Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 12: Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet?

The biggest sugar customer in this country is the food processing industry. That figures. Who is number two and trying harder? Would you believe, the tobacco industry? Exact figures are called trade secrets. The Surgeon General is permitted to tell you on every package and in every advertisement that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health. Cigarette manufacturers, however, are not required to give you any further information.

Manufacturers of candy kisses are required to tell you on the wrapper that sugar is their principal ingredient. Cans of oyster stew have to list their ingredients also. The manufacturer of an ice cream sandwich has to tell you every single item that goes into the wafer, but he’s not even allowed to say what’s in the ice cream. So it is with tobacco. About the tar and nicotine they tell you. About the filters they go on and on, but about anything else in the tobacco? Nothing. One American tobacco industry authority told Medical World News in March 1973, that an average of 5 percent sugar is added to cigarettes, up to 20 percent in cigars, and as much as 40 percent in pipe tobacco, mostly in the form of molasses and such.

The sugar-in-everything craze reached such a peak in this country that, during one four-year period in the 1960s, the amount of sugar used in processed food increased a whopping 50 percent. Has this type of increase also occurred in the tobacco industry’s use of refined sugar? According to a television documentary aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the fall of 1972, it has indeed and for quite some time. Since this particular TV show may not be picked up for rebroadcast in America, you may as well know that it amounted to an indictment of sugar in tobacco as a possible source of lung cancer, based on chemistry and experimental studies. Interesting statistics compared lung cancer figures in countries where sugar-cured cigarettes are smoked with lands where cigarettes are made with unadulterated tobacco — that is, not sugar-cured tobacco.

Tobacco, of course, is almost as new to Western civilization as man-refined sugar. Native American Indians have been blowing peace pipes for centuries, for all we know, but tobacco was unknown to the white man until Columbus caught the Cuban natives chewing and smoking it in 1492. Smoking was found to be bound up with the most solemn tribal religious ceremonies. Some say tobacco was the Mexican-Indian word for the herb; others claim it was the name of the Y-shaped, wooden tube apparatus the natives fitted into their nostrils.

The tobacco plant itself was first brought to Europe in 1558 by a physician dispatched by Philip II of Spain to investigate the flora and fauna of Mexico. The French Ambassador to Portugal brought tobacco seeds to his queen, Catherine de Medici. His name, Jean Nicot, eventually became the basis for the Latinized name of the plant Nicotinia. Like sugar, nicotinia was thought to possess healing medical powers. It became the miracle drug of its time and its boosters went all out, calling it herba panacea, herba santa, divine tobacco, healthy holy herb, holy all-purpose herb. During the seventeenth century, tobacco addiction spread like wildfire through all European nations, despite the opposition of statesmen and clergy who invoked ultimate penalties of excommunication and death. When the death penalty didn’t work, most governments settled for taxes.

Tobacco was eventually cultivated all over the world, but the prime producers and growers were in the U.S. In the beginning, tobacco was cured the way the Indians had done it from time immemorial: Wilted tobacco leaves were suspended on racks in the sun. Eventually barns and sheds were built to protect crops from the rain.

Air curing — tobacco is hung in a bam where the air circulates freely during dry weather — was similar to sun drying. In cold weather, artificial heat was used. Most cigar tobacco today is air cured. Air curing takes about three months and only traces of natural sugars are left in the tobacco after that time.

In flue curing (also known as the Virginia cure), fires are set outside the bam, and the heat is led via iron pipes or flues into the building in which the tobacco is hung fresh from the fields. Since the temperatures reach up to 170 degrees, this process speeds the cure. Time is money in the tobacco business — and all business — so this saves money. However, the intense heat inactivates natural enzymes which would otherwise cause the natural tobacco sugars to ferment. So flue-cured tobacco can contain as much as 20 percent sugar by weight.

To complicate things even further, sugar (sucrose) is added to air-cured tobacco during the blending process. How long has this been going on? Practically forever. At the turn of the century, the British claimed that pure water alone was used to dampen tobacco leaves in the United Kingdom, whereas in America certain sauces are employed which consist of mixtures of aromatic substances, sugar, liquorice, common salt and salt petre etc. dissolved in water. The use of sauces is to improve the flavor and burning qualities of the leaves.

Anyone who has ever smoked a French cigarette and put it down after a few puffs will have noticed how it extinguishes itself in the ash tray. Put down an American cigarette and it smokes itself. In France one can buy cigarettes in yellow, unbleached paper. The first time I offered an American cigarette to a Frenchman, he accepted with pleasure. He then sliced the cigarette laterally with a knife, removed the tobacco from the white paper, and re-rolled it in yellow paper. When he lit the white American paper with a match and burned it under my nose, I choked.

I must confess that the idea that tobacco had been treated with sugar all this time came as something of a surprise to me. In England, in the 1970s, the controversy over the sugar content of cigarettes is often front page news. When the British government announced in the fall of 1972 that it would publish a table of tar and nicotine levels in British cigarette brands — as had been done in the United States — the London Sunday Times went to bat on page one. They charged that this kind of list might be misleading and cited studies which showed that British cigarettes — made from flue-dried tobacco (which has a high sugar content) may increase the risk of serious lung disease, even though the tar and nicotine ratings are relatively low.

The late Dr. Richard D. Passey of London’s Chester Beatty Research Institute had spent twenty years investigating smoking and cancer. Intrigued by the lower incidence of cancer in cigar smokers as compared with cigarette smokers, he studied the difference between the two types of tobacco and the smoke they produced. He pointed out that most British cigarette tobacco is flue-cured whereas cigar tobacco is air-cured. In many countries, cigarettes are blends of the two types of tobacco, as in the U.S., or are entirely of air-cured tobacco as in most of Eastern Europe and Asia.

Smokes produced by burning the two types of tobacco are very different, according to Dr. Passey. High sugar content tobacco produces strongly acid smoke. Low sugar tobacco produces smoke that is weakly acid or alkaline.

This thesis is supported by America’s Dr. G. B. Gori, associate director of the National Cancer Institute and chairman of their Tobacco Working Group which spends $6 million yearly searching for a safer cigarette. One would tend to inhale more when the smoke is acidic, and that’s why I believe that flue-cured tobacco may be more dangerous, in the long run, than the hurley or air-dried type, says Dr. Gori.

Dr. Passey, the British tobacco expert, has compared European cigarette and cancer rates country by country.

England and Wales have the world’s highest rate of lung cancer for men. British cigarettes have the highest sugar content of any in the world, 17 percent.

Frenchmen smoke about two-thirds as many cigarettes per capita as Englishmen. Their lung cancer rate is one-third as high and their cigarettes are made of air-dried tobacco with only 2 percent sugar.

American men smoke more cigarettes per capita than Britons, but their lung cancer rate is only half what it is in Britain. American cigarettes are a blend of both kinds of tobacco — with an average sugar content of 10 percent.

In Russia, China, Formosa, and other countries where cigarettes are made of air-dried tobacco — close to the kind the American Indians used before the invention of sugar sauces — they are unable to find any correlation at all between smoking and lung cancer. Medical World News, January 14, 1972, March 16, 1973.

Although Mao’s government ceaselessly encourages people to keep themselves fit, China is one of the few countries in the world where there is no official anti-smoking campaign. Chinese cigarettes are said to have extremely low nicotine and tar content, as well as being low in sugar. The Chinese Smoke Rings Around Us, New York Post, January 2, 1974.

In India, where coronary disease is common enough among the well-to-do, though rare in the masses, R. P. Malhotra and N. S. Pathania showed, in a 1958 article in a British medical journal, that coronary disease was equally Common among the Sikihms who do not smoke as it was among the Hindus who do.

The British medical publication The Lancet took serious exception to Dr. Passey’s theory and his data. The National Cancer Institute’s Dr. Gori insists: I don’t think one should pinpoint sugar in particular. One thing all experts agree upon, the question is worth exploring.

The National Cancer Institute of America is not only studying the effect of different fertilizer used in tobacco growing, as well as many chemicals now used in finished cigarettes, they are also moving into the sugar question.

We are now planning to study this issue in detail, Gori wrote me in 1973, and determine inhalation patterns of smokers that use cigarettes prevalently made of air-cured (low sugar, high pH) or flue-cured (high sugar low pH). If relationships are uncovered, then it may be possible to connect the level of sugar in tobacco with the smoking dynamics of the smoker and therefore to higher or lower risks.

My friends from the Far East, such as Sakurazawa Ohsawa and Herman Aihara, find the official U.S. doctrine that smoking causes lung cancer very amusing. They are confident that, in another decade, the National Cancer Institute will be compelled to admit that the tremendous excess of sugar and artificial chemicals in our food, as well as the excess of chemicalized animal protein eaten, are involved in causing lung cancer.

They claim that the cause of cancer is excess yin — sugar and artificial chemicals.

Smoking is very yang and as such it is preferable to eating too much fruit, fruit juices, soda, and other carbonated, caffeinated, sugar concoctions.

It is more important to cut out drugs and sugar and cut down on fruit than it is to stop smoking completely.

Tobacco was used by the American Indians in its natural state as a cure for many diseases.

Commercial cigarettes contain unnatural chemicals and sugars, so avoid them and roll your own from naturally grown tobacco — if you can find it — and use wrapping paper not chemically treated.

People with weak lungs, kidneys, or liver are constitutionally weak and should not smoke very much.

Smoking is not a necessity, like eating. It is a pleasure.

The question with pleasure is always finding a healthy balance between the pleasure and its effects.

Many years ago, when weight-watching first became an American preoccupation, especially among women, a cigarette slogan advised: Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.

Perhaps that slogan was wiser than we know.

Despite all the injunctions from the Surgeon General and the diseasestablishment, smoking in the U.S. has decreased little. The lone individual today can do very little to improve the quality of the air he breathes but he does have some control over what he puts in his stomach, and what kind of tobacco smoke he admits to his body. Sugared cigarettes are unnecessary. If smokers start asking for non-sugared cigarettes, the market supply would match the demand.

In the 1970s, it became official U.S. policy to discourage cigarette smoking. Trains and buses have always had nonsmoking compartments. Now the same option exists on planes. In bars and restaurants, nonsmokers still take their chances. In department stores, offices theaters, hospitals, and some public buildings, however, no-smoking rules are posted and enforced. Fire regulations provide heavy sanctions in many places. Tobacco is heavily taxed everywhere. In some countries, Sweden, for instance, a sky-high cigarette tax is used not so much to raise revenue as to raise conscious social policy to discourage smokers.

Nonsmokers have some elements of law and custom behind them. If they smell smoke, they can holler, plead, take refuge, threaten, or move. Violators are easily detected as long as people preserve some vestige of the sense of smell. Hazards and unpleasantness may always lurk around the corner for the nonsmoker, but his plight is a cool, unpolluted breeze compared with the lot of the diabetic, the hypoglycemic, or a plain sensible soul trying to keep his body sugarfree.

The conscientious objector to sugar is alone, moving through the day like a drunk navigating minefields. The twilight zone is entered every time one opens one’s mouth. Stumbling out of bed in the morning, you reach for the toothpaste. How do you know it doesn’t contain sugar? The high-powered commercials tell you how great toothpaste tastes and what it does for your breath, as well as unintelligible details on the chemical cavity fighters that have been built in. But what tube actually tells you its contents? Even if you examine the fine print, you’re still on your own. For an answer you can believe, send it to an independent laboratory and have it analyzed. The only sure ways are to forget them all and use an advertised brand of powder that doesn’t taste sweet, or bring some unadulterated toothpaste in from Europe when you travel, or make your own out of sea salt and charred eggplant.

In March 1974, Lt. Hiro Onoda emerged from the jungles of the Philippine Islands after living a precarious, marginal existence for almost thirty years. Onoda had been holding out all that time for a direct order from his superior officer to surrender. He flew home to a hero’s welcome in Tokyo. After doctors examined him, it was announced: No cavities! No Crest! No Fluoride! Certainly no sugar. And no cavities! Sugar-drunk Americans the same age as the Japanese lieutenant have lost, on the average, half of their teeth. By the age of 55, one American out of every two has lost all his teeth. Sugar blue is the color of the solution where they park their dentures for the night.

The New York Times reported in June 1975 that 44% of Scots over 16 Found to be Toothless. The article noted that the Scottish state-operated health services had statistics for 1974 showing that 44 percent of Scots aged 16 or more had lost all their teeth. Only 2 percent of the people surveyed could be called dentally fit. The report concluded that significantly Scotland has one of the highest sugar-consumption rates in the world, 120 pounds per person annually.

In the 1973 issues for February and August, Esquire magazine published two lengthy articles, one on weight-loss dieting and the other on the high cost of dental care without a single mention of the word sugar — the major cause of obesity and tooth decay. In another article on weight-loss dieting by a doctor, the word sugar was mentioned exactly once, to tell us that sugar is pure carbohydrate. In hee article on tooth decay, the word sugar never appeared. Esquire called carbohydrates a major contributor to tooth decay.

Sugar-eaters may brush their teeth between every bite and see their dentist three times a day, but there’s no escape from the sugar blues.

The avant garde of dentistry has rediscovered that the body and the teeth are not two separate entities; the teeth are part of the body. There was an entire period during which the teeth were thought to be inactive organs; tooth decay was taken to be a local development on the surface of the teeth. Dentists were considered in the league with barbers, as mechanics, cosmeticians, tinkerers. If a dentist talked to a patient about anything except cavities or choice of filling, he was treading on the jealously regarded terrain of the medical man.

All that is over. Dental researchers have proven that the teeth are subject to the same metabolic processes that affect other organs of the body. The entire body is one.

By adapting a technique originally developed to study movement of fluid within organs like the liver and kidneys, two researchers from the Loma Linda School of Dentistry have found that subtle changes in the internal activity of the teeth, caused by sugar, can be an early sign of later decay.

In their report to a Chicago meeting of the International Association for Dental Research, Doctors R. E. Steinman and John Leonora showed that the principal change, caused by sugar, is in the movement of fluid within the teeth. Hormonal chemicals are carried from the pulp to the enamel through tiny channels in the dentin.

Resistance to tooth decay involves the health of the entire body: Complex physiological processes are involved in maintaining and protecting the health of the teeth. The two researchers found that:

Who wants to get rid of friendly germs in the mouth except those crazy people selling mouthwash?

Postponing the first of the day’s quandaries, standing in the bathroom, you might reach for the consolation of that first cigarette. Will it pass the sugarfree test? The Surgeon General’s message tells you it’s dangerous to your health. But one man’s hazard may be another man’s dish. Quantity changes quality. What’s in it? Some cigarettes list their tar and nicotine. But which tobacco is cured with sugar and which is not? If you want an imported, sugarfree cigarette a double tax is imposed. Should you want to roll your own, buy imported tobacco and imported paper without chemicals and saltpeter. Freedom of choice is a farce if one has to be a tobacco expert or send your favorite weed to a testing lab.

Back in the bathroom, maybe you stub out that cigarette and reach for a bottle of vitamins. On the one hand, the government informs us that smoking depletes our systems of certain vitamins. On the other hand, the government assures us we don’t have to worry since the average U.S. diet supplies these essential items in quantity aplenty. To be sure, without developing a vitamin pill habit, one takes a few from time to time. How can you tell which ones are coated with sugar? Manufacturers are compelled to list all sorts of things on the label. But where is the news that the little pills are sugar-coated or not? Ask your neighborhood merchant, write to the manufacturer, what do you do?

Airplanes have smoking and nonsmoking sections now so you can make your seating choice as you board. However, if you hope for something sugarless to eat or drink, you can bring your own lunch or telephone the airline 48 hours in advance and ask for a dietetic meal. I’ve always wanted to try one, but I never have that much advance notice. So it’s a treat I’ve missed.

Despite the advertising and hoopla about choosing among competing airlines, air travel only involves a slim 3 percent of the U.S. population. Those millions of flights primarily involve the same small percentage of the traveling public. Mass traveling in America happens on the superhighway, in the automobile. The superhighway has virtually eliminated the picnic ground, the roadside inn, the roadside stand, the truck stop diner, and the home-cooked meal in regional restaurants.

The hungry auto traveler today is a captive customer. Officially franchised restaurants with their standard architectural fixtures offer similar menus, coast to coast, from Maine to California. They’re pushing ice cream in umpteen delicious flavors (although — more doubletalk — usually only three, vanilla, chocolate, plus one unusual flavor, are truly available), soft drinks and cola of every kind, sugared snacks in every conceivable alluring package to set the children screaming. If you expect sustenance without sugar, you’re in for a rough time.

It’s the same old story. Bread, rolls, and pastries, crackers and cookies, donuts and waffles, pancakes and toast, jellies and jam, relish and ketchup, vegetables and fruit, meat and potatoes, soup to nuts, everything is frozen, prepared, pepped up with sugar. In the morning, you may pass over the sugar-laden packaged breakfast foods in favor of a bowl of plain old oatmeal. If you’re persistent, they may find you some honey to put on it, but even the honey may be filtered and stretched with sugar. The oatmeal is usually salted during cooking and the salt may have sugar in it, too. If you’re daring, you may inquire. The baked beans are loaded with sugar. The bacon is sugar-cured.

As your eyes run down the menu, focusing on the items least likely to have sugar in them, you breathe a sigh when you discover clam chowder on the menu. You hold your breath, expecting the waitress to tell you, with a smile of pleasure, that it’s been discontinued or is out of season. If you’re lucky, you negotiate a bowl of chowder made with canned clams, tired vegetables, and not too much else, you hope. You congratulate yourself on your acumen. The chowder, like everything else, reminds you how good clam chowder used to be in some long ago lost time. As you wait in line to pay the cashier, you find — among the sugared goodies — a display of cans of clam chowder for the take-home trade. The stuff isn’t worth carrying to the car but you pick it up and look at the label. Your stomach gurgles sharply … the first ingredient listed is the sugar you’ve been trying to escape. More sugar than clams. You’ve been had. The only way out is to carry breakfast, dinner, and lunch.

The time has come to bring back the dinner pail. I have an old-fashioned one with a thermos snapped in the top. I never get in a car anymore without a full thermos and something substantial in the way of emergency rations. The last time I did any coast-to-coast driving, I discovered the wonders of a simple emergency ration called a rice ball. Cook a bowlful of unpolished brown rice, and let it cool. Then hold sheets of the Japanese sea vegetable, nori, known in the West as laver, over low heat until they are crinkly crisp. Pit some umeboshi salted plums. Then, dipping your hands in cool sea-salted water so the rice doesn’t stick to them, shape a handful of rice into a ball. Push half a plum into the center, wrap the rice ball in the toasted seaweed, tearing it and fitting the seaweed into place. Put each rice ball in a waxed paper sandwich bag and keep them in your lunch box or a brown paper bag. Don’t wrap them too tightly, the air should circulate around them a little. The salted plum keeps the rice from turning green for three or four days, sometimes longer, it depends on the climate. The toasted sea vegetable wrapper stops the rice from drying out. Whenever you feel hungry as you drive, take a rice ball and munch it, chewing every mouthful for a good minute or so. This is important for your digestion. The seaweed absorbs the moisture from the rice, and makes it soft and chewy. The plum flavors the rice sharply. Your driving will be excellent — and even. One seems to develop eyes in the back of the head. You drive without the ups and downs of discomfort or hunger pangs. Most important of all, you’re capable of handling the vagaries of those careless drivers on the highway.

The carnage on America’s highways exceeds all deaths in all wars. Year by year, despite the billions of dollars spent for highway safety, construction, education, and policing, it goes up and up. The real causes of fatal auto accidents are usually buried with the victims. There have been studies on top of studies. Radar, computers, and behavioral scientists have all searched for answers. Shocking, agonizing appeals on television attempt to bring the horror right into our laps. Reformed drunks appeal to us to get the drunken driver off the road. At holiday time, drivers are urged to skip that last drink and have a cup of coffee for the road. How many television appeals have you seen suggesting that the sugar drunk be gotten off the highways?

It has to come. It can’t be swept under the rug much longer. In 1971, in one of the most comprehensive studies of highway accidents ever compiled, Dr. H. J. Roberts, a specialist of internal medicine, devoted a thousand pages of text and charts attempting to emphasize the fact that highway accident research on causes of traffic accidents needs to be completely revamped. Strictly speaking, events such as accidents are misnamed. An accident is, simply, an occurrence with a hidden cause. What does it mean if somebody missed a stop sign, ran through an intersection, got in the wrong lane, passed another motorist on a hill, speeded around a curve, or lost control of his car? Why did the driver do it? H. J. Roberts, Sugar Unmasked as Highway Killer, Prevention, March 1972.

One learns in army combat, in automobile accidents, in drownings, in every physical crisis that a few seconds can be an eternity which spells the difference between survival and doom: The ability to react speedily, promptly, and precisely to any challenge or danger — this is the thing one measures in service comrades, in taxi drivers, in skiing, mountain climbing, or any hazardous physical activity. This is one of the most important indices to one’s own health. When one is truly healthy, it means one has this ability to react spontaneously. If an American steps off the sidewalk into London traffic during those first few days in an unfamiliar city where the traffic flow is reversed from one’s normal pattern, an alert person catches such an error. If the steep rocks you’re climbing present a hazard, you rapidly evaluate moves around them. So it is driving on the highway.

In his comprehensive study, published in 1971, that entailed years of research, Dr. Roberts concluded that a significant source of many unexplainable accidents is that millions of American drivers are subject to pathological drowsiness and hypoglycemia due to functional hyperinsulinism. He estimates that there may be as many as ten million drivers like that on the road of America today.

In other words, low glucose level in the blood gums up brain functioning, perceptions, and reactions. What causes this condition? The doctor’s answer: The apparent increased incidence of hyperinsulinism and of narcolepsy [abnormal attacks of drowsiness] during recent decades can be largely attributed to the consequences of an enormous rise in sugar consumption by a vulnerable population. H. J. Roberts, The Causes, Ecology, and Prevention of Traffic Accidents.

Today, Americans eat 1 out of every 5 meals in restaurants, where no one is required to tell the customer, on the menu or elsewhere, whether or not there is sugar in your supper.

Some people can handle the only food available to captive customers on the superhighways — the sugar-in-everything menu from the look-alike establishments smeared across the country, plus the ice cream, the Coca-Cola, the coffee, the candy, the chewing gum, and dazzling array of sugared snacks at the check-out counter. Some people can’t. Of course, some people can handle it right up to the point they can’t. They never find out what is enough until they find out what is more than enough and end up hospitalized, maimed, or dead.

Hyperinsulinism or low glucose level in the blood can be aggravated by other factors, according to Dr. Roberts. One is age. Roberts cites a number of studies which show that three out of four elderly people have faulty sugar metabolism. Another complicating factor is the wide use of medications such as tranquilizers and antihistamines that have a marked tendency to induce drowsiness. To combine these drugs with a heavy sugar habit can be devastating. Another complicating factor is alcohol. A drink or two may be unimportant by itself. The Breathalyzer test may tell only part of the story. With someone who has problems with sugar metabolism, it depends on the kind of alcoholic beverage. After all, whiskey, beer, and wine contain more than alcohol. Their sugar content varies widely. Alcohol combined with a sugar load adds to the drain on the brain. Even more scary is the fact that many, if not all, alcoholics are also hypoglycemics or victims of hyperinsulinism, people with low glucose levels in their blood. Roberts cites other studies which show that alcoholics have an exceptionally high rate of auto accidents — even when they are sober.

If you’ve gone without sugar as long as I have, you learn to detect it by simple signs. When you have eaten at a restaurant or some place where control of the actual content of the food is out of your hands, taste is not always infallible. However, if you get sleepy after such a meal, you can be sure something had sugar or honey in it. Many fruits, especially sugar rich tropical fruits, make me sleepy. Honey can do the same thing. I know a Japanese lady who, when she came to the U.S. for the first time, had never tasted sugar in her life. When a kind soul gave her a loaf of whole wheat bread as a gift, she ate some and promptly went to sleep and missed her plane. The bread had been made with honey — that was enough to do it.

For highway safety, Dr. Roberts suggests that drivers avoid glucose and sucrose. In other words, if you want to get there and back, travel sugarfree. I’ve been sugar-free since the 1960s, by which I mean that I eliminated refined sucrose from my diet I have come to know hundreds of young people who have found that illness or bingeing on drugs and sugar became the doorway to health. Once they reestablished their own health, we had in common our interest in food. If one can use that overworked word lifestyle, we shared a sugarfree lifestyle. I kept in touch with many of them in campuses and communes, through their travels here and abroad and everywhere. One day you meet them in Boston. The next week you run into them in southern California. In all that time, with hundreds of friends more or less constantly on the road, I have known only two who were involved in auto accidents.

I made a point of personally investigating each incident. In both cases, each was driving alone. One had had a history of epilepsy. He had cured himself in a couple of years by adhering to a sugarfree diet, with lots of whole grains, vegetables, sometimes a little fish, and even less fruit. He got so frisky he forgot his old malady. It had been a year since he had had a mild seizure. When he was visiting a retired priest in a Catholic rectory in Boston, he was invited for dinner — a trap of a meal rich enough for an archbishop and topped off by a sugar-bomb dessert. Even though he stayed away from the wine, returning home on the freeway, he went blank — an epileptic seizure. The resulting accident left both legs in plaster casts.

The second friend involved in a highway accident had been a diabetic since the age of sixteen. He had been on insulin for ten years. Through trial and error, booze and marijuana, he had learned enough about his own metabolism to find a regime that worked for him. He has since been able to cut down his insulin by more than half by adhering to what quantitative nutritionists would call a high-carbohydrate diet of mostly whole grains and vegetables. Before he managed that, during the time he was combining insulin and marijuana, he blacked out on a back road in California and crashed into a ditch. The highway patrol took him to the hospital. When they found the card, I am a Diabetic in his back pocket, his driver’s license was suspended.

When you apply for a driver’s license today, a big to-do is made over your skill at backing into a parking place; a written test in which you display your memory for traffic regulations is obligatory. An inspector rides around the block with you to see how you handle stopping and starting, and other elements of driving. Your vision is tested. Computers keep track of your driving violations.

But until we figure out a way of screening out the sugar drunks, highway safety will continue to be a sometime thing.