ABSTRACT
WHEN TEXAS PHYSICIAN Joe D.Nichols declared that “America is a sick nation” in a promotional brochure for Natural Foods Associates (NFA), the statement must have struck most of his colleagues as mighty odd. For Nichols did not offer this bleak view of public health in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, when infant mortality was high and frequent outbreaks of infectious disease took a heavy toll of lives; instead, he wrote it in the 1950s, a time when Americans were living longer, and were said to be healthier, than ever before. In stark contrast to contemporary medical authorities, Nichols believed that rising rates of heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases were signs of a progressive deterioration of the nation’s health. Nichols also disagreed with the vast majority of physicians in contending that a significant amount of illness in the country was caused by the consumption of nutritionally impoverished processed foods. As president of the NFA, Nichols announced his group’s determination to “save America from poor food grown on poor soil.”1
