What Are We Really Eating?: Practical Aspects of Nutrition from the Perspective of Spiritual Science (Mercury Press) - Softcover

Wolff MD, Otto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1957569263 ISBN 13: 9781957569260

Publisher: Mercury Press, 2023

Synopsis

“Today we are in the middle of the problems that this book warned of when it first came out in 1996. The life forces of people, and especially of young people, are getting ever weaker. One can see this in the meteoric rise of conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, burnt-out syndrome, repeated infections that last a long time, increasing infertility and the weakening of the immune system. People are getting weaker and more prone to disease, not only physically, but also psychologically. Up to 20% of the patients in medical offices are suffering from depressive disorders―and the trend is rising. A general lack of orientation with respect to the meaning of life is spreading.

What can bring life and light to people again? Things that contain life and light. And this also has to do with food, which should be full of these forces.” ― Daphné von Boch, MD

Dr. Otto Wolff―known to English-language readers through his home remedies―offers a clear description of the foods we eat and what we should really look for in them.

Scientific investigation of nutrition has led to increasing industrialization of food production. Vast numbers of details are known, but industrial processing is causing the force of food to be progressively lost. This makes people feel unsure about which foods are still healthy today.

Otto Wolff’s aim is to enable consumers to form their own opinion about the food they eat. He takes guidance from the principle stated by Angelus Silesius: “The bread is not our food; what feeds us in bread is God’s eternal word, is spirit, and is life.”

Dr. Wolff shows that it is not the physical substances as such that feed us, but the force of life in our foods. The knowledge that life is transformed light has been completely lost in modern agriculture. However, viewing food as it is in biodynamic agriculture can help us gain true insight and understanding of food quality.

“Today people are brought up to think that plants ‘live’ on potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen just as animals live on plants. There is an error in this, however. Animals get their life from the life of plants. Life itself, however, is a force and bound to physical substance for only limited periods of time. Plants cannot take ‘life’ from substances like potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen because these are completely dead. Simple observation will show that light is the most important thing for plants. Light is also a force, just as life is.” ―Dr. Otto Wolff

This book is a translation from German of Was essen wir eigentlich? Praktische Gesichtspunkte zur Ernährung auf geisteswissenschaftlicher Grundlage (2nd ed., Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 2012).

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Otto Wolff was born in 1921 in Glatz, Silesia (then a region in northeast Germany). He studied biochemistry and medicine and first worked as a hospital physician, then as a general physician and school doctor. Later he worked many years in the pharmaceutical industry in the development of new anthroposophic medicines. He wrote numerous publications on anthroposophic medicine, including the standard work: The Anthroposophic Approach to Medicine (three volumes). During his last twenty-five years he taught anthroposophic medicine to medical doctors worldwide. Dr. Wolff died in Arlesheim, Switzerland, in 2003.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Those who begin to think about the food they eat will soon find that there are endless contradictions in this field, more than in any other field of science. It is true, for example, that in civilized countries food is more than abundant in peace- time. Many people therefore believe that our nutrition is better than it has ever been. Others, however, will insist that this only refers to quantity, and that the quality of our food is worse today than it has ever been. Therefore, they say, we should go back to humanity's original nutrition. But what was that nutrition? Some say it was meat, others bread. And what meat and what kind of bread? Some people feel it is self- evident that the only real bread is whole grain bread. Others will actually warn against it and advise eating only white bread, because it does not cause problems with the digestion. Others again advocate life completely without bread or any other grain.

Many people are convinced that only a raw food diet is a healthy diet. After all, they say, animals do not boil or fry their food. Other people will argue that cooking makes the food more digestible and that raw foods are not easily digested. Opposing views are also held on what kind of fat to use. Which is better and which is best avoided―butter or margarine? Opinions continue to clash unabated on many other subjects. It would be easy to give further examples of this kind. The question is, who is right?

Modern people want proof. The situation is difficult, however, because every proponent of an opposite view provides 'proof,' often from personal experience. They say they were sick for years until they changed their nutrition. Since then they have been well. The inevitable conclusion is that if everyone were to eat the way they do, all would be well. There is no reason to doubt people's personal experience, but the question is whether others will react in the same way.

There have of course been scientific investigations in the field of nutrition. It has been carefully established how many calories a person needs, how much vitamins, protein, fat, etc. It is important, however, to realize that these investigations can never come to an end. Something 'new' always comes along, which immediately spreads around the world, leaving the 'old' views completely 'out of date.'

When scientific investigation first started, for instance, it was established that only the starchy part of grains provides nourishment. The marginal layers cannot be digested and were therefore considered useless roughage. Today, the view is that such roughage is absolutely essential for good digestion. Another example is that just a few years ago, only vegetable fats were considered to be healthy. It was said that all animal fats should be eliminated as far as possible. Since then we have learned that fats from coldwater sea fish such as mackerel have valuable properties and can help to prevent heart attacks. These fish oils are definitely not vegetable fats. And then we often hear that people need specific 'essential amino acids' that are found only in meat, and a vegetarian diet is therefore not sufficient. On the other hand, numerous investigations have shown that vegetarians do not suffer from any deficiencies whatsoever and are undoubtedly healthier in the long run. This is not to say that the scientific findings are wrong! They are, however, often only theoretical or one- sided, and are influenced by other factors that are not so easily grasped in scientific studies.

So what should we do? Try every suggestion? Leave out anything that may be 'questionable?' Mark Twain (1835- 1910), the American humorist, already knew about this dilemma. He once wrote that the safest food is water―taken in moderate amounts. Even this is not always true today.

Drinking water is barely drinkable in many places because excessive amounts of chlorine have been added, pesticides or agricultural fertilizers have drained into it, or it has already 'passed' through many people or also through industry. So it is not an absolutely 'safe' food anymore. Even the water 'treat- ments' used today have their problems. They may remove most of the toxic substances, but they cannot restore the water to its original purpose as the irreplaceable carrier of life.

People who live in arid regions of the world know this very well―without water there is no life. The question is whether the maltreated water available to many people as their only drinking water really can still carry life, compared to fresh spring water. Even the rain falling from the skies has its problems today, as we know from 'acid rain.'

How is anyone to understand all these opposing views and come to an independent judgment? Success stories and scientific findings may be perfectly correct and still miss the point.

These contradictions point to a fundamental problem in today's life. Masses of details are known, we are able to measure and change them, but we fail to recognize the essence of the thing―it is often not even seen. When it comes to nutrition, the essential question is: Why do we need to eat at all? Why do people die if they have no food? Why can we not live only on water, salt, stones or wood?

People had the right instinct in the past when they called food the 'mediator of life' (German Lebensmittel), for it is life that we take in through eating. Stones, wood, or also salt evidently have no life in them, and this is why human beings cannot get life from eating them. Of course there are some exceptions: woodworms, for example, can live on wood; for them wood is a mediator of life, but not for people. So we arrive at a basic principle:

Only what contains life can nourish life.

This may be new to modern people, but it is an old idea. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) wrote:

The bread is not our food; what feeds us in the bread is God's eternal word, is spirit and is life.

Das Brot ernährt uns nicht; was uns im Brote speist ist Gottes ewiges Wort, ist Leben und ist Geist.

What Angelus Silesius meant is that it is not the physical substance as such which feeds us but its 'content.' It is the force of life that matters―life and spirit.

It must sound truly heretical to modern people to say that we eat God's word and spirit when we eat bread. Do people today know what 'life' or 'spirit' actually are? Those four lines hold more wisdom than the many details we know today. Up to our 'modern' age, everybody knew that food is a gift from God and that it is a sin to simply throw it away. Today this happens with tons of food. Leftovers and waste in the past used to be fed to the pigs or made into compost. They would never have been 'taken off the market'―today's euphemism for the mass destruction of food.

As scientific investigations progressed, the focus was no longer put on life as a force, but on the physical substances. Yet these are only the 'packaging,' for life is not a substance. It is a force, and can only be bound up with certain substances.

As people lost sight of what life really is, they changed their word for 'food' from 'mediator of life' to 'mediator of nourishment' (German Nahrungsmittel). There is some justification for this, for not everything we eat contains life. Salt, for instance, does not serve life but higher purposes, as we shall see. Roughage, which is really indigestible, also does not contain life and therefore does not nourish us. It does, however, serve the vital functions.

A third group is made up of the stimulants (the German word for these is Genussmittel, literally 'mediators of pleasure'), which do not feed us nor help the vital functions. They are only for pleasure, and almost always have a destructive effect on life. The most widely used stimulants are coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, and sugar.

Thus, it is life that we receive from food. People think today that one cannot really grasp life itself as a force. This is why the declarations on packaging will tell us how many calories are contained in, say, 100 ml of milk. The number of calories tells us how much heat is produced by burning 100 grams of a specific substance. (The more recent term 'joule' is just a different unit of measurement.) This is why we read of the 'calories' or 'energy content' of a food. Useful to a degree, this nevertheless misses the real point. These are terms that are used in the field of technology and have their justification only there. With foods, however, it is not the calories that matter but the life they contain. Gasoline or wax, paraffin and so on, have a very high energy content― high 'calorific value'―but this does not make them food. Listing the amounts of carbohydrate, fat, protein, minerals, vitamins, etc. is a poor solution that does not tell us much, because it does not grasp the essence: life.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercury Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1957569263
• ISBN 13: 9781957569260
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132
• Editor: Karnow Gerald F., Eberly MD Andrea, Luborsky Peter