• Section 1, page 19, How Do Vitamins Work

....back to chemistry. Each of those finely tuned chemical reactions that make us a piece of work depends on helper substances called enzymes to speed up (or catalyze) the reaction. And each of those emzymes requires some kind of helper of its own (called a cofactor) to be whole and active. And those cofactors -- or coemzymes, as they are sometimes also called -- are very often vitamins and minerals or both. So distilled to the essence we're a big bag of chemistry that couldn't happen without vitamins and minerals.

The chemical reactions that the emzymes and their vitamin and mineral cofactors speed up usually involve moving around ( or transferring) different chemical structures, transforming one kind of molecule to another, or in addition or removal of hydrogen atoms between molecules (oxidation / reduction reactions).

The main vitamins that act as coemzymes in these kinds of reactions are biotin, folic acid, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, riboflavin, and thiamine. The oxidation reactions, eapecially, are important to us because of their role in the aging process. Let's take a moment to look a little deeper into this particular chemical reaction: oxidiation.

• Section 1, page 20, Oxidation and Reduction

Broken down to our simplest subunits, we are merely a nearly infinite collection of atoms and molecules. Every organ, every tissue, every protein, emzyme, or cell shares this trait as a lowest common denominator of life. The atoms that make us what we are exist in a state of electrical nuetrality or balance, with all their electrons happily paired.

The electrons are negitively charged particles that orbit in pairs around the atom's nucleus or centre of positively charged and neutrally uncharged particles. Normally, the number of positives in the center matches the number of negatives whirling about it, leaving the atom electrically balanced. However, if everything stayed electrically neutral, we couldn't survive.

Our bodies depend upon the generation of energy through the shuffling of these electrons from one kind of molecule to another in a controlled fashion. This activity is called a redox reaction and occurs in each cell, primarily in structures within the cell called the mitochondria. Think of these mitochondria as little energy factories.

The name redox derives from the two phases of this kind of energy transferring activity: reduction, a process by which a molecule gains (or accepts) an electron from another substance, and oxidation, the reverse proces in which a molecule loses (or donates ) an electron to another molecule. In the donating process, the electron given or lost breaks up a matched pair of electrons that were happily in orbit around the nucleus, converting the molecule into what biochemists term a free radical.

Once formed, the free radical becomes intensely reactive, by which I mean it becomes very desirous of mating up its lonely single or free electron with one from another molecule. The formation of a free radical sets in motion asort of biochemical equivalent of robbing Peter to pay Paul: atom A takes B's electron, B takes C's electron, C takes D's, and so on. As long as the cascading process stays controlled, all is well.

• Section 1, Free Radical Chic

The formation of free radicals, however, does not always occur to our benefit. Damaging effects of chemicals, sunlight, ozone, cigerette smoke, food additatives, and oxygen contribute to the formation of free radicals that lead to aging and disease development. Day by day, the evidence suggesting that free radical damage to human tissue is the driving force behind conditions ranging from arthritis to cataracts to heart disease to cancer grows stronger.

But the free radical theory, so en vogue today is not new. Dr. Denham Harman, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska, originated the idea in 1954 and has spent much of the last 40 years defending the notion against the unified forces of eastablishment medicine, which tended to downplay its importance and poog-pooh its validity. Dr. Denham, now in his mid-70s, must feel an enormous sense of vindion these days, with researchers the world over jumping on his bandwagon.

Let me take a few moments to tell you about the theory of the radicals and touch on just some of the current work underway that points the accusing finger at these sub-cellular kamikazes. Further pages 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25.

• Section 1, page 26, Leveling the Playing Field:
  Macronutrient Effects

What, you may be asking yourself, is a macronutrient? And what, pray does it have to do with playing fields, level or otherwise? Fair question. the macronutrients are the major dietary fuels, i.e.., the proteins, carbohydrates (starches and sugars), and fats that make up the foods we eat. Everything from bagels to bananas to T-bone steaks is composed of varying amounts of protein, carbohydrates, or fat - the macronutrients that create the field upon which the actions of the vitamin and mineral micronutrients takes place.

If, as Dr. Blumberg so glibly puts it, vitamins are like seat belts, then the basic foods we eat are the whole bloomin' car. And without a safe, well built car, what good are the seat belts?

The moral of which is: before you spend your valuable time and hard earned dollars seeking out and taking micronutrient supplements, I would recommend that you start by building a level playing field. By that I mean that you begin with sound general dietary composition, you will reap far greater and more predicable benefit from the vitamins and minerals you add to that basic framework.

Let me illustrate for you. Say, for example, a group of nutritional researchers turns out a beautiful scientific study on the beneficial role of a particular vitamin - it could be any vitamin - on a certain medical condition. And no sooner has the ink dried on their paper than some other research team - studying the same vitamin effect - turns out an equally beautiful and scientific study that shows the vitamin to be of no benefit in the condition.

What could possibly explain such totally conflicting data? Is one group of researchers inept? Unscrupulous? Poorly trained? Although I suppose anything's possible, the truth is that both groups probably reported exactly what they found as accurately as they could. In one instance, the vitamin appeared to benefit the condition, in another it did not.

Simple, but why? The why may arise from the two studies being fought out on "unlevel" playing fields. Study participants in the one group may have eaten a diet that provided a basic background of protein, carbohydrates, and fats that created a favorable chemical environment for the vitamin to act. - and they benefited from the supplementation. And the other group, perhaps did not.

Vitamin and mineral research abounds with such conflicting data, but very often, he studies ignore the macronutrient composition of the diet and focus only on the dosage and effect (if any) of the micronutrient in question. Let me forge ahead with this concept to illustrate for you how the composition of the diet you eat will play a major role in how well you respond to vitamin and mineral supplementation.

• Section 1, page 28 - Protein, Carbohydrates, & Fats

Among the key players in promoting the "good" side of the yin and yang of health - of critical importance in getting that playing field level - are a group of body chemicals called the eicosinoids (pronounced: eye-kan'-sin-oyds) which influence and regulate a wide range of body functions, including blood pressure, the immune system, blood clotting, inflammation, and pain control.

We can maintain a supply of these eicosinoids by eating certain kinds of polyunsaturated fats, the primary ones being linoleic acid. Our bodies can take this basic kind of fat and alter it in stepwise fashion to male the various members of the eicosinoid gang. The action of the eicosinoids, as chemical messengers, typifies the yin and yang of health, because they are very clearly "good" ones.

The "good" group promotes such healthy occurrences as lowered blood pressure, thinner blood to prevent abnormal clotting that can lead to heart attacks, reduced inflammation and the pain that occurs in such diseases as arthritis, a stringer immune system especially against attack by viruses.

And the "bad" group? Well, they do precisely the reverse. But here's the kicker. Our bodies make both the good and the bad kinds of these chemical messengers starting with the same dietary fat: linoleic acid. Whether the linoleic acid in the foods you eat becomes an eicosinoid beneficial to you or one of the group detrimental to you depends largely on the overall composition of your diet.

Recently research into what basic dietary framework would favor the production of mainly the "good" messengers indes that a diet that controls the output of insulin ( a metabolic hormone that increases when we overeat starches and sugars) benefits most people. What would the macronutrient composition of such a diet look like?

According to Dr. Barry Sears, perhaps the country's foremost researcher in essential fats, about 40% of the calories should come from carbohydrates that do not cause pronounced blood sugar and insulin changes: primarily rice and oats and their flours / meals, fresh fruits, non starchy vegetables ( green leafies, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, squashes, green beans).

And limited in ( but not necessarily elimination of ) starches and sugars of other kinds ( wheat, corn, potato starch and products made from them or their flours / meals ) because these require more insulin for the body to use them. ( More about why that's important in a moment ).

You should get another 30% of your daily calories from lean protein sources ( meat, fish, fowl, egg white, and nonfat dairy products ). The number of calories you eat from these lean protein foods must be enough to provide you with at least one-half gram of protein for each pound of lean body weight.

Your lean body weight (LBW) is the weight of you with all the water and fat tissues removed: the muscles, organs, bones, skin.

• 1) You can figure it yourself; the details of such methods are readily found in either of two good books noted below15
• 2) There are computerized machines that will calculate body composition for you. You may find such machines by checking with your physician, a diet specialist in your area, or a fitness center. And finally -
• 3) You can use the rough guestimate method outlines below. This method won't be totally accurate, but it will at least get you into the ballpark easily and with little arithmetic.

Once you locate the category that most nearly describes you, take your weight in pounds and multiply it by the percent ( to the right of the description ) as a decimal. The answer will be your approximate lean body weight.

( Example: A woman, describing herself as moderately overweight, weighting 165 pounds would calculate her lean body weight as follows: 165 X .65 = 107.25 pounds. If for each 107 pounds, she must eat 1/2 gram of lean protein each day, her daily intake of protein would be 107 / 2 or 53.5 grams as a minimum to preserve lean tissue.)

I would encourage you to purchase a complete book of food values ( there are dozens of them at almost any book store ) that details for you the protein, fat, carbohydrate, and calorie level of most foods.

Some of these reference sources even include the value of typical fast foods, prepackaged foods, and junk foods, as well as fiber content and major vitamin and mineral content. Roam through the pages of your book of food counts and get the feel for the nutritional content of the foods you eat, the ones you like, and even the ones you avoid.

Only by becoming well versed in the macronutrients in the diet you currently eat can you know what changes you could make that would improve it. But wait. That's only 70% of the intake. What about the final 30%? That portion should come from beneficial fats: cold pressed olive oil, canola oil, marine lipid ( the beneficial oils found in the flesh of cold water fish, such as herring, salmon, mackerel, and tuna ), and a little animal fat ( about 10% ).

Okay. I promised earlier that I would make it clear to you why dietary composition and its effect on insulin control is so all fired important.

The answer to that takes us back to eicosinoids. Remember, I said that the kicker was that the body could make either the "good" kind or the "bad" kind from the same dietary fat? Well, to a large degree, the wind blows in eicosinoid production.

In the stepwise alteration of linoleic acid to make eicosinoids, there are two major steps controlled by enzymes. The first critical step is controlled by an enzyme I'll call D6D ( which for anyone interested, stands for delta 6 desaturase ) and the second, by another enzyme I'll call D5D (standing for, you guessed it, delta 5 desaturase .

Insulin acts against D6D in the first step to slow it down. The result is that the production of the raw material that our body could turn into either kind of eicosinoids falls off. Insulin further acts to improve the action of D5D in the second step, to speed up its action, which might at blush sounds beneficial, but which in truth steps up the production of the bad kind of eicosinoid.

So under the influence of insulin, your body makes fewer total eicosinoids, and what you do make will be mostly of the "bad" variety. This situation damages your overall state of health and makes it much more difficult for even large amounts of vitamin and mineral nutrients to have much of an impact.

On the other hand, if you begin with an excellent diet that favors the production of these "good" eicosinoid messengers, you've leveled the playing field and given the micronutrients a fighting chance to do their good works.

Begin today to put your macronutrient house in order, designing a diet for yourself along the lines of Dr. Sears ( and my ) recommendation that will not only improve your health and vitality, but will enhance your response to the vitamin and mineral therapies I am going to describe.

• Section 1, page 33 - The Single Ion Channel Therory

Minerals often occur, easpecially in supplemental form, as combination salts (such as the iron salt ferrous sulfate, chemical symbal Fe2(SO4)3 or table salt, sodium chloride, chemical symbol NaC1) that must be broken apart before your body can absorb it.

When mineral salt breaks apart, each part becomes what is called an ion , a particle of the element that has an electrical chemical charge. In the examples above, breaking apart the ferrous sulfate would yield two iron ions with positive charges, and three sulfate molecules with negitive charges.

The lining surface of your intestine has a protein mucous coating that is slightly negitively charged. This coating attracts the positively charged mineral ions (like iron above), and like the two poles of a maginet, the positive and negitive attract and stick. In the individual lining cells themselves, nature has provided an entry port, called the single ion channel , that permits safe passage of one ion at a time. You can envision this channel like a funnel tube.

Imagine the mineral ions in your stomach as tiny balls. Each mineral is a different color: iron is red, zinc is blue, phosphorus is green, copper is yellow, and so on. For the sake of illustration, assume that there are 100 balls of each color in the belly of the funnel with an opening large enough for only one ball at a time to pass through the spout.

Since there are equal numbers of balls of each color, the law of averages tells us that about the same number of balls of each color will pass through the funnel in a given space of time: red, blue, greem, yellow, all the colored balls with an equal chance of passing through the spout.

But imagine that someone suddenly dumps a thousand yellow balls into the belly of the funnel. Now there are over three times as more yellow balls competing with the other colors to enter the spout. Naturally, since there are so many more of them, more yellow balls will get through, and since only one ball can pass at a time, that means passage of the other colors will of necessity be reduced.

By this same means, the single ion channel permits only one ion of certain minerals to enter the cell at a time. Dumping a huge extra load of an ionic mineral into the system (your body) can create deficiencies in other minerals through unfair competition for absorption, just as happened with the yellow balls.

So what can you do?

How can you supplement with extra minerals without creating deficiencies? You've got to fool Mother Nature. Let me show you how it's done.

• Section 1, page 34 - The Magic of Chelation
  See pages 34, 35, & 36