Village Squire, 1980-09, Page 14You are
what
you eat
BY JIM BEER
If we truly are what we eat, then there
must be people walking the streets
made from cornchips and tacos, with
Pepsi running through their veins.
Over the past 200 years, scientific
technology has pushed man from the
fields into the city, from the farmhouse
into the highrise and from the vegetable
garden into the local fast foods outlet.
The pure and simple nutritional
balance of the foods we eat, like
sophisticated scientific development,
has seen rapid growth, manipulation
and exploitation, says Elaine Gottschall,
a cell biologist involved in nutritional
research.
Mrs. Gottschall and her husband,
Herb farm near Cromarty in Perth
County.
According to Mrs. Gottschall, we are
a society easily confused by mass
advertising, forgetting the simple
basics of food biology most of us learned
as children.
To help remedy the situation, Mrs.
Gottschall offers a course in what she
describes as basic nutrition, relating the
body to its environment.
A masters graduate in cell biology,
part of the zoology department at the
University of Western Ontario, Mrs.
Gottschall said her eight week course is
taught in simple terms.
Nutritionist Elaine Gottschall
"In the evening course, the onus is
upon me," she said. "People are
contributing their curiosity and I
contribute the information, in simple
terms."
In demonstrating her meaning of
simple terms, Mrs. Gottschall held up a
model of the molecular structure of a
plant constructed from a child's Tinker
toy set. She pulled off one of the
beads, attached to a series of small
straw -shaped pieces of wood and
explained this is like the energy created
by a plant, obtained from the sun. We,in
turn, obtain that energy by eating the
plant.
SIMPLE GOALS
With equal enthusiasm in demon-
strating how man receives the energy
needed to function, Mrs. Gottschall
recited a poem which manifests the
simple goals of the course.
"Tiny living cells,
Working side by side,
When they're getting what they
should,
Man ,are you alive."
She explains the course is geared to
teachers, nurses, mothers, grand-
mothers, seniors, students and anyone
else who may be interested, since as the
poem implies, the purpose of the course
is to reinstate basics.
Mrs. Gottschall began her 12 year
study out of what she describes as
simple parental concern. Her daughter,
had intestinal problems as a child and it
took years of going from doctor to
specialist, before a cure could be found.
The cure - to manipulate the foods she
was eating.
"After my daughter was cured, I
wondered, what's going on here" she
remembered. "I went back to school to
understand the differences, to under-
stand the whole interacton of foods.
What was happening and why it was
happening to my child. Even though the
research data was there, it hadn't
been drawn to my attention."
She said channels are just not open
for information to get through to the
average citizen.
DIG FOR IT
"The information is there, you just
have to dig for it," she added.
Born in Pennsylvania, Mrs.
Gottschall enrolled at Monteclair State
University there in 1968, where she
received a degree in biology She then
THE TOUCHMARK
cvlakers of Fine Pewter
Holloware, jewellery
See Methods Centuries Old
in Our Family Workshop
OPEN 7 DAYS
31 WATER ST. S., ST. MARYS, ONT. 284-1113
PG. 1Z VILLAGE SQUIRE/SEPTEMBER 1980