Prescription for Nutritional Disaster

Young Again.org

Prescription for Nutritional Disaster

- Roger Mason

The best selling book on drug free healing in the world for years has been Prescription for Nutritional Healing. This 776 page abomination was written by two fat gasbags named James and Phyllis Balch. Their promo claims they have sold 5 million copies of this awful book, and Balch is, “America’s Father of Natural Healing”. God help us! These two are anything but poster people for natural health! If they had some idea of what they were talking about that would be wonderful. They’re now divorced, but James puts out a pitiful excuse for a newsletter called Prescription for Healthy Living. As with other obese individuals purporting to be experts on natural health such as Weil, Whittaker, Atkins, and the rest of the crowd, they are fat, have high cholesterol, look terrible, are obviously in poor health, and have medical problems they are certainly don’t want to reveal. Who wants to take health advice from unhealthy fat people? Funny, Phyllis won’t put a picture of herself on the back of any of her books and you can’t find one on the Internet either. (All authors traditionally do this with their books.)

First of all, they recommend eating dairy products which are the most allergenic foods on earth. All adults of all races are lactose intolerant as they do not secrete the enzyme lactase. Scientific fact. Facts don’t bother them a bit though, and they want you to eat cheese, cottage cheese, goat’s milk, raw milk, skim milk, buttermilk, and yogurt.

It doesn’t end there. They also want you to eat chicken, turkey, eggs and lamb which are full of saturated fats and cholesterol. There’s a guaranteed road to an early grave.

When it comes to proven supplements they are just as ignorant. They recommend whey protein when 1) it is full of indigestible, allergenic lactose, and 2) Americans eat twice the protein they need in the first place. They also tout worthless junk like maca root, saw palmetto, Pygeum africanum, bilberry, CMO (cetyl myristoleate), lycopene, PC-SPES, colloidal silver, chondrotin, oral SOD, bee pollen, octacosanol, policosanol, DMG (dimethylglycine), spirulina, royal jelly, shark cartilage, maitake mushrooms, kombucha mushrooms and even emu oil! You think I made up the part about emu oil just to be mean, huh? You don’t need to make anything up with wackos like this. Truth is always stranger than fiction.

In this best selling book Prescription for Herbal Healing they actually said beta-sitosterol was bad for prostate health and you should not take herbs containing beta-sitosterol if you have a prostate condition! They say, “…beta-sitosterol, which encourages growth of prostate cells.” They really said this! As readers of this column know, beta-sitosterol is THE most effective and proven supplement for good prostate health on the face of the earth. No supplement has more scientifically demonstrated benefits, and there are over 35 years of international published studies to back this up. Yet they claim it is bad for your prostate!

In their ads they hawk Magic Supplements like Gymnema sylvestre. “Miraculous herb lets you throw away insulin needles….throw out insulin needles for good…there’s a little known herb that actually reverses diabetes (emphasis theirs). Take this for 3 months and eliminate diabetes entirely! Amazing but true!” That’s a quote folks, that’s an actual quote. Just eat all the fat, sugar, and white flour you want, sit on your dead butt and watch TV while you gulp down Gymnema capsules and cure diabetes. Why wasn’t that on the front page of the New York Times? Why is diabetes still the leading epidemic in the world when we have a cure?

Their ads also tell you green oats (Avena sativa) are Nature’s Viagra® and the, “ultimate sexual aphrodisiac.” He further says green oats are 80% effective in reversing sexual dysfunction! That should be on the six o’clock news. Guess the New York Times missed that one, too. Hundreds of millions of impotent men would love to know about this.

We could go on all day about what ignorant gasbags these two hucksters are but why waste any more time. Unfortunately 90% of the entire natural health industry is just like them.

Postscript 2005: This article was written in 2002 and Phyllis Balch died of cancer this year at only 74 years old (the average for white American women is now about 85) from following her own moronic advice. People get what their hands call for in life in the end.