This Famishing World

By Alfred W. McCann

Seven: Why Famine Follows the Use of Artificial Sugar

§ 90 -- Old Brown Sugar

OLD men and women consume little or no sugar. Babies that live consume very little. Sugar-eating infants do not survive. Men who drink alcoholic beverages rarely eat sugar. The victims of diabetes avoid sugar.

Thus a large element of our population consumes sugar sparingly or not at all. In spite of this the Department of Commerce shows the average consumption of cane sugar in the United States for the year ending June 30, 1917, was eighty-one pounds for every man, woman and child.

These figures covered cane sugar only. Another sugar debauch in the form of glucose candies, corn syrup and table syrup made of glucose and refiners' syrup was not included.

Combining the various forms of refined sugar and eliminating infants, the aged, whiskey drinkers and invalids, the average annual consumption of refined sugars in the United States is at least one hundred and fifty pounds per person.

The figures of the Department of Commerce show that in Germany the consumption is sixteen pounds, in France twenty-eight pounds and in Great Britain thirty pounds. America has become a nation of refined sugar hogs.

What are the facts concerning the effects of excess sugars in the diet, and what does such excess mean, in terms of degeneration, to the future of this country?

Sugar, as now manufactured, yields only heat to the body. Sugar is "purified" fuel burned in the tissues without contributing any of the salts, vitamines, biochemic reactions, building or repair material indispensable to health.

The end products of its combustion are acids. When it is considered that the American people already consume in their refined breadstuffs, breakfast foods and meats, enormous quantities of acid-producing foods, the sugar bombardment becomes threatening in the extreme.

I use the word "bombardment" because it expresses the facts exactly. In our excessive consumption of refined foods we are bombarding the entire nation's defence against disease; and refined sugar, heaviest of the artillery, is rapidly breaking down our resistance against these great enemies of the human family, anemia, tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease and diabetes.

In the days when we were eating unrefined grain products and unrefined sugars we ate more vegetables, fruits and greens, from all of which are obtained the basic or alkaline substances needed by the internal secretions. These alkaline substances keep the blood and other body fluids in the state of normal alkalinity essential to health.

Then appeared our first grave dietetic error almost simultaneously with the introduction of highly milled grains, the abnormal starch content of which must be converted in the body into sugar before it can be utilised. The body makes its own sugar, all it can use, from non-sugar foods and even though deprived of every form of commercial sugar, man, woman or child can and does obtain all the fruit, vegetable, and cereal sugars necessary to health and life.

Sugar became popular because, as our mothers and grandmothers knew it, there was good reason for using it in generous quantities. Not only was it far more flavourful but incomparably more nutritious than the refined products of modern times, upon which we are gorging ourselves at the expense of teeth, blood, bone and tissue.

Twenty-five years ago old-fashioned brown sugar, manufactured on the sugar cane plantation, was in common use. Such sugar possessed not only all the sweetness of the cane but also its aromatic and nutritive substances including the mineral salts no longer present.

Maple sugar can be refined until it, too, is as white and flavourless as granulated cane sugar, beet sugar, glucose or corn syrup.

The delicious flavour of maple sugar is due to the presence of "impurities" derived from the sap of the maple tree. The delicious flavour of old-fashioned brown sugar is due to the presence of "impurities" derived from the juice of the cane. The elimination of these impurities yields a colourless, but sweet product.

To-day we do not know whether our refined sugar is derived from the honey reed, now known as the sugar cane, or from a beet root. All we know is that it is sweet. Whence it comes, what curious processes it passes through on the way, how it affects the body when it arrives, are questions never asked.

In the old days when Louisiana was producing old-fashioned brown sugar and when a clean, wholesome, old-fashioned brown sugar was manufactured in the West Indies, the refiners, grasping at ways and means of earning greater profits, conceived the idea that if they could prejudice the public against brown sugar nobody would buy it.

So they started to drive out of the American market all the old-fashioned brown sugar then made on the cane plantations.

My work has made me unhappily familiar with many food crimes which, by their very nature, cannot be punished. This crime was literally a conspiracy against the human race, and its consequences are now to be reckoned with although no body of laws exists with which to meet them.

The refiners knew if they could prejudice the people against the use of brown sugar, thus destroying the market for it, they could then buy it up, refine it, and control its distribution, thus securing a profit on every pound of the raw material that every planter produced.

In the old days the manufacturer of brown sugar shipped his product direct to market. The refiners did not touch it on the way. Of course they were unable to collect tribute from such a system.

To get control so that all the producers would have to send their raw sugar through the refiners' hands it was necessary to kill off the demand for brown sugar. To kill off the demand it was necessary to disgust the people with all brown sugar so that their appetite for it might be destroyed.

To accomplish this they inaugurated one of the most violent advertising campaigns ever witnessed in America. In 1898 they were ready to "educate" the public and educate it they did.

§ 91 -- New White Sugar

The advertisements of the brown sugar exterminators consisted obviously of an attack upon old-fashioned brown sugar. Each advertisement was accompanied by a picture said to be an enlarged photograph of a dreadful looking animal described as a cross between a louse and a lizard.

To prove such a creature lived in all brown sugar they went to Dublin and dug up a commercial chemist who, like many other commercial chemists now earning fat fees by furnishing "scientific" support for many food indecencies, was willing to certify, for a consideration, that he had found this louse-lizard-monster in brown sugar.

One of the advertisements, which I quote word for word from the Congressional Record, read as follows:

"Professor Cameron, public analyst of the City of Dublin, who has examined samples of raw sugar, states that they contain great numbers of disgusting insects which produce a disgusting disease."

The advertisers did not say what disease. It was enough for their purpose to say it was a disgusting disease. They knew they were lying but the American public, long fed on advertising lies, swallowed the statement and asked no questions.

"The shape of these disgusting insects," the advertisement continued, "is very accurately shown in the accompanying photographs magnified two hundred diameters. It is a formidably organised, exceedingly lively and decidedly ugly little animal. From its oval-shaped body stretches forth a proboscis terminating in a kind of scissors with which it seizes upon its food. Its organs of locomotion consist of eight legs, each jointed and finished at its extremity with a hook.

"The number of these creatures found in raw sugar is sometimes exceedingly great and in no instance is raw sugar quite free from either the insects or their eggs. Brown sugar should never be used."

Now comes the devil from behind the stump, and here is what the devil said through the medium of this advertisement.

"It is fortunate, however, to note that these terrible creatures do not occur in refined sugar of any quality. Use only refined sugar."

Our mothers and grandmothers were horrified. Wherever they looked they found a picture of the disgusting louse-lizard-monster. They saw the dreadful creature in all their delicious desserts and dainties. Their fruit cakes, muffins, cookies, brown bread, taffies, candies, hard sauces and other good things suddenly appeared before them as horrible sepulchres in which reposed the dead bodies of vermin.

One after another the advertisements appeared. The Dublin professor became famous and the American public writhed in disgust.

The brown sugar industry, as far as the housewife was concerned, was completely destroyed.

Wholesale bakers' supply houses, unknown to the housewife, continued to handle the stuff in carload lots and the retail bakers fed it, without arousing their suspicion, to the poor creatures who wouldn't dream of using it in any home-made product.

The poor plantation owner who made brown sugar just as maple sugar is made to-day, found his market closed to him. His only means of disposing of his raw sugar was to sell it to the refiner. This is what the refiner wanted and this is what he got.

Just as the farmer used to send his grain to the local grist mill but was gradually forced to ship it to the centralised roller mills, thereby losing control of his product and furnishing enormous profits to a few highly organised groups of money makers, so also the planter found it necessary to do business with a few monopolists or quit.

Through the louse-lizard-monster the American people have been deprived of a luxury which there seems to be no hope of restoring to them unless, grimly determined to act for themselves, they decide to discourage the use of refined sugars of every kind and thus make it necessary for the sugar interests to give them back the old-fashioned product so ruthlessly destroyed.

In the meantime they must remember that the quantity of sugar which the human body can utilise is limited, although they are constantly encouraged to eat more sugar and still more sugar on the ground that it provides the body with heat.

Foods are neither heating nor cooling. No food has the power of raising the temperature of the body to a point higher than the normal constant, 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit. No foods are cooling in the sense that they can reduce the temperature of the body to a point lower than this same normal constant.

Sugars become heat producers only when the body's machinery of heat control breaks down. The result of such breakdown is fever. In fever the body literally burns up. Not only are the sugars of the body burned but its very tissues are burned.

The warmth so necessary to life is produced by a slow form of oxidation supported by the foods we eat.

In breathing we take large quantities of oxygen from the air through our lungs, provided the hemoglobin, or iron containing substance of the blood, is present in normal amount.

Hemoglobin carries oxygen to the tissues where it is needed and carries the waste product, carbon dioxide, away. The slow evolution of heat which accompanies this process is described as the body temperature.

In disease the oxidation or burning process frequently proceeds faster than in health. So delicately adjusted is this burning process that a slight variation of four or five degrees either way is often sufficient to cause death.

It has been conclusively established that the circulating blood cannot carry for the needs of this burning process any sugar in excess of one-tenth of one percent of the total volume of blood. To get more than this limited quantity of sugar into the blood circulation vital organs must first break down.

We simply cannot utilise more sugar than this fixed limit permits, for which reason the excess sugar now consumed constitutes one of our biggest waste problems.

Yet, always are we urged to consume more sugar not, as is quite apparent, for the good of our health but for the benefit of the sugar industry.

There is an organ in the body called the pancreas which in health sets up a barrier against the entrance into the blood of larger quantities of sugar than the one-tenth of one percent which the blood can take care of.

Cramming ourselves with sugar in quantities never before consumed by any nation in the history of the world, we are literally overloading the pancreas, and the liver, kidneys, lungs, skin and other glands are whipped into action to dispose of the excess fuel.

How long it takes for these glands, taxed beyond their strength, to completely break down we do not know. But we do know that sugar gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins because it is a slow form of suicide.

Scientists have proved that in diseased conditions of the pancreas, although they do not know how such diseased conditions are established, all excess or waste sugar is eliminated through the kidneys.

How long the kidneys can stand up under such overloading is not known. But it is known that in America kidney disease in one form or another is constantly on the increase.

In this respect it is interesting to know that the refined and concentrated sugars do not conduct themselves in the body as other sugars, such, for instance, as honey. In another chapter I shall attempt to show the really wonderful difference between these forms of sugar.

For the present it is enough to reiterate that we are laying a sugar curse upon the heads of prospective mothers, nursing mothers, infants still unborn, growing children, bread-winners and workers. To lift this curse we must exercise control over our refined sugar appetites, cutting down our consumption until the one hundred and fifty pounds per person per year is reduced to thirty pounds or less.

Happy was the day that America learned she really could pass safely through a sugarless siege.

§ 92 -- Sugaritis

While all America during 1917 and 1918 was clamoring for sugar and a Senate Committee was busily engaged in probing into the conditions responsible for the sugar famine, the Department of Health of New York City was preparing a bulletin on the spread of diabetes, a disease in which there is such serious disturbance of nutrition that the body partially or completely loses its ability to make use of sugar in any quantity, however small.

This disease makes it impossible to utilise starch as well as sugar, for which reason foods that are turned into sugar in the body, such as potatoes, macaroni, white bread, farina, rice and corn-meal, provide no nutrition and are wasted when consumed.

From the facts set forth the public health officials concluded that diabetes has been coming more and more into prominence in recent years and that during the past ten years the disease has taken its place as a very significant factor in the nation's mortality rate.

Joslin, whose work on the disturbance of sugar nutrition is now accepted as an authority in the United States, declares that we have here not far from 500,000 individuals who either have diabetes now or are destined to have diabetes before they die.

Commenting on this startling fact the Department of Health of New York City asserts, "That this is based on something more than guess-work is clear from the careful statistical analysis presented by the author."

The outstanding feature of the alarming situation revealed by Joslin is the fact that these diseases are to a considerable extent offsetting the good effects, such as prolongation of life, which should follow the development of sanitary science in recent years.

We no longer let our garbage decompose in the public streets. We no longer permit the bodies of dead animals to rot in our back yards. In many communities the cesspool has been abolished; water purification plants have been established; the drinking water is treated with alum and then chlorinated so as to prevent the spread of typhoid. We have established quarantine restrictions, meat inspection, milk inspection, food inspection and are spending millions of dollars annually in semi-political efforts to safeguard the purity and wholesomeness of our food, our air and our water.

But, while we are lengthening life by modern sanitation and by saving infants under five years of age who, on account of their low vitality and general weakness, used to die, we are killing off men and women in the early forties with diabetes and obesity.

Yet -- it is now clear that in the development of these diseases our abnormal consumption of refined sugars and refined cereals is responsible.

Sugar in the forms in which Nature prepares it is an indispensable element of diet.

Because it is soluble it is easily carried by the blood to the muscle that needs it.

But, as we consume it to-day, sugar is not a natural, but an artificial product.

With the exception of honey there is no concentrated sugar in Nature. Very dilute sugar exists in ripe fruits and vegetables, principally in their juices.

Man has learned the trick of taking this dilute sugar and concentrating it, although Nature teaches him that he should obtain the sugar he needs almost entirely from his ordinary fruit, vegetable and cereal foods, just as his ancestors did for thousands of years before him and as animals have done since the beginning of time.

Nature provides man with a ferment found in saliva. This ferment converts the starch of potatoes, wheat, corn, rice, oats, beets, carrots and all other starch-containing seeds and roots into sugar.

By converting corn-starch through chemical treatment into glucose and by refining cane juice and beet juice, man serves notice upon his salivary glands that he has no use for them and shuns the assistance which Nature asks them to render.

So, to-day, we consume millions of tons of concentrated candy, confections, syrups and sweets of all kinds. The inevitable result is a gradual breaking down of the body's ability to make use not only of concentrated sugar but of any kind of sugar and under the terrific strain the organs of control are finally smashed and in susceptible individuals diseases, born of sugar and starch abuses, are permitted to break through and invade the body.

It is not astonishing that we now have a half million people in this country condemned to premature death by sugar.

It is not astonishing that since the abnormal increase in the consumption of sugar the last generation has recorded a fifty percent increase in diabetic affections.

Refined sugar and refined starch have been U-boating the stamina of America.

For a long time they did their work without leaving a trace. Scientists scratched their heads and puzzled over the facts which they did not understand. But, to-day, the nature of sugar and the diseases that flow from its excessive consumption are better understood.

There is good reason to believe that honey does not conduct itself in the body like refined cane sugar or beet sugar and it is probable that maple sugar differs in like manner.

Davidoff observed that honey was tolerated by the diabetic to whom sugar in any other form was poison. Davidoff made this discovery by the merest accident. Yet he so marvelled over it that he reported his findings to the medical fraternity.

A single instance does not, of course, establish a law. But Davidoff's single instance can be put to the test in a million instances and the results of such tests will establish a law. I have had under my observation a diabetic who suffers the keenest distress if he consumes a single cube of granulated sugar or eats a single slice of white bread. Strangely enough he can consume honey in moderation and whole wheat bread without experiencing any distress.

Nearly two years have passed since I called to his attention the phenomenon noted by Davidoff. Hesitatingly and with great reluctance he took his first teaspoonful of honey expecting to pay the price for his indulgence. He was amazed to find no reaction. A few days later he repeated the dose and again seemed to enjoy immunity. He tried a teaspoonful of honey every day for a week, at the end of which time he became a little bolder and gradually increased his daily dose of honey until now he is adding to his diet four big teaspoonfuls every day.

His experience, I believe, while significant only as the experience of a single individual, is so curiously in harmony with the experience of Davidoff that it should serve as an inspiration for further study along this line.

§ 93 -- The Honey Bee

The curious indifference of the American people towards honey has cost this country more in dollars, cents, public health and common comfort than can ever be accurately estimated.

The manufacture of refined sugar in no wise assists in the development of the nation's most important agricultural industries although bee-keeping in the production of honey results in untold riches through pollination of the food farms of the country.

Neglect of the bee, through over-emphasis of the importance of the cane, beet sugar and glucose industries, has not only resulted in the withdrawal from the human family of a sugar food and sweetener of infinitely greater value than refined sugar but it has brought failure to many a fruit district that would other-wise flourish beyond the fondest dreams of the fruit farmer.

For thousands of years the confections of the world depended upon honey for their very existence. Jacob sent honey as an offering to Joseph, the ruler of Egypt, at least three thousand years before the first sugar refinery was built.

That honey and the honey bee should have been lost sight of in the advance of civilisation constitutes one of the many curious blunders which humanity, while priding itself on its progress, is so prone to commit.

The bee is destined to benefit generations still unborn but before it can render its greatest service to humanity, humanity must learn to consume honey.

It is not generally known that in the United States we consume only 40,000,000 pounds of comb honey and 120,000,000 pounds of extracted honey annually. All this honey is gathered by the bee in the form of nectar from the blossoms of white clover, sage, sweet clover, alfalfa, willow herb, raspberry, cotton, golden rod, aster, heartsease, apple, orange, basswood and buckwheat.

The greatest living authority on honey and the man who has done more to revive the neglected bee-keeping industry of the United States than all others combined, A. I. Root, insinuates that the 160,000,000 pounds of honey gathered by the bees of the United States every year represent but one percent of the total quantity which the hills, valleys, and fields of America either, can produce or have been producing since the beginning of the world.

Ninety-nine percent of the annual crop, or a total of 15, 840,000,000 pounds, is wasted every year. The enormity of this waste is almost too vast to be grasped by the human mind.

In gathering this volume of honey, which we could gather if we wanted to, every orchard in the land would be pollinated. What this pollination would mean in the production of food is almost incredible.

The Van Rensselaer apple orchard in Medina County, Ohio, tells the whole story which the farmers of America might well heed to their advantage. The Van Rensselaer farm produced on the average five hundred bushels of apples annually until its owner trimmed and sprayed his trees and began to keep bees, whereupon the production of the same orchard, with not a single new tree, leaped from five hundred bushels to sixteen thousand bushels in a single season.

Yet not so long ago bees were looked upon by the farmers of the United States as nuisances and many lawsuits have been bitterly prosecuted in order to destroy the so-called pests.

The farmer did not appreciate what a colony of bees meant to the fruitfulness of his land. But, to-day, the tragedy of bee-killing in many sections of the country is looked upon as a heinous and deplorable crime against Nature.

On the Repp Farm in Gloucester County, New Jersey, we have another experience of the bee's benevolence toward man in the production of food.

This farm is now producing 120,000 bushels of apples. Repp himself declares that so indispensable are bees to the growing of fruit in this country that fruit growers can afford to pay local bee men at the rate of five dollars a colony merely to have the bees in the orchards during the time the trees are in bloom, letting the owners of the bees take them away again at once.

Neither Van Rensselaer nor Repp are pioneers in the matter of pollinating fruit bloom through the instrumentality of the bee. They did know, however, that the old conflict between bee keepers and fruit growers in which the fruit growers swore that the bees injured the bloom, punctured the fruit and interfered with the packing, was unfounded.

They knew that the fruit growers did not understand that they were driving away the very agency necessary for the proper pollination of the fruit bloom when they were fighting the honey bee as a pest.

In Massachusetts a bee keeper was obliged to remove bees from a whole district on the complaint of fruit growers that they were a nuisance. Two years later the fruit growers were glad to have the bees come back. Two seasons of fruitless orchards had taught them a lesson never to be forgotten.

Dr. Philips, of the Bureau of Entomology, Washington, actually declares that fruit orchards cannot be planted properly on an extensive scale without maintaining in connection with them numerous colonies of honey bees and he goes so far as to assert that bee-keeping adds indirectly more to the resources of the country by flower pollination than by the sale of honey and wax.

The orange growers of Florida now know what the bee means to their crops. Sweet cherry orchards have jumped from a production of thirteen tons to thirty-nine tons merely through the introduction of a few colonies of bees to the acre. Even the tomato is pollinated by the bee.

In Massachusetts alone there are now over two thousand colonies of bees pollinating cucumbers, squashes, melons and pump kins. The grape, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, cranberry, blueberry, gooseberry, currant, plum and pear need the bee.

In New Zealand it was found that red clover could not be cultivated until honey bees were imported from England.

Greater demand for honey as a sugar food means more bees. More bees mean more food of every kind. Love of honey is therefore one of the most productive of the forces now engaged in the growing and harvesting of crops; in the reconstruction of the world itself.

We shall certainly never have more bees until we find a market for more honey. Once the people begin to demand honey instead of the substitutes that are offered for honey they will set up a system in America from which will flow blessings beyond price.

That God made the bee for a purpose is potent to all but astigmatic souls.

§ 94 -- Honey

Honey cannot be adulterated. There is no need to go into the details that justify this sweeping statement. All the efforts of food sophisticators to imitate honey have failed.

These facts were settled for all time in a Federal District Court, Philadelphia, November 20th to 25th, 1913. The bee itself was the chief witness against the honey fraud prosecuted by the government and the records of the trial are indeed consoling in that they have demonstrated that with all man's skill and all the tricks of his laboratories he cannot successfully imitate God.

Space does not permit description here of how the ordinary female bee on a diet of special food is developed into a true queen bee with a perfect body and perfect organs suggesting what can be done for the average child if properly nourished before its birth and properly fed thereafter.

For the present our purposes are served if we learn and apply one fact in connection with our purchase of honey.

The modern bee keeper extracts honey from the comb in a rapidly whirling machine. Extracted honey is cheaper than comb honey for the reason that the empty combs can be used over and over again.

It takes from five to ten pounds of honey to make a pound of wax and when the bees are constantly required to rebuild their cells they lose just that much energy which ordinarily would be spent in gathering honey. Hence in making it unnecessary for the bees to construct new combs they are given more time to gather honey.

For years in America the average market price for extracted honey has been little more than half the price of comb honey. Most people know nothing of the difference between extracted honey and comb honey. They foolishly think all honey should be liquid as it is usually found in the glass jars on sale in the stores. They also foolishly think that unless honey is in this liquid state it is not pure honey.

This is superstition. All honey will granulate and become solid unless heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and held at that temperature for a half hour or more.

Honey is heated in this way in order to keep it liquid and thus meet the ignorant objections of the uninitiated consumer.

But in heating the honey to make it satisfy artificial taste standards its finest flavours and most distinguished characteristics are lost, being driven off in the heating process.

The honey is still honey and still wholesome honey and still delicious honey but the fine aromatic bouquet has been sacrificed to a silly prejudice born in ignorance.

Another superstition of costly nature expresses itself in discrimination against the light colored honey in favor of the darker honey or against the darker honey in favor of the lighter.

The natural color of alfalfa honey, white clover honey, orange honey, basswood honey and sage honey is very light, almost water-white, with a little touch of amber. The red clover and buckwheat honeys are much darker and people who are used to these darker honeys refuse to accept the lighter honeys on the assumption that they are impure.

To overcome these erroneous ideas the honey producer is frequently forced to blend honey of all types and colours so as to get a certain uniformity. This blending in no wise affects the nutritive quality of the honey nor, let me repeat, does the heating affect its wholesomeness. But blending and heating make it quite impossible for honey lovers to gratify their taste for this or that particular kind of honey or to know anything of the true nature of honey.

To a similar extent the use of pure maple sugar parallels the results attained by the use of honey. But maple sugar is now difficult to obtain. Even at the time when the sugar famine was at its height a single manufacturer of cigarettes was purchasing more than half the annual production of maple sugar in the United States and Canada.

The last purchase of pure maple sugar made by this tobacco concern consisted of forty carloads of 35,000 pounds each, a total of 1,400,000 pounds. The price paid was less than twelve cents a pound. Every ounce of this maple sugar went up in smoke and not an atom of it will contribute to the nourishment of the human body.

Well indeed will it be for us as a nation when we reduce our consumption of cane sugar and give more attention to the uses of honey and maple sugar.

Honey drop cakes, honey fondant, maple fritters, honey ginger cookies, honey or maple ice cream, honey butter, honey jelly, honey mousse, maple meringues, honey caramels, maple creams, honey and maple taffy are indescribably superior to the same sweets made of granulated sugar.

Honey cookies, marmalade, apple puddings, brown Betty, fruit bread, coffee cake, corn bread, griddle cakes, short cake, pumpkin pie, doughnuts, drop cakes, fruit muffins, cinnamon bread, graham biscuits, tarts, layer cake, are all improved by the substitution of honey for sugar.

The American people have given little attention to the use of honey in cookery, for which reason they are almost totally ignorant of the teasing and seducing flavour which honey imparts to the hundred and one delicious and nutritious foodstuffs to the excellence of which it so readily contributes.

For a hundred reasons, all of them compelling, let us eat more honey, but less sugar.

§ 95 -- Glucose

Glucose as a filler is the symbol of denatured carbohydrate foods, the excess of which in the diet of the average American family is the cause of many diseases, beginning in constipation and ending in anemia, tuberculosis, acidosis, and the disorders incident to lowered resistance.

Thursday, August 26th, 1915, a prominent official of one of the large glucose manufacturing companies admitted to me that a restricted diet of denatured foods, whether glucose appears among them or not, will develop many disorders in the body.

"Because we recognise these facts," he said, "we are now striving to give to the human animal the indispensable organic and inorganic mineral salts and colloids of the 'steep-water' of our corn syrup factory. Our corn solids are the richest part of the corn and we have tons of it to dispose of every day.

"We can actually get a better price for these substances as fertiliser than we are now obtaining for them as cattle food," he said, "but we so recognise their importance as food that we have resisted the temptation to dispose of them as fertiliser when they are so necessary to the animals that feed upon them."

According to his estimate, 80 percent of the glucose manufactured from corn is disposed of to bakers, confectioners, jam and jelly manufacturers and makers of other commercial foods and beverages.

In all these types of ready-made food the salts of the sugar cane are not restored through the glucose employed in their manufacture, and practically the only mineral salts in the pie, cake, pudding or candy (manufactured with glucose or granulated sugar) are the salts introduced in the form of alum and other baking powders and preservatives. These are not the salts, in form or nature, required by the nutritional processes of the body.

Probably the most serious aspect of these demineralised carbohydrate foods is the vast accumulation of evidence supporting the belief that the excessive ingestion of refined sugars and starches, so common in the diet of the American people, is a factor in the cause of diabetes which may account for the rapid increase of this disease.

Theodore C. Janeway, Bard professor of the practice of medicine in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, declares:

"In diabetes the tissues are in a state of partial or complete sugar starvation though they may be bathed in lymph rich in glucose. The glucose, circulating in the blood and not utilised by the muscles and cells for food, accumulates until in excess of the normal upper limit of one part in one thousand.

"This excess of glucose in the blood is called hyperglycemia. With long standing hyperglycemia the kidneys lose their power to throw off the excess glucose and the degree of hyperglycemia tends to rise progressively. It is because the appetite is frequently gratified by carbohydrate foods (sugars and starches) that hyperglycemia is increased with no gain to the body in energy.

"Inasmuch as the diabetic has lost his toleration for sugars and starches he must be safeguarded from all influences known to diminish his tolerance. Among such influences, clinical experience teaches us plainly that hyperglycemia plays one of the chief roles.

"Failure to institute proper dietetic treatment or self-indulgence on the part of the patient so frequently leads to the development of severe diabetes in a previously mild case that it is obvious that over-taxing the weakened power for using sugars and starches is diminished by indulgence in sugars and starches."

The evidence that it is this indulgence which sets up the morbid condition, eventually expressing itself as diabetes, is weighty and significant.

§ 96 -- Glucositis

"In younger diabetic patients," declares Janeway, "it is not safe to allow an amount of sugars and starches more than two-thirds of that tolerated, and they must be kept under close supervision because they are more likely to progress from a mild to a severe form of the disease, even under treatment, for the reason that they are apt to be careless and self-indulgent."

"The younger the patient the more marked are the evidences of excesses in carbohydrates," declare Friedenwold and Ruhrah, "yet we continue to encourage our children to daily indulgence in penny sweets (refined sugar and glucose), notwithstanding the abnormal proportion of refined carbohydrates which constitute the bulk of their breakfast, dinner, and supper."

If excessive indulgence in sugars and starches diminishes tolerance and causes a mild case of diabetes to progress to a severe form of the disease, is it not this very excess which sets up diabetes in the first place by eventually destroying all tolerance for such denatured foods?

Olaf Hammarsten, emeritus professor of medical and physiological chemistry in the University of Upsala, is very positive on this point. "A hyperglycemia may be caused by the introduction of more sugar than the body can destroy. If too much sugar is introduced into the intestinal tract at any one time, so that the assimilation limit is over-reached, the glycemia is caused by the passage of more sugar into the blood than the liver and other organs can destroy."

Over-taxing any organ systematically is certain to be followed by a morbid condition in the functioning of that organ.

In the morbid condition described as diabetes the factor of most significance is always the carbohydrate factor. All the evidence warrants the assumption that this carbohydrate factor is not alone a symptom of the disease, but its actual cause.

Robert Hutchinson, physician to the London Hospital, declares: "It must be borne in mind that the assimilation limit is not the same for all individuals. Some people are able to convert more sugar into glycogen than others. Persons with a low assimilation limit are potential diabetics -- that is to say, they are more liable, through sugar excesses, than others to become the victims of diabetes."

Here is a direct connecting link between sugars and diabetes. There is evidence to indicate that artificial sweets, such as white sugar and glucose, conduct themselves in the body in a manner not now understood by scientists, but with much less tolerance than is enjoyed by natural sugars, accompanied by the other food elements with which nature endows them in the raw or unrefined state.

Dr. Alonzo E. Taylor declares that all sugars are not tolerated in the same way in the body. "Levulose and lactose are sometimes tolerated and utilised better by the diabetic than is glucose," he says.

He is not clear as to the meaning of this. He simply cites it as a fact. He calls attention to the phenomenon that all the starches yield only glucose, not fructose or galactose, and there are variations in the toleration of starches of different derivations.

"The starch of the potato," he declares, "is supposed to burn better than that of corn. There is no doubt of one fact. Diabetics tolerate oatmeal better than any other carbohydrate. It is common to feed a diabetic with little glycosuria and low acidosis 100 grams of starch per day in the form of oatmeal (accompanied by its natural mineral salts), when 50 grams of glucose (hydrolised corn-starch) will pass almost quantitatively into the urine.

"For this fact, striking as it is, we have no explanation," he says.

Referring to the same phenomenon, Julius Friedenwold, professor of gastro-enterology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Baltimore, and John Ruhrah, professor of diseases of children in the same institution, declare:

"The different varieties of sugars and starches ingested may vary in their glycosuria-producing power. Glucose causes the greatest percentage of sugar to appear in the urine in the shortest time. Fruit sugar augments the glycosuria only to one-half the extent when given in the same amount."

Who will say that this lessened tolerance for glucose is without significance? Yet we commonly read in the magazines advice to mothers written in positive and conclusive terms: "Give your children plenty of sugar, candy and sweets. It is good for them."

Occasionally a pioneer strikes out in the direction of the truth, only to be startled by his discovery that all natural foods conduct themselves in the body in a manner entirely dissimilar to the conduct of unnatural, artificial or prepared foods.

Honey is not glucose. Glucose is not sap maple syrup or maple sugar. Glucose is not sorghum or open kettle cane syrup or old-fashioned molasses, now a thing of the past.

§ 97 -- Why the Excess?

We know that in health the circulation can utilise only a certain fixed quantity of glucose -- 0.1 percent (one part in a thousand parts of blood) -- beyond which quantity the healthy or normal pancreas, one of the vital organs of the body, according to the investigations of Zulzer, Pfluger, Cohnheim, Minkowski, Norten, Dominicis, Kleiner and Meltzer, seems to set up an impenetrable barrier.

Well indeed may the scientist who is looking for strange reasons to explain the origin of diabetes be asked these questions: How, even in health, can the human body profit by the consumption of enormous non-utilisable quantities of starch, glucose or sugar?

How long can the body tolerate this overload or excess?

In diseased conditions of the controlling organ the excess or waste glucose is eliminated through the kidneys, yet all America is encouraged to use refined sugars, starches and glucose in enormous quantities, notwithstanding the fact that in order to pass into the circulation at all, beyond the fixed limit of 0.1 percent, a vital organ, the pancreas, must first break down and become diseased, permitting, in other words, diabetes to develop.

It is well known that the body in health manufactures in a natural manner from the starches, gums, sugars and fats of vegetables, grains and fruits all the glucose it requires for its normal needs and all the glucose it can utilise.

As long as the body remains in health the circulation possesses the ability and readiness to rid itself of a surplus of glucose, but in the case of growing animals, old animals, animals bearing offspring, animals nourishing their young, or animals in feeble health, it is not known by any scientist to what extent the circulation, already overtaxed, possesses the power to rid itself daily of a large surplus of glucose, the tolerance toward which, as we have already seen, is decidedly limited.

There is indeed much evidence to support the conviction that under such extra burden the controlling organ (the pancreas) must succumb to the strain, thus opening the way to the development of that disease, the origin of which seems to be so mysterious, but which all men agree upon in calling it diabetes.

Pfluger concluded, as a result of his experiments, that there is a close relationship between the liver and "pancreas-diabetes," declaring that "the liver in diabetes works actively and is the most important seat of production in diabetic-sugar."

Eppinger, Folta and Rudinger have adduced evidence to show that there is a certain relationship existing in pancreas-diabetes between the pancreas, adrenals and thyroids.

They assert that it is not the pancreas alone that controls the blood-content of glucose. What, then, is to be said of the conclusions of those scientists who persist in attributing to the failure of the pancreas the cause of diabetes and who seem to look upon the glucose factor only as a symptom of the disease and never as its cause?

§ 98 -- Can We Ignore This?

We know now positively that the body is tenacious of its fixed alkaline bases, and on a diet deficient in these bases it cannot long supply the necessary quantity of alkali required to neutralise the organic acids which are daily elaborated in the blood and tissues as a result of the decomposition of proteins, fats and carbohydrates.

On the one hand there is a deficiency of bases in our refined foods and on the other an excess of carbohydrates. No scientist would dare to claim seriously in the presence of these facts that a physiological equilibrium can be maintained permanently on such a broken balance. What would the incomparable Pasteur have said of this?

Glucose, now used in the manufacture of many commercial foods, including nearly all the candies on the market is a mineral-free carbohydrate of artificial origin.

Packard says cancer is due to a diet of mineral-free carbohydrates.

Armand Gautier has demonstrated that the loss of minerals by excretion is offset only by constant intake. Neither glucose nor any other refined food contributes to this intake.

Starling and Foster have demonstrated that animals fed on demineralised or refined food die sooner than if not fed at all. The demineralised canned beef, the extractives of which were all boiled out before canning to make beef extract and canned soup, which caused so much sickness among our troops during the Spanish-American War, is a further illustration of this fact. Rolf Wilson says mineral starvation is followed by dire consequences.

Takaki, Chamberlain and Vedder have demonstrated that the mineral deficiency of refined food is responsible for high mortality among breast-fed infants. Mother's milk lacks mineral matter in accordance with the mineral deficiency of her food.

Drennin attributes the rapid course of tuberculosis, after pregnancy, to mineral starvation. The fetus acts as a mineral parasite, robbing the mother's tissues unless her food supplies its needs.

Czerny declares that natural immunity depends on nutrition and that one-sided nutrition with sugars, syrups and candies destroys this immunity in children.

Weigert reports that "tuberculous children succumb more quickly when nourished with sugars and starches. The water content of the organism is inversely proportioned to the natural immunity. Carbohydrates diet increases unnecessarily the amount of water in the tissues and prompts a rapid rise in the body weight.

"Such children, who appear plump, round and well nourished, are water-logged and show slight resisting power against infection." In an earlier chapter we saw this. Now we understand it.

Various investigators have found that demineralised sweets, sugar, glucose, etc., give rise to many disorders. Why do they exclude diabetes from the list of these disorders when the chief symptom of diabetes lies in its rebellion against sugar, particularly its rebellion against glucose?

Charles as far back as 1882 declared: "Temporary glycosuria may be induced by a diet too rich in starch and sugars, and this is more liable to occur with a diminished alkalinity of the blood. Permanent glycosuria constitutes diabetes mellitus."

He says, in other words, that if a temporary glycosuria can be induced by an excessive ingestion of refined starchy or sugary foods and such excess is continued until the temporary glycosuria becomes permanent, the net result of such excess is diabetes.

He also declares that glucose combines with certain acids and bases, as potash and lime, forming glycosates or saccharates, and in alkaline solution has a great tendency to absorb oxygen.

He also makes the significant assertion that in diabetes less oxygen is absorbed than in health.

If glucose is a confiscator of oxygen and if it is observed in diabetes that less oxygen is absorbed than in health, is it not indeed time that the role of glucose as an oxygen pirate be investigated?

The pancreas in health appropriates the salts of lime and potash in the elaboration of its normal alkaline secretions, as is shown in the analyses of these secretions.

What scientist will say that this selective action of the pancreas on these alkaline bases is devoid of significance or that the normal functioning of the pancreas does not depend in any manner upon its ability to make use of them?

Yet, in the presence of the fact that glucose has an affinity for these alkaline bases and combines with them, thereby interfering with their ability to conduct themselves in the tissues and internal secretions in accordance with Nature's laws, who will say that the excessive ingestion of glucose, in strict obedience to its affinity for alkaline bases, does not rob the pancreas of lime and potassium salts by combining with them and carrying them off?

If deprived of lime and potassium in this manner, does not the pancreas suffer an impairment of its ability to assist in the control of the upper limit of the blood content of glucose?

Kleiner and Meltzer of the Rockefeller Institute assume (they use the word assume) that it is the failure of the pancreas to perform its function which causes diabetes.

But what causes that failure?

There is much evidence to support the belief that refined, demineralised starches and sugars, of which glucose is the most conspicuous type, induce this failure, first by weakening the ability of the pancreas to resist the excess glucose assault and, second, by permitting the entrance of glucose into the blood without hindrance after the glucose bombardment has succeeded in breaking down the natural barriers against it.

The experiments of Kleiner and Meltzer, indicating that in health the circulation can utilise only a fixed quantity of glucose -- 0.1 percent -- beyond which the healthy or normal pancreas appears to say, "No more shall enter," support the conclusion, although not intended to do so, that it is the excess of glucose and the excess of other refined and demineralised starches and sugars which causes a temporary glycosuria to be superseded by a permanent diabetes, and that the importance which eminent scientists have heretofore attached to the diseased condition of the pancreas in relationship to diabetes is erroneously given to a striking and significant symptom of the disease instead of to its cause.

§ 99 -- Infantile Paralysis

In June, 1916, an epidemic of infantile paralysis broke out in Brooklyn, N. Y.

The disease spread so rapidly that after 187 deaths had been reported in New York City and hundreds of cases discovered in eleven states and Canada, Health Commissioner Haven Emeron announced that he would appeal to the National Red Cross for help.

Three thousand three hundred physicians and nurses were put to work in New York and Brooklyn, and the Health Department informed the public that the United States Public Health Service and the Rockefeller Institute would begin active work at once to assist in stamping out the scourge.

Fifty-five street playgrounds were ordered closed. Every children's reading room in Manhattan and Brooklyn was closed. Sunday schools were closed. Summer camps were broken up. Children not only could not cross the state line but they were not permitted by the police to pass from town to town.

Dr. Lewis C. Ager called for public subscriptions to buy braces and other supporting devices for victims of the disease.

Then came this remarkable statement, July 9th, 1916, from Professor Simon Baruch, who diagnosed the first recorded case of perforating appendicitis successfully operated on, and who is one of the foremost members of the American medical profession:

"For several months I have watched the scientific development of the malign influence of defective or absent vitamines in certain foods, as published in the weekly reports of the United States Public Health Service, together with articles in the medical journals on beri-beri and pellagra.

"Pigeons fed on polished rice are affected by paralysis, technically called polyneuritis, which begins with loss of weight and ends fatally. Dr. Sidell found that pigeons fed on this exclusive diet did not become paralysed (within the two months of experiment at least) if they were given also some otherwise useless yeast products (rich in mineral salts) from the brewery vats which are usually wasted. He has also shown that if this waste material be given to a pigeon already paralysed it will recover within an hour and to all appearances it will be normal in twelve hours.

"There is a striking similarity in some of the causes predisposing to infantile paralysis and beri-beri. Both occur chiefly in overcrowded localities, in hot weather, and more among males than females. Both are accompanied by fever and paralysis, and both are extremely fatal. Both have prevailed as epidemics, and their fatality has caused terror and despair.

"Beri-beri was formerly regarded as an infectious disease from undiscoverable sources, but is now known to be due chiefly if not solely to absence of vitamines in the diet.

"May not infantile paralysis, which has eluded thus far the most searching investigations, be likewise traceable to some defect in diet that may be discovered?

"We have a clue to the possibilities in this direction in the report of the United States Public Health Service of April 17th, 1916, on bread as food, in which the fact is clearly brought out that the fine roller-milled wheat flour is devoid of vitamines, and that owing to the use of baking powders containing bicarbonate of soda the vitamines in other foods are likely to be destroyed.

"In a study of pellagra in South Carolina, Voeghtlin regards this malady as somewhat related to beri-beri. He found that this disease prevailed in the factory districts, where people eat mostly fat bacon, cereals and soda raised biscuits or corn bread made of highly milled corn, while in the backwoods, where coarsely milled grain is used, pellagra is rare.

"The high cost of vitamine-containing foods, like eggs, milk and meats, makes it impossible for these poor people to protect themselves against the loss of vitamines in purchased cereal foods.

"It may be of interest to ascertain if infantile paralysis has been more prevalent since 1878, when the new milling processes were invented. I omitted to mention as proof of similarity of causes that the experiments made on pigeons have been confirmed in chicken, which fed on whole corn remain healthy, while the same fowls fed on highly milled cornmeal are affected with paralysis.

"These briefly stated scientific facts lead me to believe that close scrutiny of the food of the children afflicted may lead to the discovery of a dietetic cause of infantile paralysis."

Perhaps it will be found that the diet of the mother before the birth of the infant predisposed it to infantile paralysis.


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