Everlasting Health by Robert Bernardini

Everlasting Health: Humanity's Guide to Understanding, Avoiding, and Reversing Disease
By Robert Bernardini, M.S.
PRI Publishing

A quick look at the cover tells you there are a lot of subjects covered in this book including the major degenerative diseases, depression, insomnia, infertility, fibromyalgia, allergies, etc. For the most part Robert Bernardini does a very good job. There are a few flaws. He encourages raw egg consumption but doesn’t warn that eating raw egg whites can impair your digestion of protein. He does recognize that some foods (cruciferous vegetables, for example) need to be cooked, so he doesn’t go completely off the deep end with raw food. There were times while I was reading that the old thumb-o-meter started gyrating toward the down position but the questionable points were more than balanced by many very excellent points. The author takes a stand on certain subjects that is sure to ruffle mainstream feathers. He starts off the section on mammography by citing studies that show no advantage to having the screening. He then goes further by citing more studies that suggest mammograms are actually worse than useless. And they are also notoriously unreliable.

Where Bernardini is at his best is in relating some of his personal experiences and observations. Once upon a time he was an environmental engineer and inspected factories. One pharmaceutical factory he inspected had a sprayer at the exit of the parking lot. Why? The vice president explained that if employees didn’t hose off their cars a few times a week, the cars would corrode and melt away because the air around the factory was so caustic. One of the VPs had a limp and an incessant eye-twitch. Another employee turned bright orange and eventually died. There were large fish kills downstream. It sounded like something out of a Simpsons episode, but he was not making this up. The factory produced anti-inflammatory drugs and heart medications.

Bernadini poses a lot of provocative questions throughout the book. Why do we need chemical pesticides and fertilizers while, at the same time we are paying farmers not to grow food? Why has literacy in America gone down steadily for decades? Are drug-based treatments effective? Even a senior GlaxoSmithKline executive admitted that most of the time they are not. If you want to have a really awkward conversation with a dentist who still uses mercury amalgam, ask him by what magic is that amalgam perfectly safe in your mouth but the leftover amalgam must be treated as toxic waste? Bernardini does a good job of expounding on the lessons learned from Weston Price and Francis Pottenger and contrasting those lessons with what we hear from the CDC, FDA and all the other letters of the government alphabet. He makes a good case that perhaps we should not always believe the prolific pontifications promulgated by the scientific high priesthood of ultimate truth. THUMBS UP.

 

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2009.

About the Reviewer

Tim Boyd was born and raised in Ohio, graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a degree in computer engineering, and worked in the defense industry in Northern Virginia for over 20 years. During that time, a slight case of arthritis led him to discover that nutrition makes a difference and nutrition became a serious hobby. After a pleasant and satisfying run in the electronics field, he decided he wanted to do something more important. He is now arthritis free and enjoying his dream job working for the Weston A. Price Foundation.

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