Diet for the Acutely Ill

How and When To Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Mose, Steve Solomon

(Page 25 of 28)

The acutely ill person experiences occasional attacks of distressing symptoms, usually after indiscretions in living or emotional upsets. They have a cold, or a flu, or sinusitis, or a first bout of pneumonia, or a spring allergy attack. The intense symptoms knock them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. If they are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the chronically ill category.

People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent that they are able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute illness, the appetites is probably pretty dull anyway, so why not give a brief fast on water or fruit juice a try.

Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting more than a week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first bout of pneumonia may well last for three weeks or a month. The general rule is to eat as little as possible until the symptoms have passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have a horror of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses of Vitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.) Those having a little experience with natural medicine make teas of echinacea, fenugreek seeds and red clover and quit eating. Eating as little as possible can mean only water and herb teas, only vegetable broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice, even only cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relieved your system of enough digestive effort.

After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your life-style and improve your diet so that you aren't so toxic and don't have to experience an acute illness several times a year when your body is forced to try an energetic detox.

Diet For A Healthy Person

I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth century. Doctors Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the New Health Catastrophes state that in-depth laboratory testing of the population at large demonstrated four universally present pathological conditions: heavy metal poisoning, arteriosclerosis, sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not really healthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional supplementation.

A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and does not have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing interferes with or handicaps their daily life or work. A healthy person has good energy most of the time, a positive state of mind, restful sleep, good digestion and elimination.

Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie count - eating or drinking those things that they know are not good for them but that are fun to eat or are 'recreational foods or beverages.' Such 'sinning' could mean a restaurant bash twice a month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, ice cream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key concept of responsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent limit.

A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not exceed the digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of quantity or quality. All foods that can not be efficiently digested should be removed from the regular diet and relegated to the 'sin' category, including those you are allergic to and those for which you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish, but some can, and some can with the assistance of digestive enzyme supplements. In order to digest meats, the stomach must be sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin, pancreatin, and bile, etc., and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side (not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces), and not combined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you must include meat in your dietary, it should represent a very small percentage of your total caloric intake, be eaten infrequently, with the bulk of the calories coming from complex carbohydrates such grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities of vegetables and fruits.

The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is advised to fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a chance to catch up on their internal housecleaning. If water fasting seems impossible, try a day of juicing it; if that is too rigorous, try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though less beneficial than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking your overnight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up breakfast altogether or postponing breaking your overnight fast, because from the time you stop eating at the end of one day to the time you start eating the next is actually a brief, detoxifying fast.

Eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt can be assimilated by some healthy people with or without digestive aids. It is possible to take lactase to break down the milk sugars for example; sometimes aids such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and pancreatin help. If you can buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurt containing lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily, especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on unsprayed food, and served very fresh. Eggs should come from chickens that run around outside, eating weeds, and scratching bugs. The yokes of those eggs will be intense orange, not yellow. Few people these days have ever eaten a real egg. Surprisingly, for those of you who fear cholesterol, the healthy way to eat eggs is use just the raw yolk from fertile eggs. It is enjoyed by many people in a smoothie - fresh fruit blended up with water or milk. Eggs contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturally prevents the body from forming harmful fatty deposits in the arteries.

Sea weeds are a wonderful source of minerals and should be eaten in soups and salads. Other invaluable fortifying foods are algae of all kinds (such as chlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast, and fresh bakers yeast. Many people have had very unpleasant experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast and so use brewers yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins it contains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw yeast is so powerful, it feels like pep pills!

It takes a special technique to eat raw yeast because in the stomach and intestines the yeast does the job it is supposed to do: convert sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The entire digestive tract then bloats with gas and the person will feel very uncomfortable for some time. However, raw yeast is a marvelous source of B vitamins and proteins and can make someone feel very energetic - if they know how to use it. The secret is to eat live yeast very first thing in the morning on an empty stomach and then, not eat anything at all for about two hours, giving the stomach acids and enzymes time to kill the yeasts and digest them before adding sugars from another meal. Some like to eat yeast in fresh cake form, buying it from a bakery. Others prefer dry granular baker's yeast blended with water into a sort of 'shake.' This is not a bad place to put your raw egg yoke either. If you need it sweetened to drink it, use an artificial or herbal sweetener like nutrisweet or stevia. Live yeast cannot consume milk sugars very well. So if you can handle dairy, try one or two tablespoons of granulated live yeast, an egg yoke and a little raw milk or yogurt, well whizzed.

Wheat germ is also a great, rich food, but is usually rancid unless it is taken out of the refrigerated display; unless it is refrigerated, in a dated package and fresh, don't eat it. Herb teas and roasted grain beverages are healthy beverages, along with mineral and distilled water avoiding where possible chlorinated and fluoridated water.