Locating and remedying deficiencies and excesses in vitamins, minerals, enzymes, sugar, protein, oil and fats, carbohydrates and bulk fiber as well as other dietary elements is the keynote of dieting. No special substance or food or abstinence from it is a whole answer.
Diet should be considered a subject where one seeks a balance of body support elements and determines quantity.
The problem of weight is resolved by counting daily calories of consumption of the diet as a whole. This is the only contemporary successful method which proves itself. Fasting, magic foods eaten to the exclusion of others, dozens of dietary fads alike tend to be more harmful than beneficial.
At times, personal allergies have to be taken into account. In some persons, disease or illness has to be allowed for. But in both cases the artificial creation of deficiencies in vitamins, minerals and other elements must be guarded against and made up for in some other way.
When large dosages of certain vitamins, minerals or foodstuffs are given, an artificial deficiency can apparently be created in others not given. Increase of some elements, just by the fact of being increased, demands increases in others. When intake of some elements is markedly increased, balance must be maintained by proportionately increasing others. A vitamin or mineral does not work alone — it must be accompanied by other elements with which it combines to do its work. It will even rob bones, muscles and tissue to obtain the missing elements. Artificial deficiencies can be so created.
Any vital substance on which body support depends, when too reduced or omitted from consumption, can be depended upon to result in a nonoptimum physical condition.
When very obvious, it becomes a “disease”. And when less obvious and even undetected, it becomes a “not feeling good.”
There is a distinct possibility (after mental and spiritual factors) that the largest distinctive contributive factor in aging is the composite of cumulative deficiencies, Predisposition to other types of illness is in many instances occasioned by these deficiencies even when the precipitation is viral or bacterial.
Prolongation of illness is guaranteed when deficiencies remain present and unremedied.
A lot of people probably go on drugs because they feel so terrible due to dietary deficiencies. And drugs, themselves, cause wholesale vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which then progressively worsen. Recovery from drugs requires a full repair of these deficiencies.
The bugbear is that man does not know what man’s optimum diet really is. And another difficulty arises in that not all essential elements to life support have been isolated.
Improvement in these two areas of research is what will produce greater longevity and better health for man, barring mental factors, which of course we have now isolated and resolved.
As we are dealing with a being in an organism, our work is impeded by man’s slow progress in biochemical and physiological spheres and the attendant authoritarianisms and faddisms which always arise around uncodified or little known subjects.
The most useful published, popular compilations on the subject of diets and biochemistry to date were done by the late Adelle Davis in her four books: “Let’s Get Well”, “Let’s Eat Right To Keep Fit”, “Let’s Cook It Right” and “Let’s Have Healthy Children”.
An improperly fed and cared for body is a kind of trap. And as long as one is pushing a body around, he should make a sincere attempt, without becoming its slave, to provide it with the fuel, care and exercise required to keep it functioning.