Jungle fruits — gorillas show the way to health?

Press, 3 August 1985, Page 19

Jungle fruits — gorillas show the way to health?

By

GARRY ARTHUR

A retired Australian airline pilot is stumping this land of milk, honey, butter, and fat lambs, preaching absolute heresy. Ross Horne, author of “The Health Revolution,” now into its third edition, says that butter, cheese, and meat are helping to kill us off before our time with degenerative diseases such as can-

cer, heart attacks, arthritis, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. We should all be eating nothing but fruit and vegetables instead.

If we stop poisoning our bodies with foods for which we are not designed, not only will we start to cure ourselves of such diseases, but we can do it without doctors, medicines, or hospitals. This sounds as threatening to the medical profession as it does to New Zealand’s primary industries, but Ross Horne says they need not worry.

“We are fighting an addiction here,” he says. “Most people will agree that what I say is true, but they can’t change because they are addicted to it. It needs a strong incentive. Those who break the addiction soonest are those who wake up in the intensive care ward.”

Ross Horne is a walking advertisement for his alternative way of dining. He started the day in Christchurch with six kiwifruit, then equipped himself with a bag of mixed fruit from which he would snack only when he felt like it. He looks tanned and healthylean but not hungry. At 60, his eyes positively glow with good health and he says he will never need reading glasses. Because he still likes to fly, he has six-monthly medicals, and he says his doctor always has to doublecheck his blood pressure because it is as healthy as a schoolboy’s. It was the compulsory medical check-ups that first made him look into the causes of degenerative illnesses such as heart disease. When he was 42, two other pilots of the same age had sudden heart attacks which had not been predicted by the doctors. Ten years ago, desperately seeking help for his dying wife after massive heart attacks had left her with arteries too diseased for surgery, he telephoned Nathan Pritidn in Santa Barbara, California, and was told by that famous dietary expert how to help her. With the hospital’s co-operation, he eliminated from her diet all fats, even the polyunsaturated kind, and all sugar, salt, and coffee. Within three days, he says, she was walking again, although she had previously been able to walk only wo or three steps. Now she lives a normal life.

In the first edition of his book, Ross Horne promoted the dietary ideas of Pritikin, founder of the Longevity Centre in California and leader of a world-wide revolution against animal fats, refined carbonhydrates, and the high-choles-terol diet as the culprits in heart disease and other degenerative diseases. But he deviated from Pritikin’s ideas in the second edition, because

he had reached the conclusion that cooking food destroys the enzymes that help digestion, and that cereals are not an ideal food for humans because they contain no Vitamin C and are difficult for the body to digest.

Races which eat a lot of cereals display hypertrophy of the pancreas, indicating that it is overworking to produce the body’s own enzymes.

“It is clear to me,” he says, “that all of the degenerative diseases are associated with poor diet, including cancer. I’m interested in the biological processes involved with cancer, and I’ve made a deep study of it. “I soon realised that Dr Max Gerson’s diet of raw fruit and vegetables, which he developed in the 1920 s to rid himself of migraine, is far more effective in all the degenerative diseases, including cancer. It is essential that all food be vegetable, and uncooked. “The body responds best on an uncooked vegetarian diet. If those at the lowest ebb of metabolism can improve on that diet, so can everybody.” Ross Horne says further study showed him that raw fruit was the human animal’s natural diet. Some nutritionists argue with him that the body needs more protein than raw fruit and vegetables can provide, but he points out that the world’s largest, most powerful land animals are herbivorous—oxen, elephants, and gorillas, for example, get their entire supplies of protein, fat, carbohydrate and calcium from vegetable matter.

The human body, however, is not designed to function entirely on greens like a cow, nor just on flesh like a lion, nor on seeds like some birds. Ross Horne concludes that man’s natural food is fruit.

Evidence for this, he says, can be seen in such features of the human

anatomy as stereoscopic coloursensitive vision, sense of taste, jaw movement, tooth structure, the size and shape of the stomach and pancreas, and the length of the intestine. These all show that man evolved, together with the other primates, on a diet primarily of fruit.

He notes in the “Anti cancer, Anti heart attack Cook Book” for which Toni Bobbin devised the recipes, that fruit is “the only food available in nature to humans which, without special preparation of some sort, is appealing to the eye, appealing to the taste, easy to eat, easy to digest with the minimum of demand on the body’s enzyme systems, provides all necessary nutrients (including protein and calcium) in ideal proportions with the minimum of extraneous substances or toxic by-pro-ducts, and which leaves residues that pass easily through the digestive tract to be quickly expelled.” He concedes, however, that as the human digestive system is also constructed to handle a certain amount of animal protein and fat, such food eaten raw occasionally is “probably beneficial.” He recommends fish.

Eskimos survive (but not for long lives) on animal protein and fats, but they eat them raw. He says that people with the longest life-spans are those on vegetarian diets in mild climates. Those who eat only small amounts of food live even longer. The fruits he recommends are the nicest ones—tropical fruits, because they are highest in vitamin C, and are more succulent.

Ross Horne says he is not claiming to be able to cure such disease as cancer (indeed it is illegal in most countries, including New Zealand, to make such a claim). “There is no cure for anything,” he says. “The only way out is to

remove the dangerous factors that allow the body to degenerate. “The healing power of nature is phenomenal, but we rarely see it. They were astounded at how rapidly President Reagan healed after his surgery, and it is significant that he had adopted an anticancer, low fat, low cholesterol, low protein, high fibre diet.”

In the case of cancer, Ross Horne says medical research should have concentrated on the baffling spontaneous remissions that sometimes occur, instead of going off in other directions. “I claim that something has altered in the body to improve the immune system and supply oxygen to cells and tissues,” he says. “This has allowed the body to heal itself. “I’m saying that the cancer patient’s objective should be spontaneous remission. Instead of waiting for it to happen, contrive it to happen. Surgery, drugs, and radiation only try to remove the symptoms; that is why medical treatment always will be a failure.” Although Ross Horne shows that a switch to his recommended diet can bring about remarkable improvements in cancer, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions, he emphasises that in advanced states of cancer the damage to internal organs can be so great that recuperation is not possible. Similarly with multiple sclerosis: if the nerve sheaths have been destroyed by the disease they probably cannot be re-grown, although the progress of disease can be arrested.

He feels no guilt about proposing changes in eating habits which would wipe out New Zealand’s dairy industry. “The dairy farmer, even if he’s broke, is going to thank me if he doesn’t get cancer,” he says.

He makes his simple solution, involving no special foods, drugs, or supplements, sound like the promised land to those suffering from diseases brought on by Western life-style—or food-style. “When you clear the blood stream, lower the blood’s viscosity and improve the circulation, the blood pressure becomes normal and the heart doesn’t have to pump as hard,” he says. “The brain gets extra oxygen, which increases its

acuity, and the immune system is restored to its natural function. (It is because our immune systems are so bad that we get epidemics of viruses.) You will become free of all disease. Your arteries will unblock and you will get no cancer or arthritis or diabetes.”

One particularly amazing claim is that unhealthy, viscous blood unable to carry enough oxygen to body cells, clears in only four day’s after switching to the vegetable diet, and the pain of circulatory problems stops. Nathan Pritikin, who had been diagnosed in 1957 as having severe coronary artery disease and leukaemia (caused by radiation treatment which damaged his bone marrow), committed suicide in February this year. An autopsy showed his leukaemia to be in partial remission and his previously blocked arteries clear. Ross Horne says he now has enough testimonials to the efficacy of his diet to fill a book of their own. One to which he draws attention is the case of Jean Halewyn, aged 52, of Sydney, who had such severe rheumatoid arthritis that she walked like a stick insect, her knees and ankles being so swollen and rigid. She could not wear shoes—only men’s carpet slippers cut open to get them over her deformed feet. Some days she. could not move at all. She met Horne, switched to the Pritikin diet, and began to improve after only a few weeks. She is not fully cured, but she is mobile, walks three miles a day, and wears shoes again. She say it is a tedious diet, but is amazed that “most of me had seized up—yet now lam working again.” If he wanted to save the world from over-dosing on the wrong foods, Ross Horne could not have started in a more appropriate country. In his cookbook he reproduces graphs showing the international death rates from breast cancer compared with consumption of animal fat, and for cancer of the colon compared with consumption of total fat, animal, and vegetable.,, New Zealand is away out in front in consumption of these fats (see diagram), and among the top four countries in the mortality rate.