Food Combining for Health: The bestseller that has changed millions of lives

Among these manifestations Dr Cleave lists constipation, with its complications of varicose veins and haemorrhoids; obesity; diabetes; skin diseases; dental decay and periodontal disease; urinary tract infections (such as cystitis, from which so many women suffer today); and coronary disease. Dr Hay dealt with most of these manifestations and others as well, but nowhere in his many writings have I found any reference whatsoever to coronary heart disease (CHD).

This fact is highly significant; it confirms Dr Cleave’s contention that it ‘takes time for the consumption of refined carbohydrates to produce the various manifestations of the saccharine disease’, and that these manifestations have ‘incubating periods’ which differ in each case. In the case of diabetes, for instance, the incubation period may be 20 years, but in the case of CHD, 30 years. As CHD was a rare disease from 1900 to 1930 when Dr Hay was practising medicine, it is not surprising that he never had to deal with it. It was still a rare disease in the 1920s and it was not until 30 years afterwards, in the 1950s, that CHD started to become an epidemic disease, concurrent with the massively increasing consumption of refined sugar.

A recently concluded study of the lifestyle and diet of the people of Okinawa, an island in the North Pacific, established that the 1.3 million inhabitants have the longest life expectancy in the world with four times as many centenarians as in the Western world (Bradley Willcox et al., The Okinawa Way, Michael Joseph, 2001). Heart problems and strokes are virtually unknown among the older people who still follow their traditional plant-based diet. However, Western diseases are beginning to appear among the younger adults who, since the American occupation, have adopted a Western diet. As Dr Cleave demonstrated, these problems have arisen roughly 20 to 30 years after the introduction of refined and processed foods.

CHD incidence in Britain was among the highest in the world when this book was first published in 1984, killing 170,000 people annually – one every three minutes – and about 5,000 of these before the age of 50. Since then the annual number of deaths from CHD in Britain has been declining. However, this is thought to be owing to better survival rates rather than a reduction in heart disease. In 1991, a government white paper ‘The Health of the Nation’ reported that CHD accounted for about 26 per cent of deaths in England and was still one of the highest death rates for CHD in the world. A 10-year study published by the Office of Health Economics showed that deaths from CHD between 1990 and 2000 fell by 36 per cent, although mortality in Scotland remained much higher – 1,014 per 100,000 people compared with 835 in England and Wales.

A report on BBC Radio 4 (28 September 2003) stated that CHD was four times more likely than breast cancer to be a cause of death in women, though the latter was perceived as a more potent threat.

Doctors now generally accept that the main risk factors for CHD are cigarette smoking, raised plasma cholesterol, raised blood pressure and obesity coupled with lack of physical activity. All these can be influenced by changes in lifestyle, and the emphasis is now very much on prevention by stopping smoking, reducing the consumption of saturated fats, sugar, salt and refined carbohydrates, and increasing intake of fruits and vegetables (‘Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases’, WHO, 2003).

Dr Hay advocated this selfsame approach – not for CHD, which was virtually non-existent in his lifetime, but for treating and preventing all the degenerative diseases. There are a number of very good nutritional cures now being promoted, but it can be stated categorically that the Hay system comes nearer to a full understanding of the causes, treatment and prevention of disease than any other doctrine, as the following discussions of some of these degenerative diseases will confirm.

Constipation (Simple)

Fifty years ago William Howard Hay listed constipation as one of the main sources of acid formation in the system. He warned that long-term cases of constipation could be the cause of many of the degenerative diseases. Present-day medical findings have confirmed this warning and have also revealed that constipation is almost certainly a contributing factor to the high rate of bowel cancer in Western society.

Dr Hay also listed incompatible food combinations and fibre-deficient refined carbohydrates as sources of acid formation. Both these sources directly contribute to constipation. Striking proof that they do so was provided in a paper entitled ‘Amylaceous Dyspepsia’ (starch-caused indigestion), published in The Liverpool Medico-Chirurgical Journal in 1931. Its author was Dr Lionel J. Picton, author-in-chief of the famous Cheshire Medical Testament, published in 1938, in which 31 family doctors declared that the prevention of sickness depends on right feeding.

In this paper Dr Picton drew attention to a well-known laboratory experiment on dogs by the famous Russian scientist, Pavlov. From this experiment, according to Dr Picton, Pavlov deduced the following data: minced beef fed to a dog is digested in about four hours, starch by itself passed through a dog’s stomach in a much shorter time, in one-and-a-half hours or less, white bread more slowly than brown. But when meat was mixed with the starch there was invariably a delay – a protracted delay. Instead of four-and-a-half hours for meat alone, this mixture took eight or more hours to leave the stomach.

Dr Picton argued that this delay in one section of the line tended towards delay all along the line. As he pointed out: ‘The somewhat startling conclusion flows from this, that meals of mixed character such as meat and bread favour constipation, whereas meat and salad at one meal and starchy food such as bread and butter at a separate meal have no such effect.’

Dr Picton’s paper provided outstanding confirmation of the truth of the starch – protein concept, and of the close relationship of incompatible food mixtures to constipation. And his case histories of patients provided proof.

The first step in the treatment of constipation is therefore none other than that recommended by Dr Hay for all diseases, the removal of the cause – far too much acid-forming meat and carbohydrates (especially refined carbohydrates), far too little alkali-forming vegetables, salads and fruits, and incompatible food mixtures. Instructions for ‘the removal of the cause’ are given in Part Two; they are not difficult to follow and will soon prove to simplify meal-planning, and lessen cooking and the cost of cooking.

No matter how correctly the meals are combined, the fibre in the diet may be increased by taking unprocessed wheat bran daily. It should be taken at first in teaspoonful doses, in water, before meals, increasing this gradually to suit individual needs. The fibre found in oats, brown rice, linseeds or psyllium, vegetables and pulses is more soothing to the gut than wheat bran, which can cause problems for people with diverticulitis or irritable bowel syndrome. Linseeds or psyllium fibre are particularly helpful in encouraging regularlity and should always be taken with a large glass of water.

Neil S. Painter, well-known London surgeon, advises: ‘You are eating enough bran only when you can pass soft stools without straining. Once you have found this amount take it for life.’ Recent research has shown that in Westernized countries the daily stool is hard and viscous compared to that of rural Africans and Asians living on unrefined foods, and that the intestinal transit time (the time taken for food to traverse the intestines) may be as long as five days instead of 24 hours. Thus many people who think that they are not constipated may be very constipated indeed, despite having a daily stool. For this reason, and in order to speed recovery from any disease, Dr Hay suggested taking a daily two-quart, cool, plain water enema, but not without professional instruction.

Indigestion

(Standard type – upper abdominal pain, heartburn, sometimes accompanied by acid regurgitation)

For many people this condition has become an accepted evil and part of their lives. It is most frequently caused by treacherous food mixtures and it responds with astonishing rapidity to compatibly combined ones. I have rescued many people from afternoon indigestion pains resulting from lunchtime sandwiches of bread and cheese, or bread and meat. They all marvelled at the ensuing peace and tranquillity in their interiors!

Dr Cleave argues that the main cause of indigestion is the refining of carbohydrate foods which strips them of proteins so that there results an outpouring of gastric secretion but not enough protein to neutralize it.

(#litres_trial_promo) This argument, however, is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the fact that, in spite of eating refined carbohydrate foods (white bread and sugar) during the whole of my first year of compatible eating, I nevertheless lost indigestion of 15 years’ duration during the very first week.

In her excellent book Gut Reaction (Vermilion 1998), Gudrun Jonssen gives a very clear account of the digestive process and stresses the importance of maintaining the acid – alkaline balance. She advocates Food Combining as the most effective way of improving digestion.

Dr Hay, too, was convinced that in many, perhaps most cases of indigestion, refined carbohydrates were the cause, but for a different reason. Dr Lionel Picton was likewise convinced. In the aforementioned paper he states that his evidence for this conviction was ‘mainly clinical’, having found that a reduced intake of refined starchy food relieved his patients’ symptoms. For ‘the incipient dyspeptic’ Dr Picton recommended ‘a dietary in which more greens and grilled meat should replace some of the bad foods of modern times, and moreover a diet in which starchy foods should be separated as far as possible from meat, and taken at separate meals’ – a ‘dietary’ totally in accord with Dr Hay’s precepts.

Naturopath Harry Benjamin is another who believes that combinations of starch and protein foods can cause digestive trouble. In Your Diet in Health and Disease (Thorsons, 1974) he recommends cutting out bread and potatoes with meat.

Dr Hay warned that taking antacids, the patent ‘cure’ for indigestion, is not the answer; they can compound the trouble, leading to more serious conditions. There have been medical warnings that antacids can use up certain vitamins in the body that are vital for its proper functioning. Moreover, experiments at Cornell University in the United States revealed that giving carbonate of soda and milk caused a form of kidney stones in laboratory animals. At the University of Vienna, a more recent controlled study of 300 people led by Professor Erika Jensen-Jarolim concluded that people who took medicines to combat indigestion and heartburn, particularly those bought without prescription, were more likely to develop allergies to food. Antacids are merely a crutch which deals with the symptom instead of the cause. The best treatment for indigestion is compatible eating.

Arthritis

The cause and cure of arthritis, whether rheumatoid or osteoarthritis, has baffled the medical profession. Doctors frankly admit as much; they prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers, and tell their patients they must learn to live with it. The side-effects of the painkillers, however, can be serious, even lethal, as the effects of one ‘wonder drug’ for arthritis, Opren – now withdrawn – proved all too tragically. ‘No drug to date has cured, or ever will cure, a true case of arthritis,’ wrote Dr Hay.

There are many contributing causes of arthritis, such as injuries, abuse of the body, allergic reactions, infections, stress-exhausted adrenal glands, vitamin D deficiency, etc. But the end result of most of the underlying causes produces one common denominator – deranged body chemistry. A main cause is therefore an accumulation of acid end-products of digestion resulting in a lowered reserve of the alkaline buffer salts. Dr Hay stressed that ‘the function of every organ and tissue depends on the height, breadth and depth of the alkaline reserve; and the lower this is the lower the function …’

The logical approach to treatment is therefore a nutritional one, aimed at the deranged body chemistry and not at the joints as in the conventional drug treatments and surgical treatments presently in vogue. These are merely palliatives which, once again, deal with the symptoms instead of grappling with the causes.

In a personal communication from Dr James Lambert Mount (author of Food and Health of Western Man [Charles Knight & Co. Ltd, 1975], and one of the founders of the McCarrison Society) he described how he had successfully applied a nutritional approach when treating 100 volunteer patients, suffering from arthritis, who took part in a trial in New Zealand. They were put on a diet aimed at changing the body from an acid to an alkaline state, by giving up red meat, flour and sugar, and concentrating on salads, fruit and organ meats (e.g. heart, kidney). There was an average 80 per cent success rate varying from considerable improvement in the arthritis to a complete cure.

Arthritis is considered the least amenable to treatment of all the chronic diseases. But Dr Hay maintained that arthritis responds to nutritional treatment as surely as do other degenerative diseases. Twenty-eight years of experience enabled him to write very positively – and comfortingly – about the ultimate cure of arthritis:

Most cases of arthritis are curable, and permanently so, if the disease has not progressed to such a degree that it has permanently destroyed the function of the affected joint as occurs in ankylosis. As long as there is motion left in any joint, the case is by no means hopeless. Do not be discouraged if the pain seems to inhibit motion completely, if at the same time the joint can be moved passively to any degree.

He warned, however, that deposits outside the circulation, as those in the tissues about the joints, may require years to be completely absorbed or may never be fully absorbed, yet the joints become usable, and pliable, without pain. But he promised that even cases of severe arthritis, when every joint in the body is affected with pain and immobility, recover uniformly when the body is relieved of its excessive debris and feeding is corrected.

No specific diet is necessary, or even advisable, he said, for arthritis, but it is essential that the food intake should be largely of the alkali- or base-forming variety – vegetables, salads, fruits – and kept so throughout life; that the colon should be brought up to date and kept so. It is essential that the diet should contain fresh, properly constituted foods, whole foods, and as much as possible of these in raw form. It is interesting that, in 1936, at the Royal Free Hospital in London, an experiment on arthritic patients with a raw diet was successfully carried out by Dr Dorothy C. Hare. In the report of this experiment Dr Hare stressed the fact that the rawness of the food seemed to be the one outstanding factor that brought about results.

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Dr Hay warned that starches and sugar, carbohydrates of concentrated character, are the chief dietary causes of arthritis, not so much because they are so intrinsically causative, as because they are usually eaten in combination with incompatible foods and their proper digestion prevented, with resulting fermentation.

The elimination of starches and sugar in the diet is therefore of paramount importance. In the opinion of some authorities at the present time, most arthritic patients experience difficulty in assimilating carbohydrates, with ensuing indigestion. (Once again, starch is the villain of the piece, and even a valuable whole-grain one can be so if not correctly combined with other foods.) From my own experience, and that of correspondents and friends, indigestion frequently precedes and accompanies arthritis. This indicates that both conditions are due to the same cause – incompatible food mixtures and a lowered alkaline reserve. This underlines the great value of compatible eating; it automatically reduces the amount of starch eaten and ensures its compatible combination with other foods.

Many of Dr Hay’s patients recovered fully by making no other dietary change apart from the strict separation of incompatible foods (as in my own case). But to make this strict separation, and at the same time to make the diet 80 per cent alkali forming, is more effective, speedier and helps to correct the chemical balance. Arthritis, asserted Dr Hay, is a purely nutritional state, the result of an imbalance in the body’s chemistry; he found this was evident from observation of many cases. He also found it evident that ‘exposure to weather, or occupational pursuits, have nothing to do with the creation of the condition, except in a secondary way’.

To help correct the chemical balance and increase the delicate alkaline reserve in the bloodstream, Dr Hay particularly recommended a sufficiency of acid fruits such as oranges, grapefruit and lemons (the juice of a lemon in a glass of water on waking is very beneficial); these acid fruits are especially high in alkaline salts – lemons most of all. Unfortunately, many arthritic sufferers make the mistake of avoiding all ‘acid fruits’ thinking thereby to help their condition, whereas they are merely worsening an already deficient intake of vitamins. As there seems to be much confusion regarding the term ‘acid fruits’, the reader is urged to re-read its classification in Chapter 2.

Dr Hay also recommended:

Celery juice; this has proved invaluable in dissolving and removing years of accumulated acid deposits in the cartilage of arthritic joints. In The Home Herbal (Pan Paperback), Barbara Griggs recommends celery seeds for arthritis and rheumatism because their ‘high alkaline value helps to counteract acid formation in the blood and clear it out of the system’. Arthritis sufferers will find her other recommendations most helpful.

Wheatgerm, bran, kelp (seaweed, obtainable in tablet form at health-food shops) and cod liver oil. Dr Hay claimed that these supplements are also very beneficial for all departures from health.

Gentle exercise, rest and natural sunlight. Research by Dr John Ott, famous pioneer of time-lapse photography, confirmed the great benefit to arthritis of natural sunlight. In Health and Light (The Devin Adair Co., Conn., USA) he proved with regard to his own arthritis that spending as much time as possible out of doors, walking or gardening, and receiving natural sunlight energy (even on dull days) directly through the eyes, minus sunglasses, spectacles or contact lenses, is highly beneficial in the control of this disease.

The elimination from the diet of vinegar, spices, tea, coffee and alcohol – especially sweet wines and liqueurs.

Calmness and emotional control; tension, fear, anger, hate etc., do much to aggravate arthritis symptoms and increase suffering.

It must therefore be repeated again: arthritis is a purely nutritional state and its logical treatment is a nutritional one. Unfortunately, arthritis research foundations have been issuing statements for many years that nutritional therapy is totally without merit, thus discouraging most doctors from paying attention to their patients’ diet. Any cure or improvement resulting from nutritional therapy has therefore been dismissed as a ‘spontaneous remission’. There is now, however, too much solid evidence of sustained benefit from such therapy to justify this concept. In particular, the Arthritic Association has had much success in promoting a high-potassium diet based on the work of Charles de Coti-Marsh, which is very much in accord with the ideas of Dr Hay.

Obesity

This is a far more serious condition than most people realize; it is now closely linked with diabetes, cholesterol-rich gallstones, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and stroke. Roughly half the people in the UK are overweight, and obesity among children is now reaching epidemic proportions. One in ten six-year-olds is now classed as obese, and the epidemic is spreading at nearly one per cent a year.

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It is generally believed that people become obese because they eat too much. Dr Hay believed that obesity is far more often evidence of an imbalance in nutrition than the result of eating too much, and that its cause lies very frequently in the mixture of starchy food and proteins, or starches with acid fruits. He also strongly indicted refined carbohydrates, as did Dr T.L. Cleave 50 years later.