Food Combining for Health: The bestseller that has changed millions of lives. Doris Grant

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СКАЧАТЬ with astonishing rapidity to compatibly combined ones. I have rescued many people from afternoon indigestion pains resulting from lunchtime sandwiches of bread and cheese, or bread and meat. They all marvelled at the ensuing peace and tranquillity in their interiors!

      Dr Cleave argues that the main cause of indigestion is the refining of carbohydrate foods which strips them of proteins so that there results an outpouring of gastric secretion but not enough protein to neutralize it.^* This argument, however, is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the fact that, in spite of eating refined carbohydrate foods (white bread and sugar) during the whole of my first year of compatible eating, I nevertheless lost indigestion of 15 years’ duration during the very first week.

      In her excellent book Gut Reaction (Vermilion 1998), Gudrun Jonssen gives a very clear account of the digestive process and stresses the importance of maintaining the acid – alkaline balance. She advocates Food Combining as the most effective way of improving digestion.

      Dr Hay, too, was convinced that in many, perhaps most cases of indigestion, refined carbohydrates were the cause, but for a different reason. Dr Lionel Picton was likewise convinced. In the aforementioned paper he states that his evidence for this conviction was ‘mainly clinical’, having found that a reduced intake of refined starchy food relieved his patients’ symptoms. For ‘the incipient dyspeptic’ Dr Picton recommended ‘a dietary in which more greens and grilled meat should replace some of the bad foods of modern times, and moreover a diet in which starchy foods should be separated as far as possible from meat, and taken at separate meals’ – a ‘dietary’ totally in accord with Dr Hay’s precepts.

      Naturopath Harry Benjamin is another who believes that combinations of starch and protein foods can cause digestive trouble. In Your Diet in Health and Disease (Thorsons, 1974) he recommends cutting out bread and potatoes with meat.

      Dr Hay warned that taking antacids, the patent ‘cure’ for indigestion, is not the answer; they can compound the trouble, leading to more serious conditions. There have been medical warnings that antacids can use up certain vitamins in the body that are vital for its proper functioning. Moreover, experiments at Cornell University in the United States revealed that giving carbonate of soda and milk caused a form of kidney stones in laboratory animals. At the University of Vienna, a more recent controlled study of 300 people led by Professor Erika Jensen-Jarolim concluded that people who took medicines to combat indigestion and heartburn, particularly those bought without prescription, were more likely to develop allergies to food. Antacids are merely a crutch which deals with the symptom instead of the cause. The best treatment for indigestion is compatible eating.

      Arthritis

      The cause and cure of arthritis, whether rheumatoid or osteoarthritis, has baffled the medical profession. Doctors frankly admit as much; they prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers, and tell their patients they must learn to live with it. The side-effects of the painkillers, however, can be serious, even lethal, as the effects of one ‘wonder drug’ for arthritis, Opren – now withdrawn – proved all too tragically. ‘No drug to date has cured, or ever will cure, a true case of arthritis,’ wrote Dr Hay.

      There are many contributing causes of arthritis, such as injuries, abuse of the body, allergic reactions, infections, stress-exhausted adrenal glands, vitamin D deficiency, etc. But the end result of most of the underlying causes produces one common denominator – deranged body chemistry. A main cause is therefore an accumulation of acid end-products of digestion resulting in a lowered reserve of the alkaline buffer salts. Dr Hay stressed that ‘the function of every organ and tissue depends on the height, breadth and depth of the alkaline reserve; and the lower this is the lower the function …’

      The logical approach to treatment is therefore a nutritional one, aimed at the deranged body chemistry and not at the joints as in the conventional drug treatments and surgical treatments presently in vogue. These are merely palliatives which, once again, deal with the symptoms instead of grappling with the causes.

      In a personal communication from Dr James Lambert Mount (author of Food and Health of Western Man [Charles Knight & Co. Ltd, 1975], and one of the founders of the McCarrison Society) he described how he had successfully applied a nutritional approach when treating 100 volunteer patients, suffering from arthritis, who took part in a trial in New Zealand. They were put on a diet aimed at changing the body from an acid to an alkaline state, by giving up red meat, flour and sugar, and concentrating on salads, fruit and organ meats (e.g. heart, kidney). There was an average 80 per cent success rate varying from considerable improvement in the arthritis to a complete cure.

      Arthritis is considered the least amenable to treatment of all the chronic diseases. But Dr Hay maintained that arthritis responds to nutritional treatment as surely as do other degenerative diseases. Twenty-eight years of experience enabled him to write very positively – and comfortingly – about the ultimate cure of arthritis:

       Most cases of arthritis are curable, and permanently so, if the disease has not progressed to such a degree that it has permanently destroyed the function of the affected joint as occurs in ankylosis. As long as there is motion left in any joint, the case is by no means hopeless. Do not be discouraged if the pain seems to inhibit motion completely, if at the same time the joint can be moved passively to any degree.

      He warned, however, that deposits outside the circulation, as those in the tissues about the joints, may require years to be completely absorbed or may never be fully absorbed, yet the joints become usable, and pliable, without pain. But he promised that even cases of severe arthritis, when every joint in the body is affected with pain and immobility, recover uniformly when the body is relieved of its excessive debris and feeding is corrected.

      No specific diet is necessary, or even advisable, he said, for arthritis, but it is essential that the food intake should be largely of the alkali- or base-forming variety – vegetables, salads, fruits – and kept so throughout life; that the colon should be brought up to date and kept so. It is essential that the diet should contain fresh, properly constituted foods, whole foods, and as much as possible of these in raw form. It is interesting that, in 1936, at the Royal Free Hospital in London, an experiment on arthritic patients with a raw diet was successfully carried out by Dr Dorothy C. Hare. In the report of this experiment Dr Hare stressed the fact that the rawness of the food seemed to be the one outstanding factor that brought about results.^*

      Dr Hay warned that starches and sugar, carbohydrates of concentrated character, are the chief dietary causes of arthritis, not so much because they are so intrinsically causative, as because they are usually eaten in combination with incompatible foods and their proper digestion prevented, with resulting fermentation.

      The elimination of starches and sugar in the diet is therefore of paramount importance. In the opinion of some authorities at the present time, most arthritic patients experience difficulty in assimilating carbohydrates, with ensuing indigestion. (Once again, starch is the villain of the piece, and even a valuable whole-grain one can be so if not correctly combined with other foods.) From my own experience, and that of correspondents and friends, indigestion frequently precedes and accompanies arthritis. This indicates that both conditions are due to the same cause – incompatible food mixtures and a lowered alkaline reserve. This underlines the great value of compatible eating; it automatically reduces the amount of starch eaten and ensures its compatible combination with other foods.

      Many of Dr Hay’s patients recovered fully by making no other dietary change apart from the strict separation of incompatible foods (as in my own case). But to make this strict separation, and at the same time to make the diet 80 per cent alkali forming, is more effective, speedier and СКАЧАТЬ