Chapter 18 Chapter Eighteen

Since the 20th century, people's scientific understanding of diet and its impact on health has made great progress.The development of nutrition, like other sciences, has gone through a slow and arduous process.A lot of research work has been done.Some research results have been published in some conferences and journals.After many discussions, repeated experiments, and repeated inspections, it is a pity that these things are only carried out among professionals, and the general public does not understand.Of course, the layman gets a taste of some of this through news reports and magazine articles, as well as the writings of authors who try to do some serious popularization.But these voices are drowned out by the louder voices of the phonies and bandwagoners.It is very easy to tell a truth or half-truth and then exaggerate its importance regardless of other aspects of the truth.The result may be exciting, a deceitful superstition, but so far removed from the truth that it can only be a health threat, not a panacea.

Superstition diet therapy is a good example.Some diseases are often accompanied by nausea and loss of appetite, which naturally requires a temporary diet.In the light of this fact, it is tempting to think that dieting itself has some magical therapeutic value, even for people who are in good health, but this is quite wrong.In fact, a long-term diet by a healthy person can only be harmful.This weakens the body and weakens its resistance to disease, and only the very strong can withstand prolonged abstinence.Yet despite all the medical proof, this superstition persists. Hereward Carrington wrote many books on spiritualism and similar subjects.His 1908 648-page book, Vitality, Diet and Nutrition, may be the best guide to this once-touring therapy.Another advocate of dieting was Upton Sinclair, who was even more assertive than Carrington.In his book "Diet Therapy" written in 1911, he told people that long-term starvation can resist tuberculosis, syphilis, asthma, cancer, liver disease, Bright's disease, colds, and even treat movement disorders caused by nerve damage!

Sinclair wrote in his "Book of Life", "I have heard of two or three cases of dieting deaths, but I feel sure that their deaths were not due to dieting, and even if they were not dieting, they would die." die too." He went on to say, "I don't want to make wild guesses as to what percentage of dying patients in hospitals would be saved if doctors were to starve them of food..." Nothing could be more scientifically ignorant than that that's it.Sinclair could "feel for sure," but it never occurred to him to ask the opinion of someone who knew the subject.Apparently, he didn't think professional physicians were good at it.

Sinclair was, at one point, a Fletcher pie.It was at the Battle Creek Sanitarium that he met Horace Fletcher.Fletcher is the author of The Fletcher Law: How I Look Young at 60.This book, like his earlier works, was a hit when it was published in 1913. The motto of the Fletchers is "Nature will punish those who refuse to eat slowly." Meaning, eat when you're hungry, choose the food you crave most, and chew each bite 30 to 70 times .Swallowing food without chewing it into a liquid and letting it "go down on its own" is bad for digestion, Fletcher said.Even if it is soup and milk, it should be "chewed" over and over in the mouth until it is completely mixed with saliva before swallowing.John Rockefeller was an ardent Fletcherite, and the philosopher William James experimented with the method for three months.James later confirmed, "I had to stop, it almost killed me."

Now there are still some Fletcher pies here and there.There was a recent drawing on the Sunday Comic Page, "Being Bitter," of a housewife listening to a speech and saying to her husband, "The speaker said that if everyone chewed their food rightly, there wouldn't be all these wars." ..." There are dozens of weird theories about something that can't be eaten with something.For example, it is believed that eating fruit with milk is harmful because the acid makes the milk go bad, when in fact the milk encounters acid as soon as it enters the stomach.Milk and fish are also things that this strange theory often reminds people that they should not be eaten together.According to "Shanghai Pai", eating meat and potatoes together is equally harmful.

Regarding the "Shanghai School", it is worth spending a little time to talk about it.The late Dr. William Hay founded this school of theory.He holds a medical degree from the City University of New York (class of 1891) and ran a private sanitarium in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania from 1932 until his death.He published the famous textbook "From Food to Health" in 1933, which expounded his views in detail. According to Dr. Hai, almost all physical diseases are caused by "acidosis".Acidosis, in turn, is caused by: (1) eating too much protein; (2) eating too much impure food, such as white bread; (3) dietary protein combined with carbohydrates; (4) Food stays in the intestine for more than 24 hours after eating.He also recommends frequent diets, which he doesn't seem to know cause acidosis.

Dr. Hay's argument against eating meat and potatoes at the same time is interesting.He believes that alkali is needed to digest starch, and acid is needed to digest protein, but "the stomach cannot be acid and alkali at the same time".In fact, most foods contain a mixture of protein and starch.But these facts are too complicated for self-proclaimed diet experts.It would be nicer to invent new recipes that avoid harmful concoctions, such as Hay's Jolly Ginger Ale, Light Cocktail, Easter Bunny Salad, and Wrapped Asparagus, as described in the doctor's cookbook. ". There are also many strange theories about forbidden eating of certain foods.A strange theory that people are fanatical and superstitious recently was created by Melvin Page.Page is a dentist and director of the Biochemistry Research Foundation in St. Petersburg, Florida. When he practiced medicine in Muskegon, Mich., in 1940, the government stopped him from selling a drug called Sicklep, which was said to cure everything from cataracts to cancer.Dr. Page is against milk, among other things.In his self-published 1949 book Degeneration and Regeneration, he wrote, "He (man) and certain ants are the only creatures, so far as I know, that eat the excrement of animals after weaning."

Page believes that milk is good for babies before weaning, but after weaning, milk is a dangerous food that often causes colds, sinusitis, colitis and cancer.Wisconsin, by population, kills more people from cancer than any other state, and Wisconsin leads in milk production, the doctor noted.If we don't stop drinking the secretions of this animal, and reform our diets along the lines of other wonderful recipes suggested by Dr. Page, he fears that the Anglo-Saxons will continue to degenerate faster than some "primitive" races (he Which races are not indicated) faster. The important principle of "fasting something" is originally a kind of vegetarianism.This is especially prevalent among Hindus and some mystical groups such as the Trappist Friars, as well as Protestant sects such as Seventh Day Resurrectionists.Tolsca, Gandhi and Shaw were all vegetarians.Upton Sinclair, at various times, believed in the paradox of fasting all kinds of food, and wrote a book in defense of vegetarianism.

But vegans don't quite agree. "Laco-ovo vegetarians" like to eat milk, eggs and cheese, but stricter sects see these foods as meat.There are even people who call themselves "fruit pies" who only eat fruit.These factions formed the loose Vegan League of America and joined the earlier International Vegetarian Union of Europe.Now New York City publishes the monthly magazine "American Vegetarian". We don't have to discuss the moral reasons for not eating meat, but the medical reasons do.Vegetarians always point out that meat produces harmful deposits of uric acid and necroptin in the body, which will inevitably cause disease.Strange to say, none of the doctors discovered what "necroptin" is.This kind of stuff sounds scary, but it's scientifically meaningless.As for uric acid, increased uric acid in the blood is indeed associated with conditions such as gout, but only because the body itself produces too much acid.The myth that dietary uric acid is the cause of these ailments has long been disproved by nutrition science.

No physician denies that it is possible, but in fact difficult, and unnecessary, to obtain a meat-free diet containing all the nutrients necessary for health.Of the various amino acids that are essential to health, about 10 must be supplied by the foods people eat.It is very difficult to obtain these 10 amino acids from plant foods, and the lack of one will cause malnutrition.Amino acids, on the other hand, are products of the digestion of protein. When meat is added to the diet, some vegetarians attribute the cause of cancer to meat, based on vastly distorted statistics.There are also some weird theories that even healthy people should eat a high-protein diet!Read Daniel Munro's 1948 book, Longer Lives.He said in the book that Methuselah lived to be 969 years old because he ate mainly meat.

"Raw food" fanatics are even more extreme than vegetarians, and they object to eating cooked "dead" food.Jerome Rodell of Emmos, Pennsylvania, wrote that "no animal eats cooked food," and one would certainly agree with that statement.But he went on to write, "Man is the only animal that eats cooked food, and it is a well-known fact that cats do better on raw than cooked meat." Rodell was a wire manufacturer and leader of what became known as the "organic farming" movement in the United States.According to Rodell, cooking not only deprives food of some of its nutritional value, it also loses its health value if the food is grown in soil that has been destroyed by chemical fertilizers.Farming had to be "left to itself." Rodale claimed that the soil, too, was like a living organism, and only animal or plant fertilizers could maintain its fertility.Soil and nutrient experts tell us that if plants are to grow, they have essentially the same mineral and vitamin content as they do in "fertile" soil.A soil that is not fertile enough produces few and small plants, and if the soil is completely exhausted nothing will grow.But, in Rodale's view, the use of "artificial" fertilizers and sprays has caused almost national health disorders, including cancer.He has written a number of books (self-published) on this subject. His 1948 book, The Organic Front, outlined his claims.In addition, he edited three monthly journals: Organic Gardening, Organic Farmer, and Preventive Measures, the latter devoted to disease prevention through organic farming.These kinds of magazines carry a lot of advertisements promoting sunflower seeds.Rodale believes that sunflower seeds are an amazing food, and adding sunflower seeds to the diet will greatly improve people's health. The fanatical superstition of German physiognomy founded by Rudolf Steiner is closely related to the organic farming movement.This man has already been mentioned in Chapter Fourteen of this volume in the introduction to his work on Atlantis and Lemuria.Phenomenologists have gone further than Rodel, arguing that the earth is indeed a living organism that "breathes" twice a day, and that its soil is "alive" too, not in a metaphorical way. "Biodynamic farming" was developed by Steiner at his "spiritual school" in Dornach (near Basel), Switzerland.Dornage is now the center of the physiognomy world.The city has its own strange architecture, and its inhabitants are almost exclusively of the school of physiognomy.His two principal researchers were Lily Collisco (whose work has not yet been translated) and Ellenfred Pfeiffer.Many of Pfeiffer's books are available in English.His Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening was published by Physiognomy in 1938, and The Face of the Land and the Destiny of Man was published by Rodale in 1940. In essence, the anthropomorphic school's approach to soil, just like their approach to the human body, is a variant of homeopathy (see Steiner's English translation of "An Outline of Physiognomic Medical Research", published in 1939. Parasites are treated properly, cancer can be cured by absorbing "ether force" and strengthening "soul").They believe that adding some mysterious agent to the soil can improve the "power" of the soil.Such preparations, like homeopathic "pure" medicines, can be diluted to such an extent that none of the compound substances are present. In 1923, Lily Collisco experimented with spraying a gradually diluted salt solution on germinated wheat.She found that when the saline solution was diluted to the 10th and 12th decimal places, its effect disappeared, but further dilutions made it work again.Phenomenologist Hermann Popelbaum wrote of this question in the December 1950 issue of Organic Gardening: "A simple calculation shows that, in such a highly dilute solution, no Any amount of dissolved 'substance' that can be weighed is left. Therefore, this effect can be called non-quantifiable potency, that is, it is not based on the physical presence of the substance salt in the solvent. Therefore, the effect played by this substance is only could be of a motive nature." Dr. Pfeiffer was born in Munich in 1899 and graduated from the University of Basel.He received an honorary degree from the Hahnmann School of Medicine in Philadelphia for discovering that a drop of blood mixed with copper chloride forms crystals, and for inventing a method for diagnosing human disease based on the various crystalline forms.In the 1930s, he ran a biochemical research laboratory of the Physiognomy School in Dornage, and at the same time ran an 800-acre experimental farm in Lovrendale, the Netherlands. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940, he fled with his family and came to the United States. He started a model farm in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and later purchased his own near Chester, New York.There he made what he considers his most significant discovery—a special mixture of strains (the exact recipe is a closely guarded secret).He claims the mixture can turn ordinary trash into a valuable organic fertilizer.Just add one tablespoon of bacteria to every ton of garbage, and after a week the garbage will become a high-grade compost with no smell. Recently, a company was set up in Oakland, California, funded by a Buffalo waste paper owner.The company buys city trash, processes it with Pfeiffer's wonder bacteria (which he has licensed to supply the bacteria from his biochemistry lab in Spring Valley, N.Y.), and sells it as organic fertilizer.Experiments conducted by Pfeiffer showed that vegetables grown with this mixed fertilizer were 25% heavier than those grown with ordinary fertilizers, and the vitamin A content was equivalent to 1 to 3 times that of vegetables applied with ordinary fertilizers.Grains grown in treated soil are higher in protein.Even sandy land can be turned into fertile farmland if there is water, Pfeiffer said.Details of this revolutionary plan can be seen in the article "Urban Garbage Is Gold" in the May 31, 1952, issue of Collier's magazine.But the article neglects to inform the reader of the physiognomic perspective that forms the basis of Pfeiffer's research. There is currently a very popular strange theory in the United States related to the character of Guy Lord Houser.His book "The Way of Youth and Longevity" (1950) was serialized in Hearst's newspapers after being abbreviated by "Reader's Digest", which is better than "Bon Appetit and the Art of Youth" by competitor Lilord Cordell. Books sold better, despite the fact that the latter looked younger and prettier than the former. Hauser was born in Tubingen, Germany in 1895, and came to the United States at the age of 16, suffering from hip tuberculosis.A hospital in Chicago concluded he was terminally ill and sent him by boat to Europe to die.Houser wrote, "There, in the snow-covered mountains, a miracle took place." An old man who visited his home said to him, "If you continue to eat dead food, you will surely die. Only living food can have life." A living body." Young Hauser heeded his advice and began eating fruits and vegetables.His hip bone healed. Hauser was amazed by the changes in himself, so he developed a strong interest in natural therapy.Benedict Luster, the aforementioned naturopathic advocate, offered him dietary advice.Houser switched from naturopathy to massage therapy.This therapy is a branch of massage therapy in Chicago.He was cured at last.He returned to the United States in the early twenties, changed his name and surname, and began to open a small clinic on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, providing massage therapy for people.He had no formal education, either in medicine or nutrition, aside from a degree from the Chicago College of Massage Therapy. Eventually, Houser gave up massage therapy to devote himself to writing and lecturing.His immediate success brought him to Hollywood in 1927.His advice on diet quickly caught on among moviegoers.His most ardent disciple was Greta Garbo.She frequented him and maintained a friendship for many years.Later, his ideas became as popular in Britain and Europe as in Hollywood.Mrs Elsie Mende was an ardent supporter of him, and until her death at the age of 94, she kept the dragonfly upside down as a form of therapy.The Duchess of Windsor was also an ardent supporter, and she wrote the preface to the French edition of his bestseller, Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Sir Corbina Wright, and There was Paulette Goddard, other notables in what Houser calls "my people." What exactly is Houser's therapy?It's basically a natural remedy, especially focusing on what Houser calls five essential foods: skim milk, brewer's yeast, malt, yoghurt and brown sugar paste."Eating any one of these a day will roughly make you five years younger," he wrote. Although these foods are sold primarily in health food stores in major cities, general grocery stores are also stocking them.There are more and more people who worship Hauser, so that the sales of this kind of food have increased greatly.However, the efficacy of these refined foods has become a big problem.The most favorable opinion in medicine is that these foods provide what people can get from ordinary foods for less money.For example, yoghurt, a specially fermented milk, is no more beneficial than whole milk, but is much more expensive. Brown sugar paste is the dark, sticky residue left after sugar has been sufficiently refined.According to Hauser.It has huge therapeutic benefits.His works pointed out that brown sugar paste can cure insomnia, nervousness, women's menstrual discomfort, baldness and low blood pressure.Houser claimed.It can also restore gray hair to its original color, help digestion, prevent aging changes, improve the function of various glands, and strengthen the heart.Government nutrition experts dismissed the claims as "false and misleading." In addition to earning income from lectures, radio and television appearances, published books, and hosting a "Guy Lord Houser's Diet Digest," Houser is a partner in Modern Products, a Milwaukee firm for more than 20 years.From this company one could buy the special foods and medicines that Houser advocated in his writings and lectures.In order to advertise such products, he repeatedly got into trouble with the government. Due to the magnanimity of the courts, the government encountered great resistance in banning the sale of strange foods and secret medicines.For example, it took the FDA four years to restrict 15,000 salesmen from going door-to-door selling "nutrition stones."Nutristones, an inexpensive concoction of alfalfa, parsley and watercress, are said to cure patients of 57 different ailments for $200 a year.After arguing, the government's intervention was ineffective and only forced the manufacturers of "Nutritional Stones" to be a little cautious in promoting their curative effects. It could take several volumes to discuss all the supplements, vitamin products, mineral salts, and other amazing foods that have made the promoters rich in recent years.One manufacturer even puts various vitamins in the soap, which is said to be as effective as the hormones in the cream, or the magnets in some razor blades.It seems that chlorophyll has become the latest medicine to cure all diseases.