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EAT WHOLE FOODS UNCONTAMINATED BY PESTICIDES A NOHA theme "Avoid processed foods". This has been a continuing theme in NOHA classes and from NOHA speakers. This theme is brilliantly highlighted in the NOHA tape of Charles T. McGee, MD and in his book, How to Survive Modern Technology. We learn from the introduction and in the NOHA tape that Dr. McGee had conventional training "with about 90 minutes of rather poor instruction in nutrition". He took his residency in obstetrics and gynecology. Right after that, in 1965, he went to Ecuador with Project Hope and "treated the medically indigent – which meant the Indian population – about 320,000 Indians living in the province". They lived on a variety of vegetables they grew themselves and occasional meat. What struck him immediately was the absence of degenerative
diseases: We would say that they don’t live long enough to have degenerative diseases. He replies that they have a very high infant mortality. However, after four or five years of age, their life expectancy is as long as ours. They stayed sharp, alert, and active until they died. In the women there was NO OSTEOPOROSIS. They all breezed through menopause with no symptoms at all: NO DEPRESSION The same was true with the beginning of menstruation. In fact, there was almost no gynecology.
To summarize, in the mountains of Ecuador there was no air pollution and the food was fresh. The Indians "never ate processed foods, refined foods, or any junk foods because they couldn’t afford them. Every bit of food they took was nutritious. "In contrast, the city people were consuming many modern foods. Soda pop and candy were widely available, and white rice and white bread had been in use for several years. Cases of heart attacks, diabetes, and many other diseases of modern civilization were beginning to appear in the city population, but were absent in the Indians." Needless to say, Dr. McGee was very much interested by this experience. After returning to the United States he spent a great deal of time looking up studies of other primitive peoples and found the same absence of degenerative diseases on a great variety of diets – as long as they consist of whole, fresh foods. These diets range from the Eskimos’, which is almost completely meat and fish, to others that are almost completely vegetarian. In all these cases, degenerative diseases commence after the introduction of modern refined foods. Dr. McGee cites Weston A. Price, DDS in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 1945, who gives many, many examples of people who develop crooked teeth and narrow jaws from consuming a modern refined diet. He even has examples of children from the same parents – first with fine teeth; then the store arrives with its refined foods, the family changes its diet, and next the children have crooked teeth and narrow jaws. In cases where the family again changed back to their traditional diet, later children again had fine teeth and wide jaws. Price also finds pelvic narrowing and deformity to be more common on commercial diets, resulting in increased difficulty in labor and delivery, with higher Cesarean Section rates.
McGee comments, "As an obstetrician I can verify that narrow pelvic bones are common in the United States and contribute to our increasing Cesarean Section rates. I had never before run into a possible explanation for this phenomenon. We always assumed that narrow pelvic bones were weeded out by natural selection through death at childbirth. "Price stands as a giant because of his discoveries. His findings show how delicate our balance of health really is and how easily physical degeneration can begin. He showed that changes from traditional diets can’t be taken lightly." On an optimistic note, there are some farmers raising food without pesticides and fumigation, and some stores selling this food, usually called "organic". Article from NOHA NEWS, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer 1984, pages 1-2. |
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