Something very wrong is going on, something that is killing good people and causing untold suffering to families and communities around the world. Never has such a high percentage of us been afflicted with so many tragic and wasting illnesses. In the past thirty years, a group of diseases has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and many other countries. These afflictions, often collectively referred to as diseases of civilization (DOC), include multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, melanoma, and autism, a once rare birth defect. Because the incidence of these diseases has increased gradually over three decades, we are inclined to accept this as a natural, if unfortunate, part of modern life. But such a lethal trend is not natural; the changes that we have witnessed over the last generation are unprecedented in the history of medical science. French physician Stanislaw Tanchou, the first to observe that cancer was rarely found in hunter-gatherer populations, is credited with coining the term “diseases of civilization” in a paper presented to the Paris Medical Society in 1843. His descriptive term survives to this day because certain diseases have still not been proven to have existed before the “civilized” era, and these conditions continue to be largely absent in modern hunter-gatherer societies.

These are the worst of times, as mankind endures a plague whose point of origin distinctly coincides with the Food and Drug Administration’s 1981 approval of aspartame—an artificial sweetener containing methanol, which is metabolized into deadly formaldehyde within the brain and sinew of all who consume it. I am a food scientist who warned thirty years ago in the scientific literature of the hazards we court by adding large amounts of methanol to our food supply.[#1] I am a professor who taught my students of these dangers. I am an activist who took the FDA to the Supreme Court in an effort to compel it to carry out its mandate and obligation to protect the public. I am still waging this battle and will continue to fight until the salient and suppressed facts have been revealed. To date, I have had little success in engaging the medical community, despite having presented at numerous professional meetings and published on this subject. I have even invented and received patents on novel means of addressing the problem – all to little avail, and with vexingly little explanation or substantive refutation of my central claim that dietary methanol may be the root cause of these and possibly other diseases.

The Book takes the reader where I have been over the last twenty five years and teaches what I have learned in plain English so that they will be able to make their own decisions and food choices.