Fitness

All other parts of your body are but servants of the cell.

The heart, for example, which people think of as important, only makes it possible for supplies to reach the cell and wastes to be removed. The arteries, veins, and thousands of miles of capillaries are mere pipes through which supplies and wastes are carried. The lungs are slaves which supply oxygen and throw off carbon dioxide; the kidneys are slaves which purify water and remove the wastes freed by the tearing down of worn tissue; the urinary bladder is merely a reservoir. The digestive tract is nothing more than a mechanism for changing food into the form which the cell can utilize. The bone marrow is a slave which produces blood corpuscles to carry oxygen, and the spleen is the graveyard for these corpuscles when their usefulness is spent. All of the glands are slaves which produce hormones to help regulate each cell’s activity; the master gland, the pituitary, is in turn a slave which supervises the functions of the other glands and of each body cell.

The most important slave of all is undoubtedly the liver.

This organ is the storage house which holds fats, sugars, and proteins coming from the digestive tract, ready to supply them to the cell the split second they are needed. It is largely in the liver that toxic substances which might damage the cell are rendered harmless; here the nitrogen-containing waste products from worn-out cell proteins are broken down; the protein, albumin, needed to collect urine, is made here, and still other proteins, the antibodies, which destroy bacteria, are produced. The liver makes the fat-like substances, lecithin and cholesterol; it likewise produces the bile necessary to aid the digestion of fats and the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K; it stores not only these vitamins but also minerals such as iron, copper, and the trace elements; it forms and stores the body starch, glycogen. By the help of insulin, it largely controls the amount of sugar in the blood, withdrawing sugar when the supply is generous and changing it into body starch or fat or, when the supply runs low, changing the starch back into sugar and spilling it into the blood. When no food is eaten and all the stored glycogen is used up, cell proteins are tom down into sugar and fat; the liver again withdraws sugar from the blood and feeds it back once more as needed. This servant produces enzymes capable of inactivating the hormones which would otherwise accumulate to the extent that the cell might be injured. In spite of all these duties and many others, this master servant has only one purpose: to help maintain, regulate, and protect the life of the cell. Like the nutrients, all of these slaves co-operate with each other.

Although the structure and activity of every cell in the body are similar in that each must have oxygen and food and from each waste must be removed, the cells themselves are differentiated; their hundreds of duties vary endlessly. The cells of the muscles are the body’s pulleys; their cytoplasm is so made that it can contract, and by each cell contracting in harmony, muscles are shortened and movement is made possible. The cells which make up the bones attract minerals and solidify them to give form to the body. The cells of the glands are manufacturers, turning out hormones. Thus is the function of groups of billions of cells each differentiated to make up the separate structures of the body.

Foods can be selected which will supply all the nutrients known to be needed by each cell. If these foods are grown on good soil and eaten in as nearly their natural state as possible, the nutrients still unknown can probably be furnished. Digestion and absorption, if faulty, can be improved; the destruction of nutrients in the digestive tract and the blood and losses of those nutrients from the body can be prevented. The well-nourished body can protect itself from bacterial invasion and can detoxify foreign materials which gain access to it. My belief, therefore, is that every person, if intelligent enough and financially able to obtain a completely adequate diet, can achieve perfect health provided irreparable harm has not already been done.

Dr. Szent-Cyorgyi, who was given the Nobel Prize for his early work on vitamin C, pointed out that when he was a medical student, everything appeared to be always wrong with the body. There were so many diseases that it seemed impossible to learn them all; he tells how he flunked examinations covering this subject. Later, when getting his doctorate in biochemistry, or the chemistry of the body, which is the study of health, he was amazed to find that this time everything was so right, so very right. Probably there never has been a person who has studied the detailed mechanisms which make up health who has not felt as did Dr. Szent-Cyorgyi.

In fact when one considers the healthy body as a functional structure of billions of cells having hundreds of separate purposes, yet each working co-operatively in perfect unison with absolute harmony and almost inconceivable synchronization, so far surpassing the most delicate machinery made by man, one cannot help being reminded of the philosophers who argue that there is only one perfection, and that perfection is God. Regardless of the religious skepticism of any person when he starts to study the workings of the healthy body, he usually soon agrees with the philosophers and realizes simultaneously that only disease is manmade. The God-made perfection is health, and potentially thrs perfection is you.