Health: Evidence of Extensive Global Nutritional Research
You wouldn’t know that a massive amount of global research exists on nutrition if all you know comes from American doctors, medical authorities, and media. So here is an introduction to it.
The following are examples of books that cite extensive research references: “The New Supernutrition,” Richard A. Passwater Ph.D, 1991; “Dr. Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution,” Robert C. Atkins M.D, 1998; “Cancer and Vitamin C,” Ewan Cameron and Linus Pauling, several editions.
The following are sources that cite extensive, current global research: Life Extension Magazine, and Jerry Hickey’s web broadcasts and podcasts at Invitehealth.com.
The above sources look at nutrition from the inside out, via specific chemical reactions.
Another approach is to look at the whole person and note what works.
Weston A. Price, D.D.S., came to feel that once teeth had been heavily degraded by cavities, no good option existed, so he travelled the world in the 1930s looking for diets in which people had good teeth and vibrant health. He found them in peoples who practiced traditional diets of widely varied sorts, while close relatives who had moved to modern locales and ate modern processed foods suffered bad teeth and other degenerative ills of modern life.
You can get his book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, and you can get discussions of Dr. Price’s work from both the PPNF and The Weston A. Price Foundation. Plenty of other doctors have found results similar to Dr. Price’s, but to my knowledge, his is the only one with two organizations actively making such work available to the public.
Medical authorities will say that Price’s method is not science; it’s just “anecdotal,” not double blind, placebo controlled, etc. Let me give you an insight into that.
As a physics major at U. of P., I learned the attitude that the study of the smallest elements of nature was real physics and that explaining the behavior of human-scale matter was “solved in principle.” As a graduate student in the Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences Department of Princeton University, I encountered contempt for that attitude, calling it cowardly because it runs away from solving problems in the human-scale real world. Why can’t elementary-particle physics solve human-scale problems? Because we can never know everything about each and every elementary wave/particle; and there would be too many equations to solve even if we knew. So engineers developed models that looked at average behaviors of matter. Examples of this familiar to us all are the concepts of amps and volts (which were developed in “classical,” ie. pre-quantum, physics).
So there is real validity in looking from the outside in, as Price did, rather than just from the inside out, because the number of human variables are just too many, and we can’t solve all the interactions that result. In other words, allopathic medicine uses science at the microscopic level—biochemistry for example—but medical treatment of whole human beings may be called a disciplined study, or art informed by science, or a “practice,” but it is not science as a whole because it lacks the sheer reliability of real science. Nor can allopathic practice be called engineering, for it lacks the reliability of good engineering too. (Look for my post, “First Principles: When ‘Following the Science’ is NOT Science.”)
My first two dramatic successes using nutrients came from the outside-in approach (though informed by inside-out too) via Linus Pauling and Adele Davis.
I have been successfully fighting off colds and the flu ever since the early 1970s when I began following Linus Pauling’s protocols for vitamin C.
I classify this as outside-in because while Pauling well understood the chemistry of vitamin C—he was considered to be the greatest chemist of the 20th century—and he cited many references, when I read his early works I noticed that he worked from the point of view of how much vitamin C was in his estimates of what early humans ate. He also looked at what amount of vitamin C guinea pigs need to eat. (Guinea pigs, like people, are unable to manufacture vitamin C internally.) At the last point of my reading his work, he had arrived at 12 grams—12,000 milligrams—per person per day as a maintenance dose, spread out widely in divided doses, and modified according to how much the body could tolerate without getting loose stools. If in spite of that a cold still comes on, increase the vitamin C to one gram or more every waking hour. I found for myself that four grams taken four times daily were effective too. Two of his books are “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” and “Vitamin C, the Common Cold, and the Flu.”
In the early 1980s, I read Adelle Davis’s “Let’s Get Well” (1965) and “Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit” (1954, 1970). She didn't cite research papers but wrote from her experience as a professional nutritionist. I encountered:
1. Vitamin B6 is important for the eye—and bright lights were hurting my eyes.
2. Vitamin B6 is important for digesting fats—and I was having indigestion after eating nuts and seeds and their oils.
3. Vitamin B6 was vital in generating energy in the body—and I was suffering considerable fatigue.
Being cautious about trying new things, I first just inched up from the RDAs in my dosing and got nothing noticeable, but then I took 200 mg B6 and my energy jumped from flattened to full normal (not “high”). (By then I had heard Carlton Fredericks speak in his radio broadcasts of Dr. Marshall Mandell’s success treating allergies with 500 mg. B6 and 500 mg. vitamin C.) Encouraged by that, I found that 200 mg. B6 stopped bright lights from hurting my eyes. And taking 50 mg. to 100 mg. B6 with meals containing unsaturated oils ended the indigestion I had suffered. I also took lesser amounts of all the B-complex, for they work as a team. (In fact, all the nutrients work as mix-and-match-as-needed teams.)
My post Health: Natural Anti-Infectives shows why these and many other successes were not “placebo effects,” not wishful thinking.
In that post, you will also see that I cite a wide range of references.
Perhaps most amazing of all, under the circumstances, are:
— A 2010 paper showing that chemicals called “zinc ionophores” carry zinc ions into human cells, where the ions stop a whole class of RNA viruses from reproducing, including SARS and influenza [and the SARS-CoV-2 virus—the Covid virus].
—A 2014 paper showing that two food substances, quercetin from some fruits and vegetables, and EGCG from green tea, are zinc ionophores.
—A 2014 paper showing that chloroquine is a zinc ionophore [hence, hydroxychloroquine too].
In writing this post, I also found “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” 2005. Click for it Here. Granted, it was in primate cells in culture, but wouldn’t it have been worth serious follow-up? The authors certainly thought so. But of course, that follow-up didn’t happen, or was forgotten, or was suppressed; or else, everyone would have known about it years ago.