Annemarie Colbin - Food and Healing

I recommend it to my patients. Its an excellent book to help people understand the relationship between what they eat and how they feel.

Stephen Rechtstaffen, M.D.
Director, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies

Coming from a holistic point of view, [Food and Healing] urges us to make conscious choices in our diets based on not just physical, but philosophical, emotional, and even spiritual perspectives.

Free Spirit

Food and Healing establishes the scientific, philosophical, ethical, nutritional, emotional, psychological, sensual, and cross-cultural foundations on which a vibrant state of health can build.

Organica

Food and Healing is like a breath of fresh air. Nutritionally speaking, this book can be a powerful catalyst to our letting go to the wisdom of life.

The Chiropractic and Whole Health Center

This is a work of careful research and scholarship. Food and Healing is a compendium of concepts, practical recommendations, and personal sharing a bold as well as valuable undertaking. Readers will appreciate [Colbins] broad view and the gentleness and clarity of thought behind the words.

Macromuse Magazine

Must reading A nice summation of a lot of current trends, ancient philosophy, and modern scientific breakthroughs on the health benefits of right eating.

Santa Cruz Sentinel

Highly recommended.

Brain Mind Bulletin

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 1986 by Annemarie Colbin
Foreword copyright 1986 by Robert S. Mendelsohn
Illustrations copyright 1986 by Mary Wirth

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

The theories presented here are based on the authors research and experience. They should not be put into effect without prior consultation with a medical authority.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-90882

eISBN: 978-0-307-83313-6

Photo by David Spindell
Charts designed by Clarse Peterson
Illustrations by Mary A. Wirth

v3.1

Psyche and soma, mind and bodymirrors. Mind, by intending, operates on matter, method not known. Matter disappears into a glimmer of subatomic ghosts. If final answers are not forthcoming, we can take more interest in our own experiences and ideas. Our questions can be reframed in terms of esthetics and practicality. Not Is it true? but Does it fit? Not What is real? but Does it work?

Marilyn Ferguson
Brain/Mind Bulletin
December 10, 1984

Contents

Foreword

This is the most profound book on nutrition I have ever read. Filled with wisdomderived from a kaleidoscopic array of sourcesAnnemarie Colbin successfully integrates modern medicine, folklore, alternative healing systems, legend, myth, and common sense. The result is a mosaic pattern that is as pleasing esthetically as it is practical on a personal level.

Coming from a background of modern medicine, I, as well as hundreds of thousands of other M.D.s, was carefully educated in nutritional ignoranceindeed in disdain for food. The hospital dietician was notand is not even todaya teacher of physicians. The dieticians traditional purpose in life has always been to serve as a referral for a patient who bothered the physician with too many questions about food. The very title of this book Food and Healing represents a joining of two concepts that most doctors regard as unrelated. But thanks to my patients, I have learned something about nutrition since my formal education ended. I now appreciate Mark Twains answer to the question, Where did you get your education? His response: Throughout my lifeexcept for the years I attended school.

All doctors can learn from Annemarie Colbin what they didnt learn in school. And because of pressure from insistent patients, who now know that food is important, doctors have a new and powerful incentive to learn. Patients are increasingly aware of the aphorism that when it comes to nutrition, a doctor knows as much as his secretaryunless she has been on a diet, in which case she knows more.

But this book is important for many other than M.D.s. For those whose backgrounds are in general nutrition, macrobiotics, herbology, vegetarianism, fruitarianism, homeopathy, iridology, faith healing, reflexology, massage therapy, natural hygiene, and other food and healing systems, Annemarie Colbin has provided an opportunity to make a giant leap forward. While other books are satisfied to downgradeand even attempt to destroythose they regard as competitors, Annemarie Colbin instead selects judiciously and comprehensively from each system, correlates aspects of different methods, highlights interrelationships between various approachesall with thorough documentation and clarity of expression.

Taste just a sample of the delicious morsels in this book:

No one diet is right for everyone all the time.

In the modern western belief system it could have happened to anyone is the consoling, guilt-absorbing response. The sick one is a victim, not responsible for the state of his health.

Any cure of a major disease that occurred without official medical intervention is considered spontaneous remission.

Could the lack of an integrated energy field in baby formulas be the reason for the high correlation of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and formula feeding?

The partial, fragmented, unwholesome, chemically tampered-with foods that the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) consists of cannot, in the long run, adequately support healthy life processes

Forcing a sick person to eat to keep up his strength overlooks the fact that digestion uses up strength too.

Every food philosophy has its dogma and its devils, its sin and its salvation.

In accord with the definition of intelligence as the ability to identify and correlate important relationships, Food and Healing is a quintessentially intelligent book. I recommend it as the state-of-the-art work in the fieldsecond best only to a personal consultation with its author.

Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Author, Confessions of a Medical Heretic

When I set out to write Food and Healing in the early 1980s, I intended to lay out a unified field theory of the effects of food on health, and to include practical information on the uses of food as nourishment and as medicine. In the ten years since the books publication, Ive been deluged with positive feedback from readers and students who have applied its principles. I am delighted to have the opportunity, in this preface, to add to the original edition a few comments that incorporate additional information.