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Documentation of the effect of sugar and white flour on the development of peoples and degenerative diseases. Sugarcane culture dates from antiquity and probably originated in what is now New Guinea. Its cultivation spread along human migration routes to Southeast Asia, India, and Polynesia. The technology for making sugar by pressing out the cane juice and boiling it down into crystals was developed in about 500 BC in India. Sugarcane cultivation did not reach Europe until the Middle Ages, when conquering Arabs brought it to Spain. Columbus carried the plant to the West Indies, where it thrived in the favorable climate and soil. Sugarcane cultivation began in what is now the United States in the middle of the 18th century, when cuttings were planted in New Orleans. The first American sugar refinery was built in New York City in 1689, and the industry was finally established by the 1830s. From Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia Deluxe © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc.  This information below is cited from Let's Try Real Food by Ethel H. Renwick, 1976. The Civilized Diet - Before and After Dr. George M. Briggs, professor of nutrition at the University of California, says candidly, "The typical American diet is a national disaster." He contends that the average American maintains a terrible diet and that if he fed it to pigs or cows, without adding vitamins and other supplements, he could wipe out the livestock industry. Dr. Briggs claims that there is much malnutrition in this country among rich and poor alike and that it shows up in many different ways - hunger, nutrient deficiencies, high incidence of anemia, increased infections, under-weight and overweight, severe dental problems, reduced growth, needless problems in pregnancy and with infants, shortened life spans, and even behavioral and mental problems in children and adults. He is of the opinion that diabetes, heart disease, alcoholism, and other great problems are related in part to poor nutrition. It is no surprise that Dr. Briggs believes that adequate nutritious food is not only essential to good health - it is a matter of life and death. Nutritionists have been telling us this for the forty years I have been reading their books and listening to their lectures. It is now being expressed more widely, but still from too few. Many competent nutritionists are convinced, as is Dr. Briggs, that the basic reasons for our dilemma are that our national leaders do not recognize the need for nutrition and that too few people with proper nutrition training hold key positions in our schools and food industries (I would add to this, our clinics and our churches). Dr. Briggs does, however, place most of the responsibility on the individual when he says that the fault lies largely in ourselves for the kind of foods we eat and demand on the shelves of our grocery stores. ... To more clearly comprehend that our national diet is a departure from what God intended, we have only to look at our diet before and after it was "civilized," ad depicted by Dr. Weston A. Price in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which was first published in 1939 and again in 1979. This book should have shaken our nation and radically changed its eating habits. The Journal of the American Dental Association claimed that the book was "one of the outstanding books in dental literature in recent years." The Pittsburgh Courier said of the book: Dr. Price, a Cleveland dentist, circled the globe studying the relation of nutrition to health and degeneration. He found that whenever our "tin can" civilization had touched the natives they had terrible teeth and all of our loathsome degenerative diseases. He is honest enough to admit the superior culture of these "uncivilized" people, and he contends that unless we adopt their wisdom we will perish.Earnest Albert Hooton, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, says in his foreword to the book: Since we have known for a long time that "savages" have excellent teeth and that civilized men have terrible teeth, it seems to me that we have been extraordinarily stupid in concentrating all of our attention upon the task of finding out why our teeth are so poor, without ever bothering to learn why "savage" teeth are good. Dr. Weston Price seems to be the only person who possesses the scientific horse sense to supplement his knowledge of the probable causes of dental disease with a study of the dietary regimens which are associated with dental health…[he] has found out why primitive men have good teeth and why their teeth go bad when they become "civilized." But he has not stopped there: he has gone on to apply his knowledge acquired from "savages" to the problems of their less intelligent civilized brothers. For I think that we must admit that if savages know enough to eat the things which keep their teeth healthy, they are more intelligent in dietary matters than we are. So, I consider that Dr. Price has written what is often called "a profoundly significant book."1 Had Dr. Price's book shaken the nation when it was first published, our children and grandchildren would have better teeth and better physical and mental health today. As made clear in Dr. Price's book, poor teeth and malformed dental arches are the first signs of physical degeneration and "our loathsome degenerative diseases," to quote the Pittsburgh Courier's apt description of what ensues. Our nation and the civilized world had all the evidence they needed in the detailed findings carefully reported and photographed by Dr. Price, as well as by Sir Robert McCarrison2 in India, in regard to the health of peoples of this world before the white man's diet of sugar, refined flour, and canned goods was introduced to them. The uninformed are apt to stay that it was not the change the natives made in their diet which caused the degeneration in their health, but the change they made in their living habits when civilization crept in. However, the natives who started adding sugar and refined flour to their diets lived exactly as they always had. Not all natives came to the ports and worked for the white man there, but the food introduced by the white man went back to the villages and was carried from tribe to tribe, often for trading purposes. Physical degeneration set in and was, as we ourselves witnessed, more and more pronounced as new generations were born. The scientific findings of these doctors did, indeed, bear out what my family had observed of primitive people in various parts of the world, and interestingly enough, we covered almost all the same areas. Our conclusion was that man, no matter where he lived or what his occupation, suffered severely when departing from what God had supplied in the way of food, and that the departure in every case was caused by the introduction of the white man's diet of refined flour and sugar. We saw clearly that our missionaries who went to all part of the world to carry the gospel and to educate the illiterate needed more and more medical missionaries working alongside them because of what we "civilized" people were doing to undermine the health of the natives. Wilmon Menard, anthropologist, sociologist and writer, who spent many years of his life in the South Pacific, himself witnessed what he calls "civilization's kiss of death." He records a penetrating account of what took place among the Polynesians of the Marquesas Islands which verifies that the white man's adulterated diet is the cause of physical degeneration. Mr. Menard quotes Herman Melville's description of the Marquesans in 1841: "I was especially struck by the physical strength and beauty they displayed…in beauty of form they surpassed anything I had seen…free from blemish…a sculptor's model."3 Civilization came to the Marquesans, and they replaced their natural food with polished rice, tinned foods, and confections. Degeneration set in, and a population of about 100,000 dwindled to a sickly 2500. This was due, Mr. Menard says, to cash paid for their copra crops and the attendant prestige value the natives placed on imported European goods. Then came the day when the price of copra dropped, poverty set in, and the natives were forced back to their original simple but highly nutritious diet. The result: a return to health, few or no dental caries, and dazzling white teeth. The population started increasing instead of decreasing, and they were a healthy people again. On the coast where some of the people were still subjected to the white man's diet, the signs of degeneration continued. Dr. Price made some interesting observations in Africa besides the usual findings of good health among the people before their exposure to modernized diets. In thirty primitive tribes north of Mombassa (in Kenya, Ethiopia, and so forth) with whom Dr. Price came in contact, he found the natives constitutionally immune to the diseases the white man contracts in this area: dysentery, malaria, typhoid fever, sleeping sickness, and others. Yet, when the natives of the primitive tribes adopted modern civilizations, they, too, became susceptible to those diseases and to tooth decay. Dr. Price also quotes a Dr. Anderson who was in charge of a government hospital in Kenya; Anderson assured Price that the primitive people of that district did not suffer from appendicitis, gall bladder trouble, cystitis, or duodenal ulcers and that malignancy was rare. Dr. Price gives many examples of diet among the different tribes in Africa, from the Negroid to the Arab and others who are characterized by their superb physical development and high intelligence. Throughout the centuries, their food has varied according to locale. Some tribes depend largely upon milk, meat, and blood (extracted from the jugular vein of the animal by a unique and antiseptic process), reinforced with vegetables and fruit. Others within reach of Lake Victoria or streams obtain large quantities of fish, which constitute an important part of their diet, together with sweet potatoes and whole-grain cereals. Several tribes neighboring Ethiopia are agriculturists, growing corn, beans, millet, sweet potatoes, bananas, Kafir corn, and other whole grains, which are their chief articles of food. What was particularly interesting to me was that the tribes living on vegetables alone were not as well built as the tribes using dairy products liberally or fish from the lakes and streams; they had been dominated because they possessed less courage and resourcefulness. My own observation has always been - in studying and in observing firsthand the various peoples of the world - that protein is valuable in the diet worldwide, and that strict vegetarians who eliminate dairy products as well as meat from their diet are less strong and less robust even under the most ideal conditions. Dr. Price's conclusions are similar to mine. He points out that Uganda, for instance, has been called the Garden of Eden because of its abundance of fresh water, fish, and animal life; natives of Uganda, besides being strong, are unusually intelligent. One of the most efficiently organized mission schools in Africa asked Dr. Price to help them solve a serious problem: why the families who had grown up in the mission and government schools were not as strong physically as those who had not had contact with them. The scourge, of course, was modern civilization. Dr. Price found the same evidence among the Alaskan Eskimos and the Indians of Northern Canada where he could still find isolated tribes. The Forest Indians had superb health and lived among an abundance of wild animal life and vegetation. Wherever Indians were living on their native foods, chiefly moose and caribou meat, physical development - including facial dental arch - was superb, with nearly complete immunity to tooth decay. Wherever the Indians had access to the modern food of commerce, Dr. Price said that the dental conditions were extremely bad. He found the same true of the Seminoles in the Everglades of Florida who were, in the thirties, still largely beyond contact with the white civilization and lived on native foods. They produced magnificent teeth and dental arches. Needless to say, today, the Seminoles, who have been living in contact with modern civilization and its food, suffer from rampant decay. The State of Our Health What is the result of the civilized diet of our nation? The result is that we are a sick nation. We must face this reality. Too many of us live under the illusion that we are not only the best-fed nation in the world, but the healthiest. The United World Health Organization made a survey in 1968 which revealed that the United States ranks twenty-fifth in male life expectancy and fourteenth in female life expectancy. Statistics are misleading. We are told we live longer, but the statistics only work that way because fewer babies die now under the age of five. In the book Supernutrition we learn that "contrary to popular belief, neither the maximum life span nor the average death for people living past the age of twenty has increased significantly since 1800. The average age of death increased steadily until 1950, but this was due to an improved childhood mortality rate…For someone reaching sixty years of age, there is only a one-year difference in life expectancy between the eighteenth century and today"4 - despite modern medical wonders of recent years. Well over 1,000,000 people a year die of heart diseases. Dr. Wilfrid Shute quotes Dr. Paul Dudley White, the eminent heart specialist of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, as writing: "When I graduated from medical school in 1911, I had never heard of coronary thrombosis, which is one of the chief threats to life in the United States and Canada today - an astonishing development in one's own lifetime! There can be no doubt but that coronary heart disease has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, where it is now responsible for more than fifty percent of all deaths."5 The World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations has spent twenty-five years in a world-wide endeavor to furnish pure water, eradicate disease-carrying insects, inoculate against disease, and teach sanitation and good nutrition. They make constant comparisons of the greographical locations of various diseases in trying to determine the causes and combat them most effectively. Certainly no group has a more comprehensive view of the people of the world and their health, and they make the profound statement that "good nutrition means good health." When asked what precautions can be taken in infancy to try to overcome the diseases of the world, they say "diet."........ Our National Diet We eat more candy than eggs; we eat more sugar than vegetables, fruits, and eggs put together; we drink more soft drinks than milk; and beginning in 1971 we started eating more processed foods than fresh. We do not have to be nutritionists to know that this is a downhill race we are in; unless we make a drastic change, we are leading our children and grandchildren to a higher incidence of degenerative diseases than our present deplorable rate. I think our problem is that we have not added up our diet. We think a little sugar here and there, a soft drink now and then, a little additive to a food, and "enriched" flour cannot hurt. But that is not realistic. Refined foods, sugar, and additives are in almost everything we eat, and we do not figure our actual milk intake against the soft drinks we consume and let our children consume. All our children have to do is eat what we give them and watch us, and they will have poor eating habits. Added to this, they have $75,000,000 worth of television advertisements enticing them with promises of gimmicks and sugar. In fact, there are now more than thirty-seven kinds of sugar-coated tooth decayers - all claiming to be nutritious - from which to choose on the cereal shelf. When you add to this what we do not give our children - whole-grain breads and cereals, properly cooked meats and vegetables, wholesome drinks and desserts which growing children need badly, along with vitamin and mineral supplements - we should not wonder at the ills they develop. They inherit weaknesses from us through several generations of poor nutrition, and then we let them add new ones of their own. Ad we talk about bringing up our children in a good Christian home! What we mean is that we have looked after two-thirds of our responsibility to the best of our ability. But we have left out the other third - an abundance of God's provisions for the bodies of which we are stewards. There are volumes of evidence that our diet is a national disaster. And that diet is getting worse. Footnotes:
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