Diseases of Civilization

Table of abreviations lsp  --  Low sugar population    CVD cardiovascular disease     CAWD Conditions associated with the Western diet     t2d type 2 diabetes

 “In the US in 1830 went from less than 15 pounds a person yearly to 100 pounds in the 1920s and 150 pounds . . . by the end of the century.”[1] 

            The large cluster of disease is clearly associated with diet; and to a lesser extent with tobacco, all types of drugs, and occupational hazards.  Yes, lesser extent because those risk factors have only a most pathologic affect upon populations on a low sugar diet.  For example 70% of Kitavans smoke, yet advanced cardiovascular disease (CAVD) was not observed.  The questions imbedded in the number of conditions associated with the western diet (CAWD) is:  ‘what is making every cell defective and how?’  At http://healthfully.org/rmb/ the first page is a list of the conditions (all are major killers and chronic conditions) and the next 2 web pages are the best answer available on how fructose can make us so sick--based on present science.  I have spent 3 years scowering fulltime journals and books in search of that evidence for how our high fructose western diet overwhelmed our repair systems and thus adversely affected every cell in our body.  Over a dozen major cellular processes are affected, and counting.  During that period I also laid out 5 best dietary fixes, depending on degree of insulin resistance, age, weight, severity of type-2 diabetes (t2d), and general health. 

Ninety-five % of dietary fructose is metabolized in the liver, and there it causes cellular damage by bonding to proteins (fructosylation/glycation) and though conversion to fat causes a fatty liver and at about 2 pounds of it is called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NFALD).  From this combo as starting point, insulin resistance develops in the liver and then in cells throughout the body.  Other consequence kick in among them are a sensitivity to serum uric acid, delayed replacement of collagen, damage to the mitochondria, turning on of the polyol pathway which reduces cellular glucose by its conversion to sorbitol and then fructose in two steps, and others, Two years prior I studied macronutrient.  All of this fulltime studies is amply represented at /rmb and http://healthfully.org/rh/.

 The tobacco science answers for CAWD, when it is brought up (which is seldom) is saturated fats, eating too much, lack of physical excursion, and stress.   Buck trumps science and the crap is repeated over and over again in the media, along with a dozens of miracle foods, supplements and diets.  What follows is the evidence concerning CAWD among low sugar population (LSP). 

Denis Burkitt[2] and Trowell invited 19 physicians in various part of the world where the indigenous population were relatively immune to the conditions of the western industrial nations.  They and contributors based their material in the book on years of treating native populations, and the hospital records in those regions.  The evidence is presented at has essentially gone unchallenged as to the conditions of these population.  Burkitt and Trowell have bout into the lip hypothesis, and lack of fiber in foods o

What follows below are other sources confirming both Denis Burkitt & Trowel’s seminal book Western Diseases:  heir Emergence and Prevention, 1981.  (my notes at  http://healthfully.org/cr/id3.html).  Staffan Lindeberg’s work with the Kitavans who lived on the Trobriand Islands archipelago in the Solomon Sea, off of southeastern Papua New Guinea  (at http://healthfully.org/rmb/id5.html).   I am relying upon award winning science writer’s Gary Taubes Good Calories, Bad Calories (2002) and his 2016 The Case against Sugar. Both meet academic standards of reference as sources, and neither books have received a negative review.[3] 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   Low-sugar populations     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Good Calories, Bad Calories

AFRICA:  “Forty-one years after [Albert} Schweitzer’s arrive (1913) arrival , and a year and a half after he received the  Nobel Peace Prize for missionary work, Schweitzer encountered his first case of appendicitis among African natives.  “On my arrival in Gabon,’ he wrote, “I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer. . . .  I cannot of course, say positively that there were no cancer at all, but, like other frontier doctors, I can only say that if any cases existed they must have been quite rare.  P 89, GC. Fouche, for instance, district surgeon of the Orange Free State in South Africa, reported in the BMJ in 1923 that he had spent six years at a hospital that served fourteen thousand natives.  “I never saw a single case of gastric or duodenal ulcer, colitis, appendicitis, or cancer in any form in a native, although diseases were frequent seen among the white or European populations.”. . p. 90 GC   When Trowell arrived in Kenya, he would later write, hypertension and diabetes were absent.  The native populations were also as thin as “ancient Egyptians, despite consuming relatively high-fat diets and suffering no shortage of food.”  By the 1950s obese Africans were a common sight in the cities and towns.  In 1956 Trowell himself reported what he believed to be the first diagnosis of coronary heart disease in a black African, an obese High court Judge who had spent two decades living (and thus eating) in England.  By the 1960s, hypertension was as common among black Africans as it was in any other population in the Western world. When Trowell returned to East Africa in 1970, “the towns were full of obese Africans and there was a large diabetic clinic in every city.  The twin diseases were  born about the same time and are now growing together.” 228-29 CAG.   

ESKIMOS:   ”The most striking is cancer,” noted Hutton on the basis of his eleven years in Labrador, “I have not seen or heard of a case of malignant growth in Eskimo.” He also observed no asthma and, like Schweitzer, no appendicitis, with the sole exception of a young Eskimo who had been “living on a ‘settler‘s dietary.”  Hutton observed that the Eskimos who had adopted the settlers’ diet tended to suffer more from scurvy, were “less robust, and endured “fatigue less easily , and their children are puny and feeble,”  P 90, GC .

AMERICAN INDIANS [BECAUSE MANY OF THEM LIVED ON RESERVATIONS AND RECEIVED GOVERNMENT RATIONS, THEY ARE AN UNRELIAB LE SOURCE]:   In a 460 page report entitled Physiological and medical Observations Among the Indians of Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, Hrdlicka described his observations from 6 expeditions he had undertaken.  “Malignant disease”, he said “if they exist at all—that they do would be difficult to doubt—must be extremely rare.” . . . Hrdlicka considered the possibility, which [Ancel] Keys  would raise fifty years later, that these Native Americans were by chronic disease unaffected because their life expectancy was relatively short:  he rejected it because evidence suggested that they lived as long as or longer than the local whites p 92-3, GC.   . . . Chas M. Buchannan, for instance, practiced fifteen years among two thousand Indians with an average life expectancy of fifty-five to sixty years and saw only one case of cancer; Henry E. Goodrich, practicing for thirteen years among thirty-five hundred Indians, saw on a single case. . . .” p 93, GC.      

ISLANDS:  In Fiji, for instance, in 1900, among 120,000 aborigines, Melanesians, Polynesians, and “Indian coolies,” there were only two recorded deaths from malignant tumors.  . . .  In the United States the proportional number of cancer deaths rose dramatically in the latter part of the nineteenth century:  in New York from thirty-two per thousand deaths in 1964 to sixty-seven in 1900. . . thirty  seventy in Philadelphia....  p 93, GC.       

SUMMARY: “ Most of these historical observations came from colonial and missionary physicians like Schweitzer and Hutten, administering to populations prior to and coincidental with their first substantial exposure to western foods.  The new diet inevitable included carbohydrate foods that could be transported around the world without spoiling or being devoured by rodents on the way:  sugar: molasses, white four, and white rice.  Then diseases of civilization or Western diseases would appear:  Obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, various forms of cancer, cavities, periodontal disease, appendicitis, peptic ulcers, diverticulitis, gallstones, hemorrhoids, varicose, veins, and constipation.  When any diseases of civilization appeared, all of them would eventually appear.  This led investigators to propose that all these diseases had a single common cause the consumption of easily digestible, refined carbohydrates.  This led investigators to propose that all these diseases had a single common cause—the consumption of easily digestible, refined carbohydrates.  The hypothesis was rejected in the early 1070s, when it could not be reconciled with [Ancel] Key’s hypothesis that fat was the problem. . . . ,” P 91 GC. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   Sugar   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[While some considered the refined carbs as the cause for CAWD, others singled out sugar.  The founding professor—first in the UK to head a nutrition department—John Yudkin (1910-1995) convincing argued for the role of sugar.]  “Yudkin also fed high sugar diets to college students and reported that it raised their cholesterol and particular their triglycerides:  their insulin levels rose, and their blood cells became sticker, which he believe could explain the blood clots that seemed to precipitate heart attacks,” 120-21.  [The thrombi which precipitates a heart attack is a two-step process, first of young, immature plaque leaking from a coronary artery and partially obstructing down-stream the artery, and then a blood clot forming to close it off.  John Yudkin in the 70’s published his findings in a book for a wide audience, Pure, White, and Deadly, which has been rereleased recently in a new edition with introduction by Prof. Robert Lustig. Unfortunately the sugar growers association and the food manufacturer’s, corporate farms, and pharma  “persuaded” government to endorse the lipid hypothesis.

By the beginning of World War I, the English were already eating more than ninty pounds of sugar per capital per year—a 500 percent increase in a single century—an Americans more than eighty pounds, p 97, GC. 

The consumption of sugar is undoubtedly increasing.  It is generally recognized that diabetes is increasing [didn’t distinguished between type 1 and type 2 back then], and a considerable extent its incidence is greatest among the races and the classes of society that consume the most sugar.  There is frequently discussed, still unsettled, question regarding its possible role of sugar in the etiology of diabetes. The general attitude of the medical profession is doubtful to negative as regards statement in words. . . .  But the practice of the medical professions is wholly affirmative.  Frederick Allen Studies Concerning Glycosuria and Diabetes 1913 [the leading authority on diabetes for a generation]. . . . Hindu physicians two thousand years ago suggested it was a disease of the rich and by indulgence in sugar, which had only recently arrived from the Guinea as had flour and rice. [Glycosuria is the excretion of glucose in the urine, which occurs with type-1 diabetes] P 100, GC.   

INTERNAL SITE SEARCH ENGINE BY GOOGLE