Subject: [instinctive-eating] interesting experiment from
http://www.angelfire.com/ny2/bass/mice.html
"The ideal diet consists of the foods listed - approximately 75-85% raw
foods with 15-25% cooked, to be eaten in correct sequential order." "I
still worry about people who attempt to be fruitarians."
Excerpts from
In Search of the Ultimate Diet
Volume I
Advantages of working with mice
Primitive races and diet
Mice and the fruitarian diet
Deficiencies from fruitarian diet
The 100% raw vegetarian diet
The ideal diet
With no grains - mice always hungry
The essentials in diet
Supplements
Overview
The following materials represent a four-year project I undertook to answer
fundamental questions about nutrition, questions such as what is the best
diet for humans? Which is most conducive to maximum life span, health,
happiness, and freedom from disease? Can it be a diet which includes meats?
Seafood? Ovo-lacto-vegetarian? Macrobiotics? Vegan? Raw foods? Natural
Hygiene? Fruitarian? What are the best aspects of each system? How much of
each should we make use of?
..... Even though I have been a practitioner in nutritional health for well
over forty years, I undertook this research in the early 1980's because I
had many unanswered questions about which is correct among the many
conflicting theories that make up the field of natural health, conflicts
that can be extensive and overwhelming.
..... I wondered how long I would have to wait to discover relevant
information. I felt it could easily take another hundred years. I felt so
frustrated that I started to think about setting up my own mouse trials.
Even though I am an animal lover I knew I could work with mice because I saw
no need to harm them. I would give each trial group one of the various diets
followed by many health seekers. I saw no need to destroy and dissect the
members of the different test groups to monitor results. Observation of
appearance, behavior, fertility, growth of offspring and longevity would be
my indicators of success, if only I could set up the studies - a daunting
prospect for a sole, unfunded researcher.
Decades later in September of 1983, I obtained the necessary equipment and a
group of ten mice .....
The final push to get me into a pet store
..... The man never forgave the doctors who had amputated his first leg. He
felt he could have saved the leg if the doctors had known about fasting. He
could have avoided being crippled for life, not to speak of the daily pain
involved in walking around with an artificial leg. Trying to get him off
fruitarianism was not easy. I was dealing with dedication of monstrous
proportions.
..... Now, how do most people work out their theories and approaches to
diet? From books. If the book is in error, like the old joke says, "Nice
fellow, he died of a misprint, you know." It can happen, easily. We need
broad studies on vegetarianism, all the different types of vegetarianism.
..... once again I regretted the lack of dietary tests on mice. Some solid
information from dietary tests on mice in fruitarianism could have provided
me with the hard evidence I needed to persuade the members of the dangers of
the practice.
This debate on fruitarianism was the final push that got me into a pet store
to inquire about getting mice to study.
Setting up research
...... The bill came to around $150. All the store had was ten mice, so I
bought them and outfitted a few cages. That's how I got started.
I decided to begin the mice on my diet. I felt it was a wholesome diet that
should build up strength and number - a diet including fruits, nuts, raw and
cooked vegetables, grains, legumes, and a small amount of cheese and eggs. I
was correct. The mice thrived and reproduced. I bought more cages. Before
long, I had over 100 mice. I kept them on my diet for six months. They kept
growing and reproducing by leaps and bounds. Before I knew it, I had seven
cages, each with around forty-five mice - weIl over 300 mice in six months.
I was ready to begin testing diets.
Advantages of working with mice
Why are mice experiments so good? Well, as the medical man who headed the
Longevity Research Institute in California, Dr. Roy Walford, neatly observes
in his book "Maximum Life Span":
"If mice cannot live on a diet, you can be sure humans can't."
Dr. Walford explains that the metabolism of mice is close to humans. As
warm-blooded animals, mice suckle their young. They require much the same
minerals, vitamins, enzymes, proteins, and carbohydrates that we do. Mice
need just a little less food that we do for their size, and their life span
is proportionate, a ratio of 30 to 1, thirty days of human life to one day
of a mouse. A mouse will live two, two and a half; sometimes three years
compared to our life span of 75 to 90 years.
..... Of course, there are some minor differences. Mice can manufacture
their own vitamin C. We must get it all from food. Also, mice require a
little more protein proportionately.
But mice have been sponging off humans for the last few millions of years,
seeking out our foods wherever they live. Especially because their dietary
needs and preferences are much like ours, mice can be a valuable vehicle for
investigating questions about human nutrition.
Difficulties in obtaining clinical experience with patients
Speaking as a practitioner, there are problems with trying to get answers
from clinical experience with human beings. Simply put, if you put people on
a diet, they will cheat much of the time because it's difficult to change
from one diet to another. When your patients come back to you for
re-examination, lots of times they're ashamed to admit they've cheated. So
they lie to you, and you can't get a true picture. Let me give you an
example.
I'll ask, "Did you follow the diet?"
"Yeah."
"What do you mean, 'Yeah'? A hundred percent? What percentage?"
"Why, I'd say about 90%."
"What did you eat that was not on the diet?"
"Well, I had a pizza one time, and we had a Bar Mitzvah so I had steak
there..."
Too often they get tempted to stray from their diet, go on a binge, shrug,
and say, "Well, tomorrow I'll start." You can read about this in my book
"Overcoming Compulsive Habits", which discusses all the copouts there are.
Difficulties due to humans' varying nutritional reserves - Example B12
So it's very difficult to get accurate dietary information from humans. But
there's an even greater problem in evaluating humans in nutritional
research: the problem of accounting for our varying nutritional reserves.
Unlike mice - whose deficiencies show up immediately - a human can go for
many years before he uses up his reserves and his body begins to
deteriorate.
Consider the B12 factor. It's been discovered that human beings can function
five or more years without getting B12. They are living on their reserves.
Then, after five years, some people will start to develop symptoms. Others
can degenerate and completely break down in five years. But many can last
for up to ten years. So you cannot thoroughly evaluate deficiencies or
excesses in a dietary study with human subjects because of the great
disparity in time for problems to appear in different individuals, even if
you follow a group for years.
Difficulties due to deceptive feelings of well-being on certain diets
..... There are other reasons for a deceptive feeling of well-being. Even if
you practice a regimen for a year or two you might feel good simply because
you are stimulated from an increased sugar content in the diet, as in
fruitarianism. You get on a kind of high. You say, "Wow, this is a paradise
diet. I'm in heaven. This is the way to live!" You follow the diet happily
and then, wham, you run into a vitamin deficiency, your health falls apart,
and you can't reverse it anymore. This is a danger in fruitarianism.
Dr. Clive McCay's experiments with mice
..... This was fascinating. It was like he had discovered the Fountain of
Youth. By feeding the mice a minimum of food, he prolonged their life to the
point of nearly tripling their life spans. It was like tapping the
borderland of Methuselah, like discovering what Methuselah knew.
Walford was excited by the results of this research. He tried the same thing
on himself. He pared down his diet, and by also continuing the periodic
fasting, he achieved a state of nearly constant happiness.
Luigi Cornaro lived l02 years
If you follow a minimal diet you can achieve super nutrition. Let's look at
Luigi Cornaro, a man who at age 35 was weak, sick, and dying. Click here for
the continued story.
Primitive races and diet
At that time I came across in my library a book by Weston Price entitled
"Nutrition and Physical Degeneration"
..... Price found in all these primitive races perfect skeletons. The bone
structure was perfect and the teeth were perfect. They had the wide
structure of the jawbone, of the face, the well-formed dental arches, all
the teeth were there. There was no deformity and the skeletons were free of
all disease. Deaths seem to have resulted from old age, wounds, or
accidents. These races were remarkably free from any diseases that
civilization knows about.
For thousands of years these people had lived in a state of near perfection
on their simple diet. But as soon as the white man came with his trading
store and set up headquarters and started to sell food to the natives such
as canned goods, white flour products, polished rice, and sugar products,
their health started to degenerate in one generation. For example, let's say
the mother started eating this food, and the first child that she had began
to get deformities. The teeth started to get crowded, to get crooked, to
fall out of line. Different diseases developed and behavior problems
developed that had never existed before. These primitive races were quite
peaceful, and they had no trouble getting along socially for thousands of
years.
..... Now this is quite shocking when you think about it, that thousands of
years of heredity could be reversed in such a short time, in a matter of
ten, fifteen, twenty years. Children were born deformed and then they got
married and produced a second generation with greater deformities until
eventually they had all kinds of terrible conditions.
No primitive races found living on a 100% raw diet
..... he discovered that there were no races that lived on a 100% pure
vegetarian diet among any of these primitives. But there were some that came
close to it. For example, some lived on a vegetarian diet plus milk
products, and they succeeded. There were some that had a vegetarian diet,
milk products, plus eggs, and they were successful too.
But there were no races in his book living on a 100% raw diet. This is
interesting. Some were eating many things raw - those that ate meat, some of
them ate it raw - but he found none of them living on a 100% raw diet.
..... Along with food from the vegetable kingdom, primitives had to have
protein from any one of the above four [animal] kingdoms to be successful.
If they didn't, then problems developed. That was Dr. Price's conclusion.
Test starts
Not surprisingly, I decided to begin with a test of the fruitarian diet.
Additionally, a prominent educator was writing that the fruitarian diet was
the ultimate diet of man, that man is a fruitarian by nature, and that we
shouldn't even eat vegetables. I said to myself, "Okay, let's see what the
mice have to say." .....
My personal experiences with fruitarianism
Now I had tried to be a fruitarian myself for two years when I was in my
early thirties. I followed the teachings of Arnold Ehret, and I ran into
problems such as inflammation of my gums, some loosened teeth, a noticeable
paleness and weight loss from 170 to 140 pounds. I lived as a fruitarian for
two years with very little cheating. I had always attributed my failure as a
total fruitarian to the fact that I didn't have enough willpower. It wasn't
until my mice experiments thirty years later that I realized the cheating
saved my life.
Mice and the fruitarian diet
I put a group of mice on a fruitarian diet. But they didn't seem to be
eating very much fruit, and they certainly weren't crazy about it. .....
..... When I returned them to the fruitarian diet, after the second day they
started the cannibalistic behavior again. They grabbed another young mouse
and this time they ate it. The poor thing. I saw it happen. I was shocked.
I'd never seen anything like this. "What happened here?" I asked myself.
I had given them a fruitarian diet, a diet that some natural health
practitioners fervently believe in. Then I added corn, then avocado, foods
that fruitarians are not supposed to include, and still I ran into trouble.
It really scared me to witness what had happened to my mice. I worried then
and still worry about people who attempt to be fruitarians.
Renewed fruitarian diet
..... On the third day I found four dead mice. Two had their heads eaten
off! Because their bodies were intact, I knew they hadn't died from being
killed but had died from diet deficiencies. Then they were cannibalized
because of deficiencies in the rest. If they had died from being killed,
there would have been injury marks, so I was able to conclude that again the
diet was deficient
Deficiencies from fruitarian diet
..... To relate the results to humans, this trial seemed to indicate that
after being a fruitarian for the human equivalent of three months, humans
would show deficiencies and imbalances and health problems. My results
suggested that if a fruitarian lived strictly without cheating he would be
able to do so for three months before deficiencies began to show. But since
the average fruitarian cheats, he doesn't know the diet doesn't work. If he
didn't cheat, after three months his body would start breaking down. He
wouldn't necessarily die, but problems would start to develop.
I immediately added greens, lettuce leaves, and carrot tops. I was stunned
by this experience. I determined that the cause of death was due to protein
deficiencies, mineral deficiencies, and possible sugar poisoning from the
excess fruit. This shocked me. I became so disillusioned that I stopped
fruit in all the cages. I had about five cages at the time with about 150
mice. From there on no mice got fruit anymore. Only later, after many
months, equivalent of several human years, did I gradually re-introduce a
little fruit
Nathan Pritikin and the macrobiotic views on fruit
..... One cage had no fruit for the equivalence of ten human years. No
fruit. People tell you that you can't live healthfully without fruit, that
it's the key food. My experiments indicate that fruit was not necessary if
you had other carbohydrates.
Fruitarian mice restored to full diet
..... My two fruitarian experiments opened my eyes. I became anxious to test
other theories.
..... I'd taken them off the fruitarian regimen. They were eating well
again, but I couldn't stop the degeneration, no matter what I did. I tried
everything. I gave them chicken, I gave them eggs, I gave them fish, but no
matter what I did I couldn't stop the degeneration.
I still keep these mice in a separate cage. To this day they reproduce
rarely, and they don't act like the other mice.
..... Okay? So much for the fruitarian diet. I hope people here who had
aspirations to become fruitarians will remember the results of this
experiment
Looking for a cancer diet close to a fast
Then I began another diet. At the time I was looking for a nutritional
approach to cancer. I was also looking for a diet that had everything the
body needed but was close to a fast for those people who couldn't fast. For
example, people who were emaciated, people who had a fear of fasting, or
whatever. .....
The 100% raw vegetarian diet
..... Conclusions: The 100% raw vegetarian diet consisting of no fruit -
including salads and sprouts (mung, lentil, alfalfa, and sunflower) alone -
can be safely followed for about 15 months for humans. But it does have
deficiencies: smaller, weaker litters are born to fewer mothers, and the
babies are smaller and many do not survive.
The same diet with added soaked overnight wheat and other grain sprouts
still produces deficient litters. These problems are seen mostly in the
babies, not in the adults.
..... The adults remained in what appeared good health, but reproduction
seemed almost to stop. If young are born, they are eaten by the parents.
..... Then when I gave cheese daily on the raw diet, they started to
reproduce again. The babies were healthy and they stopped cannibalizing. On
the raw diet, it appears that daily cheese compensates for the absence of
vitamin D, vitamin B12 and other missing factors.
How to survive during a famine
..... or you were poor, you were broke, and you had a large family it's
interesting to realize that you could bring the whole family up in perfect
health on dried milk or whole milk plus whole wheat alone and nothing else.
..... Sherman's experiments confirmed to me that I was right in adding
cheese to my mice diet. When I gave cheese to my patients, I got better
results than with any diet I had used in the past.
Adding cooked grain to a vegetarian diet
The mice were on this regimen for 129 days, or the human equivalence of ten
and a half years of nothing but a pure vegetarian diet with cooked grains. I
was surprised to find that they did so well. They had many offspring, no
deaths or cannibalism, although the offspring were smaller, less developed,
and occasionally weak and skinny compared to the mice in the cages getting
cheese or eggs.
..... In other words, you could live longer if you ate a complete diet which
had salt and pepper and contaminants and chemicals, even fluorides in the
water, even sprayed chemicals on the food, than if you ate an incomplete
diet. But if the foods were whole and natural, you would live longest and
healthiest.
Serious diseases are due to deficiencies
..... We are all more or less toxic to some extent, and we all increase
toxins in the blood temporarily when we exercise, but we are not all sick.
Most bodies can handle a large degree of toxemia for a long time.
Deficiencies damage us much more quickly.
That's the difference between the two evils.
The ideal diet
To jump to the end for a moment. After two years of experiments I concluded
that the ideal diet is approximately 75 to 85% raw food, with the rest
cooked vegetables, plus grains and legumes and small amounts of nuts, egg
yolks, and dairy.
Without some grain and animal protein, after about ten and a half years for
humans on a vegan diet, or 129 days for mice, breakdowns do occur. Some
cannibalism begins to appear in mice. In humans, the deficiencies develop
more subtly. You could be a vegetarian on a very imbalanced diet and feel
good for five, seven, even ten years, but after ten years you'd start to
fall apart when you have used up your reserves of B12 and D. When that
happens, down you go. And once down, it is very hard to get back up.
So you have to be careful. You need this type of research to know what
you're doing. Otherwise you could be running into trouble. Real trouble.
Testing egg yolk and egg white instead of cheese
..... Interestingly, in the raw food vegetarian cage of mice, when I
substituted egg yolk instead of cheese, the growth was even more rapid.
With no grains, mice always hungry
..... Get this. Mice are generally docile and friendly. If they get to know
you, they'll climb in your hands. They're amiable and cute. Normally, they
don't mind you, but here they were all angry with me. I couldn't believe
what I was seeing. I'd put my hand in the cage, and they'd snap at me like
turtles! Even with excessive amounts of potatoes and yams, they ate
ravenously and were always hungry.
I wish I had done this experiment thirty years ago because I'd be about
twenty years younger now. Following the Hygienic philosophy and teachings, I
had avoided grains or even legumes for thirty years. But when I saw what was
happening to my sweet-natured mice, I was shocked and worried. I had been on
many diets to lose weight myself, and I had been off grains for thirty
years.
As soon as I restored the grains and legumes, the compulsive overeating
ended. Conclusion? It appears that grains and legumes are more important
than potatoes, yams, cheese. vegetables, and fruits combined.
That's a big statement to make. Especially to people who want to lose
weight.
I had put many patients on diets of potatoes and yams and gave them all they
wanted, but on reducing diets I stopped all flour products, all the breads
and all the grains. I gave them vegetables and fruits and lots of potatoes
and yams. But they were all hungry and all complained that they couldn't
stop eating. I believed they were all compulsive overeaters.
But after this experiment with the mice, I realized I had to take a second
look.
I was amazed to find that even if you gave complete proteins needing no
complements, like cheese and meat, turkey necks and fish, still the body
wasn't satisfied without grains. And even though carbohydrates like potatoes
and yams and corn were given -- very high quality carbohydrates -- the mice
were still not satisfied. There was something missing. Even though the
proteins of the animal foods were there, there was something missing that
only grains and legumes can provide.
Eggs with potatoes
..... Here I had taken away their grains and legumes. I gave them no cheese,
no fish, no chicken. Nothing but eggs with potatoes and yams, and I had
perfect babies.
I came to the conclusion that eggs were the most perfect protein on the face
of the earth. And I'd thought all this time that cheese was superior to eggs
because cheese was closer to a vegetarian diet. I realized then why a friend
of mine had been using egg yolks so frequently.
Egg yolks and cholesterol
..... And all the books were saying, "Egg yolks, stay away from them. You'll
die of cholesterol. They'll give you heart attacks." For me, I considered
one egg a good maximum. Two only for emergencies. Even though Dr. Cursio
used daily as many as four egg yolks on some patients, their blood pressure
dropped steadily. I found the same to be true. Lecithin in egg yolks appears
to negate cholesterol deposition in arteries.
When I saw the results with the mice, I changed my opinion about eggs.
Greens were indispensable
..... I found that greens were indispensable. I had tested all the
vegetables, and I found that the mice preferred lettuce and carrot tops to
all the vegetables. In fact, I raised them for over ten years in human time
almost exclusively on lettuce. Mostly iceberg because I was able to get the
outer leaves free. And they did well even though we know iceberg lettuce
isn't the best lettuce.
The essentials in diet
So I felt that I had finally discovered the essentials in the diet: the
greens - just a few of the vegetables were absolutely indispensable; the
others were secondary; grains were indispensable; legumes were
indispensable. Milk-products were a key factor, especially if you didn't
have any other animal products or legumes. Eggs were best used because of
the high quality nutrition, and I figured they would be ideal to offset
pollution and problems relevant to digesting protein. Even though you get a
total impact from grains and legumes, because of digestive difficulties, the
stress factors, and wrong food combining, the body in digestion will lose
some of the value and will assimilate maybe 70-80% of the protein even if
all the amino acids are supplied.
..... By the way, the mice liked carrot tops very much, and I included them
in my diet. To this day I use them with excellent results. I read recently
that the macrobiotics were recommending that too. So there was another
confirmation.
Conclusions reached: evaluating two years of test
My experiments are still continuing, but here are my conclusions from all
experiments of the first two years. The most important foods are
No.1: grains and legumes, raw, soaked, sprouted or cooked are even better.
They should be complemented with each other.
No.2: the green vegetables, especially lettuce, including Romaine, outer
iceberg leaves, and others.
No.3: nut and seeds, which are closer in importance to grains. But you must
realize that even nuts have to be complemented. They don't contain all the
amino acids, but they're approximately as good as grains. Grains have a
slight edge over the nuts because nuts are high in fat. .....
No.4: eggs or egg yolks represent the best of all the proteins for
ovo-vegetarians. Next best is cheese. For non-vegetarians, of the animal
proteins, fish is the best after eggs because of its high mineral content,
easy digestibility, rapid assimilation, and high utilization. After fish
comes poultry. Meat comes last.
Lastly, let's look at fruit. It is useful in moderation. But fruit is not
indispensable. One could live without it and stay in excellent health. My
mice lived without fruit for the human equivalent of over ten years.
The ideal diet consists of the foods listed above - approximately 75-85% raw
foods with 15-25% cooked, consisting of steamed vegetables (including
tubers), cooked grains and legumes, these to be eaten in correct sequential
order. The correct amounts of each item should be properly proportioned in
one to three meals daily.
Every time I made a discovery with the mice I introduced it with my
patients. I found with each discovery that when I introduced it into the
diet of a patient, greater improvements resulted. I was excited. I was into
new territory, and I saw no limit to the tremendous knowledge that could
unfold. Dr. Cursio was also excited because my findings helped to verify his
work as accurate.
Food combining
This is new territory that I moved into, and I tested it out. The only
problem is traditional food combining. If you mix several foods, you have to
make sure they're compatible. If they're not compatible, you don't digest
them properly. If you don't digest properly, you don't get the full protein
portion.
..... I also began to notice that when I looked in my patients' eyes and saw
great paleness of the conjuctiva under the lids and symptoms of low blood
count that within two or three weeks on the new plan, the conjuctiva started
to get a darker red, showing that the blood count was building. I had
patients who came in from famous nutritionists, and when I put them on this
diet of properly sequenced total proteins the phenomenal results staggered
me.
Maximum amount of fruit to eat
..... You should eat no more than two to three varieties daily of medium
fruit - like an apple, an orange, and a banana. Save bananas for the end of
the day. Or half a cantaloupe and a mango. Or two medium grapefruits and a
handful of cherries.
Supplements
Today, in the natural health fields of vegetarianism, Natural Hygiene,
veganism, and so on, there are two schools of thought about vitamin D and
B12. One school believes that B12 can be manufactured by the intestinal
flora on a vegetarian diet, that it is present in some vegetable foods,
foods like kelp, seaweed, and so on. The other school believes that if one
lives on a pure vegetarian diet, to be perfectly safe one must take a low
concentration B12 tablet once or twice a week.
..... So if one wishes to live on a pure vegetarian diet for ethical
reasons, the problem is easily solved by the use of a tablet or capsule
weekly. Non-vegetarians can easily get these two factors in dairy, eggs,
fish, poultry, or meat.
What is important is to recognize the indispensable necessity of having both
these factors present in the diet for your health and safety. That's the
best health insurance in the world.
In closing
..... Whatever you believe, the solution is simple. Small adjustments in the
raw food diet can help users avoid slowly developing but disastrous health
problems. These small changes can lead to optimum longevity and magnificent
health - physically, mentally, and spiritually.
As a believer in raw food vegetarianism myself, I feel a moral imperative to
share the disturbing, surprising results of my experiments with mice. I hope
to help health seekers avoid hidden dangers in their journey toward health,
strength, and happiness. I hope my discoveries have shed a little light on
your journey.
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