Cayce
"What we think and what we eat - combined together - MAKE what we ARE; physically and mentally." [Cayce 288-38]
"Through diet and exercise the greater portion of all disturbances may be equalized and overcome, if the right mental attitude is kept." [Cayce 288-38]
"Do not eat like a canary and expect to do MANUAL labor. Do not eat like a rail splitter and expect to do the work of a mind reader or a university professor." [Cayce 341-31]
"There should be at least one meal a day of only raw fresh vegetables, whether in the middle of the day or whether in the evening; preferably in the noonday time would this meal be taken." [Cayce 1276-1]
Rudolf Steiner
"A man wouldn’t be able to generate productive thoughts if he ate too much and too often, because his forces would be used in digestion, and there wouldn’t be any left for thinking. Schiller, Shakespeare and many other writers lived on very little food. The mind is never so clear as after long fasting. The greatest saints lived on fruit, bread and water, and no miracles were ever done on a full stomach.
When a man works on himself he harmonizes his temperaments, but until then a melancholic pupil should eat fruit, so that its sun forces permeate the solidifying and rigidifying element in melancholics. Phlegmatics shouldn’t eat black roots because they would only increase his inner love of ease. Whereas a sanguine would benefit by eating root vegetables. One could almost say: A sanguine must be fettered to his physical body by food, otherwise he might fly away. The ego is predominant in cholerics, so they should avoid hot spices and stimulating food." [Rudolf Steiner – GA 266 – ESOTERIC LESSONS 1: Number 56 – Unknown place and date]
Garth Limburg
In 1927 a British army doctor in India fed rats the diet of the English working class, and the rats ate each other.
Robert McCarrison ran the nutrition laboratory at Coonoor in the Nilgiri hills. He had spent 20 years among the peoples of northern India and had noticed that the Sikhs and the Pathans, who ate milk, butter, meat and wholemeal chapatis, were among the finest physical specimens in the Empire, and that the rice-eating peoples of the south were not.
So he fed rats the diets of the nations and watched.
The rats on the Sikh diet grew large, glossy and placid, bred well, and were free of disease. He kept over 1,000 of them for years without a single illness.
Then he fed a batch the diet of the poorer classes of England: white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, boiled cabbage and potato, tinned meat, and jam.
They stopped growing properly. Their coats went. They developed the ailments of an English industrial town, stomach and bowel disease, bad lungs, bad teeth. And their temper changed. They became nervous and vicious, bit the attendants, and turned on one another. Three were eaten so completely by their cage mates that there was nothing left to examine.
McCarrison put the photographs side by side and lectured on them in London for the rest of his life. Same rats, same cages, same country. The only difference was the food.
He called the English diet of the day a national experiment in deficiency. Nobody in the Ministry disagreed, and nobody changed the bread. [Garth Limburg]
See Also