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From: dts@gitpyr.UUCP (Danny Sharpe)
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Folk Medicine (long)
Message-ID: <651@gitpyr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 16:54:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: gitpyr.651
Posted: Tue Aug 13 16:54:34 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Aug-85 07:40:51 EDT
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Lines: 123

I just subscribed to this newsgroup and walked in in the middle of the
discussion of sugar, etc.  This discussion is interesting to me because I
recently took a room in a house where the other three residents all, to one
degree or another, subscribe to the "anti non-natural food and medicine" school
of thought.  I hadn't particularly been exposed to these ideas before (no, this
is not going to be a testimonial -- read on) and I've been asking questions
and observing what I can, and even investigating some of the stuff first-hand.
It's been a lot of fun.

From what I've seen, there seems to be a large and widespread body of belief
that is composed of old ideas (like from Middle Ages and Greek science) passed
down through time, mystical/pagan/shamanistic ideas about nature, and
misunderstood modern scientific ideas.  All these notions are combined to make
a model of the world that is fairly coherent (if you don't question it *too*
closely).

On the wall of our kitchen there is a big, laminated poster on food combining.
It gives good illustrations of the mixture of ideas, spiced with a sprinkling
of errors in fact.  For those readers who are not familiar with food combining,
it is a set of guidelines governing what foods can be eaten in combination with
each other.  Eating foods that don't combine well is supposed to be a major
cause of physical and mental problems.  The guidelines are based on some
interesting ideas and reasoning...


   On eating proteins and starches together:

     "Take for example, the hamburger -- the meat is a protein and the
      bread is a starch.  It takes a series of ACID digestive juices to
      digest the protein (pepsin, hydrochloric acid, etc.) and a series
      of ALKALINE digestive juices to digest the starch (ptyalin, maltase,
      etc.).  Remember in chemistry class when you burned yourself with
      some acid, you were told to put an alkaline such as lemon or
      vinegar, etc., to neutralize the acid!  Well, the same result
      happens when you eat a protein and a starch together.  They
      neutralize themselves and absolutely NO DIGESTION IS THE RESULT.
      Then, as we have learned, when your food doesn't digest, it ROTS."


Note the major error in simple, commonly known, fact that 'most everyone
reading this should have caught -- calling lemon and vinegar alkaline.
This mistake is, of course, not central to the issue of whether there's
anything to food combining, but it casts doubt on the writer's credibility
in general.  There is the possibility that it's a typo (that's what my
housemate who put up the poster said when I pointed it out), but if you
read on you will see still more mistakes of similar nature.  I am also
told by someone who has studied digestion that the digestive process described
in this paragraph is apparently based on medical descriptions, but only loosely.

In another part of the poster there are some tables which classify foods as
either acid or alkaline, and some of the citrus fruits, like lemon, are
classified as alkaline.  I'm thinking that this may be the reason for calling
lemon alkaline in the previous example.  I asked my housemate what was the
reason behind calling a citrus fruit alkaline.  The response was that it starts
out acid but when it hits the digestive juices they turn it into an alkaline.
Is there some fact, like perhaps a relation between lemons and blood pH or
something, that this could be based on?  I'd appreciate it if some one out
there (who really knows) could answer this.


   On eating food with salt in it:

     "And to show you how toxic salt is, chemically broken down (SODIUM
      CHLORIDE) it's a lethal poison."


I haven't been able to make much sense out of this sentence, in context or
out, but it could be saying that since sodium and chlorine are by themselves
poisonous then salt must be poisonous, too.  This is the logical conclusion
to the idea that food is broken down into its components during digestion,
generalized to included salt.


   On sunbathing:

     "Don't overdo your sunbathing as it WILL be harmful -- DO NOT sunbathe
      between 11AM & 2PM.  The HOT infra-red burning rays are too strong
      and you can't tan then.

      ...lay at least 1/3 of your time with your head lower than your feet.
      This way your blood nourishes the Brain & takes wastes from the legs
      & feet to the heart for purification."


My understanding is that it's the ultraviolet rays that both tan and burn,
and I'm not aware of infrared having any inhibiting effect on tanning.  The
idea that the heart purifies the blood sounds like it might be an old theory
-- like straight out of the middle ages -- that hasn't quite died.

As a last example: after looking at the poster a while I noticed that honey
is mentioned nowhere.  Listening to the housemate who posted it gives me the
impression that honey is taken to be sort of an ultimate food, as close to
perfect as any food can be, so it seems that honey should be mentioned
prominently.  This brought to mind the following question, which I asked my
housemate: Honey is supposed to be very healthful to people, but it doesn't
spoil.  This means it's not healthful to bacteria.  Why not?  Is it a
selective poison, or what?

This question has been asked and answered on the net.  Bacteria that fall into
the honey get all the water sucked out of them by osmosis.  Some bacteria
(like the one that causes salmonella) form spores and do survive to be
rejuvenated in the body of the unlucky eater.  My housemate's answer was
substantially different: honey is concentrated life force so the decay process
just doesn't work on it.


I can easily envision reasonable ways that scientific notions and results
could be at the root of many of these ideas -- the idea that warmer bodies
generate more infrared light becomes the idea that infrared rays carry heat
yields the idea that sunburn must be caused by strong infrared given off
by the sun.  It makes sense in a layman's sort of way.  Perhaps this is
what you get when you mix science and people without a strong background
in scientific thought.



-- 
-- CAUTION: WET FLOOR    <== Is this a warning or a command? --

Danny Sharpe
School of ICS
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
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