Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 5: Blame It On the Bees

By 1662, sugar consumption in England had zoomed from zero to some 16 million pounds a year, this in little over two centuries. Then, in 1665, London was swept by a plague. More than 30,000 people died that September. Since only one pest house, or hospital, existed for the entire city, sick people were locked up in their homes, under guard, behind doors painted with huge red crosses. Others fled the city; everything ground to a halt. While swarms of quacks sold worthless potions and pills, learned physicians used knives and burning caustic to lance the underarms and groin swellings. When their surgery did more harm than good, and the doctors themselves became infected, they stopped that treatment. In a year, the epidemic ran its course. The plague was named after its most obvious symptom, the swelling (or buboes), and became known as the bubonic plague. The swelling plague. The plague of boils.

People who lived in the country virtually without sugar seemed to escape the plague. Had anyone called it the city sugar plague, they might have been denounced as menaces to commerce and crown and strung to a gibbet.

Shortly after the plague, Thomas Willis (anatomist and physician, one of the first members of the Royal Society, and an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians) took a house in London’s St. Martin’s Lane, where he began a medical practice which was to mark him as one of the finest physicians of his time. His first anatomical writings in 1664 (he was known for the elegance and purity of his Latin style) described part of the brain as the circle of Willis — as it is still known today in anatomy. He also wrote, in English, A Plain and Easy Method for Preserving Those that are Well from the Infection of the Plague, and for Curing such as are Infected.

Willis was the first to describe in writing — if not the first to discover — a new and extraordinary sweetness in the urine of his rich and famous patients. In a second medical treatise, Pharmaceutice Rationalis (in Latin, published in 1674), he described this symptom as diabetes mellitus.

The Greek diabetes simply described inordinate passage of urine. In Latin, the same symptom would be described as polyuria. The Latin mellitus, which Willis combined with the Greek diabetes, means honey-sweet. Mel is Latin for honey, itis, for inflammation.

We now have the discovery, in London after the plague, of a new symptom: The passage of inordinate amounts of extraordinarily sweet-smelling urine.

After two hundred years of sugar eating, especially by the rich and famous patients who could afford Dr. Willis, why not call the new disease polyuria saccharitis, Latin for sugar inflammation? Well, plain speaking was not exactly the vogue in medical circles at that time. The British had just beheaded one king and restored his son to the throne. Willis was an ardent Royalist who fought against the roundheads; he eventually became private physician to King Charles II. The king, like all royal personages since Good Queen Bess, was up to his neck m the lucrative sugar trade.

What would you do if you had the king for a patient, as well as numerous other high-titled personages who made money hand over fist in the sugar trade? Since one does not want to offend one’s clientele unnecessarily — or risk the loss of your trade or your head — by suggesting that the sugar racket might be the cause of a new malady, you name the problem in Greek. Even better, one blames it on the bees. Honey has been around since the beginning of time and nobody has ever figured out a way of making a fortune from bee-keeping. Blame it on the bees and use hermetic Latin words for honey inflammation, and you can boost your medical reputation, as well as ensure your place in medical history without any risk.

Anyway, Willis made his enduring contribution to the science of nosology — the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases — and rates a footnote in what passes for medical history. He played it safe. Galileo had run afoul of the Inquisition the year before. Men of science were playing it safe, especially those with royal connections. Scientific kowtowing to industry is very much with us still. After an entire Japanese village was decimated by eating fish poisoned with mercury-laden industrial waste, the myriad resultant symptoms were christened Minamata disease — the name of the village, not the mercury.

Willis intuitively spotted the connection between sugar and scurvy centuries before the discovery of vitamin C. When sugar cane or sugar beet is refined, all the vitamins including vitamin C are lost, discarded. Natural sugar, such as that in raw fruits and vegetables, supplies the body with vitamin C. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the difference between a classic French dessert, raw fruit, and a British dessert of the same time, sugared pudding, added up to scurvy.

(In relation to consumption, now called tuberculosis and blamed on a bacillus, evidence suggests that a sugar-rich diet may create the necessary conditions in our bodies for the bacteria. Three hundred years ago, in the 1700s, deaths from tuberculosis — especially in Britain — increased dramatically. The highest incidence occurred among workers in sugar factories and refineries, according to Naboru Muramoto. In 1910, when Japan acquired a source of cheap and abundant sugar in Formosa, the incidence of tuberculosis rose dramatically.)

James Hurt, Doctor in Physicke, wrote The Family Companion for Health or Plain, Easy, and Certain Rules which being Punctually Observed and Followed will infallibly keep Families from Disease and Procure them a Long Life, which was published in 1633 as Klinike or the Diet of Disease. Dr. Hurt was not a member of the Royal Society, the AMA of his time. He was a natural healer who believed that the doctor should be a teacher who concerned himself with diet and health rather than the kind of fame attainable from affixing one’s name to a new disease. He wrote in English, for the common folk, rather than in Latin for the members of the Royal Society. His seventeenth-century ideas about sugar are so old-fashioned that they are right on the button:

Sugar in itself be opening and cleansing, yet being much used produceth dangerous effect in the body: as namely, immoderate use thereof, as also of sweet confections, and Sugar-plummes, heateth the blood, ingendreth obstructions, cachexias, consumptions, rotteth the teeth, making them look blacke; and withal causeth many times a loathsome stinking breath. And therefore let young people especially beware how they meddle too much with it.

Quoted in W. R. Aykroyd, Sweet Malefactor.

Cachexias — a medical term that has gone out of style — is derived from the Greek, kakos, for bad, and hexis, for condition, which originally meant a state of ill health produced by malnutrition. Medical dictionaries today note that cachexias may occur in chronic diseases such as advanced malignancies, advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and so forth. It has taken three hundred tortuous years for medical science to rediscover the obvious and proclaim that the myriad symptoms of multiple diseases with multi-syllable names are caused by sugar.

It is mind-boggling today to read through medical histories and other tomes and find again and again that the basic cause of diabetes mellitus is still unknown, that it is chronic and incurable, or that it is due to the failure of the pancreas to secrete an adequate amount of insulin. It’s still Greek to the best of them. Language and history are tortured and twisted in order to prove that diabetes has been around for thousands of years.

When the Ebers papyrus — one of the most venerable of medical documents was discovered in 1872 at Luxor, Egypt, we are told that a number of prescriptions were provided for medicines to drive away the passing of too much urine. E. M. Abrahamson and A. W. Pezet, Body, Mind, and Sugar, p. 22.

Although this is only one symptom of diabetes, medical historians leap to the conclusion that what they call diabetes has been around for well over three thousand years. That seems very conveniently to acquit the man-refined sugar of today. Or does it? The Egyptians did not have refined sucrose. However, they did have plenty of honey, as well as the natural sugar from the date palm. Candy was made by sweetening dough with honey and dates. The mixture was cut into triangles and was akin to the baklava eaten today. Gluttons in the upper classes who could afford it might overdo it on date sugar and honey. Date sugar and honey are complete foods; one can eat just so much of them without getting sick. For thousands of years, nobody outside the tropical belt had access to date sugar.

I find it hard to explain why Hippocrates never described a case of diabetes, noted Dr. G. D. Campbell, the South African expert on the disease. Such a careful clinical observer could hardly have failed to recognize its florid manifestations, either alone or complicating one of the many cases that he meticulously described. Certainly, it must have been an uncommon disorder, probably of the order of frequency or sporadicity seen only today in peasant communities. G. D. Campbell, Nutrition and Diseases — 1973. Part III — Appendix to Hearings of the United States Senate Series 73/ND3.

Modern medical history leans heavily on the Greeks when supporting a prejudice. When they don’t, they can be skipped over.

During the nineteenth century, medical history tells us, the incidence of diabetes seemed to increase over that of ancient times. Figures on the incidence of diabetes in ancient times do not exist. Figures relating the consumption of sugar in early America to the number of deaths from diabetes have not been compiled. However, Danish authorities do have such statistics, but the medical histories in the U.S. rarely mention them or make any connection between sugar and diabetes.

In 1880, the average Danish citizen consumed over 29 pounds of refined sugar annually; at that time, the recorded death rate from diabetes was 1.8 per 100,000. In 1911, consumption had more than doubled: some 82 pounds of sugar per Dane annually; the recorded death rate from diabetes was 8 per 100,000. In 1934, Danish consumption of refined sugar was approximately 113 pounds per person annually; the recorded death rate from diabetes was 18.9 per 100,000.

Before World War II, Denmark had a higher consumption of sugar than any other European country. (The word Danish also means a pastry sugar bomb.) In Denmark, every fifth person suffers from cancer. In half a century, the annual Swedish consumption of refined sugar increased from 12 pounds per head in 1880 to over 120 pounds per head in 1929. Every sixth person suffers from cancer. G. Schwab, Dance With the Devil, p. 86.

In the Scandinavian countries, statistics date from the days when sugar consumption was relatively low. Nothing comparable exists in the U.S. While the rest of the world lags behind the Scandinavian countries in compiling and publishing such statistics, the point is inescapable: As sugar consumption escalates wildly, fatal diseases increase remorselessly.

The scenario for the saga of the progress of medical science is always onward and upward, one epochal discovery after another. In the fight against sugar disease, such discoveries were few and far between. Nothing turned up until a dispute between the Russian Oskar Minkowski and his associate J. Von Mering was settled in 1889 by removal of a dog’s pancreas to see if the animal could live without it. The dog died: many more died in successive experiments. Before they did, they passed excessive urine which contained from 5 to 10 percent sugar. J. Von Mering and O. Minkowski, Arch. Exper. Path. Pharm., 1889, vol. 26, p. 371.

Now they were getting somewhere! The cause must lie in the pancreas.

In 1923, Canadian physician Frederick Banting received a Nobel prize for having discovered a way to extract the hormone insulin (which the average human pancreas excretes in adequate supply) and proving that it could control the abnormal amounts of blood sugar that made diabetes mellitus a slow killer. Strength and Health Magazine, May-June 1972.

In the intervening decades since the 1880s, patients with diabetes have endured the tortures of the damned. They have been alternately starved, glutted with fats, injected with baking soda, and taken off all cereals, because the latter were classified (incorrectly) as carbohydrates by the chemists. Toes, feet, and limbs were amputated. However, sadly enough, despite such efforts on the part of the medical profession, death eventually resulted.

The following summary of pre-insulin insight and therapy was published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911:

"Diabetes mellitus is one of the diseases due to altered metabolism. It is markedly hereditary, much more prevalent in towns and especially modern city life than in more primitive rustic communities and most common among the Jews. The excessive use of sugar as a food is usually considered one of the causes of the disease, and obesity is supposed to favor its occurrence, but many observers consider that the obesity so often met with among diabetics is due to the same cause as the disease itself. No age is exempt, but it occurs most commonly in the fifth decade of life. It attacks males twice as frequently as females, the fair more frequently than dark people … Diabetes is a very fatal form of disease, recovery being exceedingly rare … there are two distinct lines of treatment, that of diet and that of drugs; diet is of primary importance inasmuch as it has been proved beyond question that certain kinds of foods have a powerful influence in aggravating the disease, more particularly those consisting largely of saccharine and starchy matter … various treatment methods aim at the elimination as far as possible of these constituents from the diet … the best diet can only be worked out experimentally for each individual patient … Numerous medicinal substances have been employed in diabetes, but few of them are worthy of mention as possessed of any efficacy. Opium is often found of great service, its administration being followed by marked amelioration in all of the symptoms. Morphia and codeia have a similar action … Heroin hydrochloride has been tried in their place, but this seems to have more power over slight than over severe cases …"

The discovery of insulin was the kind of modern medical miracle which the diseasestablishment knew how to exploit. Production of insulin was and is a boon to the pharmaceutical industry. Patients with diabetes presented a captive market, a million people in the early 1900s. The surge of sugar addiction in the 1920s ensured that this profitable market would increase annually. Insulin injections were expensive but manageable palliatives, not quick or cheap cures in any sense. Millions of diabetics would become dependent on insulin for the rest of their lives. Insulin was something that could be packaged and sold over the counter in drugstores — together with the attendant hardware, such as needles. It captured the imagination of a vaccination-happy, drug-oriented society. So diabetics were kept alive by the injection of insulin extracted from the pancreatic glands of animals from abattoirs. Many people who might have died survived — if they could afford insulin — to breed diabetic-prone descendants of their own. The classification of varieties of diabetes multiplied. Diabetes mellitus — honey inflammation causing copious passage of urine — was superseded by modern, symptomatic terminology: hypoinsulinism (underproduction of insulin).

Then, in 1924, a year after the discoverer of insulin was awarded a Nobel prize, a professor of medicine discovered the complementary antagonist of hypoinsulinism. Inevitably, doctors and patients experimenting with insulin in its early years took too little or too much. An overdose produced symptoms of what came to be called insulin shock. Dr. Seale Harris of the University of Alabama began to notice symptoms of insulin shock in many people who were neither diabetic nor taking any insulin. These people were diagnosed as having low levels of glucose in their blood; diabetics have high levels of glucose.

Dr. Harris officially reported his discovery that year: Low levels of glucose in the blood were declared to be a symptom of hyperinsulinism: excessive insulin. Up to that time, patients with symptoms of hyperinsulinism had been treated for coronary thrombosis and other heart ailments, brain tumors, epilepsy, gall bladder disease, appendicitis, hysteria, asthma, allergies, ulcers, alcoholism, and a variety of mental disorders. Seale Harris, J.A.M.A., 1924, vol. 83, p. 729.

A Nobel prize was not awarded, however, to Dr. Harris. His discovery was an embarrassment to the diseasestablishment, not a boon. The remedy he suggested for hyperinsulinism or low blood glucose was not a glamorous new miracle drug that could be packaged and sold across the drug counter in a bottle or licensed to the pharmaceutical industry as a billion-dollar business.

Dr. Harris pointed out that the cure for low blood glucose or hyperinsulinism (also commonly and misleadingly called low blood sugar) was something so simple that nobody — not even the medical practitioners — could make any money out of it. The remedy was self-government of the body. The patient with low blood glucose must be prepared to give up refined sugar, candy, coffee, and soft drinks — these items had caused the troubles. Patients with hyperinsulinism could never be made dependent for a lifetime on anybody else. They had to fend for themselves. A doctor could merely teach them what not to do. Hyperinsulinism or low blood glucose therapy was a do-it-yourself proposition.

Predictably, the medical profession landed on Dr. Harris like a ton of bricks. When his findings were not attacked, they were ignored. His discoveries, if allowed to leak out, might make trouble for surgeons, psychoanalysts, and other medical specialists. To this day, hyperinsulinism or low blood glucose is a stepchild of the diseasestablishment. It took the AMA twenty-five years to get around to awarding Harris a medal.

In 1929, Dr. Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin, tried to tell us that his discovery was merely a palliative, not a cure and that the way to prevent diabetes was to cut down on dangerous sugar bingeing.

In the U.S. the incidence of diabetes has increased proportionately with the per capita consumption of sugar, he warned. In the heating and recrystallization of the natural sugar cane, something is altered which leaves the refined product a dangerous foodstuff. F. G. Banting, Strength and Health, May-June 1972.

Figures from England indicated that insulin may delay deaths from diabetes, that is all. Schwab, p. 86.

Before the introduction of insulin in Britain, deaths from diabetes were:

After the introduction of insulin, deaths from diabetes were:

In the 1930s, brilliant researchers in the U.S. discovered that the Chinese and Japanese who take rice as their principal food had very little diabetes. They also noted that Jews and Italians were among those ethnic groups with a high incidence of diabetes. From this, ignoring the vastly different intake of refined sugar between East and West, they were able to conclude that, since Jews consume a great deal of animal fat and Italians are lavish users of olive oil, diabetics were apt to be those who use excessive amounts of fat. H. P. Himsworth, Clinical Science, 1935, vol. 2, p. 117.

Other statistics in the U.S. showed that the outbreak of diabetes dropped sharply during World War I (when sugar was rationed). Figures also showed that the incidence of diabetes among young men in the armed forces (where soldiers were supplied with the sugar that civilians had to do without) rose steadily from World War I to World War II.

When a man’s knowledge is not in order, said Herbert Spencer, the more of it he has, the greater will be his confusion. Western medicine’s answer to the sugar disease was confusion compounded.

Man-refined sugar (sucrose) was introduced to Japan when the Christian missionaries arrived after the US Civil War. At first, the Japanese used refined sugar in the way the Arabs and Persians had used it centuries before: as a medicine. Sugar was taxed as severely as imported patented medicines. By 1906, 45,000 acres of sugar cane were cultivated in Japan, compared with 7 million acres devoted to the cultivation of rice. Interestingly enough, in its war with Russia in 1905, the Japanese armed forces carried their own food in much the same way as the Viet Cong in the 1970s: Each man had enough dried rice to keep him going for three days. This was supplemented with salt fish, dried seaweed, and pickled umeboshi plums.

In the years following victory over the Russians, many Japanese gradually began to abandon ancient traditions in favor of Western ideas of medicine, nourishment, technology, and religion. The gradual introduction of sugar into the Japanese diet brought in its wake the beginning of Western diseases. A Japanese midwife, trained in the techniques of Western medicine as a nurse, fell ill and was abandoned as incurable by the Western doctors she had espoused. Three of her children died the same way. The fourth, Nyoiti Sakurazawa, rebelled at the notion of dying of tuberculosis and ulcers in his teens. He took up the study of ancient Oriental medicine which had been officially outlawed in Japan under the impact of modernization. Sakurazawa was attracted to the unorthodox career of a famous Japanese practitioner, Dr. Sagen Isiduka. Thousands of patients had been cured by Isiduka (through the traditional use of food) after they had been abandoned as incurable by the new medicine of the West.

Dr. Isiduka had discovered the biochemical validity of the ancient, unique principle of Yin/Yang when he uncovered the complementary antagonism between sodium (Yang) and potassium (Yin). Young Sakurazawa studied with Isiduka. When the latter died, Sakurazawa went beyond him; he studied ancient Indian and Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and the sacred books of these civilizations. After World War I, Sakurazawa journeyed to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and the Pasteur Institute. He opened a private acupuncture practice (then virtually unknown) in Paris in the 1920s to support himself. Later, he collaborated with the French physician de Morant — who had become interested in acupuncture during a stint with the French army in Indochina — on the first book on acupuncture in a Western European language (French). This feat rates Sakurazawa a footnote in the German and English translations of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, which is used as an historical text in medical schools in America.

Eventually, Sakurazawa published many books in Japanese and French on Oriental philosophy and preventive medicine. He translated Alexis Carrel’s classic Man the Unknown and introduced it to Japan. From personal experiences in East and West, Sakurazawa concluded that Western medicine was many decades late in sounding warnings on the relation between sugar consumption and disease. Western medicine will one day admit what has been known in the Orient for years, he wrote in You Are All Sanpaku. Sugar is the greatest evil that modern industrial civilization has visited upon the countries of the Far East and Africa.

Sakurazawa prescribed self-government of the body for the healing and prevention of all symptoms, not hyper-insulinism alone, as Dr. Seale Harris had stressed. Naturally, here and abroad, the diseasestablishment laughed and laughed. Where he was not ignored, he was ridiculed. His analysis of sugar disease is simplicity itself:

When we eat, the process of digestion converts food into glucose (a simple sugar which is yin). This glucose is carried in the blood to the pancreas, where the increased blood glucose level stimulates the production of insulin (yang). The insulin is carried in the blood to the liver, where excess glucose is converted to glycogen (a complex sugar which is yang), which is then stored in the liver.

A decrease in blood glucose, on the other hand, stimulates secretion of the cortical hormones in the adrenal gland and the hormones of the pituitary gland (these hormones — ACTH — are yin) which raise the blood glucose level by converting some of the stored glycogen in the liver to glucose. In a healthy body, the blood glucose level is maintained by the interplay of insulin (yang), cortical hormones, and ACTH (yin).

In a poorly functioning organism, however, the swings in the blood glucose level are much greater. If the insulin supplied by the pancreas is excessive, too much glucose will be converted to glycogen; the blood glucose level will fall and remain low. This condition is called hyper-insulinism, or hypoglycemia, the first stage of the sugar blues. This overstimulation of the pancreas is caused by the ingestion of excessive quantities of simple sugars such as refined sucrose, honey, fruits, and indirectly by drugs (including marijuana).

On the other hand, if the insulin supply is inadequate, the liver cannot effectively convert excess glucose to glycogen. This is diabetes. As the pancreas tires of producing insulin to neutralize highly yin foods such as simple sugars, honey, fruits, or drugs, or eventually becomes completely exhausted from the effort, excess sugar begins building up in the blood. The blood glucose level rises and remains high. Excess stimulation by excess sugar, honey, and fruits will lead to hyperinsulinism or hypoglycemia or low blood glucose and then to diabetes or high blood glucose, the next stage of sugar blues.

High blood glucose, what Dr. Thomas Willis called diabetes in 1674, was discovered first because only a urine sample and a sense of smell were needed to detect it. The medical technology for detecting low levels of glucose in the blood, the first stage of sugar blues, was not available until the turn of the twentieth century.

Since the disease is yin, says Sakurazawa, treatment must be yang — a well-balanced diet, neither too yin nor too yang. Sakurazawa suggested whole, unpolished rice, Japanese azuki beans, and Hokkaido pumpkin (any pumpkin or squash is suitable). Sakurazawa had introduced the cultivation of whole natural carbohydrates like rice, Hokkaido pumpkin, and azuki beans in Belgium and France where they had never been grown before, just as the soya bean (the cow of the Orient) had been first introduced in America as a source of cheap vegetable protein in the 1920s. The soya bean caught on like wildfire in the U.S. because it could be fed to cattle, which could in turn be eaten. The pumpkin, the azuki bean, the whole rice, and the other traditional soya bean products like miso, tofu, and tamari didn’t catch on as readily. That too will change, Sakurazawa predicted. It has changed. As the food and energy crises of the 1970s mount, it will change even more.

Naturally, the pundits of Western medicine denounced Sakurazawa as a charlatan and a quack. The fact that he practiced something as far out as acupuncture without a Harvard degree — and before the U.S. rapprochement with Red China — was enough to discredit him totally in some quarters. However, his practice of prescribing what Western medicine had mistakenly labeled a high carbohydrate diet for people with high blood glucose or diabetes was, according to some, demonstrably insane. Everybody knew that carbohydrates, which tend to break down into simple sugars during digestion, tend to raise blood glucose levels to dangerous highs.

Sakurazawa was a threat to the sugar business and its stepchild, the insulin industry. He took that as a tribute. He noted in the 1960s:

No Western doctor can cure diabetes, even thirty years after the discovery of insulin. Physicians have continued to recommend insulin, condemning diabetics to walk with an insulin crutch for life. Yet on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of insulin, the inefficiency of insulin as a treatment or cure for diabetes was publicly admitted. In the meantime, millions of diabetics have paid millions of dollars for this ineffective remedy, not only in the U.S. but all over the world. And the diabetics are increasing every day. Once they begin taking insulin, they can expect to feed the pockets of the doctors and pharmaceutical corporations as long as they live.

Sakurazawa stuck to his guns, insisting that any nutritional regime for diabetics which excluded what the West called carbohydrates was dangerous. He pleaded with Western nutritionists to make the distinction in the quality of food which they mechanically labeled carbohydrates: He begged them to make the distinction between whole, unrefined grains as a source of carbohydrates and not lump them indiscriminately with potatoes, white bread, processed grains, and refined table sugar, which are the average sources of carbohydrates in the typical American diet.

One measure of the confusion in the U.S. medical profession over the symptoms of sugar diseases has been the number of suffering doctors — and their wives — who couldn’t even help themselves, let alone their patients. The story of Dr. Stephen Gyland from Tampa, Florida, is classic. C. Fredericks and H. Goodman, Low Blood Sugar and You, pp. 16-19.

Dr. Gyland fell ill with a myriad of mental and physical symptoms. His concentration and memory were failing; he was weak, dizzy with rapid, unprovoked beating of the heart; and he suffered from unprovoked anxieties and tremors. Dr. Gyland went to one of the most eminent specialists he knew, only to be told he was neurotic and ought to retire for the good of the profession. He sought another opinion and then another. Before he was through, he had consulted fourteen physicians and three of the most famous diagnostic clinics in America.

Physicians feel they have accomplished a great deal for a patient when they give his disease a name, Immanuel Kant said. Dr. Gyland had more than one name for his disease, he had a multiple choice: neurosis, brain tumor, diabetes, cerebral arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries of the brain). It cost him a fortune to end up where he started: sick, unable to work, and baffled by the conflicting jargon. He was near the end of his rope when he happened upon Dr. Harris’ original medical paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1924.

Gyland took the five-hour glucose tolerance test (GTT) and learned he had low blood glucose … hypoglycemia … sugar blues. Following Dr. Harris’ prescription, he went on a simple diet that eliminated all refined sugar and white flour. Gyland’s symptoms, anxieties, tremors, dizziness, neuroses, and cerebral arteriosclerosis faded. After he recovered, he recalled that one diagnostician had diagnosed the malady correctly but prescribed the wrong remedy! The trouble was compounded by labeling his ailment low blood sugar and recommending candy bars to increase it. Naturally, this action could only add fuel to the flame and worsen Gyland’s symptoms.

If you’ve ever gone through this kind of medical rigmarole, as I and millions of others have, one ends up a little bitter, with a sense of mission. Dr. Gyland was properly bitter and blasted off with a letter to the AMA Journal (Vol. 152, July 18, 1953), reproaching his colleagues for neglecting and overlooking the pioneering work of Dr. Seale Harris. He vowed to use his hard earned lesson to help diagnose and treat the legions of people suffering from sugar blues, including many who were being told — as he had been — that refined sugar was the cure for their miseries when it was actually the cause.

Dr. Gyland went on to prove it takes one to tell one. More than six hundred patients were treated by him for the same symptoms he had discovered in his own body. He wrote an exhaustive study of his patients, detailing how he diagnosed them, the symptoms presented, and how they responded to his treatment, which always began with the complete restriction of refined carbohydrates — primarily sugar and white flour. A gadfly to the AMA, he was finally permitted to read his paper before one of the medical societies. He waited anxiously for it to appear in one of the AMA journals. Nothing happened. That’s how anxious the AMA was to alert its members to the importance of glucose tolerance tests in routine physical examinations. (Three such tests, each of a different length of time, do exist.) The report of Dr. Gyland’s important work was finally published (in Portuguese) in a Brazilian medical journal.

While Dr. Gyland was trekking from one specialist to another depressed and dizzy with the sugar blues, a science writer trained at Harvard and MIT was making the same discouraging pilgrimage. He wandered through countless consultation rooms, survived misdiagnoses and mistreatment for more than ten years before he found a doctor who spotted the trouble, confirmed it with a GTT test, and took him off sugar. Writer A. W. Pezet saw his symptoms fade. He asked some hard questions of his physician. Dr. E. M. Abrahamson. Why do so many doctors know little or nothing about a constellation of symptoms which afflicts millions of people? If the diagnosis is so simple, and the removal of the cause of the symptoms is simpler still, what’s happened to medical education?

Pezet’s sense of mission deepened when he discovered that his wife suffered from the same symptoms he had had and quitting sugar gave her the same relief. The result was the Abrahamson-Pezet collaboration, a landmark volume: Body, Mind, and Sugar, first published in 1951. Its sale of over 200,000 copies in hardcover was evidence of the intense public interest in the subject. The book, which is dedicated to Dr. Seale Harris, didn’t have to await publication in medical journals, as had the material by Harris and Gyland. It went over the heads of the AMA hierarchy direct to the long-suffering, misdiagnosed public. Patients began asking their doctors for GTT tests, and the word hypoglycemia passed into common currency. Unfortunately, use of the terms like low’blood sugar and sugar starved on the paperback edition, published later, created some confusion. Many people were led to believe misinformed doctors who said that the answer to sugar starvation was to eat candy bars between meals.

In 1969, nutritionist Carlton Fredericks collaborated with Dr. Herman Goodman on the invaluable popular book, Low Blood Sugar and You.

Despite such medical and general books and articles, the AMA continues to assure America that they know best about what’s not supposed to be ailing us. The Journal of the American Medical Association pronounced in 1973:

Recent publicity in the popular press has led the public to believe that the occurrence of hypoglycemia is widespread in this country and that many of the symptoms that affect the American population are not recognized as being caused by this condition. These claims are not supported by medical evidence …

Hypoglycemia means a low level of blood sugar. When it occurs, it is often attended by symptoms of sweating, shakiness, trembling, anxiety, fast heart action, headache, hunger sensations, brief feelings of weakness, and, occasionally, seizures and coma. However, the majority of people with these kinds of symptoms do not have hypoglycemia. (Emphasis added.)

How in the name of Allah can they claim to know?

What are they telling us? Only a minority, maybe 49.2 percent, of the U.S. population has hypoglycemia?

Among the people who wondered about that point was Marilyn Hamilton Light, Executive Director of the Adrenal Metabolic Research Society of the Hypoglycemia Foundation. (She had suffered through the same nightmare as Dr. Gyland.) According to foundation files, their average undiagnosed or misdiagnosed victim of the sugar blues had visited twenty physicians and four psychiatrists before discovering (by word of mouth, pure chance, or reading) the possibility of their having hypoglycemia — later confirmed by a GTT test.

Marilyn Light wrote the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and asked for their figures on the prevalence of hypoglycemia in the U.S. Letter from Department of Health, Education and Welfare, M. A. Hight, to M. H. Light; September 10, 1973.

Here’s the answer she received: … unpublished data from the Health Interview show that an estimated 66,000 cases were reported in household interviews of the civilian, noninstitutional population during fiscal year 1966-67. (Emphasis added.)

Out of 134,000 people interviewed, 66,000 cases of hypoglycemia were reported. This represents 49.2 percent of those interviewed.

Not a majority, only 49.2 percent!

Further inquiry to the Agency established the following points:

  1. The same interview sample is used by the U.S. government to establish data and trends on all sorts of health problems.
  2. People interviewed were not prompted in any way. Neither the word hypoglycemia nor the term low blood sugar appeared on the checklist of chronic conditions people were asked about.
  3. Interviewers had to depend on a catch-all question — Do you have any other condition? to get their answers.
  4. The respondents had to be aware of their condition, they had to know what to call it, and they had to be willing to volunteer it to the interviewer before they were counted.
  5. Despite the fact that the 49.2 figure is already ten years old, and should represent a major alert on the widespread prevalence of the sugar blues (comparative epidemic basis), the HEW never subsequently added hypoglycemia to their survey checklist and has no plans in the near future to include it.

Are you ready for that?

Can you imagine the HEW and the AMA calling off a drive against cancer or heart disease because it does not yet afflict a majority of the population, only a paltry 49.2 percent?

The difference between the expensive diseases like cancer and the cheap ones like sugar blues is crucial. Present-day orthodox treatment for cancer is fiendishly expensive. Your financial ruin is your doctor’s yacht. The treatment for sugar blues or hypoglycemia is a do-it-yourself proposition. Kick man-refined sugar and say goodbye to doctor and hospital bills. Mink coats for the wives and sunshine seminars in Bermuda can hardly be squeezed from that.

By the 1970s, the slogan was preventive medicine. What the diseasestablishment means by preventive medicine, however, is regular and costly visits to an MD or clinic for expensive tests and, maybe, a free sermon on smoking or cholesterol if Doc can hide his paunch under his white coat and abstain from tobacco long enough to deliver it. Plenty of money can be made from this kind of preventive medicine, from people terrified of cancer and heart disease. Medicine has only one valid answer for preventing the sugar blues, or hypoglycemia, or prediabetes: preventive nutrition. Stop eating sugar. Stop — before you ruin your adrenals — before you end up with symptoms of the sugar blues, hypoglycemia, prediabetic condition, or whatever you want to call it.

How much money can anybody charge you for simple advice like that?

The 1967 HEW data on sugar blues goes unpublished. Because it goes unpublished, the AMA can claim not to know about it. So in 1973, they can notify America with a straight face that claims of hypoglycemia being widespread in ihis country are not supported by medical evidence. After all, the evidence is only HEW statistical epidemiological evidence. The former patients — misdiagnosed and mistreated — reported the evidence, not the doctors. Therefore, it is not medical evidence. That, surely, is quite clear.

Medical evidence as such does not exist because those 66,000 people in the statistical survey did not have medical records to back up their opinions. They didn’t have medical records because most doctors and hospitals still refuse to give the patients copies of their diagnoses and test results.

The AMA’s credibility is based on our ignorance.

In case the difference between evidence and medical evidence or the difference between facts and scientific facts eludes you, let me explain. If I have a headache or a fever, that’s not a fact except to me. If I tell a doctor about it, that’s what doctors call anecdotal evidence qr testimonial. If the doctor takes my temperature and writes it down, the headache becomes medical evidence. If another doctor copies it, it becomes a scientific fact. Should I need proof that my fever was 101 last Tuesday and ask my doctor for my chart, it will not be given to me. That plain garden variety fact has now become a scientific onl y available to another doctor. If I complain the doctor won’t give me the scientific facts about my past condition, that’s anecdotal evidence again. This is where I came in.

After practically making a religion of the low carbohydrate diet for diabetics for thirty years, modern medicine was undone by another discovery. Early in 1971, a team of scientists headed by Dr. Edwin L. Bireman reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that high carbohydrate diets actually lower blood glucose levels in mild diabetics and normal humans. Diets high in carbohydrates do not raise the blood sugar, said Dr. Bireman. That’s the misconception that most physicians have had during the last thirty years.

The American Diabetes Association then urged the U.S. medical profession to make a complete turnabout and recommend that sufferers from diabetes be put on diets with carbohydrate levels equal to or surpassing those in the diet of healthy people. The ADA action reflected the fact that, since the widespread use of insulin and other symptomatic treatment, many diabetics are eventually afflicted with hardening of the arteries, arteriosclerosis, heart attacks, and strokes. Such conditions are thought to arise from the disproportionately high consumption of fats physicians recommend for diabetics.

Fifty years after the epochal discovery of insulin, the number of diabetics has increased relentlessly. From World War I to Vietnam, physical examinations of eighteen-year-old draftees tell a story of steadily increasing rejections for diabetes. Figures for 1970s place the current rejection rate up to 12 percent. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, as well as a major contributor to disability and death from heart and kidney diseases. Estimates of the number of diabetics in America range from 4 to 12 million. The number of prediabetics, people suffering from hypoglycemia, hyperinsulinism, or low blood glucose — the complementary antagonist and sometimes precursor of diabetes — is estimated to be even higher.

Appeals for self-regulation to control sugar diseases are drowned out by the clamor for more millions of federal funds to find a potion, a pill, a shot, perhaps a magical Medicare atomic pancreas pacemaker — which can one day magically conquer disease.

We want to have our health and eat our sugarcake too.