Vegetables

"Vegetables are the earth's most effective alkalizers, especially when consumed raw in salads or as freshly extracted juices.

Cooling and cleansing, they are also high in fiber, which helps sweep post-digestive putrefactive debris from the intestinal tract.

Their chlorophyll content protects the body against cancer, neutralizes toxins, and helps keep vital fluids pure. Easy to digest and non-putrefactive, fresh vegetables go well with meats as well as grains and help counteract the acidifying effects of both.

Crucifers

Cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, mustard greens, and cabbage. 

These vegetables seem to have potent protective properties for mucous membranes, especially in the lungs and digestive tract, and they are therefore effective guardians against cancer, ulcers, and infections in these vital organs. 

Rich in antioxidant nutrients such as betacarotene, vitamin C, and selenium, crucifers guard your body against all sorts of toxins absorbed from polluted environments. Crucifers have always played important roles in traditional Asian diets, especially in China.

Roots

Root vegetables are rich in minerals and replete with the stabilizing energy of the earth in which they grow. A few roots, such as carrots and turnips, are commonly consumed as ordinary vegetables, but most of them are used as condiments, seasoning, and side dishes. Many, such as ginger, garlic, and burdock, also have potent medicinal properties.

Horseradish, a traditional condiment served with beef in England and with sashimi in Japan (where it is called wasabi), stimulates the live and gall bladder, which are required to process proteins and fats assimilated from animal sources.

Ginger has always been noted for its digestive properties in Chinese cuisine, and it is said that Confucius refused to eat a meal without it. Onions help clear congestion and cut through excess mucus in the digestive tract.

The most protective of all root foods is garlic, which has been used for millennia throughout the world for its well-known healing powers as well as its pungent flavor.

In recent years, garlic has been shown to possess the following properties: inhibits growth of tumors; increases activity of white blood cells and macrophages; raises antibody production; provides a rich dietary source of the rare trace element selenium, which is a potent antioxidant; destroys fungus and yeast such as candida.

Not only is garlic one of nature's most powerful immune-system boosters, it is also prized in the Orient as a potent sexual tonic, which is why it is strictly prohibited in monastic kitchens throughout the Far East. Most practicing Taoists include fresh garlic in their daily diets.

Leaves

Leafy greens contain abundant supplies of chlorophyll, one of nature's best cleansers and detoxifiers. Eating plenty of fresh leafy greens helps eliminate unpleasant body odour by neutralizing acidity and protein putrefaction. Fresh coriander is a particularly effective dietary deodorant.

Thanks to chlorophyll, green leaves have the capacity to convert the pure energy of sunlight into vegetable matter (E= mc2 again), and when we consume and metabolize green vegetable matter, this solar energy is released into our own systems. 

Leafy greens thus serve as transformers and storehouses of revitalizing solar energy.

Nightshades

Among the most popular vegetables in Western diets today are certain members of the Solanaceae family, known as 'nightshades', which include twenty-two general and over 2,000 species of plants. Among the nightshades are tobacco and many potent medicinal plants, some of them highly poisonous. Common foods from this shady family include potato, tomato, eggplant, and chili peppers.

The distinguishing feature of all nightshades is their rich alkaloid content. Alkaloids are potent plant chemicals, similar in molecular structure to proteins, with powerful physiological effects when consumed and metabolized.

Caffeine, morphine, cocaine, nicotine, and belladonna are all alkaloids with well known psychoactive effects and toxic properties. There is growing evidence that the alkaloids present in nightshade foods may have deleterious effects on human health, at least for some people.

It is interesting to note that, with the sole exception of eggplant, the traditional diet of China did not include nightshades, and that Taoist dietary guidelines have always strongly discourages the consumption of nightshades, including eggplant.

Tomatoes, for example were brought to China from the New World by Spanish traders during the sixteenth century and were named 'foreign eggplants' by Chinese. Potatoes, which the Chinese call 'foreign yams', were also imported from the Western world, as were chili peppers. Before this, the Chinese used nightshades only for medicine, not food, and even in the West tomatoes and potatoes were once regarded as poisonous.

Today nightshades such as tomato and potato have become ubiquitous in Western diets, particularly in fast food in the form of French fries and potato crisps, tomato sauce and ketchup. Potatoes and tomatoes are fast-growing, inexpensive and easy to store.

Recent research has implicated nightshades in the calcification of soft body tissues, a condition known as 'caliphylactic syndrome', which has become one of the most prevalent pathological conditions of all modern industrial societies.

This syndrome, which occurs when nightshades remove calcium from teeth and bones and deposit it in tissues, where it does not belong, is associated with arthritis, arteriosclerosis, cerebral sclerosis, kidney stones, gout, migraine, high blood pressure, bronchitis, osteoporosis, lupus, hypertension, and other common maladies.

May people have reported rapid recovery from these ailments when they completely eliminated nightshades from their diets. That includes smoking, because tobacco is also a nightshade, so smoking tobacco only compounds the severity of tissue calcification.

If you suffer from any of the above conditions, try abstaining entirely from all nightshades, including tobacco, for a period of six months.

This cure works only if eliminate all traces of nightshade alkaloids from your system, including those hidden in processed foods and condiments in the form of potato flour, tomato sauce, paprika, cayenne, Tabasco, and so forth."

Source: Daniel Reid.