This is the continuation of the 6-Part Series of ENZYMES: THE KEY TO LONGEVITY.
THE SHELF-LIFE BUSINESS
Let’s talk about processed foods. How did all these artificial, devitalized foods become the main components of the American diet in the first place?
Long story. In 1910 Harvey Wiley, MD was the first head of the original FDA. Dr. Wiley was a big critic of food adulteration. He was against bleached flour, refined sugar, and the sale of adulterated, devitalized foods. He once tried to prevent the Coca Cola company from shipping Coke across interstate lines because it had white sugar in it, which Dr. Wiley correctly described as an adulterated food. Then Wiley actually began seizing shipments of bleached flour. A legal battle ensued and went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1913.
Wiley won. Bleach was proven to be an empty filler whose main purpose was to kill bugs and bulk up the flour. This law has never been enforced, or reversed either. Soon thereafter the huge financial interests controlling food processing banded together and got Wiley thrown out of office. Ever since we have had white flour, which has no food value whatsoever – no vitamins, no minerals, no enzymes, and which often contains large amounts of bleach – (Bealle, Royal Lee) That’s what bread labels even today are talking about when they state “unbleached flour.” Like it’s some hot selling point that the bread doesn’t have bug-killer in it.
Food processing has only been around for about the last 90 years or so. Food processing came about mainly during wartime when we had to figure out how to transport large quantities of food to the WWI soldiers without spoiling on the way. Scientists found out that the more efficient were the methods of removing enzymes from foods, the better it transported and the longer it lasted. After the war, the techniques that had been earned were applied to the grocery business. The supermarket industry soon found out that profits could be greatly increased if foods can be made to last longer without spoiling. If that meant that they were also removing most or all of the nutrition from the food along with the enzymes, hey, too bad. The manufacturers weren’t in the health business; this was the Shelf-Life business.
Scientific methods of enzyme removal and food preservation then became more and more sophisticated continuing to the present day. In addition, chemical additives came in, which do nothing to nourish the body – it’s just about the money. And now the two new buzzwords are irradiation and genetic engineering. Do you think any of these methods has anything to do with increasing the nutritive value of foods? Dream on. This is big business, driven by one motive only.
GOOD LIVER – GOOD LIFE
One of the first organs to be overwhelmed by the constant deluge of toxic fast foods is the liver, the most important organ of the body. Bieler feels that if the liver were able to keep up with cleansing the blood of all the indigestible debris we shove down our throats, we would live more or less indefinitely. (Bieler, p63) Before it gets into general circulation, digested food from the intestine goes first through the liver via the portal vein. The liver is then supposed to choose what to do with the digested food
i. make new body tissues
ii. release energy
iii. store nutrients for future use
Unfortunately in an enzymeless diet that consists of 80% hard fats and refined sugars, the liver hardly has time to get around to these standard life functions. Instead it wastes most of its energy and power just trying to tread water in a sewer of chemicals. Liver cells die, cirrhosis results, and this is today the #10 cause of death in the US. (Historical Statistics)
The human liver evolved from 60 million years of animal liver evolution. For all but the last 100 years of man’s 200,000 years, the human diet was simple fruits and vegetables, with a little animal protein. Thus was the liver allowed to develop normally and concentrate on its main tasks, which did not involve toxic waste breakdown. Modern processed foods are a shock to evolution. ( Food Is Your Best Medicine, p 183)
Bieler explains the idiocy of trying to force the liver and kidneys to work harder by falsely whipping them into action by adrenal-stimulating steroid and diuretic drugs, which is the standard medical approach. This is a short-term solution and will ultimately result in organ destruction.
The simple fact is, the liver and kidneys were never meant to work this hard, spending all their metabolic energy trying to deal with enzymeless processed food chemicals from our horrible diet. Bieler, p 142)
WESTON A. PRICE
Once there was a dentist named Dr. Weston A. Price. In the 1930s, he and his wife went around the world, gathering data from dozens of countries. He was looking for the healthiest people on earth. That is, the ones with the longest lifespan, no degenerative disease, no tooth decay, the strongest bones, and best physiques. Everywhere he went, Dr. Price would check the bones and teeth of various tribes and civilizations, including:
Swiss Alpine villages
Fiji
Eskimos
Seminole Indians
Canadian Indians
Scottish primitives
Melanesia
Hawaii
What Price found was startling and undeniable: across the board, those primitive civilizations and cultures enjoyed sound teeth, strong bones, and lives generally free from degenerative disease, provided there was adequate natural food and a mineral-rich water supply. Then invariably, as soon as the enzymeless foods of commerce became available to these simple people, within a few years, their teeth would be rotten, their bones would soften, and they would experience the onset of epidemic degenerative diseases, just like the ones that prevail in America today. Like Royal Lee and JH Tilden, Price is talking about white flour, white sugar, and processed, devitalized adulterated foods.
The common factor in the new foods which infiltrated and corrupted the diets of these primitive societies, again, was lack of enzymes.
Dr. Price also examined ancient skulls from the burial grounds of many of these civilizations. He was looking to correlate the amount of tooth decay with the formation of the dental arches, as well as the formation of the facial bones and the nostrils. Location after location, Price’s findings were overwhelmingly consistent: when the isolated people had a primitive diet consisting of fish, whole grains, raw dairy, and a mineral-rich environment, the people enjoyed perfect teeth, and a very low incidence of infectious and degenerative disease. Price correlated beyond a doubt the exposure of primitive people to white flour and white sugar with all the following:
Bone thinning
Facial deformity
Mouth breathing, because the nostrils did not develop properly
Rampant tooth decay
Tuberculosis
Arthritis
Price shows how physical degeneration of a group of people who may have enjoyed nearly perfect health for centuries – how this situation can be destroyed within a few years of being exposed to the foods of commerce – white sugar, white flour, and processed devitalized products.
Dr. Price’s book is called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and is still in print. No nutritionist or dietician can claim to be well-informed without a thorough understanding of this landmark work. Remember, nutritionists and dieticians are the ones who design hospital food, airline cuisine, and school lunches.
THE IDIOCY OF THE HIGH PROTEIN DIET
Because of advertising, and “soft” advertising in which scripted information is made to look like hard news, food fads are as rampant today as ever. Eat for your blood type, eat for your body type, eat for your horoscope, eat for your recovered memories, eat what your muscle testing says, eat according to your ethnicity, eat according to the results of your hair analysis – junk science is at its zenith in America today. Not the least unscientific of these is the currently popular high protein diet.
Riding high on the cholesterol/ heart disease myth, and the Dangers of Carbos spectre, the high protein diet was the new messiah – the ultimate healthy diet. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Obviously if someone is pounding fries and ice cream and coke all day long, and suddenly he trades up to the high protein diet, there are going to be some immediate improvements in the way the patient feels. But the same effect would probably have been obtained by an all citrus diet, or Price’s diet of raw milk and rye cakes.
There are many physiologic nightmares which are promoted by the Atkins approach. We’ll look at just a few:
A long-term high protein diet exclusive of good fats and natural carbohydrates is very detrimental to the kidneys, the liver, and the blood.
The breakdown products of processed artificial protein are highly acidifying to the blood and tract.
In addition to blocking most digestive and metabolic enzymes by constantly lowering the body’s pH, this sets in motion the whole calcium buffering program in which the pH of the blood is saved from all the dangerous acidification by pulling calcium out of the bones and teeth.
The body’s next effort may be to precipitate some of the excess protein out of solution in the form of uric acid crystals. These may then be deposited in joints and organs, resulting in arthritis, kidney stones, gallstones, etc.
Too much protein in the diet putrefies in the digestive tract, setting up blockage, leaky gut syndrome, and a whole host of intestinal disorders. Excess nitrogen in the system from all those excess amino acids further stresses the blood.
The food advertisers pretend that we need more protein and less fat. The more protein and the less fat, the better. The truth is, Americans average 125g of protein per day, while only requiring 25g. (McDougall) We are not protein deficient in this country. That only happens in Third World starvation countries. The reason for this Protein Religion is simple economics: high protein foods are expensive. It’s a sales job. At stake are billion$ in foods and billion$ in advertising.
The high protein diet is of course aggressively promoted by the entire soy-pandering contingent. Having perpetrated the lie that soy is a complete, safe protein, far superior to those fat-laden animal proteins, the soy sellers are enjoying huge success by means of consistent and ubiquitous persuasion methods in all media. This concept is just as false and as dangerous as the high protein diet itself. For the whole story please see The Magic Bean.
Food faddists like to complicate things, deriving rules and patterns out of thin air. Usually for the end purpose of book or supplement or food sales. A reasonable proportion of fats, protein, and carbohydrates is just common sense. Less important than the proportion of fats, protein, and carbohydrates is the form in which each is presented. Digestible or indigestible? Natural or processed? Raw or cooked? Sprayed or organic? Cleanse or clog? With or without enzymes? These are the real issues that determine the value of a food. These are the questions we should be asking.
The other major misconception is the fat – free phobia that has taken hold in this country. Controlled by advertising from huge food interests, false information is everywhere about the dangers of fat and cholesterol and how this causes heart disease, etc. The solution? Processed soy, a toxic indigestible non-food containing the the worst possible type of fat: altered fats. The irony is that Americans are now actually fat deficient, having been tricked into thinking that all fats are bad. We need good fats, essential fatty acids, and we’re not getting them. (Erasmus)
- See Part 4 for the Milk Topic, the Fattening of America and Diseases of this Generation.
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