As a cardiologist, I've long been interested in Sathya Sai Baba's teachings on health. Swami has given us a number of divine prescriptions for keeping the body healthy, and His advice is both spiritually profound and medically sound. He tells us, "Health is the essential requisite of man … Without health, man cannot brave temptations, earn a decent living, fulfill his basic needs, and succeed in spiritual discipline. Man can engage himself in obligatory and optional functions only if he enjoys good health."

One of the most feared obstacles to good health in modern times is cancer. As a group, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. and causes tremendous suffering for its victims and their families. Economically, cancer cost the U.S. $171.6 billion last year in direct medical costs and lost productivity due to illness or premature death. During a discourse on health in 1983, Swami revealed that it is actually white sugar - not smoking, pollution, or chemicals - that is the most significant cause of cancer today. He said, "To this day, no doctor has come up with a solution for the problem of cancer. The cause of all this cancer is something worth knowing. Now, some might say that cancer is the direct cause of smoking cigarettes and others might say that air pollution is the cause. These factors might be contributing in a small way, but they are not the primary cause of cancer. The main cause of cancer is white sugar. The reason for this is that in the refining of sugar, a lot of chemicals are added. And one of these processing chemicals is bone char which, when you eat the sugar, may get lodged in any part of the body and create problems."

The "bone char" Swami refers to is the by-product of animal bones used to process and bleach sugar into the common white sugar that we see everyday. Swami tells us, "In what form was sugar eaten in the good old times? Not in this artificial, synthetic one, but as wholesome jaggery (raw, unrefined sugar). Today you find the artificial creeping into everything that you eat - all merely for the sake of money."

What kind of options, then, do we have in our food choices? One approach could be to exclude sugar from one's diet altogether; alternatively, one could ignore Swami's warning and eat as one likes. Perhaps the most reasonable option is to restrict the amount of sugar in one's diet and use alternative sweeteners where appropriate. Swami's own suggestion is that we use jaggery (a form of unrefined sugar available in Asian grocery stores) or honey in place of white sugar. Brown sugar, however, is a poor alternative since it is often derived from white sugar that has been reprocessed with sugar by-products to make it look brown again. Fortunately, several companies now offer white, brown, and powdered sugar that is certified free of animal products during processing and refinement (White Satin and Fred Meyer brands).

Other choices include crystallized or dehydrated cane juice (e.g. Florida Crystals, Sucanat, or Sugar in the Raw brands), molasses or sorghum-all of which come from sugar cane but avoid the processing associated with white sugar. Depending on the types of foods being prepared, one could also try fruit sweeteners, maple syrup, beet sugar, stevia, or date sugar (made from dried dates). Perhaps the most important choice of all, however, is to keep Swami's warning in mind and control our senses, especially our sweet tooth! Swami says, "Health is wealth."