Years later, in his autobiography, McCollum justifi ed his defense of white bread by pointing out that he had suggested adding skim milk powder to it and said that it should be consumed along with “protective foods.”
However, he did not even mention, let alone justify, his using his sci-entifi c credibility to help other large food producers foment fear of a practically non-existent disease: acidosis.⁴¹ A brief look at his role in this helps explain why this gap was no inadvertent oversight.
It is not that there was no such thing as acidosis—it is a rare blood ail-ment that can severely debilitate diabetics. Before the mid-1920s, some doctors claimed to have seen it in non-diabetics, but this was mainly in
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infants whose diets contained too much fat. However, as dieting to lose weight swept the middle class, some physicians began diagnosing acido-sis in adults. They opined that extreme reducing diets forced the body to burn too much fat, causing an imbalance of acid in the bloodstream and the kind of acidosis experienced by diabetics. Other experts, citing widespread complaints of acid stomachs, then expanded the indictment.
Excess acid in the stomach, they said, had made acidosis rampant among a host of people who were not on extreme diets, with dire consequences for their health.⁴²
Leading this new charge was Elmer McCollum, who joined the batt le with a column in McCall’s in February 1928. Until then, the main symp-toms of acidosis were said to be fatigue and lassitude. Now, according to McCollum, they included
lassitude, malaise, nausea, sometimes vomiting, headache, sleeplessness, weakness, and loss of appetite. The muscles ache, the mouth becomes acid with resulting injury to the enamel of the teeth. . . . Some eminent physicians now believe that the disease of the blood-vessels which is responsible for high blood pressure, kidney diseases, gangrene, and apoplexy are the result of prolonged injury due to eating excessive amounts of acid-forming foods.
As a coda, he also att ributed “much of the chronic fatigue” that seemed to aff ect businessmen and housewives to “diets that are too acid.”⁴³
Others added acidosis in children to the list of mothers’ worries. The Washington Post’s medical adviser said, “The child with acidosis is dopey, drowsy, and acts sick. He complains of headaches and the thermometer shows he has fever. His breath is foul; this breath odor has been compared to the sweetish smell of overripe apples. The urine is highly acid. When tested, it is found to contain acetone.” Good Housekeeping told mothers to suspect acidosis when a child suff ering from fever, vomiting, or diarrhea
“becomes relaxed, too quiet, limp or drowsy.”⁴⁴
One would think that pinpointing too much acid in the stomach as the villain would mean big trouble for the large California and Florida citrus fruit producers. But here again McCollum was ready to lend a hand. Using the nutritionists’ mantra, he advised listening to scientists, rather than one’s palate, regarding which foods caused an excess of acid in the blood. When the acids in citrus fruits arrived in the stomach, he said, they quickly turned alkaline, the opposite of acid. “Foods which taste acid do not necessarily form acids in the body. . . . Even lemons and grapefruit, which taste so strongly acid, are actually alkalizers in the body.” Indeed, he said, citrus fruits were among the most eff ective of the
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acid-fi ghters. What, then, caused the surplus of acid in the stomach? It was non-acid foods such as beef, pork, bread, and eggs that were the acid producers.⁴⁵
McCollum’s warnings were reported in major newspapers and maga-zines, helping to ratchet up the scare. A piece in the New York Times Maga-zine said that acidosis had now displaced vitamins as the major nutri-tional concern. “Where once we prated about calories and vitamins,” it said, “we are now concerned with an alkaline balance.” The nutrition col-umnist for the American Journal of Nursing wrote that constipation and acidosis “caused more ill health” in America than any other condition, and repeated McCollum’s advice to combat it with plenty of citrus fruits and lett uce.⁴⁶
Of course, citrus fruit marketers jumped at the chance to promote Mc-Collum’s ideas. Ads for Florida grapefruit producers said that grapefruit was what “the body needs to combat the common foe, Acidosis, for citrus fruit turns alkaline in the human system.” In an advertisement for Sun-kist lemons, the California growers’ organization repeated McCollum’s warning that acidosis was caused by “good and necessary foods such as cereals, bread, fi sh, eggs and meat—all of which are of the acid-forming type.” Luckily, it said, there was “a seeming paradox”: this was that al-though called “acid fruits,” citrus fruits caused an alkaline reaction in the body that counteracted acidosis. The accompanying cartoon showed a manager lamenting that one of his underlings failed to “get ahead” be-cause he lacked “punch.” His problem: “Doctors call it acidosis. Oranges and lemons would do him a world of good—as they have for me.”⁴⁷
McCollum butt ressed the citrus fruit producers’ campaign with in-creasingly dire warnings about the practically fi ctitious ailment. He de-voted a whole chapter to it in the 1933 edition of his popular book on diet and nutrition, saying it was “responsible for a great deal of ill health.” He now added tooth decay to the list and recommended drinking plenty of orange juice as a cure. In 1934 Parents magazine said anxious mothers now described children’s upset stomachs as “a touch of acidosis.” “Every-one looks worried,” it said. “They’ve heard it may have a fatal termina-tion.” The writer Kenneth Roberts, tongue fi rmly in cheek, said that leaf-ing through a pile of new diet books left him “scared.” “If I had acidosis,”
he said, “I was liable to pop off at a moment’s notice with any one of a score of painful and unpleasant diseases.”⁴⁸
But the acidosis scare soon began fading. From the outset, some scien-tists had questioned McCollum’s idea that diet caused excess acid in the bloodstream. Some simple experiments in the early 1930s backed them
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up.⁴⁹ A review of McCollum’s book in a nursing journal in 1934 regrett ed
“the introduction of controversial material [about acidosis] in a book intended for the lay reader.”⁵⁰ Other medical experts now called the aci-dosis scare a fad, saying that it was a rare ailment that would not, in any case, be aff ected by orange juice.⁵¹
The citrus fruit producers, having gott en more mileage out of acidosis than they could ever have hoped for, dropped it and returned to extolling vitamin C.⁵² But McCollum’s warnings of the dire consequences of hav-ing an imbalance of acid- and alkaline-produchav-ing foods in the stomach lived on, particularly in variations on the old idea that it was dangerous to mix diff erent kinds of foods in the stomach.⁵³ For instance, one of the diet books Roberts examined warned that if baked beans, a starch, were eaten with tomato catsup, an acid, “the resulting fermentation causes deadly acidosis.” Another warned against eating corned beef hash be-cause the beef is protein and the potatoes are starch. It was, said Roberts,
“somewhat similar, in its eff ects on the stomach, to a lighted pinwheel.”⁵⁴ As a result of such warnings, the automobile tycoon Henry Ford, a fervid believer in crackpot nostrums, ate only fruits for breakfast, starches at lunch, and proteins for dinner.⁵⁵
A host of radio hucksters turned McCollum’s concept into a gold mine of quack dietary advice. One of the airwaves’ medical messiahs said that
“acidosis and toxicosis are the two basic causes of all disease.” Acidosis, he said, was brought on by eating bad combinations of food, especially starches and proteins at the same time. For $50, listeners could enroll in his correspondence course to learn how to eat foods separately.⁵⁶ An-other radio guru, William Hay—owner of a sanitarium in the Poconos called Pocono Hay-Ven—had a similar message. His best-selling book, Health via Food, said that the root of all disease was acidosis caused by eat-ing protein- and carbohydrate-rich foods together. He also threw in the promise that his acidosis-preventing diet would lead to weight loss, since acidosis sapped vitality and encouraged the accumulation of fat. Later in the century, this would reappear as the popular Beverly Hills Diet.⁵⁷
Of course, all of this took place during the Great Depression, when government nutritionists were trying, with limited success, to use the lessons of the Newer Nutrition to help the millions of people who could not aff ord a healthy diet. But the middle classes were hardly aff ected by this kind of insecurity about food. Instead, they continued to navi-gate the shift ing currents of faddish weight-loss diets.⁵⁸ If they did have other worries about food, it was the nagging suspicion, stimulated by vita mania, that modern food processing was robbing their food of its
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vitamins. As the 1930s drew to a close and what threatened to be a con-tagious war broke out in Europe, eminent experts, supported by the full weight of the government, helped heighten these concerns by warning that processing-induced vitamin deprivation was putt ing the very sur-vival of the nation in peril.