Hippocrates of Cos, long known as the “father of medicine”
is reported to have pontificated: “Let food be your medicine and medicine be
your food”. In more recent times I was told: “You are what you eat”. It is
quite evident that a great many Americans are not in good shape. Many are
beginning to resemble the food pyramid. Dr. David Williams “Alternatives” reports
that in 2004 over 70% of American men were obese. Even our children are
affected. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association almost 20%
of them are obese. Obesity in adults is
associated with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, liver and kidney
diseases, type II diabetes and, ultimately heart trouble. Children are beginning
to suffer from these same diseases. Dr Williams also notes that there has been
a 100% increase in juvenile diabetes in the last 25 years and it is now being
found in 6 year olds. The use of medications to treat type II diabetes in
children doubled between 2002 and 2005.Furthermore life threatening food
allergies among children doubled in the last 10 years and asthma increased
about 75%. We appear to be producing more and more patients in need of medical
care. He expects a dramatic decrease in both life expectancy and quality of
life for our children. Is this a desirable situation? I think not. If we are what we eat, could changes in our food
supply have caused changes in the state of our health?
According to Dr. Bruce West’s Health Alert of December 2005,
Iodine used to be added to bread 20 years ago because it was considered to be
deficient in people’s diets. Iodine is present in every organ and tissue of the body and it is
especially important in the thyroid gland. Dr. West claims that from 1900 to
1960 most physicians in the United
States used iodine in the form of Lugol’s
solution for both hyper and hypo thyroidism as well as many other diseases.
Presently bromine is added to bread instead of iodine. Bromine has toxic
effects on the thyroid gland which controls metabolism and hence might well be
responsible for some people gaining too much weight.
According to Dr. Guy Abraham, former professor of
endocrinology and an expert on medical use of iodine, unwarranted fear of
iodine by the medical profession has wreaked havoc on both the practice of
medicine and patients. He feels that a great deal of unnecessary misery and
death has resulted from this fear.
According to Dr. West orthoiodosupplementation, the
provision of optimal amounts of iodine is a panacea for a considerable number of
disease conditions such as: fibrocystic breast disease, polycystic ovary
syndrome, brain fog, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and atrial fibrillation.
Is it possible that insufficient iodine has contributed to the increasing
prevalence of many diseases during the last 20 year?
Over the years, Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of American
possessed by farming families has been abandoned in favor of the apparent
efficiency of giant factory farms. These
are generally owned and operated by large corporations whose executives are
focused on efficiency and profitability. Their farm managers replace nitrogen,
phosphorus and sulfur with fertilizers, but the not the rest of the elements removed
by the cash crops. Waldsterben, death of
forests, in Europe has been associated with
demineralization. In some cases special rock dusts, added to the soil around
trees, has caused them to take on a new lease on life. Some farmers in Germany are reported to spread rock
dusts on their fields to maintain fertility. This might be something for our
farmers to consider.
Lack of selenium in food supplies in parts of China
has been connected with high cancer rates in those areas. In some areas of this
country soils are also deficient in selenium Vegetables and other farm products
coming from these soils produce deficiencies in those who consume them. Again
cancer rates are higher in such areas.
Besides depletion of minerals in the soils, many substances,
not all of them benign, have been added to our food supply. For example many
years ago butter substitutes were introduced. These were produced by
hydrogenating vegetable oils. Initially
these substitutes came in the form of a block of white fat with a small bead of
yellow dye which had to be mixed into the fat to give it the appearance of
butter. It was a good enough substitute to fool my grandmother who had been
brought up on a farm. Unfortunately the hydrogenation produces transfats whose
molecular structure is substantially different from the naturally occurring
saturated fats in butter. Although they are less expensive than butter they cause
negative effects and the National Academy of Sciences has indicated that the
most desirable amount to ingest is Zero.
The consumption of unfermented soy products, cheap substitutes
for milk and meat has burgeoned during my lifetime. Presently they are consumed
in large quantities and because they contain phytoestrogens they are not
benign. Perhaps 30% of bottle babies in this country are being fed soy milk. As
a result their phytoestrogen levels are reported to be 20 times higher than
those fed mother’s milk. According to Dr.W. C. Douglass February 2006 Real
Health Breakthroughs” this causes early onset of puberty in girls, as early as
age 7, and delayed puberty, with confused sexual identity, in boys. Could the
dramatic increase in male homosexuality have its origins in soy milk? Douglass
claims that a baby on soy milk gets the equivalent of 5 birth control pills per
day. Could this be the reason for our declining birth rates? The British,
French, Israeli and New Zealand Governments discourage this use of soy milk. Our
Government is promoting it.
At the 3rd International Phytoestrogen Conference
in l995, FDA regulator Michael Bolger is reported to have indicated that soy
isoflavones were implicated in infertility, uterine hypertrophy and testicular
atrophy in rodents, reproductive failure in Cheetahs and menstrual cycle
effects in women. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
evaluated potential uses of soy products in foods and concluded that the only
safe use was as cardboard package sealers according to Douglass.
It should be noted that Soybeans were a cover crop, plowed
under between food crops to fertilize the soil, in ancient China. The Chinese ate small quantities of fermented
soy foods, but not the beans themselves. Did they know something that we have
overlooked? “The Whole Soy Story” by Kaayla Daniels has a lot to say about
soybean products as foods, very little of it being complementary. She suggests
that tofu was used in monasteries in the Far East
to reduce the sexual impulses of monks.
On the other hand our Department of Agriculture and the Food
and Drug Administration are promoting soy foods as healthful and may even allow
the claim that they prevent cancer.
During my childhood milk was dipped out of bulk containers
into the customer’s milk can. Cream was carried home in a pitcher. Subsequently
Milk was delivered in bottles with a layer of cream on the top. It was not
homogenized. Now it is difficult to buy anything but homogenized milk. However, there are reasons to believe that
the required pasteurization and homogenization processes degrade milk proteins
and may actually be a cause of diseases. This is a very controversial subject.
“Don’t Drink Your Milk” by Frank A. Oski claims that milk is implicated in
anemia, arthritis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, fatigue, allergies and multiple
sclerosis. Dr. W. C. Douglass claims
that cows are not at fault. He plans to buy one, if necessary, to insure that
he has unpasteurized and unhomogenized milk to drink.
“The Douglass Report” Vol 6 No. 3 presents some persuasive
arguments against pasteurization and homogenization. For example the process
converts normal lactose to beta-lactose, a potential allergen, destroys vitamin
C, B-6 and B-12, beneficial enzymes, antibodies and hormones and renders the
remaining
nutriments, like calcium, more
difficult to absorb. He also states that the Board of Supervisors in Los
Angeles Country during hearings on the advisability of allowing sales of raw milk
determined that more than 220,000 people picked up salmonella infections from
pasteurized milk between 1982 and 1997, but there were no reports of any
sickness among raw milk drinkers. Pasteurization may not be providing the
protection that we think it does.
Dr. Bruce West claims that diabetes is caused by eating
processed food loaded with wheat, sugar and corn syrup while avoiding exercise.
Recent reports have the average American consuming 138 pounds of sugar,
sucrose, yearly. This is a double sugar consisting of glucose and fructose. We
also consume lots of high fructose corn syrup, unknown in my childhood. Now it is
in all kinds of packaged foods. Glucose is the sugar that our bodies use for
many purposes. Fructose associated with fruit, is not. Corn syrup is cheap in
relation to cane sugar and just as addictive. Loaded into soft drinks it is
happily guzzled by both children and adults. The soft drinks provide quick
energy, but their sugars are easily converted into triglycerides and added to
deposits of fat in sedentary people. They also induce a rapid rise in insulin,
which lowers blood sugar levels and creates the desire for another fix to
satisfy the addiction. Oscillating insulin levels ultimately overstress the
pancreas gland and voila – diabetes!
In the 1930’s most of our foods were unprocessed. In 1990
about 10% of it was processed and now about 90% of what we eat has been
modified in some way. To improve shelf life, appearance and taste, over 3000
additives entered our food supply and much of the essential fatty acids left it.
Furthermore applications of recent advances in biochemistry have increased crop
yields and the shelf life of foods by adding genetic information from different
species to the seeds of food crops which had been relatively unchanged for
hundreds of years. This has been profitable for the exploiters of this new
technology, but its impact on the people who are eating these modified foods is
not yet clear. Many countries are averse
to experimenting with what some call Franken Foods.
In the simpler times of my youth there were fewer choices of
food products and much more work involved in food procurement and preparation. For
example many people lived in rural area or on farms and raised chickens. I
recall feeding chickens, collecting eggs and helping to pluck feathers. However
the chickens and eggs we ate were of high quality, containing essential omega-3
oils, because the chickens ate insects and growing plants besides chicken
feed. Today most chickens are tightly
confined in cages and don’t get a chance to eat things that contain this kind
of oil.
Beef from grass fed cows contains lots of essential omega-3
oils, grain fed cattle very little. The same can be said for wild salmon as
against the farm raised variety. Most Americans are said to be deficient in
essential oils and this makes us more vulnerable to aches and pains.
It seems to me that the industrialization of our food supply
has made life easier for us, but what has this done to our health? Convenience,
shelf life and taste may have been purchased at a higher price than we thought
we were paying. Industrialization has also made life more hazardous. We have
become dependent on the food stores and the trucks that deliver the food to the
stores and the factory farms that produce most of our food. A few days of
interruption of the flow of foods could create a national disaster that would
make the troubles in New Orleans
pale in comparison. A significant number of people survived the last depression
because they grew most of the food they needed to survive. Today relatively few people are capable of
doing that. Is it time for more of us to consider raising at least some of our
own food? For those unwilling or unable to do that, a stock of emergency food
may become a necessity. Don’t depend on Uncle Sam! He has problems of his own.
Jack Phillips
