The body requirements include essential fatty acids, carbohydrates, complete proteins, and every known vitamin and mineral. If only unrefined foods are eaten, nutrients still unknown will probably be furnished. Hundreds of thousands of animal experiments have shown that if a single nutrient or any combination of nutrients is omitted, disease is produced. There can no longer be doubt but that people produce illnesses in themselves by selecting diets as faulty as those that cause disease in animals. Yet, provided injury is not irreparable, a diet including all nutrients in ample amounts can restore health. Because this fact has been repeatedly proved beyond question, no person--not even a physician, in my opinion--has the right to impose an inadequate diet on another individual. There are times, of course, when these rules cannot be applied, but during such periods health is being tom down rather than built up.

Cream, butter, whole milk, eggs, and liver supply vitamin A but are often avoided because of calories or cholesterol. Carotene, a substance in yellow and green vegetables and fruits that changes into vitamin A, is not well absorbed unless textures are unusually soft. Thus many individuals obtain too little vitamin A unless their diets are supplemented.

Excessive vitamin A can be toxic and cause such symptoms as thinning hair, sore lips, bruising, nosebleeds, headaches, blurred vision, flaky itching skin, painful joints, and tenderness and swelling over the long bones. These symptoms disappear in a few days after the vitamin is withdrawn or can be completely prevented by generous amounts of vitamin C. Adults who have developed vitamin- A toxicity have usually taken 100,000 to 500,000 units daily for 15 months or longer before any symptoms became noticeable, though they have appeared in two weeks when a volunteer took 1 million units daily.

Because high blood pressure has been repeatedly produced in animals on diets deficient in cholin, 158 patients with dangerous hypertension were studied while being given cholin daily. Of this group, 133 had essential hypertension of unknown origin; and had had hemorrhages in the brain or eyes, three had diabetes, three heart disease, and 19 nephritis. Since each person had been on various medications for a year or longer without improvement, all medication was discontinued before cholin was given.

The force exerted by the blood against the walls of the blood vessels is the blood pressure, and it is similar to the pushing of water against the sides of a garden hose. Decreasing the water in a hose or replacing a small hose with a large one and keeping the amount of water the same reduces the force against the walls, simulating low blood pressure. Conversely, if the amount of water in a hose is increased or a standard hose is replaced by a small one, the pressure against the walls is raised, as in hypertension. In atherosclerosis, arteries normally large enough to slip a little finger into may be so plugged with fatty substances that a match can scarcely be inserted; when most of the arteries are thus clogged, the blood is squeezed into a relatively little space, and the blood pressure naturally becomes high.

The blood pressure becomes elevated when larger than normal amounts of water (and sodium) are held in the body, a situation that invariably occurs during the alarm reaction to stress. In this case, the quantity of blood plasma, or the blood volume, increases. On the other hand, arteries can become smaller when tension causes the muscular walls to contract or when they are plugged with cholesterol, compressed in beds of fat, or shrunk by scar tissue that may be calcified. Most persistent high blood pressure results from a combination of these factors.

If the diet were completely adequate, the painful tongue would heal without our slightest knowledge of niacin amide. When all building materials are supplied to the cells and damage is not irreparable, nature will do the healing, and she cares not one whit if we understand how she does it.

Dozens of diseases formerly considered to be incurable are now readily corrected. The word "incurable," therefore, cannot invariably be defined as incapable of remedy. The method of correction may at present merely be unknown. Because sound nutrition has rarely been tried, its role in rebuilding health in cases of "incurable" illnesses is still a mystery.

This skin disease, which primarily affects the connective tissue and is characterized by anemia, stiffness of the joints, and numerous symptoms of adrenal exhaustion, is customarily treated with aspirin and cortisone. The amount of vitamin E in the blood is unusually low, and scarring often becomes severe.

Massive amounts of almost every vitamin have been given in an attempt to clear up this disease, Patients receiving 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams of vitamin E and 10 to 15 grams of pantothenic acid (10,000 to 15,000 milligrams) daily have responded "most favorably" even though many had suffered from the disease for 10 to 30 years. Their illness recurred, however, when the vitamins were discontinued. To me such an approach seems rather like trying to make a cake by adding more and more baking powder and sugar but omitting the other ingredients.

Another of the "incurable" diseases, cystic fibrosis, which is becoming increasingly more common, appears to result from combined deficiencies of vitamins B6, E, and pantothenic acid. At the onset, abnormal amounts of salt are retained, typical of the alarm reaction to stress. Cortisone or ACTH therapy, which simulates this stress reaction, frequently causes the pancreas to be damaged.

When cystic fibrosis is first diagnosed, the pancreas produces digestive enzymes normally. This organ, however, gradually becomes a mass of scar tissue; yet scars always follow injury and never precede it. Furthermore, scar tissue cannot synthesize enzymes. Digestion and absorption, therefore, gradually becomes so incomplete that deficiencies of all nutrients quickly occur. Eventually most of the food eaten remains undigested, causing persistent diarrhea with bulky, foul-smelling, greasy stools; and persons with this disease soon become susceptible to severe respiratory infections.