24 Diet Wise
and are poorly tolerated. No matter how important the food, or “essential”
it is for your well being, if you eat such a toxic food you will be ill.
Similarly, if you follow the dietary recommendations of someone
who has not heard of food allergy or genetic food incompatibility, you may
find yourself feeling worse. Whereas some foods are commoner allergies
than others, I have patients allergic or intolerant to every single so-called
healthy food you could name: lettuce, bananas, fish, apples, tomatoes, whole
wheat, herbal teas and all the rest of the healthy foods that are supposed to
be good for you. I have yet to see a popular diet book that even acknowledges
this crucial health factor, let alone makes allowance for it.
That’s why this book is important: it fills a vital gap in knowledge.
The exact mechanism of incompatibility is not important to
this key understanding. I am not confining my remarks to food allergies,
intolerance or any other mechanism. Nor is it necessary, for the success of
this plan, that you identify why you do not tolerate the food. The important
step is to identify such stressor foods and remove them from your diet. You
will benefit immediately from increased well being, zest and health. Many
chronic symptoms you may have become accustomed to and consider
almost “normal” will disappear.
Ultimate Diet Principle 2.
These toxic or incompatible foods are different for everyone. Thus there can be no one-
size-fits-all diet. Diets do not really work by giving you “good” foods, but by taking you
off the bad foods.
Those diets that succeed in any degree at all really do so because
of Principle 1, often inadvertently and without anyone being aware of the
real reason. By following a suggested eating plan, the individual must avoid
certain foods and the real benefit comes from this exclusion principle. The
credit for the recovery is given to the new diet craze and the correct scientific
explanation, which I am giving you here in this book, remains obscure.
For example: you may have heard of the “food combining” approach
to diet. A lot of elaborate theory is put forward as a justification for the
ritual of separating morning, midday and evening – your body is supposed
to be unable to digest proteins and carbohydrates at the same time, some
foods are acid and some are alkaline and other such fake science. These
claims are simply not true. The body is geared to digest fats, carbohydrates
and proteins, sequentially, in different segments of the alimentary tract.
But what I observe is that individuals on the food combining
program simply avoid or drastically reduce their intake of certain foods.