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Nathan Pritikin - Pioneer for Healthy Food

As usual, the first person to pioneer a healthy diet was a man who did not have a fancy degree from some university. Jesus would be criticized today for being a "self-proclaimed" messiah because he did not have a Ph.d. Nathan Pritikin was a successful inventor. He never studied diet or nutrition or health. His doctor told him when he was, I believe, around 40 years old or so, that he had heart disease and had only a few months to live. He self educated himself on nutrition and saw something that none of the many experts saw. He saw that those cultures that ate high animal fat had many diseases that cultures who ate a low animal fat diet hardly ever had. He started eating low fat meals and reversed his heart disease. He lived many years and became famous for his best-selling books.

What do you think the prestigious doctors and their respected organizations like the American Medical Association did when they read his book? They did what people always do in human history -- they attacked him with everything they had. But human history has also shown that truth cannot be stopped once it appears. Gradually, people have begun to absorb in one way or another the insights of Pritikin and others who have written books and appeared on TV to teach against eating so much saturated fat. Still, most affluent nations or people continue to eat high fat food and suffer from it. I saw Pritikin fighting it out with doctors on TV shows when he started out in the 1970s. It amazes me that most people still have no idea how to eat, and it amazes me that there has also been so much advancement. It is common to see major food companies advertize on prime time TV for their low fat foods. For example, a new chain of fast food restaurants is Subway and they constantly have ads that compare their lower fat sandwiches to McDonalds, Burker King and Wendys. Still, the owner of Wendys, Dave Thomas, wins more people than Subway. But eventually, Satan will not have powerful Dave Thomases and God's truth will be the norm. Until that time we should not legislate against Dave Thomas. I don't think we should picket Wendys. And it is ridiculous to accuse him of using mind control and brainwashing techniques on weak minds. Satan often gets his message across by using attractive people. Dave Thomas is a very warm person who comes across on TV as someone you can trust. But even he can't escape the consequences of his actions. He has had a bi-pass heart operation because his arteries were clogged from the animal fat he sells.

Pritikin, like all messengers of new truths, are labeled as being too extreme, dangerous and unAmerican. God's way always seems weird, extreme, harsh, cruel, boring and stupid to the majority. And out of the majority there arise those who write and speak out and of course encourage legislation to get the police to stop what they see as evil pied pipers leading everyone, especially young people, to hell.

Pritikin's first book was Live Longer Now. It is an excellent book. He has many books and many other people have followed in him in presenting their angle on how much fat to eat.

The UC needs to balance its life by understanding that the physical world is spiritual too. Father says we are grow twelve trees a year and live outside of cities in a rural setting. Father loves nature.  We should eat organic food.  He is not saying we are to live gaudy materialistic lives, but he is also not for us to live like St. Francis either.

Our bodies are temples

One of the most neglected areas of the UC is in its understanding of nutrition and how important it is to be fit and trim. We should be the healthiest people in the world. To be happy and successful we need to be physically fit. We need to exercise. Diet plays a large part in health. For many years there has been a revolution in nutrition. Nathan Pritikin started the low-fat diet. America and the UC eat high fat food. America and the UC have a lot of unhealthy and obese people. Other writers on nutrition are Dr. John McDougall and Dr. Dean Ornish who also teach the value of a low-fat high carbohydrate diet. John McDougall in The McDougall Program says,"Among the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Malaysians -- in their homelands, that is -- obesity is almost unknown. The reason for this lies in their diet: Their main food is starchy plant. You will consistently find that the diets of people who remain slim throughout life are centered around rice, or wheat, or potatoes, or corn, or beans, and other starchy vegetables. Their diets will also provide plenty of fruits and vegetables, but very little (if any) fatty meats and dairy products. And yet, when slender Chinese or Japanese move to San Francisco or New York or your hometown in America, they soon look very American indeed. Obesity is not genetic; it's the result of exchanging a starch-based diet for rich, fattening foods." He goes on to explain that it can work in reverse and many have become thin again by eating low-fat food.

One of the best foods is fish, especially those high in Omega 3. Once again Father does the right thing in focusing on fish. There are so many good books on this topic. Heart disease is the greatest killer of men in America and so many wives are not doing their job of keeping their husbands healthy. The UC should be the healthiest, trimmest, fittest people in the world.

There has been a tremendous increase in knowledge on nutrition in the last few decades. Nutritionists say we need to cut down on fat, especially bad fats. There is a lot of controversy about red meat and dairy. One of the most powerful videos I have ever watched is by John Robbins who was heir to the Baskins-Robbins empire of ice cream stores. He wrote a book and named his video the same called Diet for a New America. The video was at my library, and it is one of the best I've ever seen. If only the UC had videos that are as clear and well-done as the one he made. He shows how products from cows are so dangerous to the health. What is even more eye opening is how cows are damaging to the earth. (Also check out at the library Nova's video on soil erosion called Down on the Farm) The world needs to cut back drastically on meat and dairy just to be ecological. Cows are so inefficient and in the huge numbers they are now ruining our land and waterways. To be successful the UC needs to make powerful videos like this one on every area of life giving God's viewpoint. Videos are how people learn. I plan on making videos on this book and other topics. Few will read this book. Almost every member will watch my videos. What a great day it will be when UC headquarters makes great videos and puts them in every library and advertises everywhere for people to go see them.

One idea that you might try is what we have started to do in our home. We will not allow any high-fat food in our house. Sugar is a tough one. We have decided that its just too much to not have it. It seems to be in everything anyway. Even ketchup! We generally keep it out of the house. The only meat we have is fish and chicken breasts. I was reading in a magazine for vegetarians and saw a letter from a woman who had written in that her cat was vegetarian. She said she fed it only plant food, and the cat was doing great. Later someone wrote a letter back saying that her cat was probably eating birds when it left the house. As hard as we tried to be vegetarians (This was many years ago. We've experimented with many diets), we kept eating meat when we were out. Eventually we decided we were "vegetarian cats." We have told our children that they can be vegetarian cats and eat at McDonalds if they want. This world is run by Satan so everything is turned upside down. People eat a meat centered diet instead of plant food. They eat processed grain instead of whole grain (white vs. brown rice), and they eat high fat instead of low fat foods. By balancing our home with extreme low fat with the outside world's high fat, our children are eating better. Magazines like Time are always having cover stories of how too many kids are obese and this causes everything from low-self esteem to dangerous diseases, even cancer. Speaking of cancer, a low-fat diet that some have used to reverse cancer is the macrobiotic diet. There are many books and cookbooks on this diet.

In Save-Your-Life-Diet High Fiber Cook Book, David and Barbara Reuben correctly push for more fiber in our diet. The 20th century has corrupted food by processing it and taking out nutrients and fiber. The result has been tremendous suffering and death. Satan has worked with a vengeance in this century to kill and hurt as many people as he could. He teaches what is false. Fast food is deadly, but the images of McDonalds are wholesome families having fun. Burger King's sandwiches are around 40 grams of fat which is enough fat for two or three days! When you add fries and milk shakes it is truly obscene. Never eat at fast food restaurants. Not only are they high in fat, but the fat is a bad fat as opposed to better types of fat such as olive oil. Also they are low in fiber. The Reubens say"In modern America we seem to have lost the instinct for self-preservation." They say the Vietnam war killed 50,000 Americans, automobile accidents kill 50,000 every year, narcotics kill 10,000 a year and we make some effort to correct these deaths,"But in our society the greatest single threat to survival for the average person is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Over one million Americans each year meet an untimely death directly as a result of the food they eat. And nobody seems to care. The undeniable facts are there for everyone to see. In the past seventy-five years (their book was written in the 70s) -- since the traditional high-roughage diet has been replaced by the 'modern' high prestige low-roughage 'convenience' diet -- new diseases have sprung up to devastate our society. Here is a small part of the evidence:

Fatal heart attacks 1900: virtually unknown 1975: 750,000 deaths

Cancer of the Colon 1900: insignificant incidence 1975: 99,000 cases

The twentieth century has been a disaster worse than any before. Satan has done everything he could to kill us or make us sick. He took bread, and, as the Reubens say, turned it into"the white puffy gloopy batter-whipped junk that clogs our intestines of our children" into an"entirely different substance. It is synthesized from what is left of the grain of wheat after everything worthwhile is removed -- wheat germ, bran, and most of the vitamins and minerals. The starchy powder that remains is mixed with chemicals that no one in his right mind would swallow if he had a choice. That includes things like calcium bromate, sodium stearyl fumarate, and tricalcium phosphate, to name only a few. As a touching gesture, federal law requires bakers to add 5 hard-to-absorb synthetic vitamins to replace the 24 or so nutrients removed in the milling process."

The Reubens incorrectly feel the FDA should regulate and somehow protect us better, but as I'll explain in later chapters that is not how to help people. We do it by persuading others as the Reubens are doing in their book and I'm doing in this. Government is force, and it is not a success principle to force people to eat right. They go on to say,"Hundreds of responsible scientists and medical researchers agree on one undeniable point: the greatest single cause of cancer in America today is the methodical debasement of the basic elements of our diet. Over one million lives could be saved each year at absolutely no cost by simply leaving the natural roughage in our food and removing every artificial additive." They say Americans"eat, on the average, twenty-two pounds of artificial chemicals in their food each year" and they are linked with cancer. They debunk the myth that stress causes cancer. It is mainly diet. They explain how the Seventh-Day Adventists suffer from the same stress as everyone else but because they eat a high-fiber diet and few food additives they have"much lower incidences of cancer and heart attacks." They implore everyone"to reproduce the diet that Americans consumed a hundred years ago -- before 750,000 of us perished each year from heart attacks, before one of us succumbed to colon cancer every ten minutes by the clock, before seventy percent of those who collect Social Security also collect diverticulosis, before over half of us had our bodies bloated by ugly fat."


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