Kirt wrote, about fringe diet gurus:
<< Cutting them slack is embarrassing. >>

Kirt, you misunderstood me about the "gurus."  I don't mean to "cut them
slack"
-- I CELEBRATE them, exalt them, enshrine them on the highest pedestals.
Iconoclastic visionaries have led me to turning points in my life.

And you too, no?  Wasn't your life enriched by your own (former) heroes --
Burger, Janov, Korzybski?  Hey, after the credulous adulation you lavished on
those guys not so long ago, I don't blame you for feeling sheepish.  But might
you be slipping over the line into backlash?

You fault the gurus for having the courage of their convictions -- claiming to
have a "corner on the truth," you call it.  So different from "mainstream"
scientists, who "admit they don't know" the cause and cure of most diseases.
Gosh, Kirt, which scientists are you thinking of?  Surely not those guys who
swear that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease?  ... that mercury
fillings
are harmless?  ... that fasting is quackery?  Kirt, if you see no
closed-mindedness in Establishment science, you're not paying attention.

"For dang sure," you proclaim, let's hold the gurus "accountable for their
criminal acts."  Huh?  Are they all convicted felons?  And even if they
are, SO
WHAT?  Shall we repudiate a theory because its author misbehaves?  What
happened to the old-fashioned idea of judging a theory on its merits?

When Guy-Claude Burger, for example, was busted on a morals charge, did that
invalidate the genius of his work -- he who articulated, before anyone had
coined the word, the core of what we now call Paleodiet.  The benchmark of
healthy diet, said Burger, must be evolutionary adaptation.  I honor him as a
trailblazer and an original thinker.

What was Herbert Shelton's crime?  Raso, the born-again AMA flack, belabors
the
death of a client who fasted with Shelton -- as if no one ever died under the
ministrations of AMA doctors.  I thank Shelton -- whatever his foibles -- for
teaching me this simple, venerable, self-responsible healing method.

And I thank Arnold Ehret for the gift of Breath.  After decades of taking
drugs
for congestion, rhinitis and asthma, I learned from his little book me what
the
"open-minded" minions of medical orthodoxy never told me:  Diet makes a
Difference.  No doctor had ever asked me what I was eating!

Three cheers for the health gurus and the beacons they light for us all!  May
we never follow them blindly, but may their tribe prosper.

C.