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Synthetic Foods and Race Suicide
Chapter 3 of The Value of Lecithin, pp. 17-19.
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The civilized fraction of the human race is committing suicide by its acceptance of synthetic food products. This acceptance is against their will, against their better judgment, against their sense of taste. Given the opportunity, the average person would never use synthetic imitations of good food, but he has not the chance of choosing. He must eat what is commercially available or go hungry.
What are these synthetic foods? They are, in the main, of two classes. Synthetic sugar, otherwise known as glucose, dextrose, corn syrup and corn sugar. Synthetic fats, sold as substitutes for lard and butter.
Dextrose is made by using acid (sulfuric or hydrochloric) to convert corn starch to the soluble carbohydrate form, and in this conversion everything of a nutritional value in the starch–the phospholipids, the phytates of calcium and magnesium, the vitamin factors of the B and E complexes are destroyed. They cannot survive the acid treatment, but are converted into ill-smelling and dark waste products that must be completely removed by deodorizing and decolorizing treatment with activated carbon and other methods before the snow-white refined residue is ready for doctoring up as a cane-syrup-flavored blend of “corn syrup,” or as a snow-white “corn sugar” or white corn syrup for adulterating candy and a multitude of canned fruits and other foods.
Unless sweetened with cane syrup or cane sugar, dextrose has so little sweetening power that it could not be used in foods on its merits. For sugars are used as flavoring agents, as sweeteners, not as fillers, except by deliberate adulterators who wish to load a higher priced product with cheating filler that is not readily detected. For the latter purpose, dextrose is an ideal material. There is always a little dextrose in most foods to start with, so adding more is not an obvious cheat. Just as there is a modicum of water in many foods, such as butter, and adding more is a very tempting idea to the cheater. (There are more citations by the Pure Food authorities on the offense of adding water to butter than on any other form of adulteration. There is hardly a butter processing firm in the business that has not had its run-in with the authorities, many as regular as the “pinches” for operating a gambling establishment, where a regularly collected fine is considered equivalent to paying license fees.)
In Canada, the Food and Drug authorities are more strict. Adulteration with dextrose of any food, we understand, is absolutely barred. In this country not only is such adulteration permitted, but the presence of the synthetic counterfeit stuff need not be declared on the label. Certainly a specimen of where the food adulterators make our laws, and “to the devil with the hindmost.”
Only Natural Carbohydrates Recommended
Dextrose is widely advertised as a “source of energy.” Sure, so is alcohol. But to eat it as food is another matter. The synthetic stuff in the first place is not in any way to be considered as the same as the natural form found in foods. Dr. Sandler in his book Diet Controls Polio explains the difference, and shows how much unnatural counterfeit food components fool our natural physiological controls, and create havoc with our defenses against disease. No carbohydrate is legitimate as food unless it carries all the vitamins and minerals originally in it. Otherwise we are cheated of the essential health-building factors that we need to build teeth, and bones and to keep our glands and our body in general in normal health. Sure, we can live for a long time on cheat foods, we can cheat our body a lot before a day of reckoning arrives.
Sometimes it arrives quite without warning. Whenever you read of a middle-aged businessman dropping dead from heart disease you are reading about just such an occasion.
The Value of Lecithin
We hear a lot about cholesterol too, and its effect on the blood vessels when it accumulates in abnormal amounts. Why this sudden interest? What is the antidote for cholesterol? It happens to be lecithin and other phosphorus compounds found in all natural fats. But who gets a full schedule of natural fats in his diet today? Our shortenings are synthetic fats, made by treating natural oils with hydrogen at high temperatures and pressures in a retort, as in the production of dextrose from starch.
Also, as in dextrose synthesis, the accompanying mineral and vitamin fractions are converted to evil-smelling, dark materials that again must be carefully removed by filtration through activated carbon and other absorbents. The snow-white stuff that remains is now doctored up to imitate butter, lard or what-have-you. The counterfeit fat is then advertised widely as a substitute to undersell the natural food. We even find a widely advertised condensed milk product on the market that has had its butter removed and counterfeit oleo homogenized into the skimmed residue to imitate natural milk. The users are not told what they are getting, neither are they told what they are not getting.
No wonder, when we are being cheated of the normal cholesterol metabolizers, we start to see an increase in diseases due to excess cholesterol collecting in the tissues. The major use of lecithin is to emulsify fats, as well as cholesterol. The best way to get fat and always feel tired is to eat these counterfeits. Then you will build a great reserve of fat in your tissues, and will be totally unable to recall it for use when you need it. You will be in the same fix as a person with a big bank account but with no checkbook to make use of the money. Worse, you will have to carry the unusable deposit of reserve food with you at all times. You cannot give it away, or use it yourself. All thanks to the fellow who thought it a clever stunt to make an imitation food, and swindle his fellows. He did not dream of the consequences, consequences that no doubt rebounded to his own physical detriment, too.
At any rate, we know enough about synthetic fats and sugars to want none of them. And more and more people should get wise–before it is too late. Only your own sense of propriety can protect you. The food and drug laws are of little benefit in this instance.