12 Acidic Wastes: The Real Culprit
cans living near the equator, it was rare that anyone came down with
the disease. What prevented the gene’s expression was the dietary staple
of the Africans: the cassava root.
Being aware of these facts, I recommended to Dawanta’s grand-
mother that she make cassava for Dawanta once a day, and to make it
according to the traditional African recipe. (Peel the barklike skin,
grate it raw, and cook it in a little water until the mucilage is released
and the cassava achieves a gluelike texture.) After one month on the
cassava, Dawanta was able to stretch the time between blood transfu-
sions from one month to two months and to cut down on her blood
transfusions from four pints to two. Given the healing effect of cassava
on Dawanta’s sickle-shaped red blood cells even though she was already
in her teens, imagine what cassava could have done for her had it been
a regular part of her diet from the time she was a baby.
Dawanta’s story points up the advantage to health of continuing the
dietary traditions of one’s ancestors, particularly of their dietary staple.
If your ancestors were primarily meat eaters you should make meat the
staple of your diet. If your ancestors had a diet heavy in fi sh, you should
eat fi sh two or three times a week. On the other hand, individuals of
Asian descent benefi t from following the grain-eating traditions of their
cultures. The fact is that nutrients not part of a person’s cultural heritage
are incompatible with that individual’s biochemistry. Solomon Katz of
the University of Pennsylvania has proven in his research that people’s
genetic makeup is shaped by their food practices.^3 A case in point are
those U.S. immigrants from India who have replaced their grain diet
with meat. They have experienced a sharp increase in heart disease.
Not all individuals, however, have the same metabolism as their ances-
tors. Most people in the United States are of mixed descent, and there are
variations in individual metabolisms within any given population cluster.
A simple, self-administered test (explained later in this chapter) can deter-
mine whether you have a grain-eating or meat-eating metabolism or
whether your digestive apparatus can handle all kinds of protein.
During the earlier part of the twentieth century in the United States,
the general public viewed health in relation to nutrition either in terms
of providing food for the hungry or, for those who had enough to eat,
the balanced meal. This was a meal in which the three food groups—
protein, carbohydrates, and fats—were well represented. Textbooks
typically described food according to food type, weight in grams, and