This is a summary of the Sugar Blues Book
I noticed some posters started questioning whether sugar is healthy or not. Read this first.
The Sweetest Poison of All
A multitude of common physical and mental ailments
are strongly linked to the consuming of 'pure', refined
sugar.
by William Dufty © 1975
Extracted/edited from his book Sugar Blues
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."1 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."2
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 overacid 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.3
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".4
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 (1) sugar is a major factor in dental decay; (2) sugar in a
person's diet does cause overweight; (3) removal of sugar from diets has cured symptoms
of crippling, worldwide diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart illnesses.
Sir Frederick Banting, the codiscoverer 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.5 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 Biscuitsabout
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,6 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.7 "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 energybuilding
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 thence
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. Flesheating
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."8
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 substancesnutriments.
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 substancespoisons.
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 quantitativelyand
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.15
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?
Topic: The Sweetest Poison of All - Sugar Blues summary (Read 16057 times)