Health Care

by: Luzia Braun

'One of the worst of the many bad food habits that Americans have acquired is their use of sweetened carbonated beverages.' This quotation is from Drs. R. M. Wilder and T. E. Keys in the Handbook of Nutrition (American Medical Association). The soda pop addict is a ready victim of edgy nerves, irritability and hazy thinking, to say nothing of digestive upsets caused by the fermenting sugar in the liquid, together with its high artificial carbonization. The soft drink fiend can become just as jittery, just as much of an addict to his 'lift' beverage as the chronic alcoholic or the drug user. What is true of the eating habits of the average driver probably holds good for you and every other forty-plus reader of these words. You bought this book because you realized you were losing your grip on youth-and that feeling of age probably got its head start on you because you always have eaten too much starch.

Let me turn clairvoyant for a moment, and 'project' my thoughts with you through an average day's eating. Your breakfast consisted of a fruit-perhaps a canned juice (sweetened with white sugar), or half a grapefruit liberally sprinkled with sugar. Your cereal bowl was filled with a dry, wholly artificial pile of something whose resemblance to a grain long since ceased to exist in the process of making a dough from devitalized flour, sweetening it and turning it out in some weird patented shape or texture, designed more for novelty than nutrition. And, of course, you reached again for the sugar bowl to flavor this already too-starchy cereal of yours. Toast? Of course, and more than likely made with white bread; or perhaps a sweet roll or two, well coated with sugar frosting, eaten with your generously sugared coffee. 'Please pass the jelly.' More sweet. Some mornings you do get around to eating an egg, but usually you're too full after downing your starchy cereal and toast to want anything more.

So off you go to work, or, if you are a housewife you set about your daily tasks. You feel quite a bit less than up to par; but by now you're probably belching as all the breakfast starches, plus those left undigested from previous meals, begin fermenting in your digestive system. By mid-morning you're feeling pretty pepless. So what do you do? If you're at work, you take time out for a candy bar, or a soft drink, or maybe more coffee and another sweet roll. If at home, you more than likely indulge in some starchy food found in the refrigerator, washed down by a soft drink or another cup of sweetened coffee. Then comes lunch. You're hungry-and yet you're not. How about a sandwich, a cup of coffee and a piece of pie? That holds you until about three-thirty, when you begin to feel so worn out and dispirited that you realize you'd better get something to eat if you want to keep on going until dinnertime. More pie, maybe a piece of cake this time, a candy bar, or a soft drink.

By the time you drag yourself home and get through a dinner that is a repetition of all your day's dietary sins (white bread, sugared coffee, perhaps a dish with rice or spaghetti or macaroni, and a starchy, heavy dessert), you are more convinced than ever that you're getting old. You can't think straight any more; your job seems to take more and more out of you every day; there's no energy left in you for leisure-hour activities; and you are sleeping poorly these nights.

I could go on being 'clairvoyant' and trace your footsteps to the kitchen before bedtime for that piece of pie which was left, or for a sandwich, but you're entitled to some privacy in your dietary indiscretions, so I'll leave you for the day, with your intestinal tract full of fermenting, half-digested starches. If you're statistical-minded, you might try calculating the number of grams of carbohydrates you eat in an average day (not to mention the calories) and then compare them with the woefully few grams of protein that manage to get included in your meals. If you are the average person, of sedentary habits or occupation, the chances are that you eat about 75 per cent more devitalized carbohydrate foods than are compatible with your good health, and your desire to feel and look younger than your years.

This estimate is based on the consumption in New York City. According to figures given by the Food and Drug Journal, 55 per cent of all food shipped into that metropolis is either white flour or processed white flour products-all of them devitalized, de-mineralized and de-vitaminized. White sugar, and the products made from it, account for another 20 per cent of all food shipments into the city. This means that the diet of the New Yorker (which is more or less typical of other cities and communities) consists of 75 per cent artificial starches, leaving a paltry 25 per cent to be divided among protein foods and natural carbohydrates. Certainly not a safe balance for health.

If you haven't already figured it out for yourself, the chief reason why starchy foods are so popular with boardinghouse keepers and restaurant owners is that these foods fill you up quickly. And when you're well stuffed on the cheaper starch foods, your appetite is dulled for the more expensive protein foods in the meals such as meats, eggs, cheese and milk. There's more profit for them (but certainly not for you) in appeasing your appetite with the less expensive macaroni, rice, spaghetti, noodles, white bread and starch puddings than in serving you ample portions of tasty meats, fresh vegetables and fruits. An old trick, yet one which many a housewife unknowingly pulls on her own family. Unknowingly, I say, because no conscientious wife and mother would deliberately pull this nutritional fraud on her family if she fully understood the harm she was doing to their health-and her own, too. 'But we must have carbohydrates for energy!' you are likely to point out if you have a knowledge of physiology. You are only half correct in saying that the human body 'needs carbohydrates for energy.' While it's true that the sole function of carbohydrates is to provide heat and energy, what about the Eskimos who eat nothing except meat and fish-protein foods? Merely because they do not stuff themselves with artificial sugars and starches, must they be shivering, lethargic beings? If you have ever read any of the books written by the various Arctic explorers, you know that the Eskimo, far from being a slothful fellow who huddles into his skins with his teeth chattering like castanets, is robust, energetic and warmblooded (so much so that he has to sit or lie around in his heated igloos, stripped almost naked). In fact, it's only where our 'white' civilization has brought in its white flour and white sugar that the Eskimo ever falls victim to our respiratory and intestinal diseases. Colds and constipation were the 'benefits' of civilization which we bestowed upon the poor Eskimo.