This April 4, 2023 interview is straight from the mouth of a registered dietician. Check her book on Amazon: The Dietician's Dilemma.
From history:
EXAMPLE #1
[In a feeding study] pregnant rats were divided into two groups and were fed different foods. The same diets were consumed throughout pregnancy, weaning, and in offspring after weaning. One group was fed only fresh eggs that had been frozen, then thawed. The other group ate only thawed Egg Beaters, one of the liquid no-cholesterol egg substitutes we have been encouraged to eat as part of the effort to reduce cholesterol in the diet. . . One picture [in which the Egg Beater rat had thin, scraggly fur and was 1/3 the size of the fresh egg rat] amply describes the results. The Egg Beater rat pups died of malnutrition a few days after the photo was taken, about four weeks after they were weaned. . . Defenders of the processed food industry would say that this study is of no importance to humans because humans would never eat just one food. The common defensive phrase is: any nutritional deficiencies will be made up from other foods. The problem is, in the case of Americans, the other foods commonly consumed also are depleted of essential nutrients. Charles T. McGee, M.D., Heart Frauds: Uncovering the Biggest Health Scam in History
EXAMPLE #2
An experiment done in 1960 was originally undertaken as a joke. It was carried out by researchers at Ann Arbor University and involved three groups of rats. The first group was fed cornflakes and water. The second group was fed the box the cornflakes came in and water and the third group got rat chow and water. The rats fed the rat chow remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats fed the box became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. But the rats that were fed the cornflakes and water died before the rats that were fed the box. The last cornflake rat died on the day the first box rat died. Before death the cornflake rats developed schizophrenic behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the spine – all signs of “insulin shock.” The results of this experiment were never published and similar studies have not been undertaken, perhaps because vast fortunes would be jeopardized? Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions
EXAMPLE #3
Patricia Hardman, PhD, director of Woodland Hall Academy, a school for children with hyperactivity and learning disabilities in Maitland, Florida. Says, “We can change a child’s behavior dramatically by lowering his or her intake of sugar. If a child comes to school extremely depressed or complains that nothing is going right, or if he flies off the handle and can’t be controlled, we ask him what he’s been eating. It’s almost always the case that the night before he had ice cream or soda or some other food with a lot of sugar. . . We had one child who was tested for his I.Q. and scored 140. Three days later he was tested and scored 100! It turned out that grandma had come for a visit and, that morning, had made the child pancakes for breakfast [smothered with store-bought sugary syrup]. We waited another three days and tested him again. Sure enough he scored 140.” cited from Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions
EXAMPLE #4
Weston A. Price spent most of his professional and retired life traveling to the far corners of the globe in order to study the impact of diet on the health of various cultures and peoples. By observing and careful recording of disease and health patterns of the populations he studied he eventually was able to astonish tribal chiefs by pinpointing the date at which refined foods began to be made available to the local peoples. He did this by comparing siblings and offspring of families within the tribe. The clues that allowed him to determine the date at which refined foods were introduced (even in small amounts) were provided by what he described as "disrupted heredity" in which the younger children exhibited a variety of declining health conditions, increased susceptibility to disease, poor dental and facial structure and more susceptibility to tooth decay. Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects
EXAMPLE #5
In the 1940s [British epidemiologist T.L. Cleave, M.D.] published a series of papers about his discoveries [about the relationship of degenerative disease and processed food] and finally wrote a book about his discoveries. . .Cleave found that the entry of refined carbohydrates into the diets of primitive lifestyle people led to the onset of diseases of physical degeneration (including heart attacks). The tricky part was that the effect was delayed. He found that the disease pattern shift occured about 20 to 30 years after modern foods began to be consumed, a delay he called an incubation period. . . The concept has been repeated in animal feeding experiments. It is also consistent with knowledge gained in biochemistry, inborn errors in metabolism, and certain genetic disorders . . . In hundreds of location around the world from which information was available, Cleave never found a single exception to this pattern. This may be the most consistent finding in the entire field of medicine. Charles T. McGee, M.D., Heart Frauds: Uncovering the Biggest Health Scam in History
EXAMPLE #6
Eskimos of the Northern Yukon Territory of Canada were nomadic food gatherers until about 1955. In that year the Defense Early Warning (DEW) system was built to try to detect Russian missiles coming over the North Pole. Eskimos from all across nothern Canada and Alaska took jobs building air fields and radar stations. . . The Eskimos gave up their food gathering ways and moved to town. Overnight they made a switch from a diet of 100 percent natural foods to 100 percent modern store foods which were shipped in from the outside. Instead of the usual incubation period of 30 years, the disease pattern shift described by Cleave was condensed to 10 to 15 years. . . Women began to suffer gallbladder attacks and develop diabetes. Men developed coronary artery disease. Children developed tooth decay and acne. None of these conditions had been seen in these people before. . . A team of doctors from Edmonton, Alberta, described these changes. The doctors had been providing medical care in a regional hospital in the area for many years. These disease pattern changes occurred right under their noses. Almost as they watched. They were so impressed they wrote an article about their observations titled When the Eskimo Comes to Town, which was published in a major nutrition journal. Charles T. McGee, M.D., Heart Frauds: Uncovering the Biggest Health Scam in History
EXAMPLE #7
Weston Price found another "anomaly" in his voluminous and detailed research into "primitive" diets. The people who exhibited the best health, the least amount of tooth decay, least problems with infertitlity or difficult labor, the most overall hardiness, strength and resistance to disease and so forth were the coastal communities which depended primarily on fish and sea vegetables. The next healthiest groups were those that depended on large amounts of animal sourced foods, including glands and organs. The least healthy (although far healthier than their "civilized" counterparts) were the groups that depended primarily on carbohydrates and grains. None of the cultures Price studied were completely devoid of animal-sourced foods. Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects
EXAMPLE #8
The results of a study done on puffed wheat cereal were so negative that the researchers begged the company to discontinue production of the cereal. The president of the company said it had no say over what people decide to put in their mouths and so it would continue to sell the cereal so long as it made a profit. The study involved four groups of rats. The first group was fed plain whole wheat, water and a vitamin/mineral supplement. The second group was fed puffed wheat, water and the supplement. The third group was fed water and the supplements and the fourth was fed water and white sugar. The group eating the whole wheat and vitamins lived over a year. The rats that got only water and vitamins lived about eight weeks. The rats getting white sugar and water lived about a month, and the rats given the puffed wheat cereal and vitamins died within two weeks, suggesting there was something actually toxic about the puffed wheat itself. Paul Stitt, Fighting the Food Giants
EXAMPLE #9
A farmer in New York State, a few [decades] ago, made a contract with some New York hotels to take their stale bread and rolls off their hands to use as hog feed. His hogs had plenty of other foods, too, having the run of a large orchard with windfall apples, no scarcity of vegetation, and the various by-product foods that a farm affords. But the young pigs developed at only half the usual rate of growth and were subject to many diseases normally foreign to the pig species, particularly pneumonia. His brood sows had small litters or aborted. His hens began to lay eggs with irregularity, and chicks hatched from them were so feeble that few survived. It seemed that a curse had been laid upon his farm . . . He finally came to the conclusion that the white bread might have something to do with the matter. Forthwith he set up two test pens, putting one group of pigs on the white bread regimen, the other on the whole corn and wheat grain. In three months there was a “woeful lot” of pigs in one and a perfectly normal group in the other. The test absolutely established the responsibility of the white bread. The farmer was Senator W.P. Richardson of Goshen, New York. From an article titled "A Farmer's Conclusion" by Dr. Royal Lee [1885-1967] posted at www.soilandhealth.org
EXAMPLE #10
Doctors and other health professionals claim there is ample proof that animal fats cause heart disease while they confidently advise us to adopt a lowfat diet; actually the literature contains only two studies involving humans that compared the outcome (not markers like cholesterol levels) of a diet high in animal fat with a diet based on vegetable oils, and both showed that animal fats are protective. . . The Anti-Coronary Club project, launched in 1957 and published in 1966 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, compared two groups of New York businessmen, aged 49 to 59 years. One group followed the so-called "Prudent Diet" consisting of corn oil and margarine instead of butter, cold breakfast cereals instead of eggs and chicken and fish instead of beef; a control group ate eggs for breakfast and meat three times per day. The final report noted that the Prudent Dieters had average serum cholesterol of 222mg/l, compared to 250 mg/l in the eggs-and-meat group. But there were EIGHT deaths from heart disease among the Prudent Dieter group and NONE among those who ate meat three times a day. . .[And] In a study published in the British Medical Journal, 1965, patients who had already had a heart attack were divided into three goups: one group got polyunsaturated corn oil, the second got monounstaurated olive oil and the third group was told to eat animal fat. After two years, the corn oil group had 30 percent lower cholesterol, but only 52 percent of them were still alive. The olive oil groups fared little better - only 57 percent were alive after two years. But of the group that ate mostly animal fat, 75 percent were still alive after two years. Wise Traditions, Spring 2004
EXAMPLE #11
Both Weston Price and Francis Pottenger accurately predicted that western man would develop more and more diseases as he substituted vegetable oils for animal fats, and that reproduction would become increasingly difficult. By some estimates, 25% of American couples are now infertile. Cited from Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions
EXAMPLE #12
Another decidedly "un-nourishing modern tradition" has to do with the manner in which agriculture has developed in the "civilized world." Heavy use of a variety of toxic chemicals (many of which were originally developed as biological weaponry) is now threatening the very environment we depend on.
Monocrop, industrial-style agriculture requires ever more chemical interventions to maintain its productivity and despite this, annual crop production has been steadily declining for over twenty years. Many of the fertilizers now sold contain undisclosed "recycled" toxins and a long list of known cancer-causing agents.
Livestock (and the free nitrogen-rich compost they supply) are taken out of the traditional agriculural mix and so mono-farmed lands then require massive amounts of chemical nitrogen fertilizers, which then runs into waterways and destroys fish habitat. Today such chemical runoff from Mid-western farms into the Mississippi is creating massive problems for Gulf Coast fisheries and this same kind of runoff is affecting coastal fishing areas around the world.
Commercial livestock are also fed, injected and sprayed with a wide array of synthetic hormones and other chemical substances which not only finds its way into our waterways but into YOU and ME as well! Because of a variety of high-tech feeding practices, commercially produced animals are far less healthy, have dramatically reduced lifespans and supply us with nutritionally inferior, chemically burdened foods.
Even worse, small farmers all over the world (but most aggregiously in third world countries) are the most obvious and immediate victims who are now being held hostage to a globalized "free" market system which forces these small farmers into high tech, very expensive styles of agriculture while at the same time allowing industrialized nations to "dump" heavily subsidized, artificially cheap food commodities onto third world countries.
It is an environment in which the small farmer cannot compete. Things are not much better for small farmers in industrialized countries either, where a smorgasboard of laws and regulations together with massive subsidies for giant monocrop producers work against the small farmer and in favor of mass producers.
Here is how small farmer Joe Salatin describes part of the problem in an article appearing at www.ecofriendly.com:
"The 50 percent of the consumer dollar that goes to animal proteins--meat, poultry, milk, eggs--is regulated so tightly that these vigilante consumers who want to opt out of conventional supermarket fare can scarcely do so. In my travels around the country, the constant cry in the countryside is from livestock producers who cannot access their neighbors with clean food because every pound of sausage and every pound of cheese must first be wrapped in a million dollar processing facility. . . . It doesn't matter that thousands of us small producers can show empirically, using western reductionist science, that our home-processed, direct marketed products are astronomically cleaner and more nutritious than the federal-inspected fare. Society, via the government and the attorneys general, say categorically that such food cannot be sold. . . .The answer is not HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) [which Eric Schlosser says the inspectors have dubbed "Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray"] regulations from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which has already put thousands of small abattoirs out of business. The answer is not irradiation, chlorination, and safe handling labels. All of these regulations keep small processors--including farmers who make their own cheese or slaughter their own animals--out of the market by requiring huge, expensive facilities for the very first item. And while the new economy via computer reduces politics in business to performance-only since computers are gender-blind and race-blind, these new food safety laws inject more and more subjective polical bureaucrats into the food system. . . .Why must a T-bone steak be wrapped in a $750,000 quintuple-permitted, agricultural-zone-prohibitted facility to be "clean?" I guarantee you that I can drop a steer in the coral, lift it up with a front end loader in the clean grass of the backyard, and skin it out far cleaner than having it trucked 100 miles to be penned on concrete overnight with animals of dubious extraction at a slaughterhouse killing 100 animals per hour by hirlings who don't even speak my language. Give me a break! . . . . I don't mind numerical thresholds for clean. We grass farmers can meet them, no problem. Just show me the finish line; don't tell me what clothes I have to wear. If I can win the race wearing a spacesuit, who cares? Or if I win the race running on my hands instead of my feet, who cares? Performance is the operative term."
These are only a few of the symptoms of an agricultural system in crisis. But IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
As Peter Rosset, co-author of World Hunger: 12 Myths and executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, better known as Food First tells us: “we’ve reviewed the data from every country for which it’s available, comparing the productivity of smaller farms versus larger farms. By productivity, I mean the total output of agricultural products per unit of area – per acre or hectare. For every country for which data is available, smaller farms are anywhere from 200 to 1000 percent more productive per unit area.”
Moreover small farms can provide fresher, more nutritious, less processed, and less toxic food. We just need to give him a fighting chance. Buy LOCAL!