|
In 1973, studying at
Grossmont College, in California, to become a gymnastics coach, Cheryl
Kelly fractured her skull in a gymnastics accident. The fracture cut
through her spinal sac, olfactory nerves, and the nerves at the front of
her face, leaving her with spinal fluid dripping down her throat and no
sense of smell. Because she couldn’t chew, she had to have liquefied
food. And she had a severe vision problem, because her pupils wouldn’t
dilate.
“The
doctors really didn’t have a good prognosis for me,” recalls Kelly,
now pursuing a doctor of naturopathy degree. “They wanted to cut my face
all the way across and roll my skin back and go in and just do exploratory
surgery. But if they did that, there was a good chance I could get spinal
meningitis, and if I got that, I would have a very small chance of
living.”
Another
problem was her inability to eat animal protein. “I would throw protein
right back up, so I had nothing to rebuild with. The doctors said that
with the severity of my concussion, it would be about a year before I’d
be able to eat proteins.” Her doctors also told her that once the nerves
were severed, they couldn’t be rebuilt. And because of the vision
problem, “I couldn’t even go out, except for at night, with
sunglasses,” Kelly says.
Kelly
felt that medicine didn’t have anything to offer, even with the
operation, so she left the hospital. Because of her vision problem, she
had to stay in most of the time. But, she says, “I’d heard that people
in health-food stores had alternative methods in terms of using
proteins — they were vegetarians, and somehow or other they were existing.
That’s how I got into the health field.”
“I
went to some health conventions and started drinking a lot of live
vegetable juices,” Kelly says. She “found out about herbs and
started
taking different herbs, and within a year I rebuilt the nerve structure to
be able to smell. I was rather surprised that I was able to reestablish
something they told me was impossible to reestablish, but it seemed like
other animals were able to grow things back, and other parts of your body
naturally redevelop, so to me it seemed more natural that it was a
possibility.”
After
Kelly regained her sense of smell and stopped the spinal fluid drainage,
she decided to become an herbalist. She enrolled at Sonoma State College
to study herbs with the botany teachers, because she didn’t know
anyplace else to go. Back in college, “I tried to work with their
botanists, and they wouldn’t even let me write my papers on herbs. They
told me I was reversing medicine, and they gave lectures to me, pounding
on the pulpit and pointing their fingers at me and screaming at me. They
refused at all to work with me or to let me do any individual studies, so
I didn’t get far with that.”

Kelly
decided to continue on her own. In looking into holistic health options in
the San Diego area, she had learned of Dr. Bernard Jensen, a pioneer
American herbalist and an accomplished
practitioner of iridology.
Iridology is a technique of evaluating the condition of the internal
organs by examining the irises of the eyes, based on the concept that each
part of the iris corresponds to a particular organ or system.
Kelly
asked Jensen if she could study with him. “Bernard Jensen gave me his
book and an iridology chart and a magnifying glass and told me if I read
the book three times and then I came back, he’d teach me,” she says.
He also told her to look at as many eyes as she could.
She
did, and he did. “In learning iridology, I was able to see the continual
breakdowns through generations. I would look at whole families — old
people, middle-aged people, young people, and their whole family
lines” — as long a chain as she could get. “If I could get four
generations, I’d get that. I would watch the breakdown in the eyes, so I
became convinced that iridology was a solid science that definitely showed
the hyper- or hypoactivity of the organ structures.
“I
was amazed at how broken down the American eye was, in comparison to
someone who came over from Europe or from some of the older schools of
dietary approaches. Bernard Jensen studied centenarians throughout the
world, trying to understand what their diet had to do with their
longevity, so I was kind of trained according to that, to notice that diet
does have some sort of an impact on peoples’ health.
“Realizing
it only takes four generations to completely break down the body, one of
the things that fascinated me was seeing you could reverse it, and having
my children all have stronger iris structures. I had really very poor iris
structure in terms of what I inherited. I’ve knitted all the fibers back
together, but you never regain the constitutional integrity — you’ll
still have pockets that are just knitted together. So I don’t have deep,
dark pockets in my iris structure, but I have an inherently very poor
constitution. In almost every eye I saw when I was studying iridology,
everybody would always be continually getting worse, and that was a very
depressing sight, but it was nice being able to see the reversal of
it — to see that a weak-constitution person can actually have a stronger
constitution if they apply the correct methodologies of healing themselves
and providing nutrients for their children.”

After
her studies in iridology, Kelly began studying herbology with the late Dr.
John Christopher, “one of the people who brought herbology back into the
country.” Dr. Christopher had studied in Canada, then returned to the
U.S. and subsequently started a school of natural healing. He taught that
herbs were the original medicines and that science had learned to extract
what seemed to be the active ingredients, Kelly says. Although this could
relieve symptoms, the herbs in their intact form “not only have the
elements that help with the symptoms, they also have the elements that
rebuild that particular system. So by removing the element that just gives
you the symptomatic change and eliminating all of the elements that give
you the rebuilding capacity, you lose the tremendous benefit that the
herbs have.
“Dr.
Christopher’s combinations I find to be the most effective of just about
anybody I’ve worked with,” Kelly says. For a problem with the colon,
for example, he “would work in a way that would stop spasms, that would
create the peristalsis that would help the liver lubricate the colon
correctly, that would help the stomach digest the food — he worked with
the whole system.”
Dr.
Jensen, she says, “always trained us to recognize when there was, for example, a potassium deficiency or a sodium deficiency or a calcium
deficiency — he worked primarily with mineral deficiencies. I never was as
attracted to using separated-out minerals in comparison to herbs, so I
mainly used herbs to correct conditions and kept in mind using things like
potassium and calcium and trying to get them more from juices and foods.
After Dr. Mark Pedersen did his work on the nutrients contained in each
herb, I could use herbs more specifically related to particular
nutritional deficiencies to help resolve those deficiencies.”
Both
Dr. Jensen and Dr. Christopher taught that the body typically breaks down
for three reasons: nutritional deficiencies, toxic overload, and stress.
The problem in correcting deficiencies was ascertaining which nutrients a
person needed. From iridology, Kelly had learned that “people’s bodies
were breaking down at a pretty significant rate in America, and there were
so many body systems to work on with a person that it overwhelmed me. It
became very frustrating, realizing that they have so many things wrong
with them or so many organs that were broken down and trying to figure out
what, specifically, you could do for them. Then when you look at the
herbal field, for every organ that’s broken down, there’s a
multiplicity of herbs that will go with that particular organ.
“So
my big question to both Bernard Jensen and to Dr. Christopher as I studied
with them was, ‘How do you pinpoint and pick, most appropriately, which
herbs to work with a particular system, with a particular body type?’
“Dr.
Christopher’s reaction was, basically, ‘One herb will many times do a
multiplicity of things. It won’t just work on one organ structure — it
might work on three or four. So you try to find ones that are most
appropriate to do all the types of things you’re trying to work on with
that particular person.’”
Although
this partially answered her question about how to determine which herbs to
use in a particular case, she still wasn’t satisfied. As it happened, a
chiropractor for whom she was
working asked if she would do patient exams
for him. “He asked me if I would go and learn kinesiology, which I
didn’t know existed at the time.”

By
“kinesiology,” Kelly is referring to a group of techniques that use muscle
testing to evaluate the body’s imbalances and assess its needs.
Kelly learned Touch for Health, which taught that substances could be
tested for their effect on the body by placing them in the mouth. She
found that putting certain foods or supplements in the mouth of a person
who was being tested would remedy an imbalance and allow a muscle that
tested weak to test strong. In a moment of insight, she found “it was
really the thing I was looking for, to tie together the most appropriate
way to select herbs for a person. When I learned kinesiology, I realized
it was not only something that could be used for chiropractic, to
understand the muscular imbalances of the body, but also something that
could help show when there’s an imbalance in one of the organs or the
meridians — because any time there’s a blockage in either the lymphatic
system or the circulatory system or the meridians, it creates an inability
to communicate to particular muscles. So I was able to start to pinpoint
what it was that people needed.” Understandably, this came as a
revelation. “It was really exciting — I was pretty amazed!”
Aside
from the information it provided, muscle testing allowed Kelly to confirm
her evaluation of the body’s condition derived from other techniques.
“Being scientific-minded, I like
consistency,” she says, “and I’m
not convinced of anything unless I find really strong consistencies across
the board — the same problems in the iris, the musculature, and the
dietary things, all confirming each other.”
As
Touch for Health became known, Kelly says, “people grabbed it and found
out that it worked well for them, that it gave them some information they
didn’t have any other method of obtaining. Everybody was sharing
information with everybody else and networking all over the country.”
She found books by the Biokinesiology Institute, in Oregon, which had done
extensive work with muscle testing. Their procedure was to test substances
externally, by putting them on the navel (when the person was lying down)
or on a cheek. “I decided to try it and find out if I get the same
results as I do with putting things in the mouth, because I don’t like
to take anybody’s word for anything,” Kelly says. “I always check
everything out for myself, and I’m cautious about everything until I’m
thoroughly convinced.” She experimented extensively and confirmed for
herself that using the cheek or navel worked but that using other
locations on the body didn’t work.
Kelly
combined the two forms of muscle testing she had learned into a style
of
her own. “I was getting much faster results with the more difficult
cases,” she says. She also began muscle testing not only for what herbs
made a person strong but what foods made him or her weak.

For
some people, Kelly says, milk has an adverse effect on an organ or
system — like constricting blood vessels or causing colon
problems — without producing a full allergy reaction. “I usually want to
know why it’s creating that type of reaction in the body, and with
kinesiology that’s used by Touch for Health, you can go through and
muscle test things like the gallbladder, the liver, the stomach, the large
intestine, to find out if it’s creating an adverse hormonal reaction. Is
it because of the high estrogen? Is it because of the fats?”
Testing
for food allergies has allowed Kelly to find herbs or supplements to
counter the effect of a food to which a client is intolerant. In cases
where nothing is available, a client may have to stay off the
food — sometimes indefinitely, sometimes for a certain period, also
determined by muscle testing—until the problem is resolved. “I’ve
seen incredible success with being able to get rid of food allergies. Just
about anything, including milk intolerances, I’ve seen people turn
around — which is pretty amazing to me, because that was one of the
hardest ones.
“The
problem I find most often is a potassium deficiency,” Kelly says, which
can create intolerance to the calcium in dairy. “When you bring up the
potassium levels, generally people can tolerate dairy. Before, I used to
try lactase. That would help them tolerate it to a degree, but you
couldn’t stop the reactions, and they had to take it with the dairy
product every single time.” Once the potassium deficiency is resolved,
however, “people who would double up in pain and would have a lot of
mucus no longer had any kind of reaction.”

As
to whether milk intolerance results from the milk itself or from the
antibiotics, growth hormones, and fertilizer and pesticide residues cows
consume, Kelly says she thinks several factors are involved. She’s
investigating hormone-related intolerances “not only in milk but also in
meat. A lot of people are amino-acid intolerant and oil intolerant, so
I’ve been trying to understand why. I’ve been getting different types
of meat — organic meat, kosher meat, hallal meat [slaughtered according to
Muslim ritual], and some regular meat from the stores. People across the
board test very poorly on regular meat and the hallal meat, if it’s high
in fat. Kosher is actually the best, and organic generally is okay, but
sometimes it doesn’t test well. I’m not really sure why.”
For
those with difficulty digesting animal protein, vegetable protein is a
possibility. “Soy products, if they’re predigested, work,” Kelly
says, “but soy has a very long amino-acid chain, and our bodies can’t
break down the amino-acid chain short enough when it’s in just a bean
form or in a powdered form. We can only break it down to a
seventeen-length chain, and we need to be able to break it down smaller
than that.” Curding or culturing it, as in tofu or tempeh, “breaks
down the amino-acid structure, so in that form it’s very digestible.”
Other types of beans have elements in them that hinder their breakdown,
but these elements can be removed by sprouting or appropriate cooking.
“Other beans don’t have as long an amino-acid chain as the soybeans,
but soybeans have a more complete amino-acid base.”
“We’ve
pretty much lost all dietary standards,” Kelly observes. “People used
to have standard diets — specific combinations of grains and beans or meat
and particular grains, to give them that balance between amino acids and
carbohydrates. In our society, people pretty much eat whatever they want,
and they’ve gone to a very high -carbohydrate diet
— and unfortunately,
not only a high-carbohydrate diet but a high-glycemic diet. The types of
carbohydrates they’re eating raise the glycemic levels very quickly,”
she says, potatoes and refined wheat products being the most common. This
“raises the insulin levels and creates inflammatory prostaglandins,”
causing problems like “poor circulation, poor fueling.
“I’m
finding most people to be hypoglycemic, and their blood-sugar levels are
all over the place,” Kelly says. “I’m trying to work with people to
bring them back to more normal homeostasis in terms of their protein
levels,” because protein helps restabilize blood-sugar levels. It
“makes all your enzymes, rebuilds all your tissue. I’m finding that in
terms of their body structure, people are displacing their protein with
fat — they’re displacing muscle and basically consuming their own body,
becoming fatter and fatter. I’m trying to understand and reverse that
process and reestablish muscle tissue instead of fat.”
Kelly
has found that people who are intolerant to amino acids and oils also have
a problem with hormonal imbalances, particularly their progesterone and
estrogen levels. Muscle testing indicates that estrogen levels are “much
higher, because of the estrogen that’s going into all the animals.
Hormonally, we’re causing ourselves to do the very things that our body
shouldn’t be doing, and we’re eating foods that are extremely high in
fat.” Improving the uptake of amino acids helps relieve the hormonal
imbalances.
“Most
people, because of the high estrogen, need to reestablish their
progesterone levels,” Kelly says. With women, she uses progesterone
supplements. “With men, I’m mainly trying to reestablish their
protein-to-carbohydrate balance.” When this balance is upset in men from
eating too many refined carbohydrates and sweets, “their testosterone
starts to turn to estrogen, so then they have a double estrogen
problem.” When this balance is upset in women, their estrogen starts to
turn to testosterone.

“What
you find in the health field,” Kelly says, “is that most people talk
mainly about elimination in terms of the colon and don’t talk much about
elimination in terms of the kidneys, which actually eliminate 90 percent
of the waste. When the colon is toxic it’s a major problem, but the
kidneys I’m finding equally to be the problem.
“The
thing that got me interested in the kidneys was that when I would get
people so all their meridians would come into balance, sometimes they
would still have an overactive central meridian, and I couldn’t figure
out why.” Testing indicated that “in ninety-nine percent of the
people, the kidneys were overactive. I couldn’t understand why everybody
had these overactive kidneys or what the problem was with the kidneys. I
tried to use kidney herbs and things like that — it didn’t really
correct the problem, so something else was involved.”
Kelly
continued to investigate and, while reading a book titled Your
Health, Your Choice for her naturopathic studies, found a point
“that Bernard Jensen always talked about, that very much confused me,
because there was conflicting information in our society — and that was
the sodium issue.” Jensen himself had written a book several decades
earlier, titled The Sodium Story.
“I had read it way back then but was young in the field, and it was in
the recesses of my mind. I always knew sodium was important, but I also
knew sodium was something to which many people tested intolerant, and a
lot of people had too much sodium. I didn’t understand the
difference — why sodium was so important and yet people had so much of it
and still couldn’t be well.”
“Your
Health, Your Choice
discussed the difference between organic sodium and inorganic sodium — the
difference between sodium you get in foods, like celery and romaine
lettuce and spinach, and the sodium you get in salt, which is sodium
combined
with chloride. And understanding chemistry, I knew that once the
sodium and the chloride got hooked together, they just didn’t want to
separate. They’re a perfect match chemically, they fill each other’s
outer electron shells, and they don’t want to hook up to anything else.
“This
was the first book that ever really explained why the sodium is used in
the body as a cleansing source. What it talked about was the fact that
when we eat food, we basically burn it at the cellular level. When fruits
and vegetables burn at the cellular level, they leave what’s called an
alkaline ash, which can be eliminated through the lungs. When you burn
carbohydrates and proteins at the cellular level, they leave an acid ash,
which has to be eliminated via the kidneys. The acid ash is eliminated
through a hookup with either sodium, potassium, calcium, or magnesium.
Those are the four alkalinizing elements inside your body. They help keep
the acids neutral, so they can flow through your bloodstream and be
eliminated through the kidneys. If those levels become low, you start to
have troubles with the gallbladder — you start stripping the sodium from
the gallbladder, because sodium is your number one choice for that
eliminative process.”
Sodium
in the form of salt — sodium bonded with chlorine — is not available for
this eliminative function, Kelly says, because even though it separates
from the chlorine in body fluids, it bonds with it again in preference to
the acid ash. This raises a person’s blood pressure and water content.
“Then I understood the difference between why people tested bad on salt
and yet were still sodium deficient. Even sea salt is a problem — it’s
still hooked up to the chlorine.
“Norman
Walker, who was a raw-juice therapist, would use specific foods for
specific disease conditions or specific abnormalities within particular
organs.” For example, Kelly says, he would use lettuce for one
condition, string beans for another, carrots and beets for others.
“There was only one juice he used across the board, and I never could
understand why he used that one juice for everybody: carrot-spinach juice.
Until I read that book, I never completely understood the sodium
connection with it, because sodium used in other ways, or sodium used as
sea salt, doesn’t give you the same results. But spinach happens to be
one of the highest sodium foods there is. Most herbs aren’t high in
sodium — they’re usually higher in potassium and the other elements, but
they’re not high in sodium.
Although
Kelly often recommended spinach juice in the early years of her practice,
spinach is the subject of some controversy, because it has a high level of
oxalic acid, which has been implicated in the formation of kidney stones,
and more sodium than potassium. “Gerson’s work, in cases where the
sodium levels would rise above the potassium, showed a typical cancer-type
situation. They were always trying to raise the potassium above the
sodium, so I kind of veered away from using sodium foods.” Subsequently,
she began to wonder why, once a client’s major or minor issues were
cleared up, certain major organs were “out more often than not, usually
from gallbladder and liver problems and kidney problems.
“I
kept trying to rebuild particular organs, and then I finally got
frustrated and said, ‘Why are these organs breaking down to begin with?
What have we done to cause it?’” This led her to think “about the
sodium levels and understand that as we strip that sodium from the
gallbladder, the bile starts to solidify, because sodium wants to hold
onto liquid.”
Another
book Kelly used in her studies was The
Ultimate Healing System, by Donald LePore, N.D., which groups
allergies in categories according to the nutritional deficiency they
represent and the herbs that can supply the required nutrients. “I found
that those groups definitely correlated with people.” Kelly says. The
book also pointed out “that sodium was the critical issue, and once the
sodium levels go off — which starts to strip the potassium levels and the
calcium levels and the magnesium levels—as you lose each level in the
body, what that particular element is supposed to do is no longer
functioning.
“So
if the magnesium isn’t keeping the calcium moving around inside the
body, then you’re going to end up having troubles with the calcium
settling out, and then you’ll have an allergy reaction or an intolerant
reaction as the calcium starts to settle out. Or if you don’t have the
sodium, you can’t utilize your potassium correctly, and then you if
don’t have potassium, you can’t utilize the calcium, so it’s this
hierarchy that showed me what I was finding was true.” Although she had
stopped recommending sodium foods “in my concern about not creating
another condition trying to help one condition, I found that by adding the
sodium foods back in, people who were having severe food
intolerances — where no matter what they ate, they would have a severe
reaction — were fine.” She now frequently recommends carrot-spinach
juice. The oxalic acid is not a problem in this case, Norman Walker has
pointed out, because it binds to calcium as a result of cooking, not when
consumed raw.

Although
muscle testing is based on energy, Kelly is interested in physiological
mechanisms. One reason is an affinity for the subject, dating from her
college days. “We had a very tough anatomy and physiology teacher in our
college. This guy wanted me to become a doctor. He was always on my
case — he really liked me. I would look like I was sleeping through the
class, because I was always lying there like this [pantomimes her head
down nearly flat on her arm] with my back to him, writing my notes, but I
aced all my tests, and I knew everything he talked about. I’m fascinated
by chemistry and anatomy and physiology.
“But
I was so frustrated as I read the books and would find out what the
doctors actually did, and I was so unimpressed by what happened with me
when I was hurt and they had no answers, and when I tried to talk to them:
‘Okay, you’re telling me I can’t eat protein — now I know, from the
little bit of health classes I’ve had, that if you don’t eat protein
you can’t rebuild. So how am I going to rebuild this tissue that’s
broken down in my body when you’re telling me I can’t utilize protein
for a year?’ I would throw it right back up. And I said, ‘How are you
going to heal me? How are you going to help me?’
“They
had no idea. They could only remove symptoms and try to tie things back
together, but they didn’t really understand the concepts of energy flow,
balance, and how to restore body functioning without drugs, and that
frustrated me. As I learned that the medical field spends very little time
in that — that it’s mainly symptom removal and altering the body
externally or cutting out organs — it didn’t intellectually or logically
make sense to me. My logical mind kind of veered me away from that field,
and yet they had to have fairly logical minds because it’s such
technical knowledge. So once they do actually grasp the idea of holistic
body functioning, they’re usually the ones I’ve found have been able
to promote really good information. I like studying with the ones that
have branched off in that area.”

For
the nearly three decades she’s been involved in this field, Kelly says,
“I’ve just watched the continual breakdown in people’s health, and
the chronic illnesses have become magnified drastically — almost on a
logarithmic scale, it seems, with every generation. So what I used to find
simple to deal with is now more difficult — a lot more people with
allergies, chronic ADD, children who have severe eczema, psoriasis, other
chronic illnesses that are very difficult to turn around. I find that even
simple foods they can react to, that should be normal, wholesome things.
“The
breakdown is becoming so severe in terms of the allergies of children
being brought up now that it’s difficult to find many things to work
with — they react to almost everything you put in them. Until you get the
normal homeostasis, so the energy currents function normally, improvement
is hard to see. You can tell it just by the amount of ADD kids and Ritalin
and Prozac and things that are being put out on the market.”
The
degradation of the environment and our food supply, Kelly says, is
“becoming such a problem that eventually it’s going to have to be
addressed — that’s why most people seek me out. They’ve tried
everything they can with the doctors, and it gets to the point where they
can’t get results even with that — they’re barely maintaining their
own. I see children now — eczema almost on their entire body. You can’t
ignore that. Their children are so hyper they can’t even go to
school — they can’t focus. But people are switching, because they’re
forced into it. And I’m finding that people are willing to change.”

From
1974–76, Kelly studied at the Hippocrates Health Institute, in Boston.
“During the time I was at Hippocrates,” she says, “I became involved
with both macrobiotic-diet people and Hippocrates-diet people.”
Macrobiotics advocates a grain- centered diet of whole foods, mostly
cooked, selected according to the energy in them; the Hippocrates diet
advocates consuming primarily wheatgrass juice, sprouts, and raw foods.
One
of the high points of her time at Hippocrates was when “Dr. Jensen came
out and did a week-long seminar, and there were about six hundred people
at it. Quite a few of them were doctors, but more than the doctors-
versus-the-laymen issue there was the macrobiotics-versus- the-raw-foods, especially being in Boston”
— at the
time, one of the centers of macrobiotic activity in the United States, in
addition to being the home of the Hippocrates Institute.
“The
way Bernard Jensen works is, he had a huge screen, and he went around the
audience and just picked out people’s irises. Through the iris you can
tell both the genetic breakdown of that person’s body from existing
lesions and the type of healing” that has occurred from healed lesions
that have knitted back together.
“So
they sent people around the audience and picked out people to bring up.
And Bernard Jensen had no idea — he’s from California, and he’s
standing onstage with his marker, pointing at all the places on
somebody’s iris — he doesn’t even know who they are. He has them
sitting in the back, under a camera, and it transfers the picture onto the
screen, and he would just sit there and talk about what their constitution
was like and what they were probably doing in terms of diet that would
create the types of things he was seeing inside the iris. Then he would
have the person come up, and he would have them speak about what their
diet was like and what they’d been doing.
“So
basically, what ended up happening is that all the people who were on raw
foods and had been on a lot of greens and sprouts and things like that
actually had more healing signs in their irises than the macrobiotics, and
the macrobiotics had more healing signs than the people who were on the
regular American diet. But there was a definite hierarchy, which impressed
me. A lot of the macrobiotics started coming over and discussing things
with Hippocrates Health Institute people. A lot of people from Hippocrates
actually had some of the weaker conditions in their eyes — they had a
worse constitution to work with, and they’d gotten stronger results than
the people who were on the macrobiotic diet.
“And
the only thing I can ascertain in terms of why that would be so was that
the Hippocrates diet was very high in amino acids, because people who
followed it ate so many sprouts, and high in chlorophyll, which has a
significant capacity to heal and cleanse tissues. So Hippocrates people
had both the capacity to cleanse and the capacity to bring up the amino
acids, which is what I’m finding to be the lowest with everybody — that
everybody is pretty much amino-acid deficient.” A lot vegetarians now,
Kelly says, “are really carbotarians, I term them, because they eat
mostly carbohydrates. They lack protein, and they don’t really have the
balanced macrobiotic diet.
“The
macrobiotic diet is better than not being on a particular diet,” Kelly
says, but because beans are the primary source of protein in this diet,
“unless beans are cooked correctly, by sprouting them before cooking,
and a person has the digestive capacity to be able break down the beans
correctly or has a good intrinsic factor [an inherent ability to digest
beans] functioning in the digestive system,” they may find beans hard to
digest. Therefore, she thinks the Hippocrates diet had an advantage over
macrobiotics in this respect. “That’s why it had faster healing
signs — it was just because it had more available nutrients.”
“I’m
not a high promoter of raw foods in and of themselves,” Kelly says.
“There are people I find we can’t put on raw foods, because raw foods
are too active for their system. I worked and lived at Hippocrates for a
while, and watching some of those people try to go through their healings
was traumatic. They’d have mucus coming out of their mouth, their nose,
their eyes, their ears — they were going into major destructive cleanses.
It was, in the end, good for their bodies, but they were all spacy — it’s
not an easy way to heal. I think there needs to be a balance between the
two. Many people say that when you have a broken-down system, it’s
easier if you use more cooked foods, because cooking breaks down the
cellulose, and you can get more of the amino acids, whereas when you’re
eating raw food, if you don’t have the digestive capacity, you can’t
break down the roughage.”
Nevertheless,
Kelly says, it’s inadvisable to avoid raw foods entirely, “because
then you’re losing the enzyme capacity. You want to get enzymes, so you
can get the protein that enzymes help break down, so you can start to make
your own enzymes to break things down correctly and cleanse your system. I
think there needs to be a balance between the two.”
Cheryl
Kelly
Shirley, MA 01464
|
|