Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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On 5/5/2007 at 2:48 AM Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net wrote:


http://www.gotwater.net/senate_doc_264.htm

SENATE DOCUMENT 264 - Unabridged Version
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 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 is the Unabridged Version of this document.

 
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 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, (By 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 -- fruit and vegetables and grains
-- now being raised on millions of acres of land 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'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 [and foremothers] thrived on a selection of foods that
would starve us!) No one of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to
supply their system with the mineral salts they require for perfect health,
because their 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 contain, in addition,
something like a score of mineral salts.
        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 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.
        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 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 disorder. Later, he moved
to New York and made extensive studies along this line, in conjunction with
a famous French scientist from 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
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 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 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 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 them one vegetable, one glass of
milk, or one egg is about the same as another. Dirt is dirt, too, and they
assume 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 or lands, even 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."
       
        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 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 improvement
in food value but also an increase in quantity and quality.)
        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 effect the growth and development, 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
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; in time they will begin to sleep in a pile as before.
        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 the 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, phosphorous,
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
contractability 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 catalog them. Included in the list are rickets, bony
deformities, bad teeth, nervous disorders, reduced resistance 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 and bad teeth, 69 percent showed affections 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 phosphorous 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 phosphorous 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 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
dieticians 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 phosphorous,
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 scale 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. Therein 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 assertions 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 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
analysis, 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 be actually grew crops
that contained an ample amount of 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, 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. 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 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 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 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.
        He is an elderly, retiring man, with a warm smile and an engaging
personality, He is a trifle shy until he 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 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 disease that
plague them. Insecticides cost farmers nearly as much as fertilizers 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 germ 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."
        "Good heavens! Do you realize what that means to agriculture?"
        "Perfectly. Enormous saving. 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 analysis 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 deficiencies 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 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 person 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
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:
        Many States show a marked reduction in the productive capacity of
the soil * * * in many districts amounting to a 25 to 50 percent reduction
in the last 50 years * * *. Some areas show a tenfold variation in calcium.
Some show a sixtyfold 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 food.

        "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," says Dr. Northen. "As a matter of fact, it's a money-making
move for the farmer, and any competent soil chemist can tell them 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 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 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 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 dietician prescribe them with intelligence and with effect.
        "There was a time when medical therapy 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
undernourishment 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 one knows their mental or
bodily capacity, how well they can feel or how long they can live, for we
are all cripples and weaklings. It is a disgrace to science. Happily, that
chemistry is being rewritten and we are 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 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?"





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