FCNNEWSSOURCE Editorial
Breakfast, lunch and dinner. That is the prescription for health these days, according to status quo physicians and nutritionists.
On top of that, there is not much emphasis placed on what you eat, as long as you eat. Stay healthy, we are told.
But, is all that we’ve been told true?
A recent study based on depriving mice of food for a certain length of time reveals that longer intervals between meals may, in fact, improve health, lengthen life and prevent disease. The research was reported in the recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Mark P. Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, which is part of The National Institutes of Health, said, “I would be very confident in saying that healthy adults don’t need three full meals a day and would be better off skipping one or two. When you go without food, there are benefits. Your cells become more efficient. “
It seems that we’ve heard something like this before. Where was that? Oh, it was in “How To Eat To Live” books I and II, written by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The first book was published back in 1967. He had been preaching the diet since the 1930s.
In various parts of “How To Eat To Live,” Mr. Muhammad writes: “Many years could be added to our lives if we only knew how to protect our lives from their enemies. As He [meaning Master Fard Muhammad, teacher of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad] said to me, food keeps us here; it is essential that we eat food which gives and maintains life. … If we eat the proper food, and eat at the proper time, the food will keep us living a long, long time.
“Eat one meal every 24 hours, if you are not sick. Sometimes, when people are ill, in order to keep up their strength they must eat. … Eating one meal a day or one meal every other day is the key to long life–if you eat the right kind of food.”
Mr. Muhammad explains that fasting allows the body to rid itself of toxins that are produced by all foods and it allows our stomach muscles time to relax.
Cramming breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks not only wears out the stomach, he says, but it robs us of our beauty appearance and dulls the mind, not to think of what the hog and other slave diet items that Blacks particularly have been trained to eat do to our minds, body and spirit.
“Eating three and four times a day is to your stomach as dripping water is to a stone or iron. The dripping water will eventually wear the stone and iron away. … It is the same with food … if we let our stomachs rest a while and gain strength, they will last longer in doing a job of digesting food for us,” he writes.
Concerning the hog, Mr. Muhammad writes: “He is so poisonous and filthy that nature had to prepare him a sewer line and you may find the opening on his forelegs. It is a little hole out of which oozes pus. This is the filth of his body that cannot be passed fast enough.”
Harsh, but true. And the hog is the number one item on many plates in America.
Mr. Muhammad teaches so much in these little books that it’s amazing that such a simple man of such limited schooling could be so wise. But isn’t there something in the scriptures about wisdom coming from the mouths of babes and the answer to the problems of a great nation being found among the slaves?
What Mr. Muhammad taught at the time sounded strange, but science and technology is catching up to the wisdom of this great man. It makes you wonder what else he taught that we would be wise to take another look at.
