Читать книгу Food Combining for Health: The bestseller that has changed millions of lives - Doris Grant - Страница 10

In A New Health Era Dr Hay related how this warning inspired him to treat his own symptoms. He did so by ‘eating fundamentally’, as he called it, eating ‘only such things as he believed were intended by nature as food for man, taking them in natural form, and in quantities no greater than seemed necessary for his present need’. (It is interesting to note that 60 years later, Surgeon Captain T.L. Cleave was to put forward similar concepts in his book The Saccharine Disease.) To the great astonishment of Dr Hay’s doctors his symptoms gradually disappeared, and at the end of three months he felt fitter and stronger than he had done for many years. He reduced his weight – he had been greatly overweight – from 225lb to 175lb and soon was able to run long distances without distress.

This experience, he wrote, deepened the conviction that had been growing over the past 16 years that medicine was on the wrong track; it was merely fussing with the end results of a condition instead of attempting to remove the cause, ‘for here was his own case recovering from a condition that the best authorities said was incurable’. It had taken a major health disaster and a hopeless outlook for the future to open his eyes to the possibility of treating disease along dietary lines, unorthodox although these at first seemed.

It was not, however, till the middle of 1908 that he had regenerated himself to his own satisfaction. By 1911 Dr Hay was virtually certain that he had discovered a ‘surefire treatment’ for diabetes. He little realized then that this same treatment would prove equally efficacious in the treatment of all disease.

For the next four years he devoted all his time to treating his patients along dietary lines in order to prove or disprove his contention that we are exactly what we eat and ‘that the body is merely a composite of what goes into it daily in the form of food and drink’. These four years provided proof in plenty that his contention was right and that anyone can be as well as desired if given the right food in the right way (provided, of course, there has been no serious, irreversible organic change). Thus he developed over the years the system of eating for which he became famous. He always claimed, however, that he had not discovered anything new, but had merely used the knowledge already made public by others and consolidated it, adding his own deep convictions with a dash of common sense. Moreover, he made no claims that he ‘cured’ any disease, and emphasized that this system merely removed the obstacles in the way of nature’s own marvellous healing powers.

The message in A New Health Era was simple: that no matter how diverse our diseases, there is one underlying cause – wrong chemical conditions in the body. These conditions are created through the manufacture and accumulation of acid end-products of digestion and metabolism in amounts greater than the body can eliminate. A state then develops ‘that is variously called auto-intoxication, acid-autotoxicosis, toxaemia, self-poisoning, or whatever you like to call it’. This results in a lowering of the body’s vital alkaline reserve leading, in turn, to departure from health. ‘The science of medicine takes no cognizance of this accumulation,’ wrote Dr Hay, ‘till disease, that is definite pathology, has developed.’

He taught his patients that there were four main causes of the accumulation of acid end-products of digestion: eating too much meat; over-consumption of refined carbohydrates – white flour products, refined sugar and refined carbohydrates of any kind; disregard for the laws of chemistry as these apply to the digestion of foods; and constipation.

Dr Hay also taught his patients that although many people, especially young people, build up a tolerance to incompatible mixtures just as people build up a tolerance for increasing doses of irritant poisons, they do so at a very considerable and continuing cost in vitality. This formed tolerance, he warned, is unnatural. But if compatible eating is followed long enough, it can be removed. Then, claimed Dr Hay, ‘you cannot go back to the practice of mixing starches and proteins without immediate notice from your stomach that you have made a mistake – one that you are not likely to repeat’. He promised that two weeks would be sufficient to convince anyone of this, and that the reward for the effort would be greatly improved vitality and health.

Dr Hay never forgot to teach the importance of other adjuvants to health – fresh air, exercise, daily baths, sunshine and rest. Nor did he forget to teach the importance of health to the spiritual man: ‘When the body and mind are in harmony, only then will there be an opportunity for proper spiritual development; for do not forget that the spiritual man is the first man, the mental man the second, and the physical the third man; and only when these second and third are in harmony can there be a proper spiritual state!’