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“Food” For Thought
Published in Priest Magazine, December 1945.
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“They shall eat and shall not be filled”, said the prophet Osee (iv, 10). And, with due apologies to the prophet, this is literally true today.
Almost every mouthful of food we eat has been tampered with by someone. It is decidedly not to our advantage, our physical well-being. As a result we eat and our bodily needs are not satisfied, no matter how sumptuous the spread. Our food is being robbed of its life’s essentials.
Big words?–maybe, but easy to prove. Some of that compliant acceptance of food, all food, without questioning must change if we wish to survive.
Of those responsible a few can plead not guilty on the grounds of ignorance. But for the worst offenders, the commercial food processors, this alibi is out. They may trumpet to the world the sums expended for ‘research’. Their dominant motivation is profit and more profit with our well-being the least considered. Their escape to date from just retribution rests on two facts: Our ignorance and, that their sins as sins of omission are not readily detected. Their deliberate deprivation of life’s essentials from the food they process only gradually manifests its bad effects. Like the feeding of poison in small doses so negatively, their abstractions will do the same evil work. Few, even among doctors, are capable of attributing the eventual effects to the true causes. That is their escape and to maintain this they work hard in denials, recriminations and even smear tactics.
Nutritional research is an extremely recent science. Discoveries are being suppressed in some circles. Only a few independent individuals are beginning to make known the crimes that are being perpetrated on the people right now. It is so recent, in fact, that medical schools may need another 50 years before it will appear in their curriculum. In the meanwhile the old adage of “God helps those that help themselves” is urgently needed by us individually.
Indications, in the light of this, point to a needed revision in the concept of disease. This does not imply a denial of germs and bacteria as disease provocative. Day in and day out these germs are our constant companions. Why is it that they hit us hard ever so often? “Because of lowered resistance” is the mainstay answer. This too needs revision and additions.
Our body is a miracle machine of chemical integration. For elaborate details read Alexis Carrel, Man The Unknown. Even our psychic faculties are dependent on this integration as long as we are in body. Take sound, take sight, take that fractional protoplasmic compound that can originate another body as a soul carrier!
“Dust thou art” is no mere figure of speech. From the earth, the soil, comes most of the basic raw material that eventuates in those complicated chemical body compounds. The Sun and the Atmosphere add to this, but these are suppliers more of energy and bulk than the fractionally small essentials. But the union among all is cooperative and close. The closer we stay with the “NATURAL” the better we prosper physically. This table shows the close relationship between our body, the plant and the soil.
But here is a worthwhile fact–NO SINGLE ELEMENT is used in its RAW FORM. Every substance is subjected to an intense processing with other substances. Energized by the Sun the plant comes forth from the soil, a miracle of complex chemical compounds. It is made to live by LIVING SOIL MICROORGANISMS. These possess the ability to take dead, inorganic matter, change it into forms that eventuate as organic constituents absorbable by the plants, without loss of their chemical characteristics. And again literally true–”And to DUST thou shalt return”!
In these natural products all life-giving essentials are present. Man has NOT been able to duplicate these bio-chemical compounds no matter what he may claim in his arrogance. BEWARE OF SYNTHETICS! They are not what we think they are.
According to that table 95% is derived from the sun and atmosphere. This acts as a carrier for the minute fractional essentials originating in the contributions, of less than 5%, from the soil. These essences are so concentrated that their ultimate use by the body demands their dispersion in that great mass of bulk. Leisurely our digestive system extracts what it needs, if there, and then evacuates the carrier, the bulk.
All and everything necessary for health and well-being has been provided by Divine Providence. And so it would be if MAN, as usual, did not interfere. He it is, either in stupidness or greed, that extracts from food all or some of the essentials urgently needed by the body. With a lack of full supply the BODY cannot function properly. There will occur breakdowns in some of the intricate, integrated bodily activities. (Why suggest birth control when the fertility factors are disappearing rapidly?) Here there is no need of the “Germ” concept of disease.
Beriberi, Pellagra, Scurvy are climatic manifestations of malnutrition, in plain English a protracted deprivation of certain food essentials. They died by the thousands from beriberi until someone found out the “Why”. Natural brown rice is “processed” by polishing. But polishing the rice, any rice, extracts the life’s essentials carried in the hull and the other discarded fractions. When someone gave the sufferers extracts made from the ‘discards’ many of them recovered. The same with Pellagra. This hits hard down South. Feeding the sufferers with certain food concentrates, they begin to recover.
These starvation diseases are climatic manifestations. When did they begin? What about the innumerable intermediate stages before they reached this terrible bodily breakdown?
Clinical nutritionists insist that the MAJORITY of us, today, are suffering in varying degrees from this same malnutrition–HIDDEN HUNGER. In one test, covering the whole economic range, only 2 out of 2511 were found receiving the essentials necessary for optimum well-being. Starvation in the midst of plenty?
As individuals, upon analyses, we can corroborate our own intermittent or chronic lack of well-being. Doctors cannot help. They themselves are victims.
Three basic causes could be listed as responsible for this terrible condition. They are:
- Depletion of soils by abuse of the land. QUALITY is becoming an unknown factor. Writer has an entire book on this point alone.
- Food processors and their methods guided by the “Profit” Motive alone.
- The COOKS! Many of them mean well. But as children of the times, in their preparation of food, they just about finish what the other two allowed to survive.
In a digest article of this type all three points cannot be covered. In fact, to prove our assertion we can single out only one of the “Foods” and cryptically cover even this. The one we choose is “FLOUR”. This is because it is the basic ingredient of bread, and found on the table at most meals.
Flour is a classic example of how a God-given food can be abused, with the abusers, deliberate in their action, escaping just retribution because of our ignorance. At the same time this brief synopsis will help explain why the Church is so solicitous about choosing FLOUR for hosts. 99% of the flour on the market today is made from wheat–BUT IT IS NOT WHEAT FLOUR. (This is no mere play on words.) The preparation of FLOUR from wheat rests almost exclusively in the hands of a few big companies.
What happens to the wheat when it enters the mill should not happen to my dog (if I had one).
The profit factor demands SPOILAGE PREVENTION. The methods developed are attuned to this ONE end. It is not the value of the food that counts. Cleverly, they achieve a final product that will last a long time–almost indefinitely. This is acquired at a terrible price to the ultimate consumer not only in money but in health.
Good food cannot last indefinitely–it has a relatively short span of life. Its entire structural makeup is living matter and dynamic; its inner action is continuous.
Wheat entering the mill is stripped of everything but its inner kernel core. The finished product: “The principal constituent of the endosperm of wheat, and hence of flour, in point of quantity is starch.” (Bailey, 140.)
The MILLERS themselves blandly admit “some loss” in this abstraction. And then proceed to minimize the loss with many “weasel” words!
We have seen that such “abstractions” from the rice grain caused beriberi with its unnumbered deaths. What about the flour we get? It is positively just as bad and dangerous!
At the end of this article there will be found a partial list of these abstractions. A study of this will show that these abstractions have been made to the point of positive deprivation of essential food needs for the body.
The first item that went ‘out’ was the WHEAT GERM. Its rich natural oils would make the flour rancid in a short period of time. However, you can buy this same ‘wheat germ’ separately at a fancy price, and the package will tell you of its vital need in human nutrition. All other abstractions are SOLD as feed supplements to farmers for their livestock. With the soils depleted farmers must buy these to keep animals at a fair margin of health. Did you buy “BRAN” as a breakfast cereal? Some of that comes from the flour in the bread you eat!
Since all flour is subjected to a final bleaching process with a gas, nitrous oxide, even poor wheat can be made to look like good wheat. That the residue is harmful does not phase the processors.
With righteous indignation making itself felt, the MILLING COMPANIES now make a concession. They call it “ENRICHING” the flour. After abstracting almost everything of value, they now put back 3, at most 4, of some of the vitamins. Even this addition is a “SYNTHETIC” and not a natural product. Some are worrying already that these synthetics will be more harmful than their absence–and they are right!
The JOKE of our days is this: In order to live, we pay out good money for lifeless foods and then pay extra money to get the food concentrates that were abstracted to supplement the original robbery. To top it there is a real racket developing in the field of “SYNTHETIC” vitamins. No man can imitate God successfully. Synthetics are IMITATIONS. If you buy vitamins–buy NATURAL VITAMINS. These are food concentrates.
Following is a partial listing made from the various analytical tables to be found in C. H. Bailey–Constituents of Wheat and Wheat Products, Reinhold, 1944.
Statement in defense of natural Whole Wheat Flour by Dr. Charles E. Banks of the U. S. Public Health Service.
“I read with considerable amazement but not with surprise the statement made by Robert M. French, a chemist in the employ of the Produce Exchange, evolving another of the various forms or THROWING A SCARE into the public mind lately adopted by the patent flour interests.
“French says, ‘If the quacks and jingoes who preach whole wheat flour were to have their way bread of any kind would become a rarity.’
“This is his special form of scare. Another scare recently appearing in the Northwestern Miller, a journal devoted to the interests of patent flour manufacturers, amounts in effect to the statement that whole wheat flour will produce typhus fever.
“Again, a large miller in a public interview threw another scare into the people by declaring regretfully that he was afraid if whole wheat were used for bread it might cause dyspepsia.
“Still another contemptible insinuation published in a flour trade journal was that the Belgians were starving because they could only get whole wheat bread–contemptible, I say, because this sorely stricken people can scarcely obtain anything to eat, and their tragedy is being exploited to frighten the American public into swallowing henceforth the only material the millers intend to make, unless compelled to do otherwise, a starch flour–just starch and nothing else of consequence.
“The present milling percentage reached in producing this patent flour does not exceed 75 per cent. of the grain, thus discarding an entire quarter of the crop as a tribute to the white flour fetich. This quarter of the crop, containing the rich elements of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, iron and the other mineral salts and vitamines of the grain, is sold by the millers as ‘feed’ for animals. The tissue-building elements of the grain thus go to the animals while the millers sell for human consumption the starch as flour.
“It is not necessary to confuse the lay public with the physiochemics of the digestion of starch except to say that starch is not an element of the body and to get anything out of starch for the body it must be converted into something else.
“The end result is what is the matter with the American people to-day, physically forty inches around the waist at the age of forty and so on, an inch for every year, a puff for each eye, and a bag for each cheek. The present milling methods are only thirty-eight years old and were devised for mechanical reasons solely because the old stone grinding was too slow. There was nothing of a dietetic or hygienic character which demanded this improved roller process to take care of the rapidly increasing size of our crops.
“Not content with this new process, which simply got out the starch more readily, the millers later invented an artificial bleaching process for the purpose of further refining the already deathly pallor of their product. This is refinement run mad and the housewives of America have been led through ignorance to believe that the whiter the flour the better or purer the product.
“A pale, anæmic generation of people has grown up under its continued use, as any medical man can testify who has had extended opportunities to examine hundreds and thousands of American boys physically, comparing them with the youths of the nations of Europe who have a whole grain diet.
“Our forefathers ate whole wheat bread for nearly three centuries, and if the absurd shrieks of the patent flour prophets of disaster were worth controversy it would only be to say that our hardy ancestors, men of brawn and vigour, who knew nothing of the bled-white wheat flour sold today, ought to have starved or died of typhus fever, and the lucky survivors should have built a museum to exhibit the last loaf of the old, deadly bread for their descendants to gaze upon.
“These athletic grandsires of ours who got the elements from the wheat which produce muscle, blood, bone, and nerve tissue, enabling them to do pioneer work and to live to old age, might well ask the starch contingents what sort of tissue starch makes, advising them that if starch has any advantage in this line it would be well to present evidence of its superiority instead of abusing the champions of whole wheat as quacks.
“These patent flour people are not quacks. They are rather apostles of the doctrine of frightfulness, and if they are successful in forcing the American public to live on denatured cereals, America will eventually become a race of physical degenerates.”
(As quoted by Alfred W. McCann in, The Science of Eating, George H. Doran Company.)