Page 59 - Winter2009

All Thumbs Book Reviews

pithecines died out due to climate change (too many SUVs and flatulent for 30 seconds to tick away on their microwave
bovines?). For those who don’t have a good understanding of probability, oven. Is it really more convenient to cook your
it is not hard to believe random chance could turn australopithecine into food than to eat raw food you are adapted to? I’m
human. Others who have the nerve to question established wisdom have pretty sure Australopithecines or their descen-
difficulty believing “Lucy” is our great, great, great … great, grandmon- dants for many generations after didn’t have very
key. But suppose we let that go for the moment and follow the reasoning many modern appliances to make life easier. If
in Catching Fire. At some point long ago our predecessors got along rea- you have ever tried to start a fire without any help
sonably well on raw food before they invented fire and cooking. By some from modern technology, you know the inven-
random accident never explained in the book, they stumbled onto cooked tion of fire probably paralleled the invention of
food and liked it. Because it was easier to digest and hence more “conve- cursing.
nient,” the cooking fad took off and is still going strong after hundreds of In summary, I see an already fantastic
thousands of years. scenario being made even more fantastic. The
I know a lot of people love to cook and that’s perfectly fine, but con- careful reader may have already surmised that
venient? I also know people who drum their fingers impatiently waiting my thumb is pointing down for this one.
Review by Tim Boyd.

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 fertil-
izers 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. Review by Tim Boyd.

WINTER 2009 Wise Traditions 57