Man and Food Bionomics
Contents in this issue:
- “Man and Food Bionomics.”
The following is a transcription of the Third Quarter 1972 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Man and Food Bionomics
“The food plants we eat and the water we drink are our connections with the soil from which we came and to which we return.”
—A. W. Erickson
Health
Depending on the source of information, definitions of health are varied and generally incomplete. Some medical practitioners have negatively inferred that we are healthy if we are not diseased and do not require surgery. Psychiatry advises that health is the absence of maladjustive emotional patterns. Chiropractic concludes health exists when blood circulation is normal and the neuro-muscular-skeletal relationships are functioning at maximum efficiency. A combined dictionary definition describes health as the state of dynamic equilibrium between various systems of an organism, to promote a state of being hale or sound in body, mind, or soul.
None of these definitions answers the question as to how the intricate systems of man are supplied with the necessary materials to cooperate and function as a healthy unit. Apparently, all seem to presume that the red blood cells carry adequate nutrition to supply all our physiological needs. However, the blood cells can only furnish the nutrients as provided in our food. In this age of specialization, all the systems of the body continue to serve the whole unit, as the Creator intended. So also, the complete unit must be fed by the whole food the Creator provided and which man has despoiled. Processors generally do not pay any attention to the complete nutritive value of their products. The average consumer is only now beginning to realize that anything less than whole food creates systemic unbalance or pathology.
Cellular Balance and Health
In regard to incomplete nutritional factors, Dr. Roger Williams, University of Texas, states: “My conclusions after decades of biochemical research…[is] that malnutrition, unbalanced or inadequate nutrition at the cellular level should be thought of as a major cause of disease.”
All body functions depend on metabolically active healthy cells to convert nutrients into special materials needed to perform its assigned task, as for instance, a heart cell, a liver cell, a brain cell, a particular endocrine gland cell, or an antibody-producing cell. We know that such substances as hormones and enzymes can be produced in the body, provided the necessary food factors (essential fatty acids and other mobilizing or growth-promoting substances) are available in the proper assimilable form, through nutrition. We also know that the amino acids, minerals, and vitamins must come from food in complexes rather than single synthetic entities. It is necessary to have a sufficient supply of nutrients flowing to and through the cell beds, to maintain physiological body function in equilibrium with its environment or at optimal level. Dr. Seymour L. Halpern has stated: “All the nutrients utilized by the tissues must be simultaneously available to the cell.”
“We are what we eat” is being emphasized more and more as the death rate from the present-day killers—namely coronary and vascular conditions, cancer, and diabetes—continues to rise. Biochemists have now ascertained that the living cell is dependent on food for health and that if the food is poison the cell becomes sick and succumbs to virus and other diseases. According to these researchers our present health dilemma stems from inadequate nutrition at the cellular level. In this day of medical specialization, it is regrettable that man is divided into either the physical or the psychological entity. From a nutritional health standpoint, man is a complete unit of many parts, all dependent on the other. Health is no longer “the absence of disease.” It is rather the ideal in which the perfect balance of the processes of life is achieved.
A Biological Unit
The ideal situation for man is to have optimal health and enjoy a full functional life. Optimal health should be interpreted as a normal birth without injury or defects, normal resistance to infections so that bacterial exposure does not lead to infection or, if infection should occur, is readily controlled and no permanent damage results. It means natural intelligence with a mind that is alert to everyday problems and allows functioning successfully in the social order. It requires functional endocrine balance throughout life, sound teeth that should last as long as the rest of the body normally, without the use of so-called cavity inhibitors, and a balanced biochemical physiology, so that one anatomical system does not wear out in advance of others to shorten the normal individual lifespan. The ideal situation is when the whole body wears out equally.
Modern-day interference with natural foodstuffs has apparently cancelled out what was formerly known as “death from old age.” One of the most neglected fields in education is the study of man himself. The study of man, as a biological unit, should be the basis of human ecology. Man is a creature of physiological balances and controls that always obeys the laws of physics and chemistry.
The result of these chemical forces from without as well as from within the body is only now beginning to be understood by scientists. To date, scientific technological advances in industrial chemistry have failed to acknowledge, or appreciate, that the body of man is a living entity and not just a piece of inanimate machinery unaffected by the chemical pollutants being unloaded on the natural environment and, in effect, jeopardizing human ecology.
The food processing chemist has also failed in many instances to realize that man is an entire and complete unit, a whole unto himself. Failure to recognize the benefits of whole food for himself could account for his statistically recorded short life. Man has in so many instances failed to use his ability to reason, which, after all, lifts man above the flora and fauna of nature. In this respect we are reminded of the definition of Professor Carleton S. Coon:
“Man; an animal who by his cunning brain and skillful hands, conquered the forces of nature, making the beasts his servants, changing the face of the earth, growing in numbers and learning to control everything—except himself.”
And as Dr. Alan Gregg stated: “The world has cancer; the cancer cell is man.”
Early Man and Food
“Instinct may play a part in an animal’s choice of food, but man acquired cultural patterns of food selection. These patterns are ruthless. They have long since obscured the natural picture and made the operation of good selection improbable. They include taboos, religious ritual, educational programs, prejudice, even planned propaganda. All these, particularly in recent times, have blunted man’s freedom of food choice and made it difficult to distinguish his original choices from more social conventions. Yet, there is inescapable evidence that early people chose their original diets shrewdly and with care, sometimes with far more care than modern westerners. Perhaps today’s nutritionist can learn as much by studying man’s food choices through the ages as he can in the laboratory. It may be that the Masai of East Africa, a tribe noted for exceptional physique, who live on milk, meat, and raw blood, or the splendidly healthy Hunzas of Northern India, who for generations have eaten milk, butter, whole cereals, vegetables, fruit and some goat meat, can teach as truly as laboratory-fed rats.”
—Quoted from “What Early Man Discovered About Food,” by William H. Adolph, in Harper’s Magazine.
Modern Food Problems
Vital nutritional substances are needed in correct amounts. Transposition of oxygen in the cell is the source of energy for the body. Although oxygen is the active element in oxidizing cellular matter to produce energy for motivation, it is only coincidental that there is a ratio between nutritional food and computed calory values. It is regrettable that the processing industry’s pseudo-nutritionists and/or their propaganda advertising agencies have used calorie values as a red herring to confuse the issue of proper nutrition.
It is true, however, that total nutritive food should not exceed the body’s normal power of oxygen replenishment, as it may cause intermittent oxygen deficiency in the cell. In this event food substances such as vitamin A and vitamin C, sensitive to destruction by oxidation, could be affected. In early experiments at McCollum-Pratt Institute, Johns Hopkins University, vitamin E was found to have a protective action in checking this oxidative action, especially in unsaturated fat. Further, vitamin E, probably with the aid of a fatty acid, activated the yellow enzyme cytochrome reductase. It was held that this yellow enzyme plays an important role in oxidation processes involved in energy transfer in body cellular tissue.
Later, it was further discovered and recorded in Anatomical Record, by Dr. Z. Menschik, Georgetown University Schools of Medicine and Dentistry, that when vitamin E (wheat germ oil) was added to the diet the cardiac elastic elements form: 1) an elastic lamina under the endocardium from which fibers radiate toward the periphery; 2) a delicate membrane under the epicardium; 3) elastic laminae of the coronary arteries and their branches; and 4) elastic sheath of the bundle of His and Purkinje fibers. These investigations concluded that complete vitamin E (wheat germ oil) apparently is one of the essential factors for preserving the integrity of elastic elements of the heart muscle structure. Fetuses from vitamin E-deficient mothers and adult animals on a prolonged vitamin E deficiency showed a decreased amount of elastic fibers in the heart. In those animals kept on the E-deficient diet for over 70 days, the cardiac elastic elements, especially those of the coronary arteries and of the sheath around the Purkinje fibers, showed disintegration, broken curled ends, and isolated segments, beady in appearance.
Originally, vitamin E was known as vitamin X, or the fertility vitamin. Then animal feeding revealed that a deficiency of vitamin E leads to muscular dystrophy in chicks, dogs, guinea pigs, lambs, rabbits, and monkeys. In the chick feedings, investigators found that in vitamin E-deficient diets muscular dystrophy was aggravated by low and prevented by high levels of methionine and cystine. With these facts corroborated by modern investigative nutritionists, we must concede that processing vitamin E out of much of our refined foods, especially the nutritive oils, could be detrimental to heart and general muscle action.
Heating and reheating of commercial fats and oils negates the purposes for which the polyunsaturates are usually advertised, by saturating them. French-fried foods therefore become a hazard, in that the oils are used over and over, with new oil added only to make the proper level for cooking. This reheating of oils forms undesirable peroxides. According to Dr. Laurence Hursh of the University of Illinois: “Peroxides are highly toxic, destroy cells and strip the body of its vitamin E stores.” Obviously, then, this could lead directly to heart muscle failure. With peroxides the danger is always complete oxidation.
Saturating the polyunsaturates by processing and/or heating makes a mockery of recommending such heated or hydrogenated fats to lessen heart and vascular conditions, through control of blood cholesterol. Corn oil now used in many margarines originally contained linoleic acid, which is converted to the saturated stearic acid by hydrogenation; thus, it would appear to be lacking in the factors claimed to reduce the risk of heart failure.
In addition to the germ oil, whole grains carry a high phosphorus content, both as phosphoric acid and as phospholipids, such as lecithin. In combination they tend to supply factors needed by the body to ward off heart and cardiovascular diseases.
If the heart sounds are recorded, various deficiency indications can often be identified in the cardiogram. Too little of the fatty acid demobilizing factors seems to permit a failure of delivery of diffusible calcium (calcium bicarbonate) to the heart muscle and heart arteries, so its contraction tends to collapse before the cycle is complete. This causes a weakening of the second sound, or even its complete disappearance. Restoring the deficient essential fatty acids (arachidonic, linolenic, and linoleic) to the diet appears to promote the diffusion of calcium bicarbonate to the starving heart muscle and to the cardiovascular system as a whole. The ionized calcium then restores the normal contraction, which has been collapsing before completion of the systole. Food sources of these fat-soluble nutrients are butter, eggs, plant leaves, seeds and seed oils, fresh meat, and yeast.
Natural Fatty Acid Balance
Butter made from whole raw cream is a worldwide good natural food product. The body naturally requires both saturated and unsaturated fats that can be assimilated, and butter is an excellent source of both. The fact that butterfat in various forms has been a source of nutrition for humans throughout the world for centuries proves that it is readily metabolized. The natural content of choline, cephalin, arachidonic acid, lecithin, the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, together with protein and such minerals as calcium, magnesium, potassium—and probably other unknown essentials in the associated components of milk—supply the butter with its own cholesterol-metabolizing factors.
In the confusion regarding cholesterol, we have lost sight of the fact that as far back as April 1959, Nutrition Reviews reported that butterfat carries a factor that promotes heparin activity in the bloodstream. Heparin is the substance that occurs in the liver and other tissues which has the property of prolonging the clotting time of blood, apparently by inhibiting certain factors involved in the conversion of prothrombin to thrombin. By reason of its anticoagulant action, heparin is often used for postoperative prevention of thrombophlebitis in vascular surgery.
In a recent test, forced stimulation of specific brain areas caused an increase in blood fats, triglycerides in particular. One area was the hypothalamus, which governs such activities as sleep, urination, and regulation of blood pressure. The other area was the amygdaloid nucleus, which governs such emotions as fear and rage. The increased blood fats from forced activity of these brain centers was believed to be due to the impedance of heparin action.
For some time, diet-conscious physicians have advised that butter is not good for the high cholesterol patient. Upon advice from industrial chemists, they have relegated it to the animal fat category, which chemists have also maligned. As Senator Gaylord Nelson states: “The chemical and drug industries have joined the food industry in a food complex, poorly monitored at best.”
Biochemists now advise that the human body needs both saturated and unsaturated fats from both animal and vegetable sources. Apparently, the industrial chemist, with little knowledge of physiology, did not realize that butter physiologically supplies its own cholesterol metabolizing factors. To date most substitutes lack the sustenance of butter and can only be considered an artificial likeness with their own special metabolizing problems.
Coronary Thrombosis and Nutrition
The high cholesterol type patient is usually considered a candidate for a salt-free diet. However, salt deprivation can aggravate the situation when urea is low. Many times, more urea and/or potassium is of greater importance than getting less sodium. Sodium chloride is an electrolyte and urea an anti-electrolyte. Because of its diffusibility, urea exists in the lymph, bile, pancreatic juice, and spinal fluid in practically the same concentration as in the blood. It is also found in the saliva in about 80 percent of this concentration.
According to George W. Crile, MD, author of the Bipolar Theory of Living Processes, “Urea, present in pericellular fluids, would reduce the conductivity of the fluid and tend to raise the vitality of the cell.” This balance between salt and urea is one of physiological equilibrium and just as important as the isotonic balance that considers osmotic pressure alone.
Ringer and some other investigators overlooked the physiological action of urea in preventing the formation of blood clots in the vascular system. It promotes colloidal dispersion of materials insoluble in water, and it is this effect that causes urea to cooperate with heparin in preventing a nonphysiological blood clotting. Nutritionally, urea is considered to be a protein, but in large doses it is considered as a diuretic. However, if we can retain our physiological balances through nutrition, it is doubtful we will need pharmaceutical assistance.
Some years ago, a report by researchers Doles, Hunter, and McGuire advised that a deficiency of vitamin K very often increased coronary thrombosis. Their experiment proved that deep-freeze foods lost vitamin K by oxidative destruction in vegetables apparently stored too long. In foods vitamin K is regarded as a natural coagulation and antihemorrhagic vitamin. It is formed by intestinal bacteria and is very essential for the formation of prothrombin by the liver cells.
Synthetic vitamin K (menadione, actually K3) apparently does not have the same action as the vitamin K in food. In fact, such side effects as albuminuria, vomiting, renal tubular degeneration, and depression of prothrombin activity have been recorded. In a later survey, Dr. Doles showed that the destruction of vitamin K in food caused a statistical rise of 30 to 1 in coronary conditions and sudden deaths from heart disease.
Previously, Dr. Martha Jones reported having saved the lives of some 300 babies a year in Hawaii when she changed the baby formula carbohydrate from corn syrup and refined sugar to unrefined sugar cane syrup. She believed the major life-saving factor in the natural cane syrup was the natural fat-soluble vitamin K, although potassium was credited with an assist. This vitamin, because it was found to assist in coagulation, was called the “Koagulation vitamin” by the original Danish investigators. They found they could produce internal hemorrhage and anemia in chicks fed a fat free diet. In fact, the blood clotting time in chicks provides a standard for assaying vitamin K activity. Scientists now know that it is especially needed in humans, at least temporarily, where the microflora of the alimentary tract has been upset by antibiotics or bacteriostatic drugs. However, they presently consider it to be the “anti-hemorrhagic vitamin.”
According to Cantarow and Trumper, coauthors of Clinical Biochemistry, the absence of bile acids in the intestine impairs vitamin K absorption. Functioning in the same manner as they do with vitamin D and carotene, bile acids appear to carry vitamin D across the intestinal wall. Food sources are the green leaves of plants and vegetables, liver, eggs, and fish.
Serum Lipids and Cholesterol
In view of the complexities of lipid metabolism, both normal and created, lipid evaluation in the body continues to be difficult. There is a difference in the lipoprotein concentrate in the same individual at various times and ages, in men and women, among population groups, in specific areas in the loss-gain cycle of athletes, and also a variation in methods and tests for determination. Most of these test methods apply to research and are not appropriate for a short-term diagnosis, which also adds to cholesterol level confusion. Medical clinicians have been advised that esterification occurs preferentially with the polyunsaturated fatty acids, as has been demonstrated with essential arachidonic acid as a natural cholesterol mobilizer. Apparently, a diet preponderant in saturated fats—and especially in refined carbohydrates—creates new metabolic problems that may possibly interfere with heart muscle action and also raise the blood cholesterol and triglyceride level.
Some nutritional investigators doubt if many of the highly advertised brand name synthetic fats, processed oils, and margarines will meet the new standard labeling regulation recently proposed by the FDA. Some fat processors are now promoting sitosterol, the sterol factor refined from soybean oil, as a cholesterol controlling factor.
In commenting on the fallacy of restricting natural foods like butter and eggs as a futile effort to alter cholesterol formation, George L. Curran, MD, has also advised:
“Sitosterol would only lower blood cholesterol temporarily and…fails to alter the state of overloaded tissues that represent the true pathological condition.”
Also:
“Because a compensatory increase in cholesterol synthesis would always prevent more than a transitory reduction in tissue cholesterol induced by other means, as in the case of rats fed soy sterols, the future treatment of atherosclerosis must of necessity include some inhibitor of cholesterol synthesis.”
According to Dr. Hugh M. Sinclair of Oxford University, England:
“It is a deficiency of the natural unrefined fats and their unsaturated fatty acids lost in foods from oxidation, flour bleaching, hydrogenation of oils and other processing which makes the body sensitive to cholesterol, sunlight and carcinogens, all of which can then, and then only, perform their devastating damage.”
Unbiased investigators believe that processing interferes with the cholesterol regulating hormones produced by the cells of the pancreas and by the kidneys and liver. We know that the beta cells of the pancreas produce insulin in proportionate amount to the carbohydrates ingested. Also, ingestion of excess refined sugars and starches over a period of time can result in diabetes. Science also tells us that the ingestion of natural fats provides the balancing factor in the production of hormones. Interference with the pancreatic hormone has been known to induce the high blood cholesterol count in diabetes. In this regard, from research at the University of California, it would seem plausible to manage high blood cholesterol by the same nutritional supportive measures required by diabetes. Biochemists now stress that fact that anything less than whole food can create systemic unbalance or pathology.
Pregnancy Toxemia
The pluriglandular involvement in pregnancy serves as an example of systemic dependency and the relationship of nutriments and health. Cumulative worldwide evidence reveals that the high intake of over-refined foods (such as bleached white flour, white sugar, and white polished rice) and the low intake of proteins and natural fats and oils are contributing to a steadily increasing incidence of pregnancy toxemia. Refined foods often lose part or all of the water and fat-soluble vitamin complexes, amino acids and minerals, all of which contribute to enzyme formation, good digestion and normal metabolism. The expectant mother needs food that is fresh and wholesome to aid in the normal production of bone, its marrow and red blood cells, and for the total cell development and normal growth of the embryo, as well as to provide personal health and stamina.
According to Dr. Tom Brewer of the Nutrition Action Group, the swelling associated with pregnancy toxemia comes from too much sugar and starch and a protein deficiency. He says, “It is associated with liver dysfunction and malnutrition and, if you treat them with low salt diets and diuretics, you can kill them.” Except in cases of heart disease or hypertension, he advises pregnant women to salt food according to taste as it is needed to maintain blood volume in both mother and baby.
Man and Progress?
The Los Angeles Times recently reported the sad story of the tomato. The grower wanted to keep costs down by increasing the yield and have all get ripe simultaneously and with a tougher skin so they would not be damaged by his mechanical picker. The canning factory desired one shape so they would roll on the conveyor belt. University of California scientists produced the desired changes but, in so doing, lost some of the consistency and the good tomato taste. In attempting to recapture lost flavor they have extracted 70 chemicals from the old-fashioned tomato but do not expect to recapture the original flavor for another four or five years. The loss of consistency and flavor also indicates a loss of nutriments.
Since World War II the nutritional value of our food intake has been deteriorating. Nutrition and health have become secondary to convenience for the processor, convenience in packaging and a conveniently long shelf life for the retailer. However, the paying consumer is left hungrily in the lurch from eating the “inferred nutrition” in these processed “convenience foods.” In nutrition, man’s progress seems more or less backward.
Report No. 2 of the Science and Educational Staff of the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggests that the annual cost of heart and vascular disease, said to be $31.6 billion, could be reduced 20 percent with the implementation of improved nutrition. Arrogant industrial chemical scientists, by usurping the Creator’s province and function, have messed up the nutritive intake in the American diet, creating hazards which have apparently increased the death rate. They have not reconciled themselves to the fact that “we are what we eat.” Neither have they realized that, to quote Robert Herrier, “Man is not in control of the earth. He only tends the garden.”
