Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 8: How to Complicate Simplicity

… The sugar boom also penetrated the civilization of the bohio and the very depths of the jungle. Everything bowed before the royal decree. Clear more land to plant cane. And the magnificent primeval forests, bowing beneath the dread command, assumed a prominent but sorrowful role in the Cuban pageant. No country on earth is more rich in the blessings of its woods than the pearl of the Antilles. Forty excellent cabinet and building woods are grown in the Cuban forests: mahogany, rosewood, logweed, ebony, the fragrant Spanish elm. In clearing up land to make way for sugar, Cubans felled and burned phalanxes of century old royal palms, which yielded food, milk, rope, and numerous necessities of peasant life were sacrificed to the Great God Sugar.

And with more subtle significance, the coming of the sugar industry on a large scale changed the world of the peasant. Formerly the rural Cuban had squatted so contentedly on his square land which produced about everything he wanted, that a German peddler coined the immortal phrase: The damned wantlessness of the Cuban countryman.

Now with his land sold to the sugar corporations, he found himself a part of a great industrial enterprise, which provided him with a house and wages on its own terms. Temperamentally he was unsuited to this stream of modern industrial progress in which he found himself … He has no part in directing this industrial giant; he has no voice in its management. Yet to it he must look for education, recreation, and bread. He has, willy-nilly, exchanged a simple life for vassalage to a foreign colossus. His future is not his own. It is determined for him in a director’s room in New York. Abstract from the Pageant of Cuba, Hudson Strode H. Smith & R. Haas, New York, 1934, pp. 248-279.

America is a country that has elevated waste to an industry. Wasting inexhaustible resources and buying up those of other lands has been basic policy. Halfway through the twentieth century, the U.S. is up to its ears in an energy crisis and a food crisis. The two have always been intertwined. One major difference between America and Europe — and most of the founding forefathers of America came from Europe, after all — is that new resources existed in the U.S. to squander and plunder. The natural geographic chasm between East and West was widened with the invention and use of a single tool: the mill. One could now select from wheat meals, oat meals, rye, barley, and Indian corn meals.

In the beginning, grain was ground between stones. Man’s own energy was expended to change grain to meal. Porridge, cakes, or bread were made from the meal. The instant the whole grain is ground into meal, its natural energy or its life force — whether one calls this nutrients, vitamins, or enzymes — is reduced. Once the grain is pulverized, it will not sprout, it cannot reproduce itself. Mills driven by human energy were replaced by water mills. Then the Crusaders introduced the windmills from Arab lands. Eventually, stones were replaced by steel rollers; water became steam, and then electricity.

Power increased and meals became more and more refined. That which is termed civilization — separation from the land — advanced. More and more energy was used to remove more and more life force from the grains by milling, crushing, and sifting initially through woolen cloths, which were replaced by those of linen, and finally, seines of silk. People ate refined meals and they became refined. The grain is a fruit with the seed or germ in it. More and more of this was removed, starting with the germ and the seed. If the grains of wheat that fell between rollers were planted in the earth, one grain would sprout many, many grains. The end product of the processing of grain, however, the meal, was dead. It would rot if put into the soil. The vital energy had been extracted, lost, killed, spent.

Thus, all man’s energy was harnessed to crushing the natural energy of grain. Bleaching, gassing, and all the other refinements were perfected one by one. At first, blood was used to clarify the juice of the sugar cane. Eventually, that method was replaced and charred animal bones were used to bleach the sugar.

The germ and bran of the wheat caught in the bolting cloth were called offal — a word which means waste or byproduct of a process. The waste of the sugar cane, bagasse, was fed to cows and other animals. As people became more and more refined from eating refined wheat and refined sugar, consumption of the animals that had eaten the rejected part of grain and cane also increased. The mill had taken over man’s chewing; now the animals were used in the same way. Whole grains must be chewed and chewed or they cannot be digested. Whole wheat bread has to be well chewed, also. However, refined bread can be bolted. As usual, humans choose the easiest way, the quickest way.

Since World War II, the food industry in the U.S. has gone a long way toward ensuring that their customers (just about all of America’s children, as well as a good proportion of the adults) do not have to chew breakfast. The bleached, gassed, and colored remnants of the life-giving grains are roasted, toasted, frosted with sugar, embalmed with chemical preservatives, and stuffed into a box much larger than its contents. Fantastic amounts of energy are wasted by sales and advertising departments to sell these half-empty boxes of dead food — money-back coupons, whistles, and toy guns are needed to induce refined women to lift these half-empty boxes off supermarket shelves.

One of the reasons East was East and West was West and the twain were considered unbridgeable was that the mill did not exist in the East for centuries after its invention and incorporation into the West’s way of life. Man and soil were considered one, whole, healthy, and holy — all derived from the same root. Whole grain meant holy, healthy grain. The Japanese ideogram for peace was a mouth with a whole grain of rice in it. Waste was considered an offense against nature and the order of the universe. The Chinese child whose bowl contained leftover rice was told that any future spouse would have one pockmark for every grain wasted. In the East, grain was harvested in the fields. Stalks of rice were beaten in wooden pans to remove the outer hull. Then the rice and chaff were bounced from a cloth into the air. The wind carried off the chaff and it fell back to the soil. The grain of rice — whole and complete, the fruit with the seed — was harvested and kept and eaten whole. The rest of the plant — everything that was not eaten or used — was returned to the soil. Grains of rice were eaten whole, chewed in the mouth, instead of between stones in a mill. Little or nothing was left for the animals. Even now, few domestic animals are maintained in the East. Human wastes, like residues of all kinds, were not wastes at all. The excess man did not use in his own body was returned to the soil from whence it had come.

During the flowering of the industrial age in Europe and America, millers in every land competed with one another in perfecting more complicated devices for torturing wheat berries into fine white flour. As the refinement of sugar reached the ultimate state where it was bare of anything save calories, extensive court litigation ensued patented milling and refining devices. Shortly after the perfection of machines for the ultimate refinement of sugar and flour, a German invention, the Engelberg machine, was patented. It went well beyond the hand threshing of rice that had been previously accomplished in the fields. Each grain was stripped of its intermediate and inner shells. As with wheat grain and sugar cane, precious nutrients and minerals were removed; little was left but the pure white hydrate of carbon core. Suddenly, the lowly coolie food from the East had been made fit for the delicate palates and refined appetites of the West. Polished rice was introduced to the West as rice. The entire word was appropriated to describe what actually were the leavings. In French, white rice is riz. Unpolished, complete rice is riz complit. Following that rationale, someone could sell you an apple core when you asked for an apple. When you complained, they might say: Why didn’t you say you wanted a complete apple?

The Engelberg polishing machines were introduced to the rice-eating countries in the Orient. Rice may have been an exotic delicacy in the West; in the East, it had been the principal food for centuries.

The process of moving from whole grains through the various stages of ground meals had taken several centuries in the West, thus biological deterioration of the people was gradual. However, such deterioration was visited upon the Orient very rapidly. Polished white rice was new, modern, refined, and civilized. It was accepted wherever modernization was vogue. In its wake, it brought sudden outbreaks of new symptoms. Eventually, these new symptoms were labeled beriberi, after the Senegalese word for weakness.

When outbreaks of beriberi followed the introduction of white rice into Japan, the common people frequently realized what the solution was. Traditional habits, fortunately still fresh in their memory, told them to go back to eating old-fashioned, complete rice. When they did, all was well. Eating whole rice, they became whole and healthy again. To this day, if you visit a Japanese restaurant in America or Europe and ask for unrefined, brown nee, the waitress is apt to ask you with some concern if you are not feeling well.

As with the British admiralty coping with scurvy a century before, the Western-educated medical officers of the Japanese navy were unable to understand such a simple tack. After the introduction of refined white sugar and white polished rice on Japanese battleships, beriberi began plaguing sailors the way scurvy had the British. Instead of going back to eating unpolished rice like the peasants, the Japanese navy went the whole way and adopted western rations like those of the British and German navies. Meat and condensed milk, among other things, were added to the diet of the Japanese sailors.

It was only imperialist colonizers, supersalesmen for European technology, and the great scientific geniuses of the West who thought of beriberi as a mysterious plague to be conquered by modern science. At first, it was classified as a tropical disease. It was studied as a parasitic infection. Among the suggested therapies for beriberi were quinine, arsenic, bloodletting, cold douches, steambaths, sunbaths, strychnine, and massage. In Java in the 1890s, the Dutch army, Dutch missionaries, and colonial administrators were afflicted with a veritable epidemic of beriberi. They slept under mosquito netting and sprayed each other with carbolic acid and were careful not to let the dirty natives touch them on the way to church, but nothing seemed to protect them from beriberi.

The top German-trained physicians and scientists were ordered to Java to conduct scientific experiments to find a cure. Many of the scientists died or went home on stretchers. One who returned for a second round of duty was young Dr. Christian Eijkman. E. V. McCollum, A History of Nutrition, p. 217.

He worked alone in a jungle laboratory, near Batavia, which was attached to a small hospital for beriberi victims, inoculating chickens with the blood of beriberi patients. The chickens seemed to be immune. Then one day he noticed a chicken staggering around with all the apparent symptoms of the disease. Eureka, he was onto something. Soon, however, all the chickens — those he had inoculated and those he had not — seemed to have the same symptoms. His hopes were dashed. Then, as mysteriously as they had fallen ill, the chickens recovered, without any help from Western medicine.

Eijkman turned detective. A single clue existed. Ordinarily, the chickens were fed with brown, unpolished rice — the cheap kind the Javanese natives ate. A shortage of the unpolished rice had arisen, so the chickens had been fed white, refined rice — the kind the refined European patients in the hospital were fed, together with pure refined white sugar, pure white bread, butter, jam, and all the sweet goodies the missionaries and colonials imported. As soon as this shocking waste of good white rice was discovered, the chickens had been put back on the unrefined rice. Eijkman began experimenting with the chicken feed. Soon he discovered the secret that the Javanese natives refused to share with their sugar-eating army of occupation. If you eat white rice and sugar, you get beriberi. Eat brown, whole, unpolished rice and recover.

This was no news among the simple people of the Orient. One of the natural laws they still observed was that everything is perfectly balanced in nature. Natural law decrees that man should eat whole food, the entire fish, the root of the leek, the top of the carrot, vegetables that grow wild in the sea as well as those man cultivates on land. The emperors of Japan tried to teach this by example — always eating whole rice.

The good doctor then surveyed the modern, hygienic Dutch prisons where natives were interned for transgressions against the army of occupation. The prisoners were being fed white rice just like the patients in the colonial hospital. Out of 3,900, beriberi was contracted by 270. Outside prison, among the natives living in grass shacks (under conditions considered appallingly unhygienic by the antiseptic-minded Dutch colonials), the principal food was unpolished rice, which the natives thrashed themselves. Eijkman was unable to find a single case of certified beriberi among a population of 10,000.

Timidly, Eijkman made his first report in 1893, On a Polyneuritis Similar to Beriberi Observed in Chickens. Nobody paid any attention. Eventually, he was shipped back to Europe. A colleague who replaced him, Dr. C. Grinjs, published findings in 1901 based on experiments suggesting that beriberi in birds, as well as men, is caused by the lack of some vital substance in polished nee that is present in rice bran. Ibid., p. 216.

In 1907, two Norwegian workers, Holst and Froelich, induced beriberi in chickens and pigeons. The guinea pig chosen as the experimental mammal was fed polished rice; the animal came down with something which was diagnosed as scurvy. Ibid., p. 254.

Suddenly, this was big news in scientific quarters in the West. The lesson would seem to have been very simple: Western man could learn a thing or two from the simple folk of the Orient. They had been eating whole, unpolished rice for centuries as their principal food. That, however, was far too simple for the Western scientific community, which just then was in the throes of an explosion of interest in the new science of chemistry which seemed to be getting to the root of all the secrets of life.

In 1911, at the Lister Institute in London, a Polish chemist, Dr. Casimir Funk, took Eijkman’s experiment with the chickens and the rice and set about to complicate it. He spent four months grinding and polishing 836 pounds of unpolished rice. From it, he extracted 170 grams of rice bran, which was made into a solution. An infinitesimal amount was fed to a pigeon paralyzed with beriberi — it recovered within a few hours. In 1912, Funk published his daring, radical theory that a vital substance in natural unpolished rice is removed in refining. H. Bailey, The Vitamin Pioneers, p. 34.

When there is a failure of human understanding, said Goethe, men make up new words. So Casimir Funk, victim of the mania for nomenclature — preferably from the Latin or Greek — undertook to christen this mysterious natural life force which he discovered in unpolished, whole brown rice. He took the Latin word for life, vita, and combined it with the word amine — amino acids are components of protoplasm — and came up with the word vitamine. The anti-beriberi vitamine. Had he stuck to the Anglo-Saxon fashion of naming his discovery after himself — as doctors name symptoms — he might have christened this mysterious life force the funky funkies and spared this crazy world a lot of confusion.

The next step occurred at the University of Wisconsin in 1912. German chemists had discovered the balanced diet: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, salts, and water. This was the scientific age Mary Shelley had portrayed when she created the character of Dr. Frankenstein. The original Dr. Frankenstein was the real flesh and blood-brother of Baron Liebig, the superman of the new science of chemistry. Liebig announced that he was on the brink of brewing an artificial milk in his laboratory which would be an improvement over anything that ever dripped from mothers or cows. Source and quality of food were not important in that period, the focus was on chemical formulae.

Stephen Babcock, who studied with Liebig in Germany, later became a pioneer scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He analyzed the food given to a test group of cows, and then analyzed the manure they deposited. To his amazement, he found that more minerals came out than had gone in. He presented both chemical formulae to the laboratory head, asking — with a straight face — which would be best as food for the cows. Chemically, virtually no difference existed between the food and the manure. Food and manure were chemically the same. It couldn’t matter to anyone but the cows. And cows had nothing to say about it, being captives of the new science. (A hundred years later, another scientist has come up with a process for recycling manure into food for cattle.) McCollum, pp. 274-276.

At the University of Wisconsin in 1912, Professor E. V. McCollum conducted nutritional experiments on rats. Various combinations of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats were fed to the rodents. On some combinations, the rats thrived. On other combinations, the rats withered. However, both the sustaining and the insufficient diets had exactly similar chemical compositions. Obviously, chemistry was not the whole answer. The captive rats were on diets of milk, sugar, and other lethal combinations eaten by civilized Westerners. Had the rats been given the freedom of their natural instincts to select their food, McCollum might have learned a valuable lesson. However, through trial and error, he concluded that all proteins do not have the same nutritive value; that all carbohydrates are not the same; and that some fats are different from others. Once again, only a scientific community spellbound by German chemistry could have found this news at all. McCollum isolated a nutrient present in certain fats, as well as alfalfa leaves, and in the livers and kidneys of animals. He took it out of butter put it in margarine. When fed to rats which up to then were on diets containing sugar and milk, the rodents thrived. Eureka, this was absolute proof of the existence of some new substance which McCollum called fat-soluble A. Here entered the scientific genius for labels. The letter A was added to the word vitamine coined by Casimir Funk — vitamin A. Another billion-dollar business was born. E. V. McCollum and M. Davis, J. Biol. Chem., 1913, vol. 15.

In 1906, Frederick Hopkins of Cambridge University had called for more research on vitamins: … This much is certain: every food contains trifling amounts of substances from which the body benefits … If that statement is accepted as accurate, it then follows that sugar is not a food.

In 1920, Hopkins joined with Dr. W. H. Wilson of St. Mary’s Hospital in London in making this statement: The proof that deficiency diseases, when occurring amongst men on a ration scale deficient in necessary vitamins, can be prevented by the addition of articles containing these vitamins must be regarded as definitely established. The history of epidemics of scurvy and beriberi during the war affords conclusive evidence. Bailey, pp. 119-120.

Now if these discoveries meant anything, they meant that there was something present in the whole, unpolished rice — whether you call it vitamins or funky funkies — which is vital to health and life — whether it be that of Javanese chickens or Western man. It meant that stripping rice and sugar — through the refining process — removed the nutrients. It thus follows that eating these substances is not good for you. (In 1973, a U.S. Senate committee used the word antinutrient to describe sugar.) Thus such substances are actually harmful since they upset the existing balance in the body, bloodstream, and vital organs. Did the leaders of science share this great discovery with the man in the street? Did the AMA launch an educational crusade to tell the people of America, of the world, that a diet of white rice and sugar could give you beriberi or neuritis or whatever you want to call it? Were we told that a diet containing whole rice and omitting sugar would cure one — or keep one healthy?

Pellagra and beriberi were both named for symptoms of the individual disease. Pellagra progressed into general disability, then death — after death a general tissue degeneration was observed. For years, pellagra was thought to be an infectious tropical germ related to sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly. After yellow fever had been conquered by military experiments with vaccine, vaccine cures were expected for every disease that occurred in the tropical zone. Arsenic and other poisons were tried, but pellagra baffled the great medical minds of Europe for two centuries.

All the time, the peasants of Italy and Spain — where the disease had become epidemic — kept saying, Feed a pellagrin well, and he’ll do well. That was too simple for the medical brains searching for vaccines, tsetse flies, and Nobel prizes. The poor peasants seemed to survive. It was apt to be the rich folks — with money enough to call a doctor — who were dying.

By 1914, pellagra had reached epidemic proportions in the American South. The Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service were under tremendous pressure from Congress and the public to find a quick cure for this Italian plague. Leading American Medical scientists, with unlimited research funds, had experimented fruitlessly for five years.

Doctors in the South were sure it was contagious. Whole villages in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi were suddenly swept by the strange flame-red skin rash. Finally, the Public Health Service found someone willing to go where other doctors feared to tread (reports had it that the plague was contagious). Joe Goldberger, a Hungarian-born Jew from New York’s Lower East Side, was an excellent bacteriologist and an expert on tropical diseases. Remember, this was an age of microbe hunting.

Goldberger, rather than studying cultures and biopsies of dead people in a laboratory, went to the hospitals and asylums to examine pellagra victims who were still living. How many of your doctors and nurses catch pellagra? He asked the head of a Georgia insane asylum. Well, none of us ever do. Only the patients die of it, replied the doctor. Thus the scientific theory that pellagra was contagious was laid to rest.

Told that pellagra afflicts the poor rather than the rich, Goldberger theorized that it might have something to do with the fact that poor folks don’t always get the right stuff to eat.

Couldn’t be, the asylum doctors reported. Here doctors and patients eat the same food. Goldberger insisted on checking. So he visited the dining halls and saw the meals: cornmeal mush, hominy grits, cane sugar syrup. Refined corn and sugar! Attendants and nurses were helping themselves to all of this, of course, as well as good cuts of meat and glasses of milk.

Goldberger found the same thing when he visited orphanages. Cornbread, hominy grits, biscuits, and molasses comprised the diet of youngsters between six and twelve years of age. Refined grains and sugar again. What meat and milk there was went to infants and teenagers. The disease was concentrated in that middle group, the six to twelve-year-olds whose diet was heavy in refined foods, those antinutrients.

Within a few months, Goldberger was convinced. He obtained U.S. government funds for a nutritional experiment at two parochial orphanages in the same town. Within a few weeks, no new cases of pellagra appeared, and there was marked improvement among the children who had been sick.

Before publishing results of his experiments, Goldberger had to reverse his field: he had to induce pellagra in healthy people by restricting their diet. Only one place existed where that could be done, without a public hue and cry should events backfire. Not even a Georgia chain gang would do. A prison with walls was necessary. The governor of Mississippi went along with Goldberger’s scheme when assured the experiment could not be fatal.

Goldberger isolated eleven adult male volunteers on a Mississippi prison farm for six months. The convicts were fed all they could eat of best white bread, corn pone, hominy grits, sweet potatoes, salt pork, cane syrup, cabbage, and coffee. The experiment began in April 1915. The men — among them lifers and murderers — were promised freedom at the end of the experiment. Breakfast was biscuits, cornmeal mush, polished rice, cane syrup, coffee, and sugar; at noon, cornbread, collard greens, sweet potatoes, cane syrup, and hominy grits. Supper was grits, biscuits, mush, gravy, cane syrup, sugar, and coffee. For variety, supper was sometimes served at noon. It was a diet of refined grains, refined flour, cane syrup, and sugar. A little meat was added occasionally. What started out as a lark for the convicts swiftly turned into unpleasantness. Within a few weeks, all were complaining of backaches, stomachaches, and dizziness — early symptoms of pellagra. But because the red skin lesions had not appeared, the ultimate symptom for which the disease had been named, the experiment dragged on. After five months, the men were weak and haggard, but there were no red marks. Time was running out, the warden, the prisoners, and the medical detective were all worried.

The telltale rash was supposed to appear first on the knuckles and on the back of the neck. One morning at roll call, Goldberger’s assistant warden undertook an all-over inspection of one subject. There, underneath the scrotum, was the telltale red butterfly rash. He examined others. Seven showed the telltale rash in the same place. Goldberger sent out a rush call for a pellagra expert from Memphis and a skin specialist from St. Louis. They came. They examined. They reported conclusively that six of the convicts undoubtedly had pellagra.

Goldberger published his findings, as medical protocol decrees, in a scientific journal. The plague of the dreaded pellagra — which had Congress, the Surgeon General, and the scientific community in an uproar for years — was simply what the Italian peasants had said. Diet causes it and diet cures it. A diet of refined cereals and sugar causes it. Feed a pellagra well and he’ll do well. P. de Kruif, Hunger Fighters, pp. 40-44.

Was Goldberger awarded a Nobel prize that year or any year? Did he receive a Congressional Medal of Honor, or a medal from the AMA? A few of the best minds in medicine accepted his findings. The vocal majority landed on Goldberger like a ton of bricks. They challenged his findings, they vilified him. They relied on epidemiological evidence that pellagra was a plague like typhoid fever, that it was infectious, it had to be caused by a germ. The diehards wouldn’t give in. Blind, selfish, jealous, prejudiced asses, Goldberger called them. He sought to convince the skeptics by injecting himself with blood from pellagra victims, he swallowed intestinal discharge from pellagra victims, he gulped down powdered, scaled-off skin from people ill from the dread sickness. He didn’t die, but he didn’t make the medical hall of fame either.

Walter Reed became a national hero, and the subject of a play and a movie. All this after Reed’s experiments in Cuba with yellow fever resulted in a vaccine, which temporarily made the Cuban sugar plantations safe for U.S. exploitation. Maybe that explains why the hospital where America’s presidents are treated is named after Walter Reed and not Joe Goldberger.

Science and medicine marched on. The next step was protracted and complicated enough to make Casimir Funk’s discovery look primitive. Rather than teaching giddy, sugar-eating Westerners to quit polishing the life out of rice, the scientists slaved away in their laboratories trying to prepare magic vitamin crystals out of massive quantities of life-giving rice polishings. How were the polishings obtained? By stripping whole rice. These crystals were worked on by chemists around the world in an effort to break them down to a chemical formula.

Dr. Robert R. Williams and his colleagues spent twenty-six years isolating five grams of pure crystals from a whole ton of rice polishings. With these crystals, the molecular structure of this mysterious life-giving element was at last determined. It took two more years to rebuild the molecule synthetically, step-by-step, in their laboratory. When that stupendous task was finally accomplished in 1936, another world war was around the comer. The announcement of the substance, which was called thiamine or vitamin B1, was big news in The New York Times of August 23, 1936:

Twenty-six years ago, Dr. Robert R. Williams, who has since become chemical director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, began to devote his spare time to the study and investigation of vitamin B1.

… Three years ago he announced, in association with collaborators, the development of the first successful large-scale method of extracting the substance from its natural plant sources in pure crystalline state, which at once made it available in its most potent form for use by the medical profession in the treatment and relief of neuritis. There remained only one further step — to imitate nature by creating the vitamin artificially in the laboratory.

… Shuffling and re-shuffling in endless combinations as many as fifty different chemical compounds, the scientists have succeeded in duplicating nature’s secret combination.

Williams and Cline give credit to many collaborators in the important chemical achievement which not only will make the vitamin available to the medical profession in unlimited quantities but also will materially reduce its market price and bring it within the means of the lower-income groups. At present, the market price of the natural product is $400 a gram.

The publication of this article was an accolade. Further recognition and validation appeared several weeks later in an article in The New York Times by William L. Laurence: September 15, 1936 — The etiologic (causal) relationship of defective nutrition to polyneuritic beriberi (a nervous disorder due to a deficiency in vitamin B1) has been appreciated for many years, Dr. Maurice Strauss stated today. Only recently, however, has it become known that many other disorders of the nervous system may be the result of nutritional deficiency.

It has been demonstrated that the polyneuritis associated with chronic alcoholism, pregnancy, and certain gastrointestinal abnormalities are identical clinically and pathologically to polyneuritic beriberi.

Read that August story in The New York Times carefully. Does it mention that whole brown rice has vitamins in it and white rice doesn’t?

Of course not. Brown, unpolished rice was retailing for about ten cents a pound at the time. Did the newspaper article tell you to rush to your nearest grocery and buy some? Hell, no. Drop in at the Bell Telephone Lab and buy some vitamin B1 for $400 a gram. After vitamins had been turned into another billion-dollar religion, Dr. Casimir Funk tried valiantly, like Pasteur, to undo what he had begun.

Vitamins are not any magical possessions, he said. They exist in milk because the mother or the cow assemble them from the food she had eaten …

What would be the use of preparing all our foods artificially as long as nature is producing her own foods in sufficient abundance … It would be folly even to think of turning ourselves into domestic manufacturers and consumers of self-made food as long as nature gives us enough …

By then it was too late. The vitamin game was big business; there was no stopping it. The mills of the great gods of grain were soon grinding the life out of whole grain rice. We were? sold the white rice which — added to the antinutrient sugar in our diet — began establishing imbalances in our bodies. Then commerce busily, proudly created vitamin B1 pills from the rice polishings. These were then sold to us; after all, we were now in sore need of them.

At the beginning of World War II, the British crown colony of Singapore was threatened with a food crisis — the kind that faces many lands today. Malaya and Singapore did not grow all the rice they needed; imports were about to be sharply reduced. The British medical officer of Singapore, Dr. Scharff, made the same kind of hard decision that had saved Denmark in World War I during the German blockade. Polished white rice was forbidden by military decree. Only unpolished brown rice could be sold. British military authorities were influenced by one factor only: Inadequate supplies. They were worried about quantity: Quality was of no concern. They simply didn’t want any food riots on their hands. A hundred tons of brown rice represented a hundred tons of food. Processing and polishing would reduce that hundred tons of brown rice to 70 tons of white polished rice. L. J. Picton, Nutrition and the Soil, pp. 243-244.

The aftermath was startling, incredible. Dr. Scharff had originally gone to Singapore with the mission of reducing infant mortality from malaria. When he arrived, the mortality rate was 420 per 1,000 births. He used herculean but orthodox medical methods. In less than a decade, the program had reduced the death rate of infants to 160 per 1,000, almost on a par with the existing rate in Britain. However, after a year on the brown rice diet enforced by military decree, there was a dramatic shift in vital statistics. Instead of 160 infants dying in their first year of life, only 80 died. The figure was cut in half without medical efforts.

It seems to me that here is a phenomenon which should make every statesman think, the eminent British physician Dr. L. J. Picton, O.B.E., wrote some years later. At a stroke of the pen, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

Was Dr. Scharff awarded a Nobel prize? Did the World Health Organization spread the news? Perhaps prenatal clinics, pediatricians, and white hospital ships of hope spread the story to the rest of the world? Surely the answer is obvious. What fees can the medical profession earn by selling brown rice? A vogue for natural grains could raise havoc with the vitamin pushers, the sugar pushers, the pharmaceutical companies, and their partners in the diseasestablishment. The Singapore story seemed buried for keeps in secret files or perhaps at the Ministry of Health.

… We are left to wonder, mused Dr. Picton, in what proportion caprice and unthinking custom are mixed with the wisdom that governs us. Ibid., p. 248.

The combination of white sugar and white rice — especially among people whose principal food is rice — is lethal. The removal of the B vitamins, among others, from the rice, causes imbalance, for as the body seeks what it lacks, more B vitamins are leeched from the system in order to digest the white rice. Refined white sugar leeches the same vitamins for the same reason. The combination of refined flour and refined sugar spells double trouble: beriberi is that final stage of weakness, that exhaustion which is the body saying Enough, no more. The health problems that physicians now call subclinical scurvy and subclinical beriberi cover all the escalating stages of malnutrition and weakness in between. Subclinical beriberi is an officious hermetic way of describing beriberi that is not sufficiently severe or classical in its symptoms to alert the average physician into diagnosing the symptoms.

The U.S. adventure in Vietnam was, by world consensus, a folly on many levels. Perhaps, on the basic level of human nutrition, it was one of the sorriest stories of all. Vietnam was one of the world’s biggest rice bowls. For decades, Vietnam exported rice to many parts of the world. Whole rice was the principal food of the Vietnamese. For years, the guerilla bands of the Viet Minh and Viet Cong sustained themselves with a food supply system as simple and primitive as that of the Roman legions of Julius Caesar. Each man carried a little sack of whole rice and some salt. They added manioc leaves, from the jungle, and fish when possible. For years, they stymied the elaborately equipped and lavishly rationed armies of the West.

When Western military forces finally withdrew, the world was told in copious detail about the Vietnamization of the war. One heard far less about the Americanization of the South Vietnamese Army’s food supply.

Since the late 1960s, perhaps longer, the allied armies of South Vietnam — one of the major rice-producing areas on this planet — were supplied with white, instant rice from America. The cost to the American taxpayers was almost a million dollars a month.

A Pentagon official explained:

At the same time, of course, the U.S. had been supplying the South Vietnamese sugar by the ton, soda by the ocean. Now that South Vietnam was permanently hooked to a Westernized diet of sugar and polished rice — each stripped of their life-sustaining B-complex vitamins — it is no surprise that the South Vietnamese have developed many entirely new diseases. U.S. medical officials in Vietnam professed to be stumped by the outbreak of new fevers which afflicted children principally. Radio and TV broadcast warnings; leaflets were dropped from the air; the hospitals were overrun. U.S. doctors were ordered to search for a vaccine. Intravenous adrenal fluids and blood plasma were airlifted in and everything blamed on the mosquitos. Ailment Striking Young in Vietnam, The New York Times, July 22, 1973.

When the victorious Viet Cong armies overran Saigon, they were exposed for the first time — like the Crusaders arriving in the Holy Land centuries before — to the pause that refreshes, the Coke machine, the candy counter. It is their turn to accustom themselves to gluttony, and La Dolce Vita and to eat and drink sugar openly in the street without shame.

Isn’t this where we came in?