Sawdust Pudding (July/August 1996 | Volume: 47, Issue: 4)

Sawdust Pudding

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Authors: John Steele Gordon

Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

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July/August 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 4

In 1 Timothy, Paul advises his young disciple: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and for thine often [i.e., common] infirmities.” It might amuse Paul to learn that, after nearly 2000 years, the United States government finally agrees with him. In its most recently issued guidelines for nutrition, the federal government acknowledged that a modest intake of alcohol is not harmful and might even have benefits for the heart.

 

This is an astonishing development. After all, if there has been one consistency in dietary advice through the years, it has been —to use the title of an amusing book on food fads—"If you like it, don’t eat it.” Virtually everything that people regard as delicious or pleasurable, from cream to gin, has been regularly denounced by diet “experts,” beginning at least as far back as Pythagoras—a vegetarian as well as a mathematician —in the sixth century B.C.

Heaven knows, there have been few other consistencies. Hardly a single food that is extolled as the very elixir of life itself in one book is not excoriated as the purest poison in another.

This raises an interesting question. Why is so much that is written about nutrition, even at the tail end of the most scientific of centuries, such selfevident twaddle?

There are two reasons, I think. The first is that it has only been in this century that nutrition became a science at all. The word vitamin, for instance, entered the English language only in 1912, when these substances were first being chemically analyzed and their role in human nutrition determined. And there are still vast gaps in our scientific knowledge, largely because of severe ethical constraints on experimenting on human beings. As a result, we know much more about the real nutritional needs of, say, chickens than we do of our own species.

This has left plenty of room for the philosophers and cranks, who dominated the field of nutrition in the nineteenth century, to continue to be influential, aided and abetted, of course, by the gullible, often ignorant, and always headline-hunting media.

The second reason is that there appears to be a nearly bottomless market for nutritional nonsense, just as there is for astrological advice. Hundreds of diet books are published every year in this country. Their authors crisscross the land on lecture tours to feed this longing for a Rosetta stone to the secret of good health and longevity and to make very tidy incomes in the process. It will not surprise the readers of this column to learn that the man who first discovered this market, and exploited it profitably, was an American. His name was Sylvester Graham.

Graham was born in West Suffield, Connecticut, on July 4, 1794. His father was 72 at the time and had already sired 16 children by two wives. He had been the minister at the local church for fifty years