Preface

Nutrition Against Disease (1971)

This book is written primarily to bring new information and hope to the millions of people who are groping for a better understanding of how our bodies work and how health may be maintained. It is important for the public to have this new information because it points the way toward a vastly improved approach to health, both from the personal and the public standpoints.

The fundamental premise on which this book is based--that the microenvironment of our body cells is crucially important to our health--is, I think, by now unassailable on any responsible scientific grounds. But the conclusions that I have derived from this premise, although powerfully supported by laboratory evidence, are in some cases so unorthodox that they will doubtless give rise to objections.

Most of these objections, alas, will probably come from members of the medical profession. Laymen tend to be more open-minded about unorthodox medical theories than those who have had to undergo long years of formal training and have had, perhaps, all too little leisure to reexamine the fundamental assumptions on which all their early indoctrination and most of their subsequent practice have been based. No doubt men outside the medical profession are prone to similar afflictions.

I should emphasize here that I make a careful distinction in my own mind between what individual physicians think and what the medical establishment teaches them. I am personally and professionally well acquainted with many admirable, able, and dedicated doctors, some of whom are either activity or potentially interested in the subject of how disease may be prevented through improved nutrition. But it is only fair to add that those physicians who do recognize the importance of nutrition in the medical scheme of things have done so as the result of individual research and extra training, and not as the result of anything they were taught in the course of their formal medical education.

I do not mean to be quarrelsome about this, but I do regard our present-day medical education as seriously--I might almost say willfully--deficient in certain matters of extreme importance, matters that intimately affect the health and well-being of every person on the surface of this planet. I think I should be remiss in my obligations both as a scientist and a citizen if I were to fail to speak my mind on matters about which I have such deep convictions.

It is only natural that physicians should experience a kind of "psychic wrench" when assumptions they long have taken for granted are challenged. And no doubt my strictures on the content of contemporary medical education will give unintended offense in some quarters. I can only say that the conclusions I present here are very far from being light-minded; they are the result of a lifetime of scientific inquiry, of extensive laboratory research, and long hours of contemplation. I hope that my scientific and medical colleagues will accept that I advance these conclusions with no desire to shock or provoke, but solely because I believe they are true and that they are important.

Of course I do not expect physicians--or, for that matter, laymen--to accept unsupported assertions. For that reason I have included an appendix composed of notes, comments, and approximately 1100 medical and scientific citations. The length of this appendix is in itself suggestive of the large quantity of research data that has yet to be assimilated into conventional medical thinking.

A final word: The analyses, conclusions, and speculations that I have advanced in this book are very definitely not the last word on the subject of the relationship between nutrition and disease. I should be more than content if they were to be only a modest positive beginning. There is a desperate need for massive and painstaking research in the matter of the multiple origins of disease, just as there is a desperate need for the medical profession in general to devote far more attention than it ever has to the prevention, and not simply the cure, of disease. It is upon health, not upon ill-health, that our sights should be fixed.