North American Diet: Why People Get
Sick!
Excerpt from the Health Book:
How and When to be Your Own Doctor
North American Diet:
Why People Get Sick
This is the Theory of Toxemia. A healthy body struggles
continually to
purify itself of poisons that are inevitably produced
while going about its business of digesting food, moving
about, and repairing itself. The body is a marvelous
creation, a carbon, oxygen combustion machine,
constantly burning fuel, disposing of the waste products
of combustion, and constantly rebuilding tissue by
replacing worn out, dead cells with new, fresh ones.
Every seven years virtually every cell in the body is
replaced, some types of cells having a faster turnover
rate than others, which means that over a seven year
period several hundred pounds of dead cells must be
digested (autolyzed) and eliminated.
All by itself this would be a lot of waste disposal for
the body to handle. Added to that waste load are
numerous mild poisons created during proper digestion.
And added to that can be an enormous burden of waste
products created as the body's attempts to digest the
indigestible, or those tasty items I've heard called
"fun food."
Add to that burden the ruinous effects of just plain
overeating. The waste products of digestion, of
indigestion, of cellular breakdown and the general
metabolism are all poisonous to one degree or another.
Another word for this is toxic. If these toxins were
allowed to remain and accumulate in the body, it would
poison itself and die in agony. So the body has a
processing system to eliminate toxins. And when that
system does break down the body does die in agony, as
from liver or kidney failure.
Detoxification and the body
The organs of detoxification remove things from the
body's system, but these two vital organs should not be
confused with what hygienists call the secondary organs
of elimination, such as the large intestine, lungs,
bladder and the skin, because none of these other
eliminatory organs are supposed to purify the body of
toxins. But when the body is faced with toxemia, the
secondary organs of elimination are frequently pressed
into this duty and the consequences are the symptoms we
call illness.
If toxins weaken the body's immune response, cancer. The
liver and the kidneys, the two heroic organs of
detoxification, are the most important ones; these
jointly act as filters to purify the blood. Hygienists
pay a lot of attention to these organs, the liver
especially.
In an ideal world, the liver and kidneys would keep up
with their job for 80 years or more before even
beginning to tire. In this ideal world, the food would
of course, be very nutritious and free of pesticide
residues, the air and water would be pure, people would
not denature their food and turn it into junk.
In this perfect world everyone would get moderate
exercise into old age, and live virtually without
stress. In this utopian vision, the average healthy
productive life span would approach a century, entirely
without using food supplements or vitamins. In this
world doctors would have next to no work other than
repairing traumatic injuries, because everyone would be
healthy. But this is not the way it is.
In our less-than-ideal world virtually everything we eat
is denatured, processed, fried, salted, sweetened,
preserved; thus more stress is placed on the liver and
kidneys than nature designed them to handle. Except for
a few highly fortunate individuals blessed with an
incredible genetic endowment that permits them to live
to age 99 on moose meat, well-larded white flour
biscuits, coffee with evaporated milk and sugar, brandy
and cigarettes (we've all heard of someone like this),
most peoples' liver and kidneys begin to break down
prematurely. Thus doctoring has become a financially
rewarding profession.
Most people overburden their organs of elimination by
eating whatever they feel like eating whenever they feel
like it. Or, they irresponsibly eat whatever is served
to them by a mother, wife, institution or cook because
doing so is easy or expected. Eating is a very habitual
and unconscious activity; frequently we continue to eat
as adults whatever our mother fed us as a child. I
consider it unsurprising that when people develop the
very same disease conditions as their parents. they
wrongly assume the cause is genetic inheritance, when
actually it was just because they were putting their
feet under the same table as their parents.
Toxemia also comes about from following the wrongheaded
recommendations of allopathic-inspired nutritional texts
and licensed dietitians. For example, people believe
they should eat one food from each of the four so-called
basic food groups at each meal, thinking they are doing
the right thing for their health by having four colors
of 41
food on every plate, when they really aren't. What they
have actually done is force their bodies to attempt the
digestion of indigestible food combinations, and the
resulting indigestion creates massive doses of toxins.
I'll have a lot more to say about that later when I
discuss the art of food combining.
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