ENORMOUS PROGRESS HAS been made since the turn of the century in the scientific understanding of diet and its effects on health. Like any other science, the science of nutrition advances by slow, painstaking steps. Research studies are undertaken. Results are reported in meetings and in the journals. There is much debating, repetition of experiments, checking and double-checking. Unfortunately, this process takes place on a technical level beyond the understanding of the general public. Some of it, of course, reaches the layman through news reports, magazine articles, and books by writers who try to do a conscientious job of popularization. Alas, these voices are drowned out by the louder voices of the charlatans and faddists.1 It is so easy to take a truth, or half-truth, then magnify its importance at the expense of other truths. The result may be exciting, and a convenient gimmick for a cult, but with so little reference to the facts that it becomes more a health menace than a panacea.
The cult of fasting is a good example. Some body ills are accompanied by nausea and loss of appetite, which naturally enforce a temporary fast. From this fact it is an easy but completely false step to the belief that there is some sort of magic therapeutic value in the fast itself, even for a person in good health. Actually, a prolonged fast by a healthy person can cause nothing but harm. There is such a general weakening of the entire body, and lowering of resistance to disease, that only an extremely vigorous and healthy person can stand a lengthy fast. Yet in spite of all medical evidence, the cult persists.
Hereward Carrington (author of many books on spiritualism and kindred topics) wrote a 648-page volume titled Vitality, Fasting, and Nutrition, in 1908, which is probably the best introduction in English to this once highly touted fad. Another advocate of fasting, who has written with a dogmatism even surpassing that of Carrington, is Upton Sinclair. His book The Fasting Cure, 1911, tells how prolonged starvation will combat tuberculosis, syphilis, asthma, cancer, liver trouble, Bright’s disease, colds, and even locomotor-ataxia—the result of a destroyed nerve!
“I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were fasting,” Sinclair writes in his Book of Life, “but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their death, they would have died anyhow.” And he adds, “I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food from them. . . .” No statement could be more typical of a scientific Philistine. Sinclair “feels quite certain” about it, but it never occurs to him to seek competent advice from men who know. Obviously, in his opinion, professional physicians are not men who know.
For a while, Sinclair was a Fletcherite. It was at the Battle Creek Sanitarium that he met Horace Fletcher, the handsome, athletic, prematurely white-haired author of Fletcherism: What it is, or, How I Became Young at Sixty. Like Fletcher’s earlier works, the book had quite a vogue when it was published in 1913.
The motto of the Fletcherites was “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.” The idea was to eat only when you are hungry, choose the foods that appeal to you most, and chew each mouthful thirty to seventy times. It was bad for the digestion, Fletcher argued, to swallow food before it had been reduced to such a liquid state that it “swallowed itself.” Even soup and milk had to be “Fletcherized” by rolling it about the mouth until it was thoroughly mixed with saliva. John D. Rockefeller was an ardent Fletcherite, and the philosopher William James once gave the system a three-month trial. “I had to give it up,” James later testified. “It nearly killed me.”
There are still some Fletcherites around. Recently the Sunday cartoon page, Grin and Bear it, had a drawing of a matronly wife returning from a lecture and saying to her husband, “And that diet lecturer said that if we all chewed our food properly, we wouldn’t have all these wars. . . .”
Dozens of ingenious food fads have been built around the conviction that certain foods should never be eaten together. For example, fruit and milk is considered bad because the acid curdles the milk, in spite of the fact that as soon as milk reaches the stomach it promptly meets with acid secretions. Milk and fish is another combination against which faddists often warn. According to the “Hayites,” meat and potatoes form a similar evil partnership.
The Hayites are worth a few paragraphs. The late Dr. William Howard Hay, who started it all, held a medical degree from the University of the City of New York (class of 1891), and from 1932 until his death, directed his own resort at Mount Pocono, Pa. His views are set forth at length in his famous text, Health via Food, published in 1933.
According to Dr. Hay, almost all bodily ills are the result of “acidosis.” This in turn is caused by (1) too much protein, (2) too much adulterated food, like white bread, (3) combinations in the diet of protein and carbohydrates, (4) retention in the bowels of food beyond twenty-four hours after eating. He also recommends frequent fasting, apparently unaware that fasting really causes acidosis.
Dr. Hay’s reason for objecting to meat and potatoes is interesting. Starches need alkaline for digesting, proteins need acid, and “no human stomach can be expected to be acid and alkaline at the same time.” Actually, most foods contain mixtures of proteins and starches. But such facts are much too complicated for the self-appointed diet experts. It’s more fun to invent new recipes which avoid the poisonous mixtures—such as Hay’s Happy Highball, Pale Moon Cocktail, Easter Bunny Salad, and Parcel Post Asparagus, which are described in the doctor’s cookbooks.
Many food fads are built around the view that certain foods should be avoided entirely. A recent cult of this sort stems from the strange dietary views of Dr. Melvin Page, a dentist in St. Petersburg, Florida, and head of the Biochemical Research Foundation. When Page was operating in Muskegon, Michigan, in 1940, the government stopped him from selling a nostrum called Ce-Kelp which cured everything from cataracts to cancer. At the moment Dr. Page is, among other things, against milk. “As far as I know,” he writes in his learned opus, Degeneration—Regeneration, published by himself in 1949, “he [man] and a certain species of ant are the only ones who use an animal secretion after the age of weaning.”
Page thinks milk is fine for babies before being weaned, but after that it is a dangerous food and a frequent cause of colds, sinusitis, colitis, and cancer. The doctor points out that more people die of cancer per capita in Wisconsin than any other state, and of course Wisconsin takes the lead in milk production.2 If we don’t stop drinking this animal secretion, and reform our diet in other curious ways proposed by Dr. Page, he fears the Anglo Saxon race will continue to degenerate faster than certain “primitive” races which he does not specify.
The principal “don’t eat this” cult has long been, of course, vegetarianism. 3 It is particularly popular with Hindu and occult groups, the Trappist monks, and small Protestant sects like the Seventh Day Adventists. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw were vegetarians. Upton Sinclair, who at one time or another has embraced almost every food fad of the century, once wrote a book defending it.
Not all vegetarians agree. The “lacto-ovo vegetarians” are willing to take milk, eggs, and cheese, but stricter sects regard these foods as forms of meat. There is even a group calling themselves “fruitarians” who confine their diet to fruit. All these groups are loosely organized into the American Vegetarian Union, affiliated with the older International Vegetarian Union of Europe. A monthly magazine, The American Vegetarian, is currently published in New York City.
We need not be concerned here with the ethical arguments for avoiding meat, but the medical arguments are worth citing. Vegetarians are fond of pointing out that meat produces in the body harmful deposits of uric acid and “necrones,” which in turn play a role in causing disease. Oddly enough, no medical doctor has ever found out what a necrone is. It sounds terrible but is completely without scientific meaning. As for uric acid, it is true that its increase in the blood is associated with some ailments, such as gout, but only because the body itself produces more of the acid. The notion that uric acid in the diet is a cause of such ailments is a myth long ago punctured by nutritional science.
No doctor denies that it is possible to obtain a balanced diet without meat, but the fact is that it is difficult to do this, and totally unnecessary. Among the amino-acids which are essential to health, about ten must be supplied by the food we eat. It is extremely hard to obtain all ten from a plant diet, and if even one is missing, there are nutritional deficiencies. On the other hand, amino-acids are the products of protein digestion, and the addition of meat to the diet is a simple method of getting all the needed ones. It is true that in some ailments, such as gout, meat in the diet must be limited. On the other hand, in other ailments diets rich in protein are necessary to restore health. There is no evidence whatever that meat plays a significant role in causing bodily disorders, least of all cancer, which some vegetarians trace to meat by means of wildly distorted statistics. Some food fads, it is interesting to note, advocate high protein diets even for the healthy! See, for example, Daniel C. Munro’s You Can Live Longer Than You Think, 1948, in which he argues that Methuselah lived 969 years because he ate mostly meat.
Even more extreme than the vegetarians are the “raw food” fanatics who rail against the eating of cooked “dead” foods. “No animal eats cooked food,” writes Jerome I. Rodale, of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a statement with which one must heartily agree. “Man is the only creature that does,” he continues. “It is a known fact that cats thrive much better on raw rather than cooked meat.”
A manufacturer of electrical wiring devices, Rodale is also the leader in this country of a movement known as “organic farming.” Not only does cooking devitalize food, according to Rodale, but food also loses in health value if it is grown in soil that has been devitalized by chemical fertilizers. Farming must be “God’s way.” The soil is like a living organism, Rodale claims, and only animal or vegetable fertilizers preserve its vitality. Soil and nutrition experts tell us that if plants grow at all, their composition tends to remain essentially the same, with respect to mineral and vitamin content, as plants grown in “rich” soil. A depleted soil will produce fewer or smaller plants, and if completely depleted, none at all. According to Rodale, however, the use of “artificial” fertilizers and sprays has caused almost all the nation’s health disorders, including cancer. He has written many books about it (published by himself), of which The Organic Front, 1948, is the best summary of his opinions. In addition, he edits three monthly magazines—Organic Gardening, The Organic Farmer, and Prevention, the latter devoted to preventing disease by organic farming. In these magazines one may find many advertisements for Sunflower seeds. Rodale regards them as the great “forgotten food,” of enormous health value when added to the diet.”
Closely related to the organic farming movement is the German anthroposophical cult founded by Rudolf Steiner, whom we met earlier in connection with his writings on Atlantis and Lemuria. The anthroposophists go one step further than Rodale, and regard the earth as an actual living organism. It “breathes” twice a day, and its soil is “living” in much more than a metaphorical sense.
“Bio-Dynamic Farming” was established by Steiner at his School of Spiritual Science, in Dornach (near Basle), Switzerland. (Dornach is now the anthroposophical world center—a city with its own curious architecture and populated almost entirely by anthroposophists.) His two chief researchers were Lili Kolisko, whose works have not been translated, and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. Many of Pfeiffer’s books are available in English. His Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening was issued by the anthroposophists in 1938, and The Earth’s Face and Human Destiny was printed in 1940 by Rodale.
In essence, the anthroposophists’ approach to the soil is like their approach to the human body—a variation of homeopathy. (See Steiner’s An Outline of Anthroposophical Medical Research, English translation, 1939, for an explanation of how mistletoe, when properly prepared, will cure cancer by absorbing “etheric forces” and strengthening the “astral body.”) They believe the soil can be made more “dynamic” by adding to it certain mysterious preparations which, like the medicines of homeopathic “purists,” are so diluted that nothing material of the compound remains. In 1923, Lili Kolisko experimented with progressively rarefied salt solutions on germinating wheat. She found that the effect of the solution faded when the dilution passed the tenth and twelfth decimal, but after that, appeared again! In writing about this in Organic Gardening, December, 1950, anthroposophist Dr. Herman Poppelbaum states: “By a simple calculation it can be figured out that in such high dilutions nothing ‘material’ of the ponderable solute is left. The effect therefore may be called imponderable, that is, not based on the physical presence of the material salt in the solvent. The substance then exercises an effect which is merely dynamic.”
Dr. Pfeiffer was born in Munich in 1899, and was graduated at the University of Basle. He holds an honorary degree from the Hahnemann Medical College, Philadelphia, for discovering a method of diagnosing human ills from crystal patterns which form when a drop of blood, mixed with chloride of copper, is crystallized. In the thirties he directed the anthroposophists’ Biochemical Research Laboratory, at Dornach, and also the cult’s 800-acre experimental farm at Loverendale, Holland. When the Nazis took over Holland in 1940, he escaped with his family and came to the United States.
After creating a model farm at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, he bought his own farm. near Chester, New York. It was here he made what he regards as his most momentous discovery—special blends of bacteria strains (the exact formulas are highly secret) which he claims will convert ordinary garbage into rich organic fertilizer. Only a tablespoon of the bacteria need be added to each ton of garbage. In a week the garbage is transformed into an odorless supercompost. With funds provided by the owner of a wastepaper business in Buffalo, a company has recently been formed in Oakland, California, which buys garbage from the city, processes it with Pfeiffer’s wonder germs (his Biochemical Laboratory at Spring Valley, New York, gets a royalty for supplying the bacteria), then sells it as organic fertilizer. Laboratory tests (by Pfeiffer) show that vegetables grown with this compost weigh 25 percent more than vegetables grown with ordinary fertilizers, and have one to three times as much vitamin A. Grain grown in the treated soil has higher protein content. Even sand can be made into rich farm land, Pfeiffer says, if water is available. You can find the details of this revolutionary project in an article, “The City with the Golden Garbage,” Collier’s, May 31, 1952. The article neglects to inform the reader of the anthroposophical views which underlie Pfeiffer’s work.
At the present time, one of the most popular eating fads in America is built around the personality of Gayelord Hauser—a handsome, virile-looking man with dark wavy hair, whose face appears prominently in the advertisements of his book. His latest work, Look Younger, Live Longer, 1950, was condensed by Reader’s Digest, serialized in the Hearst papers, and is still far outselling its closest competitor, Eat and Grow Younger, by Lelord Kordel, in spite of the fact that Kordel looks even younger and handsomer.
Hauser was born in Tübingen, Germany, in 1895, as Helmut Eugene Benjamin Gellert Hauser. He came to the United States at the age of sixteen, where he contracted tuberculosis of the hip. A Chicago hospital decided his case was incurable, and shipped him back to Europe to die. “There, high up among the snow-capped peaks,” Hauser writes, “a miracle happened.” An old man who was visiting the family said to him, “If you keep on eating dead foods, you certainly will die. Only living foods can make a living body.” Young Hauser took his advice and began eating fresh fruits and vegetables. His hip began to heal.
Intensely curious about what was happening to him, Hauser developed a strong interest in naturopathy. Benedict Lust, whose role as a pioneer naturopath has previously been discussed, advised him on dietary matters. From naturopathy Hauser went to naprapathy—a Chicago-born off-shoot of chiropractics—and eventually enjoyed a full recovery. He returned to the United States in the early twenties, had his name officially changed, and began practicing naprapathy at a small office on Michigan Boulevard, in Chicago. Outside of his attendance at the Chicago College of Naprapathy, he has had no formal schooling in either medicine or the science of nutrition.4
Eventually, Hauser gave up naprapathy for writing and lecturing. His success was so immediate that he invaded Hollywood in 1927, where his dietary views quickly became a movie colony craze. His most enthusiastic convert was Greta Garbo. She became his constant companion in a friendship which lasted many years. England and Europe later provided pastures as green as those of Hollywood. Lady Elsie Mendl, who until her death at ninety-four regularly stood on her head as a therapeutic measure, was one of his strong supporters. So was the Duchess of Windsor, who wrote an introduction for the French edition of his current best-seller. Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Cobina Wright, Sr., and Paulette Goddard are other notables included among those whom Hauser likes to call “my people.”
What is the Hauser system?5 Basically it is a naturopathic approach with special emphasis on what Hauser calls his five wonder foods—skim milk, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, yogurt, and blackstrap molasses. “Any one of these five foods, used daily,” he writes, “can probably add five youthful years to your life.” Although sold chiefly through health food stores in large cities, regular grocers now stock them, and there is no question that the astonishing growth of the Hauser cult has enormously increased the sales of these products. There is considerable question, however, about the virtues of the wonder foods. The best medical opinion is that they offer nothing one cannot obtain less expensively from ordinary foods. Yogurt, for example, is a specially fermented milk of no more health merit than buttermilk, but it costs a great deal more.
Blackstrap molasses is the dark, sticky dregs that remain after the process of sugar refining is completed. According to Hauser, it has enormous medicinal properties. In his book he states that it will help cure insomnia, nervousness, menopause troubles, baldness, and low blood pressure. In addition, Hauser claims, it will help restore gray hair to its former color, aid the digestion, prevent many changes due to old age, help the functioning of glands, and strengthen the heart. Government nutrition experts have called these claims “false and misleading.”6
In addition to income from his lectures, radio and TV appearances, books, and a magazine called Gayelord Hauser’s Diet Digest, Hauser also is a partner in Modern Products, Inc., a Milwaukee firm of more than twenty years standing. It is from Modern Products that one can obtain the special foods and medicines which Hauser promotes in his books and lectures. In the past there have been several brushes with the government over advertising claims for many of these products.
Due to the leniency of courts, the government has great difficulty in preventing the sale of magic foods and nostrums. It took the Food and Drug Administration four years, for example, to restrict the sale of Nutrilite by 15,000 door to door salesmen. Nutrilite was a cheap mixture of alfalfa, parsley, and watercress, that was supposed to cure 57 different diseases at a cost of $200 a year to the client. The government did not win its case. It succeeded only in forcing the manufacturers of Nutrilite to soften their claims. The product is still widely advertised and sold.
It would take many volumes to discuss all the tonics, vitamin products, mineral salts, and other miracle foods which in recent years have made fortunes for their promoters. One manufacturer even put vitamins in soap, where they are about as useful as the hormones that appeared in a nationally advertised brand of face cream or the magnetic properties recently acquired by a certain make of razor blade. Chlorophyll seems to be the latest wonder compound turning up everywhere to do everything.
If one wants insight into the rise and promotion of a worthless tonic, he should read H. G. Wells’ amusing novel, Tono-Bungay. The title is from the name of a patent medicine that not only had none of the virtues advertised but also was slightly harmful to the kidneys. And if you think Wells’ narrative is dated, compare it with the recent fabulous rise of Hadacol, a cure-all vitamin and mineral tonic that smells and tastes terrible, but is high in alcoholic content.
Groucho Marx, on his radio program a few years ago, interviewed the inventor of Hadacol, Louisiana State Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc. When Groucho asked him what Hadacol was good for, LeBlanc gave an answer of startling honesty. “It was good,” the senator said, “for five and a half million for me last year.”