Paul Bragg and Other Gurus

The Miracle of Fasting by Paul Bragg was recommended to my husband by a fascinated friend.

My husband immediately started sprouting wheat in a large untidy-looking bowl and declared a week fast. To me it seemed slightly extreme. Reluctantly I read the book myself in hope of bringing him back to sanity.

Although it did not ease my caution regarding week-long fasts, some ideas of the book clicked with me. The concept of getting all the nutrients from no other sources but wholesome produce looked very reasonable and I made thorough lists of “power foods” encircling those that were not yet in our diet.

 We stopped adding salt to cooking and while our taste buds cleared up, started re-discovering unique flavors of various grains, fruits and vegetables.

This experience reminded me of my childhood discoveries, when together with my best buddy Vitka (nickname for Victor) we tried every fruit and nut growing around: soft young walnuts that had to be shelled out from bitter iodine-saturated skins; sweet flowers of white acacia and early apricots straight from our neighbor’s tree. Those small pinky fruits were deliciously sweet-and-sour.

The unhappy owner of the tree begged us to stop it or at least wait until apricots ripened up, but we did not care for oversweet and mushy things: our unspoiled little bodies knew better where vitamins were…  

Together with my husband we decided that it was the time for us to substantially reduce meat consumption.  A number of reasons were taken into consideration. One of them was that in no traditional culture people over 50 consumed meat regularly (except for the few very powerful and rich).

Feast of warriors with Russian prince Vladimir,

A. Riabushkin

Anyway, what is perfectly justifiable in the phase of growth and ultimate physical activity - i.e., in childhood and youth, becomes unreasonable in the later phase of life with its changed dynamics.

The idea of including more raw foods in our diet also felt natural. We always preferred raw apples to baked ones. In season I would make ambitious plans for apple pie or baked apples with honey, only to be discouraged by my husband.

- Why spoiling, - he would say, - let’s have them as they are. 

Not all of our life changing attempts had been successful or long-standing. For example, we tried to fast but this did not work for us.

I personally disliked constant cravings and dehydration that came along no matter how much water I had drunk. Maybe we did not do it the right way, but recommendations of drastic cleansing before fasting alarmed me even more - I am not a big fan of extremes.

Galina Shatalova was another author who made a great impression on us. She is a Russian neurosurgeon, clinical researcher, nutritionist and simply an extraordinary woman. In the fifties and early sixties she was the head of medical selection-committee in charge of screening Soviet astronauts and became a passionate promoter of physical challenges and food restrictions. All her research and experiments pointed to the fact that in order to stay healthy people should eat much less.

Being in her nineties with a group of much younger patients she undertook a 311 mile (500 km) hike through the Karakum desert described in her book Choosing the Way (Выбор пути). According to various internet sources I recently checked  Shatalova is still alive (she was born in 1916!), and is full of energy.

Apparently she lives exactly what she preaches.

She strongly speaks against food reheating. In her opinion heating (boiling, frying or microwaving) the same food twice makes it carcinogenic. While not dismissing cooking process entirely, she recommends reducing it to a minimum and applying in mildest and shortest forms. At the same time she admits superior value of raw food and considers it a staple of healthy diet.

These concepts gave us a different prospective on “smart utilization of leftovers”. They also helped us re-evaluate all the precooked (then frozen) and canned products that made cooking so easy.

After reading her book it became difficult for me to find a really healthy recipe even in the most health-devoted magazines: practically all of them included canned beans, broth or sauces. 

Another strong conviction of Dr. Shatalova is meal simplicity and limited number of cooking ingredients. In her opinion fewer ingredients naturally allow for better food combining, they also simplify cooking from scratch and thus promote freshness.

At that point my perception of “good food” made the full circle: from regretting culinary scarcities of my childhood, through enjoyment of immense variety of ready-to-eat foods in the near-by store; to realization, that a tomato picked in my backyard garden and eaten while still fragrant and warm from sun - is the best way of having it, a paradise lost for most of us in the modern world.

Based on this idea I formulated my own “six ingredients” rule, meaning that if a recipe requires more than that, forget it! With different feelings I now watch TV cooking shows where famous chefs even of my beloved Asian cuisine easily mix together soy and Worcestershire sauces, add butter to olive oil and pour chicken broth from cardboard boxes…

We also stopped peeling potatoes, apples and cucumbers. According to Shatalova there are skins that should be eaten and those that should be not. The last are easy to figure out, because Mother Nature makes them hard or bitter. Others – are the best part of the produce, usually with highest nutritional content and additional properties particularly good for digestion. (By the way, all of this is true  for organic produce only. Conventional skins specifically accumulate pesticides, herbicides, etc.)

For example, potato - the epitome of starchy vegetable avoided by many sensitive eaters due to bloating it might cause, when consumed with its skins, makes no trouble at all. Skins take care of it.

We verbalized this prospective on healthy eating as:

-         Max eats a mouse with its skin.

And believe me, he is doing just fine!

As I already mentioned, Shatalova came to the conclusion that in developed countries people eat much more than they physically need. In clinical trials with athletes and astronauts she reduced portions more than twice comparing to standards of the day and her control group constantly showed better physical performance and higher energy levels.

I checked the concept against my own teenage sport and mountain hiking experience.  I remember that on the morning of gymnastic competition we hardly ate at all, otherwise you felt weak, heavy and perspired excessively. The same strategy was instinctively chosen on a mountain trail:

- Let’s first get there; then we will rest and eat.

The appetite after such exertions was also notably subdued. And yet, from those trips I always returned home stronger and healthier.   

It might look like each and every impressive book on nutrition made us join another philosophy and become its devoted followers. In fact we gradually build our own approach to healthy living by trying different ideas, accepting some and dismissing others.

I see it as an endless process, where mistakes may be made, but also corrected; influences may be experienced, but also - overcome.