Eggs are considered an ideal breakfast food and appear on every nutrition chart. This is fine, we recommend them for arthritis too. Unless an allergy prevails or you have a gall-bladder ailment, arthritics should enjoy eggs frequently.
But here’s another case where the charts fell short. Why didn’t they print something about the method of cooking eggs. The nutritional value of eggs is drastically altered by the way they are prepared. For instance, when you scramble eggs you make it impossible for your digestive tract to assimilate the egg yolk properly. Arthritics should rely on boiled three-minute eggs.
MEATS are pictured in brilliant, appetising colours on every “Vitamin Chart.” Yet, you are never told by the diagrams that over-cooking will destroy the very vitamins you are seeking. Arthritics, especially, should beware of tossing out the vitamins in the cooking water. Instead, broil or grill your meats, medium rare.
VEGETABLES should be treated with the same care. Avoid excessive cooking. Use a pressure cooker, or serve vegetables raw, when possible.
WATER is the most neglected item of all when the health chart experts do their art work. We never see a picture of a glass of water along with the colourful foods. Diluting your foods, while they are being digested, can raise havoc with the figures on the chart. Drinking water can reduce the value of vitamins, protein, minerals, etc.
Most of the foods which health charts list do contain water soluble vitamins, as well as oil soluble vitamins. These substances are very important to our bodies. The oil types of vitamins are vitamins A, D, and E. If the oils and fats carrying these vitamins into your body suddenly have their chemical structures changed—because you are simultaneously drinking water—how can these vitamins serve as true vitamins for body maintenance? They have been diluted or practically destroyed.
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Closely associated with the lemon is another fruit, the lime. Most people do not consider actually eating limes. They should not. Arthritis sufferers should even refrain from drinking lime juice or any drink containing that particular juice, because of its drying effect on the bodily oils.
There is still another citric fruit which finds its way into the diet of many arthritics. They have been led to believe that it is rich in vitamin C—and it is. We refer to the grapefruit. It, too, has a severe drying effect on the oil being distributed throughout your body.
When sugar is added to grapefruit, even more disastrous damage is wrought. Note your joint pains as they got worse, your skin as its gets drier. Five years after an arthritic becomes well, grapefruit can be eaten occasionally without too harmful results.
Until then, while the body is trying to correct oil deficiency, grapefruit and grapefruit juice should be omitted. There are many, many fruits—rich in vitamin C—which do not tend to dry out oils. For example, do eat, enjoy and benefit from apples, peaches and pears.
There have been many diets offered by accepted authorities as beneficial to arthritics. Very often you will see citric fruits have been eliminated because of the acid properties. Many other dieticians agree with me on this point.
People with arthritic tendencies have often discovered the “citric truth” by themselves. Sufferers have sometimes recognised the stinging pain which followed their excessive intake of citric fruit. But these victims of arthritis too often ignored the pain signals. Their complaining became known as the “acid myth.”
I repeat, go easy on the use of grapefruit and lemon juice!
Now, let’s go on to discuss the most popular citrus fruit of all. . . .
A popular breakfast is a quick one . . . which a person can gulp down. In their haste some mornings too many arthritics will just drink a glass of orange juice and call it a meal. Unfortunately, when you drink orange juice—hastily or otherwise —it has a drying effect on the skin and joints.
But . . . EATING AN ORANGE IS SOMETHING ELSE AGAIN, it is not so detrimental to arthritics. When you eat an orange, the saliva in your mouth alkalises it. Keep from drinking plain orange juice, because its fruit sugar and citric acid are in a combination which attacks bodily oils.
The orange is only 1 per cent, acidic. The lemon and grapefruit are 7 per cent., with seven times the drying effect.
The longer a person has had arthritis, the more he should abstain from plain orange juice. One year after being fully relieved of pain, the arthritic may eat sections of an orange in a fruit salad. Or an occasional whole orange, well masticated.
EVEN FOR PEOPLE NOT THREATENED BY ARTHRITIS, HEALTH AUTHORITIES RECOMMENDED THAT CONSUMPTION OF ORANGES BE LIMITED TO TWO OR THREE PER WEEK. AS YET, SCIENTISTS DO NOT KNOW HOW MUCH ACTUAL VITAMIN C OUR BODIES REQUIRE.
Concentrated frozen citric juices should be omitted altogether from the arthritic’s diet.
*20\146\2*

Time has now borne out conclusively that lemons are NOT a cure for arthritis. Instead of being helped, many arthritics become worse and some become permanently disfigured. Fruit sugar in any citric juice—particularly lemon juice—has a parasitic affinity for joint and skin linings and pigment. In the case of the joint lining, it may well hasten degeneration and its resulting deformity.
If lemons were the answer, there would not be millions of arthritis sufferers in all parts of the United States. There are lemons for sale in nearly every neighbourhood store in the country—and still the number of arthritics grows larger and larger.
Next, someone discovered that lemon juice in water would help relieve constipation. No doubt this is so. It is said that lemon juice clears the blood. I’d I taps it does—but at a terrible price. Let this be a warning to you if you are tempted by lemons. Observe and gauge joint pain daily. Watch your skin, nails, scalp and hair as they become drier and drier.
Why jeopardize your arthritic body—to rid yourself of constipation by means of lemon and water—when constipation can be conquered in so many other less harmful ways?
In 1947 the reputable Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, issued a warning about water and lemon used for constipation, colds and rheuma-1 ism. Clinically they found that it erodes the enamel of teeth, a very hard substance.
If lemon mixed with water has this awful power against tough tooth enamel, think of the effect of this citric juice in undiluted form! It would be proportionally more disastrous to the body internally.
Medically, we know the acid of the juice is reduced to alkali . . . but in reduction, what price does our poor body pay? The urine, pretty well stabilised at an acid level throughout life, can be alkalised by drinking copious amounts of lemon juice. What a terrifying effect it must have on the bloodstream and its oils? Summed up, lemon juice kills off the lubricating oils we need most—prevents their proper digestion and circulation to our joints!
For arthritics a little lemon juice sprinkled occasionally on a salad or used as a flavouring on fish is condoned. But that is where the use of lemon juice should stop.
Under no circumstances should people with arthritic tendencies indulge in lemonade during hot summer months. If an arthritic is seeking early and lasting health, eating lemons or drinking lemon juice should be forgotten indefinitely.
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Carrying out the trial

At this point our patients should have lost the effect of most drug therapies which they had been on and should be in a fairly suitable condition for the trial. Use of pain-killers will be helping somewhat with aggravated conditions that have arisen through lack of treatment. The reason for specifying that the pain-killers should not be of the aspirin type is that this type is also effective as an anti-arthritic treatment and would influence our results.

Our thirty patients are divided at random into two groups of fifteen and are administered either placebo or active substance over a period of eight weeks. Weekly checks on the condition of each patient are made and recorded. At the end of eight weeks we reverse the treatments, so that those who had been receiving placebo would now be treated with the active substance, and vice versa. Of course, no one other than the holder of the code knows which is which. Weekly conditions of each patient are recorded for the next eight weeks and the trial then ceases. We now have to analyze the data collected and compare active and placebo results for each patient. This is where the weakness of this trial will show up.

Assessing the results

As we are conducting an imaginary trial we will not have any actual results. It will therefore be necessary to look at the trial critically and see what sort of results we could get from it.

Take the case of imaginary patient ‘A’ who, after the three weeks run-down period to clear the system of any previous drug therapy, happens to receive the placebo treatment first.

This patient receives no treatment at all (the pain-killers are not treatment for the disease) for the period of eleven weeks. By this time the patient’s condition has deteriorated to a considerable degree. Now the active substance is given. Suppose that it is effective for this person, and that it begins to rectify the situation. It will probably take the whole eight weeks to bring the patient back towards the condition he or she was in at the start of the trial. Remember, we have at least fifteen patients who will have been treated with placebo first and whose circumstances may well be very similar. If we now do what is required by this trial process, that is, measure the difference between patient condition on active treatment and on placebo, we will find in all probability that there is no significant difference.

Now let us take the case of patient ‘B’, who is also representative of fourteen other patients. This person, after the three weeks of no treatment, begins the trial on the active substance. Again, let us assume that the substance works for our patient and an improvement in condition begins to take place about six weeks from starting the trial. This is looking good: how can we fail with this one? Unfortunately we can, because at eight weeks from the start of the trial we change the patient to placebo. Because our active substance is effective for a long time it continues to maintain the patient in good condition throughout the eight weeks of placebo treatment. Now we come to study our results and find that in this case the patient seemed to do as well, if not better with placebo as with the active substance! Thus, the conclusion must be drawn that the trial has demonstrated no significant difference in the therapeutic effect of the active substance compared with placebo.

Quite so: this is precisely what the trial has demonstrated, but it is not ‘Seapower’, our active substance, that has failed: it is the trial procedure itself.

It is possible to select suitable procedures for trials of substances like our imaginary one. It is also important that the people responsible for setting up such trials do select appropriate procedures. The very reason that this subject has been emphasized so strongly here is that personal experience has shown that this is not always done. The ones who lose out through such negligence are the people awaiting effective new treatments.

Some doctors are now advocating changes in the trials system to take account of failures like the one just described. Not only are better trial designs being suggested, but also shorter periods of involvement are being recommended. Whilst the need for thorough testing of new substances is appreciated, the lengths to which some of the governmental agencies go, possibly in the interests of self-protection, are becoming ridiculous. The banning of saccharin by the United States Food and Drug Administration on the grounds that it is cancer-producing demonstrates this trend. Many things are, or can be shown to be, dangerous if used to excess but are quite safe in normal use. The sun is carcinogenic (cancer-producing): let us hope they do not ban that! It is probable that many of the more practically-minded scientists involved with trial techniques for the safety, and efficacy of materials realize the negative effect that results from some of our present systems and will effect a change for the better.

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