For several chapters now I've been acquainting you with protein, and explaining why protein is your first food need. Actually, the protein story is so old it's new.

There were no nutrition scientists and health teachers to warn our prehistoric cavemen ancestors that if they wanted to be alert and powerful enough to survive the incredible dangers of life in their era, they had to "eat their protein every day." What these apemen ancestors of ours did was to grab a piece of meat—more than likely raw or only half-cooked—and wolf it down. It was their instinct to seek food that satisfied their hunger cravings and kept them strong enough to meet the physical problems of their rigorous lives.

Even today, the instinct for protein, man's best energy food, is strong among primitive peoples, although the supply of such food available to them may be scarce. The more primitive tribes, living in regions of Africa where the hunt­ing of wild animals is not plentiful enough to supply their instinctive appetite for meat, attempt to satisfy this craving by eating grubs and caterpillars, by trapping birds, mice and ground squirrels.

"Unpleasant eating," you say. And I agree. But protein, nevertheless, is an appeaser for the hungry native's craving for energy food.

With all the bountiful sources of tasty protein foods avail­able to us, we can afford to look down our noses at the hungry African's revolting habit of eating caterpillars and mice. But now I'm going to shock you: Between our national habit of gorging ourselves on starch-and-sugar foods and guzzling soft drinks, and the native's taste for worms and varmints, the primitive black man has more nutritional justification for his choice than do we for our substandard diets in this land of "culture and enlightenment." At least the African is sticking to natural, energy-giving protein foods, while we are pandering to an artificially created appetite for starch-and-sugar foods which are doing more to make old men and women of us long before our time, and to weaken us as a nation, than any other single factor.

Please don't misunderstand me. I enjoy a wedge of pie, a slice of cake, a piece of candy or a plate of spaghetti as thoroughly as anybody. But I recognize these artificial foods for what they really are—dissipations, not nutrition. I realize these heavy starches and sugars are life-shorteners, not youth-preservatives.

Life would be pretty dull if we always did what we should. Of course, you would be far better off if you never let another bite of rich, starchy, artificial food pass your lips. But you are going to fall from grace anyway—even as I sometimes do myself. And it's a whole lot better for your psychology— to say nothing of your opinion of your will power—if you are given a 1 per cent margin for "nutritional sinning"! That is why I always include a 1 per cent dissipation margin in my Eat-and-Grow-Younger program. But you must keep it the margin, and not your mainstay.

There is a proper time to sin on sugars and starches, but that time is not at your regular mealtime. If you feel that you have to munch on a piece of candy, or eat a slice of cake, by all means do so at very rare intervals, between meals, and far enough away from the next meal so that you don't take the edge off your appetite for the youth-protecting protein foods. But never, if you wish to derive any benefit from this Eat-and-Grow-Younger regimen, include heavy starches with your high-protein meals. In the menus prepared for you in Part II, I have provided desserts that are both appetizing and nourishing. Their food values are calculated in that day's total protein nutrition, so i£ you sneak in a rich, starchy dessert (pure starch, no vitamins, no minerals and certainly no protein) instead of the ones shown, you'll only be cheat­ing yourself.

Like many another blackguard, starch has several aliases. When he wants to work his way into the good graces of his unsuspecting victims, he assumes the highly formal name of carbohydrates. And when he wants to appear at his most tempting, he becomes sugar. But it is as starch that he is commonly known.

Artificial starches and sugars are saboteurs. They sabotage your youthfulness, your mental agility, your power to be a vigorous, radiant person, glowing with health and youthful energy. Stealthily they undermine your sexual powers. Like thieves in the night, they rob you of your good looks.

Unnecessary aging begins with starch addiction.

Yes, that is the correct word, for it is an addiction, nothing less. More than half the American populace stays on a per­petual drunk—a sugar jag. The ardent anti-saloon leaguer who points a pious finger at the village drunk, and then goes home to three meals a day of heavy starch dishes—pies, cakes, rich puddings, plus munchings of bonbons and gulpings of sweetened beverages—is as intemperate as the old soak who tanks up at the corner tavern.

Any physician can verify this overindulgence in starches as a true addiction from his years of experience with the cheating done by obese or diabetic patients who are supposed to abstain from rich, artificial foods. Because of their long­standing addiction, these "food tipplers" cannot refrain from sneaking a bite here, a portion there, even though their health—their very lives—depends on a drastically curtailed consumption of sweets and rich foods. Physicians have dis­covered that no chronic alcoholic going through "the cure" can invent more excuses for cheating than these starch drunkards.

I am justified in calling these cravings an addiction, because carbohydrates (sugars and starches) are converted in the human body into a type o£ sugar which, in great quantities, gives the identical "lift," or satisfaction, as that experienced by an alcoholic when he yields to his abnormal cravings. The sweet habit takes hold with almost as tenacious a grip as do certain drugs. Anything to achieve that temporary feeling of energy and buoyancy, no matter how costly the habit may be to the body in the long run. The nervous system of a person continually starch drunk can be undermined just as surely as that of a chronic alcoholic.

But I must be careful not to give all carbohydrates a black eye, for like many villains there is also a good side to our bad man. The carbohydrates found in vegetables, fruits, milk, whole grains and seed cereals are good carbohydrates pro­vided from natural sources. These foods also contain varying amounts of protein (something wholly lacking in artificial starches), in addition to valuable minerals and vitamins, and furnish a necessary contribution to your Eat-and-Grow-Younger diet.

It's only when carbohydrates wander too far from the "straight and narrow path" of good nutrition that they be­come harmful.

You're certainly not going to be advised to pass up all sweets in this Eat-and-Grow-Younger program. Instead, you're going to convert to sweets that, before long, will have you turning up your noses at a gooey cake made with white sugar and white flour. Not only are the flavors of the natural deli­cacies provided for you "fit for the gods," but they are sweets that actually help you stay young.

"What sweets are these?" you ask, half curious, half skep­tical. Turn to Chapter 12, then glance through the menus and recipes in Part II for your answer.

But first I want to make sure that you understand the character of the artificial carbohydrates which, I'll wager, have made up about 95 per cent of your sugar-and-starch intake for many years.

You aren't alone in this serious nutritional error, for it is an accepted American custom to serve a menu something like this: fried potatoes, meat, white bread, artificially-flavored gelatin salad, chocolate pie and coffee (sweetened, of course, with white sugar). I am not quoting this as some far-fetched menu seldom encountered on a dinner table. This is a menu copied word-for-word from a newspaper article dated February 18, 1951, describing the foods in the chow line of the enlisted men's mess at a large army camp in the East—a place where nutrition supposedly would be at its scientific best. Yet there was white bread made of devital­ized grain, a salad made with a gelatin that is artificially flavored and colored with coal-tar dyes and sweetened with white sugar (as are most artificially flavored, ready-prepared gelatin desserts), chocolate pie made of more devitalized white sugar and more white flour, with still more refined white sugar in the coffee.

No, indeed, we Americans need never worry about not getting "enough" carbohydrates. Our danger comes from getting too much of the wrong kind of carbohydrates.

What are the "wrong kind" of carbohydrates?

Let's take bread as an example—the "staff of life." But is it?

Dr. Agnes Fay Morgan of the University of California stated on April 18, 1951, that modern production methods rob bread of 30 nutrients. Think of it! You are eating bread under the mistaken idea that it is giving you a certain amount of nourishment, yet it is 30 nutrients poorer than the bread your ancestors baked in their kitchens. All the advertising hullabaloo about "enriched" flour, which began during World War II in an ill-planned, not-wholly-honest attempt to raise the country's nutritional standards, did succeed in restoring 4 out of the 30 missing nutrients, but still leaves you shortchanged of 26, provided your household depends on baker's bread, or you bake your own from white flour. Which brings us to white flour, the principal ingredient of our nutritionally robbed "staff of life."

It might interest you to know that wheat has not always been the bread grain. Up until the beginning of the past century, in many provinces of France the peasants made their bread of chestnut flour. Other countries made their breads of rye, barley, millet and oat flour; while maize (corn) was the staple grain of the New World and still is in many Latin-American countries.

When white flour was first introduced in France several centuries ago, the powder merchants used only the finest quality of flour for powder to be dusted over the exaggerated coiffures of the dandies and aristocratic ladies. What a pity for the health of the civilized world that all milled white flour could not have been confined to this uncommon ' 'outside" use, instead of being allowed to get inside to "gum up" the works.

Nature never created a white grain of wheat or rice, nor a white grain of cane sugar. Such improvements were left to the ingenuity of modern processors. To produce the ' 'master­piece" of white flour (enriched or otherwise), the mills sift and bolt out three-fourths of the minerals (plus undeter­mined amount of vitamins B-complex and E), leaving only the white starchy cells and refined gluten of the wheat. So-called "enriched" white flour is but a makeshift—an appeasement of public indignation arising because of the commercialized ruination of good grain by stripping it of its natural food elements.

I frequently tell my lecture audiences to compare the lunacy of preparing a fine roast, then throwing it away and serving the water used to rinse the roasting pan with the equal idiocy of milling the food values out of wheat, and then foisting the residue onto the public as white flour, a com­modity that enters into every American meal.

The same sort of criminal processing takes place with sugar cane and sugar beets which are milled and refined down to sickly white crystals devoid of all food values except pure starch.

White sugar is 100 per cent carbohydrate, containing no proteins, no vitamins and no minerals. It contributes abso­lutely nothing to your body except an energy which could be far better obtained from other food sources. When too much white sugar is used, your tendency is to neglect other more nourishing, youth-promoting foods.

What the processors do to rice and to corn is equally maddening. They strip off the outer husk of the rice, leaving a wholly starch product; and they rob the wonderfully nutritious corn of its heart to make profitable com oil and corn syrup, selling you "corn meal" that is little more than a starchy waste product.

If undeniable proof is wanted of the harm done to a people by a high-starch diet, I have only to cite our good friends, the Brazilians. For many generations, the lower-class Brazilian living in the areas near the equator has subsisted mainly on rice, bread and mandioca—all of them high starches—•usually washed down by nauseatingly sweet beverages. Life expect­ancy among these people has never been high, and they are frequently made fun of for a "laziness" that is actually a deficiency disease brought on by protein starvation. I have seen more than one of them lying sprawled out asleep in the street or on the dock, as though they had dropped right where they were at the moment when their extremely lim­ited supply of energy gave out.

Especially noticeable was the difference between the vital­ity and ingenuity of the Brazilian stevedore and that of the dock hands in Uruguay and Argentina. The starch-stuffed Brazilian was lethargic, and slow to comprehend commands^ or the need for changing his routine; whereas the meat-eating Uruguayans and Argentineans who handled our ship and the near-by vessels did more than twice the amount of work, with a minimum of direction from their bosses.

Many of those poor, protein-starved Brazilian stevedores must have been men in their early twenties and thirties, surely none past their middle forties. And yet each moved with the careful slowness of a man who had reached the time of life when he must begin to show more consideration for aging muscles and brittle bones. There was none of the snap and zip about them that I saw in the dock workers in Monte­video or Buenos Aires. It made me tired just to watch the slow, I-don't-believe-I-can-make-it motions of the tropical Brazilians as they went unwillingly, or so it seemed, about their jobs.

Here in our own country, the National Safety Council warns automobile drivers against overeating on starches before and during trips. That stuffed feeling which is the sure result of a too-starchy meal (rarely can anyone eat enough protein to produce that gorged feeling, since the appetite is satisfied much quicker with protein foods than with high starches) cuts down your mental and physical alertness, and leaves you wanting to "doze," an extremely dangerous desire when one is behind the wheel of an auto­mobile.

The average driver has the habit of stuffing himself on candies, cake, pie, sandwiches and sweet drinks, all easily accessible to the motorist at every roadside stand; often he substitutes these all-starch items for regular protein meals.

"One of the worst of the many bad food habits that Amer­icans have acquired is their use of sweetened carbonated beverages." This quotation is from Drs. R. M. Wilder and T. E. Keys in the Handbook of Nutrition (American Medical Association). The soda pop addict is a ready victim of edgy nerves, irritability and hazy thinking, to say nothing of digestive upsets caused by the fermenting sugar in the liquid, together with its high artificial carbonization. The soft drink fiend can become just as jittery, just as much of an addict to his "lift" beverage as the chronic alcoholic or the drug user.

What is true of the eating habits of the average driver probably holds good for you and every other forty-plus reader of these words. You bought this book because you realized you were losing your grip on youth—and that feeling of age probably got its head start on you because you always have eaten too much starch.

Let me turn clairvoyant for a moment, and "project" my thoughts with you through an average day's eating.

Your breakfast consisted of a fruit—perhaps a canned juice (sweetened with white sugar), or half a grapefruit lib­erally sprinkled with sugar. Your cereal bowl was filled with a dry, wholly artificial pile of something whose resemblance to a grain long since ceased to exist in the process of making a dough from devitalized flour, sweetening it and turning it out in some weird patented shape or texture, designed more for novelty than nutrition. And, of course, you reached again for the sugar bowl to flavor this already too-starchy cereal of yours. Toast? Of course, and more than likely made with white bread; or perhaps a sweet roll or two, well coated with sugar frosting, eaten with your generously sugared coffee. "Please pass the jelly." More sweet. Some mornings you do get around to eating an egg, but usually you're too full after downing your starchy cereal and toast to want anything more.

So off you go to work, or, if you are a housewife you set about your daily tasks. You feel quite a bit less than up to par; but by now you're probably belching as all the break­fast starches, plus those left undigested from previous meals, begin fermenting in your digestive system.

By mid-morning you're feeling pretty pepless. So what do you do? If you're at work, you take time out for a candy bar, or a soft drink, or maybe more coffee and another sweet roll. If at home, you more than likely indulge in some starchy food found in the refrigerator, washed down by a soft drink or another cup of sweetened coffee.

Then comes lunch. You're hungry—and yet you're not. How about a sandwich, a cup of coffee and a piece of pie?

That holds you until about three-thirty, when you begin to feel so worn out and dispirited that you realize you'd better get something to eat if you want to keep on going until dinnertime. More pie, maybe a piece o£ cake this time, a candy bar, or a soft drink.

By the time you drag yourself home and get through a dinner that is a repetition of all your day's dietary sins (white bread, sugared coffee, perhaps a dish with rice or spaghetti or macaroni, and a starchy, heavy dessert), you are more con­vinced than ever that you're getting old. You can't think straight any more; your job seems to take more and more out of you every day; there's no energy left in you for leisure-hour activities; and you are sleeping poorly these nights.

I could go on being "clairvoyant" and trace your footsteps to the kitchen before bedtime for that piece of pie which was left, or for a sandwich, but you're entitled to some privacy in your dietary indiscretions, so I'll leave you for the day, with your intestinal tract full of fermenting, half-digested starches.

If you're statistical-minded, you might try calculating the number of grams of carbohydrates you eat in an average day (not to mention the calories) and then compare them with the woefully few grams of protein that manage to get in­cluded in your meals. If you are the average person, of sedentary habits or occupation, the chances are that you eat about 75 per cent more devitalized carbohydrate foods than are compatible with your good health, and your desire to feel and look younger than your years.

This estimate is based on the consumption in New York City. According to figures given by the Food and Drug Journal, 55 per cent of all food shipped into that metropolis is either white flour or processed white flour products—all of them devitalized, de-mineralized and de-vitaminized. White sugar, and the products made from it, account for another 20 per cent of all food shipments into the city. This means that the diet of the New Yorker (which is more or less typical of other cities and communities) consists of 75 per cent artificial starches, leaving a paltry 25 per cent to be divided among protein foods and natural carbohydrates. Cer­tainly not a safe balance for health.

If you haven't already figured it out for yourself, the chief reason why starchy foods are so popular with boardinghouse keepers and restaurant owners is that these foods fill you up quickly. And when you're well stuffed on the cheaper starch foods, your appetite is dulled for the more expensive protein foods in the meals such as meats, eggs, cheese and milk. There's more profit for them (but certainly not for you) in appeasing your appetite with the less expensive macaroni, rice, spaghetti, noodles, white bread and starch puddings than in serving you ample portions of tasty meats, fresh veg­etables and fruits.

An old trick, yet one which many a housewife unknowingly pulls on her own family. Unknowingly, I say, because no conscientious wife and mother would deliberately pull this nutritional fraud on her family if she fully understood the harm she was doing to their health—and her own, too.

"But we must have carbohydrates for energy!" you are likely to point out if you have a knowledge of physiology.

You are only half correct in saying that the human body "needs carbohydrates for energy." While it's true that the sole function of carbohydrates is to provide heat and energy, what about the Eskimos who eat nothing except meat and fish—protein foods? Merely because they do not stuff them­selves with artificial sugars and starches, must they be shiver­ing, lethargic beings?

If you have ever read any of the books written by the various Arctic explorers, you know that the Eskimo, far from being a slothful fellow who huddles into his skins with his teeth chattering like castanets, is robust, energetic and warm­blooded (so much so that he has to sit or lie around in his heated igloos, stripped almost naked). In fact, it's only where our "white" civilization has brought in its white flour and white sugar that the Eskimo ever falls victim to our respira­tory and intestinal diseases. Colds and constipation were the *'benefits'* of civilization which we bestowed upon the poor Eskimo.

How then, i£ the Eskimos in remote Arctic areas never eat anything except protein foods, can their bodies receive the fuel and energy which we are told carbohydrates provide?

Every human body has been given the power to convert amino acids into either body proteins or energy sugars. Actually, the type of carbohydrate moiety produced in the body from food protein yields more heat and energy than any of the carbohydrate foods you eat. Any textbook on physiology will tell you that protein burns with a hotter flame, and produces more heat and energy than either carbo­hydrates or fats in this proportion: 30 for protein, 6 for carbohydrates and 4 for fats.

If it were true that carbohydrates conferred plenty of energy and body fuel upon those who eat them, then those Brazilian starch-eaters I mentioned earlier should be among the world's most energetic people—to say nothing about having a body heat that would not permit them to live so near the equator.

You get quantities of natural sugars in every food you eat. Even the all-meat diet of the Eskimo and the Gaucho— neither of whom ever tasted refined sugar—contains about 15 per cent natural sugars. Plants are nature's sugar manu­facturers, and these energy sugars are passed on to the ani­mals, fowl and sea life that feed upon them.

When you eat enough protein, you need never worry about getting enough carbohydrates. Your big worry should be not to eat too much carbohydrate.

Protein is a complete food, that is, you could live long and vigorously on an exclusive diet of protein foods. This is not true of carbohydrates. A great number of war prisoners who died in Oriental prison camps during World War II perished because they starved to death on an all-carbohydrate diet.

Therefore: since carbohydrates are not complete foods¿ isn't it nutritional folly to clutter up the menu with so many of them?

Not only do high-starch meals overload the stomach and place an unnecessary strain on the heart, they are also pre­disposing factors in many ailments and serious diseases that appear in the later years.

Without alarming you unduly, allow me to cite a few pertinent facts and figures on the unholy relationship be­tween devitalized grains and the increase in certain fatal diseases.

Dr. Haven Emerson of Columbia University points out that since grains were first milled (that is, since the protein, minerals and vitamins were taken out of the wheat) diabetes has increased 1150 per cent! Corresponding increases have also been noted in heart disease, kidney disease and cancer. High blood pressure has increased 250 per cent during the past ten years. Anemia and appendicitis have also increased at an appalling rate. These are diseases wholly unknown among primitive peoples who use only unmilled grains rich in all the vitamins of the B-complex group. Even among the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) of our own country, who are taught to adhere to sound, health-promoting diets, there are far fewer deaths from these serious deficiency diseases than among a similar group of persons elsewhere in the country as a whole.

There is good scientific cause for believing that too much starch in the diet helps build up those unwanted deposits of cholesterol in the arteries (see Chapter 9), causing them to harden and become brittle to the point where a rupture brings on a fatal heart attack, or a brain hemorrhage.

Heavy starch-eaters are also more susceptible to sinus and respiratory infections than are those who limit their carbo­hydrate intake to the sugars and starches found in natural foods (fruits, vegetables, milk and whole grains) and build their meals around high proteins.

Many persons who attend my lectures have told me that all symptoms of their asthma disappeared after they had elim­inated white sugar from their diets, substituting honey and fruit juices as sweeteners. One woman, whose life had been made miserable for years by one sinus attack after another, experienced complete relief from this painful infection after she eliminated all artificial carbohydrates from her diet. You couldn't bribe this woman to resume eating white bread, white rice, macaroni or white sugar. She also noticed that, since avoiding white bread, her long-standing affliction of heartburn after a meal had disappeared.

Constipation, a common symptom of digestive disorders, is another universal ailment that can be traced directly to high-starch food habits. The same holds true for gas in the intestines and belching, which are uncomfortable manifesta­tions of undigested starches fermenting in the digestive tract.

Cancer, a dread word at any age and especially after forty, has been linked quite definitely to over consumption of carbo­hydrates. Chronic irritations and other causes of cancer, have less chance of stirring up riotous malignancies if the body is not oversupplied with carbohydrate foods.

This was proved several years ago at the McArdle Memo­rial laboratory for Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin, and at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. A yellow chemical called benzpyrene, known to cause skin cancer was tested on 100 laboratory animals. Seventy-two of these developed cancer within six months—and these 72 were those that deliberately had been given 40 per cent more calories (in starch foods) than were needed for good nutrition. The diets given the other animals, that proved highly resistant to cancer, contained a full quota of protein foods, yet totaled little more than half as many calories as were contained in the high-starch diets given the animals developing cancer. The same experiment was repeated many times—and always with the same results: The group of animals receiving less carbohydrates developed the fewest number of cancers.

This does not mean, however, that any person with cancer can cure himself by cutting down on the amount of high-starch items in his diet. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way as yet. But the message to be derived from this research is that limiting the amount of high-starch foods in the diet is possible insurance against developing cancer.

Here is the scientific reasoning behind the results of this cancer research: Biologists have good reason to believe that cancer begins with the formation of a single cell that is abnormal because it lacks normal proteins, or because of a disturbance in hormone balance, plus other reasons not yet fully explored. During the so-called "critical" period of cancer development (this immediately precedes the stage at which the disease can be detected by either the patient or the doctor), the cancerous cells must compete with normal body cells for nourishment. If there is only enough food for the normal cells, then the cancer cells will be starved out.

This is true because, at the start of the critical period, the cancerous cells have not yet had time to establish their own direct blood supply, as they do during the final or progressive period. Since they cannot receive food directly from their own blood supply, cancerous cells must compete with healthy cells for the nourishment present in fluids brought to the tissues by the bloodstream. At this stage of cancer, the normal cells have a better chance of survival because they are still the more vigorous cells.

Growth requirements for abnormal, or cancerous, cells are quite different from those of healthy cells. For this reason, whatever nourishment is present will be taken up at once by the normal body cells, leaving the cancerous cells either to starve because there is no surplus nourishment for them— or to thrive because more food was taken in by the body than was needed.

If there is no surplus nourishment, cancerous cells must starve and die. But if there is a superabundance of body sugars in the tissue fluids, derived from too much starch in the diet, cancerous cells are assured all the nourishment they require to make them grow and thrive. And thus the abnormal growth progresses to its third, and final, stage.

Cancer is known to be more prevalent among people whose diets are high in carbohydrates. Among the Navajo and Hopi Indians of our Southwest, only 36 cases of cancer were found in 30,000 patients admitted to hospitals. Yet among the same number of white persons, approximately 1,800 cases of cancer would have been discovered. Why should these Indians have such strong resistance to cancer? Diet seems to be the answer. These tribes do not overeat. In fact, their diet would seem extremely inadequate to us. Moreover, the Navajo and the Hopi Indians are protein-eaters, consuming very little carbohydrate. Draw your own conclusions.

I have singled out these ailments and diseases—heart trouble, hardening of the arteries, respiratory infections, con­stipation, indigestion and cancer—because they are commonly associated with the past-forty group. I don't need to empha­size that all these diseases and ailments are destroyers and killers in one way or another. Even those not commonly thought of as "fatal" can destroy your hold on youth, cutting down your physical vitality and mental alertness almost to the vanishing point.

It would be tragic enough if you had to depend on white breads, refined sugar, macaroni, rice and rich desserts to keep from starving. In that case, no one could censure you for filling your stomach with these potentially dangerous foods. But to deliberately destroy your youth and shorten your life because of an acquired starch-and-sugar habit, after being told all the facts about these saboteur foods, is one way of proving that you want to grow old prematurely and don't care what happens to your precious body. Are the taste pleasures you derive from these high-starch foods worth the heavy cost to you in health and good looks?

Think it over.

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