purpose, in making a unique diet for themselves as unique individuals that will aid in maintaining health and assist in overcoming whatever may befall them as illnesses.
In the process, I hope to give you some concept of the importance of stress, attitudes, emotions, beliefs, habits, prayer, and meditation as they affect the use of food and your general health. A glossary in the back of the book will help define certain words or ideas. Have fun reading these pages. They will let you know that you are indeed incomparable in this universe—and that simply no one will need exactly the same kind of diet for full health as you do. Thus, you can be very creative as you search for that diet that will suit you best. And you can be assured that
1
My Search for Good Nutrition
Good nutrition—a constructive diet that we might follow—becomes for many of us the open door to a new awareness, the beginning of a major change in consciousness.
Simply recognizing that the body has the ability to create within us life-giving substances out of those foods we put into our mouths is a revelation. For me it was. And that revelation, although slow in coming, brought me face-to-face with a concept I had read in the Bible and heard repeated literally hundreds of times: The body is indeed “the temple of the Living God.”
As I came to the point of recognizing that the adoption of good dietary habits helped me in fashioning my own temple, I realized that this would give me insights into my spiritual reality and would open the door to those changes that bring more and greater spiritual growth.
As a child, my concern was not the kind of food I should or could eat, but rather—at least during those depression years—would there be food to eat? One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a trip I took in Wellsville, Ohio, me pulling my little wagon along with my father down the back alleys to the 12th Street storehouse where food was being given out to those who were in need. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew that we stood in line for a long time, until Dad signed some papers and got a supply of food.
My mother had died in 1927, two years before the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression. Then Dad lost his job when the steel mill closed. He had to feed my two brothers and me, as well as himself, with no wages coming in. So we ate whatever we could get. If it didn’t build our health, at least we didn’t starve.
During my teens, I recall celebrating my team’s baseball victory with Pepsi-Colas—and I could down the entire bottle on occasion without stopping, not the best thing for my health. It seems that the human body has a tremendous ability to survive and stay relatively healthy under the most adverse circumstances. My teeth suffered, however, requiring some thirty fillings when I was just fifteen.
Today, our six grown children have a minimum of fillings. I would guess that together they have not totaled in their lives the number of fillings I had done that year when I was in my midteens. Their diet, of course, has been totally different. And that has made a great difference, not only in their teeth but in their overall health.
Through my final years of high school and college, I didn’t think about my diet. It was only when I got into medical school that the subject of vitamins became part of my studies. Those years (1943-47) were discovery years in the field of vitamins, but their use in medicine was almost nonexistent.
The subject fascinated me, however. I simplified the problem somewhat, figuring that if (1) the lack of vitamins can cause scurvy and other recognized diseases, then (2) the use of vitamins must relieve a variety of diseases where vitamins might be in inadequate supply.
It seemed logical to me at that point in my medical education that a human body receiving an adequate supply of vitamins would very naturally be in a better state of health than one in which the vitamins were lacking.
Surprisingly, this concept was not particularly acceptable among the majority of my professors or fellow students. It was apparent that the disease—rather than the nutritional status of the patient—was the focus of the studies, laboratory tests, X-rays, medical histories, and examinations. My interest, then, remained an interest only, and I had little chance to try out my ideas, except on myself. Vitamins did, however, enhance my state of health—more energy, fewer colds. I simply felt better. I still didn’t know too much about nutrition or diets, but I had made the first step.
The attitude taken by medical schools in those days (which to a great extent still exists) was that nutrition had little, if any, importance, that the mind and the emotions had no direct, or even indirect effect on the physical body; that prayer was in no manner associated with the health of the body or with the correction of disease; and that meditation (“What’s that?”) would only be found in some of those strange Eastern religions. In my years at the University of Cincinnati, the mention of a Divine Being or God came about only in the profanity of the professors, residents, interns, and students. And, as for the subject of reincarnation, well, that wasn’t even considered.
While there was little development toward an understanding of good nutrition during those days of my formal medical training, ideas about food gradually came into focus during the early years of my practice in the field of what is now called family medicine. From a state of what I call unawareness, I moved step-by-step into a sometimes painful awakening.
A woman patient of mine in Wellsville, where I began my practice of medicine, was bedfast and not doing well due to an illness that was not readily diagnosable. From my interest in vitamins and the availability of injectable vitamin B-12, I gave this lady three consecutive daily injections of B-12. She was not only out of bed, but was moving around normally once again in a matter of just a few days.
Some years later, when I spent two years as a flight surgeon in the Air Force, I had many an argument with another medical officer who was trained in internal medicine. He could not see the benefit of B-12 for anything except pernicious anemia. Perhaps it was because he was so immersed in looking at the disease—was it treatable?—rather than the idea that the patient might be deficient in that particular vitamin without necessarily suffering from pernicious anemia. Early in my experience in the field of medicine, this reluctance to understand the importance of vitamins was the norm. In later years, I have found that there is a change coming about, slow as it seems in making its appearance.
Things had not improved to any extent in the late fifties or early sixties. I brought a case before a panel of physicians who were looking at problems in the Medicare coverage. The system had refused to pay for injectable vitamins for a patient who had a textbook case of vitamin deficiency and did not respond to oral dosages. I even took the textbook down to the meeting to show the doctors. They still could not understand what to me was obvious: The patient had not responded to oral vitamin therapy and needed (and responded to) the injectable form.
I tried to use what knowledge I had of nutrition with our family. I will never forget the picture of our four-year-old Annie standing on the street near the ice-cream wagon, yelling so that everyone would hear her, “Everyone in the whole world gets ice cream except the McGareys!”
Nutrition was also important in our medical practice. We came across the Koch cancer therapy not long after we opened our offices. Dr. William Koch had developed a substance he described as an oxidation catalyst. Although he had many adherents, Koch was eventually discredited by the established authorities in his attempts to treat cancer. One thing stood out among all other factors, however, in the regimen of therapy he prescribed. Eat a very good diet, no fried foods, lots of greens, don’t cook with aluminum, drink lots of water—advice Edgar Cayce also put forth in his readings.
We adopted some of those ideas, although at that time we had no idea why such a diet would influence the course
