FURTHER EXCERPTS FROM THE CLOSING SUMMARY

MR. BARTLETT: I would conclude, then, that you think benzoic acid as a preservative is not necessary.

DR. WILEY: I think you forecast my argument very well.

MR. ADAMSON: Before you became a chemist, you saw women make catsup and put it up hot in sealed bottles and keep it a long time, didn't you?

DR. WILEY: Yes, sir.

MR. ADAMSON: Without putting anything in it?

DR. WILEY: Excepting the ordinary spices and condiments. I want to call the especial attention of this committee to this argument which I am presenting. I will state it again without reading from my manuscript, so as to make it perfectly distinct.

The human body is required to do a certain amount of normal work. That amount of normal work is a beneficial exercise of these organs. If you diminish the normal work of an organ you produce atrophy--lack of functional activity. If you increase it hypertrophy ensues, and increase of functional activity. Nearly all of the organs that wear out do so from one of those causes, not from normal exercise of their functions. Therefore, assuming that the food of man, as prepared by the Creator and modified by the cook, is the normal food of man, any change in the food which adds a burden to any of the organs, or any change which diminishes their normal functional activity, must be hurtful.

MR. ESCH: If the organs were always normal, death would not ensue?

DR. WILEY: I will not go so far as that, Mr. Esch. I do, refer to longevity, though, and I believe this with all my heart, that when man eats a normal food normally the length of human life will be greatly extended. That is what I believe. But if we consume abnormal food abnormally we shall lessen the length of human life.

MR. TOWNSEND: Who is going to define normal food; there is a great difference of opinion about that?

DR. WILEY: I will admit that.

MR. MANN: Doctor, do you think the action of eating cranberries with turkeys is detrimental to health in any way or to any degree?

DR. WILEY: I will answer that as categorically as I can. I do not believe that a healthy organism is going to receive any permanent injury or measurable injury by eating cranberries because they contain benzoic acid. And I want to add this, that it is not because they contain benzoic acid that they are wholesome, but that if they did not contain it they would be more wholesome than they are.

I want to accentuate this point: I noticed very many questions from many members of the committee which lead me to think that you have this feeling, that if a substance does not hurt you so that you can measure it it is not harmful. That does not follow at all. Take this one substance of benzoic acid. Benzoic acid never takes any part in the formation of tissue, and its. degradation product is hippuric acid, which is a most violent poison. If the kidneys should cease to act for twenty-four hours there is not a man on this committee who would not be at death's door from the hippuric acid and the urea which would be in the blood. Hippuric acid is perhaps far more poisonous than urea; it is a deadly poison. Therefore nature gets rid of it directly it is formed, otherwise health would be destroyed.

Now, is there force in the argument, gentlemen, that in view of the fact that this degradation product comes from the natural foods which we eat--and I am not criticizing the Creator at all for putting them in the food--then benzoic acid, which occurs in natural foods and of which the degradation product is a violent poison if increased by an infimitesimal amount, and although we may not be able to note any injury coming from it, yet should we be advised to use it? There is a subtle injury which will tell in time. For instance, a mathematician desires to make a curve to express inflnitesimally small values which only the mathematician can consider, and to do that he has to have experimental evidence. He can not experiment at the small end of his curve; it is impossible. He experiments upon the part of the curve that he can measure, fixes the ordinates and the abscissas with the points that he can measure. Then he draws his curve, passing into the infnitesimally small values. And it is the same with the substances added to food. You must construct your curve on data which you can measure, and then you draw your curve down to the inflnitesimally small. That curve is a curve the moment it varies from zero, although you can not see it or measure it. If you add any substance to food--add, I say--which produces a poisonous degradation product, or adds one additional burden to the secretory organs, you have changed that infinitesimal small part of your curve that you can not measure, but the change is there all the same.

MR. MANN: Take the case of cranberries. Does benzoic acid in the cranberries to the extent that the benzoic acid exists injure cranberries as a food?

DR. WILEY: It is so small. that you can not measure its harmful effects.

MR. MANN: But to the extent that it exists at all; or that the other values in cranberries as a food in the normal use of them overcome the injurious effects of benzoic acid. If that be the case, might not that be the case of other preservatives in other foods?

DR. WILEY: What is true of one is true of all.

MR. MANN: But with artificial preservatives. Might not the case arise where, although the food is injured to the extent in which the preservative exists, yet it has preserved the food so that it is better food, the total product is better than the food would have been without the preservative. That is what we want to get at here.

DR. WILEY: I stated that particularly in my introduction. I said there were many places where preservatives were indicated. Wherever you can make food better, where it is impossible to have it without having a preservative, certainly the preservative is indicated.

MR. ADAMSON: I am curious to ask you, before you leave the subject of cranberries, about the effect of berries, in which I am locally interested. I can give up cranberries, but I can not give up blackberries and huckleberries. * * *

MR. BARTLETT: Did you see the account in yesterday's Herald about the dinner that some chemist gave to a friend in New York, at which everything they ate was made out of acids and things of that kind?

MR. MANN: Synthetic products?

MR. BARTLETT: Yes.

DR. WILEY: Yes, sir; I saw the account, and I know the gentlemen very well. I don't believe any of them would care to eat that kind of a dinner every day. It is like my very distinguished friend, Professor Chittenden, perhaps the most distinguished physiological chemist in this country, who proved conclusively to himself that man in his natural tastes ate too much protein. The average man instead of eating 17 grams of nitrogen in a day, as he does, ought not to eat more than 10 or 11. But almost every man taught to do that, I understand, has gone back to the old way, although apparently it was beneficial at the time.

MR. TOWNSEND: Professor Chittenden does not agree with you in regard to the use of preservatives.

DR. WILEY: I think not; I think he does not agree with me. I want to say here, Mr. Chairman, that experts never think the less of each other because they disagree; it is the natural condition of humanity.

MR. ADAMSON: You did not really run a boarding house on pills, paregoric, and other things, did you?

DR. WILEY: I ran a boarding house something of the kind you describe for four years, and I am running it to-day; and would be pleased to have you come down and take a meal with us.

MR. ADAMSON: I think I would prefer to have a colored woman do the cooking for me.

DR. WILEY: We have a colored cook. You will hear more about that boarding house later on.

MR. BARTLETT: I understood you to say you knew these gentlemen in New York who gave this dinner that we were speaking about a moment ago?

DR. WILEY: I know them very well.

MR. BARTLETT: They are reliable gentlemen?

DR. WILEY: Oh, yes; perfectly so. In fact, I have a very high opinion of the chemists of this country. Just as high when they differ from as when they agree with me.

MR. ADAMSON: While you have such a high opinion, yet you do not take their judgment in these instances?

DR. WILEY: Certainly not; I should not occupy such a position. I do not want anybody else to judge for me the results of my own work. I want to do that myself.

MR. ADAMSON: I wanted to give you a chance to disclaim that.

DR. WILEY: Not only disclaim it, but I never have put myself in any such position and never intend to.

Now I will go on with my statement.

Because nature produces an almost infinitesimal quantity of substances in foods which add to the quantity of these poisonous excreta appears to me to be no valid argument for their wholesomeness. Could even the small trace of substances in our foods which produces hippuric acid be eliminated, the excretory organs would be relieved of a useless burden and the quantity of work required by them be diminished. This would be conducive to better health and increased longevity. I fail to see the force of the argument that a deliberate increase of the work required by the adding of substances capable of producing poisonous degradation products is helpful and advisable. Granting, for the sake of the argument, the grounds of a trace of benzoic acid and its analyses in all the substances mentioned by Professor Kremers, we do not find that this is a warrant to add more of these bodies, but, on the contrary, a highly accentuated warning to avoid any additional burden. That benzoic acid is a useful medicine, no one who has ever studied medicine will deny, but I think almost every practicing physician will tell you that the exhibition of drugs having a medicinal value in case of health is highly prejudicial to the proper activity of these drugs when used in disease. The excretory organs of the body become deadened in their sensibilities by the continued bombardment to which they are subjected and do not respond at the proper time to the stimulus which a medicine is supposed to produce. Keeping the hand in cold water constantly would unfit it to be benefited by the addition of a cold application for remedial purposes.

I think that I need only call the attention of the committee to the wide distinction between a drug used for medicinal purposes and a food product to show them that all reasoning based on the value of drugs as medicines is totally inapplicable to their possibly beneficial effects in foods. I further think I shall be sustained almost unanimously by the medical profession of the United States when I say to this committee that the "drug habit," which is so constantly and so unavoidably, I am sorry to say, formed in this country is one of the greatest sources of danger to the public health and of difficulty in the use of remedial agents that can well be imagined. Professor Kremers, on page 33, seeks to justify the statement he reads from Professor Hare respecting the properties of benzoic acid by saying that benzoic acid is useful in diseases of the urinary organs which produce alkalinity. I will show this committee later on that small doses of borax bring about this abnormal condition of the urine, and therefore it might be advisable in using borax, which has been pronounced harmless by some experts here, to be able to counteract one of its particularly certain effects by administering a remedy at the same time that you supply the cause of the disease. For this reason your committee might well say in the bill that whenever borax is used in foods benzoic acid should also be used as a corrective of its dangerous influences.

I am somewhat surprised also at the reference that Professor Kremers makes to salt, on page 34. Salt is not only a delightful condiment, but an absolute necessity to human life, and the fact that excessive doses of salt are injurious has no more to do with this argument than the fact that you can make yourself ill by eating too much meat. It seems to me astonishing in these days of rigid scientific investigation that such fallacious reasoning can be seriously indulged in for the sake of proving the harmlessness of a noncondimental substance. Yet this is the argument advanced by Professor Kremers on page 34 in respect of salt, wood smoke, and other useful, valuable, and necessary condimental bodies. The argument in regard to benzaldehyde in ice cream is on the same plane. The substance known as ice cream, as usually made, is an inferior food product at best, and how it could be improved by the addition of a substance which increases the quantity of poisonous principles in the excrements is a matter entirely beyond my comprehension. I am perfectly familiar with the argument that this small quantity would not produce any harm. It is doubtless true, Mr. Chairman, that a slight increase for one day or even oftener of these bodies in the food would produce practically no measurable effect upon a healthy individual for a long time, but that in the end it would produce no harmful effect is contrary to all the rules of physiology and logic.

The body wears out and death supervenes in natural order from two causes: First, from a failure of the absorptive activities of the metabolic processes, and, second, by an increased activity of the catabolic processes, producing increased amounts of poisonous and toxic matters in the system, while the excretory organs are less able to care for them. Thus the general vitality of the body is gradually reduced, and even old age, which is regarded as a natural death, is a result of these toxic activities carried through a period of time varying in extreme old age from eighty to one hundred years. This process is described by Professor Minot, of Harvard University, as the differentiation and degeneration of. the protoplasm. On the contrary, it is not difficult to show that.every condimental substance, by its necessary and generally stimulating effect upon the excretory organs which produce the enzymes of digestion, produces a positively helpful result, while its preservative properties are incidental merely thereto. Condiments are used not simply because they are preservatives, but because without them the digestive organs would not respond to the demands of nature, and therefore I ask your very careful consideration of the arguments based upon a comparison of noncondimental preservatives added to foods and the use of the condimental substances which are natural and necessary. I do not believe that your minds will be misled in the consideration of this important and radical distinction.

A careful review of other parts of the argument of Professor Kremers shows that he unwittingly admits the poisonous and deleterious properties of benzoic acid by calling attention, on page 35, to the fact that when doses of it are added to an kinds of stock, so called, preserved in large quantities, it is boiled out or disappears by sublimation during subsequent treatment. If benzoic acid is a. harmless substance, as suggested, why should so much importance be attached by its advocates to the fact that it is practically eliminated? Thus the advocates of benzoic acid at once, by their own words, show the insecurity of the platform on which they stand.

MR. TOWNSEND: Did you understand him to testify in that way as showing that that was the reason it was not harmful?

DR. WILEY: No; excepting it was boiled out.

MR. TOWNSEND: That was in answer to a question.

MR. ESCH: The use of it more particularly with reference to the preparation of the stock.

DR. WILEY: Yes; I have mentioned that in large quantities, in relation to the stock.

You are asked to insert in this bill a provision which will allow the use of one-fourth or one-fifth of 1 per cent of benzoic acid in food products, which is practically ten times that found, as stated by Professor Kremers, in the cranberry, which, of all known vegetable substances used as foods, contains the largest quantity. Fortunately, cranberries are not an article of daily diet. Do not, I beg of you, lose view of the fact that because a single dose of benzoic acid does not make you ill its daily consumption is wholly harmless. This is a non-sequitur of the most dangerous character.

Professor Kremers says that he has searched through all literature and has not found a statement that benzoic acid administered even in medicinal doses would produce harm. I would like to compare this with his own quotation of Professor Hare, in which it is said:

Ordinary doses cause a sense of warmth through the entire body, which feeling increases with the amount ingested, large quantities causing severe burning pain.

Asked by Mr. Richardson, Professor Kremers acknowledged that there might be many persons who would be injuriously affected by benzoic acid. Now, when anyone is accused of a crime it is no defense to prove that the crime was not committed against a hundred or a million individuals. It is sufficient to prove that it was committed against one. Professor Kremers acknowledges that benzoic acid may be harmful, therefore Professor Kremers has convicted benzoic acid as being a harmful substance; and, therefore, his argument that it should be used indiscriminately in foods, or, as asked when before this committee, be permitted to the extent of one-fourth of 1 per cent, being ten times the quantity produced in its most abundant natural substance, seems wholly illogical.

MR. TOWNSEND: That would be true of any article; that not only applies to a preservative, but it applies to all kinds of foods as well.

DR. WILEY: Well, yes; but foods and drugs must be regarded differently.

MR. BARTLETT: There are people who can not eat food ordinarily regarded as harmless. There are certain people who can not drink sweet milk; and I know people who can not eat eggs of any description, nor anything that has an egg in it. Now, do you think that everybody ought to be prevented from eating eggs or drinking milk if a half a dozen people in a thousand are injuriously affected by them?

DR. WILEY: Certainly not; nor would I prevent anybody from using benzoic acid who wanted to do it, but I certainly would help persons from using it who did not want to use it. I am not advocating the prohibition of the use of benzoic acid by anybody who wants to use it. I would be in favor of putting benzoic acid in a little salt-cellar, the same as is used for salt and pepper, and letting the people use it if they want to. I think benzoic acid would not hurt me, or be injurious to my system, if I used it one day--

MR. BARTLETT: You know some people have tried to eat a quail a day for thirty days, but they get sick.

MR. ADAMSON: Is there not a great difference between the occasional use of these poisons medicinally, in cases of emergency, and the use of them in any quantities in food?

DR. WILEY: I think that is a great point. I will come presently to the statement of Professor Vaughan, which covers that case beautifully in the testimony he gave here.

There are two points that I wanted to call to the attention of the committee. One is that we have examined a number of substances in which Dr. Kedzie testified that he has found benzoic acid, and we have found none.

MR. BARTLETT: What substances are those?

DR. WILEY: Dr. Kedzie testified that he had found benzoic acid in cranberries, huckleberries, plums, grapes, grapefruit, oranges, pineapples, carrots, pears, cauliflower, rhubarb, and green peppers.

We have obtained from the open market samples of the following fruits and vegetables, said by Professor Kedzie to contain benzoic, and tested them for benzoic acid:

Malaga grapes, grapefruit, oranges, pineapples (two varieties), carrots, parsnips, cauliflower, rhubarb, and green peppers. We were unable to obtain any indication of benzoic acid in any of these fruits with the exception of pineapples, where in one test of one variety there was a reaction which might have been caused by a trace of benzoic acid. On repeating the test on a fresh portion of the sample, however, the test could not be confirmed. The test obtained, however, even if caused by benzoic acid, was so slight that the substance could not have been present in greater quantity than one part per million, or one ten-thousandth of 1 per cent. It is certain from our analyses that benzoic acid is not present in this substance in the quantities stated by Doctor Kedzie, viz., from one one-hundredth to two one-hundredths of 1 per cent.

In 1904 1 obtained samples of huckleberries grown in three regions of the United States and did not succeed in obtaining the slightest indication of benzoic acid in any of them.

Professor Kedzie also dwells upon the fact that in the process of cooking a great deal of the benzoic; acid escapes. Inasmuch as he contends that it is harmless, the object of enforcing this view of the case is not apparent, although I do not doubt its accuracy.

Professor Kedzie found catsup made by Heinz, when sold in Michigan, to contain benzoic acid. Mr. Allen finds that when sold in Kentucky, it does not contain any benzoic acid. Professor Kedzie states that he has determined that the amount of benzoic acid in grapes is not far from one one-hundredth to one two-hundredths of 1 per cent. It requires, of course, very delicate manipulations to quantitatively determine these small quantities and very large quantities of samples must be taken. We feel certain that Professor Kedzie has utilized much more delicate methods than we have been able to develop in our own laboratory and I regret that he.did not disclose the methods employed to the committee.

Professor Kedzie testifies that the artificial product added to a food does not differ from the article naturally present in food. He testifies that it is present as pure benzoic acid in either case. This statement would mean that if you should take some butter and skim milk and beat them up together the product will be exactly. the same as that of the original full-cream milk. This is a remarkable doctrine in physiological chemistry, and upon this doctrine could be established the perfect wholesomeness of all synthetic foods. This will be strange doctrine to the makers of champagne. For instance, a still wine having practically the same composition as champagne, when artificially carbonated with the same quantity of carbonic acid which would be found in the natural champagne, is exactly the same substance as the article made naturally by fermentation in the bottle by the slow and tedious process employed. Every physician who prescribes champagne and every man who drinks it will without hesitation doubt this statement.

Professor Kedzie testifies that he is not a physiological chemist and not a doctor of medicine. On the same page, however, he testifies that between 60 and 100 grains, a large amount, a teaspoonful or a tablespoonful or something like that, would have an inflammatory action upon the stomach. When asked in regard to its specific effect in small doses, he said:

I eat cranberries right straight through the season. I like the cranberries, and I see no untoward effects whatever from their use. I never took benzoic acid except in that form and in the form of catsup.

He therefore testifies, as he says, from his own personal experience, and. at the same time says that he never took any except that which was natural to certain foods and introduced in catsup. Professor Kedzie has already testified that cranberries contain only five one-hundredths of 1 per cent of benzoic acid. The amount which he took daily he does not state, but it evidently must have been quite small in quantity, and, more than that, it was in the form in which the Author of Nature had placed it and not in an artificial or adulterated form. From this remarkable metabolic experiment Professor Kedzie says that he can testify from his own experience that benzoic acid is not harmful. I ask you, gentlemen, to consider in all seriousness expert testimony of that description and compare it with the elaborate trial and continued experimental work conducted in the Department of Agriculture on similar lines of inquiry which I have mentioned.

I quote Professor Kedzie's experiments with boric acid and salicylic acid:

I investigated bulk oysters, for instance, and found the presence of boric acid in a small amount. We investigated shrimps, also, which I found at the market and brought to the laboratory. That is my way of teaching. I investigated the shrimps and found in the shrimp liquor, on evaporating it, that there was a considerable amount of boric acid. Then, I took a sample of pickles from my grocer--pickles that I eat myself--and tested them and found in the vinegar of the pickles sulphurous acid to prevent that little growth of mold that is so objectionable to the consumer.

MR. BURKE: To what extent did you find sulphurous acid in the vinegar that you have just spoken of?

MR. KEDZIE: I did not estimate the exact amount, but it was very small. It takes very little to inhibit the growth of a mold in the vinegar.

MR. ESCH: What determination did you reach in regard to cranberries?

DR. WILEY: His analysis and ours agreed almost exactly.

MR. TOWNSEND: Did you examine more than one specimen of the cranberries?

DR. WILEY: We examined a large number. That is only a question, however, of analytical detail. I only present that, not to throw any doubt on the fact of the wide distribution of benzoic acid, which no one denies.

I also want to call the attention of the committee to Doctor Kedzie's expert testimony to the effect on his health, and ask you to compare the few samples of cranberries that he has eaten, and few samples of ketchups, with the careful determination which we have made. That is all. The rest is confirmatory of what Professor Kedzie says.

I say here that I am sorry that Professor Kedzie did not submit his methods of examination; and I would like to incorporate in the minutes the methods which we have used so he can review our work if he desires.

MR. EXCH: Do you know of any other analysts who have found benzoic acid in these fruits?

DR. WILEY: No; I do not. I have never seen any results excepting these of Professor Kedzie and Professor Kremers.