Born in Texas. Grew up on a farm. Studied Nature Cure and chiropractic. Became a doctor of naturopathy and a health educator. Supervised more than 30,000 fasts between 1925 and 1970. Published "Dr. Shelton's Hygienic Review." Wrote more than forty books. Operated a health school in San Antonio, Texas. Promoted Natural Hygiene. Much persecuted for his outspoken denunciation of orthodox medicine. Died in Texas.
It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.
General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power.
Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.
You are free to choose your own way of life, but you are not free to choose the results.
Cutting out bad habits is far more effective than cutting out organs.
What the sick need is teachers not treaters, health schools not hospitals, instruction not treatment, education in right living not training the sick habit. Both they and their advisors must get rid of the curing idea and the practices built up thereon.
The so-called symptoms of disease are manifestations of an inherent principle of the organism to restore healthy function and to resist offending agents and influences.
Health and disease are the same thing—vital action intended to preserve, maintain, and protect the body. There is no more reason for treating disease than there is for treating health.
Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds.
Life should be built on the conservation of energy.
There are many things to resist, but disease is not one of them.
There are but a few blood purifiers and these are all in the body. We know them as the liver, kidneys, lungs, colon, and a few glands.
In a fast, the body tears down its defective parts and then builds anew when eating is resumed.
Deep within the human constitution lie written laws of nature that should guide man in the conduct of his life.
We cannot be damaged into health.
So long as the processes of healing were not understood and man thought that the power to heal resided in substances and things outside of him, he logically sought for extrinsic means of healing, and a healing art was a logical development. The system of medicine, as we know it today, was a logical development out of the fallacy that healing power resides in extrinsic sources.
Substances that are injurious to the well are equally (or more so) injurious to the sick.
There are no healing agents.
Most of our so-called thinking processes are devoted to finding excuses for going on believing as we already do.
The intelligent person, viewing the great number of so-called diseases that arise out of this prostration of the functions of life, and realising that they have one and all grown out of the habitual violations of the laws of life, will recognise at once that the first step in the restoration of health needs must be to make amends at once by the unconditional return to the simplicity and perfect obedience to the laws that have been so perseveringly violated.
The skin is an integral part of the body and depends upon the general system for its supply of food and to carry away its waste. Skin health depends primarily upon the general health of the body. All attempts to deal with the skin as an independent entity, without due regard to its reliance upon the general system, must of necessity result in failure. The skin is nourished by the blood and there is no other source from which it can draw sustenance. "Skin foods" are all frauds. These are composed chiefly of grease. No fat can be assimilated by the skin or other tissues of the body until it has first been broken down into its constituent fatty acids in the process of digestion. Even were this not true, the skin contains very little fat and these "skin foods" would still not constitute proper nourishment for it. Blood is the only skin food.
If you desire truly to live you will cease trying to find magic tricks and short-cuts to life and learn the simple laws of being, and order your life in conformity with these. Realign your life with the laws of nature—this and this alone constitutes living to live.
Moderation is the only rule of a healthful life. This means moderation in all things wholesome.
Conventional eating habits violate all of the rules of food combining in the preceding chapters and, since the majority of people manage to live for at least a few years and to "enjoy" their aches and pains and their frequent "spells of sickness," few of them are willing to give any intelligent consideration to their eating habits. They usually declare, when the subject of food combining comes up, that they eat all of the condemned combinations regularly and it does not hurt them. Life and death, health and disease are mere matters of accident to them. Unfortunately they are encouraged in this view by medical advisers.
Natural laws admit of no exceptions.
The effort to cure disease has been, without doubt, the greatest curse that has ever been perpetrated upon the human race. The idea that disease is something that must be cured, the idea that it is something that can be cured, must be eradicated from the human mind before we can hope to arrive at a rational solution of our health problems.
The power to assimilate crude inorganic matter as it is found in the soil, and convert it into living protoplasm and other organic substances, or to use such substances in performing physiological function, does not belong to the animal organism. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to convert the primary elements from their crude inorganic state into the organic state. This conversion cannot be accomplished by any synthetic process known to the laboratory. After the plant has raised the crude inorganic matter of the soil into plant protoplasm, the animal may take these and raise them to a still higher plane—that of animal protoplasm. But the animal cannot do the work of the plant. He must get his food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. That is, the animal must either eat the plant or its fruits, or he must eat the animal that has eaten the plant. Food must be in the organic form. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule.
At the very dawn of history, the care of the sick was actually superior to what the great majority of mankind receive today when ill.
A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness.
The great error of physicians has been that of attributing recovery to the operations of their poisons, while they have left out of account the healing powers of the body itself. .
