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Get Energized With Solar-Powered Foods
by author Siegfried Gursche, MH

Food provides measurable energy to our bodies. This idea was established in the century before last when food combustion in the body was calculated into calories.

Indeed, metabolism is a biochemical process by which energy from food is released. German physician Julius Mayer established in 1842 that energy changes from one form into another. He also claimed its quantity never gets lost. Thus, the school of thought of relating energy to calories was established and has carried over to this day. Many dieticians and nutritionists are obsessed by it, following this method of counting calories religiously when preparing menus.

But ethnologists who have studied the Incas of South America or the Hunzas of the Himalyas, as well as other tribes around the world, found that these peoples consume a fraction of the calories, work much harder and live healthier, longer lives than we do.

Food intake recommendations of the famous doctors Hippocrates (460-370 BC) and Paracelsus (1493-1541 AD) are totally inadequate by today’s standards, yet they must have proven sufficient at that time. Biochemists and nutritional scientists have been at a loss to explain this ever since. However, biophysicists exploring nutrition have established that the idea of combustion as the only source of energy is outdated.

The first insight was gained just over 100 years ago by the famous Swiss physician Max Bircher-Benner (1867-1939) while he worked directly with patients in his hospital of 120 beds. For patients suffering from digestive and degenerative diseases, he recommended raw fruits and vegetables, which he called “living foods.” Bircher-Benner’s innovation in the science of nutrition was to introduce the idea of the sunlight value of food, based on the insight that all plants and living organisms store the power of the sun. The food that healed his patients had to contain a different kind of energy, of a divine order–the living elements.

While others were counting food calories, Bircher-Benner maintained that the value of individual foods depended on how much of the sun’s energy was stored in them. While he recommended a diet consisting of raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and sprouts for therapeutic purposes, he considered a combination of raw and cooked foods to be best in the long term.

In 1900 he presented his research and experiences–properly documented–to the Zurich college of physicians and requested they be added to the curriculum. As a result, he was expelled. His data and ideas were totally opposed to the beliefs of that time, when meat was considered the basis of good nutrition.

Meanwhile, a great number of other nutritionists, scientists and medical doctors have realized that the sun’s energy stored in raw food plays a tremendous role in healing disease. Dr. Johanna Budwig talks about the storage of photons (sun energy) in seeds, which transfer into cold-pressed oils yet are lost when oils are heated or refined. Photons have the power to fight cancer cells, whereas refined, heat-treated, hydrogenated oils cause cancer, according to Dr. Budwig.

Drs. Max Gerson, George Malkmus from Hallelujah Acres, as well as Ann Wigmore, Herbert Shelton and Norman Walker–all personally experienced the healing power of raw, fresh fruits and vegetables in treating a sick society and getting people back to health naturally. These famed pioneers of natural health knew about the process of photosynthesis by which a plant absorbs sunlight and turns it into chlorophyll, the plant equivalent to human blood. Today it is possible to measure the stored sunlight with extremely sensitive instruments either as electronic waves or as light, as is captured in Kirlian photography.

This energy, directly from the sun, captured in "living food," is the most powerful life-giving and life-sustaining element known. It kept the Hunzas healthy, and so it will you.

Siegfried Gursche is the founder of Alive Publishing Group Inc. Respected as a pioneer of the Canadian health food industry since 1954, he continues to educate and inspire people through book and magazine publishing.

Source: alive #249, July 2003

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