HYGIENIC SYSTEM ORTHOTROPHY

This book is a reprint of TGS Alternative/Survival Health books. UNNATURAL food is the principal cause of human degeneration. It is the oldest vice. If we reflect upon the number of ruinous dietetic abuses, and their immemorial tyranny over the larger part of the human race, we are tempted to eschew all symbolic interpretations of the paradise legend and ascribe the fall of man literally and exclusively to the eating of forbidden food. From century to century this same cause has multiplied the sum of our earthly ills.

Excerpt from the Chapter 1:

Several generations of study of cell development and heredity have ignored almost completely the more important study of nutritional habits as these determine and predetermine cell developments and affect reproduction and survival. The role of nutrition in integration, reintegration, and disintegration has been shamefully neglected.

For the most part, it has been taken for granted that it matters not what kind of food an organism consumes, so long as it consumes "enough" and more than "enough." Plenty of food and lack of food are chiefly considered as of importance. This places most importance upon quantity rather than quality and kind.

Only recently have we begun to seriously investigate the physiological basis of life and the incidences of nutrition as they affect growth and reproduction, both in a physiological and pathological sense. It is true that hints of the role of nutrition in health and disease have come to thinking members of our race during the past several thousand years; but scientists have considered such things unworthy of their notice.

Nutrition is the sum total of all the processes and functions by which growth and development, maintenance and repair of the body, and, by which reproduction are accomplished. It is the replenishment of tissues and not the accumulation of fat and not the "stimulation" (excitation) of the vital powers. Due to the great misunderstanding and confusion that exists about "stimulation," we are inclined to associate it with nutrition. "Pure and perfect nutrition," says Dr. Trall, "implies the assimilation of nutriment material to the structure of the body, without the least excitement, disturbance, or impression of any kind that can properly be called stimulating." "All stimulus, therefore, is directly opposed to healthful nutrition, and a source of useless expenditure or waste of vital power."

Food, we define as any substance the elements of which are convertible into, and do form, the constituent matters of the tissues and fluids of the body and are employed by the organism in the performance of any of its functions. Life depends on food. All growth, repair and maintenance of tissues and all development of vital power are the results of nutrition. All parts and products of the body are elaborated from the blood, and all the functions of the body depend upon the blood for material supplies. The blood is elaborated from air, water, food and sunshine. These are essential and all that are essential, so far as materials are concerned, for the production of good blood and sound tissues and organs and functional results.

During life two simultaneous processes are in continual progress--a building up and a breaking down process. The two processes taken together are called metabolism. The constructive process is known as anabolism; the breaking down process as katabolism. In the healthy organism, during childhood and youth and well into maturity, the constructive process exceeds the destructive process. During sickness and in old age the destructive process exceeds the building up process.

During complete rest and sleep all the general life functions are carried on as during waking hours, only less actively. The heart continues to pulsate, the chest to rise and fall in breathing, the liver and digestive organs and other internal organs all go on working. All of the body cells work.

The metabolism carried on at complete rest is called basic metabolism. The metabolic rate is determined by measuring the amount of oxygen used. This varies with age, sex, climate, race, habits, diet, mental state, etc. It is lower in women than in men, higher (nearly double) in infants than in adults, lowest in advanced age. It is lower in Orientals (Japanese and Chinese); higher in athletes than in sedentary men. Americans living in Brazil show a lower basal metabolism than in this country. It is greater after effort (but during sleep) due to muscular tension. It rises during the day, being higher in the afternoon than in the morning. It is lower in vegetarians than in meat eaters.

Orthodox science cannot tell what is a standard metabolism and a standard of biological relation. As in everything else, the standards for "normal basic metabolism" are mere statistical averages made, for the most part, on over-stimulated, over-fed and particularly over-protein-stuffed subjects. The ideal or biological norm can be determined only from healthy individuals living a truly bionomic life.

It is the Hygienic view that normal metabolism must be based on a normal mode of nutrition which involves not only the kind, quality and amount of food eaten, but also, and very importantly, the kind and amount of work--"sweat of the brow"--expended in earning this food. No mode of nutrition can be considered normal that does not involve work--counter-service--in procuring it. Predacity, parasitism, saprophytism, and similar modes of stealing supplies or of living without work involve, not only a disturbance of the normal work-food ratio, but also feeding upon inferior foods. Metabolic abnormalities growing out of such modes of nutrition result in losses and exaggerations of structure and in disease in general.

7,000,000 of the 25,000,000,000,000 red blood cells in the body of an average man die every second, so that 7,000,000 new ones must be produced every second of our lives--a wonderful example of the creative operations always at work in our bodies. The materials out of which these new cells are built are supplied by food. This represents only a small part of the creative work that goes on. Similar destruction and reconstruction occur in other tissues of the body.

The human body is made up of twenty-two chemical elements

Back Cover