Bananas Read online

  Early symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis include gradual weight loss, fatigue, and a cough. Before the discovery of antibiotics, the only therapy available was a regimen of fresh air, a nutritious diet, and rest. Most people could not afford to spend a year or more under the treatment of a physician in a sanatorium, and so public health officials searched for ways to prevent and cure the disease while the people who were infected continued to live at home. The tuberculosis movement pioneered many of the methods of public health, including voluntary associations devoted to restricting a specific disease, close cooperation between physicians and the public and between private and public agencies in health work, and campaigns of mass public education.46

  Undernourished children living in crowded urban districts at great risk of contracting the disease became a prime target of the efforts of tuberculosis associations and other public health agencies. Most children were easy to reach because they attended public schools. Education programs expanded to include school lunch programs and summer camps for the children at greatest risk. Tuberculosis associations also provided medical facilities and services including dispensaries, visiting nurses, camps, classes, open-air schools, “preventoria” for children, and sanatoria for the sick.47

  In the summer of 1926, a “Sunshine Camp” was organized in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the Anti-Tuberculosis Association in conjunction with the public schools. The camp served twenty girls ages seven to twelve who were considered to be pretubercular “because of their undernourishment and poor habits of life.”48 Camps such as the one in Cambridge offered children an outdoor life with plenty of food, rest, play, and nature study. The children were also taught health habits such as tooth brushing and “no spitting.”

  KEEP BANANAS ON THE PANTRY SHELF regularly—the year around. Don’t keep them in the ice-box.

  Serve them in some fashion—cooked or raw—at all meals. Give them to the kiddies “between times.”

  Eat them when they are thoroughly ripe—as the golden skin begins to mottle into dark brown. Then the luscious sugary pulp is at its best—delightful to taste, easy to digest, and of rare tissue building quality.

  “Yes! Bananas the Body Builder,” from Yes! 100 Ways To Enjoy Bananas (New Orleans: Bauerlein, 1925), 17.

  The banana was a popular food for combating malnutrition since it was cheap, filling, needed no preparation, and children liked it. The children in Cambridge were given oranges twice a week and received ripe bananas and milk every day as these were considered to “supplement each other exceedingly well in providing essentials for growth.”49 The successful pilot program was followed the next summer by a more ambitious undertaking. Two camps held at the Cambridge public schools, each with four hundred children, offered a morning snack, games, singing, posture work, training in health and food habits, dinner, nap, sewing, basketry, other handiwork, and sandwiches, milk, and bananas before dismissal. Much of the cost of the food was borne by the Anti-Tuberculosis Society.50 A photograph with the caption “Lunch Hour at the Summer Camp” shows a group of children wearing only shorts, posed by tables holding pitchers of milk while great stalks of bananas hang from the rafters of an outdoor pavilion.51

  The Bangor, Maine, Anti-Tuberculosis Association also sponsored a summer day camp for underprivileged children “of the pretubercular class.” The children received a snack of milk, a banana, and graham crackers every morning.52 A similar program in Lowell, Massachusetts, provided milk and banana snacks not only for “its adequacy as a supplementary lunch for those children who were in a special need of extra nourishment, but also to create a taste for a palatable food which might replace concentrated carbohydrates in the form of candy, or other sweets, between meals.”53

  A public health survey of the white school children of Iberville Parish in Louisiana in the 1920s indicated that between 47 and 69 percent were underweight, and that their usual diet lacked green vegetables and fruit. As in Cambridge, Massachusetts, bananas and milk were chosen as a dietary supplement. United Fruit donated twelve bunches of bananas a week for the first three months to get a clinic started. This provided the children with two bananas each as a supplement to their school lunch. Milk was also provided from funds raised by a special benefit. The organizers were pleased to find that children who were not be included in the program—owing to a lack of funds—supplied themselves with bananas and milk at their own expense, in imitation of their friends. This provided a more balanced diet for all the children.54

  “A Good School Lunch” worksheet from 1956, Bananas for Us, United Fruit, Education Department (Boston: United Fruit), 4.

  Ninety thousand people died from tuberculosis in the United States in 1930.55 It wasn’t until the 1940s that streptomycin was cultured and found to be effective against the disease.56 In the meantime, nutrition continued to play an important part in prevention and treatment. In 1939 Hygeia, a health magazine published by the American Medical Association, reported on an experiment involving 277 boys and 48,000 bananas. The first group of 123 boys living in an institution were given two or three bananas a day over a period of nine months. The other 154 boys were “denied bananas and used as controls.” A guarded report of the results indicated that the children who ate the bananas “may show greater progress in growth than a youngster who is deprived of them.”57 It seems to have been a cruel study for such meager results but perhaps the boys got tired of eating three bananas a day and shared the bananas clandestinely with the control group. The combination of bananas and milk has endured. In 1976 Dole advertised “The 60 Second Breakfast,” advising readers that a banana and a glass of milk “satisfied that morning emptiness with delicious natural flavor.”58

  With the identification of vitamins and calories, physicians, research scientists, and dietitians searched for ways in which various foods would not only balance the average person’s diet, but also serve as cures for common diseases following the example of citrus fruit and scurvy. Practical Dietetics for Adults and Children in Health and Disease, published in 1928, “strongly recommended [bananas] for cases of chronic appendicitis; they should, however, be prohibited in cases of asthma bronchiale.”59 The fruit was promoted as an excellent food for people with kidney trouble as the banana was said to be “deficient in organic salts and it therefore leaves little residue to be eliminated by the kidneys.”60 In addition bananas were recommended as a particularly valuable food for nephritic patients in a 1917 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.61

  The Research Department of United Fruit Company was particularly interested in promoting the curative properties of the banana and in 1935 published Dietary Uses of the Banana in Health and Disease with the claim that

  in disease, it is suited for some of those conditions in which the maintenance of proper nutrition is especially difficult—such as malnutrition and gastro-intestinal disturbances of infancy and childhood, nephritis and colitis in adults. Strange to say, it is sometimes helpful in both overweight and underweight, or in diarrhea and constipation. It is something of a challenge to explain these empirically observed facts.

  The next year, the Research Department published a digest of scientific literature concerning the nutritive and therapeutic values of the banana for “the busy physician as well as the nutritionist and dietitian.”62 This digest cited 292 publications that promoted the use of the banana in the treatment of diseases such as diarrhea, ulcers, colitis, tuberculosis, diabetes, obesity, malnutrition, fertility, celiac disease, scurvy, and gout. Many of the citations also promoted bananas in the diet of healthy infants and children.

  Celiac disease was diagnosed and named for the first time in the early 1930s. It is a hereditary chronic intestinal malabsorption disorder now known to be caused by intolerance to gluten. It is a childhood disease that causes retarded growth, serious stomach disorders, weakness, and may result in death.63 The prevalence of the disease is estimated to be about one in three hundred in southwest Ireland and one in five thousand in North America.64 In the 192
0s and 1930s, it was believed that children with the disease could not tolerate milk, carbohydrates, starches, or sugars.65

  In 1924 Dr. Sidney Haas advocated a banana cure for children suffering from celiac disease. Bananas were found to be tolerated by the children and the fruit in fresh and powdered form was prescribed as a major component of their diet. It appeared that children actually were cured of the disease after one to three years on the diet.66 United Fruit claimed that “in celiac disease, banana sugars are almost the only carbohydrates which are well utilized, and the banana diet has curative properties.”67

  When the United States entered World War II, the banana trade was severely disrupted. In August 1942 Newsweek reported that U-boat sinkings, conversion of fruit ships to war-materiels carriers, and an overburdened railway system combined to halt the flow of bananas to the grocery store.68 Parents who, a generation or two earlier, would never have given bananas to their sick or even well infants, panicked when the fruit became hard to find. United Fruit announced that it was giving priority to celiac patients and asked physicians to write or wire the Fruit Dispatch Company for supplies. Villar and Osorio, a New York importing company, advised that a “fairly adequate” supply of banana flour was also available to doctors.69 Newsweek reported that a bunch of bananas was rushed from New York to Montreal by Canadian Colonial Airways to save 22-month-old Margo Bradley’s life. Mrs. Valentine Dreschel asked the New York Journal-American for help in obtaining bananas for her 21-month-old-son John, and Brooklyn police in radio cars searched for hours to find twenty-four bananas which they rushed to the home of 15-month-old Helena Gottlieb.70

  Other reports that two hundred New York babies were in danger of dying of celiac disease because of the banana shortage prompted a new look at the importance of bananas in infant diets. Experts at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore recommended the use of other fruits such as strained apples, apricots, and pears in place of bananas.71 Worried parents were reassured that their children would do fine without bananas, since after all, they themselves had grown up without the fruit.

  An article in a postwar 1947 New York Times Magazine noted that bananas were “back in pre-war quantities, but so greedy have we become for the soft, yellow tropical fruit that even current shipments are not enough to satisfy us. As a consequence, some communities still complain of shortages.”72

  Research continued in the healing and nutritive properties of common foods. In 1949 scientists announced that bananas apparently produced two antibiotics, one active against fungi and the other, like penicillin and streptomycin, active against bacteria. It was suggested that banana skins, known to be germ-proof wrappers, might owe this property to the antibiotics that the fruit produced during the ripening process.73

  Ten years later, research scientists at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, identified the amines serotonin and norepinephrine in bananas. Serotonin inhibits gastric secretion and stimulates the smooth muscle in the intestine and elsewhere, while norepinephrine is used as a vasoconstrictor agent that mediates autonomic function in the cardiovascular system. The reported therapeutic uses of bananas in celiac disease, peptic ulcers, and constipation may be due to the presence of these amines in bananas.74 These findings led to the development of new tests for drugs to treat angina pectoris and high blood pressure.75

  An article in Organic Gardening in 1979 reported that “it has been recently discovered that bananas contain L-tryptophan, a natural amino acid that induces sleep.” Combined with milk, which also contains L-tryptophan, bananas might make “a very beneficial bedtime snack for an insomniac.”76 Did the thousands of children in the 1920s and 1930s who were given bananas and milk every day at school and summer camp feel drowsy afterwards?

  In 1995 reports were published of a new project, conducted by Charles J. Arntzen at Texas A&M University, to genetically engineer bananas that will protect humans from a variety of diseases. Tobacco plants and potatoes have been found to produce proteins that stimulate protective immune reactions in mice, but unfortunately most people are not interested in chewing tobacco or eating raw potato (cooking kills the protein). If bananas could be induced to offer disease protection, they would be especially suitable research subjects because they are cheap, globally popular, and especially appealing to children, the prime target audience for edible vaccines.77 Enhanced bananas could take the place of vaccination, eliminating concerns about refrigeration for vaccines as well as for clean needles in poor countries. In 1998 researchers reported that they had immunized people against a disease by having them eat several servings of genetically engineered raw potatoes.78 And genetically engineered bananas are not far behind. Four-inch-tall transgenic banana plants have been grown, but it will take several years before these grow into trees with fruit.

  After World War II, affluence, white-collar sedentary jobs, television, and air conditioning combined to fashion a nation of weight- and health-conscious citizens. Weight-loss dieting spawned a major industry of health foods, diet, and exercise programs. It also produced the nutrition pundit. New health concerns included cholesterol, sodium, potassium, and fiber. Fruit-import companies continued to promote the banana as a healthy food for babies, the elderly, athletes, and dieters of all ages. Where the banana once had been extolled as a food for building up underweight children, it was now also promoted as an aid in weight loss. As early as 1934 bananas and milk were recommended for the treatment of obesity “on the grounds of simplicity, low cost, ready availability, palatability, high satiety value, low salt content and demonstrated effectiveness in securing the desired aim.”79

  Dole ran an advertisement in 1977 with “Waist Not, Want Not” in large letters, picturing three middle-aged women wearing leotards and standing around a scale. The copy suggested that bananas were the perfect diet food: “A medium-size Dole banana contains only about 101 calories, no cholesterol and about as much fat as you’ll find in lettuce.” Readers were assured that “it’s one snack that won’t go to your waist.”80 An article on bananas in Good Housekeeping in 1982 noted that bananas “are low in sodium, high in potassium, have virtually no fat, are cholesterol-free, and contain important vitamins and minerals too; and their easily digested natural fruit sugars supply quick energy.”81

  In 1993 a full-page advertisement in a Newark, New Jersey, newspaper, sponsored by a major supermarket chain and Chiquita bananas, listed the contents of the “perfect yellow package” as follows: fiber, biotin, calcium, pantothenic acid, folic acid, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, magnesium, vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, and E, niacin, zinc, manganese, protein, copper, iron, and 18 amino acids.82 American housewives were supposed to know that all these things were important in the diet of their family members and to feel good about providing them with “The World’s Perfect Food.”

  Athletes consume bananas because of the potassium that is supposed to help their performance and ease leg cramps. The organizers of the 1995 Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., provided 8,000 bananas to participants in addition to 80,000 cookies, 520 dozen doughnuts, and 6,100 gallons of lemon-lime Gatorade.83 An advertisement for banana-flavored Power Bar Athletic Energy Food claimed that it was the “first take-anywhere, ripe-everytime, bruise-free, slow-to-spoil, never-slip-on-the-peel, vitamin-packed, energy-enhancing, moist-and-delicious banana,” and offered a free, twelve-page Guide to Nutrition and Energy.84 Bananas have become such a symbol of good health that advertisers include them in blurbs for sports clothes such as the one for a women’s cycling tank top with “three pockets in the back [that] can hold a banana, a sandwich or even your pet hamster.”85 The picture of the garment included a banana and a Power Bar.

  Bananas hold a secure place in our folklore. Probably more people eat a banana a day than eat the proverbial apple a day to keep the doctor away. Some people claim that their daily banana is the secret of their longevity; others count on it for digestive-tract regularity. In addition bananas have been used to cure corns, warts, headaches, and stage fright. An
advertisement in 1918 read “Hooray for Banana Peel ‘Gets-It’ Only Real Way to Get Rid of Corns.”86 And a 1993 advice column by Ann Landers discussed various methods of wart removal including “the miraculous use of a banana peel.”87 Letters to Ann Landers in 1997 included a treatment for headache with the instructions to

  peel a banana, take half the banana peel and place it on the forehead with the inside of the peel next to the skin. Secure this with a headband or some strip of cloth. Take the other half, place it on the back of the neck and secure it also. Be sure the banana peels are secured very snugly and the white mushy stuff on the inside of the peel is next to the skin. Eighty-five percent of the people who have tried this say they get relief within 30 minutes.88

  The reader submitting this “cure” noted that his “great-grandfather, Dr. J. B. Frymire, a graduate of the University of Louisville School of Medicine in 1867, started using the banana-peel treatment in the 1890s. “Thousands have written to me to say it works.” A second column with letters supporting and deriding the “cure” appeared several months later.89

  A musician friend confided that she eats a banana before each concert to take the edge off her stage fright. The nutritional and medicinal claims for the banana have shifted over the years, but the perceived connection between the banana and nutrition or disease has remained strong and the popularity of the banana has continued to increase. Advertising departments have taken full advantage of the health-benefit claims for bananas since the early years of the twentieth century and will no doubt continue to do so far into the twenty-first.