Article Written by William Dufty

Why Sugar Is Toxic To The Body

In 1957, Dr. William Coda Martin tried to answer the question: When is a food a food and when is it a poison? His working definition of “poison” was: “Medically: Any substance applied to the body, ingested or developed within the body, which causes or may cause disease. Physically: Any substance which inhibits the activity of a catalyst which is a minor substance, chemical or enzyme that activates a reaction.”1 The dictionary gives an even broader definition for “poison”: “to exert a harmful influence on, or to pervert”.

Dr. Martin classified refined sugar as a poison because it has been depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals. “What is left consists of pure, refined carbohydrates. The body cannot utilize this refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins and minerals are present. Nature supplies these elements in each plant in quantities sufficient to metabolize the carbohydrate in that particular plant. There is no excess for other added carbohydrates. Incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results in the formation of ‘toxic metabolite’ such as pyruvic acid and abnormal sugars containing five carbon atoms. Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system and the abnormal sugars in the red blood cells. These toxic metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells. They cannot get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally. In time, some of the cells die. This interferes with the function of a part of the body and is the beginning of degenerative disease.”2

Refined sugar is lethal when ingested by humans because it provides only that which nutritionists describe as “empty” or “naked” calories. It lacks the natural minerals which are present in the sugar beet or cane.

In addition, sugar is worse than nothing because it drains and leaches the body of precious vitamins and minerals through the demand its digestion, detoxification and elimination makes upon one’s entire system. So essential is balance to our bodies that we have many ways to provide against the sudden shock of a heavy intake of sugar. Minerals such as sodium (from salt), potassium and magnesium (from vegetables), and calcium (from the bones) are mobilized and used in chemical transmutation; neutral acids are produced which attempt to return the acid-alkaline balance factor of the blood to a more normal state.

Sugar taken every day produces a continuously overacid condition, and more and more minerals are required from deep in the body in the attempt to rectify the imbalance. Finally, in order to protect the blood, so much calcium is taken from the bones and teeth that decay and general weakening begin. Excess sugar eventually affects every organ in the body. Initially, it is stored in the liver in the form of glucose (glycogen). Since the liver’s capacity is limited, a daily intake of refined sugar (above the required amount of natural sugar) soon makes the liver expand like a balloon. When the liver is filled to its maximum capacity, the excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids. These are taken to every part of the body and stored in the most inactive areas: the belly, the buttocks, the breasts and the thighs.

When these comparatively harmless places are completely filled, fatty acids are then distributed among active organs, such as the heart and kidneys. These begin to slow down; finally their tissues degenerate and turn to fat. The whole body is affected by their reduced ability, and abnormal blood pressure is created. The parasympathetic nervous system is affected; and organs governed by it, such as the small brain, become inactive or paralyzed. (Normal brain function is rarely thought of as being as biologic as digestion.) The circulatory and lymphatic systems are invaded, and the quality of the red corpuscles starts to change. An overabundance of white cells occurs, and the creation of tissue becomes slower. Our body’s tolerance and immunizing power becomes more limited, so we cannot respond properly to extreme attacks, whether they be cold, heat, mosquitoes or microbes.

Excessive sugar has a strong mal-effect on the functioning of the brain. The key to orderly brain function is glutamic acid, a vital compound found in many vegetables. The B vitamins play a major role in dividing glutamic acid into antagonistic-complementary compounds which produce a “proceed” or “control” response in the brain. B vitamins are also manufactured by symbiotic bacteria which live in our intestines. When refined sugar is taken daily, these bacteria wither and die, and our stock of B vitamins gets very low. Too much sugar makes one sleepy; our ability to calculate and remember is lost.

SUGAR: HARMFUL TO HUMANS AND ANIMALS

Shipwrecked sailors who ate and drank nothing but sugar and rum for nine days surely went through some of this trauma; the tales they had to tell created a big public relations problem for the sugar pushers. This incident occurred when a vessel carrying a cargo of sugar was shipwrecked in 1793. The five surviving sailors were finally rescued after being marooned for nine days. They were in a wasted condition due to starvation, having consumed nothing but sugar and rum. The eminent French physiologist F. Magendie was inspired by that incident to conduct a series of experiments with animals, the results of which he published in 1816. In the experiments, he fed dogs a diet of sugar or olive oil and water. All the dogs wasted and died.3

The shipwrecked sailors and the French physiologist’s experimental dogs proved the same point. As a steady diet, sugar is worse than nothing. Plain water can keep you alive for quite some time. Sugar and water can kill you. Humans [and animals] are “unable to subsist on a diet of sugar”.4 The dead dogs in Professor Magendie’s laboratory alerted the sugar industry to the hazards of free scientific inquiry. From that day to this, the sugar industry has invested millions of dollars in behind-the-scenes, subsidized science. The best scientific names that money could buy have been hired, in the hope that they could one day come up with something at least pseudoscientific in the way of glad tidings about sugar.

It has been proved, however, that (1) sugar is a major factor in dental decay; (2) sugar in a person’s diet does cause overweight; (3) removal of sugar from diets has cured symptoms of crippling, worldwide diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart illnesses. Sir Frederick Banting, the codiscoverer of insulin, noticed in 1929 in Panama that, among sugar plantation owners who ate large amounts of their refined stuff, diabetes was common. Among native cane-cutters, who only got to chew the raw cane, he saw no diabetes. However, the story of the public relations attempts on the part of the sugar manufacturers began in Britain in 1808 when the Committee of West India reported to the House of Commons that a prize of twenty-five guineas had been offered to anyone who could come up with the most “satisfactory” experiments to prove that unrefined sugar was good for feeding and fattening oxen, cows, hogs and sheep.5

Food for animals is often seasonal, always expensive. Sugar, by then, was dirt cheap. People weren’t eating it fast enough. Naturally, the attempt to feed livestock with sugar and molasses in England in 1808 was a disaster. When the Committee on West India made its fourth report to the House of Commons, one Member of Parliament, John Curwin, reported that he had tried to feed sugar and molasses to calves without success. He suggested that perhaps someone should try again by sneaking sugar and molasses into skimmed milk. Had anything come of that, you can be sure the West Indian sugar merchants would have spread the news around the world. After this singular lack of success in pushing sugar in cow pastures, the West Indian sugar merchants gave up.

With undaunted zeal for increasing the market demand for the most important agricultural product of the West Indies, the Committee of West India was reduced to a tactic that has served the sugar pushers for almost 200 years: irrelevant and transparently silly testimonials from faraway, inaccessible people with some kind of “scientific” credentials. While preparing his epochal volume, A History of Nutrition, published in 1957, Professor E. V. McCollum (Johns Hopkins university), sometimes called America’s foremost nutritionist and certainly a pioneer in the field, reviewed approximately 200,000 published scientific papers, recording experiments with food, their properties, their utilization and their effects on animals and men. The material covered the period from the mid-18th century to 1940. From this great repository of scientific inquiry, McCollum selected those experiments which he regarded as significant “to relate the story of progress in discovering human error in this segment of science [of nutrition]”.

Professor McCollum failed to record a single controlled scientific experiment with sugar between 1816 and 1940. unhappily, we must remind ourselves that scientists today, and always, accomplish little without a sponsor. The protocols of modern science have compounded the costs of scientific inquiry. We have no right to be surprised when we read the introduction to McCollum’s A History of Nutrition and find that “The author and publishers are indebted to The Nutrition Foundation, Inc., for a grant provided to meet a portion of the cost of publication of this book”. What, you might ask, is The Nutrition Foundation, Inc.? The author and the publishers don’t tell you. It happens to be a front organization for the leading sugar-pushing conglomerates in the food business, including the American Sugar Refining Company, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Curtis Candy Co., General Foods, General Mills, Nestlé Co., Pet Milk Co. and Sunshine Biscuits-about 45 such companies in all. Perhaps the most significant thing about McCollum’s 1957 history was what he left out: a monumental earlier work described by an eminent Harvard professor as “one of those epochal pieces of research which makes every other investigator desirous of kicking himself because he never thought of doing the same thing”.

In the 1930s, a research dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, Dr. Weston A. Price, traveled all over the world-from the lands of the Eskimos to the South Sea Islands, from Africa to New Zealand. His Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects,6 which is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, was first published in 1939. Dr. Price took the whole world as his laboratory. His devastating conclusion, recorded in horrifying detail in area after area, was simple. People who live under so-called backward primitive conditions had excellent teeth and wonderful general health. They ate natural, unrefined food from their own locale. As soon as refined, sugared foods were imported as a result of contact with “civilization,” physical degeneration began in a way that was definitely observable within a single generation. Any credibility the sugar pushers have is based on our ignorance of works like that of Dr. Price.

Sugar manufacturers keep trying, hoping and contributing generous research grants to colleges and universities; but the research laboratories never come up with anything solid the manufacturers can use. Invariably, the research results are bad news. “Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating and be wise,” Harvard professor Ernest Hooten said in Apes, Men, and Morons.7 “Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and toothpaste are any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish. It is store food that has given us store teeth.” When the researchers bite the hands that feed them, and the news gets out, it’s embarrassing all around. In 1958, Time magazine reported that a Harvard biochemist and his assistants had worked with myriads of mice for more than ten years, bankrolled by the Sugar Research Foundation, Inc. to the tune of $57,000, to find out how sugar causes dental cavities and how to prevent this. It took them ten years to discover that there was no way to prevent sugar causing dental decay. When the researchers reported their findings in the Dental Association Journal, their source of money dried up. The Sugar Research Foundation withdrew its support. The more that the scientists disappointed them, the more the sugar pushers had to rely on the ad men.

SUCROSE: “PURE” ENERGY AT A PRICE

When calories became the big thing in the 1920s, and everybody was learning to count them, the sugar pushers turned up with a new pitch. They boasted there were 2,500 calories in a pound of sugar. A little over a quarter-pound of sugar would produce 20 per cent of the total daily quota. “If you could buy all your food energy as cheaply as you buy calories in sugar,” they told us, “your board bill for the year would be very low. If sugar were seven cents a pound, it would cost less than $35 for a whole year.” A very inexpensive way to kill yourself. “Of course, we don’t live on any such unbalanced diet,” they admitted later. “But that figure serves to point out how inexpensive sugar is as an energy-building food. What was once a luxury only a privileged few could enjoy is now a food for the poorest of people.”

Later, the sugar pushers advertised that sugar was chemically pure, topping Ivory soap in that department, being 99.9 per cent pure against Ivory’s vaunted 99.44 per cent. “No food of our everyday diet is purer,” we were assured. What was meant by purity, besides the unarguable fact that all vitamins, minerals, salts, fibers and proteins had been removed in the refining process? Well, the sugar pushers came up with a new slant on purity. “You don’t have to sort it like beans, wash it like rice. Every grain is like every other. No waste attends its use. No useless bones like in meat, no grounds like coffee.” “Pure” is a favorite adjective of the sugar pushers because it means one thing to the chemists and another thing to the ordinary mortals. When honey is labeled pure, this means that it is in its natural state (stolen directly from the bees who made it), with no adulteration with sucrose to stretch it and no harmful chemical residues which may have been sprayed on the flowers. It does not mean that the honey is free from minerals like iodine, iron, calcium, phosphorus or multiple vitamins. So effective is the purification process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries that sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a chemist has on the laboratory shelves.

What nutritional virtue this abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us. Beginning with World War I, the sugar pushers coated their propaganda with a preparedness pitch. “Dietitians have known the high food value of sugar for a long time,” said an industry tract of the 1920s. “But it took World War I to bring this home. The energy-building power of sugar reaches the muscles in minutes and it was of value to soldiers as a ration given them just before an attack was launched.” The sugar pushers have been harping on the energy-building power of sucrose for years because it contains nothing else. Caloric energy and habit-forming taste: that’s what sucrose has, and nothing else. All other foods contain energy plus. All foods contain some nutrients in the way of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins or minerals, or all of these. Sucrose contains caloric energy, period.

The “quick” energy claim the sugar pushers talk about, which drives reluctant doughboys over the top and drives children up the wall, is based on the fact that refined sucrose is not digested in the mouth or the stomach but passes directly to the lower intestines and thence to the bloodstream. The extra speed with which sucrose enters the bloodstream does more harm than good. Much of the public confusion about refined sugar is compounded by language. Sugars are classified by chemists as “carbohydrates”. This manufactured word means “a substance containing carbon with oxygen and hydrogen”. If chemists want to use these hermetic terms in their laboratories when they talk to one another, fine. The use of the word “carbohydrate” outside the laboratory-especially in food labeling and advertising lingo-to describe both natural, complete cereal grains (which have been a principal food of mankind for thousands of years) and man-refined sugar (which is a manufactured drug and principal poison of mankind for only a few hundred years) is demonstrably wicked. This kind of confusion makes possible the flimflam practiced by sugar pushers to confound anxious mothers into thinking kiddies need sugar to survive.

The use of the word “carbohydrate” to describe sugar is deliberately misleading. Since the improved labeling of nutritional properties was required on packages and cans, refined carbohydrates like sugar are lumped together with those carbohydrates which may or may not be refined. The several types of carbohydrates are added together for an overall carbohydrate total. Thus, the effect of the label is to hide the sugar content from the unwary buyer. Chemists add to the confusion by using the word “sugar” to describe an entire group of substances that are similar but not identical. Glucose is a sugar found usually with other sugars, in fruits and vegetables. It is a key material in the metabolism of all plants and animals. Many of our principal foods are converted into glucose in our bodies. Glucose is always present in our bloodstream, and it is often called “blood sugar”. Dextrose, also called “corn sugar”, is derived synthetically from starch. Fructose is fruit sugar. Maltose is malt sugar. Lactose is milk sugar. Sucrose is refined sugar made from sugar cane and sugar beet. Glucose has always been an essential element in the human bloodstream. Sucrose addiction is something new in the history of the human animal.

To use the word “sugar” to describe two substances which are far from being identical, which have different chemical structures and which affect the body in profoundly different ways compounds confusion. It makes possible more flimflam from the sugar pushers who tell us how important sugar is as an essential component of the human body, how it is oxidized to produce energy, how it is metabolized to produce warmth, and so on. They’re talking about glucose, of course, which is manufactured in our bodies. However, one is led to believe that the manufacturers are talking about the sucrose which is made in their refineries. When the word “sugar” can mean the glucose in your blood as well as the sucrose in your Coca-Cola, it’s great for the sugar pushers but it’s rough on everybody else.

People have been bamboozled into thinking of their bodies the way they think of their check accounts. If they suspect they have low blood sugar, they are programmed to snack on vending machine candies and sodas in order to raise their blood sugar level. Actually, this is the worst thing to do. The level of glucose in their blood is apt to be low because they are addicted to sucrose. People who kick sucrose addiction and stay off sucrose find that the glucose level of their blood returns to normal and stays there. Since the late 1960s, millions of Americans have returned to natural food. A new type of store, the natural food store, has encouraged many to become dropouts from the supermarket. Natural food can be instrumental in restoring health. Many people, therefore, have come to equate the word “natural” with “healthy”.

So the sugar pushers have begun to pervert the word “natural” in order to mislead the public. “Made from natural ingredients”, the television sugar-pushers tell us about product after product. The word “from” is snot accented on television. It should be. Even refined sugar is made from natural ingredients. There is nothing new about that. The natural ingredients are cane and beets. But that four-letter word “from” hardly suggests that 90 per cent of the cane and beet have been removed. Heroin, too, could be advertised as being made from natural ingredients. The opium poppy is as natural as the sugar beet. It’s what man does with it that tells the story. If you want to avoid sugar in the supermarket, there is only one sure way. Don’t buy anything unless it says on the label prominently, in plain English: “No sugar added”. use of the word “carbohydrate” as a “scientific” word for sugar has become a standard defense strategy with sugar pushers and many of their medical apologists. It’s their security blanket.

CORRECT FOOD COMBINING

Whether it’s sugared cereal or pastry and black coffee for breakfast, whether it’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola for lunch or the full “gourmet” dinner in the evening, chemically the average American diet is a formula that guarantees bubble, bubble, stomach trouble. unless you’ve taken too much insulin and, in a state of insulin shock, need sugar as an antidote, hardly anyone ever has cause to take sugar alone. Humans need sugar as much as they need the nicotine in tobacco. Crave it is one thing-need it is another. From the days of the Persian Empire to our own, sugar has usually been used to hop up the flavor of other food and drink, as an ingredient in the kitchen or as a condiment at the table. Let us leave aside for the moment the known effect of sugar (long-term and short-term) on the entire system and concentrate on the effect of sugar taken in combination with other daily foods.

When Grandma warned that sugared cookies before meals “will spoil your supper”, she knew what she was talking about. Her explanation might not have satisfied a chemist but, as with many traditional axioms from the Mosaic law on kosher food and separation in the kitchen, such rules are based on years of trial and error and are apt to be right on the button. Most modern research in combining food is a labored discovery of the things Grandma took for granted. Any diet or regimen undertaken for the single purpose of losing weight is dangerous, by definition. Obesity is talked about and treated as a disease in 20th-century America. Obesity is not a disease. It is only a symptom, a sign, a warning that your body is out of order. Dieting to lose weight is as silly and dangerous as taking aspirin to relieve a headache before you know the reason for the headache.

Getting rid of a symptom is like turning off an alarm. It leaves the basic cause untouched. Any diet or regimen undertaken with any objective short of restoration of total health of your body is dangerous. Many overweight people are undernourished. (Dr. H. Curtis Wood stresses this point in his 1971 book, Overfed But undernourished.) Eating less can aggravate this condition, unless one is concerned with the quality of the food instead of just its quantity. Many people-doctors included-assume that if weight is lost, fat is lost. This is not necessarily so. Any diet which lumps all carbohydrates together is dangerous. Any diet which does not consider the quality of carbohydrates and makes the crucial life-and-death distinction between natural, unrefined carbohydrates like whole grains and vegetables and man-refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour is dangerous. Any diet which includes refined sugar and white flour, no matter what “scientific” name is applied to them, is dangerous.

Kicking sugar and white flour and substituting whole grains, vegetables and natural fruits in season, is the core of any sensible natural regimen. Changing the quality of your carbohydrates can change the quality of your health and life. If you eat natural food of good quality, quantity tends to take care of itself. Nobody is going to eat a half-dozen sugar beets or a whole case of sugar cane. Even if they do, it will be less dangerous than a few ounces of sugar. Sugar of all kinds-natural sugars, such as those in honey and fruit (fructose), as well as the refined white stuff (sucrose)-tends to arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect on the stomach’s natural ability to move. Sugars are not digested in the mouth, like cereals, or in the stomach, like animal flesh. When taken alone, they pass quickly through the stomach into the small intestine. When sugars are eaten with other foods-perhaps meat and bread in a sandwich-they are held up in the stomach for a while.

The sugar in the bread and the Coke sit there with the hamburger and the bun waiting for them to be digested. While the stomach is working on the animal protein and the refined starch in the bread, the addition of the sugar practically guarantees rapid acid fermentation under the conditions of warmth and moisture existing in the stomach. One lump of sugar in your coffee after a sandwich is enough to turn your stomach into a fermenter. One soda with a hamburger is enough to turn your stomach into a still. Sugar on cereal-whether you buy it already sugared in a box or add it yourself-almost guarantees acid fermentation.

Since the beginning of time, natural laws were observed, in both senses of that word, when it came to eating foods in combination. Birds have been observed eating insects at one period in the day and seeds at another. Other animals tend to eat one food at a time. Flesh-eating animals take their protein raw and straight. In the Orient, it is traditional to eat yang before yin. Miso soup (fermented soybean protein, yang) for breakfast; raw fish (more yang protein) at the beginning of the meal; afterwards comes the rice (which is less yang than the miso and fish); and then the vegetables which are yin. If you ever eat with a traditional Japanese family and you violate this order, the Orientals (if your friends) will correct you courteously but firmly. The law observed by Orthodox Jews prohibits many combinations at the same meal, especially flesh and dairy products. Special utensils for the dairy meal and different utensils for the flesh meal reinforce that taboo at the food’s source in the kitchen.

Man learned very early in the game what improper combinations of food could do to the human system. When he got a stomach ache from combining raw fruit with grain, or honey with porridge, he didn’t reach for an antacid tablet. He learned not to eat that way. When gluttony and excess became widespread, religious codes and commandments were invoked against it. Gluttony is a capital sin in most religions; but there are no specific religious warnings or commandments against refined sugar because sugar abuse-like drug abuse-did not appear on the world scene until centuries after holy books had gone to press.

“Why must we accept as normal what we find in a race of sick and weakened human beings?” Dr. Herbert M. Shelton asks. “Must we always take it for granted that the present eating practices of civilized men are normal?… Foul stools, loose stools, impacted stools, pebbly stools, much foul gas, colitis, hemorrhoids, bleeding with stools, the need for toilet paper are swept into the orbit of the normal.”8

When starches and complex sugars (like those in honey and fruits) are digested, they are broken down into simple sugars called “monosaccharides”, which are usable substances-nutriments. When starches and sugars are taken together and undergo fermentation, they are broken down into carbon dioxide, acetic acid, alcohol and water. With the exception of the water, all these are unusable substances-poisons. When proteins are digested, they are broken down into amino acids, which are usable substances-nutriments. When proteins are taken with sugar, they putrefy; they are broken down into a variety of ptomaines and leucomaines, which are nonusable substances-poisons. Enzymic digestion of foods prepares them for use by our body. Bacterial decomposition makes them unfit for use by our body. The first process gives us nutriments; the second gives us poisons.

Much that passes for modern nutrition is obsessed with a mania for quantitative counting. The body is treated like a check account. Deposit calories (like dollars) and withdraw energy. Deposit proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals-balanced quantitatively-and the result, theoretically, is a healthy body. People qualify as healthy today if they can crawl out of bed, get to the office and sign in. If they can’t make it, call the doctor to qualify for sick pay, hospitalization, rest cure-anything from a day’s pay without working to an artificial kidney, courtesy of the taxpayers. But what does it profit someone if the theoretically required calories and nutrients are consumed daily, yet this random eat-on-the-run, snack-time collection of foods ferments and putrefies in the digestive tract? What good is it if the body is fed protein, only to have it putrefy in the gastrointestinal canal? Carbohydrates that ferment in the digestive tract are converted into alcohol and acetic acid, not digestible monosaccharides. “To derive sustenance from foods eaten, they must be digested,” Shelton warned years ago. “They must not rot.” Sure, the body can get rid of poisons through the urine and the pores; the amount of poisons in the urine is taken as an index to what’s going on in the intestine. The body does establish a tolerance for these poisons, just as it adjusts gradually to an intake of heroin. But, says Shelton, “the discomfort from accumulation of gas, the bad breath, and foul and unpleasant odors are as undesirable as are the poisons”.9

SUGAR AND MENTAL HEALTH

In the Dark Ages, troubled souls were rarely locked up for going off their rocker. Such confinement began in the Age of Enlightenment, after sugar made the transition from apothecary’s prescription to candymaker’s confection. “The great confinement of the insane”, as one historian calls it,10 began in the late 17th century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in 200 years from a pinch or two in a barrel of beer, here and there, to more than two million pounds per year. By that time, physicians in London had begun to observe and record terminal physical signs and symptoms of the “sugar blues”.

Meanwhile, when sugar eaters did not manifest obvious terminal physical symptoms and the physicians were professionally bewildered, patients were no longer pronounced bewitched, but mad, insane, emotionally disturbed. Laziness, fatigue, debauchery, parental displeasure-any one problem was sufficient cause for people under twenty-five to be locked up in the first Parisian mental hospitals. All it took to be incarcerated was a complaint from parents, relatives or the omnipotent parish priest. Wet nurses with their babies, pregnant youngsters, retarded or defective children, senior citizens, paralytics, epileptics, prostitutes or raving lunatics-anyone wanted off the streets and out of sight was put away. The mental hospital succeeded witch-hunting and heresy-hounding as a more enlightened and humane method of social control. The physician and priest handled the dirty work of street sweeping in return for royal favors.

Initially, when the General Hospital was established in Paris by royal decree, one per cent of the city’s population was locked up. From that time until the 20 century, as the consumption of sugar went up and up-especially in the cities-so did the number of people who were put away in the General Hospital. Three hundred years later, the “emotionally disturbed” can be turned into walking automatons, their brains controlled with psychoactive drugs. Today, pioneers of orthomolecular psychiatry, such as Dr. Abram Hoffer, Dr. Allan Cott, Dr. A. Cherkin as well as Dr. Linus Pauling, have confirmed that mental illness is a myth and that emotional disturbance can be merely the first symptom of the obvious inability of the human system to handle the stress of sugar dependency. In Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Dr. Pauling writes: “The functioning of the brain and nervous tissue is more sensitively dependent on the rate of chemical reactions than the functioning of other organs and tissues. I believe that mental disease is for the most part caused by abnormal reaction rates, as determined by genetic constitution and diet, and by abnormal molecular concentrations of essential substances. Selection of food (and drugs) in a world that is undergoing rapid scientific and technological change may often be far from the best.”11

In Megavitamin B3 Therapy for Schizophrenia, Dr. Abram Hoffer notes: “Patients are also advised to follow a good nutritional program with restriction of sucrose and sucrose-rich foods.”12 Clinical research with hyperactive and psychotic children, as well as those with brain injuries and learning disabilities, has shown: “An abnormally high family history of diabetes-that is, parents and grandparents who cannot handle sugar; an abnormally high incidence of low blood glucose, or functional hypoglycemia in the children themselves, which indicates that their systems cannot handle sugar; dependence on a high level of sugar in the diets of the very children who cannot handle it. “Inquiry into the dietary history of patients diagnosed as schizophrenic reveals the diet of their choice is rich in sweets, candy, cakes, coffee, caffeinated beverages, and foods prepared with sugar. These foods, which stimulate the adrenals, should be eliminated or severely restricted.”13

The avant-garde of modern medicine has rediscovered what the lowly sorceress learned long ago through painstaking study of nature. “In more than twenty years of psychiatric work,” writes DR Thomas Szasz, “I have never known a clinical psychologist to report, on the basis of a projective test, that the subject is a normal, mentally healthy person. While some witches may have survived dunking, no ‘madman’ survives psychological testing…there is no behavior or person that a modern psychiatrist cannot plausibly diagnose as abnormal or ill.”14 So it was in the 17th century. Once the doctor or the exorcist had been called in, he was under pressure to do something. When he tried and failed, the poor patient had to be put away. It is often said that surgeons bury their mistakes. Physicians and psychiatrists put them away; lock ’em up.

In the 1940s, DR John Tintera rediscovered the vital importance of the endocrine system, especially the adrenal glands, in “pathological mentation”-or “brain boggling”. In 200 cases under treatment for hypoadrenocorticism (the lack of adequate adrenal cortical hormone production or imbalance among these hormones), he discovered that the chief complaints of his patients were often similar to those found in persons whose systems were unable to handle sugar: fatigue, nervousness, depression, apprehension, craving for sweets, inability to handle alcohol, inability to concentrate, allergies, low blood pressure. Sugar blues!

DR Tintera finally insisted that all his patients submit to a four-hour glucose tolerance test (GTT) to find out whether or not they could handle sugar. The results were so startling that the laboratories double-checked their techniques, then apologized for what they believed to be incorrect readings. What mystified them was the low, flat curves derived from disturbed, early adolescents. This laboratory procedure had been previously carried out only for patients with physical findings presumptive of diabetes. Dorland’s definition of schizophrenia (Bleuler’s dementia praecox) includes the phrase, “often recognized during or shortly after adolescence”, and further, in reference to hebephrenia and catatonia, “coming on soon after the onset of puberty”. These conditions might seem to arise or become aggravated at puberty, but probing into the patient’s past will frequently reveal indications which were present at birth, during the first year of life, and through the preschool and grammar school years. Each of these periods has its own characteristic clinical picture.

This picture becomes more marked at pubescence and often causes school officials to complain of juvenile delinquency or underachievement. A glucose tolerance test at any of these periods could alert parents and physicians and could save innumerable hours and small fortunes spent in looking into the child’s psyche and home environment for maladjustments of questionable significance in the emotional development of the average child. The negativism, hyperactivity and obstinate resentment of discipline are absolute indications for at least the minimum laboratory tests: urinalysis, complete bloodcount, PBI determination, and the five-hour glucose tolerance test. A GTT can be performed on a young child by the micro-method without undue trauma to the patient. As a matter of fact, I have been urging that these four tests be routine for all patients, even before a history or physical examination is undertaken. In almost all discussions on drug addiction, alcoholism and schizophrenia, it is claimed that there is no definite constitutional type that falls prey to these afflictions.

Almost universally, the statement is made that all of these individuals are emotionally immature. It has long been our goal to persuade every physician, whether oriented toward psychiatry, genetics or physiology, to recognize that one type of endocrine individual is involved in the majority of these cases: the hypoadrenocortic.15 Tintera published several epochal medical papers. Over and over, he emphasized that improvement, alleviation, palliation or cure was “dependent upon the restoration of the normal function of the total organism”. His first prescribed item of treatment was diet. Over and over again, he said that “the importance of diet cannot be overemphasized”. He laid out a sweeping permanent injunction against sugar in all forms and guises.

While Egas Moniz of Portugal was receiving a Nobel Prize for devising the lobotomy operation for the treatment of schizophrenia, Tintera’s reward was to be harassment and hounding by the pundits of organized medicine. While Tintera’s sweeping implication of sugar as a cause of what was called “schizophrenia” could be confined to medical journals, he was let alone, ignored. He could be tolerated-if he stayed in his assigned territory, endocrinology. Even when he suggested that alcoholism was related to adrenals that had been whipped by sugar abuse, they let him alone; because the medicos had decided there was nothing in alcoholism for them except aggravation, they were satisfied to abandon it to Alcoholics Anonymous.

However, when Tintera dared to suggest in a magazine of general circulation that “it is ridiculous to talk of kinds of allergies when there is only one kind, which is adrenal glands impaired…by sugar”, he could no longer be ignored. The allergists had a great racket going for themselves. Allergic souls had been entertaining each other for years with tall tales of exotic allergies-everything from horse feathers to lobster tails. Along comes someone who says none of this matters: take them off sugar and keep them off it.

Perhaps Tintera’s untimely death in 1969 at the age of fifty-seven made it easier for the medical profession to accept discoveries that had once seemed as far out as the simple oriental medical thesis of genetics and diet, yin and yang. Today, doctors all over the world are repeating what Tintera announced years ago: nobody, but nobody, should ever be allowed to begin what is called “psychiatric treatment”, anyplace, anywhere, unless and until they have had a glucose tolerance test to discover if they can handle sugar. So-called preventive medicine goes further and suggests that since we only think we can handle sugar because we initially have strong adrenals, why wait until they give us signs and signals that they’re worn out? Take the load off now by eliminating sugar in all forms and guises, starting with that soda pop you have in your hand. The mind truly boggles when one glances over what passes for medical history. Through the centuries, troubled souls have been barbecued for bewitchment, exorcised for possession, locked up for insanity, tortured for masturbatory madness, psychiatrised for psychosis, lobotomised for schizophrenia. How many patients would have listened if the local healer had told them that the only thing ailing them was sugar blues?

This article is extracted and edited from the book, Sugar Blues, © 1975 by William Dufty. The book was first published by the Chilton Book Company, Padnor, PA, USA. Warner Books, Inc., NY, published an edition in 1976 and reissued it in April 1993.

February 13, 2014 

Vegetarians are less likely to have diabetes, compared with nonvegetarians, according to a new study from Taiwan. Among 4,384 Buddhists, the women and men who avoided all meat products had an approximately 70 and 45 reduced risk for diabetes, respectively. The lead author notes that the omnivorous participants consumed a predominantly plant-based diet with little meat and fish, suggesting that even modest animal consumption can increase the risk for diabetes. Other population studies have also found that as animal product intake increases, so does risk for diabetes. In addition, the vegetarian group had higher intakes of fiber, folate, vegetables, and whole grains and lower intakes of saturated fat and cholesterol.

Chiu THT, Huan

Dr. John McDougall

Nutrition is an emotional subject and nothing arouses people’s passions more than the subject of protein in their diet.  Widely divergent opinions on whether more protein or less is best, and on the merits of animal vs. vegetable sources, have been debated for more than 150 years.  And for all that time solid scientific research has clearly supported the wisdom of a diet low in protein – favoring vegetable sources.  So far, however, the scientific facts have fought a losing battle against popular opinion – which values high-protein diets based on animal foods.  Mark Twain once said, “Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.”  Even though the facts may never become popular knowledge, I will always believe it is your fundamental right to know the truth about your nutritional requirements – this vital information should be taught from childhood as basic education, along with reading, writing, and mathematics – and along with health facts such as cigarettes cause lung damage, drunk driving kills, and automobile safety belts save lives.

High Protein Standard Set by Social Bigotry

One of the earliest proponents of high protein diets was the distinguished German physiologist Dr. Carl Voit (1831-1908).^1,2 After studying laborers who consumed approximately 3100 Calories daily, he concluded that protein intake for people should be 118 grams (g) per day – this value became known as the “Voit standard.”  How did he reach this conclusion?  He believed that people with sufficient income to afford almost any choice of foods – from meat to vegetables – would instinctively select a diet containing the right amount of protein to maintain health and productivity.   Other European and American authorities made similar observations about the eating habits of working men with sufficient incomes to afford meat and came to similar conclusions – ultimately recommending diets high in protein (100 and 189 grams of protein a day).  No experiments were performed on the human body to reach these conclusions.  Information on the diets of vigorous individuals living during these times and following low-protein vegetarian diets was largely ignored.^2,3   The healthy active lives of hundreds of millions of less affluent people laboring in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America on diets with less than half the amount of protein recommended by Dr. Voit (and almost no meat), were overlooked when experts established protein requirements that still affect us today.^3,4

What arrogance!  To conclude that the superior intellect of moderately affluent people of European descent would cause them to naturally come to correct conclusions about their personal nutritional needs. What foolishness! You can see the effects of self-selection when unrestricted food choices are available. What do more than one billion people living in the 21^st century choose?  McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut – need more be said about people’s innate wisdom to make food selections in their best interests?   Unfortunately, these flawed recommendations based upon such social bigotry have not yet been silenced by over 100 years of scientific research.

Russell Henry Chittenden Tells the Truth a Century Ago

Such narrow-minded thinking should have been stopped by 1905 when Russell Henry Chittenden, Yale UniversityProfessor of Physiological Chemistry, published his scientific findings on human protein needs in his classic book,Physiological Economy in Nutrition.²  Professor Chittenden believed Dr. Voit had cause and effect reversed: people did not become prosperous because they ate high protein diets, but rather they ate meat and other expensive high protein foods because they could afford them.   One hundred years ago he wrote, “We are all creatures of habit, and our palates are pleasantly excited by the rich animal foods with their high content of proteid (protein), and we may well question whether our dietetic habits are not based more upon the dictates of our palates than upon scientific reasoning or true physiological needs.”

He reasoned that we should know the minimal protein requirement for the healthy man (and woman), and believed that any protein intake beyond our requirements could cause injury to our body, especially to the liver and kidneys. As he explained it, “Fats and carbohydrates when oxidized in the body are ultimately burned to simple gaseous products…easily and quickly eliminated…”  “With proteid (protein) foods…when oxidized, (they) yield a row of crystalline nitrogenous products which ultimately pass out of the body through the kidneys.  (These nitrogen-based protein byproducts) – frequently spoken of as toxins – float about through the body and may exercise more or less of a deleterious influence upon the system, or, being temporarily deposited, may exert some specific or local influence that calls for their speedy removal.”  With these few words Professor Chittenden explained the deleterious effects of diets high in protein and meat – consequences too few practicing doctors know about today.

The First Scientific Experiments on Our Protein Needs

Professor Chittenden’s first experiment was on himself.  For nine months, he recorded his own body weight, which decreased from 143 pounds (65 Kg) to 128 pounds (58 kg) on his new diet of one-third the protein that Dr. Voit recommended. Chittenden’s health remained excellent and he described his condition as being with “greater freedom from fatigue and muscular soreness than in previous years of a fuller dietary.”  He had suffered from arthritis of his knee and discovered that by reducing his intake of meat his condition disappeared and his “sick headaches” and bilious attacks (abdominal pains) no longer appeared periodically as before; plus he fully maintained his mental and physical activity, with a protein intake of about 40 grams a day.

Chittenden performed valid scientific studies by collecting data on the daily dietary and urine histories of his subjects (including himself) to determine protein utilization. Because he was contradicting the known “truths” of his time, he proceeded with extreme caution with his further investigations.  He organized three controlled trials with increasing demands for testing the adequacy of diets lower in protein than commonly recommended.

The first trial involved a group of five men connected with Yale University, leading active lives but not engaged in very muscular work.  On a low-protein diet (62 grams daily) for 6 months, they all remained healthy and in positive nitrogen balance (more protein went into, than out of, their bodies).  The second trial used 13 male volunteers from the Hospital Corps of the U.S. army. They were described as doing moderate work with one day of vigorous activity at the gymnasium.  They remained in good health on 61 grams of protein daily.  His final trial was with 8 Yale student athletes, some of them with exceptional records of athletic events.  They ate an average of 64 grams of protein daily while maintaining their athletic endeavors, and improving their performance by a striking 35 percent.  Following these studies, Chittenden in 1904 concluded that 35–50 g of protein a day was adequate for adults, and individuals could maintain their health and fitness on this amount.  Studies over the past century have consistently confirmed Professor Chittenden’s findings, yet you would hardly know it with the present day popularity of high protein diets.

Rats Confuse Nutritionists

Many people have the idea that animal foods contain protein which is superior in quality to the protein found in plants.  This misconception dates back to l9l4, when Lafayette B. Mendel and Thomas B. Osborne studied the protein requirements of laboratory rats and demonstrated nutritionalrequirements for the individual amino acids.⁵  They found that rats grew better on animal sources of protein than on vegetable sources. So, investigators at that time suspected that the vegetable foods had insufficient amounts of some of the amino acids essential for the normal growth of rats.  Because of these and other animal-based experiments, flesh, eggs, and dairy foods were classified as superior, or “Class A” protein sources.  Vegetable proteins were designated inferior, or “Class B” proteins.

Studies completed in the early 1940’s by Dr. William Rose of the University of Illinois found that l0 amino acids were essential for a rat’s diet.⁶  The removal of any one of these essential amino acids from the food of growing rats led to profound nutritive failure, accompanied by a rapid decline in weight, loss of appetite, and eventually death.  Animal products, such as meat, poultry, milk, and eggs prevented this decline in the rats’ health, and were found to contain the l0 essential amino acids in just the right proportions for needs of growing rats.  Based on these early rat experiments the amino acid pattern found in animal products was declared to be the “gold standard” by which to compare the amino acid pattern of vegetable foods.  According to this concept, wheat and rice were declared deficient in lysine and corn was deficient in tryptophan.

Subsequent research has shown the obvious: the initial premise, that animal products supply the most ideal protein pattern for humans, as they do for rats, is incorrect.⁷ The dietary needs of rats are considerably different from those of humans, mainly because rats grow very rapidly into adult size as compared to people.  Rats are fully adult after 6 months; whereas a person takes 17 years to fully mature.  This difference in need is especially clear when the breast milk of both species is examined and compared.  The protein content of rat breast milk is 10 times greater than the milk intended for human babies.^8,9   Baby rats double in size in 4.5 days; an infant doubles in size in 6 months.  The obvious reason for the different needs is because rats grow very rapidly into adult size as compared to humans; therefore requirements for protein to support that growth are very much higher.

Dr. William Rose Discovers Human Needs

In 1942, Dr. William Rose turned his attention from rats to people and began studying the amino acid requirements for humans using basically the same methodology he had used with rats. Healthy, male graduate students, grateful in those days for the free food, the dollar a day they were paid and the prospect of getting their initials in print in Rose’s widely read publications, served as his experimental animals. They were fed a diet consisting of corn starch, sucrose, butter fat without protein, corn oil, inorganic salts, the known vitamins, and mixtures of highly purified amino acids. Their diet also included a large brown “candy,” which contained a concentrated liver extract to supply unknown vitamins, sugar, and peppermint oil to provide a “never-to-be-forgotten taste.”

The study used a chemical measurement called nitrogen balance to determine whether the subjects were getting enough usable protein from the mixture.  From his experiments, Dr. Rose found that only eight of the ten amino acids essential to rats were also essential to men – we were better at making two amino acids than rats.  When an essential amino acid was given in insufficient amounts for approximately two days, all subjects complained bitterly of similar symptoms: a clear increase in nervous irritability, extreme fatigue, and a profound failure of appetite.  The subjects were unable to continue the amino acid deficient diets for more than a few days at a time.

Through his studies, Dr. Rose also determined a minimum level of intake for each of the eight essential amino acids.¹⁰ He found small amounts of variation in individual needs among his subjects. Because of these unexplained differences among people, he included a large margin of safety in his final conclusion on minimum amino acid requirements. For each amino acid, he took the highest recorded level of need in any subject, and then doubled that amount for a “recommended requirement” – described as a definitely safe intake.  It is important to realize that his higher requirement is easily met by a diet centered around any single starchy vegetable. Even in children, as long as energy needs are satisfied by starch, protein needs are automatically satisfied in almost every situation because of the basic and complete design of the food.  These investigations were completed by the spring of 1952, resulting in sixteen papers in The Journal of Biological Chemistry that are considered classic contributions in the history of nutrition for the benefit of human beings.

The results of Dr. Rose`s studies are summarized in the following chart, under “minimum requirements”.  From the chart, it is clear that vegetable foods contain more than enough of all the amino acids essential for humans.¹¹

Many investigators have measured the capacity of plant foods to meet our protein needs.  Their findings show that children and adults thrive on diets based on a single starch; and they grow healthy and strong.^11,12  Furthermore, no improvement is obtained by mixing plant foods or supplementing with amino acid mixtures to make the combined amino acid pattern look more like that of flesh, dairy, or eggs.¹²  (For a thorough discussion of human protein needs see The McDougall Plan, New Win Publishers.)

Diet for a Small Planet Helps and Harms

A popular book among vegetarians, Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappe’ published in 1971, started a revolution that has had a positive impact for the past three decades on the lives of millions of people.  Unfortunately, Ms. Lappe’ failed to understand the basic scientific literature on human protein needs and the sufficiency of plants foods before she wrote her influential book.  She believed plants contained “incomplete proteins” with insufficient amounts of certain essential amino acids to meet the needs of people.¹³  As a result of this misunderstanding, she placed great emphasis on combining vegetable foods to create an amino acid pattern which resembles that found in animal foods.  This emphasis is unnecessary and implies that it is difficult to obtain “complete” protein from vegetables without detailed nutritional knowledge.  Because of her complicated and incorrect ideas people are frightened away from vegetable-based diets.

The impact of her incorrect teachings of more than 30 years ago affects nutritional policy even today.  In 2001 the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association published a long overdue review warning people of the dangers of high protein diets, like the Atkins, the Zone, and Sugar Busters diets.¹⁴  Unfortunately, this one statement in an otherwise valuable report is scientifically incorrect: “Although plant proteins form a large part of the human diet, most are deficient in 1 or more essential amino acids and are therefore regarded as incomplete proteins.”  For a supporting scientific reference the Committee cites Frances Moore Lappe’s 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet.

You may think this is a trivial matter; however, incorrect information on our protein needs can have grave consequences on your health and your family’s health.  With the American Heart Association teaching that plants fail to supply complete protein you are almost certain to receive incorrect, potentially damaging, medical advice.  For example, say you go to your doctor after a heart attack and mention that you are now going to become a pure vegetarian to avoid future heart trouble.  Your doctor may respond, “You can’t do that, you will become protein deficient on an all plant food diet – the Heart Association says so.”  Or your child is sick with recurrent asthma and ear infections and you want a dietary cure – you may be warned away from a highly effective therapy because members of the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association fail to understand basic scientific research about human protein needs and plant foods.  So this is no small matter.

I have confronted the Heart Association about spreading misinformation that can result in suffering as serious as death from heart disease – so far they have shown no interest in making overdue corrections to their incorrect teaching.  (See my July, August and November 2002 Newsletters for more information on this.)   I recently shared my conflict with the Heart Association with the world’s leading authority on human protein requirements, Dr. D. Joe Millward from the Center for Nutrition and Food Safety, School of Biological Sciences University of Surrey, UK.  His response to me on July 10, 2003 was, “Contrary to general opinion, the distinction between dietary protein sources in terms of the nutritional superiority of animal over plant proteins is much more difficult to demonstrate and less relevant in human nutrition.  This is quite distinct from the AHA position which in my view is wrong.” ¹⁵

So How Do You Know the Truth about Your Protein Needs?

Read the scientific literature (www.nlm.nih.gov) and look at the world picture.  Notice that 60 percent of people alive today and most of the people who have lived in the past have obtained their protein from plant foods.  They have lived successfully; avoiding all the diseases common in our society.  Even today plant sources provide 65% of the world supply of the protein we eat.

What about the starving children in Africa?  The picture one often sees of “protein deficient” children in famine areas of Asia or Africa is actually one of starvation and is more accurately described as “calorie deficiency.”¹¹  When these children come under medical supervision, they are nourished back to health with their local diets of corn, wheat, rice, and/or beans.  Children recovering from starvation grow up to l8 times faster than usual and require a higher protein content to provide for their catch-up in development – and plant foods easily provide this extra amount of protein.  Even very-low protein starchy root crops, such as casava root, are sufficient enough in nutrients, including protein, to keep people healthy.³

The World Health Organization knows the truth. Since 1974 it has recommended that adults consume a diet with 5% of the calories from protein – this would mean 38 grams of protein for a man burning 3000 calories a day and 29 grams for a woman using 2300 calories a day.  These minimum requirements provide for a large margin of safety that easily covers people who theoretically could have greater protein needs – such as accident victims or people with infections. This quantity of protein is almost impossible to avoid if enough whole plant food is consumed to meet daily calorie needs. For example, rice alone would provide 71 grams of highly useable protein and white potatoes would provide 64 grams of protein for a working man.¹⁶  For a pregnant woman the WHO recommends 6% of the calories come from protein – again an amount of protein easily provided by a diet based on starches, vegetables, and fruits.

Human Breast Milk – Your Final Assurance

Your greatest need for protein is when you grow the most.  The greatest time of growth in a human being’s life is as an infant.  We double in size during the first 6 months.  The ideal food for a baby is mother’s milk.  Therefore, breast milk is the “gold standard” for nutrition – during your time of greatest need for all nutrients, including protein.  Five to 6.3 percent of the calories in human breast milk are from protein.^9,17  This is the maximum concentration of protein we will ever need in our food supply.  Knowing this value tells us that at no other time in our life will we ever require more protein.  Consider the protein content of the foods we consume after weaning – these are even higher in protein – rice is 9%, potatoes are 8%, corn is 11% and oatmeal is 15% protein.¹⁶

Wrong Thinking Ruins Health

Even though all the scientific knowledge accumulated over the past 100 years clearly shows our bodies were designed to live best on a diet lower in protein than dictated by common belief, we continue on the same disastrous dietary path.  As Russell Henry Chittenden explained 100 years ago, “The poorer man emulates his richer neighbors as soon as his circumstances permit, and resources that could be much more advantageously expended for the good of the family and the home are practically wasted – to say nothing of possible injury to health – under the mistaken idea that this more generous method of living (a high-protein, high-meat diet) is the surest road to health and strength.”²  Dr. Chittenden also believed that knowledge and the truth would prevail.  He wrote, “Habit and sentiment play such a part in our lives that it is too much to expect any sudden change in custom.  By a proper education commenced early in life it may, however, be possible to establish new standards, which in time may prevail and eventually lead to more enlightened methods of living…” The past century of declining health for people living in developed countries has proved Chittenden wrong – so far. However, with widespread communication via the Internet his predictions may soon become reality.

References:

1)  Carpenter K.  A short history of nutritional science: part 2 (1885-1912).  J Nutr. 2003 Apr;133(4):975-84.

2)  Chittenden, R. H. (1904). Physiological economy in nutrition, with special reference to the minimal protein requirement of the healthy man. An experimental study. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company.

3)  Millward DJ.  The nutritional value of plant-based diets in relation to human amino acid and protein requirements.  Proc Nutr Soc. 1999 May;58(2):249-60.

4)  Millward DJ.  Metabolic demands for amino acids and the human dietary requirement: Millward and Rivers (1988) revisited. J Nutr. 1998 Dec;128(12 Suppl):2563S-2576S.

5) Osborne T.  Amino-acids in nutrition and growth. J Bio Chem. 1914; 17:325-49.

6)  Rose W.  Comparative growth of diet containing ten and nineteen amino acids, with further observation upon the role of glutamic and aspartic acid.  J Bio Chem. 1948; 176: 753-62.

7)  Bicker M.  The protein requirement of adult rats in terms of the protein contained in egg, milk, and soy flour.  J Nutr 1947;34: 491.

8)  Bell G.  Textbook of Physiology and Biochemestry, 4^th ed., Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, 1959, p. 12.

9)  Reeds PJ.  Protein nutrition of the neonate.  Proc Nutr Soc. 2000 Feb;59(1):87-97.

10)  Rose W.   The amino acid requirement of adult man.  Nutr Abst Rev. 1957;27:63l-47.

11)  McDougall J. (1983).  The McDougall Plan.  Clinton, NJ. New Win Publishing.

12)  M. Irwin, Hegsted D.  A conspectus of research on protein requirements of man.  J Nutr. 1971;101:385-428.

13)  Moyer G.  Frances Moore Lappe’s new edition says it all.  Nutrition Action, Oct. 1982. p. 10-11.

14)  St. Jeor S, Howard B, Prewitt E.  Dietary protein and weight reduction.   A statement for health professionals from the Nutrition Committee of the Council on Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Metabolism of the American Heart Association.  Circulation 2001;104:1869-74.

15)  Personal Communication with John McDougall, MD on July 10, 2003.

16)  J Pennington.  Bowes & Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used.  17^th Ed. Lippincott. Philadelphia- New York. 1998.

17)  Reeds PJ.  Protein and amino acid requirements and the composition of complementary foods.  J Nutr. 2003 Sep;133(9):2953S-61S.