Ten Commandments of Healthy Eating

1. Avoid sugar like a plague.

Sugar is a highly toxic substance. It is considered as deadly as tobacco and alcohol. It is as addictive as cocaine. The center of the brain that says you are happy when you take cocaine is the same center of the brain that says you are happy when you take sugar. Many practitioners of modern medicine have already recognized the many deleterious effects of sugar.  These are what they say:  “Sugar can cause hyperactivity, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and crankiness in children.” They also say that sugar leads to chromium deficiency, it interferes with the absorption of calcium and magnesium, and it can cause varicose veins. One Stephen Byrnes said:

“Excessive sugar intake can also contribute to free radical damage. White and brown sugars, and even sugar from so-called natural sources, such as fruit and fruit juices, maple syrup and honey, get converted into triglycerides by the liver and are subject to free radical damage. These damaged fats then promptly attack your arteries and directly contribute to cardiovascular disease. Additionally, cancer and tumor cells feed off of sugar. It is for this reason that excessive sugar intake correlates very strongly with heart disease, cancer and a host of other ailments.”

Every year, more than 175,000 children worldwide suffer from cancer. In the Philippines, there are at least 3,000 children with cancer confined in medical institutions at any one time. There is good reason to believe that their illness is strongly related to sugar. Health authorities should conduct a diet profiling of these children, find out what their parents fed them, to verify the correlation between sugar and cancer.

Parents should never introduce sugar, or candies or anything sweet to their children for obvious reasons. Sugar has been described as “a dangerous metabolic poison and a leading contributor to our epidemic of chronic disease.”

The worst form of sugar is refined sugar, or the favorite white sugar. It has become part of our daily diet. Even supposedly healthy food recipes are sweetened with white sugar. Cooking demonstrations on TV often show some chef hosts putting sugar in the food that they cook, not knowing that once you put sugar in your food it becomes unhealthy because it becomes acidic.

2. Eliminate anything refined from your diet.

Anything refined is bad for your health. Refined foods (e.g., refined flour, refined salt) are not really food. They are nothing but toxic chemicals. They are bereft of any trace of natural nutrient. Every small amount of nutrient beneficial to the body has been eliminated from them by the process of refining. Since refined substances were mere toxic chemicals, they produce tons of acid inside the body when ingested. Too much acid in the body results in acidosis which is the staging ground of all chronic diseases.

3. Do not eat protein and starch at the same time.

In his book How to Always Be Well (published 1967 by Groton Press, Inc., Island Park, New York); Dr. William Howard Hay says that eating protein and starch at the same time produces so much acid inside the body. This is because protein and starch are contrary foods and when taken together they prevent each other from being digested. That is because protein requires acid condition in the stomach in order to be digested while starch requires alkaline condition. When these foods are not digested, they lodge in the intestine where they eventually ferment due to the action of bacteria, and then they putrefy, producing lots of acid and toxin. If we eat protein and starch together every day, we accumulate so much acid that when we get old we develop acidosis and get sick with chronic diseases like asthma and cancer and all kinds of diseases associated with old age.

If the combination of protein and starch is bad for health, then we have to do away with our favorite sandwiches—hamburger, and breads stuffed with eggs, tuna, cheese, ham, bacon, and hot dogs, we have to do away with hot pandesal stuffed with ginisang sardinas, and also foods like dinuguan at puto, fried chicken and spaghetti, and since sugar is bad we have to avoid all our favorite kakanins—biko, puto, kutsinta, sapin-sapin, maja blanca. Leche flan, ube halaya. We should also stop the widespread practice of squeezing lemon or calamansi juice on top of our favorite noodles—pansit malabon, pansit bihon, pansit canton, sotanghon, etc.

4. Do not eat two kinds of protein at the same time.

Each protein requires a specific digestive enzyme before it can be broken down and digested inside the stomach. There is a specific enzyme for meat, for fish, for cheese, for egg, for milk, and for other proteins. When meat enters the stomach, the stomach lining produces an enzyme that breaks down the meat molecules. This must be done first before another enzyme is produced to finally digest the meat and release its nutrients to be absorbed by the bloodstream. If the meat compounds are not broken down by the specific digestive enzymes, no digestion will take place no nutrients will be released, and the undigested protein will ferment and putrefy inside the body.

If you eat meat and fish at the same time, the stomach will be confused as to what specific digestive enzymes to produce. In the end it will not produce the needed enzymes. Thus, the proteins will not be broken down, therefore they will not be acted upon by another set of enzymes, they will not be digested and they will remain in the intestines to ferment and to putrefy and to produce toxins that will cause chronic diseases.

5. Eat fruits on empty stomach or at least a half hour before meal.

When you eat fruits after waking up in the morning, the nutrients—minerals and vitamins that the body needs will be easily absorbed because the stomach is still empty. This is very good for detoxification. When your body detoxifies, it will move the toxins into your large intestines and you will be induced to move your bowels. Sometimes the bowel movement is harsh, especially if you take virgin coconut oil or chlorophyll in the form of barley grass or wheat grass, and you will feel pain in the stomach. Some people mistake this for an illness, so they avoid eating fruits early in the morning when their stomach is empty. But this is actually just a “healing crisis,” expressed in the popular saying that “you get worse before you get better.”

6. Do not eat anything if you are not hungry, and, when definitely hungry, eat only what you need at the time.

If you take food even if you are not hungry, chances are that the food will not be used by the body. Chances are that they will just be stored in the intestine as undigested food and will eventually putrefy to produce toxins. It is like throwing left-over foods in the waste basket. These thrown foods will ferment and putrefy overnight so that in the morning they will smell foul, just as your undigested food will smell foul inside your body, so that when you fart you release foul-smelling gas. This foul smell also goes out of your skin so that when you perspire you become intolerably smelly.

7. Chew your food thoroughly until it melts in your mouth before swallowing it.

This is called food mastication, which was advocated by American dietetics expert Horace Fletcher. His method became popularly known in the U.S. as “fletcherism.”He died in Copenhagen, Belgium on January 13, 1919 at the age of 70.

Dr. Fletcher was the originator of “Fletcherism,” or “Fletcherizing,” as it was better known—a system for the proper mastication of food. He became known the world over as the proclaimer of the theory that the more you chew the less you eat, and for years he directed experiments along these lines.

He was nearly as well known in England and Northern Europe, where he spent most of his time for several years, as in America. He was reputed to be a millionaire, but never attracted wide public attention until, on retiring, he devoted himself to globe-trotting and hobbies. His first hobby, which he called “mental culture,” which expounded the theory of mind over matter, never gained many followers, but his exploitation of the art of chewing, which began about fourteen years ago, attracted worldwide attention, gained the endorsement of many scientists, and has probably been adopted by thousands of persons.

The theory is, in brief, that everybody eats too much and that the cure is to be found in thorough mastication of food.

8. Do not take any liquid, unless necessary, when having your meal.

You can drink water 30 minutes before and after your meal, but no soft drinks, please, or any sweet drink during meal. Most fast food restaurants include sweet drinks in their combo meals. And it has become a habit of many people to take gulps of their sweet drinks in the midst of taking their meal. The result of this practice is that you prevent your saliva from producing the enzymes needed to digest your food. I myself loved to drink the black soft drink on the rocks during meals. By the time I had finished my meal, I had drunk several glasses of this dangerous soft drink. Eventually, I caught diabetes and suffered a stroke, which I continue to suffer today. So, what’s my K in telling you all these commandments? Just take it from me because I’ve been there. So, I repeat, do not drink that sweet poison when having your meal. After your meal wait some 30 minutes before drinking water to your heart’s content.

9. Keep your meal simple. Do not mix many kinds of food at one time.

This is for obvious reason. You need to make sure you digest your food, so keep your meal simple, if possible one main dish at a time. This automatically prevents you from eating incompatible foods or eating the wrong combination of foods. Therefore, say good bye to six-course dinners, or to smorgasbords, or to eat-all-you-can dinners. And when you go to a party with plenty of food, don’t be afraid to disappoint your host by eating a little of just one kind of food. Better still, avoid lavish parties.

10. Eat little, live long.

Most people believe that in order to sustain a good life, you should eat plenty enough, not too much but just enough, so you will have the energy to enjoy your daily life. But if someone says, “If you want to live long, eat little, as little as possible, the little you eat, the longer you live.” But don’t apply this to children. They need plenty of nutrients to grow well.  Just don’t make them eat too much sugar. Anyway, sugar is not a vital nutrient. It’s just poison. If your children don’t take sugar throughout their lifetime, that’s fine. That means they’ll have good teeth and strong bones. If they need sugar they can get it, top-quality, from sweet fruits and from starchy vegetables like squash, carrots, and sweet potato.

This reminded me of how my grandmother in Bicol died. I saw her a few years before she died when I was vacationing in Bicol. She was already in her late 90s. I noticed that she ate very little, nothing but ginataang gulay, vegetable cooked in coconut milk, one of the most nutritious and healthiest foods in the world. Every day she chewed her nganga, which consisted of  diced and pounded betel nut mixed with white sulfur powder, and wrapped in buyo leaf. The nganga made her teeth brown. She was very skinny but she did not have any ailment. According to my cousins when she reached the age of more than a hundred, maybe around 105, she said one night that she was very tired and wanted to sleep early. She slept and never woke up.

Nowadays, nobody dies of natural death like my grandmother. People today die of illness—heart attack, liver and kidney disease, stroke, complications of diabetes, and many others, but nobody dies a natural death. A sad legacy of modern civilization, all because we have forgotten how to eat right.