The International Journal of Healing and Caring

September 2003   Volume 3, No. 3

DRYING OUT FOOD BY HOLDING IT IN ONE’S HANDS
An Interview with Bernard Grad, Ph.D. (Conducted by Daniel Benor, M.D.)

IJHC: Today is Saturday, May 24, 2003, and I am with Bernard Grad and we’re discussing an unusual ability of healers. Can you tell us, Bernie, how you discovered this ability?

DR. GRAD: I conducted a series of experiments with a man called George Ille. George was recommended to come to me by a friend of his whom he met at a fencing class, the friend being a psychiatrist who worked in the same psychiatric institute that I did. George came to me initially in the lab in the early 1980s, claiming that he was producing a strange effect on meat and other animal protein that he had handled. He said he produced a kind of cessation of rotting that normally took place and spoke of it as a kind of mummification. He brought with him some material – dried meat he had worked on in that way.

We began to do experiments. We started out with taking square bits of beef and leaving them in the lab with controls and it certainly seemed as if those that he had handled dried up .However, the same thing happened to the controls. We decided not to investigate that aspect of his effects and we abandoned meat as the target.

It happened that I had been doing some unrelated studies on the weight loss of bananas in the lab and I so thought it might be a good idea to use them in the experiments with George in the place of meat because I knew for sure that bananas rotted in my lab whenever my wife gave me a banana for lunch and I had forgotten to eat it.

Now, the way he impacted on the green bananas was by holding each banana, sometimes two at a time, with one hand at each tip of the bananas. Occasionally, he would handle one banana at a time and twirl it, slowly. That was all his treatment involved. He held the bananas in this way for 2-1/2 minutes, then paused for about a minute or two, then repeated the procedure six times – that is, doing it seven times in all. The reason that he treated for 2-1/2 minutes and then took one to two minutes’ rest and then worked again was because he found that working longer than that made him feel uncomfortable.

Two things stood out with these bananas. First of all, our studies showed that bananas normally lose anywhere from 2 to 3 grams of weight every day. George’s handling of them accelerated this process at least to double the rate of weight loss so that the next day, one would immediately see a striking drop in weight in the bananas that he had handled. Another feature we noted was that the treated bananas became darker more quickly than the controls. Sometimes they went from the green stage to the black stage, barely passing through the yellow one. But the most striking feature that became apparent as we proceeded with the experiment was that after three to four weeks’ time, many of his bananas hardened in a way that looked like a kind of mummification was taking place. The pulp of the banana became much more like wood. and have remained the same for years.

This was in marked contrast with the controls, which would normally rot to a mush, with the skin splitting open, and drying until there was no pulp left and all that remained, essentially, was the dry skin of the banana.

IJHC: What were the relative time frames to the endpoint of complete drying?

DR. GRAD: Control green bananas lost 2 to 3 grams per day early in the experiment and progressively less in the following weeks, so that by the third and fourth week they were losing only a few tenths of a gram each day. Experimental bananas lost weight at about twice the control rate but by the fourth week they also lost very little weight. However, there was a striking difference in appearance between the controls and experimental bananas a month into the experiment. The control bananas lost all their pulp and only the dried skin remained. On the other hand, the pulp of the experimental bananas had hardened into a wooden consistency, were covered with a blackened skin and still retained the distinctive banana shape, whereas the controls did not.