THE LESSONS OF HISTORY - FAST FOOD

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge."
(Alfred North Whitehead)

Our society is a reflection of the foods we eat. This isn’t a new concept. In fact, history has shown us this truth with frightening accuracy. That’s why the pages that follow are as much a history lesson as they are a discussion of nutrition and health. I’ve included the examples you’re about to read because they reveal the ways in which our society has suffered from nutritional deficiency in the past, and why it is so crucial that we change this for the future. I hope that the information in this chapter will lead you to greater understanding of and compassion for those people who are most affected by poor nutritional options, and will serve as a rallying cry for positive change. We cannot let the discoveries of nutritional science and what they reveal about the causes of death and disease remain a conversation “for another time.” The time is now. As you’ll see, the mistakes of history have carried over into our current reality.

THE TRAGEDY OF PELLAGRA

More than one hundred years ago, extreme violence plagued the South, especially against former slaves from the end of the Civil War. For example, the Freedmen’s Bureau has a register of more than a thousand murders from 1865 to 1866 in Texas, mostly against former slaves.1 After the war, racist groups emerged, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Knights of the White Camelia, which aimed to assassinate or intimidate African Americans and the white officials who tried to help them assimilate after they were freed from slavery. Such groups also used violence to prevent black people from voting. Violence was the way some tried to restore a system of white supremacy that was disrupted by the end of slavery.

Coinciding with this increased violence was an increase in cases of a nutrition-based disease called pellagra. And while it may seem peculiar in this context to mention pellagra, this now rare illness played a significant role in the postemancipation era. Pellagra is caused by niacin deficiency and was epidemic in the South. It could cause a form of dementia that made some people chronically depressed and angry and others impulsively violent.

Science ultimately traced the cause of pellagra to the Southern diet at that time. But because of sheer indifference and ignorance, local doctors chose to overlook the obvious connection between unhealthy diet, pellagra, impaired brain function, and violent behavior. Of course, this nutritional deficiency was certainly not the sole cause of violence and hate crimes, but there is no question now that there is a link between the foods people ate and the behaviors that ensued. And the severe and dangerous problems exacerbated by poor nutrition continued needlessly for decades. All the while, a vital lesson about the importance of nutrition was ignored.

Despite being a disease most Americans have never heard of, pellagra created a famous American stereotype. It had four distinct symptoms known as the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death.2 The dermatitis caused areas of the skin exposed to the sun to turn a bright red; one of the etymologies of the term “redneck” is that it referred to poor white people with this condition. Europeans called the rash a Casal necklace, after Gaspar Casal, who first described the disease in 1762. “Pellagra” comes from the Italian phrase pelle agra, meaning sour skin.

The Southern diet, which was rich in corn, flour, and sweeteners, traces its origins to slavery. Volumes have been written on this subject, but none has recognized the fascinating role these calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods played in shaping mind sets—and our nation’s history. A diet lacking in fresh produce, specifically dark leafy greens rich in vitamins and nutrients, has the power to alter our physical state and mental faculties in such a way as to change the way we behave. We now know that poor nutrition can create violence, magnify racism and bigotry, and increase tensions between various populations of the world. It did in the past, and it continues to do so today.

A NUTRITIONAL DIFFERENCE

In the nineteenth century, African Americans, on average, died at a younger age compared with poor whites. However, this was not true of all blacks everywhere. Despite high infant mortality rates, a significant percentage of blacks outlived their poor white neighbors. Some enjoyed advantages that translated into superior physical health and optimal brain function.

Todd Savitt, a medical historian, examined Virginia mortality records in four counties and found that more blacks than whites died of old age between 1853 and 1860 and according to an 1850 census, there were more centenarians among blacks.3 The same trend, according to Savitt, existed throughout the South.

Many historians have suggested that slaves received superior medical care because they were considered to be financial investments. However, this implies healing powers beyond those of nineteenth-century doctors, as medicine in those days was primitive and could not account for the kinds of differences observed in the mortality records. Even today, doctors cannot replicate those outcomes through medical means. A better explanation for this enormous health discrepancy and the longer life spans of slaves is not the deliberate effort by slaveowners or the skill of Southern doctors, but is the nutritional advantage of many slaves’ diet compared with the diet of poor whites.

Southern agriculture focused on producing cotton and tobacco; feeding people was an afterthought. Most Southerners ate lots of corn products, because it was cheap and easily grown. It took hundreds of years, and the suffering of many, before modern science discovered that corn is deficient in niacin. Most poor Southern whites ate primarily corn, cornbread, pork fatbacks (like bacon), and molasses-flavored sweets. This resulted in insufficiencies in multiple vitamins and minerals, much like the fast food diet people eat today. But we no longer see cases of pellagra because we now have niacin-enriched junk food.

The diet of slaves living on plantations was different from that of poor whites, in many cases because they were permitted to grow their own food. By the mid-seventeenth century in Virginia, for instance, many slaves were growing kale, cabbages, mustard leaves, black-eyed peas (cowpeas), gourds, okra, spinach, squash, watercress, watermelon, yams, corn, pumpkins, and peanuts.4 These foods fed slaves and plantation families and were not made available to those who didn’t live on the plantation. The resulting health and life span of slaves who ate a healthier diet is a great example of a truth scientists have known for decades: Health and life span can be extended by packing in more micronutrients and more micronutrient diversity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were no refined fast foods with concentrated calories to induce overeating and obesity. However, all the healthy vegetables and beans were not valued throughout the South.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration employed writers through the Federal Writers’ Project to produce a written history of the lives of slaves before the opportunity was lost. They fanned out across seventeen states, mostly in the South, to interview twenty-two hundred former slaves. Firsthand testimony revealed that slave diets varied from plantation to plantation. One former slave from South Carolina said that slaves ate potatoes, rice, corn pone, hominy, fried meat, molasses, a whole-wheat by-product called “shorts,” turnips, collards, and string beans. The white plantation owners ate the white flour, leaving the bran, germ, and whole wheat for the slaves. A former Mississippi slave added: “We always had plenty of something to eat. Meat, cornbread, milk and vegetables of all kinds. The garden was made for the colored, and the whites together, so each person didn’t have to worry with making one for hisself.”5

In the years following the Civil War during Reconstruction, the federal government established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedman’s Bureau, to assist newly emancipated slaves in their transition to freedom. Over the five-year period from 1865 to 1870, the bureau established more than four thousand schools for blacks, employing nine thousand teachers and giving instruction to about a quarter of a million pupils of all ages. The thirst for knowledge of the newly freed community and their children was unquenchable. African Americans went on to sustain more than thirteen hundred schools; they built five hundred school buildings and made donations out of their own earnings to do so and pay teachers and further the cause of their children’s education.6 Unfortunately, an inaccurate vision of newly freed slaves as uneducated and helpless sharecroppers was perpetuated for many decades. On the contrary, many former slaves and their offspring, empowered by a nutritional advantage, embraced education and actively pursued the American dream.

Schools sprang up throughout the South, and literacy rates among African Americans soared, from an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent under slavery to 70 percent in 1910.7 Among black people born after 1860, literacy rates were substantially higher. A significant number of freed slaves obtained college degrees, and a black middle class emerged.

The rise of the black middle class after slavery was a cause for great concern to many who felt threatened by this emergence. Ray Stannard Baker, an American journalist and historian born in 1870, was considered a muckraker because he exposed political corruption. He observed firsthand the surprising ascent of African Americans:

"The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education. One day I visited the mill neighborhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!"8

Baker further reported that a Senator Thomas of the Alabama legislature stated that “he would oppose any bills that would compel Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.”9

Not only did African Americans embrace education, they also embraced capitalism and employed the skills they learned as slaves—only now, they could profit from those skills. As Booker T. Washington described it: “If a Southern white man wanted a house built, he consulted a Negro mechanic about the plan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suit of clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to a shoemaker of the same race.”10 On plantations young black men and women were constantly being trained not only as farmers, but as carpenters, blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks, laundresses, sewing women, and housekeepers.11

A VIOLENT BACKLASH

The efforts of African Americans to educate themselves was a direct threat to white supremacy. According to historian Leon Litwack, the response to black ambition was swift. Some whites employed terror, intimidation, and violence in response to black success because such success was unacceptable to a people who deemed themselves racially superior.12 As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, “There was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”13

For many poor Southern whites, the rise of an African American middle class was too much to bear. James Kimble Vardaman (1861–1930), a Mississippi governor and U.S. senator, famously stated, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”14 He was not referring to criminals.

This emerging black middle class in the midst of a racially segregated and profoundly bigoted society speaks to an African American population of smart, industrious, and fearless individuals who were embracing their newfound freedoms in profound ways that were shifting the culture. And one rarely discussed aspect of this great charge forward was that African Americans were living with a nutritional advantage. As mentioned, African Americans were in general eating a more varied diet with vegetables, resulting in lower chance of pellagra and giving them adequate nutrition to aid these necessary and great steps forward.

And without question and as expected, this rapid development threatened the social status of whites, many of whom suffered nutrient deficiencies in their basic diets. Rather than working to elevate everyone, Southern authorities enacted Jim Crow laws, which suppressed African American advancement and segregated their housing, schooling, and access to public places. It institutionalized the basis for white supremacy. Jim Crow laws were America’s version of South African apartheid, keeping blacks separated from whites and prescribing how they were to behave.

White supremacy and Jim Crow laws were established to diminish the status of African Americans, even if it meant resorting to violence and suppressing educational opportunity for all. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson introduced the doctrine of “separate but equal” and made Jim Crow practices the law of the land. The effect of the Plessy ruling was immediate. There were already significant differences in funding for the segregated school system, which continued into the twentieth century; states consistently underfunded black schools, providing them with substandard buildings, textbooks, and supplies. States that had successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased Reconstruction-era efforts at reform. Jim Crow practices were encouraged and spread to the North in response to a second wave of African American migration from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities that started around 1941.

Jim Crow laws and white supremacy were motivated by racist ideologies and by competition over jobs and economic opportunities. In a 1965 speech following the Selma to Montgomery March, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained how Jim Crow manipulated blacks and poor whites alike:
You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

. . . the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. . . . If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.15

By the turn of the twentieth century socially promoted white violence against blacks had become common throughout the South, and it coincided with a rampant epidemic of pellagra, which we have seen can make people more aggressive, confused, and eventually demented. Southern authorities turned a blind eye toward or tolerated the violence, and Southern doctors rejected the possibility that the violence might be intensified by a disease.

In 1902, a Georgia farmer became the first American diagnosed with pellagra, which by 1912 was epidemic in the South. He had suffered for fifteen years before his diagnosis. Each spring when the weather warmed, blisters erupted on his arms and legs, and he became severely depressed and suicidal. By 1912, in South Carolina alone, thirty thousand cases were recorded, with twelve thousand deaths. Three million cases were recorded in the early twentieth century in the South, but this greatly underestimates the problem, because it is thought that only one in six people suffering from the disease sought out a physician.16 It was not a new disease; by the time medical authorities detected it in the United States, it had been a recognized epidemic in Eastern and Southern Europe for nearly two hundred years.

Pellagra, which is mostly caused by a lack of niacin in the diet, was a result of what is called the “3M diet,” meaning meal (that is, cornmeal mush), meat (mostly pork fat), and molasses. White flour was not “enriched” with B vitamins and niacin until the 1940s. In the Southern United States many poor whites relied on this diet. Angry white supremacists were not all poor or hungry; they were also wealthy landowners and community leaders. But pellagra-affected males were already primed by the rampant racism and heightened tensions in the South. It is no wonder that the increased aggression the disease can cause led them to join angry and violence-prone social groups and networks directing their anger against blacks. Far from being an excuse for violent crimes and murders, pellagra is an important factor to consider as we look back at this time in U.S. history.

Most U.S. doctors refused to consider the psychological implications of pellagra and viewed it as merely a skin ailment. A notable exception, James Woods Babcock (1856–1922), a native South Carolinian and Harvard-trained physician, was one of the only American doctors who appreciated the scope of this epidemic. Babcock noted that “apparently healthy persons commit crimes of various kinds for which they cannot be rightly regarded responsible, according to the accepted views as to culpability because they are not mentally sound.”17 He examined old medical records back to 1828 and concluded that pellagra had been continuously present, undetected, and ubiquitous in the South.18

While most people will rightly disagree with Babcock’s assertion about culpability, racism and the violence that went hand in hand with it should never be excused. Racist crimes shattered lives and tore the fabric of this country. But we should not dismiss or ignore the ways in which nutritional deficiency has real and lasting effects on individuals and society. To ignore nutrition is to ignore a critical aspect of how we function in the world. We must not make this same mistake again.
A nineteenth-century French psychiatrist, Henri Legrand du Saulle, was one of the first doctors to draw attention to pellagra’s criminal implications. He described how the disease could result in acts of violence, including homicide and suicide. He noted how people afflicted with this disease “commit the most reprehensible acts, and this is the most convincing proof of [their] insanity.”19 Many other European physicians echoed Legrand du Saulle’s findings. Unfortunately, according to Henry Fauntleroy Harris, a physician from Georgia, U.S. doctors mostly ignored the connection between pellagra and violence and generally ignored the European reports. Harris noted that throughout the South, people “plagued with a multitude of both physical and mental ailments, were often driven to acts of violence and even homicide.”20

As one early-twentieth-century writer noted, “Pellagra is a universal scourge which attacks all races and has millions of victims; which provokes crimes, insanity, and suicide; and fills our prisons and asylums.”21 Pellagra affected the character of the South. Research has demonstrated that areas with higher levels of the disease also had higher rates of violence and social dysfunction.22

There is no way to prove that specific acts of violence that happened more than one hundred years ago were the result of pellagra or nutritional deficiencies. The important issue here is that a time of extreme violence coincided with the presence of a disease that made people more violent and when deficiencies of niacin and other nutrients were rampant.

A nutrient-deficient, corn-based diet creates a constellation of problems. It impairs serotonin function, a neurotransmitter needed for emotional stability.23 Corn is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids and niacin. Omega-3 DHA and vitamin D also control the synthesis of serotonin. Researchers who discovered this relationship explain that “serotonin plays an important role in inhibiting impulsive aggression toward self, including suicide, and aggression toward others.” These researchers also noted that “experimentally lowering brain serotonin levels in normal people has a wide range of behavioral consequences: impulsive behavior, impaired learning and memory, poor long-term planning, inability to resist short-term gratification, and social behavioral deficits characterized by impulse aggression or lack of altruism.”24 Studies also show that low serotonin combined with high testosterone leads to increased aggressiveness.25

The ideology of white supremacy created a catastrophe. It empowered people with low status and nutrient-deficient dysfunctional brains to be violent toward African Americans. A constellation of mild nutritional deficiencies, even without full-blown pellagra, still affects emotional stability. Subclinical pellagra can also create mental symptoms and induce anger, even without a skin rash. Despite our increased understanding of the relationships between diet and brain chemistry, and brain chemistry and behavior, we still fail to acknowledge how inferior diets can help to create dysfunctional communities today.

I’d like to take a step back here and talk about how this example from history relates to the experiences we have with nutrition in our world today. It’s hard to believe that diet can play a role in how we treat one another, that it can escalate our prejudices and amplify our belief systems, that it can even lead to murder and violence. The prevalence of pellagra in the American South is a devastating example of a moment in time when the accepted diet in the area made matters much worse. While good, nutritious food isn’t a cure for racism, bigotry, misogyny, or any other prejudice, and while nutrient-deficient food isn’t an excuse for prejudice, it is a powerful driver that affects how we interact with one another. You’ll learn more about this in the next chapter, but it’s important that I make this clear now: Pellagra may not be around today, but we have new nutritional disasters amplifying tragic issues in our lives.

PERVASIVE INDIFFERENCE AND DENIAL

Because of Southern indifference, outsiders from the North eventually set up research facilities to find a cure for pellagra. In 1912, the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital established the Thompson-McFadden Pellagra Commission based in the South. The school chose Joseph F. Siler, a physician with the Army Medical Corps, and Philip E. Garrison, a Navy surgeon, to head the commission. The following year, Dr. Charles Davenport (1866–1944), a Harvard-trained biologist from the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, joined the commission to study pellagra from the viewpoint of heredity.

Eugenics has been called a form of scientific racism because eugenicists encouraged selective breeding to improve the human race. Davenport was a eugenicist who opposed the idea that poor nutrition or disease could affect brain function. He did not join the commission out of a concern for the poor. Instead, the existence of a disease like pellagra threatened the very foundations of eugenics; that is, the idea that violence could be caused by a bad diet would reduce the idea of being superior to simply being better fed.

The Pellagra Commission surveyed more than five thousand people and found no relationship between diet and the occurrence of the disease.26 In 1914, the U.S. Public Health Service Hygienic Laboratory, which would become the NIH, started a competing commission on pellagra to find a cure. The U.S. surgeon general appointed Dr. C. H. Lavinder to lead the government commission.

By 1914, the Thompson-McFadden Commission concluded that pellagra was likely an infectious, insect-borne illness. In the same year, Lavinder was replaced by Joseph Goldberger, a trained researcher and medical pioneer from New York City.

Goldberger advocated for the poor and tested solutions. He visited places where the disease was most prevalent: orphanages, asylums, and prisons. In these institutional settings, only the orphans, patients, or inmates got sick with pellagra; workers were rarely affected. The disease was not contagious; he noted that the only difference between the two groups was what the workers ate—their diet was not as restricted as that of the orphans and inmates. Goldberger suspected that some essential missing factor in corn caused the disease. In the fall of 1914, Goldberger supplemented the diets at three institutions: two Mississippi orphanages and a Georgia state sanitarium.

By the following spring, of the 172 cases in the orphanages, only one recurred; no new cases developed. In the sanitarium, all 72 cases in the test group were cured. Pellagra recurred in half of the control group. This was proof enough for Goldberger, who concluded that a balanced diet cured pellagra. In his 1915 annual report, Goldberger wrote that a change in diet cured all of the children and made them healthier than ever before: “There can be no doubt that the cause of pellagra is dietary.”27 After Goldberger published his results, Siler and Garrison both resigned from the Pellagra Commission, leaving Davenport in charge.

For the next six years, Goldberger continued to conduct experiments and tried to persuade the authorities to take action. In 1921, he wrote the U.S. surgeon general describing how poverty and a poor diet led to pellagra. President Warren G. Harding responded by urging the Red Cross to provide aid and suggested that Congress make a special appropriation to address the problem. But this offended politicians throughout the South.28 One remarked that news reports of “famine and plague” were “utter absurdity.”29 Southern leaders were not interested in curing pellagra.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, who voted at first to thank the president, ended up sending him a letter of protest a month later. Southern leaders not only rejected the president’s offer, but also rejected the idea that people in the South were suffering from the effects of poverty or malnutrition. For his part, James Babcock, the one doctor who had described the connection between pellagra and crime, was fired in 1914 by the South Carolina legislature for, among other things, having “caused injury to the reputation and progress of South Carolina by calling attention to the prevalence of pellagra in that state.”30

Most people today have no knowledge of pellagra or Goldberger’s efforts to combat this disease. The entire episode was swept under the rug. Goldberger spent the rest of his life trying in vain to persuade the medical community of his findings. He died unheralded in 1929. Eight years later, in 1937, Conrad Elvehjem discovered nicotinic acid, or niacin, a B vitamin—the missing factor in corn. By then, the pellagra epidemic had largely subsided because of the Depression and public feeding programs.

THE BIRTH OF A LIE: EUGENICS

The indifference of Southern politicians to this horrible ailment was in part due to the efforts of Charles Davenport, who rejected the idea that human differences were linked to nutritional differences. He advocated an alternative ideology that continues to dominate our thinking to this day. Davenport was one of the leaders of eugenics in the United States. This ideology was first conceived in 1863 by British mathematician Sir Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton assumed that observed differences in humans were the result of heredity. He believed that healthy offspring could be produced only if healthy and talented people married other healthy and talented people. Eugenics, from the Greek meaning “well-born,” was based on the premise that humanity could be perfected through better breeding; it was part religion and part science. Nutrition did not enter into the eugenics equation.

Violence in the South did not go unnoticed; it in fact inspired the American eugenics movement. The deteriorated physical and mental condition of nutrient-deficient Southerners was well-known. Many nineteenth-century travelers and writers observed the high prevalence of nutritional illness in the South, describing white skin, rashes, a sunken chest, and a sinister countenance; many people lived in squalor, with a high incidence of insanity, epilepsy, and tuberculosis as well as pellagra.31

In 1916, one year after Goldberger reported that pellagra was a nutritional disease, Davenport perpetrated his greatest crime: He published an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine on the hereditary causes of pellagra.32 Davenport presented detailed tables and pedigree trees to establish his view that pellagra was a hereditary disease. Davenport’s paper was readily embraced because of its length, scientific complexity, and “authoritative” tone. But the different standards of medical education in those days did not require that physicians question the report’s veracity. Davenport persuaded the medical community that pellagra and all of the social problems it caused were not the result of bad diet, but of bad genes. It confirmed that people who didn’t have this disease were superior. It was precisely the lie that most people wanted to hear.

Not everyone was swayed by Davenport. Some of his methods were so flawed that even his fellow eugenicists criticized him. His methods had been questioned before: In 1913 and 1914, members of the Galton Eugenics Laboratory in England, including Karl Pearson and David Heron, published a response to an earlier paper critical of Davenport’s methods and of his organization, the Eugenics Record Office.33 Heron noted that Davenport had essentially falsified data in order to support his claims. Pearson believed that Davenport’s deception would cause eugenics to be discredited. But it had precisely the opposite effect, at least in the short term.

Pellagra was an unpopular disease shunned by doctors, politicians, and eugenicists. Eugenics shifted scientific focus away from the study of nutrition, instead advocating remedies of violence, sterilization, and segregation. Even the idea of extermination was floated as an acceptable means of “keeping up the standard of the race.”34 Eugenics, which was the alternative hypothesis for diseases like pellagra, took the place of nutritional wisdom.

A NEAT, PLAUSIBLE, AND WRONG SOLUTION

H. L. Mencken said “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” The assumption that all human problems resulted from heredity led to the belief that all human problems could be solved by eliminating the people with the problems. This is flawed logic of the so-called eugenics solution. The popularity of eugenics in the early twentieth century was a direct consequence of a failure to learn from the medical examples of pellagra, hookworm, and iodine deficiencies. In a real sense, we are all victims of Charles Davenport’s deception, which would have global consequences. By promising racial superiority, eugenics lured many prominent Americans, such as Madison Grant, a lawyer, conservationist, and religious postmillennialist. Grant helped preserve the California redwoods and the American bison; he founded the Bronx Zoo, fought for strict gun control, built the Bronx River Parkway, helped to create Glacier and Denali National Parks, and worked tirelessly to protect whales, bald eagles, and pronghorn antelopes—all while advocating for the sterilization of humans.

In 1916, Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, an international best seller that influenced a generation of scientists, academicians, and businesspeople. In it, Grant presents the eugenic solution to all the world’s problems:

Those who read these pages will feel that there is little hope for humanity, but the remedy has been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak and unfit—in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future generations will be cursed with an ever-increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem and can be applied to an ever-widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.35

Grant was referring to poor whites from the American South and Eastern Europe who filled U.S. prisons and insane asylums—80 percent of whom were later found to have pellagra. Around this same time, Davenport’s assistant at the Eugenics Record Office, Harry H. Laughlin, began lobbying for eugenics laws. He developed model legislation for compulsory sterilization and immigration restrictions based on eugenics “science.” A group of Virginians devised a plan to enact Laughlin’s law, launching a preemptive “friendly suit” that would ultimately end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. This lawsuit sought to preempt future challenges by deliberately compromising the rights of Carrie Buck, a young mother who gave birth to a daughter after being raped by a relative of her foster family. To avoid prosecution, the family placed her in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded, whose superintendent, Albert Priddy, advocated for the sterilization of the “feebleminded.” Priddy previously had been sued for forcibly sterilizing patients against their will.

Priddy eventually persuaded the Virginia legislature to pass the 1924 Sterilization Act, which empowered the state to legally sterilize its citizens on the basis of a finding of feeblemindedness. A confederate of Priddy immediately filed suit on Buck’s behalf contesting the state’s right to perform involuntary sterilizations. In the course of the litigation, Priddy died. His successor, John Hendren Bell, was named in the suit. Buck’s lawyer, who was also her guardian, was in cahoots with the state. He deliberately lost and appealed the case in order to get a higher court to affirm the lower court ruling. His goal was to preempt someone else from effectively challenging the law. The case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927.

Laughlin wrote a scientific analysis of Carrie Buck for the court, concluding that Buck and her mother “belong to the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South. . . . The evidence points strongly toward the feeblemindedness and moral delinquency of Carrie Buck being due, primarily, to inheritance and not to environment.”36 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in writing for the court, opined that “it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”37

The 1927 Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell made eugenics the law of the land. Thirty-three states ultimately adopted eugenics laws. California applied the law most vigorously, conducting the most prodigious number of involuntary sterilizations. Sixty thousand Americans would be forcibly sterilized; the vast majority were white. About one-third of the sterilizations were carried out in California. It was the beginning of what would soon become a global catastrophe.

Three years earlier, in 1924, a young Adolf Hitler was inspired by the German translation of Madison Grant’s manifesto—a book he would later call his “Bible.” Hitler’s Nazi Party seized power in 1933 and modeled its Nuremberg Laws after California’s eugenics code. The California sterilization efforts further inspired the Nazis and their Final Solution. In 1934 E. S. Gosney, founder of the Human Betterment Foundation to support compulsory sterilization, received a letter from C. M. Goethe, a prominent California eugenicist visiting Germany, that said:

You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the intellectuals behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.38

The Nazis sterilized an estimated four hundred thousand people. A Virginian eugenicist complained that “they are beating us at our own game.”39 Nazis would ultimately exterminate five and a half million people under the guise of eugenic science and launch a world war whose impact continues to haunt us to this day.

At the military tribunals at Nuremberg after the war, Major General Karl Brandt, who was Hitler’s personal physician, was charged with heinous crimes relating to the slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust. In his defense, Brandt’s lawyers introduced into evidence a copy of Madison Grant’s book. During the trial, Nazis also quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion in Buck v. Bell in which he had stated, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The scope of Hitler’s crimes cannot be overstated. Yet the Nazi Party also seemed to be aware of things that were actively hidden from the American public. They understood that nutrition matters. The Nazis didn’t just profess to be the master race; they sought to actively achieve it by implementing the most progressive public feeding programs the world has ever seen. The Nazis collaborated closely with U.S. scientists, including Davenport, who held editorial positions at two influential German journals.

They banned everything that was unhealthy, including carcinogens such as asbestos and food dyes. They established policies that promoted healthful food while opposing excessive fat, sugar, and alcohol in the diet and a sedentary lifestyle. Otto Flössner, a nutritional physiologist at the Reich Health Office, believed that a whole food diet complemented racial hygiene.40

Nazi researchers suggested that improper dietary habits led to an increased risk of cancer decades before scientists in the United States reached the same conclusion. They encouraged consumption of fresh fruit, vegetables, and whole grain bread as well as the avoidance of meat-derived fat.41 A 1930s Hitler Youth manual titled Health Through Proper Eating discussed the dangers of empty calories and championed legumes such as soybeans as a healthier alternative to meat. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, launched the Holocaust, and started a world war.

This is a surprising and mostly untold story of the role of nutrition in the lead-up to this tragic historical moment. It is also a warning about allowing “facts” to remain unquestioned. The contradictory arguments made by the Nazis were not the first or the last time that science and fake science have been used to promote evil.

As we move closer to the present day, we will see the ways in which technology seemed to displace some of the gains made in nutritional science. The war came home to U.S. soil in many ways.

THE MILITARY LAUNCH THE FAST FOOD INDUSTRY

A generation after World War II, in the 1960s, crime rates exploded in the United States. Nowhere was this catastrophe felt more than in African American communities. The war had transformed the country economically, socially, and physically. It created the longest economic boom in U.S. history, which turned the country into a global superpower. The G.I. Bill enabled millions of vets to get a college education; in 1947 G.I.s made up 47 percent of college enrollments. G.I. benefits also helped returning vets to buy new homes, farms, and businesses. The war elevated the entire nation. In 1949, the desegregation of the military had launched the civil rights movement. However, what was perhaps the most significant change was also the least recognized: World War II fundamentally altered how Americans ate.

While the Nazis were advancing nutritional science, American scientists were operating under the faulty premise that nutritional adequacy could be achieved by chemical means. Medical experts at the turn of the twentieth century had failed to learn from the pellagra outbreak. The general presumption that all calories are created equal perpetuated the flawed conclusion that people are not created equal. By simply recognizing how poor nutrition leads to chronic illness and impairs human brain function, we could have avoided many tragic and lasting consequences.

Two years after Hitler invaded Poland, Japan launched an attack on Pearl Harbor on December 14, 1941, and pulled the United States into the global conflict. In response, the country transformed its industry into the greatest war machine this planet has ever seen. The military needed weapons and a way to feed troops in far-flung parts of the globe. Feeding an army on foreign soil is an age-old challenge. A frustrated Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “An army marches on its stomach.” In 1795, the French Army offered 12,000 francs to the first person who could invent a new way to preserve food. Fifteen years later Nicolas Appert presented his idea for canning food, using the same basic process in practice today.

The Hormel Company introduced canned Spam (short for shoulder of pork and ham) in 1937. It seemed like the perfect military food solution. By the end of the war, the U.S. military had purchased more than 150 million pounds of Spam, and it had quickly become a staple in cuisines around the world, especially in the Pacific region. In addition, products such as M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls, and instant coffee, designed to feed U.S. soldiers, became staples of the American diet. The military required nonperishable foods that soldiers could carry onto the battlefield. Veterans who ate these foods during the war desired more after the war. Candy bars, commercial baked sweets, such as Twinkies and Devil Dogs, and fast food chains such as McDonald’s sprang up and profited from this demand.

At the same time, American diets improved briefly during the Depression and World War II because of farm-to-table programs and meat rationing, which led to an increased consumption of vegetables. However, by failing to learn from the mistakes of the past, Americans created the modern U.S. diet and became victims of their own success and ingenuity. Like a diet predominant in corn, bacon, and molasses leading to subclinical pellagra, a diet dominated by processed and fast foods increases physical, psychological, and intellectual problems and creates the illusion of genetic inferiority. Presently, impoverished communities, both urban and rural, have less access to fresh foods and are more acutely affected by these nutrition-related issues.

The year 1945 brought an end to the war and a big stockpile of ammonium nitrate, which had been used to make explosives during the war. But ammonium nitrate doesn’t just make bombs explode; it also makes certain crops grow faster. The government wanted to turn the war machine into an instrument of peace, so U.S. Department of Agriculture officials had a good idea: Turn the main ingredient of explosives into a fertilizer. Furthermore, nerve gases, which worked as well on insects as on people, became pesticides. The remnants of war were modified and dispersed into the U.S. agricultural system. As the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva points out, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”42

Ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer works best on corn. This ingredient of explosive bombs during the war led to an explosion of corn production after the war. Enterprising people found creative ways to make use of the surplus corn, and ranchers began feeding it as a primary food to livestock. These days, corn-fed livestock is deceptively referred to as “conventionally fed.” Such conventionally fed cattle grow significantly faster compared with grass-fed cattle, but they are also profoundly unhealthy. A corn-fed cow loses its natural immune function, so to reduce its risk of developing bacterial infections, ranchers mix high doses of antibiotics into its food.

Corn-fed beef is chemically different from grass-fed beef; for instance, it has significantly lower levels of omega-3 DHA. Raising cattle on corn dramatically lowered the cost of beef; more cattle can be raised on less land and in less time. Government farm subsidies for growing corn further aided the development of cheap meat, leading directly to the explosion of fast food restaurants and a dramatic rise in the consumption of DHA-deficient meat. And as we have seen, people who consume processed foods, fast foods, and excessive amounts of conventional meat will tend to have very low levels of DHA. A global survey revealed that Americans have extremely low levels of omega-3 DHA and EPA in their bloodstreams,43 and this directly affects serotonin function and resulting crime rates.

Another new use for corn came out of the postwar Japanese Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which was founded in 1952 to redirect Japan’s military scientists toward civilian research. In 1971, an AIST scientist, Yoshiyuki Takasaki, patented high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which ended up being a bomb that landed on the American public. HFCS is produced by using an enzyme from bacteria to break down cornstarch. After World War II, corn became the most abundant food on the planet; most of it is now consumed by Americans, who are also the largest consumers of HFCS. Today, the average American consumes 60 pounds of corn syrup every year, and the percentage of Americans with diabetes has grown with this increased consumption.45 Policymakers focus almost exclusively on the short-term consequences of unhealthy diets, while generally ignoring the long-term effects, such as diabetes.

SHELF-STABLE, CONCENTRATED, PORTABLE, AND ADDICTIVE

Industrializing the food industry and feeding the Allied troops were massive undertakings during World War II. After the war, the military established a policy of military preparedness that promoted food technology. The U.S. military actively shaped the SAD to ensure a population that could be ready at a moment’s notice to produce army rations or to create consumer products that met military standards. Modern commercial foods were created by the military so we could effectively wage war. The technology to make these foods was then handed over to the food industry, and the basic ingredients were made cheaply so these foods became widely available and consumed in large quantities. The primary purpose of fast food was first developed to energize military personnel on the battlefield, not to maximize long-term health.

Energy bars, canned goods, deli meats, and even goldfish crackers all have military origins. In her 2015 book Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat, Anastacia Marx de Salcedo describes how many of the packaged, processed foods we find in today’s supermarkets started out as science experiments in an army laboratory. Many modern processed foods can be traced back to the Natick Soldier Systems Center, a U.S. Army research complex in Natick, Massachusetts. This federal laboratory investigates how to improve the taste and shelf life of soldiers’ rations. The processed cheese now found in the likes of goldfish crackers and Cheetos is just one of the ingredients that was developed at Natick. The center is also behind longer-lasting loaves of bread and the energy bar, which are designed to be sources of quick energy. It is the policy of the military to get the science that it uses for rations into the public food supply. It is part of a broader policy to ensure a powerful industrial base as the foundation of national defense preparedness.

World War II changed how Americans ate. People became accustomed to highly flavored, processed foods with long shelf lives. In 1943, the War Food Administration enacted Order Number 1, which mandated the enrichment of all bread. The order would be repealed in 1946 after the war, but the enrichment of bread continued. Vitamin enrichment masks long-term problems, as it replaces a select amount of lost nutrients, ignoring hundreds more. Modern nutritional science has uncovered hundreds of complex compounds (called phytochemicals or phytonutrients) in natural plants that humans need which are not vitamins and minerals, and not all of them have yet been identified.

The government is subsidizing the very foods that are destroying us because of our failure to learn from the nutritional mistakes of the past. The simple truth is that people require a broad assortment of colorful plants in conjunction with exposure to DHA-containing (wild) animal products, to maximize overall health and brain health. And for those few nutrients not sufficiently available in plants, specifically vitamin B12 and DHA, supplements are available today.

The food industry creates an astonishing array of foods from a tiny group of plant species. Today, only four crops—corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice—account for two-thirds of all calories humans eat. Add those calories to the heightened consumption of commercially produced animal products in the United States and it is clear we have crowded out fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds from our nation’s plates. Since World War II, meat, dairy, and processed food products have become increasingly available, and the nutrient diversity of our diet has shrunk.

We now have more food than ever and yet nutritionally, the SAD is astonishingly reminiscent of the Southern 3M diet of molasses, meat, and (corn)meal, which led to the pellagra epidemic. Food fortification efforts have eliminated such acute nutritional deficiencies and their associated diseases (for instance pellagra, rickets, and beriberi), but those efforts have also led to life-shortening, chronic health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. The incidence of psychotic dementia has been overshadowed by ADHD, other learning difficulties, subclinical aggressiveness, and reduced impulse control.

Despite the growth of nutritional science, the physical and emotional health of Americans suffers greatly. The low cost, appeal, and profitability of packaged and fast foods have led to the expansion of the consumption of those foods. Many contributory influences confound this problem, including, as we have seen, the addictive nature of processed foods and the appeal of using drugs for medical problems instead of changing the dietary habits that cause chronic disease.

CHANGE CAN HAPPEN

Leaded gasoline caused a catastrophe in recent history that is similar to the one being caused by fast food today. In the 1920s, petroleum companies added tetraethyl lead, a known toxin, to gasoline to increase the octane level, enabling cars to run more efficiently. The economic boom following the war dramatically increased the number of cars on the road, and all of those cars were fueled by leaded gasoline. But studies show that the use of leaded gasoline caused brain damage that affected behavior and learning capacity.46 People in densely populated urban areas were subjected to concentrated dosages because of traffic congestion and the canyons created by high-rise buildings. This disproportionately affected poor people with already poor nutritional status. People who are deficient in iron will also metabolize more lead.

The rise of lead in the atmosphere is associated with an increase in violent crime rates, just as the drop in atmospheric lead was followed by a similar drop in the violent crime rate. The removal of lead from gasoline and paint was one of the most successful public health initiatives of the twentieth century. Antioxidants from fresh fruits and vegetables also reduce the toxic effects of lead.

The government was slow to act on evidence suggesting that lead contamination was a significant problem because it thought the solution was impractical. But this was not the case. According to studies cited in a 1989 paper published in the World Health Statistics Quarterly, the benefits of eliminating leaded gasoline outweighed the costs 10 to 1. The authors concluded with the following bit of wisdom: “The environmental health calamity caused by lead in petrol could have been avoided if the initial warnings had been heeded and better preliminary research of the health issues had been carried out. Nevertheless, incontrovertible proof of causality should not be required before regulations are made to protect public health.”48

Research evidence, although not conclusive, suggested that lead pollution caused violence. Lead was removed from gasoline, and violent crime rates dropped. However, crime rates did not drop to pre-1960 levels because the lead problem coincided with a dietary problem. A similar problem has occurred from the use of soft drinks, fast food, and junk food. This has been made worse by the rapid increase of not just HFCS-sweetened soft drinks, but also the tremendous increase in oil consumption. Oil is an empty-calorie junk food; in other words, it supplies a huge load of concentrated calories but no micronutrients or fiber. The excess of omega-6 fats in oils also increases omega-3 insufficiency.

There is no easy fix to the health problems created by the SAD. Policymakers consistently make decisions that favor the commercial food industry over public health, and the food and drug industry have tremendous influence in Washington, D.C., that slows and inhibits change for the better. Nutritional mistakes made by health authorities have also taken their toll. For instance, in 1961, the American Heart Association advised Americans to reduce their intake of saturated fats by replacing animal fats, such as butter, with vegetable oils, shortening, and margarine.49 People replaced one dangerous food with another. Soybean oil became the primary source of fat for most Americans. Government subsidies made it a cost-effective ingredient for cost-conscious makers of processed foods. Vegetable and seed oils, such as soybean oil, are generally very high in omega-6 linoleic acid and low in omega-3 ALA.

The rise in crime also directly corresponded to the rise in the consumption of linoleic acid, and this has had an effect that we have yet to address. The sharp rise in linoleic acid consumption from increased use of food oils also directly correlates with the rise in murder rates that began in the 1960s.51 This problem has been studied and systematically ignored, reminiscent of the problem that occurred with lead. The CARDIA (Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults) epidemiological study of four thousand subjects found that people with lower tissue levels of omega-3 fatty acids were more hostile.52 Oily, processed, and fast foods are rich in omega-6 linoleic acid and low in omega-3 fats. And the more omega-6 fat consumed, the more omega-3 fats are needed and the more the formation of the brain-protective omega-3 fats is inhibited. Another study found that greater intakes of seafood rich in EPA and DHA were correlated with lower rates of homicide mortality across thirty-six countries.53 Young developing brains across the United States are suffering multiple nutritional stresses simultaneously.

LEARNING FROM THE PAST

The status quo resists change. Remember, there was huge opposition to the claims that smoking cigarettes was harmful. Some people will never consider evidence to be conclusive. It can’t be denied that nutrient deficiencies create immediate effects that can destroy human potential. Low-nutrient diets stress the brain and influence decision-making by impairing brain metabolism. In the past, and today more than ever, society’s greatest problems of poverty, violence, criminal behavior, drug abuse, and devastating health tragedies have their roots in the diet style of the population under duress.

Unhealthy eating feeds inequality, bigotry, racism, and intolerance. Today, we know that modern dietary practices cause much human tragedy and affect society on every level—from autism, to childhood cancer, to learning difficulties, to medical dependence and premature death, and yes, to drug addiction and crime. It is time to end this tragedy.

NOTES

1Stewart DO: Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy: Simon & Schuster; 2009. https://books.google.com/books?id=DHdhbBfNnlgC&dq=%22Freedmen%27s+bureau%22+and+murders+and+texas+and+1865&q=44+murders#v=onepage&q=44%20murders&f=false.
2Hegyl J, Schwartz RA, Hegyl V. Pellagra: dermatitis, dementia, and diarrhea. Int J Dermatol. 2004;43(1):1–5.
3Savitt TL. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978, 201.
4Chambers DB. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
5Covey HC, Eisnach D. What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, 2009, 29.
6Washington BT. Frederick Douglass. G. W. Jacobs, 1907, 252.
7National Assessment of Adult Literacy. 120 years of Literary, Literacy from 1870 to 1979. National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp.
8Baker RS: Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy: Doubleday, 1908, 53.
9Baker RS: Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy: Doubleday, 1908, 248.
10Washington BT: The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today: James Pott; 1903, 10. (Contains republished article “Industrial education for the Negro”).
11Washington BT. Frederick Douglass. G. W. Jacobs, 1907.
12Litwack LF: Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; 1999. Page xiii.
13Du Bois WEB: The Negro: Cosimo, Incorporated; 2007, 130.
14Baker RS. Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy. New York: Doubleday, 1908, 247.
15King ML, “Address at Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March” in Carson C, Shepard K, Young A: A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: Grand Central Publishing; 2001.
16Frankenburg, FR. Vitamin Discoveries and Disasters: History, Science & Controversies. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO; The pellagra epidemic of the southern United States in the early 20th century. ActForLibraries.org. 2017. http://www.actforlibraries.org/the-pellagra-epidemic-of-the-southern-united-states-in-the-early-20th-century.
17Harris HF. Pellagra. New York: Macmillan, 1919, 255.
18Wheeler G. A note on the history of pellagra in the United States. Public Health Rep. 1931;46(6):2223.
19National Association for the Study of Pellagra. Transactions of the National Association for the Study of Pellagra. R. L. Bryan: 1914, 391–92.
20Ibid., 254.
21Yarbrough JF. Pellagra: its etiology, symptomalogy, and treatment. Medical Record. 1917; 92:893.
22DeWall CN, Deckman T, Gailliot MT, et al. Sweetened blood cools hot tempers: physiological self-control and aggression. Aggress Behav. 2011;37(1):73–80.
23Lytle LD, Messing RB, Fisher L, et al. Effects of long-term corn consumption on brain serotonin and the response to electric shock. Science. 1975;190(4215):692–94.
24Patrick RP, Ames BN. Vitamin D and the omega-3 fatty acids control serotonin synthesis and action, part 2: relevance for ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and impulsive behavior. FASEB J. 2015;29(6):2207–22.
25Birger M, Swartz M, Cohen D, et al. Aggression: the testosterone-serotonin link. Isr Med Assoc. 2003;5(9):653–58.
26Wheeler G. A note on the history of pellagra in the United States. Public Health Rep. 1931(46):6.
27Goldberger quoted in Etheridge EW. The Butterfly Caste: A Social History of Pellagra in the South. Greenwood, 1972, 77.
28“South Resents Federal Alarm over Pellagra,” New York Times, 27 July 1921.
29Etheridge, EW. The Butterfly Caste.
30New York Department of Mental Hygiene. The Psychiatric Quarterly: Supplement. State Hospitals Press, 1964, 207.
31Kemble F. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. New York: Knopf, 1961; Cash WJ. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf, 1941, 204.
32Davenport CB. The hereditary factor in pellagra. Arch Intern Med. 1916;18(1):4–31.
33Spencer HG, Paul DB. The failure of a scientific critique: David Heron, Karl Pearson and Mendelian eugenics. Br J Hist Sci. 1998;31(4):441–52.
34Popenoe P, Johnson RH. Applied Eugenics. New York: Macmillan, 1918, 184.
35Grant, M. The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History. 4th rev ed. New York: Scribner’s, 1922, 50–51.
36Laughlin, HH, Deposition in Circuit Court Proceedings-Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200. Paragraph II.
37Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (May 7, 1927). Page 207. Opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
38Kuhl S: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism: Oxford University Press; 2002, 58.
39Kuhl S: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism: Oxford University Press; 2002. Page 37.
40Proctor RN. Why did the Nazis have the world’s most aggressive anti-cancer campaign? Endeavour. 1999;23(2):76–79.
41Basil H. Preventive nutrition in Nazi Germany: a public health commentary. Online Journal of Health Ethics. 2013;9(1):10.
42Shiva quoted in Pollan M. What’s eating America. Smithsonian. July 2006. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/presence-jul06.html?c=y&story=fullstory.
43Stark KD, Van Elswyk ME, Higgins MR, et al. Global survey of the omega-3 fatty acids, docosahexaenoic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid in the blood stream of healthy adults. Prog Lipid Res. 2016;63:132–52.
44Daniel CR, Cross AJ, Koebnick C, Sinha R. Trends in meat consumption in the United States. Public Health Nutr. 2011;14(4):575–583.
45Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Long-Term Trends in Diabetes, April 2016.
46World Health Organization. Lead poisoning and health. Fact sheet. Reviewed September 2016 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs379/en/.
47Nevin R. How lead exposure relates to temporal changes in IQ, violent crime, and unwed pregnancy. Environ Res. 2000;83(10):1–22.
48Shy CM. Lead in petrol: the mistake of the XXth century. World Health Stat Q. 1989;43(3): 168–76.
49Page IH, Allen EV, Chamberlain FL, et al. Dietary fat and its relation to heart attacks and strokes. Circulation. 1961;23(1):133–36.
50Blasbalg TL, Hibbeln JR, Ramsden CE, et al. Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011;93(5):950–62.
51Hibbeln JR, Nieminen LR, Lands WE. Increasing homicide rates and linoleic acid consumption among five Western countries, 1961–2000. Lipids. 2004;39(12):1207–13.
52Iribarren C, Markovitz JH, Jacobs DR, Jr., et al. Dietary intake of N-3, N-6 fatty acids and fish: relationship with hostility in young adults—the CARDIA study. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2004;58(1):24–31.
53Hibbeln JR. Seafood consumption and homicide mortality. In: Fatty Acids and Lipids—New Findings. Vol. 88. Basel: Karger, 2001, 41–46.

Written by Joel Fuhrman and Robert B. Phillips in "Fast Food Genocide - How Processed Food Is Killing Us And What We Can Do About It", Harper One (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), USA, 2017, chapter 4. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.