Our desire to “improve” everything and to separate “needed” ingredients from the “unneeded” ones leads us to refining most of our food products.  Our artificially “improved” food only seemingly has the same nutritious qualities as natural food.  Artificial and natural foods have as little in common as silk roses with real ones – they only look similar.  The same difference exists between synthetic and natural vitamins or synthetic margarine and real butter.

The objective of refining food is to make it more attractive commercially.  Cooking and other forms of temperature treatment causes the food to lose its biological information (the total content and composition of chemical substances in natural products) acquired from the Sun, the Earth, and from water.  Our body does not readily recognize and assimilate this sort of food. It has to draw from its own resources in order to make the food useful.  Sugar beets, and sugar acquired from them, are a good example.  Sugar beets are natural plant products containing many vitamins, mineral salts, enzymes, and hormones.  On the contrary, sugar acquired from the beets is thoroughly refined, crystallized, and filtered. (A poison, calcium chloride, is used to make it white.)  It gets into our stomach as a chemically pure substance, sucrose, without any vitamins, mineral salts, or other biologically active substances. Pure sucrose cannot be assimilated; it has to be joined with other substances.  Beets have all the necessary substances in them; sugar does not.  Our body is forced to use its own resources of calcium, iron, and other elements.  This causes tooth decay, diabetes, anemia, etc.  Research suggests that high consumption of sugar causes degeneration of blood vessels and individual cells, mutations, and eventually may lead to cancer.

We do not consume sugar only with our coffee and tea; it is in our candies, biscuits, cakes, and soft drinks.  There are countless products containing sugar.

Because of high sugar consumption, the number of cases of diabetes, anemia, and blood cancers increased rapidly in the last twenty years in all developed countries.  This is why parents and grandparents make a serious error when they treat children with candies and let them acquire a taste for sweets.  The habit may be very difficult to eliminate later in the child’s life.