HOME HYGIENIC
LIBRARY CATALOG
Go To Chapter Seven
How and When to Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
Chapter Six
Vitamins and Other Food Supplements
From The Hygienic Dictionary
Vitamins. [1] The staple foods may not contain the
same nutritive substances as in former times. . . . Chemical fertilizers, by increasing
the abundance of the crops without replacing all the exhausted elements of the soil,
may have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains and
of vegetables. . . . Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis
of diseases. Their studies of conditions of life and diet, and of their effects on
the physiological and mental state of modern man are superficial, incomplete, and
of too short duration. They have, thus, contributed to the weakening of our body
and our soul. Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown.
I have already explained the hygienist's view of why people
get sick. The sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia, alternative elimination,
disease. However, there is one more link in this chain, a precursor to enervation
that, for good and understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists.
That precursor is long term sub-clinical malnutrition. Lack of nutrition effects
virtually everybody today. Almost all of us are overfed but undernourished.
I have already explained that one particular head of broccoli
does not necessarily equal another head of broccoli; the nutritional composition
of apparently identical foods can be highly variable. Not only do different samples
of the same type of food differ wildly in protein content, amino acid ratios and
mineral content, their vitamin and vitamin-like substances also vary according to
soil fertility and the variety grown.
These days, food crop varieties are bred for yield and other
commercial considerations, such as shipability, storage life, and ease of processing.
In pre-industrial times when each family propagated its own unique open-pollinated
varieties, a natural selection process for healthy outcomes prevailed. If the family's
particular, unique varieties carried genes for highly nutritious food, and if the
family's land was fertile enough to allow those genes to manifest, and if the family
kept up its land's fertility by wise management, their children tended to survive
the gauntlet of childhood illness and lived to propagate the family's varieties and
continue the family name. Thus, over time, human food cultivars were selected for
their nutritional content.
But not any longer! These days, farming technology with its
focus on bulk yield and profit, degrades the nutritional content of our entire food
supply. Even commercial organically grown food is no better in this respect.
Sub-clinical, life-long, vitamin and mineral deficiencies
contribute to the onset of disease; the malnourished body becomes increasingly enervated,
beginning the process of disease. Vitamin supplements can increase the body's vital
force, reversing to a degree the natural tendency towards degeneration. In fact,
some medical gerontologists theorize that by using vitamins it might be possible
to restore human life span to its genetically programmed 115 years without doing
anything else about increasing nutrition from our degraded foods or paying much attention
to dietary indiscretions. Knowing what I do about toxemia's effects I doubt vitamins
can allow us to totally ignore what we eat, though supplements can certainly help.
More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a
thinking person to use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are constantly assaulted
and insulted by modern life in ways our genetics never intended us to deal with.
Today the entire environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted;
our food supply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules that our
bodies have no natural ability to process and eliminate. Our cities and work places
are full of loud, shocking noises that trigger frequent adrenaline rushes and other
stress adaptations. Our work places are full of psychological stresses that humans
never had to deal with before.
Historically, humans who were not enslaved have been in control
of determining their own hour to hour, day to day activities, living on their own
largely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for another, at regular hours,
without personal liberty, ignoring or suppressing one's own agenda and inclinations
over an entire lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takes continual subconscious
applications of mental and psychic energies to protect ourselves against the stresses
of modern life, energies that we don't know we're expending. This is also highly
enervating. Thus to remain healthy we may need nutrition at levels far higher than
might be possible through eating food; even ideal food might not contain enough vitamins
to sustain us against the strains and stresses of this century.
And think about Dr. Pottenger's cats. Our bodies are at the
poorer end of a century-long process of mass degeneration that started with white
flour from the roller mill. Compared to my older clients I have noticed that my younger
patients seem to possess less vital force on the average, show evidence of poorer
skeletal development, have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding
and coping with their family life, and are far more likely to develop degenerative
conditions early. Most of my younger patients had a poor start because they were
raised on highly refined, devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without much
exercise. Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparents may
have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and actually had to walk,
not owning cars when they were young. Their great grandparents had a high likelihood
of enjoying decent nutrition and a healthful life-style.
Unfortunately, most of my patients like the idea of taking
vitamins too much for their own good. The AMA medical model has conditioned people
to swallow something for every little discomfort, and taking a pill is also by far
the easiest thing to do because a pill requires no life-style changes, nor self-discipline,
nor personal responsibility. But vitamins are much more frugal than drugs. Compared
to prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension supplements are much less expensive.
I am saddened when my clients tell me they can't afford supplements. When their MD
prescribes a medicine that costs many times more they never have trouble finding
the money.
I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements,
because I can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies heal with dietary
modification and detoxification. Of all the tools at my disposal that help people
heal, last in the race comes supplements.
One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they
were healing agents is that food supplements almost never have harmful side effects,
even when they are taken in what might seem enormous overdoses. If someone with a
health condition reads or hears about some vitamin being curative, goes out and buys
some and takes it, they will at very least have followed the basic principle of good
medicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did nothing for them
at all, they are practicing the same kind of benevolent medicine that Dr. Jennings
did almost two centuries ago. Not only that, but having done something to treat their
symptoms, they have become patients facilitating their own patience, giving their
body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get better, but not because of
the action of the particular vitamin they took. Or, luckily, the vitamin or vitamins
they take may have been just what was needed, raising their body's vital force and
accelerating the body's ability to solve its problem.
One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well
as they might is that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has created
largely false fears in the public mind about harmful effects of vitamin overdoses,
the person may not take enough of the right vitamin. The minimum daily requirements
of vitamins and minerals as outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent
the most obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements at or
near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by the FDA as being 'generally
recognized as safe') they should not expect to see any therapeutic effect unless
they have scurvy, beri beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra.
In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt,
and even vitamin C fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of life-threatening
deficiency states people first learned to recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long
sea voyages used to develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could
kill. Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For this reason
the British Government legislated the carrying of limes on long voyages and today
that is why British sailors are still called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams
of vitamin C. But to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg does
absolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C takes 10,000 milligrams
a day, and to make a life threatening infection like pneumonia go away faster might
require 25,000 to 150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administered intravenously.
In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that's 300 to 750 of them daily–clearly
impossible.
Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of
vitamin B 3, but schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams,
roughly a thousand times as much as the MDR.
There are many many common diseases that the medical profession
does not see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many mental disorders
fall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprised
largely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have
good enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not
have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all old people
have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably declines with age, the quantity
and quality of digestive enzymes decreases, then the ability to breakdown and extract
soluble nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to serious deficiencies.
These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as disease and as aging.
Suppose a body needs 30 milligrams a day of niacin to not
develop pellagra, but to be fully healthy, needs 500 milligrams daily. If that body
receives 50 milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the medical doctor it could
not possibly be deficient in this vitamin. However, over time, the insidious sub-clinical
deficiency may degrade some other system and produce a different disease, such as
colitis. But the medical doctor sees no relationship. Let me give you an actual example.
Medical researchers studying vitamin B 5 or pantothenic acid noticed that it
could, in what seemed to be megadoses (compared to the minimum daily requirement)
largely reverse certain degenerative effects of aging. These researchers were measuring
endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging process. How they made this measurement
may appear to some readers to be heartless, but the best way to gauge the endurance
of a rat is to toss it into a five gallon bucket of cold water and see how long it
swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, the researcher can be absolutely
confident that the rat does its very best to stay alive.
Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50° Fahrenheit
water before drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And old rats swim
differently, less efficiently, with their lower bodies more or less vertical, sort
of dog paddling. But when old rats were fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose
for a few weeks before the test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently,
like the young rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the gray
went away) and improved in texture; they began to appear like young rats. And the
rats on megadoses of B 5 lived lot longer–25 to 33 percent longer than rats
not on large doses of B 5. Does that mean "megadoses" of B 5
have an unknown drug-like effect? Or does that mean the real nutritional requirement
for B 5 is a lot higher than most people think? I believe the second choice
is correct. To give you an idea of how much B 5 the old rats were given in human
terms, the FDA says the minimum daily requirement for B 5 is about 10 milligrams
but if humans took as much B 5 as the rats, they would take about 750 milligrams
per day. Incidentally, I figure I am as worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams
daily.
My point is that there is a big difference between preventing
a gross vitamin deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create optimum functioning.
Any sick person or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overall
functioning in any way that won't be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapy
can be an amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification.
Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using
vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food supply was better,
when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today. From their
perspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. In
our time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces virtually
all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintained and
adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately,
ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to otherwise
admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and homeopathy because these
disciplines also downplay any need for food supplementation.
Vitamins For Young Persons And Children
Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties
should also take nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel so
good that they find it impossible to conceive that anything could harm them or that
they ever could become seriously sick or actually die. I know this is true because
I remember my own youth and besides, why else would young people so glibly ride motorcycles
or, after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into the barrel of
a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple venereal diseases. Until
they get a little sense, vitamin supplements help to counteract their inevitable
and unpreventable use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapest long life
and health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally very surprised at
the thought that even their children need nutritional supplements; very few healthy
children receive them. A few are given extra vitamin C when acutely ill, when they
have colds or communicable diseases such as chicken pox.
Young people require a low dose supplement compared to those
of us middle-aged or older, but it should be a broad formula with the full range
of vitamins and minerals. Some of the best products I have found over 25 years of
research and experimentation with young people are Douglas Cooper's "Basic Formula"
(low dose and excellent for children) and "Super T Formula" (double the
dose of Basic Formula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also from
Douglas Cooper Company; Bronson's "Vitamin and Mineral Formula for Active Men
and Women" and Bronson's "Insurance Formula." "Vitamin 75 Plus;"
and "Formula 2" from Now Natural Foods are also good and less costly.
Healthy very small children who will swallow pills can take
these same products at half the recommended dose. If they won't swallow pills the
pills can be blended into a fruit smoothie or finely crushed and then stirred into
apple sauce. There are also "Children's Chewable Multi-Vitamins + Iron"
(1-5 years old) from Douglas Cooper that contains no minerals except iron, Bronson's
"Chewable Vitamins" (make sure it is the one for small children, Bronson
makes several types of chewables) and a liquid vitamin product from Bronson called
Multivitamin Drops for Infants . These will be a little more costly than cutting
pills in half.
There is also an extraordinarily high quality multivitamin/mineral
formula for children called "Children's Formula Life Extension Mix" from
Prolongevity, Ltd. (the Life Extension Foundation), it is in tablet form, and slightly
more expensive.
I hope that my book will be around for several generations.
The businesses whose vitamin products I recommend will not likely exist in twenty
years. Even sooner than that the product names and details of the formulations will
almost certainly be altered. So, for future readers discovering this book in a library
or dusty shelve of a used book store, if I, at my current level of understanding,
were manufacturing a childrens and young adults vitamin formula myself, this is what
it would contain. Any commercial formulation within 25 percent of these figures plus
or minus would probably be fine as long as the vitamins in the pills were of high
quality.
| Vitamin C |
500 mg |
B-1 |
30 mg |
| Vitamin E |
50 iu |
B-2 |
30 mg |
| Vitamin A |
500 iu |
B-3 niacinamide |
100 mg |
| Vitamin D |
25 iu |
B-5 |
50 mg |
| Magnesium |
100 mg |
B-6 |
30 mg |
| Calcium |
400 mg |
B-12 |
30 mcg |
| Selenium |
10 mcg |
Chromium |
20 mcg |
| Manganese |
2 mcg |
Biotin |
30 mg |
| Zinc |
5 mg |
Iodine (as kelp) |
5 mg |
| PABA |
20 mg |
Bioflavinoids |
100 mg |
Vitamins For An Older Healthy Person
Someone who is beyond 35 to 40 years of age should still
feel good almost all of the time. That is how life should be. But enjoying well-being
does not mean that no dietary supplementation is called for. The onset of middle
age is the appropriate time to begin working on continuing to feel well for as long
as possible. Just like a car, if you take very good care of it from the beginning,
it is likely to run smoothly for many years into the future. If on the other hand
you drive it hard and fast with a lot of deferred maintenance you will probably have
to trade it in on a new one after a very few years. Most people in their 70s and
older who are struggling with many uncomfortable symptoms and low energy lament,
'if I'd only known I was going to live so long I would have taken better care of
myself.' But at that point it is too late for the old donkey; time for a trade in.
Gerontologists refer to combating the aging process as "squaring
the curve." We arrive at the peak of our physical function at about age eighteen.
How high that peak level is depends on a person's genetic endowment, the quality
of the start they received through their mother's nutritional reserves, and the quality
of their childhood nutrition and life experience. From that peak our function begins
to drop. The rate of drop is not uniform, but is a cascade where each bit of deterioration
creates more deterioration, accelerating the rate of deterioration. If various aging
experiences were graphed, they would make curves like those on the chart on this
page.
Because deterioration starts out so slowly, people usually
do not begin to notice there has been any decline until they reach their late 30s.
A few fortunate ones don't notice it until their 40s. A few (usually) dishonest ones
claim no losses into their 50s but they are almost inevitably lying, either to you
or to themselves, or both. Though it might be wisest to begin combating the aging
process at age 19, practically speaking, no one is going to start spending substantial
money on food supplements until they actually notice significant lost function. For
non-athletes this point usually comes when function has dropped to about 90 percent
of what it was in our youth. If they're lucky what people usually notice with the
beginnings of middle age is an increasing inability for their bodies to tolerate
insults such as a night on the town or a big meal. Or they may begin to get colds
that just won't seem to go away. Or they may begin coming home after work so tired
that they can hardly stay awake and begin falling asleep in their Lazy Boy recliner
in front of the TV even before prime time. If they're not so lucky they'll begin
suffering the initial twinges of a non-life-threatening chronic condition like arthritis.
The thinnest line demonstrates the worst possible life from
a purely physical point of view, where a person started out life with significantly
lowered function, lost quite a bit more and then hung on to life for many years without
the mercy of death.
If one can postpone the deterioration of aging, they extend
and hopefully square the curve (retard loss of function until later and then have
the loss occur more rapidly). Someone whose lifetime function resembled a "square
curve"(the thickest, topmost line) would experience little or no deterioration
until the very end and then would lose function precipitously. At this point we do
not know how to eliminate the deterioration but we do know how to slow it down, living
longer and feeling better, at least to a point close to the very end.
Vitamin supplements can actually slow or even to a degree,
reverse, the aging process. However, to accomplish that task, they have to be taken
in amounts far greater than so-called minimum daily requirements, using vitamins
as though they were drugs, a therapeutic approach to changing body chemistry profiles
and making them resemble a younger body. For example, research gerontologists like
Walford reason that if pantothenic acid (vitamin B 5, in fairly substantial
(but quite safe) doses can extend the life and improve the function of old rats,
there is every indication that it will do a similar job on humans. Medical researchers
and research gerontologists have noticed that many other vitamin and vitamin-like
substances have similar effects on laboratory animals.
Some will object that what helps rats and mice is in no way
proven to cause the same result on humans. I agree. Proven with full scientific rigor,
no. In fact, at present, the contention is unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high
likelihood's of being so, yes! So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes!
But provable to the most open-minded, scientific sort–probably not for a long time.
However, the Life Extension Foundation is working hard to find some quantifiable
method of gauging the aging process in humans without waiting for the inarguable
indicator, death. Once this is accomplished and solidly recognized, probably no rational
person will be able to doubt that human life span can be increased.
Experiments work far better with short-lived laboratory animals
for another reason; we can not control the food and supplement intakes of humans
as we can with caged mice. In fact, there are special types of laboratory mice that
have been bred to have uniformly short life spans, especially to accelerate this
kind of research. With mice we can state accurately that compared to a control group,
feeding such and such a dose of such and such a supplement extended the life-span
or functional performance by such and such a percent.
A lot of these very same medical gerontologists nourish their
own bodies as thoroughly as the laboratory animals they are studying, taking broad
mixes of food supplements at doses proportional to those that extend the life spans
of their research animals. This approach to using supplementation is at the other
end of the scale compared to using supplements to prevent gross deficiencies. In
the life extension approach, vitamins and vitamin-like substances are used as a therapy
against the aging process itself.
Will it work? Well, some of these human guinea pigs have
been on heavy vitamin supplementation for over thirty years (as of 1995) and none
seem to be suffering any damage. Will they live longer? It is impossible to say with
full scientific rigor? To know if life extension works, we would have to first determine
"live longer than what?" After all, we don't know how long any person might
have lived without life extending vitamin supplements. Though it can't be "proven,"
it makes perfect sense to me to spend far less money on an intensive life extension
vitamin program than I would certainly lose as a result of age-related sickness.
Besides, I've already observed from personal use and from
results in my clinical practice that life extension vitamin programs do work. Whether
I and my clients will ultimately live longer or not, the people who I have put on
these programs, including myself and my husband, usually report that for several
years after starting they find themselves feeling progressively younger, gradually
returning to an overall state of greater well-being they knew five or ten or fifteen
years ago. They have more energy, feel clearer mentally, have fewer unwanted somatic
symptoms.
Sometimes the improvements seem rather miraculous. After
a few months on the program one ninety year old man, an independent-minded Oregonian
farmer, reported that he began awakening with an erection every morning; unfortunately,
his 89 year old cranky and somewhat estranged wife, who would not take vitamins,
did not appreciate this youthfulness. A few months later (he had a small farm) he
planted a holly orchard. Most of you won't appreciate what this means without a bit
of explanation, but in Oregon, holly is grown as a high-priced and highly profitable
ornamental for the clusters of leaves and berries. But a slow-growing holly orchard
takes 25 years to began making a profit!
A few older clients of mine reported that they noticed nothing
from the life extension program, but these are unique people who have developed the
ability to dominate their bodies with their minds and routinely pay their bodies
absolutely no attention, driving them relentlessly to do their will. Usually they
use their energies to accomplish good, Christian works. Eventually, these dedicated
and high-toned people break down and die like everyone else. Will they do so later
on life extending vitamins than they would have otherwise? I couldn't know because
I can't know how long they might have lived without supplementation and since they
refuse to admit the vitamins do them any good, they won't pay for them.
Many on life extension programs experience a reverse aging
process for awhile. However, after the full benefit of the supplementation has worked
itself through their body chemistry, they again begin to experience the aging process.
I believe the process will then be slowed by their vitamins compared to what it would
have been without supplements. But I can't prove it. Maybe we will have some idea
if the program worked 20 to 40 years from now.
At this time I know of only two companies that make top quality
life extension vitamin supplement formulas. One is Prolongevity (Life Extension Foundation),
the other, Vitamin Research Products. I prefer to support what I view as the altruistic
motives behind Prolongevity and buy my products from them. Unfortunately, these vitamin
compounders can not put every possibly beneficial substance in a single bottle of
tablets. The main reason they do not is fear of the power-grabbing Food and Drug
Administration. This agency is threatening constantly to remove certain of the most
useful life-extending substances from the vitamin trade and make them the exclusive
property of prescription-writing medical doctors. So far, public pressure has been
mobilized against the FDA every time action was threatened and has not permitted
this. If some product were included in a mix and that product were prohibited, the
entire mixed, bottled and labeled batch that remained unsold at that time would be
wasted, at enormous cost.
Were I manufacturing my own life extension supplement I would
include the following. By the way, to get this all in one day, it is necessary to
take 6 to 12 large tablets daily, usually spread throughout the day, taken a few
at a time with each meal. If you compare my suggested formulation to another one,
keep in mind that variations of 25 percent one way or another won't make a significant
difference, and adding other beneficial substances to my recommendations probably
is only helpful. However, I would not want to eliminate anything in the list below,
it is the minimum:
| Beta-Carotene |
25,000 iu |
Selenium |
100 mcg |
| Vitamin A |
5,000 iu |
Taurine |
500 mg |
| B-1 |
250 mg |
Cyctine |
200 mg |
| B-2 |
50 mg |
Gluthaianone |
15 mg |
| B-3 niacinamid |
850 mg |
Choline |
650 mg |
| B-5 |
750 mg |
Inositol |
250 mg |
| B-6 |
200 mg |
Flavanoids |
500 mg |
| B-12 |
100 mcg |
Zinc |
35 mg |
| PABA |
50 mg |
Chromium |
100 mcg |
| Folic Acid |
500 mcg |
Molybdenum |
123 mg |
| Biotin |
200 mcg |
Manganese |
5 mg |
| Vitamin C |
3,000mg |
Iodine (as kelp) |
10 mg |
| Vitamin E |
600 iu |
Co-Enzyme Q-10 |
60 mg |
| Magnesium |
1,000 mg |
DMAE |
100 mg |
| Potassium |
100 mg |
Ginko biloba |
120 mg |
| Calcium |
1,000 mg |
Vitamin D-3 |
200 iu |
Please also keep in mind that there are many other useful
substances not listed above. For example, every day I have a "green drink,"
an herbal preparation containing numerous tonic substances like ginseng and also
various forms of algae and chlorophyll extracts. My green drink makes my body feel
very peppy all day, so it certainly enhances my life and may extend it. It costs
about $25,00 a month to enjoy that. I also use various pure amino acids at times.
Phenylalyanine will make me get more aggressive whenever I am feeling a little lackluster;
this nutrient has also been used as an effective therapy against depression. Melatonin
taken at bedtime really does help me get to sleep and may have remarkable life-extending
properties. Other amino acids help my body manufacture growth hormones and I use
them from the time I begin training seriously in spring through the end of the summer
triathlon competition season. Pearson and Shaw's book (see Bibliography) is a good
starting point to begin learning about this remarkably useful subject.
The Future Of Life Extension
I beg the readers indulgence for a bit of futurology about
what things may look like if the life extension movement continues to develop.
Right now, a full vitamin and vitamin-like substance life
extension program costs between $50 and $100 dollars per month. However, pharmaceutical
researchers occasionally notice that drugs meant to treat and cure diseases, when
tested on lab animals for safety, make these animals live quite a bit longer and
function better. Though the FDA doesn't allow any word of this to be printed in official
prescribing data, the word does get around to other researchers, to gerontologists
and eventually to that part of the public that is eagerly looking for longer life.
Today there are numerous people who routinely take prescription medicines meant to
cure a disease they do not have and plan to take those medicines for the rest of
their long, long life.
These drugs being patented, the tariff gets a lot steeper
compared to taking vitamins. (Since they are naturally-occurring substances, vitamins
can't be patented and therefore, aren't big-profit items. Perhaps that's one reason
the FDA is so covertly opposed to vitamins.) Right now it would be quite possible
to spend many hundred dollars per month on a life extension program that included
most of these potentially beneficent prescription drugs.
As more of life-extending substances are discovered, the
cost of participating in a maximally effective life extension program will escalate.
However, those who can afford chemically enhanced functioning will enjoy certain
side-benefits. Their productive, enjoyable life spans may measure well over a century,
perhaps approaching two centuries or more. Some of these substances greatly improve
intelligence so they will become brighter and have faster reaction times. With more
time to accumulate more wisdom and experience than "short livers" these
folks will become wiser, too. They will have more time to compound their investment
assets and thus will become far more wealthy. They will become an obvious and recognizable
aristocracy. This new upper class will immediately recognize each other on the street
because they will look entirely different than the short-lived poorer folk and will
probably run the political economic system.
And this new aristocratic society I see coming may be far
more pleasant than the one dominated by the oligarchy we now have covertly running
things. For with greater age and experience does really come greater wisdom. I have
long felt that the biggest problem with Earth is that we did not live long enough.
As George Bernard Shaw quipped when he was 90 (he lived to 96), "here I am,
90 years old, just getting out of my adolescence and getting some sense, and my body
is falling apart as fast as it can."
Vitamin Program For The Sick
No matter which way you look at it or how well insured you
may be against it, being sick is expensive (not to mention what it does to one's
quality of life), and by far the best thing to do is to prevent it from happening
in the first place. However, most people do not do anything about their health until
forced to by some painful condition. If you are already sick there are a number of
supplements you can take which have the potential to shorten the duration and severity
of the illness, and hopefully prevent a recurrence.
The sicker you are, the more supplements you will require;
as health is regained, the dosage and variety of substances can be reduced. In chronic
illness, megadoses of many nutrients are usually beneficial. Any sick adult should
begin a life extension vitamin program unless they are highly allergic to so many
things already that they can not tolerate many kinds of vitamins as well. In addition
to the life extension program, vitamin C should be taken by the chronically ill at
a dose from 10 to 25 grams daily, depending on the severity of the condition.
Many people want to know whether or not they should take
their regular food supplements during a fast. On a water fast most supplements in
a hard tablet form will not be broken down at all, and often can be seen floating
by in the colonic viewing tube looking exactly like it did when you swallowed it.
This waste can be avoided by crushing or chewing (yuck) the tablets, before swallowing.
Encapsulated vitamins usually are absorbed, but if you want to make sure, open the
capsule and dump it in the back of your mouth before swallowing with water. Powdered
vitamins are well absorbed.
On a water fast the body is much more sensitive to any substance
introduced, so as a general rule it is not a good idea to take more than one half
your regular dose of food supplements. Most fasters do fine without any supplements.
Many people get an upset stomach from supplements on an empty stomach, and these
people should not take any during a water fast unless they develop symptoms of mineral
deficiencies (usually a pre-existing condition) such as leg cramps and tremors, these
symptoms necessitate powdered or well-chewed-up mineral supplement. Minerals don't
taste too bad to chew, just chalky.
The same suggestions regarding dosage of supplements for
a water fast are also true for a juice fast or vegetable broth fast. On a raw food
cleansing diet the full dose of supplements should be taken with meals.
There exists an enormous body of data about vitamins; books
and magazine articles are always touting some new product or explaining the uses
of an old one. If you want to know more about using ordinary vitamins you'll find
leads in the bibliography to guide your reading. However, there is one "old"
vitamin and a few newer and relatively unknown life extending substances that are
so useful and important to handling illness that I would like to tell you more about
them.
Vitamin C is not a newly discovered vitamin, but was
one of the first ever identified. If you are one of those people that just hate taking
vitamins, and you were for some reason willing to take only one, vitamin C would
be your best choice. Vitamin C would be the clear winner because it helps enormously
with any infection and in invaluable in tissue healing and rebuilding collagen. If
I was going on a long trip and didn't want to pack a lot of weight, my first choice
would be to insure three to six grams of vitamin C for daily use when I was healthy
(I'd take the optimum dose–ten grams a day–if weight were no limitation). I'd also
carry enough extra C to really beef up my intake when dealing with an unexpected
acute illness or accident.
When traveling to far away places, exposed to a whole new
batch of organisms, frequently having difficulty finding healthy foods, going through
time zones, losing nights of sleep, it is easy to become enervated enough to catch
a local cold or flu. If I have brought lots of extra vitamin C with me I know that
my immune system will be able to conquer just about anything–as long as I also stop
eating and can take an enema. I also like to have vitamin C as a part of my first
aid kit because if I experience a laceration, a sprain, broken bone, or a burn, I
can increase my internal intake as well as apply it liberally directly on the damaged
skin surface. Vitamin C can be put directly in the eye in a dilute solution with
distilled water for infections and injuries, in the ear for ear infections, and in
the nose for sinus infections. If you are using the acid form of C (ascorbic acid)
and it smarts too much, make a more dilute solution, or switch to the alkaline form
of C (calcium ascorbate) which can be used as a much more concentrated solution without
a stinging sensation. Applied directly on the skin C in solution makes a very effective
substitute for sun screen. It doesn't filter out ultraviolet, it beefs up the skin
to better deal with the insult.
I believe vitamin C can deal with a raging infection such
as pneumonia as well or better than antibiotics. But to do that, C is going to have
to be administered at the maximum dose the body can process. This is easily discoverable
by a 'bowel tolerance test' which basically means you keep taking two or three grams
of C each hour, (preferably in the powdered, most rapidly assimilable form) until
you get a runny stool (the trots). The loose stool happens when there is so much
C entering the small intestine that it is not all absorbed, but is instead, passed
through to the large intestine. At that point cut back just enough that the stool
is only a little loose, not runny. At this dose, your blood stream will be as saturated
by vitamin C as you can achieve by oral ingestion.
It can make an important difference which type of vitamin
C is taken because many people are unable to tolerate the acid form of C beyond 8
or 10 grams a day, but they can achieve a therapeutic dose without discomfort with
the alkaline (buffered) vitamin C products such as calcium ascorbate, sodium ascorbate,
or magnesium-potassium ascorbates.
Vitamin C also speeds up the healing of internal tissues
and damaged connective tissue. Damaged internal tissues might include stomach ulcers
(use the alkaline form of vitamin C only), bladder and kidney infections (acid form
usually best), arthritic disorders with damage to joints and connective tissue (alkaline
form usually best). Sports injuries heal up a lot faster with a therapeutic dose
of vitamin C. As medicine, vitamin C should be taken at the rate of one or two grams
every two hours (depending on the severity of the condition), spaced out to avoid
unnecessary losses in the urine which happens if it were taken ten grams at a time.
If you regularly use the acid form of vitamin C powder, which is the cheapest, be
sure to use a straw and dissolve it in water or juice so that the acid does not dissolve
the enamel on your teeth over time.
And this is as good a point as any to mention that just like
broccoli is not broccoli, a vitamin is not necessarily a vitamin. Vitamins are made
by chemical and pharmaceutical companies. To make this confusion even more interesting,
the business names that appear on vitamin bottles are not the real manufacturers.
Bronson's Pharmaceuticals is a distributor and marketer, not a manufacturer. The
same is true of every vitamin company I know of. These companies buy bulk product
by the barrel or sack; then encapsulate, blend and roll pills, bottle and label,
advertise and make profit. The point of all this is that some actual vitamin manufacturers
produce very high quality products and others shortcut. Vitamin distributors must
make ethical (or unethical) choices about their suppliers.
It is beyond the scope of this book to be a manual for going
into the vitamin business. However, there are big differences in how effective vitamins
with the same chemical name are and the differences hinge on who actually brewed
them up.
For example, there are at least two quality levels of vitamin
C on the market right now. The pharmaceutical grade is made by Roche or BASF. Another
form, it could be called "the bargain barrel brew," is made in China. Top
quality vitamin C is quite a bit more costly; as I write this, the price differential
is about 40 percent between the cheap stuff and the best. This can make a big difference
in bottle price and profit. Most of the discount retail vitamin companies use the
Chinese product.
There's more than a price difference. The vitamin C from
China contains measurable levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, iron and other toxic
metals. The FDA allows this slightly contaminated product to be sold in the US because
the Recommended Daily Allowance for vitamin C is a mere 60 milligrams per day. Taken
at that level, the toxic metals would, as the FDA sees it, do no harm. However, many
users of vitamin C take 100 -200 times the RDA. The cheap form of C would expose
them to potentially toxic levels of heavy metal poisons. The highly refined top-quality
product removes impurities to a virtually undetectable level.
I buy my C from Bronson who ethically gives me the quality
stuff. I know for a fact that the vitamin C sold by Prolongevity is also top quality.
I've had clients who bought cheaper C than Bronson's and discovered it was not quite
like Bronson's in appearance or taste. More importantly, it did not seem to have
the same therapeutic effect.
The distributors I've mentioned so far, Bronson, NOW, Cooper,
Prolongevity and Vitamin Research Products are all knowledgeable about differences
between actual manufacturers and are ethical, buying and reselling only high quality
products. Other distributors I believe to be reputable include Twin Labs, Schiff
and Plus. I know there are many other distributors with high ethic levels but I can
not evaluate all their product lines. And as I've mentioned earlier, businesses come
and go rather quickly, but I hope my book will be read for decades. I do know that
I would be very reluctant to buy my vitamins at a discount department store or supermarket;
when experimenting with new suppliers I have at times been severely disappointed.
Co-enzyme Q-10. This substance is normally manufactured
in the human body and is also found in minuscule amounts in almost every cell on
Earth. For that reason it is also called "ubiquinone." But this vitamin
has been only recently discovered, so as I write this book Co-enzyme Q-10 is not
widely known.
Q-10 is essential to the functioning of the mitochondria,
that part of the cell that produces energy. With less Q-10 in heart cells, for example,
the heart has less energy and pumps less. The same is true of the immune system cells,
the liver cells, every cell. As we age the body is able to make less and less Q-10,
contributing to the loss of energy frequently experienced with age, as well as the
diminished effectiveness of the immune system, and a shortened life span.
Q-10 was first used for its ability to revitalize heart cells.
It was a prescription medicine in Japan. But unlike other drugs used to stimulate
the heart, at any reasonable dose Q-10 has no harmful side effects. It also tends
to give people the extra pick up they are trying to get out of a cup of coffee. But
Q-10 does so by improving the function of every cell in the body, not by whipping
exhausted adrenals like caffeine does. Q-10 is becoming very popular with athletes
who measure their overall cellular output against known standards.
Besides acting as a general tonic, when fed to lab animals,
Co-Enzyme Q-10 makes them live 33 to 45 percent longer!
DMAE is another extremely valuable vitamin-like substance
that is not widely known. It is a basic building material that the body uses to make
acetylcholine, the most generalized neurotransmitter in the body. Small quantities
of DMAE are found in fish, but the body usually makes it in a multi-stage synthesis
that starts with the amino acid choline, arrives at DMAE at about step number three
and ends up finally with acetylcholine.
The body's nerves are wrapped in fatty tissue that should
be saturated with acetylcholine. Every time a nerve impulse is transmitted from one
nerve cell to the next, a molecule of acetylcholine is consumed. Thus acetylcholine
has to be constantly replaced. As the body ages, levels of acetylcholine surrounding
the nerves drop and in consequence, the nerves begin to deteriorate. DMAE is rapidly
and easily converted into acetylcholine and helps maintain acetylcholine levels in
older people at a youthful level.
When laboratory rats are fed DMAE they solve mazes more rapidly,
remember better, live about 40 percent longer than rats not fed DMAE and most interestingly,
when autopsied, their nervous systems resemble those of a young rat, without any
evidence of the usual deterioration of aging. Human nervous systems also deteriorate
with age, especially those of people suffering from senility. It is highly probable
that DMAE will do the same thing to us. DMAE also smoothes out mood swings in humans
and seems to help my husband, Steve, when he has a big writing project. He can keep
working without getting 'writers block', fogged out, or rollercoastering.
DMAE is a little hard to find. Prolongevity and VRP sell
it in powder form. Since the FDA doesn't know any MDR and since the product is not
capped up, the bottle of powder sagely states that one-quarter teaspoonful contains
333 milligrams. Get the hint? DMAE tastes a little like sour salt and one-quarter
teaspoonful dissolves readily in water every morning before breakfast, or anytime
for that matter. DMAE is also very inexpensive considering what it does. A year's
supply costs about $20.
Lecithin is a highly tonic and inexpensive food supplement
that is underutilized by many people even though it is easily obtainable in healthfood
stores. It is an emulsifier, breaking fats down into small separate particles, keeping
blood cholesterol emulsified to prevent arterial deposits. Taken persistently, lecithin
partially and slowly eliminates existing cholesterol deposits from the circulatory
system.
In our cholesterol-frightened society lecithin should be
a far more popular supplement than it currently is. It is easy to take either as
a food in the granular form or when encapsulated. Lecithin granules have very little
flavor and can be added to a home-made vinegar and oil salad dressing, where they
emulsify the oil and make it blend with the vinegar, thickening the mixture and causing
it to stick to the salad better. Lecithin can also be put in a fruits smoothie. A
scant tablespoon a day is sufficient. Try to buy the kind of lecithin that has the
highest phosphatidyl choline content because this substance is the second benefit
of taking lecithin. Phosphatidyl choline is another precursor used by the body to
build acetylcholine and helps maintain the nervous system.
Algae. Spirulina or sun dried chlorella are also great
food supplements. Both make many people feel energized, pepped-up. It is possible
to fast on either product and still maintain sufficient energy levels to take of
minimal work responsibilities. Algae reduces appetite and as a dietary supplement
can assist in weight loss. It contains large amounts of highly-assimilable protein
due to it's high chlorophyll content, as well as a large amount of beta carotene.
It also assists in detoxification of the lymphatic system. It can be purchased as
tablets or powder. Take a heaping teaspoon daily, or at least six tablets.
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