Dr. Page says, "Pigeons, chickens and mice will flourish on Graham (whole wheat) flour, but all will die within three weeks on white flour." A colony of mice fed on the best grade of white flour will all develop constipation in three days and die within a month. An equal number fed on whole wheat flour will flourish and gain weight.

In the process of making white flour out of wheat grain the outer coat of the grain is removed. This removes seventy-five per cent of the calcium of the wheat, much of the phosphorus, four-fifths of the iron and much of the other minerals of the wheat. The process also removes seven-eights of the thiamine and niacin, and three-fourths of the riboflavin. Much protein of the wheat is also cast aside by the milling process and the protein thus lost is of better quality than that in the heart of the wheat. Farmers feed these cast-off portions of the wheat to their horses, cows, pigs, chickens and other animals. "What fools these mortals be!"

In the milling process about thirty per cent of the wheat grain is thrown away and with it practically all of its alkaline minerals. White flour is of so little value that bugs, weevils and worms, that readily eat and do well on whole wheat flour, will not eat it except when forced to do so by extreme hunger, and then it kills them in a short time. How true is the statement that "we boast of having the whitest flour in the world. We have also the thinnest hair, and the poorest bones, teeth and nerves as a result."

Whole wheat alone, as pointed out in a previous chapter, will not sustain life in a normal manner. After a shorter or longer period the normal rate of growth slackens, unless green foods are added to the diet.

Many of the "diets" employed for experimental purposes are not worthy of the name. Rats fed on the following "diet" showed rickets in thirty days:

White flour 95.0%
Calcium lactate 2.9%
Sodium chloride 2.9%
Iron citrate 0.1%

Nobody but an ignoramus could call this a diet. The white flour it contains is the only thing in it that even remotely resembles food.

A number of diets deficient in various vitamins have been formulated by the investigators. Here is one for example, formulated by Osborne and Mendel:

Purified Casein 18%
Cornstarch 48%
Lard 30%
Salts 4%
0.3 Gm. dried yeast (for vitamin B1)

It is obvious at a glance that this is not a diet. There is almost no food in these materials. The salts are inorganic. The starch is devoid of minerals as is the lard. The casein is purified, which means that it has been deprived of its salts. Vitamin A is not the only thing lacking in this "diet." Experiments with "diets" of this nature can have no practical value in enabling us to better feed ourselves, our children and our patients. It should not surprise us that subsistence on this "diet" for any length of time will stop the growth of young animals. Growth could hardly be expected to last beyond the exhaustion of the stored reserves in the bodies of the animals.

The addition of one or more vitamins to such "diets" will not render them adequate. A true diet must be composed of foods: natural foods. Neither of the "diets" presented above resemble even the worst diets eaten anywhere.

Here is another example of these experimental diets, fed by Dr. Percy Howe, of Harvard University: "We take soy beans (50%), rolled oats (28%), dried whole milk (10%), yeast (4%), butter (5%), agar (1%), calcium carbonate (1%), and sodium chloride (1%), mix moisten with water and bake into a hard cracker. We feed a liberal quantity of pure cellulose, in the form of filter paper, as roughage. This diet contains enough of everything to sustain life except Vitamin C, and we may be sure that no animal is going to get his living from it unless he chews hard and long."

The statement that this diet contains enough of everything, except Vitamin C, to sustain life is absolutely and unqualifiedly false. This is not a diet at all. It is a poison, if it is anything. It certainly is not a food.

Sodium chloride is common table salt and is not assimilable or usable by the body. It is excreted unchanged. It comes out in the same state it entered the body. No metabolized food does this. It is not food, but an irritant. Its addition to food, supplies no lacking element. The same is true of calcium carbonate. It is a useless inorganic salt. It supplies the body with nothing.

In trying to prove that this "diet" only lacks Vitamin C, he takes no consideration of the oxidation of sulphur and phosphorus, for example, in the process of cooking. The proteins of soy beans are of a high grade, but cooking them into crackers doesn't make them any good. Take, again, the milk contents of this "diet." It is already injured when it comes to the hand of this experimenter, by the process of drying, and is still further injured in being cooked into a cracker.

The mere process of "sterilizing" (pasteurizing) milk, and this is done at a comparatively low temperature, causes the calcium-magnesium-carbon-phosphate it contains (a salt indispensable to the upbuilding of bones) to break up into its constituent salts and three of these--calcium phosphate, magnesium phosphate, calcium carbonate--are practically insoluble, and their usefulness greatly impaired. There is also a partial coagulation of the milk protein, the coagulated portion being precipitated with the salts. There, is by simple sterilization of milk, a great and physiologically important reduction of the bone-nourishing salts of the milk. When still greater and more prolonged heat is applied, as in baking, there is still greater damage done to these salts and proteins. The same thing occurs with the salts and proteins of the beans, oats and yeast. The butter is rendered practically indigestible.

Is it any wonder, then, that Dr. Howe hastens to add: "No animal is going to get his living from it very long no matter how hard he chews, because if it is not changed, all the animals fed exclusively upon it will be dead in four weeks." We don't doubt it. Indeed, we would expect it. And we would expect it if we had never heard of vitamins. Animals fed on such "food" are not fed. It is not food.

We have not learned to make, nor even to imitate living substances. We know that animals are dependent upon plants for their food and cannot go directly to the soil for it. We can neither synthesize these substances in the laboratory, nor can we tear them down in the kitchen or in the laboratory in "purifying" them (extracting their salts from them) without greatly impairing their food values. It is a mistake to assume, as these experimenters do, that chemical substances constitute nourishment irrespective of their form or condition.

In these experiments they had not fed these animals upon foods at all. Nature's chemistry had been greatly altered and the breaking up of their peculiar element-groupings by the refining and cooking processes and the changing of their salts had rendered them all but valueless as foods. I strongly suspect that the "unknown substances" to which the term "vitamin" has been applied are foods--natural food. Nature gives us apples, pears, cabbage, celery, lettuce, oranges, nuts, etc., and not vitamins. The vitamin may be the peculiar chemical structure of the whole, unprocessed, uncooked food.