Bone Disease, Bone Meal and Amino Acids
The following is a transcription of the July 1958 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Also in this issue:
- Tranquilizers Bad for Children
- Find New Evidence Humans Need Vitamin E
- The Elastic Fibers of the Heart
- What Early Man Discovered About Food
- The Need for a Good Diet, by W.P. Phair, DDS
- Tip of the Month (Sunstroke, Poison Ivy, Poison Oak)
- High Points of Antronex
Bone Disease, Bone Meal and Amino Acids
We have twenty million arthritics in this country, and we spend a billion and a half dollars per year on tooth repairs, yet we consider ourselves a “well-fed nation.” A recent survey of street beggars in India showed only two in 160 had any tooth decay; none had any signs of arthritis when X-rayed at a medical college in a careful physical examination.1 These beggars were getting one-fourth their normal calcium intake, certainly less than we get.
What is wrong with us? As Dr. H.P. Pickerill said years ago:
“There can be no doubt that ignorance is largely responsible for the present widespread prevalence of dental caries. It has been amply demonstrated that the prevalence of caries is due to the habitual consumption of artificial, as opposed to natural, articles of diet. We eat devitalized and demineralized foods and thereby contract disease.”2
But just how can this eating of refined foods stop us from assimilating the rest of the food we eat? We certainly take into our bodies more minerals than the street beggars in India. The answer to that question is now available. The problem is not in the mineral intake; it is in the amino acid intake. Cooking proteins destroys the tryptophan and lysine now proven to be the actual cause of tooth decay.3 Also, chlorine in drinking water destroys tryptophan and tyrosine.4
Bone and tooth tissue are structures of fibrous protein, the binding substance for the mineral components—the calcium salts that harden the otherwise rubbery protein into a rigid structure. The most important amino acids in this fibrous component are lysine and tryptophan. If the diet is incomplete in the proportions of these amino acids, there will be a consequent inability for bone repair or tooth growth or repair to occur.
We call the clinical picture tooth “decay” or bone “disease,” such as pyorrhea or arthritis. It is clearly a deficiency consequence, since most of the patients have scurvy (pink toothbrush) as a complication. In fact, the dental profession once considered it scurvy—at least the enlightened few who were competent to reason. The status changed when the food industry got better control of the situation and properly brainwashed the dentists and the public. Now the proper comment is “science has not yet discovered the cause of tooth decay, pyorrhea, or arthritis.”
The proof is that test animals can only be caused to lose their teeth and contract arthritis by being fed cooked food.5 No feeder of animals ever cooks their feed unless he has lost his mind. In careful tests reported in Feeds and Feeding by Henry and Morrison (19th edition, page 271), the authors say, “Investigators of this subject usually begin their studies in the full belief that the common feeding stuffs would be improved by cooking. Yet the unmistakable results of their experiments showed them the errors of their previous idea.” They reported that cooking cow feed resulted in a reduction of digestibility of protein by 91 percent and a reduction of digestibility of minerals by 79 percent.
Cows soon lose their teeth if fed cooked food such as brewers’ grains. Dr. Pottenger’s cats all lost their teeth and developed arthritis on pasteurized milk and cooked meat, while controls on raw foods had no trace of such disease.5
The remedy is use in the diet of raw bone flour—or the enzymes from raw bone in tablet form—along with organic manganese (as phytate) to activate the bone-building enzymes.
The peculiar value of food products from Deaf Smith County, Texas, in both preventing tooth decay and promoting healthy bones (residents of that area live twenty years longer before incurring broken hips than the average for the rest of Texas6) is no doubt due in the main to the high manganese content of the soil in that area. The people in the older ages there are free of the osteomalacia and demineralized bone so common elsewhere.
Cooked bone meal is on the market, sold widely as a remedy for these conditions but with a very limited effect because it has lost all its protein. The cooking of bone is ordinarily done to produce gelatin, by the breaking down of the bone protein with steam. The bone meal so produced should be used only as fertilizer, since it requires refining by passing through plant life to regenerate its life-supporting qualities and to remove its high fluoride content. Cattle bone accumulates fluoride so fast that only veal bone should be considered fit for human use; 1 percent cattle bone in baby food causes death to rabbits and chinchillas if fed to them for a few generations.7
A recent article in a popular magazine8 tells us that fluorides are trace elements of our nutritional mineral pattern. This is a false and misleading statement, used for propaganda purposes. Careful scientific tests have proven that fluorides have no nutritional effect whatsoever9 and, in fact, are poisonous to test animals even in the much-used dilution of one part in a million in water, causing loss of teeth by bone disease and kidney degeneration in the later stages of the lifespan of test animals.10
Where the human victim of malnutrition (the cooked-food eater) has reached the point at which he has “low back pains” from the failure of his food to restore the fibrous protein in his overworked intervertebral discs, it is possible to produce prompt relief by supplying tablets of an aqueous extract of raw veal bone, carrying the enzymes that stimulate bone regeneration, along with some organic manganese, as phytate, to activate those enzymes. Whole, raw veal bone flour will do the job also in a little longer time. This same treatment will also tighten loose teeth, unless infection has destroyed too much of the bone structure. Great clinical changes often occur in a week or two.
Whole grains carry a high phosphorus content, both as phosphoric acid and as phospholipids such as lecithin. Both forms prevent heart and cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in this country today. If you record the heart sounds, you can identify various specific deficiency indications in the cardiogram. Too little of the vitamin F complex (the fatty acid factors accompanying the vitamin E in the cereal oil) causes a failure of delivery of diffusible calcium to the heart muscle, so its contraction tends to collapse before its cycle is complete, thereby causing a weakening of the second sound, sometimes even its complete disappearance. The administration of the vitamin F in such a case usually brings back the second sound in a few minutes.
References
- Pathak, C.L, MD. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 6, No. 2, March/April 1958.
- Pickerill, H.P., MD. The Prevention of Dental Caries and Oral Sepsis, pp. 348–360. Bailliere, Tindall, and Cox, London, 1914.
- Bavetta and McClure. Journal of Nutrition, September 1957.
- Advances in Food Research, Vol. 7, p. 143. Academic Press, 1957.
- Pottenger Jr., F.M. “The Effect of Heat-Processed Foods and Metabolized Vitamin D Milk on the Dentofacial Structures of Experimental Animals.” Jol. Orthodontics and Oral Surgery, 32:8, August 1946.
- “New Concepts in Bone Healing.” Jol. Applied Nutrition, Vol. 7, p. 318, 1954.
- Cox, W.R. “Hello, Test Animals: Chinchillas or You and Your Grandchildren?” Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee 1, Wisconsin.
- Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1956.
- Maurer and Day. “The Non-Essentiality of Fluorine in Nutrition.” Nutrition, Vol. 62, p. 561, 1957.
- McCay and Associates. Gerontology, January 1958.
Tranquilizers Bad for Children
Washington, D.C. – A correlation between heavy smoking and the frequency of cancer, as well as the harm of tranquilizing drugs on children were alleged by federal health investigators in a recent hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee.
Tranquilizers have been found very helpful in treatment of specific mental disease, but their use on children may result in permanent harm to the developing personality, the testimony said. Worry, anxiety, and dissatisfaction are good for development of character, the investigators believe. Without them all progress would tend toward a stop.
Find New Evidence Humans Need Vitamin E
“Tentative evidence” that vitamin E may after all be needed by humans appears in studies by Drs. Alvin Nason and I.R. Lehman of the McCollum-Pratt Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
The vitamin, known chemically as tocopherol, was discovered thirty years ago as a nutritional item needed for reproduction by rats. Its value for human nutrition has long been debated. It has been generally considered necessary for maintaining the structure and function of muscle, including heart muscle, and the peripheral blood vessel system in a number of animals.
These effects have been laid to its protective action in checking the oxidation of unsaturated fats and other substances sensitive to destruction by oxidation, such as vitamins A and C. However, the exact mechanism of the vitamin’s primary role in nutrition and whether humans actually do need it had not been determined.
The studies by the Johns Hopkins scientists, reported in Science (July 1), suggest that the primary function of the vitamin is to activate a yellow enzyme chemical called cytochrome c reductase. This yellow enzyme plays an important role in oxidation processes involved in energy transfer in cells of the body.
The vitamin may activate the yellow enzyme, with the help of some fatty chemical. This possibility and the behavior of the yellow enzyme in dystrophy muscles of both humans and other animals that are deficient in vitamin E are now being investigated.
—Science News Letter, July 16, 1955
The Elastic Fibers of the Heart
Abstract presented by Dr. Zygmunt Menschik, Department of Anatomy, Georgetown University Schools of Medicine and Dentistry, at the 69th meeting of the American Association of Anatomists, 1956.
A histological study of elastic fibers was made in 98 fetal and 112 adult hearts of rabbits and guinea pigs using eight diets differing in content as to vitamin E, unsaturated fatty acids, and saturated fats.
The cardiac elastic elements form: 1) an elastic lamina under the endocardium from which fibers radiate towards the periphery 2) a delicate membrane under the epicardium 3) elastic laminae of the coronary arteries and their branches, and 4) elastic sheath along the bundle of His and Purkinje fibers.
Fetuses from vitamin E deficient mothers and adult animals on prolonged vitamin E deficiency show decreased amount of elastic fibers in their hearts. In adult animals kept over seventy days on vitamin E deficient diets, the cardiac elastic elements, especially those of coronary arteries and of the sheath around the Purkinje fibers, show breaking and disintegration; broken, curled ends; and isolated segments beady in appearance. This injurious effect of vitamin E deficiency is aggravated by the supplementation of the diet with unsaturated fatty acids and by the absence from the diet of saturated fats.
Vitamin E seems to be one of the essential factors for preserving the integrity of elastic elements of the heart.
—The Anatomical Record, v. 124, n. 2, pp. 333–334, February 1956.
What Early Man Discovered About Food
“Instinct may play a part in animals’ nutrition, but human beings acquired cultural patterns at an early stage. These patterns are ruthless. They have long since obscured the natural picture and made the operation of instinct improbable. They include taboos; religious, ritual, and 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 mere social conventions. Yet there is inescapable evidence that primitive peoples chose their original diets shrewdly and with care—sometimes with more care than modern Westerners.
“Perhaps today’s nutritionist can learn as much by borrowing the methods of the anthropologist and studying man’s food choices through the ages as he can in the laboratory. It may be that the Maasai 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, cereals, vegetables, fruit, and some goat meat, can teach as truly as laboratory-fed white rats.”
—William H. Adolph, “What Early Man Discovered About Food,” Harper’s Magazine
The Need for a Good Diet
Clinicians often relate diet to dental health only in terms of the obvious effects of deficiencies that can be noted by physical examination. However, nutritional deficiencies may exist and have deleterious effects on dental structures even though these effects may not be obvious in general clinical examination. It is possible that dietary factors may play an even more important role in malocclusion than the present limits of our scientific observations specify. It is, therefore, even more important to say that good diet is always necessary, not only for good occlusion but also for strong bones and caries-free teeth. A good diet is necessary to good health—throughout life—for all tissues of the body.
—W.P. Phair, DDS, MPH, Modern Nutrition, Los Angeles
Tip of the Month (Sunstroke, Poison Ivy, Poison Oak)
Calcium lactate and vitamin F complex have been found to be invaluable in cases of sunstroke, poison ivy, and poison oak.
High Points of Standard Process Nutritional Adjuncts
Anti-Pyrexin [Antronex]: A liver extract (yakriton) that is opposite in its biological significance to thyroxine, thereby preventing toxic reactions from thyroxine, not as an antidote but as a physiological synergist normally supplied by the liver.
Anti-Pyrexin is a food product having a natural physiological antihistamine factor. For this reason, it is often found beneficial in conditions such as allergies, hay fever, colds, hyperthyroidism, and some types of hypertension. It has been observed in allergies—hay fever particularly—that these conditions are usually accompanied by systemic alkalinity. When alkalinity is present, Anti-Pyrexin is more effective if the salivary pH has been normalized (to pH 7) by the use of Cal-Amo tablets (or Betaine Hydrochloride), as shown by Hydrion test papers.
Anti-Pyrexin has also been found helpful in relieving nervousness as a result of taking thyroid extract.
Anti-Pyrexin is contraindicated in persons with low blood pressure or hypothyroid states unless they are frequently examined by a physician.
