Just an ounce of PREVENTION is worth a pound of CURE

The following excerpt is taken from the book just an ounce of PREVENTION … is worth a pound of CURE: A Modern Guide to Healthful Living from the Originator of the Blood-Type Diet, by Dr. James L. D’Adamo with Allan Richards. It is published by Hay House (April 15, 2010) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com.

Foreword

by Louise L. Hay

Life has so many interesting twists and turns.

If only we were taught as children that prevention is the best way to maintain vibrant health. Instead, we’re inundated with glossy, cheerful ads for processed, sugary junk foods . . . foods that are purposely addictive and detrimental to our health.

Then in time, our bodies react to this lack of good, natural nutrition; and we discover that we’ve contracted assorted dis-eases. It’s so much easier to keep a healthy body healthy than to have to repair a body that has gone downhill.

That was my story until I was diagnosed with cancer more than 30 years ago.

You can imagine my surprise and delight when I received a letter from Dr. D’Adamo in the spring of 2009. I was smiling with joy as I opened it. Positive memories flooded back to me as I remembered the man who had taught me so much about health.

As I read the beginning of the letter: “As a former patient of mine, publisher, and advocate of alternative health care, I would very much appreciate it if you were to publish this book. . . .” I leaped to my feet, thinking, Yes, of course, I would—in a New York minute! After all this man had done for me, I felt grateful to be able to do something special for him.

As I mentioned, I was diagnosed with cancer three decades ago. With my background of being raped at the age of five and being a battered child who was sexually abused for many years, it was no wonder I manifested cancer in the vaginal area.

Yes, it frightened me; however, I had been studying and teaching self-healing for several years, so here was Life giving me the opportunity to prove to myself that what I’d been teaching really worked. After all, I’d written the book on the mental patterns for dis-eases in the body (Heal Your Body), and I knew that cancer was a dis-ease stemming from deep resentment that has been held for a long time until it literally eats away at the body.

I truly believed that the word incurable, which is so frightening to so many people, meant to me that this particular condition could not be cured by any outer means and that it was necessary to go within to find the cure.

I immediately took responsibility for my own healing and embarked on a journey of discovery. I read and investigated everything I could find on alternative, holistic ways to assist my healing process. I learned that I needed to release resentment, practice forgiveness, and engage in processes such as foot reflexology, colon therapy, and other methodologies. I was also told that it was vital to find a good nutritionist.

Life somehow brought me to Dr. James D’Adamo. The most important part of my healing journey had arrived.

I learned several things from this experience. First: Trust Life. No matter how dire the circumstances seem to be, there is always a solution, a way out. The foods we choose to eat and the thoughts we choose to think have everything to do with our health. Junk foods and negative thoughts simply destroy our health. The body knows how to heal itself; we just need to supply it with the nutrition it needs.

Today I am in my 80s, am blessed with energy, and still maintain the beneficial practices that Dr. James D’Adamo recommended to me so many years ago. I give enormous thanks to him for all he has taught me about how to bring my body back to vibrant health. It worked for me, and it can work for you.

There are times in life when someone does you an enormous favor and you wonder how you could ever pay it back. Well, now I know.

May you benefit from this wise man’s knowledge!

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Chapter One

The Original Blood-Type Diet

In my first book, One Man’s Food . . . is someone else’s poison, published in 1980, I (Dr. James D’Adamo) set out to do two things: stake a claim for the naturopathic approach to healing in the United States; and reveal for the first time my discovery of the correlation between a person’s blood type and his or her diet as a means of maximizing health, as well as a method of treating diseases, even the leading causes of death in the United States—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

In my second book, The D’Adamo Diet, which I wrote in 1989, I described my discoveries about sub–blood groups and Rh factors, and their impact on individualized diets.

Much has been written based on my work on blood types since One Man’s Food first appeared, including The New York Times bestseller Eat Right 4 Your Type by my son Dr. Peter D’Adamo, who is also a naturopath. While I’m gratified that many health practitioners have shown an interest in my research and work, and in Peter’s case, shared my concept of blood types with millions of readers around the world, it’s also disappointing to see how many nutritionists have latched onto the blood-type concept as if it were the latest fad and incorporated the basis of my discoveries into their practice or publications without having actually treated a significant number of patients.

Blood Type and the Individual

One Man’s Food not only launched the idea of a correlation between a person’s blood and diet, but also espoused a radical idea—radical when compared to the way most medical doctors, and even some nutritionists, practice today: that each person is a unique creation with specific characteristics. In other words, there are no two people on the face of the earth who are alike—no two people have the same fingerprints, lip prints, ear lobes, irises, or voices (identical twins don’t even share all of the same characteristics); therefore, no two people should eat the same foods.

Blood type is a highly popular concept now—it even has its proponents who say that blood type defines personality. Its significance as a nutritional tool is one I have pioneered and developed over a period of 50 years. Its new marketability, although welcome, as this means reaching a wider audience, exposes it to practitioners who benefit from association with the concept but lack substantive knowledge or application of it.

At the time I wrote One Man’s Food, I had examined, diagnosed, and treated more than 15,000 patients. I had a successful practice in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a quiet Italian community just inland from the towering Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which connects Brooklyn to Staten Island; an office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; and another office on Hester Street in Little Italy where I treated the poor. It’s a time I think of as the end of the Dark Ages of natural healing in the United States. The American naturopathic movement—the natural approach to health—was only then beginning to emerge from the underground into the mainstream.

Fast Forward

Although naturopathy in this country dates back to the late 1800s and saw various spikes in popularity in the 1920s and ’30s, it started to find a broader audience during the 1960s, when many traditional approaches to life—including conventional medicine, which treats symptoms, not causes, and essentially views all people as having the same type of body—were being challenged.

The baby-boomer generation sought alternatives to many aspects of modern society—a society that had become more and more mechanistic and had increasingly removed itself from nature. The concern we see today for climate change and global warming isn’t new. The environmental movement and the quest for cleaner air and purer water and foods (that weren’t colored and preserved with artificial ingredients, including some identified as cancer-causing agents) was a response to a world that had relied on pesticides to produce vegetables and fruits; antibiotics and hormones to fatten beef and chicken; and whose industries and vehicles produced massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other pollutants that clouded our cities and increased the incidence of asthma and other respiratory conditions.

The lay public and scientists alike began to recognize that our way of life was choking us; and that obesity, heart disease, and other chronic diseases particular to industrialized society were fostered by the daily consumption of processed foods.

In many ways, America was far behind European nations like Germany and Switzerland, which were much more conscientious about safeguarding their foodstuffs—their organically grown tomatoes, green vegetables, grapes, cherries, and other fruits weren’t pale and tasteless imitations of the real things, as they so often are in this country. In addition, ailments were commonly treated with therapies that we call alternative—alternative meaning to us another approach to the medical doctor’s five-minute diagnosis and prescribing of pharmaceuticals. Physicians in European countries employed herbs and botanicals, homeopathic remedies, water and mineral therapies, and many other gentle and effective remedies drawn from nature.

Young people in America began to experiment with vegetarianism, macrobiotics, and natural therapies, and advanced the idea that we are responsible for our own well-being and could take preventive steps to secure the great gift of health. This wasn’t something the American Medical Association or the pharmaceutical companies cheerfully encouraged because health care in this country was then, and still is, about profit—more specifically, profit from people’s illnesses. Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary SiCKO is an accurate portrayal of the American health-care system: if you can’t pay for it, suffer.

It has never been easy being a naturopathic doctor in this country, or again, what’s referred to as an “alternative practitioner” in America, advocating the use of food or herbs as medicine for prevention or to help heal disease. When I started practicing in the 1950s, I couldn’t even suggest, as I do today, that I could help patients suffering with cancer overcome it through diet—even though it’s largely a food-associated disease.

If news that food is medicine was newly bursting on the American health scene in the 1960s, my concept of blood types and the idea that people should be treated as individuals, one by one, and not as carbon copies of each other, was also a fresh idea, although conventional-minded people often thought of it as a half-baked premise. And yet, as I based my treatments on the correlation between blood types and diet and helped bring relief to my patients, word spread around New York City and beyond about my discovery and approach; and my offices overflowed with people, many suffering with advanced states of diseases.

American Health Care: The Need for Prevention

Today, three decades later, there is a different climate in terms of health care in America. However, the American health system is deeply troubled. Chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity account for more than 70 percent of U.S. health-care costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Yet those who suffer from these diseases receive only about 50 percent of the recommended preventive care. One out of every four deaths in the United States is due to cancer. Over 65 percent of Americans are overweight; and the CDC estimates that obesity causes more than 112,000 deaths a year and is at the root of other conditions including diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, respiratory problems, depression, and gynecological complications, including infertility.

Yet I believe—I know—that cancer and these chronic conditions are preventable, and if these diseases were prevented or treated using my research and work in blood types, we could save well over $100 billion a year in health-care spending.

Today the powerful pharmaceutical companies still manage to get their drugs to the marketplace—many that have long lists of serious side effects or have not been tested long enough and are harmful to the body. (For example, Vioxx, a medication for arthritis, led to approximately 30,000 cardiac deaths before it was pulled from the market in 2004.)

Fortunately, there’s also a greater awareness of the role food plays in healing.

When I moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 10 years ago, after practicing in my institutes in Brooklyn and Toronto and an office in Montreal for 40 years, I sought to wind down my practice and devote more time to teaching my work on blood types to other naturopaths. And yet the patients kept coming to see me: patients from as far away as California, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Mexico, and South America; patients from countries with socialized medicine, like England and France; and even patients who had health insurance and could afford expensive conventional medical treatments (few of my treatments are covered by insurance). Why would they do this? Why would they spend thousands of dollars and travel halfway around the world for the individualized programs that I created for them? Because what my father told me as a boy is true: good health is a person’s greatest treasure, and there’s not much you can do without it.

I’m gratified to see the growing awareness people have about the importance of foods, herbs, and exercise with respect to their health. Many medical doctors still label alternative approaches to healing—even mine—as “quackery” because proof of their effectiveness and the way the techniques work haven’t been scientifically verified, although the results can certainly be observed. Yet they nevertheless have had to start incorporating natural remedies into their practice because millions of Americans are using them and enjoying their benefits.

Yet this heightened awareness is only one step in the prevention and treatment of chronic disease. My clarion call after practicing for 50 years and treating over 50,000 patients is the same: all people are unique individuals, created by the shared genetics of two parents; molded by their culture, society, and geographic region in which they were raised and live; and directed by their dominant thoughts.

Most important, a person’s blood type—whether it is O, A, B, or AB—is nature’s most reliable guide in determining their individualized dietary needs.