Catharyn Elwood: Nutritionist
(Page 4 of 11)
March/April 1972
By Hal Smith
PLOWBOY: There is currently a great deal of controversy about the "enrichment" of processed foods. Can synthetic additives really make commercially prepared and manufactured foodstuffs as nourishing as foods in which the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are naturally present?
RELATED CONTENT
John Shuttleworth discusses his experiences living the self-reliant life that Mother Earth News is ...
A Plowboy Interview with Shuttleworth, who discusses everything from the business of the magazine i...
The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins, author of the 1976 essay, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not T...
The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert May/June 1981 SCIENCE FICTION'S "YELLOW JOURNALIST" IS A HOMES...
ELWOOD: Well, there's so much we don't understand about nutrition yet and almost every day, it seems, we discover something vital in whole food that's not in processed foods at all.
When Dr. Roger Williams ran experiments in which he fed rats is "enriched" bread, 76% of the rats — if I remember correctly — died within 90 days. That's frightening, as well as ironic, considering that it was Dr. Williams' brother who held the patent on synthetic vitamin B 1 and was responsible for the so-called enrichment of bread in the first place. The brother rammed that program through during the Second World War when other countries were stopping the high refinement of their food and when many of our finest authorities on nutrition — men like Ancel Keys and the late Dr. Edward McCollum from Johns Hopkins University — were fighting to stop food refining here. But we wouldn't do it. We played ball with industry and processed our foods and tried to make up the difference with synthetics . . . which, of course, pleased the makers of those synthetics very much. Now, twenty or thirty years later, we find that rats can't live on these manufactured foods.
Dr. Williams would now like to add pyridoxine and some other factors that have never been added to so-called enriched foods before because he's tested and found that the rats will live longer when these elements are added. We shouldn't put up with it, of course . . . the real answer is to stop depending on programs of "enrichment" altogether and return to natural foods.
PLOWBOY: How do you feel about the general use of vitamin supplements?
ELWOOD: I think they're marvelous if people are deficient . . . and I don't know anybody who isn't today. I hope I can live to see the time when our food is so highly nourishing — grown properly, prepared properly and stored properly — that we won't need supplements . . . but until that day arrives, I'm certainly in favor of them.
PLOWBOY: Which supplements do you generally recommend?
ELWOOD: Well, people are so anemic today. Many adult women and one of every three children under the age of six is anemic and the disease has many causes. Iron supplements will help when anemia is a direct result of a lack of the mineral in the diet. Sometimes, however, the iron is there but we just lack the stomach acids to dissolve it. Another type of anemia — hemolytic — occurs when the red blood cells die too young because of a vitamin E deficiency. Whole grains contain vitamin E but 98% of the grain we eat is refined. So where are we going to get this vitamin unless we supplement our diet with wheat germ or vitamin E capsules?
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
Next >>
