Please don't get the idea that because I warn so constantly against the evils of white sugar, I am against all sweets in your Eat-and-Grow-Younger diet. I enjoy a sweet as much as you. But I try to confine these sweet sprees to a type of carbohydrate that will make a definite contribution to my daily quota of vitamins and minerals—that is, to confections and desserts made with pure honey. These are natural sweets, and not the sickly product of a white sugar refinery.

You probably need no introduction to the goodness of nuts and fresh or dried fruits. And you already know that both unrefined raw sugar and unsulphured syrups are fair sources of minerals. But your sole knowledge of honey may consist of the one fact that it is "made by bees."

Perhaps you've never been told that honey is the only animal carbohydrate available to us as a sweet; that it is the only predigested sugar in nature, being 99 per cent predi-gested when it reaches your table. Although the dextrose or levulose (sometimes called ''grape sugar" or "blood sugar") in honey is the sweetest of all sugars, it is also the mildest, the easiest to digest and the best source of quick, lasting energy.

Honey is one of the few sweets that possess natural laxative properties. It is also one of the quickest stimulants known. Half an ounce (one tablespoon) of honey in a cup of hot water is one of the fastest-acting restoratives in cases of shock, fainting or after a hemorrhage. Moreover, the use of honey in the diet as a sweetener does not result in the heavy production of body fat that follows the use of 100-per-cent starch, no-vitamin, no-mineral white sugar.

Honey made by the bees from the pollen of blossoms has a high vitamin C content. But, to retain its vitamin C con-tent, the honey must not be heated or too highly strained. The darker the honey, the more nutrition it contains, al­though the flavor of the light-colored honeys is somewhat milder. Not only does honey contain vitamin C, but it also retains this easily destroyed vitamin longer than most fruits and vegetables which lose their vitamin C rather quickly after exposure to air and heat.

Most honeys can also supply your diet with thiamin and riboflavin, (along with other B-vitamins) and a good propor­tion of food minerals, plus some hormones, and a few amino acids (protein), together with diastase and other enzymes that help digestion. Can the same be said of white sugar? Indeed not! You get nothing but pure starch when you buy white sugar—and your problem is how to cut down on starches, not increase them.

When you adopt honey as your principal Eat-and-Grow-Younger sweetener, you'll be using a sweet that has already won its medals from nutritional science. For honey is uni­versally recognized as a protective food. The Swiss Bee Journal reports an experiment conducted in that country with three groups of children, all in poor health. The first group was given a normal diet; the second group was given a normal diet plus medication; while the third group was fed the same diet plus honey. The honey-fed group of sickly children "outdistanced the other two in every respect: blood count, weight, energy, vivacity and general appearance."

Honey, as a supreme conditioner for strenuous activity, was appreciated in ancient times. The unparalleled athletes of ancient Greece trained for their Olympic games on honey. And today mountain climbers and long-distance swimmers use large amounts of honey in their training diets.

Deep-sea divers, too, have learned that honey gives thex» the energy needed for their grueling work. Back in 1937, the divers who were chosen to survey the wreck of the Lusitania at the bottom of the North Atlantic started well in advance preparing themselves for the tremendous job ahead of them. Starting out with small amounts of honey, they gradually increased their daily portion of this natural sweet until they were eating a pound and a half of honey every day for three weeks prior to attempting their descent to the ocean floor. And each time they were hauled up from the wreckage, the divers were given reviving draughts of half a glass of water containing honey and lemon.

European physicians, profiting by the experience of the ages, prescribe honey freely as a medicine. Yet it's somewhat ironic to note that in this country of constant medical re­search we accord honey only a minor role in medicine, merely as a base for cough syrups into which are compounded various drugs that may, or may not, relieve the cough—but which certainly do harm the stomach! Entirely concealed from the patient is the fact that the honey alone, without the drugs, mixed with a little lemon juice is an excellent remedy for simple coughs.

In his book Old Age Deferred, widely read all over the civilized world, Dr. Arnold Lorand has this to say about the use of honey as an ideal food for the heart muscle:

"As the best food for the heart, I recommend honey . . . Honey is easily digested and assimilated; it is the best sweet food, as it does not cause flatulence and can prevent it, to a certain extent promoting the activity of the bowels. It can easily be added to the five meals a day I recommend in cases of arteriosclerosis and weak heart. As it would be unwise to leave such a hard-working organ as the heart without any food over the long hours of the night, I recommend heart patients to take before going to bed a glass of water with honey and lemon juice in it, and also to take it when awaken­ing at night. Before and after muscular exertion honey should be given in a generous dose . . . The use of sugar cannot replace honey. In the same amount, sugar is chemically irritating to the stomach."

Nor is Dr. Lorand the only European physician who recog­nizes the value of honey as a heart food. Dr. G. N. W. Thomas of Edinburgh had this to say about honey in The Lancet, most important British medical journal:

"In heart weaknesses I have found honey to have a marked effect in reviving the heart action and keeping patients alive. I have further evidence of this in a recent case of pneumonia. The patient consumed two pounds of honey during the illness; there was a marked early crisis with no subsequent rise in temperature and an exceptionally good pulse. I suggest that honey should be given for general physical repair and, above all, for heart failure."

There is an easily proved, wholly scientific reason why honey is a wonderful food to build quick energy in run-down bodies, to promptly stimulate fatigued bodies back to normal, and to feed weakened heart muscles:

Honey contains as its prime ingredient the sugar dextrose which is readily converted in the body to glycogen. Now, glycogen is the only form in which sugar can be stored in the human body (main storage places are the liver, gland cells and muscles) for ready use when energy is needed. Every bite of carbohydrate you eat (flour, bread, cake, spaghetti, rice, white sugar, candy, chocolate) must first be broken down in your intestinal tract to dextrose—a long and intricate process. For it is only as dextrose that these carbohydrate foods can pass through the portal vein into the liver to be converted into body sugar or glycogen.

If this seems a little too technical, I'll slow up a bit, since it's important that you understand these bodily chemical processes so you may better appreciate the inestimable value of honey in your Eat-and-Grow-Younger diet.

You have heard the expression "blood sugar level" many times. What it means is that a certain amount of glycogen must be present in your bloodstream at all times; otherwise the efficiency o£ your body grows less and less. In cases of a severely decreased blood sugar level (insulin shock, brought on by an overdose o£ the diabetes treatment, is one in­stance), the brain slows down so completely that the person goes into a deep coma; and death is the result when the level o£ glycogen in the blood falls too low to maintain life any longer.

In a much milder form, a lowered blood sugar level is what causes you to seek a between-meals snack when you begin feeling brain-and-body tired.

Whenever your blood sugar falls to such a low level that it needs raising almost instantly to counteract severe fatigue and a general slowing down of the heart muscle, would you be wise in eating a food that requires a long, intricate di­gestive processing before it can be turned into the dextrose that produces the instantly usable glygocen? Or should you choose a food that is already a pp per cent pre-digested dex­trose—and that means honey?

When you depend on other carbohydrates for energy (the lactose in milk is the one exception), your heart muscle, your brain cells, your bloodstream must all wait for that urgently needed glycogen until the long, intricate digestive process is finished.

Not so with honey. Almost on the instant, needed amounts of glycogen appear in the bloodstream after this natural sweet is eaten. Those deep-sea divers mentioned above, you'll notice, did not restore their severely depleted energy by eating a candy bar, or by coffee and doughnuts. Quick-acting honey was the unfailing energizer they depended on to give them the strength to complete their grueling tasks.

In addition to being an unexcelled energy food, honey is also one of nature's most powerful germ killers. Germs simply cannot survive in honey. A long series of experiments by bacteriologists in this country and in Canada have proved that bacteria introduced into honey always die within a very short time. A. G. Lockhead of the Division of Bacteriology in Ottawa, Canada, reported: "... honey may be regarded as practically immune from bacterial action."

The germ that causes typhoid fever, as well as that which results in inflammation of the intestines, died after forty-eight hours when left in pure honey; and the micro-organisms responsible for dysentery were destroyed in ten hours.

Not only is honey itself the purest of foods, it is also a good purifier for your digestive tract.

The Slavic peoples, as well as the Greeks, Italians and Hungarians, consider honey an excellent laxative, using it also as a remedy for coughs, bronchitis, tuberculosis and other lung disorders. Honey is also an efficient diuretic, that is, it increases the production and discharge of urine. For this reason, honey has been used since ancient times as a dependable remedy for many kidney and bladder disorders. Persons suffering from the very painful ailment called pye-litis (an inflammation of the lower kidney) show speedy im­provement when given honey, because this natural medicine increases the amount of urine and exerts a pronounced anti­septic effect on the inflamed area.

My own nutritional studies have convinced me that honey is particularly valuable as a sweetener in the diet of anyone past the age of forty, since it places no burden on the di­gestion. Honey cannot ferment in the digestive tract (as does white sugar and all the foods made with it), and therefore honey does not set up those ideal conditions for the growth of harmful bacteria as do partially digested high-starch foods. For this one reason alone, no better tonic than honey could be added to the diet of convalescents and persons of advanced years.

Further, I have investigated several cases of stomach and intestinal ulcers that did not respond well to any other treatment, but which cleared up when treated with routine use of a tea made from the seeds of the fenugreek herb liber­ally sweetened with a pure blossom honey.

I also have knowledge of many arthritic persons who have obtained a most heartening relief after replacing white sugar in their cooked and uncooked foods with liberal amounts of honey. Dr. Heerman, a German physician, advances the theory that the internal use of honey is just as effective in treating arthritis and kindred ailments as the bee sting. (Many gout and arthritic patients obtain a marked relief after allowing themselves to be stung by bees.) The German doctor reasons that honey contains some of the same sting-substance, put there by the bees for preservation of their food; and it may be this mysterious sting-substance, which so far has defied chemical analysis, that supplies the effective treatment for arthritis, rheumatism and gout.

As the use of refined white sugar has increased during the past 150 years, replacing the honey which formerly had been the poor man's sweetener (processed sugar was very expensive and only royalty or the wealthy class could afford it), medical statistics keep on recording the steady growth of new, and often fatal, digestive and nervous diseases among the people of the English-speaking world. Dr. Harvey Wiley, former director of the Bureau of Foods of the U. S. Depart­ment of Agriculture, urged that the use of white sugar be abandoned because of its health-destroying effects, and that honey be universally restored as a sweetener. Dr. F. G. Bant­ing, the scientist who discovered insulin as a treatment for diabetes, warned that refined sugar was a "dangerous food­stuff."

Honey is a highly satisfactory sweet for the reducing diet, since it "burns" so quickly, while other sugars are metabo­lized more slowly, allowing them to be stored in the tissues as unwanted fat.

Because you have now added honey to your growing list of youth-protecting foods, you should learn that honey is not always "just honey." Some cheap brands of honey get by with the evasive labeling "Pure Honey." But no mention is made on the label of the fact that the bee actually worked on flower pollen to produce the honey. This honey is made in the quicker way by keeping the bees shut away from all contact with blossoms, substituting for pollen a white sugar-and-water syrup from which the desperate bee is only too eager to make its honey, since the bee makes honey for the same urgent reason that you work for a living—to keep from starving to death. You can imagine how many of the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients mentioned earlier, and regularly found in naturally produced honey, are contained in this fake ersatz honey!

So when you buy honey, be sure that the label mentions specifically that it is honey made from such-and-such blossoms, or that it is a "pure blossom honey." For honey of the highest food value, watch your labels. Otherwise you'll be spending your money for another health-cheating product, conceived by and foisted onto the unsuspecting public by unscrupulous producers.

Among the natural blossom honeys are the following varieties, from all over the world, famous for their special values as described:

Hymettus blossom honey is made from a flower that grows on Mount Olympus in Greece. Since ancient times, it has been known as the "honey of the gods," and today is about the most expensive of the many rare honeys. This honey is alleged to have a stimulating influence on the sex glands, in addition to its other nutritional attributes as a natural sweet.

Kiawe blossom honey comes from Hawaii, and the rich lore of those romantic islands abounds with tales of Hawaiian wives who "kept their husbands home nights" by using this honey liberally in the preparations of delicious and affection-stimulating dishes for their mates.

(By the way, a wholesome, delicious sweet prepared throughout most of the South Sea Islands is made by mashing black-ripe bananas, adding honey and freshly grated coconut to make a slightly stiffened dough, then forming into patties and browning lightly in the oven. This is so delicious that once you've tried it, you'll serve it often, either as a dessert, a confection or a tea cake.)

Onion blossom honey, which most assuredly has no flavor of the onion since honey is made from the blossoms and not from the fruit of a plant, nevertheless has all the therapeutic value of the old "onion tea" for treating colds, bronchitis and other minor respiratory ailments.

Dandelion blossom honey, like the plant from which it is made, is a good blood purifier and an all-round good spring tonic.

Blueberry blossom honey contains large amounts of iron and is recommended especially to anemic persons.

Coffee blossom honey, imported from Costa Rica where the finest coffee in the world is grown, has a high mineral content, and the flavor is excellent.

Eucalyptus blossom honey is particularly effective in treat­ing colds, because this honey contains the same properties that make oil of eucalyptus a valuable remedy for head and chest colds.

Tupelo blossom honey, from Florida, has a high levulose content, and many diabetics find it the only honey they can use.

This next group of honeys are prized especially for their delicate and distinctive flavors. You may wish to try them all at your leisure: wild raspberry blossom honey, grapefruit blossom honey, basswood honey (from Wisconsin, delicate flavor, very delicious, with a high vitamin content), wild cherry blossom honey (definite taste of cherry), lima bean blossom honey, avocado blossom honey, and rose blossom honey (from France, very rare and delicate).

I have devoted an entire chapter to acquainting you with honey because I believe that you would be well-advised to adopt pure, unstrained honey as a protective sweet food.

Those who ballyhoo the "nutritional value" of black­strap molasses neglect quoting Dr. Schuette of the University of Wisconsin who said that dark honey contains practically all the minerals composing the human skeleton. Or Professor McCollum o£ Johns Hopkins University who includes honey among our best protective foods. Or Dr. Metchnikoff, the famous Russian scientist, who attributes the unusually long life of Bulgarian peasants to their milk-and-honey diet. Or Dr. Rubner of the University of Berlin, an eminent nutri­tional physiologist, who has proved that honey contains an abundance of the important B-vitamins.

But, best of all—like all the other youth-protecting foods in my Eat-and-Grow-Younger diet—honey tastes good. It makes mealtime and snacktime a pleasure, not an endurance contest.

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