When I first heard this is in the early nineties, I thought that they were a nut.  It was more drastic than the title of this article stated.  The speaker had actually said that all death from disease was caused by nutritional deficiency.  How could all disease be caused by nutritional deficiency?  The speaker went on to describe chronic disease as being responsible for death at a rate of over seventy percent.  That seemed more reasonable but was it realistic. However, I knew that our great medical research institutions were spending billions of dollars every year in researching methods to treat disease, especially the Big Three Killers, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.  How could a society as sophisticated as American allow nutritional deficiency to be an issue.  Surely our science understood the necessities of proper eating and would direct change in our diet.

As my back started to fail to the point that I could no longer enjoy life, I started looking for anything that would give me some relief.  At that point in my life I had already been suffering debilitating pain for over fifteen years.  I thought that it was something that had just happened and nothing was wrong with the way that I ate or exposed my body to the sun – just aging.  After all our major companies were assuring me if I ate their products, I would get all of the nutrition that I would need.  They were required to put it right there on the label as directed by our great government.  It was fifteen more years before I discovered that my back was failing because I was vitamin D3 deficient.  I wrestled with how our institutions could be so wrong for over two years until I realized it was just about maintaining jobs and income in the health industries.  The work of these industries is not about our health, but about the health of the institutions.  Today, the thing that still aggravates me is the specialty groups that raise funds for research for this disease or that disease like a “walk” for breast cancer.  “Hanger on groups” playing us for the emotions of loss of a center piece of our culture – breast.

As I ‘grew’ out of my pain with vitamin D3 supplementation, I discover there were many life sustaining nutrients in which I was deficient. Here is the list:

• Eating too many carbohydrates and not getting enough protein.
• Eating too many carbohydrates and not getting enough fat.  These first two were promoted by our large grain industry.
• There is simply not enough vitamin C in our diets as we are one of the mammals that does not make this substance in our bodies.
• Exercise is necessary to move fluids through our bodies.
• Not spending enough time in the sun in the summer and not supplementing with vitamin D3 in the winter when the rays of the sun were inadequate to covert vitamin D3 in my skin.  To grow three inches in one year as the thirty plus vertebral disc healed was a startling reality!
• Our soils are so poor that there is not enough magnesium in our diets.
• Not eating enough uncooked greens and vegetables so that I was potassium deficient.
• Our government and health institutions are just wrong about the amount of iodine that we require.
• The modern food processing techniques and how we treat our water to reduce hardness was removing the necessary sulfur required for health.
• A balance in the correct amount and type of vitamins A, B, and E are also necessary.

There it was, the speaker that I had heard in the early nineties had been correct.  Health is really simple when there is a balance of nutrients and exercise.  Correct balance of macro nutrients, the ABC’s of vitamins, assuring the necessary minerals are consumed (potassium, magnesium, iodine, and sulfur), and exercise for at least three hundred minutes per week.  The only reason for the medical industry is for surgery to stitch us up when we are injured and for antibiotics when we get a ‘bug’.  Of course the other reason for its existence is to maintain a lot of high paying jobs including medical insurance jobs so that our economy stays healthy.  Someone has to be sick in order for this industry to stay large.  You are doing your friends that are employed by this industry a great service as long as you remain ill.  – Pandemic Survivor

Anticipation of Christmas hung heavily in the air.  The crops had been profuse that year with an abundant harvest of grains, tobacco, and beef, but winter had come early to the piedmont of North Carolina.  It had been cold enough in late October to kill hogs which was unusual.  The cold allowed the hams and shoulders to chill properly before being placed in the smoke house. There had even been snow and freezing rain the week of Thanksgiving.  Now in mid-December, everyone in the house was sick with some type of cold or maybe even the flu.

“I am not putting up with everyone being sick as a dog for Christmas,” my dad muttered on Saturday morning.  “I am going to do something about this,” and he left in a rush out the door in our two-tone ’58 Chevy Impala.  Our chore that morning was to load up the truck with corn and oats from the storage and take them to the mill to be ground into feed for the cows, mules, and horses.  When my brother and I arrived at the mill, a real treat to go with big brother, dad was there ‘chewing the fat’ with some other farmers.  He had a three gallon bucket of feed additive from the mill which turned out to be sulfured black strap molasses.

We returned home and dad had made it back as well.  He had added a gallon of cod liver oil to his collection of items necessary to save Christmas.  Every day from then until Christmas, we would line up for our dose of cod liver oil and a fresh home-made biscuit slathered with sulfured black strap molasses. What a waste of a hot biscuit-sulfured molasses-yuk!  By Christmas, everyone had become well and as best as I remember, no one was sick the rest of the winter.  This was my first introduction to healing through nutrition.

Black strap molasses or the syrup remaining after crystallization of the sugar from sugar cane is loaded with minerals that include: iron, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and trace minerals manganese, copper, and selenium.  The sulfur in the molasses comes from the addition of sulfur dioxide to young cane molasses as a preservative.  Because of the large amounts of concentrated minerals, it is commonly added to ground feed for cattle.  Cod liver oil is a very good source of vitamin D3 and vitamin A complexes that some researchers now say may not be the proper balance of vitamin D to vitamin A.  However, when you are deficient in both, it works like magic to boast a slumbering immune system.

How did we get to the point where claims cannot be made that nutrition will heal you from disease?  If we went to the doctor with a cold, he would not dare suggest that the reason for the cold was poor nutrition.  Only drugs can be defined as healing a disease.  Under American law, when we say that something will heal a disease, it automatically becomes a drug.  Are sulfured molasses and cod liver oil drugs?  I guess it depends on what ‘the meaning of is is.”

We have previously explored most of the nutrients listed, but not sulfur.  I was surprised to find that there is not a DRI for sulfur even though it is one of the most abundant elements in our bodies and represents about one half percent of our total weight.  It is sulfur in combination with magnesium and vitamin C that is responsible for collagen production and it is sulfur that holds our synovial fluid together for lubrication of our joints.

I did not mention that dad also brought home a large bag of Indian River oranges from Florida and I am sure that was for the vitamin C.  Somehow, even with the abundance of foods that were farm-to-table, we did not have the right combination of nutrients needed for our health.  Ah the wisdom in the treatment of disease that has been lost so that medical institutions can profit under the guise of protecting our health.  – Pandemic Survivor