Digestive Ailments 45
and less. After I had been on this nearly raw potato diet for a year, I
went to a dinner party where the hostess served a highly spiced Spanish
concoction of some sort. For the fi rst time in years after eating some-
thing so spicy it burned my tongue, I didn’t get acid indigestion. A few
weeks later I had a pizza with garlic, which also had no effect. My diges-
tive problems gradually became a thing of the past. The occasional
stomach upset I have now goes away when I eat a few slices of raw
potato. The raw potato also acts as an appetite suppressant, absorbing
the acidic wastes in the stomach that can incite hunger.
The alkaline starch in the potatoes had healed my indigestion in part
by absorbing and neutralizing the acid waste—which had probably lain
in my digestive tract for years. I discovered another component in pota-
toes involved in this healing when I read a paper that Francis M. Pot-
tenger Jr., M.D., presented at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the
American Therapeutic Society, in Atlantic City, June 4, 1937.^1 In it he
discussed the importance of the gluelike mucilage in raw foods in help-
ing the enzymes in the stomach break down the food mass. This
brought to mind that when I ran my fi ngers along the inside surface of
the pan in which I had cooked potatoes, I felt a sticky coating. This was
mucilage! The heat from cooking had separated it out from the fi ber in
the potato. While mucilage is a property of all foods, it is most abun-
dant in okra and raw meat and, as I discovered, is also plentiful in
potatoes—provided they are only partially cooked.
The nearly raw potatoes I’d been eating supplied two substances that
improved my digestion: water, which enables the food mass in the
stomach to absorb the digestive enzyme juices, and mucilage, which by
coating the food mass prevents the water from seeping out. Given the
vital role played by water and mucilage in the ability of the food mass
in the stomach to absorb enzymes, how could a diet of totally cooked
food, which has no water and enzymes to speak of, be digested? It can’t.
Unlike a food mass containing some raw foods, which forms the proper
gluelike lump in the stomach, a mass of cooked food forms distinct lay-
ers: cooked meat, the heaviest, on the bottom; bread or cake next; then
a layer of vegetables, and mashed potatoes interspersed through the
three layers.
Rapid digestion that leaves a minimum of food debris can’t take place
unless enzymes are able to penetrate the food mass, and this isn’t possible