400 
DD Pins Your Food!!. 
On the subject of foods, it is quite often 
discussed from a personal interest, which 
may be true or not; this is a report of facts 
and therefore of vital interest to everyone. 
We are sorry not to have space in this 
issue for the entire article but it will be 
completed in the next issue with suggestions. 
The following is a report to the House of 
Lords in England, made in 1951 and as it 
says, the conditions are the same as in the 
U.S.A. It is copied as reported in Prevent- 
ion, published at Emmaus, Pa. 
Only two or three generations ago man- 
kind existed upon naturally occuring foods, 
either eaten raw or prepared by such simple 
means as roasting or boiling and, in some 
cases, preserved for further use by smoking 
or salting. All that is now changed. It is 
becoming increasingly difficult to find any 
natural article of food which has not been 
treated with chemicals, had some part ex- 
tracted, been exposed to high temperature 
or preserved for long periods in cold storage, 
or otherwise processed or tampered with. 
I do not say that science can never find 
means of improving foodstuffs, but I do say 
that the addition of extraneous matters, and 
especially of SYNTHETIC CHEMICALS, 
should be looked upon with the gravest sus- 
picion and should not be permitted except 
under the most strenuous conditions. This 
subject has hitherto received too little at- 
tention in this country and the steps taken 
to protect the public have been hesitating, 
partial and inadequate. 
The gravity of the situation has been re- 
vealed in the United States by the well- 
organized and continuing work of the Fed- 
eral Food and Drug Administration, which 
has listed no fewer than 842 chemicals used 
or proposed to be used in food. Some are 
no longer used because they were definitely 
found to be poisonous. The majority are 
still in use, some very extensively; and in 
many cases it is not clearly established 
whether they are poisonous or not. The ab- 
solute determination of the toxicity of a 
chemical added to food requires long and 
very complex investigations. The chemical 
may not be toxic in itself, but may combine 
with substances naturally presented in the 
body to form toxic compounds. It may be 
very slow acting but cumulative in its effects. 
It may be one of those which are stored in 
the body and the ill-effects of which be- 
come evident only after certain concentration 
has been passed. It may be a racial poi- 
son which interferes with reproduction or 
injures the next generation. 
There are two principal ways in which 
Danger in the Use of Detergents 
chemicals are added to food. One is as 
an incident of effecting another purpose. 
This happens when insecticides, fungicides 
and weed-killers are used in agriculture, and, 
in some cases, where fumigants or disin- 
fectants are used during process of manu- 
facture or where detergents are used for 
washing food or for washing crockery and 
food containers. The other is where chem- 
icals are introduced with the express intent- 
ion of altering the nature of the food or of 
preserving it beyond its normal life. Besides 
these there are the cases in which the quality 
of the food is altered by exposure to very 
high temperatures causing chemical react- 
ions in its constituents. 
I do not pdopose to deal with the use of 
artificial fertilizers in agriculture beyond 
ent advocates of them, that unbalanced use 
saving that it is now admitted, even by ard- 
of such fertilizers may easily produce a lux- 
uriant plant growth which is also unbalanced; 
there may be too little protein, and the 
human being or the animal fed upon this 
green stuff suffers injrury to health or low- 
ered resistance to disease. It is also of in- 
terest to note that lack of proper fertilizat- 
ae el 
ion renders the plants themselves moré 
liable to fungus diseases and to attacts by 
insects cr other pests, leading to increased. 
use of insecticides and fungicides. It has 
long been common to use sprays OF washes 
on fruit trees in order to discourage the 
attacts of mites or insects. A number of 
these sprays are probably harmless, although, 
in this whole matter, we should_ take 
nothing for granted. Some are definitely 
toxic; for example, lead arsenate, which, 
like other compounds of lead, is accumulat- 
ed in the body with the possibility of its 
ultimately reaching a dangerous level. 
D.D.T in Your Food 
I shall say no more about the older in- 
secticides. It is the newer ones, and the 
enormous extent of their use, which give 
most cause for alarm. The most famous of 
these in D.D.T. which, since the war, has 
been applied all over the world without any 
adequate investigation of its effects upon 
health. It is highly toxic. Test animals 
rats for example, fed with one part per 
million of D.D..T perished — and one part 
per million is equivalant to one teaspoonful 
in ten tons of food. Not only is D.D.T. 
highly toxic but it is fat soluable. Con- 
squently, it may accumulate in the body 
fats, through repeated small doses, until a 
toxic concentration is reached. Or, if this 
concentration has been approached and, 
owing to illness or for other reasons, the 
body. is consuming its store of fats, the 
concentration then becomes toxic and the 
patient is attacted at the very time when 
his resistance is lowered. Not only is D.D.T. 
exceptionally toxic, but there is no known 
antidote. It is absorbed by plants and can- 
not be removed. Hence, all fruits and veg- 
etables which have been exposed to D.D.T. 
are carriers of it to the consumers. Ani- 
mals fed on hay or other food exposed io it 
are affected. Owing to its solubility in fat, 
milk is especially affected by it. The spray- 
ing of D.D.T. in cowsheds has been found 
sufficient to affect the milk, and the U. S. 
dairy farmers have been officially advised 
not to do this. Butter sold on the New 
York market has been found with as much 
as thirJeen parts per million of this danger- 
ous drug. The fact that D.D.T. has such 
an affinity for milk constitutes a serious 
danger for infants, and for young children 
who are encouraged to drink large quantit- 
ies of milk. Even breast-fed infants are not 
safe, for mother’s milk has been found con- 
taining appreciable quantities of D.D.T. 
The New Poisons 
Other extremely toxic substances are now 
being used as insecticides, such as H.E.T.P., 
f.E.P.C. and parathion. They were invent- 
ed during the war as gases but not actually 
used as such. They are so dangerous that 
those who use them must be covered from 
head to foot with protective clothing. Al- 
ready a number of fatal accidents have oc- 
curred to farm workers spraying with insect- 
icides. This has engaged the attention of 
the Ministry of Agriculture, and a working 
party under the chairmanship of Prof. Zuck- 
ermann has recently reported on this aspect 
of their use. Unfortunately, little is known 
of the effect of these chemicals on the food- 
stuffs to which they are applied or upon the 
health of the men or women who consume 
the foodstuffs. There are on record, how- 
ever, at least two cases in which people have 
developed illness which appeared to be due 
to flour containing one part per million of 
parathion. The illness ceased upon another 
flour being used in which none of this poison 
was found. 
I may also remind you that when fruit 
trees are sprayed about 95 percent of the 
spray fall on the ground; and if this ground 
should be used for growing other crops, 
those crops will receive a far higher con- 
centration of the poison than the fruit trees. 
In the U.S. in the year 1947 no less than 
150,000,000 pounds of insecticides were pro- 
duced: This is practically one pound per 
head of the population; and if only a small 
fraction of that finds its way into the human 
body the cumulative results may be catast- 
ropic! 
Before I leave the agricultural side of 
this matter I should like to mention the 
use of antibiotics and hormones. As a result 
of treating an inflammation of the udder of 
one cow with penicillin, the milk was affect- 
ed to such an extent that it destroyed the 
organisms essential for cheese-making when 
mixed with that off 200 other cows. An in- 
direct result of consuming milk thus infected 
with penicillin or other antibiotics is that 
the consumer might perhaps become resist- 
ant to this remedy in such fashion that, if 
it were prescribed for some illness, he would 
receive no benefit. Another example is the 
use of hormone powder, called tuberite for 
the purpose of suppressing the sprouts of 
potatoes. I do not know whether it is for 
this or other reasons that in recent years it 
has become almost impossible to purchase 
potatoes of good quality in London. (and 
the same can be said of the U.S.A.-Ed.) 
Other hormones are used as_ weed-killers, 
but it does not follow that, because they 
have a selective action on weeds, they do not 
affect other plants and the persons who con- 
sume them. It is well known that hormones 
are extremely potent in very small quantities 
and may have most dangerous effects. 
Imported food is as liable to be affected 
as home-grown food. I have heard of orang- 
es being sprayed with D.D.T., the fruit when 
picked being dyed and then waxed. (he 
could add, too, ‘and picked GREEN’—Ed) 
I should not like to eat marmalade made 
from fruit so treated. Recently, I noticed 
that a proposal is under consideration for 
preventing the spread of swollen shoot dis- 
ease among the cocoa trees of the Gold 
Coast. The principle of it is that the sap 
of the tree should be induced to imbibe a 
poison that will kill the mealy bug by which 
the disease is transmitted from tree to tree. 
The idea is ingenious, but what effect will, 
the poison have upon the cocoa bean, upon, 
the cocoa derived from it, and upon the 
health of the consumers of cocoa and choc- 
olate in this country and elsewhere? 
What’s in the Bread You Eat? 
Let us now deal with the use of chemicals 
in the processing of foodstuffs. Various 
chemicals are used to bleach flour, because 
it is said that the public insist upon having 
absolutely white bread. It is osmewhat strange 
that they do not insist upon having many 
other articles of food bleached also. Some 
chemicals are used for “maturing” flour in 
the space of a few hours, whereas nature 
takes weeks to affect this, and also for giving 
to inferior flour the characteristics of better 
flour. Others are used for the purpose of 
inducing flour to rise more in order to pro- 
duce a loaf which contains more air and 
water, which may be rather dearly bought 
in this way. 
The most widely used of these so-called. 
“improvers” of flour is nitrogen trichloride, 
commercially known as agene. After this 
chemical had been in use for about a quart- 
er of a century, its toxic effects were dis- 
covered by Sir Edward Mellanby. The. re- 
markable thing is that this discovery, like 
many other notable scientific discoveries, 
was made almost by accident! Professor 
Mellanby noticed that dogs which were being 
kept for another experiment were developing 
nervous disorders, which became progress- 
ively more grave and ended in epileptic 
seizures and death. In a research which 
is classic of its kind, he traced the causes 
of the illness to food made from filour which 
had been treated with agene! His results 
were published in December, 1946. They 
were taken notice of immediately, BUT! 
(Continued in next issue) 
