Explorers would carry enormous quantities of white flour, rice, and sugar on their travels and would trade them or give them away to the natives they met along the way.*27 In The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin tells how the expedition’s members persuaded Aborigines in Australia to hold a dancing party with “the offer of some tubs of rice and sugar.” As early as 1892, the Barrow Eskimos were already described as having “acquired a fondness for many kinds of civilized food, especially bread of any kind, flour, sugar, and molasses.” These foods remained primary items of trade and commerce with isolated populations well into the twentieth century.†28

Until the last few decades, the nutritional debate over the excessive refining of flour and sugar had always been about whether the benefits of digestibility and the pleasing white color outweighed any potential disadvantages of removing the protein, vitamins, and minerals. In late-nineteenth-century England, the physician Thomas Allinson, head of the Bread and Food Reform League, wrote: “The true staff of life is whole meal bread.” Allinson was among the first to suggest a relationship between refined carbohydrates and disease. “One great curse of this country,” wrote Allinson, “is constipation of the bowel which is caused in great measure by white bread. From this constipation come piles, varicose veins, headaches, miserable feelings, dullness and other ailments…. As a consequence pill factories are now an almost necessary part of the state.” Allinson’s chain of cause and effect from white bread to constipation to chronic disease was given credibility in the late 1920s by the innovative and eccentric Scottish surgeon Sir Arbuthnot Lane in a book entitled The Prevention of the Diseases Peculiar to Civilization. The hypothesis would hold a tight grasp on a school of British medical researchers for decades to come.

The preferred explanation for how sugar, white flour, and white rice might perpetrate disease emerged from a great era of nutritional research in the early twentieth century. In 1912, the Polish-born biochemist Casimir Funk coined the term “vitamine” (the “e” was later dropped) and speculated that vitamins B1, B2, C, and D were necessary for human health. During the next quarter-century, researchers continued to discover new vitamins essential to health and identified a host of diseases—such as beriberi, pellagra, rickets, and scurvy—as caused by specific vitamin deficiencies. Beriberi results from a deficiency in thiamine (vitamin B1), which is lost in the refining of polished rice and white flour. This led to the suggestion that even a disease like cancer could be a kind of deficiency disease, caused by vitamin starvation, as the journalist (and future homeopath) J. Ellis Barker called it in his book Cancer: How It Is Caused, How It Can Be Prevented (1924).