United States Senate Document #264
"MODERN MIRACLE MEN"
Presented by Rex Beach, June 1936
United States GPO
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. Some editorial comments have been added and
some text bolded for emphasis. All editorial comments are placed
within brackets and italicized for identification. Senate Document
264 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
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 (which doubtless explains why our
forefathers thrived on a selection of foods that would starve
us!). 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. [We now know that the number is closer to four
score.]
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.
[Today, many nutritionists, scientists and health care
professionals insist that as many as 76 minerals are essential
to achieving and maintaining optimal health, longevity and resistance
to disease. Some of the most convincing evidence of the essentiality
of minerals has come from research conducted by the Department
of Agriculture.]
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. [Cancer, heart disease, and more.]
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.
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.
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.
[Actually, we now know that colloidal minerals can not be
assimilated until they have been broken down by the digestive
system into ionic form.]
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 a 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 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 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?"
Minerals are essential to
life itself!
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