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Warning: The Author Has Determined That Not Reading the Following Pages Is Dangerous to Your Health

This is a book for folks who are willing to take time to stop and think. I’ve often said that one of the biggest problems in America today is that we Americans just don’t think, not just about food—about anything.

The trouble with us Americans is that we’ve never thought. Remember that old cleanser commercial? “Keep the rust out of the entire house!” So folks would clean up all the rusty spots. But if they ever thought to pick up that can of cleanser after it had been sitting for a while, sure enough they’d have found that little brown rusty ring!

Let’s take another example. We spend millions of dollars in the United States every year for civil defense buildings. But do you realize most of them are closed on weekends? It’s as if we think our enemies are planning to fight a five-day war! Even Israel took six days.

Life insurance is another good example. Probably no other group of people on the face of this earth spends more money on life insurance than we do in the United States. Did you ever stop and think that you have to be slightly stupid to buy life insurance? But just analyze this. You’re betting the insurance company people that you’re going to die. And they’re betting you that you are going to live. And you’re hoping they win. And they charge you.

Sometimes the strangest things cause you to stop and think. I remember when I first started thinking about whether or not it was right to eat meat. It was on Thanksgiving Day a number of years ago. I had been drinking while I waited for the turkey to get done. It takes a turkey a long time. By the time I was standing at the head of the table with my carving knife, I suddenly had the strangest thoughts. I got to thinking that there might be some beings on another planet somewhere who are as intelligent compared with us as we are compared with turkeys.

Now that’s a disturbing thought! I could just see myself in some strange planetary oven, being basted and roasted. It would be one thing to roast white folks brown; they’d be trying to figure out a way to “undone” us black folks. I even thought about myself lying on a platter all filled with stuffing!

Then I had visions of these beings from another planet going to the butcher shop with their meat list. I wonder what they’d call their butcher shops? They’d probably call them “folks shops.” I could hear them placing an order: “Give me a half dozen Oriental knees, two Caucasian feet and twelve fresh Black lips.” And the folks-shopkeeper comes back smiling and says, “These Black lips are so fresh they’re still talkin’.” After that little fantasy, I couldn’t eat my Thanksgiving dinner. But it started me thinking.

There would be a whole lot of changes in America if we Americans decided one day to start thinking. And one of the biggest and most important changes would be in the “traditional” American diet. The old saying is very true: “You are what you eat.” It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say: “You are what you assimilate.” That is, your body literally is what you assimilate from the “foods”—or more frequently “things”—you eat to rebuild cells and what you eliminate as waste products of the cell-building activity as you revitalize yourself each day.

If you just stop and look around you, you can see—and many of you can feel—the sorry results of the eating habits of the majority of folks in America today. Folks getting old twenty, thirty, forty or even fifty years before their time. Swollen ankles, varicose veins, pot bellies, bald heads, arthritis, rheumatism, ulcers, sinus trouble, eye trouble, mental illness, gallstones, prostate gland trouble, hemorrhoids, heart trouble, liver trouble, kidney trouble, overweight, underweight, anemia, bad feet, headaches, short breath, can’t sleep or can’t wake up, no energy, “tired” blood, sitting in front of the television set all evening and falling asleep watching it—the list is endless and very, very familiar.

Dr. Laura Newman, in her 1970 book Make Your Juicer Your Drugstore, reports: “During the last 50 years in the U.S.A., the increase of Epilepsy has been 450%; Diabetes, 1800%; Bright’s Disease, 650%; Anemia, 300%; Insanity, 400%; Heart Trouble, 300%; Cancer, 308%; and, while we have the distinction of raising the world’s best hogs, we have 75% of the world’s Sinus Trouble.”

The sad truth is that all of these afflictions, and their unbelievable increase, are the result of Americans’ habit of putting “garbage” in their stomach instead of in the disposal. Most folks throw leftover garbage in the incinerator, disposal or garbage can—but only after they have tossed down or gulped—seldom chewed!—the greatest percentage of garbage into their own bodies.

It is very hard to unlearn the falsehoods we have accepted as truth all our lives. So much of what we are taught—both in school and at our mother’s knee—is nothing more than accepted, handed-down opinion that simply will not hold up under cold, hard analysis or weather the test of new experience. The great scientist Albert Einstein described most of what we learn as “a collection of prejudices which are fed to us with a porridge spoon before our eighteenth year.” In schools at all grade levels, teachers present the current theories and notions of the time as though they were established facts. But the passage of time, combined with new experience and research, makes yesterday’s “facts” today’s myths, superstitions and falsehoods.

Einstein’s description is uniquely appropriate when it comes to the matter of personal diet. We are literally spoon fed wrong food and wrong notions about what we ought to eat! It begins when we are babies and food is inserted in our mouths; we are offered no choice. For many of us the process never changes! The only alternative babies have is to spit it out—which of course they often do. Mothers see that reaction as something babies go through until they learn how to eat rather than as the natural response of innocence to a violation of Mother Nature’s rules!

Teachers in the great centers of education in the ancient world (e.g., Pythagoras at Crotona) were very hip. They understood that it was impossible for folks to learn anything until they had experienced its truth for themselves. So the ancient teachers set up a curriculum where their pupils practiced the arts of numerology and dynamic geometry, for example, to experience the faculty of intuition. From that experience a pupil could go on to apprehend the essential laws of cosmic motion.

This book is based upon that ancient understanding of how we learn. The book grew out of my own personal experience. Its pages reflect what I have learned—what I have experienced as Truth and what I hope you will try for yourself—in my new life of “cookin’ with Mother Nature.”

Unless you are already very heavy into the natural-food-and-way-of-life movement, most of what you read in Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat will go against everything you’ve ever believed about food, eating, health and disease. I can only say to you, “Don’t feel too bad. I started out on an equal footing with the worst-eatin’ reader of these pages!”

But I was fortunate. I met a teacher in the “ancient tradition,” Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton. I’ll speak more of her later, but in this chapter I’ll just testify! When I met her, Dr. Fulton was confident that she possessed the truth about food, nutrition and proper diet. But she also knew I would have to experience that Truth for myself. I resisted every step of the way. Out of ignorance, I argued, rationalized and repeated all the wrong notions about food I had been taught.

Why? Because I just couldn’t believe my momma would have fed me meat if it was wrong, or given me cow’s milk if it was wrong. And here was a stranger, a woman I had just met, telling me that my own momma had fed me wrong! My momma never had the benefit of learning the Truth about proper diet, and as a result she suffered many of the physical results of improper eating habits. We were very poor and my momma’s main concern was that we kids got “somethin’ to eat.”

Every time I would come up with one of my stupid arguments, trying to refute what Dr. Fulton was telling me about some new way to change my diet, she would smile and say, “Just try it for me. Try it for a while and see what happens.” I tried it, and invariably I liked it! I liked the fresh, pure tastes of natural foods; but even more important, I liked the glowing feeling of health, vigor and energy which followed my change in diet.

So many times I hear people resist changing their diet because they don’t want to give up something they like. That’s the first great myth to be dispelled. Learning to eat as Mother Nature intended her children to eat does not mean giving up something. It means just the opposite! It means gaining something of great value—a value far greater than the old rationalization “I’ve grown accustomed to its taste.” It means gaining health, youthful energy and appearance, increased mental capacity, and a joy in living you never dreamed was possible. To say nothing of the clean, fresh, natural taste of the food you will be enjoying!

The more I tried out Dr. Fulton’s recommendations, the more I began to realize the sad neglect of my formal education. I had gone the whole school route—grade school, high school and college—and never once did I take a course in “Nature.” I was never taught that the most important thing in life was learning to live in harmony with Nature. My formal education was so designed to teach me how to make a living, it never got around to teaching me how to live! I was taught about so-called civilization’s attempt to control Nature and about the ongoing war against Nature (although those terms were never used). I learned about the industrial revolution, the invention of the automobile, the steam engine and the airplane, the world wars, the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and other “accomplishments” of twentieth-century civilization. I was taught about great thinkers, great political and military leaders, great philosophies and ideologies, but none of them told me about Nature.

But Mother Nature herself is a great teacher. She provides experience. And our experience reminds us over and over again, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

Fool around with Mother Nature’s clouds, “seeding” them and conducting other experiments, and eventually you will have a “natural disaster” on your hands—a flood or hurricane. Absorb enough alcohol in your bloodstream and sooner or later Mother Nature’s liver will go on strike and your body declare a work stoppage. Expel enough smoke, exhaust and fumes into the air and eventually Mother Nature’s respiratory system will show you what you can do with all that “progress.” Eat bad enough, long enough, and Mother Nature will send you little notes of reprimand—tooth decay, high blood pressure, heart trouble, kidney trouble or any of the other ways she uses to remind us “It’s not nice.” Try to fool Mother Nature and she will make a fool out of you!

Rather than trying to exercise “control,” a truly civilized humanity should try to learn enough self-control to live in happy harmony with Mother Nature.

I want to share with you my new experiences with Mother Nature. Hopefully you’ll learn something and have a few smiles. But most important is the experience you will gain in living a more natural way of life—the joyful experience of “cookin’ with Mother Nature.”