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Why Is Oleomargarine Inferior to Butter?
Publication and date unknown.
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- Because it is a counterfeit, designed to imitate butter by chemists who cannot possibly succeed because nobody yet knows, and probably may never know how to equal the forces of Nature, acting in living cells, in creating a food product. Scientifically speaking, it appears to be one of those propositions in which we constantly learn more about how to approach a goal, never to actually reach it. Even before the first vitamin was discovered, oleo makers were quoting nutrition authorities to the effect that “oleo was equal to butter.”
Today the oleo makers are still totally incompetent to appreciate the function or necessity of three lately discovered vitamins in butter:
- Vitamin E2, the counterpart in foods of the drug nitroglycerine, which prevents angina pectoris.
- Vitamin E3, the sex hormone precursor complex whose absence promotes “nutritional castration”, and the tendency to stomach and duodenal ulcers. (Much more prevalent in men than women, because the male requires more of the vitamin.)
- Vitamin F2, a complex lost by pasteurization, whose function is to protect chromosome components, and whose deficiency promotes prostate disease, arthritis and thyroid hypoactivity.
- Because it is composed of synthetic fats, made by hydrogenating oils, a process that no food product can survive. It is a basic principle in any philosophy of honest administration of a pure food law to consider all synthetic products as criminal counterfeits. The metabolic processes of the human body are not adapted to use any kind of synthetic foodstuffs for the simple reason that it has had no opportunity to adapt itself to such things, even if the possibility existed of the human body being capable of such adaptation. As centuries of time and hundreds of generations are required for such adaptation, we need not consider the theoretical aspects of the use of counterfeits. We do know that today we are confronted with new diseases caused by high blood cholesterol levels, directly a consequence of the use of synthetic fats. Clinical tests on both man and animals show a constant rise in blood cholesterol if the test subject is fed with refined or synthetic fats, while when fed with natural vegetable oils, the blood cholesterol progressively returns to its normal levels.
- Because the consumer soon loses his taste for foods in which oleo is used and therefore loses the benefit of the special nutritional factors he would have obtained from the butter. You cannot fool your own body with counterfeits. In one Navy test on an eight month’s cruise, oleo was supplied as a test in place of butter without the knowledge of the ship’s personnel. The consumption of oleo was half the usual amount of butter, and the reporting officer was enthusiastic about the great saving, both in cost per pound and in poundage. I might say, however, the real test of a food is not in getting a record reduction in quantity, but rather in finding one that created its own demand, and remained attractive to the appetite of the consumer. If you were feeding army mules, certainly you would not select feeds that were rejected after a trial by the animals.
If there is such a thing as false economy in anything, it is right here, for if you want results in performance of either men or mules, you had better select the foods that will maintain an appetite.
Shavings dyed green and perfumed with the scent of new mown hay represent the mule counterpart of oleomargarine. However skillfully done, the end result will never be satisfactory to the victims regardless of the pleasing profits the racket provides for the counterfeiter.
How is it That Scientific References Are Cited to Show That Oleo is Equivalent to Butter?
The vitamins provided by butter are also bound up in lipo-proteins in the milk casein. In every case where test animals have been fed oleo, (to my knowledge, and to the knowledge of Congressional Investigators) casein from milk was used as the PROTEIN QUOTA of the animals. No wonder the oleo performed quite well.
This little trick (gimmick in the language of racketeers) is like several others I might quote. In testing the toxicity of aluminum salts in the only report I have found, an antidote was fed the test animals along with the aluminum. (As sodium silicate, ostensibly as a part of the “mineral supplement” supplied–though I never heard before nor since of the use of sodium silicate in mineral supplements.)
This causes the aluminum to take the form of aluminum silicate (clay), one of the harmless forms of aluminum. (Because it is insoluble.) Aluminum otherwise may combine with phosphorus in phospholipids, and cause various forms of creeping paralysis, loss of control of such organs as the pancreas, with diabetes and what-have-you as a result. Just like allowing the insulation of the wires in your car to become impaired with endless trouble of no specific character and a definite shortening of life.
I could write a book on these “gimmicks” that come out of our respectable and honored universities, in support of the host of food rackets we are inflicted with. The above instance is one of the most important, because it staved off for many years an impending Federal Trade Commission ruling on aluminum contamination of foods, and earned untold millions for makers of aluminum cooking ware. Any well-informed biochemist will tell you that when it is desired to lower the blood phosphorus of test animals the most convenient way is to feed a little of some soluble aluminum salt. Lead salts are poison because they too rob the tissues of phosphorus.
YOU are not told that in any text book on toxicology or nutrition. Our universities are well staffed with the right kind of stooges to keep any such information out of all “recognized” textbooks. They rush to action to smear anyone who might suspect the truth as “crackpots” and worse. Newspapers and magazines dare not print the truth, as they would be boycotted by advertisers of counterfeits, naturally. They are not to be blamed for not committing suicide for a principle. The real miscreants are the crew of law enforcement gentry who know what the facts are, but continue to take orders from crooked politicians. To get this story I recommend Dr. Wiley’s book, The History of a Crime, price three dollars, free for thirty days reading.