A HOUSE OF PROTEINS 35In the urban areas of some of the big cities, as many as 15-20% of
the children aged three to six years were judged to be third degree. I
can so well remember some of my initial observations of these children.
A mother, hardly more than a wisp herself, holding her three-year-old
twins with bulging eyes, one at eleven pounds, the other at fourteen
pounds, trying to get them to open their mouths to eat some porridge.
Older children blind from malnutrition, being led around by their
younger siblings to seek a handout. Children without legs or arms hop-
ing to get a morsel of food.A REVELATION TO DIE FOR
Needless to say, those sights gave us ample motivation to press ahead
with our project. As I mentioned before, we first had to resolve the
problem of AF contamination in peanuts, our preferred protein food.
The first step of investigating AF was to gather some basic information.
Who in the Philippines was consuming AF, and who was subject to liver
cancer? To answer these questions, I applied for and received a National
Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant. We also adopted a second strat-
egy by asking another question: how does AF actually affect liver cancer?
We wanted to study this question at the molecular level using laboratory
rats. I succeeded in getting a second NIH grant for this in-depth bio-
chemical research. These two grants initiated a two-track research inves-
tigation, one basic and one applied, which was to continue for the rest of
my career. I found studying questions both from the basic and applied
perspectives rewarding because it tells us not only the impact of a food
or chemical on health, but also why it has that impact. In so doing, we
could better understand not only the biochemical foundation of food and
health, but also how it might relate to people in everyday life.
We began with a stepwise series of surveys. First, we wanted to know
which foods contained the most AF. We learned that peanuts and corn
were the foods most contaminated. All twenty-nine jars of peanut butter
we had purchased in the local groceries, for example, were contami-
nated, with levels of AF as much as 300 times the amount judged to be
acceptable in U.s. food. Whole peanuts were much less contaminated;
none exceeded the AF amounts allowed in U.s. commodities. This
disparity between peanut butter and whole peanuts originated at the
peanut factory. The best peanuts, which filled "cocktail" jars, were hand
selected from a moving conveyor belt, leaving the worst, moldiest nuts
to be delivered to the end of the belt to make peanut butter.