What’s in This Book . . .
Can foods heal?
Does what we eat really affect the way we feel and function?
Inside, the writings of three teachers and healers—Hippocrates, V.G. Rocine, and Bernard Jensen—offer compelling evidence that what we put in our mouths has a profound effect on our health and well-being.
Based upon three lifetimes of observation, study, and research, the fascinating principles presented by these men in Part One may change the way you look at your next meal. In addition to these basic concepts, the first part of the book contains a host of helpful troubleshooting advice: health cocktails for common ailments, herbal teas, tonics, vitamin- and mineral-packed food combinations, and detailed data on the roles foods play in the optimum efficiency of specific bodily systems, functions, and overall health.
Part Two of Foods That Heal provides an easy-to-understand guide to fruits and vegetables. Each listing in this section presents a history of use, a buyer’s guide, therapeutic benefits, and nutrient information.
Both those looking to improve their health and those interested in taking an active role in enhancing their overall well-being will find this book interesting, informative, and full of common-sense suggestions for attaining—and maintaining—good health through proper nutrition.
Part Three contains easy-to-prepare recipes for soups, salads, appetizers, entrees, and desserts utilizing the “Foods That Heal”. Each recipe utilizes the freshest and most natural ingredients—ingredients that are not processed or altered by chemical preservatives, food colorings, or additives.
Preface
I am not the kind of physician who performs surgery, prescribes or administers drugs, or practices medicine the way most modern physicians are generally thought to do. Rather, for the past fifty-five years, I have been a different kind of physician. I have counseled patients, striving to guide and uplift them by building their health and teaching them that there is a right way and a wrong way to live.
This does not mean I have not taken care of sick people. Hundreds of thousands of patients have entered my sanitariums—many with serious chronic disease—some in wheelchairs, several on stretchers. I have had the privilege of seeing the great majority of them leave free of the symptoms and conditions that brought them into my care.
I have treated these patients using a combination of proper nutrition, exercise, positive thinking exercises, water treatment, and other natural methods. Though I believe in the scientific merit of certain therapeutic drugs, I do not advise their use nor do I use them myself. Though I believe surgery has its place in the treatment of certain life-threatening diseases and extreme conditions, I advocate the use of less invasive, more natural methods in most cases.
I do not regard the healing art lightly. On the contrary, taking care of people has been both my life’s ideal and its privilege. I sincerely feel that each person I treat is a living soul and a member of the family of man and, as such, is entitled to love and respect. As a physician, I feel a humanitarian responsibility to respond to suffering and its needs.
The story of how I developed my philosophy begins in 1926 when I was a young man of 18. It was then that I entered the West Coast Chiropractic College, supporting myself by working at a local dairy. Long hours of study, followed by long hours of work, combined with poor nutritional habits, posed a triple threat to my health. Shortly after my graduation from college I collapsed.
Physicians diagnosed my condition as bronchiectasis, an incurable lung disease, often fatal in those days before antibiotic treatment. I had inherited weak lungs from my mother, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 29. Lung weakness ran in my family, and now it had run into me.
It was about this time that I was introduced to a Seventh-Day Adventist physician who enlightened me on the differences between a poor food regimen and a healthy one. Sadly, his name escaped me over the years. I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude because of the path he set me upon. This doctor declared that a root of my problem was my nutritional deficiencies. I was, he said, starving myself with a “junk food” diet. In its place he prescribed a diet full of healthy foods. Combined with breathing exercises given by Thomas Gaines who once worked for the New York Police Department, my condition improved. I began to gain weight, put several inches of flesh back on my chest, and found renewed energy. I was back on the road to health.
Though I began my career in the health arts as a chiropractor, my remarkable experience with the regenerative abilities of proper nutrition and exercise spurred me to incorporate these healing methods in my growing practice. In addition, I continued my postgraduate education to keep abreast of new developments in natural health care. I worked alongside Dr. Ralph Benner of the Bircher-Benner Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. I studied bowel management with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan; iridology with Dr. R. M. McClain of Oakland, California and Dr. F. W. Collins of Orange, New Jersey; homeopathy with Dr. Charles Gesser of Tampa, Florida; and water cure treatment at Bad Wörishofen, West Germany, home of nineteenth-century water therapy pioneer Fr. Sebastian Kneipp.
Now, at the age of 80, I often reflect on what it was in my life that allowed me to live this long—to come this far. For though I had cured bronchiectasis with nutrition and exercise, I continued the frantic pace of work and study that, combined with my bad habits, had made me so ill so long ago. Looking back, I have concluded that wellness is as much a satisfying relationship with life as it is a consequence of dietary and lifestyle changes.
I believe the secret of my good health is that I am always good to myself mentally. I am convinced my longevity is due to my mental philosophy, my joyous contentment with life. I have always loved people. I have always loved seeing people who came to me for help return home healed. And these people loved me in return. I uplifted them to the best of my ability, and it always came back to me.
Perhaps it was the warmth of this kind of gratitude that provided the incentive and energy for me to do so much more than I had to do. When the people you take care of want to take care of you, life becomes a blessing. I feel I had blessings that uplifted me constantly.
For this reason I have come to believe that loving your work is one of the great secrets of health and high-level well-being. On most of my twelve-to-fourteen-hour-long days at sanitariums, including my ranch in California, I have never felt overworked or “burned out” at the end of the day. And each morning I awake eager to get going again because I love my work.
I have received many honors and awards during my lifetime, but the greatest gift I have ever been given is the gratitude, love, and respect of the thousands of patients whose lives have been changed by what I have been able to share with them. It is through serving them that I have found the greatest portion of my own life’s happiness.
Introduction
From the time of Hippocrates, it has been known that certain foods have disease-preventing and disease-healing benefits. Yet, for some reason this knowledge has remained one of history’s best-kept secrets—until its resurgence in very recent years.
Despite the growing body of documented medical evidence that diet both causes and cures disease, nutritional awareness remains far from a twentieth century world ideal. According to Stuart M. Berger, M.D., in What Your Doctor Didn’t Learn in Medical School, currently a mere 24 of this country’s 130 medical schools require future doctors to take courses in nutrition. By omitting the subject of nutrition, 80 percent of America’s medical schools are not only perpetuating a nutritional “knowledge vacuum,” they are sending out a negative message about the importance of nutrition in health, as well.
With our doctors ill-educated on nutrition, it’s no wonder the public continues to lag in its own nutritional awareness. For instance, a recent survey of 12,000 Americans by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) revealed a majority continues to practice poor eating habits, despite strong evidence that diet can reverse the course of some forms of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and learning disorders—to name a few. Asked by NCI what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, more than 40 percent of the respondents said they had not had even one piece of fruit, and about 20 percent said they had not eaten even one vegetable. Just as discouraging, some 55 percent of the NCI survey group said they had eaten red meat, and more than 40 percent had at least one serving of luncheon meat or bacon that day.
Results like these lead me to believe that the message of good nutrition is not getting out there. Because of this, it is my hope that this book becomes a nutritional guidebook for the common man’s journey toward disease-free living through proper nutrition.
Far from a “bandage” approach like medicine applied to a wound, proper nutrition changes the course of disease at its source: tissue structure. No therapy or drug known to modern medical science can rebuild tissue that has been damaged by disease or trauma. Food alone can accomplish this feat. It is for this reason that nutrition is an indispensable weapon against disease.
But the story of nutrition is not simply one of cure. It is also a story of life-enrichment and well-being. Sadly, many people are living at only 50 percent of their full health potential, not really sick, but not truly well either. These people need to understand that the same foods that heal by rebuilding damaged tissue will enhance wellness by increasing the efficiency and energy level of underactive endocrine glands, and all other organs, glands, and tissues—including the skin, the muscles, the nerves, the joints, the veins, and the arteries. The message is clear: You can feel wonderful—if you will simply eat healthful foods and avoid harmful foods.
For 55 of my 80 years, my life has centered on the application of foods to healing and wellness. In this book, I discuss all I’ve learned about nutrition, healing, and wellness so that you will have an opportunity to enjoy your own life and health as I am enjoying mine.
Chapter One of this book is dedicated to a discussion of the great physician Hippocrates’ influence on modern health care from a nutritional standpoint. Before Hippocrates’ lifetime during Greece’s Golden Age, health care was still a hodgepodge of superstitious rituals. Indeed, after his time, much of the medical knowledge he gave Western civilization sank back into obscurity for centuries. (Some claim the nutritional knowledge he pioneered remains there still.) Hippocrates was probably the first physician to employ observation, analysis, and practical procedures such as diet change to promote healing in his patients. In addition, this greatest of physicians was committed to ethics in the physician-patient relationship. I use many of Hippocrates’ practices and principles in my own work.
Though less well-known than Hippocrates, Dr. Victor G. Rocine was equally influential in my work. Rocine emigrated from Norway to the United States after studying the work of pioneer European food chemists—work that had not yet been introduced to this country. To Rocine, all illness and disease could be traced to either nutrient deficiencies or excesses in the human body. Rocine “rediscovered” the preventive approach to disease first advocated by Hippocrates more than 2,000 years before. For this reason, I have dedicated Chapter Two to the work of Rocine.
Much of Chapters One and Two comes from the original works of Hippocrates and Dr. Rocine.
The impact of these two great teachers on my own work is discussed in detail in Chapter Three, a discussion of my work in the health arts. A brief concluding chapter suggests how to get started making changes.
Following Part One’s narrative chapters, which deal with the basis of my work, I have included Part Two, entitled A Guide to Fruits and Vegetables. This section will provide you with a handy home reference guide to the actions and importance of scores of foods. I am sure you will find it a valuable tool to gain better understanding about the way foods can help us and heal us. Combined with the knowledge in Part One, it is my hope that this book as a whole will serve as a nutritional source book to guide you and your family towards better health.
Part One
Three Pathways to Health
“Let food be thy medicine.”
–Hippocrates circa 431 B.C.
1.
Hippocrates and His Work
It is because Hippocrates laid the cornerstone for modern medical and nutritional science that I discuss his work here first. I have been fascinated with the teaching of Hippocrates for as long as I can remember. The reason is not only that he believed in foods and natural cure, but also that he was committed to serving his fellow man, and that he applied wisdom and integrity to his art. In other words, I like his philosophy as well as his methods.
Hippocrates believed in the power of positive thinking. “Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician,” he wrote.
Over the years I have found, as Hippocrates taught, that my relationship with patients is just as important as the attention I give to their health. This is because when people trust you, they seem to get well more consistently. But the physician’s concern must be genuine, Hippocrates wisely observed. For the patient will only trust the physician fully when he or she feels the physician is giving his very best.
Hippocrates taught that the physician must be full of personal integrity. “Sometimes give your services for nothing,” Hippocrates advised his students. “Unless the doctor values doing what is right more than he values money, the ideal of service to humanity is corrupted and the high purpose of the health art is compromised.”
Called the Father of Medicine by historians, Hippocrates is believed to have been born on the Greek island of Cos around 460 B.C. One biographer suggests he was practicing medicine by 431 B.C., at the age of 29. Historians believe that Hippocrates continued practicing his art well into his eighties, to about 377 B.C., traveling to various parts of the Greek world.
The real greatness of Hippocrates was not only in turning the healing arts away from magic and superstition to a more scientific approach, but in recognizing that therapy must be consistent with nature and the design of the human body. He knew that effective health care could not be separated from nutrition as part of the therapy. Because he has been widely respected through the ages, some of his writings, such as the Aphorisms, were used in medical schools throughout the world until as recently as the 1800s. Curiously, however, Hippocr...
