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Food Facts vs Food Myths?
Food Truths vs Food Myths
Interesting Reading for July 4,
independence day.
Where do you stand?
What do you believe?
What is true for you?
Date: 7/4/2009 10:14:04 AM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 1369 times
July 4, 2009
8:07 AM
Got into doing some research this early morning.
Found this delightful article that I highly recommend
if you want to understand a bit of the issues with FDA
and the evolution of nutritional thinking in the last
century.
Many of the myths identified as nutional myths
are held as truths by many of us here in the Curezone.
As far as the integrity of some of the"food myth peddlers"
I am sure their integrity was lacking as stated.
It is interested to note which myths are not accepted
as truth, and also to be aware that forces such
as CODEX ALIMENTARIUS coming my view again now,
consider many of what many of us call truths to be
food myths.
Here is a juicy section of
what some of us call truths and others call myths.
Where do you stand on this day of July 4?
This is from
http://www.quackwatch.com/13Hx/MM/16.html
The Medical Messiahs:
A Social History of Health Quackery
in Twentieth-Century America
Chapter 16: "You Are What You Eat"
James Harvey Young, PhD
"After studying the eating habits of the American people for a number of years, I found thirty distinct Disease Conditions: vitamin-deficient, mineral-starved, cooked food-enervated, sun-cheated, clothes-insulated, coffee-soaked, spice-irritated, tobacco-poisoned, constipation-befouled, oxygen-deprived, sugar-acidified, meat-polluted, starch-clogged, salt-ified, mustard-plastered, pepperized, jelly-bowled, pop-bloated, vinegar-jagged, chocolate-coated, mashed and creamed, toasted and roasted, ice-cubed, tea-tannined, sauce-jaded, night-hawks, morning-deadheads, heat-treated, sex-depleted, and gravy-saturated. That's the average human being today."
—Adolphus Hohensee, Lecture In Denver, 1952 [1]
WHERE DO YOU STAND ON SOME OF THESE?
WHICH DO YOU HOLD AS TRUTHS?
WHICH AS MYTHS?
Hohensee's basic pattern of fear and hope conformed to, as it helped create, a major nutritional myth. Other lecturers, door-to-door salesmen, writers, TV pitchmen, health food store proprietors, shared in its construction and propagation. Thousands of Americans came to believe in it implicitly, so that they bet their dollars, staked their health, upon its doctrines. They could be roused to fierce antagonism against any scientist, businessman, or government regulator who questioned the myth's basic tenets.
One of the cardinal principles of this myth held that most disease resulted from improper diet. This was, of course, untrue. A few dietary deficiency diseases did exist, but even these had been largely vanquished in America by the nutritional revolution. It was easy, in America, to buy and eat an adequate diet. The nation's citizens, indeed, would have to go out of their way to avoid being properly nourished. Where deficiencies might exist, the proper solution lay not in spending money for expensive food supplements vended by the ill informed, but in eating better. Only a physician could detect deficiencies, in any case, and only he possessed the knowledge to prescribe therapeutic vitamins and other nutrients if needed. Yet the prophets to the faddists, with goods to sell, persevered in blaming all ills on the American food supply [32].
A subsidiary principle in the faddist's mighty myth blamed soil depletion for the alleged well-nigh universal malnutrition. The land on which food was grown had lost its zip, been drained of the minerals and vitamins which once it held. "Laboratory tests prove," Hohensee wrote in one of his pamphlets, "that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago. . . . No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health, because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them!" [33] This doctrine too was false. The soil's quality does affect the quantity of the crop grown, but has very little influence on its quality. Unless the necessary elements are present in the soil, crops will not grow. Only with respect to iodine has there been depletion.
A third aspect of the myth held chemical fertilizers responsible for poisoning the land and the crops grown on it. Here the purveyors of specious nutrition counsel employed an ancient stunt, taking a legitimate concern and distorting it to suit their purposes. Pesticide residues, inadequately removed, did pose a hazard to health. New and more powerful pesticides came increasingly into use, and legitimate scientists expressed alarm. Congress took up the problem and in 1947 and 1954 passed laws to help the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration exercise more effective Control [34]. The faddists, however, did not relax. Their prophets, like Hohensee, urged the eating of only "natural" foods raised by "organic" farming, in which only animal fertilizer was used. El Rancho Adolphus apple juice, Hohensee told his classes, came only from non-sprayed apples fertilized by animal manure; all other apple juice, he said, was contaminated with insect poisons which would destroy the kidneys [35]. Artificial fertilizers, according to the myth, besides being poisons, devitalized the soil and thus ruined the nutrients in food, making necessary the purchase of food supplements.
Still another facet of the myth, based in part on very old folk beliefs, put great stress on the special dietary value of various "wonder" foods. Hauser had his own particular list, and Hohensee too employed this doctrine. One of his favorites was garlic. "In addition to being good for a specific condition of high blood pressure," he wrote, garlic "also seems to have a profound cleansing effect upon the intestines and, of course, the blood." [36] Among other things, it inhibited growth of the tuberculosis germ. To prove garlic's potency in the system, Hohensee advised putting a piece up the rectum at night: by morning its taste would be apparent in the mouth. These claims for garlic were utter nonsense. Some of the other socalled wonder foods might have some value as foods, experts were willing to agree, but they possessed no miraculous properties and were not indispensable in diet.
One more aspect of the myth held that cooking utensils made of certain metals poisoned the food prepared in them. Aluminum was the particular bugaboo, a scare doctrine at least half a century old. Hohensee had propagated this theory right from the start. He also denounced the hazards of peeling vegetables with metal knives. Like other fringe operators, be had his own "safe" tenderizer and Lucite knives to sell [37].
Processed foods, according to the myth, possessed a double danger. The milling of cereals, the canning of foods, even the pasteurizing of milk, according to the specious nutritionists, destroyed the natural nutrients. At the same time, food processors poured into their products a mounting array of additives, chemicals intended to deter spoilage, improve texture, and perform other like functions, although the real result, the faddists said, was the slow poisoning of the public. Reputable nutritionists assured the nation that most food values survived milling, canning, and freezing, and insisted that the nutritional losses from pasteurizing milk were far outweighed by the gains. The health faddist's penchant for raw fruits and vegetables, the experts said, was certainly extreme. As with pesticides, food additives posed a genuine problem, but one which the nutritional lecturer distorted beyond all reason. Congress acted to ensure that substances added to processed foods be proved safe before being permitted in use, passing a law in 1958 giving the FDA jurisdiction in this field [38]. The public debate leading to the law provided many frightening charges to bolster the scare doctrines of nutritional lecturers. Hohensee constantly condemned "dead"—that is, processed—foods and praised the "live" foods eaten at El Rancho Adolphus [39]. He had had excellent fortune, he told his classes, curing cancer with chlorophyll.
A final major principle in the nutritional myth concerned subclinical deficiencies. This represented a clever borrowing of a recognized medical concept: a given person's diet might not contain an adequate amount of a given nutrient, although the amount lacking was so small or had continued for so short a time that no symptoms of deficiency were yet observable. As translated by the fringe operators, almost everybody might be so threatened, and the imminent dangers to health were catastrophic. Going further, they blamed many of life's day-to-day difficulties, like weariness, tension, a sense of discouragement, on subclinical deficiencies. The hypochondriac especially found conviction in this theory. If a doctor had examined him and discovered nothing wrong, when he himself knew in his bones that there must be, it was reassuring to find out from a food supplement salesman that there was such a thing as vitamin deficiencies which even a physician could not detect. The answer, of course, lay in the insurance of multivitamin mixtures. "Good cheer and optimism," Hohensee asserted, "are impossible if you are suffering from hidden hunger or an undernourished brain [40].
RELATED PLANT YOUR DREAM BLOG:
HEALTH FREEDOM CHALLENGED
BY CODEX ALIMENTARIUS SUPPORTERS:
http://curezone.com/blogs/fm.asp?i=1448838
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