As a physician, if a therapy or medication makes a patient feel better, and if that patient's blood chemistries and other laboratory test results also improve, then I am comfortable that the right thing has been done. However, I do like to see the objectivity of such test results improving before definitively concluding that a given inter-
Refined Sugar: The Toxic Treat 45
vention was appropriate. Many people are so desperate to get better that they can actually rationalize that they are better. However, blood chemistries improve only when something positive has really happened inside the body. I certainly never disregard the importance of anybody's sense of well-being after an intervention, but I always feel the obligation to let them know if their physiology and general bodily function also seem to be improving. This is not to underestimate the power of the mind and its influence over the intangible pathways of energy flow in the body when people choose to treat themselves with nonmedical therapies or different forms of spiritual healing. Certainly, a positive mental attitude is felt by many to facilitate the healing process. Presumably, when such improved healing really takes place, there must be some associated improvement in some specific laboratory tests. Furthermore, if the improved healing represents a real, permanent change, the treatment or therapy that produced it must be able to withstand the ongoing scrutiny of long-term laboratory testing in the follow-up of the patient.
Melvin E. Page, D.D.S., found that ingested sugar had significant and consistent effects on certain blood chemistries.3 Dr. Page found that proper nutrition could stabilize and even reverse many disease processes, in conjunction with minimal hormonal and supplemental therapies. He served as a mentor to Dr. Hal Huggins, whose work I described in chapter 2. Dr. Huggins took Dr. Page's work a big step forward by adding the removal of toxic dental materials to the nutritional regimen. The toxin removal appeared to accelerate the rate at which positive results were obtained in the patients.
Sugar consistently affects the serum levels of calcium, phosphorus, glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol in a fairly direct manner. More indirectly, due to the negative impact sugar has on immune function, sugar ingestion will also affect the serum globulin levels, lymphocyte counts, and the liver enzyme levels to a limited degree. This negative effect that sugar has on immune function certainly helps to explain the increased incidence of endometrial cancer seen
46 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health
in obese diabetic women. Of course, obesity and diabetes are both sugar-related conditions. Shoff and Newcomb demonstrated that women who were both obese and diabetic were three times as likely to develop endometrial cancer as slim, nondiabetic women.4 Sugar ingestion can have a negative effect on even a larger number of blood tests than those just mentioned, but these are among the tests affected that are most commonly reviewed by doctors.
Dr. Page found that his patients were healthiest when their calcium-phosphorus ratio was about 2.5 to 1. When this ratio was higher, as it would become upon the eating of sugar, he considered the body to be in a "degenerative" mode. This ratio has always strongly correlated with clinical health in patients followed after their dental toxicity had been addressed. Sugar ingestion, too rapid a rate of detoxification, or the exposure to new toxins would reliably foul up this very important ratio.
Dr. Page also made the very important observation that caffeine ingestion raises the sugar (glucose) level in the blood! For this reason, caffeine avoidance has to be given the same serious consideration as sugar avoidance. Even though some of the increase in blood sugar resulting from the caffeine ingestion is released from internal storage sites and not newly absorbed from the digestive system, the harmful effects of the sugar spike into the bloodstream will still be felt. And for those more concerned with weight than with health effects, caffeine can also serve to increase the appetite, and larger appetites are counterproductive to losing weight. Caffeine is so much more than just a stimulant that keeps you awake or makes you "hyper." But more about caffeine and its multiple effects a bit later.
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