Upton Sinclair

“ If it be true that the fast leads to constantly increasing autointoxication, how do you account for those phenomena which are summed up in the phrase, "the complete fast"? I personally do not advocate the complete fast; I only advocate the investigation of it. I have never taken one, but I have letters from many people who have taken them, and they are in agreement upon the point that there comes a time during the fast when the tongue clears, the breath becomes pure, and hunger manifests itself in unmistakable form. ”

“ I try to guide my conduct by scientific knowledge; what I ask to know about the question of meat-eating is the actual facts of its effect upon the human organism—the amount of energy which it develops, the diseases which it causes, or, on the contrary, the immunity to disease which it claims to confer; also, of course, its cheapness and convenience as an article of diet. ”

“ For it should be noted, of course, that the objections which I have brought against the cooked vegetarian diet do not apply at all to the raw-food diet, which is entirely a different matter. If one lives upon nuts, whole grains boiled or shredded, salad vegetables and fruits, he does not get an excess of either starch or sugar, but a perfectly balanced dietary, every article of which is rich in natural salts—in which the starchy foods, and especially the prepared cereals, are fatally deficient. Such a diet can be followed by any person in normal health, who is leading a physically active life. ”

“ I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a new potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness, such as I did not know could exist in the human body. ”

“ I do not mean to say that healthy men and women cannot eat such things and be well; but I say that they cannot be as well as they would be without them; and that every particle of such food they eat renders them more liable to all sorts of infection, and sows in their systems the seeds of the particular chronic disease that is to lay them low sooner or later. ”

“ But the temptations of hotel-keeping are severe, and when he went back home, he found himself going up in weight again. This time he concluded to do the job thoroughly, and went to Macfadden's place in Chicago, and set out upon a fast of ninety days. That is a new record—though I sometimes wonder if it is quite fair to call it "fasting" when a man is simply living upon an internal larder of fat.
It must be a curious experience to go for three months without tasting food. It is no wonder that the stomach and all the organs of assimilation forget how to do their work. ”

“ Diet after the Fast
Many people write me, begging me to outline for them the ideal diet. I used to do that sort of thing, but I have stopped; having come to realize that we are still at the beginning of our diet-experiments. I have done a good deal of experimenting myself, and have made some interesting discoveries. I have lived for a week on fruit only, and again on wheat only; I have lived for three weeks on nothing but milk, and again on nothing but beef-steak. I have lived for a year on raw food, and for over three years I professed the religion of vegetarianism. ”

“ Several people wrote me who were in the last stages of some desperate disease. Of course [Pg 47] they had always been consulting with physicians, and the physicians had told them that my article was "pure nonsense"; and they would write me that they would like to try to fast, but that they were "too weak and too far gone to stand it." There is no greater delusion than that a person needs strength to fast. The weaker you are from disease, the more certain it is that you need to fast, the more certain it is that your body has not strength enough to digest the food you are taking into it. ”

“ There are conditions in the human body which lead to death inevitably; and some of these conditions are beyond the power of the fast to remedy. When a person so afflicted sets out to fast, and dies in spite of the fast, the papers of course declare that he died because of the fast. Dr. L. B. Hazzard of Seattle has published a very useful little book, "Fasting for the Cure of Disease," in which she tells of two cases of "death from [Pg 71] fasting," where the autopsy revealed conditions with which the fast had no connection, and which made death certain. ”

“ Dewey's contention I know to be true, that during a fast the heart, lungs, and brain are supported by the predigested food stored up in the body. These organs take the nourishment and not the poison, for during a fast the eliminating organs work to the very limit to force the poison out of every cell of the body, so that during a fast all the poison in the body is growing less every hour, and when it is all eliminated natural hunger manifests itself, the tongue is clean, and the patient is ready to build up and have a clean physical organism. ”

“ A person breaking a long fast should regard himself as if he were liable to seizures of violent insanity. I know a man who fasted fifty days, and then ate half a dozen figs, and caused intestinal abrasions from which he lost a great deal of blood. I would dwell more upon this topic were it not for my discovery of the "milk diet." When you drink a glass of milk every half-hour you have no chance to get really hungry, and so you glide, as if by magic, from a condition of extreme emaciation to one of blooming rotundity. But very frequently the milk diet disagrees with people ”

“ Fasting is the voluntary act that permits rapid accomplishment of the result; and disease itself is but Nature's attempt to cleanse and purify by means of elimination. The longer this thought is dwelt upon, and the more its details are verified by experiment, the stronger becomes the conviction that we are facing the truth of the matter.
When coated tongue, foul breath, and vertigo appear, whether feeding or fasting, hunger is absent. It must have disappeared many days before these signs became acute, although Nature's warnings did not fail of display. ”

“ Life was never so beautiful, hope and joy never so green, the future for me and humanity's great movement toward a better day and higher good of existence never seemed so reasonable and possible of every realization as now, in the full possession of physical health and mental strength which have come back to me. ”

“ I have known a number of people, old and [Pg 102] young, to start out upon this way of life without any preliminaries, and they have noted a great gain in health and efficiency, and have had no trouble of any sort. This diet is as cheap as the bean and white flour and rice diet of the ordinary "vegetarian," and it is, by all odds, the simplest and most convenient diet in the world.
I have been accustomed all my life to think of meat as a very "heavy" article of food, an article of food suited for men doing hard physical labor ”

“ So long as I am doing hard physical labor, whether it is walking ten miles a day, or playing tennis, or building a house, I get along perfectly upon the raw food; but when I settle down for long periods of thinking and writing—often sitting for six hours without moving from one position—I find that I need something else, and nothing has answered that purpose quite so well as beef-steak. ”

“ I would wager that of the people who read my article and set out to fast, practically all had been suffering for many years, and had given the "regular" physicians unlimited opportunity to work on them.
Third, it may be set down as absolutely certain [Pg 70] that no one ever died of starvation while fasting. The essential feature of the fast is that after the first two or three days all hunger ceases; and that any one could die of lack of food without feeling a desire for food, is absurd upon the face of it. Nature simply does not work that way. ”

“ So far as meat is concerned, of course no sensible person would use meat which showed the slightest trace of being spoiled, nor any meat which had been canned, or ground up and made into messes, such as sausage. If one uses reasonably fresh meat, the bacteria which may be on the outside of it will be killed by proper cooking. And so the question is, it seems to me, what does meat do after it gets into the stomach? And that is a matter for practical experiment, which very few people have made, so far as I have any information. Innumerable people are eating meat, of course ”

“ It is the only remedy which is based upon an understanding of the fundamental nature of disease. And I believe that when the glad tidings of its miracles have reached the people it will lead to the throwing of 90 per cent of our present materia medica into the waste-basket. This may be unwelcome to those physicians who are more concerned with their own income than they are with the health of their patients; but I personally have never met any such physicians, and so I most earnestly urge it upon medical men to investigate the extraordinary and almost incredible facts about the fasting cure. ”

“ It is during those days that you are hungry, and if you begin to eat just when your hunger is ceasing, you have wasted all your efforts. In the same way, perhaps, it might be a good thing to eat very lightly of fruit, instead of taking an absolute fast—the only trouble is that I cannot do it. Again and again I have tried, but always with the same result: the light meals are just enough to keep me ravenously hungry, and inevitably I find myself eating more and more. ”

“ Kellogg's contention is correct, that autointoxication continues and increases during a fast. If his idea is correct on this point, instead of one improving and at last overcoming the disease entirely, there would not only be a continuation of the disease but an increase, and death would naturally result. Should autointoxication continue and increase while [Pg 148] one is fasting, the time would not come when the tongue would be clean and natural hunger manifest itself. On the contrary, there would be an increase of the coating on the tongue until death finally resulted. ”

“ I am telling what it does to the body; but besides this, of course, fasting is a religious exercise. I heard the other day from a man who was taking a forty-day fast, as a means of increasing his [Pg 75] "spiritual power." I am not saying that for you to smile at—he has excellent authority for the procedure. The point with me is that I find life so full of interest just now that I don't have much time to think about my "soul." I get so much pleasure out of a handful of raisins, or a cold bath, or a game of tennis, that I fear it is interfering with my spiritual development. ”

“ I look about me in the world, and nearly everybody I know is sick. I could name one after another a hundred men and women, who are doing vital work for progress and carrying a cruel handicap of physical suffering. ”

“ If people suffering with stomach and intestinal troubles, Bright's disease, diabetes, rheumatism, sciatica, or tuberculosis, would eat nothing but beef pulp and drink hot water before meals they would be cured in nine cases out of ten, as this was Dr. Salisbury's average of cures when they stuck to the treatment. I acknowledge that one gets rid of a lot of diseased tissue while fasting, but not more rapidly than on the beef diet, and the latter has the advantage that one is making good blood all the time. ”

“ I do not advise people to fast who have nothing the matter with them, and I do not advise the fast as a periodical or habitual thing. A man who has to fast every now and then is like a person who should spend his time in sweeping rain water out of his house, instead of taking the trouble to repair his roof. ”

“ The loss of weight during the fast is generally about a pound a day. The fat is used first, and after that the muscular tissue; true starvation begins only when the body has been reduced to [Pg 27] the skeleton and the viscera. Fasts of forty and fifty days are now quite common—I have met several who have taken them.
Strange as it may seem, the fast is a cure for both emaciation and obesity. After a complete fast the body will come to its ideal weight. People who are very stout will not regain their weight; while people who are under weight may gain a pound or more a day for a month. ”

“ But all the same, I know that there will be great poetry written some day, when our poets have got on to the fasting trick—and when our poets care enough about their work to be willing to feed it with their own flesh. ”

“ One person cannot digest cheese, another cannot digest bananas, another cannot stand the taste of olive oil. You may read a glowing account of some diet system by which some other person has worked miracles, and you may try it, and persist in it for a long time, and finally come to realize that it was the worst diet you could possibly have been following. I have always counted orange juice as the ideal food with which to break a fast ”

“ The sensation of hunger, the desire for food for the purpose of restoring cell life, is the human body's greatest natural safeguard. A sentinel of lower rank is the sense of taste, which, however, like other outposts, often becomes debauched and valueless. But hunger never can be turned from its protecting task, and it cannot be stimulated into [Pg 152] action. Hunger is the one natural function that is incorruptible, for once abused it withdraws. ”

“ Domestic animals survive on earth solely because of the protection of man, and for the sake of the benefits they bring to him. If it is necessary to human health and well-being to slaughter a cow rather than to wait and let her die of old age and lingering disease, it seems to me that nothing but mawkish sentimentality would protest. ”

“ Kellogg's advice. I could live on nothing but fruit for several days, but I would get so weak that I could not stand up—far weaker than I have ever become on an out-and-out fast.
One should drink all the water he possibly can while fasting, only not taking too much at a time. I take a glass full every hour, at least; sometimes every half hour. It is a good plan to drink a great [Pg 42] deal of water at the outset, whenever meal time comes around, and one thinks of the other folks beginning to eat. ”

“ Salisbury said to me "a man whose food is beef can live in a hole in the ground and be healthy." His last words to me were, "Stick to beef and hot water the rest of your life and nothing but old age will kill you barring accident." I asked him how long he had lived on this diet, he replied, "thirty years."—"Do you expect to die of old age?" ”