DATE: Saturday, March 15, 1997              TAG: 9703150289

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY SCOTT MCCASKEY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE                        LENGTH:   69 lines

SPEAKER PROMOTES HEALTH BENEFITS OF ``GOD'S FOOD'' MINISTER DISCOURAGES TRADITIONAL DIETS, AND INSTEAD RECOMMENDS RAW GARDEN PRODUCE.

Forget traditional nutrition. Reconsider chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Cure disease and remain healthy through the ``Hallelujah Diet,'' a regimen of raw fruits and vegetables.

That was the message Dr. George H. Malkmus presented at seminars this week in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach.

A Baptist minister, Malkmus said he was diagnosed 21 years ago at age 42 with colon cancer, a disease that had killed his mother. At the behest of a Texas evangelist, Malkmus rejected traditional treatment and went on a diet of raw fruits, vegetables and juices.

``I started feeling better in days, and within a year my baseball-sized tumor was gone,'' Malkmus, 63, told a crowd of about 200 at Harvest Assembly of God in Chesapeake Wednesday. ``I haven't been sick since then.''

Malkmus appeared on ``The 700 Club'' on the Christian Broadcasting Network, earlier Wednesday; spoke at Great Neck Community Center in Virginia Beach on Thursday; and addressed a gathering at Regent University on Friday. He speaks at 6 p.m. today at Charles E. Brown Park Community Services Center in Williamsburg before heading on to Maryland. The free seminars are open to the public.

A resident of Rogersville, Tenn., where his Hallelujah Acres ministry is based, Malkmus travels the nation spreading his philosophy that ``God's food,'' raw fruit and vegetables as found in the Bible's Garden of Eden, is the diet to eliminate sickness. In the last two years he has published two books, ``Why Christians Get Sick,'' and ``God's Way To Ultimate Health.'' His newsletter, ``Back To The Garden,'' has a nationwide circulation of about 60,000. Some 25,000 people are on his diet.

``The thrust of my message is for the Christian community,'' he says. ``We make ourselves sick by what we eat. . . . The same number of people dying of disease in the general world community is the same as in the Christian community. We're taught moral lessons, but never how to minister to the body temple.''

Malkmus berates ``world food'' - animal and dairy products, sugar, salt and white flour - as the scourge of the body, saying people must get ``back to the garden.'' His diet consists of a mainstay of barley green (derived from barley sprouts), raw fruits and vegetables and carrot juice. A potato, brown rice, or steamed vegetables for dinner are the only cooked food choices on the Hallelujah menu.

Fred H. Schaller of Chesapeake was among many in the Harvest Assembly audience who are on the Hallelujah regimen.

``I have heart disease, but I've been on his diet for the last year, and I feel much better,'' said Schaller, 59. ``I've lost weight and can jog a lot better. And I'm not on medication anymore.''

Drugs of any kind are on Malkmus' list of don'ts.

``There are no good drugs,'' he says. ``Not alcohol, not cocaine, not what the doctor puts on the bottle that you can't read.''

Dieticians and the medical community also draw the minister's scorn.

``After the dieticians make us good and sick at school with world food, then we're candidates for the medical industry,'' Malkmus says. ``The medical industry doesn't want to find a cure. Every diabetes case is worth a quarter-million dollars to them.''

Malkmus said he is not against doctors, ``just against what they've been taught.''

Carole Thorpe, a family and consumer science agent with the Chesapeake division of Virginia Cooperative Extension, said new U.S.D.A. guidelines for a healthy diet stress eating a variety of foods in moderation, including fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as meat and dairy products. MEMO: More information about the Hallelujah Diet is available by calling

1 (757) 868-3745 in Williamsburg or 1 (423) 272-1800 in Tennessee.

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