Proper Food
Mineral Balances
“Charles Northen Builds Health From
The Ground Up. This 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
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
contains enough of certain needed minerals, are starving us — no
matter how much of them we eat!
A realization of the importance of minerals in food is so new that
the textbooks on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it.
Nevertheless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the
further we delve into it the more startling it becomes.
You’d think, 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.
We now know that diet must contain, in addition, something like a
score of mineral salts.
It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99% of the
American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked
deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually
results in disease.
Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack of one or another
element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we
sicken, suffer, shorten our lives.
This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions
of science to the problem of human health.
Dr Charles Northen, MD 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.
“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, for up to that
time people had paid little attention to food deficiencies and even
less to soil deficiencies.
Men eminent in medicine denied there was
any such thing as vegetables and fruits that did not contain
sufficient minerals for human needs.
Eminent agricultural authorities insisted that all soil contained
all necessary minerals.
They reasoned that plants take what they need, and that it is the
function of the human body to appropriate what it requires.
Failure to do so, they said, was a symptom of disorder.
Some of our respected authorities even claimed that the so-called
secondary minerals played no part whatever in human health.
It is only recently that 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 in the body.
Disorder and disease result from any vitamin deficiency.
It is not commonly realized, however, that vitamins control the
body’s appropriation of minerals, and in the absence of minerals
they have no function to perform.
Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but
lacking minerals, vitamins are useless.
Neither does the layman realize that there may be a pronounced
difference in both foods and soils, to 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 most necessary to health, growth, long life, and
resistance to disease.
Up to the time I began experimenting, almost nothing had been done
to make good the theft.
The more I studied nutritional problems and the effects of mineral
deficiencies upon disease, the more plainly I saw that here lay the
most direct approach to better health, and the more important it
became in my mind to find a method of restoring those missing
minerals to our foods.
The subject interested me so profoundly that I retired from active
medical practice and for a good many years now I have devoted myself
to it.
It’s a fascinating subject, for it goes to the heart of human
betterment.” - Dr Charles Northen, MD
The results obtained by Dr Northen are outstanding.
By putting back into foods the stuff that foods are made of, he has
proved himself to be a real miracle man of health, for he has opened
up the shortest and most rational route to better health.
He showed first that it should be done, and then that it could be
done.
He doubled and redoubled the natural mineral content of fruits and
vegetables.
He improved the quality of milk by increasing the iron and the
iodine in it.
He caused hens to lay eggs richer in the vital elements.
By scientific soil feeding, he raised better seed potatoes in Maine,
better grapes in California, better oranges in Florida and better
field crops in other States.
By “better” is meant not only an improvement in food value but also
an increase in 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 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.
Many backward children are “stupid” merely because they are
deficient in magnesia. We punish them for our failure to feed them
properly.
Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon
the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins
or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein, or carbohydrates
we consume.
It is now agreed that at least 16 mineral elements are indispensable
for normal nutrition, and several more are always found in small
amounts in the body, although their precise physiological role has
not been determined.
Of the 11 indispensable Salts, Calcium, Phosphorus, and Iron are
perhaps the most important.
Calcium is the dominant nerve controller; it powerfully affects the
cell formation of all living things and regulates nerve action.
It governs 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% 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 catalogue them.
Included in the list are rickets, bony deformities, bad teeth,
nervous disorders, reduced resistance to other diseases,
fatigability, and behaviour disturbances such as incorrigibility,
assaultiveness, non-adaptability.
Here’s one specific example: The soil around a certain Midwest city
is poor in Calcium.
300 children of this community were examined and nearly 90% had bad
teeth, 69% showed affections of the nose and throat, swollen glands,
enlarged or diseased tonsils. More than 1/3 had defective vision,
round shoulders, bow legs, and anemia.
Calcium and phosphorus appear to pull in double harness.
A child requires as much per day as 2 grown men, but studies
indicate a common deficiency of both in our food.
Researches on farm animals point to a deficiency of one or the other
as the cause of serious losses to the farmers, and when the soil is
poor in phosphorus these animals become bone-chewers.
Dr McCollum says that when there are enough phosphates in the blood
there can be no dental decay.
Iron is an essential constituent of the oxygen-carrying pigment of
the blood: iron starvation results in anemia, and yet iron cannot be
assimilated unless some copper is contained in the diet.
In Florida many cattle die from an obscure disease called “salt
sickness.”
It has been found to arise from a lack of iron and copper in the
soil and hence in the grass.
A man may starve for want of these elements just as a beef “critter”
starves.
If iodine is not present in our foods the function of the thyroid
gland is disturbed and goiter afflicts us.
The human body requires only 14,000 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 undetermined.
Aside from calcium and phosphorus, they are needed only in
infinitesimal quantities, and the activity of one may be dependent
upon the presence of another.
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.
Therein lies the short cut to better health and longer life.
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.
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 10 miles
away.
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 the desired minerals.
This was incredible.
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.
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 flavour.
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.
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.
- “My work lies 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.”
- “Do you realize what that means to agriculture?”
- “Enormous savings, better crops, lowered living costs to the rest
of us. But, I'm not so much interested in agriculture as in health.”
He gave me some of his case records.
For instance, in an orange grove infested with scale, when he
restored the mineral balance to part of the soil, the trees growing
in that part became clean while the rest remained diseased.
By the same means he had grown healthy rosebushes between rows that
were riddled by insects.
He had grown tomato 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 fruit, the chemistry and
the food value of which accurately reflected the soil treatment the
trees had received.
Dr Northen’s work is of such importance as to rank with that of
Burbank, the plant wizard.
“Healthy plants mean healthy people. We can’t raise a strong race on
a weak soil. Why don’t you try mending the deficiencies on your farm
and growing more minerals into your crops?” - Dr Northen
I did try and I succeeded.
I was planting a large acreage of celery and under Dr Northen
direction I fed minerals into certain blocks of the land in varying
amounts.
When the plants from this soil were mature I had them analysed,
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 man requires for a day.
These incredible figures taken from a bulletin of the South Carolina
Food Research Commission:
“In many sections 3 out of 5 persons have goiter and a recent
estimate states that 30 Million people in the United States suffer
from it.”
Foods rich in iodine are of the greatest importance to these
sufferers.
Mr Kincaid took a brown Swiss heifer calf which was dropped in the
stockyards, and by raising her on mineralized pasturage and a
properly balanced diet made her the third all-time champion of her
breed!
In one season she gave 21,924 pounds of milk.
He raised her butterfat production from 410 pounds in 1 year to
1,037 pounds. Results like these are of incalculable importance.
Others besides Mr Kincaid are following the trail Dr Northen blazed.
Similar experiments with milk have been made in Illinois and nearly
every fertilizer company is beginning to urge use of the rare
mineral elements.
As an example I quote from statements of a subsidiary of one of the
leading copper companies Anaconda Copper Mining, Montana:
“Many States show a marked reduction in the productive capacity of
the soil
in many districts amounting to a 25% to 50% reduction in the last 50
years. Some areas show a 10-fold variation in Calcium.
Some show a 60-fold variation in Phosphorus.
Authorities see soil depletion, barren livestock, increased human
death rate due to heart disease, deformities, arthritis, increased
dental caries, all due to lack of essential minerals in plant
foods.” - in “Farm Chemicals”, 1934.
“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. As a matter of fact, it’s a moneymaking 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 or 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.” - Dr Northen
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.
“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.
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 in its food.
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? - Dr Northen.” - Rex
Beach, Writer, in “Modern Miracle Men”, 74th Congress, 2d Session,
U.S. Senate Doc., No. 264, relating to “Proper Food Mineral
Balances” by Dr Charles Northern, reprint from Cosmopolitan, 1 June
1936.
"Water is, of course, the most
important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question
of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the
population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The
one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs,
who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as
a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme
solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any
other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.
Personally, I believe it's better to give a foodstuff a value so
that we're all aware it has its price, and then that one should take
specific measures for the part of the population that has no access
to this water, and there are many different possibilities there."
- Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé, Multinational
Swiss Company, in "We Feed the World", 2005.
“Did we actually manage to Vaccinate everyone in the world, no so
highlighting Water as a Global Commons, and what it means to work
together and see it, both out of that kind of global commons
perspective but also the self-interest perspective, it's not only
important but it's also important because we haven't managed to
solve those problems which had similar attributes, and Water is
something that people understand. Water every kid knows how
important it is to have water when you're playing football and
you're thirsty you need water.” - Professor Mariana Mazzucato,
Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public
Purpose, in “Press Conference: The New Economics of Water - Launch
of Global Commission”, WEF, August 2022.
Essenia
ssanctuary@gmail.com
