How and When to Be Your Own Doctor by Moser and Solomon (best classic books to read .TXT) 📖

had nearly as much success with this approach as talented naturopaths. Sometimes, long fasting can regenerate a pancreas. It is far better to avoid creating this disease!

The dietary management of hypoglycemia requires that not only refined but also unrefined sugars and starches with a high glycemic index be removed from the diet. (The glycemic index measures the ease with which the starch is converted into glucose in the body, and estimates the amount of insulin needed to balance it out.) This means no sugar, no honey, no white flour, no whole grains sweetened with honey, no sweet fruits such as watermelons, bananas, raisins, dates or figs. Potatoes are too readily converted into sugar.

Jerusalem artichokes are a good substitute.

People with hypoglycemia can often control their symptoms with frequent small meals containing vegetable protein every two hours.

When a non-sweet fruit is eaten such as an apple, it should be eaten with some almonds or other nut or seed that slows the absorption of fruit sugar. Hypoglycemics can improve their condition with vitamins and food supplements. See the next chapter.

Allergies to foods and environmental irritants are frequently triggered by low blood sugar. Mental conditions are also triggered by low blood sugar levels, frequently contributing to or causing a cycle of acting out behavior accompanied by destruction of property and interpersonal violence, as well as psychosis and bouts of depression. It is not possible to easily deal with the resulting behavior problems unless the hypoglycemia is controlled.

Unfortunately most institutions such as mental hospitals and jails serve large amounts of sugar and starch and usually caffeinated beverages, with a high availability of soda pop, candy, and cigarettes at concessions. If the diet were drastically improved, the drugs given to control behavior in mental hospitals would be much more effective at a lower dose, or unnecessary.

The insulin-cycle overworked pancreas may eventually not be able to secrete enough enzymes to allow for the efficient digestion of foods high in protein. As stated earlier, poor protein digestion leads to a highly toxic condition from putrefied protein in the intestines.

This condition is alleviated by eliminating animal proteins from the diet and taking digestive aids such as pancreatin pills with meals to assist in the digestion of vegetable proteins.

Food Combining And “Healthfood Junkfood.”

This brings us to a topic I call healthfood junkfood. Many people improve their diet, eliminating meat and chemicalized food in favor of whole grains and organically grown foods, but they then proceed to make these otherwise good foods into virtual junkfood by preparing them incorrectly. In my travels, I’ve noticed this same thing happens everywhere on Earth. What should be health-producing dietaries are ruined by frying, salting and sugaring.

Healthfood junkfoods include organically grown potato chips deep fried in cold pressed organic unsaturated canola oil (made rancid by frying) sprinkled with natural sea salt; organically grown oat and nut granola roasted with cold-pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid by roasting) hideously sweetened with honey; carrot cake made with rancid whole wheat flour, cold pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid by baking), honey, and cream cheese (salted); whole wheat cookies (stale, rancid flour) sweetened with honey, made with vegetable oil baked at high heat (rancid); whole wheat pizza vegetarian style with lots of soy cheese; whole wheat pizza vegan style with lots of real raw milk cheese; organically grown corn chips deep fried in cold pressed vegetable oil with or without natural sea salt, yogurts made from powdered milk without an active culture of beneficial bacteria and covered with highly sugared fruits, etc. These foods may well represent an improvement over the average American diet, but they still are not healthy foods, and should never be used in a diet for a sick person. Nor are they worthy of a person attempting to maximize health.

The problem with healthfood junkfoods is not their major ingredients, but how they were combined and processed and adulterated. Remember, fats, animal or vegetable, subjected to high heat become indigestible and toxic and make anything they’re cooked with indigestible; salt is a toxic drug; cheese, hard enough to digest as it is, when raised to high temperatures as it is when making pizza, becomes virtually indigestible and cheese inevitably contains a lot of butterfat which, though saturated animal fat, when raised to high temperatures, still becomes slightly rancid. And all these foods represent indigestible combinations.

My clients almost never believe me when I first explain the idea of food combining. They think if it goes in one end, comes out the other, and they don’t feel any unpleasant symptoms in between, then it was digested. But bad food combinations have a cumulative degenerative effect over a long period of time. When the symptoms arrive the victim never associates the food combination with the symptom because it seems to them that they’ve always been eating the food.

Mainstream nutritionists have brainwashed the public into thinking that we should have a representative serving from each of the “four basic food groups” at each and every meal, plus a beverage and a desert. Or, as my husband Steve is fond of quipping, a “balanced meal” has four colors on every plate: something red, something green, something white and something yellow. But the balanced meal is a gastronomic catastrophe that can only be processed by the very young with high digestive vitality, the exceptionally vital of any age, people with cast iron stomachs which usually refers to their good heredity, and those who are very physically active.

Few seem to realize that each type of food requires specific and different digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach, and intestine.

Carbohydrates, fats, proteins—each requires differing acid or alkaline environments in order to be digested. Proteins require an acid environment. Starch digestion requires an alkaline environment.

When foods in complex combinations are presented to the stomach all together, like a meal with meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, bread, butter, a glass of milk, plus a starchy sweet desert, followed by coffee or tea, the stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine are overwhelmed, resulting in the fermentation of the sugars and starches, and the putrefaction of the proteins, and poor digestion of the whole. It is little wonder that most people feel so tired after a large meal and need several cups of strong coffee to be able to even get up from the table. They have just presented their digestive tract with an immensely difficult and for some an impossible task.

For the most efficient digestion, the body should be presented with one simple food at a time, the one bowl concept, easily achieved by adherence to the old saying, “one food at a meal is the ideal.” An example of this approach would be eating fruits for breakfast, a plain cereal grain for lunch, and vegetables for supper. If you can’t eat quite that simply, then proper food combining rules should be followed to minimize digestive difficulty, maximize the adsorption of nutrients from your food, and reduce or eliminate the formation of toxemia, and of course foul gas.

In general, fruit should be eaten alone unless you happen to be hypoglycemic or diabetic in which case fruit should be eaten with small quantities of a vegetable protein such as nuts, or yogurt and/or cheese if able to digest dairy. Starches should be eaten with vegetables, which means that a well combined meal would include a grain such as rice, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, corn, wheat, rye, oats, spelt, potatoes, or starchy winter squash combined with raw or cooked vegetables. Protein foods such as meat, eggs, beans, lentils, tofu, split peas, should be combined with vegetables, raw or cooked. But protein should never be combined with starches. The most popular North American snacks and meals always have a starch/protein combination, for example: meat and potatoes, hamburger in a bun, hot dog with bun, burrito with meat or cheese, meat sandwiches, etc. It is little wonder that intestinal gas is accepted as normal, and that over time these hard to digest combinations eventually cause health problems that demand attention.

Another sure fire way to ruin any food, including the very best available is to eat in the presence of negative emotions generated by yourself or others. Negative emotions include fear, anger, frustration, envy, resentment, etc. The digestive tract is immediately responsive to stress and or negative thoughts. It becomes paralyzed in negative emotional states; any foods eaten are poorly digested, causing toxemia.

It is natural for a person who has lost a loved one or suffered a great loss of any kind to lose their appetite for a period of time.

This reaction is prosurvival, because while grieving, the body is griped by powerful negative emotions. There are people who, under stress or when experiencing a loss, eat ravenously in an attempt to comfort themselves. If this goes on for long the person can expect to create a serious illness of some kind.

Individual sensitivity to this type of overeating is dependent upon genetics and personality and who is generating the negative emotions. Self generated negative emotions are very difficult to avoid. If you are unable to change your own emotional tone or that of others around you, then it is important to eat very lightly, eat only easily digested foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, raw juices, steamed vegetables, and small servings of whole grains, nuts and seeds.

Diets To Heal The Critically Ill

A critically ill person is someone who could expire at any moment; therapeutic interventions are racing against death. Can the body repair itself enough before some essential function ceases altogether? If there already exists too much damage to vital organs the person will die. If there remains sufficient organ function to support life, enough vital force to power those functions, and a will to live, the body may heal itself if helped by the correct therapeutic approach. But the therapy does not do the healing; the body does that by itself—if it can. This reality is also true of allopathic medicine.

I believe fasting is the therapy that almost invariably gives a critically ill person their very best chance of recovery. If a patient dies while fasting they almost certainly would have died anyway, and if death comes while fasting, it will be more comfortable, with less pain, and with more mental clarity.

Critically ill people may have, among other things, any of the following diagnoses: advanced cancer, advanced aids, heart failure, very high blood pressure, kidney failure, advanced liver disease, advanced emphysema, pneumonia or other catastrophic infections, especially those that seem unresponsive to antibiotics, strokes, emboli, sclerotic vessels as found in arteriosclerosis, severe nerve degeneration interfering with nerve transmission to vital organs.

Treating the critically ill does not have to be an all or nothing, ideological choice between holistic medicine and AMA style medicine.

It is important for the critically ill and their families to know that if they use standard medical treatment such as drugs or surgery, these measures can and should be combined with natural healing methods. It is always desirable to quit all addicting substances, start a whole foods diet, (as light as possible), and add meganutrition (supplements) to the medical doctor’s treatments.

Few medical doctors are so arrogantly partisan as to assert that natural measures will do any harm as long as the MD is still allowed to prescribe as they please.

Holistic support will not only lessen the side effects of the medical treatments but will speed up healing and often reduce the required dose of prescribed drugs. I have had several clients with cancer who chose to have surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but stayed on a raw food diet and took high doses of supplements throughout the treatment. These people amazed the attending physician by feeling good with little if any fatigue, no hair loss, or flu symptoms. The same can be true of other conditions.

Food In The Order Of Digestive Difficulty Individual digestive weaknesses and allergies