Nature Doctors and Digestion.

Happy February First! Can you feel the love? It's unbelievable that January is now over, but thank goodness... soon enough it will be Spring.

Here are some brief bios of some people responsible for implementing naturopathic medicine in North American. I learned about these people after reading Nature Doctors (a book I had to read last semester about the history of naturopathic medicine).

Adolf Just thought that disease was the result of unnatural food entering the body. When it was not digested (because it was not natural and the body doesn't know how), it became "foreign matter", fermenting and then becoming the cause of disease and pain in the body.

Otis Carroll also believed that disease was due to an overload of toxins in the body and that toxins accumulated in the body because of poor digestion. Carroll was the first to identify and test people for food intolerances. He believed that in the 1940s, most people had food intolerances to grains, fruit, sugar, dairy, eggs, and potatoes. Carroll once said that health came from and was maintained by digested foods. He said that naturopathic doctors are capable of healing damaged bodies with supplements, but these supplements originally come from good food. He also stated that after a food is digested, it is converted to nutrition and is then used to support every organ, tissue, and cell in the body, and that no drug can reverse damage to the body done by poor digestion other than starting to practice good digestion.

Louisa Lust was the wife of another one of the fathers of naturopathic medicine, however she played a big role in the development of the nutrition modality. She once said that most Americans gradually starve to death on their diet of white flour, sugar, and butter (not in the weight sense of starving to death, but in the lack of nutrients). She said that it is possible to either lengthen or shorten life by eating. She also stated that one of the "greatest evils" was the act of overeating. She advocated the consumption of a simple, pure diet and wrote a cookbook called the Practical Naturopathic-Vegetarian Cookbook in 1907. She believed that eating minimally allowed the nervous system to spend more time on mental processes rather than digestive processes.

(Note the trend in the excerpts I included? They all believe that a key to good health is in good digestion. I couldn't agree more!)