REFINED SUGAR
The Sweetest Poison of All
A multitude of common physical and mental ailments are strongly linked
to the consuming of 'pure', refined sugar.

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Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 7, Number 1 (December 1999 -
January 2000).
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381

by William Dufty © 1975
Extracted/edited from his book Sugar Blues
First published by Chilton Book Co. Padnor, PA, USA
Currently published by Warner Books, USA.

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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 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,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 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 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. 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."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 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.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?