The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, gave His followers and Black people in general a divine prescription for prolonged life in “How To Eat To Live,” Book One and Book Two. He taught the importance of eating one meal per day, what foods to eat, what foods to avoid and the best time of day to eat.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad also warned that many of the health conditions we suffer from are a direct result of what we eat. He also cautioned about the many chemicals contained in food and food products.
Recently, two studies linking food preservatives to cancer and type 2 diabetes further confirmed that we must learn how to eat to live, as taught by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
“Poisonous food and water we are now eating and drinking—sometimes too much poison to kill poison that is in our food and drinks. And, maybe it is the wrong poison for us human beings, whether it is in food or in drinks,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad wrote in “How To Eat To Live,” Book One, in the chapter, “Poisonous Food and Water.”
“Take for instance, the use of fluoride, chloride, and sodium, which if not used correctly can destroy our entire life. Maybe it is best to find something else that will clear our water without killing both us and the poison in our food and water,” He continued.
“The scientist should not advocate the use of such poisonous chemicals as fluoride, chloride, and sodium, which may have a bad effect on our brains and our human reproductive organs.
The scientist that uses such poison on human beings wants to either minimize the birth rates or cause the extinction of a people,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad continued.
Today, many foods, food products and beverages contain preservatives, additives and chemicals in an attempt to “preserve” items to give them a longer shelf life or to add flavor. However, at what cost to consumers’ health and bodies?
The cancer study found that eating more of certain common food preservatives, found in processed foods, was linked to a slightly higher risk of getting cancer overall, specifically breast and prostate cancer.
Published in The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) on Jan. 7, it looked at the impact of 58 preservatives on a little over 105,000 cancer-free participants for 14 years.
The type 2 diabetes study also published Jan. 7 in BMJ included over 108,000 participants (79.2% of them women) absent the disease. Researchers studied the impact of preservative food additives, massively used by the food industry globally, and found that some of them raised the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by almost 50 percent.
“Widely consumed preservative food additives—such as sodium nitrite, sulfites, sodium erythorbate—were associated with a higher incidence of cancer and type 2 diabetes,” the reports’ authors wrote.
The findings were based on more than 100,000 French participants enrolled in the NutriNet-Santé study. While both studies focused on food additives in the European market and the participants were French, the authors said the findings might not be “generalized to other groups.”
However, according to CNN, senior author and principal investigator of the study, Mathilde Touvier, stated, “These are very important findings for preservatives that are not only widely used in the French and European markets, but also in the United States.”
In the U.S., the use of preservatives and additives in the food industry is common.
Some common foods that contain some of these preservative food additives examined in the study include processed foods such as industrial pastries, packaged meals and processed meats.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, like his teacher, also warned of the dangers posed by the substances added to America’s food supply.
In Minister Farrakhan’s 1991 five-part series on health, titled “The War on Obesity,” he stated, “The American food industry has gone a long way in destroying the health and well-being of the American people by its misuse of the knowledge of chemistry.
The addition of coloring to change the appearance of food; preservatives to lengthen shelf life; injection of hormones into livestock to produce speedy growth and a fatter animal—the sum of these profit-seeking actions brings in its wake an unprecedented growth of cancer and heart disease.
Both of which have increased more than 250 percent since the beginning of the century and are now the leading causes of death in this country,” said Minister Farrakhan.
These latest French studies continue to spotlight these very real concerns.
Dr. Darnita Muhammad is a family medicine physician. She explained that food preservatives are a vitally important topic for discussion. “These agents that are unseen in our foods (and skin products as well) have been implicated as causal agents contributing to the rise of cancers, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune and neurological disorders, heart disease, and more,” she told The Final Call.
Dr. Muhammad referenced page 93 of “How To Eat To Live,” Book One, in the chapter, “The Safest Way to Eat,” where the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad writes, “America’s markets are loaded with swine, and loaded with vegetables and fruits which are preserved and made to look beautiful by having poisonous chemicals poured upon them.”
She explained some of the history of food preservation. “Food preservation has a long history, from ancient techniques using salt and coolers to centuries old natural methods like canning, dehydration, and fermentation to use of the modern-day substances that unfortunately are mostly harmful man-made chemicals.
The idea of preserving food based upon self-preservation and preparation in the event of an unseen emergency, natural disaster, or other circumstance can be lifesaving,” she said.
However, she cautioned, “Choosing and consuming mostly processed foods (fast foods, deli meats, boxed, bagged, bottled food and drinks, etc.) for convenience is unhealthy and puts you and your family at risk for a myriad of health problems and diseases.”
Dr. Christina X Parks, a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology, reviewed the two studies and told The Final Call that some of the findings were relevant. She believes the problem also lies in the type of food being preserved and stated that more studies will be needed. She stressed that highly processed foods are “basically unclean.”
What has been known for years is that nitrates and nitrites (naturally occurring compounds of nitrogen and oxygen) have been widely used to preserve meats such as summer sausage, meat sticks, and lunch meats, Dr. Parks explained.
Those are broken down in the gut and sometimes in the meat itself, as it sits (in the stomach,” into toxic compounds. That has been known for years, and in fact, that showed some of the strongest correlations,” she said.
She further explained that the conversion of nitrate to nitrite in the body forms compounds, including carcinogenic nitrosamines.
According to the cancer study, she explained that sodium nitrate had 32% increased risk of prostate cancer. Potassium sorbet, another salt, had about 20% correlation with cancer, 26% with breast cancer. Potassium nitrate, 22% increased risk of breast cancer.
“Now that sounds high, but that’s actually a really modest increase, because, in fact, the rates of cancers in these studies were still really low,” she stated.
If one’s takeaway is looking at food labels, then do look at nitrates and nitrites, she recommended. However, she also cautioned that, even when natural preservatives are used, such as rosemary or Vitamin C, the problem could be the food itself.
Dr. Parks, like Dr. Muhammad, cautioned that highly processed meats, already known to be bad for human consumption (like lunch meats, summer sausages) should be avoided. Dr. Parks added that meat specifically breaks down into compounds that can be really bad.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught that, for those who eat meat, it must be clean and of high quality. “If you must eat meat, always eat the cleanest, such as healthy and tuberculosis-free beef. The lamb is the best.
Most beef is too coarse for our stomachs. The lamb is a much finer-grained meat,” He writes on page 11 in Book One in the chapter, “Food God Suggests.” He also stressed that we must eat one meal a day and fast for three days each month.
“We can begin to detoxify this body from some of these harmful chemicals by fasting as taught by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad in “How to Eat to Live,” said Dr. Muhammad. “Also, by eating one meal daily of the best foods, including adding navy beans (to our meal.)
In three days of fasting, you can begin to reset your body, stabilize your diabetes, and boost your immune system. Of course, get your regular check-up with a health care provider before any major change. Walking exercises, breathing, and sunshine are excellent additives to correct and rid oneself of some of the preservative toxins,” she added.
“It takes time to prepare fresh and wholesome foods and to discipline yourself to one meal daily with fasting; however, it is well worth it for our health’s sake,” said Dr. Muhammad.
Final Call staff contributed to this report.