THE bane of modern life is constipation. Huge fortunes are made by the production of laxatives and purgatives, and the vendors advertise them as “perfectly innocuous”, selling them in the form of chocolates or in some other attractive form and proclaiming that these laxatives are not “habit creating”. Of course this is a lie. Every laxative is habit creating and I have no hesitation in asserting that purgatives create constipation. If no laxatives and purgatives existed, then people would be compelled to regulate their bowels by natural means, by dietetic means.
As it is, people eat and drink what they like, they do not inquire for a moment whether the food is constipating or not because they know that their daily dose will clear their bowels. The bowel, like the stomach, has no pain nerves. Consequently we do not realize the injury we do to our bowels by the laxatives which we take. All laxatives act as an irritant to the bowel, exactly as a vomitive acts as an irritant to the bowel, exactly as a vomitive acts as irritant to the stomach. Now the bowel wall gets weakened, not only by constant abrasions which occur in consequence of the irritating medicines taken day after day, week after week, year after year.
A few weeks ago I went to the leading London nursing home, the London Clinic and Nursing Home in Harley Street, where they have accommodation for about two hundred people. The cooking is exceptionally good but the serve white bread and white sugar as a matter of course. The idea that we need entire foods, and that especially the sick and ailing need entire foods, had perhaps not occurred to the managers of that excellent institution, or they may say to themselves: “People want to have white bread and white sugar and we cannot force them to have anything different”.
The difference between white and wholemeal bread can easily be shown. Experimenters have put a number of rats in two different cages, feeding one set with white bread and water and the other set with wholemeal bread and water. The rats fed on white bread became ill, nervous and insane, and died a horrible death within a few weeks. The rats fed on wholemeal bread flourished and increased.
We are treated like wretched experimental laboratory animals by the people who supply us with white bread and flour, sugar and jam, cereals, and countless other things. To the providers of these so-called goods it is quite immaterial whether their food-stuffs create constipation and kill or cause disease and disorder as long as they can make a profit, and the average business man wished to provide those things which the public demands. The public is too lazy to cook so it gets things in tins and, therefore, hundreds of thousands live on mummified food.
Eighty years ago Florence Nightingale pointed out in her Notes to Nurses that one can frequently cure constipation by eliminating white bread and substituting wholemeal bread. Nevertheless, I should think that 99 per cent. of nurses live on white bread reinforced by daily pills. The one tastes nicer and the others do not taste at all.
Constipation is not a triviality to be laughed at but a desperately serious complaint. According to the great Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane it is the principal cause of innumerable diseases, and it is obvious that constipation is bound to aggravate very seriously all existing diseases and disorders. The bowel cannot be cleared by a brisk laxative, as if it where made of wrought iron, with impunity. Cancer of the bowel is particularly frequent in the chronically constipated who take their daily laxatives.
It is noteworthy that the weakest part, or the most diseased part, of the human body is the alimentary tract. The condition of the civilized food tract from the mouth to the anus is disgraceful. The mouths of the civilized are usually mis-shapen, the jaws are too narrow, the teeth are too cramped, and in consequence of this condition the nasal passages also are insufficiently developed, causing mouth breathing. The teeth of the civilized are a disgrace and a reproach.
Pyorrhoea and other food diseases ruin the dentures of the vast majority of the civilized. Further down in the mouth and throat we find the degeneration process continuing, producing enlarged tonsils, adenoids, chronic sore throats, relaxed throats and so forth. The condition of the stomach is as shameful as that of the mouth. The civilized are dependent on medicines for digesting their food, most of which would be better put into the dust-bin than into human stomachs.
Gastric ulcers, colitis, appendicitis, etc. are privileges of the produces constipation. The lower end of the bowel is ornamented in thousands of cases with haemorrhoids. Primitive animals and savages do not suffer from constipation and auto- intoxication. They have magnificent teeth, roomy jaws and throats, and excellent digestions. Gastritis, colitis, appendicitis, etc. are unknown among them.
We can produce constipation, colitis, appendicitis, etc. in laboratory animals by putting them on a diet of white bread, overcooked meat, etc., which by way of constipation will lead to the degeneration and complete breakdown of the apparatus of digestion and excretion.
Cancer and constipation undoubtedly go hand in hand. I do not assert that constipation causes cancer in every cases, a thing which would be absurd, but practically every cancer patient is constipated.
The diseases due or aggravated by constipation are innumerable. Twenty-three between ago Hippocrates pointed and advised the treatment of the alienated with purges. The insides of lunatic asylums and such like institutions reveal to every sensitive nose the condition of the bowel tract of the sensitive nose the condition of the bowel tract of the inmates. Melancholia is caused in about 95 per cent. of the cases by constipation, and melancholia is relatively easily curable in its early stages if the sufferer is put on a diet which will provide him with the needed body materials, and which will incidentally regulated the excretory system.
A house where the drains do not function if foul and uninhabitable. That is unfortunately the condition of millions of people who liver under the illusion that they can flourish by eating totally unsuitable foods which cause constipation and then regulate their bowels with pills and salts, a deadly delusion.
Animals and men that have a well-chosen diet with a sufficient supply of vitamins can live for long periods in the absence of sunlight, e.g. pit ponies, night-workers. PROFESSOR LEONARD HILL, Sunshine and Open Air.
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.