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Raw Food Vitamins
Address delivered before the Massachusetts Osteopathic Society Convention, Boat, May 22, 1949. Published in Health Culture.
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The cooking of food reduces its nutritional value in animal feeding tests at least one-third, judging from weight gains produced.
Cooked foods, however, are more insidious in their nature than the tests indicate, in that various diseases develop from the deficiency of the vitamins lost in cooking that only appear later in the history of the test animals; and the changes become more apparent and serious in each succeeding generation. We can start with the reports of Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., who demonstrated that cats fed pasteurized milk and cooked meat could not reproduce after two or three generations. They usually died from arthritis, heart disease, or gastro-intestinal complications, and always lost their resistance to infections.
Just what does cooking do to foodstuffs? First it tends to destroy certain amino acids, mainly lysine, the most important of the entire group of protein components. Lysine gives us physical endurance and mental stability. Human subjects deprived of lysine become quarrelsome and ill-natured, and tire quickly at the slightest exertion.
Cooking also destroys another amino factor, glutamine, the essential tissue fluid buffer without which we cannot defend ourselves against acidosis. The pains we feel from slight burns or even hot coffee are probably due to the breakdown of glutamine in our tissues, as it is one of the organic factors in all cells that cannot tolerate even slight changes in temperature or acidity. Evidence piles up to show that glutamine may be the most common cause of arthritis, but the investigations are hampered by the fact that glutamine in the raw state outside of foodstuffs is not available except in minute quantities at prohibitive prices.
Pasteurization or cooking destroys the enzymes in foods. We have failed to recognize the importance of these enzymes. One, the phosphatase group, is very important. Pasteurized milk fails to deliver its calcium and constipates rather than aids digestion. Cereal foods fail to release muscle sugar, or inositol, and free phosphoric acid from the germ components, the phytates. As a result, chickens fed such foods develop perosis, a joint disease that seems to have its counterpart in the flat feet and fallen arches of the human family.
The inositol deficiency plus the lack of other germ factors lost in cereal processing contributes to liver disease, cirrhosis and fatty degeneration. The phosphoric acid deficiency contributes to hardened arteries and arthritis.
Dr. Garnett Chaney at Stanford University reports that he has found a new vitamin in raw cabbage juice that cures peptic ulcers. Patients put on one quart of raw juice recovered in ten days, while the best previous hospital regimes took four times as long. It is a fat soluble vitamin also found in raw milk, whose existence has heretofore been totally unsuspected. It has been named vitamin U.
The next effect of cooking is to destroy in part if not wholly the oxidizable factors in foods, that is, cooking “burns” the food factors that the body ordinarily oxidizes. Heat speeds up oxidation, and so turns food to ash before it gets into the stomach. The major function of vitamin E seems to be to protect certain factors in the tissues from oxidation. These factors include known vitamins as well as some that are unknown.
It is interesting to note that our cereal foods, especially our wheat flour, is treated by the millers with an agent (agene bleach) that speeds up its oxidative changes, that is, artificially ages the flour. Its poisonous nature is well proven by the tests made in animal feeding. Commercial whole wheat flour, containing more agene than white flour (because it contains more vitamins to be killed to keep out bugs than the white flour), caused the death of all test animals, where over half would survive on the white.
Among the newly discovered factors lost by oxidation is a vital part of vitamin E that seems to be necessary to protect us from such seizures of nervous pains like the doloroux and angina pectoris. Dogs fed white bread develop what veterinarians call running fits, and soon die. These fits are no doubt seizures like tic doloroux or angina pectoris, and cause the animal to go into the frenzy we call “fits.” The human victim is as ignorant of the cause of his agony as the dog, but when we read the morning paper and read that Mr. Well-Known-Business Man died from a heart attack at the age of forty-eight and seemed normal at his work the day before, we can draw our own conclusions. Especially when we find that cattle too will drop dead just as suddenly if fed grain that has lost its anti-oxidant vitamin E by removal of the germ. We believe the deaths were due not directly to the lack of the vitamin E but to the loss of the oxidizable factor that the E was protecting. That is why there has been such variable results in heart disease from the use of the vitamin E (as alpha tocopherol). What the victim really needs is the oxidizable factor itself, once it has been destroyed.
We need some honest enforcement of Federal laws that are being ignored by Food & Drug officials, as the U. S. Supreme Court decided in 1918 that it was illegal to put any kind of poison into flour, regardless of the smallness of the quantity. The flour millers always have claimed the bleach preservative chemical was harmless in the quantity used. Their opinions seem to be pure propaganda, and the high death rate we have in this country from heart disease would appear to be the price we are paying for permitting this kind of law violation.
We suspect that the real vitamin E is the phospholipid found in raw vegetable foods, and in fresh butter from properly fed cows. Dr. Weston A. Price first described this factor, which he named X. It seems to act by protecting the determinants that are present in our cell chromosomes, without which we fail to properly develop, and in some degree lose our hereditary characteristics. A recent test of oleo in comparison with butter, in an orphan asylum, illustrates the point.
In two years’ time a group of children on oleo, boys as well as girls, grew an average of 2.2 inches. The boys gained 6.7 pounds, the girls 8.2, per year.
Girls on butter grew only .9 inches, gained 6.3 pounds per year.
Boys on butter grew 1.6 inches, gained 8.1 pounds a year.
The investigators thought there was no significance in these figures, but let’s look again.
The girls gained more on oleo than the boys did on butter. Both boys and girls on oleo grew THE SAME in height.
On butter the girls grew almost half as much in height as the boys, and gained less weight than on oleo.
What is this but a loss of hereditary influence, the same effect Dr. Pottenger found in his cats on cooked food where they became homosexual and lost their normal hereditary endowment of racial and sex characteristics?
The tendency of modern boys and girls to develop alike with loss of the characteristic sex anatomy of wider hips for girls, broader shoulders for boys, and loss of definite height differences have been marked. Tests showed it was impossible to tell boys from girls by their anatomical differences of height, shoulder and hip dimensions. Their nude torsos viewed from the rear were identical in appearance.
Dr. Price tells of a “5 year old boy who had suffered 2½ years with inflammatory rheumatism, arthritis, and heart involvement.” By changing the diet from white flour and commercial butter to whole wheat and special butter high in the “X” factor, plus natural cod liver oil, a rapid recovery took place. The impairment of the tissue determinants in these cases renders a normal growth and development impossible, and as in the case of Dr. Pottenger’s cats, the destruction of the determinants in the cell chromosome ends the race in a generation or two by destroying the hereditary mechanism at its source.
These same tissue determinants are essential for normal repair and maintenance, and so it is no mystery why vitamin E deficiency seems to cause and aggravate multiple sclerosis and other paralytic changes.
That is why Dr. Evers was able to report recently in Germany his success in treating multiple sclerosis with diets in which the main feature was the elimination of all refined foods and the use of raw milk and sprouted grains, raw honey, raw eggs, and raw meats. He states that in 600 cases he has had consistent good results. He considers denatured foodstuffs as the basic cause of multiple sclerosis.
It is high time we carefully review the facts that are available and decide what we should do about getting the genuine foodstuffs we pay for, instead of the imitations that are as fraudulent as selling tin watches for keeping time. The trouble with most of us is that we are not informed as to what a food really should do. We are little better as food buyers than the South African Hottentot who is satisfied with a dime store watch for a bracelet.