Most people are familiar with the workhorse phrase, “You are what you eat.” How could it be otherwise? Our growth and final adult stature is built, literally, from nutritional bricks, ground upwards.
In times gone by, children were often stunted because they were not well nourished. And sometimes specific nutrients were in short supply, such as iodine, which when deficient during growing years results in dwarfism and mental retardation of an order we once called cretinism. But today we use a kinder label: congenital iodine deficiency syndrome. Congenital is just a fancy technical term, meaning present at birth.
But here most people miss the crucial point, which is that it’s not just about stature in the early years. Our bodies, at any age, renew themselves almost completely every few weeks. Every cell, every molecule, every bit of us, is fluid, changing and renewing. You are not the same YOU as you were 3 months ago!
So it’s no use thinking, “OK good, I’m up to size now, I can have more fun with my diet, choosing what’s nice over what is healthy.” I’m sure nobody thinks that, but you get the point!
You have to eat well at all stages of life, with proper nourishing foods, in order to maintain vibrancy and health. And, I would add, those foods have to be pure, “clean” and suited to you, which is what I mean by the above phrase PURE YOU.
Lucretius
Now speaking of foods suited to you… Here is another popular saying to take note of: One man’s meat is another man’s poison. It’s by the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius (circa 70 BC) who actually wrote, “What is food to one person may be bitter poison to others.” [In his masterwork, De Rerum Natura, which translated means of natural things]
It’s not certain that Lucretius was talking literally about food but perhaps more figuratively, meaning what some people like other don’t like, or even hate.
But in relation to food, I found this proverb shockingly relevant, indeed almost universal. It led to a whole career change for me. We began talking about allergy foods, food intolerance, toxic foods or what I shall call, for this work, bandit foods!
They can mess you up pretty bad and that leads to another of my core observations, which is that people tend to think of food as friendly. After all, don’t foods nourish our bodies? But this is a misunderstanding. Very many foods are toxic and only with the advent of fire were humans able to detoxify a vast range of plants by cooking them and make them safely edible. That, perhaps more than anything, started us on our ascendency over other creatures, because we could gather far more useful calories per square kilometer than any other species.
Raw foodies beware! You are messing with progress!
If you really need it driven home with an example, consider kidney beans. Raw kidney beans contain the toxin phytohemagglutinin and must be boiled for 10 minutes to destroy it. It tends to cause blood clotting. Phytohemagglutinin is not lethal by any means, but may cause severe gastrointestinal discomfort and require hospitalization.
Robert Burton (1577 – 1640)
Toxic foodstuffs is a complex subject. Food allergies have been known since ancient times. An early English classic of literature is The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton (1621). Ostensibly a three-part treatise on depression and its treatment, the book consists of quotations by, paraphrases of, and commentary on, numerous authors, from many fields of learning, ranging from classical times to his contemporaries, in what one reviewer called a “tangled web of opinion and authority”.
A manuscript MSS of Anatomy of Melancholy sold by Sothebys
Arguably, it is one of the first psychiatric texts, although Burton was not a doctor, but an academic. However he did personally suffer from migraines. The book was added to and revized many times and notably ended up around 500,000 words, which is quite a lot!
I have quoted Burton often in my texts because he wrote: “Milk, and all that comes of milk, as butter and cheese, curds, &c., increase melancholy (whey only excepted, which is most wholesome).”
It’s as plain a description of dairy allergy as found in any book prior to the 20th century!
[you can find The Anatomy of Melancholy on Project Gutenberg; hard reading but free: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10800/10800-h/10800-h.htm]
Keith Scott-Mumby Saying
I’m going to bring myself in on the debate, because I learned something of magical importance around 50 years ago: there are vastly greater health improvements to be had from giving up foods you SHOULDN’T be eating than introducing missing foods that you SHOULD be eating.
I hope that’s clear enough. But it’s slightly complicated… enough to confuse people sometimes. For example, goat’s milk or donkey milk was once thought of as a “cure” for eczema. Sure enough, children switched on to one of these alternative milks would often recover, dramatically.
But it wasn’t the goat’s or donkey milk doing it! It was giving up the cow’s milk that effected the cure! Multiply this example by thousands of food combinations and you’ll see it not as simple as wannabe “health researchers” like to proclaim.
That’s why I groan when I hear people writing about “superfoods”. They are obviously just Googlers, who have never gone through this with a client. I’ve taken 10,000s of patients down this track and I can tell you categorically, there is NO food which is safe and “clean” for everybody. I’ve had patients react violently to lettuce, tomatoes, oats, almonds, onions, carrots and numerous other foodstuffs that could be expected to be healthy… but are not.
That’s why I conceived, years ago, of the unique personal eating plan, or ME diet! Everyone is different and you have to figure it out for yourself (more of that in a moment).
Rough Foods
First, Let’s visit a famous story from Renaissance times. It concerns an Italian nobleman, name of Luigi Cornaro. He was a contemporary of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Being a nobleman, he ate and drank too much and was probably very debauched on the quiet.
Anyway, by the age of forty he was nearly dead. But Luigi was lucky and met a good doctor who told him to do what I would have told him to do: “Pull yourself together or you are going to die! You need to eat better. Figure out what your body likes and stick to that!”
Well, long story short, he acted on the advice. He knew nothing about food allergies or food intolerance, of course. He just called them “strong foods”, meaning they disagreed with his delicate constitution. We don’t have the whole list; for example he just said “salads” were a strong food. That fits with what I know, which is that lettuce is a common bandit food (it’s on the composite or mustard, family).
Cornaro also found that he did not tolerate fish, pork, melons and other fruits, rough wines and pastry. Surprisingly, the foods he could tolerate included meats and certain choice wines. He liked an egg, bread and soup.
Eat less and eat right was his basic formula. He soon found out what foods suited him best and stuck to those. It amounted to about 12 ounces a day. Interestingly, he could drink wine and took 14 ounces a day. That puts an end to the calorie restriction claims about his success. For sure it was his ME diet that worked. A couple of times when the family insisted he break it, he fell ill again but he soon recovered by going back on his ME diet!
What actually happened is that he went on to live an exceptionally long and healthy life. At the amazing age of eighty-three he published his first treatise, entitled The Sure and Certain Method of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life. The English translation went through numerous editions. He wrote three more pamphlets on the same subject, composed at the ages of eighty-six, ninety-one and ninety-five respectively.
Luigi Cornaro finally died, serene and dignified, at the age of ninety-eight (best estimate). All four of his diet pamphlets have since been collected into a book entitled How To Live To Be a 100 (sometimes spelled out). In fact Cornaro was the first person on record to work out his own personal detox diet. He was pretty smart and realized that the foods he liked or craved were not necessarily the best for him. In other words: please the stomach, not the palate.
This painting of a Venetian senator by Tintoretto is thought to be Luigi Cornaro
What was remarkable about his achievement was that he lived in an age when the average life expectancy was under forty years. To live beyond the Biblical three score years and ten was almost unheard of, never mind reaching two years short of one hundred. Cornaro had clearly made a major discovery in the field of disease and health; you would think the medicos of the day would be won over and want to pass on the good news.
Instead they ignored Cornaro’s remarkable diet experiments. I don’t want you to make the same silly mistake…
TO BE CONTINUED…
Isn’t this exciting?
To Your Good Health,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
