United States Senate Document #264
Full Version
"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. 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 . 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.
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.
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
"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 important
for your health!
