Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone. Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.
food until agriculture developed about 10,000 years ago. The best proof is that the world’s population did not begin its explosive increase until agriculture developed. There always was and always will be a strict relationship between the number of people and the supply of food—famine victims in Africa will attest to that. We have not adapted to superabundance. Rather, we are adapted to conditions of temporary abundance followed by temporary starvation. It is doubtful that there were many obese cavemen and women.
WHAT KIND OF FOODS DO WE EAT?
In sharp contrast, modern food to a large degree, as consumed by most people, can be described as: artifact, dead, toxic, monotonous, exotic, and surplus (overly abundant). Our ancestors ate more nutritiously because they had no choice. In the same way, animals eat wisely when they have no choice. When our ancestors began food technology by inventing fire and cooking, they could not have foreseen how this would eventually destroy the quality of our food. But we do know better. Yet, the professionals to whom society entrusted the quality of our food, the physicians and the nutritionists, have failed to behave responsibly, often advocating junk diets when they knew this was wrong. Society needs new professionals who understand the connections between good food and health, between sick food and disease.
Artifact—Food is fractionated. The better or more nutritious fractions are discarded or fed to livestock. The protein, fat, and carbohydrate are isolated and then recombined into material that looks, smells, and tastes like food but is not. It is possible to make a caviar look-alike from starch, black dye, and salt. No natural food is safe from exploitation. Fish is now being processed to appear as if it were another, more desirable, seafood. Artifacts do not contain the nutrients present in the original food and often contain additional chemicals.
Dead—Modern food has to be stored because there is such a long distance between the farm and the kitchen. Store-bought food must be kept free of bacteria and fungi and its enzymes must be removed or suppressed; this is difficult to do with whole food. Thus, it is easier to store white flour than whole-wheat flour. To be prepared for storage, food may have to be heat-treated, pasteurized, canned, cooled, or frozen. The most devitalized foods keep best, and the longer a food is stored, the less nutritious it becomes.
Toxic—Modern food, especially processed food, contains chemicals used to enhance preferred qualities, such as taste, smell, color, stability, etc. The best known are the cosmetic additives. But processed foods also contain trace or hidden additives, chemicals used in preparing the artifacts that are used in preparing the final processed food artifact. The final food processor is probably not even aware that these additives are present, and they are not listed on the final label. Modern foods are not toxic immediately, although when one sees how sugar can turn a normal child into a hyperactive tyrant in an hour, it is difficult not to consider it as toxic as any poison. Modern foods are insidious and they can destroy over many years. That is why it is so difficult to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between diet and specific diseases.
Monotonous—The high-tech food industry depends on having large amounts of a few plant foods as our staples, including sugar, wheat, oats, corn, milk, and cheese. These few food sources are reworked and recombined into an amazing variety of processed foods. A modern supermarket may contain up to 20,000 different items. There may be a hundred different boxed breakfast cereals, yet all are made from sugar, wheat, oats, or corn, plus additives. It is this monotonous, repetitive attack on our bodies by the same artifact foods that is responsible for a huge proportion of all allergies.
Exotic—These are foods grown in one climatic area and sent to another area, usually north or south. Bananas are exotic to Canada, while flaxseed or wheat in the Sahara would be equally exotic. There is some reason to believe the most dangerous movement is from tropical to cold climatic areas, because tropical plants do not contain enough of the omega-3 essential fatty acids needed in the cold areas.
Surplus—Not only is our food bad, but we have too much of it. As many as half of the people in high-tech societies are obese. The problems of obesity and the other diseases caused by excessive consumption of food, especially sugar, are enormous. The term “sugar metabolic syndrome” is used to describe these illnesses.
A FEW SIMPLE RULES
Most people will not appreciate being told that they must eat food which is whole, alive, nontoxic, variable, indigenous, and scarce. But once interested in the possible connection between malnutrition and their discomfort, they want to know as simply as possible which foods they should eat and which foods they should avoid. Fortunately, one need know only a few simple rules:
1. No junk food. Junk food is defined as any food that contains added sugar and additives.
2. Avoid any food that you know makes you sick.
The “no junk” diet is easy to understand and relatively easy to follow.
THE HARM CAUSED BY OUR MODERN DIET
The food industry, most doctors, and most nutritionists advise us there is no harm in eating modern food if our diet is “balanced.” The term balanced meal has been a favorite one used by dietitians for many years. It means that the optimum proportion (balance) of all necessary food components is provided. But it has come to mean something else: most nutritionists, in the name of a balanced meal, consider that even larger quantities of sugar in a meal are fine, provided that it is balanced against some protein, fat, and the essential vitamins and minerals. This leads to the preposterous idea that junk cereal and milk are nutritious, whereas in reality the cereal has diluted the nutritional quality of the milk. Some nutritionists consider the doughnut made from white flour, oil, and sugar plus a tiny quantity of vitamins a good food, presumably because it is “balanced.”
The concept of balance was originally useful, but it has been corrupted by our food technology and no longer serves any useful purpose. However, there is no better word, and we will use it in its original sense—to denote the importance of using optimum quantities of all the essential nutrients. This is best achieved by obtaining these from a variety of foods, which are more apt to satisfy our needs than is a dependence upon any one food.
Food should be balanced in itself, within each meal, and over the entire day. The best way to ensure balance in food itself is to use only whole foods, which nature has already balanced. Balance in a meal is achieved by eating several foods from different groups, such as meats, fresh vegetables, fruits, dairy products, and nuts and seeds. Balance over the whole day is ensured by eating balanced meals every time. Snacks need not be made from a variety of foods, as they are minor components of our diet, but they must be whole foods, not doughnuts, chocolate bars, and other junk.
Clinical nutritionists, orthomolecular physicians, and some clinical ecologists have seen how correcting a patient’s diet leads directly to his recovery. It does not require a major leap in logic to conclude that, had the patient followed the optimum diet all along, the disease would not have occurred.
Modern diets differ from diets we have adapted to in a number of ways. Protein levels, fat and lipid levels, and carbohydrate levels may be too high or too low. This applies to vitamin and mineral levels as well. But it is too simplistic to talk about too much or too little of any food component. One individual can eat only so many calories. If the amount of one is increased, there must be a reduction in the quantity of another. If one increases the protein level, there must be a decrease in fats and carbohydrates. For this reason, studies that take into account only fats and their relation to coronary disease but ignore carbohydrate levels will yield very low correlation, even if there were, in fact, a high association.
Here, we will discuss the most common fault with modern food, and what that fault does to people. This is the low-protein, high-sugar, low-fiber diet that causes the sugar metabolic syndrome.
TYPES OF CARBOHYDRATES
There