The Seven Deadly Whites: Evolution to Devolution - The Rise of The Diseases Of Civilization
384
The Seven Deadly Whites: Evolution to Devolution - The Rise of The Diseases Of Civilization
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785351808 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hunt, John Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Karl Elliot-Gough studied archaeology/anthropology, fell into the music business, and produced, managed and ran independent record labels. He became disillusioned, unfulfilled and found his calling from Gaia in writing and researching 'real' matters. His research over the past 9 years has led him to becoming a nutritionist and herbalist.
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The Seven Deadly Whites
Evolution to Devolution - The Rise of The Diseases of Civilization
By Karl Elliot-Gough
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Karl Elliot-GoughAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-180-8
CHAPTER 1
The First Deadly White Sugar
"I love to eat Kit Kats or cookies-and-cream ice cream. I need sugar like five times a day"
(Kim Kardashian)
The initial intention was to come out with all guns blazing, proclaiming sugar as the scourge of the human race, saturating your head with an endless stream of statistics, facts, diseases and problems, all caused by sugar. Such a start would have put sugar firmly where it deserves to be, being a toxic, omnipresent ingredient in the food chain. However, such an approach would have distorted the reality, as sugar is not alone in the devolution of our species, a devolution that involves all of the deadly whites found within this book. With no need to rush into the negativity, let's begin at a slower pace, with a little history and information about sugar.
Was Buddha a misogynist?
The etymology (that's the study of the origins of words) of sugar derives from the Arabic, sukkar, which in turn finds its root in the Sanskrit, shakkara, referring to a 'granular material'. The granulated sugar we are familiar with today was probably first processed in India around 1,500 years ago, although the original homeland of the sugar cane is almost certainly Papua New Guinea, many millennia before this.
One of the earliest written references to sugar, or at least the cane, comes from the words of the Buddha, Siddhartha Guatama, who likened women's involvement in religion to that of a fungal infection that affects sugar canes, known as red-rot. This indicates that at the time of the Buddha, around 550BC, sugar canes must have been growing fairly extensively in India, whether it indicates that Mr Guatama was a misogynist is another matter. Admiral Nearchus, sailing under Alexander the Great in 325BC, described 'Indian canes, dripping in honey', which surely has to be referring to sugar cane. It was from India that the granulated crystal form was first processed by at least 500AD, if not considerably earlier. This technique had been passed onto the Persians and the Chinese some time soon after, having spread west to all Arabic lands by 800AD, where the first factories and refineries were established. It was first introduced to Europe by either the crusaders in the eleventh or twelth centuries, or the Arabs and Berbers from the Iberian Peninsula, sometime in the tenth or eleventh centuries.
Atlantic Europe's Slave Age
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish sugar exportation from their plantations in Madeira by about 1450, with refineries soon being established in Antwerp, Bologna and Venice as well. The Portuguese were also the first to use slaves for sugar production, when they settled Sao Tome in 1486 (an island off the coast of present day Equatorial Guinea and Gabon), initially using expelled Spanish Jews, switching to African slaves soon after. By 1500, Madeira had about 80 sugar mills and was exporting 1,700 tons of sugar to Venice, England and elsewhere. It was proving to be a very lucrative trade, although the main hurdles to expansion were that large quantities of land and water were required to grow the canes, as well as being extremely labour intensive. It is here that the real legacy left by Columbus comes into play, as it was no coincidence that on his second voyage in 1493, he took with him sugar cane from the Canaries to Hispaniola (the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today). This single import was to change the course of history, facilitating European global economic dominance. From this time on, sugar cane spread throughout the West Indies like wildfire and with it the awfulslave trade, transporting Africans to the West Indies.
Sugar became far more readily available with the colonial expansion of the seafaring European nations, where the British yearly sugar consumption in 1700 was no more than 2kg per person, almost exclusively at this time due to its price, consumed by the rich until well into the nineteenth century. The slave trade saw supply vastly increased, with an estimated 13 of the 20 million African slaves who survived the horrendous crossing to America put to work in the new sugar plantations, all in order to feed the spreading addiction amongst the upper classes in Europe for this sugar-rush.
Many writers and social commentators of the day expressed grief at the blood and misery that the sugar industry had brought, to both the African slaves and the Central and South American populations, who were exterminated to make room for the sugar plantations and the slaves. The local populations had already been decimated by as much as 95%, after the initial European contact, spreading smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and other contagious diseases amongst the Native Americans, who unfortunately had a total lack of any form of immunity to these diseases, whilst the Europeans had built up an immunity over the preceding several thousand years; as these are zoonotic diseases, brought about by humans close proximity to cattle and avian species during our domestication of such animals. Yellow Fever further escalated this death-count with the introduction of the Africans to the continent, a disease that also wiped out many Europeans. The sugar also went towards the production of a considerable quantity of rum, which was traded with the Indians for fur, further adding to the general subjugation and overthrow of the Native Americans. The karmic payback for all this slavery and sugar, if you tread such boards of spirituality, is the rise of the diseases of civilization. Karma or not, there are some very real physical ailments that this sugar has been responsible for, or significantly contributed towards, as seen in a few pages.
More mention needs to be made of the fact that it was slavery and sugar that financed the whole Industrial Revolution, alas this book is not the place to discuss this. A brief mention will suffice for now to merely arouse the appetite of curiosity (and anti-establishmentarianism). The monies directly made from sugar and the subsequent reparations paid to slave owners when slavery was abolished significantly helped to finance and expand the various industries that had been invented since the 1740s, as well as paying for the construction of many stately homes. The industrialisation of the sugar industry and its associated technology was for some time the most significant leap in machinery use, until the Luddites turned against the mechanized looms in the 1810s. Britain may well have led the way in inventions that enabled the Industrial Revolution to finally flourish from the 1820s, but it only became seriously viable and profitable once the saying "its takes money to make money" became a reality. Without slavery or sugar, this financial clout would not have been accessible to Britain, and Britain would not have been in the position it found itself in, where it undeniably was at the forefront of this new machine age and the economic possibilities this created. Without sugar and slavery the Industrial Revolution would have been very different and not centred in Britain.
The emergence of European sugar beet enormously added to the steady growth in the supply of sugar cane from the colonies. Helped in no small way by Napoleon, as the French had lost out in the control of sugar from the West Indies, the expansion of European sugar beet secured a steady supply for them. The first beet-processing factories were established in Eastern Europe at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The resultant competition between cane and beet sugar began a price war which saw the price drop considerably, becoming even cheaper after the abolition of the sugar taxes in 1874. By 1915, the average annual consumption in Britain had risen to about 8 to 10kg per person, with its consumption no longer the preserve of the wealthiest. Today, the average sugar consumption is over 50kg, with many people eating more than their own body weight in refined sugar each and every year, making consumption of 130kg to 200kg per year increasingly common.
Widespread sugar use, addiction and increasing health problems
Many physicians from the end of the seventeenth century observed the detrimental health affects caused by the rise in the popularity of sugar, coining the phrase 'sugar-blues', which manifested itself in any number of symptoms, from nervousness, depression, insomnia and mental instability. In most instances, it was intolerance to such large inputs of refined sugar, causing havoc with digestion, hormones and mind. This was the first time that sugar had been introduced into the general population's diet and it was clear to see, to those observers at the time, that the before-and-after effects of refined sugar becoming readily available were extremely varied, albeit predominately negative and certainly most worrying. The spread of early sugar addiction was on a comparable level to observing a whole city today getting addicted to crystal-meth or crack cocaine. The effects of sugar were truly monumental. Incredibly, there is very little mention or thought given to this today, hardly even warranting a historic footnote, although the reasoning for this exclusion is answered below. A deadly poison in sheep's clothing had surreptitiously joined the flock.
It was because of this surge in refined sugar consumption that the establishment of a number of 'mental institutions' was made necessary to take care of those who had been too damaged by this initial flow and public consumption of sugar at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of (and throughout) the nineteenth century. Just as with any other drug, for the first few hits the negative effects had an enormous range of symptoms, then after a month of consumption it became tolerated for the majority, asaddiction settled in. For the minority, this addiction was the catalyst to many further psychological problems, hence the requirement of the institutions. (Although I'm not implicating sugar as being the only factor involved in mental disorders, it certainly made the situation far worse). When it was a minority of the rich going off their rockers from sugar, they could afford to live with it, as well as them being able to afford a more varied diet; when it affected the minority of the general public, this numbered easily into the tens of thousands, if not much more, it became much more of a problem.
Hardly anyone calls it an addiction, but an addiction it is for the vast majority. Just try to cut out all sugar from your diet for a day, and see if you have any cravings for this sugar drug-rush. That is an addiction, both physical and mental. And so it has continued for over two centuries, only now we have sweeteners ten thousand times sweeter than nature has. We have unwittingly assimilated sugar addiction into our culture, weaning children onto it from as young as six to twelve months old, if not before. However, as with any addiction, there is always going to be quite a few contra-indications and these are the very diseases of civilization that title this series of books.
Sugar has absolutely no health benefits or nutritional content whatsoever. It is actually a poison. If you only had refined sugar and water to survive on, you would die much quicker if you consumed both the sugar and the water, as opposed to just the water. A fact that was noticed as long ago as 1793, when five shipwreck survivors, who only had sugar and rum for sustenance, had in only the nine days till they were rescued, become thoroughly ravaged. It was clear to see, they were in a much worse condition than if just water had been consumed for those nine days. Tests were subsequently carried out on dogs and rats, all of which died in a surprisingly short time when fed just sugar. Unsurprisingly, this alerted the sugar industry to beware of any future scientific meddling in their affairs. Since then, numerousanimal experiments, scientific medical evidence as well as anthropological and ethnological comparative analysis, all overwhelmingly show sugar plays a detrimental role on the human organism. There is nothing positive to read about sugar from any independent sources. This is the reason why the detrimental sociological affects of the introduction of sugar don't even warrant a historical footnote, because the sugar industry has incessantly undermined the truth with their propaganda, editing and tippexing out the inconvenient truth about their industry, writing in their own version of the truth, exactly as with the case of the Nutrition Society below.
Industrial manipulation
In 1939, dental researcher Dr Weston Price published his 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and their Effects'. He travelled around the world to make his observations and took over 15,000 photographs to further substantiate his claims. The results of his research must have come as a bit of a shock to the establishment, as it clearly identified that the general health and wellbeing of some of the most primitive cultures far exceeded that of Europe and America. Indeed, his stunning photographs all show what can only be described as perfect specimens of the human race. Dr Price further noted that when the healthy 'primitives' became acculturated (changed from their traditional culture to a 'civilized' culture), the physical degeneration was very evident after only a few years. He recorded that the tooth decay rates of those living by eating only wild foods was as low as 0.1% of the population. Amongst some Canadian Inuit who were predominately hunters at this time, the rate was 0.16%, when only a few miles away, the white settlers enjoyed a rate of 25.5%. This makes tooth decay 160 times more prevalent amongst the eaters of a western diet, compared to those eating a wild diet. If our teeth and diet had improved since 1939, this comparison would be irrelevant, however, our teeth have not got better and our diets have deteriorated, along with our health, as clearly signified by the emergence of the diseases of civilization.
Needless to say, Price's meticulous and amazing work found many adversaries in the food industry. His impressive and studious book was superseded amongst much fanfare in 1957 by Prof McCollum's 'A History of Nutrition'. The media buzz surrounding this book stated McCollum was apparently one of America's greatest nutritionists, drawing from over 200,000 published scientific papers to substantiate and corroborate his work. Within this vast tome, there is not one single mention of any possible deleterious effect that sugar may play upon the human, or even rat for that matter. There certainly had been loads of experiments with rats before 1957, all clearly showing sugar's negative health impacts, although apparently none in the 200,000 McCollum used, which is extremely unlikely, if not impossible. This 'History of Nutrition' was a standard reference book in libraries for decades, with the book only being made possible by the generosity of The Nutrition Society, whom the author and publishers thanked accordingly. This all appears perfectly in order, as an informative book about nutrition should, after all, be helped along its way into the public consciousness by an organization with such a name as The Nutrition Society.
Until that is, one realises that The Nutrition Society was a ruse, used and paid for by Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Nestle, General Mills and a few other conscious and caring companies, keen and eager to get their point of view across. It seems logical to suggest that the first draft of McCollum's book would have mentioned the dangers of sugar, only to be removed at the insistence of The Nutrition Society before allowing publication to take place. A manoeuvre that is standard practice for all sectors of industry, hence why McDonalds, Coca-Cola et al. are always involved with nutritional agencies, institutions and conferences, in the same light that petroleum corporations head environmental and climate change agencies. It's not because they genuinely care about the considerable negative impacts of their industries, it's just their lofty academic persona allows for better control and censure of the information that gets filtered down to the public about their nefarious, clandestine, money-making activities.
What is sugar?
When we think of sugar, the mind's eye conjures up a picture of a bowl or packet of white refined sugar, or even a cube, although who uses these today? This is not the only sugar, nor is it the only meaning of the word 'sugar'. Somewhat confusingly, the word sugar now refers to this refined sugar in the same breath as blood sugar, artificial and natural sweeteners and foods that sugar, when in reality all these are totally different, though all share a negative outcome if left unchecked. This chapter is more concerned with the sugar used in the food industry, as it is this variety that constitutes the majority of the sugar consumed by the general population. Although sugar, which would have until only the past couple of decades been virtually exclusively white refined cane or beet sugar, the term today applies to a whole plethora of sweeteners, with refined cane and beet sugar still having the largest market share. This lead has been eaten away with the recent rise of highly refined vegetable fructose extract, mostly from corn, known as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and the artificial sweeteners, notably aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame K, all of which will get a mention throughout this chapter, although the focus will remain on the popular view of sugar being the white refined, granulated version.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Seven Deadly Whites by Karl Elliot-Gough. Copyright © 2015 Karl Elliot-Gough. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,The First Deadly White: Sugar,
The Second Deadly White: Milk,
The Third Deadly White: Flour,
The Fourth Deadly White: Fats / Oils,
The Fifth Deadly White: Salt,
The Sixth Deadly White: Rice,
The Seventh Deadly White: Lies,
Conclusions and Solutions,
Appendix,
Bibliography,