This is a excerpt from Herbert M. Shelton’s Superior Nutrition concerning the "superfoods" of his day. Though the foods are different in his list verus those of today, the basic concept still applies to today's "superfoods."

Super-Foods

The Devil builds chapels wherever God erects a house of prayer, and, as Defoe has it, “it will be found, upon examination, the Devil has the largest congregation.” This is strangely true in the realm of diet. It is not only true that the great majority of people eat and prefer the common denatured and inferior foodstuffs that are everywhere eaten, but it is also true that, when some of them break away from the conventional diet and make an attempt to find a more wholesome mode of eating, the majority of them are misled by the claims made for the superiority of the many substitutes for natural foods that are now offered the public by manufacturers and salesmen.

One of my correspondents once very seriously urged me to give more attention, in the Hygienic Review to such “high pressure vital foods” as cod-liver oil, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, blackstrap molasses, and yogurt. Today certain of these foods, among which is powdered skim milk, are now frequently referred to as “wonder foods.” Honey and apple cider vinegar are also included by some among the “wonder foods.” The many exaggerated claims made for the healing virtues of these foods are made by those whose motives are purely commercial.

Like synthetic vitamins and mineral concentrates, they are offered to the public as supplements to their diet of white sugar, white bread, white rice, denatured cereals, canned vegetables, sulphured fruits, embalmed meats, pasteurized milk, candy, cake, pie, etc. Instead of teaching the people the truth about their diet and trying to lead them into rational eating practices, they offer them supplements,” so that their diet of foodless foods may be rendered adequate. There are diet compounds, also, that are said to “contain all the minerals for the body in organic form,” which are offered to the people as a substitute for a much needed dietary revolution.

There is also a search for long-life foods and the people are being led to believe that they can prolong their lives by eating freely of high grade proteins, brewer’s yeast, powdered skimmed milk, yogurt, black strap molasses, honey, vinegar, etc. The modern Ponce de Leons search, not for a magic spring, the waters of which restore and prolong youth, but for foods that have this magic power. This search is of a piece with the ancient search for an elixir vitae that would enable man to live for hundreds of years, if not forever. It is the same as the search for the Fountain of Youth. As soon as men give up the effort to discover special chemical compounds, or a special pool that will guarantee them long life in spite of every possible reason why they should die young, they turn to something else in their age-long quest for some holy grail. Gland extracts, gland transplantations, rays of various kinds and foods, have been looked to as sources of length of life. Perhaps Metchnikoff started this food way to long life when he popularized the sour milk fad. He asserted that it was responsible for the long life-span of the Bulgarians, who actually take but little sour milk and are not a long lived people.

Not until the present frenzied search for food specifics and food panaceas has run itself out can we hope for sanity in the approach to food and feeding. Food is now the new magic-it is the mysterious compound that will do what we once expected drugs to do. Foods now cure without the necessity of removing cause; they now prevent, also without the necessity of avoiding cause. They are replacing drugs and serums in the armamentarium of the magician. This absurd eulogizing of special articles of food in each case, being greatly altered products, and imputing to them peculiar virtues, is, when not a purely commercial trick, the expression of childish credulity.

One of these peddlers of “wonder foods” urges proteins and more proteins-emphasizing, with the exception of yeast, only animal proteins: meat, egg, milk, cheese. He stresses the fact that powdered skim milk is a rich source of protein and points out that besides being a rich source of protein, yeast also contains seventeen vitamins. He also stresses the richness in minerals and vitamins of blackstrap molasses. But, with all the vitamins contained in these foods, he urges fortifying the diet with vitamin extracts taken daily. He urges vitamins and more vitamins. His scheme of feeding is to get a redundancy of amino acids, vitamins and minerals, it seems not to matter what kind of minerals, into the body. Take the proteins and vitamins in great quantities, even if you do not need them. As nature made no provision for us to get adequate vitamin D, he advises fish-liver oil in capsules.

The idea is rapidly gaining ground that, if a thing is good, we must over-eat of it. We must have a super-abundance of this or that vitamin, or of this or that amino-acid, or of this or that mineral in order to get enough. The evils of redundancy are being. Completely ignored by the new school of overfeeding. Today, they dose their patients with special foods or special food factors as the medico’s dose theirs with drugs, and for the same reason. They are not feeding people to nourish them but to cure them. Foods are no longer nutritive substances, but medicines. They are elixirs of one kind or another.

Your gum-willies, who write and talk about diet, have decided that all human ailments are the results of deficiencies. To prevent them, to remedy them, we need only provide ourselves with a super abundance of the vitamins, minerals or amino-acids that are deficient and, presto! we can live longer and look younger. They have created a fool’s paradise in which they sport themselves for a brief time and then pass to that bourne from which no man returns.

That life is more than food and the body more than raiment, that man shall not live by bread alone, is a principle that these men never heard of. That living is more than eating, that we cannot eat ourselves into the millennium, that we need something in life other than the B complex and amino-acids-these are matters that these men seem incapable of thinking about. In their works they talk only of foods and they write about their foods as a De Kruif might write about an anti-biotic.

These miscalled dietitians offer the people only altered and denatured food products. Not only this, but one of them actually declares that natural foods are dangerous and unusable. One man declares that salads are harmful to many people, acid fruits are harmful to many more, spinach robs the body of lime, coffee stimulates the adrenals and is needed by many people, sunbaths are harmful to many more. He finds that at least seventy-percent of people are harmed by salads. Of course, if nature’s products are hurtful, we must depend on the manufacturers for their “superior” products.

Honey, which is a poor food and much inferior to sweet fruits as a source of sugar, is urged upon the gullible public as a miracle’ food. Yogurt, which is an inferior form of sour milk (having been pasteurized and boiled before culturing), is another “superior-food, that is sold at big profits. Cider vinegar, the poisonous product of fermentation of apple juice, is urged in certain quarters as a superior source of food values.

A large part of the nutritional problems of both the North and the South grow out of our refusal to eat natural foods. Our preference for the manufactured articles-those that have been demineralized, devitaminized, denatured, standardized, pasteurized, homogenized, cooked, canned, frozen, and in other ways rendered less valuable as foods-creates dietary problems that are not adequately solved by the present reliance upon supplements and substitutes. We go to great lengths to spoil our foods and then complain about the climate. We live on a diet of white flour products, degerminated and! demineralized corn meal, denatured cereals (“breakfast foods” that stick to your ribs), white sugar, pasteurized milk, embalmed flesh l foods, canned fruits and vegetables, candies, cakes, pies, etc., and expect to render such diets adequate by “supplementing” them with’ oils, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, black strap molasses, honey, yogurt, powdered skimmed milk, cider vinegar, etc.

If we purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from the stores and vegetable and fruit markets, or if we take these from our own gardens and orchards, we refuse to eat them until they have been cooked out of all resemblance to food. Spinach is cooked until it is black and mushy and no one is able to tell from its taste, what it was before cooking; cabbage is boiled until it is unrecognizable; potatoes are peeled, boiled and mashed, apples are baked and then drowned in sugar (white sugar), peaches are stewed and plenty of white sugar added, nuts are roasted, perhaps salted. We eat so little unchanged, unspoiled foods that we can’t possibly have optimum nutrition and, then, we blame our poor nutrition upon the climate. If it were not for the so obvious fact that the same kind of diets produce poor nutrition in warm climates, it might be possible to sustain such a position.

How true it is that he who fills his belly with substitutes often abolishes his hunger for real foods. The food manufacturers and the physicians feed people on counterfeit “foods” so that the people know not the value of the genuine article. It is like the receipt of truth-people reject truth because they are so filled with fallacy that they cannot receive truth- “there was no room at the inn” for the mother pregnant with the savior child. Truth is often born in a manger (and all too often left there to languish) because the inn is so filled with crowds of thoughtless revelers that there is no room there for its birth.

We are offered all manners of supplementary food factors ranging all the way from supplementary roughage to supplementary vitamins, minerals, amino acids, chlorophyll etc. Even if these things possessed all the value their manufacturers say they possess, their use would not make the conventional diet of denatured foods adequate. On the other hand, natural foods will be adequate without the addition of the supplements. It is important that we teach people how to get back to a normal mode of eating rather than that we offer them substitutes for a natural diet. The “compensatory” program is a commercial program, not a program of sane nutritional practice.

It must be emphasized that science does not yet know all of the factors essential to human nutrition, nor does it understand all of the correlations of the various food factors, so that it cannot, at least in its present state of ignorance, put together arbitrarily, a balanced system of diet.

Herbert M. Shelton

thanks herbie

it would be nice if soil was much richer these days

Thanks for posting this Bryan. I’ve always like Shelton’s “Superior Nutrition” and thought of it as a better and condensed version his “The SCIENCE and FINE ART of FOOD and NUTRITION.”

Although I agree and understand where Shelton is coming from in this Chapter from this book, I have to take issue with a few points. The first point that we have to distinguish is that there’s a HUGE difference between someone who promotes taking Superfoods in lieu of Eating a Diet we are Biologically Adapted to Eat and someone who promotes taking Superfoods in addition to Eating a Diet we are Biologically Adapted to Eat. Obviously, we have to Apply the Law of Cause & Effect and Remove Primary Causes, but that does NOT mean that we must ignore the Ripple Effect and NOT address any of those Subsequent Causes that do NOT go away just because we Removed the Primary Causes. Herein lies the Flaw with Herbert Shelton and all of his followers who do not have an original thought, like Doug Graham, for example. A classic example is where I just read this morning something Doug wrote about Zeolite and his response was, “I do not utilize zeolites, snake oil, or magic potions.” It’s statements like this that give Natural Hygiene a bad name and makes people like Doug look like a Fool to everyone who knows anything at all about this amazing Supplement. It’s not hard to see where Doug gets his ideas from based on the Chapter you just posted where Shelton writes, “They are replacing drugs and serums in the armamentarium of the magician.”

Yes, Drugs used by Conventional Medicine do indeed fall under the class of “magic potions” because that’s exactly what they do - most Drugs, like Blockers and Inhibitors, interfere with our bodies’ Communication System and Magically don’t allow the symptoms to Manifest. But Superfoods and other Supplements like Zeolite are not Interfering with our bodies’ Communication System - they are addressing Subsequent Causes, such as extreme Nutritional Deficiencies and Heavy Metal Toxicities, respectively.

So there is a lot we can take away from Shelton’s Chapter on Superfoods and that is that we cannot use the Art without the Science, which is what most people do and I have addressed this problem countless times on this website, especially with powerlier. However, as I have also mentioned countless times, there is a way we can SCREW UP the Law of Cause & Effect and that is when we don’t recognize the Ripple Effect so we can deal with those Subsequent Causes that do NOT go away just because we Removed the Primary Causes.

On a final note, I always write the best sentences in every book I read at the top and bottom of the page it’s written on and the only sentence or part of a sentence that I wrote in this chapter was, “-people reject truth because they are so filled with fallacy that they cannot receive truth-”. And then, I did a quick comparison between the Indexes in “Superior Nutrition” and “The SCIENCE and FINE ART of FOOD and NUTRITION” and I noticed an addition that I made to the Index in “Superior Nutrition” which referenced to something Shelton wrote on page 9 and interestingly, it has been a primary focus of mine ever since I’ve been posting here lately despite it not being well received by some of the obvious Internet Shills. Indeed, this is one of the many reasons why I love Shelton so much because he understood what we’re up against, just like everyone else does who tries to get this message out to the masses, and I refer to this as the Problems of Knowledge.

Anyway, here’s page 9 from Shelton’s “Superior Nutrition”:

“The greatest obstacle to living reform in the earth today, the greatest foe of dietary reform is not ignorance, of which there is much, but the desire of those who profit from the present evil practices and the means of carrying them on, to continue to reap rich financial harvests from pandering to the many harmful practices of the present conventional way of life. We are in serious need of economic and agricultural revolutions. Basic changes are required before we can hope to give every one the materials for a better and healthier life and before we can hope to reach them with the information that they need in order to make use of those materials. So long as our channels of public information and our educational system are in the hands of the, at present, economic royalists, so long as they conceive it to be their duty to serve the special interests of these private owners of the earth, rather than to serve the interests of the people as a whole, the truth about health, disease and healing will make slow progress in reaching the people.” -Herbert Shelton, "Superior Nutrition" p. 9

Peace and Love..........John