NH: INHS Classic - HM Shelton - Super Foods

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and for the last in this series of posts, we have:

 

[super-Foods

 

Super-Foods

Herbert M. Shelton

From " Superior Nutrition "

 

The Devil builds chapels wherever God erects a house of prayer, and,

as Defoe has it, " it will be found, upon examination, the Devil has

the largest congregation. " This is strangely true in the realm of

diet. It is not only true that the great majority of people eat and

prefer the common denatured and inferior foodstuffs that are

everywhere eaten, but it is also true that, when some of them break

away from the conventional diet and make an attempt to find a more

wholesome mode of eating, the majority of them are misled by the

claims made for the superiority of the many substitutes for natural

foods that are now offered the public by manufacturers and salesmen.

 

One of my correspondents once very seriously urged me to give more

attention, in the Hygienic Review to such " high pressure vital foods "

as cod-liver oil, brewer's yeast, wheat germ, blackstrap molasses,

and yogurt. Today certain of these foods, among which is powdered

skim milk, are now frequently referred to as " wonder foods. " Honey

and apple cider vinegar are also included by some among the " wonder

foods. " The many exaggerated claims made for the healing virtues of

these foods are made by those whose motives are purely commercial.

 

Like synthetic vitamins and mineral concentrates, they are offered to

the public as supplements to their diet of white sugar, white bread,

white rice, denatured cereals, canned vegetables, sulphured fruits,

embalmed meats, pasteurized milk, candy, cake, pie, etc. Instead of

teaching the people the truth about their diet and trying to lead

them into rational eating practices, they offer them supplements, " so

that their diet of foodless foods may be rendered adequate. There are

diet compounds, also, that are said to " contain all the minerals for

the body in organic form, " which are offered to the people as a

substitute for a much needed dietary revolution.

 

There is also a search for long-life foods and the people are being

led to believe that they can prolong their lives by eating freely of

high grade proteins, brewer's yeast, powdered skimmed milk, yogurt,

black strap molasses, honey, vinegar, etc. The modern Ponce de Leons

search, not for a magic spring, the waters of which restore and

prolong youth, but for foods that have this magic power. This search

is of a piece with the ancient search for an elixir vitae that would

enable man to live for hundreds of years, if not forever. It is the

same as the search for the Fountain of Youth. As soon as men give up

the effort to discover special chemical compounds, or a special pool

that will guarantee them long life in spite of every possible reason

why they should die young, they turn to something else in their age-

long quest for some holy grail. Gland extracts, gland

transplantations, rays of various kinds and foods, have been looked

to as sources of length of life. Perhaps Metchnikoff started this

food way to long life when he popularized the sour milk fad. He

asserted that it was responsible for the long life-span of the

Bulgarians, who actually take but little sour milk and are not a long

lived people.

 

Not until the present frenzied search for food specifics and food

panaceas has run itself out can we hope for sanity in the approach to

food and feeding. Food is now the new magic-it is the mysterious

compound that will do what we once expected drugs to do. Foods now

cure without the necessity of removing cause; they now prevent, also

without the necessity of avoiding cause. They are replacing drugs and

serums in the armamentarium of the magician. This absurd eulogizing

of special articles of food in each case, being greatly altered

products, and imputing to them peculiar virtues, is, when not a

purely commercial trick, the expression of childish credulity.

 

One of these peddlers of " wonder foods " urges proteins and more

proteins-emphasizing, with the exception of yeast, only animal

proteins: meat, egg, milk, cheese. He stresses the fact that powdered

skim milk is a rich source of protein and points out that besides

being a rich source of protein, yeast also contains seventeen

vitamins. He also stresses the richness in minerals and vitamins of

blackstrap molasses. But, with all the vitamins contained in these

foods, he urges fortifying the diet with vitamin extracts taken

daily. He urges vitamins and more vitamins. His scheme of feeding is

to get a redundancy of amino acids, vitamins and minerals, it seems

not to matter what kind of minerals, into the body. Take the proteins

and vitamins in great quantities, even if you do not need them. As

nature made no provision for us to get adequate vitamin D, he advises

fish-liver oil in capsules.

 

The idea is rapidly gaining ground that, if a thing is good, we must

over-eat of it. We must have a super-abundance of this or that

vitamin, or of this or that amino-acid, or of this or that mineral in

order to get enough. The evils of redundancy are being. Completely

ignored by the new school of overfeeding. Today, they dose their

patients with special foods or special food factors as the medico's

dose theirs with drugs, and for the same reason. They are not feeding

people to nourish them but to cure them. Foods are no longer

nutritive substances, but medicines. They are elixirs of one kind or

another.

 

Your gum-willies, who write and talk about diet, have decided that

all human ailments are the results of deficiencies. To prevent them,

to remedy them, we need only provide ourselves with a super abundance

of the vitamins, minerals or amino-acids that are deficient and,

presto! we can live longer and look younger. They have created a

fool's paradise in which they sport themselves for a brief time and

then pass to that bourne from which no man returns.

 

That life is more than food and the body more than raiment, that man

shall not live by bread alone, is a principle that these men never

heard of. That living is more than eating, that we cannot eat

ourselves into the millennium, that we need something in life other

than the B complex and amino-acids-these are matters that these men

seem incapable of thinking about. In their works they talk only of

foods and they write about their foods as a De Kruif might write

about an anti-biotic.

 

These miscalled dietitians offer the people only altered and

denatured food products. Not only this, but one of them actually

declares that natural foods are dangerous and unusable. One man

declares that salads are harmful to many people, acid fruits are

harmful to many more, spinach robs the body of lime, coffee

stimulates the adrenals and is needed by many people, sunbaths are

harmful to many more. He finds that at least seventy-percent of

people are harmed by salads. Of course, if nature's products are

hurtful, we must depend on the manufacturers for their " superior "

products.

 

Honey, which is a poor food and much inferior to sweet fruits as a

source of sugar, is urged upon the gullible public as a miracle'

food. Yogurt, which is an inferior form of sour milk (having been

pasteurized and boiled before culturing), is another " superior-food,

that is sold at big profits. Cider vinegar, the poisonous product of

fermentation of apple juice, is urged in certain quarters as a

superior source of food values.

 

A large part of the nutritional problems of both the North and the

South grow out of our refusal to eat natural foods. Our preference

for the manufactured articles-those that have been demineralized,

devitaminized, denatured, standardized, pasteurized, homogenized,

cooked, canned, frozen, and in other ways rendered less valuable as

foods-creates dietary problems that are not adequately solved by the

present reliance upon supplements and substitutes. We go to great

lengths to spoil our foods and then complain about the climate. We

live on a diet of white flour products, degerminated and!

demineralized corn meal, denatured cereals ( " breakfast foods " that

stick to your ribs), white sugar, pasteurized milk, embalmed flesh l

foods, canned fruits and vegetables, candies, cakes, pies, etc., and

expect to render such diets adequate by " supplementing " them with'

oils, brewer's yeast, wheat germ, black strap molasses, honey,

yogurt, powdered skimmed milk, cider vinegar, etc.

 

If we purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from the stores and

vegetable and fruit markets, or if we take these from our own gardens

and orchards, we refuse to eat them until they have been cooked out

of all resemblance to food. Spinach is cooked until it is black and

mushy and no one is able to tell from its taste, what it was before

cooking; cabbage is boiled until it is unrecognizable; potatoes are

peeled, boiled and mashed, apples are baked and then drowned in sugar

(white sugar), peaches are stewed and plenty of white sugar added,

nuts are roasted, perhaps salted. We eat so little unchanged,

unspoiled foods that we can't possibly have optimum nutrition and,

then, we blame our poor nutrition upon the climate. If it were not

for the so obvious fact that the same kind of diets produce poor

nutrition in warm climates, it might be possible to sustain such a

position.

 

How true it is that he who fills his belly with substitutes often

abolishes his hunger for real foods. The food manufacturers and the

physicians feed people on counterfeit " foods " so that the people know

not the value of the genuine article. It is like the receipt of truth-

people reject truth because they are so filled with fallacy that they

cannot receive truth- " there was no room at the inn " for the mother

pregnant with the savior child. Truth is often born in a manger (and

all too often left there to languish) because the inn is so filled

with crowds of thoughtless revelers that there is no room there for

its birth.

 

We are offered all manners of supplementary food factors ranging all

the way from supplementary roughage to supplementary vitamins,

minerals, amino acids, chlorophyll etc. Even if these things

possessed all the value their manufacturers say they possess, their

use would not make the conventional diet of denatured foods adequate.

On the other hand, natural foods will be adequate without the

addition of the supplements. It is important that we teach people how

to get back to a normal mode of eating rather than that we offer them

substitutes for a natural diet. The " compensatory " program is a

commercial program, not a program of sane nutritional practice.

 

It must be emphasized that science does not yet know all of the

factors essential to human nutrition, nor does it understand all of

the correlations of the various food factors, so that it cannot, at

least in its present state of ignorance, put together arbitrarily, a

balanced system of diet.

 

Herbert M. Shelton ]

 

all for now..and all the best,

 

 

Bob