164 Diet Wise
who are likely to become quickly allergic to other substances. Theirs is a
difficult problem, and a rotation diet is really quite vital.
There is also a third advantage: a proper rotation diet may be
diagnostic, in other words it enables one to identify reacting foods. Substances
are eaten infrequently deliberately, so that the masking effect will not work. The
key to this is allowing the body to become clear of that food before eating
it again; thus previously hidden allergies will expose themselves, or if a new
reaction should somehow develop it will at least declare itself and become
obvious. It will not be able to make you critically ill; you will know, and all
you will have to do is drop it from the rotation plan, replacing it with a new
food that you have found safe on testing.
I like to point out that Nature rotates our foods for
us – or it happened in the past. As the seasons passed
through their changes, first one crop then another became
available. Spring vegetables would fade and be replaced
by those of summer, fall and winter. Fruits would come
in due season, last a few weeks, and then vanish.
Ingenuity enabled Man to harvest and store some
foods, against cold winters or leaner times. But storage
was not entirely safe; foods would loose nutrients. This
often meant that by the end of winter, most foods were
depleted of essential vitamins and if you take the trouble
to look at historical accounts (I have) you will see that
spring was often the danger time, when people would weaken
and die of malnutrition. Scurvy was rife. The problem
paradoxically occurred in the midst of spring’s abundance;
it marked the end of winter’s long nutritional deprivation,
before the new crops could grow.
In fact I am willing to speculate that this is one of the
reasons that most of the early great civilizations sprang
up in warmer climes: that the annual winter cull of weaker
humans did not take place because of the availability of
foods all year round.
Once farming had moved beyond the Medieval feudal
system to commercial market-oriented gardening, foods
were grown and moved around according to available
markets. This meant that cold snowy Northern Europe
could feed itself and the stage was set for the greatest of
all civilizations to evolve.