantities or over a sufficient period."

     "Some human beings, including some of the plaintiffs, have already absorbed ... and now irremediably retain in their bodies an accumulated amount of DDT which is toxic and pathological, so that the threatened spraying upon their persons will endanger their health and lives, and the threatened spraying on their gardens and other cultivated lands will make it unsafe for them, this year, or even thereafter, to eat the produce therefrom."

20.1  Nutrition (deterioration)

     The preparation of the juices is described in the prescription booklet. There, the physician will find an outline of the diet as it is used at the present time and also a description of the preparation of vegetables. The prescription booklet (Chapter 33) also contains an outline of the medication without indicating the exact doses. Instead of that, one cancer case is presented in full detail, from beginning to end. I believe that the physician will thus have a much clearer idea of how the medical treatment can be applied in the best manner. The details of the agriculture of foods and vegetables cannot be given in extenso in this volume. Space will only permit a few brief chapters to deal with the problems of artificial fertilizers, organic gardening methods, the poisons of spraying and all other factors damaging to foods and vegetables in their preparation and distribution.

     In 100 grams fresh substance Ash content of the edible portion of some common foods (modified from Lusk)

     For the choice of fruits and vegetables , it was most important to know the potassium content as well as the sodium content.¹⁴⁶ The table shows that the potato has the lowest sodium content, of 19 milligrams in 100 grams of fresh substance, while the potassium content is 440 milligrams, or 32 times as much. The content of the apple is fifteen to 125, or about eight and one-half times as much.

     The accuracy of this table is quite uncertain, as the vegetables, fruit and milk show quite different figures at different times. The more our agriculture turns away from natural methods, the more the contents of fruits and vegetables are changed: the sodium content rises, the potassium content diminishes.

     In the near future, hospitals and cancer clinics and clinics for chronic degenerative diseases will be more or less forced to use fruits and vegetables grown by organic gardening methods, or we physicians will see that our results and therapeutic successes of the treatments will be fewer and fewer.

     The poisoned soil will not only help to increase degenerative diseases, but it will also reduce the healing power of the body when brought under special conditions where it functioned favorably previously.

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