Lecithin is often mentioned as an important food constituent. It is a phosphorus-containing protein-fat compound, occurring both as a plant product and animal product. It is found in vegetable cells, in nuts, in eggs, in beans, etc. Soy beans and egg yolks have a very high lecithin content. It also occurs in normal blood and in all actively glowing cells.
A well-balanced diet that includes fresh raw fruits, raw vegetables, nuts, and soybean and peanut products will furnish the required supply of lecithin for the healthy body.
In diseases in which there is a tendency to excessive cellular growth, such as tumors or leukemia, lecithin-containing foods must be kept out of the diet until the disease can be successfully brought under control.
Cholesterol is an organic waste compound which is an ingredient of gallstones. It is a by-product of improperly digested and assimilated fats. It is normal for the liver to manufacture 0.1 per cent of cholesterol.
When bile enters the gall bladder, it is more concentrated than liver bile. Its normal percentage of cholesterol may be 0.2 per cent.
This percentage of cholesterol is apparently normal for healthy blood.
Cholesterol becomes a menace to body health when its content is above the normal percentages. When the liver is charged with excessive amounts of fatty or fat-forming nutriments, cholesterol is deposited in excess of normal, and then the liver and other organs are subject to disease.
Gallstone formation is a disease that has long been bafflng the scientific thinkers and practitioners of medicine and surgery. Some-times a patient has a surgical operation for the removal of a gall-bladder full of gallstones; yet a few days or a few weeks afterwards, new gallstones are formed, causing obstruction of the bile duct that leads from the liver to the small intestine.
It is known to medicine that cholesterol is a component of gall-stones. It is also known to medicine that an inflamed gall bladder and inflamed liver cells upset the chemical processes of that most important body laboratory, the liver.
When the liver is overcrowded with nutriments that cannot be assimilated by the blood for distribution throughout the body, it becomes irritated, inflamed, producing pathological amounts and kinds of by-products, such as cholesterol and gallstones.
A food intake that includes excessive amounts of particularly decomposable substances, such as meat, fish and fats, must result in impairing the liver and its chemistry, thus leading to the production of cholesterol and gallstones.
The entire body suffers as a consequence. Excessive cholesterol con-tent in the bile pollutes the bloodstream and irritates every cell of the body.
The road to good health can always be taken safely by giving up the meat-eating, egg-eating and fat-eating habit. A fruit and vegetable diet that is not excessively mixed, followed for a month to six months, should help anyone suffering from excessive cholesterol in the system and from gallstones or tendencies to gallstone formation. Such a diet can make the liver over into a healthy organ, instead of one that is in a hopelessly cancerous condition.
Food as medicine can be potent, when the food is chosen from the fresh, raw fruits and raw vegetables. These foods are the best to save mankind from the miseries of hopeless diseases.