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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Henry Thoreau and Tuberculosis
By Benjamin P. Sandler, MD
Summary: In this provocative letter to the editor of the medical journal Chest, Dr. Sandler speculates whether the death of famous American author Henry David Thoreau, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 45, might have been the result of malnutrition he suffered during his years living on Walden Pond. Specifically, Sandler points to the lack of quality protein and excess of carbohydrate foods in Thoreau's diet as probable causes behind his infection. 1973.
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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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Letter on Corpulence [Obesity] Addressed to the Public
By William Banting
Summary: William Banting was an overweight British undertaker who by the mid 1800s had tried all the popular prescriptions for weight loss of his day without success. Then his physician recommended he try abstaining from starches and sweets (i.e., processed carbohydrates). When Banting promptly dropped 35 pounds in a few months, he was inspired to inform the public of his success in the form of this pamphlet. Banting’s publication sparked a rage of successful low-carb dieting across Europe and America that would span the next century. Unbeknownst to most modern nutritionists and weight loss "experts," low-carb dieting in the Banting mode was commonly recommended in early-twentieth-century textbooks on medicine, obesity, and endocrinology. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with the emergence of the notion that eating saturated fat leads to heart disease—a hypothesis that remains unproven to this day—that low-carb diets fell out of favor. Harrison Publishing, London, 1869.
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Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio (entire book)
By Benjamin Sandler, MD
Summary: The complete book, published in 1951 by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. Captain Sandler, a former United States naval surgeon, had been studying the causes of polio and tuberculosis since the 1930s. In both cases, he found that the best way to prevent these infectious diseases was a low-carbohydrate diet. In this book, Dr. Sandler describes how in the summer of 1948, he convinced the media outlets of North Carolina to put his ideas to the test. Over a few-day period in August, newspapers and radio stations throughout the state ran stories presenting Sandler's low-carb diet as a means of polio prevention. (For an example of one such report, see "Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio—Newspaper Article" in these archives.) Subsequently, North Carolina's rate of polio incidence went from being one of the worst in the country to one of the best. Sandler also pokes holes in common beliefs about polio and examines the disease's pattern around the world, explaining why the United States was the worst hit. Shockingly, this book was banned by the government not long after it was published. Yet it reveals much about polio that most doctors have never heard and merits rediscovery, so that the fundamental truths it details can receive a fair hearing in light of current biochemical knowledge. Published under the original title Diet Prevents Polio, 1951.
Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio, Chapter 2
By Benjamin P. Sandler, MD
Summary: In this excerpt from his book Diet Prevents Polio, Dr. Sandler explains how he came to believe, based on years of clinical observation, that susceptibility to infection by the polio virus is determined by quality of diet. "Specifically," he writes, "I suspected that children and adults contracted polio because of low blood sugar brought on by a diet containing sugar and starch." To see how Sandler proved his theory, read the rest of his book, available in these archives under the title "Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio (entire book)." 1951.
View PDF: Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio, Chapter 2
Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio—Newspaper Article
Author unknown
Summary: In 1948, the polio epidemic in the United States was raging. While medicine attempted to find an answer to the problem with its usual recourse, pharmaceutical drugs, one doctor in North Carolina proposed a safer and easier way to prevent the disease: nutritional therapy. Dr. Benjamin Sandler, a former Navy doctor, had discovered that patients who ate a diet high in quality in protein and low in refined carbohydrates were resistant to infection by polio and other contagious diseases. Sandler would prove his point when he convinced the newspapers in the state to run stories, such as the one shown here, recommending a low-carb diet as a means of preventing the disease. The result was a dramatic drop in polio incidence statewide, transforming North Carolina's rate of the disease from one of the highest in the country to one of the lowest. For more on Dr. Sandler's newspaper campaign and his theory of blood-sugar control and disease prevention, see "Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio (entire book)" as well as "Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio, Chapter 2" in these archives. From the Statesville Daily Record, North Carolina, 1948.
Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio—Newspaper Reports
Summary: In the summer of 1948, polio expert Dr. Benjamin Sandler convinced the newspapers and radio stations of North Carolina to test his theory that a low-carbohydrate diet prevents polio. With an epidemic of the disease raging throughout the state and the rest of the country, North Carolina's major newspapers and radio stations ran stories presenting Sandler's low-carb diet as a means of polio prevention. The story was also released to the Associated Press and picked up by papers throughout the nation, including the New York Times, as shown in these clips. Tragically, though North Carolina's rate of polio incidence decreased dramatically as a result of the campaign, the country's medical and health authorities ignored Sander's work. For more on Dr. Sandler's anti-polio newspaper campaign as well as his theory of low-carb diet as a means of disease prevention, see "Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio (entire book)" as well as "Low-Carb Diet Prevents Polio, Chapter 2" in these archives. 1948.
Treatment of Tuberculosis with a Low-Carbohydrate Diet
By Dr. Benjamin P. Sandler and Dr. R. Berke
Summary: Dr. Sandler, a former United States naval surgeon, studied for decades two of his era's most devastating infectious diseases: polio (a viral infection) and tuberculosis (a bacterial one). In both cases he found that a low-carbohydrate diet was the best treatment and prevention for the disease. In this brief, Sandler reports that in ten tuberculosis patients treated with a low-carb diet, "digestive, cardiac, respiratory, nervous and mental symptoms were rapidly relieved and relief was sustained" in each subject. Sandler's findings have been echoed in recent years in diet trials testing low-carbohydrate diets, in which subjects invariably exhibit improvement in biomarkers such as triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, and blood pressure. From American Revue of Tuberculosis, 1942.
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