The Evils of Smoking

Today most of us tolerate the smoke blown in our faces as we travel by air, and we try to avoid getting holes burned in our clothing as we ride with cigarette smokers on hotel elevators. Today the press is filled with stories relating to smoking—because they force increases in the advertising budgets of the tobacco companies—in an attempt to offset the truthful disclosures. Recent impressive research seems to point to a definite relationship between smoking and diseases of the heart and blood vessels, to say nothing of its relationship to lung cancer. Mrs. White wrote, “Tobacco is a slow, insidious, but most malignant poison....It is all the more dangerous because its effects are slow and at first hardly perceptible.”—The Ministry of Healing, 327, 328.NADEGW 8.6

Mrs. White recognized the value of mixing a variety of grains. She wrote: “All wheat flour is not best for a continuous diet. A mixture of wheat, oatmeal, and rye would be more nutritious than the wheat with the nutrifying properties separated from it.”—Counsels on Diet and Foods, 321. She recognized the truth from Ezekiel, “Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof” (Ezekiel 4:9). These additions supplement the proteins of wheat bread, as well as increase such essentials as calcium.NADEGW 9.1

In his book, The Geography of Hunger, Josue de Castro has stressed the fact that millions of people in the world are suffering from malnutrition because of poor dietary practices. In parts of the world this is owing to the few foods that are available. In the United States it is caused by the great surplus and poor selection owing to ignorance and the pressures of commercial industries that seek to force their products upon the public by subtle methods of advertising. The people of the world would serve themselves best if they produced part of their foods in their own gardens and if they followed a general plan of a wise leader such as Mrs. White.NADEGW 9.2

Among nutritionists there is an acute awareness of the problem of feeding the ever-increasing population of the world. This has been well summarized recently in the Journal of the New York Academy of Sciences in an article by J. G. Harrar entitled “Food, Science and People.” He notes the increase in the population of the earth from a half billion in the year 1700 to five times this number in 1950. It is hazardous to venture a guess as to what the future holds in regard to population growth, because many developments are in the offing that may reverse the whole trend. Large numbers of chemicals are finding their way into the human food supply in the form of additives, spray residues, drugs fed to poultry and meat animals, as well as radioactive fallout materials such as strontium90. Chemists are well on their way in developing compounds that will produce sterility when added to food supplies.NADEGW 9.3