For several chapters I have been familiarizing you with protein and explaining why protein is your first dietary need. Actually, the history of proteins is so old that it is new. There were no nutrition scientists or health professors warning our prehistoric caveman ancestors that if they wanted to be alert and powerful enough to survive the incredible dangers of life in their era, they had to “eat their protein every day.” What these ape-men ancestors did was take a piece of meat, most likely raw or undercooked, and devour it. It was their instinct to forage for food that satisfied their hunger cravings and kept them strong enough to face the physical challenges of their rigorous lives. Even today, the instinct for protein, man’s best energy food, is strong among primitive peoples, although the supply of such foods available to them may be in short supply. the most primitive

Tribes living in regions of Africa where the game of wild animals is not abundant enough to satisfy their instinctive appetite for meat, try to satisfy this craving by eating grubs and caterpillars, catching birds, mice and ground squirrels. “Unpleasant eating,” you say. And I agree. But the protein, however, is an appeaser to the hungry native’s craving for power foods.

With all the abundant sources of tasty protein-rich foods available to us, we can afford to look down on the disgusting habit of hungry Africans eating caterpillars and mice. But now I am going to surprise you: Between our national habit of gorging ourselves on starchy and sugary foods and gulping down soft drinks, and the natives’ taste for worms and vermin, early black man has more nutritional justification for his choice than we do for our poor diets in this land of “culture and enlightenment.” At the very least, Africans stick to natural protein foods that provide energy, while we are indulging an artificially created appetite for starchy and sugary foods that are doing more to make us old men and women long before our time, and weaken us as a nation, than any other factor. Please do not get me wrong. I enjoy a slice of pie, a slice of pie, a sweet treat, or a bowl of spaghetti as much as anyone. But I recognize these artificial foods for what they really are: dissipations, not nutrition. I realize these heavy starches and sugars shorten life, they do not preserve youth.

Life would be pretty boring if we always did what we should. Of course, you’d be so much better off never letting another mouthful of rich, starchy, artificial food pass your lips. But you’re going to fall out of favor anyway, even as I sometimes do myself. And it’s much better for your psychology not to mention your opinion of your willpower, if you’re given a 1 percent margin for “nutritional sin”! That’s why I always include a 1 percent dissipation margin in my Eat-and-Grow-Younger program. But you must keep it on the sidelines, and not your main room.

There is a right time to err on sugars and starches, but that time is not the usual time for meals. If you feel you have to munch on a piece of candy or eat a slice of cake, do it at very sporadic intervals, between meals, and far enough from your next meal that you don’t lose your appetite for youth-protecting protein foods. But never, if you want to get any benefit from this Eat-and-Grow-Younger regimen, include heavy starches with your high-protein meals. In the menus prepared for you in Part II, I have provided desserts that are both appetizing and nutritious. Your food values ​​are calculated on that day’s total protein nutrition, so if you sneak in a starchy dessert (pure starch, no vitamins, no minerals, and certainly no protein) instead of the ones pictured, you’re only kidding yourself. Like many other scoundrels, Starch has several aliases. When he wants to curry favor with his unsuspecting victims, he assumes the very formal name of carbohydrates. And when he wants to appear at his most tempting moment, he turns to sugar. But it is like the starch that is commonly known. Starches and artificial sugars are spoilers. They sabotage your youth, your mental agility, your power to be a vigorous, radiant person, glowing with health and youthful energy. They stealthily undermine your sexual powers. Like thieves in the night, they steal your good looks. Unnecessary aging begins with addiction to starch. Yes, that’s the right word, because it’s an addiction, nothing less. More than half of the American population is held on a perpetual drunk: a sugar crash. The ardent member of the anti-saloon league who points the pious finger at the town drunk, and then goes home to eat three meals a day of heavy starch dishes (cakes, pies, rich puddings, plus chewing sweets and swallowing sugary drinks) is as intemperate as the old drunk who gets drunk at the corner tavern. Any doctor can verify this excess in starches as a true addiction from his years of experience with the deception done by obese or diabetic patients who are supposed to abstain from rich and artificial foods. Due to their long-standing addiction, these “food drinkers” cannot stop eating a bite here, a serving there, even though their health – their very life – depends on a drastic reduction in the consumption of sweets and rich foods.

Doctors have discovered that no chronic alcoholic going through “the cure” can come up with more excuses for cheating than these starch drunks. I am justified in calling these cravings an addiction, because carbohydrates (sugars and starches) are converted in the human body into a type of sugar that, in large quantities, gives the same “high” or satisfaction that an alcoholic experiences when giving in to his abnormal cravings. The sweet habit takes hold with a control almost as tenacious as certain drugs. Anything to achieve that temporary feeling of energy and buoyancy, no matter how costly the habit may be to the body in the long run. The nervous system of a person continually drunk on starch can be just as surely weakened as that of a chronic alcoholic.

But I have to be careful not to give all the carbs a black eye, because like many villains, our bad man also has a good side. Carbohydrates found in vegetables, fruits, milk, whole grains and seed cereals are good carbohydrates provided by natural sources. These foods also contain variable amounts of protein (something artificial starches are completely lacking), as well as valuable minerals and vitamins, and provide a necessary contribution to your Eat-and-Grow-Younger diet. Only when carbohydrates stray too far from the “straight and narrow path” of good nutrition do they become harmful. You certainly won’t be advised to pass up all the sweets in this Eat-and-Grow-Younger program. Instead, it will turn into sweet treats that, before long, will have you scoffing at a gooey cake made with white sugar and white flour. The flavors of the natural delicacies brought to you are not only “fit for the gods” but are sweets that actually help you stay young. “How sweet are these?” questions, half curious, half skeptical. Later I will put some recipes. But first I want to make sure you understand the nature of artificial carbohydrates, which, I bet, have made up about 95 percent of your sugar and starch intake for many years.

You’re not alone in this serious nutritional mistake, as it’s an accepted American custom to serve a menu like this: French fries, meat, white bread, artificially flavored gelatin salad, chocolate cake, and coffee (sweetened, of course, with white sugar). I am not citing this as an implausible menu that is rarely found on a table. This is a menu copied verbatim from a newspaper article dated February 18, 1951, describing the foods on the food line of the enlisted men’s mess hall at a large military camp in the East, a place where nutrition was supposed to be scientifically better. There was, however, white bread made from devitalized grain, a salad made with an artificially flavored gelatin colored with coal tar dyes and sweetened with white sugar (like most artificially flavored prepared gelatin desserts), chocolate cake made with more devitalized white sugar and more white flour, with even more refined white sugar in the coffee. No, in fact, we Americans should never worry about not getting “enough” carbs. Our danger comes from consuming too many carbohydrates of the wrong kind.