Many foods today, particularly all processed meats, are preserved with these toxic chemicals. They are used on fresh meats to enhance the color. Even baby foods contain nitrates. Also, nitrate fertilizers, commonly used today, contaminate the soil and pollute the water supplies.

Nitrosamines, formed in the body from ingested nitrates and secondary amines, are extremely toxic and proven carcinogenic substances. They cause cancer in the liver, stomach, brain, esophagus, bladder, kidneys and several other organs. They also cause high blood pressure and heart disease.

Nitrates and nitrites interfere with the conversion of carotene into vitamin A in the body, and even destroy the body’s own storage of vitamin A.

Protection

1. Vitamin С. Large doses up to 5,000 mg. a day. In acute cases of poisoning, 2,000 mg. every one and one-half hours for one day, then reduce to 5,000 mg. a day. A recent study conducted at the University of Nebraska’s Eppley Institute For Cancer Research, showed that vitamin С can effectively neutralize and destroy nitrites in the stomach, and prevent their conversion into the nitrosamines. Vitamin С should always be taken in large doses when nitrite containing foods have been eaten. It is best to use vitamin С daily as a preventive measure, as these toxins are hard to avoid these days.

2. Vitamins B-complex, A, E and Lecithin are other substances that have been found to be helpful in neutralizing or minimizing the damaging effect of nitrates and nitrites.

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GENERAL HEALTH

Pain, rest, and inflammation, then, are protective devices, guarding our bodies against injuries. It seems certain that the greatest injuries sustained are the results of infection. Our chief infections are from bacteria, animal parasites, and viruses.

Probably most of you think of bacteria as little “bugs” causing disease. You are mostly wrong. In the first place they are plants; and secondly, the different kinds of bacteria in the world are as the sands of the sea, and only a few kinds cause disease. The others have useful jobs and animal life could not exist without them.

Somewhere about the time of our Civil War, Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, showed that fermentation and putrefaction always were caused by living organisms. If I remember rightly, the first disease that he showed to be produced in this way was a blight attacking silk worms. Quickly after that, many diseases attacking human beings were shown to be due to bacteria, a particular kind producing each disease.

These latter bacteria are called pathogenic, which means disease producing and they attack only living tissue. They have been well advertised. Probably less well known to you are the saprophytic, which work only on dead organic matter, that is, plants and animals, and break it up. If it were not for them, the whole world would soon be buried in dead matter.

Innumerable are the good deeds done by bacteria. Collecting nitrogen is one of the chief of these. The animal body is largely protein, and the distinctive thing about protein is that it contains nitrogen. The supplies of nitrogen on the earth are limited but the air is mostly nitrogen. Certain bacteria collect this air nitrogen for the plants and then it comes automatically to us.

Even in the body there are many bacteria that do us no harm but are actually necessary for our health. One of the bad things about the modern antibiotic treatment is that not only the disease-producing bacteria are killed off but also the helpful ones suffer at times the same fate with bad results for us. One unfortunate fellow that I know was given penicillin and for some weeks was miserable with a sore throat and cough. After a heavy steel instrument was put through his mouth and throat and a piece cut out of a vocal cord, it was found that, the normal bacteria having been killed off, the yeast took that opportunity to grow in abundance and irritate him.

So you see that you must be careful how you condemn and chastise whole groups, either of people or bacteria.

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GENERAL HEALTH