yet actually deficient?
The COMMON water soluble minerals you over consume are increasingly more
difficult to expel because they are damaged through complex commercial water
and food processes.
The RARE non water soluble essential trace minerals found in tumbling
mountain streams, precariously exist as tiny particles in suspension called
(colloids) These are even more easily disturbed, altered and damaged by the
same commercial processes and further blocked by the plethora of dead
minerals building up as a person ages, slowing all body systems and sharply
diminishing mineral absorption.
Your good useable "live minerals" are being further depleted by body functions
necessary to get rid of the over abundant "dead minerals"
Why sufficient essential trace minerals are so unavailable?
Short answer: Unfortunately, Its unlikely you are getting sufficient minerals or
vitamins because:
1. Plants cannot make minerals, if no trace minerals are in the soil, no trace
minerals get in the plant.
2. 90+ % of foods are produced from "DEAD SOILS" long depleted from decades
of drawing minerals out and replacing nothing
3. According to Senate Document #264, " 99% of American people are
deficient in minerals" (many of these people are likely already taking
vitamin and mineral supplements)
4. According to Dr. Linus Palling, the two time Nobel Prize winner , "All
nutrients including vitamins, require minerals for proper
absorption" and "You can trace every sickness, every disease
and every ailment to a mineral deficiency".
5. The "synthetic pill peddlers" /chemists have the impossible task of delivering
absorption efficiency with those insulting replacements for nature that their
"marketeers" could possibly brag about.
6. Both the colloidal and water soluble minerals from a mountain stream are
removed or damaged by the 70+ chemicals being used (in the name of "public
safety") in Most of the US population's water processing plants, converting
those "live" useable minerals into unusable "dead" minerals that are
problematic and overloading to the body's tissues and eliminatory organs
7. No two water or soil sources have the same mineral content, usually
abundant in some minerals and deplete in others.Man has never been ascribed
sufficient intelligence to produce food from raw chemicals, Nevertheless; If you
could read that dictionary of un-pronounceable chemicals listed on the label
included in your can of highly processed food or vitamin supplement, you would
swear the chemists boundless ego would never give up trying! Be assured that
nature and plants still wholly own, control, and reproduce that magical equation
they so effortlessly unfold to sustain our clue-less lives. If you wish to place
your precious life at the feet of that holy chemist then do it on that day he takes
a shovel of dirt and magically transforms it into a pound of carrots !!!
CONCLUSION: There is little safety in those "pill peddler promotions" Even the
few simple elemental foods that the body may absorb directly like salt are
usually significantly damaged by mans "foolery" the other forms of directly
absorbable essential trace elements require careful production parameters in
simulating nature in their colloidal suspension.
PLEASE REVIEW THE Quality Check-List necessary to identify a superior trace
element colloid
by, Rex Beach, United States GPO
Washington, D.C., June 1936
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 United 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.
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 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 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 as 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.
[Those "progressive medical men" would be shoved into obscurity by the large-scale
development of antibiotics and the belief that we could produce a drug for every illness.
Preventative medicine was relegated to the back seat by pharmaceutical politics.]
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 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?"
The above educational statements make no medical claims
and have not been evaluated by the FDA.
