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 coPYRiGirr DEPosrr. 
 
Sugar and Salt- 
 Foods or Poisons ? 
 
Axel Emil Gibson 
 
Sugar and Salt 
 
 Foods or Poison? 
 
 BY 
 DR. AXEL EMIL GIBSON, 
 
 Author of ^^ Prolonging Human Life 
 Through Diet." 
 
 WILL A. KISTLER COMPANY, PRINTERS 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
r>^ 
 
 ^Kq. 
 
 
 Copyright 1913, by 
 
 DR. AXEL EMIL GIBSON, 
 
 Published December, 1913 
 
 FEB iu I9!4 
 
 CI.A862513 
 
To 
 
 Luther Burbank — 
 
 whose untiring labors in the service of hu- 
 manity have made him a prophet and a seer 
 of the divine life in man and nature — is this 
 little volume lovingly and gratefully dedicated. 
 
INDEX 
 
 SUGAR— PART I 
 
 Preface. 
 
 I. Has the Popularity of Sugar a 
 Scientific Basis? 
 
 II. Sugar as an Extract, and Sugar 
 as a Natural Product. 
 
 III. The Constructive Phase of Sugar. 
 
 IV. The Magic of a Chemical Formula. 
 
 V. The Destructive Phase of Sugar. 
 
 VI. Excess in Food-Failures as 
 Nourishment. 
 
 VII. The Philosophy of Excess and Bal- 
 ance. 
 
 VIII. The Difference between Organized 
 and Unorganized Acids, and their 
 Relation to Rheumatism. 
 
 IX. The Peril of ^Tree Sweets." 
 
 X. The Place of Sugar in the Hy- 
 gienic Bill-of-Fare. 
 
 XL Sugar an Explosive Force in the 
 Human Dynamo. 
 
INDEX 
 
 XII. Can Sugar Alone Maintain the 
 Expenditure of Muscular Labor? 
 
 XIII. Sugar as a Force. 
 
 XIV. Sugar as a Fatformer. 
 XV. Sugar as a Poison? 
 
 XVI. Sugar as a Medicine 
 
 XVII. The Moral AppUcation of ^T^ree 
 Sweets." 
 
 SALT— PART II 
 
 XVIII. Evidence For and Against the Use 
 of Salt. 
 
 XIX. The Fundamental Purpose of Salt. 
 
 XX. Salt at Once a Preservative and 
 a Destroyer. 
 
 XXL The Meaning of ^^The Salt of the 
 Earth' ^ to Physiological Chem- 
 istry. 
 
 XXII. How Salt at Once can become 
 the Savior and Destroyer of 
 Life. 
 
 XXIII. Can the Body Absorb Mineral 
 Substances? 
 
 8 
 
INDEX 
 
 XXIV. The Fallacy of Dr. Willjamar 
 
 Stephanson's Theories as to the 
 Value of Salt. 
 
 XXV. Why the Esquimo Abhors Salt in 
 His Dietary. 
 
 XXVI. Why Life in the Temperate Zone 
 Needs Salt for its Maintenance. 
 
 XXVII. Correspondence Between "Free 
 Sweets" and Loose Morals. 
 
 XXVIII. The "Salt'^ and the "Sweets'^ of 
 the Earth. 
 
 XXVIV. The Value of Salt in Medicine. 
 
 XXX. The Value of Salt in Food. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 When sitting at your breakfast-table and 
 quietly enjoying the drink that cheers, but 
 not inebriates, it may not occur to you 
 that the lump of sugar you just slipped 
 into your cup, relates you to principles 
 and force-aspects that have the profoundest 
 bearing, not only on your physical, but 
 also on your mental and moral nature. 
 
 For if thoughts are things, so, on the other 
 hand, things must be thoughts. Proceed- 
 ing from within, outward thoughts are things, 
 while from without inward things turn into 
 thoughts. They are interchangeable as-pects 
 of cause and effect, and relate man to the 
 sources and expressions of universal prin- 
 ciples. 
 
 This means that the principle of ''sweet- 
 ness," which has in sugar its material ex- 
 pression, has on the moral plane the subtler, 
 but not less forceful expression of tempta- 
 tion. In other words, the same principle 
 which in the seductive form of sugar appeals 
 to the gustatory instincts of the physical 
 man, appeals with still greater force in 
 the form of moral ''sweetness" to the inner 
 
 man. 
 
 Life is a woof, progressing under the for- 
 
 11 
 
PREFACE 
 
 mative action of cause an effect, action 
 and reaction, impulse and motive; while 
 throughout its entire fabric runs the direct- 
 ing or supporting lines of principles, guag- 
 ing its advance, unifying its expression and 
 unfolding its purpose. 
 
 This gives to man^s place in nature at once 
 its reality and its mystery. His relation to 
 the universe becomes freighted with the 
 gravest and most far-reaching importance. 
 He becomes a subject of cosmic dominion, 
 yielding with equal felicity to the scalpel of 
 concrete dissective science, and the abstract 
 measurements of intangible metaphysics. 
 The solution to the human equation is no 
 longer to be worked out on one plane, but 
 on all planes. 
 
 From a close study of human motives in 
 their relations to the conflict between the 
 needs of man and the supply of nature, 
 between the appetite of the senses and the 
 recoil of their gratification — we will learn 
 to decipher the signboards of evolution, 
 and become more able to adjust our means 
 of time to the ends of Destiny. The temp- 
 tations that swerve us in our attitude to 
 diet, and cause our failure to rationally 
 relate means to ends, enjoyment to purpose, 
 etc., are at present confronting the indi- 
 
 12 
 
PREFACE 
 
 vidual with an intensity that in many cases 
 threaten him with extinction. And |the 
 agent which today exerts the greatest in- 
 fluence on our sense-hfe in relation to food 
 is sugar. The dominating ingredient in most 
 of our dishes, sugar perverts our taste, 
 bhnds our instincts, bewilders our gastric 
 consciousness, and leaves us guidelessly and 
 aimlessly adrift in the rapids and breakers 
 of morbid and despotic cravings, not in- 
 frequently decoying the individual into 
 body-and-mind-destroying excesses . 
 
 In the book before you a bold attempt 
 has been made to explain the w^eird power 
 which sugar holds over the taste of the 
 highest advanced culture-folk of the world 
 today. At the same time it will convey 
 a knowledge of the principle which trans- 
 lates into terms of moral temptations, on 
 the plane of the mind, the ''sweetness" 
 or attractiveness which, as sugar, it exerts 
 on our body through the sensation of taste. 
 
 The reader will also learn that our atti- 
 tude to sugar, as an element of food, will 
 react with positive force on our moral na- 
 ture in the construction of character. The 
 Master was right: ''What ye bind on Earth, 
 will be bound in Heaven.'' In our daily 
 routine existence, as we relate ourselves to 
 current events, we are offered the key of 
 
 13 
 
PREFACE 
 
 St. Peter, with the power to unlock the moral 
 and intellectual treasures of man's highest 
 nature. 
 
 And furthermore, as it is not in the uses 
 of sugar, but in its misuse and abuse that we 
 evoke the Nemesis of nutritional disaster, 
 so on the moral plane, we will find that as 
 long as passion remains our servant, and 
 under the control of our judgment, it will 
 act as a lever of incalculable mental and 
 moral force in the building up of will power 
 and character. 
 
 As with sugar so with salt. The rela- 
 tion of the latter to the moral life and des- 
 tiny of man, is no less significant than the 
 former. Both stand for principles adherent 
 in the deepest springs of human nature. 
 In salt, we have the mystic ^^Rock of Ages,'' 
 the ''Elixir of Life," and the ''Philosopher's 
 Stone," all in one. But its nature, like 
 the Sphinx, is double-faced; it relates us 
 both to life and death; to health and dis- 
 ease. It may set free by evaporation, or 
 imprison by crystalization. From the stand- 
 point of principle, it may give to our charac- 
 ter the stability of the "Salt of the Earth," 
 or crystalize our intellectual life into the 
 rock-salt pillar of the symbolic wife of Lot. 
 
 Sugar and salt are the symbols of man's 
 dual nature, the balancing forces of his vast, 
 
 14 
 
PREFACE 
 
 complex evolution. As servants they raise 
 him in the scale of life and power; as mas- 
 ters they destroy him. 
 
 ^^At the gate of every Eden/' said Mo- 
 hammed, ^ 'hangs a two-edged sword." In 
 the Eden of Health, this sword is represented 
 by the duality of Sugar and Salt. 
 
 15 
 
SUGAR AND SALT- 
 FOODS, OR POISONS? 
 By 
 
 Dr. Axel Emil Gibson 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HAS THE POPULARITY OF SUGAR A 
 SCIENTIFIC BASIS? 
 
 Without possessing the fatal fascination 
 of a narcotic, sugar exerts a greater at- 
 traction on the human race than any other 
 element of the dietary; and strange as it 
 may appear, there exists a positive relation 
 between a people's demand for sugar and 
 the standard of its culture. 
 
 Thus we find the Anglo-Saxon race to be 
 the greatest of the world's sugar-eaters. 
 In the statistics of the United States Govern- 
 ment, collected in the year of 1910, we 
 find that the average citizen of this country 
 and Great Britain consumes yearly more 
 than half his own weight, or 80 lbs. per 
 capita. Next in the line of sugar-loving 
 culture-people come Denmark, Sweeden and 
 Norway, with their respective 70 and 65 
 
 17 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 lbs. per average man, woman and child. 
 Then follow Germany, France and Holland, 
 with their tribute to the Monarch of Taste, 
 at the rate of some 50 lbs. each, while at 
 the end of the list we find Italy, Greece 
 and Turkey with a sugar consumption of 
 somewhat less than 23 lbs. per head. Last 
 year's consumption of sugar in the United 
 States alone exceeded 7000 million pounds. 
 
 This universal popularity of sugar, es- 
 pecially among nations where the tide of 
 culture touches its high-water mark, has 
 its cause and explanation in the readiness 
 by which it gives off a maximum of energy 
 with a minimum of digestive labor. The 
 tension of modern life with its prodigious 
 expenditure of muscular and nervous en- 
 ergy demands a quick combustible to fa- 
 cilitate rapid metabolic exchanges. Such 
 a combustible, or ever-ready generator of 
 muscular and nervous energy is found in 
 sugar. Suspended in its bosom is held stor- 
 age batteries of incalculable power, ready 
 to be discharged in response to physiological 
 needs and necessities. But the relation 
 between the demand and the supply, in 
 order to produce nutritionally safe results, 
 must be metabolically balanced, and pro- 
 ceed in accordance with physiological and 
 biological principles. Through the culinary 
 
 18 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 excesses in modern living we have ruptured 
 the chain of vital reciprocity by which 
 Mother Nature relates herself to,; the enti- 
 ties of universal evolution. The ingenuity 
 of the human intellect, stimulated by a self- 
 ish desire to gratify an undue and unnatural 
 craving for extracted and concentrated 
 relishes, has devised expediences by which 
 nature can be ^^held up" so to speak, and 
 coerced to yield gustatory sensations in ex- 
 cess of the powers of digestion and assim- 
 ilation. One of the strongest, and at the 
 same time most serious temptations in the 
 life of an individual lies in his natural but 
 over-indulged and hence overgrown desire 
 for ^'sweets," not only on the physical plane, 
 but as a mental attitude, on all planes. 
 
 This craving for ^ ^sweets," experienced 
 more or less by every creature of evolution, 
 has a deep meaning in its relation to the 
 unfolding and maintenance of life and growth. 
 The function of sugar in evolution is unique 
 and fundamental, having for its purpose to 
 re-charge the cells of every entity with the 
 vital force of structurel rejuvenescense. In- 
 troduced into the system in its natural, vege- 
 tative combinations, it starts chemical reac- 
 tions in the responsive physiological functions, 
 from which arise those cellular, unorganized 
 vital enzymes, or ferments, which form the 
 
 19 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 basic elements in all successful digestion 
 and nutrition. 
 
 It is thus readily seen why the creatures 
 of evolution should worship at the shrine 
 of this powerful, nutritional, stimulant. . . 
 The engines of life — the innumerable cells 
 of the organism — are kept in action through 
 the combustion of the sugar molecule. The 
 energy liberated from the breaking up of 
 this persuasive element is instrumental in 
 rising the whole organic world into levels 
 of progressive unfoldment of power and 
 substance. It constitutes the Atlas of a 
 biologic Cosmos, maintaining the nutritional 
 and physiological balance of organized ex- 
 istence. 
 
 > 
 
 20 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 SUGAR AS AN EXTRACT, AND SUGAR 
 AS A NATURAL PRODUCT 
 
 The fact that no natural sugar occurs 
 without being atomically balanced by carbon, 
 leads us to the conclusion that its com- 
 position, the formula of which is C6, H12, 
 06, is an atomic or ionic charge of H. 0., 
 held in chemical sequence by the carbon 
 envelope. Brought in touch with organiza- 
 tions that demand sugar for their growth 
 and sustenance, the affinity evolved through 
 the interaction of the different elements, 
 may rise to an intensity overcoming the 
 controlling power held by carbon over its 
 compound. This transit of the sugar mole- 
 cule from its carbonic envelope to the tro- 
 phic cell of an organism, under the process 
 of affinity, constitutes the basic principle 
 and governing conditions in the entire chem- 
 istry of nutrition. In other words, chemical 
 affinity, in its action on the digestive and 
 assimilative processes, brings out the prin- 
 ciple of supply and demand in the field 
 of physiological economy: hence the physiolo- 
 gical value of sugar depends on the character 
 
 21 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 of its origin — whether naturally or arti- 
 ficially obtained. With natural sugars we 
 mean the sweets prevailing in nature, as 
 fruit and vegetable, before they have become 
 subject to the processes of extraction and 
 concentration demanded by the jaded sen- 
 sibility of an over-stimulated and hyper- 
 trophied appetite. 
 
 At the head of the natural sugars stands 
 Grape-sugar, or Dextrine, introduced by its 
 carbon carrier in the form of a saturation- 
 compound, and appearing as a complete 
 molecule under the chemical formula C6, 
 H12, 06. By this is indicated that Dex- 
 trose stands for a complete, integral, per- 
 manently self-sustained compound, in which 
 Carbon, with its four valencies, or powers 
 of affinity, redoubled or reinforced six times, 
 is adequate to hold in a firm grip the single 
 unit-power of the Hydrogen molecule — 
 doubled 12 times, and the two-armed power 
 of oxygen — doubled 6 times. Or, in other 
 words, the valency or power of affinity of 
 carbon amounts in power to the combined 
 valencies of Hydrogen and Oxygen — viz: 
 
 Oxygen, 2x 6 — 12 
 
 Hydrogen, 1x12—12...... 24 
 
 Carbon, 4x 6—24 24 
 
 The formula governing this compound 
 comprises the whole group of natural sugars, 
 
 22 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 such as Grape-sugar, Fruit-sugar, and other 
 Monosaccharides. Complete, and chemically 
 satisfied with every atom of the compound 
 structurally engaged, the formula C6, H12, 
 06, introduces nature's own method of sup- 
 plying her creatures with energy adequate 
 to meet the needs and conditions of a com- 
 plex evolution. Hence the congenial and 
 energizing influence of fruit, vegetables, milk 
 and honey upon the system, having the 
 power to combine taste with virtue, impulse 
 with permanence, and stimulation with 
 normal growth. 
 
 23 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE OF 
 SUGAR 
 
 In its natural condition, as vegetable and 
 fruit, sugar performs the supremely vital 
 and constructive function in the physio- 
 logical economy of the body, to acidify 
 and subsequently to dissolve the slowly 
 accruing crystalizations of waste-deposits in 
 the capillaries. The modus operandus, by 
 which this process is accomplished, is at 
 once supremely grand and supremely simple. 
 When, in the course of excessive feeding, 
 the capillaries and lymph-spaces become 
 clogged up with crystalizations of accumulated 
 urates, oxalates, carbonates, ammonia, etc., 
 the system, by an ingenious process of sdf- 
 governing adjustment, has the power to 
 change the normal alkalinity of the circula- 
 tion into a temporary condition of acidity, 
 so as to be able to dissolve the constantly 
 increasing blockade of toxines in the vas- 
 cular exchange. This change is affected by 
 the natural, unorganized — i. e. non-bacterial 
 — acids imparted into the system by fruit. 
 For the sugar of the fruity when assimi- 
 
 24 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 lated by the system, gives rise to normal 
 fermentative processes resulting in the for- 
 mation of the above acids, whose useful- 
 ness to the system consists in dissolving 
 crystalized waste matter. On the other 
 hand, the magnesium, potassium, sodium 
 and other organic tissue salts contained in 
 the fruits, have the power to engender a 
 return of the acidified blood back into its 
 normal state of alkalinity. Thus Nature 
 wields, in one single hand, the knife of the 
 surgeon and the balm of the nurse — the dis- 
 solving fires of the acids and the restorative 
 alkalinity of the salts. 
 
 The acidulation of the natural sugars in 
 the system is attended by physiological emer- 
 gencies. The greater percentage is turned 
 into fat and energy. Acid depletes — exca- 
 vates. Sugar repletes — renovates. Acid, by 
 its chemical fire, reduces organized waste- 
 products and tissue-poisons into ashes; sugar, 
 by its chemical affinity for organized poisons, 
 absorbs the pathological wreckage thrown 
 into circulation, and removes the blockade 
 from the ducts and channels. Acids lower 
 the temperature of the system, by dis- 
 solving the decayed and fermenting substances 
 held suspended in the various tissues; sugar 
 restores the normal degree of temperature' 
 by virtue of its chemical affinity for the 
 
 25 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 liberated poisons — extracting and conducting 
 them out of the system. 
 
 So far, so good; but while the power of 
 Nature to maintain the w^orking standard 
 of constitutional health has its seat and 
 condition in a normal balancing in the 
 system of salts and sugars, obtained from 
 the fruits and vegetables — in order to meet 
 the exigencies of obvese environments and 
 abnormal situations — nature, in her ever- 
 present resourcefulness, often takes recourse 
 to abnormal means. Thus, in the great 
 vital economy of existence, what may stand 
 for unhygienic and illogical food combina- 
 tions under one set of conditions, may, 
 under the stress of reversed conditions, be- 
 come the very means necessary to restore 
 a disturbed physiological balance. We may 
 therefore find that in the countries of the 
 North, where fruits are scarce, or absent, 
 a moderate indulgence in extracted sweets, 
 are not only physiologically tolerable, but 
 may be necessary. Jellies, jams, and fruit- 
 preserves, in themselves mere dead and em- 
 blamed fruits, nevertheless, under certain 
 conditions are valuable agencies of muscular 
 and nervous energy. To the extent, how- 
 ever, that nature is adequate to supply our 
 dietary directly from her own faultless cuisine, 
 where the sun does the cooking and the 
 
 26 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 earth the seasoning, any procedure to stim- 
 ulate taste and appetite by artificial mix- 
 tures will only result in invoking the Nemesis 
 of a disordered stomach and liver. Only 
 in regions where nature is barren, and fails 
 to meet the demand of our system for a 
 balanced nutrition, are we justified in pre- 
 paring, artificially, the required food-supply. 
 
 27 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MAGIC OF A CHEMICAL 
 FORMULA 
 
 The enormous difference between sugar as 
 a health-promoting, and sugar as a health- 
 destroying power, is represented in the dis- 
 placement of a single figure in its chemical 
 formula. In chemistry, if anywhere, figures 
 do not lie. The formula back of the whole 
 series of artificial or extracted sugars — CI 2, 
 H22, Oil — shows at once that its compound 
 is spurious and not in a position to supply the 
 system with its congenial, normally-adequate 
 needs of energy. A dissection of the formula 
 reveals its inadequate and unbalanced 
 structure. 
 
 Hydrogen, 1x22—22 
 
 Oxygen, 2x11—22.... ...44 
 
 Carbon, 4x12—48 48 
 
 which means a balance of unsatisfied affini- 
 ties amounting to -4. 
 
 Thus we see how, in this spurious compound, 
 carbon enters the field of physiological chem- 
 istry with two unsatisfied valencies for Oxygen, 
 
 28 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 which means that the digestive system has 
 to fill the ensuing elemental vacancies with 
 its own supply of Oxygen. That is to say, 
 that artificial sugar comes into the system 
 with a demand in place of a supply, and 
 with its unsatisfied affinities threatening the 
 solidarity of every tissue, subject to its power. 
 Under the category of artificial sugars we 
 comprise cane-sugar, malt-sugar, milk-sugar 
 and the various forms of disaccharides in 
 extracted fluids or crystals. Indulged in 
 as means of increasing the flavor of foodstuffs, 
 in themselves complete, such as cereals, 
 vegetables and ripe fruit, this artificial form 
 of sugar proceeds to re-establish its ruptured 
 chemical balance at the expense of the 
 body^s own nutritional storages. Sooner or 
 later this brings the system into a state of 
 general functional and structural bankruptcy. 
 
 29 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DESTRUCTIVE PHASE OF SUGAR 
 
 An analysis of the natural and extracted 
 sugars shows unmistakably the dangerous 
 character of the latter, when used indis- 
 criminately in the preparation of foods: 
 
 Natural Artificial 
 
 Sugar Sugar 
 
 Potassium 30 .19 28 . 79 
 
 Sodium___ 10 .42 2 . 89 
 
 Calcium Carb. 2.60 10.93 
 
 Magnesium..... 4.71 1.16 
 
 Iron. 3.23 1.68 
 
 Sulphur 4.85 4.69 
 
 Water 44.00 
 
 100.00% 50.14% 
 
 Now it is in this mutilated form that 
 sugar works its ravages in the human nu- 
 trition. Subjected to the processes of diges- 
 tion and assimilation, it forms a nutritional 
 vacuum in the system by which is generated 
 a protracted suction or urge towards a restor- 
 ation of its disturbed elemental balance; a 
 suction, which, like a thousand-armed octopus, 
 extends its fibres to every center of the 
 
 30 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 organism. As it is Potassium and Sodium 
 that^ are especially subjected to the raving 
 affinities of the extracted sugar, it is in the 
 attack on these highly important tissue-salts 
 that the deadliest blows are dealt to health 
 and life. And, furthermore, as the function 
 of these salts is to drain and clean the tissues 
 of poisonous substances, their absorption 
 by the chemical action of the sugar means a 
 retention of the carbonic, lactic, oxalic, uric 
 and other acids, and the subsequent forma- 
 tion of obstructive deposits in the tissues 
 and capillaries. This again means high blood- 
 pressure, with cellular asphyxia and auto- 
 intoxication, which if continued must, in 
 the course of time, give rise to permanent 
 functional disorders of liver, kidneys and 
 lungs. Furthermore, as retarded circulation 
 and subsequent incomplete oxygenation of 
 tissue-wastes generates adipose or fatty tissue 
 in the body, it is readily seen how the in- 
 dulgence in free sugars can give rise to fat, 
 and why fat is a very unreliable sign of 
 health. It is only a question of time when 
 adipose tissue, if continued to be formed, 
 will terminate in Adiposis, or fatty degeren- 
 ation. 
 
 31 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 EXCESS IN FOOD — FAILURE IN 
 NUTRITION 
 
 In the geat economy of nature, with its 
 ever-present adjustment of supply to demand, 
 of gratification to need, etc., we find all along 
 the highway of evolution the presence of 
 certain guide boards or danger signals, re- 
 minding the individual of the perils which 
 lie in wait for the trespassers. 
 
 It is there curring verificationon a universal 
 scale of the statement of the great Moham- 
 medan Prophet, that at the gate of every 
 Eden swings the two-edged sword of life 
 and death. 
 
 It is the sword of moral balance, suspended 
 over the alluring field of gratification and 
 excess, for were it not for this corrective 
 of suffering, following upon the heels of 
 excess, the creatures on the stage of evolution 
 would long ago have been blotted out of 
 existence through self-destruction. It is only 
 through the unerring and unrelenting re- 
 adjustment, unfolding along the chain of 
 guilt and punishment, that an overwhelming 
 
 32 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 percentage of humanity is kept from ex- 
 tinction. 
 
 Excess strikes the Hmit of the evolutionary 
 scale of balance. Whether this excess has 
 its balance in sugar or salt, in carbon or 
 nitrogen, in acids or starches, its course is 
 Hnked with sensuous gratification on a basis 
 of personal egotism, and followed by the 
 inevitable train of vital exhausture and sys- 
 temic breakdown, — a breakdown which has 
 its closing event in some or other phase of 
 functional arrest, indicated by a gradual hard- 
 ening of the tissues of the organism. Thus 
 arise the more or less grave ailments known 
 as Arterio-Sclerosis, Induration of the Liver, 
 Arthrodial Rheumatism, Interstitial Nephri- 
 tis, Cardiac Ossification, etc., which all stand 
 as immutable state-evidences in the court of 
 physiological equity, testifying to inroads in 
 the field of self-indulgences and excess. With 
 all the differences inherent in the various 
 forms of dietetic transgression, both as to 
 principle and process, in this final phase of 
 nutritional excess, they all join issue: — the 
 reaction from over-stimulation into condi- 
 tions of functional arrest, and the subse- 
 quent breakdown, from congestion of the 
 tissues and viscera, into their crystalization. 
 Under specific conditions, however, when its 
 consumption is gauged by a biological and 
 
 33 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 nutritional balance, sugar may rise the cel- 
 lular activities of the system in to the highest 
 standards of efficiency. Its swiftness of com- 
 bustion and readiness to generate nerve- 
 power, swells the tides of the vital currents 
 in the organism, into ever higher levels of 
 functional efficiency and structural endur- 
 ance. 
 
 FOOT NOTE.— This law holds good on all planes— in mental 
 not less than elemental nature. It maintains with unfailing 
 safety the physical, mental and moral balance of the universe. 
 From the dispersion of a thunderstorm to the breaking up of a 
 fever; from the neutralization of a chemical eruption to the 
 assuaging of a raging passion, this same principle holds good — 
 the neutraUzation of a movement by the progeny of its own 
 convulsions. In other words, the unemployed excess of energy, 
 generated by an unleashed and uncontrolled nature-force, 
 seeks in the formation of a new center or nucleus a fresh field 
 for its activity, while, parasite-hke, it proceeds to feed upon 
 its own parent substance. 
 
 In the breaking up of organic crystalizations, by converting 
 the system from a normal state of alkahnity into a critical 
 state of acidity, this same law is at work, balancing up the 
 debit and credit columns of physiological economy. It repre- 
 sents the principle of self-adjusting intelligence, inherent in 
 every atom of the universe, from the system of man to the system 
 of suns — converting waste products of excess into means and 
 methods of order, harmony and growth. 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXCESS AND 
 
 BALANCE 
 
 In its relation to sugar, the philosophy 
 of excess and balance unfolds one of the most 
 profound schemes ever manifested in the 
 evolution of life. At once a depressant and 
 a stimulant, a check and a motor, sugar, 
 by its quality of effecting instantaneous 
 chemical changes from alkalinity into acidity, 
 has the power to dissolve the organic crystal- 
 izations of nutritional wastes, which have 
 been formed through excess, and stored up 
 in the muscles and capillaries of the system. 
 At a given moment, when under the strain 
 of a constantly increasing avalanche of cry- 
 stalizations, which threaten to break through 
 the walls of the capillaries, the vascular 
 strain reaches its limits of endurance, the 
 blood, by the magic of true alchemy, changes 
 its nature from normal alkalinity to tem- 
 porary acidity. By this wonderful expe- 
 diency, nature saves the situation, and re- 
 stores the physiological balance to the system. 
 The power of natural acids to dissolve the 
 uric and carbonic crystalizations, lodged in 
 
 35 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the muscles and capillaries, sets free the 
 circulation from its deadly octopus, and 
 the chemical constitution of the blood re- 
 turns to its normal alkalinity. 
 
 FOOT NOTE. — It is through the action of natural sugar 
 that the blood has the power to affect this marvelous piece of 
 chemistry. Nor do these changes take place in the human 
 body alone; they occur in the field of general vegetation as well. 
 Back of all acidity we find the formula, C6H1206, which is 
 also the index on natural sugar. The flavor of the fruit pre- 
 vails in sweetness or acidity, just to the extent its sugar is con- 
 verted into acid, or its acid converted into sugar. Thus, in 
 the lemon we find the entire biologic contents of the tree con- 
 verted into acid, while on the other hand, in the pear, the acid 
 is held in abeyance, the sugar alone occupying the field. Again 
 in the apple, prune and cherry, the elemental transmutation 
 has affected an intermediary balance. Sugar and acid are the 
 two interchanging phases or poles of biogenic unfoldment, 
 springing out from the vast, slumbering storehouse of starch, 
 which in its turn has its birth in the womb of carbon. For in 
 carbon we have the great archaic matrix, or repository, in 
 which the whole organized zone of Ufe has its seat and center of 
 unfoldment. The steps of organic ascent of life can thus readily 
 be verified. Out from the carbon, on the threshold of the in- 
 organic, unawakened world, arises the vegetable kingdom, 
 unfolding and organizing its biological properties in a zone of 
 starch. In the latter is formed the volatile compound of sugar ; 
 while out of sugar, like a purging, refining, regenerating spirit, 
 is born the acid. 
 
 36 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORGAN- 
 IZED AND UNORGANIZED ACIDS, 
 AND THEIR RELATION TO RHEU- 
 MATISM. 
 
 Taken in its natural form as fruit or vege- 
 table, sugar performs the function of a 
 nutritional balance, promptly removing, by 
 its strong affinities, any hardening or crystal- 
 ization of tissue arising from errors and 
 excesses in the human dietary. But if in 
 disregard of Nature's plain indications, sugar 
 is consumed in its artificial form, as the ex- 
 tracts or compounds of commerce, the pro- 
 cess becomes altogether different. As the 
 system of nutrition has no way of employing 
 in its economy this extra, uncalled for, and 
 consequently unused supply of sugar, the 
 latter becomes a vagrant and a hindrance to 
 the sweep of the vital energies that keep 
 the metabolic exchanges of the system in 
 balance and order. And it is here, in the 
 nutritional disturbance thus given rise to, 
 we find the cradle for that long chain of 
 morbid progeny which forms the ghostly 
 
 37 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 procession of the constantly increasing num- 
 ber of modern ailments. Foremost in this 
 procession, we have congestion, catarrh and 
 rheumatism. This is a phase of physiolo- 
 gical chemistry which is of greatest impor- 
 tance to the student of human nutrition. 
 The chemical action at work, transforming 
 natural sugar into natural acids of the liv- 
 ing fruit, differs fundamentally and essenti- 
 ally from the chemistry by which artificial 
 or extracted sugars are changed into 
 the organized acids of bacterial fermenta- 
 tion in the system. For the latter process 
 involves the action of what is called ^^or- 
 ganized enzymes/' by which is meant that 
 the ensuing fermentation is due to the pre- 
 sence of bacteria feeding on the artificial 
 sugar circulating in the system, — a process 
 which gives rise to the pathologic phase 
 of acidity recognized in the various forms 
 of indigestion, dyspepsia and general acidity 
 of the system. In place of acting as a sol- 
 vent on the crystalizations deposited in the 
 body tissues of the organism, these acids 
 add directly to the morbid processes already 
 present. 
 
 This accounts for the common belief that 
 ^ 'acids" give rise to rheumatism and further- 
 more, as fruit is regarded as the general 
 source of the acids, the first advice of the 
 
 38 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 old time doctor in a case of rheumatism is to 
 eliminate this wholesome article from the 
 dietary. The significance of this dietetic 
 mistake is more readily appreciated when 
 we realize that not only do the fruit-acids 
 act as a solvent on the crystalized waste 
 products, but the natural sugar contained 
 in the fruit, by transforming itself into acid, 
 aids the elimination, and thus lays bare to 
 us the very heart of the fruit-and acid de- 
 lusion. It is the atrificial sugars, the ex- 
 tractea and concentratea ''sweets'' of the 
 preserves, the syrups or candies of commerce, 
 converted by an unsuccessful digestion into 
 the organized acids of bacteral fermenta- 
 tion, that give rise to rheumatism;— not the 
 wholesome sweets and acids, contained in 
 the natural fresh fruit. 
 
 39 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 THE PERIL OF ^TREE SWEETS." 
 
 It is doubtful whether any extractions 
 or extortions from the storages of elemental 
 nature have brought the transgressor to 
 more disastrous ends than the consump- 
 tion of what has been termed ''free sweets." 
 
 Now by ''free sweets" is meant the sach- 
 aride substance extracted by mechanical 
 or chemical means from sugar-bearing trees 
 and plants, at the expense of the vital poise 
 physiological balance of the fruit as the 
 latter, transmitted as food into the system 
 of nutrition, goes to build up the animal 
 and human organism. 
 
 Suspended as a vital ingredient in the 
 product, and balanced in its nutritional 
 action by other elements, present in the plant, 
 grain and fruit, such as the fats, starches 
 and acid, — sugar becomes the indespensible 
 source to the fat, heat and energy necessary 
 to the normal functioning of the body; 
 while on the other hand, in the form of 
 concentrated and isolated extracts, the action 
 of sugar becomes the very opposite: a vio- 
 
 40 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 lent combustible, destructive in place of 
 constructive. In other words, — per- 
 mitted to form an integral, undisturbed 
 part of its fruit or vegetable origin, sugar 
 represents the safe and practical house- 
 hold fuel, perfectly under control, and well 
 suited for its purpose; while when extracted 
 or concentrated, its nature becomes changed 
 into a dangerous explosive,beyond the power of 
 control, and unfolding in a train of ever 
 threatening accidents. 
 
 Now it is this readiness of sugar to yield 
 physiological combustion, that accounts for 
 its immense importance in the process of 
 digestion, oxygenation and assimilation. Its 
 strong affinity for Carbon,Uric and Oxalic acids 
 and other waste poisons of the bod}^, equips 
 it with power to break up the toxic compound 
 of the latter, and thus to set free and cause 
 to be eliminated the compounds of these 
 tissue poisons. Carried by the blood stream 
 to the lungs, its swift oxygenation renders 
 the entire mass of chyle porous to the purg- 
 ing and vitalizing action of oxygen Hence 
 in its normal combination sugar constitutes 
 the ever stirring, impelling energy in the 
 vegetable world, pushing the molecular com- 
 pounds of the latter into processes of in- 
 cessant combustion and constitutional re- 
 construction. 
 
 41 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 But on the other hand, if sugar is intro- 
 duced into the system as an extractive, and 
 consequently in excess of nutritional needs, 
 its very readiness to absorb oxygen causes 
 it to monopolize the latter, almost to the 
 exclusion of the rest of the chyle, thereby 
 preventing the circulating proteids from com- 
 ing in touch with the pulmonary ignition. 
 A physiological combustible, sugar, when sus- 
 pended in the blood stream, explodes at 
 the first touch of the igniting oxygen, and 
 if present in excess, will prevent the heavier 
 less ignitious, nitrogenous material of the 
 blood from becoming oxygenated. This '^ad- 
 vanced ignition' ' so to speak, with its natural 
 consequence of leaving the starch and pro- 
 teid substances only partially oxygenated, 
 will sooner or later, lead the system into 
 grave nutritional disorders. For as the ex- 
 posure of the swift moving blood-stream to 
 the air current, sweeping through the 
 lungs, is only momentry, it follows that the 
 chyle,in place of being oxygenated and trans- 
 formed into nourishing, regenerated blood, 
 is turned into a devitalizing, degenerating 
 poison, starting processes of decomposi- 
 tion and decay in the body tissues. The 
 pathological accretions thus arising gradually 
 calcify into forms of rheumatism, gout, catarrh 
 etc., wherever the curves and windings of 
 
 42 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the venous and arterial passages of the body 
 impede the flow of the blood stream and it 
 generating action. 
 
 The more direct and immediate effect 
 on the digestion due to an excessive consump- 
 tion of the ^'free" or extracted sugar, is 
 experienced in the ^^sour stomach", belching 
 of gas and general dyspeptic disorders, etc., 
 and refers to an action similar to that al- 
 ready described in the relation of sugar to 
 the lungs. Its readiness to combine with 
 oxygen breaks up the hydrochloric acid mole- 
 cule in the stomach and thus precludes the 
 proteid foods from being acted upon by the 
 gastric juice. Suspended in a temperature 
 of some 97^ and bathed in alkaline- 
 pepsin (non-disinfectant ) secretions, the food, 
 after a longer or shorter exposure, is passing 
 into partial or complete decomposition, ac- 
 cording to the constitutional strength of. 
 the individuals' digestive power to counter- 
 act the ensuing morbid conditions. If the 
 the dietetic transgressions are continued, the 
 final result of bacterial invasion auto-poison- 
 ing and organic breakdown — becomes in- 
 evitable. 
 
 In its action on the physiology of nutri- 
 tion, ''free sugar'' gives rise to other dis- 
 orders in the system. Suspended in the 
 blood-stream, it exerts a similar influence 
 
 43 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 on the iron, contained in the latter, as on the 
 iron active in the chemistry of the soil. 
 According to Prof. E. T. Wright, author 
 of 'Tlant Disease" (London, 1903), it has 
 been proved by analysis that an unstable 
 quantity of iron is extracted from the soil 
 in every crop of cane sugar, which, in the 
 course of a few years cultivation, results in 
 the total withdrawal from the soil of its 
 entire iron supply. 
 
 Now as the iron percentage of sugar is 
 greatly reduced through its processes of 
 extraction and concentration, it follows that 
 the first engagement of the sugar molecule, 
 upon entering the system, is to replenish 
 its own vacuum, i. e,, its diminished balance 
 of iron, by a direct chemical absorption of 
 this element from the blood. 
 
 And furthermore as iron constitutes the 
 balancing lever between inspired oxygen and 
 expired carbonic acid gas in the processes 
 of breathing, it follows that the departure 
 of the iron molecule from the blood cor- 
 puscle means a retention of the carbonic 
 acid gas in the tissues, with the subsequent 
 poisoning of the various organs and viscera 
 of the entire system. The numerous cases 
 of anemia, myopia, and nasal catarrh, which 
 occur almost like an epidemic among our 
 candy-devouring school-children, are certain- 
 
 44 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 ly strong indications of the ravages wrought 
 on the system by the excessive indulgence 
 in free sugar. 
 
 45 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PLACE OF SUGAR IN THE 
 HYGIENIC BILL-OF-FARE 
 
 On the basis of the foregoing, it becomes 
 easier to reahze the true charatcer and value 
 of sugar as a product of extraction. As a 
 quickly assimilable substance, sugar may even 
 in its extracted form be a valuable source 
 of energy for the system. Wisely combined, 
 or better still, not combined at all, sugar is 
 more readily converted into heat, fat and 
 energy, than any other known food stuff. 
 Taken in its natural, unextracted form, such 
 as carrot, beet, turnip, etc., it enters by two 
 steps the field of absorption. Conversion 
 into dextrine, through salivation, and into 
 dextrose, through intestinal digestion. This 
 makes it ready for systemic absorption and 
 utilization in terms of energy, heat and fat ; — 
 the latter however involving further and 
 more complex processes in the chemistry of 
 nutrition. Sugar is an evolution of starch 
 in the vegetable kingdom, and from acids 
 in the kingdom of fruits. Hence a piece 
 of free sugar, whether extracted in the human 
 stomach, from a baked potato, a corn muffin, 
 
 46 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 or a carrot; or extracted in a sugar factory 
 from the sugar cane or beet — involves prin- 
 cipally the same processes: the dextrini- 
 zation of starch into sugar. 
 
 So far, so good. The system accepts 
 the output of the sugar factory with appar- 
 ently the same readiness and utility as the 
 output of her own gastric industry. A lump 
 of sugar from one of the Jamaica cane sugar 
 refineries, is converted into heat and mus- 
 cular energy with the same practical result, 
 and followed by the same stimulation of 
 the system, as a measure of glycogen 
 poured by the liver into the stream of nutri- 
 tion. The diffierence is not so much to be 
 found in the facts of its manufacture, as in 
 the facts of its combination with other food- 
 stuffs of the daily diet. 
 
 Hence a stick of pure candy, or a lump 
 of plain sugar— if enjoyed at a time when 
 theistomachl is empty, and no fermentation 
 of other foods possible, may not only 
 be harmless to the normal and healthy 
 stomach, but even be of great value in mom- 
 ents of exhausture, owing to its quickly 
 available sources of energy. The same may 
 be said as to the enjoyment of ice-cream. 
 If pure, and taken when the stomach is empty, 
 ice-cream may be a most congenial and 
 effective form of light nourishment to the 
 
 47 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 healthy and nerve-strong, — at once cooling 
 and refreshing to the blood, and stimulating 
 to the nerves and muscles. 
 
 But this advantage is entirely lost the 
 moment, when in one form or another, 
 we use sweets as the major ingredient in 
 elaborate food mixtures, or at the end of 
 a dinner when the stomach is already over- 
 taxed and in the stress of a laborious diges- 
 tion. The unavoidable fermentation, due 
 to the action of the sugar on the incongru- 
 ous mass, will subvert the gastric process 
 from a field of digestion into a field of de- 
 composition. And here is where the force 
 of motive, as applied to diet, has a life-and- 
 death wielding significance. For the ques- 
 tion which in this relation is all important 
 lies in its ruling motive, whether we employ 
 sweets as a means of strength and utility, 
 or merely for the gratification of an abnor- 
 mal, uncontrolled, purposeless and reason- 
 less craving for sweets, mostly to the menace 
 of health, strength and usefulness. 
 
 To be safe in employing free sugar as a 
 means of food, another fact must be consid- 
 ered — the fact of quantity — excess. Even 
 if the combinations are guarded, the intro- 
 duction into the system of more sugar than 
 the system can assimilate, means eventual 
 physiological disaster. If cane sugar is not 
 
 48 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 assimilated,) and when used to excess, 
 assimilation must always be faulty) it passes 
 unchanged through the kidneys and remains 
 in the system as a poison. The compli- 
 cations arising from such a course of malnutri- 
 tion, not only requires an extra amount of work 
 by the system but demands the vitally ex- 
 haustive secretions of certain '^defensive fer- 
 ments," to serve as a ^^body guard" for the 
 isolation and deportation of poisons afloat 
 in the circulation. Hence so far from being 
 a source or means of energy, sugar under 
 such conditions, becomes a factor of decay 
 and degeneracy. On the other hand the 
 degree of digestibility of pure sugar when 
 consumed in moderate quantities, and guard- 
 ed from admixtures with other food stuffs, 
 especially starches and proteids, is very great 
 — amounting in the healthy stomach to over 
 90 per cent. However it must be recogniz- 
 ed, that it is this high nutritional percent- 
 age of the sugar that renders its admixture 
 with nitrogeneous substances dangerous, as 
 the readiness of the sugar to be assimilated 
 retards the assimilation of the heavier pro- 
 teids, such as beans, peas, meats, lentils, 
 etc., which in consequence are retained in 
 the system — unused and unusable — to be 
 treated and disposed of as poisonous waste. 
 
 Guided by these facts, we are more 
 
 49 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 capable of determining the true position 
 of sugar, both as to quahty and quan- 
 tity, in our daily diet. Its power to retard 
 and even to arrest the digestion of proteids 
 and starches, should give us a reliable clue, 
 as to conditions, making sugar a safe and 
 healthful part of our foodstuffs. Its work 
 in the body is to release muscular energy, 
 and to give explosive force to functional 
 levers. It is this character of being a mere 
 extract that renders sugar incapable 
 in any direct way of mending a single muscle. 
 On the contrary, if used in excess, it may 
 not only burn up the muscle by the very 
 explosiveness of its liberated energy, but 
 even cause to be retarded the assimilation 
 of the very substances, the proteids, whose 
 function is to generate and repair mus- 
 cular tissue. 
 
 FOOT NOTE. — The employment of sugar in the preservation 
 or seasoning of fruit has a logical and hygienic basis in the fact 
 that sugar is a natural ingredient in fruit, being one of its main 
 and vitally indispensible elements. With perhaps the exception 
 of the lemon, all full-grown and perfectly ripe fruits are sweet 
 and congenial, both to the palate and to the gastric juice. When 
 on the other hand, the fruit has had an incomplete ripening 
 owing to insufficient exposure to the sun, or to excess of 
 humidity in the air or soil, etc., or perhaps in most cases to a 
 premature picking, its acidity has had neither the time nor 
 conditions to accomplish its evolution into a natural sweetness. 
 To avoid the corrosion which this unmodified acidity may have 
 upon the fining of a sensitive stomach and intestine, it may be 
 advisable to artificially incre9,se tjie sugar percentage of the 
 
 50 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 fruit, preferably by cooking. This sweetening of the fruit 
 tends to balance up its deficiency of sugar, and by a neutraliza- 
 tion of Its acidity, bring about an arbitrary, though, under the 
 circumstances, hygienically defensible ripening. 
 
 51 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SUGAR THE EXPLOSIVE FORCE IN 
 THE HUMAN DYNAMO. 
 
 From this, it is evident that though sugar 
 is vitally important as a source of dynamic 
 energy, its abuse or excess is wrought with 
 mediate or immediate disaster. If, by way 
 of illustration, a live wire is permitted to 
 stand for a nerve, and the glow of the elec- 
 tric lamp represent the phenomena of life, 
 so the sugar in our simile, would occupy 
 the position of the electric fluid, sweeping 
 through the conduits of the nerve as a form 
 of vital impulse. And furthermore, as the 
 electric current in its discharges, so far from 
 repairing and replacing the worn out wires, 
 by its very nature becomes the cause of their 
 breakdown, so the sugar by its very charac- 
 ter as force, in place of regenerating or re- 
 pairing the engaged muscular tissue, is us- 
 ing it up as an inevitable consequence of 
 its activity. An excess of sugar in the diet 
 must therefore, sooner or later lead to pre- 
 mature physical weakness and breakdown. 
 
 From this it naturally follows that the 
 muscles first to suffer from the excess or 
 
 52 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 force would be those on which the indivi- 
 dual most depends in his specific work and 
 vocation in life. Thus we find that the 
 college students or school children, whose 
 eye muscles are under a constant and con- 
 centrated strain, if indulging excessively in 
 sugar, are hable to suffer premature senility 
 in their power of vision. The enforced ac- 
 tion of the optic nerve with its response in 
 the orbital muscles, demands for the repair 
 of the latter a correspondingly increased 
 supply of blood. Surcharged with sugar, 
 however, the blood will become a field of 
 combustion for vital batteries, which in 
 place of building up the worn out muscles 
 will hasten their breakdown. The increas- 
 ing percentage of eye-glass wearing children 
 in our public schools testifies abundantly 
 to the sad havoc played by the excessive 
 consumption of sugar, in young and old. 
 
 Now on the other hand, if the percentage 
 of sugar solution in the blood is below the 
 normal, and the muscles in consequence 
 receive insufficient supply of energy to form 
 an adequate basis for the finer functioning 
 of an evolutionally advancing nervous sys- 
 tem, the latter for its maintenance requires 
 an extra supply of sugar. One of the causes 
 for an inadequate supply of sugar in the blood 
 may be found in the hyperacidity of unripe 
 
 53 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 fruit in which the acid, owing to its insuffi- 
 cient sun exposure has failed to be conver- 
 ted into sugar — a fact which gives to the 
 sweetening of fruit a hygienic defense. Ow- 
 ing to the insufficient Hght and heat of 
 the sun to accompUsh a perfect ripening of 
 the fruit, the incomplete saccharization of 
 the latter demands a supply of sugar equal- 
 izing the lacking percentage. The taste of 
 the normal and healthy individual, if care- 
 fully and self-masterly trained, may in most 
 cases be dependable in determining the a- 
 mount of sugar, needed to complete the 
 sugar standard of any particular fruit. 
 
 However, there can be no generalization 
 with regard to standards of diet. Each 
 individual must be prepared to work out 
 his own standard of diet in accord with the 
 dominent key of his constitutional peculiar- 
 ities. Some people find in the fresh, ripe 
 fruits and grains all that is required to sat- 
 isfy their nutritions needs, while the consti 
 tution of others make positive nutritional 
 demands on the heavy proteids. 
 
 As the geographical position of the coun- 
 tries approach the tropical latitudes, where 
 the fruit receives a complete ripening, the 
 natural sweetness of the fruit requires no 
 addition of sugar to become a perfect re- 
 liable source of health, strength and effi- 
 
 54 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 ciency. The factor of individual health and 
 predisposition, however, must never be dis- 
 regarded in matters of diet. The nervous- 
 ly high-strung, and delicately organized in- 
 dividual, must be especially care- 
 ful in avoiding any excess in the employ- 
 ment of sweets. A large percentage of ner- 
 vousness, without doubt is due to the sur- 
 plus of sugar in the diet of the sufferer 
 which burns and explodes in the conduits 
 of the nervous system. A prompt elimin- 
 ation of sugar from their diet should be 
 the first act toward the re-establishing of 
 a proper balance between energy and sub- 
 stratum; between the levers of muscle and 
 the pressure of force in the system. 
 
 55 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 CAN SUGAR ALONE MAINTAIN THE 
 EXPENDITURE OF MUSCULAR 
 LABOR? 
 
 In the laboratory experiments by Prof. 
 Vaughan Harley, Dr. Alphonso Mosso and 
 other investigators, it seems to have been 
 brought beyond the reach of doubt that the 
 muscular energy released by the consump- 
 tion of sugar surpasses the effect of any 
 other food stuff. Prof. Mosso, in his work 
 at the Royal Laboratory of Physiological 
 Research of Italy, has proved by a series 
 of experiments that 3 or 4 ounces of sugar, 
 taken an hour or so before 6 p. m. — the time 
 for the cyclic oncoming of systemic fatigue 
 and consequent need of rest, — has the power 
 to practically recharge the force output of 
 the entire organism. As if touched by magic 
 the individual bounds into the possession 
 of new energy, restoring his flagging mus- 
 cles into a sense of undeminished vigor, 
 without having to take recourse to any form 
 of rest or relaxation, while continuing 
 the work to the end of the experiment. 
 
 Similar conclusions have been reached by 
 
 56 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 Dr. Schumberg in his experimental work 
 in Prof. Zuntz's laboratory in Berlin, Ger- 
 many, in collaboration with Dr. Long- 
 meyer and Prof. Stockvis, of Amsterdam. 
 On a diet of 500 grams of sugar dissolved 
 in water, a laborer was able to perform the 
 same amount of daily work as if fed on an 
 ordinary mixed flesh diet. Applied to the 
 German Army, it was further demonstra- 
 ted that the soldiers could endure expo- 
 sures in marches and field maneuvers, other- 
 wise unendurable, if some 70 grams (about 
 l-6th of a pound of sugar were added to their 
 daily rations. Taking every condition and 
 exigency of the test into consideration, it 
 stands as a positively ascertained fact, that 
 sugar, at least during the length of time 
 covered by the experiments, is capable of 
 supplying the muscular expenditure of en- 
 ergy involved in standardized physical work, 
 without the assistance of a starch or pro- 
 teid dietary. 
 
 Instructive and interesting as these ex- 
 periments are, they fail however to touch 
 the real, vital points of the problem. So 
 far, the whole series of experimentation has 
 only reached surface results. Here as every- 
 where, science has given way to theorizing, 
 allowing generalizations to serve as stan- 
 dards for permanent and enduring elemen- 
 
 57 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 tary facts in human physiology. While the 
 theoretical fact that 7.5 ounces of sugar 
 dissolved in a pint of water can sustain the 
 muscular strain and nervous expenditure 
 involved in a day's physical labor, the ar- 
 gument has failed to consider the extreme- 
 ly important roll occupied by life itself in 
 its organized expression. If man were a 
 mere machine, his upkeep on standardized 
 weights and measures would easily be made 
 possible. But being a living, intelligent en- 
 tity, individualized and poised to vital and 
 mental impulses, his relation and response 
 to fuel, as values of dietetics, must be meas- 
 ured in terms of qualities rather than quan- 
 tities. The generalization of individual 
 standards of life has always remained the 
 greatest foe to deeper and truer conception 
 of the true needs and necessities of life. 
 
 Foods have their vital values revealed 
 not in the chemical retort of the laboratory 
 in its base or acid reactions, but in 
 their relation to the rythmic flow of indi- 
 vidualized life. For after all, it is the rythmi- 
 cal adjustment between the vital principles 
 contained in the natural foods, and the 
 specific receptivity of the cell-lives or cell- 
 organisms of the system, that lies back of 
 and gives destiny to the entire physiologi- 
 cal or biologic being. The chemistry of 
 
 58 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the laboratory is a crude, hap-hazard pro- 
 ceeding, compared with the chemistry of 
 the cell-life. The essences or forces that 
 fundamentally and essentially build up the 
 body, are principles rather than elements; 
 the effluvia or ionic discharges of foods; 
 as vital force, rather than of foods as mole- 
 cular structure. 
 
 This brings us back to our original posi- 
 tion with regard to sugar. As an extract 
 the latter constitutes a mere means or method 
 of expediency, toward the artificial improve- 
 ment of fruits where a delinquent Nature 
 under the strain and stress of contrary en- 
 vironment, fails to ripen and mature. Con- 
 sequently the addition of sugar to fruit is 
 hygienically legitimate, only to the extent 
 that climatic or environmental limitations 
 have interrupted nature in bringing her 
 creative labors to an ideal finish. Con- 
 sequently it is only in regions where nature 
 is thus handicapped, in the temperate and 
 arctic zones, that cookery may be tolerated 
 to round out and equalize natural defi- 
 ciencies in the sugar percentage of the fruit. 
 And while extractives, preserves and general 
 admixtures of free sugar in food prepara- 
 tions, have their values as expediencies in 
 the economy of human nutrition, relative 
 to imperfectly matured fruit, yet it must 
 
 59 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 never be forgotten that it is only in sub- 
 mitting to the weights and measures used 
 by nature in the preparations of her articles 
 of diet, that we find the true course to at- 
 tain a higher and a highest standard of human 
 efficiency, and that the closer we observe 
 nature's elemental balance, the safer are our 
 guarantees for a long and useful life. Only 
 where Nature positively fails has man the 
 right to step in with his artificial methods 
 and attempt a completion of her foreshort- 
 ened aims. 
 
 But when this sweetening process is ex- 
 tended to food-stuffs whose composition, 
 complete by itself, makes no constitutional 
 demand on an increased percentage of sweets 
 such as starches, vegetables and cereals 
 in their various forms of mushes and pastry, 
 etc., the matter of sugaring our food-stuffs 
 takes on an altogether different aspect. In 
 this case, the science of nutrition can offer 
 not a single logical argument in its favor. 
 The direct and immediate objection lies 
 in the fact that the digestion of sugar pro- 
 ceeds at a far quicker rate than that of 
 starches and proteids, and consequently, if 
 taken in excess, will over balance the sys- 
 temic demands for sugar and at the same 
 time over tax the power of the liver to con- 
 vert the mass of saccharides into glycogen. 
 
 60 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 To save the liver from breakdown, nature 
 is obliged to revert the method of her normal 
 functional industry and to permit a larger 
 or smaller percentage of the sugar to go 
 nutritionally unchanged into the field of 
 excretion — a delinquency that spells an un- 
 usual taxation of the excretory organs, es- 
 pecially the kidneys, and eventually follow- 
 ed by their gradual weakening and collapse. 
 Furthemore, the undue stimulation of the 
 system itself, must, by the very nature of 
 the disturbed nutritional balance, lead to 
 an ultimate, though remoter breakdown. 
 
 Nature is safe and reliable only to the 
 extent we accept her fundamental, life-sus- 
 taining propositions, and fall in line with 
 her rythmic sweep of law. There is an 
 inner vital, subjective — if you please — cor- 
 respondence and reciprocity between the 
 needs of the creature and the supply of 
 creation, which, applied to individually spe- 
 cified existence in its original unbroken purity, 
 stands for an instinctively recognized ur- 
 gency of a cell, or group of cells, towards 
 replenishment from a given class or species 
 of food stuffs, conditional to a harmoni- 
 ous, beautiful, strong and useful develop- 
 ment of the entity. 
 
 As a sum total of the experiments carried 
 on in the various laboratories and experi- 
 
 61 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 mental stations throughout the world, con- 
 cerning the character of free sugar as food, 
 we find the following statements as gener- 
 ally accepted points of argument. 
 
 First — When the organism is adapted to 
 the digestion of starch, and there is suffi- 
 cient time for its utilization, sugar has no 
 positive advantage over starch foods in sup- 
 plying muscular energy during a protract- 
 ed period of labor. 
 
 Second — The positive advantage of sugar 
 over starch lies in the fact that it furnishes 
 the needed carbohydrate material for or- 
 ganisms that have as yet little or no power 
 to digest starch. Consequently in the ex- 
 tract or free sugar, obtained from milk 
 (sugar of milk) the infant has a valuable 
 asset in the composition of his diet. 
 
 Third — In time of great exertion and 
 under the strain of exhaustive labors — child- 
 birth may be counted as one — the rapidity 
 with which sugar is assimilated gives it 
 certain advantages over starch. Its rapid 
 conversion or translation into heat or energy 
 creates a flush of exhilaration and sense of 
 available strength, which may suffice to 
 carry the individual over the critical moments 
 of£stress. It is this rapid-firing power of 
 the sugar with its swift systemic invig- 
 oration that makes sugar so highly relished 
 
 62 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 by people of high-strung, emotional and 
 nerve-exhausting temperament. It is this 
 quality of force in the sugar which is in- 
 stinctively recognized and coveted by the 
 nervous, the irritable, the mentally stren- 
 uous, whose main expenditure lies in loss 
 of energy. The use of free sugar when 
 applied to sluggish currents of energy in 
 order to force them into higher levels, has 
 a striking similarity to the starting of a quick 
 fire by throwing a piece of cotton or a measure 
 of coal oil into a stove. The evolution of 
 heat is instantaneous, but of only passing 
 permanence: while the injury wrought to 
 the stove by a possible explosion may be 
 permanent. On the other hand we can 
 readily see, in the light of this illustration, 
 how, by using sugar in order to modify the 
 hyperdacity of imperfectly matured fruit, 
 we gain the same advantage as by using 
 some igneous material in connection with, 
 and to the aid of, the slow combustiveness 
 of green or incompletely seasoned fire-wood. 
 
 63 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 SUGAR AS A FAT-FORMER 
 
 When used to excess, or to an extent ex- 
 ceeding the power of oxygen to convert it 
 into energy and heat, the sugar may sohdify 
 in the muscles and form fat or adipose tissue 
 — a process which, being the output of an 
 incomplete oxygenation, must, from a strictly 
 physiological point of view, be regarded as 
 a degree of tissue degeneration. Within cer- 
 tain limits, however, fat is a food material, 
 stored up in the system for future use, either 
 to be burned into muscular energy, or used 
 as a non-conductor for the conservation of 
 systemic heat. And it is this quality of being 
 an absolute non-conductor of heat that makes 
 it possible for the system, through its fatty 
 tissue, to maintain its normal constitutional 
 heat, and to prevent it from being dissipated 
 into sub-normal temperatures under the sap- 
 ping influence of exterior cold. 
 
 So far, so good. But if the fatty solidi- 
 fication is intensified by an excessive sugar 
 consumption, proceeding at a rate beyond 
 the vital needs and conditions of the system, 
 and an insufficient access to oxygen fails to 
 
 64 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 completely energize the mass, fatty degener- 
 acy with all its sluggishness and inertness 
 of tissue function must follow as a natural 
 and inevitable consequence. From being a 
 non-conductor of heat the accumulating fat 
 becomes a non-conductor of hfe, and the 
 organs imbedded in its degenerate tissue 
 become more or less isolated from the current 
 of vital electricity normally polarizing the 
 organism. The various ailments known as 
 fatty degeneracy of the heart, waxy kidney, 
 fatty liver, etc., indicate the gradual sur- 
 render of the system, function after function, 
 to the isolating, deadening effects of the 
 accumulating adipose masses, walling in by 
 msiduous steps the entire organism. And 
 here again we are brought to face the old 
 stern, inevitable problems of life as con- 
 tamed in the philosophy of excess and balance. 
 In other words, the very agent which, when 
 employed in accord with physiological laws, 
 as expressed in terms of demand and supply, 
 and under the sw^ay of moderation and self- 
 control, is productive of health, energy and 
 power; if used in excess, and in slavish sub- 
 mission to cravings and morbid appetites, 
 subverts the direction of the entire vital 
 process,— overpowering by its death-weights 
 the very levers of life which normally move 
 in rhythmic response to the sweep of mighty, 
 
 65 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 evolutionary forces. Or again, the same 
 element — sugar — which, when enjoyed in 
 moderation, releases the muscular coil of 
 high nervous efficiency, if used in excess of 
 need, closes the coil into a life-strangling, 
 muscle-withering, fatty degeneracy. Mod- 
 eration and excess, whether in regard to 
 sugar or any other form of food or stimulant, 
 constitutes the two ends of the balancing scale 
 of health and life, of w^hich the rising of the 
 one, corresponds, with unfailing surety, to the 
 lowering of the other. 
 
 Furthermore, in the course of an excessive 
 consumption of sugar, when the system has 
 become over-stocked, not only with glycogen, 
 but also with fat, the nerves, engaged in the 
 production and fixation of the latter, become 
 overtaxed, and lose their power of sustaining 
 and vitalizing the overbalancing mass of 
 adipose tissue. As a result, we have disin- 
 tegration of the fatty structure with its 
 subsequent organic breakdown into fatty 
 acids; the toxic products of the bacterial 
 invasion of the mass. Like the boomerang 
 in its parabolic flight, the excess turns back 
 upon itself. The gluttonous individual is 
 forced to disgorge his nutritional overplus, 
 and to return to nature his illegitimate gains. 
 The microbe, the biological Nemesis or ele- 
 mental adjustor of the organized universe^ 
 
 66 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 has come to break down his storage vaults 
 and return to their appropriate places his 
 ill-gotten treasures. The fastidious glutton, 
 violating Nature's sacred (because trusted) 
 proprietorship, by indulging for his own 
 selfish gratification in the fruits of her labors, 
 devouring in wanton excess the bounties of 
 life prepared by the great universal Mother 
 for the joy, strength and usefulness of her 
 children, stands powerless and forlorn in 
 the wrecks and ruins of his own making. 
 With his digestion ruined from repeated 
 dietetic outrages, the man is famishing in the 
 midst of plenty, while facing the unescapable 
 dead-sea fruits of premature senility, func- 
 tional collapse and social worthlessness. 
 
 It is the old futile attempt of egotism and 
 wanton self-indulgence to hold up Nature's 
 vital express to appropriate the gifts intended 
 to be placed upon the altar of love and use- 
 fulness. In a moral universe every break of 
 law, every infidelity in our attitude to trust 
 and service, every excess or waste in our 
 economic relations to life and nature, must 
 sooner or later reach its point of limiting 
 recoil, where the forces of a law-governed, 
 but trespassed evolution return over paths 
 of inverted progressions, to re-estabhsh peace, 
 equity and moral poise between the indi- 
 vidual and his deserted field of duty and 
 usefulness. 
 
 67 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 SUGAR AS A FORCE 
 
 It is as a generator of fat and energy that 
 sugar, without being a proteid, or muscle 
 builder, holds the claim of being classed with 
 foods. 
 
 For in its normal state, fat is as important 
 for an adequate discharge of functional life 
 as is the striated or non-striated muscle. 
 Without its proper insulation by the fat 
 capsule the muscle would at once become 
 exposed to nervous deflection and exhausture. 
 Fat, as already shown, is a form of carbon — 
 the end-product of sugar, not being used 
 up in the generation of energy. Hence, 
 sugar, in its natural form, performs a highly 
 important role in the human nutrition, and 
 is indispensable in a diet which aims at 
 highest individual health and usefulness, men- 
 tally as well as physically. 
 
 Yet sugar is a force rather than a food. 
 For if by food, we understand an impulse 
 of life, manifesting as a concrete substance, 
 capable of constructing and repairing the 
 levers and pistons in the organized move- 
 ments of entities; then, with force we mean 
 
 68 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the energy by which these implements of 
 lite are brought into positions of leverages 
 and mechanic displacements. Essentially 
 however, foods and forces may be regarded 
 as the same thing, differing as quantities 
 only, not as qualities. All foods are forces 
 but all forces are not foods. A force is the 
 quintessence or attenuation of food— the con- 
 centrated, intangible charge of the essence 
 ot organized and organizable substance. In 
 the evolution of food into force, Nature takes 
 a step from the concrete and measurable 
 into the abstract and illimitable. As a fat 
 former, sugar is food; as an energy producer 
 It IS a force. Food and force are the two 
 mam departures in the generation or evolu- 
 tion of a substance. But there is still another 
 departure (for in the elemental changes of 
 things there always appears a third)— the 
 poison! These three steps, or departures, 
 m the evolution, or devolution, of nature 
 correspond irrisistably to the old Hindoo 
 conception of a metaphysical ^'trimurti''— 
 the Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; the Creator, 
 Preserver and Destroyer; the Food, the 
 -borce, the Poison. 
 
 69 
 
CHAPTER XY 
 SUGAR AS A POISON 
 
 An impulse, imparted to the human system, 
 either mentally, morally or physically, if 
 congenial to its general vital functions, and 
 in synchronous relation to its rhythm as or- 
 ganism, covers our conception of food, whether 
 it be enjoyed by the body, mind or soul. 
 Food imparts no shock to the system, in- 
 troduces no uncongenial changes, but main- 
 tains by means of repair and preservation, an 
 unbroken serenity, and a progressive balance 
 of individual unfoldment. 
 
 Now as long as the rhythm of this vital 
 impulse remains synchronous and harmon- 
 ious to the constitutional key-note of the 
 system, the latter responds by raising its 
 cellular and functional activities to an ever 
 higher level of efficiency. In other words, 
 that though the vigor and vitality of the 
 system have thus become intensified, and 
 the vital exchanges made to proceed at a 
 greater rapidity, no incongruous or disturb- 
 ing element in the form of artificial stimu- 
 lant has been thrown into the balance of 
 the constitutional rhythm. In a word, food, 
 
 70 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 in its congenial, rightly combined relations 
 to individual needs, is translated by the 
 cell into a vital force, which raises the entire 
 organism into constantly increasing refine- 
 ment and survival value. 
 
 But if the vibrations of the new impulse 
 have been inharmonious to the evolutionary 
 order of the system; if the incoming current 
 of vibrations has struck it at an angle in op- 
 position to its constitutional plane of pro- 
 gression, there ensues a clash in the contact. 
 The rhythm of the system, involving the 
 entire commonwealth of its cellular ex- 
 change, is ruptured, and in proportion to 
 the degree of rhythmic diversity of the two 
 planes, is the severity of the shock. The 
 alien impact may strike the system with 
 the demolishing force of a tornado. The 
 cell organisms become dazed; their functional 
 activities subverted; the net-work of nerve 
 connections torn and disordered; and the 
 entire vital structure totters like a wrecked 
 and stranded vessel. The elemental antag- 
 onism of the substances involved in the 
 contact, subverts a living force into a death- 
 dealing poison. 
 
 A poison, scientifically defined, is thus a 
 force proceeding in its action along a differ- 
 ent scale of vibration than the system into 
 which it has been introduced. From this it 
 
 71 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 follows that a poison may be rendered harm- 
 less, either by subduing its rate of vibration 
 through a process of neutralization, or by 
 a reinforcement or intensification of the vital- 
 ity of the system under attack. If the 
 poison can be leashed to the rhythmic order 
 of the organism on which it has a hold, its 
 force is broken and the peril averted. It is 
 on this principle that the standardized anti- 
 dotes exert their saving qualities; they either 
 adjust the system to the force, or the force 
 to the system; they either subdue the poison, 
 or reinforce the organism. 
 
 According to its manner of treatment, 
 sugar may become the one or the other of 
 the above aspects; in its combination in the 
 ripe fruit or vegetable, it is a food; in its 
 "free^ or extracted form, it is a force; in its 
 decomposed state as ^ ^organized' ^ acid, it is 
 a poison. 
 
 72 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 SUGAR AS A MEDICINE 
 
 Owing to its concentrated form, sugar is 
 at once a great antiseptic and a glandular 
 excitant. The basis for this quality lies 
 in the fact that in its extracted condition it 
 has an elemental hunger, or chemical affin- 
 ity, for every substance or essence from which, 
 by the very fact of its extraction, it has 
 become separated. Its artificial state, as 
 ^^free'^ sugar, turns it into a sponge of suction, 
 ready to absorb any element from which, 
 as compound, it has been separated. 
 It is from this ruptured elemental balance 
 that sugar derives its quality as medicine. 
 Mixed with lard and melted in a vessel over 
 a slow fire, sugar becomes a valuable salve, 
 which, if spread over a wad of sterilized 
 cotton, and applied over the surface of any 
 inflamed interior structure such as the ovar- 
 ies, tonsils, testis, lymphatics, etc., will ab- 
 sorb the urates, carbonates, and other kin- 
 dred toxins accumulated in the diseased 
 tissues. The oxygen of the sugar will oxy- 
 dize and burn up the poisons, retained and 
 crystalized in the involved congestions. The 
 
 73 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 broken-up indurations are then readily elim- 
 inated by the blood current through the 
 various organs of excretion. 
 
 In corroboration of this fact, the late Dr. 
 W. H. Burgess, of Chatanooga, Tenn., has 
 found that a teaspoonful of sugar, held in 
 the mouth for a period of five or ten minutes 
 and then expectorated, if repeated two or 
 three times on an empty stomach, will drain 
 the glands of the head and neck from the 
 poisons active in neuralgia, catarrh, deaf- 
 ness, bronchitis, pharyngites and the various 
 forms of sore and swollen throat. Dr. Bur- 
 gess even seems to have reason for beheving, 
 that this ''sugar cure" has power to in- 
 fluence more or less every organ and tissue 
 of the body, even as remote as those of the 
 abdominal cavity and the pelvis. 
 
 In this power of the sugar to absorb, by 
 and through its vacuated carbon, the various 
 toxic acids that poison the cells of the system. 
 Materia Medica has found an immensely 
 valuable agent in its work of restoring health 
 and strength to broken-down tissues. Its 
 action points out the moral of nature, the 
 fine irony of universal law, compelhng the 
 individual to retrace his steps in evolution 
 and restitute his ill-kept vital records. The 
 same force in sugar which as an object of 
 over-indulgence wrecks him, will, when sub- 
 
 74 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 jected to self-restraint, bring him back his 
 lost estate of health. The acid of the sugar 
 incarcerated the man, its vacuated carbon 
 again released him. This gives to the sugar 
 a new meaning — that of life-saver. From 
 being a means of gustatory irritation and 
 gluttonous appeals, it assumes the position 
 of a remedial agent of most far-reaching 
 therapeutic power. Reports of clinical ex- 
 periments with regard to the therapeutic 
 value of sugar, are constantly increasing in 
 the medical pubUcations. Prof. Dingle, the 
 famous London speciahst in disorders of the 
 heart, reported quite recently in the British 
 Medical Journal of a case in which the mitral 
 valve had been damaged by over-exertion. 
 Owing to the subsequent insufficiency of 
 the heart-muscle to perform its role in the 
 circulation, abnormal fluids had begun to 
 collect in the abdomen to the extent that 
 tapping had to be resorted to repeatedly. 
 Every remedy within the reach of experience 
 having failed, solutions of sugar was tried of 
 one ounce five times a day. After three 
 days' treatment the tapping was no longer 
 required, and the increase in health and 
 strength, following upon the new treatment, 
 suffered no relapse up to the date of the Pro- 
 fessor's report. A clinical feature of great 
 significance was the heavy increase of urates 
 
 75 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 and oxalates, the physiological ash or oxy- 
 dates, resulting from the action of the sugar 
 on the tissues, its carbon absorbing the or- 
 ganized acids and thus breaking up the 
 toxic compounds, accumulated in the system 
 through the weak circulation due to the in- 
 sufficiency of the heart. 
 
 Similar reports have been made by Dr. 
 Hausch and Prof. Behrend, of Berlin, Ger- 
 many. Patients suffering from general de- 
 bility have found in a judicious adminis- 
 tration of sugar a new source to energy and 
 health. In most cases, however, the sugar 
 solutions are medically prepared and ad- 
 ministered hypodermically, as ordinary cane 
 sugar is found to be incongenial to the as- 
 similative functions. Often a large per- 
 centage of the sugar was found in the urine, 
 eliminated from the system by the kidneys. 
 An incident which may shed some light on 
 the subject of sugar therapy is reported from 
 a hospital in Edinburg, Scotland, where 
 a patient afflicted with a severe attack of 
 rheumatism had been advised by his phy- 
 sician to ^'cut out" sugar from his daily 
 ration. In consequence the rheumatism was 
 duly cured, but in the course of time, symp- 
 toms of general debility and nervous break- 
 down began to show up. In his distress he 
 returned to the hospital and asked his old 
 
 76 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 physician for advice. Connecting the dis- 
 continuation of the sugar with the new 
 development, the physician allowed him ex- A 
 
 perimentally a certain amount of ^^free sugar" 
 daily. The patient showed signs of recovery 
 from the very start, though the report did 
 not include the fate of the kidneys, and 
 the subsequent return to the old rheumatism. 
 
 These various case reports are in perfect 
 accord with the philosophy of sugar as set 
 forth in this volume. They all go to show 
 the effect of sugar on the human system of 
 nutrition. It is in the very fact of ''free 
 sugar'' being an abnormal substance, that i 
 has its value as medical agent, and which on 
 the same time distinctly and unmistakably 
 points out its proper place in the human 
 dietary. For v/hile its action as a chemical 
 absorbant is of the greatest value toward 
 the breaking up of accumulated tissue poisons 
 in the system, yet its further actions on other 
 body tissues, viz: kidneys and liver, may 
 and does give rise to remoter complications. 
 The safer way in employing sugar as medi- 
 cine is to limit its application to external 
 tissues. The transit form sugar as force, 
 to sugar as poison is obscure and indeter- 
 minable, and safe only under the guidance 
 of the light of painstaking scientific experi- 
 mentation. The very allurements connected 
 
 77 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 with the taste of sugar should accompany 
 its employment with a double caution, a scru- 
 pulous restraint in its indulgence, either as 
 food, as force, or poison, and only with a 
 motive of health and general usefulness. 
 
 78 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE MORAL APPLICATION OF ^TREE 
 
 SWEETS'^ 
 
 The extracted or concentrated form of 
 sugar which we term 'Tree Sweets/^ stand 
 in the same relation to the physical world, as 
 temptation and the dead-sea-fruits of grati- 
 fication, stand to the moral world. Either 
 of these forms of sweetness, when in excess, 
 turn readily into the general acidity of dis- 
 gust and pain, physically and morally. On 
 either plane the action of ' 'sweets" is to 
 break up fixed compounds for the reorgan- 
 ization of the new ones, which may either 
 be higher or lower types of life, according 
 to the motive, character and degree in- 
 volved in the indulgence. Thus tempta- 
 tions may be called ''moral sweets," which 
 if extracted or rendered "free," i. e., indulged 
 in for its own sake, will produce the same 
 effect on the individual's moral nature as 
 the indulgence and excess of "free sweets" 
 on his physical nature: the break-down and 
 dissolution of substances and principles in 
 a swifter ratio than the vital constructive 
 forces of his system can replace. By a 
 
 79 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 recognition of these principles we are able 
 to apply them as practical solvents to the 
 problem of human life. 
 
 As already pointed out, the ''sweets'^ con- 
 tained in the natural products of evolution 
 in the fruit, grain and vegetable, are indis- 
 pensible in the work of dissolving old, used- 
 up, and decomposing cell-structures in the 
 system. Applied to morals this means that 
 the sweets contained in the soul-trying events 
 known as ^^temptations," — if countenanced 
 and treated with the temperance, dignity 
 and moral restraint as expressed in self-control, 
 will generate those changes in the human 
 mind, and introduce those assets of self- 
 conscious experience and knowledge, which 
 are back of and give rise to the formation 
 and growth of character and manhood. And 
 furthermore, as pathological changes, and 
 subsequent breakdown of body tissues, are 
 due to excessive indulgence in extracted 
 or ^^free sugar;" so in a sorresponding way 
 a mental and moral breakdown, with sub- 
 sequent decay and dissolution of character, 
 is the inevitable outcome of an indulgence 
 in the ^^free sweets" of the moral plane. 
 For what is immorality but the extract 
 of natural events: the giving up to self- 
 gratification, with the subsequent surrender 
 of an individual's moral nature to soul and 
 character-dissolving forces. 
 
 80 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 EVIDENCE FOR AND AGAINST THE 
 USE OF SALT 
 
 In the strong search-light which the chem- 
 istry of an advanced physiology sheds upon 
 the subject of diet, old, time-honored stan- 
 dards are breaking down to give way to a 
 new conception of the quantitative and qual- 
 itative values of digestion and nutrition. 
 
 Among the prevalent objections to the 
 use of salt is the tendency of the latter to 
 crystalize and cause a hardening and stiffen- 
 ing of the body tissues. It is alleged that 
 salt, being a mineral substance, is imper- 
 vious to the action of the digestive juices, 
 and hence becomes an encumbrance or pre- 
 ventative in the digestion of salt-cured food- 
 stuffs. Furthermore, as salt is a mineral, 
 and as such unassimilable, it must be suffered 
 to remain in the system as a foreign body, 
 deposited in the capillaries in the form of 
 crystalizations, and constantly threatening 
 the individual with a hardening and rup- 
 turing of his vital tissues. The final out- 
 come would be some type or other of Artero- 
 sclerosis, Bright's disease, Arthrodial Rheu- 
 
 81 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 matism, etc., or at its best premature old 
 age. 
 
 In a recent publication of Dr. Willamer 
 Stephanson, — the discoverer of the white 
 Esquimaux, new arguments have been added 
 to the above claims against the safe use of 
 salt in the dietary. Dr. Stephanson, as a 
 result of his experiences in the Arctic, 
 considers salt as a positive hindrance to 
 life. He describes its action upon himself 
 and his followers as a narcotic poison, 
 and found its use absolutely eliminated 
 from the dietary of the Esquimaux, 
 who would rather submit to the ravages of 
 starvation than to use food cured or seasoned 
 with salt. On the basis of this data, Dr. 
 Stephanson draws the conclusion that sodium 
 chloride — our common table salt — is incon- 
 genial and harmful to the system, and its 
 use in the dietary of the civilized races, a 
 grave physiological error. Like tobacco, he 
 says, salt has conquered our taste and in- 
 stinct by the unnatural craving created by 
 its indulgence as a stimulant, resulting in 
 a habit difficult to break away from. ^^ Among 
 the uncivihzed Esquimaux,'' he tells us, 
 '^the dislike for salt is so strong that a salt- 
 iness, imperceptible to me, would prevent 
 them from eating at all." In connection 
 with these observations he refers to fat as 
 
 82 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 more agreeable to his taste than any other 
 form of food, including meats and cereals. 
 The Doctor at last gives as his firm convic- 
 tion that salt is inimical to the pursuit of 
 life and health, and advocates strongly its 
 removal from our diet. 
 
 Over and against these arguments, the 
 advocates for the use of salt refer to its 
 traditional recognition among all nations, 
 and during all times and ages. The appel- 
 lation made by Jesus to great characters, 
 as the ^^Salt of the Earth/ ^ has been referred 
 to as an evidence of the high opinion and 
 universal recognition in which salt was held 
 by the ancients. In the records of the 
 old Norse people, as far back as in the Edda, 
 reference is made to salt-cured meats; and 
 in ancient Egypt and Greece, salt was re- 
 garded as an indispensible article of diet. 
 Among the modern nations few people em- 
 ploy more salt-cured meats, and especially 
 fish, than the Scandinavian. As regular as 
 Scotchmen take their oatmeal, and the Amer- 
 icans their Parkerhouse rolls and coffee to 
 break their morning fast, the Scandinavian 
 laborer takes his salt-cured bloater and black 
 bread to start the course of his daily diet, 
 which in the course of the day is to be fol- 
 lowed by a noon meal and supper of additional 
 salt meat or fish^ boiled or fried. With few 
 
 83 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 exceptions the meat diet of the farm-hands 
 and city-laborers of this time — and history- 
 honored pennsula, consists of the preserved 
 and pickled varieties, the year round. And 
 yet their physical endurance, digestive power, 
 and efficiency as laborers seems to suffer in 
 no way from this dietetic excess of salt. 
 
 Even in lands where natural barriers have 
 isolated the people from the ways and habits 
 of culture, such as inland China, the Russian 
 Steppe, primitive North America, Australia, 
 etc. with all the radical differences of the 
 natives in other respects; with regard to 
 salt, their taste-buds are all uniformly de- 
 veloped. The unique craving by these na- 
 ture-children for a substance, in spite of its 
 alleged unfitness, not to say dangers, to 
 health and life, remains an inexplicable and 
 incongruous fact in the scientific theories 
 of the modern food-reformer. 
 
 Nor is this instinctive craving and relish for 
 salt limited to the human species; it is dis- 
 tinct both in the wild and domesticated 
 animals. All throughout the arid regions 
 of the temperate zone, are found what are 
 called ^^deer licks" — deposits of rock salt — 
 where cattle and horses, often after miles 
 of trailing, come to enjoy a good old time, 
 licking salt. Recognizing this peculiar crav- 
 ing in the animals, the farmers in the northern 
 
 84 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 countries, where cattle have to beTkept 
 indoors on dry fodder during at least half 
 of the year, have a custom to occasionally 
 supply their stock with salt, which, by the 
 latter, is always eagerly looked for. Besides 
 a general functional sluggishness and loss 
 of appetite, the animals in the absence of 
 salt, manifest their need of its stimulation 
 m a lessening, both as to quality and 
 quantity, of their daily output of milk. 
 
 What, to the naturalist, stand as mere 
 interesting traits, become, to the student 
 of biology, factors of great scientific sig- 
 nificance. Thus, Dr. Barriere, of Lyons— 
 a rising French scientist— has found reasons 
 to believe that the entities of evolution 
 are not only identical as to the character of 
 their origin, but also as to the place of their 
 origin. According to him, the cradle in 
 which organic life found its first receptacle 
 was rocked by the waves of the ocean, and 
 its archaic cradle-song wrought in the treble 
 clef of singing waves. ^The primitive life,'^ 
 ^u^^P^* .^^™^^e^ ' Vhich in Genesis is called 
 the Spirit of God moving upon the waters,' 
 sprang from the single cell. And this cell, 
 vegetating m the plant or the animal, is 
 continually bathed in a fluid, which, whether 
 ^^i^^ ^.^^^ of lymph, blood or vegetable sap, 
 difters m no essential way from sea-water.'' 
 
 85 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 Similarly, Prof. Jacque Loeb, of Chicago 
 University, finds in saline preparations a 
 most miraculous power to influence and 
 promote the progress of life. In his albio- 
 genetic and parthenogenetic experiments he 
 suspends his unfertalized eggs for about 
 two hours in a solution of 100 c. c. sea-water, 
 which effects changes in the albumen of the 
 eggs, leading up to the formation of the 
 ominous membrane with its gelatinous zone, 
 which constitutes the physical condition for 
 fertiUzation and the biogenetic drama, which 
 has its termination in the phenomena of 
 cellular mitosis. 
 
 No less argumentatively strong for the 
 power of salt to influence vital processes, 
 is the fact that a saline solution, injected 
 hypodermically, is able to substitute, or 
 replace, the loss of blood in an animal body 
 to the extent of sixty per cent of the entire 
 blood volume. Nor can we ignore the num- 
 erous cures effected by mineral hot springs, 
 especially in Germany, where immense crowds 
 of people gather every year to regain their 
 shattered health from the power of iron, 
 sulphur, sodium or magnesium salts — by 
 which the waters are charged. Medical prac- 
 tice is not at all uncertain as to the power 
 of certain mineral salts — viz., Mercury, Po- 
 tassium, Sodium, etc. — to check, after a few 
 
 86 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 doses, the ravages of syphilitic infection; 
 while, on the other hand, the very power of 
 mineral poisons to arrest vital processes is 
 in itself an evidence of the power of these 
 poisons to enter dynamically into the very 
 sanctum sanctorum of cell life. For the 
 power of destroying life demonstrates the 
 active presence of an influence which is 
 no less deep-reaching and ^effective than the 
 power of generating life. Hence, the de- 
 fenders of salt in its general usage, have 
 certainly recourse to powerful evidences, not 
 only for the possibility of saline absorption 
 and metabolization in the human body, but 
 also for its qualification to meet a strong 
 vital need. 
 
 87 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 THE FUNDAMENTAL BASIS OF SALT 
 
 Then, after all, what is salt? Whence 
 its origin, its powers, its necessity? Is the 
 nature of salt in any way — and if so, in what 
 way — conditioning the evolution and the 
 maintenance of life on this planeAt? 
 
 In the chemical formulary salt is defined 
 as an oxidation product arising from the 
 action of oxygen and hydrogen on a metal. 
 At the encounter of the two elements on the 
 field of a mineral substance, the latter gradual- 
 1}^ yields to the attack and decomposes in 
 the form of rust. This rust is the mineral 
 ash, remaining as an end-product of the de- 
 composed mineral elements, after the co- 
 hesive force back of its characteristic group- 
 ings of atoms is set free. 
 
 Oxygen and Hydrogen are the forces of 
 breakdown and renewal, employing elemental 
 affinity as their levers or agencies of action. 
 Thus, salt may be the end-product of multi- 
 ple elemental decompositions, obtaining its 
 name and characteristics from the two or 
 more minerals involved. Hence, in a com- 
 bination, let us say of Magnesium and Sul- 
 
 88 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 phur, the oxidation product becomes the 
 famihar Epsom Salt (MgS04). If the field 
 consists of Sodium and Sulphur, the result 
 of the combination is Glauber Salt (NaS04). 
 If it be Sodium and Borate, we get Borax 
 (Na2B407), etc. Finally if the combina- 
 tion is Sodium and Chloride, the output is 
 our familiar table condiment — our common 
 salt (NaCl), Socium Chloride. 
 
 89 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 SALT AT ONCE A PRESERVATIVE AND 
 A DESTROYER 
 
 It is the peculiar origin of salt, arising as 
 it does from processes of decomposition and 
 disunion, that accounts for its subsequent 
 influence on the composition of the organic 
 or inorganic substances on which its influences 
 is brought to bear. A duality in its com- 
 position, the very nature of salt is at once 
 to preserve and to destroy, to condense and to 
 evaporate; with one arm producing and with 
 the other reducing — centrifugal in its atomic 
 action, and centripetal in its moleculer. 
 
 Now the basis and the perpetuity of form 
 lies in the undisturbed rhythmic interaction 
 between the intrinsic and extrinsic proper- 
 ties of any substance. A change in this 
 rhythm, due either to internal or external 
 interruption — thermal, mechanical or chem- 
 ical, — by disturbing the molecular balance 
 of the compound, invites the dissolving at- 
 tack of the hydrogen-oxygenions. A fissure 
 or crannie in a rock provides at once an 
 opportunity for this dissolving elemental play. 
 
 90 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 And the rusting away of a metal, or the 
 crumbhng away of a granite, display, con- 
 cretely, the processes of dissolution and 
 resolution engendered in the respective sub- 
 stances. Like the microbes entering the field 
 of a disturbed physiologic rhythm in the lungs 
 of a consumptive proceed to disorganize 
 and remove the ruptured tissues, so the fiery 
 attack of the Hydrogen-Oxygen ion on the 
 exposed substance of a fissured rock, starts a 
 process of dissolution which sooner or later 
 must involve the reduction of a solid granite 
 boulder into a vitrious, formless mass — the 
 ash of combustion with its resultant inor- 
 ganic salt. The evolution of water, present 
 in the moisture of vapor, accompanying all 
 combustion, organic or inorganic, reveals 
 the identity of the engaging elements. It 
 is a metamorphosis of the atoms of the 
 temporarily divorced Hydrogen-Oxygen com- 
 bination, reappearing in the ensuing water 
 molecule, H20 — the type of universal equi- 
 poise — after having spent their excess of 
 chemical energy in the attack. For it is 
 this exhausture and subsequent loss of iden- 
 tity of the elements as they disappear in 
 the new-formed compounds, that lie at the 
 basis of the entire chain of the biochemical 
 phenomena of the world. As the atom of 
 life, the biological unit, while passing through 
 
 91 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 its short cycles of formed and lost affinities, 
 pre-figures the metamorphosis of the organic 
 kingdoms from seed to plant and fruit, and 
 back again into the seed; or, as in the still 
 higher forms of evolution, from larva to pupa 
 and subsequent butterfly, — so the atom or 
 unit of chemistry, exhibits the same prin- 
 ciple of evolution in the kingdom of the 
 inorganic world. Merging its identity as 
 atom into the compound of a new molecular 
 body, in the course of the cyclic dissolution 
 of that form, it is again released and restored 
 to its elemental identity. In the chemistry 
 of salt, the engaging elements, the Hydro- 
 Oxygen ions, in their exhausted state are 
 found to disappear into the compound of 
 water, from which again, in the process of 
 dehydralization or evaporation, they regain 
 their original unity and elemental balance. 
 
 This conception of salt, as a product of 
 decomposition, is borne out by every new 
 discovery in the field of chemistry. For 
 what are the radio-active phenomena of the 
 Roentgen rays, Actinic rays, Finsen rays, N 
 rays, etc., but the incidental manifestation 
 of an all-embracing process of elemental 
 break-down engendered by two world-des- 
 troyers and world-rebuilders — the Hydro-Ox- 
 ygen. Thus the new metal, Helium, con- 
 stitutes a field of action where the ominous 
 
 92 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 Hydroxyle is at work wrecking an element 
 the decomposition product of which, meets 
 us in the radium salt. The quality of des- 
 tructiveness characteristic to the radium salts, 
 and often fatal to the tissues exposed to its 
 action, indicates unmistakably its true nature 
 and genesis. The phenomena of light ac- 
 companying radium decomposition, reveals 
 the intensity of the elemental disintegra- 
 tion. 
 
 93 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 HOW THE PRINCIPLE OF SALT EX- 
 PLAINS THE PHENOMENON OF THE 
 X-RAY. 
 
 The power of salt to change the constitution 
 of substances brought under its influence 
 exemplifies the operation of an ever-present 
 law or principle in the universe — the in- 
 fluence exerted by one substance or subject 
 over another. For the philosophy of in- 
 fluence is expressed in the power of an agent 
 to impose its rate of systemic vibrations, or 
 its tenor of life — its keynote — on any object 
 or entity responsive to the influence. It is 
 the functional or constitutional identifica- 
 tion, transmitted through the power of in- 
 fluence, that compels one violin string to 
 respond in consonance with another of the 
 same tonal quality. And it is in this transfer 
 of constitutional identification between sub- 
 stances, subject to each other's influence, that 
 explains the power of salt to impart rigidity 
 and crystalization to the substance brought 
 under its influence, (whether it be the muscles 
 of the butchered beef or the living muscles 
 of the human body), if salt has been used too 
 
 94 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 freely in the dietary. In the case of radium 
 salt a new quality is added to its influence. 
 The immense rate of vibration character- 
 istic to the molecules of this salt gives rise 
 to a swiftness amounting to luminosity — a 
 state of vibration, which, in accordance with 
 the principle of influence, becomes trans- 
 mitted to the substance on which it acts. 
 Hence the radium salts, to the extent the 
 different tissues respond to its vibration, 
 gives rise to the X-ray and its phenomena of 
 transparency. Focahzed on the physical 
 body, the substance of the latter is thrown 
 into the radio or rhythm of the radium light 
 itself, and consequently becomes identical in 
 vibration with the latter : — which means luni- 
 inosity. So sweeping and fundamental is 
 this law of vibration, that its application 
 governs consciousness itself in the power of 
 influence exerted by one mind over other 
 minds. The stronger mind imposes the rate 
 or quality of its own vibration on the weaker 
 mind, resulting in an approach to similarity or 
 rather identity of conscious perception in 
 form of moral or mental conviction. 
 
 Hence the same principle that lies back of 
 the curative power of meat, lies back of the 
 curative power of mind: it is the power or 
 quality of one form or expression of energy 
 to impose its characteristics, by means of 
 
 95 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 enforcing its own rate of vibration, upon a 
 substance or subject of less power of resistance 
 than itself. 
 
 96 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 WHAT THE ^^SALT OF THE EARTH'^ 
 MEANS TO PHYSIOLOGICAL CHEM- 
 ISTRY 
 
 What is the real mission of salt in the human 
 body and in what particular processes can 
 its beneficent effects be traced in the tissues 
 and viscera subjected to its action? An 
 output of disintegration -a mineral or physio- 
 logical ash-product, — the nature of salt is 
 thus to impart its characteristic to every 
 substance in which it succeeds generating 
 chemical action. And furthermore, as dis- 
 integration involves a dual process: the crys- 
 talization of solids and evaporation of liquids, 
 the condensation or hardening of the fibrous 
 tissues of the body, with a subsequent re- 
 lease of its fluidic elements, -we are forced to 
 admit that sodium chloride (common salt) 
 occupies a high vital significance in the 
 metabolism of the human body. 
 
 Like the sword of Mohammet, salt has a 
 dual nature, and only through a close obser- 
 vation of its variegated employment as a 
 therapeutic agent are we able to define its 
 seeming paradoxical^action. Thus, while its 
 
 97 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 effect as cathartic is due to its powers of 
 evaporation and subsequent collection in 
 the intestines of excessive fluids, thereby 
 causing evacuation, so the on other hand, 
 its reactionary influence in the hardening 
 and ossification of the body tissues arises 
 from the opposite phase of evaporation — 
 condensation. Furthermore, the presence of 
 salt in the system sets free body-serums and 
 general aqueous accumulations in the various 
 tissues, -a fact which explains the power of 
 the hypodermic injection of a saline solution 
 to compel the different body-tissues to set 
 free any available serum, and pour it out into 
 the general circulation. The paralized heart- 
 muscle, reacting under the same influence, 
 responds to the impulse, and by re-assuming 
 its integral rhythm of expansion and con- 
 traction, starts anew the pistons and levers 
 of the human dynamo, swinging the vehicle 
 safely over a threatening collapse. 
 
 98 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 HOW SALT CAN BE AT ONCE THE 
 SAVIOUR AND DESTROYER OF LIFE 
 
 The constant manufacture in the system 
 of sodium chloride indicates its elemental 
 necessity in the economy of body nutrition. 
 For whenever in the course of our daily 
 diet, we introduce sodium into our system, 
 which happens every time we eat spinach, 
 beets, lettuce, strawberries, red meat, or 
 any other sodium-carrying substance, we 
 start a chemical action between this element 
 and the chlorine contained m the gastric 
 secretions, with the subsequent evolution 
 in the system of sodium chloride and water, 
 which means that hydrogen and oxygen, 
 after having engendered the decomposition 
 of the involved elements, disappear in the 
 cyclic retirement of their union in the form 
 of water. But the fact that salt, the product 
 of decomposition, is continually formed in 
 the system, indicates beyond doubt that as 
 organic or inorganic compound NaCl has an 
 important and indispensible work to perform 
 in the generation and support of life. 
 
 99 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 Now it is by virtue of the accelerating 
 action of salt on the destruction and dis- 
 placement of tissue, that its importance in 
 the vital processes of organized existence is 
 especially made evident. Its power to break 
 up fiuidic and gaseous combinations makes 
 its presence a necessary condition for the 
 elimination from the system of carbonic 
 acid gas, lactic, oxalic and uric acids, am- 
 monia, and other body poisons, which, 
 through the affinity they wield over the toxins 
 in the blood, arrest its oxydizing and tissue- 
 building functions. 
 
 It is the quality of salt, however, to re- 
 lease and set free substances that constitute 
 its peculiarity of being at once a source of 
 life and a source of death. For the opposite 
 pole of evaporation is crystalization, and 
 the drying up of a fluid naturally leaves in 
 its place a residue of deepening crystaliza- 
 tion. If, then, the supply of salt in the 
 system, owing to excess in its consumption, 
 exceeds the demand of bodily elimination, 
 the physiological balance breaks down, fol- 
 lowed by a progressive formation of deposits 
 and their gradual hardening into degenerating 
 crystalizations of muscles and viscera — con- 
 ditions which we recognize as the basic patho- 
 logical features in Artero-Schlerosis, Cardiac 
 Degeracy, Renal Calculi, and the various 
 
 100 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 progressive forms of Arthritis Deformans. 
 
 It is this power of salt, at once to evaporate 
 and crystahze, that preserves substances from 
 decomposition and decay; while on the other 
 hand, it is this very virtue that renders 
 salt-cured meat difficult for any but strong 
 stomachs to digest. For meat is preserved 
 by the progressive release of fluids engendered 
 by the action of salt in the tissues,-a process 
 which proceeds from without inwardly, from 
 the surface to the center, while isolating 
 segment after segment from bacterial invas- 
 ion. 
 
 Thus, while salt moderately enjoyed has 
 the power to prevent decomposition and 
 putrifaction of the tissues within or with- 
 out the body, its excess on the other hand, 
 leads to the very opposite, to the crystal- 
 ization and arrest of organized life. As 
 long as the high cellular vitality of youth 
 succeeds in continually bursting the saline 
 deposits formed by the ceaseless separation 
 of solids and fluids in the growing organism, 
 the functional integrity of the individual is 
 secured. The balance between evaporation 
 and crystalization in the body serum remains 
 physical body, this process of disinfection 
 is maintained by the action of Sodium 
 Chloride, either generated in the system 
 itself, or introduced as common salt by way 
 of our daily food. 
 
 101 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 WHY THE ESQUIMAUX ABHORS SALT 
 IN HIS DIETARY 
 
 Scientifically speaking, it is the very fact 
 that salt is shunned as a poison by the dwel- 
 lers of the polar region, that furnishes an 
 evidence for its unique and special qualities 
 in relation to life. Hence, so far from 
 being an evidence against the use of salt, 
 the observations of Dr. Stephanson point 
 to the presence of active principles in salt, 
 which have physiological value for us to the 
 extent we become related to them by force 
 of our environments. 
 
 Now as means of preservation, the action 
 of cold, and the action of salt, bring out 
 identical results in regard to animal tissue. 
 In either case the action, if sufficiently in- 
 tense, leads to crystalization. From the fore- 
 going we have already seen that salt, by its 
 dual processes of evaporation and condensa- 
 tion, brings about a state of normal equili- 
 brium between the fluids and the solids of 
 the tissues subjected to its action. A de- 
 ficiency of salt will lead to putrification; 
 an excess to crystalization. 
 
 102 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 In the polar regions the function of tissue 
 preservation is carried out by the influence 
 of an unrelenting all-penetrating cold. In 
 close correspondence to salt, the action of 
 frost is characterized by outward evapora- 
 tion and invv ard sohdification. Ice by thus iso- 
 lating the substances under its influence 
 from the access of oxygen, the presence 
 of ice renders putrifaction impossible. 
 The preservative power of the cold storage 
 process has its basis in this fact, which, at 
 the same time, lies back of the preservative 
 power of salt. In either process, we meet 
 the dual action of evaporation and solidi- 
 fication with the subsequent isolation of 
 the field of action, from the aerobic (oxygen- 
 feeding) microbe of putrification. 
 
 Reafizing that life in the Artie means a 
 close hfe-and-death struggle of the individual 
 agamst the crystalizing rigor of an all-pierc- 
 mg frigidity, it is readily seen why salt, in 
 itself a refrigerant, must not only be super- 
 fluous to existence in this region, but add 
 to the severity of the mortal conflict. Salt 
 would proceed to attack the system from 
 within, on the same tissue-shriveling, blood- 
 coagulating principle as the intense 
 cold from without. This again would 
 render the struggle between the attacking 
 and defending forces of existence altogether 
 
 103 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 unequal, and speedily exterminate every form 
 of vegetative possibility v\^ithin certain limits 
 of standardized geographical demarcations. 
 It is the instinctive realization of this vital 
 fact that makes the Esquimaux close his 
 flesh-pot to the superfluous seasoning of 
 the salt-shaker. 
 
 The same reason lies back of the fact 
 that there is no room for fruits and vege- 
 tables on the dining table of the Esquimaux. 
 The Sodium, Iron and Magnesium, present 
 in lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, etc., would 
 solidify his blood serum into icicles. Not 
 even cereals, with their large percentage of 
 organic salts, can be enjoyed with safety, 
 except as a very small percentage of the 
 general diet. Only fat, with its absolute 
 freedom from every reducing constituent, 
 offers perfect assurance of a safe and whole- 
 some article of high-arctic diet. 
 
 The same cause that keeps salt out of the 
 Arctic keeps it out of the Tropics. The 
 intense heat of the latter region performs 
 the same physiological function as the intense 
 cold of the former. In either case we find 
 the same duality of forces with an object to 
 render conditions suitable for the perpetua- 
 tion of life — the evaporation of fluids, and 
 solidification of solids. The swift evapora- 
 tion in the Tropics of organic fluids prevents 
 
 104, 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the stagnation of exposed substances, which 
 again precludes the generation and culture 
 of putrifactive bacteria. The Tropics and 
 Arties, though antipodes in climate, are 
 identical in their principles of vital preser- 
 vation. In either case amospheric con- 
 ditions perfom the sme antiseptic and germi- 
 cidal functions in these regions of heat and 
 cold, as salt performs in the intermediate— 
 the Temperate. Salt is substituted in the 
 Arctics by fats, in the Tropics by sweets. 
 As the former, by softening and modifying 
 the progressive solidification of tissue due 
 to^ the crystalizing action of cold, main- 
 tains the balance of life in the Arctics, so 
 the sweets of the fruits accomplishes a 
 corresponding feat in the Tropics. 
 
 105 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 WHY LIFE IN THE TEMPERATE ZONE 
 NEEDSJSALT FOR ITS MAINTEN- 
 ANCE 
 
 It is under the stress of this un- 
 escapable logic that in the Temperate zone 
 we are prepared to find conditions that 
 demand both sugar and salt for the main- 
 tenance of their ph^^siological and biological 
 balance. For while the cold of that region 
 is not severe enough to accomplish the 
 work of preservation through frigid crystal- 
 ization, nor the heat intense enough to bring 
 about the same result through evaporation, 
 the balance of organized existence finds its 
 sustaining agency in the free distribution 
 of salt, both as mineral deposits and as active 
 ingredients of plants. The number of so- 
 called ^^salt licks/' scattered broad-cast over 
 the Temperate zone, provide opportunRies 
 for hordes of grazing animals to satisfy their 
 instinctive craving for salt. 
 
 It is significant that in this Temperate 
 zone, with its vital demand for salt, the 
 forces of moral and mental evolution have 
 
 106 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 reached their high-water mark of expression. 
 In this evolutionally high-strung zone of 
 existence, bordering on antipodes of extremes 
 of heat and cold, forces of self -adjustment 
 are at work, which for their maintenance 
 require the dual agency of both salts and 
 sweets, of both vegetables and fruit. The 
 tremendous expressiveness and versatilities 
 of existence in the Temperate zone, arising 
 from its necessity to deal with vital problems 
 of every type and condition of a South and 
 of a North, demands quick access to every 
 means and method of unfoldment, involving 
 needs and exigencies pecuHar to every longi- 
 tude and latitude of the planet. 
 
 It is self-evident that generahzations which 
 may be logical and true, as far as they apply 
 to the stereotyped conditions of a given 
 zone or center of existence, must utterly 
 fail when applied to regions where different 
 environments and conditions of life give 
 rise to altogether different needs and neces- 
 sities. In the Temperate zone, where the 
 general typical conditions offer the highest 
 possibilities for physical, moral and intellec- 
 tual development; where the blending of 
 antipodal environments present the most 
 diversified and universal demands on the 
 individual for adequate self-adjustment, and 
 where unique and imperative needs in the 
 
 107 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 midst of a boundless variety of supply offers 
 an illimitable range of choice, we are entering 
 situations of life that lead us to an evolution 
 of free will, and to the cultural triumphs 
 arising from altruistic motives. 
 
 Limitations in means, lead to limitations 
 in ends, as the height of attainment stands 
 in direct correspondence to the range of 
 individual choice. In the frigid zone, cultural 
 endeavors are paralyzed by the demands of 
 life, exceeding the suppl}^ of life, and where 
 stereotyped conditions for existence set im- 
 passable barriers for diversified individual 
 development. In the Torrid zone the ex- 
 pense of individuality has been kept back 
 by the very opposite reason — the supply 
 exceeding the demand. In the former, life 
 is retreating before a stimulant to which 
 organized existence is inadequate to respond; 
 in the latter, life sits still because there is 
 no stimulus to elicit its higher powers of 
 response. The one succumbs from lack of 
 life, the other from an excess of life. 
 
 But in the Temperate zone the individual 
 triumphs over his environments because of 
 having powers level with his opportunities. 
 It is not the abuse of the means of life, nor 
 their disuse, that lead toward the elevation 
 of humanity, but the full enjoyment of 
 environment, while under the gauge of in- 
 
 108 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 dividual self-control. The ingenuity of man 
 has no other source, power or inspiration 
 than in his efforts to make opportunities 
 out of life, and life out of opportunities. 
 Limitations of choice mean limitations of 
 attainments. At a certain stage of develop- 
 ment temptation itself becomes a means of 
 moral development, and virtue the progeny 
 of understood and conquered vice. It is 
 in the wrestling with vice that innocence 
 may evolve the power of virtue. Only the 
 freedom and opportunity of choice can open 
 to us the kingdom and mastery of free moral 
 will. 
 
 And it is here the Temperate zone offers 
 us the key to destiny. Its very name brings 
 out its quality of virtue. To live in the midst 
 of accessible infatuations and yet remain 
 temperate; to hear the call of wild passions 
 reverbrate in our ear, and 3^et remain loyal 
 to the ''still small voice'' of conscience: 
 to use the fruits of the earth, sugar and salt, 
 fats and acids, starches and proteids, spices 
 and condiments, not as ends, but as means; 
 not as slaves to enjoyment, but as masters 
 of choice, with knowledge as guide. And 
 as usefulness and altruism, as motives, hold 
 the key to the deeper meaning of life, it is 
 the Temperate zone that, in the fullest 
 scope, brings out the material aspects and 
 
 109 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 opportunities for highest attainments. The 
 determination of the individual to utihze, 
 for moral purpose, the products of life, 
 makes him the true beneficiary of the tran- 
 scendal virtues. 
 
 110 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ^TREE 
 SWEETS'' AND ^XOOSE MORALS" 
 
 Sugar is to the physical world, what 
 temptation and its dead-sea fruit gratifica- 
 tion is to the moral world. On either plane 
 the action of ''sweets'' is to loosen or break 
 up fixed compounds for the reorganization 
 of new ones; and if the process is normal and 
 law-governed, the result will be higher, more 
 enduring forms and types of life. Thus 
 we may regard temptation as a ''moral 
 sweet," which, if extracted or rendered "free," 
 1. e., indulged in or gratified, will produce 
 the same effect on the individuals' m.oral 
 nature as the indulgence in extracts of "free" 
 sweets upon his physical: the breakdown • 
 and dissolution of substances and principles 
 m a swifter ratio than the vital constructive 
 forces of his system can replace. And this 
 introduces the natural equation of the problem 
 involved. For as the sw^eets, contained in 
 the natural products of evolution, in the 
 fruits, grains, and vegetables, are required 
 for the dissolution of old and used-up struc- 
 tures in the body, so as to insure a higher 
 
 lU 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 functional efficiency, so the ^^moral sweets'', 
 contained in the trying events of hfe, known 
 as temptations, if met with temperance, 
 dignity and moral restraint, which consti- 
 tutes self-control, will generate those changes 
 in the human mind and introduce those 
 assets into self-conscious experience and 
 knowledge, which give rise ro the formation 
 and growth of character and manhood. And 
 furthermore, as the pathological changes and 
 progressive breakdown of body-tissues are 
 due to excessive indulgence in '^free'' sugar, 
 so, in a corresponding way, the mental and 
 moral breakdown, with its subsequent decay 
 and dissolution of character, is the inevitable 
 outcome of indulgence in the ^'free'' sweets 
 of the moral plane. In either case it is 
 the stimulation and gratification of the 
 immoral impulse to yield to the bitter, 
 unripe fruit of soul-degrading pleasures, 
 sense-slavery and self -contempt. 
 
 112 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 THE ^'SALT'' AND THE ^^SWEET" OF 
 THE EARTH 
 
 As to the moral plane, ''free'' sugar stands 
 for the extracted and enjoyed sweets of 
 temptation, with the threatening processes 
 of mxoral breakdown in consequence, so in a 
 corresponding way, ''free' or inorganic, i. e. 
 mineral, salt, stands for the preservation or 
 fixation of character. And furthermore, as 
 salt in its mineral rigidity, unchanged by 
 the liberating, ever-stirring, ever-advancing 
 forces of opposing polarities, gradually pre- 
 serves and crystalizes into inanimation and 
 death the forms and substances subjected 
 to its action, so likewise character, if per- 
 mitted to become "fixed" in its limited self- 
 sufficiency, and kept isolated from the fresh, 
 l)alancing, swelling impulses of a sympathetic 
 solidarity with its environment, runs the 
 risk of crystaiizing into dormant, lifeless, 
 theorizing, with its inability of vital response, 
 its intolerance and egotism. 
 
 Applied to the moral plane, salt stands for 
 strength of type, perseverance of effort, and 
 immutability of purpose. Hence to deserve 
 
 113 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the title of ^^the salt of the earth/' means to 
 be a moral bulwark, a self-denying, self- 
 sacrificing, vital breaker fixed in the tumul- 
 tuous sea of life; a veritable ^'rock of the 
 ages," supporting by its very rigidity the 
 finer, fluidic, progressive and exalting ele- 
 ments of universal life. The ^^salt of the 
 earth" refers unmistakably to a phase of 
 faith— solid, severe, unyielding — which has 
 it enduring and redeeming virtue in 
 personal sacrifice; while the ^^sweet" of the 
 earth represents the very opposite phase of 
 existence, the principle of ever-fluctuating, 
 ever-soaring or sinking, ever-consumed or 
 consuming emotion — the affections, sympa- 
 thies, passions, elegies and pathos of human 
 existence, which if divorced from the ''salt 
 of the earth^' must wither in its own light, 
 burn up in its own conflagration. 
 
 Again, narrowed down to its concrete, 
 practical levels, the ''sweets of the earth" 
 represent the sum-total of organic acids, the 
 fruits, etc., while the "salt of the earth," on 
 the same basis of definition, stands for the 
 carriers of organic salts, the grains and 
 vegetables. The latter enter the body-meta- 
 bolism as transmitters of constructive, ce- 
 menting, fundamentally conserving forces; 
 the former as an energizing, impelling, gen- 
 erative, ceaselessly stirring and combustive 
 
 114 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 impulse — the principle of unfoldment and 
 growth in natural evolution. Creeping out 
 from the soil in which it remains partly 
 buried, the vegetable draws its energies from 
 the mineral world; while the fruit ripening 
 in the mJd-air and bathed in sunlight and 
 oxygen, draws its energies from atmospheric 
 storage batteries. Thus, while the former 
 is an exponent of the earth and its rugged 
 solidity, the latter stands for the intangible 
 fairy realm of light, expanse and freedom. 
 
 From this, it naturally follows that the 
 health and fulness of physical life can be 
 maintained only through a proper adjustment 
 of the vital balance of organic elements 
 represented in acids and salts, fruits and 
 vegetables; in the elements engaged in dis- 
 solution and resolution; in convulsive growth 
 or reactionary resistance; generative excess 
 or conservation of species. Any violation of 
 this code of vital ethics, any effort to compel 
 nature to surrender her integrity for the 
 gratification of any base or untrue appetite 
 in man, means directly or indirectly an act 
 of self destruction. Human ingenuity, goaded 
 by unholy and artificial wants may succeed 
 in extorting shocking advantages from the 
 administrative energies of natural evolution; 
 but the genius of retribution is continually 
 at \\ork, compelling the transgressor, through 
 
 115 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 the executioners of sickness and suffering, 
 to restore, in terms of enforced personal 
 renunciations, the things and substances that 
 once served him toward the attainments of 
 his base and degenerating pleasures. 
 
 116 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 THE VALUE OF SALT IN MEDICINE 
 
 The therapeutic value of salt has been 
 known and utihzed by the medical profession 
 from time immemorial. Its preservative 
 qualities are referred to in the ' 'Sermon on 
 the Mount" as symbols for strength and 
 purity of human character. In the philoso- 
 phy of the Rosicrucians, when medicine was 
 yet regarded as an art, and the practitioner 
 a high priest in the temple of life, receiving 
 his inspirations or instructions from powers 
 inherent as principles in the elemental world, 
 salt occupied an important position in the 
 group of agents sustaining the integrity of 
 human life. In the studies and researches 
 of these inspired dreamers, salt came next 
 to the ''Red Powder'^ as a governing element 
 in the vital compound which has survived 
 in name, if not in virtue, as the "Elixir of 
 Life." 
 
 Like sugar, its twin element, salt bears a 
 twofold relation to the evolutionary process 
 — evaporation and condensation. Applied to 
 human life and its vegetative necessities, 
 
 117 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 these qualifications give to salt its unique 
 power of loosening or binding, setting free 
 or locking up, drawing in or pushing out 
 the organized pistons and levers of the human 
 engine. 
 
 The virtue of the salt-water bath finds in 
 this fact its cause and explanation. By its 
 contact with the cuticle it starts in every pore 
 a process of evaporation, by which a stream 
 of stagnant humors is forced out through 
 the skin, while the simultaneous process of 
 condensation creates a demand for an in- 
 crease of the blood-stream, and subsequent 
 stimulation of the system toward a renewal 
 and re-inforcement of its tissues and capil- 
 laries throughout the entire vascular exchange. 
 
 If the exposures to the saline influence, 
 however, becomes too frequent, and the 
 products of condensation are formed at a 
 faster rate than the systemic circulation 
 can dissolve and eliminate, the consequences 
 will be a walling up of the pores by a mass of 
 impenetrable crystalizations. 
 
 This condition often gives rise to foul, 
 running sores on the bodies of people whose 
 occupation keeps them exposed to the in- 
 fluence of salt, such as salt-works operatives, 
 swimming-teachers, and natives of islands 
 where a mild temperature and easy access 
 to water offer great opportunities for salt 
 
 118 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 sea bathing. The ulcerations of the skin, 
 which are almost typical to the inhabitants 
 of the Hawaiian and other South Sea Islands, 
 are due to an excessive exposure to salt. 
 The rapid accumulation of sediments in the 
 pores due to an enforced evaporation, is 
 over-balancing the disolving power of the 
 blood and lymph, while the perversion of 
 the nerve power back of the vascular ex- 
 change results in a collapse of the mechanism 
 of normal elimination. In place of proceed- 
 ing along the natural channels through the 
 pores and orifices of elimination, the latter 
 breaks out through the surface of the skin 
 in the form of eruptions, boils and running 
 ulcers. 
 
 Like sugar, salt is a great stimulant. In 
 cases of extreme exhaustion, due to extensive 
 loss of blood, saline solutions, subcutaneously 
 injected, almost miraculously restore the 
 patient to life and health. The Rational 
 of this process is identical with the one above 
 described. The inherent centrifugal motion 
 governing the nature of the salt, expressed 
 in its two phases of evaporation and con- 
 densation, by setting free the fluids available 
 in the various tissues of the body, succeeds 
 in maintaining the action of the systemic 
 circulation until the blood manufacturing 
 functions have found time and means to 
 
 119 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 replenish the body with a medium for an 
 adequate vascular exchange. 
 
 This therapeutic influence of salt on the 
 mucus membranes of the body, renders it a 
 very valuable remedy in the treatment of 
 catarrh in the nose and pharyngeal structures. 
 The immersion of the entire face in a normal 
 salt solution, while allowing the fluids to flow 
 up through the nose, down the pharynx and 
 out through the mouth, will cause the in- 
 flamed membrane to give off its stagnant 
 serum and at the same time induce an in- 
 creased action of the blood stream, with 
 the subsequent reconstruction of the diseqsed 
 and broken-down cellular tissues. 
 
 The same principle that governs the action 
 of Sodium Chloride (our common salt) is 
 a factor in the behavior of all other salts in 
 organic or inorganic chemistry. The action 
 of Mercurial Salt on the syphilistic tissues 
 its explanation in the unfoldment of the 
 same principle of evaporation and conden- 
 sation. The key which fits every physiologi- 
 cal or pathological problem, where the action 
 of salt is involved, is contained in the simple 
 fact of its being a product of oxidation. It 
 is an ash remaining after the combustion of 
 any oxidizable or combustible element. The 
 difference between oxidation and combus- 
 tion consists in the character of the sub- 
 
 120 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 stance involved. Disolution of an organized 
 substance means combustion and results in 
 the liberation of water, Carbon-Dioxide, and 
 ash; the dissolution of a mineral substance 
 is characterized as oxidation, and gives off 
 Oxygen, Hydrogen and Salt. 
 
 It is this devitalized or evacuated condi- 
 tion of salt that lies back of its powers to 
 give rise to processes of evaporation and 
 condensation in substances, with which it 
 comes in touch. For just as fire, by trans- 
 mitting its rythm or key note of molecular 
 vibration to surrounding substances, spreads 
 the conflagration, in its own destructive 
 fashion; so in a similar way, salt to the extent 
 it predominates, reduces substances to its 
 own characteristics. The same principle is 
 applicable to the phenomenal structure of 
 ice. It is the principle of contagion at work 
 in all nature, the transposition of molecules 
 along a rate or rythm of vibration diverging 
 from the original normal. This power of 
 transmitting an impulse along a current of 
 molecular vibration from one object to another 
 is noticed in the transmission of sound from 
 one violin to another of the same key, though 
 separated by every other means than that 
 of rythm; and it is this same power of rythm 
 that enables one substance to transmit its 
 own state of vitality or disolution to any 
 
 121 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 other rythmically responsive substance, be 
 it through the medium of fire, ice, rust, 
 fever, inflamation or corruption. It is the 
 power of this rhythmic influence, exercised 
 by the body, mind or soul on animate or 
 inanimate nature, that causes the rising or 
 sinking of entities from one state into another, 
 from normal into abnormal, from health 
 into disease, or vice versa, according to the 
 character of the initiating impulse, and to 
 the receptivity of the substance or subject 
 under influence. 
 
 Applied to human tissues, salt may spell 
 construction or destruction, according to the 
 intensity and duration of the application. 
 If applied long enough so as to permanently 
 transpose or transmit the rate of its own 
 vibration to the involved tissues, the latter 
 may gradually become organized into a state 
 of progressive dissolution. Mercurial ulcers 
 of progressive dissolution. Mercurial ulcera- 
 tions, which often result from a protracted 
 application of these salts to syhphilistic 
 tissues, at once illustrate and demonstrate 
 the power of salt to impart its ratio of mo- 
 lecular vibration to tissues to which it is 
 applied, and thus perpetuate its own charac- 
 teristic tendency of disolution to processes 
 of corrosion and corruption of the human 
 flesh. It brings up the spectacle of elemental 
 
 122 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 dissolution transmitted to animated tissues. 
 The process of a living creature slowly 
 transformed into a physiological ash-heap, 
 through the physiological wild-fires raging- 
 through his substance. Employed as a vag- 
 inal douche or rectal enema, the action of 
 salt exhibits the same constitutional charac- 
 teristics. The presence of the saline solution 
 in the intestine starts at once its dual phase 
 of activity — evaporation and condensation; 
 the former expelling the bowel contents by 
 the expansive force of the evolution of vapor, 
 the latter causing a physiological drainage 
 of the more or less congested mucous lining 
 of the intestines. The former process empties 
 the bowels through mechanical expulsion, 
 the latter purges them by chemical dis- 
 placement. By its nature a chemical ash, 
 the action of salt on any tissue is toward 
 reduction by processes identical to those 
 that caused its own dissolution. The prac- 
 tical application of salt as a therapeutic 
 agent is thus indicated in cases wherever a 
 reduction or drainage of tissues is required, 
 as in the case of fatty degeneracy, adiposis,' 
 congestion and inflammation of tissues, in- 
 ternal or external. 
 
 It is furthermore this characteristic of 
 Sodmm Chloride that invests it with the 
 power of a universal solvent. Albumen owes 
 
 123 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 its solubility principally to the action of salt. 
 It disolves pure casin and impedes the co- 
 agulation of the fibrin of the blood. While 
 the permanent constitutional presence of 
 socium chloride in the blood shows but a 
 small percentage, 5 to 1000, its incidental 
 presence in pathological products is immense, 
 indicating its great importance in processes 
 of secretion and elimination of alien sub- 
 stances. Hence in the course of any in- 
 flammation, notably pneumonia, pleurites and 
 hectic fevers, etc., the Sodium Chlorid of 
 the system is so extensively engaged in 
 neutralizing and normaHzing the pathological 
 processes that for the time being it entirely 
 disappears from the urine. Its return in 
 the urinary excretions is in the nature of a 
 critical phenomenon and marks the subsi- 
 dence of the inflammation. It is this im- 
 portance of salt in the system as a patho- 
 logical adjuster and antitoxic corrective, that 
 may explain the almost irresistable craving 
 for salt by people whose foods are more 
 or less made up by toxic elements, such as 
 grease, alcohol, pastry and dried beans, etc. 
 -—a craving which has no basis in the attrac- 
 tiveness of its taste, and yet exceeds by far 
 the physiological need of the system. 
 
 In ulceration and infection of the bowel, 
 there is no remedy surpassing in safety salt 
 
 124 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 efficiency, a gallon of warm, normal and 
 solution retained in the bowel some ten or 
 fifteen minutes and then permitted to slowly 
 pass out. In diabetes, uremia, typhoid, in- 
 testinal catarrh, etc., the curative power of 
 saline enimas in eliminating decomposing 
 and coagulated albumen and catarrhal sloughs 
 are really surprising. If aided by diet, a 
 proper colon treatment of saline solution may 
 permanently remove the evil of constipation. 
 In the vomiting of pregnancy, injections of 
 saline solutions, either per rectum or hypo- 
 dermically, have often cured where other 
 remedies have failed. 
 
 Latest pronouncements of leading Euro- 
 pean physicians, such as Dr. Huebsch, of 
 the Imperial Hospital, Berlin, or Dr. William 
 Hampdon, of London, are strongly in favor 
 of salt as an internal remedy in the treatment 
 of asthma and tuberculosis. Dr. Bourchardat 
 of Vienna, observes that salt lessens the 
 excretion of sugar in diabetes, and even 
 diminished thirst. A recent writer in the 
 London Lancet, claims that doses of 150 
 grains have cured intermittent fever. 
 
 In his famous system of Saline Therapy, 
 the late Dr. Burgess, of Chattanooga, Tenn., 
 has made wonderful discoveries in the healing 
 powers of salt (Magnesium Sulphate, or 
 Epsum Salt) in its application to human 
 
 125 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 ailments. One pound of this salt to each 
 five gallons of bloodwarm water, taken either 
 in the form of sitz bath, tub-bath, towel- 
 bath, or internal-bath (enema) will accom- 
 plish wonders in ulcerations of the skin, in 
 rheumatism and congestion in external organs. 
 For nervous subjects, a small pinch of 
 ordinary table-salt in a glass of water, early 
 in the morning, will arrest interior decom- 
 position by a stimulation of healthy granu- 
 lation, and thus increase health and strength. 
 Its anticeptic qualities are readily seen in 
 its power to destroy fetor from gangrenous 
 sores and coagulated albumen and putrid 
 casein. In fact its virtues are so universal 
 in relation to the needs of the creatures of 
 evolution, that its disappearance from na- 
 ture would mean the extinguishing from 
 the earth, with the exception of the Arctics, 
 of everv trace of oro-anized life. 
 
 126 
 
CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 THE VALUE OF SALT IN FOOD 
 
 The demand for salt in human nature, 
 either consciously, as in the promptings of 
 taste, or subconsciously, as in the elemental 
 affinities of nutritional chemistry, is not a 
 mere whim or caprice of a sportive sensation, 
 developed into abnormal cravings, but the 
 voice of a deep-going, fundamental, nutri- 
 tional need. 
 
 The relation of salt to food is governed by 
 the same principles as its relation to medicine. 
 It is the principle of invigoration, arising 
 from the processes of absorption and elimi- 
 nation; of condensation and evaporation. 
 In the cooking and preparation of food, salt 
 becomes a saving force in the chemistry of 
 digestion. In place of having to supply 
 from its own vital resources the vigor and 
 strength lacking in cooked food, the system, 
 by the action of salt, receives an artificial 
 impulse for its digestion, by which the food- 
 cells become receptive and responsive to the 
 
 127 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 dissolving and peptonizing actions of the 
 digestive fluids. 
 
 From this, however, it is readily seen, 
 that though salt added to the products of 
 cookery, is a positive aid to digestion and 
 assimilation; if used with fresh, uncooked 
 vegetables, may give rise to excess. Nature 
 needs no digestant for her products as long 
 as the pistons and levers of her vito-mag- 
 netic mechanism are still intact, and un- 
 hampered by the wrecks of coagulated al- 
 buminoids and collapsed vascular viaducts, 
 as the result of artificially-prepared food- 
 stuffs. The presence of fresh, uncooked, 
 unartificial foodstuffs in the stomach, brings 
 out the full, unmodified charge of the virile, 
 life-stirring, cell-energizing potency of the 
 gastric secretions, adequate to deal with any 
 food is useful and needful for individual 
 health and strength. This, however, is not 
 to serve as an argument in favor of the 
 system of ^^unfired" or uncooked food, as no 
 single ^'system," fired or unfired, can ever 
 meet the requirements of individual physio- 
 logical differences. If all stomachs were 
 charged alike with unhampered natural vir- 
 ility, no cooking would be needed, but there 
 are stomachs too feeble to respond to the 
 strong polarizations of ''unfired" food. The 
 invalid stomach, having lost or forfeited its 
 
 128 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 constitutional birth-right of native nerve 
 power, must need to have the spirit of the 
 food reduced to a level of its own subdued 
 life — a reduction easily attained by cookery. 
 Hence cookery is a valuable expediency, and 
 serves as an opiate to an over-wrought and 
 over-balanced gastric nerve mechanism. 
 
 It is here, however, that salt comes in as 
 a redeeming power to substitute, dynamically, 
 w^hat the food lost, vitally. By its power of 
 inducing increased cellular drainage in vas- 
 cular exchanges of the tissues, salt is capable 
 of imparting a new impulse to the food, as 
 the latter has been rendered inert, and vi- 
 tally reduced, through cookery. And further- 
 more, it is this artificially induced explosions 
 in the contents of the stomach, due to the 
 expansive and condensive force of salt, that 
 accounts for its tonic effect upon digestion. 
 
 On the other hand, as the general demand 
 of the system for salt depends on the per- 
 centage of hydrochloric acid in the gastric 
 secretions, the amount of salt to be used in 
 the diet is not only to be governed by the 
 cooked or uncooked condition of the food, 
 but also by the composition of the gastric 
 juices. And as the percentage of the gas- 
 tric acidity, barring accidental irregularities, 
 has its cause and root in mental conditions, 
 
 129 
 
Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 
 
 individual characteristics as a force in diet 
 must never be lost sight of. 
 
 Nervous irritability and excess of Hydro- 
 chloric acid in the digestion are closely 
 associated conditions. The high strung, ner- 
 vous individual, with his gastric secretions 
 already overcharged with hydrochloric acid, 
 has positive needs for the solidifying in- 
 fluences due to the use of salt; while the 
 individual of the phlegmatic type, with im- 
 perturbal nerves and fatty inclinations must 
 lie guarded as to his use of a general saline 
 seasoning of his cooked food-stuffs. 
 
 In the use of salt we have constantly be- 
 fore us the principle of excess and balance. 
 The same force which, if used in accordance 
 with physiological needs, will aid our di- 
 gestion and circulation, — if used in excess 
 of these needs, will strike us with hardening 
 of the tissues, evaporation of the fluids, 
 crystalization of the solids, and a fatal 
 process of systemic calcification which, by 
 transfixing the whole vascular exchange, may 
 terminate into hopeless progressive regidity. 
 
 In the relation which the individual oc- 
 cupies to his environments he is continually 
 brought to face the supreme lesson of self- 
 control and self-renunciation — with useful- 
 ness and altruism as the motive powers of 
 human existence. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 130 
 
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