Your Personal Vitamin Profile: A Medical Scientist Shows You How to Chart Your Individual Vita

by Michael Colgan

Overview

In Your Personal Vitamin Profile, medical scientist Dr. Michael Colgan shows how individually tailored programs of vitamin and mineral supplements lead to better health and longer life.According to Dr. Colgan, no two people have the same nutritional needs. Consequently, an all-purpose one-a-day vitamin pill cannot guarantee optimum nutritional supplementation in any diet. And there are factors beyond diet that must be considered. For instance, a man who smokes twenty cigarettes a day may require as much as fifteen times the Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamin C to maintain efficient functioning of the immune system. A woman who takes birth control pills may require ten times the RDA of vitamin B12 to maintain normal functioning of the cardiovascular system.Dr. Colgan's Health and Performance Nutrient Supplement Program -- a vitamin and mineral plan geared to the individual -- has been successful in reducing the incidence of herpes, eczema, high blood pressure, and migraine headaches. The program has also proven successful in diminishing the pain of muscle and joint injuries, and in alleviating depression. Moreover, Dr. Colgan's individually oriented supplement program has -- in a double-blind study -- helped athletes improve marathon times by an average of seventeen minutes.Now Dr. Colgan offers his revolutionary program in this book. By following the simple formulas and tests set forth in these pages, you can at last determine your personal vitamin profile.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780688015060
Publisher:	PerfectBound
Publication date:	11/01/1982
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.46(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.78(d)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

How Healthy Are We

THE SURGEON GENERAL tells us Americans have never been healthier. True, medical science has beaten most infectious diseases and can lessen the symptoms of many others. But these advances have left us prey to worse fates, degenerative diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. Dr. Robert Levy, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, reports that 35 million Americans suffer from hypertension, a major cause of the 500,000 strokes and 1.25 million heart attacks each year.' Cancer prospects are even worse. Despite television theatricals praising the effectiveness of cancer treatments, the National Cancer Institute reported in 1981 that one in every three Americans will get cancer before the age of seventy-four, 2 That's one third of our population! Does this sound like better health than our forefathers?

From 1960 to 1978 the cost of American medical care mushroomed from $27 billion to $192 billion a year. Despite this incredible offering, the degenerative diseases remain hungrier than ever. In order of importance in causing death and disability they are:

Heart disease
Other cardiovascular diseases
Hypertension
Cancers
Mental disorders (including alcoholism and drug misuse)
Diabetes Arthritis
Obesity
Hypoglycemia
Hypothyroidism

Together these afflictions cause eight of every ten deaths in America.' The amount of suffering they produce is incalculable. Though they appear quite different from each other, all have the same basis, the progressive degeneration of bodily systems because of cumulative effects of illnesses,injuries, bodily pollution and malnutrition over many years. But through the system described in this book most are preventable.

Medical Treatment Is NOT the Answer

The main reason medicine is failing with the degenerative diseases is its concentration on treatment after illness has struck. Most of our health money is directed to treatment rather than prevention. Only four cents in each health dollar are spent on preventive medicine. This bias toward treatment offers too little, too late. The degenerative diseases listed are all manifestations of general systemic disorders which develop years before the symptoms get bad enough to notice or to bring you to a physician. Many times symptoms do not appear at all until the disease is in a terminal stage. In heart disease the first symptom is often an attack that kills. Such attacks do not happen to healthy hearts. As with cancer, most heart disease may grow insidiously for a decade with no symptoms at all. It is not surprising that medicine fails if the first opportunity to treat comes when half or more of a vital organ system is already dead or replaced by malignant growths.

Nevertheless, treatment is still the popular approach. A lifesaving operation seems more real and deserving of medical (and media) attention than the nonoccurrence of a disease. Yet the history of medicine in Western society shows that the treatment of illness has never been the key to reducing its incidence. Professor Rend Dubos of Rockefeller University, for example, shows that the rate of tuberculosis in New York City had fallen by 75 percent before the first sanatorium was opened in 1910. Treatment of the disease had nothing to do with this improvement. The disappearance of most tuberculosis was a direct result of improvements in nutrition, living conditions and sanitation. These, especially improved nutrition, increased the resistance of individuals to the disease and prevented them from developing it.

Similarly, the eradication of diarrhea had little to do with its medical treatment. Formerly a major cause of infant death in America and Britain, diarrhea killed 170 babies in every 1,000 in New York City in the 1890's. Then, over the next ten years a succession of health-conscious mayors made major improvements in street sanitation, milk sterilization, garbage disposal and the establishment of parks and recreation areas. By 1902 infant deaths from diarrhea had been cut by half to eighty- five per thousand. Clean milk, clean streets and fresh air saved those children by making them generally healthier and more resistant to disease.

The same is true for diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, mumps and measles. With improvements in living conditions, sanitation and nutrition, the combined death rate from all these diseases had dwindled to one fifth of what it was in the early part of this century, long before the advent of immunization and antibiotics. Polio is another example. Like measles, it finally succumbed to advances in medical science after the introduction of vaccines for both diseases in the late 1950's and early 1960's. But these diseases were not conquered by treatment of patients who had them, but rather by immunization to prevent them from happening. Like good nutrition, immunization is a preventive strategy which increases host resistance. The Surgeon General agrees: "Nearly all the gains against the once great killers have come as a result of improvements in sanita tion, housing, nutrition and immunization."

Medicine Does NOT Promote Prevention

Most American hospitals are built for treatment, not for prevention. They have neither the equipment nor the procedures to prevent disease, and most physicians have no training in this area. Until there is a radical reorganization of hospitals and of medical education, medicine cannot use health money effectively. The hospital treatment armamentariurn built from Pasteur's discoveries that microbes cause infections is powerless against the noninfective degenerative diseases. Immunization cannot help either, because these diseases have no infective agents against which vaccines could protect us. This leaves housing, sanitation and nutrition as weapons against Clearly, combating degenerative disease is no longer cians' battle. It is ours. As the Surgeon General says, "You, the individual, can do more for your own health and well-being than any doctor, any hospital, any drug, any exotic medical device.""

The first step in assuming responsibility for your well-being is to learn the facts and the risks concerning health. This is hard, since many sources of health information do not promote health but serve the vested interests that finance them. It does not promote medicine, for example, to tell the public of the huge...