Genesis 1:12.
Today this quotation can be confirmed in exemplary fashion from evolution. Only plants are able to produce all organic substances. For this they need nothing more than water, carbon dioxide, minerals (in themselves “lifeless” rock matter!) and light. Without the products of plants, animals and we humans would not be capable of existing. On the other hand, we have a great advantage: we do not need to form all the necessary substances ourselves and therefore save substantial amounts of energy. Biochemically speaking, then, the human being is by far not the most highly developed living creature. Here we are inferior to plants and to many animals. The human being, as an integral part of nature, had to build itself up from the substances that nature offered it, and has made itself dependent on a whole series of “essential nutrients”.
There are about 45 of these “orthomolecules”, from the groups of minerals, trace elements, fatty acids, amino acids and vitamins. Healthy, pure and living food, an adequate orthomolecular supply, is the basis of human well-being. Orthomolecular medicine (OM) is thus concerned with the use of the right substances and molecules in the right amounts. The exact definition according to Linus Pauling (two-time Nobel laureate and father of orthomolecular medicine, pictured right) is: “OM is the preservation of good health and the treatment of diseases by changing the concentration of substances in the human body that are normally present in the body and are required for health.”
OM does not look for medicines that eliminate the symptoms, but for remedies that act on the cause of an illness.
What is the human being?
Philosophers have been seeking an answer to this question for thousands of years. It is easier, by contrast, to say what the human being consists of: mainly water. The rest could be listed as little heaps of different colours: the largest would consist of pale yellow protein powder. Then come the minerals: two kilos of white calcium, one kilo of red-brown phosphorus, 90 grams of yellow sulphur, 120 grams of silvery-white magnesium, plus a pinch of black-grey iron, reddish copper, silvery chromium, brown selenium, grey zinc, manganese and iodine, metallically shining molybdenum and yellow-green fluorine. Minerals are important building blocks of the organism. On the one hand, they give various parts of the body, in particular the bones (calcium) and teeth (fluorine), the necessary hardness; on the other hand, they are indispensable as cofactors in countless enzymatically controlled biochemical reactions. They are involved in nerve conduction and in cell wall permeability and integrity, and they regulate the acid-base balance and the osmotic pressure and thus the water balance of the cell and of the connective tissue. Various circumstances can lead to an inadequate mineral status: insufficient intake, poor digestion and absorption, and inhibition by toxic heavy metals.
Affinity of the organs for minerals
Brain
- Lead
- Mercury
- Manganese
- Aluminium
Thyroid
- Cobalt
- Iodine
- Selenium
Heart
- Calcium
- Magnesium
- Nickel
- Mercury
Lungs
- Arsenic
- Cadmium
- Nickel
- Chromium
Liver
- Selenium
- Beryllium
- Nickel
- Chromium
- Arsenic
Kidneys
- Mercury
- Cadmium
- Arsenic
Fat
Cadmium
Bones
- Cadmium
- Lead
- Strontium
Nerves
- Cadmium
- Lead
- Mercury
Skin
- Arsenic
- Beryllium
Minerals and trace elements make up a large part of the actually non-organic constituents of living beings; they cannot be produced by the organism but must without exception be supplied. After death and decay, in the course of the transformation “dust to dust”, it is above all the minerals that remain and are reunited with the earth. In our modern civilisation and with our environmental pollution, the ratio of healthy minerals to harmful ones has regrettably shifted in favour of the latter. In many cases there is a toxic burden of heavy metals and, in relation to it, a relative or even absolute deficiency of desirable trace elements. The effects are of many kinds. There is no need to list them, in so far as practically every symptom and clinical picture can be associated, not exclusively but frequently, with imbalances of the trace elements.
Amino acids
are supplied through the consumption of protein, in order to be converted in the human organism into the body’s own protein. It makes no difference whether protein is taken in as a “natural” food or as a mixture of amino acids. The organism does not actually need “protein”, but only the amino acids it contains. The amino acids that the organism cannot produce itself are: isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, valine. The amino acids serve the production of structural substances, hormones and enzymes. The latter are needed to make chemical reactions possible, and to control them, at the (relatively) low temperatures prevailing in the body.
Fats & fatty acids
(FA) occur in food in various types: saturated FA, monounsaturated/polyunsaturated FA, omega-3 FA and omega-6 FA; these terms describe the chemical structure by the number of so-called double bonds between the carbon atoms. The ones humans need are the omega-3 and omega-6 FA. They are the starting substances for the production of the “eicosanoids”, which as “tissue hormones” are involved in numerous important metabolic processes: function of the blood platelets (blood clotting, heart disease), inflammatory processes (rheumatism, psoriasis, eczema), cell division (cancer), with the omega-3 FA exerting an inhibiting effect on these functions and the omega-6 FA an activating one, which is why only the omega-3 FA play a therapeutic role in OM. Whereas the ratio of O-6 FA to O-3 FA in food used to be 3 to 4:1, today it is 20:1! The most important source of O-3 FA is fish and fish oils.
Minerals and trace elements
(= minerals occurring in traces) are also referred to as electrolytes and must without exception be supplied from outside. They serve to regulate the water balance and kidney function and to maintain the function of the nerves, the heart and the muscles. They ensure a balanced acid-base equilibrium, a properly functioning metabolism through enzyme activation, and the mineralisation of bones and teeth.
Vitamins
are, in contrast to the other essential nutrients, vital complex organic molecules that the organism cannot produce itself in this form. Presumably they were available in such abundance during the evolutionary development of the human being that producing them would only have been a waste of energy. Almost all the vitamins needed by humans are also lacking in most other mammals: e.g. vit A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B12, pantothenic acid, vitamin E. Vitamin C is an exception. All mammals and most birds and fish can produce vit C themselves from sugar (glucose). They were practically always discovered through severe illnesses that occur in their absence: vit C: scurvy, vit D: rickets, vit B1: beriberi, vit B3: pellagra, vit B12: pernicious anaemia. Because the population is supplied with these nutrients, these diseases are now hardly ever encountered. Chemically, the vitamins are completely different substances that fulfil the function of enzymes and coenzymes in the body. They thus make vital biochemical reactions possible. In the event of a vitamin deficiency we fall ill; a complete absence leads to death. Symptoms of vitamin deficiency appear only when deficiencies are very advanced. Until then, the symptoms run their course without being consciously noticed, as for example in the development of arteriosclerosis, cancer or premature ageing. Cancer and arteriosclerosis are admittedly not vitamin deficiency diseases, but it is scientifically proven that these diseases are markedly rarer when the supply of vitamins is adequate.
Dietary recommendations
relate exclusively to the requirements of the healthy person, and even here only to amounts sufficient to rule out a clinically recognisable deficiency. Important influencing factors are left out of account here, however: smoking, alcohol, growing older, diseases of the digestive tract with impaired absorption, interactions with medicines. Taking in the recommended amounts thus prevents clinical symptoms, but it does not rule out a latent deficiency. The basic rule is: sufficiently high dosage, long-term use, complete combinations of OM substances, not just individual substitutions.
Diagnostics
Blood analysis
Serum
Blood provides information about what the body has absorbed recently (from hours to days ago). The test is suitable for detecting or ruling out acute poisoning. Our body tries with all its might to keep the composition of the blood, as a transport medium and “feeding bowl” for our cells, as constant as possible. For this reason, general statements about the body’s stores cannot be made here.
Whole blood / erythrocytes (red blood cells)
As the erythrocytes have a lifespan of about 120 days, this test is suitable for detecting medium-term deviations in the minerals.
Urine analysis
This measurement reflects the elements that the organism is trying to excrete and gives relatively reliable results regarding any medium-term burden (days to weeks), above all of heavy metals.
Hair analysis
The hair, like the nails and teeth, belongs to the skin as an appendage. The skin, with the subcutaneous tissue or fat, is our waste depot. Mother Nature has devised this kind of landfill perfectly. The harmful substances should accumulate less in the vital organs such as the heart or brain, and instead where they do the least harm, and that is indeed the fatty tissue and the skin. This final storage (fat is a storage medium for “bad times”) represents the exposure to the substances concerned over the last weeks to months or even years. In certain situations (above all in children), hair is also suitable for diagnostics because obtaining the sample is absolutely free of strain and unproblematic. Hair is suitable to a limited extent for screening for heavy-metal burdens and only very roughly for the analysis of trace elements and minerals. It must be borne in mind that there is always the possibility of contamination: hair-washing, hair-colouring and body care products, cosmetics and environmental factors of the most varied kinds. For this reason, hair analysis is unsuitable for “self-diagnosis”.
Caution
It is strongly advised not to try to establish causal relationships, a diagnosis, let alone a treatment plan (for example with mineral supplements) on the basis of a mineral analysis alone (of any medium). By contrast, in the hands of an experienced physician a mineral analysis can provide additional information inexpensively and without strain.