The Plowboy Interview

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SAUL: Well, the very first thing I recommend is that people stop eating meat.

PLOWBOY: Whoops!

SAUL: I know, I lose a lot of people on this point. But I'm not out to make friends . . . I'm out to tell people what I believe is the truth.

Unfortunately, a lot of my students kind of run into a brick wall right there. They are just not willing to give up the hot dogs and hamburgers in order to get rid of—say—their arthritis. Well, if they're not ready to drop meat, they should no longer look at themselves as victims of this demon arthritis, but rather as victims of their own stubbornness. This is why motivation is so important. Natural healing works . . . but only if you do.

You know, I was in a class once, and I mentioned that rats make their own vitamin C, and someone asked, "Does that mean rats are a good source of vitamin C?" I replied, "Sure, if you eat your rats raw. Once you cook the meat, the vitamin C content is almost nil."

I think that's why traditional Eskimos tend to be healthy . . . because they eat raw meat. If they tried to subsist on cooked meat, they'd all be seriously vitamin-deficient. People who do eat meat, then, probably should do so the way that true carnivorous or omnivorous creatures do: Eat the whole animal . . . skin, bones, blood, intestines, brains, eyes . . . everything.

" . . . the popularization of iodized salt [may have] had more to do with the elimination of polio in America than the polio vaccine!"

PLOWBOY: Would that actually provide a balanced . . .

SAUL: It'd be a perfect diet. If you completely consume a raw, freshly killed animal, you'll get everything you need . . . all the vitamins, all the minerals, everything. But that's repugnant to us, because, you see, we're not meat eaters by nature.

However, to return to my subject, people who do stop eating meat typically find that—for instance—their hay fever isn't as bad, their allergies aren't as severe, or their skin doesn't break out as much. This is due, in part, to the fact that these "new" vegetarians are avoiding all of the chemicals that find their way into meat: the hormones, the antibiotic residues, the colorings, and the preservatives.

On top of all that, when people stop eating meat, they spend less on food. I save $20 a week simply as a result of being a vegetarian. Now that's $80 a month tax free . . . without having to go out and earn it. I'm all for that!

PLOWBOY: There are, of course, any number of arguments as to whether humans are, by nature, omnivorous or vegetarian . . . and there are also any number of people who'll give you very convincing evidence pointing one way or the other. However, I suspect that the key here is the quality of the meat that people can get nowadays.

SAUL: Look, I'm not telling people that they have to stop eating meat. I'm saying that if I were they, I'd stop eating meat right away. If they do so, regardless of the validity of one or another of the arguments about mankind's nature, I believe they'll get results. They'll feel better, they'll have fewer illnesses. That's my real reason for not eating meat, because a vegetarian diet works.

That should hardly come as a surprise. After all, when you buy a cut of beef; for example, you're getting the dead muscle tissue of an animal that's been raised in a highly confined environment and on a very limited diet.

PLOWBOY: That environment was probably quite stressful, too.

SAUL: The meat could contain lead if the animal was grazed near an interstate highway, or be doped with antibiotics or other chemical residues. And, on humanitarian grounds, some farming conditions are deplorable . . . those typical of many veal-raising operations, for instance.

PLOWBOY: We recently did an interview with Dr. Michael Fox of the Humane Society of the U.S., and he touched on that. [EDITOR'S NOTE: See MOTHER NO.79.] In fact, he cited evidence that human diseases are developing resistance to antibiotics as a result of the huge quantities of these substances that are given to animals.

SAUL: Worse yet, we're actually starting to see humans contracting diseases as a consequence of eating animals that have been fed "killfloor scraps", or—as they're commonly called—"meat by-products". Think of it this way: A steer goes to market, and the muscle meats by no means make up the whole animal . . . there's also a lot of waste that is processed into meat by-products. And these substances sometimes include the entire bodies of animals that are cancerous or have other diseases that make them unfit for human food. Well, according to a report by Dr. P.F. McGargle—a veterinary surgeon who did meat inspection—published in Preventive Medicine Forum, countries in which these ground-up animal byproducts are used in livestock food have an unusually high incidence of human cancer. Childhood cancer, in particular, is much higher in countries that use kill-floor scraps when producing feed for hogs, chickens, and turkeys.

Now if you organically raise your own livestock, or if you're a hunter and you get wild game . . . surely that animal had a better chance to get a balanced diet rich in minerals and vitamins—and lived a better life-than did a steer confined to an intensive feedlot. Even so, I still think we should eat the whole animal— raw —if we're going to call ourselves omnivorous.

PLOWBOY: What actions other than adopting a vegetarian diet would you recommend?

SAUL: If a person is not on insulin or any medication that requires eating, I'd suggest a short fast (four to six days) to rid the body of the toxins accumulated over years of unhealthful living. Fasting, by the way, is also a commonly used naturopathic treatment for certain illnesses.

PLOWBOY: Do you have any tips that might help a first-timer get through a fast? A lot of people are really intimidated by that idea.

SAUL: We have a little brochure called "Techniques for Successful Fasting" that many individuals have found helpful. Basically, it makes the following recommendations: [1] Go into the fast with a positive attitude. Some folks think they're surely going to die if they stop eating. Of course, that's not true, unless they have a health problem such as diabetes and can't fast. [2] They should attempt a 50/50 juice/water fast . . . consuming half fruit juice and half water, either mixed together or in alternation.

PLOWBOY: In any amounts that they feel comfortable with?

SAUL: Yes . . . any amounts. [3] They should continue their vitamin supplements while fasting. Now some naturopaths say you don't need these "boosters" while fasting—or, indeed, at all, if you're eating a healthful diet—but my feeling is that in real life, with its stresses of jobs and kids and traffic jams, you'll find it worthwhile to take vitamins every day.

[4] The next tip is to have a nightly enema during the fast-on any day that you don't have a bowel movement naturally—to rinse out the wastes that accumulate in the bowel and are not being eliminated. Otherwise, toxins will remain in your body when your fast is over. Now I lose a lot of individuals when I recommend that nightly enema, but, again, I'm not out to win buddies.

[5] And the last piece of advice is to come of the fast slowly and gradually. If you fast for four days, take a day or two to come of it. If you fast for six days, take at least two days.

PLOWBOY: Just how does one come of a fast gradually?

SAUL: Stick to fruit salads, vegetable broths, and such . . . and eat half of what you want but do so twice as often as you normally would. If you try all these steps, you'll almost certainly succeed. Most people who have fasted and hated it were on a water fast with no vitamins and no enema.

PLOWBOY: If people do manage to give up eating meat and make their way through the first fast, what should they then consume on a day-to-day basis? What do you feel would be healthful?

SAUL: A two-thirds raw food diet. Or what I prefer to call a two-thirds salad diet. I recommend, for example, an all-fruit breakfast, with some cheese or yogurt, and an all-salad lunch. Try to use sprouts instead of lettuce . . . sprouts are a complete protein while lettuce is not. Then, for supper, eat any meatless menu that you like . . . going very light on sweeteners and very light on eggs. I also recommend drinking three glasses of raw fruit or vegetable juice a day . . . preferably before meals.

PLOWBOY: What about breads?

SAUL: Whole grain breads can be a very valuable part of any diet. There are other ways to get your grains, though. Sprouting your wheat, for instance, is a superb way of getting complete protein.

And this brings us to an opportunity to exercise some real dietary economy. If people want to save money and still feel that they're getting enough protein, they should be sure to have a cereal bowl full of sprouted grain or beans a day. You can grow a whole jarful of sprouts for pennies. In fact, you could live on an all-sprout diet for less than $3.50 a week!

"If you completely consume a raw, freshly killed animal, you'll get everything you need . . . all the vitamins, all the minerals, everything."

There are people right now who are starving to death in America—many of them are elderly—because they can't live on the $10$12 a week that they can spend on food. If these people were to eat, say, a diet consisting of half sprouted wheat and half sprouted alfalfa, lentils, mung beans, sunflower seeds, or chick-peas, they would get all of the protein they need . . . all of the vitamins . . . and all of the minerals. Then, if a person had just a little additional money, he or she could supplement that all-sprout diet with a daily eggnog . . . the latter being simply a glass of raw milk and a raw egg yolk only, with maybe a little sweetener added. That would provide an excellent poverty-level diet. Now I am not suggesting that we should all eat that way. I'm saying if I had only $4.00 a week, I could be very healthy on that amount of money.

PLOWBOY: And very bored, perhaps.

SAUL: Very bored, but also very alive. You know, it doesn't cost much to get good nutrition, but we neglect our need for it. I wonder how many nursing homes even give a high-potency natural multiple vitamin every day?

And simple, easily available vitamins can actually fight drug addiction! I've written to Nancy Reagan and expressed my support for her fight against drug abuse in children. And I told her that our work at the Ashwins Health Institute—in particular our vitamin dispensary that serves the poor in Rochester—has shown us that substance abuse trails off when individuals get adequate vitamin supplements . . . especially B vitamins and vitamin C in substantial quantities. I suggested to Mrs. Reagan that she help develop a national vitamin supplementation program. Unfortunately, all I got in reply was a polite letter from her press secretary.

Yet I've talked to people at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in Rochester who often seemed to be so drunk they couldn't stand up without my holding them. We get such alcoholics on vitamin C and B complex, though, and those individuals can get off the booze. And that means a lot.

More amazing still, in Scotland it's been discovered that people who—in the course of treatment for cancer—were given morphine, or even heroin, can be injected intravenously with ten grams of vitamin C a day, and break the addiction in less than ten days . . . with no withdrawal symptoms, maintenance drugs, or side effects!

PLOWBOY: Hasn't it been said that almost 90070 of all North Americans don't get enough vitamin C?

SAUL: Yes. William J. McCormick, the Toronto, Canada M.D. I mentioned before, did tests on several thousand individuals. He did find that 9007o of them were vitamin C—deficient.

That may sound like a shocking statistic, but look at our nearest animal cousin, the gorilla. It's a vegetarian animal . . . one that's anatomically very similar to human beings and one which gets over six thousand milligrams of vitamin C a day in its normal diet. Yet the government's telling us that we need (according to the RDA) about one one-hundredth of that amount. Now somebody's wrong, and I'll side with the gorilla and against the government.

Of course, that common human deficiency's very likely why we find that people simply get better when they take vitamin C. Statistics and controlled experiments aside, it all comes down to what the individual is willing to do. If any reader of this interview wants to conduct a safe experiment, all the person has to do is start taking the amount of vitamin C that I recommend and see if he or she feels better after a few weeks. [EDITOR'S NOTE: See the accompanying chart.] The proof is in the pudding. You can't argue with that, any more than you should ignore Ivan Illich's disclosure that survival rates for the most common types of cancer—those that make up 90010 of all cases—have remained virtually unchanged for the past 25 years.

PLOWBOY: Are you saying that all of our new chemotherapeutic drugs have made no progress in treating these cancers?

SAUL: Very little. Let me point out—as Linus Pauling has noted that the medical establishment has double standards when it comes to vitamins and medicines. A drug may not work all the time, and may even have dangerous side effects, but still be considered a worthwhile risk for a possible success. Whereas if a vitamin doesn't work all the time, but is totally safe, most physicians won't even try it.

PLOWBOY: Are there any other easy self-help courses of action that you'd recommend?

SAUL: Well, for one, there's the "spontaneous release by positioning" technique (as developed by Lawrence Hugh Jones, D.O.), which is a method—a first aid technique—for adjusting a person's spine. [EDITOR'S NOTE: We'll describe this method in detail in our next issue.]

PLOWBOY: You seem to be sowing a number of self-help seeds, Dr. Saul. What do you hope will result from such work?

SAUL: Most of all, I'd like to see people stop living with their illnesses and start living without them. I dream of a nationwide system of neighborhood health cooperatives, which will make individuals so self-reliant that they can simply bypass the professionals. And I mean bypass the naturopath as well as the medical doctor. Now if someone has a broken leg or is bitten by a rabid dog, for heaven's sake, they'd still have to seek medical help. The secret is not to never go to a doctor . . . the secret is to rarely need to go.

PLOWBOY: So you believe that every illness is a result of unhealthful living.

SAUL: Basically, yes.

PLOWBOY: How does naturopathic theory explain the existence of contagious diseases?

SAUL: I could probably fill your magazine responding to that question, but I'll try to be brief. First of all, there is no absolute proof that germs are the primary cause of any illness. Yes, germs are found at the scene of illness. But then, detectives are found at the scene of a crime, and that fact doesn't mean that they committed it. <<br/>
strong>PLOWBOY: OK.

SAUL: In fact, many medical doctors have, during the last 150 years, gone on record as saying that they believe the germ theory isn't valid. It certainly doesn't seem to explain cancer very well . . . or heart disease . . . or mental illness . . . or diabetes. At least 20 billion dollars' worth of cancer research hasn't been able to defeat malignancy, or we'd all be vaccinated for it, you can be sure of that.

That's the first basic point. The second is that if we go back to Robert Koch , who formulated Koch's postulates—upon which the germ theory is based—we find that there's a logical flaw in that argument. The first postulate says that you can isolate the germ in a sick animal. The second postulate says you can culture that germ and then—here's the third postulate-inject that cultured germ into a healthy animal and produce the symptoms characteristic of the illness. The fourth postulate states you can then remove the germ from the newly sick animal . . . and it will be the same germ, thus proving that the microorganisms caused the disease.

Now that sounds ironclad. But—as Andrew Weil, M.D. points out in his book The NaturalMind —there's a flaw in postulate three. How is the germ presented to the animal? By bypassing all of the body's defense systems, since it's injected directly into the bloodstream!

The naturopath claims that disease resistance is the main story! It allows germs to become a factor.

PLOWBOY: Are you saying, then, that someone who leads a healthful life would be less likely to contract a contagious disease?

SAUL: Absolutely. They'd be less likely to catch it, and if they did, it would be less severe. Here's a simple example. Our children had been playing with the neighbor's kids just before those children's chicken pox became visible, at the most contagious stage of that disease. A few days later, the other kids had chicken pox. But our youngsters developed only five or six spots apiece. We upped their vitamin C and that was the end of that.

PLOWBOY: That sounds analogous to the increased disease and bug-attack resistance shown by healthy, organically grown plants.

SAUL: Certainly. And you can apply that same line of comparison when considering the laboratory animals used in medical research. Think about the white rats—generation after generation after generation of them—that are fed only commercial rat food. That diet can't possibly contain every natural factor . . . it can only contain what we humans think rats need for a healthy life. OK?

So all of these rats get the same diet . . . one that quite possibly is deficient, and certainly is given in excess. We introduce germs to these animals and they drop dead. When I was in Australia, I studied with Professor S.A. Barnett of the Australian National University in Canberra. He asserted that if those same experiments were conducted with London sewer rats, the results would be quite different, because those rodents wouldn't be so quick to die. Not only do London sewer rats have a more broadly based diet . . . they're also, of course, constantly exposed to germs. There simply wouldn't be any rodents if the population wasn't able to resist illness. Again, resistance is the question . . . not germs.

And people can build resistance by getting plenty of rest . . . plenty of exercise . . . and the right kind of diet. We also need vitamin supplements, especially vitamin C. If folks follow these simple rules, though, germs will really become more or less irrelevant. This sort of natural disease prevention is always to be preferred to medical inoculation and such. If it's a toss-up, go with nature. Nature has had thousands of years to work out the enzyme/vitamin/elimination/nutrition structures of the body. Nature has had a lot of experience.

The medical establishment, for all its good intentions, has had considerably less experience.

You know, when the signers of the Declaration of Independence were sitting down at the table, one of the gentlemen present was Dr. Benjamin Rush, surgeon general of the Continental army. When they sat down to sign the Declaration—to more or less create this country—Dr. Rush said the following: "The Constitution of this republic should make special provision for medical freedom, as well as religious freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and to deny equal privileges to others, will constitute the bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."

And this, of course, is the real crux. Medicine is not a science . . . it's an art. And that's why people should be encouraged to be their own doctors . . . because it's an art form, for which you need no degree, and which generally requires no training that you can't pick up on your own.

Just remember this basic point: Our internal environment is the primary influence on our health! We're talking about inner-space ecology. We're talking about interior homesteading. And the rewards of naturopathic living can be enormous. To sit down to a simple, healthful meal with healthy children and to be able to know that your basic bodily equipment is functioning as well as possible, should, I think, be a more important aspect of self-reliance than solar heating!

PLOWBOY: One of the first rules of a self-reliant lifestyle is that you must take care of your tools . . . and you're talking about the most precious tool we have.

SAUL: Exactly. This body is the only one we're going to get, so we owe it to ourselves to be careful with it. And I think that we can get better health care by doing the job ourselves than we can by contracting it out.

Of course, if you are going to doctor yourself; it's vitally important that you take the time, do the reading, and put enough energy into it to do a good job. I don't want people going out half-baked . . . reading one book and thinking they're experts.

But make no mistake, naturopathic remedies do work. If a dedicated person goes into the field to prove nature cure wrong, he or she will wind up proving it right. The truth will stand on its own. The folks with real problems are those who can't be bothered to look into natural healing at all. The people who are indiferent. The people who don't care.

Our hospitals and nursing homes are filled to capacity with those people!

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