Creation of Civilization
Science Part

Written by Mokichi Okada in 1952

 

You’ve already understood how dangerous medicine is since I described it in detail until the previous chapter. However, here is the great fallacy of nutrients which I can’t overlook. As I have already described in the chapter of ‘Respect Nature’, animal protein is bad for tuberculosis. This is not only the case. Modern nutrition entirely falls into　terrible error.

Its study targets only food but neglects human body functions which must be essential. That is the most serious fault. For example, nutrients are even classified such as vitamin A, B, C, and so on to make up for the missing ones. What a ridiculous thing it is! As I previously described, the natural ability which bodily functions have is ignored. It means such functions aren’t recognised at all. In other words, the working of functions means to produce any kinds of sufficient nutrients for nourishing a human body by performing the functions. Then such nutrients are vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, amino acids, glycogen, fat and so on. Therefore, it is obvious the magical power called a nutritious function can produce enough vitamins from food in which doesn’t even contain any vitamins.

For this reason, the more a human body takes nutrients, the weaker it becomes. The result is the opposite. In a word, the more vitamins are taken, the more they become lacked. It is little wonder. The more nutrients are taken in the body, the less the function of producing nutrients works. As a result, this function naturally degenerates. It is, needless to say, because that the most of nutrients are completed components. Human vitality originally means the process generated by the activity of bodily functions. I would say that the digestive function, in particular, is its main vitality. So to speak, human vitality equals the activity of bodily functions. For this reason, the generation source of human vitality comes from the labour process which should complete the incomplete food. It is clear from the following fact above all else; a person becomes weak when he gets hungry, which means all the works of processing food is finished. Then he becomes steady soon after he eats food. Since all of the human body functions have a mutual relationship, if the fundamental digestive function becomes weak, any other functions also naturally become weak.

It is needless to say that human beings need exercise for their health. However, it is mainly for promoting metabolism externally. It also gives a considerably positive effect on the inner parts of the body but it plays only a subsidiary role. Therefore, the essential condition to build health must be enhancing the activity of digestive function itself. Since digestible food weakens the function, ordinary food would be just right. On the contrary, medical science regards digestible food as good. You will see how wrong it is. Worse still, it recommends chewing well. It is, of course, wrong as well because it weakens the stomach. I take gastroptosis as an example. It is a disease caused by a flaccid stomach and indeed made by human beings. If a person chews well when eating digestible food and regularly take the medicine which helps digestion, his stomach must become weaker and flaccid. What idiocy it is! I tell you my experience with this. It was more than thirty years ago when the Fletcherism diet was popular in America. This is the health management method of encouraging to chew well. When I tried it, it worked well in the beginning. However, I was getting weak and losing my energy after I kept doing it for about one month. I didn’t think I could keep going on this way, so I returned my eating habit to a usual one. Then I recovered as ever.

Considering what I described above, you see that nutrition tells the opposite. Therefore, it can’t be good for your health. Here is another example. It recommends drinking milk to a woman who doesn’t have enough breast milk for a baby. It is also strange. When a woman gives birth to a baby, enough milk to raise a baby must come out. If it doesn’t, there must be something wrong. What to do is just finding the cause and correcting it. However, medical science recommends drinking milk. I wonder why? It would be because it doesn’t find the cause or cannot do anything even if it finds it. Medical science must consider that the milk comes out from the nipples directly through the mouth by drinking it. How ridiculous it is! Therefore, when drinking milk, breast milk doesn’t come out well instead. It is because milk is supplied from outside and the function of making breast milk degenerates. Furthermore, a patient sometimes drinks living animal blood as a nutrient. That is astounding. It might temporarily work a little, but, to tell the truth, it weakens the bodily function of producing blood and the patient results having anaemia instead. Think about that red blood is made from white bread and rice, green vegetables and yellow beans which human beings have. If so, what wonderful production engineers they are! Since blood is made from food in which contains none of the blood, what on earth happens if drinking blood? Needless to say, blood would contrarily not be produced. However, nutrition doesn’t realise it. There is no word about such ignorance of nutrition. Even a beast called a cow produces milk from straws which it eats. How much more should human beings do? From these points, the fallacy of nutrition is caused by the complete disregard of nature and the overemphasising of scientific study.

Then vegetables have lots of nutrients essential for human beings. There is no exception that vegetarian is healthy and lives longer than others. People who have a simple meal such as Zen Buddhist monks live the longest life. Mr Bernard Shaw, who is English and recently died at the age of ninety-four, was a famous vegetarian. I have a little story; a country gentlemanlike person sat next to me when I took a Tohoku line train. He looked fifty years old or so and healthy with a good complexion. He sometimes took green pine leaves out of the pocket of his jacket and munched on them with relish. I thought he was so unique that I asked him what he was doing. He proudly replied that green pine leaves had been his staple meal for more than ten years and he didn’t eat anything else. He used to be weak. Then he got to know pine leaves were good for health and started to eat them. In the beginning, their taste was so bad but gradually became good. As a result, he became such a healthy person. As a sign of his health, he unbuttoned his cuffs and showed his arm to me. There was also the article in the recent newspaper, which says that a certain young man is healthy while he only eats used tea leaves. This article must be true as it was based on his direct talk. Here was another story. When I climbed Mt. Yarigatake of Japan Alps, I was surprised to see the lunch box of our guide. There was only rice but no side dish in it. When I asked him, he told me that it was very tasty. I tried to give the canned food of mine to him but he wouldn’t accept it. However, he still climbs up and down the mountain path of about forty kilometres every day while carrying more than forty kilograms of luggage. It must be surprising. Here is also an old story of Sorai Ogyu, who is a famous Confucian scholar. A certain book says that he lived on the second floor of a Tofu shop. He studied there while eating only tofu refuse for two years. As I previously described, I kept eating only vegetables to cure tuberculosis for three months. I didn’t use even dry bonito flakes and stopped taking medicine. As a result, I completely recovered from it. For such reasons, I will very much perform a rejuvenation method when I pass over ninety years old. What I should do is to eat mainly vegetables and plain meals. Plain meals are good because they contain poor nutrients. Therefore, the digestive function has to work hard to make nutrients and as a result, the function becomes active, then a person becomes younger. As a result, he must become healthy and live a long life. Then I have heard that coolies in Manchuria are said to be the healthiest in the world and some western scholars study them. Their food must be surprising. They only eat a large bun made from kaoliang as a meal and three buns in all a day. I wonder how to explain this for nutrition. Present nutrition recommends that a variety of food should be mixed well to have. However, the examples above show that it is very wrong. People had better eat one kind of food as much as possible. It is because the more the same food keeps being eaten, the more capable the function of producing nutrients becomes. It is the same reason as a person who becomes skilled when he keeps doing the same job. Then everyone might be surprised that a vegetarian diet keeps a person truly warm. It is true that a meet diet once makes him warm but he feels cold instead after a while. As you can see, a stove is advanced in western countries as western people eat meat and couldn’t stand the cold. On the contrary, Japanese people used to be bearable to the cold as they didn’t eat meat. Their house was built without caring for the protection against the cold very much. As for their clothes, foot soldiers or valets seemed to be all right with bare legs even during the coldest season. Women also seemed to wear one or two cotton underskirt and rarely wear Japanese socks. On the contrary, women now wear many layers of waist cloth knitted out of wool but still feel cold. When these things are considered, it would make sense.

There is one more important thing to note. People in farming areas are recommended to eat fish, poultry and meat because they have poor nutrition. It is also wrong. As I previously described, nutrients produced from vegetarian food primally gain a sustaining power so that people bear their long work and don’t get tired. Therefore, Japanese farmers of men and women work from the early morning until getting dark since before. If farmers eat a lot of animal products, their labour would be reduced. In America above all else, agricultural mechanization has been advanced. It is because American farmers cannot keep their stamina and make it up with their brain work. For this reason, Japanese agriculture should be accompanied by mechanical power if Japanese farmers eat a lot of animal products. It has to be deeply concerned.

As you can see what I described above, vegetarian food is the best to nourish exclusively the body but this is not only the case. It is good for people in farming areas to do so. However, people in cities need enough nutrients for their brain to work better than a physical one. In a word, as for Japanese, they should eat fish and poultry first and then meat as the second because it is natural that Japan is surrounded by the sea. Fish and poultry originally enrich nutrients for the brain and have the effect of giving energy and gaining wisdom. As for meat, it enhances a sense of competition which develops into a sense of fighting in the end. Western civilisation shows it well. Western culture has developed like today because of the sense of competitiveness. Because of the sense of combativeness, however, people are constantly at war. While being called civilised countries, there are many wars that happen among them, which can’t be compared in eastern countries.

I described a lot as above, it is summarised as follows; with regards to food, human beings don’t think about nutrients very much and eat what they want. To do naturally is good. In this case, the best ratio of vegetables and animal products is half and half for people in cities and seven or eight to two or three for farmers and sick persons. If people eat what I describe and don’t take medicine, they can never suffer from the disease. Since the hygiene control and health-promoting method differ from the actual condition, the extra work is created and the bad result is delivered instead. “Pity, the name is an intellectual.” That’s what I would like to say.

The other fault of nutrition is a nutrient injection. A human being is naturally made to swallow food from the mouth and to produce nutrients by each function of digestive organs. I don’t know how it is misunderstood but nutrients are tried to put into the body by injecting into the skin. There is probably nothing more ridiculous than this. If such a wrong thing is done, the function of digestive organs is not needed anymore and must be degenerated. In a word, the function of nutrient absorption is transferred. Only one or two injections are not affected very much. However, they are badly affected if they are continuously given. The fact proves this very well.

Translated by N.H.