74th CONGRESS SENATE DOCUMENT
2nd SESSION No. 264
MODERN MIRACLE MEN
AN ARTICLE
BY
REX BEACH
ENTITLED "MODERN MIRACLE MEN", RELATING TO
PROPER FOOD MINERAL BALANCES BY
DR. CHARLES NORTHEN, REPRINTED FROM
COSMOPOLITAN, JUNE 1936
PRESENTED BY MR. FLETCHER
JUNE I (calendar day, JUNE 5), 1936.-Ordered to be printed
UNITED STATES
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON 1936
S. Docs.. 74-2, vol. 18-----48
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MODERN MIRACLE MEN
DR. CHARLES NORTHEN, WHO BUILDS HEALTH FROM THE GROUND UP
This quiet, unballyhooed pioneer and genius in the field of nutrition
demonstrates that countless human ills stem from the fact that im-
poverished soil of America no longer provides plant foods with the
mineral elements essential to human nourishment and health! To over-
come this alarming condition, he doctors sick soils and, by seeming
miracles, raises truly healthy and health-giving fruits and vegetables.
(By Rex Beach)
Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dan-
gerous 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!
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'd 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 mineral salts 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, and carbohydrates. We now know that it must con-
tain, in addition, some thing 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 contri-
butions of science to the problem of human health.
So far as the records go, the first man in this 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 at Orlando, Fla. His dis-
coveries 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 au-
thentic, 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 search-
ing out the reasons therefor, 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 aninial can appro-
priate 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 suffi-
cient minerals for human needs. Eminent agricultural authorities in-
sisted 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 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 in the body. Dis-
order 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 food 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 any-
where 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 be-
came 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 fasinating subject, for it goes to the heart of human
betterment."
The results obtained by Dr. Northen are outstanding. By putting
back into foods the stuff that foods are made of, he has proved him-
self 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. (By "better" is meant not only an im-
provement 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 de-
velopment, 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 canni-
bals and be made to devour each other.
A cageful of normal rats will live in amity. Restrict their cal-
cium, 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 defi-
cient in magnesia. We punish them for our failure to feed them pro-
perly.
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 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 catalogue them. Included in the list are
rickets, bony deformities, bad teeth, nervous disorders, reduced re-
sistance to other diseases, fatigability, and behavior disturbances
such as incorrigibility, assaultiveness, nonadaptability.
Here's one specific example: The soil around a certain midwest city
is poor in calcium. Three hundred children of this community were
examined and nearly 90 percent had bad teeth, 69 percent showed affec-
tions of the nose and throat, swollen glands, enlarged or diseased
tonsils. More than one-third 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 two 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 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 deficien-
cies by drugging hasn't worked out so well. Consider those 16 indis-
pensable elements and those others which presumably perform some ob-
scure function as yet undetermined. Aside from calcium and phosphor-
us, 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 scales 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. There-
in 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 condemning 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 text-
books 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.
"And so what?" came the query.
Dr. Northen undertook to demonstrate that something could be done
about it. By reestablishing a proper soil balance he actually grew
crops that contained an ample amount of the 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, realiz-
ing the hopelessness of trying to remedy nutritional deficiencies
without positive factors to work with, recommended a careful study
content of foodstuffs and the variations due to soil depletion in
different localities. These progressive medical men are awake to the
importance of prevention.
Dr. Northen went even further and proved that crops grown in a
properly mineralized soil were bigger and better; that seeds ger-
minated 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 im-
proved 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 rich-
er 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 be opens up on his pet topic;
then his diffidence 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'm an M.D. 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 ferti-
lizer 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 tuberclosis 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 sys-
tem 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 had 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 fruit, 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 deficien-
cies on your farm and growing more minerals into your crops?"
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 the 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 determina-
tions. 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.
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 suf-
ferers.
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:
Many States show a marked reduction In the productive capacity of
the soil * * * in many districts amounting to a 25 to 5O percent
reduction in the last 50 years * * *. Some areas show a tenfold
variation in calcium. Some show a sixtyfold variation in phosphor-
us * * *. 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 re-
store 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
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 dificult to get the
varity 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 natures's plans.
"Soils seriously deficient in minerals cannot produce plant life
competent to meet 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 therpy 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 bodiliy 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. Hap-
pily, 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 in its 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 miner-
als 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?"
End