© 1999 Joshua Fox
Note added 2012: Leading doctors in Britain’s National Health Service are now advocating Naso-Gastric Feeding as the preferred nutritional approach to better health. (The Daily Mail.) Remember, you read it here first–way back in 1999!
As modern science provides ever more efficient ways to nurture our bodies and preserve our health, exciting new nutritional methods have developed. In particular, Nasogastric Feeding has rapidly gained popularity as the best, most healthful way for us to get our full nutritional needs.
Precisely formulated nutritional fluids are dripped through a tube called a gavage. The gavage goes through the nose into the stomach. The need for unhygienic, messy “food” is obviated by a sterile, nutritionally balanced formula.
NGF is a well-tested and intensively researched nutritional technology. It has been used for decades and preserved thousands of lives. Its health benefits are accompanied by societal and environmental benefits.
Yet a danger lurks for those who promote the beneficial effects NGF for our children and us. A fanatic group called the La Comida League (LCL) is actively trying to deny the health benefits of NGF to the world. These people would insist on a retreat to the bygone days of “food.” This article is intended as a clarion call to those who may have been faced with the challenges of LCL fanatics and not known how best to explain the benefits of NGF.
The single greatest value of NGF is, in a word, nutrition. NGF formulas provide a precise 100% of every vitamin and mineral needed by the human body. The relative proportions of these nutrients can be adjusted for the needs of every individual. Calories are also included in precise quantities.
The nutritional dangers of oral ingestion, on the other hand, are well known. People in modern society are becoming more obese and poorly-nourished than ever. “Food” such as potato chips, cheese-burgers and cola provides large quantities of fat, sugar and salt, and almost no vitamins and minerals.
Driven by our baser instincts, who among us has not stuffed disgusting quantities of “food” into our mouths, chip after chip, burger after burger, followed by liters of caffeine-laden cola? Primitive feeding instincts, which may have served humanity well in ancient times, now cause more harm than good. NGF formula, on the other, is measured out in precisely metered quantities that can be fine-tuned to the milliliter.
If the LCL fanatics have their way, it would mean certain death to millions of people. Go into any hospital today and you will see before you dozens of patients whose lives were saved by the gavage. Although NGF is best known for helping people who are comatose or have damaged digestive systems, in fact anyone can benefit from NGF.
The valuable health effects of NGF are not limited to nutrition. Choking on food is among the leading causes of death in the world. The gavage, of course, completely eliminates that danger. (Who among us has not chuckled at the absurdity of a restaurant which sells “food,” yet which displays a poster on the Heimlich maneuver — utterly unnecessary qere it not for the very meals the restaurant provides?)
Food poisoning (now there’s a tautology if there ever was one) is another leading cause of death. Even the most apparently hygienic butcher shop (my dictionary says that “butcher” means “someone who provides food” or “someone who kills people brutally”) can be a breeding ground for salmonella and botulism. Needless to say, NGF formula, which is produced in the most up-to-date sterile conditions, never suffers from these problems.
In recent years, “eating disorders” such as anorexia and bulimia have become epidemic. When have you ever heard about “nasogastric-feeding disorders”?
LCL fanatics insist that excessive reliance on NGF can damage the teeth and jaws through disuse. But those who receive nourishment from NGF do not neglect their teeth. Low-calorie flavored chewing gum allows us to satisfy the need to chew, properly separating the instinctive chewing reflex from the unrelated and outdated custom of “eating.” Many of those who enjoy NGF have discovered that the chewing urge fades away, and in fact teeth will become extraneous as humanity moves to the wonders of NGF. You might want to go to your oral surgeon for teeth-reduction surgery or teeth-enhancement surgery, as a way of improving your appearance. But teeth today are good for nothing more than an attractive element of personal appearance, once evolutionarily useful, but now meaningful only for aesthetics.
Vegetarians delight in disgusting us with nausea-inducing descriptions of the effects of eating dead animal flesh. But why should eating dead plants, which absorb fertilizer from the dirt, be any better? Whether the fertilizer is animal manure or petroleum derivates, is that what we really want to put in our mouths?
While the health benefits of NGF are the most obvious and important, let us not forget the societal progress that NGF brings. In bygone days, the disgusting experience of watching people masticate their saliva-drenched gobs of “food” was mitigated only by enforcement of “table manners,” the worst diversion of human etiquette from true caring to multi-fork-obsessed neurosis ever known. With a gavage, there is no need to think about the fifth fish fork or whether you should clamp your lips around your teeth as you chew. How is “food etiquette” supposed to enforce cultured conversation at your meals, while at the same time telling you not to talk while you eat?
With NGF, a beautiful, aesthetically-designed feeding line is snaked through your nose, and all that remains is to truly interact with your family and friends: Dinner time can be a time to get in touch, to share your feelings and learn to appreciate each other as human beings.
A beautiful story from the pre-NGF days tells us the difference between Hell and Heaven. In Hell, there is plenty to eat, but everyone’s elbows are locked, so that they cannot bring the food to their own mouths. Heaven is exactly the same, but the people realize that they can feed each other.
This story receives its modern-day realization in the difference between “food” and NGF. In “eating,” humans must go to great lengths to repeatedly shovel food into their own mouths. NGF, on the other hand, requires beautiful sharing and cooperation, because intubation is most conveniently done by another person. Think of the family bonding encouraged by family members intubating each other, as opposed to “grabbing a quick bite” and each running their own way.
The aesthetics of NGF allow us to replace the more repugnant instincts by the most elevated spiritual feelings. Although so-called “gourmet nuts” insist that there is some aesthetic quality in food, far more junk food than gourmet food is sold in today’s world, indicating where the preferences of the “foodies” really lie. NGF Olfactory Art, on the other hand, is one of the more exciting trends in the modern art world. Today’s hottest artists mix a palette of scents into NGF fluids, providing “designer formulas” that are all the rage among modern aesthetes. Because NGF formula goes directly into the nose and from there into the stomach, nothing intervenes between the audience and the olfactory creations of these modern-day Picassos.
The workers who produce nutritional products will gain as well. The food industry is well-known as the most abusive in modern society. Whether it’s the meat-packers of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Mexican grape-pickers wading through the sewage-laden California fields, or undocumented aliens sweating over the dishes in your local diner for $3.95 an hour, food workers are seeking any solution that will help them advance beyond their current oppressive conditions. When these people are retrained for NGF formula production, they will be working in clean, modern facilities, receiving significantly higher salaries in greatly improved working conditions. Advanced means of production do not cost workers their jobs, but rather create job and improve standards of living.
Besides the health and social benefits of NGF, the ecological benefits of NGF make it a must for anyone who cares about our overcrowded planet. We all know about the destruction of the rainforest by slash-and-burn agriculture, and agriculture mostly means food.
The hypocrisy of vegetarians becomes clear in this context. Pick up any pro-vegetarian book for an incisive portrayal of the ecological harm caused by meat-breeding. Yet far more acres are taken for growing plants than for feeding animals. The rainforest may be the best-known example, but in fact any acre taken up by a Food Farm is an acre that is no longer pristine wilderness. As much as urban areas have spread, cities still do not take up a fraction of the acreage of farms. According to Paul Erlich, who warned of the population bomb, even if humanity does succeed in producing enough food, we are in danger of turning the whole Planet Earth into a giant feeding lot for humans.
NGF formula, on the other hand, can be produced in controlled conditions from a combination of yeasts, chemicals, and precise quantities of sterilized vegetable matter, so that whatever acreage goes into producing NGF formula produces hundreds of times more nutrition than the equivalent acre in a farm.
Transportation of “food” causes significant harm to our environment. Thousands of trucks deliver perishables like milk (cow secretions) and fruit (plant reproductive organs) every day. This increases traffic jams on the roads and creates air pollution. Yet NGF formula, because it is so highly concentrated and has no refrigeration requirements, can significantly reduce the pollution caused by transportation.
It is up to every concerned citizen to promote NGF as the only way to preserve human health, improve human society, and protect this small planet on which we live. Eating in public should be at first looked down on, and then made illegal. Taxes should be placed on “food” production, subsidizing factories for NGF formulas. Children should be educated on the benefits value of NGF and given government-subsidized nasogastric feedings in schools. And LCL activists should be prevented from polluting the public mind with their primitive nonsense. Legal means should be tried, such as lawsuits against LCL counselors who advise the consumption of food by people who later suffer food poisoning. People who refuse to give their children NGF should also be prosecuted for child abuse. Companies that produce NGF formula will be glad to give financial aid to health professionals and lay people who wish to advocate this essential technology for advancing human welfare.
With vigorous advocacy for the progress of the human race, we can move into a new era of scientific nutrition, freeing humanity from the age-old-burden of the food-eating instinct.