Sugar

 

Refined Sugar

A multitude of common physical and mental
ailments are strongly linked to the consuming of pure, refined sugar.

The Sweetest Poison of
All

 

WHY SUGAR IS TOXIC TO THE BODY.

In 1957, Dr William Coda Martin tried
to answer the question: When is a food a food and when is it a poison?
His working definition of poison was: Medically: Any
substance applied to the body, ingested or developed within the body,
which causes or may cause disease. Physically: Any substance which
inhibits the activity of a catalyst which is a minor substance,
chemical or enzyme that activates a reaction. The dictionary
gives an even broader definition for poison: to
exert a harmful influence on, or to pervert.

Dr Martin classified refined sugar as a poison because it has been
depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals. What is left
consists of pure, refined carbohydrates. The body cannot utilize this
refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins
and minerals are present. Nature supplies these elements in each plant
in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrate in that
particular plant. There is no excess for other added carbohydrates.
Incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results in the formation of ‘toxic
metabolite’ such as pyruvic acid and abnormal sugars containing five
carbon atoms.

Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system
and the abnormal sugars in the red blood cells. These toxic
metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells. They cannot
get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally. In time, some
of the cells die. This interferes with the function of a part of the
body and is the beginning of degenerative disease.

Refined sugar is lethal when ingested by humans because it provides
only that which nutritionists describe as empty or
naked calories. It lacks the natural minerals which are
present in the sugar beet or cane. In addition, sugar is worse than
nothing because it drains and leaches the body of precious vitamins
and minerals through the demand its digestion, detoxification and
elimination make upon one’s entire system.

So essential is balance to our bodies that we have many ways to
provide against the sudden shock of a heavy intake of sugar. Minerals
such as sodium (from salt), potassium and magnesium (from vegetables),
and calcium (from the bones) are mobilised and used in chemical
transmutation; neutral acids are produced which attempt to return the
acid-alkaline balance factor of the blood to a more normal state.

Sugar taken every day produces a continuously over-acid condition,
and more and more minerals are required from deep in the body in the
attempt to rectify the imbalance. Finally, in order to protect the
blood, so much calcium is taken from the bones and teeth that decay
and general weakening begin.

Excess sugar eventually affects every organ in the body. Initially,
it is stored in the liver in the form of glucose (glycogen). Since the
liver’s capacity is limited, a daily intake of refined sugar (above
the required amount of natural sugar) soon makes the liver expand like
a balloon. When the liver is filled to its maximum capacity, the
excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids.
These are taken to every part of the body and stored in the most
inactive areas: the belly, the buttocks, the breasts and the thighs.

When these comparatively harmless places are completely filled,
fatty acids are then distributed among active organs, such as the
heart and kidneys. These begin to slow down; finally their tissues
degenerate and turn to fat. The whole body is affected by their
reduced ability, and abnormal blood pressure is created. The
parasympathetic nervous system is affected; and organs governed by it,
such as the small brain, become inactive or paralysed. (Normal brain
function is rarely thought of as being as biologic as digestion.) The
circulatory and lymphatic systems are invaded, and the quality of the
red corpuscles starts to change. An overabundance of white cells
occurs, and the creation of tissue becomes slower. Our body’s
tolerance and immunising power becomes more limited, so we cannot
respond properly to extreme attacks, whether they be cold, heat,
mosquitoes or microbes.

Excessive sugar has a strong mal-effect on the functioning of the
brain. The key to orderly brain function is glutamic acid, a vital
compound found in many vegetables. The B vitamins play a major role in
dividing glutamic acid into antagonistic-complementary compounds which
produce a proceed or control response in the
brain. B vitamins are also manufactured by symbiotic bacteria which
live in our intestines. When refined sugar is taken daily, these
bacteria wither and die, and our stock of B vitamins gets very low.
Too much sugar makes one sleepy; our ability to calculate and remember
is lost.

SUGAR: HARMFUL TO HUMANS AND ANIMALS.

Shipwrecked sailors who ate and drank nothing but sugar and rum for
nine days surely went through some of this trauma; the tales they had
to tell created a big public relations problem for the sugar pushers.
This incident occurred when a vessel carrying a cargo of sugar was
shipwrecked in 1793. The five surviving sailors were finally rescued
after being marooned for nine days. They were in a wasted condition
due to starvation, having consumed nothing but sugar and rum.
The eminent French physiologist F. Magendie was inspired by that
incident to conduct a series of experiments with animals, the results
of which he published in 1816. In the experiments, he fed dogs a diet
of sugar or olive oil and water. All the dogs wasted and died.

The shipwrecked sailors and the French physiologist’s experimental
dogs proved the same point. As a steady diet, sugar is worse than
nothing. Plain water can keep you alive for quite some time. Sugar and
water can kill you. Humans [and animals] are unable to subsist
on a diet of sugar.

The dead dogs in Professor Magendie’s laboratory alerted the sugar
industry to the hazards of free scientific inquiry. From that day to
this, the sugar industry has invested millions of dollars in
behind-the-scenes, subsidised science. The best scientific names that
money could buy have been hired, in the hope that they could one day
come up with something at least pseudoscientific in the way of glad
tidings about sugar.

It has been proved, however, that sugar is a major factor in
dental decay; sugar in a person’s diet does cause overweight;
removal of sugar from diets has cured symptoms of crippling, worldwide
diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart illnesses.

Sir Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, noticed in 1929
in Panama that, among sugar plantation owners who ate large amounts of
their refined stuff, diabetes was common. Among native cane-cutters,
who only got to chew the raw cane, he saw no diabetes.

However, the story of the public relations attempts on the part of
the sugar manufacturers began in Britain in 1808 when the Committee of
West India reported to the House of Commons that a prize of
twenty-five guineas had been offered to anyone who could come up with
the most satisfactory experiments to prove that unrefined
sugar was good for feeding and fattening oxen, cows, hogs and sheep.
Food for animals is often seasonal, always expensive. Sugar, by then,
was dirt cheap. People weren’t eating it fast enough.

Naturally, the attempt to feed livestock with sugar and molasses in
England in 1808 was a disaster. When the Committee on West India made
its fourth report to the House of Commons, one Member of Parliament,
John Curwin, reported that he had tried to feed sugar and molasses to
calves without success. He suggested that perhaps someone should try
again by sneaking sugar and molasses into skimmed milk. Had anything
come of that, you can be sure the West Indian sugar merchants would
have spread the news around the world. After this singular lack of
success in pushing sugar in cow pastures, the West Indian sugar
merchants gave up.

With undaunted zeal for increasing the market demand for the most
important agricultural product of the West Indies, the Committee of
West India was reduced to a tactic that has served the sugar pushers
for almost 200 years: irrelevant and transparently silly testimonials
from faraway, inaccessible people with some kind of
scientific credentials. One early commentator called them
hired consciences.

The House of Commons committee was so hard-up for local
cheerleaders on the sugar question, it was reduced to quoting a doctor
from faraway Philadelphia, a leader of the recent American colonial
rebellion: The great Dr Rush of Philadelphia is reported to have
said that ‘sugar contains more nutrients in the same bulk than any
other known substance’. (Emphasis added.) At the same time, the
same Dr Rush was preaching that masturbation was the cause of
insanity! If a weasel-worded statement like that was quoted, one can
be sure no animal doctor could be found in Britain who would recommend
sugar for the care and feeding of cows, pigs or sheep.

While preparing his epochal volume, A History of Nutrition,
published in 1957, Professor E. V. McCollum (Johns Hopkins
University), sometimes called America’s foremost nutritionist and
certainly a pioneer in the field, reviewed approximately 200,000
published scientific papers, recording experiments with food, their
properties, their utilisation and their effects on animals and men.
The material covered the period from the mid-18th century to 1940.
From this great repository of scientific inquiry, McCollum selected
those experiments which he regarded as significant to relate the
story of progress in discovering human error in this segment of
science [of nutrition]. Professor McCollum failed to record a
single controlled scientific experiment with sugar between 1816 and
1940.

Unhappily, we must remind ourselves that scientists today, and
always, accomplish little without a sponsor. The protocols of modern
science have compounded the costs of scientific inquiry.

We have no right to be surprised when we read the introduction to
McCollum’s A History of Nutrition and find that The author and
publishers are indebted to The Nutrition Foundation, Inc., for a grant
provided to meet a portion of the cost of publication of this
book. What, you might ask, is The Nutrition Foundation, Inc.?
The author and the publishers don’t tell you. It happens to be a front
organisation for the leading sugar-pushing conglomerates in the food
business, including the American Sugar Refining Company, Coca-Cola,
Pepsi-Cola, Curtis Candy Co., General Foods, General Mills, Nestlé
Co., Pet Milk Co. and Sunshine Biscuits-about 45 such companies in
all.

Perhaps the most significant thing about McCollum’s 1957 history
was what he left out: a monumental earlier work described by an
eminent Harvard professor as one of those epochal pieces of
research which makes every other investigator desirous of kicking
himself because he never thought of doing the same thing. In the
1930s, a research dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, Dr Weston A. Price,
travelled all over the world-from the lands of the Eskimos to the
South Sea Islands, from Africa to New Zealand. His Nutrition and
Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and
Their Effects, which is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, was
first published in 1939.

Dr Price took the whole world as his laboratory. His devastating
conclusion, recorded in horrifying detail in area after area, was
simple. People who live under so-called backward primitive conditions
had excellent teeth and wonderful general health. They ate natural,
unrefined food from their own locale. As soon as refined, sugared
foods were imported as a result of contact with civilisation,
physical degeneration began in a way that was definitely observable
within a single generation.

Any credibility the sugar pushers have is based on our ignorance of
works like that of Dr Price. Sugar manufacturers keep trying, hoping
and contributing generous research grants to colleges and
universities; but the research laboratories never come up with
anything solid the manufacturers can use. Invariably, the research
results are bad news.

Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating
and be wise, Harvard professor Ernest Hooten said in Apes, Men,
and Morons. Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and
toothpaste are any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish.
It is store food that has given us store teeth.

When the researchers bite the hands that feed them, and the news
gets out, it’s embarrassing all around. In 1958, Time magazine
reported that a Harvard biochemist and his assistants had worked with
myriads of mice for more than ten years, bankrolled by the Sugar
Research Foundation, Inc. to the tune of $57,000, to find out how
sugar causes dental cavities and how to prevent this. It took them ten
years to discover that there was no way to prevent sugar causing
dental decay. When the researchers reported their findings in the
Dental Association Journal, their source of money dried up. The Sugar
Research Foundation withdrew its support.

The more that the scientists disappointed them, the more the sugar
pushers had to rely on the ad men.

SUCROSE: PURE ENERGY AT A PRICE.

When calories became the big thing in the 1920s, and everybody was
learning to count them, the sugar pushers turned up with a new pitch.
They boasted there were 2,500 calories in a pound of sugar. A little
over a quarter-pound of sugar would produce 20 per cent of the total
daily quota.

If you could buy all your food energy as cheaply as you buy
calories in sugar, they told us, your board bill for the
year would be very low. If sugar were seven cents a pound, it would
cost less than $35 for a whole year.

A very inexpensive way to kill yourself.

Of course, we don’t live on any such unbalanced diet,
they admitted later. But that figure serves to point out how
inexpensive sugar is as an energy-building food. What was once a
luxury only a privileged few could enjoy is now a food for the poorest
of people.

Later, the sugar pushers advertised that sugar was chemically pure,
topping Ivory soap in that department, being 99.9 per cent pure
against Ivory’s vaunted 99.44 per cent. No food of our everyday
diet is purer, we were assured.

What was meant by purity, besides the unarguable fact that all
vitamins, minerals, salts, fibres and proteins had been removed in the
refining process? Well, the sugar pushers came up with a new slant on
purity.

You don’t have to sort it like beans, wash it like rice.
Every grain is like every other. No waste attends its use. No useless
bones like in meat, no grounds like coffee.

Pure is a favourite adjective of the sugar pushers
because it means one thing to the chemists and another thing to the
ordinary mortals. When honey is labelled pure, this means that it is
in its natural state (stolen directly from the bees who made it), with
no adulteration with sucrose to stretch it and no harmful chemical
residues which may have been sprayed on the flowers. It does not mean
that the honey is free from minerals like iodine, iron, calcium,
phosphorus or multiple vitamins. So effective is the purification
process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries that
sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a
chemist has on the laboratory shelves. What nutritional virtue this
abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us.

Beginning with World War I, the sugar pushers coated their
propaganda with a preparedness pitch. Dietitians have known the
high food value of sugar for a long time, said an industry tract
of the 1920s. But it took World War I to bring this home. The
energy-building power of sugar reaches the muscles in minutes and it
was of value to soldiers as a ration given them just before an attack
was launched. The sugar pushers have been harping on the
energy-building power of sucrose for years because it contains nothing
else. Caloric energy and habit-forming taste: that’s what sucrose has,
and nothing else.

All other foods contain energy plus. All foods contain some
nutrients in the way of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins or minerals,
or all of these. Sucrose contains caloric energy, period.

The quick energy claim the sugar pushers talk about,
which drives reluctant doughboys over the top and drives children up
the wall, is based on the fact that refined sucrose is not digested in
the mouth or the stomach but passes directly to the lower intestines
and then to the bloodstream. The extra speed with which sucrose
enters the bloodstream does more harm than good.

Much of the public confusion about refined sugar is compounded by
language. Sugars are classified by chemists as
carbohydrates. This manufactured word means a
substance containing carbon with oxygen and hydrogen. If
chemists want to use these hermetic terms in their laboratories when
they talk to one another, fine. The use of the word
carbohydrate outside the laboratory-especially in food
labelling and advertising lingo-to describe both natural, complete
cereal grains (which have been a principal food of mankind for
thousands of years) and man-refined sugar (which is a manufactured
drug and principal poison of mankind for only a few hundred years) is
demonstrably wicked. This kind of confusion makes possible the
flimflam practised by sugar pushers to confound anxious mothers into
thinking kiddies need sugar to survive.

In 1973, the Sugar Information Foundation placed full-page
advertisements in national magazines. Actually, the ads were disguised
retractions they were forced to make in a strategic retreat after a
lengthy tussle with the Federal Trade Commission over an earlier ad
campaign claiming that a little shot of sugar before meals would
curb your appetite. You need carbohydrates. And it
so happens that sugar is the best-tasting carbohydrate. You
might as well say everybody needs liquids every day. It so happens
that many people find champagne is the best-tasting liquid. How long
would the Women’s Christian Temperance Union let the liquor lobby get
away with that one?

The use of the word carbohydrate" to describe sugar is
deliberately misleading. Since the improved labelling of nutritional
properties was required on packages and cans, refined carbohydrates
like sugar are lumped together with those carbohydrates which may or
may not be refined. The several types of carbohydrates are added
together for an overall carbohydrate total. Thus, the effect of the
label is to hide the sugar content from the unwary buyer. Chemists add
to the confusion by using the word sugar to describe an
entire group of substances that are similar but not identical.

Glucose is a sugar found usually with other sugars, in fruits and
vegetables. It is a key material in the metabolism of all plants and
animals. Many of our principal foods are converted into glucose in our
bodies. Glucose is always present in our bloodstream, and it is often
called blood sugar.

Dextrose, also called corn sugar, is derived
synthetically from starch. Fructose is fruit sugar. Maltose is malt
sugar. Lactose is milk sugar. Sucrose is refined sugar made from sugar
cane and sugar beet.

Glucose has always been an essential element in the human
bloodstream. Sucrose addiction is something new in the history of the
human animal. To use the word sugar to describe two
substances which are far from being identical, which have different
chemical structures and which affect the body in profoundly different
ways compounds confusion.

It makes possible more flimflam from the sugar pushers who tell us
how important sugar is as an essential component of the human body,
how it is oxidised to produce energy, how it is metabolised to produce
warmth, and so on. They’re talking about glucose, of course, which is
manufactured in our bodies. However, one is led to believe that the
manufacturers are talking about the sucrose which is made in their
refineries. When the word sugar can mean the glucose in
your blood as well as the sucrose in your Coca-Cola, it’s great for
the sugar pushers but it’s rough on everybody else.

People have been bamboozled into thinking of their bodies the way
they think of their cheque accounts. If they suspect they have low
blood sugar, they are programmed to snack on vending machine candies
and sodas in order to raise their blood sugar level. Actually, this is
the worst thing to do. The level of glucose in their blood is apt to
be low because they are addicted to sucrose. People who kick sucrose
addiction and stay off sucrose find that the glucose level of their
blood returns to normal and stays there.

Since the late 1960s, millions of Americans have returned to
natural food. A new type of store, the natural food store, has
encouraged many to become dropouts from the supermarket. Natural food
can be instrumental in restoring health. Many people, therefore, have
come to equate the word natural with healthy.
So the sugar pushers have begun to pervert the word
natural in order to mislead the public.

Made from natural ingredients, the television
sugar-pushers tell us about product after product. The word
"from" is not accented on television. It should be. Even
refined sugar is made from natural ingredients. There is nothing new
about that. The natural ingredients are cane and beets. But that
four-letter word from hardly suggests that 90 per cent of
the cane and beet have been removed. Heroin, too, could be advertised
as being made from natural ingredients. The opium poppy is as natural
as the sugar beet. It’s what man does with it that tells the story.

If you want to avoid sugar in the supermarket, there is only one
sure way. Don’t buy anything unless it says on the label prominently,
in plain English: No sugar added. Use of the word
carbohydrate" as a scientific" word for sugar
has become a standard defence strategy with sugar pushers and many of
their medical apologists. It’s their security blanket.

CORRECT FOOD COMBINING.

Whether it’s sugared cereal or pastry and black coffee for
breakfast, whether it’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola for lunch or the full
gourmet dinner in the evening, chemically the average
American diet is a formula that guarantees bubble, bubble, stomach
trouble.

Unless you’ve taken too much insulin and, in a state of insulin
shock, need sugar as an antidote, hardly anyone ever has cause to take
sugar alone. Humans need sugar as much as they need the nicotine in
tobacco. Crave it is one thing-need it is another. From the days of
the Persian Empire to our own, sugar has usually been used to hop up
the flavour of other food and drink, as an ingredient in the kitchen
or as a condiment at the table. Let us leave aside for the moment the
known effect of sugar (long-term and short-term) on the entire system
and concentrate on the effect of sugar taken in combination with other
daily foods.

When Grandma warned that sugared cookies before meals will
spoil your supper, she knew what she was talking about. Her
explanation might not have satisfied a chemist but, as with many
traditional axioms from the Mosaic law on kosher food and separation
in the kitchen, such rules are based on years of trial and error and
are apt to be right on the button. Most modern research in combining
food is a laboured discovery of the things Grandma took for granted.

Any diet or regimen undertaken for the single purpose of losing
weight is dangerous, by definition. Obesity is talked about and
treated as a disease in 20th-century America. Obesity is not a
disease. It is only a symptom, a sign, a warning that your body is out
of order. Dieting to lose weight is as silly and dangerous as taking
aspirin to relieve a headache before you know the reason for the
headache. Getting rid of a symptom is like turning off an alarm. It
leaves the basic cause untouched.

Any diet or regimen undertaken with any objective short of
restoration of total health of your body is dangerous. Many overweight
people are undernourished. (Dr H. Curtis Wood stresses this point in
his 1971 book, Overfed But Undernourished.) Eating less can aggravate
this condition, unless one is concerned with the quality of the food
instead of just its quantity.

Many people-doctors included-assume that if weight is lost, fat is
lost. This is not necessarily so. Any diet which lumps all
carbohydrates together is dangerous. Any diet which does not consider
the quality of carbohydrates and makes the crucial life-and-death
distinction between natural, unrefined carbohydrates like whole grains
and vegetables and man-refined carbohydrates like sugar and white
flour is dangerous. Any diet which includes refined sugar and white
flour, no matter what scientific name is applied to them,
is dangerous.

Kicking sugar and white flour and substituting whole grains,
vegetables and natural fruits in season, is the core of any sensible
natural regimen. Changing the quality of your carbohydrates can change
the quality of your health and life. If you eat natural food of good
quality, quantity tends to take care of itself. Nobody is going to eat
a half-dozen sugar beets or a whole case of sugar cane. Even if they
do, it will be less dangerous than a few ounces of sugar.

Sugar of all kinds-natural sugars, such as those in honey and fruit
(fructose), as well as the refined white stuff (sucrose)-tends to
arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect
on the stomach’s natural ability to move. Sugars are not digested in
the mouth, like cereals, or in the stomach, like animal flesh. When
taken alone, they pass quickly through the stomach into the small
intestine. When sugars are eaten with other foods-perhaps meat and
bread in a sandwich-they are held up in the stomach for a while. The
sugar in the bread and the Coke sit there with the hamburger and the
bun waiting for them to be digested. While the stomach is working on
the animal protein and the refined starch in the bread, the addition
of the sugar practically guarantees rapid acid fermentation under the
conditions of warmth and moisture existing in the stomach.

One lump of sugar in your coffee after a sandwich is enough to turn
your stomach into a fermenter. One soda with a hamburger is enough to
turn your stomach into a still. Sugar on cereal-whether you buy it
already sugared in a box or add it yourself-almost guarantees acid
fermentation.

Since the beginning of time, natural laws were observed, in both
senses of that word, when it came to eating foods in combination.
Birds have been observed eating insects at one period in the day and
seeds at another. Other animals tend to eat one food at a time.
Flesh-eating animals take their protein raw and straight.

In the Orient, it is traditional to eat yang before yin. Miso soup
(fermented soybean protein, yang) for breakfast; raw fish (more yang
protein) at the beginning of the meal; afterwards comes the rice
(which is less yang than the miso and fish); and then the vegetables
which are yin. If you ever eat with a traditional Japanese family and
you violate this order, the Orientals (if your friends) will correct
you courteously but firmly.

The law observed by Orthodox Jews prohibits many combinations at
the same meal, especially flesh and dairy products. Special utensils
for the dairy meal and different utensils for the flesh meal reinforce
that taboo at the food’s source in the kitchen.

Man learned very early in the game what improper combinations of
food could do to the human system. When he got a stomach ache from
combining raw fruit with grain, or honey with porridge, he didn’t
reach for an antacid tablet. He learned not to eat that way. When
gluttony and excess became widespread, religious codes and
commandments were invoked against it. Gluttony is a capital sin in
most religions; but there are no specific religious warnings or
commandments against refined sugar because sugar abuse-like drug
abuse-did not appear on the world scene until centuries after holy
books had gone to press.

Why must we accept as normal what we find in a race of sick
and weakened human beings? Dr Herbert M. Shelton asks.
Must we always take it for granted that the present eating
practices of civilized men are normal?… Foul stools, loose stools,
impacted stools, pebbly stools, much foul gas, colitis, haemorrhoids,
bleeding with stools, the need for toilet paper are swept into the
orbit of the normal.

When starches and complex sugars (like those in honey and fruits)
are digested, they are broken down into simple sugars called monosaccharides,
which are usable substances-nutriments. When starches and sugars are
taken together and undergo fermentation, they are broken down into
carbon dioxide, acetic acid, alcohol and water. With the exception of
the water, all these are unusable substances-poisons.

When proteins are digested, they are broken down into amino acids,
which are usable substances-nutriments. When proteins are taken with
sugar, they putrefy; they are broken down into a variety of ptomaines
and leucomaines, which are nonusable substances-poisons.

Enzymic digestion of foods prepares them for use by our body.
Bacterial decomposition makes them unfit for use by our body. The
first process gives us nutriments; the second gives us poisons.

Much that passes for modern nutrition is obsessed with a mania for
quantitative counting. The body is treated like a cheque account.
Deposit calories (like dollars) and withdraw energy. Deposit proteins,
carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals-balanced quantitatively-and
the result, theoretically, is a healthy body. People qualify as
healthy today if they can crawl out of bed, get to the office and sign
in. If they can’t make it, call the doctor to qualify for sick pay,
hospitalisation, rest cure-anything from a day’s pay without working
to an artificial kidney, courtesy of the taxpayers.

But what does it profit someone if the theoretically required
calories and nutrients are consumed daily, yet this random
eat-on-the-run, snack-time collection of foods ferments and putrefies
in the digestive tract? What good is it if the body is fed protein,
only to have it putrefy in the gastrointestinal canal? Carbohydrates
that ferment in the digestive tract are converted into alcohol and
acetic acid, not digestible monosaccharides.

To derive sustenance from foods eaten, they must be
digested, Shelton warned years ago. They must not
rot.

Sure, the body can get rid of poisons through the urine and the
pores; the amount of poisons in the urine is taken as an index to
what’s going on in the intestine. The body does establish a tolerance
for these poisons, just as it adjusts gradually to an intake of
heroin. But, says Shelton, the discomfort from accumulation of
gas, the bad breath, and foul and unpleasant odors are as undesirable
as are the poisons.

SUGAR AND MENTAL HEALTH.

In the Dark Ages, troubled souls were rarely locked up for going
off their rocker. Such confinement began in the Age of Enlightenment,
after sugar made the transition from apothecary’s prescription to
candy-maker’s confection. The great confinement of the
insane, as one historian calls it, began in the late 17th
century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in 200 years
from a pinch or two in a barrel of beer, here and there, to more than
two million pounds per year. By that time, physicians in London had
begun to observe and record terminal physical signs and symptoms of
the sugar blues.

Meanwhile, when sugar eaters did not manifest obvious terminal
physical symptoms and the physicians were professionally bewildered,
patients were no longer pronounced bewitched, but mad, insane,
emotionally disturbed. Laziness, fatigue, debauchery, parental
displeasure-any one problem was sufficient cause for people under
twenty-five to be locked up in the first Parisian mental hospitals.
All it took to be incarcerated was a complaint from parents, relatives
or the omnipotent parish priest. Wet nurses with their babies,
pregnant youngsters, retarded or defective children, senior citizens,
paralytics, epileptics, prostitutes or raving lunatics-anyone wanted
off the streets and out of sight was put away. The mental hospital
succeeded witch-hunting and heresy-hounding as a more enlightened and
humane method of social control. The physician and priest handled the
dirty work of street sweeping in return for royal favours.

Initially, when the General Hospital was established in Paris by
royal decree, one per cent of the city’s population was locked up.
From that time until the 20th century, as the consumption of sugar went
up and up-especially in the cities-so did the number of people who
were put away in the General Hospital. Three hundred years later, the
emotionally disturbed can be turned into walking
automatons, their brains controlled with psychoactive drugs.

Today, pioneers of orthomolecular psychiatry, such as Dr Abram
Hoffer, Dr Allan Cott, Dr A. Cherkin as well as Dr Linus Pauling, have
confirmed that mental illness is a myth and that emotional disturbance
can be merely the first symptom of the obvious inability of the human
system to handle the stress of sugar dependency.

In Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Dr Pauling writes: The
functioning of the brain and nervous tissue is more sensitively
dependent on the rate of chemical reactions than the functioning of
other organs and tissues. I believe that mental disease is for the
most part caused by abnormal reaction rates, as determined by genetic
constitution and diet, and by abnormal molecular concentrations of
essential substances… Selection of food (and drugs) in a world that
is undergoing rapid scientific and technological change may often be
far from the best.

In Megavitamin B3 Therapy for Schizophrenia, Dr Abram Hoffer notes:
Patients are also advised to follow a good nutritional program
with restriction of sucrose and sucrose-rich foods.

Clinical research with hyperactive and psychotic children, as well
as those with brain injuries and learning disabilities, has shown:

An abnormally high family history of diabetes-that is,
parents and grandparents who cannot handle sugar; an abnormally high
incidence of low blood glucose, or functional hypoglycemia in the
children themselves, which indicates that their systems cannot handle
sugar; dependence on a high level of sugar in the diets of the very
children who cannot handle it.

Inquiry into the dietary history of patients diagnosed as
schizophrenic reveals the diet of their choice is rich in sweets,
candy, cakes, coffee, caffeinated beverages, and foods prepared with
sugar. These foods, which stimulate the adrenals, should be eliminated
or severely restricted.

The avant-garde of modern medicine has rediscovered what the lowly
sorceress learned long ago through painstaking study of nature.

In more than twenty years of psychiatric work, writes
Dr Thomas Szasz, I have never known a clinical psychologist to
report, on the basis of a projective test, that the subject is a
normal, mentally healthy person. While some witches may have survived
dunking, no ‘madman’ survives psychological testing…there is no
behavior or person that a modern psychiatrist cannot plausibly
diagnose as abnormal or ill.

So it was in the 17th century. Once the doctor or the exorcist had
been called in, he was under pressure to do something. When he tried
and failed, the poor patient had to be put away. It is often said that
surgeons bury their mistakes. Physicians and psychiatrists put them
away; lock ’em up.

In the 1940s, Dr John Tintera rediscovered the vital importance of
the endocrine system, especially the adrenal glands, in
pathological mentation-or brain boggling. In
200 cases under treatment for hypoadrenocorticism (the lack of
adequate adrenal cortical hormone production or imbalance among these
hormones), he discovered that the chief complaints of his patients
were often similar to those found in persons whose systems were unable
to handle sugar: fatigue, nervousness, depression, apprehension,
craving for sweets, inability to handle alcohol, inability to
concentrate, allergies, low blood pressure. Sugar blues!

Dr Tintera finally insisted that all his patients submit to a
four-hour glucose tolerance test (GTT) to find out whether or not they
could handle sugar. The results were so startling that the
laboratories double-checked their techniques, then apologised for what
they believed to be incorrect readings. What mystified them was the
low, flat curves derived from disturbed, early adolescents. This
laboratory procedure had been previously carried out only for patients
with physical findings presumptive of diabetes.

Dorland’s definition of schizophrenia (Bleuler’s dementia praecox)
includes the phrase, often recognized during or shortly after
adolescence, and further, in reference to hebephrenia and
catatonia, coming on soon after the onset of puberty.

These conditions might seem to arise or become aggravated at
puberty, but probing into the patient’s past will frequently reveal
indications which were present at birth, during the first year of
life, and through the preschool and grammar school years. Each of
these periods has its own characteristic clinical picture. This
picture becomes more marked at pubescence and often causes school
officials to complain of juvenile delinquency or underachievement.

A glucose tolerance test at any of these periods could alert
parents and physicians and could save innumerable hours and small
fortunes spent in looking into the child’s psyche and home environment
for maladjustments of questionable significance in the emotional
development of the average child.

The negativism, hyperactivity and obstinate resentment of
discipline are absolute indications for at least the minimum
laboratory tests: urinalysis, complete blood-count, PBI determination,
and the five-hour glucose tolerance test. A GTT can be performed on a
young child by the micro-method without undue trauma to the patient.
As a matter of fact, I have been urging that these four tests be
routine for all patients, even before a history or physical
examination is undertaken.

In almost all discussions on drug addiction, alcoholism and
schizophrenia, it is claimed that there is no definite constitutional
type that falls prey to these afflictions. Almost universally, the
statement is made that all of these individuals are emotionally
immature. It has long been our goal to persuade every physician,
whether oriented toward psychiatry, genetics or physiology, to
recognise that one type of endocrine individual is involved in the
majority of these cases: the hypoadrenocortic.

Tintera published several epochal medical papers. Over and over, he
emphasised that improvement, alleviation, palliation or cure was
dependent upon the restoration of the normal function of the
total organism. His first prescribed item of treatment was diet.
Over and over again, he said that the importance of diet cannot
be over-emphasised. He laid out a sweeping permanent injunction
against sugar in all forms and guises.

While Egas Moniz of Portugal was receiving a Nobel Prize for
devising the lobotomy operation for the treatment of schizophrenia,
Tintera’s reward was to be harassment and hounding by the pundits of
organised medicine. While Tintera’s sweeping implication of sugar as a
cause of what was called schizophrenia could be confined
to medical journals, he was let alone, ignored. He could be tolerated
if he stayed in his assigned territory, endocrinology. Even
when he suggested that alcoholism was related to adrenals that had
been whipped by sugar abuse, they let him alone; because the medicos
had decided there was nothing in alcoholism for them except
aggravation, they were satisfied to abandon it to Alcoholics
Anonymous. However, when Tintera dared to suggest in a magazine of
general circulation that it is ridiculous to talk of kinds of
allergies when there is only one kind, which is adrenal glands
impaired…by sugar, he could no longer be ignored.

The allergists had a great racket going for themselves. Allergic
souls had been entertaining each other for years with tall tales of
exotic allergies, everything from horse feathers to lobster tails.
Along comes someone who says none of this matters: take them off
sugar, and keep them off it.

Perhaps Tintera’s untimely death in 1969 at the age of fifty-seven
made it easier for the medical profession to accept discoveries that
had once seemed as far out as the simple oriental medical thesis of
genetics and diet, yin and yang. Today, doctors all over the world are
repeating what Tintera announced years ago: nobody, but nobody, should
ever be allowed to begin what is called psychiatric
treatment, anyplace, anywhere, unless and until they have had a
glucose tolerance test to discover if they can handle sugar.

So-called preventive medicine goes further and suggests that since
we only think we can handle sugar because we initially have strong
adrenals, why wait until they give us signs and signals that they’re
worn out? Take the load off now by eliminating sugar in all forms and
guises, starting with that soda pop you have in your hand.

The mind truly boggles when one glances over what passes for
medical history. Through the centuries, troubled souls have been
barbecued for bewitchment, exorcised for possession, locked up for
insanity, tortured for masturbatory madness, psychiatrised for
psychosis, lobotomised for schizophrenia. How many patients would have
listened if the local healer had told them that the only thing ailing
them was sugar blues?

 

 

sugar 2

Sugar

 

Refined Sugar

A multitude of common physical and mental
ailments are strongly linked to the consuming of pure, refined sugar.

The Sweetest Poison of
All

 

WHY SUGAR IS TOXIC TO THE BODY.

In 1957, Dr William Coda Martin tried
to answer the question: When is a food a food and when is it a poison?
His working definition of poison was: Medically: Any
substance applied to the body, ingested or developed within the body,
which causes or may cause disease. Physically: Any substance which
inhibits the activity of a catalyst which is a minor substance,
chemical or enzyme that activates a reaction. The dictionary
gives an even broader definition for poison: to
exert a harmful influence on, or to pervert.

Dr Martin classified refined sugar as a poison because it has been
depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals. What is left
consists of pure, refined carbohydrates. The body cannot utilize this
refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins
and minerals are present. Nature supplies these elements in each plant
in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrate in that
particular plant. There is no excess for other added carbohydrates.
Incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results in the formation of ‘toxic
metabolite’ such as pyruvic acid and abnormal sugars containing five
carbon atoms.

Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system
and the abnormal sugars in the red blood cells. These toxic
metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells. They cannot
get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally. In time, some
of the cells die. This interferes with the function of a part of the
body and is the beginning of degenerative disease.

Refined sugar is lethal when ingested by humans because it provides
only that which nutritionists describe as empty or
naked calories. It lacks the natural minerals which are
present in the sugar beet or cane. In addition, sugar is worse than
nothing because it drains and leaches the body of precious vitamins
and minerals through the demand its digestion, detoxification and
elimination make upon one’s entire system.

So essential is balance to our bodies that we have many ways to
provide against the sudden shock of a heavy intake of sugar. Minerals
such as sodium (from salt), potassium and magnesium (from vegetables),
and calcium (from the bones) are mobilised and used in chemical
transmutation; neutral acids are produced which attempt to return the
acid-alkaline balance factor of the blood to a more normal state.

Sugar taken every day produces a continuously over-acid condition,
and more and more minerals are required from deep in the body in the
attempt to rectify the imbalance. Finally, in order to protect the
blood, so much calcium is taken from the bones and teeth that decay
and general weakening begin.

Excess sugar eventually affects every organ in the body. Initially,
it is stored in the liver in the form of glucose (glycogen). Since the
liver’s capacity is limited, a daily intake of refined sugar (above
the required amount of natural sugar) soon makes the liver expand like
a balloon. When the liver is filled to its maximum capacity, the
excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids.
These are taken to every part of the body and stored in the most
inactive areas: the belly, the buttocks, the breasts and the thighs.

When these comparatively harmless places are completely filled,
fatty acids are then distributed among active organs, such as the
heart and kidneys. These begin to slow down; finally their tissues
degenerate and turn to fat. The whole body is affected by their
reduced ability, and abnormal blood pressure is created. The
parasympathetic nervous system is affected; and organs governed by it,
such as the small brain, become inactive or paralysed. (Normal brain
function is rarely thought of as being as biologic as digestion.) The
circulatory and lymphatic systems are invaded, and the quality of the
red corpuscles starts to change. An overabundance of white cells
occurs, and the creation of tissue becomes slower. Our body’s
tolerance and immunising power becomes more limited, so we cannot
respond properly to extreme attacks, whether they be cold, heat,
mosquitoes or microbes.

Excessive sugar has a strong mal-effect on the functioning of the
brain. The key to orderly brain function is glutamic acid, a vital
compound found in many vegetables. The B vitamins play a major role in
dividing glutamic acid into antagonistic-complementary compounds which
produce a proceed or control response in the
brain. B vitamins are also manufactured by symbiotic bacteria which
live in our intestines. When refined sugar is taken daily, these
bacteria wither and die, and our stock of B vitamins gets very low.
Too much sugar makes one sleepy; our ability to calculate and remember
is lost.

SUGAR: HARMFUL TO HUMANS AND ANIMALS.

Shipwrecked sailors who ate and drank nothing but sugar and rum for
nine days surely went through some of this trauma; the tales they had
to tell created a big public relations problem for the sugar pushers.
This incident occurred when a vessel carrying a cargo of sugar was
shipwrecked in 1793. The five surviving sailors were finally rescued
after being marooned for nine days. They were in a wasted condition
due to starvation, having consumed nothing but sugar and rum.
The eminent French physiologist F. Magendie was inspired by that
incident to conduct a series of experiments with animals, the results
of which he published in 1816. In the experiments, he fed dogs a diet
of sugar or olive oil and water. All the dogs wasted and died.

The shipwrecked sailors and the French physiologist’s experimental
dogs proved the same point. As a steady diet, sugar is worse than
nothing. Plain water can keep you alive for quite some time. Sugar and
water can kill you. Humans [and animals] are unable to subsist
on a diet of sugar.

The dead dogs in Professor Magendie’s laboratory alerted the sugar
industry to the hazards of free scientific inquiry. From that day to
this, the sugar industry has invested millions of dollars in
behind-the-scenes, subsidised science. The best scientific names that
money could buy have been hired, in the hope that they could one day
come up with something at least pseudoscientific in the way of glad
tidings about sugar.

It has been proved, however, that sugar is a major factor in
dental decay; sugar in a person’s diet does cause overweight;
removal of sugar from diets has cured symptoms of crippling, worldwide
diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart illnesses.

Sir Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, noticed in 1929
in Panama that, among sugar plantation owners who ate large amounts of
their refined stuff, diabetes was common. Among native cane-cutters,
who only got to chew the raw cane, he saw no diabetes.

However, the story of the public relations attempts on the part of
the sugar manufacturers began in Britain in 1808 when the Committee of
West India reported to the House of Commons that a prize of
twenty-five guineas had been offered to anyone who could come up with
the most satisfactory experiments to prove that unrefined
sugar was good for feeding and fattening oxen, cows, hogs and sheep.
Food for animals is often seasonal, always expensive. Sugar, by then,
was dirt cheap. People weren’t eating it fast enough.

Naturally, the attempt to feed livestock with sugar and molasses in
England in 1808 was a disaster. When the Committee on West India made
its fourth report to the House of Commons, one Member of Parliament,
John Curwin, reported that he had tried to feed sugar and molasses to
calves without success. He suggested that perhaps someone should try
again by sneaking sugar and molasses into skimmed milk. Had anything
come of that, you can be sure the West Indian sugar merchants would
have spread the news around the world. After this singular lack of
success in pushing sugar in cow pastures, the West Indian sugar
merchants gave up.

With undaunted zeal for increasing the market demand for the most
important agricultural product of the West Indies, the Committee of
West India was reduced to a tactic that has served the sugar pushers
for almost 200 years: irrelevant and transparently silly testimonials
from faraway, inaccessible people with some kind of
scientific credentials. One early commentator called them
hired consciences.

The House of Commons committee was so hard-up for local
cheerleaders on the sugar question, it was reduced to quoting a doctor
from faraway Philadelphia, a leader of the recent American colonial
rebellion: The great Dr Rush of Philadelphia is reported to have
said that ‘sugar contains more nutrients in the same bulk than any
other known substance’. (Emphasis added.) At the same time, the
same Dr Rush was preaching that masturbation was the cause of
insanity! If a weasel-worded statement like that was quoted, one can
be sure no animal doctor could be found in Britain who would recommend
sugar for the care and feeding of cows, pigs or sheep.

While preparing his epochal volume, A History of Nutrition,
published in 1957, Professor E. V. McCollum (Johns Hopkins
University), sometimes called America’s foremost nutritionist and
certainly a pioneer in the field, reviewed approximately 200,000
published scientific papers, recording experiments with food, their
properties, their utilisation and their effects on animals and men.
The material covered the period from the mid-18th century to 1940.
From this great repository of scientific inquiry, McCollum selected
those experiments which he regarded as significant to relate the
story of progress in discovering human error in this segment of
science [of nutrition]. Professor McCollum failed to record a
single controlled scientific experiment with sugar between 1816 and
1940.

Unhappily, we must remind ourselves that scientists today, and
always, accomplish little without a sponsor. The protocols of modern
science have compounded the costs of scientific inquiry.

We have no right to be surprised when we read the introduction to
McCollum’s A History of Nutrition and find that The author and
publishers are indebted to The Nutrition Foundation, Inc., for a grant
provided to meet a portion of the cost of publication of this
book. What, you might ask, is The Nutrition Foundation, Inc.?
The author and the publishers don’t tell you. It happens to be a front
organisation for the leading sugar-pushing conglomerates in the food
business, including the American Sugar Refining Company, Coca-Cola,
Pepsi-Cola, Curtis Candy Co., General Foods, General Mills, Nestlé
Co., Pet Milk Co. and Sunshine Biscuits-about 45 such companies in
all.

Perhaps the most significant thing about McCollum’s 1957 history
was what he left out: a monumental earlier work described by an
eminent Harvard professor as one of those epochal pieces of
research which makes every other investigator desirous of kicking
himself because he never thought of doing the same thing. In the
1930s, a research dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, Dr Weston A. Price,
travelled all over the world-from the lands of the Eskimos to the
South Sea Islands, from Africa to New Zealand. His Nutrition and
Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and
Their Effects, which is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, was
first published in 1939.

Dr Price took the whole world as his laboratory. His devastating
conclusion, recorded in horrifying detail in area after area, was
simple. People who live under so-called backward primitive conditions
had excellent teeth and wonderful general health. They ate natural,
unrefined food from their own locale. As soon as refined, sugared
foods were imported as a result of contact with civilisation,
physical degeneration began in a way that was definitely observable
within a single generation.

Any credibility the sugar pushers have is based on our ignorance of
works like that of Dr Price. Sugar manufacturers keep trying, hoping
and contributing generous research grants to colleges and
universities; but the research laboratories never come up with
anything solid the manufacturers can use. Invariably, the research
results are bad news.

Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating
and be wise, Harvard professor Ernest Hooten said in Apes, Men,
and Morons. Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and
toothpaste are any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish.
It is store food that has given us store teeth.

When the researchers bite the hands that feed them, and the news
gets out, it’s embarrassing all around. In 1958, Time magazine
reported that a Harvard biochemist and his assistants had worked with
myriads of mice for more than ten years, bankrolled by the Sugar
Research Foundation, Inc. to the tune of $57,000, to find out how
sugar causes dental cavities and how to prevent this. It took them ten
years to discover that there was no way to prevent sugar causing
dental decay. When the researchers reported their findings in the
Dental Association Journal, their source of money dried up. The Sugar
Research Foundation withdrew its support.

The more that the scientists disappointed them, the more the sugar
pushers had to rely on the ad men.

SUCROSE: PURE ENERGY AT A PRICE.

When calories became the big thing in the 1920s, and everybody was
learning to count them, the sugar pushers turned up with a new pitch.
They boasted there were 2,500 calories in a pound of sugar. A little
over a quarter-pound of sugar would produce 20 per cent of the total
daily quota.

If you could buy all your food energy as cheaply as you buy
calories in sugar, they told us, your board bill for the
year would be very low. If sugar were seven cents a pound, it would
cost less than $35 for a whole year.

A very inexpensive way to kill yourself.

Of course, we don’t live on any such unbalanced diet,
they admitted later. But that figure serves to point out how
inexpensive sugar is as an energy-building food. What was once a
luxury only a privileged few could enjoy is now a food for the poorest
of people.

Later, the sugar pushers advertised that sugar was chemically pure,
topping Ivory soap in that department, being 99.9 per cent pure
against Ivory’s vaunted 99.44 per cent. No food of our everyday
diet is purer, we were assured.

What was meant by purity, besides the unarguable fact that all
vitamins, minerals, salts, fibres and proteins had been removed in the
refining process? Well, the sugar pushers came up with a new slant on
purity.

You don’t have to sort it like beans, wash it like rice.
Every grain is like every other. No waste attends its use. No useless
bones like in meat, no grounds like coffee.

Pure is a favourite adjective of the sugar pushers
because it means one thing to the chemists and another thing to the
ordinary mortals. When honey is labelled pure, this means that it is
in its natural state (stolen directly from the bees who made it), with
no adulteration with sucrose to stretch it and no harmful chemical
residues which may have been sprayed on the flowers. It does not mean
that the honey is free from minerals like iodine, iron, calcium,
phosphorus or multiple vitamins. So effective is the purification
process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries that
sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a
chemist has on the laboratory shelves. What nutritional virtue this
abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us.

Beginning with World War I, the sugar pushers coated their
propaganda with a preparedness pitch. Dietitians have known the
high food value of sugar for a long time, said an industry tract
of the 1920s. But it took World War I to bring this home. The
energy-building power of sugar reaches the muscles in minutes and it
was of value to soldiers as a ration given them just before an attack
was launched. The sugar pushers have been harping on the
energy-building power of sucrose for years because it contains nothing
else. Caloric energy and habit-forming taste: that’s what sucrose has,
and nothing else.

All other foods contain energy plus. All foods contain some
nutrients in the way of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins or minerals,
or all of these. Sucrose contains caloric energy, period.

The quick energy claim the sugar pushers talk about,
which drives reluctant doughboys over the top and drives children up
the wall, is based on the fact that refined sucrose is not digested in
the mouth or the stomach but passes directly to the lower intestines
and then to the bloodstream. The extra speed with which sucrose
enters the bloodstream does more harm than good.

Much of the public confusion about refined sugar is compounded by
language. Sugars are classified by chemists as
carbohydrates. This manufactured word means a
substance containing carbon with oxygen and hydrogen. If
chemists want to use these hermetic terms in their laboratories when
they talk to one another, fine. The use of the word
carbohydrate outside the laboratory-especially in food
labelling and advertising lingo-to describe both natural, complete
cereal grains (which have been a principal food of mankind for
thousands of years) and man-refined sugar (which is a manufactured
drug and principal poison of mankind for only a few hundred years) is
demonstrably wicked. This kind of confusion makes possible the
flimflam practised by sugar pushers to confound anxious mothers into
thinking kiddies need sugar to survive.

In 1973, the Sugar Information Foundation placed full-page
advertisements in national magazines. Actually, the ads were disguised
retractions they were forced to make in a strategic retreat after a
lengthy tussle with the Federal Trade Commission over an earlier ad
campaign claiming that a little shot of sugar before meals would
curb your appetite. You need carbohydrates. And it
so happens that sugar is the best-tasting carbohydrate. You
might as well say everybody needs liquids every day. It so happens
that many people find champagne is the best-tasting liquid. How long
would the Women’s Christian Temperance Union let the liquor lobby get
away with that one?

The use of the word carbohydrate" to describe sugar is
deliberately misleading. Since the improved labelling of nutritional
properties was required on packages and cans, refined carbohydrates
like sugar are lumped together with those carbohydrates which may or
may not be refined. The several types of carbohydrates are added
together for an overall carbohydrate total. Thus, the effect of the
label is to hide the sugar content from the unwary buyer. Chemists add
to the confusion by using the word sugar to describe an
entire group of substances that are similar but not identical.

Glucose is a sugar found usually with other sugars, in fruits and
vegetables. It is a key material in the metabolism of all plants and
animals. Many of our principal foods are converted into glucose in our
bodies. Glucose is always present in our bloodstream, and it is often
called blood sugar.

Dextrose, also called corn sugar, is derived
synthetically from starch. Fructose is fruit sugar. Maltose is malt
sugar. Lactose is milk sugar. Sucrose is refined sugar made from sugar
cane and sugar beet.

Glucose has always been an essential element in the human
bloodstream. Sucrose addiction is something new in the history of the
human animal. To use the word sugar to describe two
substances which are far from being identical, which have different
chemical structures and which affect the body in profoundly different
ways compounds confusion.

It makes possible more flimflam from the sugar pushers who tell us
how important sugar is as an essential component of the human body,
how it is oxidised to produce energy, how it is metabolised to produce
warmth, and so on. They’re talking about glucose, of course, which is
manufactured in our bodies. However, one is led to believe that the
manufacturers are talking about the sucrose which is made in their
refineries. When the word sugar can mean the glucose in
your blood as well as the sucrose in your Coca-Cola, it’s great for
the sugar pushers but it’s rough on everybody else.

People have been bamboozled into thinking of their bodies the way
they think of their cheque accounts. If they suspect they have low
blood sugar, they are programmed to snack on vending machine candies
and sodas in order to raise their blood sugar level. Actually, this is
the worst thing to do. The level of glucose in their blood is apt to
be low because they are addicted to sucrose. People who kick sucrose
addiction and stay off sucrose find that the glucose level of their
blood returns to normal and stays there.

Since the late 1960s, millions of Americans have returned to
natural food. A new type of store, the natural food store, has
encouraged many to become dropouts from the supermarket. Natural food
can be instrumental in restoring health. Many people, therefore, have
come to equate the word natural with healthy.
So the sugar pushers have begun to pervert the word
natural in order to mislead the public.

Made from natural ingredients, the television
sugar-pushers tell us about product after product. The word
"from" is not accented on television. It should be. Even
refined sugar is made from natural ingredients. There is nothing new
about that. The natural ingredients are cane and beets. But that
four-letter word from hardly suggests that 90 per cent of
the cane and beet have been removed. Heroin, too, could be advertised
as being made from natural ingredients. The opium poppy is as natural
as the sugar beet. It’s what man does with it that tells the story.

If you want to avoid sugar in the supermarket, there is only one
sure way. Don’t buy anything unless it says on the label prominently,
in plain English: No sugar added. Use of the word
carbohydrate" as a scientific" word for sugar
has become a standard defence strategy with sugar pushers and many of
their medical apologists. It’s their security blanket.

CORRECT FOOD COMBINING.

Whether it’s sugared cereal or pastry and black coffee for
breakfast, whether it’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola for lunch or the full
gourmet dinner in the evening, chemically the average
American diet is a formula that guarantees bubble, bubble, stomach
trouble.

Unless you’ve taken too much insulin and, in a state of insulin
shock, need sugar as an antidote, hardly anyone ever has cause to take
sugar alone. Humans need sugar as much as they need the nicotine in
tobacco. Crave it is one thing-need it is another. From the days of
the Persian Empire to our own, sugar has usually been used to hop up
the flavour of other food and drink, as an ingredient in the kitchen
or as a condiment at the table. Let us leave aside for the moment the
known effect of sugar (long-term and short-term) on the entire system
and concentrate on the effect of sugar taken in combination with other
daily foods.

When Grandma warned that sugared cookies before meals will
spoil your supper, she knew what she was talking about. Her
explanation might not have satisfied a chemist but, as with many
traditional axioms from the Mosaic law on kosher food and separation
in the kitchen, such rules are based on years of trial and error and
are apt to be right on the button. Most modern research in combining
food is a laboured discovery of the things Grandma took for granted.

Any diet or regimen undertaken for the single purpose of losing
weight is dangerous, by definition. Obesity is talked about and
treated as a disease in 20th-century America. Obesity is not a
disease. It is only a symptom, a sign, a warning that your body is out
of order. Dieting to lose weight is as silly and dangerous as taking
aspirin to relieve a headache before you know the reason for the
headache. Getting rid of a symptom is like turning off an alarm. It
leaves the basic cause untouched.

Any diet or regimen undertaken with any objective short of
restoration of total health of your body is dangerous. Many overweight
people are undernourished. (Dr H. Curtis Wood stresses this point in
his 1971 book, Overfed But Undernourished.) Eating less can aggravate
this condition, unless one is concerned with the quality of the food
instead of just its quantity.

Many people-doctors included-assume that if weight is lost, fat is
lost. This is not necessarily so. Any diet which lumps all
carbohydrates together is dangerous. Any diet which does not consider
the quality of carbohydrates and makes the crucial life-and-death
distinction between natural, unrefined carbohydrates like whole grains
and vegetables and man-refined carbohydrates like sugar and white
flour is dangerous. Any diet which includes refined sugar and white
flour, no matter what scientific name is applied to them,
is dangerous.

Kicking sugar and white flour and substituting whole grains,
vegetables and natural fruits in season, is the core of any sensible
natural regimen. Changing the quality of your carbohydrates can change
the quality of your health and life. If you eat natural food of good
quality, quantity tends to take care of itself. Nobody is going to eat
a half-dozen sugar beets or a whole case of sugar cane. Even if they
do, it will be less dangerous than a few ounces of sugar.

Sugar of all kinds-natural sugars, such as those in honey and fruit
(fructose), as well as the refined white stuff (sucrose)-tends to
arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect
on the stomach’s natural ability to move. Sugars are not digested in
the mouth, like cereals, or in the stomach, like animal flesh. When
taken alone, they pass quickly through the stomach into the small
intestine. When sugars are eaten with other foods-perhaps meat and
bread in a sandwich-they are held up in the stomach for a while. The
sugar in the bread and the Coke sit there with the hamburger and the
bun waiting for them to be digested. While the stomach is working on
the animal protein and the refined starch in the bread, the addition
of the sugar practically guarantees rapid acid fermentation under the
conditions of warmth and moisture existing in the stomach.

One lump of sugar in your coffee after a sandwich is enough to turn
your stomach into a fermenter. One soda with a hamburger is enough to
turn your stomach into a still. Sugar on cereal-whether you buy it
already sugared in a box or add it yourself-almost guarantees acid
fermentation.

Since the beginning of time, natural laws were observed, in both
senses of that word, when it came to eating foods in combination.
Birds have been observed eating insects at one period in the day and
seeds at another. Other animals tend to eat one food at a time.
Flesh-eating animals take their protein raw and straight.

In the Orient, it is traditional to eat yang before yin. Miso soup
(fermented soybean protein, yang) for breakfast; raw fish (more yang
protein) at the beginning of the meal; afterwards comes the rice
(which is less yang than the miso and fish); and then the vegetables
which are yin. If you ever eat with a traditional Japanese family and
you violate this order, the Orientals (if your friends) will correct
you courteously but firmly.

The law observed by Orthodox Jews prohibits many combinations at
the same meal, especially flesh and dairy products. Special utensils
for the dairy meal and different utensils for the flesh meal reinforce
that taboo at the food’s source in the kitchen.

Man learned very early in the game what improper combinations of
food could do to the human system. When he got a stomach ache from
combining raw fruit with grain, or honey with porridge, he didn’t
reach for an antacid tablet. He learned not to eat that way. When
gluttony and excess became widespread, religious codes and
commandments were invoked against it. Gluttony is a capital sin in
most religions; but there are no specific religious warnings or
commandments against refined sugar because sugar abuse-like drug
abuse-did not appear on the world scene until centuries after holy
books had gone to press.

Why must we accept as normal what we find in a race of sick
and weakened human beings? Dr Herbert M. Shelton asks.
Must we always take it for granted that the present eating
practices of civilized men are normal?… Foul stools, loose stools,
impacted stools, pebbly stools, much foul gas, colitis, haemorrhoids,
bleeding with stools, the need for toilet paper are swept into the
orbit of the normal.

When starches and complex sugars (like those in honey and fruits)
are digested, they are broken down into simple sugars called monosaccharides,
which are usable substances-nutriments. When starches and sugars are
taken together and undergo fermentation, they are broken down into
carbon dioxide, acetic acid, alcohol and water. With the exception of
the water, all these are unusable substances-poisons.

When proteins are digested, they are broken down into amino acids,
which are usable substances-nutriments. When proteins are taken with
sugar, they putrefy; they are broken down into a variety of ptomaines
and leucomaines, which are nonusable substances-poisons.

Enzymic digestion of foods prepares them for use by our body.
Bacterial decomposition makes them unfit for use by our body. The
first process gives us nutriments; the second gives us poisons.

Much that passes for modern nutrition is obsessed with a mania for
quantitative counting. The body is treated like a cheque account.
Deposit calories (like dollars) and withdraw energy. Deposit proteins,
carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals-balanced quantitatively-and
the result, theoretically, is a healthy body. People qualify as
healthy today if they can crawl out of bed, get to the office and sign
in. If they can’t make it, call the doctor to qualify for sick pay,
hospitalisation, rest cure-anything from a day’s pay without working
to an artificial kidney, courtesy of the taxpayers.

But what does it profit someone if the theoretically required
calories and nutrients are consumed daily, yet this random
eat-on-the-run, snack-time collection of foods ferments and putrefies
in the digestive tract? What good is it if the body is fed protein,
only to have it putrefy in the gastrointestinal canal? Carbohydrates
that ferment in the digestive tract are converted into alcohol and
acetic acid, not digestible monosaccharides.

To derive sustenance from foods eaten, they must be
digested, Shelton warned years ago. They must not
rot.

Sure, the body can get rid of poisons through the urine and the
pores; the amount of poisons in the urine is taken as an index to
what’s going on in the intestine. The body does establish a tolerance
for these poisons, just as it adjusts gradually to an intake of
heroin. But, says Shelton, the discomfort from accumulation of
gas, the bad breath, and foul and unpleasant odors are as undesirable
as are the poisons.

SUGAR AND MENTAL HEALTH.

In the Dark Ages, troubled souls were rarely locked up for going
off their rocker. Such confinement began in the Age of Enlightenment,
after sugar made the transition from apothecary’s prescription to
candy-maker’s confection. The great confinement of the
insane, as one historian calls it, began in the late 17th
century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in 200 years
from a pinch or two in a barrel of beer, here and there, to more than
two million pounds per year. By that time, physicians in London had
begun to observe and record terminal physical signs and symptoms of
the sugar blues.

Meanwhile, when sugar eaters did not manifest obvious terminal
physical symptoms and the physicians were professionally bewildered,
patients were no longer pronounced bewitched, but mad, insane,
emotionally disturbed. Laziness, fatigue, debauchery, parental
displeasure-any one problem was sufficient cause for people under
twenty-five to be locked up in the first Parisian mental hospitals.
All it took to be incarcerated was a complaint from parents, relatives
or the omnipotent parish priest. Wet nurses with their babies,
pregnant youngsters, retarded or defective children, senior citizens,
paralytics, epileptics, prostitutes or raving lunatics-anyone wanted
off the streets and out of sight was put away. The mental hospital
succeeded witch-hunting and heresy-hounding as a more enlightened and
humane method of social control. The physician and priest handled the
dirty work of street sweeping in return for royal favours.

Initially, when the General Hospital was established in Paris by
royal decree, one per cent of the city’s population was locked up.
From that time until the 20th century, as the consumption of sugar went
up and up-especially in the cities-so did the number of people who
were put away in the General Hospital. Three hundred years later, the
emotionally disturbed can be turned into walking
automatons, their brains controlled with psychoactive drugs.

Today, pioneers of orthomolecular psychiatry, such as Dr Abram
Hoffer, Dr Allan Cott, Dr A. Cherkin as well as Dr Linus Pauling, have
confirmed that mental illness is a myth and that emotional disturbance
can be merely the first symptom of the obvious inability of the human
system to handle the stress of sugar dependency.

In Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Dr Pauling writes: The
functioning of the brain and nervous tissue is more sensitively
dependent on the rate of chemical reactions than the functioning of
other organs and tissues. I believe that mental disease is for the
most part caused by abnormal reaction rates, as determined by genetic
constitution and diet, and by abnormal molecular concentrations of
essential substances… Selection of food (and drugs) in a world that
is undergoing rapid scientific and technological change may often be
far from the best.

In Megavitamin B3 Therapy for Schizophrenia, Dr Abram Hoffer notes:
Patients are also advised to follow a good nutritional program
with restriction of sucrose and sucrose-rich foods.

Clinical research with hyperactive and psychotic children, as well
as those with brain injuries and learning disabilities, has shown:

An abnormally high family history of diabetes-that is,
parents and grandparents who cannot handle sugar; an abnormally high
incidence of low blood glucose, or functional hypoglycemia in the
children themselves, which indicates that their systems cannot handle
sugar; dependence on a high level of sugar in the diets of the very
children who cannot handle it.

Inquiry into the dietary history of patients diagnosed as
schizophrenic reveals the diet of their choice is rich in sweets,
candy, cakes, coffee, caffeinated beverages, and foods prepared with
sugar. These foods, which stimulate the adrenals, should be eliminated
or severely restricted.

The avant-garde of modern medicine has rediscovered what the lowly
sorceress learned long ago through painstaking study of nature.

In more than twenty years of psychiatric work, writes
Dr Thomas Szasz, I have never known a clinical psychologist to
report, on the basis of a projective test, that the subject is a
normal, mentally healthy person. While some witches may have survived
dunking, no ‘madman’ survives psychological testing…there is no
behavior or person that a modern psychiatrist cannot plausibly
diagnose as abnormal or ill.

So it was in the 17th century. Once the doctor or the exorcist had
been called in, he was under pressure to do something. When he tried
and failed, the poor patient had to be put away. It is often said that
surgeons bury their mistakes. Physicians and psychiatrists put them
away; lock ’em up.

In the 1940s, Dr John Tintera rediscovered the vital importance of
the endocrine system, especially the adrenal glands, in
pathological mentation-or brain boggling. In
200 cases under treatment for hypoadrenocorticism (the lack of
adequate adrenal cortical hormone production or imbalance among these
hormones), he discovered that the chief complaints of his patients
were often similar to those found in persons whose systems were unable
to handle sugar: fatigue, nervousness, depression, apprehension,
craving for sweets, inability to handle alcohol, inability to
concentrate, allergies, low blood pressure. Sugar blues!

Dr Tintera finally insisted that all his patients submit to a
four-hour glucose tolerance test (GTT) to find out whether or not they
could handle sugar. The results were so startling that the
laboratories double-checked their techniques, then apologised for what
they believed to be incorrect readings. What mystified them was the
low, flat curves derived from disturbed, early adolescents. This
laboratory procedure had been previously carried out only for patients
with physical findings presumptive of diabetes.

Dorland’s definition of schizophrenia (Bleuler’s dementia praecox)
includes the phrase, often recognized during or shortly after
adolescence, and further, in reference to hebephrenia and
catatonia, coming on soon after the onset of puberty.

These conditions might seem to arise or become aggravated at
puberty, but probing into the patient’s past will frequently reveal
indications which were present at birth, during the first year of
life, and through the preschool and grammar school years. Each of
these periods has its own characteristic clinical picture. This
picture becomes more marked at pubescence and often causes school
officials to complain of juvenile delinquency or underachievement.

A glucose tolerance test at any of these periods could alert
parents and physicians and could save innumerable hours and small
fortunes spent in looking into the child’s psyche and home environment
for maladjustments of questionable significance in the emotional
development of the average child.

The negativism, hyperactivity and obstinate resentment of
discipline are absolute indications for at least the minimum
laboratory tests: urinalysis, complete blood-count, PBI determination,
and the five-hour glucose tolerance test. A GTT can be performed on a
young child by the micro-method without undue trauma to the patient.
As a matter of fact, I have been urging that these four tests be
routine for all patients, even before a history or physical
examination is undertaken.

In almost all discussions on drug addiction, alcoholism and
schizophrenia, it is claimed that there is no definite constitutional
type that falls prey to these afflictions. Almost universally, the
statement is made that all of these individuals are emotionally
immature. It has long been our goal to persuade every physician,
whether oriented toward psychiatry, genetics or physiology, to
recognise that one type of endocrine individual is involved in the
majority of these cases: the hypoadrenocortic.

Tintera published several epochal medical papers. Over and over, he
emphasised that improvement, alleviation, palliation or cure was
dependent upon the restoration of the normal function of the
total organism. His first prescribed item of treatment was diet.
Over and over again, he said that the importance of diet cannot
be over-emphasised. He laid out a sweeping permanent injunction
against sugar in all forms and guises.

While Egas Moniz of Portugal was receiving a Nobel Prize for
devising the lobotomy operation for the treatment of schizophrenia,
Tintera’s reward was to be harassment and hounding by the pundits of
organised medicine. While Tintera’s sweeping implication of sugar as a
cause of what was called schizophrenia could be confined
to medical journals, he was let alone, ignored. He could be tolerated
if he stayed in his assigned territory, endocrinology. Even
when he suggested that alcoholism was related to adrenals that had
been whipped by sugar abuse, they let him alone; because the medicos
had decided there was nothing in alcoholism for them except
aggravation, they were satisfied to abandon it to Alcoholics
Anonymous. However, when Tintera dared to suggest in a magazine of
general circulation that it is ridiculous to talk of kinds of
allergies when there is only one kind, which is adrenal glands
impaired…by sugar, he could no longer be ignored.

The allergists had a great racket going for themselves. Allergic
souls had been entertaining each other for years with tall tales of
exotic allergies, everything from horse feathers to lobster tails.
Along comes someone who says none of this matters: take them off
sugar, and keep them off it.

Perhaps Tintera’s untimely death in 1969 at the age of fifty-seven
made it easier for the medical profession to accept discoveries that
had once seemed as far out as the simple oriental medical thesis of
genetics and diet, yin and yang. Today, doctors all over the world are
repeating what Tintera announced years ago: nobody, but nobody, should
ever be allowed to begin what is called psychiatric
treatment, anyplace, anywhere, unless and until they have had a
glucose tolerance test to discover if they can handle sugar.

So-called preventive medicine goes further and suggests that since
we only think we can handle sugar because we initially have strong
adrenals, why wait until they give us signs and signals that they’re
worn out? Take the load off now by eliminating sugar in all forms and
guises, starting with that soda pop you have in your hand.

The mind truly boggles when one glances over what passes for
medical history. Through the centuries, troubled souls have been
barbecued for bewitchment, exorcised for possession, locked up for
insanity, tortured for masturbatory madness, psychiatrised for
psychosis, lobotomised for schizophrenia. How many patients would have
listened if the local healer had told them that the only thing ailing
them was sugar blues?

 

MSN news jan 18

It’s no secret that sugar is in almost everything you eat, even the foods you’d never expect. It’s also not a secret that sugar intake is becoming a huge problem that can lead to major health issues like diabetes and heart disease.
That said, even though these issues fall on the more serious end, there are still some signs to look out for when trying to determine how much sugar is too much. We talked to Brooke Alpert, MS, RD, CDN, the founder of B-Nutritious and a member of the American Dietetic Association to learn about how to know when it’s time to cut back on the sugar.
1. You crave sugar… A lot
Believe it or not, it’s actually possible to be addicted to sugar. And, according to Alpert, you’ll develop an insatiable appetite for sugar the more you eat it. ‘By eating a high-sugar diet, you cause a hormonal response in your body that’s like a wave, it brings you up and then you crash down and it triggers your body to want more sugar,’ she tells Delish. When you find yourself constantly craving something sweet, don’t overlook it, as there’s a possibility that your cravings are the sign of a larger problem.
2. You need more sugar to satisfy yourself
You might have a problem if, on top of your cravings, you find yourself not being satisfied with the amount of sugar in certain foods. Say hello to what Alpert calls sugar overkill, which ’causes your taste bud sugar tolerance to go up, so you need more and more sugar to satisfy that sweet craving’.

3. You’ve gained weight
You probably didn’t need us to tell you this but if you’ve noticed lately that you’re a few pounds heavier, it might be time to consider cutting back on how much sugar is in your diet. The reason being that eating sugar alone isn’t satisfying your appetite – it’s actually making you eat even more.
‘Excess sugar is excess calories, and since it has no protein or fibre, it doesn’t fill you up – so you just keep eating it,’ Alpert says. ‘When you load up on sugar, your body’s told to produce more insulin [and] over time, that excessive output can lead to insulin resistance.’

4. You experience mood swings pretty often
If eating sugar has ever left in a mood that’s less than stellar, there’s a reason for that. ‘The blood sugar crash that happens when you’re coming off a sugar high can cause mood swings and leave you feeling crabby,’ says Alpert.
‘Not to mention, if your energy is also tanking, that just contributes to a bad attitude.’ It’s worth noting that, according to Prevention.com, high sugar intake can lead to a higher risk of depression since sugar can raise levels of inflammation throughout the body. A study published by The JAMA Network in 2015 found that clinically depressed patients had brain inflammation levels that were 30% higher.
5. Your skin keeps breaking out
This is pretty much a given, but you’re not exactly doing your skin any favours if your sugar intake is through the roof. ‘Some people are sensitive to getting a spike in insulin from sugar intake, which can set off a hormonal cascade that can lead to a breakout like acne or rosacea,’ Alpert says.

6. You’ve got a few (or more) cavities
There’s a reason your parents constantly told you to lay off the sugar as a child. Not necessarily because your sugar high isn’t something they wanted to deal with, but because they knew that eating all that sugar would lead to some not-so-fun trips to the dentist’s office. Enter: cavities.
‘When bacteria chow down on food particles in between the teeth, acid is produced, which causes tooth decay,’ says Alpert. To expand her point a little, the acid that is released from those food particles that have been left behind combine with the saliva in your mouth to form plaque. And when that plaque isn’t brushed away, your teeth can begin decaying.
7. You run out of energy pretty often
Do you ever have a tough time mustering enough energy to make it through your workday? That morning cup of coffee with three sugars isn’t helping you out.
‘Energy is most stable when blood sugar is stable, so when you’re consuming too much sugar, the highs and lows of your blood sugar lead to highs and lows of energy,’ Alpert tell us. ‘Eating a lot of sugar also means it’s likely you’re not eating enough protein and fibre.’