Common Sense Eating & Exercise

United States Sen­ate Doc­u­ment #264

“MODERN MIRACLE MEN”

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. In 1936, the U.S. Con­gress was inves­ti­gat­ing U.S. farm­ing prac­tices as notable author­i­ties were sound­ing the alarm bells over depleted soil.  This was brought about as the U.S. Farm­ing Indus­try was dev­as­tated by the “Dust Bowl” from 1932 to 1935 brought on by poor farm­ing prac­tices. Pre­sented by Mr. Sen­a­tor Dun­can Fletcher of Florida June 1, 1936 and Ordered to be Printed by the United States Gov­ern­ment Print­ing Office Wash­ing­ton: 1936 Dur­ing the 74th Con­gress, Sec­ond Ses­sion, Doc­u­ment No. 264.  This arti­cle was also printed in Cos­mopoli­tan in June 1936.

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. [This was before fur­ther research into trace min­er­als and our under­stand­ing Genetic Vari­a­tion.]

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.