Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 3: How We Got Here From There

So many of us have such heavy sugar habits today, it’s hard for us to imagine the reaction of a sugarfree Crusader languishing in the land of the Infidel, taking his first sweet trip.

In Beyond the Chindwin, Bernard Fergusson tells how men too exhausted even to speak were given a kind of sugar fudge to eat. … the immediate result was astonishing, like a modern Pentecost. The string of our tongues loosed, and we spake plain. Bernard Fergusson, Beyond the Chindwin, p. 198.

A substance that could produce this potent reaction on the brains of brawny men would hardly be what one would offer as a Christmas treat to the kiddies. Here was something more intoxicating than beer or wine and more potent than many drugs and potions then known to man. No wonder Arab and Jewish physicians used refined sugar carefully in minuscule amounts, adding it to their prescriptions with great care. It was a brain boggier. It could cause the human body and brain to run the gamut in no time at all from exhaustion to hallucination.

Today, the endocrinologists can tell us how it happens.

The difference between life and death is, in chemical terms, slighter than the difference between distilled water and that stuff from the tap. The brain is probably the most sensitive organ in the body. The difference between feeling up or down, sane or insane, calm or freaked out, inspired or depressed depends in large measure upon what we put in our mouth. For maximum efficiency of the whole body — of which the brain is merely a part — the amount of glucose in the blood must balance with the amount of blood oxygen. As Dr. E. M. Abrahamson and A. W. Pezet note in Body, Mind, and Sugar, … a condition in which the blood sugar level is relatively low … tends to starve the body’s cells, especially the brain cells. It is treated by diet … What happens to us when the cells of our bodies and especially our brains are chronically undernourished? The weakest, most vulnerable cells … suffer first. (Emphasis added.) When all is working well, this balance is maintained with fine precision under the supervision of our adrenal glands. When we take refined sugar (sucrose), it is the next thing to being glucose so it largely escapes chemical processing in our bodies. The sucrose passes directly to the intestines, where it becomes predigested glucose. This in turn is absorbed into the blood where the glucose level has already been established in precise balance with oxygen. The glucose level in the blood is thus drastically increased. Balance is destroyed. The body is in crisis.

The brain registers it first. Hormones pour from the adrenal casings and marshal every chemical resource for dealing with sugar: insulin from the endocrine islets of the pancreas works specifically to hold down the glucose level in the blood in complementary antagonism to the adrenal hormones concerned with keeping the glucose level up. All this proceeds at emergency pace, with predictable results. Going too fast, it goes too far. The bottom drops out of the blood glucose level and a second crisis comes out of the first. Pancreatic islets have to shut down; so do some departments of the adrenal casings. Other adrenal hormones must be produced to regulate the reversing of the chemical direction and bring the blood glucose level up again. E. M. Abrahamson and A. W. Pezet, Body, Mind, and Sugar.

All this is reflected in how we feel. While the glucose is being absorbed into the blood, we feel up. A quick pick-up. However, this surge of mortgaged energy is succeeded by the downs, when the bottom drops out of the blood glucose level. We are listless, tired; it requires effort to move or even think until the blood glucose level is brought up again. Our poor brain is vulnerable to suspicion, hallucinations. We can be irritable, all nerves, jumpy. The severity of the crisis on top of crisis depends on the glucose overload. If we continue taking sugar, a new double crisis is always beginning before the old one ends. The accumulative crisis at the end of the day can be a lulu.

After years of such days, the end result is damaged adrenals. They are worn out not from overwork but from continual whiplash. Overall production of hormones is low, amounts don’t dovetail. This disturbed function, out of balance, is reflected all around the endocrine circuit. The brain may soon have trouble telling the unreal from the real; we’re likely to go off half cocked. When stress comes our way, we go to pieces because we no longer have a healthy endocrine system to cope with it. Day-to-day efficiency lags, we’re always tired, never seem to get anything done. We’ve really got the sugar blues.

Members of the medical profession who have studied this note that since the cells of the brain are those that depend wholly upon the moment-to-moment blood sugar level for nourishment, they are perhaps the most susceptible to damage. The disturbingly large and ever-increasing number of neurotics in our population makes this clearly evident. Ibid., p. 129.

Not everyone goes all the way. Some people start out with strong adrenals; others, like the late President Kennedy, don’t. Stewart Alsop writes in Stay of Execution that Dr. John Glick of the National Institute of Health was skeptical of steroids (cortisone), since they do not get to the root of the trouble and, although one feels full of beans for a while, one pays a high price in side effects. This disappointed me. Remembering Jack Kennedy, who took steroids for adrenal insufficiency I had envisaged myself filled with uncontrollable energy … Alsop goes on to note that when he asked one of the President’s closest friends about the course of steroids the President received, he said that Kennedy never talked about it … but that [Charlie Bartlett] sensed when Kennedy had had a steroid treatment, you could feel him sort of going into high gear. In the book by O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, there are horrendous tales of the Kennedy consumption of ice cream, malted milk shakes, and such.
  On May 2, 1969, a Canadian Newspaper, The Toronto Telegram, carried Sid Adilman’s article on Helen Lewis, CBC editor for 14 years and chief editor for Josef von Sternberg, the director. Among Helen Lewis’ recollections of her early days in Hollywood was the experience of being the only person in Canada who bought John Kennedy ice cream cones. As Helen Lewis puts it, One of the people I really didn’t like at all in Hollywood was Joe Kennedy — cold fish of a man … he’d bring his boys to the studio on Saturdays. He’d order me to take the little beggars, Joe who later was killed, and John, both so cute in their sailor suits — to the commissary. I always paid; Joe never gave me any money.

Degrees of sugar abuse and sugar blues vary. However, the body does not lie. If you take sugar, you feel the consequences.

The late endocrinologist John W. Tintera was quite emphatic: It is quite possible to improve your disposition, increase your efficiency, and change your personality for the better. The way to do it is to avoid cane and beet sugar in all forms and guises. John W. Tintera, What You Should Know About Your Glands, (as told to Delos Smith) reprinted from Women’s Day, February 1958.

What the avant garde of endocrinology tells us today, the sorceress in what we call the Dark Ages knew by instinct or learned by experiment. Generation after generation, century by century, the people turned to the natural healers. Emperors, kings, popes, and the richest barons had sundry doctors of Salerno, or Moorish and Jewish physicians; but the common people of every state, the whole world, consulted no one but the natural healers, the Saga, the Sage Femme, the Good Woman, the Beautiful Lady or Belladonna — the name of one of her potions still used by physicians today. Anatomy, alchemy, and pharmacology flourished with these people long before such studies became general practice. Natural healers believed the universe was governed by law and order of which every petal of every plant was a part. They were physician and minister, friend and good neighbor. When physicians were few, practicing savage male rituals like bloodletting and lopping off extremities, the natural healers were able to cure people by combining the healing power of plants with the laying on of hands and common sense advice about diet, fasting, and prayer. Often, the sorceress was the midwife and nurse who officiated at birth and death. If a child was born deformed, the sorceress might mercifully snuff out its life with the sleeping pillow. If an old soul was dying slowly and painfully, the sorceress might do the same, use the pillow to hasten the end.

Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (a.k.a. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), a great physician of his time, who taught Goethe who taught Darwin, burned the pharmacopoeia of 1527, and declared that he had learned from sorceresses all he knew. Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft, p. xi.

The natural healers understood the power of many plants and foods. In order to distinguish between healthful edible food and poisonous substances, they often used an instrument common among ancient civilizations: A forked twig, a pendulum — a divining rod — dangling from a piece of string. The forked rod is believed to divine the presence of water or minerals by dipping downward when held over a vein. This art of dowsing has survived in many places. My Irish grandfather employed a dowser to scout the best possible location when he wanted to drill a well.

Today, this ancient art has been rediscovered by engineers and scientists throughout the world and reapplied to the measurement of the vitality of foods. Where fresh juice of a sugar beet registers 8,500 units of healthful radiant energy, a refined sugar cube registers zero, though the inert calorie count of both may remain more or less constant. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, Harper & Row, New York, 1973.

In the eyes of the sorceress, refined sugar failed another very simple test. It was not a whole food. The words holy, whole, healthy, and hale all stemmed from the same root. A whole food was holy, blessed by the nature spirits, and intended to protect the health of man. Sugar was obviously not a whole food like a green plant or an amber grain. Sugar cane grew in tropical and warm regions. The average peasant, certainly those in Europe, would not refine sugar cane at home like bread, cheese, wine, and beer. Sugar was a foreign substance, imported from afar, made by unseen hands from a tropical plant that the sorceress had never studied with the dowser. If it had any history, it was an alien history. Judgment was therefore suspended unless and until a sorceress from Cheltenham could consult with a sorceress from Barbados. Meanwhile, it was brought from afar by lackeys of church and state who — in the eyes of the natural healers — had an unblemished record for having brought nothing but death and taxes, toil and trouble, wars and pestilence.

The attitude of thoughtful men of this time is typified by the legend of the fools of Gotham. When the king announced his intention to honor their village by erecting something on the order of Nixon’s San Clemente Western White House in their midst, the elders of Gotham officially proclaimed their joy and satisfaction. However, knowing it meant disruption of their life and confiscation of their eggs and chickens, the local sorceress was consulted on how to prevent this calamity. Thereupon, everyone in the town was soon afflicted with temporary insanity, which persisted until their beloved monarch called off his plans. The only dissent possible was to play the fool.

The natural healers commanded loyalty far and wide. Everywhere, people lived with the greatest respect for their practical, down-to-earth wisdom. As such, they constituted a menace to a corrupt church and corrupt states. It would not be long before such authorities set out in systematic alliance to collaborate in the destruction of all practitioners of natural healing.

It began when the Crusaders came marching home, with tall tales to tell. They also brought back a few tricks that they had picked up in the land of the Infidels. One of them was the windmill, which soon meant that grain could be ground into meal on the top of a hill, as well as down by the old mill stream. Another was the trick of using sugar as a fermenting agent in making beer and wine. This sneaky process was called sophistication. To sophisticate beer meant to corrupt it or spoil it by adding some foreign or inferior substance. Sugar was foreign and inferior to natural malt and hops.

The word sophisticate eventually went out of fashion; it was replaced by adulterate; this gave way to the bland quantitative description of foreign inferior substances as additives. Today, we’re so sophisticated, and our food is so corrupt, that our sophisticators have us believing doubletalk. Does our food need to be fortified or enriched? Why refine flour and then enrich it? The refinement process strips many vital elements from the grain. So much for progress.

In the good old days when beer was beer, sophistication was a fighting word. Serious lovers of the brews took stern measures to ensure that they were drinking nothing but pure beer made with grains, malt, and hops. Tasters would spill a suspected brew out onto a wooden seat and test it by sitting square in the puddle in their leather breeches. After due deliberation and evaporation, the taster would rise from the wooden bench. If his leather-bound derribe adhered to the wood, the brewer was in trouble for adding sugar to his beer. Pure malt beer was not considered to yield an adhesive extract.

Consumerism was wild and woolly way back then. Retribution was swift and severe. The brewer caught adding sugar to his beer could be hauled into the pillory or ridden out of town. In the reign of England’s Edward the Confessor, the eleventh-century record shows that a knavish brewer of the City of Chester was taken round the town in the cart in which the refuse of the privies had been collected. Betty Crocker, look out!

Today one hears about Good King John und his Magna Charta, the first bill of human rights proclaimed in 1215. It is not so widely known that in those days the pillory and the tumbril were trotted out as deterrents to the sophistication of bread, meat, beer, and wine. In 1482, a wine sophisticator in Germany was condemned to drink six quarts of his own wine. He died in the middle of the commercial.

People hewed to tested, traditional ways; they were suspicious of newfangled foreign tricks. When people lost sight of the way to live, wrote Lao Tsu, came codes of love and honesty.

That point arrived in Britain in 1816; an act was passed which outlawed brewers even possessing sugar or molasses. In the twentieth century, possession of drugs is sufficient grounds for criminal charges. In the nineteenth century, possession of sugar by a brewer was considered evidence of intent to sophisticate his brew. By that time, however, the pillory and the tumbril had given way to imprisonment and fines — knavish brewers could afford to take more chances.

In olden days, beer was more than the color, bubble, and fake foam of today’s plastic age. It was a staple food — liquid bread. Nursing mothers drank it for breakfast. A brewer who added sugar to his beer was threatening the survival of the race. When he was carted around town in a merde wagon, the message was clear: The human body and brain cannot handle sugar. They knew.

People learned from the sorceress or knew in their own veins that sugar was much too sweet not to be bad for them. But, like Eve in the Garden, they were tempted. They hoped to get away with it. Some people seemed to. Or thought they did. Or thought they did right up until the point — months or years later — when they found out differently. Especially the high and mighty. Sooner or later there were signs. Occurrences. Warnings. Their bodies were telling them something.

Soldiers and sailors, freighting precious cargoes of expensive sugar across thousands of miles, found that the stuff had a way of sticking to their fingers. They began to have more trouble with their teeth. Servants in the homes of the rich, where precious sugar was kept under lock and key, began to notice that the urine in the slop jars of the high and mighty started smelling exceptionally sweet. It was not something that could be talked about with anyone but the sorceress. Sailors shipwrecked at sea on sugar cargo ships tried to survive on a diet of sugar and rum. They went bonkers and often died. There was some talk about that. Men who worked in the new cities in sugar depots and refineries seemed to develop galloping consumption in great numbers. Sometimes they talked about it. Other times, when they’d been pinching bits of sugar here and there, it was not something one could talk about.

Ancient civilizations such as those of the Orientals believed that all disorders of body and mind proceed from what we eat. As the Oriental sages phrased it, the mind and the body are not two. The sorceress … wise woman … natural healer believed this too. However, by the time sugar was introduced widely in Europe, the natural healers were uncovered — practically overnight — as a declared enemy of church and state. Ailing people consulted them at very real peril. One literally risked life and limb having any truck with them. In turn, they risked life and limb to aid you.

The church declared, in the fourteenth century, that if a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die. Catholics and Protestant churchmen forbade the exercising of healing arts or the dispensing of common sense wisdom under pain of death. T. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness.

Never mind that such people had spent their entire lives in practical study. They had studied the order of the universe, the seeds and stars, the animals, birds, and bees in their native habitat. Nature and tradition were their teachers, not the scriptures as interpreted by the priests. The printing press did not exist All knowledge and history not in the hands of all-powerful priests was passed on from natural healer to natural healer.

If you sought out a sorceress complaining of an upset stomach, she would question you on what you’d been eating, give you sound advice and perhaps a herbal infusion to settle your stomach. If you went to a natural healer complaining of melancholy, migraine, or madness, he would also know it must have been something you ate. Sugar, perhaps. So you were given stem advice and perhaps a potion or an infusion to settle your brain.

Suddenly, those days were gone. Natural healing had become witchcraft. If your hallucinations were attributed to sugar and word of it got around, the whole encounter could he turned on its head. You had been bewitched. The sorceress was spreading evil tidings against sugar to harm a new national enterprise blessed by the church and profitable to the state. Bewitchment was the province of the exorcist and the priest. The cure prescribed was for the bewitched person to denounce the natural healer as a witch or a wizard, the source of the unholy spell! The punishment? Burning at the stake.

Inquisitors complained bitterly that bewitched persons consulted the sorceress and were cured by natural means. The common method of taking off bewitchment, they wrote, is for the bewitched person to resort to wise women, by whom they are very frequently cured, and not by priests or exorcists … Such cures are affected by the help of devils, which it is unlawful to seek; therefore it cannot be lawful thus to cure bewitchment, but it must be patiently borne. Ibid.

In the age of witch hunts, the disorders, occurrences, and signs were divided into two categories: Those thought to be your own fault (physical) and those thought to be the work of the devil (mental). The milksick, a stomachache, galloping consumption, and other obvious signs and warnings were clearly physical. Invisible symptoms, however, from melancholy to migraine to madness were bewitchment.

With the support of kings and princes, the medieval church asserted complete control over medical education and practice. The infamous 1486 manual for witch hunters. Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), defined witches as those who try to induce others to perform evil wonders. Healing was one of the wonders they had in mind. Heresy was sweepingly defined as infidelity in a person who has been baptized. Midwives were singled out as surpassing all others in wickedness. There may never have been male chauvinist pigs to surpass the Inquisitors who declared that all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. J. Sprenger and H. Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, p. 47.

When male physicians were barred from attending births, a curious German physician in drag as a midwife crashed a delivery. He was found out and burned at the stake. Now the pendulum had swung all the way. H. Graham, Surgeons All, A History of Surgery, foreword by Oliver St. John Gogarty, Rich & Cowan LTD., London, 1939.

Any sudden drastic onset of illness — or what looked like illness — pointed to witchcraft. To diagnose witchcraft, Inquisitors relied on physicians to distinguish between those disorders due to natural causes and those stemming from witchcraft. Yet another way of distinguishing between natural (physical) disorders and supernatural (mental) disorders was a medieval Rorschach test: Molten lead was held over the patient’s body and then poured into water. If the lead formed a recognizable image, punishment was swift. Whatever the shape of the lead, the Inquisitors could always find a reason that proved, indubitably, that the patient was suffering from exactly the problem originally diagnosed.

Latin was the language of the physicians and the priest So physicians came to use the Latin word symptoma from the Greek word symptoma, for sign. What the sorceress had called a sign, warning from nature, the physician began to call a symptom. Few physicians could tell you something you didn’t know in your own bones. They could only examine you, listen to your complaints, then give your signs, warnings, or symptoms a fancy new name in Latin or Greek. That way the priest had no corner on mystery.

If a doctor said, Aha, it may be a stomachache, he was only telling you something you’d just told him. If he said, It must have been something you ate, you wouldn’t be exactly overwhelmed with his wisdom either. When he exclaimed, Aha, this looks like a very interesting case of dyspepsia, he’s done something for you. You’re the first in your block to have a new disease. A new disorder found in a new object, a book whose pages were written in Latin.

Johann Weyer, court physician to Duke William of Cleves, one of the few medical men of his age to speak out against witch hunts, was very rough on his sixteenth-century colleagues who collaborated with the Inquisition. He attacked uninformed and unskilled physicians [who] relegate … all the diseases, the remedy for which they overlook, to witchcraft. They, the physicians themselves, he declared, are thus the real malefactors. Quoted in Gregory Zilboorg, The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance, p. 140.

His book was promptly put on the Index.

For centuries, uninformed and unskilled physicians would continue to relegate signs of sugar blues — the simple remedy for which they overlooked — to bewitchment. Three centuries of medical mischief would produce a veritable babel of Greek and Latin symptoma: Schizophrenia, paranoia, catatonia, dementia praecox, neuroses, psychoses, psychoneuroses, chronic urticaria, neurodermatitis, cephalaigia, hermicrania, paroxysmal tachycardia — all as scarifying as the devil himself.

The wise people who understood what sugar blues were all about had been driven underground. Their litany of signs and warnings that the human body and brain cannot handle sugar was driven underground with them. It would take centuries for these signs and warnings to be rediscovered. Eventually, those zealous missionaries of Christianity would take the cross and the flag and the sugar cube and the Coke machine around the world. The church blessed slavery abroad in the sugar business as salvation for the heathens’ black souls. Physicians and priests condemned natural healers at home as witches and consigned them to damnation.

Now that the competition had been wiped out, physician and priest did what conquerors in cahoots always do: The spoils were divided. The priest and exorcist took custody of the psyche, leaving the soma to the physician and surgeon. Body and brain were partitioned into north and south, like Korea and Vietnam. Finally, the priests were phased out in favor of the psychiatrists. Dualism has endured, however: Mayo Brothers treat the body; Menningers, the brain. The National Institute of Health is separate from the National Institute of Mental Health.

When Roman Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity and began coercing his subjects to join the official Roman state church, it was the people in the rural areas who resisted; city priests scornfully denounced the pagi or country people. The Inquisitors never ventured down the dark pagan roads to knock on any doors because they were outnumbered in such areas; the natural healers were defended and protected as keepers of the flame; their wisdom and traditions were preserved intact … underground. Witches were not for burning.

Much of that deep historical antagonism is buried in language and symbols. Christians called natural healers sorcerers, from the Latin word which meant someone who drew lots, or Tarot cards, or yarrow sticks to foretell the future. Christians began to call all unbelievers pagans. Pagans called their natural healer the good woman. The natural healer dealt with herbs and potions. These were mysteries to the priests, who felt it necessary to maintain a total monopoly on all mysteries. Centuries of horror are buried in the saga of the transformation of the natural healer into the Halloween witch.

In the summer of 1973, I walked through a primeval forest in a remote area of southwestern France with a natural herbal healer and watched him perpetuate what his ancestors had done without interruption for more than four hundred years. It was like going back on the time track all the way. This remote forest resembles our images of the Garden of Eden. We walked gingerly, taking care not to trample or disturb the sacred order of the universe underfoot. He knelt to taste the early morning dew. He passed by dozens of growing things to pause before one, then picked it as carefully as one might lift a baby from its mother’s lap. He pressed it to his face and his inhalation became a kind of prayer. We retreated to an ancient wooden shed where plants were arranged on racks to dry. Each had been picked at the proper time, according to the moon and the stars as well as to the time of maturity. They are stacked to dry for days, hours, weeks. Each has its own timetable. Everything in its own season. The wood is preserved intact, inviolate, an inexhaustible source of natural healing remedies, some to be used singly, others in combination. Some are for infusions, to be drunk before meals. Others are for fomentations in which ailing people soak their hands and feet.

The healer learned all this from his father, who used to lie in the fields — studying the insects, the birds, the bees, and the animals, learning their secrets by observation — like Darwin and Goethe and Paracelsus — then checking his conclusions against ancestral documents maintained for centuries and verified constantly by trial and error, practice, and more practice … the practice of herbal healing. His father had taken him on herbcollecting trips all over the countryside, by the dawn’s early light as well as by the dark of the moon. People came from miles around to consult with his father about their miseries. Sometimes they would be given potions to take home. Perhaps a hot tub might be prepared with a selection of dried branches; the patient would soak away his pain in the tub in the kitchen. No one with the miseries ever left the healer without being questioned on eating and drinking habits. One would be cautioned about the quality of the bread being eaten, the wine being drunk. Always a stem injunction was given against sugar.

Ailing people usually came in the morning or afternoon for consultation. Once, a special patient arrived in the dead of night. The healer treated him in strictest confidence; the door was locked to other visitors, and the curtains were drawn. Under such circumstances, Papa prepared the hot water and the herbs himself; he would never embarrass the visitor by questioning him on his eating and drinking in the presence of others. For this patient was the physician from the next village. Unable — with all his scientific learning from the church and state-approved medical colleges — to heal himself. The doctor had to repair, as had his father and grandfather before him, to the lowly and disreputable herbal healer, the sorcerer, whose ancestor might have been burned as a wizard.

A modern psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, has scathingly summarized the price of hypocrisy in The Manufacture of Madness:

… The modern physician, and especially the psychiatrist, systematically repudiates his real medieval ancestor, the lowly and disreputable sorcerer and witch. Instead, he prefers to trace his descent directly from the Hippocratic physicians of ancient Greece, skipping over the embarrassment of the Middle Ages in silence … the medical profession has paid the heavy price that such a bargain with falsehood invariably entails. By denying his origins — indeed by identifying with those who have aggressed against his predecessors — the modern physician forfeits his identity as a modest but independent healer skeptical of the dogma of established social authority, and becomes instead a servile vassal of the State … In the official histories of contemporary medicine, the denial of the sorceress and witch as healer forms an important link in this fateful transformation of the physician’s role from individual entrepreneur to bureaucratic employee. Szasz, pp. 93-94.

In the remote comer of Gascony where I visited herbal healer Maurice Messegue, the Inquisition had passed them by. However, the disasters of World War II — the fall of France, the Nazi occupation — had finally reached the village. The young apprentice healer left his village and journeyed to the outside world. When the son repeated elsewhere the simple natural cures that his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had accomplished every day, they were taken either as miracles or as quackery, according to which modern superstition viewed them. Messegue successfully treated personages such as Admiral Darlan, Mistinguette, and Jean Cocteau, as well as the then president of the French Republic, Edouard Herriot. Monsieur Messegue’s simple cures were sometimes so spectacular that his famous patients talked too much. He came to represent a threat to orthodox medical authorities which they could not ignore. He was hauled into courts throughout the French Republic on more than forty occasions for practicing medicine without a medical degree — for daring, like the witches, to cure without having studied in official institutions.

The trials were spectacular advertisements for herbal medicine. The orthodox diseasestablishment in France made Maurice Messegue famous. Judge after judge duly found him guilty, sentenced him to a fine of one or two francs, then sought his professional services for the ailing wife or mistress waiting in the chambers. Eventually, the healer wrote three books — all bestsellers in Europe — about his adventures and his natural cures. In each he repeats the simple prescription learned from his forefathers: Whole natural food, naturally grown. What the avant garde of modern medicine has just now begun to tell us, his ancestors have been preaching for over four hundred years: stay away from all refined cane and beet sugar in all forms and guises. He returned in triumph to Gascony, where he was duly elected mayor of the beautiful city of Fleurance. He lives in a magnificent chateau where his mother had toiled as a maid. He became the owner of a huge primeval forest, where he walks in the morning. This vast tract of land is held in trust as an inexhaustible source of natural herbs and plants with which to minister to a polluted and chemicalized world outside.

In 1964, I prepared a translation of the first of some fifty books written by a Japanese natural healer. My introduction to Sakurazawa’s You Are All Sanpaku detailed the experiences I had had healing myself according to his simple teachings.

The book contained a chapter on sugar which said, among other things:

Western medicine and science has only just begun to sound alarm signals over the fantastic increase in its per capita sugar consumption, in the United States especially. Their researches and warnings are, I fear, many decades too late … I am confident that Western medicine will one day admit what has been known in the Orient for years: sugar is without question the number one murderer in the history of humanity — much more lethal than opium or radioactive fallout — especially those people who eat rice as their principal food. Sugar is the greatest evil that modern industrial civilization has visited upon countries of the Far East and Africa … Foolish people who give or sell candy to babies will one day discover, to their horror, that they have much to answer for.

Natural healers today may differ on many points, but on one thing they agree: The human body cannot handle man-refined sugar … sucrose.