Food Integrity — The Foundation of Health

I do not suppose I need to prove to you the premise that you cannot make something out of nothing. That you cannot build a body and maintain it without certain essential elements of food. I think we can accept the conclusions of men like Dr. Weston A. Price, who wrote Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and Dr. Robert McCarrison, who wrote Studies in Deficiency Disease, that we lose our teeth and lose our health in the main because we fail to get foods that are intact–foods with their full complement of natural vitamins and minerals. There is an incredible amount of propaganda being spread, official and unofficial, to lead you to believe otherwise.

We have floods of counterfeit foods in the markets today that are taking a terrible toll in human health and happiness. Counterfeit foods are like counterfeit money–they drive good foods (or good money) out of circulation.

An outstanding example is bread. It really is not counterfeit–that would mean entirely an imitation. Bread, rather, is a diluted and chiseled food. The good parts have been removed and sold for animal feeding, the remainder doctored up by the various bleaching, bug-killing, mold-repelling, softening and fumigating chemicals necessary to keep an originally wholesome and perishable food from spoiling when sold in a package intended to be as permanent as a can of beans.

All this is a violation of basic pure food law which says, “You must not remove or destroy any food element in any food, and you must not add any poison or nonfood chemical in any amount however small.”

Once we compromise with principle, we are lost. We have a Constitution and we have laws in great detail to protect us against those who are either ignorant or unprincipled, who would cheat us of our health and our life itself if permitted. These unprincipled people (some ignorant) have succeeded in getting the United States Government and its President and Cabinet to front for their crooked work. Here is how:

1. Flour bleaching…admitted a criminal practise by the flour millers themselves, who, in 1906, hoped that the new “pure food law” would end the crookedness in their ranks, has been declared a law violation by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the influence of politics apparently has blocked enforcement for forty years.¹
2. Both the Federal Trade Commission and the U. S. Food & Drug Administration have officially pronounced counterfeit (synthetic) foods to be equal to the real, natural, original product. The F.T.C. has gone further and has issued official “Orders” to stop producers and sellers of natural food products from claiming that the natural food is better than the imitation or counterfeit.

Under normal circumstances, if someone claimed that they had discovered a way to make a synthetic substitute for a natural food or drug, the burden of proof to show that the new product was equal to the old would be on the promoter of the product, and until he had succeeded in so proving beyond a reasonable doubt (I would say this legal principle here should be amended to read “beyond any possible doubt”, because our lives are at stake), he would be refused the right to sell his product, at least for food purposes.

Let us take a look at this flour and bread situation, and see how this compromise with principle has worked out. First, roller grinding, superseding stone grinding, was considered a great thing because it permitted the separation of the wheat germ from the flour. This meant that the flour was more immune to spoilage, could be shipped greater distances, permitted economies in milling by increasing the size of the plant, small local mills were eliminated by price cutting. (Remember John Ruskin’s sage comment, “no matter how poor a product may be, somebody will discover how to make it worse so it can be sold for less”?)

Dr. McCormick of Toronto has pointed out in his review of Poliomyelitis that the first case was reported from Vienna one year after roller-mill white flour was first sold in that city, the first installation of such a machine. He calls polio the form of beri-beri that follows the use of degerminated flour.

The next great advance in flour technology was the invention of the bleaching system. (About 1895) It is somewhat coincidental (maybe) that the first case of coronary thrombosis was seen in an autopsy in 1898. But it is no coincidence that all flour bleaches so far used convert the xanthine of flour (xanthine is one of the germ components that have vitamin value–it cooperates with vitamin E) into a highly potent poison, alloxan. The special characteristic of alloxan is that it destroys the islets of Langerhans of the pancreas, and specifically causes diabetes.

Pathologists have been looking for some source in our food or body chemistry for years for this alloxan, because of the fact that diabetes is increasing faster than any other disease in this country. They need to look no farther.

So here we have the price of chicanery in foods. Diabetes quite certainly; probably coronary thrombosis and polio to boot.

Cancer, too, is increasing at a great rate. Children are common victims today. Heretofore the disease was rare in the young. Tests made with refined foods as compared with natural foods show an astonishing difference. Test animals on refined foods were 90% susceptible to implanted cancer; comparable control groups fed natural unrefined foods were 100% IMMUNE to the same implantation of cancer fragments, in the same period.²

Another recent newcomer in deficiency disease is retrolental fibroplasia in infants. It has appeared within the last 15 years, is going strong. It causes more blindness in babies than all other causes combined at this moment. It is prevented by feeding the mother whole wheat, or wheat germ oil. Babies prematurely born, who are exposed to oxygen tent treatment, are the most susceptible, no doubt because they lack vitamin E, the anti-oxidation vitamin. Our tissues are normally protected by vitamin E from undue oxidation, the tissue consumption of oxygen may rise as much as 250% in case of vitamin E deficiency, according to animal tests.

Back in the Indian days of this country it was a comment of the Indians who carried on unsuccessful negotiations with the white man for a place to live, to say that the White Man lied so much that his teeth could not take it, and fell out.

Yes, we are still losing our teeth because of lies. Not necessarily our own personal lies, but white man’s lies, nevertheless. The latest I have heard was that “The cause of tooth decay has not been yet discovered” and “pyorrhea is due to infection.” (Infection is just one of the things that happen, in the main, when the bars are let down by malnutrition.)

Most of these lies are found in textbooks, Government publications and in the spoutings of officials of dental and medical societies. Those who refuse to go along with the malfactions of the crowd are smeared, spanked and censured. Just like any Senator who has the temerity to expose the shortcomings of previous administrations.

Unless we have the guts to fight back at these scoundrels and their dupes, we will soon cease to exist individually and as a Nation. The diseases we have listed in the main are hereditary–diabetes and cancer especially. It is a lot later than you might realize in the fight for survival. Our nation’s enemies may be better informed than we are, and can sit and wait for the rotting apple to fall off the tree. They would be fools to fight under the circumstances, while we are so rapidly losing our stamina.

You will be appalled at the labels on the latest thing in baby foods. Condensed milk, overpasteurized (that will quickly destroy the health of a test animal causing constipation, ulcers of stomach and bowel, heart disease, liver disease, arthritis) from which the butter fat has been removed, and oleo put in its place. WHY REMOVE THE BUTTER? To sell the Government, stupid: So that the retailer can get a special deal with a fatter discount. He would not buy any of the butter-loaded stuff if the price were higher–the customer never reads the label. Do you suppose you would get any jewels in a watch if you did not know that the thing was intended to keep time? Any dealer who failed to take out the jewels and sell them at a profit, and put in glass substitutes would be equally stupid. (The synthetic vitamins put back into flour are even less useful than the glass jewels.)³

We have a nice problem in ethics here in this butter business. The latest rumor to be heard about the destiny of the huge rotating stock of Government butter is that they propose to sell it on the foreign market at what it will bring. How about anti-dumping laws? How about the impact on a country like Denmark, which makes a living selling butter–we could wreck their economy in nothing flat. I wonder if the politicians in their perplexing problems ever heard of the “GOLDEN RULE”!

I wonder what the doctors will think after they find that their babies’ retrolental fibroplasia was aggravated and caused by the lack of the vitamin E they did not get from the missing butter? (Butter, you know, is high in that vitamin, one of our few sources–good butter has one tenth as much as wheat germ oil, at which price you get the rest of the butter for nothing.)

The prize propaganda line in medical literature is “there is no scientific evidence that the human requires any vitamin E beyond what is found in the average diet.”

I will take any ten persons you can find and have them checked on a heart sound recorder and you will find ample evidence of deficiency of wheat germ vitamin deficiency including the E complex. Only 700,000 persons per year die from heart disease, and the main cause is unquestionably the loss of the vitamins E, G and B groups from the refined cereals that they eat. Why? Simply because the symptoms progressively disappear if the victim is fed the missing vitamins, each of which have their specific signs in the heart sound.

One vitamin E fraction, in fact, has the exact effect of nitroglycerine in relieving heart pains, the heart cramps that occur from too much refined food. I say, occur from that cause, simply because the extract of such food will cure the ailment. What further evidence should be necessary?

Why haven’t you heard this before? Simply because the medical authorities do not dare to investigate any vitamin deficiency related to common disease. There is too much commercial influence in the management of research. Try and find any cancer research aimed at locating possible malnutrition causes. Try and find any polio research money used to determine the relation to beri-beri. I have, and there is nothing to find. I can only say that the old definition of a medical education still stands:

“The warping of unsuspecting immature minds into a meticulous system of commercial superstition.”

Vitamin E is particularly susceptible to destruction by the oxidizing chemicals used as flour bleach. It has been quite important to the flour bleachers to keep the medical profession and the public in the dark about any need for this vitamin. They have performed this job so well that no properly educated physician will ever endorse its use or think of it in connection with heart disease. It has been branded officially as “quackery.”

Counterfeit foods, real counterfeits, are the synthetic imitations. Dextrose (glucose) is one common one. It has none of the vitamins and minerals found in natural sweets. In fact, is not even sweet enough itself to get by as “sugar”, but must be flavored with cane sugar or cane syrup. It is made from corn starch, so often goes by the phony name of “corn syrup.” It blocks calcium assimilation, so is quite out of order as a baby food modifier, though gullible doctors have prescribed thousands of tons for that purpose. It causes diabetes if fed to test animals, the only kind of “sugar” that has that characteristic. (At least no natural sugar has been found to do such a foul trick.)

Another great class of counterfeit foods is the hydrogenated fat group. Any oil of animal or vegetable source can be solidified by “hydrogenation”, a process that destroys the original oil with all its vitamins and mineral compounds, and regenerates a new one synthetically in its place. The new one is purified, deodorized and bleached, to permit its sale in imitation of lard and other cooking fats.

One important component lost is lecithin, an antidote for cholesterol. So are the other phospholipids, cephalin, etc., that cooperate with vitamin E in preserving the chromosome factors, the blueprints of life. As a result of interference with these genes by such food manipulation, we have a great increase in congenital defects in babies. Mongolism, hydrocephalus, missing digits, hare-lip, etc., are examples. These cheap counterfeit foods of synthetic source are pure calories without the vitamins or organic mineral factors found in all natural foods. As such, we have no use for calories alone in any ordinary diet, the big problem is rather how to REDUCE the calorie content without reducing the vitamin and mineral values.

“Quick Energy” the advertisements tell us that promote these phony foodstuffs. Will your automobile run better if you add more gas to a tank that already is overflowing? Or is it advisable to check the need for engine oil, gear lubrication, battery water and contact points if you want to conserve the old buggy?

Your neighbor who drops dead from heart failure has been thinking too much about calories, too little about the other food factors that protect the integrity of the body. If your foods are lacking in essentials, some day your body will break down, maybe in such a critical spot that repairs will be impossible. They tell us that heart disease is practically unknown in China where refined foods are unknown.⁴

Cattle fed grain with the vitamin E removed drop dead within a few months without showing any warning symptoms of disease or discomfort.⁵

Pliny the Elder in his Encyclopedia of Roman Times, published in 77 A.D., remarked that in the first six hundred years of Rome there were no doctors and no need of any. No wonder the early Romans had the energy to create the Roman Empire.

Here in the United States we, too, have had a virgin soil to exploit. Now it is pretty much gone. We multiply our deficiency troubles by refining and poisoning the foods from the poor soil we have left, and wonder why we lose our teeth and lose our health!

Will it be possible to arouse our sleeping authorities, our President and his Cabinet, who are so thoroughly inoculated with that “meticulous system of commercial superstition” that they have forgotten the basic principles of pure food laws, and have opened wide the gates for the promotion of food counterfeits and debased and cheapened substitutes that have driven honest foodstuffs off the market?

If immediate action is not forthcoming, we may become so weakened physically that national defense may be impossible against a better fed enemy. To say nothing about the right of every citizen to good food, and to be defended against racketeers who turn the pure food laws into a situation where the law is being used to protect the criminals instead of protecting the people, as Dr. Harvey W. Wiley pointed out in 1930.⁶

 

References Cited:

1. Reprint No. 1, 5 cents.
2. Davidson Reprint, ten cents.
3. Reprint from Jol. Brit. Med. Assn., 2 cents.
4. See book Chinese Lessons to Western Medicine, Dr. I. Snapper, Interscience Press.
5. See Annals of New York Academy of Science, 1949, Gullickson & Calverley article.
6. See last chapter of Dr. Wiley’s book The History of a Crime against the Pure Food Law, published by himself, 1930. Reprint, ten cents.