Doris Grant
AN APPRECIATION Doris Grant 1905–2003
It was Doris Grant’s realization that we can all be as well as we wish to be, following her own speedy restoration to health after discovering the Hay system of food combining, that led her to study nutrition and its relation to health.
After meeting Dr William Howard Hay she produced two books based on the American editions of Hay system recipes and menus. The letters she received convinced her of the need to study further and her research into food, how it is grown and produced and its effect on human health, was wide-ranging and meticulous. She once said that it was like living in an exciting detective novel as more and more clues and discoveries emerged.
In 1944 her classic book Your Daily Bread established her as an author and doughty campaigner for natural whole food and wholewheat bread, then practically unobtainable unless made at home. Her easy no-knead recipe for bread became known as the Grant loaf and a sample was even brandished during a House of Lords debate on the use of so-called ‘improvers’ in white flour.
Doris wrote for women and their families, as titles such as Dear Housewives imply. Her style was friendly and direct but she pulled no punches when it came to describing the harm that could be caused by the use of agene in bread flour:
If you love your husbands, keep them away from white bread … if you don’t love them, cyanide is quicker, but bleached bread is just as certain and no questions asked.
Countless families have been influenced by her ideas for a balanced diet, her excellent recipes and her insistence on the importance of fresh, whole food. She had no time for highly-processed foods, especially the various margarines containing trans-fats that threaten our health.
Doris was a founder member of the Henry Doubleday Research Association and her extensive research and wide knowledge brought her into contact with many medical and other health professionals. She was a member of the prestigious McCarrison Society and corresponded regularly with many leading nutritionists who all respected her views, even if they didn’t always agree with them.
Her championship of the Hay system was a case in point. She remained a strict adherent to food combining principles throughout her long life and always said that she owed Dr Hay a debt of gratitude for her excellent health. The debt was certainly paid, for Food Combining for Health has remained a steady seller since its publication in 1984. Although the medical establishment has never quite come to terms with the Hay theory of digestion, anecdotal evidence in countless letters has shown that the system can indeed improve health and wellbeing.
Whatever Doris did was done with enthusiasm and integrity. Her capacity for sheer hard work even in her nineties was quite extraordinary. She always acknowledged most generously the help of friends and colleagues and, in particular, the support of her husband and family. She was a loyal friend and colleague and is greatly missed by all who knew her and have been inspired by her example and wise counsel.
Jean Joice, December 2003
William Howard Hay was born in Hartstown, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1866. Prophet, philosopher, hardpan Presbyterian of Scottish stock, he grew up from early boyhood with the sole thought of medicine as a calling.
He was especially fortunate that both his parents were of exceptional character. His father, according to Dr Hay, ‘was possessed of an unusually fine mind, was a great reader of good literature and developed into one of the solid men of his community’. His mother ‘combined with a very excellent education the Scottish characteristics of thrift and industry, with also one of the most even dispositions imaginable, an ability to see through a great many things that looked difficult to others and a sense of right and wrong that knew absolutely no compromise’. Dr Hay was richly endowed with his parents’ fine characteristics, and these undoubtedly provided him with the courage and strength of character to overcome the heartbreaking difficulties which beset him when his unorthodox treatment of disease evoked the enmity of his profession.
He graduated from the University of New York on 26 March 1891. For the next 16 years he practised medicine ‘according to the best light of his time’, and did much surgery. At the end of this period he broke down in health, proving, as he admitted, ‘that he knew as little as the rest of the predisposing causes of disease’. He became very ill, developed Bright’s disease, with high blood pressure, and finally a dilated heart. For this latter condition there was no relief in medicine, or at least only temporary relief. He thought his career was over, and received a warning from his doctors to put his affairs in order.
Inspiration
In A New Health Era Dr Hay related how this warning inspired him to treat his own symptoms. He did so by ‘eating fundamentally’, as he called it, eating ‘only such things as he believed were intended by nature as food for man, taking them in natural form, and in quantities no greater than seemed necessary for his present need’. (It is interesting to note that 60 years later, Surgeon Captain T.L. Cleave was to put forward similar concepts in his book The Saccharine Disease.) To the great astonishment of Dr Hay’s doctors his symptoms gradually disappeared, and at the end of three months he felt fitter and stronger than he had done for many years. He reduced his weight – he had been greatly overweight – from 225lb to 175lb and soon was able to run long distances without distress.
This experience, he wrote, deepened the conviction that had been growing over the past 16 years that medicine was on the wrong track; it was merely fussing with the end results of a condition instead of attempting to remove the cause, ‘for here was his own case recovering from a condition that the best authorities said was incurable’. It had taken a major health disaster and a hopeless outlook for the future to open his eyes to the possibility of treating disease along dietary lines, unorthodox although these at first seemed.
It was not, however, till the middle of 1908 that he had regenerated himself to his own satisfaction. By 1911 Dr Hay was virtually certain that he had discovered a ‘surefire treatment’ for diabetes. He little realized then that this same treatment would prove equally efficacious in the treatment of all disease.
For the next four years he devoted all his time to treating his patients along dietary lines in order to prove or disprove his contention that we are exactly what we eat and ‘that the body is merely a composite of what goes into it daily in the form of food and drink’. These four years provided proof in plenty that his contention was right and that anyone can be as well as desired if given the right food in the right way (provided, of course, there has been no serious, irreversible organic change). Thus he developed over the years the system of eating for which he became famous. He always claimed, however, that he had not discovered anything new, but had merely used the knowledge already made public by others and consolidated it, adding his own deep convictions with a dash of common sense. Moreover, he made no claims that he ‘cured’ any disease, and emphasized that this system merely removed the obstacles in the way of nature’s own marvellous healing powers.
The message in A New Health Era was simple: that no matter how diverse our diseases, there is one underlying cause – wrong chemical conditions in the body. These conditions are created through the manufacture and accumulation of acid end-products of digestion and metabolism in amounts greater than the body can eliminate. A state then develops ‘that is variously called auto-intoxication, acid-autotoxicosis, toxaemia,