## **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—fruits and vegetables and
grains—now being raised on millions
of acres of land that no longer
contains enough of certain needed
minerals, are starving us—no matter
how much of them we eat!

This talk about minerals is novel and
quite startling. In fact, a realization
of the importance of minerals in
food is so new that the textbooks on
nutritional dietetics contain very
little about it. Never the less, it
is something that concerns all of us,
and the further we delve into it the
more startling it becomes.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that
a carrot is a carrot—-that one
is about as good as another as far
as nourishment is concerned? But it
isn't; one carrot may look and taste
like another and yet be lacking in the
particular mineral element which our
system requires and which carrots are
supposed to contain. Laboratory tests
prove that the fruits, the vegetables,
the grains, the eggs and even the milk
and the meats of today are not what
they were a few generations ago. (Which
doubtless explains why our forefathers
thrived on a selection of foods that
would starve us!) No man of today can
eat enough fruits and vegetables to
supply his system with the mineral
salts he requires for perfect health,
because his stomach isn't big enough
to hold them! And we are running to
big stomachs.

No longer does a balanced and fully
nourishing diet consist merely of so
many calories or certain vitamins
or a fixed proportion of starches,
proteins, and carbohydrates. We
now know that **it must 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 at Orlando,
Fla. 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
disorders. Later, he moved to New
York and made extensive studies
along this line, in conjunction with
a famous French scientist from the
Sorbonne. In the course of that work
he convinced himself that there was
little 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 therefore,
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
chemical substances which are
indispensable to nutrition, and that
each of them is of importance for
the normal function of some special
structure in the body. 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 him one
vegetable, one glass of milk, or one
egg is about the same as another. Dirt
is dirt, too, and he assumes that
by adding a little fertilizer to it,
a satisfactory vegetable or fruit can
be grown.

“The truth is that our foods vary
enormously in value, and some of them
aren't worth eating, as food. For
example, vegetation grown in one part
of the country may assay 1,100 parts,
per billion, of iodine, as against
20 in that grown elsewhere. Processed
milk has run anywhere from 362 parts,
per million, of iodine and 127 of iron,
down to nothing.

“Some of our lands, even in a virgin
state, never were well balanced in
mineral content, and unhappily for us,
we have been systematically robbing
the poor soils and the good soils alike
of the very substances most necessary
to health, growth, long life, and
resistance to disease. Up to the time
I began experimenting, almost nothing
had been done to make good the theft.

“The more I studied nutritional
problems and the effects of mineral
deficiencies upon disease, the more
plainly I saw that here lay the most
direct approach to better health,
and the more important it 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 quality
and quantity.)

Before going further into the results
he has obtained, let's see just what is
involved in this matter of “mineral
deficiencies”, what it may mean to
our health, and how it may affect the
growth and 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 controling 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 calories or vitamins or upon the
precise proportions of starch, protein,
or carbohydrates we consume.

It is now agreed that **at least 16
mineral elements are indispensable
for normal nutrition**, and several
more are always found in small amounts
in the body, although their precise
physiological role has not been
determined. Of the 11 indispensable
salts, calcium, phosphorus, and iron
are perhaps the most important.

Calcium is the dominant nerve
controller; it powerfully affects the
cell formation of all living things
and regulates nerve action. It governs
contractility of the muscles and
the rhythmic beat of the heart. It
also coordinates the other mineral
elements and corrects disturbances
made by them. It works only in
sunlight. Vitamin D is its buddy.

Dr. Sherman of Columbia asserts that
50 percent of the American people are
starving for calcium. A recent article
in the Journal of the American Medical
Association stated that out of 4,000
cases in New York Hospital, only 2 were
not suffering from a lack of calcium.

What does such a deficiency mean? How
would it affect your health or
mine? So many morbid conditions and
actual diseases may result that
it is almost hopeless to 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 had 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 phosphorus appear to
pull in double harness. A child
requires as much per day as two
grown men, but studies indicate
a common deficiency of both in our
food. Researches on farm animals point
to a deficiency of one or the other
as the cause of serious losses to the
farmers, and when the soil is poor
in phosphorus these animals become
bone-chewers. Dr. McCollum says that
when there are enough phosphates in
the blood there can be no dental decay.

Iron is an essential constituent of the
oxygen-carrying pigment of the blood:
iron starvation results in anemia,
and yet iron cannot be assimilated
unless some copper is contained in
the diet. In Florida many cattle die
from an obscure disease called “salt
sickness.” It has been found to arise
from a lack of iron and copper in the
soil and hence in the grass. A man may
starve for want of these elements just
as a beef “critter” starves.

If iodine is not present in our foods
the function of the thyroid gland
is disturbed and goiter afflicts
us. The human body requires only
fourteen-thousandths of a milligram
daily, yet we have a distinct “goiter
belt” in the Great Lakes section,
and in parts of the North West the soil
is so poor in iodine that the disease
is common.

So it goes, down through the list,
each mineral element playing a definite
role in nutrition. A characteristic set
of symptoms, just as specific as any
vitamin-deficiency disease, follows
a deficiency in any one of them. It
is alarming, therefore, to face the
fact that we are starving for these
precious, health-giving substances.

Very well, you say, if our foods are
poor in the mineral salts they are
supposed to contain, why not resort
to dosing?

That is precisely what is being
done, or being attempted. However,
those who should know assert that
the human system cannot appropriate
those elements to the best advantage
in any but the food form. At best,
only a part of them in the form of
drugs can be utilized by the body, and
certain dietitians go so far as to say
it is a waste of effort to fool with
them. Calcium, for instance, cannot be
supplied in any form of medication with
lasting effect.

But there is a more potent reason
why the curing of diet 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 phosphorus they
are needed only in infinitesimal
quantities, and the activity of one
may be dependent upon the presence
of another. To determine the precise
requirements of each individual case
and to attempt to weigh it out on
a druggist's scales would appear
hopeless.

It is a problem and a serious one. But
here is the hopeful side of the
picture: **Nature can and will solve it
if she is encouraged to do so****.**
The minerals in fruit and vegetables
are colloidal; i. e., they are in a
state of such extremely fine suspension
that they can be assimilated by the
human system. It is merely a question
of giving back to nature the materials
with which she works.

**We must rebuild our soils: Put
back the minerals we have taken
out****.** That sounds difficult but it
isn't. Neither is it expensive. 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
assertion that inasmuch as foods did
not contain what they were supposed
to contain, no physician could, with
certainty, prescribe a diet to overcome
physical ills.

He showed that the 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
analyses, he pointed out, reflect only
the content of samples. One analysis
may be entirely different from another
made 10 miles away.

“And so what?” came the query.

Dr. Northen undertook to demonstrate
that something could be done about
it. **By reestablishing a proper
soil balance he actually grew crops
that contained an ample amount of the
desired minerals.**

This was incredible. It was contrary
to the books and it upset everything
connected with diet practice. The
scoffers began to pay attention to
him. Recently the Southern Medical
Association, 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. Northern 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 a more important
work. Sick soils mean sick plants, sick
animals, and sick people. Physical,
mental, and moral fitness depends
largely upon an ample supply and a
proper proportion of the minerals
in our foods. Nerve function, nerve
stability, nerve cell-building likewise
depend thereon. I'm really a doctor of
sick soils.”

“Do you mean to imply that the
vegetables I'm raising on my farm are
sick?” I asked.

“Precisely! They're as weak
and undernourished as anemic
children. They're not much good
as food. Look at the pests and the
diseases that plague them. Insecticides
cost farmers nearly as much as
fertilizer 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 germs in your system
but you're strong enough to throw
them off. Similarly, a really healthy
plant will pretty nearly take care of
itself in the battle against insects
and blights—and will also give the
human system what it requires.”

“Good heavens! Do you realize what
that means to agriculture?”

“Perfectly. Enormous savings. Better
crops. Lowered living costs to the rest
of us. But I'm not so much interested
in agriculture as in health.”

“It sounds beautifully theoretical
and utterly impractical to me,” I
told the doctor, whereupon he gave me
some of his case records.

For instance, in an orange grove
infested with scale, when he restored
the mineral balance to part of the
soil, the trees growing in that part
became clean while the rest remained
diseased. By the same means he had
grown healthy rosebushes between rows
that were riddled by insects.

He had grown tomato and cucumber
plants, both healthy and diseased,
where the vines intertwined. The bugs
ate up the diseased and refused to
touch the healthy plants! He showed me
interesting analyses of citrus fruit,
the chemistry and the food value of
which accurately reflected the soil
treatment the trees had received.

There is no space here to go fully
into Dr. Northern'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. Northern'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 man requires for a day.

Is this significant? Listen to these
incredible figures taken from a
bulletin of the South Carolina Food
Research Commission: **“In many
sections three out of five persons have
goiter and a recent estimate states
that 30 million people in the United
Stases 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 those
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 sixty fold 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 foods.

“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 him how to
proceed.

“First determine by analysis the
precise chemistry of any given soil,
then correct the deficiencies by
putting down enough of the missing
elements to restore its balance. The
same care should be used as in
prescribing for a sick patient, **for
proportions are of vital importance.**

“in my early experiments I found it
extremely 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 the
use of minerals in colloidal form,
to prescribe a cheap and effective
system of soil correction which meets
this vital need and one which fits in
admirably with 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 or iron, copper,
and other metals. An organism supplied
with a diet adequate to, or preferably
in excess of, all mineral requirements
may so utilize these elements as to
produce immunity from infection quite
beyond anything we are able to produce
artificially by our present method of
immunization. You can't make up the
deficiency by using patent medicine.'

“He's absolutely right. Prevention
of disease is easier, more practical,
and more economical than cure, but
not until foods are standardized on a
basis of what they contain instead of
what they look like can the dietitian
prescribe them with intelligence and
with effect.

“There was a time when medical
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 undernourished and
unfit plants, animals, and human beings
alike, and when the importance of these
obscure mineral elements is fully
realized the chemistry of life will
have to be rewritten. No man knows his
mental or bodily capacity, how well he
can feel or how long he can live, for
we are all cripples and weaklings. It
is a disgrace to science. Happily,
that chemistry is being rewritten and
we're on our way to better health by
returning to the soil the things we
have stolen from it.

**“The public can help; it can hasten
the change****.** How? By demanding
quality in its food; by insisting that
our doctors and our health departments
establish scientific standards of
nutritional value.

“The growers will quickly
respond. They can put back those
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?”

O