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A Practical Way To Avoid Malnutrition
Lecture delivered at American Academy of Applied Nutrition, San Francisco, California, April 17, 1948.
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After considering the collected evidence of the effects of the use of foods that are inherently incapable of building health, one is forced to conclude that the only way to avoid malnutrition is to become completely immune to the advertising blandishments of the processors of food products which have been made worse so they could be sold for less, in which procedure a greater proportion of the price was made available for commercial propaganda.
Our staff of life, bread, is a good illustration. About sixty years ago the roller mill was invented, a gadget which made possible the separation from the flour of the high vitamin components. This new flour was far less perishable, it could be distributed over greater distances without spoilage and thereby facilitated centralized production on a large scale. The old time local mills could not compete with the lower price of flour, and soon disappeared.
No tests were made to compare the nutritional value of the new flour with the old, the change was gradual and until very recently no suspicion of doubt was cast on the product. Full page advertisements were run in medical journals headed “White Flour is Wholesome” when the public in time began to doubt the wisdom of using such a devitalized and processed product that had lost its main content of minerals and vitamins. But it was 1946 before the University of Minnesota published results of a test that really caused nutritionists to sit up and take notice.1 In this test cattle were fed grain that had been degerminated like commercial flours. The cattle gained in weight, appeared to all outward indications to be in good health. But they soon began to drop dead one by one with heart failure. It is apparent that we here have the explanation of why heart disease has become the leading cause of death in all countries where the main foodstuff is white flour.
White flour, therefore, seems to be the world’s greatest monument to fraud.
Is this too harsh a term to use? Maybe the millers have inadvertently gotten “behind the eight ball” by a course of events beyond their control.
Yes, that is true, for each individual miller. Back in 1906 the State of North Dakota made a survey by questionnaire of milling companies asking their opinion of the practice of adding bleach poisons to flour. Their consensus of opinion was that it should be stopped by a pure food law, that bleaches permitted unscrupulous millers to sell low grades of flour as high grade, while the real quality was impaired.2
But collectively, as an industry, the story is otherwise, for the law never did stop flour bleaching, although the first and most celebrated head of our Federal Food & Drug Administration, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, lost his job trying to accomplish this objective; and even after Dr. Wiley’s case against bleached flour was decided in his favor by the United States Supreme Court six years after his elimination from Government service, no attempt was subsequently made to enforce the law. Whether flour bleaching is bad for your health or not you may decide after reading the article in ‘48, the Magazine of the Year, entitled “White Bread One Cause of Epilepsy?” page 28, April 1948.
So you may be sure that food and drug laws cannot substitute for your own discretion in selecting foods that will afford you the nutrition your body demands. The penalty imposed upon you for neglect of this duty may be just as sudden and just as unexpected as the penalty you will suffer if you insist on filling the gas tank of your automobile and neglect to maintain the oil level in the crank-case. You may aver today that you feel just as good as you ever did, that white flour never has harmed you, but tomorrow your friends may be buying flowers and wondering why the grim reaper had to suddenly take away one so happy and active and often only approaching the prime of life. The average food buyer, the housewife, not knowing just what a food should be like and what it should do, is in the same position as a South African Hottentot, who feels that he is not properly attired without a wrist watch, but not knowing that watches are primarily time-keeping devices, is perfectly happy with a dime store watch of tin, and never realizes that his watch is only a case without any works inside. I feel that this is a perfect description of modern white bleached flour.
To get the whole nutritional value of wheat, the flour should be as fresh as possible; the ideal way is to grind the wheat just before baking the bread.
Sugar is another common foodstuff that has been refined to the vanishing point of nutritional value. I know of a dentist who in his thirty years of practice has many adult patients at present with perfect sets of teeth who have followed his advice on food selection since infancy. His advice is very short and clear. It is simple–eat no white flour or white sugar products. That will include the banning of soft drinks, as they all contain white sugar. There is no restriction on natural sweets like honey, maple syrup, molasses, etc. It is only the refined sugars that rob the body of calcium, and wreck the teeth and bones. Most of us do not realize our bones suffer as much from sugar eating as our teeth; we wind up with false teeth, but we cannot get false bones. When we are crippled up with arthritis we have to quit working and possibly become a candidate for a wheel chair.
Butter is another food that has suffered from neglect by the Food & Drug authorities. For fifty years or so butter has been artificially colored to fool the buyers into thinking that it was richer in vitamins than it really was, for you should know that butter from cows that are not fed well is very pale and unappetizing. The coloring of foods to hide inferiority is a basic fraud that the Food & Drug laws were intended to stop. But the authorities have always been afraid of political repercussions if they meddle with established practices, and the coloring of butter never has been challenged. Not even labeling, to show the presence of the fraudulent coloring, is required. But the worst aspect of this sordid picture is that the color used–because it was the cheapest–until very recently was a coal tar dye, known because of its use as butter yellow. When cancer research workers found that coal tar applications to test animals caused cancer, they began to test the various coal tar products. Butter yellow was found to be one of the most potent cancer promoters known.
One investigator made a survey of foods in relation to cancer and came up with the conclusion that dairy foods caused the disease. He found the highest incidence of cancer in Denmark and in the dairy districts of the United States. We know now the real reason. It was not the dairy foods, but the adulterating color in butter and cheese that was causing the record-breaking incidence of cancer.
Of course, oleo is another product made worse and sold for less. Butter contains vital phospholipids that protect our very chromosomes, those little bundles of blueprints in our cells which are so necessary for passing the characteristics of the race and without which we cannot even heal a wound. Otherwise we might as well eat dime a pound fats, which are a great temptation to food processors to flavor and color to imitate dollar a pound butter and sell for fifty cents. It is still dime a pound fat. It will not protect your chromosome patterns, and it might take twenty or forty years for its use to prove to you its failure to perform as a good food should. You may recall the death of the famous ball player, Lou Gehrig, from a degenerative muscular disease. It is that kind of thing that results from chromatin degeneration. Today we are beginning to realize that vitamin E and the phospholipids in some animal fats will protect us from such a fate. Bone marrow, sweet breads and liver are about the only food sources we know of other than butter. Stomach ulcers are common in patients who have impaired ability to heal wounds. One definition of a stomach ulcer is that it is a situation where the stomach has a greater power to digest itself than to heal itself.
Milk too, has not escaped this program of devitalization. Pasteurization is in effect, the cooking of a food that should be used raw. It is one of the few raw animal foods available. What happens to its nutritional value when it is pasteurized? I can offer you a very good reference on that, too. It is found in the Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery.3 It relates the results of a test on cats, fed various combinations of raw meat, raw milk and cooked meat and pasteurized milk. The results of tests on nine hundred cats over a period of years, showed that:
- Feeding pasteurized milk, even with raw meat, definitely impaired the health of the animals.
- Feeding an entire cooked diet caused unhealthy conditions to develop within three to six months. These were:
- Gingivitis, commonly called “pink tooth brush.”
- Abscesses of teeth, and progressive loss of teeth.
- Lessened reproductive efficiency in the females, abortion common, (25% in the first generation, 70% in the second), deliveries difficult, many cats dying in labor. “Mortality of the kittens was high, frequently due to the failure of the mother to lactate. At times the mother would steadily decline in health following the birth of the kittens, dying from some obscure tissue exhaustion about three months after delivery. Others experienced increasing difficulty with subsequent pregnancies.”
- Irritability. “The females were dangerous to handle, occasionally viciously biting the keeper.”
- “Sex interest was slack or perverted.”
- “Vermin and intestinal parasites abounded.”
- “Skin lesions and allergies were frequent, being progressively worse from one generation to the next.”
- Great increase in susceptibility to infections and degenerative disease. “Pneumonia and empyema were among the principal causes of natural death among the adult cats. Diarrhea, followed by pneumonia, took a heavy toll of the kittens. Osteomyelitis was also both common and often fatal. Cardiac lesions, some ascertained clinically during life, were frequent. Hyperopia and myopia, thyroid disease, nephritis, hepatitis, orchitis, oophoritis, paralysis, meningitis, cystitis, arthritis, and many other degenerative lesions familiar in human medicine were observed.”
- Impairment of hereditary endowment to offspring. “…the kittens of the third generation were so degenerated that none of them survived the sixth month of life, thereby terminating the strain.”
- Progressive impairment of bone calcification. “The trabeculation of the bones became coarser and showed evidence of less calcium. In the third generation…some of the bones became as soft as rubber and a true condition of osteogenesis imperfecta was present. The degenerative changes in the skull and mouth grew more pronounced in the third generation. The bones were very fine, with scarcely enough structure to hold the skull together. The teeth were smaller and much more irregular. When the permanent teeth erupted, the third generation cats were frequently prostrated.”
Now, since milk is one of the few animal foods that is heat processed only for the convenience of the middlemen, as Mrs. Darlington has so ably demonstrated in her articles,4 why do not people use more certified raw milk and goat’s milk? Simply because they DO NOT KNOW what the terrible consequences are of using pasteurized milk. They do not know that pasteurized milk would be dear at any price, that its devastating effects upon succeeding generations can never be properly compensated for, and represent Nature’s penalty for our ignorance and carelessness in neglecting to select sound and wholesome food. A penalty that cannot be dodged or evaded, for we know of no way to counteract or restore the damages due to its use. Dr. Pottenger showed that succeeding generations could be gradually restored to normal by careful feeding, but the damaged individuals were just the types that flood our hospitals, incurable and often public charges. The death of second generation cats at half their life span, usually from arthritis if not from some infectious disease, is terribly suggestive of why we have twenty million arthritic victims in this country, in various stages of disability. Would these people or their parents have used one drop of pasteurized milk if they had even suspected there might be such consequences?
The use of pasteurized milk has been promoted by milk distributors with the argument that it is necessary to prevent the spread of undulant fever. The basic dishonesty of that argument has been well shown up by Mrs. Darlington and her exposé; which should be read by every housewife. Further, medical authorities have shown where two thousand cows were once accidentally inoculated with an injection of undulant fever cultures, and although the cows developed the disease, the users of their milk were not affected, although a considerable time elapsed before the accident was discovered.5
Dr. McCormick of Toronto, in Medical Record of September, 1947, shows us how infectious diseases have been becoming less and less prevalent in the last hundred years, thanks, he believes, entirely to better distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables. This has given us more of the vitamin C complex, the vitamin that activates our phagocytes and keeps them busy looking for invading disease germs.
The great increase in the degenerative diseases such as heart disease, arthritis and cancer in the same period, seems unquestionably due to the devitalization of the basic foods, flour, sugar and milk. And the pasteurization of milk has partly offset the gains in the vitamin C picture. One authority has estimated that pasteurization destroys each year as much of this vitamin in milk as is produced by the annual crop of citrus fruit in this country.
The relationship of malnutrition to cancer has been established by Dr. Davidson of Winnipeg, Canada,6 who fed mice on deficient foods and subjected them to irritants. They soon became so susceptible to cancer that every individual of the strain developed spontaneous cancer at a certain age without the irritant. By feeding the same strain of animals better foods, Dr. Davidson was able to eliminate the susceptibility to cancer, just as the cats fed raw milk progressively generation by generation lost the stigma of deformed bony structures and their susceptibility to arthritis and other disease.
Since these degenerative diseases are far less prevalent in countries like China where bleached flour, refined sugar and pasteurized milk are practically unknown, we need no more evidence to prove to us that we are victims of preventable malnutrition. Only the discriminating housewife, who is interested in learning the true function of foods, can protect us from further harm in this direction.
References Cited:
- Vol. 104, No. 2701, page 312-313–Science–4 October 1946, “Cardiac Failure in Cattle on Vitamin E-free Rations as Revealed by Electrocardiograms,” Thor W. Gullickson & Chas. E. Calverley.
- Bulletin No. 72, North Dakota Government Agricultural Experiment Station, Fargo, North Dakota, U. S. A., November, 1906, “Bleaching of Flour,” by E. F. Ladd & R. E. Stallings.
- Vol. 32, No. 8, Oral Surgery, pages 467-485, August 1946, “The Effect of Heat-processed Foods and Metabolized Vitamin D Milk on the Dentofacial Structures of Experimental Animals,” Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D., F.A.C.P.
- The Rural New-Yorker, March 15, 1947; May 3, 1947; July 5, 1947–”Why Milk Pasteurization?” by Jean Bullitt Darlington.
- Nelson’s Encyclopedia of Medicine, chapter 44, Vol. 2 (Strong).
- “Cancer a Nutritional Deficiency,” by J. R. Davidson, M.D., Question Mark Magazine, February 1943, published by Science Department, University of Manitoba.