Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 11: What the Specialists Say

Whether it’s sugared cereal or pastry and black coffee for breakfast, whether it’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola for lunch, or the full gourmet dinner in the evening, chemically, the average American diet is a formula that guarantees bubble, bubble, stomach trouble.

Unless you’ve taken too much insulin and, in a state of insulin shock, need sugar as an antidote, hardly anyone ever has cause to take sugar alone. Humans need sugar as much as they need the nicotine in tobacco.

Craving it is one thing — needing it is another. From the days of the Persian empire to our own, sugar has usually been used to hop up the flavor of other food and drink, as an ingredient in the kitchen or as a condiment at the table. Let us leave aside for the moment the known effect of sugar (long-term and short-term) on the entire system and concentrate on the effect of sugar taken in combination with other daily foods.

When Grandma warned that sugared cookies before meals will spoil your supper, she knew what she was talking about. Her explanation might not have satisfied a chemist but, as with many traditional axioms, from the Mosaic law on kosher food and separation in the kitchen, such rules are based on years of trial and error and are apt to be right on the button. Most modern research in combining food is a labored discovery of the things Grandma took for granted.

Any diet or regime undertaken for the single purpose of losing weight is dangerous, by definition. Obesity is talked about and treated as a disease in twentieth-century America. Obesity is not a disease. It is only a symptom, a sign, a warning that your body is out of order. Dieting to lose weight is as silly and dangerous as taking aspirin to relieve a headache before you know the reason for the headache. Getting rid of a symptom is like turning off an alarm. It leaves the basic cause untouched.

Any diet or regime undertaken with any objective short of restoration of total health of your body is dangerous. Many overweight people are undernourished.

(Dr. H. Curtis Wood stresses this point in his 1971 book, Overfed But Undernourished.) Eating less can aggravate this condition unless one is concerned with the quality of the food instead of just its quantity.

Many people — doctors included — assume that if weight is lost, fat is lost. This is not necessarily so. Any diet which lumps all carbohydrates together is dangerous. Any diet which does not consider the quality of carbohydrates and makes the crucial life-and-death distinction between natural, unrefined carbohydrates like whole grains and vegetables and man-refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour is dangerous. Any diet which includes refined sugar and white flour, no matter what scientific name is applied to them, is dangerous.

Kicking sugar and white flour and substituting whole grains, vegetables, and natural fruits, in season, is the core of any sensible natural regime. Changing the quality of your carbohydrates can change the quality of your health and life. If you eat natural food of good quality, quantity tends to take care of itself. Nobody is going to eat a half dozen sugar beets or a whole case of sugar cane. Even if they do, it will be less dangerous than a few ounces of sugar.

Sugar of all kinds — natural sugars, such as those in honey and fruit (fructose) as well as the refined white stuff (sucrose) — tends to arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect on the stomach’s natural ability to move. Sugars are not digested in the mouth, like cereals, or in the stomach, like animal flesh.

When taken alone, they pass quickly through the stomach into the small intestine. When sugars are eaten with other foods — perhaps meat and bread in a sandwich, they are held up in the stomach for a while. The sugar in the bread and the Coke sit there with the hamburger and the bun waiting for them to be digested. While the stomach is working on the animal protein and the refined starch in the bread, the addition of the sugar practically guarantees rapid acid fermentation under the conditions of warmth and moisture existing in the stomach.

One lump of sugar in your coffee after a sandwich is enough to turn your stomach into a ferment. One soda with a hamburger is enough to turn your stomach into a still. Sugar on cereals — whether you buy it already sugared in a box or add it yourself — almost guarantees acid fermentation. Since the beginning of time, natural laws were observed, in both senses of that word, when it came to eating foods in combination. Birds have been observed eating insects at one period in the day and seeds at another. Other animals tend to eat one food at a time. Flesh-eating animals take their protein raw and straight.

In the Orient, it is traditional to eat yang before yin.

Miso soup (yang — fermented soybean protein) for breakfast; raw fish (more yang protein) at the beginning of the meal; afterward comes the rice (which is less yang than the miso and fish); and then the vegetables which are yin. If you ever eat with a traditional Japanese family and you violate this order, the Orientals (if your friends) will correct you courteously but firmly. The law observed by Orthodox Jews prohibits many combinations at the same meal, especially flesh and dairy products. Special utensils for the dairy meal and different utensils for the flesh meal reinforce that tabu at the food’s source in the kitchen. Man learned very early in the game what improper combinations of food could do to the human system. When he got a stomachache from combining raw fruit with grain, or honey with porridge, he didn’t reach for an antacid tablet. He learned not to eat that way.

When gluttony and excess became widespread, religious codes and commandments were invoked against it. Gluttony is a capital sin in most religions, but there are no specific religious warnings or commandments against refined sugar because sugar abuse — such as drug abuse — did not appear on the world scene until centuries after holy books had gone to press.

Why must we accept as normal what we find in a race of sick and weakened human beings? Dr. Herbert M. Shelton asks. Must we always take it for granted that the present eating practices of civilized men are normal?

Foul stools, loose stools, impacted stools, pebbly stools, much foul gas, colitis, hemorrhoids, bleeding with stools, the need for toilet paper … are swept into the orbit of the normal. H. M. Shelton, Food Combining Made Easy, p. 32.

When starches and complex sugars (like those in honey and fruits) are digested, they are broken down into simple sugars called monosaccharides, which are usable substances — nutriments. When starches and sugars are taken together and undergo fermentation, they are broken down into carbon dioxide, acetic acid, alcohol, and water. With the exception of the water, all these are unusable substances — poisons. When proteins are digested they are broken down into amino acids, which are usable substances — nutriments. When proteins are taken with sugar, they putrefy, they are broken down into a variety of ptomaines and leucomaines, which are unusable substances — poisons. Enzymic digestion of foods prepares them for use by our bodies. Bacterial decomposition unfits them for use by our body. The first process gives us nutriments, the second gives us poisons.

Much that passes for modern nutrition is obsessed with a mania for quantitative counting. The body is treated like a checking account. Deposit calories (like dollars) and withdraw energy. Deposit proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals — balanced quantitatively — and the result theoretically is a healthy body. People qualify as healthy today if they can crawl out of bed, get to the office, and sign in. If they can’t make it, call the doctor to qualify for sick pay, hospitalization, rest cure — anything from a day’s pay without working to an artificial kidney, courtesy of the taxpayers.

But what doth it profit someone if the theoretically required calories and nutrients are consumed daily, yet this random eat-on-the-run, snack time collection of foods ferments and putrefies in the digestive tract? What good is it if the body is fed protein only to have it putrefy in the gastrointestinal canal? Carbohydrates that ferment in the digestive tract are converted into alcohol and acetic acid, not digestible monosaccharides.

To derive sustenance from foods eaten, they must be digested, Shelton warned years ago. They must not rot. Sure, the body can get rid of poisons through the urine and the pores; the amount of poisons in the urine is taken as an index to what’s going on in the intestine.

The body does establish a tolerance for these poisons, just as it adjusts gradually to an intake of heroin. But, says Shelton, the discomfort from accumulation of gas, the bad breath, and foul and unpleasant odors are as undesirable as are the poisons. Ibid., p. 34. I don’t know what you were doing during Digestive Disease Week in May 1973, but I celebrated by watching a seminar on David Susskind’s television talk show.

Three eminent New York gastroenterologists and a psychiatrist talked about ulcers for an hour and a half. I made myself a bet that these three distinguished specialists could go on for the entire ninety minutes without ever mentioning the word sugar. So I had to hang on to every word before I could collect.

True to form there were the learned quotations from the classics. (Iago gnawed within.) There were seductive psychiatric discussions of the ulcer personality (taxi drivers, airport control men, women after menopause).

There were historic footnotes: A nod for William Beaumont the father of gastroenterology who studied the man with the shotgun hole in his stomach; glancing blows at underlying predisposition and familial tendency (frustration eats at you); an exposition of symptoms in a constellation (hunger-like pains, relieved by eating, vomiting of blood, then see your doctor and get a barium enema and X-ray for sure).

There were incidental warnings. Aspirin can inflame ulcers and cause bleeding in 70 percent of ulcer cases.

How many commercials have you ever seen with live doctors relaying that warning? I hate aspirin, said one of the specialists, my mother-in-law lives on it but hidden aspirin is a cause of ulcers. What is aspirin hidden in? They didn’t tell us.

Certain hopeful developments on the horizon were pointed out. Neil Miller at the Rockefeller Institute has a medication that will control stomach acidity; the Japanese have perfected minute instruments that can spot ulcers. There were generous admissions of past medical errors — in the past, mutilating surgery was resorted to prematurely with the removal of all or part of the stomach.

Finally, the doctors got down to cases; acid in the stomach causes ulcers; no acid, no ulcers. Most of us, we were told, have acid stomach. What causes acid stomach? Well, acid. The stomach as a checking account again.

Do you refer ulcer patients to a psychiatrist, Susskind wanted to know. Not usually, they said. Antacids are better. They make him feel better quicker. However, drugs to accelerate healing do not exist. We all have to live with stress.

Acid causes pain, they told us. To relieve pain, one doctor suggested the standard bland diet. Palatable, but not too appetizing. Three meals and a snack on a regular schedule. Cut down acid by cutting out curries. Ever seen a TV commercial for curry? Caffeine is acid; black coffee is out, have it with cream. They were getting close to the point where I might lose my bet, but that passed. Nobody mentioned sugar or Coca-Cola, which has caffeine and sugar built in.

As a strict diet for those with severe pain, they suggested a thermos of milk, cream of wheat, custard, and Jello. These last two have their sugar built in. Nobody mentioned that. After staying on these diets for two to six weeks, the average ulcer patient should find some relief. What then?

Then, said a doctor (without argument from the others), Eat anything you want. No doctor can cure ulcers at the present time, we were told. Surgery is the ultimate answer, at a price. In place of the mutilating surgery practiced in the not-so-distant past, surgeons now have a new kind of operation that does not call for the removal of the stomach, it merely cuts off the nerves and blocks the registration of pain. Some 50 percent of ulcer patients may expect a recurrence in two years; 75 percent in four years.

Pain is the God-given warning signal from nature that something is wrong. So you have an operation that turns off your alarm signal. That’s cool, very cool … Imagine our reaction if we turned in a fire alarm and the fire engine roared to the scene and turned it off without bothering to do anything about the fire. By that standard, abortion is a contraceptive.

Well, twenty million Americans have ulcers, the good doctors told us. Here was a seminar of leading New York specialists telling us how little they know in the most convincing way possible. What is the answer? More money from the federal government for more research.

In ninety minutes, they were unable to come up with a single constructive suggestion for the average person to manage their diet in a way that might prevent ulcers.

They were able to talk for ninety minutes without a single mention of sugar.

A month later, three gastroenterologists told a Senate subcommittee that aspirin and patent medicines containing aspirin, like Alka-Seltzer, can aggravate the stomach disorders they are supposed to relieve.

Dr. J. Donald Ostrow, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, suggested that the Alka-Seltzer pushers should be ordered to put on television a guy vomiting blood and a gastroscope being put down the fellow’s throat Dr. Ostrow noted that during the past eighteen months, he had observed eighteen patients at the VA Hospital in Philadelphia in whom gastrointestinal hemorrhage was engendered by ingestion of aspirin preparations. In five of these patients, the preparation was Alka-Seltzer, repeatedly taken over a short period of time to treat symptoms of gastric distress which were in fact related to underlying disorders of the stomach. Richard D. Lyons, The New York Times, June 7, 1973.

Ostrow talked about the vicious circle which begins when people take Alka-Seltzer to relieve stomach distress: Temporarily it seems to work. As the antacid effects subside, the pain returns, more severe than before. This leads to another dose of Alka-Seltzer and so on, with more pain, more Alka-Seltzer, until the patient ends up bleeding and in the hospital. Using the figures supplied by the Alka-Seltzer makers, the doctor estimated that every four months in this country some 600,000 individuals use Alka-Seltzer to excess, ending up worse off than they were before.

Another doctor assured that Senate Subcommittee that aspirin does not induce massive bleeding in the stomachs of normal people. Of course not. However, healthy people don’t take the stuff. So where does that leave us? Interesting things often happen when physicians attempt to cure themselves. If you find a doctor who practices unorthodox medicine, chances are his eyes and mind were opened when he tried to cure himself by the book. When that didn’t work, he threw away the book and began experimenting with himself. Pain and suffering tend to erode one’s faith in conventional treatment. After a while, one is willing to try anything. Even something as sensible as watching what you eat. That has been the story among the great unorthodox healers such as Dr. Tilden, Dr. Hal Beiler, and many more in America and abroad.

In Sweet and Dangerous, Dr. John Yudkin, the eminent British physician, biochemist, and Emeritus Professor of Nutrition at London University, tells how he had been diagnosed as having ulcers twenty-five years ago. He was given the standard advice: Take it easy, don’t get exhausted, avoid spicy foods, eat small meals more frequently, and delay having surgery unless it becomes imperative. He took antacid preparations whenever he had distress. Then, he started putting on weight, like so many men of his age. So he put himself on a regime for weight reduction. He cut down on sugar, among other things; In a few months, he discovered his stomach symptoms had almost entirely disappeared.

Dr. Yudkin undertook stringent experiments for the next two years, getting together information on forty-one patients. The results were quite clear. Two claimed to be worse off on a low carbohydrate diet, eleven said they found no appreciable difference, but a decided majority of twenty-eight said they were much better off. Many vowed they would stay on the low carbohydrate regime for keeps. The patients included men and women with gastric or duodenal ulcers and some with hiatus hernia.

Now it can no longer be said that diet does not relieve severe dyspepsia, Dr. Yudkin says. The right diet will, only the wrong diet will not.

Why does the right diet work? Sugar irritates the lining of the upper alimentary canal, the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum … The diet Yudkin put his patients on contains little sugar. J. Yudkin, Sweet and Dangerous.

Dr. Yudkin was working with patients who could not be completely controlled since they were not hospitalized.

Physicians had to take the patients’ word for what they were eating and how closely they were following instructions. Under controlled conditions, in the army or prison, this kind of experiment with a sugar-free diet might be even more conclusive.

Dr. Yudkin reports another recent experiment that pointed the other way. He persuaded seven young men each to swallow a tube first thing in the morning so that samples could be obtained of their gastric juices at rest; then, at fifteen-minute intervals — after they had swallowed a bland test meal consisting mainly of pectin — further samples were taken. Samples were analyzed in the usual way, measuring the degree of acidity and digestive activity. Then the patients were put on a high-sugar diet for two weeks and tested again. Results showed that two weeks of a sugar-rich diet was enough to increase both stomach acidity and digestive activity of the gastric juices, of the kind one finds in people with gastric or duodenal ulcers. The rich diet of sugar increased stomach acidity by 20 percent or so and the enzyme activity was increased almost three times. (These effects were observed in the morning, before breakfast.) This is probably much too simple to interest the ulcer specialist. Most of the nutritional regimes being promoted today still concern themselves with quantitative things. They talk about calories. Eat your protein, watch your fats, and maybe cut down on carbohydrates. Occasionally one hears about a qualitative difference between vegetable and animal fats, polysaturated and polyunsaturated.

However, carbohydrates are still lumped together and protein is protein. The whole subject of mixing foods together in unholy indigestible combinations is left to Fannie Farmer and the people who dream up cookbooks and television dinners. We learn nothing from our hangovers and our heartburn, except to reach for that Alka-Seltzer.