Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

But too often the goal of the planners is a universal gray state of health corresponding to absence of disease rather than to a positive attribute conducive to joyful and creative living. This kind of health will not rule out and may even generate another form of ill, the boredom which is the penalty of a formula of life where nothing is left unforeseen.

It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.

Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.

Human life is now molded to a large extent by the changes that man has brought about in his external environment and by his attempts at controlling body and soul.

... each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.

Whatever his inhibitions and tastes, Western man believes in the natural holiness of seminudism and raw vegetable juice, because these have become for him symbols of unadultered nature.