William Howard Hay - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

William Howard Hay, MD

Doctor of Medicine

Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...

(1866-1940) was a New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

doctor, author, lecturer, and founder of The East Aurora Sun and Diet Sanatorium.

A traditional physician for the first 16 years of his career, this New York doctor introduced the world to food combining

Food combining

Food combining is a term for a nutritional approach that advocates specific combinations of foods as central to good health and weight loss...

, ran a successful sanatorium

Sanatorium

A sanatorium is a medical facility for long-term illness, most typically associated with treatment of tuberculosis before antibiotics...

for many years (The East Aurora Sun and Diet Sanatorium), and was a renowned lecturer on health topics.

He graduated from the New York University Medical College in 1891 and spent 16 years in regular medicine and surgery, specializing in surgery. He later discovered Bright's Disease

Bright's disease

Bright's disease is a historical classification of kidney diseases that would be described in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis. The term is no longer used, as diseases are now classified according to their more fully understood causes....

, and was unable to cure it using accepted medical methods of the time. This led him to find alternative methods to rid himself of disease. He came up with the concept of food combining

Food combining

Food combining is a term for a nutritional approach that advocates specific combinations of foods as central to good health and weight loss...

(also known as the Dr. Hay diet

Dr. Hay diet

The Hay Diet is a nutrition method developed by the New York physician William Howard Hay in the 1920s. It claims to work by separating food into three groups: alkaline, acidic, and neutral. Acid foods are not combined with the alkaline ones...

), the idea that certain foods require an acid

Acid

An acid is a substance which reacts with a base. Commonly, acids can be identified as tasting sour, reacting with metals such as calcium, and bases like sodium carbonate. Aqueous acids have a pH of less than 7, where an acid of lower pH is typically stronger, and turn blue litmus paper red...

pH environment in digestion, and other foods require an alkaline pH environment, and that both cannot take place at the same time, in the same environment. After allegedly curing himself through proper diet, he wrote several books, started a sanatorium, and lectured throughout United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

See also