Dr. Wiley’s Question Box: Starches and Sugar Are the Principal Sources of Body Fat
By Harvey W. Wiley, MD
Summary: In 1912, Dr. Wiley left his post as head of the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry because of the collusion he witnessed between food manufacturers and agents within the federal government. Unable to effectively enforce the country's first food purity law (passed in 1906), he left the government and joined the private Good Housekeeping Institute in Washington, D.C. From there, Wiley would help develop the famous Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval while also writing for the institute's magazine. In "Dr. Wiley's Question Box," he would answer specific questions from readers about food safety and nutrition. In the excerpt here, Wiley explains a fact that metabologists have known for nearly a century but which conventional nutritionists and doctors have failed to comprehend from then until now: The principal source of fat stored in the body is not dietary fat but sugars and starches (i.e., carbohydrates). While nutrition schools today continue to teach the erroneous notion that glucose from carbohydrates is "the preferred fuel of the body," Wiley points out what people who study metabolism for a living all know: up to 80% of the carbohydrates a person eats are converted to fat by the liver and stored in the body's fat tissue. Fat tissue, in turn, releases fatty acids, which form the majority of fuel calories used by the body’s cells. From Good Housekeeping, 1926.
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The Heart in Chronic Malnutrition
By J. Higginson, A. D. Gillanders, and J. F. Murray
Summary: A comprehensive review reprinted from the British Heart Journal documenting heart lesions caused by malnutrition among Bantu adults in South Africa. In all 12 fatal cases studied, "the hearts were dilated and hypertrophied," the authors noted, a "distinctive pathological pattern" they attributed squarely to malnutrition. Specifically, the high-carbohydrate Bantu diet, along with B vitamin deficiencies, are implicated. Reprint 74, 1952.
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How to Prevent Heart Attacks
By Benjamin P. Sandler, MD
Summary: An absolutely gripping book, published in its entirety by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. Dr. Sandler, a retired naval surgeon and researcher, challenges conventional science's most basic beliefs about cardiovascular disease. If hardening and blockage of the arteries (i.e., arteriosclerosis) is the reason for heart attacks, he asks, why do many heart attack victims show no evidence of arteriosclerosis upon autopsy? And why do the vast majority of people with significant arteriosclerosis die of non-heart-related reasons? The truth is arteriosclerosis is a "secondary phenomenon, purely incidental, and is not the prime factor initiating [a heart] attack," Sandler says, who points to dysfunctional blood-sugar regulation as the true cause of heart failure. Based on years of documented clinical work, Sandler reports consistent findings that a high-carbohydrate, vitamin-poor diet—the kind of diet Americans have been eating ever since the wide-scale adoption processed foods at the turn of the twentieth century—significantly weakens the heart and leads to heart attack. He especially warns against the budding advice of the time to reduce animal fat consumption. "To implicate animal foods as the ultimate cause of heart attacks because of their fat content is highly dubious and dangerous and unless absolutely confirmed as the cause...they should not be eliminated from the diet nor even slightly reduced." Fifty years later, with animal fat still not shown to be linked with heart disease and heart attack rates showing no decline in spite of Americans having reduced their consumption of animal fats significantly, Dr. Sandler's words ring as true as ever. 1958.
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Low Blood Sugar and Hyperinsulinism
By Dr. George Goodheart
Summary: Dr. Goodheart, the founder of Applied Kinesiology, describes the biochemical, muscular-skeletal, and hormonal response of patients suffering from hyperinsulinism and offers a very simple but still-overlooked step to help remedy the problem: "What does not seem to be understood or practiced is that sugar and all carbohydrates cause this disfunction [sic] and that sugar and high carbohydrates must be restricted." This is one of the earliest chiropractic papers on what was soon to become a huge area of holistic healing. From The Digest of Chiropractic Economics, circa 1965.
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Nutrition and Dental Disease
By Allison G. James, DDS
Summary: A dentist warns that refined grain and sugar products are "the chief causative factor in dental caries [cavities] and paradentosis [gum disease]." The author also discusses the body's important calcium-phosphorus ratio and warns against eating too much "heat-sterilized food." The esteemed Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., MD, comments at the end of the article. From Annals of Western Medicine and Surgery, Reprint 34, 1947.
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Nutritional Aspect of Dental Disease
By John H. Gunter, DDS, MD
Summary: This document is a forerunner of holistic dentistry. Physician and dentist Dr. John Gunter explains in detail why "dental practice is intimately associated with the practice of nutrition." While most people today, including most dentists, believe tooth decay is a result of bacterial attack on helpless teeth, the truth is that a well-defended tooth, made strong by sufficient nutrition, is impervious to such attack. Carbohydrates, Dr. Gunter shows, form the diet that is universally associated with tooth decay. Carnivorous humans and animals are free from cavities. Gunter outlines a systemic approach to dentistry based on a vitamin-rich diet that confers dental and systemic immunity. From Philadelphia Medicine. Reprint 115A, 1942.
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Vitamin B Complex and the Weak Heart
By William Brady, MD
Summary: Dr. Brady was a medical doctor who wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column in the 1940s and 50s. In this article, he discusses the importance of the B complex vitamers—specifically thiamin (B1), riboflavin (B2), and niacinamide (B3)—in the metabolism of carbohydrates as well as to heart health. Vitamin B supplementation had been shown to reduce or eliminate the need for exogenous insulin in some diabetics, Brady notes, and the critical role of the B complex in the functioning of the heart had been revealed all the way back in the 1920s by the famous nutrition pioneer Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison. Astoundingly, modern medicine still fails to grasp the significance of Dr. McCarrison's findings. From the Waterloo Daily Courier, Iowa, 1947.
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Wanted for Stealing: Sugar Bowl Pete
By the Council on Dental Health of the Southern California State Dental Association
Summary: A cartoon poster aimed at children, warning them of the dangers of white sugar and refined carbohydrates. Designed by the Council on Dental Health of the Southern California State Dental Association and published originally in Modern Nutrition. Publication date unknown.
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The Well-Fed Tooth
By Fred Miller, DDS
Summary: "America is a nation of 'candyholics' and soft drink addicts, of food adulterators, processors and refiners," writes Dr. Fred Miller in words that ring as true today as in 1946, when he wrote them. "Having practiced dentistry for more than thirty years I am thoroughly convinced—speaking from the biological point of view, not the moral aspect—that refined white flour and its products—bread, crackers, cookies, pastries —and refined sugar and its products—candies, hard candies and soft drinks—are doing more harm in this country than hard liquor." A great historical overview of the state of malnutrition in America from a frontline dentist. From The Land magazine. Reprint 49A, 1946.
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What Is Wrong with White Bread?
By Philip Harris and Paul Dunbar
Summary: A portfolio of four scientific studies, conducted within the period of 1949 to 1961, on the deadly effects of the deficiency diseases caused by white bread and other foods that have had the vitamin E complex refined out of their structure. A poignant example of how industrial-scale food refinement led to an industrial-scale deficiency in the diet of modern humankind. Various sources. Reprint 137A.
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