Enervation may develop so gradually that it progresses below the level of awareness of the person, or times of increased enervation can be experienced as a complaint—­as a lack of energy, as tiredness, as difficulties digesting, as a new inability to handle a previously-tolerated insult like alcohol.

Long-term consumption of poor-quality food causes enervation.  The body is a carbon/oxygen engine designed to run efficiently only on highly nutritious food and this aspect of human genetic programming cannot be changed significantly by adaptation.  Given enough generations a human gene pool can adapt to extracting its nutrition from a different group of foods.  For example, a group of isolated Fijians currently enjoying long healthy lives eating a diet of seafoods and tropical root crops could suddenly be moved to the highlands of Switzerland and forced to eat the local fare or starve.  But most of the Fijians would not have systems adept at making those enzymes necessary to digest cows milk.  So the transplanted Fijians would experience many generations of poorer health and shorter life spans until their genes had been selected for adaptation to the new dietary.  Ultimately their descendants could become uniformly healthy on rye bread and dairy products just like the highland Swiss were.

However, modern industrial farming and processing of foodstuffs significantly contributes to mass, widespread enervation in two ways.  Humans will probably adjust to the first; the second will, I’m sure, prove insurmountable.  First, industrially processed foods are a recent invention and our bodies have not yet adapted to digesting them.  In a few more generations humans might be able to accomplish that and public health could improve on factory food.  In the meanwhile, the health of humans has declined.  Industrially farmed foods have also been lowered in nutritional content compared to what food could be.  I gravely doubt if any biological organism can ever adapt to an overall dietary that contains significantly lowered levels of nutrition.  I will explain this more fully in the chapter on diet.

Secondary Eliminations Are Disease

However the exact form the chain from irritation or malnutrition to enervation progresses, the ultimate result is an increased level of toxemia, placing an eliminatory burden on the liver and kidneys in excess of their ability.  Eventually these organs begin to weaken.  Decline of liver and/or kidney function threatens the stability and purity of blood chemistry.  Rather than risk complete incapacitation or death from self-poisoning, the overloaded, toxic body, guided by its genetic predisposition and the nature of the toxins (what was eaten, in what state of stress), cleverly channels surplus toxins into its first line of defense—­alternative or secondary elimination systems.