If the Cerebos Company is entitled to add Phosphate of lime to our salt to improve our bones, some other manufacturer is equally entitled to add iron in some form to his products to improve our blood, and another one may add Sulphur to purify our system, or any other drug which he fancies. The average housewife has not the necessary knowledge to form an opinion whether the daily ingestion of a drug, which is extremely useful to those who need it, is, or is not, harmful to herself and her family.
We are being bombarded from every side with chemical preservatives, chemical dyes, chemical flavourings, and the manufacturers who use these chemicals are in the habit of assuring us that these chemical which may be harmful in large quantities are “quite harmless” if employed in small quantities. Whether this is so or not, no one can tell.
To go back to Cerebos. It may be that the daily ingestion of substantial doses of Calcium phosphate is harmless. It may also be that the daily ingestion of Phosphate of lime is extremely injurious and that in the course of months and years it will cause arteriosclerosis, or will at least aggravate that disease and increase the disposition towards hardening of the arteries.
It may be that the daily doses of that drug may cause or may aggravate the formation of deposits of lime in the joints, called gout, or in the values of the heart, producing valvular heart disease. One could collect opinions among medical men for and against these contingencies, but it would be extremely difficult to produce convincing proof, even by continued experiments on animals, for animals react to numerous drugs differently from human beings.
In any case, one should ask the question, which was put in the Government Report mentioned. ” Is it the manufacturer or the consumer who should have the benefit of the doubt, the manufacturer whose interest in the matter is purely commercial, or the consumer whose interest in the matter is personal and vital?”.
I assume that the Cerebos Company has acted without adequate knowledge in adding substantial quantities of Phosphate of lime to our salt and that, on consideration, they will recognize that they have made a mistake and that they will promptly rectify it. They can probably replace that drug by some harmless food substance which will prevent salt clogging, such as finely powdered starch, flour, etc.
If that is impossible, then they must give us pure salt, to which we surely are entitled, instead of salt, plus drug which only few of us need for a limited period.
In view of the undoubted risk involved in taking daily substantial doses of an unnecessary drug, I would warn all my readers, professional and lay, to avoid Cerebos and Saxa salt and I would suggest to my numerous professional readers to warn all their patients against their use, particularly those patients who suffer from sclerosis in some form or other and who are ordered to avoid the ingestion of lime in hard water, etc. Very likely the health of many patients would greatly improve if Cerebos and Saxa salt were strictly forbidden.
Most unfortunately it is extremely difficult to avoid the ingestion of the salts mentioned. Grocers wish to make a profit. Naturally they can obtain a larger profit from salt sold at 6d. a lb. than from the old-fashioned block salt sold at 1d. a lb. Consequently it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain unmedicated salt. If asked for salt, grocers will tell their customers that they keep Cerebos salt, Saxa salt, Iodized salt, etc., which they can sell at a substantial profit.
If asked for plain ordinary salt, such as block salt, they will say that they do not keep it because it is not asked for, or because it is inferior, or because it is dirty, making some plausible excuse or other. One has to go to the poorer shops in the poorer quarters to obtain plain salt in its original form.
As I stated before, I hope that the Cerebos Company will recognize that it made a mistake in selling to the people salt and a drug, probably under the honest belief that the addition of that drug constituted an improvement to the natural article. I trust that the Company will promptly put on to the market a pure, unmedicated salt. Otherwise it may be compelled to abandon its methods. I cannot imagine that the Ministry of Health will allow the mass-drugging on the part of food manufacturers to continue unchecked.
The warning contained in its latest yearly report, quoted above, should certainly be followed by action. It is particularly applicable to the salts produced by the Cerebos Company and I trust that the Ministry will act without delay for the protection of the public. Warnings in a report which is read by a few are useless unless they are followed by appropriate action.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.