High Touch Presents
AN
ARTICLE BY REX BEACH
ENTITLED
"Modern Miracle Men" - Relating To Proper Food Mineral Balances
by Dr. Charles Northen
Reprinted From Cosmopolitan, June 1936
Presented by Mr. Fletcher
June 1 1936 and Ordered to be Printed by the United States Government Printing
Office Washington: 1936 During the 74th Congress, Second Session, Document
No. 264
This is the
Unabridged Version of this document.
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Youngevity Director Be Be
MODERN
MIRACLE MEN
Dr. Charles Northen, Who
Builds Health From The Ground Up This
quiet, unballyhooed pioneer and genius in the field of nutrition demonstrates
that countless human ills stem from the fact that impoverished soil of America
no longer provides plant foods with the mineral elements essential to human
nourishment and health! To overcome this alarming condition, he doctors
sick soils and, by seeming miracles, raises truly healthy and health-giving
fruits and vegetables.
(By Rex Beach)
Do
you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet
deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which
our foods come are brought into proper mineral balance?
The alarming fact is that
foods -- fruit and vegetables and grains -- now being raised on millions
of acres of land no longer contain enough of certain needed minerals, are
starving us -- no matter how much of them we eat!
This talk about minerals is novel
and quite startling. In fact, a realization of the importance of minerals
in food is so new that the textbooks on nutritional dietetics contain very
little about it. Nevertheless it is something that concerns all of us, and
the further we delve into it the more startling it becomes.
You'd think, wouldn't you, that
a carrot is a carrot--that one is about as good as another as far as nourishment
is concerned? But it isn't; one carrot may look and taste like another
and yet be lacking in the particular mineral element which our system requires
and which carrots are supposed to contain. Laboratory tests prove that the
fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs and even the milk and the meats
of today are not what they were a few generations ago. (Which doubtless
explains why our forefathers [and foremothers] thrived on a selection of
foods that would starve us!) No one of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables
to supply their system with the mineral salts they require for perfect health,
because their stomach isn't big enough to hold them! And we are running
to big stomachs.
No longer does a balanced and
fully nourishing diet consist merely of so many calories or certain vitamins
or a fixed proportion of starches, proteins, and carbohydrates. We now know
that it must contain, in addition, something like a score of mineral salts.
It is bad news to learn from
our leading authorities that 99 percent of the American people are deficient
in these minerals, and that a marked deficiency in any one of the more important
minerals actually results in disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable
lack of one or another element, however microscopic the body requirement
may be, and we sicken, suffer, shorten our lives.
This discovery is one of the
latest and most important contributions of science to the problem of human
health.
So far as the records go, the
first man in this field of research, the first to demonstrate that most
human foods of our day are poor in minerals and that their proportions are
not balanced, was Dr. Charles Northen an Alabama physician now living in
Orlando, Florida. His discoveries and achievements are of enormous importance
to mankind.
Following a wide experience in
general practice, Dr. Northen specialized in stomach diseases and nutritional
disorder. Later, he moved to New York and made extensive studies along this
line, in conjunction with a famous French scientist from Sorbonne. In the
course of that work he convinced himself that there was little authentic,
definite information on the chemistry of foods, and that no dependence could
be placed on existing data.
He asked himself how foods could
be used intelligently in the treatment of disease, when they differed so
widely in content. The answer seemed to be that they could not be used intelligently.
In establishing the fact that serious deficiencies existed and in searching
out the reasons therefor, he made an extensive study of the soil. It
was he who first voiced the surprising assertion that we must make soil
building the basis of food building in order to accomplish human building.
"Bear in mind," says
Dr. Northen, "that minerals are vital to human metabolism and health--and
that no plant or animal can appropriate to itself any mineral which is not
present in the soil upon which it feeds.
"When I first made this
statement I was ridiculed, for up to that time people had paid little attention
to food deficiencies and even less to soil deficiencies. Men eminent in
medicine denied there was any such thing as vegetables and fruits that did
not contain sufficient minerals for human needs. Eminent agricultural authorities
insisted that all soil contained all necessary minerals. They reasoned that
plants take what they need, and that it is the function of the human body
to appropriate what it requires. Failure to do so, they said, was a symptom
of disorder.
"Some of our respected authorities
even claimed that the so-called secondary minerals played no part whatever
in human health. It is only recently that such men as Dr. McCollum of Johns
Hopkins, Dr. Mendel of Yale, Dr. Sherman of Columbia, Dr. Lipman of Rutgers,
and Drs. H.G. Knight and Oswald Schreiner of the United States Department
of Agriculture have agreed that these minerals are essential to plant, animal,
and human feeding.
"We know that vitamins are
complex substances which are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of
them is of importance for the normal function of some special structure
in the body. Disorder and disease result from any vitamin deficiency.
"It is not commonly realized,
however, that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and
in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. Lacking vitamins,
the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins
are useless.
"Neither does the layman
realize that there may be a pronounced difference in both foods and soils--to
them one vegetable, one glass of milk, or one egg is about the same as another.
Dirt is dirt, too, and they assume that by adding a little fertilizer to
it, a satisfactory vegetable or fruit can be grown.
"The truth is that our foods
vary enormously in value, and some of them aren't worth eating, as food.
For example, vegetation grown in one part of the country may assay 1,100
parts, per billion, of iodine, as against 20 in that grown elsewhere. Processed
milk has run anywhere from 362 parts, per million, of iodine and 127 of
iron, down to nothing.
"Some of or lands, even
unhappily for us, we have been systematically robbing the poor soils and
the good soils alike of the very substances most necessary to health, growth,
long life, and resistance to disease. Up to the time I began experimenting,
almost nothing had been done to make good the theft.
"The more I studied nutritional
problems and the effects of mineral deficiencies upon disease, the more
plainly I saw that here lay the most direct approach to better health, and
the more important it became in my mind to find a method of restoring those
missing minerals to our foods.
"The subject interested
me so profoundly that I retired from active medical practice and for a good
many years now I have devoted myself to it. It's a fascinating subject,
for it goes to the heart of human betterment."
The results obtained by Dr. Northen
are outstanding. By putting back into foods the stuff that foods are made
of, he has proved himself to be a real miracle man of medicine, for he has
opened up the shortest and most rational route to better health.
He showed first
that it should be done, and then that it could be done.
He doubled and redoubled
the natural mineral content of fruits and vegetables. He
improved the quality of milk by increasing the iron and the iodine in it.
He caused hens to lay eggs
richer in the vital elements.
By scientific soil feeding, he raised better seed potatoes in Maine, better
grapes in California, Better oranges in Florida, and better field crops in
other States. (By "better" is meant not only an improvement
in food value but also an increase in quantity and quality.)
Before going further into the results
he has obtained, let's see just what is involved in this matter of "mineral
deficiencies", what it may mean to our health, and how it may effect
the growth and development, both mental and physical, of our children.
We know that rats, guinea pigs,
and other animals can be fed into a diseased condition and out again by
controlling only the minerals in their food.
A 10-year test with rats proved
that by withholding calcium they can be bred down to a third the size of those
fed with an adequate amount of that mineral. Their intelligence, too, can
be controlled by mineral feeding as readily as can their size, their bony
structure, and their general health.
Place a number of these little
animals inside a maze after starving some of them in a certain mineral element.
The starved ones will be unable to find their way out, whereas the others
will have little or no difficulty in getting out. Their dispositions can be
altered by mineral feeding. They can be made quarrelsome and belligerent;
they can even be turned into cannibals and be made to devour each other.
A cage full of normal rats will
live in amity. Restrict their calcium, and they will become irritable and
draw apart from one another. Then they will begin to fight. Restore their
calcium balance and they will grow more friendly; in time they will begin
to sleep in a pile as before.
Many backward children are "stupid"
merely because they are deficient in magnesia. We punish them for OUR failure
to feed them properly.
Certainly our physical well-being
is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than
upon the calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein,
or carbohydrates we consume.
It is now agreed that at least
16 mineral elements are indispensable for normal nutrition, and several
more are always found in small amounts in the body, although their precise
physiological role has not been determined. Of the 11 indispensable salts,
calcium, phosphorous, and iron are perhaps the most important.
Calcium is the dominant nerve controller;
it powerfully affects the cell formation of all living things and regulates
nerve action. It governs contractability of the muscles and the rhythmic beat
of the heart. It also coordinates the other mineral elements and corrects
disturbances made by them. It works only in sunlight. Vitamin D is its buddy.
Dr. Sherman of Columbia asserts
that 50 percent of the American people are starving for calcium. A recent
article in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that out
of 4,000 cases in New York Hospital, only 2 were not suffering from
a lack of calcium.
What does such a deficiency mean?
How would it affect your health or mine? So many morbid conditions and actual
diseases may result that it is almost hopeless to catalog them. Included in
the list are rickets, bony deformities, bad teeth, nervous disorders, reduced
resistance to other diseases, fatigability, and behavior disturbances such
as incorrigibility, assaultiveness, nonadaptability.
Here's one specific example: The
soil around a certain Midwest city is poor in calcium. Three hundred children
of this community were examined and nearly 90 percent and bad teeth, 69 percent
showed affections of the nose and throat, swollen glands, enlarged or diseased
tonsils. More than one-third had defective vision, round shoulders, bow legs,
and anemia.
Calcium and phosphorous
appear to pull in double harness. A child requires as much per day as two
grown men, but studies indicate a common deficiency of both in our food. Researches
on farm animals point to a deficiency of one or the other as the cause of
serious losses to the farmers, and when the soil is poor in phosphorous these
animals become bone-chewers. Dr. McCollum says that when there are enough
phosphates in the blood there can be no dental decay.
Iron
is an essential constituent of the oxygen-carrying pigment of the blood: iron
starvation results in anemia, and yet iron cannot be assimilated unless some
copper is contained in the diet. In Florida many cattle die from an
obscure disease called "salt sickness." It has been found to arise
from a lack of iron and copper in the soil and hence in the grass. A man may
starve for want of these elements just as a beef "critter" starves.
If Iodine is not present in our
foods the function of the thyroid gland is disturbed and goiter afflicts us.
The human body requires only fourteen-thousandths of a milligram daily, yet
we have a distinct "goiter belt" in the Great Lakes section, and
in parts of the Northwest the soil is so poor in iodine that the disease is
common.
So it goes, down through the list,
each mineral element playing a definite role in nutrition. A characteristic
set of symptoms, just as specific as any vitamin-deficiency disease, follows
a deficiency in any one of them. It is alarming, therefore, to face the fact
that we are starving for these precious, health-giving substances.
Very well, you say, if our foods
are poor in the mineral salts they are supposed to contain, why not resort
to dosing?
That is precisely what is being
done, or attempted. However, those who should know assert that the human system
cannot appropriate those elements to the best advantage in any but the food
form. At best, only a part of them in the form of drugs can be utilized by
the body, and certain dieticians go so far as to say it is a waste of effort
to fool with them. Calcium, for instance, cannot be supplied in any form of
medication with lasting effect.
But there is a more potent reason
why the curing of diet deficiencies by drugging hasn't worked out so well.
Consider those 16 indispensable elements and those others which presumably
perform some obscure function as yet undetermined. Aside from calcium and
phosphorous, they are needed only in infinitesimal quantities, and the activity
of one may be dependent upon the presence of another. To determine the precise
requirements of each individual case and to attempt to weigh it out on a druggist's
scale would appear hopeless.
It is a problem and a serious one.
But here is the hopeful side of the picture: Nature can and will solve it
if she is encouraged to do so. The minerals in fruit and vegetables are colloidal;
i.e. they are in a state of such extremely fine suspension that they can be
assimilated by the human system: It is merely a question of giving back to
nature the materials with which she works.
We must rebuild our soils: Put back the minerals we have taken out. That
sounds difficult but it isn't. Neither is it expensive. Therein lies the short
cut to better health and longer life.
When Dr. Northen first asserted
that many foods were lacking in mineral content and that this deficiency was
due solely to an absence of those elements in the soil, his findings were
challenged and he was called a crank. But differences of opinion in the medical
profession are not uncommon--it was only 60 years ago that the Medical Society
of Boston passed a resolution condemning the use of bathtubs -- and he persisted
in his assertions that inasmuch as foods did not contain what they were supposed
to contain, no physician could with certainty prescribe a diet to overcome
physical ills.
He showed that the textbooks are
not dependable because many of the analyses in them were made many years ago,
perhaps from products raised in virgin soils, whereas our soils have been
constantly depleted. Soil analysis, he pointed out, reflect only the content
of samples. One analysis may be entirely different from another made 10 miles
away.
"And so what?" came the
query.
Dr. Northen undertook to demonstrate
that something could be done about it. By reestablishing a proper soil
balance be actually grew crops that contained an ample amount of desired minerals.
This was incredible. It was
contrary to the books and it upset everything connected with diet practice.
The scoffers began to pay attention to him. Recently the Southern Medical
Association, realizing the hopelessness of trying to remedy nutritional deficiencies
without positive factors to work with, recommended a careful study to determine
the real mineral content of foodstuffs and the variations due to soil depletion
in different localities. These progressive medical men are awake to the importance
of prevention.
Dr. Northen went even further and proved that crops grown in a properly mineralized
soil were bigger and better; that seeds germinated quicker, grew more rapidly
and made larger plants; that trees were healthier and put on more fruit of
better quality.
By increasing the mineral content of citrus
fruit he likewise improved its texture, its appearance and its flavor.
He experimented with a variety
of growing things, and in every case the story was the same. By mineralizing
the feed at poultry farms, he got more and better eggs; by balancing pasture
soils, he produced richer milk. Persistently he hammered home to farmers,
to doctors, and to the general public the thought that life depends upon the
minerals.
His work led him into a careful
study of the effects of climate, sunlight, ultraviolet and thermal rays upon
plant, animal, and human hygiene. In consequence he moved to Florida. People
familiar with his work consider him the most valuable man in the State. I
met him by reason of the fact that I was harassed by certain soil problems
on my Florida farm which had baffled the best chemists and fertilizer experts
available.
He is an elderly, retiring man,
with a warm smile and an engaging personality, He is a trifle shy until he
opens up on his pet topic; then his diffidence disappears and he speaks with
authority. His mind is a storehouse crammed with precise, scientific data
about soil, and food chemistry, the complicated life processes of plants,
animals, and human beings -- and the effect of malnutrition upon all three.
He is perhaps as close to the secret of life as any man anywhere.
"Do you call yourself a soil
or a food chemist?" I inquired.
"Neither. I'm an M.D. My work
lies in the field of biochemistry and nutrition. I gave up medicine because
this is a wider and more important work. Sick soils mean sick plants, sick
animals, and sick people. Physical, mental, and moral fitness depends largely
upon an ample supply and a proper proportion of the minerals in our foods.
Nerve function, nerve stability, nerve-cell-building likewise depend thereon.
I'm really a doctor of sick soils."
"Do you mean to imply that
the vegetables I'm raising on my farm are sick?" I asked.
"Precisely! They're as weak
and undernourished as anemic children. They're not much good as food. Look
at the pests and the disease that plague them. Insecticides cost farmers nearly
as much as fertilizers these days.
"A healthy plant, however,
grown in soil properly balanced, can and will resist most insect pests.
That very characteristic makes it a better food product. You have tuberculosis
and pneumonia germ in your system but you're strong enough to throw them off.
Similarly, a really healthy plant will pretty nearly take care of itself in
the battle against insects and blights --and will also give the human system
what it requires."
"Good heavens! Do you realize
what that means to agriculture?"
"Perfectly. Enormous saving.
Better crops. Lowered living costs to the rest of us. But I'm not so much
interested in agriculture as in health."
"It sounds beautifully theoretical
and utterly impractical to me," I told the doctor, whereupon he gave
me some of his case records.
For instance, in an orange grove
infested with scale, when he restored the mineral balance to part of the soil,
the trees growing in that part became clean while the rest remained diseased.
By the same means he had grown healthy rosebushes between rows that were riddled
by insects.
He had grown tomato and cucumber
plants, both healthy and diseased, where the vines intertwined. The bugs ate
up the diseased and refused to touch the healthy plants! He showed me interesting
analysis of citrus fruit, the chemistry and the food value of which accurately
reflected the soil treatment the trees had received.
There is no space here to go fully
into Dr. Northen's work but it is of such importance as to rank with that
of Burbank, the plant wizard, and with that of our famous physiologists and
nutritional experts.
"Healthy plants mean healthy
people", said he. "We can't raise a strong race on a weak soil.
Why don't you try mending the deficiencies on your farm and growing more minerals
into your crops?"
I did try and I succeeded. I was
planting a large acreage of celery and under Dr. Northen's direction I fed
minerals into certain blocks of the land in varying amounts. When the plants
from this soil were mature I had them analyzed, along with celery from other
parts of the State. It was the most careful and comprehensive study of the
kind ever made, and it included over 250 separate chemical determinations.
I was amazed to learn that my celery had more than twice the mineral content
of the best grown elsewhere. Furthermore, it kept much better, with and without
refrigeration, proving that the cell structure was sounder.
In 1927, Mr. W. W. Kincaid, a "gentleman
farmer" of Niagara Falls, heard an address by Dr. Northen and was so
impressed that he began extensive experiments in the mineral feeding of plants
and animals. The results he has accomplished are conspicuous. He set himself
the task of increasing the iodine in the milk from his dairy herd. He has
succeeded in adding both iodine and iron so liberally that one glass of his
milk contains all of these minerals that an adult person requires for a day.
Is this significant? Listen to
these incredible figures taken from a bulletin of the South Carolina Food
Research Commission: "In many sections three out of five persons have
goiter and a recent estimate states that 30 million people in the United States
suffer from it."
Foods rich in iodine are of the
greatest importance to these sufferers.
Mr Kincaid took a brown Swiss heifer
calf which was dropped in the stockyards, and by raising her on mineralized
pasturage and a properly balanced diet made her the third all-time champion
of her breed! In one season she gave 21,924 pounds of milk. He raised her
butterfat production from 410 pounds in 1 year to 1,037 pounds. Results like
these are of incalculable importance.
Others besides Mr. Kincaid are
following the trail Dr. Northen blazed. Similar experiments with milk have
been made in Illinois and nearly every fertilizer company is beginning to
urge use of the rare mineral elements. As an example I quote from statements
of a subsidiary of one of the leading copper companies:
Many States show a marked reduction
in the productive capacity of the soil * * * in many districts amounting to
a 25 to 50 percent reduction in the last 50 years * * *. Some areas show a
tenfold variation in calcium. Some show a sixtyfold variation in phosphorus
* * *. Authorities * * * see soil depletion, barren livestock, increased human
death rate due to heart disease, deformities, arthritis, increased dental
caries, all due to lack of essential minerals in plant food.
"It is neither a complicated
nor an expensive undertaking to restore our soils to balance and thereby work
a real miracle in the control of disease," says Dr. Northen. "As
a matter of fact, it's a money-making move for the farmer, and any competent
soil chemist can tell them how to proceed.
"First determine by analysis
the precise chemistry of any given soil, then correct the deficiencies by
putting down enough of the missing elements to restore its balance. The same
care should be used as in prescribing for a sick patient, for proportions
are of vital importance.
"In my early experiments
I found it extremely difficult to get the variety of minerals needed in the
form in which I wanted to use them but advancement in chemistry, and especially
our ever-increasing knowledge of colloidal chemistry, has solved that difficulty.
It is now possible, by use of minerals in colloidal form, to prescribe a cheap
and effective system of soil correction which meets this vital need and one
which fits in admirably with nature's plans.
"Soils seriously deficient
in minerals cannot produce plant life competent to maintain our needs, and
with the continuous cropping and shipping away of those concentrates, the
condition becomes worse.
"A famous nutrition authority
recently said, 'One sure way to end the American people's susceptibility to
infection is to supply through food a balanced ration of iron, copper, and
other metals. An organism supplied with a diet adequate to, or preferably
in excess of, all mineral requirements may so utilize these elements as to
produce artificially by our present method of immunization. You can't make
up the deficiency by using patent medicine.'
"He's absolutely right. Prevention
of disease is easier, more practical, and more economical than cure, but not
until foods are standardized on a basis of what they contain instead of what
they look like can the dietician prescribe them with intelligence and with
effect.
"There was a time when medical
therapy had no standards because the therapeutic elements in drugs had not
been definitely determined on a chemical basis. Pharmaceutical houses have
changed all that. Food chemistry, on the other hand, has depended almost entirely
upon governmental agencies for its research, and in our real knowledge of
values we are about where medicine was a century ago.
"Disease preys most surely
and most viciously on the undernourishment and unfit plants, animals, and
human beings alike, and when the importance of these obscure mineral elements
is fully realized the chemistry of life will have to be rewritten. No one
knows their mental or bodily capacity, how well they can feel or how long
they can live, for we are all cripples and weaklings. It is a disgrace to
science. Happily, that chemistry is being rewritten and we are on our way
to better health by returning to the soil the things we have stolen from it.
"The public can help; it
can hasten the change. How? By demanding quality in its food. By insisting
that our doctors and our health departments establish scientific standards
of nutritional value.
"The growers will quickly
respond. They can put back those minerals almost overnight, and by doing so
they can actually make money through bigger and better crops.
"It is simpler to cure sick
soils than sick people -- which shall we choose?"
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