Does modern medicine accept the idea of vitamin therapy? The answer is a resounding no! It has only been a little over 100 years since vitamins were synthesized. Of course, as everybody knows, all of these chemical substances were found to exist in natural food. They were very much part of the mystery of evolution. Essential to all animal life, they were there for the picking. Later, it was also found that a number of essential minerals were required. Both the vitamins and minerals need to be present in minute doses, covered under the eponym of recommended daily allowance (RDA). All we had to do was to obey the rules set out by Mother Nature. Our ancestors were classified as “hunter gatherers”. They hunted animals and gathered the bounty of nature. Yes, we were primitive savages and life was not the ideal by any means, but the food contained all that was necessary for life.
An Evolutionary Imperative To Eat Real Food
To ascertain what kind of food is required by an animal, you simply look at the teeth. We have front teeth called incisors for cutting, the pointed teeth called canine for tearing meat and the back teeth molars, used for grinding. Cows and horses are vegetarian and only have molar grinders. Human beings are omnivores (all foods edible) meaning that we are designed to eat meat, fruit and vegetables. Some of the vitamins are recycled through eating other animals. Others are recycled by being returned to the soil and passing into plants. That is why I have said to many people in answering the question as to what diet they should pursue, eat only nature made food and leave the man made food alone. Well, of course, you know that we didn’t do that.
We now have a food industry and it is quite unbelievable, at least to me, to see some of the stuff that passes as food, based solely on taste and appearance. Sometimes I find a person with these typical symptoms who is very careful with diet and does not practice taste hedonism, but because farming practices have changed in modern times, the produce does not have the same kind of non-caloric nutrient content. It may not be coincidental that such persons are almost invariably intelligent and physically and mentally active. It is reasonable to assume that their nutritional demand exceeds supply and they need non-caloric nutrients.
Sugar and the Vitamin Paradox
Now let me turn to the reason that I used “vitamin paradox” in the title. Anyone that wants to follow my reasoning can look back at previous posts on this website. You will find that there is a significant emphasis on the calamity of sugar ingestion and its association with vitamins, particularly thiamine. I am sure that I will look like a broken record to many people, but here is what happens to your health. Although it is obvious that all the vitamins and essential minerals are required, I am taking the example of thiamine because of its close association with the wide consumption of things called “goodies” or “sweets”.
All simple carbohydrate foods are broken down in the body to glucose. Research has shown that overloading the metabolism with sugar overwhelms the capacity of cellular machinery to burn (oxidize) it by producing a relative deficiency of thiamine, the vital catalyst that ignites (oxidizes) glucose to synthesize cellular energy for function. Recently it has been found that thiamine is required for the oxidation of fats, making the doughnut a perfect example of high calorie malnutrition. This is so important in the brain that I simply cannot overstate it.
High Calorie Malnutrition, Oxygen Deprivation and Brain Function
High calorie malnutrition is exactly equivalent to a mild degree of oxygen deprivation, so it is sometimes referred to as pseudo-hypoxia (false oxygen deprivation). If this is induced by poor diet where the pleasure of taste (hedonism) overrides appropriate nutrition, a curious thing happens! The lower part of the brain that deals automatically with your ability to adapt to a hostile environment becomes much more susceptible in its responsiveness.
I will give you one example: panic attacks, so extraordinarily common in our culture, are simply fight-or-flight reflexes that are triggered by pseudo-hypoxia. Messages go out to the body from this part of the brain, falsely initiated as though you were actually being “chased by a tiger”. Such an affected person will begin to experience the following symptoms as examples: palpitations of the heart, unusual sweating, a sense of anxiety or panic, irritable bowel syndrome, manifestations of allergy, emotional lability (emotions out of control) etc. He or she will go to the doctor who will do a series of tests. If they are all normal, you will then be told that this is “all in your head” (psychosomatic). On the other hand, the doctor might find evidence for “mitral valve prolapse” (MVP), now known to be an early sign of “wear and tear” damage in the heart and the focus becomes “heart disease”(often used to explain heart palpitations) rather than its original cause, associated with nervous system dysfunction. I have seen MVP disappear in people from correcting their nutrition. It is rare for a patient to be asked about diet and rarer still to question the possibility of a vitamin deficiency.
Vitamin Deficiency: The Walking Sick
This kind of health situation may go one for a long time. The patient has symptoms but is not really a sick person. I refer to people like this as the “walking sick”. Life continues as usual, but medications have failed to relieve the symptoms, or worse yet have introduced side effects. Over time, the loss of metabolic efficiency gradually leads to damage in cellular machinery (e.g. MVP) because the energy need to drive daily function is not being met. Thiamine activates the most important enzyme in energy synthesis and, in the early stages of nutritional deprivation, a thiamine plus multivitamin supplement would quickly abolish the symptoms. If neglected and the marginal malnutrition continues, it will be gradually more difficult to repair the damage.
Vitamin Therapy With Chronic Deficiency: Expect a Decline Before Improving
Physicians who practice Alternative Medicine have found that it is possible sometimes to retrieve function at this late stage of development by the use of a course of vitamins given intravenously. They have also learned that the symptoms of the patient actually get worse (paradox) in the initial stages of intravenous treatment but begin to get better following an unpredictable period of worsening. Naturally, the patient concludes that the treatment is bad or that it is causing side effects as in the use of vitamins. That is why I have christened it paradox, meaning that the unexpected happens.
Over the years of administering intravenous vitamin therapy for all kinds of conditions, irrespective of conventional diagnosis, I quickly learned to inform a patient about paradox before instituting treatment. Surprisingly, this paradoxical response usually heralds a good outcome. I do have some ideas about the cause of paradox, but it is so technical that I cannot attempt it here, perhaps in future posts. Intravenous vitamins are tremendously effective in the improvement of most chronic diseases, an effect that is almost impossible to achieve with the standard treatment of drugs as used in modern medicine today.
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