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. Nevertheless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further 
            we delve into it the more startling it becomes.  

            You would 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 the 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 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 the necessary 
            minerals. They reasoned that plants take what they need, and that 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 Untied 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 the 
            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 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 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 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 16 indispensable salts, calcium, phosphorus, and iron are perhaps the 
            most important.  

            Calcium is the most 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 
            and nonadaptability.  

            Here’s one specific example: The soil around a certain Midwest city is poor 
            in calcium. Three hundred children in this community were examined and 
            nearly 90 percent had bad teeth, 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 one or the other as the cause of serious losses to the farmers, 
            and when the soil is poor in phosphorous their 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 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 roll 
            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 
            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 understood. 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 commending 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 ten miles away.  

            “And so what?” came the query.  

            Dr. Northen undertook to demonstrate that something could be done about it. 
            By re-establishing a proper soil balance he 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 
            difference 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 a or a food chemist?” I 
            inquired.  

            “Neither. I am an M.D. My works lie in the field of biochemistry an 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 has 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 fruits 
            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 crop?”  

            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 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 
            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 male 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 to 
            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 
            sixty-fold variation in phosphorous... 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 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 charged 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 written. 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 of 
            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?”  

            For information on concentrated  ionic (water soluble) minerals, click HERE.