Food Combining for Health: The bestseller that has changed millions of lives. Doris Grant

of the body’s vital alkaline reserve leading, in turn, to departure from health. ‘The science of medicine takes no cognizance of this accumulation,’ wrote Dr Hay, ‘till disease, that is definite pathology, has developed.’

      He taught his patients that there were four main causes of the accumulation of acid end-products of digestion: eating too much meat; over-consumption of refined carbohydrates – white flour products, refined sugar and refined carbohydrates of any kind; disregard for the laws of chemistry as these apply to the digestion of foods; and constipation.

      Dr Hay also taught his patients that although many people, especially young people, build up a tolerance to incompatible mixtures just as people build up a tolerance for increasing doses of irritant poisons, they do so at a very considerable and continuing cost in vitality. This formed tolerance, he warned, is unnatural. But if compatible eating is followed long enough, it can be removed. Then, claimed Dr Hay, ‘you cannot go back to the practice of mixing starches and proteins without immediate notice from your stomach that you have made a mistake – one that you are not likely to repeat’. He promised that two weeks would be sufficient to convince anyone of this, and that the reward for the effort would be greatly improved vitality and health.

      Dr Hay never forgot to teach the importance of other adjuvants to health – fresh air, exercise, daily baths, sunshine and rest. Nor did he forget to teach the importance of health to the spiritual man: ‘When the body and mind are in harmony, only then will there be an opportunity for proper spiritual development; for do not forget that the spiritual man is the first man, the mental man the second, and the physical the third man; and only when these second and third are in harmony can there be a proper spiritual state!’

      Disbelief

      In spite of the ease and speed with which people could prove for themselves the truth of the starch – protein concept, the Hay system received a battering of criticism.

      The bitterest attacks came from Dr Hay’s fellow physicians. The teaching of the means of preventing disease had not, in Dr Hay’s time, caught on with the medical profession, simply because their entire teaching had been directed towards the treatment of disease, not its prevention. Dr Hay’s teaching was therefore stark heresy and naturally condemned as such.

      As he became more and more convinced of the truth of his findings, so his colleagues became more and more sceptical. Ironically, while realizing success in his treatment of disease beyond his wildest hopes, restoring to normal health countless cases termed hopeless by the highest of medical authorities, he found himself written off as a simple quack. His frustration must have been immense when, armed not only with an inspired idea but also with proof of its truth, he was met with a blank wall of disbelief and incomprehension.

      The medical profession was most certainly not ready for Dr Hay’s concepts. At that time doctors were fervent apostles of ‘the germ theory of disease’. They were also enthusiasts for the new wonder-drug era which promised ‘a pill for every ill’; so they believed that there was no need whatsoever for nutritional therapy. His concepts were rejected with scorn and he was constantly subjected to the vehement opposition of entrenched orthodoxy, even to slander, libel and the most diabolical of rumours. But he was a courageous man who never faltered in defending his beliefs and in countering all opposition with lucid and reasoned arguments, never losing his temper or his strong sense of humour. The latter attribute, and his great personal charm, endeared him to his patients and to all who had the good fortune to hear him lecture.

      It is significant that many physicians attended his lectures in both England and Scotland, and many of these spoke to Dr Hay afterwards and said they were in full accord with everything he taught. Some admitted that they were students of the Hay system and were using it in their work with their patients. Many, moreover, told of results which could not have been achieved in any other way, except by applying the system with real understanding.

      Dr Hay died in 1940, at the age of 74, a year after a serious accident, sadly, just as medical thinking was beginning to appreciate the important relationship of nutrition to health.

      Vindication

      That Dr Hay was ‘a prophet way ahead of his time’ has now been fully confirmed by the vast change in attitude towards nutrition today by many of the foremost medical authorities in both Britain and the United States. Despite all the marvels of modern medicine, despite the wonder drugs and the astronomical cost of our health services, the health of both nations is deteriorating and disease is attacking at an increasingly early age. Medical authorities are now frankly admitting that medicine is on the wrong track and are urging a switch of emphasis from curative medicine to preventive medicine – to dealing with the causes of disease instead of merely treating the symptoms. As a result, nutrition is now being promoted as the chief priority in preventive medicine. In fact, attention is now being focused as never before on the close relationship of nutrition to health, and on just such concepts as were held 60 years ago by Dr William Howard Hay, gifted surgeon and general practitioner of note. Witness the following signs and portents:

      

Since the 1950s, medical scientists have produced evidence of the close connection between refined carbohydrates and chemically adulterated foods and such diverse symptoms as allergies, depression, migraine, fatigue, skin diseases, schizophrenia and uncontrolled aggressive behaviour in children. The research, in particular, of Dr Théron Randolph and Dr Ben Feingold in the United States and of Dr Richard Mackarness in Britain, has been outstanding.

      

The McCarrison Society is pledged ‘to advance education in, and initiate, carry out and sponsor, research into the relationship between nutrition and health’. Formed in 1967, its members consist of doctors, surgeons, dentists, veterinary surgeons and community health workers. The society was named after the internationally-acclaimed British nutritional pioneer, the late Sir Robert McCarrison, whose book Nutrition and Health (McCarrison Society, 1982) should be mandatory reading for all health-conscious people. Dr Hay claimed that he owed much to McCarrison’s teachings.

      

In 1968, the validity of the germ theory of disease was seriously questioned for the first time in a leading British medical journal. In The Lancet of 18 May, Professor G.T. Stewart revealed its weaknesses in a revolutionary paper: ‘Dogma Disputed, Limitations of the Germ Theory’. Professor Stewart’s message was, in effect, that acceptance of the germ theory as the main cause of infectious disease has been responsible for orthodox medicine overlooking other more important, or equally important, causes such as genetic and metabolic effects, behaviour (smoking etc.), and certain nutritional deficiencies.

      

In the 1970s, an epoch-making book, The Saccharine Disease by Surgeon Captain T.L. Cleave, started off the present revolutionary medical preoccupation with bran and ‘fibre’, nutrition and preventive medicine. It postulated one common cause of many of the present-day degenerative diseases – the consumption of refined carbohydrates. Moreover, it has become the major reference work for the growing number of medical specialists throughout the world who believe – as Dr Hay did – that our Western-style diet is responsible for the vast amount of disease in today’s society.

      

Also in the 1970s, another important book, The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis, by Professor Thomas McKeown, contained the blunt message that more attention should now be paid to nutrition, and that the modifications of the conditions which lead to disease will achieve more than any medical intervention after the illness has begun. That, too, was Dr Hay’s message.

      

In 1972, the editor of the British Medical Journal exhorted: ‘We now have to learn the more subtle relationships