Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 4: In Sugar We Trust

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 candy maker’s confection. The great confinement of the insane, as one historian calls it, M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity, translated by R. Howard. began in the late seventeenth century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in two hundred 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 favors. Initially, when the General Hospital was established in Paris by royal decree, one percent of the city’s population was locked up. From that time until the twentieth 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 are controlled with psychoactive drugs.

Today, pioneers of orthomolecular psychiatry such as Dr. A. Holler, Dr. Allan Cott, and Dr. A. Cherkin, as well as Dr. Linus Pauling have confirmed that mental illness is a myth and that emotional disturbances 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.

A deficiency of [vitamin B₁₂] whatever its cause … leads to mental illness, often even more pronounced than the physical consequences. The mental illness associated with pernicious anemia … often is observed for several years … before any of the physical manifestations of the disease appears … Other investigators have also reported a higher incidence of low B₁₂ concentrations in the serums of mental patients than in the population as a whole and have suggested that B₁₂ deficiency, whatever its origin, may lead to mental illness.

Nicotinic acid (niacin), when its use was introduced, cured hundreds of thousands of pellagra patients of their psychoses, as well as of the physical manifestations of the disease … More recently, many other investigators have reported on the use of nicotinic acid and nicotinamide for the treatment of mental disease … Another vitamin that has been used to some extent in the treatment of mental disease is ascorbic acid, vitamin C …

Mental symptoms (depression) accompany the physical symptoms of vitamin-C deficiency disease (scurvy) … It is my opinion, from the study of the literature, that many schizophrenics have an increased metabolism of ascorbic acid, presumably genetic in origin, and that the ingestion of massive amounts of ascorbic acid has some value in treating mental disease.

There is the possibility that some human beings have a sort of cerebral scurvy, without any of the other manifestations, or a sort of cerebral pellagra, or cerebral pernicious anemia … every vitamin, every essential amino acid, every other essential nutrilite represents a molecular disease which our distant ancestors learned to control when it began to afflict them, by selecting a therapeutic diet, and which has continued to be kept under control in this way.

In Megavitamin B’s Therapy for Schizophrenia, Dr. A. Hoffer noted that: Patients are also advised to follow a good nutritional program with restriction of sucrose and sucrose-rich foods. A. Hoffer, Megavitamin B₃ Therapy for Schizophrenia, Canadian Psychiat. Ass. J., 1971, vol. 16, p. 500.

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. A. Cott, Orthomolecular Approach to the Treatment of Learning Disabilities, synopsis of reprint article issued by The Huxley Institute for Biosocial Research, New York.

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. T. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness.

So it was in the seventeenth 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 the surgeons bury their mistakes. Physicians and psychiatrists put them away. Lock ’em up.

The excesses of the Inquisitors and witch hunters eventually produced a predictable backlash, a wave of revulsion and horror. Physicians and priests who had starred in these dramas were now in an uneasy partnership that reminded everyone of the blood on their hands. Yesterday’s heresies became institutionalized as the multiple new Protestant orthodoxies. People left the church in droves, and the royal partners had to rush into the breach and impose heavy fines on the dropouts for missing church on Sunday. Things went from bad to worse. The orgies of witch burning and exorcism had failed to stem the tide of bewitchment, possession, and madness — now physicians and clergymen were under pressure to come up with a new explanation for the symptoms and signs of the sugar blues that boggled men’s brains and disturbed their emotions.

In 1710, an anonymous clergyman-physician came up with the answer. Had they been giving Nobel prizes in those days, he surely would have rated one. His simple, sure-fire explanation for madness would satisfy physicians and priests for three centuries. It would keep them happy, busy, and rich. Although children had been doing it since the dawn of time, neither the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Orientals, nor Persians had a proper word for it. The anonymous clergyman-physician raided his Bible and perverted the legend of Onan into a new sin called onanism. He wrote a book, Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution. The physicians raided their Latin dictionaries and corrupted the closest Latin word: manustupration, to defile by hand. This was smoothed into the word masturbation, which finally made the Oxford English Dictionary in 1766. Onania was a best seller. The scientists who knew a good thing when they saw it, got into the act, dropping some of the hellfire religious crudities in favor of pseudoscientific buttressing. Besides, who could say that masturbation did not produce insanity? For a successful case against the theory, you would have to admit to having masturbated for years; then prove your sanity. Nobody dared to try it.

How about the sweet land of liberty? The Father of American Psychiatry was also one of the Founders of the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, M.D. He got on the Oh, No, Onan bandwagon early to insist that solo sex play was the pursuit of madness and produces: … impotence, [painful urination, locomotor incoordination, tuberculosis], dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, manalgia [whatever that is], fatuity, and death. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812).

The great French psychiatrist Esquirol joined the chorus, declaring that masturbation is recognized in all countries as a common cause of insanity … unless it is stopped at once; it is an insurmountable obstacle to cure … reduces a patient to a state of stupidity, [tuberculosis], marasmus [gradual wasting of tissue], and death … may be a forerunner of mania, dementia … leads to melancholy and suicide. The notion that masturbation caused insanity was accepted by the civilized world. E. H. Hare, J. Ment. Sci., 9 January 25, 1962, vol. 108, p. 4.

Masturbation supplied a perfect safety valve for medical brains. We can cure you unless you masturbate and keep on masturbating, they declared. Therefore, if you were incurable you were put in an asylum, which had a sure cure for masturbation: the straitjacket. Those on probation wore chastity belts by day and spiked rings for sleeping.

It was only a matter of time until the surgeons joined in. Their contribution? The Old Testament ritual of circumcision. Eventually, an operation for removal of the female clitoris was devised.

In the 1850s, Dr. Isaac Baker Brown, prominent London surgeon (later president of the Medical Society of London), created a surgical procedure called the clitoridectomy, on the ground that masturbation was a form of moral leprosy which caused hysteria, epilepsy, and convulsive diseases.

No less a dignitary than the president of the Royal College of Surgeons published a paper recommending circumcision for the treatment and prevention of this shameful habit and proposed going even further: Surgery for severing the dorsal nerves of the males’ penis and ovariectomy for females. The ultimate answer to masturbation and insanity, of course, was castration and hysterectomies. In the twentieth century, another giant step forward: lobotomies — incision into the brain.

By about 1880, writes historian A. Comfort, the individual who might wish for unconscious reasons to tie, chain, or infibulate sexually active children or mental patients — the two most readily available captive audiences — to adorn them with grotesque appliances, encase them with plaster casts, leather or rubber, to beat, frighten or castrate them, to cauterize or denervate the genitalia, could find humane and respectable medical authority for doing so in good conscience. Masturbatory insanity was now real enough — it was affecting the medical profession. A. Comfort, The Anxiety Makers, Some Curious Preoccupations of the Medical Profession, p. 192.

The first medical union in this country, years before the AMA, was the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. It was founded in 1844, at a time when general stores on the American frontier were giving away a half-pound of sugar free to every youngster who came into the store to make a purchase of a nickel or more. The first pronouncement of the first union of headshrinkers in the sweet land of liberty was a resolution in defense of the straitjacket: Resolved, that it is the unanimous sense of this convention that the attempt to abandon entirely the use of all means of personal restraint is not sanctioned by the true interest of the insane. N. Ridenour, Mental Health in the United States: A Fifty Year History, Harvard Univ. Press, 1961.

In 1855, an editorial in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal declared that neither the plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils have resulted more disastrously for humanity than the habit of masturbation; it is the destroying element of civilized society. Quoted in J. Duffy, Masturbation and Clitoridectomy, J.A.M.A., October 19, 1963, vol. 186, p. 246.

While official U.S. medicine was railing against masturbation, they were also denouncing as quackery the ideas of I. P. Semmelweis, who discovered in the mid-1800s that the cause of child-bed fever was the failure of doctors to take the simple precaution of thoroughly washing their hands before going from the autopsy table to the delivery room. Despite the defense of such stalwarts as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Semmelweis was hounded as a charlatan and a quack; he eventually died in an insane asylum in 1865.

If physicians a hundred years ago had trouble accepting the radical notion that their own dirty hands spread unnecessary disease and suffering, it was a bit much to expect them to connect the whopping rise in sugar consumption with new diseases.

At the end of the Victorian era, the masturbation theory of madness had begun to run out of gas. Then Sigmund Freud arrived on the scene. Freud decided that masturbation didn’t necessarily drive you insane or drive you to suicide; it was a sign of a new disease, neuroses, its remedy was no longer the chastity belt or surgeon’s knife but the psychiatrist’s couch. A chastity belt might set you back ten bucks or so; psychiatrists be paid by the hour and the treatment took weeks, months, years.

In 1897, Freud wrote, … It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the primal addiction, and that it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions — for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc. — come into existence. He didn’t mention cocaine or sugar, he was hooked on both himself. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Letter 79, December 22, 1897, vol. 1, p. 272.

In one of his books, Dr. Freud noted that he was summoned to the home of an anxious Viennese mama to examine her son. The hawkeyed Freud noticed a telltale spot on the lad’s trousers and made discreet inquiries. The boy claimed it was raw eggwhite. Of course, the good doctor wasn’t fooled for a minute, he leaped to the conclusion that his patient was suffering from the troubles arising from masturbation. Ibid. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), vol. VI, pp. 199-200.

Dr. Szasz comments acidly in The Manufacture of Madness, The young man did not send for Freud and there is no reason to believe he was suffering from anything at all; the person who was suffering was the mother, presumably from the son’s maturing sexuality.

Centuries of comic book horrors practiced by the medical and psychiatric fraternity in the treatment of madness caused by masturbation are strangely missing from our medical history books. Among millions of words devoted to self-glorification, not one is devoted to masturbatory insanity, according to Dr. Szasz. Like the involvement of the physician in the horror of the witch hunt, this sorry story is sunk without a trace. Dr. Szasz compares this most aptly to the Constitution of the United States, which manages not to mention the subject of Negro slavery. In the same way, official psychiatry remains among the most retarded sectors of the medical fraternity in recognizing that the inability of the human system to handle sugar is reflected in a whole range of symptoms of what they insist on calling mental illness.

It was as late as 1911 that Eugen Bleuler coined the fearsome word schizophrenia which supplanted dementia praecox — the latter merely means precocious madness (the symptoms appear among the young). The only thing new was the name. The symptoms were as old as sugar. In earlier times, physicians bewildered by the same symptoms had pronounced their patients bewitched; now they were pronounced schizophrenic. Where once such people had been turned over to the exorcist, now they were abandoned to the psychiatrist. Masturbation did not drive anyone mad anymore. What did? The efforts of Mama trying to stop masturbation. Or insanity could have been caused by toilet training that was too much too soon … breakfast quarrels with Papa … inconsistent discipline … lack of love or too much of it — anything in the family history that could be recalled: poverty, riches, stress, or ease.

When psychiatry proved no better than exorcism, some shrinks turned to more drastic methods, like shock treatments of all kinds, from drugs to electricity to insulin. In 1935, Egas Moniz of Lisbon introduced the ultimate answer to schizophrenia: The prefrontal lobotomy, surgical incision into the brain. In 1949, Moniz was awarded a Nobel prize for having pioneered the ultimate horror.

Traditional Oriental medicine had always insisted that the mind and the body are not two. What we call diseases and illnesses are merely symptoms that the entire body is out of kilter. To make a man whole again, he has only to eat whole food. Communist China’s foremost neuropsychiatrist insists … neuroses and psychoses do not exist here, not even paranoia. Quoted in Goffredo Parise, No Neurotics in China, Atlas, February 1967, vol. 13, p. 47.

Sagen Isiduka, fabled Japanese doctor/anti-doctor (he was so-called for his insistence on hewing to traditional ways despite Japan’s adoption of many of the practices of Western science and medicine since the 1800s), taught his disciples that what the West called mental illness could be cured by diet.

As cancer is the extreme Yin illness of people with strong constitutions, schizophrenia is the most extreme Yin illness of people with weak constitutions, wrote Nyoiti Sakurazawa (Isiduka’s successor) who lectured, wrote, and taught in Europe and America from the 1920s until his death in 1966. Sakurazawa Nyoiti, You Are All Sanpaku, pp. 62 ff.

As with acupuncture, in Oriental medicine, everything stems from the unifying principle of Yin/Yang. Sugar is the extreme Yin food as red meat is the extreme Yang food. Excess Yin sugar produces excess Yin diseases like cancer and what we call schizophrenia.

A weak constitution, as defined by traditional Oriental medical practice, is determined by genetic heredity, which is modified by the mother’s food intake during the fetus’ first months of life in the womb. To the Orientals, the outward sign of a weak constitution is a small earlobe attached to the cheek without a natural division. Large, detached earlobes are a sign of a strong constitution and a sound genetic inheritance. Western diagnosticians confirm this ancient Oriental diagnosis by telling us that large detached earlobes are a sign of strong adrenal glands. Michio Kushi, The Teachings of Michio Kushi.

Long before the explosion of interest in Oriental medicine as a result of the U.S. rapprochement with China in the 1970s, while acupuncturists like Sakurazawa were being denounced prematurely as quacks, an endocrinologist in New York was at work rediscovering the validity of some of the basic tenets of the ancient Oriental medical arts.

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 two hundred 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!!!

He 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 apologized 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, and 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. [Emphasis added.] The negativism, hyperactivity, and obstinate resentment of discipline are absolute indications for at least the minimum laboratory tests: urinalysis, complete blood count, P.B.I. determination, and the 5-hour glucose tolerance test. A glucose tolerance test can be performed in 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 he is oriented toward psychiatry, genetics, or physiology to recognize that one type of endocrine individual is involved in the majority of these cases — the hypoadrenocortic. John W. Tintera, Hypoadrenocorticism.

Tintera published several epochal medical papers. Over and over, he emphasized 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: the importance of diet cannot be overemphasized. 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 organized 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 horsefeathers 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, psychiatrized for psychoses, lobotomized for schizophrenia.

How many patients would have listened if the local healer had told them that the only thing ailing them was sugar blues?