The digestive system forms the root of the human plant. A healthy digestive system is the foundation on which a healthy human being is built.

Boerhaave, Semmelweis, Mayr: Men Ahead of Their Time

► Boerhaave. Boerhaave, the greatest physician of his day, died in 1738. During his lifetime he announced plans to bequeath the entirety of his medical knowledge to his contemporaries for the benefit of both the sick and the well. After his death, scientists from every corner of the world gathered for the sale of his sealed work. Imagine their surprise, especially the wealthy Englishman who had bought this treasure of wisdom at such a high price, when he opened its pages only to find them blank except for the following couplet penned on the last page:

“Keep the head cool and warm the feet,

And carefully watch how much you eat!”

A joke? Hardly—rather, a golden rule for a healthy way of life, easy to understand and yet misunderstood by most. There is something peculiar about the truth: the simpler it is, the easier it is to disregard.

► Semmelweis. Around a hundred years later Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, having discovered the cause of puerperal fever, spent the rest of his days in misery and ended up in an insane asylum! At that time almost half the mothers who had just given birth at a Viennese women’s clinic were dying from puerperal fever. Frantic efforts to discover the cause of this horrible epidemic were in vain. Semmelweis suspected that the physicians’ hands, which went from performing autopsies to treating expectant mothers, were probably not clean enough to avoid transmitting unknown toxins from the dead to the living, resulting in the abrupt end of thousands of flourishing young lives.

► F. X. Mayr. The Austrian Dr. Franz Xaver Mayr, who lived in the 20 th century, put forward the novel idea that most people’s digestive systems were unclean, no longer completely efficient, and therefore unhealthy. Waste products deposited in the digestive system caused it to be contaminated, often infected, and therefore a dangerous source of toxicity. This was undermining people’s health and making them prematurely ill, old, and unattractive.

Dr. Mayr insisted that people who were not completely well should thoroughly cleanse their intestines. But just like Semmelweis before him, he meant something quite different than his contemporaries. He also held that digestive systems thought to be clean and healthy were, in fact, already more or less impaired and overrun with waste deposits.

How Mayr came to these conclusions is explained by his background: Around the turn of the century, Mayr was a medical student working in a sanatorium where he treated people with intestinal problems. He wondered how he would know when he had reached the goal of his treatment, that is, wellness. As he didn’t have any reliable criteria for a healthy intestinal tract or even for healthy people, he turned to the medical superintendent of the sanatorium, then to medical texts, and finally to his teachers at the university; however, none of them could provide him with answers to the following questions:

These Questions Were Important for F. X. Mayr

• Which features can we use as a basis for forming an opinion of a person’s general state of health?

• What are the properties of a healthy stomach: its size, shape, softness, and other characteristics?

• Do normal, uneventful bowel movements in themselves guarantee that such a person has a healthy digestive system?

• How do we recognize a digestive system in which the digestion of food is inferior, in which waste deposits are present, and in which toxic decomposition processes take place that undermine general health?

Diagnostics of Good Health

After decades of research, based on a unique series of examinations, and treating thousands of patients, Mayr finally established the criteria for a healthy body, which he summarized as the “diagnostics of good health.”

Based on this, the following can be determined:

• How far a person’s state of health deviates from his or her optimal condition. (Damage to organs, preliminary stages of illness, and previously unobserved states of illness can be objectively ascertained.)

• Whether a person’s health has improved or deteriorated.

• Which factors have a positive or negative influence on health.

As medical science has always concerned itself intensely with disease, but rarely with health and healthy people, millions are spent every year on curing the sick or relieving them of specific symptoms. On the other hand, very little of a serious nature is done to prevent illness from occurring in the first place or to limit it to the erosion of vitality that is unavoidable with increasing age. Without any diagnostics for good health, many danger signs cannot be recognized and people cannot protect themselves in time. Since prevention is better than cure, Dr. Mayr’s work on maintaining wellness was significant as a basis for and complement to medical science, which until then had been oriented toward curing disease.

Like Boerhaave and Semmelweis, Mayr was far ahead of his time, viewing illness and health in a new light and pointing in a new direction.

This can be confirmed from personal experience. One day you are sick from some so-called disease of civilization (e.g., rheumatism, angina pectoris, stomach ulcers or colitis, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, cancer, etc.), or you observe some of their symptoms (such as heartburn, a ravenous appetite, constipation, blood in the stool, tension, fatigue, insomnia, headaches, backaches or stomach pains, loss of weight, and the like), leading you naturally to think that only one specific, immediate cause (such as catching a chill, overexertion, or something lacking in your diet) is solely responsible. Since you felt fine until now and had casually boasted about never being sick a day in your life, you completely overlook the fact that the cause you are blaming for everything already represents the curtain rising on the fourth or fifth act. The previous acts have already been performed—without your knowledge.

It is an undeniable fact that most human beings are no longer healthy—in the fullest sense of the word—but are at best in a state of apparent healthiness, artificially maintained.

The “diagnostics of good health” describes the preliminary stages of a decline in health so that someone in apparent good health can recognize the danger signs in time, prevent their occurrence, and initiate a recovery.

How Damage First Occurs

This is sometimes due to inherited organic weaknesses, predispositions, and defects, and sometimes to the habit of overloading the digestive system even in the first months of life, when most mothers believe that only eating a lot will make a baby grow big and strong. On the basis of this belief they overfeed their child; even the fully satisfied infant who has peacefully fallen asleep at the breast is awakened and encouraged to drink more—whether they believe it is in the baby’s own best interests or because it is called for in the breastfeeding schedule. Openings in the nipples of baby bottles are too large, so that instead of drinking small digestible portions, children have to gulp down large amounts of milk just to keep up with the strong flow.

A baby tries vainly to defend itself by spitting up the overabundance of food. The saying, “A baby that spits up is a healthy baby,” is soon no longer applicable because vomiting and satiation reflexes don’t function anymore. Instead, the baby’s stomach gets sluggish and stretched, the excess food ferments or decomposes in its intestines and leads to a qualitatively deficient diet despite the ample intake of food. To make up for this lack its appetite often increases. The child, poorly nourished by a maternal instinct to feed, overwhelmed by parental anxiety, and a victim of old-fashioned ideas, now eats a lot and often—now he’s “a good baby.” This typical story proves that a person is not born an overeater, but is raised to be one. However, the constant pressure to eat sometimes has the opposite effect: a psychological and physical aversion to eating. The result is a thin, pale child who slumps at the table and is labeled a picky, nervous eater with no appetite. This child already suffers from considerable digestive disturbances and is frequently the object of relatives’ concern and protracted treatment by doctors.

In both cases, no matter how different they may seem, the natural instinct, which should control the satisfaction of nutritional needs, is lost. Eating because food tastes good and as an end in itself, with either the quantity or a very select quality being the determining factor—without any notion of the proper amount of food—replaces this natural instinct.

Very often food is then consumed only greedily and hastily, as fast as possible, or nervously and restlessly—in a rush. Attention is no longer paid to thorough chewing and salivating, which is essential for digestion. In the place of a cherished, cultivated meal in which every bite is supposed to be calmly tasted with relish and thoroughly pulverized by the teeth—hence the term “meal”—food is gulped down much too quickly. In this way it is not uncommon for “eating time” to turn into “feeding time.” However, all these sins of eating overburden the digestive organs and sooner or later cause disease. The effects then impact the entire person.

The Digestive System—Root of the Human Plant

Normal Digestion

Normal digestion is achieved by the compatibility of and cooperation between all these parts. Digestion does not mean, as many think, the production of a stool, but rather the following complex processes:

• The correct mechanical, chemical, and bacterial breakdown of nourishment, and its conversion into bodily substance and strength. This process includes the absorption of nutrients into the blood across an intestinal surface approximately the size of two tennis courts.