DR JOEL WALLACH

The modern diet lacks mineral nutrition simply because our soils lack minerals. Trace elements such as iron, manganese, copper, zinc, cobalt, selenium, chromium and boron that once would have returned to the soil naturally in plant and animal wastes on many a farm are now depleted or missing. And returning them to the soil artificially is too expensive a business for many of today's farmers. The use of fertilisers can further distort the mineral balance of the main elements in food, as I found in my experiments with super. Yet the link between minerally unbalanced foods and the rise of chronic and degenerative diseases in the 20th century is plain to see for those who will look.

Convincing people of this, and especially the medical profession, is not easy, as the career of Dr Joel Wallach illustrates. A farm boy from Missouri, he became a vet and began a life-long crusade to get people interested in nutrition. I listened recently to a widely circulated tape recording of a talk he gave in 1994 entitled "Dead Doctors Don't Lie".

On his family's farm which grew corn and soyabeans for a cattle feed-lot operation, they knew how to "do feed and nutrition" for cows and still make money, he said. To the choice feed they added all sorts of health-giving vitamin and mineral supplements for the calves. To their own food they added nothing. If they got sick, it was too bad; the cost would just be booked up to the numbingly more expensive human-type medical system.

Wallach studied agriculture at university and then went on to veterinary school. He then visited Africa to work with elephants and rhinos, and two years later accepted a job at St Louis Zoo conducting autopsies of animals who died of natural causes. Over 12 years he claims to have done 17,500 autopsies on 454 species of animals from many zoos and on 3,000 human beings who had lived close to zoos.

His fascinating finding was that "every animal and human being who dies of natural causes dies of a nutritional deficiency". He wrote scientific papers about his work, contributed articles to textbooks, wrote for newspapers and magazines, and went on TV but "couldn't get anybody excited about nutrition back in the '60s." So he went back to school and became a physician. "And they allowed me to use everything I'd learned in veterinary school about nutrition on my human patients," he said. "And, no surprise to me, it worked". He spent 12 years in general practice in Oregon. As the message has not got through yet, he continues his crusade.

The "dead doctors" of the title of his talk refers to his statistic that the average life span of doctors in his country is 58 years compared with the average for their patients of 75.5 years. (For Australians, according to the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria, average life expectancy is 82 years for women and 76 for men.) Wallach is particularly hard on the US medical profession for giving wrong advice and not adopting and publicising, for many conditions, the cures he said were found by veterinarians 50 years or more years ago. These include ulcers, which are not caused by tension but by the germ helicobacter pylori (and cured with bismuth and tetracycline); cardiomyopathy (cured with selenium), Alzheimer's disease (cured in its early stages with high doses of vitamin E and low doses of vegetable oil), osteoporosis including kidney stones and low back pain (cured with calcium supplement, and boron), aneurisms (cured with a copper supplement), some types of arthritis (with gelatin), and diabetes (with the trace minerals chromium and vanadium).

Other conditions curable with minerals, he claims, quoting scientific support, are premenstrual tension or PMT ("to relieve 85 per cent of the emotional and physical symptoms, take twice the recommended daily dose of calcium"); grey hair, facial and body-skin wrinkles, varicose veins, sagging under the arms, legs, belly or breast (take some copper supplement); liver spots or age spots on the face or hands or "radical damage" (take selenium supplement); male-pattern baldness (take a tin supplement); low blood sugar (take chromium and vanadium and so avoid diabetes); losing your senses of taste and smell (take a zinc supplement); learning disabilities, bone problems, anaemia, a craving for sweets or dirt (give a general mineral supplement).

Wallach has identified 157 different diseases caused by calcium deficiency. Among them is osteoporosis of the joint ends of bones implicated, he says, in 85 per cent of all cases of arthritis, including lumbago and sciatica. He regards grey hair as the first sign of copper deficiency, regardless of age, and a dose of copper can restore natural color. As copper controls the health of the body's elastic fibres, he says, returning it to the diet can banish crows-feet, body wrinkles and sagging. His advice to would-be dieters is to take no notice of best-selling medical authors who write about nutrition and die practising what they preach at the age of 40. Rather, people should ensure they get all the 90 nutrients they need in their daily diet "in complete numbers and optimal amounts" . . . including some 60 minerals and 16 vitamins.