From the foregoing, the subject of dieting for health should require no further explanation; it is obvious that to get results it is necessary to eliminate or drastically curtail from our menus the sort of foods that cause toxemia and lead to ill health. This means denying ourselves a certain amount of pleasure in eating, a denial a lot of people refuse to accept on the grounds that they are not overweight and that they have "never had a day's sickness in their life". "Moderation in all things" is another good reason.

Because the Western diet contains adequate quantities of all the nutrients needed to sustain life, it is considered to be "balanced" and capable of maintaining good health. This is true only to a point, because reasonable health can be maintained on the Western diet only as long as the digestive system, liver and other vital organs are capable of enduring the load the diet puts on them in their efforts to provide a pure and complete bloodstream from processed and semi-artificial food.

Dieting for better health then has little to do with taking vitamins, minerals and "health foods", because when it is realized that most of the malnutrition suffered in civilization eventuates not because of diet deficiencies but because it is improperly constituted, then it becomes clear that the first thing to do is to cut out the harmful things. Without making any changes in the diet at all, great improvements in health can be achieved simply by eating less and cutting out salt, so accomplishing a purer bloodstream and at the same time getting rid of excess weight.

Although overweight is associated with increased risk of disease and shortened lifespan, it does not follow that dieting for weight loss and dieting for health are the same. Whereas proper dieting will achieve both weight adjustment and good health together, there are some slimming diets which achieve weight loss at the expense of health. Diets such as the Atkins diet, the Stillman diet and the Scarsdale diet are effective in reducing weight but are dangerous over a period. They work because they cut down (correctly) on fat and refined carbohydrate, but make the mistake of substituting high-protein foods as "filleruppers", so increasing the intake of protein from a barely tolerable level to an even less tolerable level certain to worsen toxemia and increase the risk of kidney failure and cancer.

Toxemia is the enemy, and lipotoxemia (lipo = fat) is the arch enemy of health. The worst feature of the Western diet is all the fat in it, and therefore regardless of anything else, our main objective must be to drastically reduce the intake of fat. By virtue of unsticking the blood and improving its circulation and oxygen content, great benefits are felt within three or four days. With less impedance to the digestion by fat, putrefaction in the colon is reduced and therefore toxemia from that source is reduced too. As fat severely inhibits the function of the immune system, reduction of fat brings about vastly improved immune function, also within a few days. Regardless of which "health diet" a person chooses, be it the European grape diet, the Pritikin diet, the Gerson diet, the Macrobiotic diet, the fruit juice diet, or just plain fasting, in all cases a great improvement in wellbeing is experienced in three or four days, the improvement being due to the fact that all these diets are low in fat.

Medical authorities, slowly getting the message, currently recommend people should reduce the amount of fat in their diet to thirty per cent but this is nowhere near good enough. Some benefit is felt at twenty per cent but for proper effect the maximum should be ten per cent as has already been described in previous chapters.

There are several alternative methods of reducing fat and cholesterol in the blood. Physical endurance (aerobic) exercise produces what is called the "training effect" by which the body becomes capable of more efficiently metabolizing blood fats for the production of energy. Athletes in training therefore display lower blood viscosity, lower blood pressure, higher oxygen levels, better immune function and better general health when on the conventional Western diet than do untrained people on the same diet. The other way of coping better with high levels of dietary fat (can you guess?) is to eat the fat raw the way the primitive Eskimos do, and allow the adipose lipase (enzyme) in the fat itself to predigest the fat to allow its more thorough breakdown during digestion. Not that the Western diet ever contained much whale blubber, but at least once upon a time the milk, butter and cheese was unpasteurised and contained valuable enzymes. I guess the easiest way to eliminate fat from the bloodstream is simply not to eat it in the first place, remembering that all foods contain some, the bad items being foods of animal origin, dairy products, and of course all extracted vegetable oils and anything containing them. Remember too that the body makes its own fat out of protein and carbohydrates and that when refined carbohydrates, sugar and alcohol are taken, these too will elevate the amount of fat (triglycerides) in the blood. Animal fat of course contains lots of cholesterol too, so eliminating this fat from the diet serves a double purpose.

The next step in dietary improvement of course is to reduce the amount of protein in the diet. Cutting out foods of animal origin--meat, chicken, eggs and dairy products--will achieve this because these foods are the major source of protein in the conventional diet, and by eliminating them you eliminate in one move not only excess protein but cholesterol and excess fat as well. Conventional nutritionalists usually advise vegetarians to maintain their protein intake levels by using nuts, lentils and beans which are high in vegetable protein, but there is absolutely no need for this as our aim is to reduce protein to between five and ten per cent. On the strict vegetarian diet it is difficult to get protein down to five per cent anyhow.

By reducing the worst ingredients of the Western diet--excess fat, excess protein, cholesterol and salt--to safe levels, you will have eliminated to a great extent the factors underlying most of the diseases of modern civilization, particularly atherosclerosis (heart disease), kidney disease and cancer, but it should be pointed out that the substitution of the dangerous fat and cholesterol foods with a lot of grain products can lead to toxemia of a different kind, possibly as harmful as existed beforehand.

Reference back to previous pages will remind you that a lot more improvements can still be made if you are looking for the very best results, because the question comes in two parts: (a) What immediate degree of health do I want? and (b) How long do I want it to last? A moderate dietary change may restore a forty year old to good health, whereas the same change may not get the desired results in a person of sixty whose vital organs are in worse condition. The forty year old, as he gets older, may find he needs to be stricter with his diet to maintain good health. A lot of people claim they don't need to diet for health at all, because they have never had a day's sickness in their life. The trouble is they cannot see the degeneration going on inside them and they don't even feel it until they perhaps one day start getting chest pains or maybe feel a strange lump inside them, or spit out some blood. Thus someone, proud of their vigorous health, may suddenly overnight become a permanent invalid or even be finished for good.

It is human nature to seek pleasure and to put other things aside until forced to attend to them, and for this reason most people only start thinking of their health when it starts to fail. Then they want a "quick fix" so they can return to their indulgences again. When they find medicine is a waste of time and money they may decide to try diet. There are many diets to choose from. All of them require self-discipline, because to some extent or other the seductive flavors of the Western diet must be abandoned. We are addicted to these flavors and giving them up is as hard as giving up any other drug.