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Counterfeit Foods and the Men Who Front for Them
Published in Vitamin News, April 1956.
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In the April issue of the Journal of the Southern California Dental Association you will find two articles by Dr. Lucien A. Bavetti (“Sugar–Natural or Refined” and “Food Faddism”) with an editorial on them entitled “Debunk and ‘D’ Truth” by Dr. J. C. A. Harding.
Both of these worthy gentlemen seem to be ignorant of the basic principles of nutritional science. To get all the cards on the table, let me set up a few principles that I defy any authority to twist, to use as a measuring stick to see how far these fellows have departed from the established facts and principles.
- All animal life including man, must depend upon organic foods elaborated by the plant kingdom. The plant and its symbionts build up inorganic materials, minerals, air and carbon dioxide by the aid of the sun’s energy into the tremendously complex foods all animal and human life absolutely depend on for its existence; animal and human life being the opposite of plant life in that instead of building up inorganic materials into organic, it reverses this process and breaks down the organic compounds into simpler ones and releases the energy they contain for their support and activity. All this was designed and consummated long before man was aware of the process, and who is just now becoming somewhat aware of the complex patterns of its operation. These organic foods are like charged electric batteries, the energy they contain can be released by the animal cell and the energy put to work. When a horse draws a plow, he is using this energy. When we use our muscles, we are releasing the energy of the sun, put into the food we eat by the sun’s rays. When we think, we are using this same energy in another way.
- All foods are complexes, of almost infinite variety and form. They are living mechanisms, not inert chemicals.
Proteins are the living fractions of plant or animal cells, incapable of supporting human or animal life if destroyed by heat or otherwise.
Fats are complex assemblies that contain not only fuel, but also vital vitamins and phospholipids, many of which are incomprehensible to the chemist because they are again, complex mechanisms, not chemicals, just as a watch is a mechanism, not a piece of brass, but to the chemist would be crudely categorized as “organized brass.” Yes, organized to do a job, that of keeping time. Organic foods are organized to keep our brains functioning as well as to keep us warm. A chemist might as well try to make a synthetic watch out of brass without the assistance of a watchmaker, as for him to try to make a synthetic food without the assistance of the plant kingdom.
Carbohydrates are just as complex, in fact no natural carbohydrate is found without accompanying natural fats, vitamins, and phospholipids, essential to its use by man.
Vitamins and minerals are in plant tissues parts of enzyme systems, and enzymes are the living mechanisms of the cell. To remove one single component–say ascorbic acid–and call it a vitamin is asinine in its concept, for every vitamin is again a complex of partners and synergists.
No victim of malnutrition is ever deficient in one such chemical. He will be deficient in a whole array of factors, for if he has used refined foods he will be deficient in dozens of single factors that might be described by a chemist who has investigated food composition. But only a nutritionist who has studied food reactions in the human subject could act intelligently in setting up a remedial diet, and synthetic chemicals would have no place in his recommendations, for chemicals are not food. As before, only a watchmaker can correct malfunctions in a watch, not the chemist who might know all about its composition, and who might not even know what the actual function of the watch might be.
Foods only become chemicals after they have been taken apart, each component carefully purified, any impurities still left carefully assayed and put on the label. A chemical must be of known composition. To assay every food before use to convert it into a chemical would destroy its usefulness as a food, just as a watch after the chemist has taken it apart is no longer a watch, but still the same material, chemically.
Drs. Harding & Bavetti would have us believe:
- There is nothing wrong with synthetic foods.
- Natural sweets are just as bad as refined sweets in causing dental caries.
- Natural and refined foods are of equivalent value, nutritionally.
As to the first statement–if synthetic food is capable of supporting life, we no longer need the plant kingdom in all its complexity to support us. Synthetic “foods” are in general, vicious and insulting counterfeits. What are a few? Hydrogenated fats, oleo, phony “vegetable” shortenings, all hydrogenated oils that should be called “death foods” by law, because they cannot possibly act as natural fat does. In careful tests on rabbits, chickens and human subjects, these hydrogenated “death food” fats caused a great rise in blood cholesterol, where honest unrefined vegetable oils reduced the blood cholesterol. What is the significance of a high blood cholesterol? Simply that it helps to bring on heart disease and sudden death.
Another synthetic food used to dilute and adulterate many real foods is glucose (corn sugar, dextrose). It, like hydrogenated fats, has no food value, unless you consider calories alone food, which I do not. Who ever needs calories alone? You cannot eat calories alone without cheating yourself of the minerals and vitamins that normally should accompany those calories, and furthermore, you no doubt are trying to get nutrition without calories alone; for the universal disease, if there is one, is overweight, the doctors tell us caused by too many calories.
And about natural sweets–Dr. Weston A. Price once related in a letter to me how an island colony had no tooth decay, though they almost lived on sugar cane. But after a sugar refinery was set up they developed the same universal tendency to tooth decay we see here. The tests reported by Dr. Bavetti were not honest tests; refined foods were a part of the food pattern of the persons involved. Sugar cane juice cannot stop tooth decay if the victim is eating white bread. Dr. Pottenger in his famous cat tests found pasteurized milk still caused arthritis, loss of teeth, gastric ulcers, etc., regardless of raw meat feeding. Crooked tests like this are a part and parcel of the counterfeit food racket. I could write a book about the gimmicks used to create false results. “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
Now, about Natural vs. Refined foods, in general. Our worst offender is refined cereals, white flour, etc.. Flour has had its germ removed–why? Because the oil in the germ goes rancid in a few days, destroys the flavor, and in fact, renders stale whole wheat flour with its rancid oil a poison instead of a food. Rancid oils act to cause muscular dystrophies, heart disease and various kinds of nerve paralysis. Cereal oils go rancid in a very short time after the grain is crushed or ground. That is why no bread can be wholesome unless made from fresh flour. That is why animals will not eat the stale cereal foods we use, unless starved into the necessity. On top of this we eat flour and bread bleached with a vicious chemical, an oxidizing agent that hastens rancidity and that converts part of the vitamin fraction of the cereal into a poison that specifically causes diabetes. (All bleaches convert xanthine into alloxan.)
It is a first principle of all pure food laws that the addition of any poison, regardless of the smallness of the amount, to any food or drink is a criminal violation of law. The U. S. Supreme Court has concurred in this. Still, we are forced to eat such foods. Why? Simply because such creatures as Dr. Harding and Dr. Bavetta spout off with such weasel words as you will find in the articles in question, as the mouthpieces for their professional society.
For forty years we were fed in our butter tons and tons of the vicious carcinogenic agent butter yellow. No doubt that is an important reason why cancer is more prevalent in countries where the most of this, “butter yellow”, carcinogenic butter and yellow cheese were eaten. As far as I have been able to discover, butter yellow was never made for any other important purpose by the coal tar industry. Every ounce of the butter so colored with cancer-causing coal tar dye was colored for the purpose of deceiving the buyer of the butter as to its quality. Every ounce was a criminal fraud, intended to get money by false pretences. Even if the most harmless of dyes were used, it would still be a criminal fraud. The buyer is entitled to get what he pays for. The highly colored spring butter from cows getting new grass always commanded a higher price, so the butter industry decided it would make all butter look as nice. “They Didn’t Know the Gun Was Loaded.” But the victims were just as dead as if killed by a robber’s gun. In this case it was a “robber’s” gun.
The apologizers for the counterfeit food makers always deny that we have any deaths in this country from food deficiencies. They refuse to admit that our 700,000 deaths from heart disease can be due to white flour and refined sugar and synthetic fats, even though countries that do not get these foods do not have these diseases. Along with poliomyelitis, only in countries eating death foods do we have these deaths.
I cannot believe that the executive management of the American Dental Association and the American Medical Association is unaware of these basic facts.
The truth is evident to any doctor who takes the trouble to record the heart sounds of almost any person. Evidences of degenerative changes in the way of valve leakage, muscular incoordination, muscular degeneration, fibrillation, skipping beats, split sounds, disappearance of the second sound and many other aberrations are common, which usually improve or disappear on the administration of a few tablets of natural vitamin concentrates of the cereal germ vitamins. There can be no argument about the whole matter. If the 700,000 people who die each year could have been reached by these tests, there is no question that 90% could have been saved.
It is this counter-publicity by such stooges as Drs. Harding & Bavetti that stops the doctors and their patients from knowing that they are suffering from a simple form of starvation, and that their condition is easily treated by better food.
Dr. Bavetti remarks that patients become victims of “quacks and food-faddists” after their doctor has told them that they have an incurable disease, and that “I am sorry, there is nothing that we can do about it.”
The real quack here is the medical man who is not permitted to tell his patient that he is starving to death. (Medical treatment anyway is the cult that is obsessed with the idea that most disease can be treated with poisons–do not forget that the official definition of a medicine is that it first must be a poison. (See Foundation Report 26A). That is a part of the whole essential principle of the control exercised over the medical and dental professions by the food industry racketeers, and for whom Drs. Harding and Bavetti are mouthpieces.
As I write this I note in the St. Louis Globe Democrat (Oct. 10, 1955) that Dr. W. S. Priest, President of the American College of Cardiology, at the meeting of the St. Louis Academy of General Practitioners, announced that the cause of heart disease is the building up of fat molecules into large sizes that causes blocking and clotting in blood vessels. He said: “When we find out how to homogenize these fat molecules of the human blood we will have the answer.”
And in the Kansas City Star of October 18 Dr. William Dock tells us too much fat in the diet is the cause of the “arteriosclerosis that accounts for so many heart attacks, brain strokes, and kidney failures.”
These men have not heard that it is the phospholipids in natural vegetable oils that absolutely prevent any such building up of large fat molecules. All phospholipids are emulsifying agents,”homogenizers”, that promote the transport of cholesterol and other fatty materials in the body fluids. Without a proper supply of these phospholipids, cholesterol and fats cannot remain in suspension, cause gall-stones as well as the heart disease etc. here listed by the best medical authorities, who are so abysmally ignorant in nutritional science, and who never would admit that the synthetic shortenings and oleo we are criminally swindled with are the basic cause of the appalling incidence of heart disease, so peculiar to America.
A most remarkable piece of dishonesty is Dr. Bavetti’s claim that soil deficiencies do not matter–crops and milk from cows fed poor feed may have no less nutritional value than those produced on the most fertile soil. This idea is also being promoted by other men who certainly should know better–Dr. Maynard at Cornell, for one. They get away with this lie by citing tests on milk showing the same chemical content regardless of the feed given to the cow. But they say nothing about the fact that the cow robs her body to maintain milk quality. Cows in Florida where the soil is the worst, live only one-fourth as long as if fed better feed. It requires carefully planned crookedness to weasel these facts, I would say. Then Dr. Bavetti cites all the Government authorities to show where “reliable” information can be obtained: Sure! write to the Food & Drug Adm. Who is the executive director? The vice president of a leading death food flour milling company in Minneapolis. Certainly, he will see that you are properly informed to shorten your life by adding to his volume of business. He will warn you against “food faddists” who do not believe in counterfeit foods, being in the counterfeit business himself. He will not tell you that in Germany a few years ago when it was found that flour bleaches destroyed Vitamin E, the practice was quickly stopped. He will not tell you that our own U. S. Supreme Court in 1918 said that flour bleaching was a criminal act, a violation of the Federal Pure Food Law, and that his job is to see that the law is not enforced. I imagine about thirty million deaths can be directly charged against these careful planners of propaganda against “health food quacks.” The Southern California Dental Association should be a little less than proud of these Judas front-men for the counterfeit food industry. Dr. Pickerill in 1911 said that all dental disease was a result of the use of counterfeit foodstuffs. Are they underwriting more business for themselves by supporting these food crooks?
Drs. Harding and Bavetti may not like these plain words, but when they call believers in honest natural foods “quacks and faddists” the quacks and faddists are entitled to a public hearing to find out exactly who is a quack and what makes him tick. The billions of dollars invested in counterfeit food rackets seem to be quite well in control of both the AMA and its aping sister, the ADA. The AMA has quite a history of criminal activity. Do not forget it was fined for trying to set up a monopoly of medicine and surgery in Washington D. C. a few years back, and was later again convicted on the State level for the same offence in the State of Washington. (Ask for my free reprint of booklet by U. S. Asst. Atty. General Thurman Arnold, Why We are Prosecuting the AMA; or the free reprint of Dr. H. A. Wiley’s summary of his conclusions showing how the Food & Drug Adm. is protecting the crooked food maker instead of protecting the people–Special Reprint 11-50, The History of a Crime Against the Food Law.)