Malnutrition re poverty
[back]
Smallpox
[Have a look at the diet of the 19th and 20th century, and see why smallpox was so rife and deadly (under allopathic care, anyway). Vitamin C levels must have been non-existent to negligible (we have a genetic defect causing inability to make our own Vitamin C ref Stone) and read Levy, MD, Klenner, & Kalokerinos to see the part vitamin C plays in defeating infections. You can imagine the malnutrition from accounts of present day third world malnutrition and the fact 27% of children in Britain are living in poverty now (2006) ref, with 20% of Americans clinically malnourished, with 70% being sub-clinically malnourished. ref. See: Infection & nutrition for a bigger list of important nutrients, and Dangers of smallpox for how the Allopaths have ignored poverty to sell vaccination, and even obstructed sanitation efforts.]
See: Poverty Infection & nutrition quotes Africa: drugs, malnutrion, clean water, sanitation quotes
"74% of Americans are below daily RDA requirements for magnesium, 55% for iron, 68% calcium, 40% vitamin C, 33% B12, 80% B6, 33% B3, 35% B2, 45% B1, 50% vitamin A. From 25-50% of hospital patients suffer from protein calorie malnutrition. Pure malnutrition (cachexia) is responsible for at least 22% and up to 67% of all cancer deaths. Up to 80% of all cancer patients have reduced levels of serum albumin, which is a leading indicator of protein and calorie malnutrition. At least 20% of Americans are clinically malnourished, with 70% being sub-clinically malnourished, and the remaining "chosen few" 10% in good optimal health."—Patrick Quillin, Ph.D.
Recent third world Malnutrition:
Malnutrition is to blame for more than half of all
the deaths of children around the world -- including deaths caused by
diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles, researchers said on Thursday.
Poor nourishment leaves children underweight and weakened and vulnerable
to infections that do not have to be fatal, the team
at the World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore found. They estimated
that feeding all children worldwide an adequate diet would
prevent about 1 million deaths a year from pneumonia, 800,000 from
diarrhea, 500,000 from malaria, and 250,000 from measles......
They estimate that 52.5 percent of all deaths in young children were
attributable to undernourishment, with nearly 45 percent of measles
deaths and more than 60 percent of deaths from
diarrhea associated with low weight and poor
nutrition.
[Media, Jun 17] Better Nutrition Could Save
Millions of Kids-Study
"You cannot immunize sick children, malnourished children, and expect to get away with it. You'll kill far more children than would have died from natural infection."--Dr Kalokerinos (International Vaccine Newsletter June 1995)
Quotes re smallpox era nutrition
"The 'victory over epidemics' was not won by
medical science or by doctors--and certainly not by vaccines.....the decline...has been
the result of technical, social and hygienic improvements and especially of improved
nutrition. Here the role of the potato...deserves special mention.....Consider
carefully whether you want to let yourself or your children undergo the dangerous,
controversial, ineffective and no longer necessary procedure called vaccination, because
the claim that vaccinations are the cause for the decline of infectious diseases is utter
nonsense."--The Vaccination Nonsense (2004 Lectures)---Dr. med. G. Buchwald ISBN 3-8334-2508-3 page 108.
"The most important observation on the medical aspect of this disease is the caehexia with which it is invariably associated and which is actually the soil requisite for its different degrees of virulence. I refer to the scorbutic cachexia. Among the lower-classes of people this particular acquired constitutional perversion of nutrition is most prevalent, primarily on account of their poverty, but also because of the fact that they care little or nothing for fruits or vegetables. That a most intimate connection exists between variola and scorbutus is evidenced by the fact that it is most prevalent among the poor or filthy class of people; that it is more prevalent in winter, when the anti-scorbutics are scarce and high priced; and, finally, that the removal of this perversion of nutrition will so mitigate the virulence of this malady as positively to prevent the pitting or pocking of smallpox. A failure of the fruit crop in any particularly large area is always followed the succeeding winter by the presence of smallpox"----Charles Campbell MD
"That the pitting or pocking can be positively prevented I am absolutely certain, for in the above number of cases I had only one patient who became pocked and this was done intentionally. In all of the cases of smallpox that have originated here I have always found bedbugs; and where patients suffering with this disease were brought here and placed in premises free from these vermin, the disease did not spread to persons living with the patient. This has occurred in many cases, and in all stages of the disease."----Charles Campbell MD
SCURVY
Dr. George Cheyne, in his famous Essay of Health and Long Life, published in
1724, says—"There is no chronical distemper whatsoever
more universal, more obstinate, and more fatal in Britain, than the Scurvy taken
in its general extent." And more than fifty
years afterwards, in 1783, we have Dr. Buchan bearing similar testimony—"The
disease most common to this country is the Scurvy. One finds a dash of it in
almost every family, and in some the taint is very deep."
[1885] The Story of a
Great Delusion by William White
POTATO
It was easy to recommend the rich to get rid of their scurvy by a resort to
vegetable food, but to the poor with their obstinate prejudices, shiftlessness,
and ignorance, such a recommendation was a sort of mockery. Deliverance,
however, came in a form recommended by pleasantness and economy, namely, in the
potato. It is true the tuber had been known long before, but not as an
article of free and ordinary consumption. Toward the middle of the century it
was discovered that potatoes could be grown cheaply in large quantities, and
supply and demand developed together. Women and children especially rejoiced in
the new food, whilst the benevolent exulted in the liberal accession to the poor
man's fare. It became a point of duty with Lord and Lady Bountiful to
recommend the culture and consumption of potatoes everywhere; and to see how far
the substitution of potatoes for bread had extended early in the nineteenth
century, we need only refer to the pages of Cobbett, who denounced the change
with unwearied virulence as a degradation of humanity. Certainly potatoes are
inferior to bread in nutritive value, but in food we have to look for more than
mere nutriment; and the general use of the potato went far to purify and
ameliorate the blood of the English people.
To this partial substitution of
potatoes and tea for salted animal food and malt liquor, we may justly attribute
the reduction of the scorbutic habit of the people, and that improvement of
health which were coincident with the close of last century and were continued
into the present. What every student of vital statistics has to remember is,
that conditions have to be identical to yield identical results. The lives of
the majority of the English people last century, and notably so in London, were
hard and sordid to a degree which in these times is difficult to realise. Their
sanitary conditions have been indicated, and I would now enforce the
observation, that they were ill fed and insufficiently fed; consequently their
diseases were malignant, and smallpox not un-frequently scarred deeply its
scorbutic victims. Wherefore to run a parallel between the Londoners of the
18th century and the English of the 19th in the matter of smallpox, and to
ascribe any difference between them to Jenner's specific, is to display
ignorance that is inexcusable, or craft unscrupulous.
[1885] The Story of a
Great Delusion by William White
DIET
Cheyne said much the same at the earlier date. He complained that the upper
classes gorged themselves with animal food, and slaked their thirst with wine,
"which is now [1724] become common as water, and the better sort scarce ever
dilute their food with any other liquor." Beer had the place of wine among the
middle and lower orders. In the words of Buchan—"The
English labourer lives chiefly on bread, which being accompanied with other dry,
and often salt food, fires his blood and excites an unquenchable thirst, so that
his perpetual cry is for drink." He adds— "If
men will live on dry bread, poor cheese, salt butter, broiled bacon, and such
like parching food, they will find their way to the alehouse—the bane of the
lower orders, and the source of half the beggary in the nation."
Were we to say that the diet of the English for the
greater part of last century consisted of Bread, Beef, and Beer, we should not
go far wrong. The London bread was then, as now, poor stuff; "spoiled," says
Buchan,"to please the eye, artificially whitened, yet what most prefer, and the
poorer sort will eat no other." Whenever it could he obtained, beer was the
beverage that went with bread, and was drank by young and old. Salt beef and
mutton, bacon, salt fish, and butchers' offal completed the dietary of the
multitude.
The causes of smallpox, I said,
were unconsidered in Cobbett's days. It never even entered into Jenner's head
that the disease might be a consequence of bad conditions of life; nor did he
try to explain why the malady was on the decrease ere he appeared with his
magical prescription. The decrease was claimed for vaccination, but it had set
in before vaccination was heard of, and was continued among those who never
received it. No sanitary improvements had been effected to account for the
abatement of the disease. To what, then, was it due? I answer, in part at
least, to a progressive change in the diet of the people—to the substitution of
tea for malt liquors, and to the displacement of arid fare by potatoes. The food
of city folk up to the close of last century was closely akin to that of men at
sea, and their scorbutic habit of body was notorious—a habit that rendered acute
or chronic whatever disorders they were subject to. The remedy came of
inclination and necessity rather than of intention. Tea was instinctively
preferred by women, and the dearness of provisions compelled resort to the
potato, easily grown and grateful to the palate as a mitigant of the saltness of
beef, bacon, and fish. If any are disposed to dispute the fact of this
revolution in the popular dietary, they may be referred to Cobbett. He
witnessed the change, and persistently denounced it. Tea-drinking was to him an
abomination. It was a slatternly indulgence, costly to the poor, and
innutritious. Potatoes were as detestable. They were trash as compared with
bread; wasteful, dirty, and unfit to satisfy a man's appetite. It is true that
tea and potatoes are poor forms of food, but the one as a substitute for beer,
and the other as an antiscorbutic, were eminently useful. It is not said that
smallpox is caused or prevented by food, proper or improper, but that the
character of food may predispose to disease, and intensify it; as is manifest on
ship-board. Hence it is (in the absence of other adequate influences) that I am
disposed to ascribe the abatement of smallpox which set in toward the close of
last century to the better blood of the people ameliorated by that increased
consumption of tea and potatoes, against which Cobbett so blindly and vainly
testified. [1885] The Story of a
Great Delusion by William White