B Complex and the Weak Heart

By William Brady, MD

Summary: William Brady was a medical doctor who wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column in the 1940s and ’50s. In this article from 1947, Dr. Brady discusses the importance of the B-complex vitamins—specifically thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), and niacinamide (B3)—to both heart health and proper carbohydrate metabolism. In multiple studies conducted at the time, he notes, vitamin B supplementation had been shown to reduce or eliminate the need for exogenous insulin in diabetics, while the link between vitamin B deficiency and heart disease had been known since all the way back in the 1920s, thanks to the work of pioneering nutrition researcher Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison. Astoundingly, medicine still fails today to grasp the importance of B vitamins to proper heart function, while both conventional and alternative doctors remain woefully ignorant of Dr. McCarrison’s remarkable and still groundbreaking research. From the Waterloo Daily Courier, 1947.

Dr. Brady’s Health Talk

By William Brady, MD

Summary: Dr. William Brady was a medical doctor with a popular syndicated newspaper column in the 1940s and ’50s. Here he discusses the link between physical degeneration and nutritional deficiencies resulting from the consumption of refined and processed foods. While we tend to think of the poor as most prone to malnutrition, Brady points out, in his characteristically biting manner, that it is actually the wealthy in America who are most susceptible. “Most Americans, particularly the well-to-do class, suffer from poor nutritional condition and are too dumb to realize what ails them,” he writes. For “anyone who purports to be informed,” Brady recommends as required reading the books Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Dr. Weston Price, Studies in Deficiency Disease, by Sir Robert McCarrison, MD, and The National Malnutrition, by Dr. D.T. Quigley. Sound advice still. From the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, 1950. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.