Nutrition Against Disease / Diet for a Small Planet / Recipes for a Small Planet

The FDA now protects us against being confused by biochemists and nutritionists. It restoreth the depleted soil, maketh processed food whole and feedeth us balanced diets simply by uttering “Let It Be.” It also tells us we cannot say it isn’t so if we are selling food. It saves us from crankily taking too much Vitamin A and D. It lusts after the B’s and C. If you don’t put the right adulterations in it you may not sell something made only with peanuts as peanut butter. At the same time, its right hand knowing not what its left is doing, it gaily permits a host of chemical additives to be used by the food industry. It permits egg factories to make hens into speed freaks.

On the other hand, Alan Nittler, M.D., who has to be the clown prince of “nutritionists,” tells you to give his book, A New Breed of Doctor, to your doc and ask him how come he isn’t as good as Nittler at curing all kinds of evils by devices ranging from coffee enemas to chomping on beets. If you do give his book to your internist be not surprised at a referral to your nearest friendly shrink.

Between the extremes of vitamins are no damned good, and food is the only medicine, the suffering layman who suspects that all is not well with our healing professions is often left reacting out of sheer negativism against the pomposity of the megabureaus.

Fortunately, on our side are such libertarians as Roger J. Williams, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Texas in Austin, full of honors and professional acclaim. Williams has written a series of books emphasizing the wide individuality among members of all species, indeed, between “identical” twins. Biological individuality is the basis for his strong arguments in favor of broadening the concept of “minimal daily requirements” and “recommended daily allowances” for vitamins and other nutriments. Nutrition Against Disease explores and develops the idea that the nutritional microenvironment of cells is the key to health and disease.

Williams’ notion of hereditary and nutritional causes of disease is well documented in medicine. Negroes who get tuberculosis die very quickly compared to others, while Jews almost always have mild cases. Negroes resist malaria while Europeans are very susceptible. Individuals in these races may run completely counter to the group trend.

Williams criticizes medical education and medical thinking for fixation on the trauma and germ-invasion causes of disease. He points out that clinical nutrition is totally absent from the curriculum of medical colleges. As a matter of fact, Science for April 5th points out that a major U.S. textbook on pediatrics allocates less than two of its 1600 pages to breast-feeding and does not even mention the basic biological mechanisms of the process.

In this highly readable book, Williams thoroughly documents the fact that improvement in our nutrition will result in an improvement in our general health. He emphasizes that nutrition research is fundamentally different from drug research. Vitamin research to date has been haphazard and basically ignorant. When we wish to discover if quinine will work against malaria we give quinine alone. This approach will not work for nutriments as they work in dynamic interrelations and one nutriment often will not make a fundamental difference except in deficiency disease. Williams introduces the reader to suggestive work on the value of nutritional treatments and preventative measures in a wide range of diseases. He is by no means of the “take 50 mg. of B-6 for itchy feet” breed of prescriptive "nutritionists." His approach is balanced, sane and reinforces a basic suspicion that medicine as currently regulated and funded in America is almost irrelevant to health.

Two books of great utility for readers interested in nutritional health (and in their pocketbooks) are the complementing pair, Diet for a Small Planet and Recipes for a Small Planet. Diet has recipes, and Recipes summarizes protein balance. However, the two together provide a superior guide to protein balance and nutrition. Vitamin enthusiasts frequently are abysmally ignorant about protein nutrition, and it is of critical importance for those who choose to be vegetarians. It was not until the late sixties that the fundamental research was done that enabled these books to be written.

Diet entertainingly rehearses the discovery that there are limiting proteins which must come from food sources and cannot be made by the body out of basic building blocks. These proteins are called "limiting" because the absence of one of the group will cause the efficiency of the rest to be reduced. Complementary foods are required. The value of meat as well as of vegetable protein can be increased by balancing foods in a more sophisticated way than the old "basic groups" which is still the major theme of dietetic instruction in America.

Ewald's Recipes reinforce a basic prejudice of mine that healthy food is tasty and attractive food. The book is thoughtfully arranged with useful chapters on food preparation, buying and simple methods of protein reinforcement without taking the whole route off the top of the food chain. The recipes are well organized and tasty.

Diet and Recipes are an essential pair of books for anyone interested in good nutrition. I know of no books of comparable utility.

Reviewed by GEORGE VON HILSHEIMER / Health and Nutrition / Nutrition Against Disease (384 pages, indexed) / BFL Price $1.95 / Diet (299 pages, indexed) and Recipes (356 pages, indexed) / BFL Price $2.75 (both books)