Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 9: Dead Dogs and Englishmen

Millions of tons of sugar could hardly have been floated across oceans for centuries without some bizarre misadventures. One such occurred when a vessel carrying a cargo of sugar was shipwrecked in 1793. The five surviving sailors were finally rescued after being marooned for nine days. They were in a wasted condition due to starvation. They had subsisted by eating nothing but sugar and drinking rum. (As many people can testify, including me, it is perfectly possible to survive comfortably for nine days or longer without food or water. With a little water but no food, it is possible to survive much longer than that.) The eminent French physiologist F. Magendie was inspired by that incident to conduct a series of experiments with animals which he published in 1816. He fed dogs a diet of sugar or olive oil and water. All the dogs wasted and died. E. V. McCollum, A History of Nutrition, p. 87.

The shipwrecked sailors and the French physiologist’s experimental dogs proved the same point once and for all. As a steady diet, sugar is worse than nothing. Plain water can keep you alive for quite some time. Sugar and water can kill you. Human subjects were unable to subsist on a diet of sugar. Ibid., p. 88.

There is on record, the saga of a young girl, seriously injured in a plane accident, who kept alive for well over a month on nothing but melted snow. Two men afloat in an overturned sailboat in the Pacific survived for seventy-two days in the summer of 1973 with nothing but a cup of rainwater every five days, a cup of saltwater, a tablespoon of peanut butter a day, and a few sardines. Los Angeles Times (UPI), September 27, 1973.

In late 1970, a nine-year-old boy ran away from home and kept alive for ten days in the Wyoming wilderness without food in temperatures that dropped occasionally to 40 degrees. At the end, he was in remarkably good condition. East-West Journal, vol. 1, no. 12, p. 1.

Refined sugar is lethal when ingested by humans because it provides only that which nutritionists describe as empty or naked calories. In addition, sugar is worse than nothing because it drains and leeches the body of precious vitamins and minerals through the demand its digestion, detoxification, and elimination make upon one’s entire system.

So essential is balance to our bodies, that we have many ways to provide against the sudden shock of a heavy intake of sugar. Minerals such as sodium (from salt), potassium and magnesium (from vegetables), and calcium (from the bones) are mobilized and used in chemical transmutation; neutral acids are produced which attempt to return the acid-alkaline balance factor of the blood to a more normal state.

Sugar taken every day produces a continuously over-acid condition, and more and more minerals are required from deep in the body in the attempt to rectify the imbalance. Finally, in order to protect the blood, so much calcium is taken from the bones and teeth that decay and general weakening begin.

Excess sugar eventually affects every organ in the body Initially, it is stored in the liver in the form of glucose (glycogen). Because the liver’s capacity is limited, a daily intake of refined sugar (above the required amount of natural sugar) soon makes the liver expand like a balloon, when the liver is filled to its maximum capacity, the excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids. These are taken to every part of the body and stored in the most inactive areas: the belly, the buttocks, the breasts, and the thighs.

When these comparatively harmless places are completely filled, fatty acids are then distributed among active organs, such as the heart and kidneys. These begin to slow down; finally their tissues degenerate and turn to fat. The whole body is affected by their reduced ability and abnormal blood pressure is created. Refined sugar lacks natural minerals (which are, however, in the sugar beet or cane). Our parasympathetic nervous system is affected; and organs governed by it, such as the small brain, become inactive or paralyzed. (Normal brain function is rarely thought of as being as biologic as digestion.) The circulatory and lymphatic systems are invaded, and the quality of the red corpuscles starts to change. An overabundance of white cells occurs, and the creation of tissue becomes slower.

Our body’s tolerance and immunizing power becomes more limited, so we cannot respond properly to extreme attacks, whether they be cold, heat, mosquitos, or microbes. Excessive sugar has a strong mal-effect on the functioning of the brain; the key to orderly brain function is glutamic acid, a vital compound found in many vegetables. The B vitamins play a major role in dividing glutamic acid into antagonistic-complementary compounds which produce a proceed or control response in the brain. B vitamins are also manufactured by symbiotic bacteria that live in our intestines. When refined sugar is taken daily, these bacteria wither and die, and our stock of B vitamins gets very low. Too much sugar makes one sleepy; our ability to calculate and remember is lost.

Shipwrecked sailors who ate nothing but sugar and rum for nine days surely went through some of this trauma; the tales they had to tell created a big public relations problem for the sugar pushers. The dead dogs in Professor Magendie’s laboratory alerted the sugar industry to the hazards of free scientific inquiry.

From that day to this, the sugar industry has invested millions of dollars in behind-the-scenes, subsidized science. The best scientific names that money could buy have been hired in the hope that they could one day come up with something at least pseudoscientific in the way of glad tidings about sugar.

It has been proved, however, that (1) sugar is a major factor in dental decay; (2) sugar in a person’s diet does cause overweight; (3) removal of sugar from diets has cured symptoms of crippling, worldwide diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart illnesses. However, the story of the public relation attempts on the part of the sugar manufacturers began in Britain in 1808, when the Committee of West India reported to the House of Commons that a prize of twenty-five guineas had been offered to anyone who could come up with the most satisfactory experiments to prove that unrefined sugar was good for feeding and fattening oxen, cows, hogs, and sheep. McCollum, p. 86.

Food for animals is often seasonal, always expensive. Sugar by then was dirt cheap. People weren’t eating it fast enough.

Pigs thrive on garbage because they know their way around. Sheep are no dopes either. When artificial fertilizer was first introduced into Britain, one skeptical farmer divided his largest meadow into two parts. He had heard all the new scientific propaganda from Germany about the wonders of store-bought chemical fertilizer, but he had some respect for the intelligence and instinct of his four-legged friends. That fall, he used the new manufactured stuff on one half of his meadow; on the other side, he used plain old manure. The following spring, he removed the dividing lines and turned his sheep loose. Within a few days, they were all grazing on the side of the meadow that had been treated in the old-fashioned way. That was scientific evidence enough for him. He never used manufactured fertilizer again.

Sir Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, noticed in 1929 in Panama that among sugar plantation owners who ate large amounts of their refined stuff, diabetes was common. Among native cane cutters, who only got to chew the raw cane, he saw no diabetes. Naturally, the attempt to feed livestock with sugar and molasses in England in 1808 was a disaster. When the Committee on West India made its fourth report to the House of Commons, one Member of Parliament, John Curwin, reported that he had tried to feed sugar and molasses to calves without success. He suggested that perhaps someone should try again by sneaking sugar and molasses into skimmed milk. Had anything come of that, you can be sure the West Indian sugar merchants would have spread the news around the world. After this singular lack of success in pushing sugar in cow pastures, the West Indian sugar merchants gave up.

With undaunted zeal for increasing the market demand for the most important agricultural product of the West Indies, the Committee of West India was reduced to a tactic that has served the sugar pushers for almost two hundred years: Irrelevant and transparently silly testimonials from faraway, inaccessible people with some kind of scientific credentials. One early commentator called them hired consciences. The House of Commons committee was so hard-up for local cheerleaders on the sugar question, they were reduced to quoting a doctor from faraway Philadelphia, a leader of the recent American Colonial rebellion: The great Dr. Rush of Philadelphia is reported to have said that sugar contains more nutrients in the same bulk than any other known substance. At the same time, the same Dr. Rush was preaching that masturbation was the cause of insanity.

If a weasel-worded statement like that was quoted, one can be sure no animal doctor could be found in Britain who would recommend sugar for the care and feeding of cows, pigs, or sheep.

While preparing his epochal volume A History of Nutrition, published in 1957, Professor E. V. McCollum of Johns Hopkins University (sometimes called America’s foremost nutritionist, certainly a pioneer in the field) reviewed approximately 200,000 published scientific papers, recording experiments with food, their properties, their utilization, and their effects on animals and men. The material covered the period from the mid-eighteenth century to 1940. From this great repository of scientific inquiry, McCollum selected those experiments which he regarded as significant to relate the story of progress in discovering human error in this segment of science [of nutrition]. Professor McCollum fails to record a single controlled scientific experiment with sugar between 1816 — when Professor Magendie was inspired by the shipwrecked sailors of 1793 to feed sugar and water to the dogs who subsequently died in his laboratory — and 1940. Although he does not mention early medical alerts on sugar from such medical writers as Rauwolf, Willis, and Hurt, the good professor had time and space to record this kind of pro-sugar flimflam that hasn’t changed from that day to this: That eminent physician Sir John Pringle remarked that the plague had never been known in any country where sugar composes a material part of the diet of the inhabitants. (Emphasis added.) Just which plague, or sickness, neither writer classified.

Thomas Thompson writing in 1838 said: Sugar has now become an essential part of the food of the Europeans. It contains perhaps a greater proportion of nourishment than any other vegetable substance in the same bulk … If we believe Dr. Rush, the plentiful use of it is one of the best preventatives of the disease occasioned by worms. It has long been supposed to have a tendency to injure the teeth; but this prejudice is now given up. (Emphasis added.)

While the italics are mine, the tongue in cheek has got to be Professor McCollum’s. Is he telling us whatever is, is OK? Is he telling us that two hundred years of science has missed the boat? If sugar can kill dogs, as Professor Magendie seems to have proven, it certainly ought to be able to kill worms. There has been no outbreak of leprosy in Ashtabula, Ohio, since the establishment of a Coca-Cola plant there in 1922. How about turning that into a scientific fact and hiring some doctor to cite it in the Ladies’ Home Journal?

Unhappily, we must remind ourselves that scientists and always accomplish little without a sponsor. Official scientific facts — as distinguished from plain garden variety facts like the one the British farmer came by in his own meadow with his own sheep — are expensive to come by. The protocols of modern science have compounded the costs of scientific inquiry. We have no right to be surprised when we read the introduction to McCollum’s A History of Nutrition and find that The author and publishers are indebted to The Nutrition Foundation, Inc., for a grant provided to meet a portion of the cost of publication of this book.

What, you might ask, is The Nutrition Foundation, Inc.? The author and the publishers don’t tell you. It happens to be a front organization for the leading sugar pushing conglomerates in the food business, including the American Sugar Refining Company, Coca-Cola, PepsiCola, Curtis Candy Co., General Foods, General Mills, Nestles Co., Inc., Pet Milk Co., and Sunshine Biscuits; about forty-five such companies in all.

Perhaps the most significant thing about McCollum’s 1957 history was what he left out: A monumental earlier work described by an eminent Harvard professor as one of those epochal pieces of research which makes every other investigator desirous of kicking himself because he never thought of doing the same thing.

In the 1930s, a research dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, Dr. Weston A. Price, traveled all over the world — from the lands of the Eskimos to the South Sea Islands, from Africa to New Zealand. His Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects, which is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, was first published in 1939.

The work of Dr. Price took the whole world as his laboratory. His devastating conclusion, recorded in horrifying detail in area after area, was simple: People who live under so-called backward primitive conditions had excellent teeth and wonderful general health. They ate natural, unrefined food from their own locale. As soon as refined, sugared foods were imported as a result of contact with civilization, physical degeneration began in a way that was definitely observable within a single generation.

Any credibility the sugar pushers have is based on our ignorance of works like that of Dr. Price. Sugar manufacturers keep trying, hoping, and contributing generous research grants to colleges and universities; but the research laboratories never come up with anything solid the manufacturers can use. Invariably, the research results are bad news.

Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating and be wise, Harvard professor Earnest Hooten said in Apes, Men, and Morons. Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and toothpaste are any more important than shoebrushes and shoe polish. It is store food that has given us store teeth.

When the researchers bite the hands that feed them, and the news gets out, it’s embarrassing all around. In 1958, Time magazine reported that a Harvard biochemist and his assistants had worked with myriads of mice for more than ten years, bankrolled by the Sugar Research Foundation, Inc., to the tune of $57,000, to find out how sugar causes dental cavities and how to prevent this. It took them ten years to discover that there was no way to prevent sugar causing dental decay. When the researchers reported their findings in Dental Association Journal, their source of money dried up. The Sugar Research Foundation withdrew its support.

The more scientists disappointed them, the more the sugar pushers had to rely on the ad men.

It is a rule of thumb, wrote Paul Hawken, the more you see a product advertised, the more of a ripoff it is. Hawken, author of The Magic of Findhorn, spent several years building a natural food business which used no advertising and no sugar.

A product like Coca-Cola, which contains known poisons and destroys teeth and stomach, has one of the most stunning ad campaigns in the history of the Western world.

It is really fantastic: This unreal amount of money creating an illusion — the illusion that Coke is the real thing, Now Coke executives have learned from extensive research that America is searching for what is real, meaningful in this plastic world, and one bright ad executive comes up with the idea that it is Coke. Yep, Coke is the real thing and this is drilled into the minds of 97 percent of all young people between the age of six and nineteen until their teeth are rotting just like their parents’ did.

There is nothing truthful about advertising. Imagine a young pimply-faced kid in front of a camera telling folks how clear his complexion was before he started drinking Coke; and even though he knows it’s bumming his social life, he just can’t seem to get off the stuff. That would be truth in advertising. Or how about a young girl holding up a can of orange drink made in New Jersey saying the reason it’s orange is because of the food coloring. The reason it is bad is because we use coal-tar artificial flavors, and the reason we would like you to try it is because we want to make money. Truth in advertising would be the end of three major networks, 500 magazines, several thousand newspapers, and tens of thousands of businesses. So there will never be truth in advertising.

After scanning fifty years of sugar advertising, it’s hard to disagree with Hawken.

When calories became the big thing in the 1920s, and everybody was learning to count them, the sugar pushers turned up with a new pitch. They boasted there were 2,500 calories in a pound of sugar. A little over a quarter-pound of sugar would produce 20 percent of the total daily quota.

If you could buy all your food energy as cheaply as you buy calories in sugar, they told us, your board bill for the year would be very low. If sugar were seven cents a pound, it would cost less than $35 for a whole year.

A very inexpensive way to kill yourself.

Of course, we don’t live on any such unbalanced diet, they admitted later. But that figure serves to point out how inexpensive sugar is as an energy-building food. What was once a luxury only a privileged few could enjoy is now a food for the poorest of people.

Later the sugar pushers advertised that sugar was chemically pure, topping Ivory soap in that department, being 99.9 percent pure against Ivory’s vaunted 99.44. No food of our everyday diet is purer, we were assured.

What was meant by purity, besides the unarguable fact that all vitamins, minerals, salts, fibers, and proteins had been removed in the refining process? Well, the sugar pushers came up with a new slant on purity.

You don’t have to sort it like beans, wash it like rice. Every grain is like every other. No waste attends its use. No useless bones like in meat, no grounds like coffee.

Pure is a favorite adjective of the sugar pushers because it means one thing to the chemists and another thing to the ordinary mortals. When honey is labeled pure, this means that it is in its natural state (stolen directly from the bees who made it), no adulteration with sucrose to stretch it, and no harmful chemical residues that men may have sprayed on the flowers. It does not mean that the honey is free from minerals like iodine, iron, calcium, phosphorus, or multiple vitamins. So effective is the purification process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries, that sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a chemist has on his laboratory shelves. What nutritional virtue this abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us.

Beginning with World War I, the sugar pushers coated their propaganda with a preparedness pitch. Dietitians have known the high food value of sugar for a long time, said an industry tract of the 1920s. But it took World War I to bring this home. The energy-building power of sugar reaches the muscles in minutes and it is of value to soldiers as a ration given them just before an attack was launched. The sugar pushers have been harping on the energy-building power of sucrose for years because it contains nothing else. Caloric energy and habit-forming taste, that’s what sucrose has and nothing else. All other foods contain energy plus. All foods contain some nutrients in the way of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, or minerals — or all of these. Sucrose contains caloric energy — period.

The quick energy claim the sugar pushers talk about, which drives reluctant doughboys over the top and drives children up the wall, is based on the fact that refined sucrose is not digested in the mouth or the stomach but passes directly to the lower intestines and thence to the bloodstream. The extra speed with which sucrose enters the bloodstream does more harm than good.

Anyway, in World War I, while sucrose was rationed for the folks back home, it flowed freely and unrationed to the fighting doughboys. They not only had it in their candy and chewing gum before attacks, it was available for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Perhaps the army was consciously using sucrose as a stimulant for the troops about to go over the top (hashish was used in the same way by the Assassins against the Crusaders). Refined sucrose might have worked as a stimulant through World Wars I and II; but by the time of Korea and Vietnam, the troops were so glutted with sugar that many turned on to hashish … pot … grass, and even stronger addictive drugs.

Much of the public confusion about refined sugar is compounded by language. Sugars are classified by chemists as carbohydrates. This manufactured word means a substance containing carbon with oxygen and hydrogen.

If chemists want to use these hermetic terms in their laboratories when they talk to one another, fine. The use of the word carbohydrate outside the laboratory — especially daily in food labeling and advertising lingo — to describe both natural, complete cereal grains (which have been a principal food of mankind for thousands of years) and man-refined sugar (which is a manufactured drug and principal poison of mankind for only a few hundred years) is demonstrably wicked. This kind of confusion makes possible the flimflam practiced by sugar pushers to confound anxious mothers into thinking kiddies need sugar to survive.

In 1973, the Sugar Information Foundation placed full-page advertisements in national magazines. Actually, the ads were disguised retractions they were forced to make in a strategic retreat after a lengthy tussle with the Federal Trade Commission over an earlier ad campaign claiming that a little shot of sugar before meals would curb your appetite. You need carbohydrates. And it so happens that sugar is the best-tasting carbohydrate. You might as well say everybody needs liquids every day. It so happens that many people find champagne is the best tasting liquid. How long would the Women’s Christian Temperance Union let the liquor lobby get away with that one?

The use of the word carbohydrate to describe sugar is deliberately misleading. Because the improved labeling of nutritional properties was required on packages and cans, refined carbohydrates like sugar are lumped together with those carbohydrates which may or may not be refined. The several types of carbohydrates are added together for an overall carbohydrate total. Thus, the effect of the label is to hide the sugar content from the unwary buyer. Chemists add to the confusion by using the word sugar to describe an entire group of substances that are similar but not identical.

Glucose is a sugar found usually with other sugars, in fruits and vegetables. It is a key material in the metabolism of all plants and animals. Many of our principal foods are converted into glucose in our bodies. Glucose is always present in our bloodstream, and it is often called blood sugar.

Dextrose, derived synthetically from starch, also called corn sugar.

Fructose is fruit sugar.

Maltose is malt sugar.

Lactose is milk sugar.

Sucrose is refined sugar made from the sugar cane and the sugar beet.

Glucose has always been an essential element in the human bloodstream. Sucrose addiction is something new in the history of the human animal. To use the word sugar to describe two substances that are far from being identical, which have different chemical structures, and which affect the body in profoundly different ways compounds confusion. It makes possible more flimflam from the sugar pushers who tell us how important sugar is as an essential component of the human body, how it is oxidized to produce energy, how it is metabolized to produce warmth, and so on. They’re talking about glucose, of course, which is manufactured in our bodies.

However, one is led to believe that the manufacturers are talking about the sucrose that is made in their refineries. When the word sugar can mean the glucose in your blood as well as the sucrose in your Coca-Cola, it’s great for the sugar pushers but it’s rough on everybody else.

People have been bamboozled into thinking of their bodies the way they think of their checking accounts. If they suspect they have low blood sugar, they are programmed to snack on vending machine candies and sodas in order to raise their blood sugar level. Get it up. Actually this is the worst thing to do. The level of glucose in their blood is apt to be low because they are addicted to sucrose. People who kick sucrose addiction and stay off sucrose find that the glucose level of their blood returns to normal and stays there.

Since the late 1960s, millions of Americans have returned to natural food. A new type of store, the natural food store, has encouraged many to become dropouts at the supermarket. Natural food can be instrumental in restoring health. Many people, therefore, have come to equate the word natural with healthy. So the sugar pushers have begun to pervert the word natural in order to mislead the public.

Made from natural ingredients, the television sugar pushers tell us about product after product. The word from is not accented on television. It should be. Even refined sugar is made from natural ingredients. There is nothing new about that. The natural ingredients are cane and beets. But that four letter word from hardly suggests that 90 percent of the cane and beet have been removed. Heroin too could be advertised as being made from natural ingredients. The opium poppy is as natural as the sugar beet. It’s what man does with it that tells the story.

The back of the box of Quaker 100% Natural Cereal reads, Leaving well enough alone is the secret to the delicious taste. Every ingredient is natural. Nothing has been processed in. No artificial flavoring. No preservatives. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

The box lists the proteins and the carbohydrates, the fats and vitamins. But nowhere does it tell you that it’s about 20 percent sugar. That’s hidden under the umbrella word carbohydrate. Nothing has been processed in. Everything has been processed out of the sugar but the calories.

Unfortunately, the examples are endless. If you want to avoid sugar in the supermarket, there is only one sure way. Don’t buy anything unless it says on the label prominently, in plain English: No sugar added. Use of the word carbohydrate as a scientific word for sugar has become a standard defense strategy with sugar pushers and many of their medical apologists. It’s their security blanket.

On April 12, 1973, three prominent doctors, two of them representing the American Medical Association’s Council on Food and Nutrition, were testifying before a Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.

Senator Schweiker of Pennsylvania tried valiantly to get the doctors to make the distinction between sugar and carbohydrate. Here’s what happened (italics added):

Senator Schweiker: … one of the points apparently at issue here medically [in the AMA report] … saying it is inaccurate to state that sugar has high antinutrient properties. I wonder is this an accurate expression and who might comment on this for me?

Dr. Van Italie: When we talk about antinutrient properties, we usually refer to a substance in the diet or a drug that is antagonistic to a nutrient, interfering in some way with its use or its metabolism. Carbohydrate is metabolized or burned with the help of certain enzymes which contain thiamin and other B vitamins. Thus, there is an increased need for these vitamins when more carbohydrate in the diet is consumed. This is why people on very high carbohydrate diets in the Far East who also have a low vitamin B₁ intake develop beriberi. The fact that the requirement for vitamin B₁ and certain other B vitamins will increase somewhat when take more carbohydrate does not justify the statement at carbohydrates — or sugar — is an antinutrient.

Senator Schweiker: I am not talking carbohydrate; I’m talking sugar. Let’s keep it on the sugar track.

Dr. Van Italie: There is no difference between sugar or carbohydrate with respect to vitamin B₁.

[This is inaccurate, unless refined carbohydrates are specified.]

Senator Schweiker: Well, we have had a number of dentists just come before us recently and tell us how bad sugar, not carbohydrate, was on dental cavities.

Dr. Van Italie: That is correct, but that’s not what I am talking about. Sugar is lacking in vitamins. That’s agreed and it’s probably bad for teeth … I was addressing myself to one specific statement … which affirms sugar to be an antinutrient. This is scientifically not a correct statement. Sugar and all other carbohydrates increase the need for vitamin B₁. That’s the only statement I made.

[Once again, the statement is inaccurate. Natural carbohydrates supply their own B vitamins; refined carbohydrates don’t.]

Dr. Van Italie: An antinutrient is a substance that interferes with the utilization or metabolism of a nutrient. Something that actually antagonizes its metabolic use. It might be, let’s say, an excess of certain toxic metal that might interfere with metabolism. Certain drugs interfere with the nutrients and are called antinutrients. The antifertility pill may have antinutrient properties.

Senator Schweiker: And you are saying that something that increases the need for nutrients in terms of quantity is not an antinutrient?

Dr. Van Italie: That is correct.

Senator Schweiker: Are you sure we are not getting into a semantic argument here?

Dr. Van Italie: It’s misleading to say that there is something bad about carbohydrate because it increases the need for a vitamin …

[It is even more misleading to talk about natural carbohydrates such as grains interchangeably with refined carbohydrates such as sugar.]

Dr. Van Italie: After all, exercise increases the need for certain vitamins. That doesn’t mean that exercise is antinutrient.

Senator Schweiker: If we market a cereal and say we presweetened the cereal and added sugar, we are working against ourselves. A customer buys a pack of cereal, nutrients added, presweetened. Here we have both in the same ingredients. That increases the nutrients and who are we kidding? If we hadn’t had the sugar we might not need the nutrients.

Dr. Van Italie: I am not defending sugar, Senator Schweiker. I am not in favor of an excessive intake of sugar.

[Is anybody ever in favor of excess?]

Dr. Van Italie: I was merely objecting to the term of antinutrient in the context it was used. I agree with you that when you add sugar to a product you may make people eat it because it is sweeter but it certainly adds no nutritional property other than energy.

Senator Schweiker: Right. That is all the questions I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Dr. Butterworth: Sugar is a carbohydrate.

Senator Schweiker: It is one of the carbohydrates but to say that the whole range of carbohydrates and sugar are the same thing is not true. Dental cavities are caused by sugar, not by carbohydrates. That’s exactly the differentiation I am trying to make.

Dr. Butterworth: That is correct but I didn’t want to leave the hearing with the impression that sugar is an antinutrient. Now, sugar may cause dental caries and, certainly, there is excellent evidence for that.

Senator Schweiker: There is no doubt about that.

Dr. Butterworth: No doubt. But it is not an antinutrient. Sugar is a nutrient and sugar is a carbohydrate.

Senator Schweiker: But it does substantially increase the need for nutrients.

Dr. Van Italie: No more than other forms of carbohydrates …

[He keeps repeating and repeating that inaccuracy. How many medical practitioners realize that some carbohydrates come with vitamins, whereas other carbohydrates are available only as empty calories, stripped of their vitamins?]

Dr. Van Italie: I think it is important to point out that any carbohydrate you take, no matter what it is, if it’s going to be absorbed by the intestine, has to be reduced to sugar before it can be absorbed.

[The difference between glucose made in the body from natural carbohydrates and refined white sugar can be the difference between life and death.]

Dr. Van Italie: When you take starch, any form of starch, it’s digested in he intestinal tract and ends up as glucose or one of the other simple sugars. Thus sugar or sucrose is really a pre-digested type of carbohydrate.

[More confusion. Sucrose is a refined carbohydrate; refinement removes 90 percent of its bulk and all its vitamins and minerals. This is precisely where the major damage to the body from refined sugar arises. To absorb this predigested carbohydrate, the body has to deplete its store of vitamins and minerals; imbalance is created. Since the stress is continual if the diet is sugar-heavy, the eventual results are chronic ill health.]

Senator Schweiker: Now, the FTC made the sugar associates quit advertising that sugar was an energy builder and nutrient. Now, say carbohydrate is an energy builder but to say sugar is an energy builder nutrient, the FTC made them cease and desist, so we are getting in a very close area here of what impression the public has.

Dr. Adamson: I would like to examine the credentials of those who made this recommendation. It is certainly hard for me, not being a nutritionist to accept that anybody who is qualified to make a judgment and testify to your committee could make a statement that sugar is not an energy deliverer — energy giver.

Dr. Van Italie: I think the reason that the FTC cracked down on that sugar ad was that the sugar people were suggesting there was something unique about sugar as an energy source. If this was the case, I believe the Federal Trade Commission was justified in their criticism of this kind of advertising approach.

Senator Schweiker: But it was getting to the semantics of what the layman understands. It is very well for us to define the dimensions of what we mean but if the effect is the opposite on the public that is what the FTC was complaining about. They implied it was a nutrient. Now, when you say it’s inaccurate to call it an antinutrient, we are getting awfully close to the same thing. That’s two negatives making a positive.

Dr. Van Italie: Any food that contains readily available calories is a good source of energy. I think that’s what the FTC was saying.

[Really?]

Senator Schweiker: When you say it’s inaccurate to call it an antinutrient, you are really saying it is a nutrient, by any kind of deductive reasoning.

Dr. Van Italie: Sugar is a nutrient.

Senator Schweiker: And that is just what the FTC said you can’t say because they don’t believe it.

Dr. Van Italie: I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with that. I think the FTC was objecting to possibly misleading information that the advertisers were using in the promotion of sugar.

Senator Schweiker: Well, I’ll be glad to show you the ad. I have a copy of it.

At that point the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee, Senator McGovern, said they were running out of time. The argument and the hearing were adjourned. Of course Senator Schweiker was right all along the line, as far as he went.

Some months later, a five-member arbitration panel of the National Advertising Review Board found that the claim that sugar was a nutrient was without foundation. The sugar pushers promised to stop making the claim until they could back it up. However, millions more people were misled before the ad was suspended. It cost nothing for the sugar manufacturers to promise not to use a similar advertising campaign.

While one arm of government was slapping the wrist of the sugar manufacturers, another arm of the government was rushing to the rescue. A brand new, multicolored comic book which comes free on request (at taxpayer’s expense) has been prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Health, Education and Welfare in cooperation with the Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Advertising Council. It does exactly what the FTC bagged the sugar pushers for doing; the comic implies that sugar is a nutrient. Sugar is listed under the major nutrients, and public confusion is compounded by the failure to make the basic and crucial distinction between natural carbohydrates such as those in whole grains, vegetables, and fruit and refined carbohydrates such as those in sugar and white flour. Even the elementary warning about what sugar does to your teeth is niissing; its cautions on sugar are confined to quantitative warnings for overweight teenagers.

As the U.S. populace has learned in the 1970s, the years of Watergate, government from the White House down does not even pretend to be embarrassed when caught lying. This is progress, as Russell Baker of The New York Times says, no matter what the moralists tell you. Government lies are most dangerous when they are believed to be the truth.

Their credibility is based on our ignorance.

Almost twenty years ago, Dr. William Coda Martin tried to answer the question: When is a food a food and when a poison? His working definition of poison was:

Medically: Any substance applied to the body, ingested, or developed within the body, which causes or may cause disease.

Physically: Any substance which inhibits the activity of a catalyst which is a minor substance, chemical, or enzyme that activates a reaction.

The dictionary gives an even broader definition for poison: To exert a harmful influence on, or to pervert.

Dr. Martin classified refined sugar as a poison because it has been depleted of its life forces, vitamins, and minerals.

What is left consists of pure, refined carbohydrates. The body cannot utilize this refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins, and minerals are present Nature supplies these elements in each plant in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrate in that particular plant. There is no excess for other added carbohydrates. Incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results in the formation of toxic metabolite such as Pyruvic acid and abnormal sugars containing 5 carbon atoms. Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system and the abnormal sugars in the red blood cells. These toxic metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells. They cannot get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally. In time some of the cells die. This interferes with the function of a part of the body and is the beginning of degenerative disease. With over 50 percent of our diet today composed of these refined carbohydrates [refined sugar, white flour, polished rice, macaroni, and most breakfast cereals], does it require a million dollars for research to find out why this generation is developing more and more degenerative diseases?

Things have changed very little in three hundred years.

When Dr. Thomas Willis’ warning on sugar was published in 1685, it took almost forty years for the sugar industry to find a doctor to defend them. Finally, Vindication of Sugar Against the Charge of Dr. Willis was published in London. It was not written in Latin, as it might have been had it been addressed to the fellows of the Royal Society of which Willis was a founder. It was written in English and dedicated to the ladies. Its author conceded that sugar was the subject of continuing controversy inside the medical profession; for he boasts of having outlived many bitter enemies of that most delicious and nourishing balsamic preparation, fine sugar.

This was a jab at Willis, who died young — perhaps he had found out about the dangers of sugar the hard way. It’s hard to read this so-called vindication without suspecting that the author might have been offered a few shares in the British West Indian Company. It was no vindication at all. It was an all-out blurb:

I have frequently recommended the Ladies well-chosen morning repast, called Break-Fast, as consisting of good materials, namely bread, butter, milk, water, and sugar. Chocolate and tea are also endowed with uncommon virtues when warily and discreetly used; nor do I decry and condemn coffee tho’ it proved very prejudicial to my own health. Coffee to some people is of good use when taken in just proportions, and for some particular disease, especially when they join it with a quantity of fine sugar …

One caveat or caution, to those that are inclining to be too fat, namely that sugar being so very high a nourisher may dispose them to be fatter than they desire to be, who are afraid of their fine shapes, but then it makes amends by applying a very wholesome and goodly countenance and sweetens peevish and cross humors where they unhappily prevail …

More particularly in praise of sugar. It is sugar we call upon to correct the harshness of remaining sourness in our most sweet and delicate fruits, even in their ripe state, even the sweetest strawberries and raspberries are mended by strowing sugar on them, and currants are scarce tolerable without it. Sugar may be proved to be a lower sort of Vice Regent to the Glorious Planet, the Sun, by anticipating the ripening virtue of this most illustrious Star. F. J. Slare, Vindication of Sugar Against the Charge of Dr. Willis.

The author was Dr. Frederick Slare, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society. He sounds for all the world like Dr. Frederick Stare of the Harvard School of Nutrition, writing assurances about sugar today for the sugar-pushing magazines with large circulation.

In a recent interview with W, the bi-weekly version of Women’s Wear Daily, Dr. Stare managed to bring things full circle, back to where the sugar pushers began years ago. He now finds the world energy crisis the imperative for doubling our intake of sugar:

We have to cultivate foods that require as little land as possible to produce a maximum amount of energy. For instance, it takes 0.15 acres of land to produce a million calories of sugar; it takes 17 acres of land to produce a million calories of meat. Calories are energy, and I would recommend that most people could healthily double their sugar intake daily.

Sugar is the cheapest source of food energy, and I predict it will become much more prevalent in the diets of the world.

People say that all you get out of sugar is calories, no nutrients. Like many foods, I expect it to be fortified more and more in the future. There is no perfect food, not even mother’s milk. F. J. Stare, W, January 11, 1974.

Stare’s statement is one of those effective lies that contains truth, but does not express it. Again, its credibility is based on the reader’s ignorance. The choice between sugar and meat is desperate and false. The raising of cane for sugar and beef for steak are both appallingly wasteful.

Sugar may offer the cheapest calories in the supermarket, until you count the total hidden cost. One estimate of the current cost of doing the backlog of repair and replacement of America’s teeth runs to $54 billion.

The U.S. has already doubled its intake of sugar a few times since 1909, with the consequences in physical degeneration all around us.

People say sugar is only calories, no nutrients, (emphasis added) says Dr. Stare. Whether this is true or false, he doesn’t say. But by saying people instead of medical authorities like himself, it becomes an authoritative put down, hinting (without promising anything) that we will all find out better one day.

Meanwhile, Stare expects sugar to soon be fortified. The FDA will have to reverse itself again. Enrichment of devitalized sugar with a few synthetic vitamins will be the ultimate perversion.

If Dracula drains your blood with his teeth and gives you a vitamin B₁₂ shot before he flies out the window, would you say you’d been had or enriched?

Sugar is not perfect, Stare admits. But, he continues, what food is, not even mother’s milk.

Whose mother’s milk is he talking about?

Sugar is a constant. Its lack of perfection as a food is total.

On any scale of nutrients, it would rate less than zero.

Mother’s milk is as infinitely variable as life itself; it depends muchly — like the future of the human race — on the judgment each mother displays in her selection of food.

In an address on Food Faddism published by the Sugar Research Foundation on May 16, 1951, Dr. Stare is quoted as saying:

I should certainly say before closing that the food industries, the Sugar Foundation, the Nutrition Foundation, and a number of food companies as individual companies have certainly done a lot in helping to support basic nutrition, and a lot in helping to support our department [of nutrition at Harvard] for which we are certainly appreciative.

Between 1950 and 1956, according to Open Letter II of the Boston Nutrition Society, January 22, 1957, these same groups contributed almost a quarter of a million dollars to Dr. Stare’s Harvard Department of Nutrition.

Medical authorities on sugar, such as Dr. G. D. Campbell, physician to the Diabetic Clinic of King Edward VII Hospital, Durban, South Africa, have suggested urgent restriction — under the aegis of the World Health Organization — of highly slanted and at times virtually untrue statements issued by sugar authorities and their medical agents to promote the sale of sugar. Campbell suggested a code of ethics banning the intrusion of interested or sugar-subsidized scientists in nutrition societies to debar them from using societies and academic titles in the interests of their employers or sponsors. Disinterested scientists should be particularly guarded in acceptance of any form of financial assistance from the sugar authorities, especially those given with no strings attached; more than one nutritionist has already had cause to regret such a course. Highly interesting versions of interim results have appeared from time to time in sugar publications, without the knowledge or sanction of the actual workers sponsored. G. D. Campbell, Nutrition and Diseases.