“Whole food nutrition begins with the sun, water and fertile soil.” 
 -- Royal Lee D.D.S.

As Dr. Lee simply but profoundly stated above, real synergistic nutrition begins with healthy soil, clean water, and the sun.  These elements combine to foster the healthy growth of plants and the animals that graze and feed on vegetation.  The harmonious cycle of nature continues when we ingest plants and animals that have been raised to have the highest nutritional value.  No where in nature is there found a single food that supplies only one specific nutrient.  In addition, there is no one system or organ in our bodies that relies solely on a single nutrient.  What this gives rise to is an understanding that nature provides its nutrients in combination – a synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The nutrients of one plant, such as buckwheat, provide the full Vitamin C complex (which includes bioflavonoids like rutin), Vitamin K, Vitamin J, tyrosinase (enzyme with organic copper), inositol, calcium, and many others.  It is this synergistic combination that provides powerful benefits that are more important than the dose of any single isolated nutrient.  As in our example of the buckwheat plant, the synergistic combination of rutin, bioflavonoids, organic copper, and the rest of the whole Vitamin C complex, will strengthen capillaries whereas Vitamin C provided as ascorbic acid will not do this. 

Nature provides us with many such examples of this synergy:  fat-soluble Vitamins A, D, and K work together to help osteoporosis when calcium alone may not help at all; zinc is synergistic with copper; chromium works best with the full Vitamin B complex; beta-carotene does not work well alone; Vitamin C as ascorbic acid cannot cure scurvy.  On the other side of the coin, nutritional deficiencies occur synergistically:  excess Vitamin C as ascorbic acid reduces organic copper stores; excess zinc depletes iron; and excess phosphorous depletes calcium.  We must get our nutrition from food as it is what nourishes us and provides us with the building blocks of a healthy body and mind.  This has been how the human race has survived and thrived over the millennia.  When these nutrients are not available from our diets, then whole food supplements are extremely important.  With proper nutrition and the aid of the highest quality supplements, the body has an amazing capacity to restore health and vitality. 
 

With the advancements in technology and progress over the past 100 years, the nutritional landscape has dramatically changed – and usually not for the better.

With the discovery of vitamins in the 1920’s, a new chapter in nutrition was ushered in.  Technological advancements allowed the study of the vital factors that kept us healthy.  With this knowledge also came the ability to isolate a particular nutrient and study its effects and the result of its deficiency or absence.  Such was the case of Vitamin C and its ability to cure scurvy; Vitamin B1 and its deficiency leading to beriberi; and Vitamin D deficiency leading to rickets.  These discoveries and the ability to isolate the single vitamin led to the manufacturing of these specific nutrients.  To this day this is how the majority of nutritional supplements are made and studied.  The only difference is that we now combine many synthetic isolates and put them into one pill – but still we fall short of the mark.  I have seen this time and again as people tell me that they have already tried supplements, but inevitably when I read the bottles that they bring to me, all I find is a list of synthetic chemical ingredients.  The problem with this approach, in addition to its unnatural formulation, is that it rarely works for long term health enhancement or recovery.  At this point some would argue that  these products such as Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), Vitamin E (alpha tocopherol), and Vitamin B1 (thiamine mononitrate) have had positive results and countless people take these everyday to either ward off future problems or to help recover their health.  The key point to this is not whether or not these products will have an effect, because they will, but what kind of effect will result from their use.  Herein lies the critical importance of working with nature, as it works, to truly restore health and balance to your body.
 

So if the body needs living nutrients to restore and maintain health, then just what is happening when we take synthetic products?  First, synthetic supplements will disrupt the intricate balance among numerous other nutrients.  Remember, we are an interconnected whole, and the use of something in isolation can therefore affect the whole, whether it was intended to or not.  We want to believe that if we can isolate a certain biochemical pathway and formulate a product for it, then it will only have a very limited, specific and desired effect.  This is the premise that pharmaceutical drugs work on.  All you have to do is watch a commercial for the latest new ‘miracle pill’ and listen for the list of side effects at the end to know that this is just not possible.  So it is with synthetic supplements.  This is why studies will report that beta-carotene can cause an increased risk of cancer.  It was never meant to be ingested in a high-potency chemical form, but as part of a whole complex with its other synergistic factors to contribute to overall immune health.  This is also seen in products that originated from foods and are therefore claimed to be ‘natural’ or ‘organic’.  A good example of this is products being developed from research that shows the cruciferous vegetables (i.e. broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, etc.) are powerful cancer fighters and free radical scavengers.  This has now turned into various companies making products of a particular component that was evaluated in these studies – indole-3-carbinol (I3C).  So instead of using these whole foods with all their inherent nutritional compounds that work together we now have an isolate from these vegetables.  There has been controversy surrounding the use of I3C, so now many practitioners recommend the ‘safer isolate’ diindolylmethane (DIM).  All of this could be avoided if we just used the whole food as nature intended! 

The second issue with synthetic supplements is related to the one above.  This has to do with the body’s efforts to utilize the ‘nutrients’ that are ingested.  For example, when the body receives 1000mg of ascorbic acid it will attempt to assemble the rest of the vitamin C complex in order to use this influx of ascorbic acid.  A good analogy for this is like trying to manufacture a car – you need an engine, transmission, chassis, wheels, and so on.  When you receive 1000 wheel covers on the assembly line (1000mg ascorbic acid) but you only have 50 engines, transmissions, chassis, etc. then you can only make 50 cars (whole Vitamin C complex)!  You cannot build a car with extra wheel covers no matter how many wheel covers you receive.  The same is true for excess ascorbic acid – no matter how much you take, the limiting factor of its usefulness lies in how many ‘parts’ you have to assemble the full functioning molecule.  In reality, ascorbic acid is only 5% of the total Vitamin C complex.  It is the outer antioxidant portion which protects the mineral activator (tyrosinase - organic copper) that sits at the center of the complex.  See diagram of structure of Vitamin C Complex below. 

  The Functional Architecture of the Vitamin C Complex

To use our car analogy, it’s like having the shell of a car with no engine.  The engine is at the center of the cars ability to go from point A to point B.  So the same goes with Vitamin C.  Without its core or center of tyrosinase (organic copper) it is inactive and has only limited potential.  What the extra ascorbic acid can do is cause a pH shift in the body because it is working as a chemical isolate.  There are times and instances when this may be valuable depending on someone’s body chemistry and health condition.  This is seen in the use of IV Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) therapy for cancer.  It is forcing a chemical reaction to take place, but it is not a vitamin effect.  It is also well-known that IV Vitamin C therapy can cause a profound depletion in organic copper stores and bleeding problems if not monitored closely.  The solution to these depletion and vascular problems is to give whole food Vitamin C complex.  
 

So if whole foods are the key to nourishing our bodies, then why are so many supplements synthetic?  Part of the reason for this is the cost to manufacture the products.  If it costs just pennies to produce a nearly indigestible form of calcium (calcium carbonate) then that will be the route many companies will take.  To them calcium is calcium and an unsuspecting public, mainly women worried about bone health, will believe that they are doing something good for their bodies.  Common ‘side effects’ of taking calcium carbonate are an increased risk of kidney stones, arthritis, sludging of blood (thicker; increased clotting) and calcifications of all kinds, including vascular (hardening of the arteries).  Why is this?  Calcium carbonate is also limestone or concrete.  It acts like a cement in the body and is highly unusable because it requires 12 steps to be ionized or usable by the body.  This is a highly inefficient process that requires a great deal of energy and most people cannot make the necessary conversions.  So, all that calcium that many women take daily for ‘strong bones’ will most likely never make it there for this reason and several others. 

A second reason is that most studies are done on single nutrients.  In order to conform to the reductionist view that science and medicine adheres to, it is required that single variables are studied at a time.  This means that to ‘prove’ that a nutrient such as beta-carotene is helpful in a study, it cannot be taken with any other nutrient so that the effects of just beta-carotene are then known.  While this may seem like a logical idea, in reality it only serves to mislead people as to the true benefits of carotenoids when used in its natural combination with Vitamin A.  How many times have studies been released that first say beta-carotene is good, then its bad, and then it’s OK again.  It’s enough to make your head spin!  What is lacking is the fundamental understanding that nature cannot be reduced to a single isolated variable without reference or regard for the whole. 
 

One further example of the misrepresentation of a nutrient complex is the case of Vitamin E.  Since the 1940’s, Vitamin E has been helping the hearts of millions the world over.  The original product available was alpha tocopherol, which was a synthetic anti-oxidant portion of the Vitamin E complex.  Over time more research came out to show the benefits of taking mixed or multiple tocopherols.  At this time these synthetic supplements were produced by the pharmaceutical giant Hoffman LaRoche and the Eastman Kodak film company.  Eventually the agri-giant Archer Daniels Midland started extracting an unnatural, but no longer synthetic, version of Vitamin E from corn oil.  As researchers ‘discovered’ more vitamin fractions, the new superstar on the block became the tocotrienols.  While most of these products are now being extracted from oils, usually corn and palm oils, they are still highly unnatural fractions.  Vitamin E, like any other vitamin, is a complex and cannot be optimally beneficial without all its parts.  While real benefit has been seen with both the synthetic and unnatural forms, there are many side effects to their use that are not routinely discussed.  These include hypertension, fatigue, vein problems, painful breasts, breast tumors, headaches, dizziness, muscle weakness and even angina.  In addition, blood chemistry changes such as increased LDL and abnormally increased coagulation tests such as PT and PTT have occurred.  Some of these conditions are the very things that Vitamin E is supposed to help!  The body was never meant to take high-potency fractions of a vitamin complex.  This is one of the factors that explain the inconsistent results of various research studies.  As always we need to look to nature for the answer and it has provided us with numerous sources of the full Vitamin E complex such as high selenium yeast, liver, wheat germ, and kale.  Just as with Vitamin C, we can see what we are missing out on when we take only a fraction of the whole.  See diagram of structure of whole Vitamin E complex below.

The Functional Architecture of the Vitamin E Complex

As with the Vitamin C complex, Vitamin E has an anti-oxidant shell which protects the more complex and active factors at the center.  In the case of Vitamin E, its core mineral activator is selenium.  How many people do you know who now take selenium with all their other supplements because of its cancer fighting benefits?  Many, I’m sure, and they would be remarkably better off with just one whole food product that contained the whole Vitamin E complex that had all the parts that worked together, form its core of selenium to its outer ring of anti-oxidants to restore balance.
 

If we are to fully restore our health, we must restore balance to our internal environment, our terrain.  Just what is this ‘internal environment’ or ‘terrain’?  It is quite simply the fluid that surrounds each and every one of our trillions of cells.  We are 70% water and the balance of this ‘internal ocean’ will be one of the most profound determiners of our health.  Science has shown us that the cells of our body respond to our internal watery environment thereby influencing our genes.  The holy grail of medicine in its search for the genes that cause disease is once again a false promise.  We also know too that our cells communicate through our extra-cellular fluid and not by direct contact, again reminding us that as the state of our ‘internal terrain’, so is our health.

This concept is in direct opposition to conventional wisdom which supports Louis Pasteur’s ‘Germ Theory of Disease’.  His belief that ‘microbes’ cause disease and that their eradication would cure the world of its ails has served as the paradigm upon which modern medicine has been built.  With the discovery of penicillin and sulfa drugs in the 1930’s and 40’s we fully ushered in the chemical era of modern medicine and Pasteur’s ‘germ theory’ was the new dogma.  What many people today don’t realize is that Pasteur’s theory wasn’t the only game in town.  Several of his contemporaries, such as Claude Bernard and Antoine Bechamp were looking at things from an entirely different perspective.  They took the more holistic and broader view.  They saw the germ / microbe as merely something arising from a diseased environment – an unhealthy terrain.  They postulated that disease can only happen when the internal environment provides a favorable condition, not the presence of a microbe or germ.  A good analogy is provided by Mark Anderson in his book Empty Harvest which he calls the ‘rat theory of garbage’ - …”if germs cause disease, then rats must cause garbage.  Show me a town that’s full of rats and I’ll show you a town that full of garbage.  I’ll show you a town with a sanitation problem.”  So in essence what he is saying is rats do not create the garbage, just as germs don’t cause disease, but you will always find a rat or a germ wherever garbage or disease is found.

While the alternative view of Bernard and Bechamp was recognized by many, and even supposedly by Pasteur himself, as he lay on his death bed acknowledging that “the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything”, this view was not adopted by medicine (for the full story refer to The Curse of Louis Pasteur by Nancy Appleton).  Thankfully, those who labored for the fuller truth did not stop their pursuit.  We owe one such individual much for his quest and the product that resulted from his years of observation and diligent research.
 

French scientist Rene’ Quinton went beyond the theories of his contemporaries Bernard and Bechamp and strove to actually restore balance to the internal environment.  Greatly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Quinton asked the question “where did all life begin?”  His search to answer this question led him to studying the ocean, its environment, and ultimately to the most basic form of life – plankton.

What Quinton discovered was several unique oceanic vortexes which supported an immense population of phytoplankton and the zooplankton that consume them.  When the zooplankton consumes the phytoplankton, they leave behind a fluid filled with biologically active minerals, amino acids, unmodified RNA, antioxidants, polysaccharides, and fatty acids.  The zooplankton’s action on the phytoplankton activates and structures the nutrients in such a way that supports the proliferation of life occurring within this oceanic vortex – a process known as ‘biocenosis’.  The key to this as it relates to human health lies in the fact that this biocenosis process, in its isotonic form, bears an incredible resemblance to human blood plasma and our extra-cellular fluid – i.e. our internal ocean.  See Chart Below for Comparison.

As Rene’ Quinton discovered, our internal environment is a microcosm of the sea itself.  His development by 1897 of this unique marine plasma has been used in Europe for over 110 years to treat hundreds of thousands of people with an amazing variety of health conditions.  Today it is still available in oral and topical formulations to assist in recovering the balance of our internal ocean and is now at the foundation of numerous of my client’s health protocols – especially for those who have been resistant or slow to respond to other holistic or traditional medical therapies. 
 

When we remember that we are part of the whole of nature, we begin to see the way forward to health and balance once more.  We cannot separate ourselves from our environment and our false belief that we can only serves to deny us our birthright in the natural order of life.  From our ‘internal ocean’ which is a microcosm of the sea to the Earth as a macrocosm of our bodies, we are intimately and profoundly a part of nature.

We can also see that all of nature works in the same simple way – from within to without; from interior to exterior; from seed to plant; from embryo to infant.   As a simple example, we can see this by taking a journey into the body where we find our most basic element – the cell.  Our cells have a nucleus or center with our genetic material (DNA).  The nucleus is surrounded by organelles and fluid which receive information from our DNA to carry out millions of functions.  These vital components are all protected by the outer cell membrane.  Our cells then make up the organs and glands which then form systems such as the cardiovascular and endocrine which work together to enable our most basic daily functions.  We are then covered with a protective outer layer, our skin.  As we work from the center outwards, we nourish our bodies with the whole foods that nature provides with their full complex of nutrients that also work from the center outwards.  We have an internal ocean which matches the oceans of our planet and we must restore this to a balanced state to heal.  We are a part of nature so we work in the same way as nature does and it has provided us with the means to heal.  This profoundly simple yet mostly ignored truth is the key to restoring health and balance and should be the guide to our choices in both nutritional products and holistic therapies.  All too often though, we work against nature because it is not ‘scientific’, ‘high-tech’, or ‘advanced’ enough to garner our respect.  True health and healing is ultimately an understanding and application of a timeless, yet simple return to the natural order of life. 

Once scientists and medicine can embrace this concept, we will then have come full circle to the days of the original nutritional pioneers such as Royal Lee, Rene’ Quinton, Weston A. Price, Melvin Page, and Francis Pottenger.  While their research seems to have been ignored as not ‘scientific’, ‘high-tech’, or ‘advanced’ by the majority, their wisdom and legacy lives on today as some of the highest quality nutritional products available for restoring health and balance as nature intended.
 

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