Source:Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity, Daniel Reid, Fireside, New  York,  p 100


Those who eat according to nature's way rarely report symptoms of
gastric distress, but in America almost everyone now takes it for granted
that a big meal is going to cause them some sort of gastric discomfort, and
many Westerners routinely arrive at restaurants and dinner parties
armed with antacids and other stomach remedies.

In order to help guide the reader onto the path of natural, healthy
eating habits that promote longevity without sacrificing the pleasure of
eating, the following pages present practical guidelines for the correct
way to combine and consume the most important categories of food in the
human diet: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fresh fruits, and raw veget-
ables.


How to eat proteins
How to eat carbohydrates
How to eat fats
How to eat raw vegetable salads
How to eat fruits






How to eat Proteins


Jehovah spoke unto Moses, saying, 'I have heard the murmurs of the
children of Israel: speak unto them, saying: "At evening ye shall eat flesh,
and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread." ' In other words,
Jehovah instructed Moses in the rules of trophology, telling him to teach
his people to eat their proteins and carbohydrates at separate meals. He
also forbade them to consume milk and flesh together. This is the earliest
and soundest dietary advice every recorded in Western civilization, but
unlike Orientals, who still respect the wisdom of their ancient sages,
Western folks spurn the teachings of the past as 'outdated' and 'unscien-
tific'. On the other hand, as the great American nutritional scientist Dr
Tilden pointed out, 'Nature never produced a sandwich!'

Proteins are potent foods and require special conditions to digest and re-
lease their nutrients. The best choices for combining animal proteins with
other foods are non-starch vegetables such as greens, squash, cabbage,
sprouts, etc., and it's best to consume these vegetables raw in the form of a
large salad. Concentrated animal proteins should only be consumed at one
meal per day, though light vegetable proteins such as beancurd (tofu) may be
eaten more often. Indeed, light vegetable proteins may completely replace
meats in the human diet: Vi-2 pounds of raw nuts and seeds per week, for
example, provide all the protein and fat required by anyone and eliminate
the metabolic craving for meat, eggs and other animal proteins. Be sure to
pre-soak all raw nuts and seeds in water overnight before consuming.



How to eat Carbohydrates


Starchy carbohydrates should not be combined with any concentrated
proteins. The best items to blend with starch-foods are non-acid fruits and
fresh raw or lightly cooked vegetables. If you like potatoes or pasta or
pastries, then make a meal of them, but do not add eggs, meat or cheese to
the meal.

Most people prefer to take their carbohydrate meal for breakfast in the
morning, either as toast or cereal. Even a well-functioning stomach
requires approximately 12 hours to recover digestive equilibrium after
ingesting imcompatible combinations of food, and therefore a bad blend
at breakfast will ruin your digestion for the rest of the day, regardless of
what you eat for lunch or dinner. Among the worst breakfasts is dry
cereal flavoured with refined sugar and soaked in pasteurized milk. Jam
on toast is almost as bad. Children suffer most from the ravages of such
breakfasts, because many adults either skip breakfast entirely, or eat
nothing but plain toast and coffee, which is a perfectly agreeable com-
bination.

As with protein, you should not have more than one starch-based
meal per day, and you should try to avoid combining two widely different
types of starch at a single meal. Since protein and starch are the major
antagonists in trophology, it's best to separate the protein and starch
meals by 10-12 hours, such as the bread breakfast and flesh dinner
recommended by Jehovah to Moses.

With starch-foods, it is even more important than with protein not to
wash it down with water, fruit juice, milk or other fluids. Digestion of
starch must begin in the mouth in order to continue in the stomach.
A mouthful of fluid taken along with a bite of starch dilutes the salivary
secretions so much that the starch hits the stomach with insufficient
infusions of the alkaline ptyalin enzyme, permitting the starch to ferment
instead of digest in the stomach. All carbohydrates should be chewed
well and thoroughly ensalivated before swallowing.


How to eat Fats

Fats may be consumed in combination with carbohydrates, vegetables
and fruits, but should be avoided with concentrated proteins; with light
proteins, fat is relatively compatible.

In the fat category, avoid all margarines and other butter substitutes
and all 'hydrogenated' oils. Hardened hydrogenated vegetable oils are
processed in such a manner that your stomach would have to generate
temperatures of 500°F to break them down, i.e. they are indigestible. The
best fats are butter and cold-pressed vegetable and nut oils in their fluid
state.


How to eat raw vegetable salads

Both Dr Herbert Shelton and V. E. Irons strongly recommend everyone
eat a large salad of fresh raw non-starch vegetables every day, pre-
ferably just before the main protein or carbohydrate meal. In addition to
providing active enzymes and fibrous bulk, raw vegetable salads are
excellent sources of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other vital
nutrients in their most assimilable forms.

It is most important to eat your salads immediately after cutting up the
ingredients. Raw vegetables that are sliced and shredded then left sitting
for hours prior to a meal rapidly lose many of their valuable enzymes and
other nutrients due to oxidation.

Be careful with the type of dressings you use on salads, especially
when combining them with protein meals. Excess oil or vinegar or cream
interfere with digestion of protein in the stomach.

Raw salads are particularly beneficial to growing children. They
provide abundant supplies of vital nutrients required for growing bones
and tissues, and they keep young colons swept clean of the toxic debris
created by eating candy and other junk food. Though it may strike you as
illogical, raw vegetables are in fact a much better source of organic calcium
for growing bones then the denatured pasteurized cow's milk which so
many doctors and parents force children to drink for that purpose. Milk
does indeed contain a lot of calcium, but pasteurization renders it
virtually inaccessible to the body. If your children have trouble with acne,
pimples and other skin eruptions and are chronically constipated, try
taking them completely off pasteurized milk for a few months and replace
it with fresh raw vegetable juices, especially carrot juice, and see the
results for yourself. Raw certified milk is equally good for clearing up skin
problems, but it's almost impossible to buy these days. Furthermore, by
providing real nutrition that actually enters the bloodstream and feeds the
tissues, raw vegetables and their juices effectively stave the notorious
'sweet tooth' syndrome that plagues the health of children whose meals
of denatured processed foods ferment and putrefy instead of digest and
metabolize. The chronic craving for sweets is a clear-cut sign of nutritional
starvation.


How to eat Fruits

The human digestive tract evolved around a diet of fruits and their close
relatives, nuts and seeds. It is a biological fact that fresh raw fruits and
nuts contain all the vitamins, minerals, natural sugars and amino acids
required for human nutrition. 'Experts' continue to claim the contrary,
saying that since fruits contain little 'protein' per se, they are therefore
insufficient to maintain human health. While it is true that fruits contain
very little complete complex protein molecules, such as that found in meat
and eggs, it is equaly true that the body cannot utilize the complex
proteins found in meat and eggs. It must first spend a lot of time digesting
and breaking down these proteins, then restructuring the constituent
ammo acids into the unique proteins required by the human organism.
Fresh raw fruits and nuts provide those very building blocks in the form
of free-floating amino acids, complete with all the synergistic enzymes
and vitamins with which they are associated, thereby saving the bodv all
the time, energy and digestive distress required to process complex
animal proteins.

Owing to ignorance of trophology and basic nutrition, fresh fruits
have been unfairly accused of all sorts of culinary crimes. The self-styled
nutritional 'expert' Dr William Henry Porter, in his book Eating to Live
Long, condemned fruit as 'one of the most pernicious and reprehensible
dietetic follies', and Dr Percy Howe of Harvard University observed that
most people have trouble digesting oranges with their meals, though he
did note that this trouble disappeared entirely when the oranges were
consumed alone.

Many fruits, especially melons and acid fruits, will indeed cause
digestive distress, ferment and thus provide little nutrition when con-
sumed indiscriminately with incompatible foods. But when eaten alone
and in sufficient quantities, fresh raw fruits provide all the enzymes,
vitamins, amino acids and energy that any body needs for optimum
health and vitality. They are also highly cleansing and detoxifying, which
is why many people experience diarrhea and discomfort during the first
few weeks of an exclusive fruit diet.

The Swedish heavyweight bodybuilder Andreas Cabling, winner of
the highly coveted Mr Europe and Mr Universe titles, is an exclusive
frugivore. He eats neither meat nor dairy products, not even grains or
vegetables! Yet his body is every bit as strong and his health as robust as
his carnivorous competitors, who feel obliged to consume many pounds
of meat, dozens of eggs and quarts of milk every day to provide protein.

The biggest mistake people make when going on an exclusive diet of
fruit is not to eat sufficient quantities. The other mistake is to throw away
the most nutritionally beneficial parts. Fruit is composed primarily of
water. Frugivores like Andreas Cabling therefore chomp their way
through half a dozen bananas or a dozen apples or 3-5 pounds of raw
grapes at a sitting. They always eat the white fibers between orange
sections, the cores of apples and pears, the seeds and skins of grapes,
because these parts contain the most potent enzymes and most of the
amino acids. Seeds, cores and fibers of fresh fruits should be well chewed
to liquid consistency before swallowing.

Fruits deliver their best nutritional benefits when consumed on an
empty stomach, for much of it passes directly onward to the small
intestine for digestion. But unless you eat nothing else but fruit and fruit
juice all day, you should limit your fruit comsumption to one or two
exclusive fruit meals per day. Eating fresh fruits or drinking their juices
between starch and protein meals can severely inhibit digestion because
the stomach will still be busy working on the starch or protein when the
fruit lands there. You should also eat sweet fruits and acid fruits at
separate sittings and never sweeten any fruit with sugar or honey, for
other sugars do not blend well with fruit in the stomach.

If you eat carbohydrates for breakfast and proteins for dinner, then
you may construct a very healthy lunch entirely of fresh raw fruits. This
habit is especially beneficial for meat-eaters, for the fruit meal will provide
active enzymes, fresh fibrous bulk and fruit acids to help clean the
by-products of putrefactions from the intenstinal tract and bloodstream.
As an extension of this once-a-day fruit meal diet, you might wish to
declare one day each week as 'fruit day' and consume nothing but fresh
raw fruits all day long.

All this is much easier to implement than it seems. The biggest hurdle is
not physiological but psychological. As Walter Bagehot once remarked,
'The pain of a new idea is one of the greatest pains in human nature . . .
Your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill founded.'
And your favorite foods may be the root cause of your greatest pains! It's a
fact of life that people find it much easier to believe a lie they've heard a
thousand times than a fact they've never heard before. One must first
unlearn all the bad dietary habits instilled since early childhood, then
familiarize oneself with the real facts concerning diet and nutrition. And
there is no need to take anyone else's word about all this. If you simply
follow the Tao of diet and the rules of trophology for a few months, your
own body will provide all the evidence you need, and, unless you simply
don't care about your health and longevity, you will quickly adopt these
new eating habits as a permanent and natural part of your daily life.

Taoist diets do not require strict self-denial or culinary boredom.
Using your imagination and your knowledge of trophology, it is easy to
construct compatible, digestible, nutritious meals that are very pleasing
to the palate. And how much trouble is it to set some fresh fruit, nuts and
seeds on the table from time to time, instead of cooking up a storm? And
by leaving the cupboard bare, you will be motivated to shop a bit more
frequently for fresh, enzyme-rich produce instead of relying on canned,
processed, refined foods that provide no nutrition while causing nothing
but misery in your digestive tract.

Eating out at even the fanciest restaurants is also no excuse for
commiting culinary crimes against your body. You can order a perfectly
balanced and trophologically compatible meal at almost any restaurant
that prepares food to order. That of course eliminates all fast-food outlets
where everything is prepared long in advance from pre-processed pro-
ducts. But in an Italian restaurant you can build a good starch-based meal
of pasta and tomato sauce (without cheese or meat, please), sup-
plemented with a plate of antipasto and a big vegetable salad. At a steak
house, help yourself to a large steak if you like, but forgo the bread and
potatoes and specify your steak to be cooked very rare, and supplement it
with a fresh vegetable salad. If you find yourself at a big buffet table laden
with all sorts of tempting desserts that you know you will not be able to
resist after the main courses, then skip the main courses and take two or
three desserts after first preparing your stomach with the enzymes and
roughage of a large salad. Where there's a will there's a way, and now that
you know the Way, the rest is up to your own will to practice it.