United
States Senate Document #264
Full Version
"MODERN MIRACLE MEN"
Presented by Rex Beach, June 1936
United States GPO
Washington, D.C., 1936
Washington, D.C., 1936
This document is reproduced here in its
entirety from a copy obtained from the United States Government Printing Office
in Washington,
D.C. . Anemic Earth was written in 1936, and submitted as part of a
Congressional investigation into U.S. farming practices. The leading
authorities of the day had been sounding the alarm that depleted soils were
causing a significant decline in the nation's health, evidenced by a steady
increase in degenerative diseases. But when Congress saw the price tag on
repairing the nation's farm and range soils, they swept their own investigation
under the carpet.
INTRODUCTION
Concerning Dr. Charles Northen: "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."
- Rex Beach
- 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, fruits and vegetables
and grains, now being raised on millions of acres of land that 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 would 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 .
No man of today can eat enough
fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for
perfect health, because his 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, or 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 or more of the 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 the 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
disorders. Later he moved to New York
and made extensive studies along this line, in conjunction with a famous French
scientist from the 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 therefore, 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 the necessary minerals. They reasoned that plants
take what they need, and that 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 Untied States Department of Agriculture have
agreed that these minerals are essential to plant, animal, and human feeding.
"We know that vitamins are complex
chemical substances which are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them
is of importance for the normal function of some special structure of 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 him one
vegetable, one glass of milk, or one egg is about the same as another. Dirt is
dirt, too, and he assumes 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 our lands, even in a virgin
state, never were well balanced in mineral content, and unhappily for us, we
have been systematically robbing the poor soils and the good soils alike of the
very substances 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 the 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 improvement in food value but also an increase in quality and quantity.)
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 affect 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. [Magnesium] 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 then upon
calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of, protein, fats 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 16 indispensable salts, calcium, phosphorus and
iron are perhaps the most important.
Calcium is the most dominant nerve
controller; it powerfully affects the cell formation of all living things and
regulates nerve action. It governs contractility 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 and nonadaptability.
Here's one specific example: The soil around
a certain Midwest city
is poor in calcium. Three hundred children in this community were examined and
nearly 90 percent had bad teeth, swollen glands, enlarged or diseased tonsils.
More than one-third had defective vision, round shoulders, bowlegs and anemia.
Calcium and phosphorus appear to pull in
double harness. A child requires as much per day as two grown men, but studies
indicate a common deficiency of one or the other as the cause of serious losses
to the farmers, and when the soil is poor in phosphorous their 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 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
being 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 dietitians 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. (Added Note: Because of the digestive juices; however, My Minerals has been reduced to ionic molecule size for direct cellular absorption, thereby bypassing the digestive system.)
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 not yet understood. 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. (Additional Added Note: My Minerals are in perfect natural balance taken directly from the ocean without manipulation.)
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 commending the use of bathtubs - and he persisted in his
assertion 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 analyses, he pointed out, reflect only the content of
samples. One analysis may be entirely different from another made ten miles
away.
"And so what?" came the query.
Dr. Northen undertook to demonstrate that
something could be done about it. By re-establishing a proper soil balance he
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 difference 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 am an M.D. My works lie in
the field of biochemistry and nutrition. I gave up medicine because this is a
wider and a 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 diseases that plague them. Insecticides cost farmers nearly as
much as fertilizer 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 germs 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 savings. 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 has 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 analyses of
citrus fruits 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 crop?"
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 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 male 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 to 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 sixty-fold variation in phosphorous... 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 foods.
"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 him 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 the use of minerals in colloidal form, to prescribe a
cheap and effective system of soil supplementation.
"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 immunity from
infection quite beyond anything we are able 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 dietitian 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 undernourished 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 man knows his mental or bodily
capacity, how well he can feel or how long he can live, for we are all cripples
and weaklings. It is a disgrace to science. Happily, that chemistry is
being rewritten and we're 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 of 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?"