The Mightiness In Leaves of Grass

There is only one test for safety and wholesomeness in food. That is the test of time. The test of a long history of use, over many generations of life. Animal tests are not reliable to indicate good food for us; each species requires a separate inquiry. The man who is successful in feeding race horses to win races cannot tell how to raise chinchillas or how to feed prize-winning sheep.

Agenized Flour

However, where poisonous effects are suspected, animal tests are valuable, for if a food is poison to an animal, such as agenized flour in causing fits in dogs, we had better accept it as poisonous for us. The bleached flour makers were very vociferous in claiming that agenized flour never had any such effect on human subjects when its effect on dogs was discovered, but now, after a number of years have passed, you will find in the March 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine, page 10, the news that English doctors, observing the effects of agenized bread, find that it caused in human victims “epileptic-like fits, abdominal bloat, irritable, negativistic and spiteful dispositions, headache, insomnia, mental depression, diarrhea and rectal itching.” The report blames “wheat allergy.” But England has not yet outlawed agene. If people on agenized bread get “fits” like the dogs on agenized bread, why look for a new cause, heretofore unknown? And, if one oxidizing bleach is poison, how can another be safe? We know that ALL bleaches cause the formation of alloxan in cereals by the oxidizing of xanthine, so all bleaches should be condemned on that basis alone.

Synthetic Glucose

This is a good illustration of the use of a new synthetic component in a staple food and the consequent reactions. Another example is that of synthetic glucose (dextrose, corn syrup, corn sugar), synthetically made by treating corn starch with acid under high temperatures, then bleaching and deodorizing the chemically altered residue so it can be used as a food adulterant. The acid treatment destroys the food nature of the product. It destroys the natural mineral and vitamin content of the starch that otherwise is nothing but pure calories. Synthetic glucose has been shown to cause diabetes, block the assimilation of calcium and predispose to cancer.

Hydrogenated Fats

The identical situation is true of hydrogenated fats. They are synthetic imitations of natural fats. They are all falsely labeled “vegetable shortening” just because they were synthesized from a vegetable oil. But the hydrogenation again was accomplished by destroying the original oil and all its components, leaving a questionable fat that is at best pure calories. Of late, it has been definitely proven that hydrogenated fats cause high blood cholesterol which aggravates cancer and heart disease. As pure calories, it never had an excuse for admission to any diet. The Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1956, had a leading article on the cause of cardiovascular disease, which kills 800,000 people per year in this country, and remarked that a major cause of the high blood cholesterol behind this situation is hydrogenated fats.

Synthetic Food Colors

Synthetic food colors have a sorry history, too. Used basically to defraud, to deceive the buyer, we might start with butter-yellow. Low grades of butter are made from winter milk, when the cows are not getting green grass or succulent feed. Their low quality is shown by the poor color, due to low vitamin content. The housewife, in her instinctive search for wholesome health-building food for her family, always was willing to pay more for yellow butter. So the custom, vicious in its inception, grew up to add a dye to the white butter so its price could be raised to that of the best butter. (Today, butter is treated with special “flavoring essence” to improve the illusion of quality–I speak here of butter, not oleo). After forty years of swindling the housewife, the gruesome discovery was made that coal-tar dye being used in butter was one of the most potent carcinogenic chemicals known to science. This started an investigation of other coal-tar dyes used in foods, with results described in the quotation added as an appendix herewith, from Morris Bealle’s Capsule News of Washington, No. 26. In the Orient, especially the Philippines, butter-yellow has been used in great quantities to dry rice, as a substitute for the costly Spanish saffron. As a result the cancer incidence has been tremendously augmented. This is discussed at length in Dr. Blond’s recent book, The Liver and Cancer (Williams & Wilkins).

U.S. Supreme Court Rulings

Now, Dr. H. W. Wiley long ago set up the interpretation of the Pure Food Law that any meddling with food to deceive the buyer was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with him in two very increasing cases, one where they affirmed that the addition of more caffeine (beyond the content of the natural coca and cola) in a soft drink to make the stuff more habit-forming (like spiking coffee with more crystalline caffeine, or beer with more alcohol) was a violation of law. The bleaching of flour was declared illegal. The principle was affirmed that the Government to prove violation need not prove harm from the added products. We know today how wise that principle was, so well exemplified in its failure of enforcement, thanks to financially powerful opposition.

Vitamin Jack-Pot

Of course, the big jack-pot in synthetic foods was struck when the vitamin discovery developed. Natural vitamins are, in the main, parts of enzyme systems, not chemicals at all but biological mechanisms. The chemist, however, took over, took apart the complexes and hastened to make synthetic imitations of the major component of each complex. He was about as clever as if he had stumbled on a watch and, in his ignorance of the watchmaker’s art, thought that his find was a piece of organized metal–organic brass. Obviously organized for a purpose, but the purpose unknown to him. His bungling efforts to make a synthetic vitamin has been limited mainly to making only simple chemical components, as if he were to cast a brass watch without the internal mechanism. Vitamin C, he thought, was ascorbic acid, ignoring the discovery of Dr. Charles Sajous of Johns Hopkins, who identified vitamin C as tyrosinase in 1933. Tyrosinase is, in fact, the organic nutritional form of copper, just as vitamin B12 is organic cobalt. Later it was discovered that copper and ascorbic acid were always found in parallel concentrations in milk, indicating that they were parts of the same complex. This explains why scurvy tends to be accompanied by anemia, copper being known as a factor to promote iron assimilation.

Nutritional Monstrosities

We might go back to the fundamental principle that a vitamin is the stuff that corrects a deficiency disease. Until you know all the reactions to a known deficiency, you certainly cannot set up specifications for the vitamin to cure it. Just because the scurvy victim gets some relief from ascorbic acid, the beriberi victims some relief from thiamin, is no proof that you have captured the vitamin in question. Ascorbic acid does not relieve the capillary fragility of scurvy; that requires another synergist of the complex, the P factor. Thiamin does not relieve the nerve paralysis of beriberi; that requires vitamin B4. A refined, pure vitamin is as much a nutritional monstrosity as a refined food, white sugar or white flour. Its use can only result in new and unexpected hazards to the user. Now, the pure synthetic product is still another step away from sanity. Just as synthetic glucose not only fails to provide the minerals and vitamins that accompany every natural carbohydrate, as refined natural sugar fails to provide these essentials, but goes further and promotes diabetes, hypoglycemia and cancer, the synthetic vitamin also has some very frightful attributes.

Known Toxic Effects

To list a few, I may cite the fact that Dr. Barnett Sure in 1943 showed thiamin to act as a long-range castrating agent on test animals, only twice the daily requirement causing sterility of second generation offspring. Dr. Morgan at the University of California has shown that synthetic pantothenic acid had castrating effects on test animals. The failure of synthetic vitamin C to stop dental gingivitis or any other infection is well known. The natural product is very prompt and reliable in this effect.

Synthetic Vitamin D

The poisonous nature of synthetic vitamin D is well known; it causes calcification of kidneys in normal doses where the natural product never does. Thousands of babies have been killed by viosterol, prescribed by doctors who were unaware of its vicious effects. I know of one pediatrician who committed suicide when he realized how many babies he had killed by his ignorance. Nausea, and the inability to retain food is the reaction to toxic doses of viosterol in the infant, plus kidney hemorrhage.

Chemical Difference

These toxic effects of synthetic vitamins are due to the fact that there is a chemical difference between synthetic and natural products. No synthetic amino acid has ever been found usable in nutrition. Amino acids must be created in living cells to be non-toxic and useful in food. They therefore must be in truth “natural, organic foods.” Amino acids made by chemical methods have been found toxic and incapable of supporting life. Only those made by living cells–by fermentation processes–can be used in food without harmful effects. The chemical reason for the incompetence of synthetic foods is discussed in the Lee Foundation Report No. 6 for those who would like to pursue this type of study. Also, in Dr. McAllister’s book Narrative on Comfrey (Lee Foundation) is a discussion of why and how organic crystalline products can change with age so that they become unfit for use either as food or drugs, even though adapted for such use at one time. We have here again the advice of Dr. E. V. McCollum, “Only perishable foods are wholesome, eaten before they spoil.”

We are paying a terrible price for our unwarranted and, in fact, illegal use of synthetic foods. There can be no honest and sound defense of such a practice.