HEALTH Via FOOD
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
WILLIAM HOWARD HAY, M. D. HEALTH via FOOD — BY — WILLIAM HOWARD HAY, M. D. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, 1891 Medical Director EAST AURORA SUN AND DIET SANATORIUM, INC. SUN-DIET HEALTH SERVICE, INC. EAST AURORA, NEW YORK Copyright, 1929 SUN-DIET HEALTH SERVICE All Foreign Rights Reserved First Printing, June, 1929 Second Printing, March, 1930 Third Printing, December, 1930 Fourth Printing, June, 1931 Fifth Printing, January, 1932 THIS COPY OF PUBLIC DOMAIN MATERIAL WAS MADE BY THE SOIL AND HEALTH LIBRARY FOR THEPURPOSES OF STUDY ONLY, FOR THE USE OF ITS PATRONS. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION 11 I. THE WORLD AT ITS WORST 15 II. WHAT DOES IT COST? 25 III. THE LAW OF COMPENSATION 37 IV. WHAT IS DISEASE? 47 V. HOW DISEASE ORIGINATES 56 VI. DISEASE AND CRIME 68 VII. MAN A TRINITY 77 VIII. INSANITY A PHYSICAL CONDITION 87 IX. WHAT IS AGE? 97 X. THE FOUR HORSEMEN 107 XI. PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE 119 XII. WHAT CAN WE DO TO CURE DISEASE? 130 XIII. THE ROLE OF MEDICINE 142 XIV. THE ROLE OF FOOD 154 XV. VITAL AND DEAD FOODS 164 XVI. THE MECHANISM OF DIGESTION 176 XVII. COMPATIBILITY AND INCOMPATIBILITY OF FOODS 188 XVIII. DIGESTIVE ENERVATION 200 XIX. CONSTIPATION A SECONDARY CAUSE OF DISEASE 211 XX. APPETITE AND HUNGER 222 XXI. FASTING 234 XXII. HOW TO BREAK THE FAST 245 XXIII. NORMAL DIET 256 XXIV. MENUS FOR ONE MONTH 268 XXV. EVERYONE HIS OWN PHYSICIAN 277 XXVI. A MEDICAL MILLENIUM 289 DEDICATION THIS effort to teach the public the things it should know about self-help in illness and health is most respectfully dedicated to one of nature's noblemen, Oliver Cabana, Jr., of Buffalo. Realizing the benefits of a right understanding of the subject of food, he was not content to enjoy selfishly the fruits of this knowledge, but resolved that the general public should have the same opportunity, knowing too well the meagerness of the knowledge possessed by this uninformed public on this most vital question of foods and feeding. Possessed of great wealth he has undertaken a nationwide education of the public relative to foods and nutrition, willing to bear the great financial risk for the sake of his convictions. Through the Sun-Diet Health Service and the Sun-Diet Sanatorium, located at East Aurora, N. Y., he is attempting to educate the ailing public to a realization that health cannot be bought with money, neither can it be fully bequeathed, but must be earned by so living that the body will no longer manufacture and store the vast quantities of acid waste that result from wrong selection and combination of the daily foods. He is thoroughly convinced that when this public fully realizes that all of its diseases are self-created, and to exactly the same extent self-controllable, the present fear of disease as a great and dangerous mystery will have passed, and health will be restored in the simple and effective ways taught through both these institutions backed by his wealth and experience, the whole motivated by his burning desire to help those who need this help. May his tribe increase and his shadow never grow less! INTRODUCTION "Of the making of many books there is no end." Surely Solomon was right, and for making another book at the present time, especially a book that is an addition to the increasing flood of health literature, there should be both reason and excuse that will satisfy the reader that the occasion is opportune for just one more book. There is so much apparent disagreement among writers on the subject of health, particularly as this relates to foods, that the writer deems it timely to point the only seeming character of these discrepancies, and to draw particular attention to the fact that through all proposed systems that embrace the idea of foods as cause of disease and its cure, there is an unmistakable cable of truth that is nearly identical in all. Certain fundamental hypotheses are recognizable in all, even though this author stresses this phase, that author that phase, for truth is unchangeable through all time and in every circumstance, and only confusion of terms or lack of perception on the part of the writer or reader will keep the great truths of food as a primary factor in disease and health from being easily discernible. The writer himself was a physical bankrupt twenty-four years ago, suffering the very familiar trinity of troubles that now stands first in our mortality statistics as cause of death after forty years of age, the so-called cardio-vascular-renal condition, consisting of high blood pressure, kidney disease and dilated heart. He had for years weighed 225 pounds in street clothing, and was unable to lower this figure through exercise and what he supposed was a proper modification of diet. He was in a busy practice, chiefly surgical, and like most other physicians, he thought only of his work and not enough of his own physical equipment. While at Arts and Science College he had gloried in his strength, and even years after his medical degree was attained he still considered himself a strong man, never dreaming that his very ordinary habits of life were laying the foundation for an early breakdown. It was not till a hurried sprint for an incoming train dilated his heart that he really began to think that perhaps he was not the man he had believed himself to be. At this point, where circulatory compensation was broken, his legs swelled to the capacity of the skin, he was unable to lie down and sleep for fear of drowning in his own fluids, yet he continued to work at the same rate, catching what sleep he could in a chair at night, or sitting upright in bed. The same condition was very familiar to him in his daily practice, and he had always told those in a similar state to prepare for the final hop-off, which was never far in the future. Remembering his own consistent failures in treatment of this condition, the future did not look over-long or very bright, and realizing the utter failure of medical treatment in this class of cases he did not take any medicine whatever,—for what was the use? It was at this point that during many a long night, he made a careful analysis of his own previous habits—habits that might have led a strong man of splendid heredity to such a woeful pass—and finally developed the fact that since his graduation in medicine, sixteen years previous, he had eaten at hotels, boarding-houses, restaurants, and only the past five years had he lived as a married man in his own home, with controllable conditions at table. This meant eleven years of public eating; surely a long enough period to form permanent habits that undoubtedly ruled the selection and combination of foods at his own table afterward, for each man's wife seeks to cook and serve the things that please her mate. Analysis of the food situation at this time showed that he had been eating meat or other concentrated protein food at each meal, usually combined with white bread and generally potato in some form; the "plain food" of the American table. He had been eating pastries freely as a top dressing for this incongruous mixture of incompatible foods, the whole washed down with two or three cups of coffee, sweetened thoroughly with white sugar and well aulaited with rich cream. He had been smoking like a veritable chimney, and drinking stimulants freely—the usual man's idea of how a man should live— when he can afford it. No effort was made to change the habits in regard to either stimulants or tobacco, but the table was changed all around, two meals a day being totally deleted and the third consisting of vegetarian food, wholly. The coffee also was discontinued, and in a few weeks the stimulants cured themselves through loss of desire for them. In a few months the tobacco was given up, and for four years there was no desire to smoke, even after many years of heavy smoking. Then followed a period of rejuvenation that was truly remarkable, especially to a physician who had always looked on disease from the conventional professional standpoint as a great mystery, as the eminent ones have always described it. In two weeks there was not a sign of dropsy anywhere in the body. In three months the weight had gone down to normal, 175 pounds in street clothing. At about the same time he discovered that he could again run as fast and as far as he desired without disturbing the rhythm of his heart, and there was surprising endurance and long-windedness. This meant a complete come-back for a dilated heart, a thing not in the books, scarcely to be believed, and a test of the blood pressure showed 120 mm. systolic, the low, normal figure. Then followed four years of study, questioning, and experimenting, ending in a period in a New York post-graduate medical course, to correlate these surprising facts, and it was not till after four full years that he was forced to the conclusion that man is an exact composite of what he eats daily, yearly, and as a life habit. During these four years he read everything he could find on the subject of foods, health, exercise, natural cure of disease and everything formerly regarded as taboo reading, from the orthodox standpoint, and it was then that he discovered this great cable of truth running through many apparently contradictory treatises on health, from the angle of correct diet, and was able to pick out this cable (not a thread) of truth from all systems, and to disregard the trivial differences in opinion, theory or viewpoint of the mass of writers, each of whom was seeking to put over his own peculiar view.