The Natural Hygiene Movement: What Is It and How Can It Help You Live a Healthy Life?
HISTORY AND FOUNDERS OF HYGIENE
Today there is a large movement of people educating themselves and adopting a whole food plant-based diet. You will see the term plant-based everywhere throughout the world of food and nutrition. This could appear to be a relatively new movement toward healthier eating; however, this has been around for hundreds of years. Before John Robbins’ books Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, Colin Campbell’s book The China Study, and the popular 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives, there were other pioneers of this movement toward optimal health. In the 1800’s the term Hygienist, or the Natural Hygiene Movement spread across Europe and into the United States. A few men known for bringing natural health, vegetarian diets, and questioning medical treatments and procedures to the forefront were Sylvester Graham, Russell Trall, and Isaac Jennings.
After these men and many others paved the way in the 1800’s, Dr. Herbert Shelton, born in Texas in 1895, spent his life writing over 40 books on natural hygiene, which included authoring a series of seven volumes titled The Natural Hygienic System. He lectured extensively on the topic, speaking for hours at a time, and helped teach others how to bring their diseased bodies back to a state of health. Later in his life, Shelton opened his own health school and claims to have helped heal thousands of patients through water fasting and raw foods. In many respects, he helped birth the raw food movement today. He was heavily criticized by the medical community as practicing quackery, and for his belief in not using medicine to make the body well. This was during a time when Rockefeller took over the entire medical community, put all naturopathic doctors and other natural healers out of business, and labelling them as “quacks.”
In Dr. Shelton’s book Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life, he explains the very unsanitary conditions during the 1800’s which he believed contributed to the deaths of many people. Very simple concepts were blatantly ignored. For example, denying patients fresh air and water while sick in the hospitals was standard practice. Rooms were hot and stuffy, and many patients screamed for water which they were told would not help their condition. Many physicians frowned upon and vehemently opposed bathing while wounds were left dirty and unwashed. It was common practice for surgeons to not wash their hands after working with a deceased patient then running to deliver a newborn. Bleeding patients, blistering their skin, using leeches, giving patients so-called medications, that were nothing but poison such as mercury and quinine, were in fact making patients even worse and killing them in many cases. These inhumane principles, which didn’t cure anyone, led Shelton to inform the public about living in accordance with nature and human biology.
WHAT DOES HYGIENE CONSIST OF?
Most of us think of the word hygiene as keeping our body clean by bathing, washing our hands regularly, brushing our teeth, the standard external things we have been taught. Unfortunately, this is not what the real term Natural Hygiene is about, even though they are simple elements included within it. Dr. Shelton describes hygiene in the following manner is his book Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life,
“Hygiene is properly defined as that branch of biology which designates the conditions upon which health depends and the means by which it may be sustained in all its virtue and purity while we have it, and the means upon which its restoration rests when we have lost it. It is the scientific application of the principles of nature in the preservation and restoration of health.” (Shelton, Dr. Herbert. (2005) Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life. Dodo Press p. 122)
To summarize, hygiene includes all the elements required to maintain a healthy life and a healthy body. This includes what Shelton refers to as the “primordial requisites” of life such as oxygen and fresh clean air, sunshine, raw foods and clean water, exercise, rest, sleep, cleanliness, and the overall mental state of an individual. Natural Hygiene is against putting any form of poison into the body. A poison from this understanding is anything that cannot be converted into living matter in the body, or anything that is not food. Food is considered organic matter. Today we have been conditioned to believe that many of the promoted processed foods are health foods, and we are often told to consume them regularly. For example, flours, oils, sugar, salt, the elements found in most foods in today’s grocery store are considered poisons from the Natural Hygienists interpretation of health.
Natural Hygiene is not only about cleanliness of the physical body, it is about living in balance with the natural world and respecting what our biology is capable of digesting. Just because we can eat whatever we want, and the body will do the best it can with the material we choose to put into it, doesn’t mean it will lead to health. In fact, Natural Hygiene is stating quite the opposite, that man is inherently responsible for the chronic diseases so prevalent throughout the world. Hygienists point the finger at the medical establishment because the majority of the methods used for healing create more of a problem in the body, rather than solutions. Unnecessary surgeries and toxic drugs do not find cures for ailments, but rather aim to eliminate symptoms. Targeting symptoms does nothing to discover the real cause of all the health trouble increasing every year.
TWO BASIC CAUSES OF DISEASE
Dr. Shelton describes the two basic and simple causes of what we call disease, toxemia and starvation. When we continue to dump improper foods into our bodies, inorganic matter the body cannot digest, over time these materials build up within the entire system causing a total body constipation. Not only will indigestion, bowel irritability, and constipation occur, but all the pathways within the body will become obstructed. When these toxic obstructions create waste in the tissues all types of symptoms can develop anywhere in the body. A Hygienist does not adhere to the medical belief that individual germs are the culprits for disease, but rather the presence of toxic matter is the source of the problem.
Starvation results due to improper eating habits and wrong food choices. Even though people may be eating a large amount of food, the person may still be nutrient deficient. Even people who are overweight may still be starving for proper nutrition. The combination of eating the wrong indigestible foods, foods that cannot be utilized and are putrefying inside the body’s tissues, and the concept of cellular starvation work together to create all the diseases labelled by the medical establishment. Have you looked at the list of identified diseases today? The World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases, most recently updated in 2019 and implemented in 2022, says there are over 17,000 diagnostic categories and over 100,000 diagnostic terms. That’s an overwhelming amount of potential ailments and diseases to identify, which according to Shelton only have two main causes. If Shelton’s simple theory is correct, there is an incredible number of unnecessary treatments, research, expense, and education that isn’t doing one thing to truly solve anyone’s health trouble. ICD-11 Fact Sheet (who.int)
The Natural Hygiene approach brings very logical and simple explanations for any ailment in the body. This natural approach treats the entire body as one system that is interconnected and simply rejecting what is put into it, and what it is lacking from the natural environment. Keeping ill patients in hospitals devoid of natural air, no sunlight, eating unhealthy cooked and processed hospital food, and injecting them with numerous toxic chemicals stalls health, and in many cases will end the person’s life. If toxic substances harm the body, then why are they used in so many medical treatments? Why is chemotherapy, a known poison, used as the number treatment for cancer? The person is suffering from cancer, so adding more harm is not sensible from the Natural Hygienist perception. Adding more harm cannot do long term good. Just watch a patient undergoing multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Look how sick the poisonous substance makes them. Making the patient even more ill with harmful drugs is not part of any natural healing system.
HOW TO GET WELL USING NATURAL HYGIENE PRINCIPLES
According to Dr. Shelton, there are three necessary means of recovery and returning the body to optimal health. First, eliminate the cause of the problem which means eliminate the toxemias present in the system. Second, the body needs to restore its normal nerve energy. During distressing symptoms and chronic diseases, the energy of the body is altered and lowered making elimination difficult. Lastly, Shelton says the individual must correct the mode of living that was responsible for the toxemia in the first place. A total shift in one’s lifestyle will be required in order to avoid the symptoms causing one discomfort, pain, and suffering. These are simple steps that do not require a lot of money to implement and are in line with the natural world. No toxic substances or drugs will be used to help eliminate the already toxic body.
In order to remove cause, you must first identify what you are doing in your life, what you are eating and drinking, that is contributing to your current problem. Dr. Shelton would sit down with his patients and get a lengthy description of everything they ate, everything they drank, what they did for work, for exercise, how much they got in the sun, what type of air they breathed, what their mental state was on any given day, bathing, and sleep they were getting. A thorough analysis would immediately point him to cause, which could be a person’s cooked food diet, bad food combining, over intake of processed foods, drinking coffee, tea, milk, alcohol, breathing toxic air, working in unsanitary conditions, living in anxiety and fear, and any other number of contributing factors. He implemented a period of rest and fasting as a means to detoxify the body of poisons. When the body’s nerve energy is not busy trying to digest food, to keep you physically moving throughout the day, or talking as you need, your body’s nerve energy can be conserved during a resting and fasting period. Then all the nerve energy can be directed toward eliminating toxemias. The more work you try and do physically, the more food you ingest, the harder it is for your body’s vital energy to eliminate waste. By taking a short period of time to relax and water fast, the body eliminates the toxemias that have built up causing the symptoms in the first place.
After the detoxification process, restoring the body’s nerve energy is accomplished through the primordial requisites described above. The recovery process will include getting outside breathing fresh air, sunbathing for short periods of time, eating raw fruits and vegetables, drinking clean water, exercising, bathing properly, getting adequate rest when needed, and sleeping well. Consistently adopting these simple principles in line with the natural biological processes will restore and invigorate the body’s nerve energy. Before detoxification, when the body presented with disease, the nerve energy was so low due to the buildup of waste from bad habits. The body was overloaded working overtime just to keep your vital organs working. Once the body is cleaned, a large, cooked meal or festive celebration should not be overly taxing because the toxemias have been cleared. According to Shelton, a person who is severely toxic, could suffer from flu or pneumonia type systems following an overindulgence.
The final means of recovery is correcting the mode of living permanently. For instance, heavy drinkers cannot fix their problem continuing to drink alcohol. A drug addict cannot become well continuing to use drugs. This is no different when it comes to food and health. In order to maintain optimal health, using the natural methods previously mentioned is essential. Natural Hygiene is suggesting the cleaner you eat, the cleaner you drink, the cleaner your environment, the clearer your mind, the better you sleep, the more sunshine you receive, then the healthier you will be. The current world of medicine may disagree with these simple modes of living as a means for healing. However, Dr. Shelton had thousands of people help themselves and become well using this system. Therefore, there must be something to it.
Reference:
(Shelton, Dr. Herbert. (2005) Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life. Dodo Press.)