We started walking again: miles and miles of walking. Will would set the pace of our walk and I would set the distance. Before long we were up to doing five miles a day. I also stopped taking the elevator at work. The stairs became my new best friend.

I was so proud the day that I came home with my first 10 pound ribbon - ten pounds lost! Will was with me all the way. It wasn’t always easy. I know that I could lose the weight on my own but knowing that your spouse is supporting you all the way makes such a big difference! He was my biggest cheering section.

By the time I lost my 55 pounds I felt like a new woman! Wait a minute–I was a new woman! I was in love with life again and I actually liked myself and didn’t mind looking at myself in a mirror. What a difference from the year before.

Will went with me to the meeting when I was to receive my lifetime ribbon and when I spoke in front of everyone at the meeting I could tell that he was as proud of my achievement as I was.

Christmas, one year later, found us at a Danier store and instead of sitting on a bathroom floor and crying my heart out, I was modeling leather skirts and jackets for my husband! I wore my new leather suit to all the Christmas parties that year and was proud to show off my new body.

I managed to keep the weight off for 12 years before a few pounds re-found themselves to my hips and butt. The onset of menopause is going to be another hurdle that I will have to figure out.

I’m in better shape now than I have ever been and I plan on keeping it that way to look fit and foxy by the time I hit fifty!

I remember going away for Christmas 1991 and having a fantastic time but when returned home and I happened to get on the scale, I found out that I had gained 7 pounds over the holidays. I remember sitting down on the bathroom floor for 3 hours and crying my heart out. When I couldn’t cry anymore, I dried my eyes and vowed that I would NEVER be in the same place ever again.

I went downstairs and asked Will for a hug and told him that I had gained 7 pounds and that I feel that I had hit ground zero and that things had to change and I needed help.

I loved Will so much at that moment. He didn’t pooh-pooh the way I felt or berate me for gaining weight. He listened to everything I had to say without interrupting and promised that he would help me in anyway possible to achieve the goals that I set for myself.

I had decided to join Weight Watchers. I knew that they were starting a Weight Watchers lunchtime meeting at my work place. He promised that he would make any changes necessary to make his cooking more health and weight conscious for the both of us. He even agreed to the reward that I would get when I achieved the goals that I had set for myself: a Danier leather suit! I had wanted one for years but felt it was too expensive for me to buy. This would be my incentive to keep me going when the going got tough.

I started Weight Watchers that week and found that we didn’t have to stop eating any of our favourite foods. Portion control was half of my battle as well as getting back to a fitness regime.

I remembered back when Will first started cooking for me, I would barely be able to finish a quarter of the dinner he served me but by the time I hit size 12, I was eating almost as big as plate as Will did. He played sports, I didn’t. Not that I didn’t like sports - I was just wasn’t good at any sport.

Will hadn’t said anything about me gaining weight but he could see that I was not happy with the way I looked. He probably was a little alarmed at the weight that I had put on, but to his credit he never had a negative word for the way I looked. I had always been thin when I was younger and never had to worry about weight but it seemed as soon as I hit the age of 30, weight was becoming a problem. It’s funny when I was younger I had vowed I would never be one of those wives who let themselves go. It just kind of happened.

As for Will, Will never changed. Will had always been lean and fit. He played sports all year round.

Soon you see the potential good an athletic coach can accomplish. He is already interested in health; his athletes are almost crying for knowledge of nutrition. Without any trouble at all you get him to rush in scarcely thinking of the timid wise men. He gets enthusiastic approval because everyone wants the team to win. Several coaches have told me that the boys make a touchdown for tiger’s milk or wheat germ at every football game. I know of one basketball team which won a championship with good nutrition last year; the physician at this school said he could scarcely believe the improvement he found. A university physician gave me an even more glowing report: much less fatigue among the boys; the crew ending the season without enlarged hearts; broken bones healing more quickly than ever before. These coaches and physicians will be writing articles for their journals before long; they, too, become enthusiastic and cannot help themselves.

After you go to bed, you lie awake thinking that adult education classes in nutrition should be taught in every evening school. You look around for someone to teach such a class, perhaps a physician, a nurse, or the hospital dietitian; after you talk to this person, you go to the principal of adult education, then to your neighbors to be sure that they turn out for the class. If you cannot find anyone else, you study like mad and then offer to teach it yourself. Perhaps you even go back to college for a few courses in chemistry or foods.

You realize that nutrition should be taught in every medical school but feel that you can do nothing about it. Who do you suppose has already forced some medical schools to teach this subject? You have. For example, the reason physicians are giving so many shots of vitamin B12 is that patients demand them. If you get enough people interested in nutrition, you will all find yourselves asking your physicians such questions as: “Where am I going to get linoleic acid on a fat-free diet?” “Why aren’t you giving the baby any vitamin E?” “Doctor, will you give Johnny a vitamin-C shot?” “How many milligrams of pantothenic acid do you think I should take?” When physicians hear enough questions they cannot answer concerning nutrition, the subject will be taught in every medical school; thousands of practicing physicians are on the staffs of such schools.

If you have any contact with hospitals, you quickly realize that someone should do something about the food they serve. The dietitian’s hands are usually tied; she does not see the patients, let alone learn to love them or to feel concerned about their needs. She must meet the budget. Surveys have shown that the meals in approximately two-thirds of the hospitals in the United States do not meet the minimum nutritional requirements set up by the National Research Council in any respect, even calories.

There are three small hospitals I personally know of where a patient has a reasonable chance of recovering rapidly; two are run by physicians who know nutrition. At the third, the Sister Kenny Polio Hospital at EI Monte, California, the entire personnel, nurses, physicians, physiotherapists, and kitchen help, were requested to attend a lecture course in nutrition given by Dr. Michael Walsh. Dr. Walsh also helped to supervise the application of nutrition in the meals served the patients and also those for the staff. The health of physicians, who were originally antagonistic to the program, has so improved that they are now enthusiastic.

Often parents have refused to allow their children to stay in a hospital where the food was inadequate. Frequently nutrition-minded people bring good food to a member of their family or a friend in a hospital; the attending physician may be surprised at the speedy recovery, ask questions, and make similar recommendations to other patients. Certain patients in our county hospital are now being given brewers’ yeast; everyone able to swallow on the polio ward has vitamin-C tablets handed him almost every hour; I suspect some mother or friend started both practices.

This report is not imaginary. It is what is actually happening all over America. The snowball is rolling on and on. Wonderful “fools,” more and more of them, keep rushing in. A big job is being done by big people, the big people who are sometimes mistakenly called the “little” people, by uncommon men so wrongly called, individually, the “common man.” I could give you the names and addresses of hundreds of these big people, some of whom have changed the lives of almost everyone in their communities. They are people like Celia Massie in Grants Pass, Oregon, Mildred Hatch at St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Amy Tapping at Plainfield, New Jersey, Bernice Hicks at Bellingham, Washington, and the Clive McCays at Ithaca, New York. In California Homer Dahlman at Paradise, Eleanor Kingsley at Pomona, Douglas Campbell and Rhoda Kellogg in San Francisco, Alfreda Rook at Vista, Harold Stone in La Habra and Gladys Lindberg in Los Angeles are all doing magnificent work. Making such a list is like sending out wedding invitations; you do not know where to stop. Without any specialized training, any organization, or any particular leadership, without one cent of tax money and without even any work but just a lot of fun, we can collectively solve this problem of America’s malnutrition.

Although much is being done, there is still much to do. It cannot be done fast enough. Millions of persons of all ages are still going to suffer needlessly. Spastic, feeble-minded, or disease-susceptible babies are still to be born. Children now fairly healthy will hate ugliness still to be produced or will live out years in iron lungs. Arteries now elastic are still to be filled with cholesterol, mouths to be filled with dentures, and hearts to be filled with dread. If you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the groaning, sobbing and pleading for help, groaning and sobbing which you can prevent, help which you can give. There is work for everyone; every talent is sought. Equally important is the discipline of the scientist, the humanitarianism of the clinician, and the enthusiasm of the amateur.

Every person who has the ability to see our country’s need can help to fill that need. It is part of my creed-of my region if you like-that when you have the ability to help ,our fellow man, that ability ceases to be merely an ability and becomes a responsibility. It is part of my faith that this responsibility will be shouldered by the big people of America.

You may have considered opening a small business and have wondered what would be best. The people you have given vegetables to like them so much that you may open a roadside stand; or you convert a front room into a small restaurant where you serve wonderful vegetable soup with stock you have to cut with a knife, your fresh vegetables added after the customer is seated; or your specialty may be slow-roasted meats and delicious cooked vegetables or a tossed salad seasoned with your fresh herbs.

Maybe a specialty food shop interests you even if you have no garden. The first thing you do is to learn to prepare some food better than anyone else in your part of the country; then you convert that front room into a place like the famous New York Central oyster bar, for example. People do not want big meals; they want delicious, filling meals. Think of the business a small specialty restaurant could do on a cold rainy day serving nothing but delicious soup and hot homemade bread; or a restaurant with a sign, “The Best WafHes in the World,” their product coming up to expectations, served with creamed chicken or turkey and a beverage, nothing more. I should like to find a place which serves only a delicious tossed salad with piping-hot cheese blini, made fresh for each customer instead of warmed over as in the restaurants which serve them at all. If 100,000 or more such specialty food counters could be opened across the country, motoring would be a pleasure.

Perhaps you start selling homemade bread, cookies, nut–breads, or cakes made of whole-wheat flour, wheat germ and other health-building ingredients; I know of several women who are, doing that. One of them makes the best orange nut-bread I have ever tasted. One acquaintance is now in the health-candy business, making delicious candies of such ingredients as powdered milk, honey, nuts, and peanut butter. Another man is making pure orange juice lollipops without added sugar; he supplies all the stores and schools in a moderately large city, his business far surpassing his expectations. A number of couples have opened small bakeries, using only health-building ingredients. Still other families have started health-food stores; every county seat needs at least one such store. A boy I know of is putting himself through college by raising goats and selling goats’ milk. Aside from supporting themselves with such businesses, these people are spreading the itch.

You find yourself wanting to learn more. You get such books as The Wheel of Health.’ Tomorrow’s Foods Body, Mind and Sugar/ Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Our National Malnutrition, and Diet Prevents Polio,” You may subscribe to Modern Nutrition:” The Journal of Applied Nutrition and to Carlton Fredericks’ Nutrition Neuis.” All of these you circulate among your friends; they borrow them again to lend to their friends who buy them to lend to their friends. Together you get your local library to order these books and to keep them prominently displayed. Soon you find yourself and your friends giving book reviews. You may long for company and join the American Nutrition Society or the American Academy of Nutrition 13 or even start a chapter of your own. Perhaps you go to a national convention where you meet wonderful physicians, dentists, agriculturists, chemists, laymen of every variety, all of whom think and feel as you do; you leave with your head in the clouds, determined to work harder than ever.

It soon gripes you that your money supports schools run so inefficiently because of poor nutrition. You dream about nutrition being taught in every classroom. That was the dream of the late Dr. Mary Swartz Rose, too. I studied under her and observed classes she herself often taught in a grade school near Columbia University. The fifth grade that year was studying calcium; they learned about milk, bones, and teeth and brought real teeth and bones to class; they soaked bones in acids to observe the bone base. They made milk drinks for parties; they raised white rats, some on milk, some without. They learned more about calcium than most adults know. The sixth grade was studying vitamin A, and they also had rats with and without this vitamin. They had parties with carrot-stick refreshments and ate dried apricots instead of candy. They learned a great deal; they loved it and went home to teach their parents about nutrition.

Suddenly you realize that every teacher in every public school in America could teach nutrition in one way or another; you quickly lend your books and magazines to teachers. Once interested, a teacher cannot help teaching nutrition even if she tries. She lives it and saves herself much fatigue; then she finds herself helping her students to feel better. Her work soon becomes easier because they are more alert. By this personal method many teachers are already doing a corking good job in nutrition education, although they do not consider that they teach nutrition at all. Some day such teachers will publish in the teachers’ magazines their experiences and methods which will serve as a guide and inspiration for other teachers.

After you have applied personal nutrition for awhile, you feel it and look it. You hear yourself exclaiming, “I never felt better in my life!” Your friends who did not want advice now want what you have, the sparkle, the pep, the glow you radiate. They start asking you questions. Soon their reports come back: they are not tired any longer; the leg cramps or headaches have disappeared; their constipation is gone. You glow with pride, and your snowball gains momentum. They ask you to talk to their friends who have problems. The itch spreads; more and more people begin scratching.

Your educational campaign with the children starts paying dividends, just momentary flashes at first, like feminine fireflies calling their lovers. “We have better food than other people, don’t we, Mommie?” My son, sitting at a restaurant counter next to a woman drinking a soft drink, came out with this one, “Don’t you know that will hurt your teeth? I’ll drink it if you like, and you can save your teeth.” Barbara brings her doll’s bottle to me, lfs inch across at the top, “Mommie, put yeast in my baby’s formula.” You will hear similar comments. The older children bring their friends with pimples and menstrual cramps to you. You feel happy inside, knowing some day you will have beautiful grandchildren.

Perhaps you start a nutrition cooking school in your home; several friends of mine have, charging a fee for each person who attends. One girl, infected with a splendid case of divine itch, charges, but her fee is not monetary. She agreed to teach four of her friends how to make whole-wheat bread provided each of them would teach four friends who would agree to teach four of their friends. Soon the lessons included the making of yogurt, high-protein custard, cookies prepared with vegetable oil, and meat loaf fortified with powdered milk and wheat germ. Spirited discussions of nutrition take place at each lesson. The chain of her Magnificent Obsession continues to lengthen.

You may get interested in the 4H Clubs, an organization of farm youngsters thousands strong, to whom practical nutrition could be so easily and wonderfully taught and applied. You read the surveys showing that the health of farm children is inferior to that of city children, an ironical twist of fate which you realize should not be so; you know that a few itchy fools could quickly change that. Perhaps you become a leader of a garden club and teach biological methods and the nutritive value of the foods; or you help the little girls make breads, muffins, and cookies of whole-wheat and soy flour. You teach them to put some meaning into their 4Hs by allowing their hearts to feel the need for alert heads to direct capable hands into helping build national health.

The persons who in my opinion will save our nation are those marvelous individuals who rush in where wise men fear to tread. These wonderful people often do not know enough to believe it when the wise men tell them that something cannot be done. Sometimes they cannot even understand why it cannot be done.

One such person was an author who bought several worn-out farms in Ohio; the wise men said the land could not pay taxes. This author had no degrees in agriculture and did not consider himself a farmer; he had lived in France and watched the peasants there, and he had ideas and was willing to study and work. He changed that eroded, worn-out land into a paradise where springs, long dried up, bubbled again, with lakes where you could swim on hot days and where delicious fish almost jumped into the breakfast frying pans. He let wild roses and berries grow along fence rows. Small animals hid there to have their babies; hunting was always good. Quail and other birds nested in the bushes, feeding their young on worms and insects which the educated wise men said must be killed with poison sprays. The paradise he created is now a mecca; thousands of farmers become pilgrims to learn wholesome farming methods which the money they have spent on taxes has not given them. This author has done tremendous good for nutrition, which starts with the soil. I hope some day I can know Mr. Bromfield well enough to call him Louie.’

Another remarkable person refused to believe the wise men who said it could not be done; he manufactured electrical equipment in New York City. Somehow he became interested in farming and moved onto worn-out land in Pennsylvania; he believed in soil bacteria, compost heaps, and lowly earthworms. When his health and the health of his family improved as his soil improved, it occurred to him that other people might want to know about his methods. First he published a magazine on gardening by biological methods and then one on farming.” This man had the courage to stick to his convictions, although the agricultural colleges said that what he said was poppycock. Several of these colleges set out to prove him wrong. Can you guess what they are finding out? That he has been right all along. I have never met this man, but I admire his courage; he has done much for nutrition.

Perhaps I love these “fools” who rush in because I have always been one of them. If you have become interested in nutrition, you will be one of us too; you cannot help yourself. Genuine interest in nutrition gives everyone a sort of divine itch, virulently contagious. It is like health, which is a million times more contagious than disease. The first thing you know, you have everyone around you scratching. This is the way it works.

At first there usually comes a trial-and-error period which varies depending on how genuinely you want to help others and/or how much you have been helped by nutrition. The more enthusiastic you are, the more hot water you get yourself into. You may use the Prussian-commander technique:

“You have to eat these hotcakes. They’re blown up vitamin pills, full of wheat germ, soy flour, powdered milk, the works.” The hotcakes may be more delicious than any your family ever tasted, but they go uneaten while you writhe in defeat. Perhaps you try the eager-beaver attack next: “Mary, you’ve got to take brewers’ yeast. Deficiencies stick out all over you. Let me see your tongue. Oh, darling, you are a mess!” Mary is a little cool after that; her deficiencies become more severe. Next you use the blunt approach: “You don’t eat liver every morning for breakfast? Huhl You’re as inefficient as a horse and buggy.” After a period of being an antagonizer par excellence, it dawns on you that no one enjoys criticism or advice; that every person has received an overdose of both as a kid and will take no more. You give up your talk-too-much technique and proceed with a sort of personal underground movement, silently conducted, which is the point where the less eager person starts in the first place.

You quietly improve your own nutrition; not your husband’s or wife’s or children’s, just your own. Gradually y@u make changes. You buy better food every time you go to market. You get nuts for the kiddies instead of candy, make lollipops of pure fruit juices instead of buying ones of colored water and sugar. Perhaps you investigate a source of milk safe to use unpasteurized, or find hens associating with roosters and allowed the freedom of a barnyard. You locate supplies which must be purchased outside your community. You are more careful in selecting foods in restaurants and in planning and preparing delicious meals at home. Possibly you or even your husband starts baking homemade bread of stone-ground fresh wheat. When this art is mastered, you give slices or loaves to neighbors and relatives; they may start making bread or beg you to make enough to sell them. You discover the fun of having the youngsters say, “Gee, Mom, these are the best waffles you have ever made.” Even after your husband finds out that they are full of wheat germ, which he tells you he “hates,” and after he says that you will be putting ground glass into his food next, you give him butterscotch brownies at the following meal; he eats them to the last crumb, never dreaming they are made entirely of wheat germ.

When you have conquered the home front, you volunteer for the refreshment committee and serve some really good cookies at the P.T.A. or the Women’s Club tea; you improve the food at Scout meetings and birthday parties; or you put some Christianity into a few church suppers. If you are a man, you work on the Breakfast Club or Rotary or Kiwanis luncheon menus. In case you are an executive, you realize the stupidity of paying for inefficiency produced under your own nose by mid-meals of coffee, soft drinks, and doughnuts, and you see that nuts, delicious milk drinks, “hopped-up” ice cream, and fresh fruits are made available. Perhaps you give a talk to some organization about highprotein breakfasts, fluoridation of water, the use of iodized salt or nutritious lunches carried from home. The local paper hears about your talk and wants copy, so you find yourself writing a food and nutrition column. Some people may call you a crackpot or food faddist; you expect that and shrug it off.

There are no statistics available for dozens of things which really matter or really hurt; of exhausted mothers who, missing nights of sleep because of a sick child, must still go to an office the next day or drag themselves through mountains of housework, simultaneously caring for other children. No statistics tell of the billions of father- and mother-hours of worry or anguish endured per year; of the billions of spankings given annually to good children whose parents were irritable or frustrated; of the billions of meals mined per year by nagging and scolding; of the billions of student-hours wasted because so many of the 30,700,000 in school attendance receive too few nutrients to keep their minds alert; of the number of parents paying dentists with savings they had hoped to spend on college educations.

I could find no health statistics. What is health? It seems to be something we talk glibly about. We speak of health insurance, meaning sickness insurance; of health benefits, meaning sickness benefits; health plans and surveys, meaning sickness plans and surveys. People talk about health education, health courses, health books; I have taken the courses, read the books; you learn about vaccinations, contagion, and diseases. What health actually is, apparently no one knows; certainly it is more than freedom from disease or ability to go to work. The best definition appears to be one which a small boy used to define money: “It’s something we ain’t got much of.”

The less health we have, the less money we will have. It is said that 60 per cent of the savings of people sixty years old are spent on a search for health; but 60 per cent of the people sixty years old have no savings. Their sickness bills are paid by you and me. Our taxes pay for the county and state hospitals and homes for the chronically ill, as well as for institutions for the insane and feeble-minded. It is your tax money and mine which pays for schools, whether the children attend or not, are mentally alert or not, or the teachers eat breakfast or not.

In addition to the taxes, there are the fund-raising campaigns: the heart fund, the polio fund, the cerebral palsy fund, the cancer fund, and numerous others. Money-raising has become big business, for which experts are trained. To my knowledge, no money has yet been raised for the purpose of what I call prevention. The native races studied by Drs. Price and McCarrison did not “prevent” tuberculosis by early X-rays, or cancer by free clinics where frightened people could be examined; they used constructive methods.

Unless something is done and done quickly toward real prevention, I think we can expect still more irritability, fatigue, mental sluggishness, psychological maladjustment, faulty posture and bone structure, crooked and decayed teeth. We can expect more surgery: more tumors, cancers, gall bladders and prostates removed, more sinuses scraped, more hysterectomies performed. As things are now, I cannot see how an increase can be prevented in the incidence of cancer, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart and kidney diseases, diabetes, muscular dystrophy and atrophy, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and many other diseases, some still unknown and unnamed. How sincerely I hope I am wrong I can you hear the arguments being raised? Diagnostic methods are better. People are living longer, we are told, into the heart-disease-, diabetes-, nephritis-, cancer-susceptible age. Granted that these arguments contain some truth, but not all the truth. Before Iron Curtain days, it was known that the Bulgarians lived to be older than other peoples in the world without these diseases. When grains were unrefined in Denmark from 1914 to 1920, people lived longer, into the “disease-susceptible age,” and had fewer of these diseases. Diagnostic methods are better, yes; they are now so good that a tremendous increase in cancer among babies and small children has been diagnosed. A year ago a young woman sat beside my desk, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Her three-year-old child, a little girl whose picture she showed me, had just died of cancer; another child of less than two and still another of scarcely five were then dying. She herself wanted to die; she said so repeatedly. Yet she came asking for help for her two dying children. I wish I could have helped her six years earlier.

To my way of thinking, our national health began to decline at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when families began to move from self-sustaining farms into crowded cities. It declined still further with the invention of machinery for milling grains, and with each new method of processing foods, each new trick for forcing hybrid crops to yield higher tonnage per acre on worn-out soil. New problems arising every year make sound nutrition more difficult to apply, or prevent its application.

The technical knowledge for halting this decline is at our fingertips as never before. Every person wishes to feel well, to stay young; persons aware of sound nutrition are eager to apply it. But we need men and women with courage and willingness to be leaders, to set the example, and to educate, probably in the face of ridicule, cynicism, and criticism. I hope enough fine men and women can be mobilized for this purpose. I believe they can.

Thirty years ago a dreamer-researcher named Dr. Weston A. Price traveled the world over, examining people untouched by so-called civilization. He investigated groups in lit then isolated part of the Swiss Alps, in northern Italy, on the Isle of Man, in the New Hebrides, Australia, New Zealand, central Africa, the South American jungles, the north of Canada and Alaska and on various islands in the South Pacific. The foods of many of these peoples were limited indeed. In some cases their diets were largely meat or fish without vegetables or grains; in others, vegetables and grains without meat or fish; they appeared to have nothing in common. These peoples, however, had two things in common: their diets met every body requirement; and the know-how for refining foods was lacking. The latter allowed the former to be so.

Dr. Price told of his findings in a book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He tells of people with erect posture, unbelievable endurance, and cheerful, even dispositions. These people had excellent bone structure; their faces and jaws were so wide and well developed that their teeth were not crowded together, and stayed free from decay just as their bodies stayed free from disease. The statistics concerning the incidence of cancer, ulcers, high blood pressure, tuberculosis, heart and kidney diseases, polio, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and cerebral palsy were zero, zero, zero in every case. Names for these diseases were unknown and unneeded. Dr. Price found no physicians, surgeon, psychiatrists; no prisons, institutions for the insane or feebleminded; no child delinquency, no homosexuality. Every mother nursed her babies; a non-functional breast was unheard of. Mental, moral, and emotional health accompanied physical health.

Sir Robert McCarrison, an English physician, investigated the health of the Hunzas, living high in the Himalayas. Their foods were limited, but their lands were composted and watered by glacial streams rich in minerals from rocks grinding on rocks. Dr. McCarrison’s statistics were the same as those gathered by Dr. Price: all zeros. He could find no ulcers, cancers, heart or kidney diseases, polio, or the rest; no prisons, mental institutions, child-delinquency problems. As a physician, he would have starved; as a researcher and dreamer, he made a great contribution. Other Hunza visitors have written of the cheerfulness and lack of fatigue of these people after great feats of endurance; a runner carried a message to a nearby village only 35 miles away and returned the same day with no sign of fatigue. As mountain guides, the Hunzas scrambled sure-footed over precipitous cliffs, carrying tremendous loads, laughing and singing the while.

Years ago a group of medical missionaries, Mormons by faith, collectively examined more than a million natives in central Africa; they found no disease, no cancer. A similar group found none among primitive peoples in South America.
Recently Dr. Michael Walsh studied Indians in an isolated district in Mexico, people without even a water supply. Their only beverage was fermented cactus juice, so rich in vitamin C that the amount allotted per person per day was equivalent to a dozen glasses of fresh orange juice. These people had never taken a bath; yet they were as free from body odor as they were from cancer, high blood pressure, coronary thrombosis, and other diseases.

These same dreamer-investigators also studied diseases; they did not have to go far to find them. In villages only a few miles away, white men had brought white sugar, white Hour, and less-white “civilization.” In such villages, Dr. Price found faulty bone structure, crowded, crooked teeth, rampant tooth decay, diseases of all kinds, prisons, perversions, and sexual immorality. Dr. McCarrison found ulcers, heart and kidney diseases, cancer, high blood pressure, colitis, and tuberculosis. In Africa and South America the medical missionaries found cancer rampant among members of the very tribes who, on their native diets, had stayed cancer-free. Now, only a generation later, these African natives are dying like Hies from a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor; 60 per cent coming to the autopsy tables have died of cancer. In populated areas in Mexico, Dr. Walsh found every disease he had the heart to look for.

I hunted for statistics of health in America to compare with the zeros found by Drs. Price and McCarrison. All I found were records showing people suffering from diseases in huge, heartbreaking numbers. The one group of statistics of the numbers and causes of rejections during the Korean War compared with those of World War II threw me into a depression which lasted days-the time interval is so short, the increases in abnormalities so appalling. These are not sickness figures; merely statistics of our finest young men at the height of their physical development.

Statistics can tell so little. The number of new cancer cases discovered each year tells nothing of the fear and dread in the hearts of millions of Americans who already know that some day they themselves will suffer from the disease. Statistics about the “chronics” in every county and state home, people whose illnesses go on year after year, do not mention the tired underpaid nurses ready to drop in their tracks; the stinking bedpans, the raw, running bedsores, or the looks of despair on the faces from which hope was lost so long ago. Statistics of the number of elderly people sitting or lying out monotonous and/or agonizing days in the thousands of rest homes in our country do not mention the bitterness, the fear, the hopelessness in the hearts of these still nne old people; if you see enough of these homes, you wonder whether our increased life span is always to be viewed with unmitigated pride.

The morbidity statistics all seem the same even though the diseases and numbers of people suffering from each are different. The new cases of polio per year, for example, tell nothing of the man- and woman-hours of the wonderful physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, and mothers who with endless patience help persons to some slight use of nearly useless arms and legs; of the heartbreak of youngsters who want to play football or dance, of ill mothers who ache to care for their children or of fathers who long to support their families. Each year the Red Cross pleads for blood plasma with which to fight polio. “More cases are expected this year than ever before,” goes the appeal, and the Red Cross predictions have not yet been wrong; they will probably not be wrong in the future.

One day on a television program I may show you some of these people. For all of you doubting Thomases I could supply names and addresses, except in one case. This is a woman of eighty-two who enjoys tremendously the fact that most people think she is sixty; she works half-time as a secretary, Hitting about like a humming bird. There is Mr. G., now eighty-six, who talks about having fun on borrowed time; he loves to garden, and once when I was entertaining, he turned our house into a florist shop and in addition brought a camellia corsage for each guest. Mrs. S. must be nearly eighty by now. It is unbelievable that one person can do as much good as she does; I know how much she helps people because she sends many to me for nutritional advice. She was ill and old when I first saw her 15 years ago; now she is active and young and vibrantly alive.

Mrs. L. is one of the most amazing of this group. I would bet that in 12 years she has swallowed no morsel of food which does not build health. Her figure is that of a thirty year-old. I tell her I should pay her to visit me instead of vice versa. She is particularly amazing because she is a crack skier and is on the ski patrol, skiing down the slopes with stretchers, helping to carry youngsters who have broken bones. She does not worry about breaking bones nor does she need to.

Mrs. H. has been one of my favorites since 1936. She came to me because of pernicious anemia, exhausted, depressed, her mouth and tongue so sore she could hardly eat. Her life has been hard; money always scarce. Before child-labor laws were passed, she was taken out of school and forced to work in the New England woolen mills, leaving home when it was still dark in the morning and returning after dark at night. There was little love and few bright spots in her life until she was sixty-eight; then a childhood sweetheart found her, a wonderful physician whose record is in Whd s Who. A friend and I poured coffee at their wedding, a big occasion with the brightest bunch of oldsters I have ever seen assembled; we laughingly said we were the only persons present who could hold a coffee cup without shaking out its contents. This woman sent me a report of her physical examination from Johns Hopkins Hospital: “Although this patient claims to be seventy-four years old, she has the body of a fifty-year-old woman.” She and Dr. H. are now spending happily-ever-after summers in Vermont and winters in Florida. Dr. H. asked me to visit them in Vermont. I said I could not decide when to come; I wanted to be there for maple syrup making but also for autumn colors. His answer was graciousness at its height: “If you can come only once, come in the spring and stay till the fall.”

I wish you could all meet Mr. and Mrs. R., people whom it seems God must have made especially for each other. He is seventy-six; she, seventy-two. She had been crippled with arthritis for years, and he had the usual old-age symptoms: a tremor, fatigue, some shortness of breath, trouble with his eyes; years of hay fever and sinus infection, both still troublesome. The arthritis scarcely bothers her any more; his symptoms, too, have gradually cleared. Both are now amazingly active. She is busy with a grandchild who lives with them, with Spanish classes and social gatherings. Mr. R. holds down what could be considered three full-time jobs. He is president of a building and loan association which takes a great deal of his time; he operates three oil wells which require as much attention as spoiled children; and he has gardened their acre of land since their Mexican gardener, an old man of forty, became ill. Besides these activities he plays 18 holes of golf twice each week. I remarked that he probably played with men 20 years his junior, and he said they were sometimes SO years younger than he. If you want to taste really good homemade bread, you should drop in to see them, as I frequently do.

And lastly, there is Dr. P., who earned his Ph.D. at Columbia half a century ago. He and his family lived in Shanghai for years, then in Manila where he was caught at the outbreak of World War II. He spent the war years in the terrible Santo Tomas Prison. His health was broken then, and recovery was never complete; heart attacks followed and then polyneuritis, the American term for beriberi. His pain was too excruciating to be deadened by opiates. Although he was given B vitamins by many physicians, he became worse and was not expected to live. As a last resort, his wife and daughter came to see me. Tiger’s milk, liver, wheat germ, all three in small amounts at first, large quantities of pantothenic acid which had not been given before, calcium tablets to help deaden pain, vitamin pills of. every letter, tablets of enzymes and hydrochloric acid to digest the food combined to turn the tables; his recovery was spectacular. Since childhood, Dr. P. has had a wonderful voice, and singing had been his joy. He sang solos at churches, clubs, and weddings, including Chiang Kai-shek’s wedding, his wonderful wife playing his accompaniment. His voice failed with his illness, but now he believes it is stronger than ever; again he is singing for churches and clubs and weddings. Just before he left for Manila to be an executive of an insurance company, he sang to me a song he said he had especially selected. It was, “I’ll be loving you always.” And if I had a voice and could have held back the tears, I would have sung the same song to him.

These are young people, every one of them. The good health they enjoy, however, is no mere happenstance. Every person in this group takes his nutrition seriously, not just occasionally but every meal of every day and year after year. The rewards are pretty wonderful. With these people there is no gap between the generations. Each one of them is an inspiration, almost a vision of what could be for possibly every human being. They remind you again that aging may not be a “natural” process but the result of years and years of cumulative nutritional deficiencies. I tell them that they make me look forward to my nineties.