Denatured Foods Destroy Life

Article #1: Denatured Foods Destroy Life by Alfred W. McCann

Animals, human or dumb brutes, die when their food is debased, but the very number of such foods makes it impossible for an individual to go before a grand jury with the charge: “This food killed my little girl.”

For months, perhaps for years, one juggled food brought substances to her diet which her little body could not use. Her vitality in throwing off the excess baggage was slowly sapped.

She was not poisoned by any particular food. A combination of inadequate foods merely robbed her tissues of their tone.

Another food from another source had been processed in a manner that removed some or all of its most indispensable elements. In its refinement it withheld from her little frame the very materials she required for growth, materials that God had elaborated for her, but which unnatural practices had withdrawn from her reach on the vain assumption that it is not necessary to credit the Creator with a profoundly conceived and marvelously executed scheme of biochemic balances and harmonies.

Persistently, month after month, the disordered combination of artificial foods sallied to the dinner table, where all the forces of outraged nature were called into battle with the unseen enemy of health and life.

Commercial expediency looked on as the fight was waged with nature but nature had been equipped with poor fighting materials and the child’s resistance, broken at last by the combined attack of unsuspected enemies, buckled, snapped and was gone.

There is no pathologist, no public prosecutor, no father or mother who can accuse the food industry of her death. Let this be fully understood.

Before we can correct a single refined food abuse, by law, we must produce in court the body of a dead child, and prove that life was destroyed by a particular food.

Scientists will be on hand to testify in behalf of the defendant. Food manufacturers have been paying scientists for twenty-five years to testify in their defense.

I have listened on hundreds of occasions to their testimony in adulterated food cases, and in many instances I have seen their sophistries fail, but the facts have rarely been reported to the public.

The fear of advertising losses, as we have seen, has closed the columns of most newspapers and magazines to the truth.

Foods that kill mice, rabbits and guinea pigs are not “harmful” to the child in the law’s eyes, for the reason that nobody is willing to feed a child on an exclusive diet of such things until it dies, in order thereby to produce as evidence, a dead body in court.

However, when it is argued that chickens or other experimental animals are not human beings, and that therefore any deductions based on barnyard phenomena are unwarranted when applied to humanity, we are not confined entirely to animal experimentation for our facts.

The same facts have been established in most startling and dramatic fashion, hundreds of times, upon human beings.

In Billibid Prison, Phillipine Islands, 1912, twenty-nine criminals under sentence of death were fed exclusively on refined and denatured foods of the kind most common in America for the purpose of determining the effect of such diet.

Their chief food consisted of polished rice. In six weeks the condemned men became anemic. Their first symptom was slight edema (water-logging or swelling) of the feet and ankles which disappeared after lying down. Puffiness beneath the eyes, with general weakness and pains in the legs, soon followed.

Later the edema became massive, involving even the thighs. Then came marked apathy with muscular wasting and extreme pallor. Finally, an enlargement of the heart with feeble heart action.

It is noteworthy that the symptoms of war-edema reported among German, French and British soldiers, 1916-1918, are identical with these.

Commenting on the Billibid experiments, Drs. R.P. Strong and R.C. Crowell stated: “These diseases developed owing to the absence of some substance or substances in the diet necessary for the normal physiological process of the body. Without a supply of such substances in the food sickness results.” This comment in all its vagueness disclosed the poverty of food knowledge possessed by the medical profession six years ago.

The prisoners fed on the denatured diet mingled freely with the other prisoners but there was no tendency of the disease to spread outside the group fed on the polished rice.

When this denatured food was removed from their diet and whole natural brown rice restored to them, they recovered promptly.

In the near future, depending upon the rapidity with which the truth is spread, it will not be so difficult to prove with evidence that cannot be controverted that a murder was committed by depraved food.

Reprinted from This Famishing World