Table Of ContentWILLIAM 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.
This experience so changed the character of the writer's
practice that he dropped surgery entirely, and as completely also the
administration of drugs, for if man is a composite of what goes into
him daily in the form of nourishment, then what is the use of
drugging him or cutting him for the results of wrong feeding habits?
It is much more to the point to change the wrong habits and let
Nature perform the cure, as Nature alone is able to do.
It is now twenty-four years since this breakdown and
upbuilding occurred. After this long period, when the writer has
already passed the average life-limit by many years, he has had the
great pleasure of watching similar come-backs in many thousands
of cases of apparently incurable conditions in every sort of
individual and every sort of case, and now feels that the occasion is
not strained when he presents a little book setting forth the theory of
man's dependence on foods, their relation to the body in health and
disease, and the discernible fact that in all the present successful
systems of applying food to health there is always this great
similarity that should far outweigh all seeming differences. This is
the occasion and excuse.
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD AT ITS WORST
After all, it isn't such a bad old world, all things considered, for
we are alive, we see the sun, feel the air, hear the sweet singing of
the birds and enjoy the beautiful in everything.
The average citizen dresses well, enjoys the usual social
functions, listens in on the music or the literature of the world over
the radio, in fact, he is in a better position to enjoy life than ever
before in the history of civilization.
He has all the foods of the world from which to choose, instead
of being limited to those peculiar to his locality.
Food! Ay, there's the rub! For with all his blessings he has
forgotten the true function of food, and he has made of his body a
place unfit for the enjoyment of the glorious time in which he lives.
We in America are the sickest nation on the face of the whole
earth, yet we have the largest food markets of any.
We have more physicians to the thousand population than has
any other nation. We have the largest and best equipped hospitals,
the best insane hospitals, and the most and best means for caring for
epileptics, the feeble-minded, and the crippled. Our penal system is
thoroughly organized and equipped for taking care of by far the
most criminals of any other country on the globe. We need all these
institutions.
These are not things over which to enthuse; but rather they are
things to condone, to excuse, to explain.
Why should America, one of the most enlightened of all
countries on this old ball of clay, supposedly the richest of any, the
farthest advanced in science and manufacture, admittedly the most
modern of all—why should she have this state of affairs?
When we were unceremoniously hurried into the late world
war and faced the necessity of recruiting quickly a very large army,
we found to our national chagrin and dismay that our young men of
army age, the most vital period of life, were nearly half of them
unfit for military duty.
They had poor teeth, poor eyesight, weak arches, varicocele,
rupture, deficient chest expansion, rheumatism, various dyscrasic
conditions, things that make a man unfit to carry the heavy
equipment and stand the rigors of a campaign.
Nearly half of these young men, the pride of their country,
unfit to serve her in an emergency!
The shock was so great that we did not then fully appreciate its
significance, for we were in a hurry to raise an army, no one
knowing how big it might have to be, and we took a great many of
these young men that could not have passed under less urgent
conditions; we made over others who did not have anything worse
than weak arches, perhaps, and we got by this one time with a
sizeable army of fairly good physique.
Now that the smoke has cleared away and we have had time to
think this over, we are humiliated to think that we are as a nation in
such physical condition, for if this is true of the young man of
military age, what of the older ones?
Every year at any given time two million of our people are off
the pay roll, sick, with perhaps half as many more also restrained
from productive pursuit to care for these.
What of those who are still carrying on? Are they enjoying life
as they should? Are they fulfilling their full destinies? Are they
cashing in fully on their opportunities, or are they in some degree
handicapped by ill health that is causing them to fall far short of all
that is coming to them?
If the young men of army age were found fifty per cent
deficient, it is fair to suppose that those at home and of more
advanced age were still more deficient.
With two million continually sick, all the rest come under
suspicion of being only a little less sick, for it is not thinkable that
these two million people are singled out of all the rest to bear the
illnesses of the entire nation.
400,000 children never see the tenth year of age, 200,000 of
these never see the second year. Our percentage of deficient
children is increasing with each generation, not only the actual
number of incompetents, but a percentage increase.
Our school reports show major or minor deficiencies in well
over seventy-five per cent of American childhood.
This state of affairs is not confined to the urban part of our
population, as it was once supposed to be, for the same deficiencies
in nearly the same ratio show in the suburban and district schools,
showing that it is something more than the restricted life of the
cities that is at the root of our troubles.
Teeth have come to be looked on as a source of grave danger
to any one, and tonsils are an admitted horror, while such a thing as
a retained appendix in good working order is coming to be regarded
as a sort of curiosity.
Surgical operations have multiplied till our hospital
requirements for surgery alone have quadrupled in the past twenty-
five years.
For a married woman to escape at least one surgical operation
of major character is now considered remarkable, and the
unfortunate sister who cannot show an abdominal scar is compelled
to occupy a rear seat at the sewing societies and the afternoon teas,
for she has nothing to talk about.
We hear more and more of the wonders of modern surgery, but
can it develop as fast as the seeming need for it, or must we make
more surgeons out of our young men?
It would seem to an inquiring mind as though the trouble is not
so much in the rapid growth of surgical conditions as in the rapidly
growing surgical equipment that must have more and more material.
This subject will be referred to again, but for the present it is
pertinent to quote Dr. Charles Mayo, of Rochester, Minn., who said
in open meeting of the American College of Surgeons a very few
years ago: "Nine-tenths of the internal surgery that is done today
never should have been done, and the seemingly necessary tenth
part should be done by some one who has some further evidence of
surgical ability than merely a diploma in medicine."
But leaving out surgery, there has been a tremendous increase
in those diseases that we term degenerative, even though the
zymotic group has for some unaccountable reason been less
prevalent than formerly.
What we seem to have gained in lowered mortality from
tuberculosis is swallowed up by a far greater increase in cancer.
What we have seemed to gain in lowered prevalence and
mortality from the ordinary diseases of childhood has been more
than offset by the increase in such conditions as heart failure
(whatever this may mean), Bright's disease or other kidney
degenerations, diabetes, which is still on the percentage increase, or
the nerve degenerations, including insanity.
Statistics show an average lengthening of life, but this is
chiefly due to better infant conservation, better housing conditions,
better environment, more appreciation of the outdoors, of exercise,
and perhaps also to the great interest recently aroused in foods.
All of this is offset by the far greater increase in degenerative
diseases, more unfit living to greater ages than formerly, for which
medicine takes credit, but it is a moot question whether this credit
(if there be such) should go to medicine or whether it should be
taken as evidence that the race is developing a tolerance for the
destructive agencies of both medicine and surgery, for neither can
by any stretch of the wildest imagination be considered constructive
in character.
With all our declining health rate, which none can doubt, we
still take Olympic contests quite regularly, though not so regularly
as formerly, showing that while the mass may be degenerating
slowly, yet the individual young man can succeed in so developing
athletic efficiency that we send abroad a set of athletes that any
country may be proud to claim.
The trouble is wholly with Mr. Plain Citizen, the man who
stays at home and is satisfied with conditions as they are, or perhaps
not wholly satisfied, but believing his circumstances prevent any
effort at change.
His father, his grandfather, lived as he does, at least in
compliance with environment, for the average citizen is a well-
meaning man, not inclined to kick unless stepped on ruthlessly,
patient to the nth degree, uncomplaining even though he feels many
times that he is somehow getting the short end of the stick.
He was raised to accept what is offered at the table, perhaps
quoting St. Paul's advice to one of his pupils: "Eat what is set before
you, asking no questions for conscience sake."
Too many people have quoted this same suggestion of St. Paul
without reading what immediately preceded it, for he was asked for
advice when eating at tables on which was served meat that had
been offered to idols, and his reference to conscience shows that it
was merely this phase to which he referred.
When the average citizen realizes that he has the control of his
almost entire destiny he will wake up to the fact that he is himself
largely to blame for his state, whether this has been to his liking or
not, for he is just what he eats daily.
Perhaps his father ate all wrong and lived to a good old age,
but did he transmit to this son as good a heredity as would have
been the case had he known how to live?
Look over the average family records and you will find that
but few marriages ever result in anything beyond the fourth
generation.
