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."
