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 th 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

B3, 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 B5 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 degree 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 B5 lived lot longer--25 to

33 percent longer than rats not on large doses of B5. Does that mean

"megadoses" of B5 have an unknown drug-like effect? Or does that

mean the real nutritional requirement for B5 is a lot higher than

most people think? I believe the second choice is correct. To give

you an idea of how much B5 the old rats were given in human terms,

the FDA says the minimum daily requirement for B5 is about 10

milligrams but if humans took as much B5 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 B5), 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 3,000 mg 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.