People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent that they are able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute illness, the appetites is probably pretty dull anyway, so why not give a brief fast on water or fruit juice a try.
Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting more than a week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first bout of pneumonia may well last for three weeks or a month. The general rule is to eat as little as possible until the symptoms have passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have a horror of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses of Vitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.) Those having a little experience with natural medicine make teas of echinacea, fenugreek seeds and red clover and quit eating. Eating as little as possible can mean only water and herb teas, only vegetable broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice, even only cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relieved your system of enough digestive effort.
After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your life-style and improve your diet so that you aren't so toxic and don't have to experience an acute illness several times a year when your body is forced to try an energetic detox.
Diet For A Healthy Person
I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth century. Doctors Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the New Health Catastrophes state that in-depth laboratory testing of the population at large demonstrated four universally present pathological conditions: heavy metal poisoning, arteriosclerosis, sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not really healthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional supplementation. In fact the odds against most people receiving adequate vitamin and mineral nutrition without supplements are very poor as demonstrated by the following chart.
| Nutrient | Percent Receiving Less than the RDA |
| B-6 | 80% |
| Magnesium | 75 |
| Calcium | 68 |
| Iron | 57 |
| Vitamin A | 50 |
| B-1 | 45 |
| C | 41 |
| B-2 | 36 |
| B-12 | 36 |
| B-3 | 33 |
A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and does not have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing interferes with or handicaps their daily life or work. A healthy person has good energy most of the time, a positive state of mind, restful sleep, good digestion and elimination.
Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie count--eating or drinking those things that they know are not good for them but that are fun to eat or are "recreational foods or beverages." Such "sinning" could mean a restaurant bash twice a month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, ice cream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key concept of responsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent limit.
A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not exceed the digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of quantity or quality. All foods that can not be efficiently digested should be removed from the regular diet and relegated to the "sin" category, including those you are allergic to and those for which you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish, but some can, and some can with the assistance of digestive enzyme supplements. In order to digest meats, the stomach must be sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin, pancreatin, and bile, etc., and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side (not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces), and not combined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you must include meat in your dietary, it should represent a very small percentage of your total caloric intake, be eaten infrequently, with the bulk of the calories coming from complex carbohydrates such grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities of vegetables and fruits.
The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is advised to fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a chance to catch up on their internal housecleaning. If water fasting seems impossible, try a day of juicing it; if that is too rigorous, try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though less beneficial than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking your overnight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up breakfast altogether or postponing breaking your overnight fast, because from the time you stop eating at the end of one day to the time you start eating the next is actually a brief, detoxifying fast.