The Missing Nutritional Elements

Modern civilization has become so complex that it is often difficult for us to find our way back to the simple moral principles that all Christian people subscribe to. The Christian simply says that he proposes to treat his neighbor in all his transactions with him as he would want to be treated himself.

The only other philosophy of life that we know of is simply admitting that we, as individual personalities, propose to grab whatever we can, regardless of any idea of fairness and justice. The Communist has of late exemplified this “law of the jungle” and so did the now almost forgotten Nazi tribe.

A Complex Life

In the complex fabric of life today, the various ways of cheating at this game of life are of infinite variety. The high tariff proponent wants by this subterfuge, to force his neighbor countrymen to give him free one hour of labor every time he exchanges an hour, when an import duty is placed at 100% of the value of an import. Such a violation of the Golden Rule is nothing less than a declaration of war–economic warfare–and no neighbor would take the insult unless we were big enough to bully him into accepting the ultimatum.

A food processor, in order to sell at a lower price (thereby cutting the throat of his competitor) unfairly reduces the quality of his product. Often the final depraved form of this product is nothing more than a plain counterfeit, with no actual food value left. Truly, as John Ruskin said, nothing can be made so poor but what somebody will make it worse and sell it for less.

Nutritional Loss

Look at our staple foods, for example. Milk, bought from the farmer and paid no higher price for higher quality, is pasteurized to avoid inevitable epidemics of diseases and with complete disregard of the loss of nutritional value that occurs. This is no argument in favor of selling milk without some control of quality. All I say is that any pasteurized milk, no matter how fine a quality it was before pasteurization, is a vicious fraud after pasteurization.. As absolute proof of that seemingly unusual statement, I refer you to my lecture, “A Practical Way to Avoid Malnutrition,” where the evidence is beyond argument as to the way pasteurization creates arthritis, peptic ulcers, liver diseases, lost teeth, heart disease and many others.

To cap this climax, look at modern baby foods–skim milk, condensed, pasteurized and NOW ROBBED OF ITS BUTTER FAT.

Why this switch? Simply because of price. The drug store that sells the baby food will not try to sell a product on any basis except that of price. The fond mother is never told that there is any choice in quality.

Any number of “experts” can be cited to prove that oleo is equal to butter. Experts have been saving that ever since the first oleo was made 60 years ago.

Counterfeit Food

But suppose your baby died of an infection that was fatal only by reason of undermined vitality consequent on the use of such counterfeit food? Just how could you prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” his responsibility? Federal law says that a food processor is subject to a fine of $5,000 for permitting his product to become altered or contaminated because of his carelessness, ignorance or stupidity–or any other reason–to the extent that its nutritional values are impaired, or if toxic substances are added. According to that, every pint of pasteurized milk and every pound of bleached flour ever sold has been in violation of that law.

Poison Bleach

As a result of the poison bleach in the flour we may get diabetes by reason of the xanthine in the germ, a part of the vitamin complex, being changed into a vicious poison, alloxan, by the action of the bleach chemical (chlorine dioxide) (Thorpe’s Dictionary of Chemistry, article on xanthine). And we find that vitamin E actually protects test animals against alloxan. (Ann. Review Biochem., v. 18, p. 343.) Of course these are just possibilities, not certainties. Only it is a certainty that test animals will drop dead, if fed on such food.

Fundamental Principles

To get back to fundamental principles, it is the responsibility of the food processor to see that he passes on all the nutritional elements in his product to the consumer. If he does not know that the butter he adulterates by renovating and rechurning in fresh milk is a fraud by reason of the loss of all its vitamin E due to rancidity, he is no less culpable. Good butter has so much vitamin E that if you paid for that one item alone at market price, the rest would be free. But if you eat bleached flour bread and oleo, aIl without any of its vitamin, no wonder you might turn up as a statistic before long–one of the 700,000 people each year who die from heart disease.

Read the story in the A.M.A. Journal of March 21, 1953, page 1179, on acute poisoning from flour bleach, and estimate how much harm has been done bv the slower chronic action of those poisons in promoting diabetes and heart disease, Mental disturbances, severe itch, loss of appetite, insomnia and “morose depression” occurred from the use of both kinds of flour bleaches commonly used.