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Primer for Food Faddists
Published in Let’s Live, 1958.
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Beware of the epithet, “food faddist.” When that term is used, look behind the name caller. You will soon find the hidden conspirator who “rules by ridicule,” and cashes in on your vulnerability by converting your health to his dollars. You will be called a “food faddist” if you are not gullibly accepting what is offered by commercial interests as food–food which dollar-wise may produce ample profit, but health-wise is nothing but a counterfeit, the penalty for using it being a loss of as much as 20 years of useful life. And you are a “food faddist” if you think worn out soils are giving us poor nutrition.
Grim Harvest Reaped
The statistics of disease are twisted in order to prove that we are living a longer life when actually, at 50 years of age, our life expectancy is greatly reduced. A recent article published in U.S. News and World Report (August 2, 1957, page 67) showed that American children, when tested for muscular fitness, had 57.9% failures, while comparable children in Europe, showed only 8.7% failures. Later in life the harvest is cancer, diabetes, arthritis, poliomyelitis, rheumatic fever, heart disease and cardiovascular disease. This is the disease-harvest created by counterfeit foods of refined sugar, soft drinks, hydrogenated fats, white flour and glucose. All are so thoroughly promoted that it is almost impossible to buy natural foods. Peanut butter, for example, is criminally adulterated with synthetic fat and synthetic sugar, (hydrogenated fat, sometimes called “hardened,” and “dextrose” on the label).
Contradictory Evidence
Those who would call the people who question the quality of counterfeit and refined foods “food faddists” are contradicting the best scientific opinions. Let us take a very careful look at the evidence:
1. Are our soils wearing out to a dangerous point? The conclusive evidence of the soil depletion is the protein content of our cereal grains.
As the soils wear out, the protein content of the grain drops. Wheat today averages only one half the protein it had 30 years ago, and it is dropping one-half % a year.
2. Is the refining and processing of food a really dangerous practice? Potassium is the main mineral element lost in sugar refining and in white flour milling. Just how important is potassium in the food pattern? Here is some recent evidence in Nutrition Reviews (October 1957, page 298) on how potassium deficiency causes paralysis. The acute attack is brought on by refined sugar. “Often a child who has this disorder may induce an attack of paralysis by over-eating candy.” It would obviously be impossible to cause such an attack of paralysis by eating natural raw sugar or molasses with its high potassium content. Just how often is such paralysis interpreted as polio, and just how much polio is brought on by reason of refined carbohydrates? Dr. Sandler in his book, Diet Prevents Polio, believes there would be no polio if we had no excess of refined carbohydrates. This new report certainly confirms Dr. Sandler’s hypothesis.
3. Is it true that chemical fertilizers are poisonous to the degree that we really need to beware? We may refer to one report of the Minnesota Health Department: 139 cases of infant poisoning, with 14 deaths, occurred from chemical fertilizers leaking into well water and getting into baby formulas. We might cite the case, not too uncommon, of fatal poisoning from eating watermelon too freely fertilized with similar poison chemicals. Or of farmers dying from nitrite gases in silo contents from excess nitrate fertilizers, a frequently reported accident in recent years.
4. Is it really a “myth” that chemical imbalance in the human body can result from faulty diet, with serious disease as a result?
May we quote from a lecture Dr. Tom Douglas Spies gave at the 1957 annual meeting of the American Medical Association? He said, “If we only knew enough, all diseases could be prevented, and could be cured through proper nutrition…. As tissues become damaged because they lack the chemicals of good nutrition, they tend to become old. They lack what I call ’tissue integrity.’ There are people of 40 whose brains and arteries are senile. If we can help the tissues repair themselves by correcting nutritional deficiencies, old age can wait.”
Real Food Faddists
The real food faddists are those who claim that they can supersede the plan of the Creator, or beat Mother Nature at her own game in the business of organizing inert matter into living tissue. The so-called “food faddists” who are being slandered recommend organic foods, foods from a living source in their intact form, whose value has not been reduced by heat treatment or other destructive influences. The use of organic foods–foods made by living cells and not biologically altered by oxidation, cooking or refining–is the only safe way to avoid the danger of the diseases of malnutrition. We may never become smart enough to find out exactly why these counterfeit foods cannot support life if we use too much of such imitation foods before we learn about their shortcomings….Incontrovertible proof may only come with irreparable disaster, with us, the human race, as guinea pigs. Let us use a little common sense instead of the blundering illogical approach which now seems to be the rule, namely, “Do not confuse me with the facts, my mind is already made up.”