One of my father's favorite analogies had to do with arsenic. Imagine a society, he'd say, where people were crazy about arsenic--they loved the way it tasted, and it went with just about every food. They sprinkled it on cereal, stirred it into hot drinks, cooked it into meat, vegetables, bread, desserts. Soon you couldn't buy a food that wasn't doused with arsenic: It was an unbeatable flavor-enhancer and no one could imagine food without it.

Then people started to get sick. Some people's hair fell out, others lost their teeth, others got nauseated and dizzy or suffered excruciating headaches. Some people even died, right in the middle of a golf game or after lunch! What was going on? Was there any common link in all these different illnesses? 

Doctors, nutritionists, and other experts scrambled around trying to cure what seemed to be a growing number of baffling diseases. Some even wondered if it could be arsenic--it was in everything, wasn't it? But no, it couldn't be. Look at all the people who ate just as much arsenic as everyone else--and seemed to be fine!

So the Hair Association funded research into new hair-loss treatments and better hair transplants. The Tooth Association came up with "new, improved" false teeth and dental aids. Pharmaceutical companies pushed a wide range of drugs to combat nausea, dizziness, and headaches. Some of these preparations did what they claimed to do--but most had side effects that were as bad as the symptoms they were designed to alleviate! And none of them worked on every disease. You took one drug to combat this symptom, and another--or several--appeared in its place. If you took more than one drug at a time they often counteracted each other, or led to completely new symptoms--everything from diarrhea to impotence! 

Then came some truly terrible news: Research seemed to indicate that a common link in some of these illnesses *might*, after all, be excess arsenic. But people couldn't do without arsenic--they loved it too much! It was what made food *good*. 

Drug companies, dietitians, and medical specialists fell over themselves trying to come up with solutions. "Experts" told television audiences they could "get all of the taste of arsenic and none of the harm with Product X." "Health foods" boasted things like "23 percent less arsenic per serving! "Best-selling books (_Who Says You Can't Eat Arsenic?_ ran one popular title) vied in a market hungry for a quick fix--and for the taste of arsenic. In the medical establishment, the gears ground slowly: "Nothing," they reported, was "quite conclusive yet." 

And still people got sick, and died. Finally, someone who'd been following all this because he was suffering so badly himself, and was frustrated because no medication seemed to help him, got an idea: "What would happen if I just *stopped* eating arsenic?" So that's exactly what he did. And what happened was remarkable--even miraculous. His symptoms disappeared. All those cures, promises, and quick fixes, all those megadoses of vitamins and minerals, all the drugs and all the medicines-- suddenly he didn't need any of them. And there was a dividend: Food *didn't* need arsenic to taste good! In fact, once he stopped adding arsenic to his food, he liked it better than when it was doused with the stuff. 

My father, Nathan Pritikin, liked this story because it was, in effect, his own story. His poison wasn't arsenic, of course. His--and our--poison (which he deduced from evidence so clear that it seems amazing today that nobody else was willing to draw the same conclusions from it) was excess fat, cholesterol, and salt--and foods so overprocessed that they're virtually devoid of nutrition.

....the central message (of Pritikin's program is): If you don't want to get poisoned, don't eat poison.