Peter wrote:

>>Mineralization of the soil in the respective regions.

>Are you suggesting that the Vilcabamban region is poorly mineralized?

No, just guessing, but this is probably a safe assumption unless
they have a natural means of remineralization such as glacial runoff
or volcanic dust.  Any people farming the same land year after year
are going to deplete it quickly.

>>>Interesting. Can you mention some that might have relevans to
>>> eating food raw?

>> Eating raw maximizes the body's natural ways of getting
>>loads of oxygen into all the cells.

>I have heard this stated many times but never quite understood
> how raw foods provide us with more oxygen than cooked foods. Please
> expain.

First, you can assume this is the case by implication, as there is
essentially no cancer incidence on raw diets, while cooked foods are
highly carcinogenic.  Lack of oxygen is probably the single most
important causative factor in cancer.  Bob Avery's wonderful post to
the CR list on the various toxic components in cooked foods goes a
long way to explaining things.  All toxins will impede the normal
metabolism (i.e., transport & burning of oxygen) since the cells
have to stop everything & get the toxins out and/or neutralized.
Assuming that many of these toxins are oxidizers, they are going to
deplete the internal oxygen levels.  Probably the body's leading
detoxifying agent is vitamin C, & this & other antioxidants will be
depleted dealing with the toxins.  I'm talking out of my hat (or
worse) here, but I would assume that cooked foods bring in all sorts
of strange compounds we never evolved to deal with, & these things
will literally clog up the works since we won't have efficient means
of removing them.  Clogging poor-oxygen-transport cancer.  And I
wonder about minerals in meats.  I have no idea whether their
absorption is superior to plant foods, but this may not be good
because it brings in stuff herbivores are not adapted to efficiently
remove excesses of.  Calcium is a big-time factor in aging, & I
wonder if meat-derived calcium (or cooked calcium) is not properly
handled in the body.

Can Peter or somebody explain (other than perhaps dental problems
from fruit acids) what the long-term problems are with a raw-veg
diet supplying plently of green leafy vegetables?  Time & again
Shelton underscored the importance of the leafy vegetables.  I am
simply not fluent in all this, & don't get what you are talking
about.

>>Just curious, but has anybody on this list eaten foods grown
>on highly-mineralized soils, loaded with rock dusts?  I have, &
> there is a MAJOR difference.

>How do you obtain such high quality foods? - not at your
> local natural foods or farmers market.  Please elaborate on the major
> difference that you have experienced.

The Clean culture movement was hot in Britain especially over a
century ago until the fertilizer industry sprouted & did everything
they could to erase the knowledge of this.  Basically no nitorgen
fertilizer & loads of rock dust.  About 20 years ago I purchased
books on this from Health Research in California (are they still in
business?).  "Bread From Stones" by Julius Hensel is one of them.
One year I applied the technique to peach trees, also spraying them
in the mornings (prior to the leaf pores closing up) with seaweed
solution.  Incredidble fruits: huge, sweet, satisfying & kept many
times longer than normal. I believe a very few organic growers are
doing similar stuff, & even some chemical growers appear to be also,
judging from the quality of the fruits.  But for proprietary reasons
they might not want to let the secret of their superior fruits out.
There is a California-grown brand of nectarines (Red Lion?) which
strikes me as coming from at least semi-mineralized soils.  I think
I have seen mineralized produce years ago in the NY Health Emporium
back when Barry Mesh (a NHer) ran it.

>According to Sally Fallon ("Nourishing Traditions") & The
> Price Pottenger Nutritional Foundation (PPNF) the minerals in meats
> have a much higher absorption rate than those in vegetarian foods.

>>And all proteins are acidic, so this is not going to help in
> the mineral dept. anyway.

>Again according to PPNF this is of no concern as the acidity
> is balanced by the high phosphorous content of most meats.

It is my understanding that when burned (what the body also
essentially does, but at a much slower rate) all proteins will yield
an acidic ash. (BTW Sandy, that quote I posted on bone mineral
density correlating with cancer was extracted from something
discussing the hormonal aspects of all this, so I think you are on
the right track.  My point is that diet can apparently do what
hormonal malfunctions can do too: mess up your mineral balance &
send you into cancer.)

Amazingly, from the chaos of my desk, I just managed to pluck out a
copy of an article on all this from the J. of Biological Chemistry,
Vol. XI, no. 4 (I think it was 1912 or 1913).  [O.K., I admit it was
not from my desk per se, I found it in the lava flow emanating
outward.]  A few items from a quick perusal: In terms of
acidity/alkalinity on an equal calorie basis, celery (followed
closely by lettuce) is at the very high end of alkalinity.  All
meats & fish were acidic, while milk & almonds were only slightly
alkaline; grains are a lot less acidic than meat; the fruits &
vegetables are all alkaline, even beans; meat
is high in phosphorous, as are beans, grains & almonds, most of
which are condsiderably higher than meat.]  From human experiments,
the authors speculated that the best thing to do if eating acidic
(i.e., high-protein) foods was to combine them with alkalinizing
foods at the same meal, as their preliminary data seemed to point in
this direction, i.e., that acidic foods eaten alone acidify the body
much more than if combined with alkaline foods, above & beyond what
happens if the same quantities of each are consumed in separate
meals.  I should add that this article was written by researchers
from Columbia U., & during that whole era straddling WWI the best
physiologists did loads of solid work along these lines, including
fasting experiments.  People seem to think Shelton made up some of
his stuff, but what he did was to soak up an enormous amount of the
latest research & also the entire corpus of hygienic experience.
His genius was in synthesizing all this into a finalized system.
And it is an error to point to his death at 90 or his preceding
decade of illness as in any way disproving his scheme.  He was very
clear in stating that they only proved the laws of health could not
be violated with impunity.  He worked himself to death helping an
enormous # of people in their quest for health, including probably
most on this list.  And do not forget that he was not born a NHer
(didn't he have poor health before getting into NH?), nor that any
of us can fully rectify what our genetic inheritance bequeaths us.
So if Tilden did much better than Shelton, this proves nothing.  If
1000 people faithfully adhere to what Shelton suggested & 1000 to
this or that other scheme, then we start to build up useful data
which offers hints to what any one individual MIGHT experience when
adhering to such a scheme.  Health & death is simply a game of
probabilities, and you can take x number of people & place them all
on the same regimen & all sorts of individual diffrences will pop
up, from what diseases they contract to when they die.  Was it on
this list a while back where somebody posted what actually happened
when a large group of people were forced to eat the same diet & they
all developed widely differing disease patterns?

--Doug Schwartz
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