During sickness of any kind it is safe to rest the stomach as well as the body as a whole. A simple cold will pass without complications when food intake is restricted to freshly made fruit juices diluted with hot or cold water.
During any ill health there is seldom any appetite for food. The sick should be left alone when they do not feel like eating or drinking. The mouth should be washed with lukewarm water and salt, or lemon juice with water, every two or three hours, because the mouth is a breeder of germs. The salt solution or the lemon juice with water weakens germs in the mouth.
In ordinary medical practice tea, milk, eggs, toast and cereal are allowed to the sick. This is wrong. The body in ill health does not need any building foods, because it cannot digest or assimilate them for the benefit of its economy. The most tragic pitfall of the orthodox profession is its over-feeding of the sick.
When fever is present, grapefruit juice diluted with cold water or lemon juice diluted with cold water is the best beverage. No solid foods of any kind should be given to a sick person who has any degree of fever. A cold, the grippe, or any illness in which a cough is present would be cured much more quickly without any food intake other than water and fruit juices.
No drugs should be needed as supportive treatment. The bowels must be kept open twice a day by means of an enema consisting of a quart to three pints of water containing the juice of a lemon. Cleansing the lower bowel this way helps the body to eject wastes from the system, and this hastens recovery.
Headache and Eating
In acute disease headache is often one of the symptoms. In case of a cold, the grippe and other ailments in which fever is present, head-ache is also present, because there is a certain amount of congestion of the brain.
A headache will be relieved much more quickly by means of the right food, when the patient also gets one or two osteopathic treatments at the bedside. Hygiene of the bowels by means of the daily enema, or even two enemas per day, will also reduce headache quickly.
The only food that a sick person is fit to take, when he has a headache due to any cause, is fresh raw fruit (if there is any appetite for it) or fruit juices, and water.
Pain, Biliousness, Nausea, and Eating
In case of nausea, due to any kind of ill health, cold liquids, such as freshly made grapefruit juice or the juice of a lemon in half a glass of cold water, are the best to stimulate the stomach and relieve the feeling of nausea. This also helps to remove the cause of nausea. Nausea as a rule is caused by a crowded liver that is full of nutriments and wastes.
“Biliousness” is accompanied by nausea and headache, pain, and other discomforts, all caused by the overcrowding of the digestive system with wastes from foods that the body does not require or cannot assimilate. The liver is the vital body laboratory that must disintegrate such excess metabolic substances; when it is over-saturated, nausea, pain and gallstones may result. Therefore, the only reasonable procedure is to wash those wastes out.
Cold fruit juices, lemon juice with water and grapefruit juice will speed this process of intestinal and liver- and stomach-cleansing most effectively. Fresh raw pineapple in juice formalso in solid form is a very acceptable food for a person who is recovering from nausea. The next food that would be well tolerated by one recovering from headache, pain, fever and nausea would be a raw vegetable salad, providing there is appetite for such food. If no appetite is present an orange or half a grapefruit, every three hours or even less often, is the only thing required, for a few days or until all the symptoms sub-side while the patient is resting in bed.
Poliomyelitis
The above rules apply to children as well as to adults. In the last few years there has been a great deal of poliomyelitis among children, and also among adults. Before this disease is fully developed, the patient already suffers from premonitory symptoms, or prodromal symptoms. These may be: excessive fatigue, weakness, chilliness, head-ache, backache, fever, lack of appetite. Those who have read a biography of the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt know that he was very tired and had a cold before he was stricken by polio….
No serious disease comes very quickly. The body’s strength must first be worn out. Its resistance and vitality must be lost. This dreadful disease, polio, could be prevented by better hygiene. Better daily habits of eating and living can fight polio more effectively than the immunization of healthy children with “gamma globulin” or with other medical immunizing agents that are supposed to be preventives of this disease.
Children of our time are allowed to overexercise. They are allowed to play too hard. At the end of the day, during the school year or during vacations, children are very tired. This sort of fatigue must be reduced by better schedules of daily activities. Creative play of various kinds is very good for children, but it must be within reason, not to the point of wearing out the nervous system.
Some foods and beverages, including the “soft drinks,” are bad for growing boys and girls. “Soft drinks” tend to overstimulate the nervous system. Sugar-sweetened foods such as candies, cake and other types of pastry, and ice cream are also consumed to excess by boys and girls of grade school and high school age. These foods tend to deplete the energy and strength of the body, by chemically charging the system with acid ash wastes.
For between-meal snacks, children should be allowed fresh raw fruits instead of candy, cake, soft drinks or ice cream. Raw fruits would fortify the body with vitamins and minerals; they would help to prevent fatigue and also to reduce fatigue. Fatigue and weakness are two signs of accumulated and retained cellular wastes within the body.
Hygiene of the body means preventing it from getting tired, from falling victim to such maladies as partial or complete constipation. Correct food intake would prevent much disease; it would even help avoid such catastrophes as acute appendicitis, mastoiditis and other children’s ailments for which hospitalization and surgery are often required as drastic measures to save life.
Correct care of the body, including a balanced diet and daily elimination from the bowels, would be enough to prevent much acute and chronic disease among children, and would also prevent the emergencies, such as “just in time” operations for the mastoids, the appendix and the tonsils.
Rheumatic Fever in Children
Rheumatic fever as a rule involves the heart, its inner lining, and the valves. The muscular wall or myocardium may also be involved, but the main pathology at first affects the heart valves and its inner lining or endocardium. The small joints of the feet and hands are inflamed when a child has endocarditis. When rheumatic fever strikes a child, it is a complication secondary to nose and throat inflammation that was treated improperly.
A fruit juice diet for a few days, when a child has a cold, sore throat, cough, headache, nausea or vomiting, may prevent rheumatic fever. It therefore pays to feed children according to this simple rationale.
It would not be necessary to pump the so-called “wonder drugs” into the sick if correct food and good nursing care were used. The wonder drugs” change every year or even more often. Some of the “wonder drugs” of a few years ago are forgotten today. Those that are still in use today may prove futile to prevent or cure illness. When food is properly chosen and used, it can prevent and cure disease more effectively than any kind of drugs.
Chronic Diseases in Children
Chronic diseases are those that the individual lives with, suffers with, at times attends school with. Chronic diseases handicap a child so that he cannot do his best work at school or enjoy the play and other activities of the normally healthy individuals.
Chronic diseases in children are entirely preventable. Children as a rule have no worries similar to those of adults.
One of the main causes of chronic disease is the wearing out of the body by overplay and by poorly chosen food intake. If the food were wholesome, the blood and tissue chemistry of children would be normal and vigorous. Children would be more energetic than they are today at the end of a day’s work and play. Adequately fed children would be free from accumulated cellular wastes, and would therefore have a greater resistance to infection by germs. Correct food intake is a preventive of acute infections and of chronic diseases.
Acute and Chronic Diseases in Adults
Acute and chronic diseases in adults of every age would likewise be prevented by a better daily food intake than is commonly the habit of people today.
Adults wake up tired in the morning because the body is charged with tissue wastes. These tissue wastes are produced by excessive amounts of cooked foods, canned foods, sugar-sweetened foods, animal meats, and other forms of cadaverous substances such as fish and fowl. All these eatables do not invigorate the body; they may stimulate it temporarily. The after-affect of stimulation is depression. Depression gives subjective sensations or symptoms of nervous tension and tiredness that impel the use of coffee, liquor and tobacco.
The majority of modern adults are sick to some degree because they habitually eat wrong. It is necessary to restrain and recondition the adult individual for correct habits of eating, in order to build sturdier men and women than those who move about their daily work today taking one or another patent medicine for relief.
Chronically sick children or adults often suffer from constipation, as one of the effects of impaired health. This symptom, constipation, like other such symptoms, can be remedied and cured only by a dietary that excludes the ordinary starchy, sugary, and meat-and-fish mixtures. This conventional type of eating contributes to the causing of many diseases, including constipation.
Stomach Ulcer, Colitis, Hemorrhoids, Fissures
Besides constipation there are other stomach and intestinal diseases that should be briefly discussed in this chapter. Stomach ulcer is one of them, colitis with complications such as hemorrhoids, ulceration, fissures of the rectum, and also fistulae. These last complications of rectal inflammation or proctitis are usually sequelae of chronic colitis that has not been treated properly.
Stomach ulcer takes a long time to develop as such. Ulceration means an abrasion of the surface membrane. A concrete example of ulceration is a foot sore that develops as a result of wearing tight-fitting shoes.
Stomach ulcer is always one of the results of acute or subacute or chronic gastritis, or inflammation. A person who suffers from inflammation of the stomach will have symptoms such as pain before eating, pressure after eating, hyperacidity and regurgitation of sour fluids after eating. Thirst as a symptom of inflammation of the stomach is also important.
Thirst is a signal that vinegar, mustard, pepper, fatty foods and excessively salty foods, must be cut out. Thirst is the indication that the digestive secretions have been reduced-by astringent effects of condiments, spices, vinegar, liquors and other so-called “appetizers” that are served with conventional meals.
When the mucous membrane lining of the stomach becomes very weak, some of its cells may wear away and cause some type of ulcer. An ulcer can be diagnosed only by X-ray pictures. Many sufferers with stomach inflammation and ulceration go about their business until a serious consequence, such as perforation with hemorrhage, occurs.
The human individual is not trained to go without food, even when in distress. If sufferers from pain or pressure or regurgitation were to stop eating solid foods and other heavy mixtures, even in liquid form and in semi-solid form (custards, jellos, etc.) and were to put themselves on a fasting regime consisting of water with fruit juice only, they would soon feel better and cure the disease, inflammation and ulceration in due time.
All the diseases of the digestive tract that are characterized by inflammation would get well within a period of four weeks to three months, if they were treated according to the plan suggested in this book.
A mild case of inflammation of the stomach or of any other section of the digestive tract would clear up within a matter of a few weeks- A very chronic case, one that has been neglected or mismanaged, may take several months to heal completely and successfully. In stomach and intestinal diseases that are characterized by inflammation and ulceration, the liver and gall bladder may become affected in due time. An inflamed digestive tract cannot handle food properly.
After food has been digested in the stomach and small intestines, the next step is that it is taken up by the liver. The liver is too often overburdened. And it soon manifests its own signs and symptoms such as biliousness, nausea, regurgitation of bitter fluid, pain in the gall-bladder area, and, finally, gall-stone formation.
When a person is put on a water and fruit juice diet the curative processes of the body at once begin to regenerate those parts that are impaired. Nature does a much neater, much cleaner job of healing an ulcer than medication and ordinary medical diets can accomplish.
In order to help nature, no food of the building kind, such as starch, sweets or proteins (even of the lightest varieties) should be permitted, until there is freedom from pain and pressure and the patient has a clean, good taste in the mouth and a good appetite for simple foods.
Milk is in order at this stagenot served with bread, but in combination with fruit, stewed or raw, in order to be adequately digested. (See my Health Menus for simple combinations of milk and fruit meals.) For a few days the food intake should consist of fruit and milk only, three or four times a day. When an ulcer patient can take a quart of milk per day, together with some fruits, without feeling distressed, and when he is hungry for other foods, it is time to add an egg to one meal, cottage cheese to another; and one meal may consist of steamed vegetables with milk and raw fruit.
When there is actual ulceration showing up on X-ray films, every solid food must be liquefied or strained. It is best to use the food liquefier to make purees at home, instead of buying little cans of pureed foods from the store.
Anyone suffering from inflammation and ulceration should be guided by a physician. During the first four weeks of the treatment, the person must rest in bed and be waited on. The inflammatory dis. eases of the stomach and intestines, as of other parts of the body, can. not be cured easily or quickly while the patient is allowed to be up and about. Bed rest, in conjunction with the dietetic treatment out-lined here, will soon make the sufferer feel that he is on the road to recovery.
Another type of food that helps to build up general resistance of the body and also helps to heal the inflammation and ulceration process is freshly made raw vegetable juice, prepared with three or four raw vegetable salad materials. This should be fed at regular meals, and, in the case of some individuals and thin persons, between meals also.
When an ulcer patient has much pain and also hemorrhage, any dietary treatment must be preceded by a fast of a few days to a week or two. No sick person will die from fasting or even get weak.
Fasting is not at all dangerous. Fasting does not cause “acidosis.” This is a misconception that unfortunately exists in old school medical beliefs. What the fast does for the body is that it compels nature to bring about a speedier recovery. During a fast, tissue substances (fat and muscle mainly) are used for sustaining the body processes or basal metabolism. The body lives on its own meat and fat. Stored carbohydrates are also being used up from the liver, the muscles and other parts of the body.
As soon as he is ready for food, it is therefore in order to feed the patient some easily digested sweet, such as honey in lemonade. Grapes are another easily digested sweet fruit.
Fasting helps the body to regenerate itself because the tissues, with their stored wastes, are used up for organic and functional activitiesfor breathing, sleeping, circulating the blood, moving about in bed and out of bed.
Convalescence after a fast can be ideal for building up (among other things) stronger muscles, better nerves, better blood. During a fast and during the subsequent raw vegetable juice and fruit juice feeding, the blood picture of anemic patients has often shown pronounced improvements. This includes patients with signs of pernicious anemia and leukemia.
In due time, perhaps in a decade or so, the medical profession will have to take note of the facts which are being brought out here, and test these methods under scientific clinical conditions. As a physician, choosing the tough road of the pioneer, I have had a hard time studying those patients who came to put themselves under my treatment. Remember: the sick never quit their family physicians and even their specialists unless and until these practitioners have failed to help them. Most of my patients have come to me at very late stages in their disease. Thanks to the teachings of Dr. J. H. Tilden, I have been able to work along the lines outlined in this discussion, through the years of my practice.
At this stage (after 25 years) of hard work, work that has been successful to the extent of curing many of my patients completely and prolonging the lives of those who could not be wholly cured, I can make these statements with emphasis. Older doctors in practice are often reluctant to learn from younger ones. But the young ones in increasing numbers are anxious to learn methods that have proved successful in treating the sick.
Diarrhea
There are other troublesome digestive ailments which have diarrhea as their pronounced symptom.
Diarrhea is, as a rule, a consequence of small intestine inflammation. Acute enteritis is often caused by eating spoiled fish, spoiled eggs, spoiled meat, spoiled ice cream. Chronic diarrhea is, as a rule,
caused by chronic inflammation of the small intestine. The cause may be some type of superimposed bacterial infection. Tuberculosis some-times attacks the small intestine.
If typhoid fever is not properly treated or cured, there may re-main a kind of residual inflammation and ulceration of the small intestine with frequent diarrhea. This ailment is much more difficult to cure, because the small intestine is a convoluted tubular structure about twenty-five to thirty feet in length. It is also a busy structure, because digestion and absorption of food always go on in its machinery.
I had a number of interesting cases suffering with acute and chronic enteritis and diarrhea. They responded to my regime of strict fasting until diarrhea had ceased completely. It is marvelous how the body regenerates itself from a serious and critical disease when it is being treated by a correctly managed fast.
Heartburn, etc.
The fast must also be used as an initial method of treatment for the very chronic diseases which are marked by the insufficient production of digestive juices. This particular impairment is, as a rule, associated with malignancy. Then “heartburn” is a pronounced symptom. Nausea is another symptom. Pain is another. Lack of taste for food while eating is still another one. Even in late stages of disease, properly managed fasting, with the subsequent intake of fruit juices and raw vegetable juices, will result in a marvelous therapeutic regeneration.
Diseases of the Chest
Chest diseases include diseases of the heart, the lungs and the blood circulation. Books have been written about them in the hundreds. Medical literature is very rich in all sorts of detailed descriptions and discussions of the diseased chest organs and their treatments.
Fasting and diet in ordinary medical practice has been and is rather crude and immaturely developed, because the great physicians and surgeons are too busy practicing their specialties, and the ordinary ones are falling into routines and failing to make a radical departure from merely writing prescriptions for some kind of medicine, while allowing their patients to eat any old thing- Doctors must themselves become diet-conscious. “Physician, heal thyself” is an old dictum. There are many doctors who suffer from digestive disorders just as their patients do, because they eat wrong.
The diseases of the heart and of the blood vessels, such as hardening of the arteries, take in quite a group of organic structural de-generations. The kidneys, and secondarily the liver, become affected by heart and blood-vessel diseases.
Correct dietary treatment can regenerate every cell of the body. This is therefore the right approach. Medication may be required in addition to diet, but in smaller dosages than when it is used in con-junction with an ordinary regime of feeding for the sick.
The diet for the cardiovascular diseases is really no different from the diet outlined for inflammatory diseases of the stomach and intestines. When the heart is affected by inflammation, its treatment and cure must be managed by the same approach, by the same rationale. The heart patient may be required to rest longer and more thoroughly than a stomach case.
Tuberculosis is one of the chest diseases that is being treated more or less successfully in ordinary medical practice. This is so be-cause the tubercular patient is recognized as an invalid requiring a complete rest cure until his diseased lung has undergone regeneration to the greatest extent possible. All chronic diseases must be treated by means of applying the basic principle of rest-bed rest.
When this becomes impressed on physicians as the accepted requirement for the sick, there will be fewer untimely deaths from coronary thrombosis and from other types of heart and blood-vessel disease.
A Few Points on Skin Disease
Skin manifestations in the form of any type of acute or chronic dermatitis is an end-result of oversaturation of the skin structures by wastes that the kidneys and bowels have failed to excrete adequately.
Skin disease of any kind responds very effectively to dietetic management. Dietetic management for disease must always be preceded by one or two fasts. The fast may be continuous, when the patient is not afraid, or it may be interrupted by alternate feeding periods when the patient is afraid of a prolonged period of fasting.
It is safe for anyone, no matter how weak he is, to fast about three days in one continuous period. By fasting, I mean the taking of water with lemon juice only, or water and grapefruit juice only.
Even the most stubborn type of skin disease, such as psoriasis, responds to fastingl Other forms of chronic skin irritation and inflammation likewise respond to fasting and properly planned diets. Diets for skin diseases must exclude proteins and fats for a long timealso sweets. This points to the fact that when the body shows skin disease manifestations it is in an advanced state of health impairment or disease.
Diabetes
Dietetic management of the diabetic is one of the problems that has come under my care from time to time. Mild as well as severe cases have been under my treatment.
In this condition nature itself works wonders. The tissues in the diabetic become saturated with wastes because the blood is “a neutral system.” It maintains its chemical condition at a constant level for a long time, transporting acidosis wastes into the cells of the tissues. Excessive sugar in the blood may be metabolized by medicinal insulin.
Excessive wastes that cannot be eliminated by the bowels, kidneys, skin, and lungs are transported into the cells of the tissues.
This points to one explanation why, in late stages of diabetes, terminal structures degenerate, ulcerate and become gangrenous. It has been my privilege to treat a few cases with tendencies to gangrene and with actual gangrene. These experiences are dealt with else-where. Even in late stages of bodily disintegration, blood-purifying and tissue-purifying foods will save toes and limbs from diabetic gangrene.
The raw fruits that are not so rich in sugar and the raw vegetables that ripen above-ground are the foods that must be fed to the diabetic. Diabetic patients respond to dietetic treatment to such an extent that the blood reduces its sugar-percentage level. The sugar condition in the urine clears up when food-intake is managed correctly.
Dead animal matter-meat, fish, fowl-are excluded from the diabetic diet as from any and all forms of chronic disease. The diabetic must really be fed on the purest of foods, in order to remake his body. That has been done in my comparatively limited practice. It can be done on a large scale. The sick, as well as their doctors, have every-thing to gain by the approach outlined above.
Other Types of Chronic Disease
Cerebral hemorrhage due to neglected treatment for high blood pressure must also be treated by fasting and fruit juice diets.
In this case, nature must indeed be the physicianl A blood clot results from hemorrhage, and it must be digested within the economy of the blood stream. It is a superhuman task. The physician, if wise, would help the body by feeding the patient nothing more than fruit juice and raw vegetable juice in small amounts until regeneration is manifest. Stroke cases recover in a shorter time by this method than by the ordinary medical procedures.
Compared to physicians of the orthodox school I have treated fewer patients suffering from some kind of serious and critical disease; nevertheless, those patients who came to me as a last resort were in many instances rewarded with better health and longer life, be-cause my dietetic management recognizes and includes the principle of removing tissue wastes from the sick body, as a prerequisite to the effort of building it up.
Professor Virchow, an eminent medical authority, in a treatise on cellular pathology stressed the need to treat the body as an entity, in order to regenerate local structures and restore them to health from disease. Fasting and the consumption of raw fruits and vegetables are the most potent methods of approach to curing any type of localized disease, because fasting and the choice of the right foods remove the disease constituents and rebuild healthy structures and normal functioning.