Dr. Ralph Moss – The Moss Report
A Disease of Civilization
When I wrote an article about cancer as a disease of civilization I had many interesting responses. One reader wondered how cancer could be a disease of civilization since there aren’t many references to it in ancient literature.
I have long had an interest in the history of cancer and would be the last person to argue that the disease was not known in ancient times. The Greeks had a word for it: carcinoma. The word “cancer” is itself Latin for crab (still found in the Zodiac symbol and the Constellation of that name). This metaphorical term was probably chosen because the protruding blood vessels surrounding breast tumors reminded someone of the claws of a voracious crustacean. The ancient physician Galen even wrote a small book on abnormal growths, titled On Tumors (De Tumoribus), which was first translated into English in 1975. I have written a lengthy review of that book.
None of these facts, however, contradicts the idea that cancer is predominantly a disease of civilization. Everything indicates that cancer was relatively rare, not just in antiquity, but well into the 19th century, and remains rare in some areas even today.
But even if we agree that the incidence and mortality of cancer experienced a giant increase in 19th-century Europe and America, there is ample room to disagree on the exact cause. “Civilization” entails many changes from the simple life of a medieval peasant, much less the aboriginal state of the hunter-gatherers. I want to point out to you a single change that I believe had profound health consequences. This was the refinement of white sugar from cane and beets, a practice that really exploded in the 19th century.
Increase in Sugar
In an excellent but out-of-print book, The Saccharine Disease, Dr. Thomas L. Cleave demonstrates that many of the diseases that presently afflict us are relatively modern plagues. In his view (and mine), these diseases of civilization are due largely to the incredible increase in sugar consumption during the past century.
Cleave was a surgeon-captain in the Royal Navy, Director of Medical Research at the Institute of Naval Medicine, and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. His book was hailed by Robert C. Atkins, MD, as “one of the most important books ever written.” Although The Saccharine Disease suffers from a terrible title (it has nothing to do with the artificial sweetener saccharin) and is written in a rather dry technical style, its theory is worth investigating.
Cleave shows that many diseases that are common today were virtually unknown until the introduction of refined sugar. These conditions include constipation, diverticular disease, varicose veins, thrombosis, hemorrhoids, dental caries (cavities), the twin plagues of obesity and diabetes, E. coli infections, and peptic ulcers. He also touches on the subject of colon cancer.
Cleave rules out the possibility that these diseases were caused by the refining of wheat, since the wide-scale use of white bread dated from 1800, while the onslaught of these common modern diseases only happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It is hard to comprehend the massive increase in sugar use in society. In 1815, the average resident of Great Britain consumed about 15 pounds of sugar per year. When Cleave’s book was published in England in 1974, this had risen to about 120 pounds per year, an eight-fold increase.
A Nation of Sugar Junkies
In the U.S. today, sugar consumption is now around 150 pounds per year for every man, woman, and child. Imagine if people had to buy their year’s supply of sugar all at one time. A typical American family of four would then have to fill the back of a station wagon with 12 fifty-pound sacks of sugar!
The average American consumes about 20 teaspoons (almost one-half cup) of sugar per day, which accounts for 16 percent of their daily intake of calories. For teenagers, sugar consumption accounts for a full 20 percent of calories per day. In 1977 sugar accounted for “only” 11 percent of caloric intake.
Cleave’s book doesn’t even mention corn syrup, but this sweetener has become a significant source of our sugar intake in recent years. US consumption of corn syrup increased 400 percent between 1900 and 1980. And this doesn’t even take into account the rise of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). One explanation for this dramatic increase is the similarly explosive rise in the consumption of soft drinks sweetened with HFCS.
Between 1960 and 1980, U.S. soft drink consumption increased 300 percent. In 1997, the soft drink industry produced 14 billion gallons of soft drinks, twice as much as in 1974, and Americans shelled out over $54 billion on this “liquid candy.” At this writing, the average American consumes 38 gallons of soft drinks per year. It’s easy to see why one-fifth of our sugar intake is accounted for by soft drinks.
No Restraints
I remember having to get a written permission slip to drink a bottle of soda in camp. Today, there are no restraints. The average teenage boy now gets 15 teaspoons per day of sugar from soft drinks. Twenty years ago, teenage boys consumed twice as much milk as soda pop; today they consume twice as much soda pop as milk. Nutritionists warn that soda consumption may be contributing to osteoporosis since many girls and young women drink soda instead of milk, which is rich in calcium.
Older readers may remember that in the 1950s, Coca-Cola only came in a 6 1/2-ounce bottles. That soon grew into the 12-ounce can. Today, 20-ounce bottles are readily available from vending machines, and since 1983 a 44-ounce Super Big Gulp® has been as near as your local 7-Eleven. In fact, five years later came the giant 64-ounce Double Gulp® drink. In one year (2017), 7-11 stores “sold enough fountain drinks to fill 75 Olympic-size pools.”
It always shocks me to see the wall of soft drinks at, for example, Wal-Mart’s checkout, with two-liter bottles available for as little as 88 cents. For a lot of people, sugar is a cheap “high” that comes in brightly colored bottles. Mixed with caffeine (e.g., in cola drinks) it is an especially potent mixture.
Believe it or not, even toddlers are being primed for a lifetime of sugar addiction. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), major manufacturers “encourage feeding soft drinks to toddlers by licensing their logos to a maker of baby bottles, Munchkin Bottling, Inc. Infants and toddlers, they say, are four times likelier to be fed soda pop from those bottles than out of regular baby bottles.”
Sugar and Cancer
We have not yet spoken about the link between sugar and cancer. However, the affinity of cancerous tissue for sugar (glucose) is well known. The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg believed that cancers ferment sugar rather than respire in the normal way. This fact is the basis of the high-tech diagnostic tool known as positron emission tomography (PET). PET scans are x-rays that reveal areas of heightened glucose metabolism in the body, which may indicate the presence of cancer.
It certainly is suspicious that, like the other diseases I have mentioned, the incidence of cancer increased tremendously at the same time as sugar consumption went sky-high. There are some studies showing that decreasing one’s exposure to refined carbohydrates could diminish your risk of getting colorectal cancer.
My strong advice is to avoid sugar whenever possible. In the dog days of summer, water with a twist of lemon is an extremely refreshing drink. If you are hooked on carbonated beverages, try soda water that is flavored with fruit essences (cranberry, lemon, lime, etc.) but which contain no sweeteners. You will quickly come to like the taste and will never regret having given up cloying sweeteners.