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The Survival Value of Foods
Published in Let’s Live, 1958.
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A fleeting impression may be the only result of formidable statistics, but an experience with reality can be something you may never forget. So it is with the statistics published in connection with our so-called Number One Problems which range all the way from juvenile delinquency through drug addiction and alcoholism to sudden death from heart disease and automobile accidents. But relatively few of us are drug addicts or chronic alcoholics and we may tend to regard these as problems of others when we begin to evaluate the status of our national health, however we find there is hardly a person in these United States who will escape unscathed from some chronic addiction during his lifetime. At the family level we begin to get an insight by experience of what is the most widespread number one problem of them all–the disregard of nature’s basic food laws and the substitution of man-made laws which permit the sale of counterfeit foods to an unsuspecting, unprotected public. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that everyone knows of someone who is suffering from a chronic disease. Arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, liver and kidney disease, allergies and many other forms of suffering, have become such an integral part of our daily experiences that unless it is called to our attention, we may not realize the extent to which we are involved, or that our survival as a nation is threatened.
Sheep-like Tactics
We have been beset with a follow-the-leader pattern of conduct, led by vicious commercial interests who direct their gullible flock with apparent deliberateness into disastrous pastures to feed on counterfeit foods. Then we stumble blindly over the cliff provided by them into the dismal valley of ill health. There is no use lamenting over folly of the past. Attention should be directed toward enlightenment of those who may yet avert this tragedy. This may only come about when scientific knowledge is put to the use for which it is intended, namely, the modification of the conduct of our society to increase (not decrease) its survival value.
Facts and Conclusions
However, we find that the results of scientific research are being suppressed and misused. The attitude of the commercial interests is: how can they use the facts to the benefit of their pocket books. Clive M. McKay, Professor of Nutrition, Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., in a recent article cites one example of this type of scientific maneuvering. He states, “A very clever article has just appeared in Nutrition News published by the National Dairy Council. Written by a physiology professor from the heart of the cola industry, it describes some Scandinavian work of several years ago in which it was shown that sticky candy produced more tooth decay than sugar in solution. What is left out is that sugar in solution will promote tooth decay, and no mention is made of the erosion of teeth by the acids of soft drinks.” There are hundreds of similar instances in which scientific facts are presented in the same deceptive manner.
Rule of Thumb
“Accept the facts, but doubt the conclusions” is good advice to anyone reading the pseudo-scientific literature presented by commercial interests. For example, it is a fact that commercial fertilizers may produce a greater poundage per acre–a fact which is exploited by chemical manufacturers to sell more of their products. It is also a fact–a much more important fact–that in stimulating the plants to produce this greater bulk the quality of the crops is reduced; this latter fact you are not likely to see publicized in chemical journals. We need a better method of evaluating the products of our farms than how much profit will mature from their sale on the market. Vegetables grown by stimulation with commercial fertilizers and “protected” by poisonous chemicals from insect infestation may appear attractive when you buy them in your local market, but like Pandora’s box, this attractiveness may prove to be an introduction of deleterious materials into your body. In the face of this chemical invasion into our internal environment we must learn to use more than our taste buds and eyes to survive, instinct having lost its reliability in modern civilization. Remember, “All that glitters is not gold.”
Reasonable Approach
It is difficult to convince the person who relishes white bread with its dough conditioners, doughnuts made with synthetic grease, and stilbestrol-treated steaks that there is any connection between these counterfeit foods and his health status. Of course, when he becomes victimized by arthritis, heart disease or diabetes, for example, the job of convincing him becomes somewhat easier. especially when, after attempting to cure his condition with equally unnatural chemicals and drugs, he finds only palliative relief and ultimate failure.
Let us not limit to the social status of marriage the admonition in the Bible, “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” but enlarge upon its usual meaning to include the nutritional pattern of man, whereby chemical “masterminds” have tampered with God’s food, culling us asunder from natural foods intended for man’s use.