“The danger in sugar lies in its unnatural concentration. Nature placed sugar in the sugar cane and the sugar beet in a more or less diluted concentration. Animals eating these entire products are vastly benefited by the unconcentrated carbohydrate represented in this sugar content, together with the associated carbohydrates, resins, gums, salts, etc.
Even the plantation human and brute workers are said to benefit greatly in health, the former from chewing, the latter from eating, the raw sugar cane, out of which they extract the just named food properties in natures own proportions and perfect combinations; as we would reasonably expect. Give nature a chance and she will always work seeming wonders. It is the unnatural that plays havoc with human bodies; and it is the devil of unnaturalness out of which civilization has made a god, that is playing havoc with the bodies of civilized mankind.
“It has been stated of David Livingstone in Africa that while no white men could last in the equatorial jungle for more than a year, because they demanded more luxurious foods, Livingstone subsisted for long periods on a few sticks of raw sugar cane and went on year after year in good health.
“White sugar is the most unnaturally concentrated foodstuff we possess. Yet in North America every man, woman and child consumes, on an average, 100 pounds per year. In addition, they consume enormous quantities of the next most concentrated of civilizations foods, white flour and refined cereals, all also remarkable for their heat-producing properties.
And with these are consumed enormous quantities of unnaturally concentrated peeled and boiled and drained and salted and mashed and creamed and fried potatoes. Equally enormous quantities of concentrated table syrups, the refined products of the sugar refineries; also jams, jellies, marmalades, all made with white sugar, are consumed.
“And North America leads the world in the prevalence of diabetes.
“Of course, one may not be the cause of the other. We must not jump to conclusions. We always get nearer to the truth by long turning all such problems over and over in our minds. In thinking it out, however, keep this other fact in mind; no non- sugar eating animal – meaning refined sugar-ever has the disease diabetes. Nor does the savage who knows absolutely nothing of refined sugar and its associate denatured carbohydrate foodstuff, refined white flour and refined cereal foods.”.
“Is it not strange, is it not almost ridiculous, that we gorge upon unnatural sugar, syrups and molasses, when we have a most delectable natural sweet in honey, a product of nature, a natural food for the young of some of natures most intelligent insects? This natural sweet is rich in saccharine properties, also very rich in mineral salts (about 25 per cent.), and in gums, resins and aromatic properties. Honey is a natural monosaccharide. Honey does not require digestion. It does not have to be inverted.
It is ready for immediate absorption into the blood so soon as it is swallowed. It does not have irritate the mucous lining of the normal stomach. It is slightly laxative. It has not the tendency to ferment or to cause fermentation in other foods that is possessed by white sugar.”.
“Fruits are the very best alkalinizers of the blood and body tissues that we have any knowledge of, just as refined sugar is one of the most powerful acidifiers that we have any knowledge of, in all the range of human foodstuffs. Fruit is also one of the very best sources of the most unstable vitamin C, the food accessory substance that prevents the development of scurvy and a host of kindred, but less well-defined, affections of the human body – probably early and very slowly progressing manifestations of scurvy.
When fruits are cooked, these vitamins are to some extent destroyed, except those inhering in the very acid fruits. When fruits are cooked in strong solutions of sugar, their alkalinizing potentialities are destroyed.
“Fruit preserved in cane sugar is almost certain to cause fermentation, unless used in the most conservative quantities; and such preserved fruit is, for most people, very difficult to digest.
“Fruits preserved in strong sugary solutions are of doubtful benefit to most persons and absolutely harmful to very many who try to make use of them as foods.”.
“Nature has most wonderfully adapted our digestive organs to meet our reasonable needs. If there is only starch food in the stomach there is no need for acid gastric juice to digest it, and nature has arranged that little shall be secreted. For it would make no difference how well saliva were chewed into starch foods, the saliva would cease to digest the starch immediately it contacted acid; and stomach juices is always acid. Nature intends the starch foods to be digested, therefore she holds back the acid secretion.
But if richly protein foods, such as lean meat, fish, game, cheese, eggs are taken into the stomach, this protein food can be digested only by the stomach secretion known as acid gastric juice. From natures standpoint it is more important that protein foods be digested than that starches be digested, for if not digested they quickly decompose and turn to poisons.
Nature, therefore, immediately pours into the stomach acid gastric juice for protein digestion, and starch digestion that is being carried on by the saliva contained in it must immediately cease. Starch digestion cannot possibly go on in the presence of the acid stomach juice”.
“Sir Almroth Wright: It is only the last year or so that I found that the blood of footballers, much as I dislike the game and all its works, is more bactericidal after playing the game than before. I give football only as an physical exercise. The germ staying power is increased after any game”.
“I think the best way by which I can do this is to outline briefly my own daily health regimen, through the operation of which I regained by own health, and rejuvenated my own body at fifty, already old, decrepit and dying at that age, and for many ye ars previous to that age. A man is decrepit and old when his blood pressure reaches 212, and remains there, regardless of the years he has lived.
“So completely have I regain my health, that I have not had even a cold for nineteen years, although I was previously almost a
constant victim. Moreover, I can work eighty to ninety hours a week at the highest possible pitch of effort, carrying on several kinds of activity, mental and physical; walk 250 miles a month and actually never feel tired, my body being practically untouched by ache or pain at seventy-six.
“At seventy-six my mind is clear, more facile and capable and elastic than at any period of my life. I have no backward look towards the past as the best period of my life, but look forward to the future with anticipation of greater things to do and with more certainty of accomplishment than I have ever had. Mine is the mental attitude of youth, and I am really youthful. I have a better chance to reach one hundred and twenty than the average youth or thirty, who lives the conventional civilized life, has to reach sixty.”.
“I have had no holiday since 1917, unless I count as holidays the nineteen-day bicycle trip I took in May, 1924. But this was the most strenuous undertaking of my life. It was a contest undertaken to test my physical endurance, and entered upon as a result of a challenge from a young man thirty-five years my junior.
“This young man had himself given some study to diet, and he was quite certain that upon my diet I could not develop either endurance or pep, but especially endurance. Commencing with a jest, a serious contest was finally arranged to test my endurance. We were to bicycle from Toronto to Montreal, then as much farther as we might decide between us. He was to set the pace. If I could follow I won the contest. If not, I lost.
“He ate the conventional diet of civilized peoples: meat, white b read, eggs, bacon, marmalade, jams, etc. I ate Roman Meal, fruits (raisins, prunes, figs, dates), vegetables (cabbage, sauerkraut, baked beans), milk.
“We reached Montreal in four and a half days, each carrying fifty pounds of camp equipment, etc. We returned through Northern and Central New York, via Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Hamilton to Toronto. We slept out all of those nineteen nights but one, in the cold wet spring of 1924, often wet to the skin.
“I not only kept up to my young companion, but over the hills around Watertown, N.Y., actually ran away from him, causing the only unpleasantness of our entire trip. He was so angered that I should make of the contest a trial of brute strength that when he arrived at Watertown, where I awaited him until chilled to the bone, beating him by almost three hours, he actually went so far as to go to the railways station to take the train for home, but thought better of it, and continued on with me to the end, admitting, like the good sport he was, that he was beaten.
“So strenuous had been the day for him, that he was sick all night, all the next day and the next night – so sick that we were able to make eighteen miles only, instead of our usual seventy to seventy-five miles daily.
In 1914, when Dr. Robert G. Jackson M.D. was in his 40s, he developed a severe case of arthritis (probably rheumatoid arthritis) and when he was 49, his doctors gave him four years to live. He refused to accept the diagnosis and began to exercise more and sleep with his bedroom windows open. Long before such things were popular, he developed a health food diet of fruits, vegetables and his own line of health foods including Roman Meal bread. This bread was fashioned after the multi-grain bread ate by the Roman legions and included wheat, barley, oats, spelt and rye. Disease,” he said, “was due solely to man’s stupidity.”
Jackson started the Roman Meal Co. to manufacture his special diet foods. He went on lecture tours where he attracted large audiences. He bragged that “I am growing younger every year.” By 1930, at age 72, and in good health, he was a millionaire. He died in 1941 from complications of a broken hip. Roman Meal bread is still available in the United States.