Food for thought.

.....That clinches it. Nothin' but Twinkies and Mountain Dew for me.

tenetnosce you just made it so easy!
       :-)

This is a topic I really do need some serious guidance with.

Excellent thread..... I'll be listnin'

                                                         J

That's why we have endlessly conflicting scientific studies out there.

Nutrition and supplements are my profession. I give several seminars on this subject every month. When I say "you simply cannot conduct a scientific study with the same rules (double blind, placebo etc) as synthetic drugs on supplements or nutiriton" other health professionals tend to disagree. For them, there must be solid evidents & facts on the subject. But there are not, there would not be. Nutrition is definitely different for all of us, has different effects on us because we are different. Our opinions are different, our attractions are different, our self-knowledge is different.

Nowadays there is a new subject called nutri-genetics. They say nutrition has different effect on us because of our genes - how our enzyme systems work, how we might have some genetic deficiencies/problems. I attended some educations on this. Really interesting, really have valid info - but still misses the main point. Again this kind of thought-reaction brings one to victim mentality. "Oh, there's nothing to do for me, my genes have defects, it's easier for me to have cancer or heart attack, I am a victim of my genes". Well, what about junk-dna? Where does it fit in this picture? What about our own reflections about ourselves, what we do with our own image in our energy system as Sowelu said. No answers for these.

Mainstream science have some valid points on nutrition or health problems related to it. I think eating chicken and broccoli is not the same for most of us. These have definitely different effects on our 3D system - just as fear and love has different effects on our multidimensional self. But.... mainstream science always tends to miss the main point, always looking to strict physical reasons. You may be at a conscioussness level where eating anything should not effect your body harmful, but when you're at there, you do not need/want to eat some unnecessary things - be it junk food, fast food, red meat etc. Or you may be at a point where smoking would be good for your body - and fear would be good for your mind (then you're called dark-sider )
Till being honestly open on body-mind-spirit connections and understanding these, we'll have conflicting studies on natural health - e.g. "mixed results on effect of Vitamin C on common cold".

And I'll be taking 1000 mg Vitamin C everyday, needing not to wait till "science" have a common agreement on this.

OK I can't resist giving a mini-rant here on "scientific" study.

In the realm of health and medicine, the gold-standard is a double-blind placebo-controlled study. This just also happens to be the style of investigation that lends itself to the study of pharmaceuticals.  Hmm.

What all these pea-brained scientists and doctors seem to be unaware of, or willfully ignore, is that a properly performed double-blind placebo-controlled study, can only be done using one pharmaceutical agent at a time.

Well that's all fine and dandy, except for the fact that the average person being managed by the mainstream health care system is on 3 to upwards of 10 (yes, ten!) different drugs at any given time.  The complexity of interactions between multiple agents in the body becomes wildly unpredictable very quickly.  Add in genetic and environmental factors, and it is easy to see that nobody can really predict with any level of respectable accuracy, the effect of any one particular agent.  We simply don't have the mathematics to model it.

Another example is lab testing.  While a valuable tool, what most people (including doctors) don't realize is that the range that a lab company uses as "normal" is simply two standard deviations from the mean.  Put in layman's terms, this means that 5% of people tested will be "normal" when they are actually pathologic, and another 5% of people will be "abnormal" when they are actually healthy. 

That's one out of ten false results.  Does that sound like "hard" science to you?

Throw in lab error and you've got an additional 10 percent false results.  Now you're down to one out of five.

So next time somebody snubs their nose at you for subscribing to an "unscientific" form of medicine, suggest that they go and review their high school statistics notes so they can see that what they are calling "science" is about as scientific as roulette.

I think that to a degree some people are more sickness prone, and certainly genetics is a factor.

But there is much more to it than that.

I've casually noticed for years that some people tend to develop more internal illnesses, while others seem to have more physical injuries.  When I started taking actual case histories, I noticed the same trend.

I've also noticed that illness and injury both tend to occur in relation to some emotionally charged event.

Some years ago I observed myself becoming ill in response to an explosive burst of anger I experienced at work that day.  It was very clear to me because only about twenty minutes had passed between the event and when I started to feel ill.

More commonly there is a greater amount of lag time between the manifestation of the emotional illness and the physical illness, so it is a bit more difficult to put the two together.

I think that there are all sorts of diets that can be beneficial in the short term (like 2 to 8 weeks), but making a "permanent" lifestyle change to an extreme diet is rarely sustainable, and can be detrimental.

Like the man in the example above, people get so jazzed up on some theory of nutrition that it blinds them to the actual facts of the situation.  The fruitarian may "feel great" but that's probably because they're on a sugar high and not because their diet is all that wonderful.

Diets like fruitarianism fly in the face of the most basic knowledge of how the body works, and appeal to people on an emotional basis who think they are in constant need of "cleansing".  In my professional opinion, chronic cleansing is a symptom of a deeper psychological issue and may be a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  This becomes especially apparent when you start to notice how vehemently a chronic cleanser will support and justify what they are doing and angrily lash out at anybody who questions their practice.  There is an emotional attachment to the diet, and as you mentioned in your response, having that much of an emotional attachment to food in any form is not healthy.

The body needs protein to function.  Yes, most people eat more protein than they need, but to subscribe to a diet of almost no protein is lunacy.   It is based on a gross ignorance of how the body works, and is a surefire way to cause all sorts of health problems if extended out over a long period of time.  In addition, fruits are very high in fructose which, unlike glucose, is not regulated through insulin in the body.  There is essentially no control of blood sugar in a fruitarian other than the amount of fiber that is in the fruit that they are eating, and this can lead to some very unhealthy results.

A couple weeks of fruitarianism can be a really positive thing, but a lifestyle of fruitarianism is highly questionable.

Fruitarianism has one more essential problem; the risk of mineral deficiency.

Some epidemiological studies (imho which is more reliable than these so-called "gold standart" studies which are always funded by some company or institute) show that east-mediterrean style eating seems the most healthy eating. That is based on vegetables and coloured fruits (eg. berries), olive oil as the main oil source and fish as the main protein source. This also provides important macro and micro minerals too. An example is selenium, an important cofactor of the body's natural antioxidant system which is taken from mostly sea food or vegetables from the soil like potatoes. I may go on, but wait... got another idea - coming soon 

Well, just as vegetarians eat other things besides vegetables, so do fruitatians eat other things besides fruit.  There are some fruitarians who eat only fruit, but they are in the minority.  Anyway, Natural Hygiene teaches the importance of including lots of greens in the diet along with fruit, for balance. 

As for me, right now I'm eating cheesecake with raspberries, with a nice cup of coffee.  If I could live on that diet, I would