142 Diet Wise
Casebook 10.
To illustrate the point I am making, let me describe the case of a young
woman in her late twenties who came to see me because of asthma. At
college she had become interested in health foods, healing and the occult;
she then decided to be a vegetarian. For a long time this apparently suited
her and harmonized well with the way of life she and her friends led.
However, while engaged in full-time study, she began to notice that her
mental faculties were not as good as she knew them to be.
Things got worse. She became drowsy and apathetic; her brain
wouldn’t clear in the morning and she tended to forget what she was doing,
even where she was at times. As the listlessness grew worse, she became
unable to attend college and at one stage ended up in a zombie-like trance
that lasted many weeks. She would lie in bed, out of touch with reality and,
to the despair of her friends, rising only occasionally to eat a little food,
perform her natural functions and go back to bed. This continued day after
day for almost three months.
Then she had what she described as a vision of a fish and realized
that Nature was telling her she should eat some. This she did, and felt a
little better. That prompted her to try eating meat, and from then on she
improved rapidly: Within a matter of weeks she was her old self, resumed
her studies and graduated successfully in the normal time.
It is remarkable – and perhaps fortuitous – that students living
away from home can experience such ill health and that it can remain
undetected. As it was, she had a lucky escape. It is no exaggeration to say
that, like so many allergy patients, she might have ended up as a lifelong,
institutional case in a psychiatric ward without anyone suspecting the real
reason. Instead, a lucky change of diet cured her.
All this emerged in the course of our discussions about her asthma,
which she suffered from quite badly. Testing under my care showed that she
was severely allergic to the grains. Even today, if she exceeds one slice of
bread in twenty-four hours her mental condition deteriorates markedly, and
a real binge drives her out of touch with her surroundings to an alarming
degree. Yet for years she ate heavily of the grain family, as vegetarians often
do. Undoubtedly this built up her cyclical allergy to wheat, and her excursion
into meatless eating was almost a disaster.
Nevertheless, some people are made ill by beef, pork or lamb (rarely all
three in fact). Commercial meats often have chemical contaminants of some
kind, such as hormones and antibiotics. It is a practice with some suppliers
to treat meat with agents to keep it red; niacin, also known as vitamin B3, is