Around 500 B.C. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, imparted to his students the most basic and profound medical truth, “Thy food shall be thy remedy.” Inspired by this idea, in the late 1920’s a young Henry Bieler M.D. devoted his life to using foods as medicine. The information in this book is primarily based on Dr. Bieler’s work.

A toxic body depresses the immune system and is a root cause of disease

Dr. Bieler disagreed with most of his medical colleagues when he declared that germs and viruses were not the cause of disease. He said that germs and viruses are present and multiply readily in a toxic body, but it is the toxemia and not the germs/viruses that is the root cause. He felt the most effective way to revive the immune system and regain permanent health was to reduce the toxemia through proper foods, and thus enable the body’s immune system to control the germs and viruses.

Dr. Bieler discovered that the main cause of most people’s toxemia was their life-style choices, ie. primarily their eating habits. A wide variety of recent long term studies , including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1991 Healthy People 2000 report , has largely validated Dr. Bieler’s opinion by concluding that roughly 70% of all disease is caused by life-style choices.

The cure for a toxic body

Dr. Bieler felt that low starch vegetables should be the main food group in most diets. This is partly because low starch vegetables greatly help support the liver. Of course the liver is the primary organ for cleansing the blood and if it’s functioning well, the immune system can deal with toxicity more effectively. Secondly, Dr. Bieler discovered that most people’s poor dietary habits made their bodies highly acidic. And since low starch vegetables are primarily alkaline, they serve to balance the body’s PH. This is very important since a significant PH imbalance depresses the immune system and has a negative effect on all body systems.

People have been taking supplements now for 30 years and yet the overall health situation has not improved. While the idea of taking nutritional supplements looks good in theory, unfortunately the application in the real world has not worked as promised. The reason for this is that people cannot assimilate most of the vitamins/minerals that they take.

Too many vitamins and supplements can cause problems

Nutritional supplements unfortunately have at least three drawbacks. First, they are not readily bio-available, meaning that your body has to do a lot of work to digest and assimilate them. Second, they put a strain on the liver by making it work overtime to handle high concentrations of non-organic compounds. And third, the combination of the first two usually tends to unbalance the body's PH and makes it more acidic. So with this in mind it is best to choose a good combination multi-mineral/vitamin and take it in small doses.

It is generally accepted that overall accumulated stress is very unhealthful, especially for your immune system. Although stress can produce a wide variety of unwanted reactions, in very simple terms it tends to make your body acidic. When you add this to a diet that also helps create an acidic PH, you can see that something needs to be done to restore balance. Otherwise you depress your immune system and illness and disease will eventually occur. Fortunately you can learn to achieve and maintain a healthy balance through the easy practices outlined in this book.

The wise use of drugs

Although Dr. Bieler successfully treated the vast majority of his patients with food instead of drugs, this does not mean that you should simply drop all medications and only follow the guidelines in this book. Quite the contrary, I strongly urge you to work ongoing with qualified medical professionals in your healing process. Dr. Bieler’s chief complaint, that modern doctors seem to have lost sight of the fact that foods may be the most effective way to treat most illnesses, should be considered. Drugs, he correctly noted, often have side effects that further degrade the immune system and overall health of the patient. Also he felt that most drugs were only treating surface issues instead of dealing with the root cause, namely the patient’s toxemia. So with this in mind I urge you to find a balance that works for you.

Proper foods help no matter what else you do

The great thing about using foods as a healing tool, is that they work by themselves or in conjunction with anything else that you are doing. It does not matter, whether you are going through chemotherapy or you regularly do yoga, eating the right foods for your unique system makes a difference. And since we all have to eat, it makes sense to me that we might as well use foods to our advantage.

Low Fat Can = Weight Gain and Poor Immune System Health

With so many “Low Fat” snacks and foods available in the grocery stores, many people who embark on a weight loss regimen naturally are attracted to these items. This is because we have been led to believe that decreasing fat intake alone will lead to weight loss and good health. Unfortunately this has not proven to be true, as people continue to carry too much weight despite consuming ever greater quantities of low fat/diet foods.

While decreasing overall fat intake is a healthy approach, there are many other aspects of body chemistry that must be addressed in order to achieve lasting success. If you simply are replacing your favorite snack foods with low fat versions, you can cause a weight gain even if your fat and calorie intake is lower than before.

To understand why this happens you need to realize how your body is designed to work. . . .

Since this book is about helping you find what foods will work best for you, it can also be seen as a system that will help you identify the foods that cause you problems. Just as the low fat / diet food problem is one mechanism for weight gain and poor health, so there are others which we will put under the category of “food allergies and sensitivities.”

Food sensitivities are the cause of many people’s problems, including being overweight and having immune system deficiencies. They are present or are developed for a number of reasons and even many natural whole foods can cause a reaction in a particular person.

One way people can develop food sensitivities over time is by eating only one thing and not rotating in a variety of similar foods. Many people are sensitive to such common foods as corn and wheat for this very reason.

The other causes of food sensitivities are also mostly due to poor dietary habits and they include poor digestion, nutrient deficiencies, a limited diet of highly processed foods. . . .