Health – Too Much of a Good Thing

“Satan well knows the material with which he has to deal in the human heart. He knows—for he has studied with fiendish intensity for thousands of years—the points most easily assailed in every character; and through successive generations he has wrought to overthrow the strongest men.” The Adventist Home, 326.

So how will Satan attempt to overthrow God’s people in the very last days? There are a multitude of methods that he is using: “Satan sees that his time is short. He has set all his agencies at work that men may be deceived, deluded, occupied and entranced, until the day of probation shall be ended, and the door of mercy be forever shut.” The Desire of Ages, 636. “As the time draws near for Christ to be revealed in the clouds of Heaven, Satan’s temptations will be brought to bear with greater power upon those who keep God’s commandments, for he knows that his time is short.” The Review and Herald, January 28, 1875. [Emphasis added.]

What are these agencies? One of them is appetite: “The victims of a depraved appetite, goaded on by Satan’s continual temptations, will seek indulgence at the expense of health and even life, and will go to the bar of God as self-murderers. Many have so long allowed habit to master them that they have become slaves to appetite.” Confrontation, 77. “Appetite and passion, the love of the world, and presumptuous sins were the great branches of evil out of which every species of crime, violence, and corruption grew.” Ibid., 47.

“The controlling power of appetite will prove the ruin of thousands, who, if they had conquered on this point, would have had the moral power to gain the victory over every other temptation. But those who are slaves to appetite will fail of perfecting Christian character. The continual transgression of man for over six thousand years has brought sickness, pain, and death as its fruit. And as we draw near the close of time, Satan’s temptations to indulge appetite will be more powerful, and more difficult to resist.” Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 154.

“The gratification of unnatural appetite led to the sins that caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. God ascribes the fall of Babylon to her gluttony and drunkenness. Indulgence of appetite and passion was the foundation of all their sins.” Ibid., 43.

In this article we will only look at one small aspect of the appetite temptation. Satan cannot force you to sin. God has not given him that power. Satan could not force Eve or Adam to sin; he had to entice them, to persuade them to do it. In the same way, Satan cannot force you to eat anything. He has to entice you to do it. In order for Satan to destroy you through your appetite, he has to persuade you to eat in a way that will destroy you. How can he do this? By making the food that is going to destroy your brain and body taste good. As we will see, it is possible to get too much of a good thing.

The Human Brain

Small molecules contained in the food that we eat are utilized by the brain as neurotransmitters. There is a delicate balance in the brain between excitatory transmitters and inhibitory transmitters. If this balance is upset, serious disorders of the nervous system can result. Today we are using tons of substances in our food that act as excitatory transmitters in the brain. These substances were completely unknown and therefore did not generally exist in their purified form 100 years ago.

In 1908, a chemist in Tokyo isolated the chemical in Kombu (a seaweed that the Japanese had used for generations to enhance the flavor of their recipes). He found to his surprise that the mysterious flavor-enhancing substance in this food was a simple salt or ester of glutamic acid—an amino acid widely distributed in plant and animal protein. This was so exciting that by 1909 this chemist and a friend of his formed a company to manufacture this taste enhancer in the form of monosodium glutamate. By 1933 the Japanese were using over 10 million pounds of this taste enhancer every year. During World War 11 American soldiers obtained some food rations from Japanese soldier prisoners. They were surprised that the Japanese soldiers’ rations were so much more delicious than their own. The reason was that MSG (monosodium glutamate), the flavor enhancer, had been added to the Japanese rations, but the Americans did not have MSG added to their rations.

It did not take long for the American food industry to see the financial boom that could result from the use of this substance. It could also be used to enhance the flavor of some new cheap foods that we were developing which did not taste very good unless some type of flavor enhancer was added.

The Vegetable Protein Industry

Adventists have long known that meat was not the best food. Although this could be discovered easily by reading the first few chapters of the Bible, Ellen White is very specific about this subject:

“Flesh was never the best food; but its use is now doubly objectionable, since disease in animals is so rapidly increasing. Those who use flesh foods little know what they are eating. Often if they could see the animals when living and know the quality of the meat they eat, they would turn from it with loathing. People are continually eating flesh that is filled with tuberculous and cancerous germs. Tuberculosis, cancer, and other fatal diseases are thus communicated.” The Ministry of Healing, 313.

“Again and again I have been shown that God is trying to lead us back, step by step, to His original design,—that man should subsist upon the natural products of the earth. Among those who are waiting for the coming of the Lord, meat-eating will eventually be done away; flesh will cease to form a part of their diet. We should ever keep this end in view, and endeavor to work steadily toward it.” Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 119.

Because of this information, Adventists have long been interested in the vegetarian diet, but they were told up until the 1960s that they needed to be very careful to get enough protein if they adopted a vegetarian diet. We know today that this advice was wrong, but this type of thinking made Adventists very susceptible to the new foods being introduced by food technologists. We know today that many of the vegetarian foods introduced by the food industry during the last 100 years are just as dangerous and perhaps more dangerous than the more expensive animal foods that they replaced. (A good example of this would be margarine, but that is another subject.)

One of these new wonder foods adopted almost wholesale by the Adventist world was hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP). Here is a thumbnail sketch of how it is made. First, the vegetable products are boiled in sulfuric acid, and then it is neutralized in caustic soda, and then dried. It can be dried until a brown powder is all that remains. This powder does not have a good taste at all, so MSG is added to it, and we have a powder that we can add to all manner of protein dishes. If a person eats meat such as hamburger, the cost of the hamburger can be greatly decreased by adding some HVP—a true “extender.” However, we have discovered other flavor compounds today besides MSG (many of them). We can add other amino acids to this HVP that will make it taste like beef, and then it can be used in barbecue sauces and fast foods. We can add still other protein combinations that will make the HVP taste creamy, and then use it in soups and salad dressings and sauces.

When we chemically analyze these foods, we find out some alarming facts. First of all, we find some compounds that, when used in high concentrations, are powerful brain transmitters, so much so that they can accurately be called brain cell toxins. Examples of these would include glutamate, aspartate, and cysteic acid.

Over fifty years ago, in 1957, it was discovered in animal experiments that these substances can destroy the inner layer of the retina in the eye. This is part of the reason that the writer developed an interest in investigating this subject.

One segment of the population that is extremely susceptible to obtaining large amounts of these substances are the overweight. These people want to lose weight, but they want low calorie foods that taste good. Three of the main ingredients that give flavor to food are carbohydrate (sugar and starch), fat, and protein. If the food is a low calorie food (like lettuce and spinach), it does not taste all that scrumptious unless some type of food flavoring is added. Historically, the way that this is done is to add fat and sugar (think butter, cream, sugar or syrup, mayonnaise, sweet and sour sauce, etc.) But all these things add calories, so today we can make the food taste good with very little additional calories with our new flavor-enhancing compounds. Any time that you buy food, if you see one of the following ingredients on the label you can be almost certain that it contains one or more flavor-enhancing compounds: “hydrolyzed vegetable protein,” “vegetable protein,” “natural flavorings,” and/or “spices,” “glutamate,” “aspartate,” or “glutamine.”

Another segment of the population that we know today is extremely sensitive to these substances are infants, both born and unborn infants. The central nervous system of the infant (both born and unborn) is much more sensitive to these substances than an adult, and although it would be unethical to perform research experiments with these substances on human beings, extensive animal experiments with these substances have demonstrated a severe effect on the development of the brain in every species of animals tested. Many pregnant women are using large amounts of these substances with absolutely no awareness of what the possible results might be. Nobody actually knows what all the results of large use of these substances might be. Some scientists are afraid that these substances can lead to severe misdevelopment of the brain, resulting in learning disorders and serious psychological problems such as autism, hyperactive behavior, dyslexia, and uncontrollable anger. (Their fears are not based on armchair speculations, but on actual animal experiments.)

If we use large amounts of these substances in our diet, what could be the long term result? Nobody knows, but following are a list of disorders that some scientists are studying in relation to these flavor-enhancing compounds: Neural degenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, seizures, headaches, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Probably by now, if you are still reading this article, you are asking the question, How can I know which foods that I am eating are containing these flavor-enhancing compounds? Unfortunately, this is a difficult question to answer since these compounds are found extensively today in almost every type of processed food, but in the next paragraph an attempt will be made to list some of the most common foods where the health seeker will need to be careful.

Soy milk naturally contains much glutamate, but what could become too much of a good thing is if your soy milk has more glutamate added or if it has more hydrolyzed vegetable protein added. Kombu, miso, and soy sauce have MSG added. Sports supplements and weight loss products often contain Nutrasweet (which, of course, contains aspartate). So, one must not think that a product is harmless, just because he or she obtained it from a health food store, or because it is labeled as “organic.” Hopefully, the reader who is thinking analytically will conclude on his own that so-called health foods are not necessarily healthy and may be some of the most dangerous foods in his diet. The so-called “meat substitutes” or “meal analogs” commonly contain large amounts of these flavor-enhancing compounds. Any drink or diet food which has a sweet taste but contains little or no sugar—obviously there is something in the drink that gives it that sweet taste; if it is not sugar, it has to be a flavor enhancer of some type, (common ones are aspartamine or aspartate). For the person who is interested in health, a healthy skepticism of food flavoring agents in general, and especially food additives, is certainly in harmony with present scientific knowledge. Beef or chicken flavoring, extracts, “broth” and “stock” commonly contain MSG and often other flavor-enhancing compounds, and as stated at the beginning, the problem is not that the product itself is bad; many of these products occur naturally in nature and are essential for the body, but too much of a good thing can be dangerous, as hopefully you now understand. Any time the food that you are eating is described on the ingredient list as containing plant protein extracts or sodium caseinate or calcium caseinate or yeast extract or textured protein or autolyzed yeast or hydrolyzed oat flour or hydrolyzed plant protein, you should assume that it contains flavor enhancers. If you commonly eat in restaurants it is probably going to be impossible for you to avoid these things in your diet, and so it becomes even more important for you to see that your intake of these things is as close to zero as possible when you are preparing your own food.

For the reader who would like to study a more systematic and thorough approach to this subject, a book that the writer referred to for additional information for this article that the reader could purchase and study for himself is Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills, by Russell L. Blaylock, M.D., published by Health Press, P.O. Drawer 1388, Santa Fe, NM 87504. ISBN 0-929173-14-7.