Ted Walther's Private Diary

The Reactor Core library has a new addition today: the full text of La Vita Sobra, The Sober Life, by Alvise Luigi Cornaro.

For the past few years there have been rumblings in the scientific press about calorie restriction diets. Mice and rats who had their calorie intake cut in half would live twice as long, age twice as slowly, and were much healthier. People have of course, been wanting to know how to apply this information to their lives. Who doesn't want to be healthy and then live twice as long? The scientific press has been stubbornly silent. Experiments on humans are costly. They are still waiting for the results to come in from the calorie restriction experiments on monkeys.

Fear not! The Word of God comes to our rescue. The proper calorie restriction diet for humans boils down to Quantity, and Quality. In 1482 A.D., Italian nobleman Alvise Luigi Cornaro went on a calorie restriction diet recommended by his doctors. He lived to be 102 years old, in good health. He was mentally keen right up to the day he passed away peacefully in his rocking chair.

When already in his eighties, Luigi wrote down the secret to his long and healthy life. That writing is presented today as the book La Vita Sobra, The Sober Life.

I recommend reading it; it is a good read. But for the impatient, here is a summary:

Luigi only ate kosher meats, and followed other Torah laws. As a citizen of a heavily Catholic country in the middle ages, he couldn't openly advocate people follow the Torah. He would have been burned at the stake as a suspected convert to Judaism. But when you look at the list of meat Luigi ate, it is 100% kosher!

His daily diet consisted of bread, eggs, cheese, butter, vegetable soup, and wine. Meat was an occasional treat. By weight, he drank slightly more wine as he ate. 14 ounces of wine is about two glasses of wine.

This is great news, because these foods are ALL spoken of favorably in the Bible.

Some modern diet people have looked at Luigi's diet and wondered about how much better he would have done if he followed the "raw" diet, and not eaten the bread at all. One example is in this article: Dr. Stanley Bass, Natural Hygienist writes on Luigi Cornaro. The article itself is inconsistent, since Luigi's own words show that he did eat chicken and fish. Perhaps the mistake shows a vegetarian bias on the part of Dr. Stanley Bass. Then the article implies that Luigi didn't eat "fresh" foods. Good grief! Nothing in Luigi's articles implies that he ate anything but freshly made foods. Certainly the vegetable soup would have been made fresh every day. But if you reject bread and dairy products, then they wouldn't count as "fresh" I suppose.

I believe the raw food fad is exactly that, a fad. It is true many foods are missing the nutrients and vitamins we need. But our body as an alchemical ability, in common with other living creatures, to transmute elements and create the necessary vitamins and nutrients. We just have to give our bodies sufficient feedstock to manufacture what it needs. Whole grain rye bread is excellent. So are eggs and milk products. So is vegetable soup. So is meat. Everything in moderation.

Sadly, today I finished reading a book by Paul Nison, Health According to the Scriptures. The book preaches Torah observance, but then sticks in raw food and vegetarianism as the ideal diets without any scriptural support. Further, it advocates mushrooms (leprosy) and seaweed (algae) in his dietary plan.

Paul Nison did make good points, which Luigi Cornaro already wrote about; eat twice a day, and don't overeat. Paul Nison also made the good point that God's People anciently observed a twelve hour day from sunrise to sunset. This means the hours change with the seasons. Based on the practice in the tabernacle of sacrificing the daily offering at the third and the ninth hour, Paul advocates we eat at the same time. This sounds like a good practice and I plan to follow it as soon as I am able. Another good thing Paul Nison wrote is, sleep when it is dark. Don't use electric lights if you can help it, but go to sleep at a good hour, and wake at a good hour. This puts us back in tune with יהוה's clock.

Summary:

• eat only twice a day, at the third and ninth hours after sunset
• only eat kosher foods, such as bread, eggs, cheese, butter, and wine
• only eat as much food as you need; Luigi needed 12 ounces per day
• sleep when it gets dark

Scriptural Support:

Proverbs 30:8-9
8 Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me:
9 Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is יהוה? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.

Proverbs 23:21 For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.

Challenge to Vegetarians: I challenge any raw foodist or vegetarian to spend a twelve hour day lifting hay bales or doing a forty mile forced march without resorting to bread and potatoes to provide the raw sugar energy that the body needs to perform such activities. When you do a lot of physical exertion, your dietary needs go up, and your body is capable of handling the so called "bad foods" that the dieticians want us to eliminate completely. Bread is a blessing from God.