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The Importance of Gastric Hydrochloric Acid
The following is a transcription of the February 1958 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Also in this issue:
- The Intestinal Flora and Its Role in the Life of Man and the Higher Animals, by P. Kouchakoff
- Solidarity in the Professions, by J.H. MacDermot, MD
- Freedom from Caries, by D. Duncan
- Long Use of Some Drugs May Cause Body Damage
- Tip of the Month (Relief from Sore Throat)
- High Points of Cholacol
The Importance of Gastric Hydrochloric Acid
The digestion of proteins fails to occur if the gastric secretion of hydrochloric acid is insufficient. The occurrence of undigested food in the stool is definite proof of the presence of achlorhydria. One test recommended for the diagnosis of achlorhydria is the examination, microscopically, of the stool after a meal of raw hamburger. Any muscle fiber in the stool is proof of the lack of hydrochloric acid in the digestive fluids.
One clinical indication of insufficient available protein is tissue hydration (tissue edema), which often causes weight fluctuations too rapid to be the result of any other cause. Waterlogged victims of hypoproteinemia lose weight rapidly and consistently upon replacement of hydrochloric acid and an improved protein intake. (Cottage cheese, raw nuts and raw nut butters, fresh meats, and seafood are good protein sources for the patient with weak digestive powers.)
We call attention too to the possibility that alkalosis may accompany the achlorhydria and hypoproteinemia, as discussed in the February 1957 issue of Applied Trophology, where attention was called to the fact that allergies are usually secondary to alkalosis and disappear as soon as the alkalosis is corrected. (Vitamin G complex must be recommended here as an important vitamin synergist to reduce alkalosis, especially the types involving allergy.)
Slow healing of wounds was also noted as an indication of alkalosis and of acidosis as well. Neuritic pains of the migrating type are also almost specific indications of alkalosis. Sciatica, for instance, is often relieved in a short time by the use of hydrochloric acid as an aid to digestion.
Pancreatic incompetence may aggravate a state of hypoproteinemia. The pancreatic enzymes are essential to the proper digestion of proteins as well as of carbohydrates. Pancreatic preparations and the Cytotrophic Extract of Pancreas [Pancreatrophin PMG] may be important in restoring this function.
Proteins and their amino acids are essential to tissue repair and maintenance as well as for growth. They are essential to the production of hormones and for enzyme formation.
The cooking of protein foods in the presence of sugar progressively destroys ten essential amino acids: lysine, tryptophan, histidine, arginine, phenylalanine, threonine, cystine, valine, leucine, and isoleucine.1 The result is tooth decay, bone resorption, pyorrhea, arthritis, and connective tissue diseases, as well as many hormone and enzyme deficiencies, if not cardiovascular disease and cancer.
We are confronted with a situation where the human body cannot make something out of nothing. Degenerative disease is the inevitable consequence.
Arthritis occurs only where excessive amounts of cooked proteins are in the food pattern; the disease is nonexistent in China, for example. No doubt the pains of arthritis are of a similar origin to those of the neuritis of alkalosis, i.e., due to calcium precipitations in nerve endings. The tissue poison guanidine is known to accomplish such a calcium precipitation, and guanidine is also known to be a most irritating influence. Healthy persons, with their detoxifying functions properly functioning, are not susceptible to pains like many chronically ill and physically debilitated individuals. They are also relatively immune to such things as the tortures of the dental drill, etc.
It is a very significant fact that the only way to produce arthritis in test animals is to feed them cooked food.
Cooking proteins promotes the release of its protein determinants, the native protomorphogens of the cell, whether of plant or animal origin, although those of animal origin are far more toxic. (Since we normally eliminate these poisons by the bile route, it is interesting to find that tiger bile, because of the animal’s all-meat diet, is so poisonous that savages use it for arrow poison.)
The eating of cooked food throws these poisons directly into the bloodstream, necessitating a sudden rise in leucocyte count to meet the emergency—the after-meal leukocytosis reported by Kouchakoff.
These protein poisons—so well described by Victor Vaughn, the eminent toxicologist of Michigan, and now known to be protomorphogen residues—are released from cooked proteins and absorbed without proper delivery into the portal circulation and to the liver (the cooking speeds the absorption so that the protein residues are taken into the bloodstream before proper digestive treatment), thereby causing the increase in blood leucocyte count after meals that is considered “normal.”
Kouchakoff discovered twenty years ago that this increase in leucocyte count failed to occur if the meal consists of one-half raw food. He placed the thermal danger point for release of these poisons at 187°F. It is of interest that a piece of human tendon put under tension and immersed in water suddenly fails to resist the tension at the temperature of 187°F, and at this point it stretches and loses its integrity. A piece of human skin under the same test loses its integrity at 145°F, the temperature of enzyme destruction in milk pasteurization. (See Kouchakoff report following.)
Dr. F.M. Pottenger Jr. has contributed much to this field of investigation by showing that pasteurized milk, with raw or cooked meat, fed to test animals caused constipation, stomach ulcers, liver disease, loss of teeth, heart disease, and arthritis—the very pattern of disease so common as chronic reactions to malnutrition in the human patient.
The crippling of endocrine organs by this loss of essential amino acids is behind much of this disease pattern. Vitamin deficiencies also contribute to further interference with endocrine function. The need for cortisone, ACTH, sex hormones, thyroid, and insulin are all instances of such endocrine damage.
The inhibition of tissue repair becomes more and more critical from this cause as the patient becomes older. As an example, a sixty-year-old patient has only one-twentieth as much ptyalin in his saliva as a twenty-five-year-old patient. Because of less efficient assimilation and a lower metabolic rate, the effects of normal aging are accelerated. Great opportunities exist for professional attention to these factors, with corresponding benefits to the patient.
Reference
- Ann. Rev. Biochem., Vol. 20, p. 317.
The Intestinal Flora and Its Role in the Life of Man and the Higher Animals
By Paul Kouchakoff
The role and significance of the intestinal flora in the processes of digestion have not yet been sufficiently elucidated. As is known, there are two groups of microbes: microbes of fermentation and microbes of putrefaction. In newborn animals the intestine is always sterile, the microbes making their appearance during the first hours of life. In the tropical fruit bats known as flying foxes, the alimentary tract is almost sterile. My own observations in the north polar regions, conducted in the course of six years in northern Siberia, Nova Zembla, and Franz Josef Land, have shown that the intestine of polar bears contains only one kind of microbe—Bacillus coli—belonging to the fermentative group (over 100 observations); whereas in seagulls and migratory birds I found a considerable and varied intestinal flora. On the other hand, in the local polar birds the flora became progressively poorer as one approached the North Pole. For example, in the genus Uria (auks) the intestine was found to be perfectly sterile (more than 300 observations).
Thus, in some animals the entire process of digestion and assimilation is purely physiological, without any intervention on the part of the microbes. It is also well known that all experiments on feeding newborn animals with sterile food and in sterile surroundings rapidly leads to their death. My own experiments with newborn polar bear cubs kept together with dogs demonstrated that these animals are not immune against the putrefactive microbes and that invasion of the intestine by microbes of this group makes them ill and sometimes kills them (three out of eight died). Uninterrupted observations in the course of two years demonstrated that in bear cubs fed on a human diet and having an abundant intestinal flora, growth and general development were retarded as compared with wild cubs of the same age, although the animals lived in complete freedom, under identical polar conditions.
It will be noted that the facts mentioned above are contradictory, since, on the one hand, under existing conditions of nutrition the absence of an intestinal flora is fatal to the animal, while on the other hand, the appearance of an abundant intestinal flora likewise causes their death.
It has been proved that between the two groups of microbes—the fermentative and the putrefactive—there is a constant antagonism, and that the saprophytic intestinal microbes may in certain cases become pathogenic and not only cause diseases in various organs but bring about different kinds of septicemia.
If the intestinal flora is necessary for the proper nutrition of the animal and for the assimilation of the food, it is difficult to understand the existence in the general harmony of the organism of this antagonism between the different species of microbes. It is equally incomprehensible that these microbes, while breaking up the foodstuffs biologically, produce by means of their by-products intoxication of the organism that they are supposed to assist. In a series of investigations, I have shown that the solution of these questions lies in the proper nutrition of the body.
Virchow’s recognition of “alimentary leukocytosis”—the name given by him to the increase in the number of leukocytes occurring after each meal—as a physiological phenomenon represents one of the greatest scientific errors, as the result of which the works of all subsequent investigators were based on false premises. My own experiments have shown that alimentary leukocytosis does not take place after consumption of food in the form in which it was produced in nature, but that leukocytosis occurs after consumption of food altered by high temperatures and by complicated manufacture. The alimentary leukocytosis is an indication of some pathological process taking place in the organism as the result of the introduction of food that is not readily assimilable. If the altered natural products of our usual diet are combined with small amounts of raw products, the leucocyte formula of the blood can be maintained at its normal physiological level, and I have succeeded in determining the necessary proportions.
In order to determine the true significance of the intestinal flora and its role in the digestive processes, further experiments should be conducted on animals and human beings fed on a diet that causes no changes in the leucocyte formula of the blood but maintains it on the same physiological level.
—The Lancet, February 13, 1937.
Solidarity in the Professions
By J.H. MacDermot, MD
We in the regular medical profession are constantly accused of excluding, for our own benefit, many people who, though not trained in every particular as we are, are yet quite competent to treat the sick.
This would include, we are sure, those who are taught and trained as we are. Should it perhaps also include the modernly trained osteopath, the modernly trained homeopath, the dentist, the chiropodist? All these men are trained and educated along almost exactly the same lines as our own—they take the same basic training, they have the same theories of disease, bacteriologic, and pathologic. Their treatment would seem to be exactly the same as ours. Yet, we tend to hold our skirts tight pressed to us as we pass them by.
The other thing we miss is the opportunity to help raise the standards of these other groups by admitting them to parity with ourselves, on the condition that their standards of diagnosis and treatment, and of education are at least as high as our own. These groups are treating vast numbers of sick people and have obviously, of their own volition, been concerned with raising their standards higher and higher till, now, they are extremely good. This shows their good faith.
—The Bulletin of the Vancouver Medical Association, British Columbia.
Freedom from Caries
D. Duncan of Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews comments on a case report published by H.R. Sullivan, Assistant Director, Institute of Dental Research, United Dental Hospital, Sydney, Australia (Austral. Dent. J., 2, 89–90, 1957):
Two sisters are described who in infancy were unable to tolerate sugar and fat. The younger was brought up on a diet based on soybean flour, skimmed milk with added vitamins, and vegetables. By the time the children were six-years old, they were able to tolerate limited amounts of sugar and fat, and their diet was gradually broadened: they ate white bread and took sugar in cooked foods, though they preferred savory to sweet foods. At the ages of fifteen and thirteen years, both were found to be free of dental caries. The elder had lactobacillus counts of 10,850 and 38,000, and the younger of 0 and 27, per milliliter saliva.
The report is made to show how freedom from caries can be associated with a diet that is not only nutritionally adequate but also acceptable.
Long Use of Some Drugs May Cause Body Damage
Prolonged use of some of today’s common medical drugs causes permanent body damage to rats and may be doing the same thing to humans, Dr. Curt P. Richter, John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, reported to the National Academy of Sciences meeting in New York.
The damage done by the drugs could not be seen and the rats appeared normal. However, daily records of the animal’s running activity and food and water intake over long periods of time show the permanent damage.
The drugs tested included a sulfa drug, two antithyroid drugs, a barbiturate, a pain-relieving drug, and female hormones. They were fed to the rats from one to four months and created great, regular cycles of activity that have never been seen in a normal rat.
Each cycle was divided into a period of activity and one of almost complete inactivity. Food intake sometimes doubled in the inactive period.
The cycles indicate that damage has most likely been done to the hypothalamus in the brain, and the rat never recovers from it.
Attention should be paid to the effects of many of today’s new drugs after treatment with them has stopped, rather than just while it is going on, Dr. Richter told Science Service.
The studies showed that, at least in the rat, the drugs may be doing damage that does not show up at first but which will be found long afterward.
—Science News Letter, December 7, 1957.
Tip of the Month (Relief from Sore Throat)
When aggravated by a raw sore throat, immediate relief can usually be obtained by holding a vitamin D tablet on the back of the tongue until dissolved. Repeat as necessary.
High Points of Standard Process Nutritional Adjuncts
Cholacol (Bile Salts with Collinsonia): Major use to control undue craving for sweets—a situation due to failure of the blood to emulsify and mobilize fat reserves. The bile salts being a physiological emulsifier, their action here is easily understood. The patient craving sweets may be overweight, but his assimilation is a one-way system; he cannot recall stored fats if he suffers from a bile salt deficiency. No one is hungry if his blood fat is up to normal, apparently. The blood levels of lecithin and cephalins, too, may be important. Use Cholacol where the patient has varicose veins or hemorrhoids, since Cholacol is buffered to prevent aggravation of these conditions.
