Andrew W. Saul
“Man is a food-dependent creature. If you don’t feed him, he will die. If you feed him improperly, part of him will die.” –Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D.
Dependency is a fact of life. The human body is dependent on food, water, sleep, and oxygen. Additionally, its internal chemistry is absolutely dependent on vitamins. Without adequate vitamin intake, the body will sicken; virtually any prolonged vitamin deficiency is fatal. Surely this constitutes a dependency in the generally accepted sense of the word.
Nutrient deficiency of long standing may create an exaggerated need for the missing nutrient, a need not met by dietary intakes or even by low-dose supplementation. Recently,1Robert P. Heaney, M.D., used the term “long latency deficiency diseases” to describe illnesses that fit this description. He writes:
“(I)nadequate intakes of many nutrients are now recognized as contributing to several of the major chronic diseases that affect the populations of the industrialized nations. Often taking many years to manifest themselves, these disease outcomes should be thought of as long-latency deficiency diseases. . . (I)nadequate intakes of specific nutrients may produce more than one disease, may produce diseases by more than one mechanism, and may require several years for the consequent morbidity to be sufficiently evident to be clinically recognizable as “disease.” Because the intakes required to prevent many of the long-latency disorders are higher than those required to prevent the respective index diseases, recommendations based solely on preventing the index diseases are no longer biologically defensible.”
There are at least two key concepts presented here: The first is, “Inadequate intakes of specific nutrients may produce more than one disease.” This exactly supports Dr. William Kaufman’s statements to this effect 55 years ago, when he wrote that, in considering “different clinical entities one cannot exclude the possibility that they may be caused by the same etiologic agent, acting in different ways. For example, in experimental animals, it has been shown that the lack of a single essential nutrient can produce a variety of dissimilar clinical disorders in different individuals of the same species...
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