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Among the civilized as among savages, social activities center about sex and food. Civilization grew up in fertile sections, where food was abundant--where food was scarce nomadic tribes roamed in savagery or semi-savagery. Man's food and his ways of procuring his food have largely shaped his whole social, political and religious history.
The study of food and its relations to the structures and functions of the body constitutes one of the most important subjects that can occupy our minds. It is unfortunate that the knowledge of diet possessed by the ancients was permitted to perish during the Christian era and people were taught to "take no thought of what ye shall eat or drink," for "it is not what goeth into a man's body, but that which cometh out that defileth him."
It is now over a hundred years since the study of food was revived and, while much valuable knowledge has been accumulated during that time, it has been slow in reaching the minds of the people. The spread of such knowledge has met with organized opposition from the medical profession, which has been able to keep many people in almost complete ignorance of how to feed their bodies.
Modern dietary science (trophology) may be said to have had its beginning with Sylvester Graham, and his Lectures on the Science of Human Life is still abreast of our time in most particulars. If you want "the newer knowledge of nutrition," you'll find most of it in this book.
It will be recalled that in Vol. I of this series we recounted Graham's experiences in preventing cholera by dietetic and general hygienic means and how the movement initiated by him grew and spread. Despite its overwhelming success, the medical profession, as stubborn then as now, in its opposition to dietary advancement, heaped ridicule and slander upon Graham and the Grahamites.
In his efforts at diet reform, as in all of his other efforts at living reform, Graham ran up against the stone wall of established prejudices and practices and the active opposition of vested interests who saw in his efforts a serious threat to their incomes and investments. Not the least of these interests was the medical profession.
From Europe the early American settlers had brought the idea that fruits and vegetables and, especially uncooked fruits and vegetables, were to be avoided. The New York Mirror warned, Aug. 28, 1830, that fresh fruits should be religiously forbidden to all classes and especially to children. Two years later the same paper carried the information that all fruit is dangerous and, because of the cholera epidemic city councils prohibited their sale in the cities. "Salads were to be particularly feared." Robley Dunglison, the famous physiologist of the period, appears also to have shared this view.
In August 1832 the Board of Health of Washington, D. C. prohibited, for the space of ninety days, the importation into the city of "cabbage, green corn, cucumbers, peas, beans, parsnips, carrots, egg plants, cimblings or squashes, pumpkins, turnips, water melons, cantaloupes, muskmelons, apples, pears, peaches, plums, damsons, cherries, apricots, pineapples, oranges, lemons, limes, coconuts, ice cream, fish, crabs, oysters, clams, lobsters and craw fish.
"The following articles the Board have not considered it necessary to prohibit the sale of, but even these they would admonish the community to be moderate in using: potatoes, beets, tomatoes and onions."
Beef, bacon and bread, with beer and wine were about all they left for the people of Washington to eat. The Board said that the prohibited articles, "are, in their opinion highly prejudicial to health at the present season." The Board were probably afraid that these wholesome foods would cause ague, chills, fever and even cholera.
In that very year (1832) Dr. Martyn Paine, of the New York University Medical School was arguing that garden vegetables and almost every variety of fruit had been known to develop the deadly cholera and that to avoid it the people should restrict themselves to lean meat, potatoes, milk, tea and coffee.
It was in New York City in 1832, the very year that the cities were prohibiting the sale of fruits and vegetables because they cause cholera, that Graham launched his attack upon the false beliefs concerning fruits and vegetables and endeavored to induce Americans and, indeed, the world, to eat more fruits and vegetables and cease eating animal foods.
Graham not only challenged the view that fruits and vegetables cause cholera and that plenty of meat and wine will prevent it; but he declared that a diet of fruits and vegetables with entire abstinence from all alcoholics, tobacco, condiments, etc., and from all animal foods, was the best preventive of cholera.
It is interesting to note, in this connection, that Graham's first observations of the effects of diet upon health were made in Philadelphia and related to the part a vegetable diet apparently played in preventing Cholera. A small sect of Bible Christians had migrated from England to Philadelphia. These people abstained from all animal foods--flesh, eggs, milk, cheese, etc.--and from all condiments and stimulants. They used no tea, coffee, alcohol or tobacco. It was their view that flesh eating violated the first command given by God to man--the instruction to Adam that he should eat the fruit of the trees of the Garden.
Ten years before Graham lectured in Philadelphia for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, this city had experienced a severe epidemic of cholera. There were many cases with a high death rate. Contrary to what was expected from the medical teachings of the time, not a single member of the Bible Christian Church had cholera. This fact made a deep and lasting impression upon Graham and caused him to turn his attention to the study of diet. No longer was he a mere temperance lecturer. His first series of lectures given the following year in New York were upon the causes and prevention of cholera. So radical and revolutionary did his lectures seem to the medical profession and most of the educated people of the time that it required nearly another quarter of a century for them to discard their false notions about vegetables and fruits causing cholera and concede that Graham may have been right. Fallacy dies slowly. Deep-rooted prejudices are not easily uprooted. Old habits are not quickly abandoned. The world's leaders do not like to admit that they have been wrong and have been misleading the people. They did not give up without a struggle--indeed, it may be truthfully said that they nave not given up entirely to this day.
Many who heard Graham's lecture followed his advice and, thereupon, the physicians, butchers and others of New York reported that the Grahamites were dying like flies of the cholera. Graham returned to New York and being unable to find a single instance of death from cholera, and only one or two instances of cholera (these in people who had not carried out his advice) among those who had adopted the plan of eating and living he offered, challenged, through the public press of the city, his traducers to bring forth a case of death among his followers. This they did not and could not do, but they did not cease to peddle the lie.
Graham pointed out in reply that in America, where animal food is almost universally consumed in excess, and where children are trained to the use of it, even before they are weaned, scrofulous affections are exceedingly common, and lead to that fearful prevalence of pulmonary consumption, which has rendered that complaint emphatically the American Disease." In addition to this, Graham pointed to "well-fed vegetable-eating children of other countries in all periods of time" and to examples of "feeble and cachectic children, and even those who are born with a scrofulous diathesis," who had been "brought into vigorous health on a well ordered vegetable diet, under a correct general regimen" as proof that the "very best health can be preserved in childhood without the use of flesh-meat."
Graham was an educated man and the same can not be said of most physicians of the period. It were folly to say to a man who knew the history of Sparta, that health and strength cannot be built and maintained on a vegetable diet.
The people were not all fools and the colleges and universities were not then, as now, dominated by big business interests. The teaching profession gave strong support to the movement for diet reform. Professor Reubin Mussey of Dartmouth College openly advocated vegetarianism and invited Graham to address the students of Bowdoin College and also to speak in Hanover. Professor Edward Hitchcock delivered a series of lectures on diet and regimen in Amherst College and these were enthusiastically received by the students. Even the unexpected happened: The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, a conservative and established periodical, endorsed his cause in its issue of Oct. 21, 1835 and declared that Graham's introductory lecture in Boston would have reflected honor upon the first medical men in America. No doubt the Journal later repented of this serious breach of medical ethics, for its editors missed few opportunities to lampoon Graham, although accepting an occasional article from his pen.
The fear of the produce of garden and orchard lingered on for many years after Graham's work began. Indeed, the author recalls many stories of how water melons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and a few other fruits and vegetables cause malaria, which he heard when a boy.
During the cholera year of 1849 the Chicago Journal strongly condemned the city council of that city, for not prohibiting the sale of fruits and vegetables as had been done in other cities, since, as the Journal said, the "sad effects," of using such foods were "so apparent." The Democrat carried the story of two boys who ate freely of oranges and cocoanuts and then went to the circus. "In a short time one was a corpse and the other reduced to the last stage of cholera." Even as late as 1867 it was reported by the press that someone by merely passing a fruit stand laden with spoiled peaches had suffered an 'attack" of the gripes, a not impossible psychic reaction. But they reached the conclusion that "if bare proximity to those peaches caused him so much pain, the eating of them would have been certain death." Today we witness a similarly asinine procedure in the prohibition of the sale of raw milk in the cities.
Certain of the old physio-medical physicians condemned the eating of tomatoes because these contained calomel; lettuce was long said to contain opium; acid fruits were held responsible for rheumatism, arthritis and other "acid diseases." Apples were condemned by many physicians because they "derange digestion." I recall hearing one aged physician (this was over thirty years ago) telling of the evils of apples and say: "I would rather give my patients a dose of poison than to give them apples." He was daily dosing them with poisons, though withholding apples.
"Medicine" does not easily give up; it does not readily admit its mistakes. If Graham and his co-workers and successors had demonstrated that fruits and vegetables were not dangerous and they did not produce cholera and other "diseases," the profession of medicine would find other reasons for rejecting these foods and sticking to their meats and meat soups. They invented the idea that while these things may be pleasing to the sense of taste they have no food value.
As late as 1916 we find Dr. Richard C. Cabot of Harvard writing: "Lettuce for instance, is a food practically without value--nice and pleasant to look at, and valuable so far as it has dressing (made with oil). But the dressing is the only thing that has any food value." Also: "Tomatoes are ninety-four percent water; there is hardly any nutrition in them." These statements are typical of the medical view of fruits and vegetables in general.
In their efforts to discourage the eating of uncooked fruits and vegetables the regular profession pictured these as reeking with typhoid germs and the germs of other diseases. Cooking was necessary in order to destroy these germs. Lettuce, now shipped all over the country and eaten raw by everybody, was especially covered with hidden dangers in the form of disease germs. Not until the discovery of vitamins did the medical profession lose its fear of germs on vegetables and fruits sufficiently to enable it to sanction the use of uncooked foods. Even so, they never mention Graham, except to ridicule him.
But it was too late to stop the civilized world from eating fruits and vegetables. Graham and the other food reformers had done their work too well. The annual per capita consumption of plant foods was then, and still is, increasing. The medical profession still opposes vegetarianism and continues to insist upon the use of meat and meat soups, but they have lost on all fronts and have been forced to acknowledge the value of the fruits and vegetables, even if they do continue to ignore Graham.
When the discovery of vitamins was first announced, the physiologist, Professor Percy G. Styles, stated that the theory is a restatement of Graham's views. Professor Styles was probably duly penalized for this breach of scientific ethics; for, apparently, neither he nor anyone else has dared reaffirm such a scientific heresy. The medical and so-called scientific crowd have long since decreed that "nothing good can come out of Nazareth" and with derisive scorn they point to Graham, when they condescend to notice him at all, and ask: "is not this the carpenter's son?" It is agreed that no discovery is a discovery unless it is made by one of the boys in the inner circle of ''science." If they have not educated him; if he teaches not their doctrines; he is unworthy of a place in the Hall of Fame; or, is it the Hall of Infamy in which the "scientists" sit?
Graham made the "mistake" of offending the bakers, millers, brewers, distillers, saloon keepers, tobacco growers and sellers, butchers, packers, etc. There was no dairy industry then, but had there been one the members of this would have joined in the effort to mob him as they now join in the conspiracy of silence against him. Despite professional opposition and the opposition of the vested interests who saw their interests threatened, Graham's work prospered and grew. Soon he had many helpers, among them, Dr. Trall.
In his Hydropathic Encyclopedia, 1851, Dr. Trall declared to the world that all fresh fruits and green vegetables are antiscorbutic (opposed to the development of scurvy). Trall soon joined Graham in his crusade for vegetables and fruits and whole grain bread and against meat, eggs, milk, white bread, wines, narcotics, etc. Graham died in 1851. Trall carried on until his death in 1879. By this time the workers were many. Dr. Jennings joined them early in Graham's crusade. After Dr. Trall's death, Drs. Page and Densmore added to our fund of knowledge about trophology.
The next great advance in our trophologic knowledge came in 1891 when Dr. H. Lahmann, of Germany published his Dietetsche Blutentmischung, in which he presented the results of his investigations of the "ash" (minerals) of food. Lahmann was a German "regular" practitioner who had forsaken the pill bags and poison bottles and joined Louis Kuhne in his establishment. Lahmann gave us our first real knowledge of the value of food minerals. His work was rejected by the medical profession, though eagerly accepted by Hygienists and "faddists," with whom he had associated himself. Forty years ago Dr. H. Lindlahr brought Lahmann's discoveries back to America with him. Otto Carque and Alfred W. McCann quickly seized upon this new advance and began the work of acquainting the American public with it.
Ragnar Berg, a Swedish chemist, associated himself with Lahmann and began the development of the world's greatest food scientist. Lahmann died, but Berg still carries on. Lahmann's sanitarium fell into the hands of others. Lahmann's work was declared obsolete, the institution was given over to "experiments a la Steinach" and Berg was discharged.
It should be borne in mind that "with the exception of certain investigations made by Ragnar Berg, absolutely no research of any kind has been undertaken on the complete metabolism of the mineral salts, either in man or animal."--The Physiology of Nutrition, London, 1927.
Within recent years laboratory workers have attacked the subject of diet and these have added to our detailed knowledge of foods if not to our practical knowledge. These experiments have now been carried on long enough that we feel safe in asserting, on the strength of their results, that foods are really good to eat and that they do actually nourish the body. We feel safe in going even further and asserting that we must have foods to grow.
These "biochemists" discovered that cabbage, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, apples, oranges, etc., are really valuable foods. Their discovery so shocked and surprised the medical world that it completely forgot that the "faddists" had been eating these foods for a long time and had declared them to be superior to white flour, salt bacon, pigs knuckles, sausage, lard pies and coffee. It was really a remarkable discovery--all they now need to do is to become "faddists" with the rest of us and make use of the things Graham, Trall, Alcott, Densmore, Page, Oswald, Kuhne, Lahmann, Berg, etc., had long taught.
Much of the experimental "findings" is sheer nonsense. Many of the experimenters are subsidized by interested commercial firms. There are many green vegetables that are as valuable as spinach, but none that have "growers" organizations back of them to subsidize research. The manufacturers of yeast, of cod-liver oil and halibut-liver oil have subsidized research workers. So have the big milk producing companies. The same is true of the citrus industry. The gatherers and sellers of sea weeds have their scientific prostitutes also. When we see some special food heralded as an apple from the "Tree of Life" and see its value over-emphasized in books, magazines, newspapers and in physicians and "research" workers' reports we may be sure that there is money behind it.
The work of the biochemist tends to center around the vitamins and is confined largely to animal experimentation. It lacks the importance possessed by the work of those who feed human beings and who do not confine their attention to one food factor, but attend to the whole diet and to the whole program of eating.
I do not desire to minimize the serious work of the laboratory experimenters, but I would call attention to the fact that the "faddists" have preceded them with a whole series of much more important experiments. The "faddists" are of all varieties and kinds and they have many different notions and practices. They have, in other words, carried out, in human beings, many dietetic experiments. Some of these experiments have involved thousands of individuals and three or four generations. These experiments and their results are not to be lightly cast aside because those who make them lack training in the diploma mills of medicine, or because they were not "controlled." Hail to the faddists! They have performed a necessary work.
In this work we do not intend to ignore the work of the "faddists" but shall make use of it just as we shall draw upon the work of the laboratory men to confirm the findings of the "faddists." For it was the "faddists" and not the "bio-chemists" who initiated the movement for dietary study and reform and, who, by their results, compelled the medical world to take notice. Except for the "faddists" the "biochemists" may not have been born.
The medical profession showed no interest in dietetics until an awakened public demanded to know how to feed itself. Trophologists were ridiculed as faddists, fanatics, extremists and unqualified practitioners, or quacks by the medical fraternity.
Dr. Trall's words in his Hydropathic Cook-Book (1853) are still true: "However strange may seem the assertion, it is nevertheless true, that the philosophy of diet has never been taught in medical schools! Physicians generally are as profoundly ignorant of the whole subject as are the great masses of people."
Back in 1916 Dr. Richard C. Cabot, one of the outstanding physicians of the world, wrote: "Almost nothing is known about diet. There are numerous books on the subject which are useful for pressing leaves, but not for much that they contain." I believe that Dr. Cabot's evaluation of medical literature on diet was correct at the time he first published his statement and that the condition has not greatly improved since.
In Nov. 1926, R. G. Jackson, M.D., Toronto, Canada, declared that although diet had "long been ignored and its few advocates been relegated to the category of 'cranks,' proper feeding is beginning to be recognized by the medical profession as a most important adjunct to our therapeutic armamentarium." He adds: "Diet was not 'scientific medicine,' therefore it was not anything. And besides, diet was a measure advocated by 'cults' outside the profession; therefore it ought to be frowned upon."
Note that Dr. Jackson recognizes that his profession are accepting diet merely as an adjunct to their "therapeutic armamentarium," and not as a very foundation stone of life and health. He adds: "Moreover, modern dietetics is not the creation of our profession. It has been developed in its scientific aspects largely by our friends, the biochemists, and through them almost forced upon us. But now our authorities are beginning to put their O.K. upon it and marking it as their own; so it becomes respectable and will soon belong to 'scientific medicine'."
The "bio-chemists" entered the field of dietetics at a rather late stage and have succeeded, by laboratory experiments, in confirming practically the whole of the trophologic philosophy and practice of the Hygienic school. They, like Dr. Jackson, omit to mention this fact, however, in their public writings.
There is not a medical college in the United States that has a course in dietetics and the number of physicians who make an effort to acquire a knowledge of dietetics after graduation is exceedingly small. They usually plead lack of time and opportunity, but they find time and opportunity to play golf, take post-graduate courses in other and much less important subjects and even to go abroad. Dr. Phillip Norman ascribes their persistence in ignorance of how to feed the body to a lack of interest in the subject.
Dieting has never been an essential part of a physician's prescription and physicians have never known and do not know anything about diet, as they so freely admit. Eighteen years ago doctors were still ridiculing those who advocated dietary measures. Thirteen years ago it was still not a factor in the treatment of the sick and occupied no place in the discussions in medical journals. Much fun was poked at "diets," "dieting," and "diet systems" by the regular medical profession until it suddenly dawned on them one fine day that the people were asking for diet. Today it is a factor in the care of patients in the practice of only a few physicians, has just reached the point of discussion by the profession and is still subject to ridicule by many of the dignitaries in the profession.
Despite their confessed ignorance of diet, despite their lack of training in dietary science and their lack of experience in dietary practice, they are ever ready to assume an air of pontificial infallibility in their criticisms of those of us who do employ a knowledge of food science in our care and feeding of the well and the sick. Some of our medical critics, some of the leaders in the ranks of materia medica, accuse "diet fads" of causing "nutritional diseases," "metabolic disorders" and cancer. Diet "fads" cause fewer evils than poisonous drugs, putrid serums, rot vaccines, dirty soups, and unnecessary surgical operations. Although freely admitting that they know nothing of diet and of trophology, they declare "it's all wrong anyway."
Another objection frequently met with is that "only a fool will bother about his diet when he is the right weight, sleeps well, enjoys life and is happy." This objection assumes either that correct eating is only for the invalid, or, else, that one should not make an effort to preserve his health, but should eat haphazardly until he becomes ill and then should try to restore his health. The intelligent person will seek to prevent rather than remedy ill health.
It too often happens that when a medical man does become interested in dietetics he absorbs as much of the work of the Hygienic school as he can and passes it out to the public as his own. For example, some of them tell us that they "have found" that raw starch is digestible and that it is not well to eat proteins and starches at the same meal, but they forget that those they decry as "faddists" preceded them with these discoveries.
I do not want to be understood as saying that there are no medical men who possess a knowledge of diet. The leaven is at work in the profession and its more progressive and honest members have seen the light and have shown the rare courage that is required to break with professional precedent and follow that light. I am happy to have a number of such men, in various parts of the country, among my friends. To these men, I look with confidence, to lead their profession out of its self-imposed darkness. But for the great mass of physicians there is no newer knowledge of nutrition. They make no advance in dietary science. Indeed, some of their leaders labor to prove that the discoveries in the field of diet only reveal that they were feeding correctly all the time. It is lamentable, but true.
A tubercular specialist wrote a booklet a few years ago on feeding in tuberculosis. He briefly reviews the high-lights of dietary research and says that these findings only prove that they have been feeding tubercular cases correctly all the time. Physicians really seem to be unable to grasp the truths that have been uncovered about diet and seem incapable of comprehending their significance. They have never fed their tubercular patients correctly and are not doing so now.
Logan Clendening asserts that "Researchers on diet have not created a new dietary: they have simply proved why the old one so long in use was effective. * * * * It is really safer to stick to the long-established diets we have been all using and liking than to the pronouncements of the food dogmatists."
He here expresses the old "conservative" resistance to change and progress, the inertia of the "long-established." In the same article he asserts that the present eating habits of "the average human being" were formed "since he became a prosperous animal" and this is tantamount to the admission that our eating habits are not "long-established" ones. If he will look a little deeper he may discover that the food manufacturers are responsible for many of our recent eating habits and that processed foods are of recent modern origin.
I agree with Clendening that dietary research has not caused the medical profession to change its feeding plans and programs. They are still feeding their families and their patients as they were forty years ago. They are still defending white flour and coffee. They are still counting calories and lauding meat and a high protein diet.
Go into the hospitals and there you will find white flour, white sugar, denatured cereals, coffee, tea and the like served to patients. You discover that these same foods are eaten by the nurses. The hospital diet is notoriously unsatisfactory, as is testified to by physicians, internes, nurses and patients. It is miserably prepared and served with no consideration for its dietary value and with no regard for combinations. Meat, potatoes, white bread, corn starch pudding and tea are likely to form the bulk of the hospital diet. The discoveries of dieticians and scientists in the realm of food science are utterly disregarded in these medical institutions.
Dr. Victor Lindlahr admirably expresses the Hygienic view of this matter when he says: "Certainly marble halls, X-ray apparatus microscopes, rounded corners, patented beds and all the frills and doo-dads that the hospital heads so delight in, do not contribute to the building of a patient's body cells. The human tissues that heal a wound do not sprout from equipment, architecture, or spaciousness. Wouldn't it be better to have less pretentious hospitals, less equipment, less staff but more vitamins, mineral salts and better cooks and care of the preparation of food."
Visit the homes of their patients and see these eat; or, better still, consult the written or printed diet prescriptions the physician gives to his patients, where he gives any thought to diet at all, and note the whole long list of denatured foods prescribed. They are still advising "standardized" and antiquated diets and pleading as an excuse that they "are too busy to keep up with the news of progress or are too far away from the places in which that information is readily obtainable."
This is the poorest kind of an excuse for ignorance of a subject so vital, all the more so when we consider that these same physicians manage to keep up with the "advances" in drugs, serums, operations, etc., Dietary knowledge is too easily obtained for us to accept this as an excuse for their failure to acquire and make use of it. Medical colleges certainly cannot offer this as an excuse for not establishing a Chair in dietetics.
Go into the homes of physicians and you soon discover that they and the members of their families are eating denatured foods of all kinds. There is white bread on the table. There is also white sugar, commercial syrups and sulphured and canned fruits. Denatured cereals are there, as are also coffee and tea. Their food is prepared according to conventional methods and is eaten in the customary, haphazard manner, with no regard for combinations or other essential orthotrophic factors.
Dr. N. Phillip Norman, Instructor in Gastro-enterology, New York Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital, says, in an article in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, July, 1925: "The average medical man seems to have so little interest in dietary matters that I feel I should like to say or write something, at every possible opportunity, to stimulate his interest to a more definite understanding of the nutritional principles that should be applied to every person, regardless of whether he is sick or well."
Progress in dietary science (trophology) makes it essential that intelligent men and women reform their eating habits, even if physicians will not. I always suspect commercial motives in the physician, however high his standing, who disparages dietary reform and who sings that "the old time religion (diet) is good enough for me."
Orthotrophy, from the Greek Orthos--straight, erect, true--and Trepho--nourish, was coined by the author to designate correct nutrition and separate it from the great mass of fallacies that make up what now passes under the term dietetics. Orthotrophy--correct nutrition — is broad in its meaning and covers more than is implied under the term, food. We, therefore, employ the term trophology the science of food, in the narrow sense of food and food chemistry. Trophology will be used to supplant the term dietetics.
Orthotrophy means correct nutrition. There are times when to abstain from food is not only right but imperative; when to eat is not to nourish the body, but to poison it. Therefore fasting, or negative nutrition, comes, properly, under the heading of orthotrophy. Although frequent references to fasting will be made in this volume, the subject will be fully covered in Vol. III of this series.
Sunshine is also a nutritive "substance" of great importance. It will likewise be covered in Vol. III.