In order to understand the problem of nutrition, we must consider it from two standpoints, one chemical, the other physical. Up to now the physical side of the this problem has been as completely neglected as if we had no physicists, whereas its chemical studies have been piled up to staggering proportions. On the one side absolute atrophy, on the other sky- high hypertrophy!.
The nutritional chemist today resembles a man who studies a dynamo minutely in all its numerous parts and from all its possible angles except one, the one which is the most important and essential, the one which concerns the energy that makes the dynamo turn.
That is why most of these studies are one-sided and useless. I have the impression that all the boasted progress made by these chemists is an enormous delusion. They have brought us nothing but an endless confusion of soap bubbles, paper castles and fatal morganas so that in the matter of nutritional science and its practical application we are today exactly where we were 50 years ago.
To begin with, some preliminaries are necessary before I can try to prove my point. A grain of wheat, if planted under proper conditions of moisture and temperature, will sprout. If this same grain is boiled or soaked in some chemical or crushed and then planted, it will not sprout. Two conditions must be fulfiled before growth ensues. On the one hand, the grain must retain its life energies unharmed, on the other, it must be surrounded by an atmosphere containing sun’s energy in the from of atmospheric electricity. No chemical material would enter the grain by mere juxtaposition and chemical affinity.
A dead grain does not grow, nor does a living grain grow in winter, in darkness or in too dry an atmosphere when there is not enough electricity in the air. Without any force to direct the chemical materials upward and downward and in and out of the grain there would be no chemical interaction and if there were one, it would not work upward and downward so as to cause growth in only one, that is the vertical, direction and from stem and roots. When the plant is formed, it grows only as long as there is enough electricity in the air as well as in the plant in order to produce sufficient mutual attraction of their different chemicals. So great can this vital force be that it breaks through the hard stony shells of nuts, peach and plum stones.
In the nutrition of the animal kingdom we find the same force in operation. A dead animal cannot assimilate even the most vitalized foods and food which is devitalized cannot be assimilated even by the most healthy animals. Foods in which life is destroyed to such an extent that there is not sufficient attraction between them and the cells of the animal body are no foods ant more. They are not assimilated, not metabolized. And that is why Hippocrates said: “Foods must be in the condition in which they are found in nature, or at least in a condition as close as possible to that found in nature”.
Primarily life is an interplay of billions of electro- magnetic forces. It is also an interplay of chemical substances, yet this is secondary. The chemicals are only carries these forces. As long as there is flow of forces, there is life. One cannot say that of the chemicals. The ply of forces may remain the same even if the chemicals are different. While chemicals are necessary, it is not essential that, because being interchangeable to an extent, they stay the same, as is the case with the forces. Force is always the same, carrier may not be. Only as long as the food particles are carriers of life forces can they enter the animal cells, undergo chemical reactions within the cells and then, also, leave the cells. An electric battery must be recharged from time to time and new energy introduced, otherwise it dies.
The same must be said of the animal life battery. New energy must be given it constantly if life is to be kept up. To think the life forces working in and between the animal cells can push and chase dead chemicals around or that life can be created out of something unanimated is preposterous. Forces are aided, augmented and replaced only by other newcoming forces and not by chemicals. You don’t recharge a battery by stuffing it with chemicals. Should you stuff it, the battery would not be charged. Yet something similar is done by humans who eat devitalized foods.
They recharge their batteries of life, not with new forces, but with chemicals which is no recharge at all. And this is what the nutritional chemists are teaching us to do and this is what they are doing with their test animals. When then the thing does not function, they invent all kinds of irrelevant explanations. The drug manufacturers are selling drugs supposed to help this recharging process, but drugs cannot do it because they do not contain, any energy. When the human machinery then suddenly stops, it is called “heart attack.”.
When, half a century ago, Doctor Eijkman made his first experiment on chicken, he and others with him though that he had discovered a new and mysterious substance in foods extremely inconspicuous as if could not be seen nor weighed, but terribly conspicuous by the effects of its absence. He found it different from all the other chemicals in that it was exceedingly elusive. It disappeared when heated even moderately or brought into contact with air, light, oxygen and many other chemicals or if dried out, and even time itself was found to be destructive to it. It did not occur him that what he discovered was no material substance, but energy, the same energy which we find in all the living plants and animals, which originally comes from the sun, which fills the atmosphere and the surface of the earth, which increases with the intensity of the sun and which on hot sunny days gets so concentrated in the clouds that it produces lightning, etc.
The description of this new substance by him and others fits this life energy to a ” T “. If Eijkman had then looked for physicists to collaborate with, we would probably today be in possession of a real science of nutrition. Nevertheless, he remained modest, called his discovery only a theory and his new substance hypothetical. But soon chemists took hold of this discovery and gave an entirely different direction to its studies.
As said, this matter was only a theory but, since theories don’t lend themselves to exploitation and lucrative business, the chemists soon proclaimed it to be a fact, christened the new substance with the lovely name Vitamin, made extensive laboratory researches of their own and started to write long papers. Besides, they saw that the medical profession needed psychological preparation for the acceptance of their ideas. This they effected by smothering the medical men with so many new data that these men could not see the forest for the trees. And, whenever the vitamin would not obey their wishful thinking, they became afraid that they would be found out, so they quickly devised an other and a third and a fourth and fifth vitamin which they then divided into fractions, calling them components, precursors, food factors or number 1,2, etc., the more to fascinate and hypnotize the grasping prospective consumers.
People become sick because they eat devitalized foods which cannot be assimilated. In the metabolic process these foods are not broken down to water and carbon dioxide but create toxins, mostly of acid nature. The only cure for this is eating fresh foods. This fact has been known to men in all epochs of history.
One would expect that, realizing this, the chemist would now start a new business of selling better, fresher foods to the public, instead they found it more profitable to extract vitamins out of the usual fresh foods. When these first vitamins did not prove helpful in practice, they were in a dilemma which threatened to annihilate all their future plans. They called those vitamins which would not obey their vitamin precursors and abandoned them as of no commercial use and turned their attention on such foods which, besides their nourishing values, also contained known medicinal properties. We known that there are many foods which are not only foods but medicines or poisons at the same time.
Their first choice fell on cod liver oil, the second on yeast. It has been known for centuries that cod liver oil was a medicine for rickets and allied troubles, yeast for boils and other skin troubles. Armed with these old drugs they were bound to obtain some results and immediately they announced, urbi et orbi, how they had found a new source of highly active vitamins and started to sell this oil under the name of vitamin A, yeast under the name of vitamin B, etc.
If some chemical cures a disease, it does not follows that the particular patient lacked that chemical. Many other chemicals might have done the same thing. Rickets can be cured by many other foods even more quickly than by fish oil, but for reasons of convenience fish oil was chosen as the representative of the vitamin A.
