Sugar Blues–Chapter 3, How We Got Here from There

Note: We have republished this book review and digest with updated comments. You might enjoy reading Sugar Blues in its entirety. To order, please click here.

…Here was something more intoxicating than beer or wine and more potent than many drugs and potions then known to man.  No wonder Arab and Jewish physicians used refined sugar carefully in minuscule amounts, adding it to their prescription with great care…

Dufty explains that our brain is the most sensitive organ in our bodies and the difference between up or down, calm or freaked out, sane or insane, depends to a large extent on what we put into our mouths. The amount of glucose in the body must balance with the blood oxygen.

Ingesting sugar into one’s body drastically increases the amount of glucose in the bloodstream, which then “destroys” the balance of glucose and blood oxygen. Now the body is in crisis.

Hormones pour from the adrenal casings and marshal every chemical resource for dealing with sugar: insulin from the endocrine “islets” of the pancreas works specifically to hold down the glucose level in the blood in complementary antagonism to the adrenal hormones concerned with keeping the glucose level up.

Dufty explains that the process goes too fast and too far. The bottom drops out of the blood glucose level and a second crisis comes out of the first. 

 Pancreatic islets have to shut down; so do some departments of the adrenal casings. Other adrenal hormones must be produced to regulate the reversing of the chemical direction and bring the blood glucose up again.

He continues by saying that we immediately feel “up”, which will soon be replaced be feeling listless and tired. The blood glucose level must be brought up again. Our brain is now vulnerable to suspicion and hallucinations. 

After years of doing this, one’s adrenals our now worn out.  When stress comes our way, we go to pieces because we no longer have a healthy endocrine system to cope with it…we’re always tired, never seem to get anything done. We’ve really got the sugar blues.

Dufty notes that…the cells of the brain are those that depend on the moment-by-moment blood sugar level for nourishment; they are perhaps the most susceptible to damage. The disturbingly large and ever-increasing number of neurotics in our population makes this clearly evident.

My comments: Sugar Blues is 40 years old. I think that most everyone would agree that things in our society have worsened in the last four decades. Just witness the increase in divorce, the rise of gangs, school shootings, and other whacked out things we hear on the news. 

What’s also interesting to note is that Japanese scientists developed high fructose corn syrup [HFCS] in the early 70’s. The latter is now used almost everywhere in conventional, processed foods.

Is the increased sugar and now HFCS consumption causal to much of the deterioration of our social fabric? I believe the answer is, “Yes.”  While there are multiple causes to this societal decline, the increased consumption of these potent and refined carbohydrates certainly hasn’t helped. 

A real eye opener is to note the correlation between obesity rates and the increased portion sizes of soft drinks sold both in containers and those served at the fountain.  Back in the fifty’s, Coke used to come in 6½ ounce bottles. That was followed by 8 ounce bottles and then 12 ounce cans.  That’s all been replaced by the 20-ounce plastic bottles in the coolers seen everywhere including the check-out aisles at box stores. That’s a triple shot compared to the old 6½ ounce serving!  For some visuals of these increased portion sizes, please click here, here, and here. The second two links have visualizations that you will need to scroll down to see.

Continuing: Dufty quotes the late endocrinologist John W. Tintera,

It’s quite possible to improve your disposition, increase your efficiency, and change your personality for the better. The way to do it is to avoid cane and beet sugar in all its forms and guises.”

Dufty spends several pages describing how both the church and the state persecuted natural healers or sorcerers. He tells us that this started with the return of the Crusaders. He describes how some clever beer makers “sophisticated” their beer by adding some foreign substance such as sugar compared to the natural malt and hops. Such offenders were subject to be paraded around the village in a merde* wagon. People knew that the human body and brains could not handle the sweetness of sugar. *French for the vulgar form of excrement or the stuff from the cleaning of privies.

He described shipwrecked sailors that ate their ship’s cargo of sugar and rum with the result that they went bonkers and often died. Soldiers and sailors that were involved in the handling of sugar began to have more trouble with their teeth.

Comments: In the first half of the 20th Century Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist, studied various native cultures, ones that were free from processed Western foods.  He described many of them as having perfect teeth. He also noted that when such people moved into a Westernized culture and were exposed to sugar, refined foods, and canned goods, they started developing the usual dental problems.

Sad to say, I had my share of cavities. Neither my parents, myself, my dentist, or anyone else in my life seemed to understand that the root cause was sugar and refined foods. Weston Price visited with and wrote about people that had perfect teeth.  I can’t think of a better cause and effect relationship of the problems caused by sugar consumption. Not only does sugar consumption play havoc with one’s blood sugar balance, it also rots teeth. 

My dental hygienist once told me about the “Pepsi” kids. Their teeth were rotted more than the kids that drank other brands of pop.

For more information about Dr. Weston A Price and the Dr. Weston A Price Foundation, please click here.

Continuing: Dufty describes ancient civilizations that believed the disorders of the mind and body

“[p]roceed from what we eat. As the Oriental sages phrased it, the mind and the body are not two. The sorceress…wise woman…natural healer believed this too.  However, by the time sugar was introduced widely in Europe, the natural healers were uncovered—practically overnight—as a declared enemy of the church and state. Ailing people consulted them at very real peril.  One literally risked his life and limb having any truck with them. In turn, they risked life and limb to aid you.

He tells us that for centuries uninformed physicians would relegate symptoms of sugar blues to bewitchment. Near the end of the chapter Dufty tells the account of a modern French natural healer, Maurice Mességué. He was hauled into the courts on forty occasions for practicing medicine without a medical license. He was fined one or two francs, and then some of the judges sought him out for his professional services for their ailing wife or mistress. 

Mességué wrote three bestselling books about natural healing where he repeats his prescription: Whole natural food, naturally grown.

Dufty describes his involvement in translating books from a Japanese natural healer, Sakurazawa, You Are All Sanpaku. In Chapter One of Sugar Blues, Dufty mentioned the catalyst for his epiphany. I’m thinking that the “little book” that he referenced must have been from Sakurazawa. 

If you’re sick, it’s your own damn fault. Pain is the final warning.  You know better than anyone else how you’ve been abusing your body. So stop it.  Sugar is poison…more lethal than opium and more dangerous than atomic fallout. Ed: My emphasis

To check it out on Amazon, please click here.

Dufty concludes the chapter by quoting from Sakurazawa again.

…I am confident that one day Western Medicine will admit what has been known in the Orient for years: sugar is without question the number one murderer in the history of humanity.

My comments: What more can you say for an encore? Rereading this book forces me to reminisce about my upbringing. I, too, ran afoul of the problems that Dufty describes of our sugar drenched culture. I so wish that my parents would not have had sugar in the house, would not have made Christmas candy, would not have brought home stale doughnuts from work, would not have had that !@#$%  Betty Crocker cookbook in our house, and would have taught me about the dangers of refined sugar…in all of its guises and disguises. I would have been spared from thousands of dollars in dental work, being overweight, and having ups and downs of my energy level during my adolescence.

What I find to be so ironic in this age of “enlightenment” is this. I meet people that are taking multiple drugs including diabetic prescriptions. I ask them if their doctor ever asked them what they eat or drink.  The answer is invariably negative. Of course, that is exactly what Dufty recounted in Chapter One.

During all that rigamarole, I cannot recall a single doctor [out of the dozens that treated me] whoever displayed the slightest curiosity about what I ate or drank.

I attend an agent-training seminar sponsored by a health insurance company.  Guess what they serve for refreshments?  A fruit and vegetable tray…..are you kidding?  I wish. It’s soda pop and sometimes canned or bottled juice, breakfast rolls, bagels, brownies, and muffins. All SORF.*  They don’t get it!

* An acronym for sugar, oil [the wrong, inflammatory kind], and refined flours

Lastly, Dufty referenced the persecution of the natural healers of old by the “church and state” including the burning of “witches” at the stake. We can look back and think how stupid and backwards society must have been back then.  But then, have things really changed all that much? True, we don’t burn people at the stake anymore, but the power of the state can be used to persecute people and put them out of business. In the last 100 years, what are some of the modern-day equivalents to what’s happened in centuries past?

What about today? What’s happened to doctors, nurses, and others that have opposed masking and Covid shots? Countries like Australia have turned into virtual police states. Aren‘t we witnessing the modern form of “burning people at the stake?” End