Something like four centuries ago man’s diet began to undergo a radical change. What he ate before that was European, Asian. Whole-grain barley, various proteins, various wheats and other foods were not necessarily abundant but they made up a radically different diet than modern man consumes.

With the discovery of the New World, for the first time there was an abundance of SUGAR. Up until then sugar came from a few scarce plants and beehives and was far too expensive for any broad general consumption. But the wealth of the West Indies was not really gold. It was the product of the sugar cane: BROWN AND WHITE SUGAR.

Also the Americas gave the world many new plants such as maize (the African’s "mealy meal"), the potato and other carbohydrates and today a startlingly large amount of the European and African diet consists of plants first found in America. Almost all these foods are mainly carbohydrate, which is to say, low on protein.

Thus man’s diet changed. And the changes were in the direction of abundant sugar and carbohydrate and away from a high-protein diet.

And with this change, it could be said, there went man’s pep.

Sugar is a deceptive thing. It appears to give one energy. But it does so by bypassing the body’s production of its own sugar. Alcohol is also deceptive. It apparently bypasses the ability to make sugar and the result of eating it which is why it messes up the liver. In other words sugar in abundance bypassed the basic energy producing mechanisms of the body.

Straight sugar makes the stomach and digestive processes alkaline. This is the opposite to acid. Food needs acid to digest. Therefore, as just one part of all this scene, when one doesn’t eat protein and digest his food he winds up in a state of malnutrition -- a general breakdown of body functions due to lack of adequate nourishment.

Sugar, that is supposed "to produce energy" does so only at the expense of physical health for sugar does not build up a body, it only burns it up.

The result of a heavy intake of sugar and carbohydrates is to feel tired all the time -- no pep. A diet of candy bars and cokes may appear to put energy there but eventually no body is left to burn it!

Well, today they start little babies out on sugar and carbohydrate as an "all right diet." No protein. The result is these fat babies you see ballooning in their perambulators. They are starting life with two-and-a-half strikes on them. The rest of the third strike is added by cokes and candy bars. And there goes the old ballgame. You get a civilization that is tired, no endurance.

The degeneration can be reversed if one knocks off the cokes and candy bars and sugar in the coffee and tea and begins to concentrate on an intake of a good percentage of protein. After a few weeks or months, one starts to feel peppy. The old body has begun to build itself back.

If one is going to run a car, he has to feed it the right fuel and oil. If one is going to run a body it has to be fed the right food and that has to include protein.

We have seen [aboard] a lot of diet fads. That’s what they were. "Eat liquefied carrots and you will fly." "Chomp only vitamin X and you will soar." Well, bad diets like that give dieting a bad name like "crazy." We’ve had food cranks around who only ate hazelnuts or Chinese herbs. Well, that’s a different subject entirely than what I’m talking about. I think those diets shouldn’t even be wished off on the birds.

All I’m talking about is eating your chow instead of living off candy bars, cokes and milk and sugared coffee.

By eating your hamburger and vegetables and leaving alone the candy bars and cokes, you will begin to build up a head of steam. It takes far longer for actual food to build up into energy than it does sugar.

Most of the bodies around got started off on a sugar-carbohydrate baby formula and got to believing that if something tasted sweet it was good. Well, cocaine probably tastes great too, but it won’t build up a body and the pep it imparts is very false indeed as it does so by ripping the body apart.

Man’s diet changed over the last four centuries. And he’s now got a lot of welfare and sick populations. And he sure pushes the stuff which got him into that condition -- sugar and carbohydrates.

America got even for being discovered and raped. She gave the world hordes of new carbohydrates and principally she gave the world abundant raw sugar. An interesting revenge.

L. Ron Hubbard
From "Pep" 

What the dickens is this stuff called cholesterol?

Well, if you think of it as soft butter floating in your arteries, you’ll have a rather traditional view.  But, that's not very accurate!

Cholesterol, the word, can also be defined as "fat."  The first part of the word, "Chole" means that something is related to the bile.  That last part comes from the Greek root "stereos," and means "solid" or "hard."  When cholesterol was first identified, it was found in the gall-bladder (which uses bile) in the form of "gall stones."  These were hard, or solid particles made up of a fatty material combined with alcohol -- Cholesterol.

If you also understand that the great bulk of cholesterol in the body was manufactured BY the body, not taken into the body as part of your diet, you’ll have a more accurate understanding of this stuff.

The liver is the primary source of manufacture of cholesterol. Note the drawing to the side. The liver is actually larger than the stomach and is an extremely important organ in the body. For instance, the liver manufactures cholesterol, mixes it with some other substances which turn it into something called bile. Bile is the substance which is secreted by the liver, some of it is stored in the gallbladder, and eventually pours into the small intestine where it is used to help digest fats that you have eaten.

There have been more lies told by medicine and the media about cholesterol, probably, than any other health subject.

You’ve generally heard that cholesterol is responsible for the cause of heart disease and that your diet, too rich in fats, is responsible for high levels of cholesterol in your blood, and therefore responsible for heart disease.

First, let me give you a quick idea about life before margarine.

Many decades ago, when your great-grandfather lived, there were two common forms of fat in the diet. The rich ate butter, the poor ate lard. Both are natural products from animals.

Lard is taken from dead pigs.

Butter is taken from live cows.

You can choose your animal.

Let’s look a bit at butter.

You are a farmer, in the 1800’s and you have a couple of cows. You milk them early in the morning, and again at night. You turn them out to eat grass during the day, and put them in the barn at night.

The milk you get from the cow could be squirted from the teat of the cow directly into a metal pail. You might want to keep the flies out of the milk. You put it into a cool place for a while and when you then take a look at it you’d find that the "milk" has separated into two different parts.

There is a thick part of the milk, floating on the top. We call that cream.

Then, there is a thin part of the milk, below the cream. We call that the skimmed milk.

Let’s simply pour off (or "skim off") the cream from the top, trying hard to not get any of the thinner milk below. We pour this into another pail. Now, we have a pail with a quart or two of cream.

Whether that cream is "rich" or not so rich depends on the type of cow and the type of food being eaten by the cow. But, most of the time that cream in the pail can be used to make butter.

How?

Well, you take a stick, place it in the pail, and stir it around, rapidly. In fact, you might say that you beat the stick through the cream, fast. This fast beating has a special name -- called churn or churning. You do that for a while and guess what? The stuff in the pail separates into two different substances. There are gobs of butter now forming, probably sticking to the stick. And, there is a thin liquid -- the left-over stuff.  The picture on the right is an actual churn -- put the cream in the jar, screw on the top and turn the handle -- very fancy compared to a stick in a pail.  Both work!

Butter Churn

The butter in that pail is ready to eat. You don’t have to process it any further at all. You might use a large spoon to scoop up the stuff and place it on some wax paper in little butter patties. You could then put that butter, on the wax paper, into the ice box so that the butter would get hard. You could then take those patties of butter and wrap them in pretty foil paper and sell them to restaurants as butter patties.

You still can find butter patties in most restaurants.

You can make butter this way. Or, you can buy an expensive automatic milking machine, and run the milk through pipes to a gadget that removes any dirt that got into the milk, and then pipes the cream to a fancy churn where the cream is turned into butter. Then, if you invest enough in machines, the butter will be automatically molded into patties, wrapped, and packed into cartons, placed in the cooler awaiting shipment to the restaurants.

Now, let’s take a look at this stuff. Back in the 1800’s, you’d mostly get butter by going to a farmer and maybe taking your own butter tub. He’d fill the tub with butter and you’d pay him.

The butter industry was a big one, but it was certainly not controlled by a small number of producers whereas the margarine industry is controlled by only a few very large companies.

As prosperity and living standards both improved, we started getting butter being produced in many mechanized dairy farms, and shipped in refrigerated trucks to supermarkets where we could buy it in one pound cartons.

That was about the scene in the 1930’s. Then, during World War II, butter, for some reason, seemed to be in short supply and you had to have a ration coupon to buy the stuff.

Butter	Choosing	Margarine
After that war, butter was in good supply and people took for granted that they could buy as much butter as they wanted in the stores. Back in 1947, after the war, butter was plentiful, but sold for $1.00 per pound when margarine was only $ .17 per pound.

At about the same time, there were the cotton growers who had good use for the cotton, but no use at all for all those devilish seeds. They realized that the seeds contained oil, but there was no market for the stuff.

Lard would be far more healthy for you to eat than margarine. If, after reading this next section you still eat margarine, then you should ask for a refund on the purchase price of this Book!

What was in there was OIL. Some smart guy got the idea that if you could get the oil out of these seeds and beans you could sell the oil and compete with the olive oil market, maybe even the butter market. Some chemists got involved -- I won’t try to give you the whole history of the creation of oleo margarine -- and before you know it this margarine stuff could be produced out of the oil squeezed from cottonseeds, soy beans or many other vegetable sources, even eventually from coconuts -- a product in great supply in cheap-labor countries and not all that much used as a food.

All you had to do was squeeze these seeds or beans and you got the oil out. You had to then mix a bunch of chemicals in with the oil, but eventually you got margarine.

Margarine was invented by a Frenchman in 1869.

When you got down to the paper and pencil work, it looked like the amount of money tied up in a pound of butter (cows, grass, milking, churning, etc.) was vastly higher than what it would cost to produce an equivalent amount of fat from cottonseed oil -- even when that cottonseed oil was converted into the solid stuff -- oleo margarine.

Butter was selling for $1.00 per pound and the cottonseed people saw how they could make a pound of margarine to sell for about $ 0.17. There was obviously a big market here if the butter eaters could be convinced to eat the left-overs from the cotton plantations.

There were problems, of course.

The butter often turned out to be a pretty yellow color. Not always! The dairy farmers had gotten together, even got laws passed, so that they could all agree on a standard yellow color for good butter. Then, when some poor cow produced milk which made butter that was too pale, the farmers just added yellow dye to make the butter yellow.

Now, when the margarine makers got done, their product was a nice natural color -- about the color of lard.

This wouldn’t do!

Butter was an upscale product.

The plot thickens -- just like butter in the churn.

The margarine people had an ugly white product that looked like lard and it was hard to sell it against butter. The butter people, seeing the face of their enemy, got laws passed to prevent the margarine people from putting any of that artificial yellow dye into THEIR product (even though the farmers were putting it into the pale butter).

So, the margarine makers fought back -- selling the ugly white stuff in one pound chunks, wrapped to include a little yellow pill. The instructions said to take the white ugly stuff, put it in a bowl, let it soften a bit at room temperature, and then mix in the yellow powder in the little pill. If you mixed it right, the white stuff turned into pretty yellow -- looking quite a bit like butter.

But what a bother!

If you are old enough, you can remember the days back in the 1940’s and 1950’s when margarine was sold with the little yellow dye tablets!

Now the story gets sinister. The oil people tended to be rich and big. The butter people tended to be small and not so rich. The oil people also were willing to corrupt the governmental processes. The dairy farmers were inherently naive -- not scheming enough.

Here’s the story about margarine:

You start with some cottonseeds -- put them in a gadget which will apply physical pressure on the seeds and allow the oil to be pressed out.

You apply the pressure. You squeeze the seeds!

Hurrah! You get some oil out of the seeds.

But, when you calculate you realize that you are getting only about 5% of the oil that is in the seed. The rest is still in the seed.

You do it again, with new seeds. This time you press harder. You put lots of pressure. This time you notice that the oil coming out is hot. You’ve put so much pressure on the seeds that you have heated them up!

But, you still only got less than 10% of the oil that is actually in the seed.

Incidentally, the first try, squeeze the seeds, but no heat -- that is called cold pressed oil in the stores. It’s much more healthy for you than the stuff that has been heated. Heated oil is bad stuff. I’ll comment on that later.

Now, if you are a cotton plantation owner, with all those cottonseeds going to waste, or if you are a scheming chemist, you figure that you can get ALL that oil out of the seeds.

Legally you could use gasoline because the government approves a standard for the types of solvent that can be used in this process. As long as you get most of the solvent out of the oil when you finish, you can use gasoline, hexane, benzene, ethyl ether, carbon disulfide, carton tetrachloride or methylene chloride. Isn’t that comforting! As long as there is not more than 100 parts per million of gasoline left in the oil, it’s legal.

So, you pour in the solvent -- turn on the heat and the pressure and you finally get about 95% of the oil out of the cottonseeds.

When you understand this process you will realize that the solvent, at this point, is worth more per gallon than the oil! So, in order to make this process economical we have to have a way to get the solvent out of the oil.

That simply takes more heat. They heat the mess up to an even higher temperature. The solvent is "boiled off" and caught to be used again. It’s good to think that your margarine is made with re-cycled solvent!

They are done, almost. They have cottonseed oil with most of the gasoline removed.

If you were to look at this stuff you would vomit! It is an evil dark color and smells terrible. So, they have chemical deodorants and bleaches they now throw in.

Hurrah! They now have a nice colorless liquid oil that has no smell. They now add in some color because customers don’t believe in colorless vegetable oil.

Well, there is a certain limited market for liquid oil, made as I’ve described it above. But, that is not butter. How, do you suppose, do they fiddle with that oil to make it solid, and color it so it looks like butter, and add more chemicals to make it taste like butter? It would also rot if preservatives were not added. But, fear not, the FDA is at the guard!

The general answer is more chemicals. For instance, lye is used as part of the process.

More specifically, the factory bubbles up some hydrogen through the oil. Some of the hydrogen sticks to the oil particles and makes those oil particles stick to one another. Miracle! The oil becomes solid. That’s why they call that stuff hydrogenated.

Now, you may have guessed, it really isn’t food by any reasonable definition. But, per the government, it is OK to put in the supermarket, next to the real stuff. It’s safe on the unrefrigerated shelf because, you see, it won’t melt! It won’t melt in your stomach either! They put it in the refrigerated case just to make you think it’s like butter!

Now that you have all that straight, I’ll bet a nickel that you are not so likely to eat margarine any more. When you hear the rest of the cholesterol story, you may feel that your government has betrayed you to the special interests of the cotton growers and chemical factories.

Congratulations on waking up!

Here’s a letter I received from Blaine and Sabra G of Shelby, North Carolina who quit eating margarine after reading the First Edition of this Book, and had other good reports besides:

Back in the 1940’s margarine was a very unattractive food product. By 1950 the stuff was being cooked up, in the sense of a master plan, in the chemical laboratories. The butter people, however, still had the big advantage.

The margarine was that ugly white color. The margarine makers won that battle, got the tax on margarine removed and got the color restrictions removed.

By 1957 margarine consumption was larger than butter consumption.

Now, of course, your reality is that margarine promotes the health of your heart while butter is bad -- and, of course, the margarine is a pretty yellow color.

You probably also have the reality that bread, pasta and fruits are excellent sources of nutrition. They are, of course, far superior to sugar and coke. BUT, man, today, is not getting enough protein in his diet, and is getting too much carbohydrates.

The extra fat you might take into your body, in cream and animal fat will do you far less harm than the extra carbohydrates you take in, in the form of processed foods, starches, sugar and junk foods.

Butter is far better for you than margarine, but this concept extends far beyond butter. Man needs a change in his diet -- towards more proteins and less carbohydrates.

Well-done research shows that consumption of margarine increases the chances of cancer. Certainly there is no evidence that butter or animal fat has anything to do with causing heart disease.

How did this all come about?

There were certain people who I identify in this Book, and who I shall call the original master planners! Read on to find out who they were!

Footnotes

L. Ron Hubbard, Pep

Grateful acknowledgment is made to L. Ron Hubbard Library for permission to reproduce selections from the copyrighted works of L. Ron Hubbard.

Butter Churns are now usually collected as valuable antiques.  Click Here to visit a site that offers butter churns.

Butter Churns have played a big part in the early rural family homes. From the turn of the century and until after WW II. By 1950, the making of butter was taken over by the large Creameries Company . The advent of electricity in rural America (REA) soon was instrumental in the demise of home made butter.