SUGAR AND HEALTH
Sweetest Poison of All -Refined Sugar - Part IV
A multitude of common physical and mental ailments are strongly linked to the consuming of 'pure', refined sugar.
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 7, Number 1, December 1999 - January 2000. From the book by William Duffy "Sugar Blues"
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 organic 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 doth 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".9
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 candymaker's confection.
"The great confinement of the insane", as one historian calls it,10 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 20 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."11
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."12
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."13
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."14
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 bloodcount, 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 overemphasised". 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?
Endnotes:
1. Martin, William Coda, "When is a Food a Food-and When a Poison?", Michigan Organic News, March 1957, p. 3.
2. ibid.
3. McCollum, Elmer Verner, A History of Nutrition: The Sequence of Ideas in Nutritional Investigation, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston,1957, p. 87.
4. op. cit., p. 88.
5. op. cit., p. 86.
6. Price, Weston A., Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects, The American Academy of Applied Nutrition, California, 1939, 1948.
7. Hooton, Ernest A., Apes, Men, and Morons, Putnam, New York, 1937.
8. Shelton, H. M., Food Combining Made Easy, Shelton Health School, Texas, 1951, p. 32.
9. op. cit., p. 34.
10. Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by R. Howard, Pantheon, New York,1965.
11. Pauling, Linus, "Orthomolecular Psychiatry", Science, vol. 160, April 19, 1968, pp. 265-271.
12. Hoffer, Abram, "Megavitamin B3 Therapy for Schizophrenia", Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, vol. 16, 1971, p. 500.
13. Cott, Allan, "Orthomolecular Approach to the Treatment of Learning Disabilities", synopsis of reprint article issued by the Huxley Institute for Biosocial Research, New York.
14. Szasz, Thomas S., The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, Harper & Row, New York, 1970.
15. Tintera, John W., Hypoadrenocorticism, Adrenal Metabolic Research Society of the Hypoglycemia Foundation, Inc., Mt Vernon, New York, 1969.
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