Everybody wants to stay young and healthy. Nobody wants to grow old. We should be able to reach this stage in life with our health and faculties unimpaired. Man’s search for the secret of prolonging human life and vitality began thousands of years ago. All sorts of strange notions and potions have been tried, but to no avail. Each generation had produced people who made the quest for the magic elixir of life a special dedication of their time and thought.

Road to Longevity
In our own lifetime we remember professor Metchnikoff, who made researches into the Bulgarians’ way of living. The hardy peasants of the Bulgarian Mountains are famous for their longevity. An extraordinary percentage of them - compared with other races - live past the century mark. Metchnikoff spent much time among them with a view to ascertaining whether it was some special kind of diet or scheme of living that accounted for their long life spans. According to ‘Science of Life’ books, Prof. Metchnikoff finally attributed their long lives and relative freedom from disease to the fact that their principal article of diet was yogurt. Yogurt is milk that has been soured and thickened by a culture.
Metchnikoff, therefore, discovered that the lactic acid producing bacteria in yogurt creates an environment in the large intestine (the colon) which prevents the over-development of putrefactive bacteria known as the colon bacilli or B Coli. Metchnikoff considered that old age and senility are attributable to toxins that cause hardening of the arteries. These toxins, he said, arise from the colon due to the overactivity of putrefactive bacteria. In health, the putrefactive bacteria are kept in check by friendly micro-organisms which produce lactic acid ferments, detrimental to the B Coli.
Experience has shown that a safe and rapid way to restore bacterial balance in the colon is to take yogurt, which has the power of inhibiting the proliferation of harmful micro-organisms that cause putrefaction and delayed elimination. Yogurt contains copious quantities of the lactic acid bacteria, and other ferments. Medical science affirms that yogurt is beneficial in such intestinal ailments as colitis, dysentery and infantile gastroenteritis. It is also effective in constipation, flatulence and such children’s ailments as poor appetite, stomach upsets and emaciation.
Premature old age is one of the greatest tragedies of life. When interest wanes, when fatigue is continual, when minor illness is chronic, when food ceases to please, when the former pleasures have all palled, when ambition and enthusiasm are dead, then we are old; what matters it the time or years? Health, high spirits, enthusiasm, energy, ambition, enjoyment -without these we are old. These also are all concomitants of health, and without health we are old, no matter at what term of years. And yet, as we shall see, premature old age, or sick old age, is not inevitable. Both can be easily and positively avoided.

Short-cut to Health
It is natural for man to be well - right to the end of his days. It is unnatural for man to be ill. According to ‘Science of Life’ books, the average life span of an animal is five times the time it takes to reach its physical maturity. Man reaches physical maturity at approximately 25 years of age, so it is reasonable to believe that nature intended man to enjoy a life span extending over 125 years. We can all live, barring accidents and violence, to be at least a hundred. The body does not wear out. It is infected out, or poisoned out, or started out or breaks down through some mineral or vitamin deficiency. If these dangers are deliberately eradicated from our life, no evidence exists to show why we should not live to be at least a hundred.
The message that nutritional sciences holds today for all people is that any individual may start to re-chemicalise the cells of the body by getting vital food elements and thus initiate a new era of mental and physical health. In his book ‘Health Via Food’, Dr. William Howard Hay makes the following very interesting contribution to the discussion of the problem as to the causes of premature old age. Once we can establish the causes of old age, the remedial measures will present no great problem. He writes, "the burning question with most who do not wish to grow old is whether or not the thing is really controllable and to this there is only theory to answer, but it is reasonable to suppose that if age were due to the increased accumulation of acids, as all are pretty well agreed, then in just as far as acid formation is controllable, to just the same extent is old age controllable".
Harmless acids, those not in themselves poisonous, if injected into the circulation of the little laboratory animals, in quantity just sufficient to neutralise the normal alkalinity of the blood, will cause almost instant death. All functions suspended until alkalinity is again restored, and they do not live long enough for this to occur. This intolerance of acid is a normal protection for body function, and if we cannot spare enough alkali from our reserves to neutralise all acids, we die, and we are said to have died of natural causes. Such death is always unnatural, because it has violated Nature’s provisions for health, and is a suicide just as is the knife or the pistol way of taking it off".
Seneca said nearly two thousand years ago that men do not die, they kill themselves. So they do, not violently, but little by little through their whole lives they set the stage for a taking off that is always premature, even if delayed beyond the usual limits of life.

Diet Regulations
We may keep in mind the four sources of acid formation and we will see that these are self-created sources, therefore, if understood and not avoided, it becomes a suicide to die through acidosis. The first of these sources is found in the habit of taking ten times as much protein as the body requires for tissue replacement, the building material with which the body is to repair itself, the most highly acid-forming of all the foods.
The second cause or source is found in the general use of the processed, de-alkalinized, refined or denatured foods that are so common; those made from white flour or refined white sugar, acid-forming in themselves and robbed of their own normal alkalies. The third source is found in the use of good or bad foods in incompatible mixtures, the fermentation arising from arrested starchy digestion producing much acid with each such mistake. The fourth source of acid formation is found in the greatly prolonged residence in the colon of fermenting and putrefying food residues, constipation. But as constipation results from rising acidity which lowers function by depleting the alkaline reserves, then this fourth source may be regarded as dependent on the other three, and we can say that all the sources of acid formation in the system are from wrong feeding.

Of one thing we are certain, and that is that the state of acidosis is positively within our own control, and if we can accept the indications as meaning anything, then we get old on account of acid accumulation, and acids we must fight so long as we live.

So from whatever angle we view the subject of old age, the one course that seems to be plain is to so arrange the diet that acids cannot form beyond our power to neutralise them daily, at the same time making sure that drainage is adequate for every need. This is probably all we can do to continue to live healthy, apart from thinking properly, keeping young in spirit, taking enough outdoors and doing exercises we can enjoy, and getting sufficient sleep every night.

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