The First Vitamins Begin To Appear
From the first days of vitamin discovery in the early 1900's through the 1930's, information about these chemical units of the body's metabolism spread like wildfire throughout the world.
Research disclosed that not only were these tiny chemical molecules necessary for life, but also that not having enough of them contributed to major diseases of the time and that having enough of them prevented the occurrence of these diseases. The "classic" examples are vitamin C preventing scurvy, vitamin B-3 preventing pellegra and vitamin B-6 preventing rickets.
Simultaneously, researchers in medicine and life sciences were discovering that certain minerals played essential parts in the body's chemistry and were also necessary for life.
The RDA's
By the 1930's, supplemental vitamins and minerals were becoming readily available as manufacturers developed more sophisticated extraction and manufacturing techniques for both vitamins and minerals.
In the early 1940's the United States Government published the first standards for vitamin and mineral intake, the RDA's (Recommended Daily Allowances) for twelve vitamins and eight essential minerals.
Today, the U.S. Government recognizes thirteen nutrients as vitamins and eleven minerals as essential for life, and it now officially recognizes three nutrients as "direct-acting" antioxidants, among the hundreds of antioxidants that have been discovered.
The RDA's (Recommended Daily Allowances) were estimates by leading scientists and doctors of the time as to how much of each vitamin and mineral were necessary to keep people from developing what we now know as vitamin (or mineral) deficiency diseases. Their estimates were based on the knowledge of body chemistry and the causes of diseases, as known at that time, and what they then believed was the best health humans could achieve.
The Second World War Explodes With New Technology
When the Second World War occurred (1941-45), almost all scientific research increased in intensity and many new techniques developed from this impetus. By 1950, many more powerful scientific tools were available, such as the electron microscope, which allowed scientists to peer down into the inner working of the body's cells and actually see what was happening. Before this, estimates of the inner workings of the cells of the body had only been scientifically based guesses. Another new tool, high-pressure liquid chromatography, allowed scientists to determine the chemical make up of what they were now seeing through the electron microscope.
A New Generation Of Scientists
Added to the newly developed technical tools, the number of scientists and researchers grew dramatically as thousands and thousands of G.I.'s returned home and went to college on the G.I. Bill (which paid for college educations for ex-soldiers). Suddenly, instead of just a handful of researchers in the sciences, there were many thousands, all using the newly-developed high-tech scientific tools.
One more important element contributed to the accelerating rate of growth of scientific information: the new batches of college graduates going into scientific research were not just young adults who left high school, went directly to college, got degrees and began research with limited life-experience. The new group of scientists included mostly mature adults.....adults who had seen war and the world, and who had acquired mature outlooks and the wisdom that comes with maturity. And with their more experienced eyes, they peered down into the cells and analyzed what they saw, and came to new conclusions.
Now just imagine this: suddenly, within ten years, the number of scientific researchers grew from a handful to many, many thousands. In fact, it has been estimated that during the 1950's, more researchers were alive and working than had been alive and working altogether since the beginning of time!
And A New Generation Of Scientific Breakthroughs
As more and more information accumulated, the mature eyes and minds of the researchers saw more and more possibilities, and scientific information (not just in health and medicine, but all the sciences) exploded in one of the most prolific eras of knowledge and discovery in the history of the world.
Men on the moon. Satellites orbiting the earth. Jacques Cousteau and the strange and wonderful new worlds under the earth and under the seas. Medical skills and techniques. New and more specific drugs. Robots doing surgery. Fuzzy logic. High-tech manufacturing techniques making appliances and electronic devices smaller and smaller and easier to use. And of course, the computer, allowing us not only to communicate with each other but to count, to add, subtract, multiply and divide, at first ten thousand times faster than the human mind could, then soon hundreds of thousands of times faster and now millions and millions of times faster.
And as scientists began using computers to count and estimate for them, they accumulated knowledge and information even faster. That's when the breakthroughs began happening in the science of nutritional biochemistry.
A Basic Understanding Re-Discovered
Medical doctors and researchers re-discovered an important fact that was forgotten after the 1940's; that all of us are different and that we have differing needs for the then-known nine vitamins and eight minerals. No single set of standards will work for everyone, and averages are not good enough since almost no one is average. We're either above average or below average, and all of us have differing needs for different vitamins and minerals.
At this time also, doctors and researchers began to look at life and aging as a series of chemical events, a series of chemical activities that worked together as a system designed to produce life.
If Aging Is A Chain Of Events, Can We Break Some Of The Links In The Chain, And Slow The Aging Process?
They postulated that aging could be considered the result of series of chemical activities in our bodies failing, or not working as well. As this happens, our abilities to work and walk, to grow hair, to process food in our stomachs, to think, to remember, to produce hormones, all begin to become weaker and weaker and we slowly become more and more crippled, until finally one of the chemical systems in our body, essential for life, fails and we die.
In other words, they postulated that if aging were not just a single event, but a chain of events, although we might not be able to stop aging entirely, perhaps we could break some of the links in that chain, and perhaps slow aging. And they set about to look at the various failing chemical activities in our bodies as links in that chemical chain of events and see if they could interfere with what was failing.
Vitamin Dependencies We All Have
At the same time, there were a growing number of medical doctors who were educated in the new science of human biochemistry (the chemistry of how the body works, focusing on the chemistry of the body's cells specifically).
They began to see how various diseases improved when they supplied different amounts of various vitamins and minerals. They rediscovered that we are all different and that RDA's for an average population may help the country as a whole but helped, at best, only about half the population; the rest had differing, higher needs.
By the 1960's, both the researchers working in aging and the medical doctors using biochemistry began to understand the concept of individual vitamin dependencies.
Vitamin dependency is a term that means that the range of nutrients needed may vary from individual to individual from twice as much up to even a thousand times more.
Vitamin dependency means that each of us needs different levels of each nutrient to operate at our optimum; that is, not to get sick as often or as severely, to be able to think clearly and rapidly, to feel good all the time, to be able to work and play whenever we need and want to without growing more and more crippled as we get older until finally we die, crippled and in pain.
These doctors and researchers saw the possibility of humans living long and full lives, strong, alert, as fully functional and capable people until we reached old age and then died without the long period of crippling and suffering we think of as part of the aging process.
Lab Animals Lives Doubled
Were they correct? In 1975, Dr. Hans J. Kugler, an anti-aging biochemist at Roosevelt University, put together what science had discovered at that time, that everything that impinges on cellular health and efficiency causes the body to wear down.
He found that the major factors that had been discovered about keeping the body's cells healthy were (1) a nutrient-rich diet, (2) adequate amounts of supplemental nutrients, (3) reduction of stress (which may "tighten" or "tense" the whole body and mind, and ultimately acts to interfere with cellular efficiency) and (4) regularly exercising the body (by having the animals run an hour a day on exercise wheels, which, among other things, increased the body's ability to get nutrients to the cells and to remove waste products from the cells).
Dr. Kugler applied these principles to his laboratory animals and found that as he added these elements, the animals began to live longer in good health, until eventually many of his animals lived up to twice their normal life spans in excellent health!
Further, to see how the all-American diet influences life span, he fed some lab animals junk foods, blew cigarette smoke in their cages for a while each day, didn't offer them anything new or different in their cages and didn't offer them an exercise wheel. They lived 20% shorter lives than their normal life spans.
Slowing Down Not Aging But Premature Aging
Although millions of dollars yearly are being appropriated for study into the biochemistry of aging, scientific consensus is that, while there is much promising research underway, there are today no therapies or regimens that can effectively stop, slow down or reverse the aging process.
Signs Of Premature Aging Not In Everyone
It is true that aging brings with it, ultimately, the weakening and wearing out of tissues, organs and glands, which is accompanied by inefficient (disordered) cellular chemistry, but at what age does this have to start? If we look at the "wearing out" of organs and glands and the weakening and crippling of our bodies that have been thought to be concomitant with aging, we see that many aged people have not lost their health, their teeth or their hair, had their organs and glands fail and are not crippled. Thus we can say that the presence of these debilities are not indeed aging, nor do these debilities have to accompany aging as early as we generally see them. We can further say they are more correctly, signs of premature aging, and that since some old people do not suffer from these debilities, then those who do are suffering from the effects of premature aging. Further, there is strong evidence that many of these debilities can be avoided or delayed by better lifestyle habits, including dieting and supplemental nutrition.
Premature Aging Accompanied By Disordered Cellular Chemistry
It is also important to note that the signs of what we are now calling premature aging are always accompanied by disordered cellular chemistry. We also note that disordered cellular chemistry almost always, if not always, results from cellular stresses which can include vitamin, mineral or other nutrient deficiencies, which in turn may result from hidden vitamin, mineral or nutrient dependencies, all of which lead to a disordered cellular chemistry. And in disordered chemistry, the cells can no longer adequately perform all of their jobs, so that their functions are impaired and the signs of premature aging may begin to emerge years before they have to.
Some Premature Aging May Be Delayed (Avoided)
In many cases, the disordered cellular chemistry may be favorably adjusted towards normal by removing or reducing stresses operating directly on the cells, which may involve supplying adequate amounts of nutrients at the cellular level.
The discovery of vitamin dependencies gave researchers tools with which to bring disordered cellular chemistry back closer to normal (optimum), thus allowing the cells themselves to function closer to optimum.
Healthy Cells Are The Actual Basis For A Healthy Functioning Body At Any Age
When the cells of the body are operating closer to optimum, the tissues containing the cells will operate better and the organs and glands made up of those tissues will operate closer to optimum. And when the organs and glands are operating closer to optimum, the body itself is healthier and operates closer to optimum.
Slowing Down Premature Aging By Maintaining High Levels Of Cellular Health
If we define premature aging as disordered cellular chemistry that leads to or accompanies crippling, weakening and the associated diseases that don't necessarily have to accompany aging, we see that modern nutritional biochemistry has given us tools to help keep cells operating closer to optimum and thus may help slow down unnecessary premature aging and the diseases and debilities that may accompany it. Dr. Hans Kugler's experiments in 1975 with laboratory animals give us an indication that if we can slow down premature aging, our normal life spans and health spans may not be as dramatically shortened and we may be able to look toward longer lives of health and activity.
Thus this is not slowing down the aging process, but slowing down premature aging through lifestyle modification to reduce stresses, including vitamin deficiencies arising from our own personal vitamin dependencies, at the cellular level.
Summary
Essentially the breakthroughs in nutritional biochemistry that led to today's modern nutritional biochemistry were:
- The ability to see how nutrients (vitamins, minerals, and now antioxidants and phyto-nutrients and phyto-antioxidants from foods) are used in the body.
- The understanding that anything that impinges on the cells' efficiency is felt throughout the entire body. This is called cellular stress and includes:
- stresses from outside the cells, like attacks by germs, environmental toxins and substances that cause allergies (ultimately felt at the cellular level), and even psychological worry (also ultimately felt at the level of the cell), and
- stresses from within the cell itself, such as genetic needs for more vitamins, minerals or other nutrients, resulting in nutritional deficiencies, and breakdown of the cell's chemical processing abilities.
- Understanding that food and chemical allergies may be among the strongest stresses that cells experience.
- The range of safety of vitamins and minerals.
It turns out that vitamins and minerals are about the safest things that we can eat.
For example, in the U.S. Government Center for Disease Control, there are no records of anyone dying from a vitamin or mineral overdose (except for a very few small children a year who die from iron poisoning from eating [apparently sugar-coated] tablets containing iron).
But thousands of people die each year from over-the-counter drugs and remedies. And there are estimates from the Center for Disease Control and several Universities that approximately 100,000 people die every year from drugs that their doctor prescribed for them. (Totaled, just for the last 20 years alone, that's more people than have died in all the wars the United States has been in!)
- The importance of exercise in maintaining both overall health and specifically, heart health.
- The importance of stress on cellular efficiency and health and the importance of stress control for good mental and physical health.
- The importance of weight control. (The single greatest predictor of mortality is being overweight.)
Together these breakthroughs give humans a tremendous new power to control their health and their lives. Almost every elite and peak performance athlete now uses this information to fine-tune their performance to levels never before possible. And millions of Americans and others worldwide use some or all of the information to keep themselves at higher levels of health than they could expect otherwise.
As the body of research and information about how our cells work, continues to grow, we can expect to see new and even more powerful nutritional tools that will help keep us at higher, more efficient and even more enjoyable levels of health and well being, as well as help us slow down unnecessary premature aging.
