Dr Joel Wallach The Wallach Revolution An Unauthorized Biography of Dr Joel Wallach, Medical Genius

Citation preview

Dr Joel Wallach : The Joel Wallach Revolution An Unauthorized Biography of Dr Joel Wallach, a Medical Genius Published by the Citizens Committee For Better Medicine

Dr Joel Wallach : The Joel Wallach Revolution

/

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION No Obstacle Too Great A Nutrition Science Leviathan Diseases of Exotic Animals Treating People Like Pachyderms Years of Autopsy, Research, and Scholarship The Cystic Fibrosis Discovery Suppressed by Yerkes Primate Center Knocked Down, Wallach Stands Up The Conventional Medical Paradigm The Naturopathic Way Wallach’s Global Empire Cystic Fibrosis in China: Further Debunking the Gene Theory of Disease The Race Based Gene Fallacy Epigenetics Versus Genetics The Importance of Bioavailability Ma Lan, Wallach’s Brilliant Partner Wallach Defeats FDA Censorship Wallach’s War on Conventional Medicine Wallach’s Global Army Transformations Reflections Wallach’s Unrelenting Drive, Vision and Legacy

No Obstacle Too Great From the time he was able to walk, Joel Wallach has never backed down from a challenge and has overcome each obstacle placed in his way. In his view nothing is impossible; rather, what others call impossible he views as ultimately achievable through the application of consistent effort over time. The word defeat is not in Joel Wallach’s vocabulary. Because when he encounters an obstacle, he maneuvers to overcome it, he has never been defeated. When knocked down, he stands up. In short, he wins precisely because he refuses to lose. That characteristic is the critical difference that defines all great entrepreneurs, inventors, and scientists. Dr. Wallach’s greatness is in that respect indistinguishable from other great achievers, like Thomas Alva Edison, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. As Wallach explains in his book Epigenetics, and as has been confirmed in an independent scientific review, Wallach was the victim early in his career of a successful smear campaign orchestrated by an otherwise respected body, the Yerkes National Primate Center at Emory

/

University. As explained in this book and in that independent review, Wallach discovered the first case of cystic fibrosis in a non-human species, a rhesus monkey, raising doubts as to whether cystic fibrosis was in fact a genetic disorder, something long accepted as dogma even to this day. Moreover, Wallach discovered that selenium deficiency caused cystic fibrosis and that selenium deficient mothers experienced in utero alterations in gene expression, resulting in cystic fibrosis in their babies. He also established that the condition could be caused later in life by selenium deficiency, as in the case of the rhesus monkey colony he evaluated while at Yerkes. While others can be derailed from achieving their ambitions because they have come to believe their dreams beyond their abilities, Joel D Wallach simply does not accept the idea that anything is beyond his reach; instead, he learns precisely what is required to reach his goals, carefully but expeditiously evaluates all options that can achieve the objectives, and then pursues zealously avenues well calculated to bring about the objectives. That strategy he learned as a boy, has applied throughout his life, and has triumphed repeatedly because of it. His dogged pursuit of success has taken him from the humblest station in life (a farm boy who was not well to do) to the status of an accomplished scientist, innovator, and entrepreneur. Although now 75 years of age it is as if Wallach’s journey has just begun. While others often accept accomplishments as a reason for rest and reflection, it is not in Joel Wallach’s DNA to be idle. He is on a lifelong mission, and he is restless. He travels and lectures, researches, writes, and communicates on radio multiple times a day over 300 days a year. Once he has achieved an objective, he simply sets a new, more ambitious one and then applies the same kind of zealous, dedicated, and tireless effort to achieve that new objective that he used in every prior instance. In this way, he has transformed academic success into commercial success and personal commercial success into the creation of a global health and financial empire that elevates the physical and economic conditions of millions worldwide. Since his formative years, Joel D Wallach has been on a mission to find a way to improve the lot of all animals, including man. In particular, he wants to enable people from all walks of life to live better longer, indeed to maximize their life spans and quality of life. He is directed like a laser beam to achieve that goal. Few people possess the powers of concentration, the dedication to achievement, and the indefatigable will of this man. He is like a pit bull affixed to a precious bone. He will not relent, he will not give in, and he will not be dissuaded from achieving his objectives. There is simply no earthly force capable of stopping him so long as he remains alive. For reasons explained later in this volume, in the independent review, and in Epigenetics, Wallach became the victim of character assassination shortly after his discovery, resulting in an effective blacklisting of him in veterinary medical circles, academia, and research institutions. As it turned out, that horrible event, roughly coincidental with the death of his second wife Josephine E. Wallach, led Joel Wallach to a different path toward fulfillment of his life’s mission. That turning point eventually catapulted Wallach to levels of achievement, success and notoriety vastly superior to anything he likely could have attained in the academic field of veterinary pathology. Precisely because of that event, Wallach entered the field of medicine, formally

/

crossing the line from the world of animal health and disease to the world of human health and disease, relying on comparative pathology to establish a unique new perspective on the best way to prevent and treat human disease, a way that defines a truly unique and revolutionary medical paradigm that, increasingly, tempts away from conventional medicine those victimized by it. Wallach’s natural resilience and determination are combined with another set of characteristics with him since childhood, high intelligence and decisiveness. All of those attributes help explain why Wallach enjoys success after success, never detained by life’s tragedies. That is not to say that his successes have come easy or that he has not suffered great hardship along the way. Indeed, he has paid very dearly for several of his most precious victories, but he has weathered each storm and come out on the other side no worse for the wear. Unlike others who may lose their way when confronted with significant opposition, Joel Wallach has remained focused on his life’s mission with a sure command of his destiny. His pattern is well established throughout each phase of his life. He studies obstacles, rapidly commits to new ways to overcome them, and is invigorated by the challenge of doing so, prevailing in each instance. He applies a combination of will power, intellect, cunning, and skill to eliminate or get past hardships in a never ending drive for success. His life’s mission is ambitious but attainable for Wallach: to enable each person to achieve his or her maximum life potential through complete nutrition and superior lifestyle Wallach acquired his powerful work ethic at a very young age. He was born in humble circumstances on a beef cattle farm in West St. Louis County, Missouri on June 4, 1940. His family lived in a small house with wood siding, few rooms, a wood stove for food preparation and heat, and a well pump for water. West St. Louis County was unincorporated at that time with 274,230 people resident there. St. Louis was an independent city, having seceded from the County in 1876. West St. Louis County was a suburban enclave in Missouri, located very near the center of the United States. A farm boy accustomed to back breaking chores and long hours of work, Wallach is a product of a quintessentially American environment, a way of life that was hard but productive and that was close to the land and the environment. He was not only physically centered in the heart of America at birth, but America has always been in the center of his heart, a nation he loves greatly. Wallach epitomizes Yankee spirit and ingenuity. Inculcated within him is a profound work ethic. His mind is inquisitive, analytical, creative, and iconoclastic. He is inquisitive like Thomas Alva Edison, patriotic and courageous like General George S. Patton, and possessed of scientific acumen akin to one of his mentors, Linus Pauling. Born into a free country, he has lived to the fullest extent, caring more about what he can do for the betterment of others than he has cared for his own lot and, in the process, has become renowned and financially secure.

Wallach is of Ukrainian descent. His grandfather was a decorated Cossack assigned to the personal guard of the Russian Czar, Nicholas II. At the time of the Russian revolution, his

/

grandfather fled Russia to the Ukraine. Wallach’s mother and father were Ukrainian immigrants to the United States. Typical of most immigrants, his mother did not go to school beyond high school (had graduated from high school); his father never finished the 10th grade. They were very hard working cattle farmers who, upon entry to the country through Ellis Island, moved West to Missouri in search of arable farmland and pastures. They settled in West St. Louis County, Missouri. In his most famous and best selling book- ‘Dead Doctors Don’t Lie’, Wallach recalls: Not being college educated or a sophisticated man of letters my father transmitted all of his Missouri wisdom relating to God, honesty, duty to family and country, and courage to me through the spoken word at the kitchen table, while chopping wood, during morning milking, truck trips to the market, and sitting at the campfire. He also encouraged me to read books that he believed were important. The Bible, My Early Life by Winston Churchill, and the complete works of Rudyard Kipling led the list. When I turned nine years old my father gave me a framed copy of Kipling’s poem “If” which summarized my father’s personal philosophy and outlined his hopes and expectations of me. ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise; If you can dream and not make dreams your master; If you can think and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools; If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,

/

And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “hold on;” If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son! Like most Missourians, Wallach is plain spoken, honest, loyal, financially independent, and humble. Although accomplished in medicine and science and, based on his discoveries, rightfully termed a medical genius, Wallach is affable and humble, capable of conversing with people from all walks of life. He is not judgmental but embraces the lives and difficulties of people without the slightest tinge of moral indignation or condescension. In short, he loves humanity, all of humanity, and works to bring about cures for afflictions regardless of how acquired or tolerated. In no small measure, those basic virtues are lessons he learned from equally humble, hard-working, loyal, and honest parents. He is cut from the same cloth. From his earliest days, Wallach applied himself enthusiastically to tasks. He has never been gingerly or halting in his approach, and he has never been intimidated by the enormity of challenges. Until he left home for college at the University of Missouri, he performed physically grueling farm chores on a cattle farm with few, if any, complaints. The work had to be done, and he made sure he did more than his part. He knew that complaining about the difficulty of the work did not get it done, so he did not complain and, instead, made haste to complete each task. Involved daily in the care of cows and calves and farming, Wallach would not allow himself to settle for a common life. He knew that he would not be fulfilled by a life of farming alone, and his parents likewise wanted something better for their precocious boy. He would be guided by the noble wisdom in Kipling’s “If,” a wisdom that beckons to the very soul to be great in character and deed, a wisdom imparted to him by his father on his ninth birthday. Wallach was naturally inquisitive and wanted to know everything about the animals in his care and the world around him. The feeding of the animals and their physical challenges interested him greatly. He found it curious that great effort was expended to ensure that animal feed contained the right proportions of vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, amino acids, and fats, but comparable attention was not paid to human diets. Although bookish, young Wallach was not reclusive. He was engaging and athletic, a physically fit boy who excelled at varsity football, wrestling, and weight lifting. At nine years of age he began to experience episodes of eyelid twitching that baffled him and his family members. Given no adequate answer for the condition from an eye doctor, Wallach pursued the answer himself by combing through medical literature in a research pattern that has been repeated

/

throughout his life. Dissatisfied with the answers given him which he found illogical, he chose instead to find the answers himself by reading voraciously on the subject until convinced of a sound hypothesis. As Wallach relates in the biographical sections of his best selling book- Dead Doctor’s Don’t Liehe came to understand that the eye twitching was due to a calcium deficiency. Aware that certain of the feed pellets he fed to his family’s calves contained calcium, he began ingesting those pellets daily and, in a relatively short period of time, the eye twitching came to an end; Wallach proved his hypothesis. That event, as well as his day to day experience and insatiable appetite for information about the anatomy, physiology, and health conditions of cattle led Wallach to the field of veterinary medicine. In high school he became increasingly interested in veterinary science and medicine. Fixated on the goal of becoming a veterinarian, he would not be deterred from attaining it. Filled with boundless energy, Wallach not only mastered chores on the farm but also found time to participate actively in the Boy Scouts, earning enough merit badges to qualify himself for the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout. He then capitalized on that achievement by choosing as his scouting vocation, work with veterinarians at the St. Louis research and feed facilities of the Ralston Purina Company. While at Ralston Purina, he learned that the animal feed formulations used by the company were carefully selected based on scientific evidence linking vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids to a lessened incidence of disease and favorable health outcomes. He wondered whether that same approach might not be tried successfully in people. He was vexed by the fact that people seemed to eat based on taste alone without regard to ingesting the right kind and amount of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and fats, yet farmers treated the animals better than humans, by Wallach’s estimation, because the farming industry had become adept at ensuring that animals had diets precisely tailored to maximize their good health. A Nutrition Science Leviathan With his formidable ability to concentrate and his tenacious pursuit of objectives, Joel Wallach committed in his teenage years to become a veterinarian. More than that, he intended to learn from animals the key elements to healthful existence with the goal of one day making discoveries that could be translated into benefits for mankind. Many born into humble circumstances find it hard to dream of achievements far beyond the limits of their life’s experience, but not Joel Wallach. He dreamed of achieving greatly since youth and believed fundamentally in his own ability to transform his dreams into reality. His worldly experience taught him that nothing was truly impossible and that with a strong will, intelligence, and enough determination he could always find a way. He knew not to leave things to chance but to make change happen. Indeed, he appreciated that in America there really is no limit to what one can achieve, the determining factors were strength of conviction, savvy, and will power. Even if others could not find a way to make their dreams come true, Wallach knew he could and would. That self-confidence has been with him since youth and has never left him even in the darkest of times. It defines who he is to this day.

/

>At the summer breaks his freshman and sophomore years of high school, Joel Wallach worked at the St. Louis Zoo where Marlin Perkins also worked. Perkins later achieved world renown as the host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Wallach and Perkins shared similar backgrounds. Both Wallach and Perkins are Missouri natives. Both were humble, hard-working, entrepreneurial, and led to achieve their dreams despite the obstacles. Perkins was born in Carthage, Missouri. Perkins also attended the University of Missouri for a time, albeit he left the university before graduating so he could work at the St. Louis Zoo. After working elsewhere as a zoo director, Perkins returned to the St. Louis Zoo, serving as its Director from 1962 until his death from cancer in June of 1986. In 1963, Perkins became the host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Perkins retired from Wild Kingdom in 1985, a year before his death. It is often said that people from Missouri are plain spoken and honest. President Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri. Former Vice President John Nance Garner supposedly said of President Truman that he “is honest and patriotic and has a head full of common sense. Besides, he has guts.” That same description applies to Missouri native Joel D. Wallach. Like Perkins, Wallach was one who has lived by his word. If he made a deal, he abided by its terms and expected others to do the same. He had promised at his interview for the St. Louis Zoo to do anything they desired him to do so long as he was given a chance to work with his idol, Marlin Perkins. When he was asked therefore to evacuate the colons of elephants so they would not discharge large quantities of dung while doing circus acts, Wallach obliged without complaint. He had said he would do whatever was required, and he fulfilled that pledge. With bare hands and arms, as was the practice, he put his entire arms deep into the colons of the elephants and removed as much excrement as he could muster. Even hardy farm boys would recoil from this dangerous and offensive task, but not Joel Wallach; he said he would do whatever it took to work with the famed Marlin Perkins. Wallach was a man of his word. Wallach, like Perkins, is also plain spoken. He does not coat his expression with insincere compliment, caveats, or hyperbole. He speaks to the point without sugar coating. Wallach has always been one known for his frankness and unvarnished presentation. He will not cow to the generally accepted position or bite his tongue while others profess it if he knows that the position conflicts with science and logic. He has always been one to reveal hypocrisy without fear of retaliation from those who stand to lose from the telling of the truth. When Wallach graduated from high school, he considered a military career. Neither he nor his parents had the means to send him to college. Despite the lack of resources, Wallach’s parents expected him not to enlist in the military, as was a common practice at that time, but to go to the University of Missouri. They wanted their son to become an accomplished American citizen. Joel Wallach would be the first in his family to go to college. Few high school age kids at that time acquired an education much beyond high school, but Wallach knew that to become a vet and to achieve his goals he would have to do so.

/

The notion that his parents would pay for his college was out of the question. They did not have the means. The notion of going out of state for a college education was likewise unaffordable. Consequently, Wallach would have to work multiple jobs at the University of Missouri in order to pay the tuition. He was not dissuaded by the notion of hard work. He would do whatever it took to reach his goal. He was admitted to the University of Missouri in 1958 at the age of 18, majoring in animal husbandry and nutrition and minoring in field crops and soils. The courses he took were well suited for veterinary school. Wallach worked several odd jobs to support his way, causing him to replace time for sleep with study, sports and dating. He thought he could manage it all, but even the tireless must get enough sleep to handle a full course load. Wallach’s first semester grades were mediocre and his counselor at school recommended that he forget about going to veterinary school. Then as now admission to veterinary school depends on academic excellence, particularly in the sciences. But Wallach was not a quitter. He would not abandon his dream. He would alter his lifestyle and resolve to do better. Wallach realized that he had sacrificed his primary goal of veterinary school because he had taken advantage of all of the social and work opportunities his school had to offer. Refusing to accept that veterinary school was beyond his reach, Wallach united with an academically accomplished roommate to refocus his energies to achieve that single objective of admission to veterinary school. He remained on the school wrestling team but gave up a social life and all other collegiate activities, using that time to attend to his studies. He so invested himself in academic work that soon he achieved top marks in all of his classes. In a bold move, Wallach applied for veterinary school half way through his second year of undergraduate school. That move was bold indeed for a student who had lackluster grades his first semester. Ordinarily students were accepted on excellent grades into veterinary school after their third year. By applying early and with a first semester grade average that was average, Wallach risked rejection, but he thought it worth the try. In an unusual move, apparently impressed by his extraordinary turn to excellent grades, the University of Missouri School of Veterinary Medicine admitted Wallach. With admission to veterinary school in hand, Wallach could have abandoned his undergraduate curriculum and proceeded directly to veterinary courses. That was the preferred and common way. But Wallach was not a quitter, so he resolved to complete his undergraduate course work while simultaneously taking the full veterinary school course load. He masterfully achieved both objectives, again by following his well-tested method of laser like focus on academics and unrelenting drive, unalterably pursuing his goal regardless of the cost in time and effort. He obtained his Bachelor of Science Degree in Agriculture in 1962 with a major in animal husbandry and, two years later, his Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine. Throughout veterinary school, Wallach remained fascinated with the role of nutrition in animal health and with comparative pathology (the study of comparable diseases in animals and man). He knew that deprivation of certain nutrients would produce disease states in animals that could

/

often be reversed by simply restoring the missing nutrients. He theorized, however, that disease states not recognized as nutritionally based were in fact the products of nutritional deficiencies in both animals and man. That concept, radical for its time, became a mainstay of Wallach’s thinking as he entered the field of veterinary medicine after college. Wallach graduated as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Missouri in 1964. For those unfamiliar with the DVM degree, it is one of the most rigorous medical degree programs, considered more academically rigorous and challenging than even an M.D. for human practice. There are only 28 universities in the United States that offer a doctorate in veterinary medicine in satisfaction of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s requirements. Admission to veterinary school is highly competitive. For example, in 2007, 5,750 applicants competed for 2,650 seats in the 28 accredited vet schools. To gain admission to veterinary school, most accredited schools, including the University of Missouri, demand excellent performance in science classes such as those in organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, physics, general biology, vertebrate embryology, general biology, and calculus While in vet school, Wallach worked in the veterinary anatomy department, beginning what would become the most extensive set of animal autopsies ever performed by a single medical practitioner. He also performed human autopsies for comparisons. Wallach gained considerable expertise in comparative pathology, making him a formidable diagnostician within a few years after graduating from vet school. After vet school, Wallach served as a pathologist and instructor in the Department of Veterinary Pathology at Iowa State University for a year, 1964 to 1965. >Through thousands of autopsies, Wallach continuously discovered instances of death and disease in domesticated and wild animals that appeared to be a result of nutritional deficiencies. Increasingly he viewed nutrients as therapeutic agents, not simply responsible for sustaining life and fending off classic nutritional deficiency diseases but also as means to treat a wide range of diseases. That perspective was unique, indeed revolutionary, for the world of the 1960’s. Wallach was among a precious few scientists in the world who were beginning to view individual nutrients and combinations of nutrients (when consumed at above levels identified as necessary to sustain life) as means to cause natural systems to work preferably and hasten disease cure. When an Iowa State veterinary pathology graduate student had to give up an opportunity to work as a Project Veterinarian and Capture Officer for the Natal Parks and Game Service (Umfolozi and Hluhlue Game Parks), Natal Republic of South Africa in 1966, Wallach seized the opportunity to replace him. Wallach was soon working with enormous and wild pachyderms (elephants, rhinos, and hippos) at first in Botswana in a region infested with life threatening blood flukes and then in various other game reserves in South Africa. In his second series of

/

expeditions, Wallach studied drug therapies and animal tranquilizers along with the rare, near extinct white rhino. Wallach served as a veterinarian and capture officer for Operation Rhino in the Republic of South Africa, involving the rescue and protection of that rare and threatened species, and for Operation Elephant, involving efforts to protect the African elephant in the Southern Rhodesian Wankie Game Reserve (now a part of Zimbabwe). Always fascinated by the role of nutrition in animal health, Wallach repeatedly observed pachyderms consuming clay from termite nests and limestone along road beds, calcium deposits, and other trace minerals. He speculated that those eating habits were purposeful attempts by the animals to obtain adequate mineral intake, including trace minerals. He made record of the fact that the healthier and larger animals he observed in Africa were the ones that had ready access to mineral deposits, while those more prone to chronic disease and early deaths appeared in regions where minerals were deficient in the soils and plants. That observation would remain with him going forward and would cause him later to observe that human populations likewise enjoyed the greatest longevity in regions where mineral deposits were rich and humans included minerals and trace minerals in their daily diets. That observation led Wallach to conclude that pica and cribbing, whereby animals engaged in binge eating, were really a manifestation of the animal’s hunger for particular sources of minerals. He correlated those animal conditions with people and, in time, likewise observed that inadequate mineral intake by people led them to crave fattening foods. In late 1966, three years after the start of his enormously popular Wild Kingdom program, Marlin Perkins asked Wallach to leave Africa, return to St. Louis, and join him as a post-doctoral fellow in comparative pathology and medicine at the newly created and NIH funded Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at the St. Louis Zoo. Perkins had grown to admire Wallach who, in many respects, emulated his own creative energies and traits and, like Perkins, was a man who could be counted on to accomplish difficult tasks expertly and without complaint. Had it been another person asking, Wallach would have had little difficulty declining the offer, and, at first, Wallach even drafted a letter politely declining Perkins’ offer. Upon reflection, however, Wallach could not break the bonds of loyalty that are so much a part of him. Wallach would always be grateful for Perkins’ decision to give him a chance to learn under his tutelage at the St. Louis Zoo. Wallach returned to St. Louis and took up his new post. In doing so, he left behind work that he truly loved and would recall fondly for decades thereafter. In this aspect, we learn another important lesson about the character of Joel D. Wallach. He is fiercely loyal. For those who have been there for him, he is there for them. Years may pass, people may change stations in life, and circumstances may change, but Wallach’s loyalty remains solid and dependable come what may. He never forgets a good deed and ordinarily rewards the person responsible. He has built solid alliances over the years precisely because he is not only loyal but goes out of his way to help those loyal to him. It is a brand of loyalty more commonly seen among battle hardened troops who have survived death due to that synergistic combination of grit, courage, ability, and leadership that they share with their commanding officers. Likewise, Wallach, in a battle to transform how the world looks at disease

/

and treats it, regards those who have been in the trenches with him, fighting against orthodoxies and advancing his mission as indispensable. He remains loyal to them for a lifetime. At the Center for Biology of Natural Systems, Wallach performed thousands of autopsies over the course of three years, the largest number he performed in his entire career to that point, expanding his knowledge of the nature, kind, and degree of disease affecting different species and his research into the role of nutritional deficiencies in contributing to disease. At the Center, Wallach began systematically to associate specific disease states in animals with chronic nutrient deficiencies, most often mineral in nature. That association was revolutionary, because even among the enlightened at that time their focus was almost exclusively on vitamin deficiencies without any serious regard to mineral, trace mineral or amino acid deficiencies. Wallach speculated, with good scientific grounds and convincing logic, that deficiencies produced disease in animals of different species and, so, likely also contributed to those same disease states in humans. Increasingly, he became convinced that nutritional therapies were the solution not only to the health problems of animals but also to those of humans. By the conclusion of his work at the Center, Wallach had spent the better part of two decades performing thousands of autopsies, involving hundreds of different species and also thousands of human cadavers for comparison. He had become a nutrition science Leviathan, one of the few comparative pathologists who had performed large numbers of animal and human autopsies and one of the few people in the world who had come to the knowledge that minerals, not just vitamins, played a critical role in preventing and treating a whole host of disease states. Although by the late 1960’s, the nutrition science revolution was in its infancy (and some scientists toyed with the idea that vitamins were capable of serving as effective disease mitigating agents and treatments), no one other than Wallach had come to the informed opinion that minerals too were indispensable. Wallach was the lone expert in mineral and trace mineral treatment of disease, and he had not yet been given an opportunity to present his findings to peers, let alone the world at large. Diseases of Exotic Animals The academic publisher W. B. Saunders wanted to publish a definitive veterinary treatise on the known physiology, disease states, and treatments for non-domesticated, so-called exotic, animals. The undertaking was mammoth–so comprehensive, scientifically detailed, and research based that the publisher anticipated the need for dozens of veterinary scientists participating, each with expertise in a peculiar species or disease state. That plan went awry, however, when all but two of the veterinarians who had signed up for the job failed to complete the work assigned. According to its original plan, the publisher wanted to invite 28 different experts to write a chapter each. Dr. Joel D. Wallach was among those asked to be a chapter author. He was asked to write three chapters. After years had passed and few chapters were satisfactorily completed but for those by Dr. Wallach, the publisher wanted Wallach to write all of the

/

remaining chapters. Wallach was asked to find a co-author for the book, one who would be given the privilege of having his name appear as a co-author without having to write book content. Wallach chose another University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine alum, Dr. William J. Boever. Wallach respected Dr. Boever for his work at the St. Louis Zoo. The writing of the entire book fell to Wallach, causing him to review the universe of scientific evidence, both animal and human, germane to the assessment of every known disease state and treatment for exotic animals. In short, the massive research undertaking would cause Wallach to become invested in the most far reaching and intensive study of all aspects of animal disease and treatment. At the conclusion of this work, Wallach became one of the most well educated and deeply sophisticated experts in animal disease and treatment in the world. No one else had singularly invested the time and energy in researching all manner of animal disease and treatment. It was daunting enough for a veterinarian to become expert in one class of diseases but to master them all seemed superhuman. The book is divided into three major parts, covering mammals, aves (birds), and ectotherms (reptiles and amphibians). It explains not only the characteristics of each kind of animal but also their metabolic processes, hematology, and blood chemistry characteristics, the best means to anesthetize them, treatments, and, in particular, common nutritional deficiencies and symptoms manifested in animals suffering from those symptoms. It also explains in detail the diseases known to be associated with each kind of animal, the symptoms associated with the diseases, the testing methods recommended for diagnosing the presence of the diseases, and the treatments appropriate for the diseases. The book is filled with photos and drawings of the proper containment facilities for the animals, examples of abnormal animal activity, examples of appropriate medical equipment, appropriate medical procedures and techniques, autopsies, microscope enlargements of bacteria, viruses, and parasites from infected animals, and restraint and immobilizing equipment. It is encyclopedic and scrupulously documented. Although an intimidating task for over a dozen other veterinary scientists, Wallach was not dissuaded by the enormity of the work. He simply strove to acquire the additional expertise, painstakingly evaluating the vast universe of published works, research papers, and reports. He did it all. Mastery of the work reveals true medical genius. At the same time that he devoted countless hours on animal autopsies from captive animals who died in zoos across the country, making him one of the most well versed experts in animal pathology, Wallach also read thousands of veterinary medical and medical journals in his quest to master everything that was known or discernible about exotic species. To achieve mastery of such a broad range of species and diseases requires a thorough understanding of science germane to the investigation: organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, pharmacology, biology, genetics, calculus, and physiology. Ordinarily limitations in one’s scientific skills would make it all but impossible, even for a talented veterinarian, to perform the enormous research task Wallach assumed, but not for Wallach.

/

Not only was he performing autopsies to determine the cause of death of thousands of animals, ultimately more autopsies than have been performed by any other single individual, but he was also immersed deeply in all aspects of veterinary and human medicine, biology, chemistry, physiology, comparative pathology, and pharmacology, making him after in excess of a decade of effort one of the most well educated medical scientists on earth. During the eighteen years that Wallach researched every known disease of, and treatment for, exotic animals, he also performed more animal autopsies, and he went to work as an animal pathologist at different zoos, including four years of pathology work at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and then at the Jacksonville Zoological Park in Jacksonville, Florida and the Memphis Zoo. Wallach spent countless hours investigating the veterinary, medical, and pathology literature and even more time performing consultations with colleagues, producing this mammoth work after ten plus years of relentless effort. Wallach revealed the breadth of his undertaking in a preface to the book: We began our project with extensive literature searches far afield from traditional veterinary sources; we collected our own data, performed thousands of autopsies, and encouraged each other to publish and to maintain an intellectual curiosity when considering the health care of our exotic charges—thus this book is not to be considered an end point, but rather a staging for all veterinarians and professionals who work with exotic species to “come up to speed” with the state of the art without the need to re-invent the wheel. It is our wish that this book provide a widespread understanding of the anatomy, physiology, diagnosis, and treatment of the rainbow of species with which we share this planet. Diseases of Exotic Animals: Medical and Surgical Management, a 1,159 page tome, was finally published in July of 1983. Comprehensive in its identification of disease states, symptoms, causative factors, and treatments, the book remains a trusted academic treatise found in the libraries of veterinary schools across the country as well as in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. (where it is listed as a “National Treasure”). The book contains some two thousand illustrations, references to over 25,000 autopsies, and references to some 10 million tissue chemistries and slides. The book is a rich source of information covering a large number of exotic animal species, informed not only by Dr. Wallach’s academic research but also by his years of clinical experience in the field. Because it is so comprehensive and detailed, it remains a valuable resource for veterinary research decades after its publication. Its size, breadth, and content are remarkable when one comes to the realization that it is the product of a single man, Joel Wallach. The tome is a validation of Wallach’s medical genius and of the enormous foundation of evidence and analysis that he brings to bear when making diagnoses and prescribing treatments. Among the many extraordinary findings contained in the book are those related to what were often termed “natural” animal deaths. Based on a trove of autopsies, Wallach was able to

/

establish that animal deaths were in fact not “natural” at all, in the sense of being non-cause specific. Rather, he found nutritional deficiencies the root cause of the vast majority of deaths witnessed in the animals he autopsied. Based on Wallach’s comparative pathology, he found diseases of man paralleled those in animals but given different names. He identified cross-species treatments that often eluded physicians and veterinarians because of the compartmentalization of the two professions, a compartmentalization that did not affect Wallach who made comparative pathology his primary method and basis for discerning the true causes of disease. For Wallach, the knowledge that, for example, pica was a condition of mineral deficient animals translated easily into the conclusion that human cravings were likewise indicative of mineral deficiencies in humans. For Wallach, muscular dystrophy deemed incurable in humans was substantially the same as white muscle disease, stiff lamb disease, and mulberry heart disease in sheep and pigs where it was understood to be curable through complete vitamin supplementation complemented by extra doses of the trace mineral selenium. For Wallach, Type II diabetes in humans was substantially the same as Type II diabetes in marmosets, alligators, and shrews where it was preventable and curable with the trace minerals chromium and vanadium. For Wallach, cerebral palsy in humans was quite similar to cerebral palsy in llamas, where it resulted from a copper and zinc deficiency. For Wallach, spina bifida in humans was largely indistinguishable from spina bifida in monkeys, where it was preventable through prenatal ingestion of folic acid and zinc. The associations Wallach made cover nearly the universe of all major human diseases. In each case, Wallach had found comparable cases in animals. He established in animals that each disease was associated with a particular kind of vitamin, mineral, amino acid, or fatty acid deficiency and would either be curable or preventable by ensuring adequate amounts of the nutrient in the daily diets of the animals. In his later experience as a human physician, Wallach found repeatedly that the treatments he used to cure animals frequently worked to prevent and cure the disease in humans. In Chapter 6 of his book Let’s Play Doctor, Wallach lists over 350 different disease states in humans that he has found through animal and human research to be associated with nutritional deficiencies or nutritional toxicities resulting from ingestion of specific nutrients to excess. In Chapter 10 of Let’s Play Doctor, he identifies specifically tailored nutritional interventions, combinations of nutrients at specific dose levels, that he has discovered to be effective in treating disease. He provides that listing for each of the over 350 diseases referenced in the book. Treating People Like Pachyderms In 1982 Joel Wallach graduated from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon, with an N.D. degree. From 1982 to 1993, Wallach worked as a naturopathic physician, treating humans. “He’ll treat you like a dog, but you will get better,” became an adage associated with Dr. Wallach’s medical practice, meaning that many of Wallach’s remedies for animal disease were applied to humans and worked just as well.

/

In his lectures, Wallach often informs audiences of this fact to much hearty laughter. He facetiously explains how a patient would come in for a medical exam, see Wallach’s University of Missouri doctor of veterinary medicine degree on the wall, and then see him approach with an enormous glove designed for the rectal examination of pachyderms, whereupon more seasoned patients in Wallach’s waiting room would announce that he treats you like a dog, but you get better. In all seriousness, however, it is common for basic research concerning the effects of nutrients on human health to begin in animal studies. While animals differ from human beings in several important respects, many species are enough like humans or, if not, the particular mechanisms of action involved are enough like those in humans, that extrapolating from animals to humans is reasonable. Indeed, the customary scientific method is to begin with animal research and progress to human research in the study of diseases and treatments for disease. Unusually, Wallach knows both sides of this equation. Most scientists who engage in animal experiments are not also ones who engage in human experiments. For decades, Wallach performed comparative pathologies, dissecting animal and human cadavers and comparing pathologies in both. That experience made him an extraordinary diagnostician. Because of his high mental aptitude, it also blessed him with superior insight yielding discoveries that are the product of true medical genius. In Wallach’s case, the extrapolation from animals to humans occurred first predicated on his investigation of nutritional formulas in the treatment of animal disease, then predicated on his reliance on safe nutritional interventions with his human patients, and then based on responses to nutritional recommendations he has made to the public at large. Having acquired in depth knowledge of the veterinary and human sides of medical science, Wallach finds the failure of medical science to include veterinary science underpinnings vexing. In Let’s Play Doctor, he writes: “All ‘orthodox’ doctors should be required to go to veterinary school as a pre-med course . . .” The body of evidence Dr. Wallach has acquired over the years confirms the wisdom of his approach. He not only finds parallels between animal and human diseases at every turn, he also finds that what works well in animals oftentimes works well in humans. The sources and kinds of ingredients he uses in his formulations for animals and humans are all food grade and safe at the dose levels recommended. Among the many innovations in nutrition science that Dr. Wallach pioneered is the liquid suspension of minerals and trace minerals. He has succeeded in creating formulations that not only contain the right forms of ingredients but also the easiest means for delivery, most often in a liquid. Individuals who have trouble taking pills appreciate this right away but also those who for one reason or another have not experienced benefits from powders and traditional pills.

/

The body works on the basis of homeostasis, meaning that at the cellular level quantitative amounts of nutrients from foods that are needed are absorbed and excess amounts are discarded, either being eliminated from the body through excretion or stored by the body in fat. The trouble comes when either nutrients are in a form that prevents their absorption, are affected by other foods that provoke reactions (i.e., gluten, etc.) that diminish absorption, or are in a form where absorption is compromised by such things as low stomach acid long before they are available for absorption in the intestines. Wallach has studied these difficulties and has endeavored to design diets and dietary supplements for animals and people in ways that maximize nutrient bioavailability. His approach is informed by the literature but also by a vast clinical experience. Dr. Wallach also follows other cultures rather closely, attempting to identify what causes some people to live longer lives in healthier states than are common in the United States. He notes that Americans not only fail to eat the right kinds of foods but also fail to be adequately nourished even when they do consume large quantities of fruits and vegetables. He also points out that while Americans spend more per capita on health care than all nations on earth we rank low among industrialized nations on the longevity scale. For Wallach, the goal is to ensure that all essential nutrients are consumed on a daily basis. He believes that by providing the body all of the nutritional elements it needs for optimum functioning, people become more resilient, less prone to disease, more alert, and less likely to suffer age related disease conditions until late in life, if at all. For Dr. Wallach, it is an outrage of modern life and proof of the failings of conventional medicine whenever young people are diagnosed with hypertension (high blood pressure), type II diabetes (insulin resistance), coronary heart disease, or osteoarthritis (pain and immobility of the joints), because he views each of those conditions largely affected by dietary choices. Were Americans to ingest the right kinds of nutrition daily and supplement properly, they would be far less apt to suffer from any of those disease conditions and, once acquired, would be more apt to eliminate them without the toxic effect of drugs. That level and kind of nutrition cannot be obtained from food sources alone, and so he advocates supplementation. Getting Americans, indeed getting people the world over, to do what is in their own best nutritional interest is Dr. Wallach’s mission. Nutritional influences on health and disease are increasingly appreciated by academics who study them, but conventional medicine still clings to the notion that, with rare exceptions, foods are not therapeutic. Wallach rejects that notion and does so based on a wealth of scientific literature. Since the 1960s, the nutrition science literature has become so prolific that there are often thousands of articles based on original research associating specific nutrients with therapeutic effects. Since childhood, Wallach reasoned that if only we could unlock the associations that exist between specific nutrients and physiological processes, we could come to discover how a full complement of nutrition could not only fend off disease but prolong life and the quality of life for much longer periods. He reasoned that if rations for animals could be perfected such that animals enjoyed maximum good health and survived far longer in captivity

/

than in the wild, so too man could ingest an ideal complement of nutrients, avoid deleterious habits, and likewise extend life. With animals, Wallach’s effort to prove nutrition therapeutic was comparatively easy. All he needed to do was place the nutrients in the animal’s feed or make edible pellets out of the nutrients. In the case of people, the challenge is far more difficult, because once acclimated to particular foods and lifestyle choices, people tend not to deviate from them (even when their lives are at stake!). Wallach must therefore excel at the art of persuasion, a skill he has honed through years of presentations around the world. Wallach’s lectures deliver complicated scientific theories in understandable form and are also motivational. People who hear him often come away with an epiphany about their lives and health, taking steps immediately to take control of their biological destines and alter their health directions toward healing and self-improvement Wallach seeks to empower people not only to change their lifestyles and make good nutrition and supplementation a daily habit, but also to convert his audience into exponents of that same nutritional advice. The power of his message, combined with the conversion effect on his audiences, magnifies each presentation manifold as word spreads from lecture hall to the contacts of those who have attended each lecture. That viral dissemination of the electrifying message conveyed by Wallach is a main element responsible for his great success. Although Wallach is most definitely an American patriot, who has served his country in the military reserves, his message is global. He seeks to uplift people in every nation, resolving nutritional issues in country after country. The marketing approach he chose in 1997 when he founded American Longevity (now, Youngevity), multi-level marketing, is ideally suited to achieve a very important secondary benefit. It is no coincidence that poverty and riches each carry with them grave threats to health. The poor, of course, have difficulty accessing adequate nutrition because cost is an obstacle. By contrast, the rich have difficulty changing their lifestyles because they can afford to maintain their bad habits. Wallach speaks to both. For those who are not financially independent, his multi-level marketing system offers them a genuine chance to become financially independent through distributing the very products that are best for their health and by becoming proponents of Wallach’s message of how best to live better longer. For those who are already financially independent, his message offers the chance to integrate, simply, key nutrients into their daily routines that can have profoundly beneficial health effects. When whole companies adopt Wallach’s nutritional program, employees can experience health benefits that make them less dependent on insurance and less costly in missed work hours to employers. Savvy employers comprehend this advantage and find ways of bringing the formulas to their employees as an added benefit.

/

Wallach is intent on treating all people the same way he did pachyderms, but we should remember that Wallach treated elephants, rhinos, and hippos very well indeed, saving them from extinction with carefully tailored nutritional interventions. Likewise, the promise of his recommendations for humans is that adherence to his advice will bring about longer, healthier lives. Years of Autopsy, Research, and Scholarship Long before the rest of the scientific community had an inkling that minerals and trace minerals were keys to good health, Dr. Wallach was hypothesizing about and studying their role in preventing and treating diseases in animals and people. He began his research in earnest in the late 1950’s, over two decades before general publication in the scientific literature concerning the effects of vitamins on disease and disease prevention. No other scientist in the world has devoted more time and has discovered more physiological effects associated with mineral deficiencies than Dr. Joel Wallach. No other scientist or medical practitioner in the world has performed as many autopsies as Dr. Wallach. When he began his research in the late 1950’s, few if any scientists in the world thought of minerals as therapeutic. Those who did understood only a select few, including calcium, magnesium, and lithium, to have disease mitigating properties. University of Missouri Professor William A. Albrecht was among those who had a profound impact on Wallach’s formative thinking concerning minerals and human health. Albrecht, who died in 1974, was the Chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri. An agronomist, Albrecht established links between soil quality, nutrients in food, and human health. In particular, he demonstrated that poor nutrient quality in soils and plants (a loss of vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals) led to poor health of livestock and, ultimately, to poor health in humans. He also discovered that colloidal clay particles, including micronutrients, were indispensable to animal diets and health, because of their rich supply of minerals. Albrecht’s career included emphasis on the loss of minerals brought about by modern agricultural techniques. He discovered that soils were rapidly becoming depleted of nutrients. Failure to rotate crops, compounded by deep plowing, and the removal of brush and natural obstacles, like large rock, contributed to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s and early 1940’s. During the Dust Bowl, winds blew top soil into drainage, resulting in an increase in pollution to streams and rivers and a loss of arable land across the West and South. Although not the subject of remark at the time, the Dust Bowl also helped deplete the soils of nutrients. Dr. Wallach Talks Minerals The lack of crop rotation was falsely thought to be the sole source of mineral depletion. In the late 1950’s and forward, as farmers began using chemical fertilizers to replenish lost nutrients, those fertilizers failed to reinfuse the soils with a complete and adequate array of minerals, favoring instead just three macronutrients: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Albrecht discovered that the nutrient value of food and feed crops grown at the start of the Twentieth Century vastly exceeded the nutrient value of food and feed crops after World War II.

/

Mineral Depletion 60 Minerals, Wallach insisted, were required for achieving and maintaining good health and was then, as it is now, a novel proposition. To this day, the scientific community has yet to catch up with Wallach’s understanding. But Wallach’s view stems in part from the work of Dr. Albrecht, who established that depletion of nutrients in soils parallel poor animal and human health. Wallach complemented that work and expanded upon it, by identifying the full complement of nutrients lost and establishing that oral supplementation would most effectively ensure that humans receive the nutrients which the soils, plants, and animals do not provide in health sustaining and enhancing quantities. Wallach alone discovered that the employment of electricity resulted in the loss of the traditional source of dietary minerals – wood ashes. Wallach realized that at 3:00pm in the afternoon, Monday September 4th, 1882, Thomas Edison pulled the switch on the first commercial electric generating plan on Pearl St. in New York City. Within ten years every city and town in the industrialized world converted from wood as the universal fuel to electricity. Oral Supplementation Because no one knew that their traditional dietary mineral source (wood ashes) was no longer available. No one made the connection between wood ashes and nutritional mineral sources, and therefore no one supplemented to make up the difference. Because people liked electricity, hydroelectric dams were built which provided large supplies of electricity, however there was an unintended consequence – flood control. No more spring floods, no more mineral rich silt to plow back into the soil each spring to renew depleted minerals A Rich Source of Minerals Not only that, but Wallach also studied geology, identifying layers beneath the earth’s surface in specific regions of the world where humic shale existed and embodied the mineral remains of prehistoric plants. These veins of mineral rich soil he knew would have to be tapped to provide the best organic forms of minerals. 90 For LifeTM With a combination of state-of-the-art manufacturing and superior raw materials, Dr. Wallach and his team have created an exceptional oral supplement. The product contains 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 amino acids, and two essential fatty acids. It ensures the ideal absorption of nutrients, resulting in the body’s optimal function. Through these products with minerals designed for optimum absorption, thousands of patients suffering from chronic diseases have been helped. Above all, he continues to educate the public about the issue of mineral deficiency and the power of oral supplementation. Science often plods along behind great discoverers whose life’s work usually propels science forward only after their deaths and after scientists who cling to the conventional wisdom have exhausted themselves in defense or have died. Although Galileo discovered that the earth

/

orbited the sun, the scholars of the time rejected the notion, condemned him for suggesting it, and insisted for decades thereafter that the earth was the center of the universe. In like manner, many in conventional medicine and science insist that minerals are largely worthless, although over time their numbers continue to dwindle as more and more research proves Wallach to be correct! The notion that minerals are worthless challenges our basic sensibilities. We know that minerals variously exist in the soils. Wallach teaches that they occur in veins through the top layers of the earth, much like chocolate in chocolate ripple ice cream. Some locations have greater quantitative amounts of minerals than others. Consequently plants that absorb minerals have varying quantitative amounts of minerals in them depending on their location. Decades of modern agricultural exploitation of the soils, along with the advent of electricity, has depleted much of the land in the industrialized world of key nutrients, a concept Wallach developed while in undergraduate school and one borne out by his subsequent world-wide research. It stands to reason, then, that if our generation depends on plant food sources that are less replete with minerals than prior generations, we necessarily are experiencing deficiencies not known to our forebears. Moreover, we know that all manner of minerals are present in the human body and perform roles requisite to normal cell metabolism, growth, digestion, respiration, and elimination of wastes. We also know that the sources of minerals in our bodies upon which we depend come only from what we ingest. It therefore offends common sense for some to insist dogmatically that supplemental minerals are irrelevant. Wallach points out how selenium, a mineral, was viewed for years as an inherently toxic substance that ought not be ingested. That notion, dangerous because selenium is an essential mineral, has now been thoroughly debunked in science, as research has finally proven what Wallach understood more than a half century ago, that selenium in the right dose levels is safe and plays a key role in supporting the healthy functioning of our immune systems and reducing the risk of disease conditions such as certain kinds of cancer, “auto-immune” disorders, such as fibromyalgia, lupus, cardiomyopathy, heart disease, muscular dystrophy, SIDS and cystic fibrosis. Wallach based his knowledge not only on academic research but also on experimentation in animals and humans. Time and again through the conduct of thousands of autopsies and through the treatment of those whose disease conditions vexed his colleagues, Wallach discovered evidence of mineral deficiencies and effective nutritional treatments. When he provided minerals to his patients, he found their recoveries hastened and were more complete (not simply a masking of symptoms but a cure of the underlying diseases). This led him to publish in the peer reviewed literature and to perform more research. He discovered the mechanisms of action of the minerals in many cases, and he developed sound hypotheses for mechanisms of action in others. Wallach has over 70 peer-reviewed scientific publications in which he is author, a large number for a professional not in academia. Wallach’s

/

views are well supported in science and in logic yet conflict in many respect with the orthodox medical view. Science ordinarily evolves slowly. Because scientists must test hypotheses repeatedly and undergo critical review before a consensus emerges, science is too slow for the needs of those suffering illnesses now. For them, physicians possessed of medical knowledge, skill, and a willingness to try new approaches become critical. Discovery and innovation threaten orthodoxies upon which science in academia depends. One would think that the academic environment would encourage novel theories and debate concerning them, but, as Dr. Wallach knows well, that is most often not the case. That is because science tends to move along incrementally without earth shaking discoveries. There is, in that slow movement, security for those who cling to orthodoxy and have built academic reputations upon it. Where revolutions in scientific thinking embraced in academia, few academic icons would exist unchallenged. Because it is natural for people, including scientists, to flee from states of uncertainty, one common method used in academic circles is to challenge extensively every new theory or proposition and to deem it unproven until virtually every member of the scientific community of repute has acknowledged it, or has died and given way to a new generation more willing to acknowledge it. Because Wallach is the quintessential example of a medical innovator whose inquisitive mind yields discovery after discovery, he is like fissile material in an academic environment. Academics who depend on slow progress find Wallach’s rapid progress unsettling and unwelcome. It is therefore that orthodox nutrition science has taken decades to adopt several of the theories Wallach has been publicly articulating since the 1970’s. When a patient suffers an illness that medical science does not recognize or cannot treat, physicians necessarily depend on a forensic approach of credible hypotheses and innovative treatments. Wallach’s career with animals and people caused him to confront thousands of such cases and to devise innovative means for care that were beyond those known in medical science. He did so methodically and logically, carefully diagnosing ailments by reference to all available environmental information concerning the patient. In this way, Wallach is among the world’s best diagnosticians. Repeatedly Wallach has found that nutritional interventions, and, in particular, provision of minerals to apparently mineral deficient patients, yielded positive results. As he dug deeper, he discovered why that was the case, and yet general scientific publication concerning these effects lags years, even decades, behind Dr. Wallach. In recent years, science has slowly been catching up. Increasingly nutrition scientists in the universities are coming to understand that minerals like boron and strontium in addition to calcium play critical roles in maintaining bone health. They are coming to appreciate the multi-faceted anti-carcinogenic properties of selenium. They are coming to understand that trace minerals are used in metabolic processes and their absence can cause malfunctions in

/

those processes. But still, conventional medicine and science have a long way to go before they catch up with Dr. Wallach.

The Cystic Fibrosis Discovery Suppressed by Yerkes Primate Center

Although educated in conventional veterinary medicine, Joel Wallach has never been one to confine his thinking to convention. A plain spoken Missourian with tremendous scientific acumen and a highly inquisitive mind, Wallach did not limit his focus to veterinary findings when assessing vexing ailments of animals. Since veterinary school Wallach has been a comparative pathologist, assessing human and animal data in determining the cause of death of animals presented to him for autopsy. Like other great Missourians, Wallach prefers to call it like it is, and not as others might prefer it to be. His genius in comparative pathology combined with his frankness and realism got him into big trouble at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Department of Pathology, in Atlanta, Georgia on the campus of Emory University. After Wallach left the Brookfield Zoo, the Memphis Zoo, and the Jacksonville Zoo, he went to work as a pathologist with Yerkes in 1977. Dr. Harold McClure was Wallach’s supervisor in the pathology department. From his dealings with McClure, Wallach understood that if he, Wallach, made a discovery at Yerkes, he would be the lead author on the scientific publications about that discovery and McClure would be the co-author. If, on the other hand, McClure made the discovery, Wallach would be the co-author. In November of 1977, McClure went on vacation. During the two weeks while McClure was away, Wallach was called upon to examine the cadaver of a diminutive and anemic six month old male rhesus monkey. The monkey had white hair instead of the normal grayish green and was one of approximately twenty-six in the NASA experiment at Yerkes. Wallach performed an autopsy and considered all of the forensic details. Ordinarily veterinary pathologists review the veterinary pathology literature in search of disease causes. Wallach pursued an unconventional and far more sophisticated approach based on his training in comparative pathology. Since veterinary school, Wallach had made it a practice to review the human pathology literature for clues into the causes of animal diseases. It was that approach, in this instance, that brought about a profound discovery not only of benefit to animal populations but also to human. It is a discovery that should have netted Wallach international acclaim and perhaps would have but for a set of unfortunate circumstances that led to an official rejection of the discovery.

It was in the human pathology that Wallach found an apparent match to the peculiar anatomical symptoms found in the rhesus monkey cadaver. From that human pathology, Wallach believed

/

the monkey’s condition strongly indicative of cystic fibrosis. Among other symptoms characteristic of cystic fibrosis, Wallach found the monkey’s pancreas scarred and cyst filled, its liver and lungs scarred, its growth stunted, and its weight below normal. If indeed the monkey had cystic fibrosis, Wallach’s discovery would be earth shaking in a number of ways. The conventional medical wisdom was that cystic fibrosis was a genetic disorder of humans. If tied to human genes, how could it possibly occur in non-humans? Wallach performed a forensic investigation that evaluated the monkey’s diet and environment with a secondary assessment of blood and tissue biopsies of pancreas, liver, and lungs from all twenty-five other monkeys in the NASA experiment at Yerkes. In combing over that data, Wallach discovered that the feed given the monkeys had been modified in one critical respect. The feed had been doused in corn oil, a known pro-oxidant. Dr. Nelly Bourne had discovered that the adult female monkeys (the mothers of the baby monkeys) suffered hair loss. She concluded that the hair loss was due to an omega-3 fatty acid deficiency when in fact it was more likely the result of the pairing of adult males and females in small cages where the more aggressive males yanked the hair out of the captive females. Peculiarly, only the female monkeys experienced the hair loss. Dr. Bourne had the monkey feed placed in vats of corn oil to compensate for what she perceived to be an essential fatty acid deficiency. That action appears to have increased oxidative stress in the monkeys, causing them to require more selenium than was ordinarily present in the feed to compensate. The rhesus monkey Dr. Wallach examined and the blood he tested from all of the 25 other monkeys at Yerkes (which were of different genetic lines) revealed selenium deficiency, with all of the twenty-five exhibiting cystic fibrosis lesions (biopsy) and symptomology. That data revealed that selenium deficiency was the common thread and that even monkeys in different family groups were suffering the same symptoms, thus negating the notion that the disease was genetic in monkeys. By calling into question the gene theory of cystic fibrosis disease with proof that heritable alterations in gene expression were in fact caused by a selenium deficiency in mothers, Wallach had landed upon a monumental discovery, which would belatedly garner him ultimate recognition in 2011 when he received the Klaus Schwarz Commemorative Award by the International Association of Bioinorganic Scientists. To seek peer review of his findings, Wallach again did the unorthodox. Rather than limit review to veterinarians, he asked medical doctors to examine slides of the pancreas of the rhesus monkey and asked each to give a diagnosis. One of those he asked was an expert in the study of cystic fibrosis. Wallach kept from him word that the patient was a monkey, leading him to believe the evidence pertained to a human infant. The doctor, Victor Nasar, a pediatric pathologist at Atlanta Grady Memorial Hospital and Emory University School of Medicine, confirmed to Wallach that indeed the cystic fibrosis diagnosis was correct. Nasar was convinced of it.

/

Wallach then revealed to Nasar that the patient was a rhesus monkey, the first non-human species ever diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Amazed, Nasar visited Wallach at Yerkes and reviewed the data for himself. He again confirmed to Wallach that the monkey died from cystic fibrosis. He soon shared the findings with his colleagues, who began spreading word of the finding far and wide in the medical community. Among those who also confirmed the cystic fibrosis diagnosis were Dr. E. H. Oppenheimer, considered one of the leading experts in the world on cystic fibrosis, at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. John Easterly, an authority on cystic fibrosis resident in pathology at Chicago Lying-in Hospital, and none other than Dr. Robert Beale, another cystic fibrosis expert, who subsequently became the Director of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Cystic fibrosis is an often fatal disease that causes severe hardship during life and shortens existence by decades. The disease afflicts tens of thousands annually. It primarily affects the pancreas, liver, and intestines. It produces a number of debilitating and, ultimately, life threatening symptoms, including lung infections, impaired breathing, sinus infections, stunted growth, low body weight, and infertility in males. The conventional medical wisdom remains to this day that cystic fibrosis is an incurable genetic disorder. Indeed, it is diagnosed in the womb based on ‘genetic factors.” Conventional treatments are limited, involving chronic prescription of antibiotics, digestive enzymes, and certain other medications. Lung transplants are often prescribed. Most cystic fibrosis patients die before the age of 40. At the outset, Wallach’s extraordinary discovery of the first ever case of cystic fibrosis in a non-human species generated excitement and a positive buzz within the Yerkes Center and in the Emory University medical community, but that did not last. A new veterinary pathologist at the Center, and a plain spoken native of Missouri not willing to deny the truth, Wallach had little interest in bureaucratic politics. The notion of being less than fully candid on a matter of critical importance to the tens of thousands who suffered from cystic fibrosis was for him offensive, as it would be for most people not caught up in the academic politics of a competition for status, self-preservation, and blame avoidance. One aspect of his discovery was of immediate concern to Dr. McClure: the revelation that the feed given the rhesus monkeys in the NASA funded experiment had been altered in a way that caused a selenium deficiency. The person responsible for changing preparation of the feed was none other than Dr. Nelly Golarz de Bourne, the wife of the Center’s director, Dr. Geoffrey H. Bourne. Dr. Nelly Bourne was the histologist and psychologist in charge of the NASA rhesus project at Yerkes. It was her decision to alter the monkey feed, and she would be to blame for a finding that the alteration resulted in a deficiency that compromised the health of all twenty-six NASA monkeys and the underlying NASA experiments. Dr. Nelly Bourne did not realize the significance of her decision to change the monkeys’ feed. In particular, she took no note of the fact that alterations in the preparation of the feed caused it to diminish selenium stores in the monkeys’ bodies and that selenium deficiency could produce adverse effects in the primates (in

/

this case, inducing cystic fibrosis). With federal funding possibly implicated on a key project at the Center, endorsement of Wallach’s discovery would inevitably lead to serious questions about management of the NASA experiment, focusing unwanted and embarrassing attention on the wife of the Center Director. Wallach thought that McClure and Dr. Geoffrey Bourne might find this issue problematic but he hoped the two men were intelligent and mature enough to deal with it. He fully expected that the finding would provoke highly critical remark from the many entrenched medical interests that had staked reputations and careers on the notion that cystic fibrosis was a human genetic disorder. Those within the Emory community, the NIH, and academia, those who had spent decades researching cystic fibrosis and publishing the conclusion that it was a genetic disorder, would perceive themselves under assault rather than assisted by Wallach’s earth shaking findings. A novice at Yerkes, Wallach had produced an intellectual revolution but did not have an academic or political base of support to defend his findings. New to the Center, he had made a discovery so impactful that it caused the life’s work of veterans there to appear trifling by comparison. As is so often the case, here again self-interest would prevail over science, denying the public the benefit of Wallach’s discovery. Dr. McClure returned from vacation and to the word that Wallach, the new veterinary pathologist, had made a discovery of such magnitude that it surpassed what he and other senior academic leaders had accomplished in their entire careers. A veterinarian new to Yerkes had upstaged his superiors of long standing with what reasonably could be described as one of the most important discoveries in modern animal and human medicine—the first case of cystic fibrosis diagnosed in a non-human species and the finding that selenium deficiency was a cause and provocateur of cystic fibrosis. Rather than be grateful for Wallach’s achievement, McClure reversed himself and reacted defensively to protect his own position, his relationship with the Center Director and, in particular, the Center Director’s wife. Before they appreciated the implication of the discovery on Center Director Bourne’s wife, Drs. Geoffrey Bourne and McClure spoke favorably of the discovery, contributing to an Emory University press release touting the significance of it. That supportive view would soon change as the basis for the selenium deficiency came to light. Issued March 5, 1978, the Emory University Press Release quoted from McClure and others words of praise for the Wallach discovery, but soon they would reject the very findings they celebrated as an extraordinary discovery. News copy from EMORY UNIVERSITY Release Date: Sunday AM’s – March 5, 1978

/

Subject: First case of Cystic Fibrosis Discovered in Nonhuman Scientists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University have discovered cystic fibrosis in a young rhesus monkey at autopsy–the first nonhuman case of this disease known to medical science. “This appears to be the first animal model of cystic fibrosis, and we’re excited about its implications,” said Drs. Joel Wallach and Harold McClure, veterinary pathologists at the Yerkes Center. Since cystic fibrosis is thought to be a genetic disease, there is a possibility that the parents or relatives of the affected monkey can have additional offspring with cystic fibrosis. An animal model of cystic fibrosis will permit investigators to learn a great deal about the basic causes of the disease and how it might be treated, the Yerkes scientists explained. At present, the basic defect of the disease is not known. Cystic Fibrosis is a disease of children, adolescents, and young adults, which is characterized by abnormal mucus secretions and fibrous scarring in various organs such as the pancreas, liver, lungs, and reproductive and digestive systems. Many of its victims die in early life of complications such as malabsorption and pneumonia. More than 25,000 white people in the United States have the disease, but a much larger number–five percent of the white population–are thought to be carriers of the recessive gene of cystic fibrosis. It is rarely seen in the black population or in people of Asiatic origin. The discovery came as Dr. Wallach, assistant veterinary pathologist at the Yerkes Center, was performing a routine autopsy on a six-month old male rhesus monkey that had died of unknown causes. He noticed pancreatic disease and bronchial mucus production; evaluation of the tissue later under the microscope revealed “a classic textbook case” of cystic fibrosis as pictured in human medical literature, the Yerkes scientist said. Studies of tissue from other organs confirmed that the monkey was indeed a victim of cystic fibrosis, Dr. Wallach said. Dr. Wallach’s diagnosis was confirmed by Dr. Victor Nassar, an Emory pediatric pathologist at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital and by Dr. John Easterly, pathologist at the Chicago Lying-In Hospital, who is a national authority on cystic fibrosis. A report on the discovery was made yesterday (Saturday, March 4, 1978) at a Primate Pathology Workshop held in Atlanta. Drs. Wallach and McClure gave the presentation at Emory’s Glenn Memorial Building near Grady Hospital.

/

They said the affected animal was bred in a colony of rhesus monkeys supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for studies pertaining to the U.S. space program. “We have here a classic example of serendipity,” said Drs. Wallach and McClure. “These animals were being studied for the space program but are now also providing us clues in a different area altogether.” Dr. Nelly Golarz de Bourne, histologist at the Yerkes Center, is conducting NASA studies on the monkey colony in collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey H. Bourne, Yerkes Center director. Their records go back at least 10 years, and include information pertaining to breeding and diseases of the animals. “We can now go back and look at slides of animals that died to see whether any of them might have had any of the more subtle changes of cystic fibrosis,” Dr. McClure explained. “This discovery has made us aware that these animals can have the disease, so we can make an all-out search for new cases, both in the past and future. If we can breed a supply of animals with cystic fibrosis, using the parents, siblings, or other relatives of the one that had the disease, this will be a great boon to researchers.” Up to now, research efforts toward understanding and curing cystic fibrosis have been severely hampered by lack of an animal model. “We are very fortunate that the rhesus monkey is the animal model that was found by Dr. Wallach, because more is known about this animal than about any other nonhuman primate,” Dr. McClure said. “They are also available for research in fairly large quantities.” Dr. James A. Peters, medical director of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which has its headquarters in Atlanta, commented: “We eagerly await the results of Dr. Wallach’s studies because of the importance of an animal model to both basic and clinical research on cystic fibrosis.” He noted that Dr. Wallach will participate in a May 25-26 workshop in Bethesda, MD., on the animal model for the study of cystic fibrosis, which will be jointly sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Disease and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The Emory University press release triggered stories in publications across the country extolling Wallach’s discovery. The Telegraph published the findings on March 7, 1978, writing: “A routine autopsy of a young rhesus monkey revealed the first known case of cystic fibrosis in a non-human and provided ‘a great boon’ to researchers seeking a cure to the disease, scientists say.” Likewise, on that same date, The Albany Herald published on that same day, quoting from the release: “This appears to be the first animal model of cystic fibrosis, and we’re excited about its implications,” said Drs. Joel Wallach and Harold McClure, veterinary pathologists at the

/

Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Atlanta’s Emory University, where the discovery was made.” The Telegraph-Herald published on August 24, and The Pittsburgh Press published on August 25, 1978 the following identical content: A maverick scientist who found a mysterious sickness in five monkeys was cystic fibrosis has upset the theory the disease is an inherited disorder – and raised the possibility that environmental factors are the cause. Dr. Joel D. Wallach of St. Louis said yesterday that he traced the first finding of the ailment in a primate colony to dietary factors—“supplemental feeding with large amounts of polyunsaturated oil which interfered with normal cell metabolism of the trace elements selenium and zinc, plus vitamin B-2. It happened late last year at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Ga.; and in a colony of research monkeys involved in unrelated investigations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Shortly after it became clear that the cystic fibrosis discovery would implicate Dr. Nelly Bourne in the rhesus monkey feeding faux pas, McClure distanced himself from Wallach. Wallach had generated a revolution in thinking about cystic fibrosis that brought national attention. To protect the reputation of Dr. Bourne’s wife, to protect NASA funding for the Center, and to keep in fellowship with the scientific community that had long endorsed genetics as the cause of cystic fibrosis, McClure, Bourne and others at Emory reversed course and conspired to oust Wallach and suppress his discovery. With McClure in line, the head of the Center, Dr. Geoffery Bourne, called Wallach into his office and fired him on the spot in April of 1978. Wallach asked for an opportunity to defend his findings before his peers, a courtesy ordinarily given among graduate level professionals in the sciences. Bourne refused. Wallach was given no opportunity to prove his findings; Bourne put it this way to Wallach: “Everyone knows cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease.” In other words, how dare you challenge the orthodox medical wisdom. Wallach was sent packing. Wallach deeply resented the fact that his superiors would sacrifice the chance to capitalize on one of the greatest discoveries in medicine in the 20th century, one that could lead to the treatment and cure of an awful disease afflicting man and animals. They had done so for parochial interests, protecting their own skins, but they were the “official” voice. Against their formidable reputations, Wallach stood little real chance of convincing the world of the contrary proposition, at least not at that time. After Wallach left Yerkes, Director Bourne and Dr. McClure moved to complete suppression of Wallach’s discovery. They effectively rescinded the press release by discrediting Wallach’s evidence, identifying Wallach as a fraud. That action caused Wallach to be black listed in the

/

veterinary academic community. Although next hired that same year to be the Director of the Laboratory Animal Research Colony at St. Louis University, as soon as word arrived at the medical school of the Yerkes’ firing, Wallach was terminated (even before his first day of work). St. Louis University had received word from officials at NIH dissuading them from making the hire after those same officials had been given a copy of St. Louis University’s employment announcement. Because of the University’s need to guard its federal funding, the hiring of Wallach against NIH wishes could place grants in jeopardy. With four children to care for and nowhere else to turn, Wallach was grateful when his father offered him a job loading trucks with scrap metal. It was physically demanding work, but Wallach could do it and welcomed the chance to earn money to feed his family. Moreover, his father was quite willing to allow Wallach to set his own time schedule provided the work was done. That enabled Wallach to continue appearing on the lecture circuit and at media interviews. Wallach thought that by doing so he would not only persuade the academic world of the gravity and worth of his discoveries but also secure professional employment, but that was not to be. The institutional blacklisting of Wallach proved too pervasive and powerful. The Director of the Yerkes Center moved quickly to reverse media attention on the Wallach discovery and isolate him. Rather than give credence to Dr. Wallach’s discovery and refer to it as a scientific find worth further research and debate (something they could have done even were they skeptical of his discovery), the Yerkes team rallied scientists to condemn the finding, even rewriting history by denying key facts first communicated in Emory University’s own press release. In the Times Daily of December 1, 1978, there appeared the following: The director of the Yerkes Primate Research Center Tuesday denied the claim of a St. Louis veterinary pathologist that the center had discovered a cure for cystic fibrosis. Dr. Frederick A. King said the prestigious center had never even looked for a cure for the disease, one of childhood’s deadliest. “Unfortunately, there is no known cure for cystic fibrosis,” said King. The national headquarters of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Atlanta also issued a denial the disease could be prevented or cured. Dr. Joel D. Wallach held a news conference at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago last weekend to announce that medical science had found the answer to cystic fibrosis. Wallach said the disease, long thought to be a genetic disorder, is caused by a nutritional deficiency during pregnancy and can be cured. He said it also could be prevented by proper diet and that autopsies and tests of thousands of monkeys at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta supported his theory.

/

King said Wallach was assistant pathologist at Yerkes in 1977-78 and that during that time the death of one monkey revealed lesions of the pancreas resembling those of cystic fibrosis. He said that whether this single case represents or is even similar to cystic fibrosis in humans “remains to be proven.” **** At his news conference, Wallach said the disease was caused by a lack of selenium, a trace element during the first three months of pregnancy. It can be prevented, he said, and also cured—by surgery in some cases and selenium in others. The official condemnation of Wallach’s discovery burdened him for years. It led many to shun association with him for fear of its effect on receipt of federal funding and peer disapprobation. Ironically, at the same time efforts to make Wallach a pariah in the academic world were preventing him from securing professional employment, he was offered invitation after invitation from government and academic centers all over the world to give lectures on his discoveries. While those audiences gave Wallach standing ovations, he left to return home to haul scrap metal for his dad. Although he could not find a job in his profession, he was offered lecture opportunity after lecture opportunity because peers were intrigued by his findings. Wallach’s discovery fascinated academics but offended the status quo and, without Yerkes to back him (and instead with Yerkes condemning him), he lacked the institutional support to obtain steady academic employment. He had become persona non grata in the veterinary academic world and among the nation’s research centers and zoos. Wallach had planned a career in veterinary pathology. Now, wherever he turned for work, whether at zoos or in academia, the Yerkes’ condemnation stood in the way. In the world of veterinary science, Wallach had become a man without a country. He would have to reinvent himself. There was no alternative. But Wallach would not abandon his central mission; he could not do that and remain true to himself. Instead, he would abandon his chosen profession and enter another. Wallach was determined not only to prove those who fired him to be in error concerning the origins and treatments of cystic fibrosis but also to overcome the personal hardships caused him (and, not simply overcome those hardships, but do so in a way that would eventually cause him to come out on top). Wallach had been vexed since boyhood that people did not regulate their diets in the same way they did animals to ensure optimum intake of nutrients. It had been his passion, in veterinary science, to identify nutritional deficiencies as the underlying cause of animal disease and to do this by comparative reference to human pathology. All along Wallach had been led back to a core conclusion, that disease was most often either a manifestation of nutritional deficiency or curable through nutritional intervention. Although the pull of a career in academia, in veterinary pathology, had been strong because of his fascination with the discovery of root causes of animal disease, his true calling and purpose

/

had all along been something else. The natural progression for Wallach was from animal science and pathology to human science and pathology. He was destined to have a greater impact on the world than solving the mysteries of animal disease. He was destined to solve mysteries underlying human pathology. To be sure, his controversial find that cystic fibrosis, even in humans, was not a genetic disease but was fundamentally a selenium deficiency was both a career turning point and, itself, indicative of a basic fulfillment of his overall true mission. The Yerkes’ firing is the critical turning point in Wallach’s professional life. It came at a most inauspicious time, roughly coincidental with the death of his wife Josephine E. Wallach from Hodgkin’s Disease and the murder of his uncle. Wallach had become a widower with four children aged one to eight and no means to support them. Jobless but for the scrap metal work, stripped of his reputation, blacklisted and in a state of great bereavement over the loss of his spouse, Wallach would have to find another way. He would have to give up the career he planned since childhood, veterinary medicine and the comparative pathology he loved, and find a new career outside of veterinary medical scholarship. The decision was difficult, even painful and sickening to him. He would never forget the harm caused to him by Yerkes, but unlike others he would not recede into the background. Instead, true to form, he would come out fighting, vowing to confirm at every opportunity his discovery that cystic fibrosis was not a genetic disease but was a condition that arose from selenium deficiency. Wallach’s hallmark characteristic is an unrelenting drive to achieve his mission. He will not allow a setback to become permanent and instead depends on steely resolve to overcome what others might consider an insurmountable obstacle. Nothing deters him from his mission. For Wallach, nothing is impossible, what others call impossible he understands to just require more time to solve. As that realization set in and as he came to grips with the reality that his first love of a life in academia, studying veterinary pathology, had come to an end, he decided to lead a revolution in nutrition science that would prove through medical practice the validity of his theories about nutritional intervention as a means to prevent and treat disease, not just in animals but in humans. We can see that change as he went on the road to lecture about his cystic fibrosis discovery. Freed from Yerkes, albeit involuntarily, Wallach was now free to tell the world what he really thought: not just that his discovery proved cystic fibrosis not a genetic disease but that it also proved the true cause of the disease in humans to be at root a selenium deficiency. The flap with Yerkes became an issue of national import when Wallach’s cystic fibrosis discoveries (and the controversies associated with them) first appeared in major national newspapers and televised news reports and then became the subject of an ABC News 20/20 story and interview. Although the story revealed elements of truth, it failed to do Wallach justice and it propounded the myth that selenium, known then to be an essential mineral, was

/

inherently toxic. Public awareness of the truth and the full story would have to wait until later. The Wallach discovery of a selenium-cystic fibrosis link continued to elude the public and the medical community, as it does to this day. Wallach’s research at Yerkes and, indeed, his entire history to that point involved his repeated reliance on comparisons between animal and human models. In trying to find a way around the blacklisting in vet and zoological circles, Wallach increasingly eyed the prospect of becoming a human physician. As a physician, Wallach could test his comparative theories, establishing nutritional treatments he had found effective in animals to be equally effective in people. Conventional medicine was based on a pharmaceutical model. Ordinarily patients’ underlying disease states were not treated or cured, rather drug agents masked the symptoms until the body healed itself. Wallach knew the healing process to depend on nutrients, and he harbored disdain for the majority of physicians who rejected nutrition in favor of a “drugs only” model of care. Moreover, years of medical school at his stage in life would have taken too lengthy and economically taxing. He had to support his family, alone. In addition, having been dealt a blow by the Yerkes’ bureaucracy for his discoveries and having lost his wife and other dear relatives to what passed as conventional medicine, Wallach was loath to become a part of the very institution he detested, to contribute in any way to the myopic and controlling medical bureaucracy that he believed sacrificed, rather than saved, lives. Knocked Down, Wallach Stands Up No doubt the management at Yerkes had no idea who they were dealing with when they sacked the newly hired veterinary pathologist Joel D. Wallach. They did not understand his history and what made him tick. They likely did not know that he was a consummate fighter with unrelenting drive who acquired what he had not by a privileged birth or a hand out but by hard work. They did not know that he would never relent, would never accept defeat, and would overcome any barrier put in his way. The process of getting a graduate degree in the sciences is often one that is humbling, forcing the student to conform to the mental framework and dictates of his or her academic master. That old school view holds sway and is rarely upset. Innovation is regulated so that it conforms to what the tenured regard as appropriate. Although Wallach had proven himself academically brilliant, he had not been reduced to hold a slovenly regard for the views of his academic elders. In academia, as well as in the real world, discovery is ordinarily brought about by iconoclasts, those who view much of the same facts and information through different eyes, eyes that perceive new paradigms, new ways of connecting the information that provide explanations that previously eluded leaders in science. Joel D. Wallach is precisely that kind of iconoclastic thinker. He perceived nutritional deficiency origins to disease that others never perceived. He was able to identify disease states across species lines that eluded all others until his arrival. He was able to engage in comparative pathology in ways never undertaken before precisely because he had discovered a new paradigm linking nutrition with disease and disease across specie lines.

/

Arrogant, those who ran Yerkes simply did not expect that Joel D. Wallach would ever find a way out of obscurity after they banished him. They thought he would become just another invisible casualty of a wooden system that would not accept innovative ideas which upset the personal interests of academic superiors and the conventional medical wisdom. So it was that when they effectively shut the door to Joel Wallach’s academic career in veterinary pathology, they unwittingly opened a new one for him of far greater potential. They did so not because it fell into Wallach’s lap somehow, but because Wallach was that innovative genius who could not sit still, whose mission was greater than a job, academic approbation, or conventional wisdom. Since childhood, Wallach had drawn parallels between animal and human health and disease. Throughout his veterinary training, as he performed more autopsies than any living pathologist (totaling 17,500 on 454 animal species and 4,700 on humans), he drew comparisons to human cadavers and to the human medical literature. He would now make the leap beyond veterinary medicine to human medicine but would do it, characteristically, in an unconventional way. From his earliest days, Wallach had been drawn to the notion that humans were remiss because they did not view food as an aggregation of nutrients which had pharmacologic effects on their bodies. That view dominated the commercial perception of animal feed, however, as Wallach learned from studying feed labels as a child and from his experience at Ralston Purina. That view also predominated in the thinking of one of Wallach’s early great influences, University of Missouri Professor William A. Albrecht. The logic of the position overwhelms the superficial view that vitamins and minerals simply create expensive urine. Protest as they might, opponents of the view that you are what you eat are repeatedly confronted with the reality that humans, like all other life forms, depend on a wide range of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids to achieve their optimal biological potential. Deprive them of an essential nutrient and they falter, but supply them with above recommended daily intake levels of certain key nutrients and they thrive, not only living longer but living a better quality of life free of disease than could otherwise be achieved. The academic, medical, and regulatory establishments had endeavored for decades to draw a clear line of demarcation between drugs and foods, emphasizing that drugs were to treat disease while foods were consumed for their taste, aroma, or general nutritive value but not as therapies. Since boyhood Wallach knew better. In his experience on the farm, at the zoos, in the wilds of Africa, and in examining thousands of cadavers to determine the causes of animal deaths, Wallach had come to a different understanding of nature. Everything ingested, whether food or drug, had effects on the functioning of cells, tissues, organ systems, life itself. The conventional demarcation was one Wallach knew to be a lie, an artificial construct that misleads. At a young age, he understood the genius of animal feed preparation lay in choosing the right kind and quantity of nutrients to

/

maximize the animal’s favorable characteristics, freedom from disease, and longevity. How, he thought, can we be so intelligent as to unlock this secret for animals yet be blind about it when it comes to humans? It had been since his teen years a source of vexation for Wallach that farmers would meticulously ensure that their animals received the right nutrients but when it came to their own sustenance, they consumed foods that met their caloric needs but did not give them ideal amounts of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids on a daily basis. Wallach looked at humanity and realized, long before nutrition science became a popular discipline, that he was surrounded by people who were starving themselves, despite their abundance of food. He understood that they were starving because they were not ingesting all of the minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids they needed on a daily basis to optimize their health, ensure the greatest longevity free of disease, and the highest quality of life. They were also starving themselves because the advent of electricity had eliminated the traditional source of mineral nutrients, wood ash and flood silt, and fertilizer contained only a small fraction of those nutrients. He knew that a tomato grown in 1960 was far less nutrient dense and rich than a tomato grown in 1920, yet no one seemed to care as long as the tomato retained a red appearance and a full and unblemished exterior. From farm feed to Ralston Purina’s nutritional program for animals to the extensive evidence of nutritional deficiencies in his animal and human autopsies, the consistent pattern and direction of Wallach’s thinking from the late 1950’s forward led him to believe that he could add years to human life free of disease by bringing about a revolution in human thinking concerning the importance of nutrition (not simply as something consumed for taste but as something intentionally consumed to nourish, enhance the effectiveness and strength, and protect the integrity of every cell in the human body). The national media uproar over Wallach’s dismissal from Yerkes attracted Dr. John Troxel, a fellow graduate from the University of Missouri, School of Veterinary Medicine. Troxel offered to pay for media campaigns for Wallach to counter those of Yerkes and Emory University. Wallach, told Dr. Troxel that he would never be able to pay back the $20,000 that the campaign would cost and Dr. Troxel came back with, “Doc, I believe you one hundred percent and the CF Families need to hear the information!” The results of the media campaign yielded just what Dr. Wallach needed – access to the medical community. He would come to find out in the 1980’s that there was an entire community of scholars, researchers, and for profit enterprises dedicated to bringing about the very nutrition revolution that he had envisioned in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In 1978 he discovered that community at a convention of the National Health Federation. Clinton Miller, a health advocate and lobbyist contacted Wallach and asked to tell the cystic fibrosis story to thousands of people. Inspired by a group of naturopathic physicians he met there to teach nutrition at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon, he went on to acquire a degree in naturopathic medicine in just two years from that same institution. He did so by doubling up on his courses and getting transfer credits for all of his graduate studies from the University of Missouri, Iowa State University and Washington University. He worked in the college’s clinic to satisfy his

/

internship requirements, as well, and excelled in patient practice. At last, what he had learned from animals, he now could apply in humans. Upon graduation, he then set out to prove in medical practice that humans could maintain excellent health and conquer disease, living longer and in a better condition, if they supplemented their diets with complete nutrition in ways that would ensure no overt or subclinical deficiency in any key nutrients, minerals, vitamins, amino acids, or fatty acids. Even then he was not thinking small (he never did). He would use his medical practice as a training ground, a research laboratory, to determine precisely what nutrient admixtures, many of which he had perfected for use in animals, performed best in humans. He quickly latched onto the idea that if only he could develop the financial means, he could translate his findings into product formulations for mass distribution and sale and he could champion delivery of his findings and formulations to the world. His aim was momentous. Aware that almost every person alive suffered or would suffer from at least some form of nutritional deficiency and disease brought about by inadequate nutrition or aggravated by a deficiency, he would foment a health revolution one person at a time. Wallach’s revolution would arm each person with knowledge of the best nutritional means to perfect the functioning of their bodies, instantaneously causing those who received and applied his message to be transformed from varying states of deficiency into optimal states, leading them to the best health achievable and, thereby, to live better longer. As it turned out, Wallach would discover that there were some 90 nutrients essential for optimum human health. Again, he would engender controversy for his bold and honest statements derived from science, but, as usual, he would not be deterred from his mission. And, in the back of his mind, always, he remembered the injustice he experienced at Yerkes, the sacrifice of a discovery that could have saved tens of thousands of people from great physical hardship and death each year. His revenge would come about through his triumph in achieving the health revolution that was his essential mission. Freed of institutional constraints, which had always limited his remarkable potential, Wallach now would chart his own course without limits. He would build on his own an economic and health empire. Others would look at the cost of doing so and the amount of effort required as impossible for one man, but Wallach never understood anything worth doing to be impossible, it just required more time to achieve, more effort to be expended, more honing of his focus to attain. The Conventional Medical Paradigm Man has always struggled with how best to treat disease. Medical practice has been a combination of healing arts and healing sciences with the balance between the two shifting depending on popular demand and political will. Never in the history of medicine has science been able to keep up with the evolution of diseases confronting man and, so, healing has depended on application beyond the known, beyond the proven. As a consequence, medical

/

science offers effective treatments for but a small subset of the universe of diseases that afflict man and depends heavily on the healing arts. Rather than bring about a cure, drugs more often than not mask symptoms, depending on the body to bring about a cure. Since the first moment man had a rational thought, he has been operating based on predictions born from observation. Having seen the sun rise each morning, man came to believe it would each morning thereafter. Primitive man, aware that superficial wounds would heal themselves, no doubt marveled, as do children today, that the body was possessed of extraordinary healing properties. Primitive man also gained knowledge from observing the effect of various natural substances on his ability to overcome the ravages of nature and endure disease. The nomadic tribesmen of Northeast Asia road on short stocky Mongol horses for miles during their marauding campaigns against the walled cities of ancient China. They were capable of sustaining themselves on a diet derived from drinking the blood of the horses they road. They would make small incisions into a minor vein in the necks of the horses and draw the blood into a cup, instantaneously giving them a whole food source. Although traversing for months atop arid mountain steppes of Mongolia, they were able to sustain themselves in no small measure on the blood of their horses. This they learned from difficult experience. From observation and experience, man came to acquire anecdotal knowledge of the healing properties of plants and animal food sources. This paradigm of natural healing and of so-called old wives tails, passed down from family to family and civilization to civilization combined with spiritual healing to form the basis of medical practice until the modern era. Since classical times, at least since the time of Aristotle in the 4th Century B.C., man has applied a somewhat formal reasoning to vexing problems of science, including those of disease. Increasingly, in the post-Newtonian world, spiritual methods of healing have been discounted or abandoned. Instead, modern medicine has associated itself with what is referred to as science based medicine, where legitimate treatment is distinguished from illegitimate based on scientific proof of its efficacy. This secularization of medicine constitutes a bias that pervades medical education, albeit most medical practice still depends on guesswork of one kind or another. Science based medicine proceeds in accordance with the scientific method, which became a mainstay of scientific inquiry at least as early as the Renaissance and has consistently gained in popularity ever since. Under the scientific method, problems are analyzed through observation to form hypotheses which are educated guesses about the relationships between two or more things. Hypotheses are then tested to determine if they are accurate descriptions of a cause and effect relationship. It is from applying the scientific method that great scientists in modern medical history have either purposefully or, quite often, accidentally discovered agents that are effective treatments. Reliable repetition of experiments leads to what is called scientific proof. Scientific proof is confirmation of a hypothesis and reveals a probability that following the methods studied will more often than not lead to the results found.

/

Early in the nineteenth century, specific substances, like mercury, ether, chloroform, morphine, opium, quinine sulfate, and alcohol became staples in the treatment armamentarium of physicians. Since the 17th century, publications have categorized as medicines substances derived from nature, mainly based on the experiential effects understood to come from use of them. In 1821 the first pharmacy school appeared in the United States, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. The school taught chemistry to a limited extent and primarily botany, focusing on plant based derivatives that were believed to have healing properties. The Civil War vastly expanded demand for and interest in pharmaceutical products. Although willow bark was used as a pain reliever, the principal constituent in it, salicylic acid, was discovered and isolated in 1853 by French Chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt. The German company Bayer AG created the first trademarked aspirin product (comprised of salicylic acid) of higher potency in 1899. In 1860 there were some 84 manufacturers of pharmaceutical products in the United States but by 1870 that number more than tripled to 300. Increasingly, medical practice focused on the provision of pills or liquid admixtures as treatments. The mass manufacture of medicines became a lucrative business, but it would require another two great wars, World War I and World War II, to transform pharmaceutical business into very big business and to make drugs the understood treatments of choice for almost every disease. The medicines available in World War I were only slightly more advanced than those used in the Civil War. In 1900, however, Karl Landsteiner, a Viennese pathologist, invented the ABO system of blood groups, and proved instrumental in the development of blood transfusions. Landsteiner founded the field of immunohematology. The enormous global carnage of World War II created demand for standardized, field ready disease treatments like never before. That enormous demand led to the creation of large pharmaceutical manufacturers and the formal establishment of chemistry labs in those commercial enterprises for the discovery of new drugs capable of mass manufacture. The most awe-inspiring discoveries that cemented the privileged role of pharmaceutical companies in society and with the government were the so-called “sulfa drugs” which proved effective agents in combating a wide range of infectious diseases and then, smash it of them all, the “wonder drugs,” the antibiotics. The sulfonamides were the first effective agents to treat bacterial infection that were mass manufactured and marketed worldwide. The first sulfonamide, Prontosil, was invented at Bayer AG in 1932. Bayer AG was a subsidiary of the enormous German chemical company IG Farben. Before Prontosil, no drug existed for public use that could effectively treat a wide range of bacterial infections. Although capable of producing significant, even life threatening adverse effects, Prontosil proved to be life saving in the battle against bacterial infection raging in field hospitals as well as in combating bacterial ailments on the home front.

/

The sulfonamides were enormously popular. In December of 1936, the New York Times reported that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s son had recovered from a near fatal streptococcal infection after successful treatment with sulfa drugs. Six years later, Winston Churchill announced to the English public that he had been cured of pneumonia by sulfa drugs. In their field kits, soldiers in World War II were given packs containing sulfa drug powder, which they were encouraged to pour into any open wound to fend off infection. The public variously referred to the sulfa drugs as “magic bullets” and “miracle” drugs during the period from 1936 to 1946 because their healing properties became widely known and celebrated. Although advances in hygienic practices undoubtedly led to the saving of tens of thousands of lives during this period, Seema Jayachandran, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Kimberly V. Smith, in their article “Modern Medicine and the 20th Century Decline in Mortality: Evidence on the Impact of Sulfa Drugs,” conclude that “sulfa drugs were responsible for a 24 to 36 percent decline in maternal mortality, a 17 to 32 percent decline in pneumonia mortality, and a 52 to 65 percent decline in scarlet fever mortality between the pre-1937 and post-1937 periods. In addition, we find larger declines in urban areas, consistent with historical evidence that sulfa drugs diffused more rapidly in cities than in rural areas.” The stark reality that pills containing sulfa drugs were responsible for wiping out a number of illnesses that were previously considered difficult to cure or incurable led to a popular reaction that galvanized public interest and support for the protection of the institutions responsible for creating these “miracles.” There were few positions of greater prominence and public acclaim than to be involved in the new pharmacological sciences. If sulfa could perform so ably, why not other drugs? At once the public became intoxicated with the notion that disease itself was capable of being eliminated from the world if only the right agents were synthesized in the big pharmaceutical labs. Natural remedies began to look anachronistic against the new science of pharmacology. Science based medicine became all the rage. The extraordinary defeat of bacterial infections that had for generations taken the lives of millions worldwide, such as puerperal fever, pneumonia, scarlet fever, meningitis, gonorrhea, and erysipelas led to enormous consumer demand. By the end of the third decade of the Twentieth Century, over 400 manufacturers competed for this enormously lucrative market. Among those producing the drug were unscrupulous purveyors. They manufactured unsafe versions that caused approximately 100 people to be poisoned with diethylene glycol (antifreeze) which had been added to the elixirs said to contain sulfa drugs. Public outrage at the offense led to the passage of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. The new FDA was, from the start, given the mission of ridding the big pharma market of small competitors. The threat of food and drug contamination was largely viewed as the product of small unscrupulous players or those who were more interested in a fast buck than a science based approach to drug creation and sanitation.

/

The public lather created in favor of miracle drugs received a second and even more extraordinary boost with the creation of penicillin antibiotics. In 1897, French physician Ernest Duchesne was the first to publish an article on the healing properties of penicillin. The Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming while working in his lab in 1928 identified with particularity the appropriate substrate for the growth of effective penicillin and coined the name penicillin. Penicillin was extraordinarily difficult to produce in a stable dose form. Merck & Company produced the first stabilized, patented version of penicillin in March of 1942. In July 1943, Merck’s penicillin went into mass production for Allied troops in Europe. The drug proved essential to containment of bacteria and to the defeat of infection throughout the conflict and on the allied home front. There were far fewer deaths associated with infectious disease, far fewer amputations, and more rapid recoveries recorded all as a result of the ubiquitous use of penicillin based antibiotics. Science based medicine was heralded as the way of the future. If enough money was invested in research, if enough brilliant minds were applied to the science of pharmaceutical discovery, no disease, regardless of its current lethality, would be unconquerable. The popular viewpoint vastly exceeded scientific reality and continued to de-emphasize the importance of basic elements in nature to sustain life. If drugs could cure disease, then man could use comparable chemicals to alter food and enhance its flavor, give it unusual color and new attraction, and cause it to take on shapes and sizes never before seen. The day of junk food also arrived with the rise of the biochemical industry. To maximize profit associated with pharmaceutical invention and novel foods, companies needed to obtain patents to ensure market exclusivity (monopolies). While the pharmaceutical industry studied all manner of compounds and their relationships to disease, none moved beyond the discovery phase unless they could be synthesized into new chemicals, ones alien to the human body. So synthesized, they could be patented and then marketed under government monopoly protection. The excesses of pharmaceutical invention soon came to the fore as increasingly individuals were experiencing problems with the synthetic drugs entering the market. Safety concerns arose from medical practice but none were so pronounced as accompanied yet another marvel of synthetic invention: thalidomide. In 1957 the German drug company Chemie Grunenthal invented and then marketed a drug it named Contergan. The active ingredient was thalidomide, which the company said was an effective treatment for anxiety, insomnia, gastritis, and tension. It was widely used by pregnant women to cope with nausea and morning sickness. Within months of its release in Germany cases began to appear of increased infant mortality and of births where children were afflicted with phocomelia (malformed limbs). Some 10,000 cases were eventually documented worldwide.

/

Although thalidomide had not been approved for marketing in the U.S., the drug industry nevertheless seized the opportunity to protect its interests and to channel public concern in favor of a regulatory solution that would benefit industry leaders. Fearing stringent new regulations that would interfere with the marketing of existing drugs while welcoming an excuse for new market protection against industry entrants, major pharmaceutical companies lobbied the United States Congress to come up with amendments to the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act that would purportedly ensure greater drug safety. In point of fact, the new law and regulations grandfathered all drugs then on the market and imposed new, costly regulatory hurdles on the introduction of new drugs. Existing firms with major market shares would thereby enjoy added protection against competition while retaining and consolidating their market positions based on existing drug sales. Senators Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Congressman Oren Harris authored the amendment (the Kefauver Harris Amendment) that grandfathered drugs then on the market while requiring manufacturers to present the FDA with evidence of safety and efficacy to the agency’s satisfaction. FDA would then approve the drugs for marketing if the evidence supplied was deemed sufficient. President John F. Kennedy signed the law on October 10, 1962. From the start the new law failed to serve its purported public interest purpose. To be sure, all drugs then on the market were exempt from any review, grandfathered so as to allow them to be sold in perpetuity. Moreover, the agency review process was entirely driven by studies performed by the drug companies themselves. The drug companies performed the clinical trials and determined for themselves whether the drug agents they wished to market were sufficiently safe and effective. In other words, the party with the greatest conflict of interest, the party that had its own interest in marketing the drug on the line, was given plenary authority to do the tests that would show whether the drug was safe and efficacious. Unsurprisingly, no new drug applications were ever filed in which the company submitting them recorded that its own drugs were unreasonably unsafe or insufficiently efficacious. The anti-competitive aspects of the law not only arose because it grandfathered existing drugs and imposed costly new regulatory hurdles to introduction of new drugs, but also because the law defined the term drug in a way that excluded competition. The Food Drug and Cosmetic Act defined the term drug based on intended use, not on therapeutic composition. A drug was not something that was used to cure disease but rather anything intended for such use. Consequently, an orange would become a drug under this definition if it was intended for use in mitigating the effects of a cold. Sell it for its nutritive value and taste, and the law would allow it as a food without requiring FDA pre-approval. Sell it as a way to help lessen the length or severity of a cold, and the FDA would declare it a drug, bar it from sale, and prosecute those who sold it for putting in commerce contraband (an unapproved new drug). In this way, the FDA not only protected big pharmaceutical interests from competition within the drug industry (by erecting a byzantine set of regulatory barriers that imposed enormous costs on anyone who dared seek drug approval), not only by granting synthetic drugs monopoly patent protection, but also granting drug companies with FDA approved drugs a monopoly on therapeutic claims.

/

Despite the extreme conflict of interest that exists when a company that is the sponsor of an application for drug approval is also the party that tests its own drug for safety and efficacy, over the years FDA medical reviewers have discovered grounds to call into question the safety and efficacy of drugs. Nevertheless, political appointees who run the agency quite frequently have demanded that drugs be approved for marketing even when evidence exists to call safety and efficacy into question. In 2004, Dr. David J. Graham, the Associate Director of the FDA Office of Drug Safety, had had enough. Year after year he watched with horror as political bosses within the FDA did the drug companies’ bidding by overruling agency medical reviewers and approving drugs for market that those bosses knew were unsafe. Graham went to Senator Charles Grassley, then head of the Senate Finance Committee, with the evidence proving that the American people were the victims of FDA abuse, were being given unsafe drugs to further the interests of some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In the September/October 2005 issue of the Assocation of Certified Fraud Examiners’ publication, Fraud Magazine, Dr. Graham explained in an extensive interview government-industry collusion at the FDA, a collusion that imperiled and sacrificed the lives of Americans in service of the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies. Graham stated: FDA is inherently biased in favor of the pharmaceutical industry. It views industry as its client, whose interests it must represent and advance. It views its primary mission as approving as many drugs as it can, regardless of whether the drugs are safe or needed. . . . The pro-industry bias leads to an environment where FDA tends to see things from industry’s perspective. Many are the advisory committee meetings where the drug company presentation and the FDA presentation are virtually super-imposable. It makes you wonder who wrote the presentations. . . . Safety isn’t on the radar screen regardless of what FDA officialdom would have you believe. Scientifically, FDA uses statistics in a biased manner that favors industry at the expense of patient safety. You see, when FDA reviews a new drug, it assumes that the drug is safe, and it facetiously asks the company to prove that it’s not safe. Of course, there is no incentive for a company to prove that their drug is not safe because then FDA might not approve it. So, with a nod and a wink, drug companies jump through very low hoops that FDA sets up for safety, and the public pays in two ways—with their money and their lives . . . . What has emerged is a lethal triangle involving FDA, the pharmaceutical industry and Congress. Pharmaceutical money funds FDA and exerts great influence with Congress. FDA allows deadly drugs onto the market and Congress pretends that nothing is the matter. In fact, since 1962, despite FDA approval of thousands of new drugs as “breakthroughs,” there has been virtually no change in the life expectancy of those suffering from chronic disease. Without question, the discovery of sulfa drugs and of antibiotics proved a boon to the world, saving and extending countless lives, but since then the reality of the pharmaceutical model has fallen far short of the health utopia predicted for it. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars, public

/

and private, invested in pharmaceutical industry discovery, research, and development, not a single major affliction (e.g., cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, liver disease, kidney disease, or auto-immune disease) has been eliminated from the face of the earth. Awash in thousands of new drugs since World War II, we now have a society of drug dependency but the promised eradication of illness has not happened. Indeed, in the United States, where more money is spent on drugs and healthcare than in any other country in the world, American life expectancy lags behind much of the industrialized world. We have thus gone full circle. The drug model has failed to prove to be a panacea. Indeed, the adverse effects of drugs often overwhelm their utility and add major afflictions to the hapless person dependent on them. If we are not to see an end to disease from a treatment model that depends on intervention at the time we become ill, where then are we to turn? Having rejected natural remedies as anathema to the new drug model paradigm, the world is now turning back to them. A majority of Americans, for example, depend on daily supplementation on the obvious assumption that they are helping fend off disease and extend longevity by doing so. Increasingly integrative medicine is replacing conventional medicine, as physicians leap from bureaucratic practice back to accepting that medicine is an art and that the means to heal are within us if only supplied with what the body needs to activate them. Long before it was popular to attack the FDA for its approval of unsafe drugs and its unseemly relationship with the drug industry, Dr. Wallach was attacking it. Viewed by some as an alarmist and condemned vituperatively by practicing physicians and patsies for the drug industry, Wallach would not budge from revealing the ugly truth that Americans were being had by an industry and a profession that was pumping out drugs that were too dangerous. He explained that synthetic alternatives to cures known to the body were an awful substitute, particularly when they came with horrific side effects. Wallach is now best understood as ahead of his time, having warned us that we were all victims of the drug model and having given us safer means to prevent and treat disease than relying dogmatically on every new drug that comes down the pike from what he has called the “medical-pharmaceutical complex.” The Naturopathic Way Naturopathic medicine depends upon many modalities not accepted by conventional medicine. Among the most common modalities practiced by naturopathic physicians are nutrition, counseling and homeopathy. Naturopaths subscribe to the view that the body, if given the nutrients it requires, has the capacity to heal itself in most circumstances. They also often accept above recommended daily intake of certain nutrients that are, at that level, associated with positive effects on the immune system, heart function, brain function, muscular skeletal function, liver function, kidney function, islets of langerhans function, and cellular function as treatments for disease. Although largely dismissed by conventional medicine, a substantial majority of Americans have chosen to follow the advice of nutrition counselors, including naturopaths, and individual success stories related to that advice are common. Not only that,

/

but most people in the world, those resident in China and in India, are far more familiar with naturopathic medicine because traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine commonly practiced in India are largely naturopathic, depending upon plant based remedies instead of synthetic drug substances as treatments. Why did Joel D. Wallach, DVM, choose naturopathic medicine? It is difficult for some to understand how a person conventionally trained in veterinary medicine with peer reviewed publications in the field would choose an unconventional education thereafter, but Wallach never was one to confine himself to conventions if he thought an alternative the right thing to do. His veterinary education and career were marked by repeated instances in which he defied conventions and, in so doing, made remarkable discoveries, such as the utility of nutrients as disease interventions not only in animals but also in man, such as the earth shaking discovery that cystic fibrosis was not a genetic disease after all but was a nutrient deficiency disease, stemming from inadequate selenium, and such as his postulate that almost all chronic disease is a byproduct, in part, of malabsorption, including gluten intolerance. Wallach’s decision to become a naturopathic doctor (ND) was not based entirely on his knowledge of the healing power of nutrition. He had also suffered his entire life with what may be termed the plague of modern allopathic medicine, the myopic perspective of physicians who practice medicine bureaucratically, avoiding any novel approach and avoiding what in many instances are logical and obvious means to solve the problems patients present to them. In a very personal way Wallach, like many Americans, had experienced the profoundly tragic consequences that often follow from misdiagnoses, toxic treatments, and neglect. In Let’s Play Doctor, Wallach put it this way: My personal experience with “orthodox” doctors both as my physicians and fellow researchers has been disastrous. The “orthodox” oncologist did not inform me of any alternatives when they “treated” my wife and killed her with chemotherapy in 1978; the “orthodox” doctors deemed my son to have “learning disabilities” when, in fact, he had severe and debilitating food allergies; pediatricians missed a diagnosis of folic acid deficiency anemia and a fractured arm in my children; and lastly, they killed my father with a nosocomial infection initiated during a very simple procedure. I am a faithful servant to anything I believe in so it took me until 1978 to realize that if I was to have a positive effect on human health I would have to go back to school and become a physician! I chose to become an N.D. (a naturopathic physician) because they believed philosophically in nutrition as a basic bulwark against disease. Despite a classical education in veterinary medicine, Wallach used innovative methods of research, comparative pathology, and nutritional intervention to diagnose and treat animal diseases. He was an iconoclast. He was not intimidated by human institutions, even very large ones like the medical establishment, universities, or government agencies. He views every proposition in science from the ground up. If it does not logically follow, he remains a skeptic until such time as he himself discovers the logical reason why.

/

With his naturopathic degree in hand, Wallach went into private medical practice in 1982 in Portland and Cannon Beach, Oregon, where he treated a wide range of ailments with nutritional interventions. Among the patients he treated were those with cystic fibrosis, where he put into practice his Yerkes discovery. Repeatedly he saw those with the condition improve (and eliminate disease and the “genetic markers” in the positive sweat test) when selenium deficient status and malabsorption were eliminated. It was during this phase in his career that Dr. Wallach perfected much of the dosing and ingredient designs of what would later be his liquid line of dietary supplements for humans. He drew heavily from his veterinary experience, including comparative pathology. His private practice flourished from 1982 to 1993. As it did he became increasingly convinced that the drug model for medical practice, so common since World War II, was based on an exaggerated premise, that all disease would one day be conquered by a synthetic drug. He found that view a pipe dream, quite wide of the mark because it offended basic biology and human physiology. He also found conventional medicine subject to corrupt influences from the drug industry and from peers who condemned innovation in medicine as a threat to their financial security. Those influences propped up and perpetuated the myth that sooner or later every disease would be eliminated based on the discovery of a patentable synthetic substance. From 1990 to 1993, Dr. Wallach worked as a naturopathic physician for Hospital Santa Monica in Tijuana, Mexico. There, he continued to witness nutritional interventions effectively treat chronic disease. Over the years, he amassed an enormous amount of popular and peer reviewed publication support for his positions, later articulated in his best-selling lecture and book, Dead Doctors Don’t Lie. He found that physicians commonly died at ages younger (58) than the general population (75) and that large numbers of people died in hospital following the use of drugs prescribed in accordance with physician labeling instructions. The drug model of medicine depends on use of inherently toxic substances, xenobiotic patented substances that often obstruct normal, and essential, metabolic processes to mask disease symptoms. But for a few notable achievements (hospital sanitation, antibiotics, and certain medical devices), wave after wave of new drugs entering the market each year have not changed health outcomes for most chronic disease states, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and cancer. Instead, modern medicine, when better than placebo, masks disease symptoms but does not alter ultimate disease progression or cure disease. Year after year, the FDA would approve new drugs as “breakthroughs” that were not breakthroughs after all, as FDA’s own Associate Director of the Office of Drug Safety, David Graham, said in testimony before Senator Charles Grassley’s Finance Committee. Other FDA whistleblowers, disgusted with a corrupt system that approved even unsafe drugs, despite FDA medical reviewers’ contrary recommendations, formed a steady stream of brave witnesses in

/

congressional hearings. Yet the political pull of the drug industry on Capitol Hill and at the FDA proved too much. Nothing has changed to stop unsafe drugs from being approved and marketed. The broken system remains broken without a single piece of corrective legislation being passed due to the lobbying power of the drug industry. Wallach’s experience taught him that nutritional interventions could halt or reverse chronic disease states, and his political education taught him that the truth of that proposition would continue to be locked out of the medical marketplace by the drug industry through its proxies, the FDA and conventional medicine. He discovered that if people relied upon 90 nutrients, comprised of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and essential fatty acids, and altered their lifestyles to avoid harmful practices, they would in most circumstances experience major improvements in their conditions. Repeatedly those who followed Dr. Wallach’s prescriptions overcame their maladies rather than continue in a state of decline until death. Wallach also discovered that malabsorption also lay at the root of many chronic disease states. Whether the problem was hypochlorhydria (low stomach acid) or gluten intolerance, time and again he found that patients suffering from chronic illness were also the victims of diets that diminished the body’s ability to absorb key nutrients while, at the same time, patients failed to ingest all 90 nutrients. Wallach identified 60 essential elements, metals, minerals, trace minerals and rare earth elements present in healthy humans and variously deficient in diseased ones: aluminum, arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, bromine, calcium, carbon, cerium, cesium, chloride, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, erbium, europium, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, gold, hafnium, holmium, hydrogen, iodine, iron, lanthanum, lithium, lutecium, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, neodymium, nickle, niobium, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, praseodymium, rhenium, rubidium, samarium, scandium, selenium, silica, silver, sodium, strontium, sulphur, tantalium, terbium, thulium, tin, titanium, vanadium, yitterbium, ytrium, zinc, and zirconium. Wallach identified 16 essential vitamins: vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, C, D, E, K, bitoin, choline, flavonoids, bioflavonoids, folic acid, and inositol. Wallach identified 12 essential amino acids: valine, lysine, threonine, leucine, isoleucine, tryptophane, phenylalanine, methionine, histadine, arginine, taurine, and tyrosine. Wallach identified three essential fatty acids: linoleic acid, linolenic acid, and arachidonic acid. Wallach also bucked conventional wisdom in finding cholesterol levels above those set as safe by the National Cholesterol Program to be not only safe but essential for healthy metabolism. Wallach understood cholesterol to be critical for healthy metabolic function. He therefore finds obsession over levels of cholesterol without regard to any other biological risk factors (ie

/

inflammation, trans fat, heterocyclic amines, acrylamides) of vascular disease to be misguided and extreme. For him, cholesterol is but one marker and not a very good one at that, because medically acceptable cholesterol levels (i.e., those below 200) produce Alzheimer’s, low-T, erectile dysfunction and early menopause. He looks to all physiological evidence of the existence of cardiovascular disease before he concludes a person to be ill or at imminent risk of atherosclerosis. In any event, he finds dietary modifications and nutritional intervention, assuredly the safest and most effective means to prevent and help eliminate vascular disease. As with all ingestible substances, dose and form determine toxicity. Wallach understood well these factors and, so, formulated products containing forms of nutrients that were bioavailable, that were a part of the diet ordinarily because they were present in human food sources from time immemorial and were known to be safe, and that were at dose levels for which there was no evidence of human toxicity. He also chose liquid rather than solid pill forms of delivery in many cases to help those with trouble ingesting solids and pills, to improve bioavailability of the nutrients, and to encourage daily ingestion necessary to maximize results. A significant portion of his book Epigenetics explores these factors and explains why all 90 nutrients are essential to optimize health through healthy cell, organ, and organ system function. Repeatedly critics will challenge Wallach based on a false paradigm that has become law in foreign jurisdictions and is viewed favorably by the FDA and the state of California. That paradigm, the so-called Precautionary Principle, takes the position that we should presume harmful any ingredients if at some dose level it is known to be toxic. By this logic, everything, including water, is a toxin. Under it, governments condemn as unsafe every substance unless industry proves it safe at a specific dose level. This shifts power from the individual to the government by creating an economic obstacle to the marketing of the very things people through decades, if not centuries, of experience know to be safe. There is an alternative to this dubious thinking and that is what toxicologists have followed for centuries, the so-called Paracelsian Principle. A Swiss physician, botanist, and alchemist from the 16th Century, Paracelsus is known as the father of modern toxicology. He famously wrote, “Dosis facit venenum.” That means the dose makes the poison. In other words, dose determines toxicity. So, all substances we ingest are toxic at some dose level but that does not justify the conclusion that they are inherently toxic. Rather, the very same substances are ordinarily safe at customarily consumed levels and, quite often, at much higher levels. In fact, the nutrition science literature of the past seventy years has confirmed repeatedly that nutrients we consume often carry with them therapeutic properties greatly beneficial to prevention of chronic disease and optimization of healthy cell, organ, and organ system function at levels higher than those necessary to avoid nutrient deficiency diseases. Acutely aware of the reality of these facts from the science and the practice of naturopathic medicine, Wallach is quick to cut through the false paradigms and illogic that often become the subject of passionate debate among critics who lack wisdom or who are driven by an anticompetitive economic motive. Quick Read Summary about Dr Wallach and Youngevity

/

In 1997, Dr. Joel Wallach, together with his new bride Dr. Ma Lan, established American Longevity, which later became Youngevity. Based on the research and unconventional perspectives of Dr. Wallach, Youngevity focuses on exceptional nutrition and healthy lifestyle solutions for the public. The company currently offers products that are changing the wellness industry all over the world. 90 For Life Through research, Dr. Wallach discovered the health benefits of selenium and other minerals. He found that human bodies require 90 essential nutrients to function properly and avoid serious diseases. So, he developed the “90 for Life” products, which are specifically formulated so people can absorb the nutrients they need to be more energetic, feel younger, and live longer. Through Youngevity, Dr. Wallach, together with his wife and son, is able to offer exceptional products containing such nutrients to the masses. The Youngevity Mission Dr. Wallach started out on a mission, to make his products available to everyone. Because of the countless lectures and conferences he needed to attend as a biomedical researcher, however, Dr. Wallach wasn’t able to focus on the company’s growth. So, he assigned the management of Youngevity to his son, Steve Wallach. Within several years, and through the efforts of Steve, Youngevity became a global health and wellness empire. The company’s flagship products became known across the globe. The company also expanded its line by adding mineral-based beauty & care items, as well as healthy, unique foods and beverages. Now, the company has thousands of distributors and offices in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Europe, Mexico, Latin America, and Russia. The company’s continued success is a testament to people’s endless search for alternative solutions to improve their somewhat unhealthy, modern lifestyles. Wallach’s Global Empire – Chapter 10 Page 1 Dr. Wallach’s Youngevity Wallach knew that with limited resources available to him as a naturopathic physician, he could not hope to rely on traditional means to bring his health and wellness message to the world, to wage his battle against conventional medical practices that caused injury to patients, and to market his effective nutritional formulations to the public. He would once again have to think in an unconventional way. While committed to doing whatever it took to get that message and those products to as many people as possible worldwide, he certainly could not do it himself and would not likely be able to do it through retail marketing in conventional channels without hundreds of millions in capital. Never one to back down in the face of apparently insurmountable odds, Wallach investigated different means of marketing, studying each carefully. He finally decided that multi-level

/

marketing (direct marketing) offered the best way to reach the most people with his message and products. Through that person to person marketing technique, Wallach knew his message was so powerful and the products he designed so effective that individuals would come to try the products and upon proof of effect would continue to buy them. He expected the products to sell themselves. After disappointment in a few initial ventures into existing multi-level marketing programs, Wallach chose to design his own company. He intended to build a global health army that would transform the world. The mission he accepted as a college student was coming to fruition through a means he did not then expect to be his chosen path: international health lectures complemented by a company he would found and direct that would supply products he designed. This integration of education, marketing, manufacture, distribution, and sales was an enormously complex and demanding one. Wallach was not trained as an engineer, a Wall Street financier, or a market logistics expert but, as with all things he confronted, he learned every aspect of the business inside out and he became not only proficient but expert in each area. While an admirer of the AMWAY marketing model, one he sought to replicate, in many respects Wallach at first used the multi-level form as a means to market products conventionally. He offered a generous compensation plan (which the company honors to this day) and sold products of real value to distributors. Many distributors in the early days did not distribute the products at all but relied upon them selfishly to improve their own health. The company grew like a successful retail company, with good and steady growth year after year, but not like the whiz bang growth patterns of comparable dietary supplement MLM’s. That was because Wallach was selling his products and preaching a gospel of health rather than exclusively selling business opportunities. In retrospect, that distinction has established Youngevity as a solid and going concern, not a pyramid scheme, because it has products of genuine value, a market for which is well established, and a distributor base that appreciates the value of the products and is willing to pay for personal use amounts that are set at MLM levels. In 1997, Dr. Wallach and his new bride Dr. Ma Lan, M.D., M.S., created American Longevity, which later became Youngevity. To ensure that day to day operations were handled masterfully while he traveled the world lecturing, Wallach assigned executive control of the company to his son, Steve Wallach. Within the span of five years, Dr. Wallach, Dr. Ma Lan, Steve Wallach, and Michelle Wallach had built the foundations of a global health and wellness empire, replete with an army of tens of thousands of distributors, offices in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and Japan.

/

Early into the twenty-first century, the company passed $30 million in revenues and then, upon merging with another company, FDI, Youngevity surpassed $130 million in revenues within the span of four years. The complimentary management styles and talents of Steve Wallach, Michelle Wallach (Steve’s wife), and Bill Andreoli have not only produced this remarkable growth but have caused a huge expansion in company acquisitions and markets, reaching markets across Europe, in Russia, and in Mexico and Latin America generally. Increasingly Youngevity products include those affecting all facets of life, including mineral based cosmetics, clothing, energy, financial services, health insurance, and home security. Youngevity’s continued success has caused great interest in the industry, reflected by Direct Selling News’s decision to name Youngevity among its top 100 global direct selling companies. Over the span of five decades, Joel D. Wallach has built a global health, wellness, and lifestyle empire that transforms, uplifts, and extends the lives of those who are a part of it; gives them residual income; and fulfills Wallach’s essential mission. From the ranks of relative academic obscurity at Yerkes, Wallach is now of considerable renown with a reputation that grows every day all over the world. His Dead Doctors Don’t Lie tapes, CDs, and books have collectively been distributed to millions worldwide. He has appeared on thousands of radio and television shows as well as on his own syndicated radio show which reaches over 400 stations nationwide and is broadcast over the internet worldwide. He is among the most well-known figures in the global health movement. Whether you are in San Diego (the location for Youngevity’s headquarters), Tokyo, Russia, or Sydney, chances are if you mention the name Dr. Joel Wallach, the person you are talking to will respond with an awareness of him and of his global health mission. Cystic Fibrosis in China: Further Debunking the Gene Theory of Disease The generally accepted medical definition of cystic fibrosis identifies the disease as a genetic one known to affect those of Northern European ancestry (i.e., whites) and largely unheard of in Asians and Blacks. Having debunked the gene theory on the basis of his rhesus monkey discovery and his selenium deficiency discovery, Wallach nevertheless wanted to disprove the gene theory of disease further by establishing that, indeed, those of non-white extraction also suffered from cystic fibrosis. Wallach believes congenital or postnatal selenium deficiencies bring about cystic fibrosis in people regardless of race. Joined by his wife Dr. Ma Lan, a noted Chinese medical doctor, clinician and micro-surgeon (Harvard, Texas Medical Center, University of California), Wallach went to China in 1989. Through Ma Lan’s familial and academic connections and based upon her good reputation in Chinese medical circles, Dr. Wallach was invited to perform 1,700 autopsies of children who suffered Keshan disease to see if any of them also suffered from cystic fibrosis. Keshan disease is a form of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy caused by a selenium deficiency (originally thought to be an infection with a mutated strain of Coxackievirus. The disease is

/

named for Keshan County in Heilongjiang province in Northern China. There, poverty stricken Chinese subsisting off of a diet largely comprised of locally grown wheat and corn were victims of soils lacking selenium. Low selenium levels in the soils translated into low selenium levels in the grain, leading to the deficiency that begets Keshan disease. Keshan disease is also more commonly found in New Zealand and Finland where selenium soil levels are also low. Those who are selenium deficient in these regions also have a higher incidence of cancer, vascular disease, cataracts, arthritis, strokes, and infections. Consistent with Wallach’s theory that congenital or postnatal selenium deficiencies cause cystic fibrosis, he expected that a significant number of the 1,700 Keshan disease cadavers he examined would also bear the characteristic symptoms of cystic fibrosis. Wallach’s study confirmed his hypothesis. Of the 1,700 Chinese child cadavers autopsied, 595 (or 35 percent) had the classic tissue changer for cystic fibrosis! He also found that every one of the 1,700 child cadavers had classic tissue changes of cardiomyopathy and mulberry heart disease, a selenium-deficiency muscular dystrophy of the heart found in pigs. That later discovery broke down another convention, that mulberry heart disease was thought to be a vital disease peculiar to swine. Drs. Wallach and Ma Lan’s findings were published in 1990 in the journal Biological Trace Elements Research and Chinese Medical Journals. Increasingly, Wallach’s research has confirmed that the genetic theory of disease lacks a sound scientific foundation. Repeatedly, as he explains in Epigenetics, Wallach has discovered that diseases presumed to be genetic, such as sickle cell anemia, are in fact not triggered by a genetic defect (i.e., do not involve a change in the DNA sequence) but are instead the byproducts of nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy. In some cases, those deficiencies in the pregnant mother translate into abnormalities in the children. Eliminate the nutritional deficiency in the mother and the disease does not show up in the children. Sometimes if a person born with the disease is given the nutrient, the disease disappears or becomes more manageable. Such is the case with sickle cell anemia, another congenital defect falsely thought to be genetically transmitted. In Diseases of Exotic Animals, Wallach explained the research associating selenium deficiency with a form of cystic fibrosis that occurred in white tail deer. The disease in deer was completely eliminated by ensuring that the deer consumed adequate amounts of selenium. Phil Oliver of the Sickle-cell Foundation of Georgia read Dr. Wallach’s book on exotic animals and contacted him in 1991. Wallach then established a treatment regimen for 25 children with the disease that ensured each received his 90 essential nutrient regimen along with added selenium, and all were put on a gluten free diet. All 25 children were rendered in clinically stable by the regimen, enabling the diseases to be managed survivably. As Wallach sees it, the world of medical research has misinterpreted disease states caused by environmental factors to be ones that arise from defects in the DNA sequence involving changes in nucleotides. Wallach regards the genetic theory of disease as a cop-out, whereby

/

diseases the cure of which have eluded conventional practitioners are attributed, for want of better science and logic, to defective DNA. The theory is well accepted in areas of medicine that have been the subject of intense research to find the real cause of disease. For example, spina bifida and anencephaly, both neural tube defects, although once argued to be genetic defects have since been discovered to be evidence of epigenetics, of a change in the expression of genes effected by a deficiency of one of the 90 essential nutrients, folic acid. Women given between 400 and 800 micrograms of folic acid in dietary supplement form before they become pregnant ordinarily experience a significant reduction in the risk of a neural tube defect birth. Rejecting the genetic theory of disease, Wallach is a proponent of epigenetics. “Epi” is a Greek term which means in this context “outside of.” Thus, epigenetics is the study of changes outside of genetics. This science evaluates how non-genetic factors cause genes to express themselves differently. British biologist, paleontologist, embryologist, and philosopher C. H. Waddington invented the term in 1942. Wallach has given it new life in 2014 with the publication of his book (co-authored with Dr. Ma Lan and Dr. Gerhard N. Schrauzer), Epigenetics: The Death of the Genetic Theory of Disease Transmission. He has done so at the apex of popularity of the genetic theory of disease and as billions are spent by governments and industry on mapping the human genome in the quest to find what genes are associated with which human characteristics. The ultimate aim is to then establish a field of medicine that “treats” disease by replacing or correcting defective genes. As Wallach sees it, this costly exercise is doomed to fail. He takes the position that it is non-genetic factors such as dietary deficiencies which alter the expression of genes in deleterious ways. It is not that the nucleotide sequence in DNA has been changed (a defect in genes themselves), but, rather, it is the absence of one or more key nutrients that cause genes to express themselves in ways that cause harm. Ensure the needed nutrient and the disease will not appear or, if it has appeared, may well enter a state of remission or be completely reversed. The Race Based Gene Fallacy August 28, 1963, is among the most critical dates in American history. On that date a large mass of over 250,000 people participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On that sweltering August day, the temperature in Washington reached an uncomfortable 87 degrees Fahrenheit with high humidity. The Black and White marchers walked from the Washington Mall to the Washington Monument and then to the Lincoln Memorial. There huddled together in what was one of the largest gatherings ever to assemble at that point in the nation’s history, the civil rights activists heard ten addresses, including among them those of civil rights activists Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, and Charlton Heston. Before the very last speaker rose to give his remarks, the President of the American Jewish Congress, Joachim Prinz, equated the discrimination experienced by the Jews throughout history with that of Blacks. After Prinz, there would be one more speaker. The audience was generally fatigued. It would take

/

quite a lot to move them from a state of weariness induced by the long day, the high heat, and the humidity. The last person to speak had been forewarned by one of his advisors not to use lines he had lately used in several other speeches around the country. That aide, Wyatt Walker, told the speaker, “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream.’” As all three major television networks broadcast the speeches, including the last delivered by a person who, until that point, remained largely unknown to most Americans: the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The words King uttered that day instantaneously entered that rarified lexicon of history which records for all times the most momentous speeches ever made. From the moment King opened his mouth to speak his words captivated the nation watching their black and white television sets. His “I Have a Dream” speech is among those works of rhetoric, so brilliantly crafted and poignantly delivered, that it has never been forgotten, resurrected year after year in classrooms, in programs, and in commemorative events that have occurred around the world ever since. One year after King delivered his most famous speech, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, tremendously fueled by the popular impact of that one speech. King’s “I Have a Dream” riveted the nation North and South, starkly revealing the horrible lie that was racial inequality. In Black Gene Lies, Dr. Wallach utterly rejects the view that Black genes are inherently defective and that Black genes put them at greater risk of disease. Wallach writes: “[T]here are many diseases that appear in the Black community at a greater rate than in the white community (i.e., hypertension, type II diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, etc.), however, the underlying causes are simply cultural dietary choices and nutritional deficiencies and they are absolutely not genetic.” Although much racial animus and overt acts of discrimination have been rooted out of America, vestiges remain. In his book Black Gene Lies, Dr. Joel Wallach explains that the conventional medical establishment has categorized a substantial number of diseases that affect Blacks as arising from genetic defects peculiar to the Black race. Blacks are said to have genetic differences that put them at higher risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, osteoporosis, and cancer. According to Dr. Wallach, that spin on the genetic theory of disease is unscientific and racist. The theory lacks empirical support rooted in any proof whatsoever of a single material difference in Black DNA and offends sound medical science. Generations of Black Americans have been told the lie, often by their own physicians who simply regurgitate, unthinkingly, the dogma they have heard over and over again since medical school. Black genes, they were told, are responsible for putting Blacks at a higher risk of disabling and life-threatening diseases than Whites. In other words, Blacks are inherently

/

defective, right down to their DNA, and, as a result, it should come as no surprise that Blacks experience a higher rate of serious illness than whites. The underlying message is clear. If Blacks are inherently at greater risk because of their genes, than they must accept a disadvantaged status and suffer ultimately terminal maladies because there is little that can be done to save them. That medical discounting of Blacks, relegating them to substandard status on the theory that they are genetically predisposed to lose in the end anyway, fuels a medical racism that locks Blacks out of quality care. In short, consistent with his findings that challenge the genetic theory of disease in general, Wallach finds no sound scientific basis to support the notion that Black genes are defective and place Blacks at greater risk of disease than Whites. To the contrary, he finds that the same kind of nutritional interventions that eliminate so-called “genetic” diseases in Whites work equally well to wipe out so-called “genetic” diseases in Blacks. In other words, Blacks and Whites are equal and the deciding factor on whether individuals of either race contract disease are predicated on environmental factors, like one’s diet, supplement programs, and not DNA. When Wallach evaluates the dietary choices of Black patients, he often finds that they, like Whites, suffer from poor dietary choices and little or no supplementation, revealing individuals of both races deficient in the 90 nutrients that Wallach has found essential to maintenance of optimal health. Wallach finds the same illnesses affecting Whites and Blacks and stemming from nutritional deficiencies in both races. In short, Blacks are not a different genetic species than Whites; Blacks are not possessed of gene defects. Whites and Blacks are biological equals and the nutritional influences on genetic expression responsible for greater predispositions to disease in Whites are precisely the same ones in Blacks. According to Wallach, the Black gene theory of disease is nothing more than a racist lie. With the help of genetic councilor Phil Oliver of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia, Dr. Joel Wallach critically tested his theory about the absence of a genetic foundation for a conventionally classified race based disease, sickle cell anemia. According to the conventional wisdom, sickle cell disease is a hereditary blood disorder wherein red blood cells become flattened and sickle-like in shape. When the cells so form in abundance, they trigger adverse symptoms ranging from chronic propensity to contract disease to infections, extraordinary pain, strokes, and even death. The common view is that those with sickle cell disease contracted the condition from defective genes inherited from parents who were carriers of the trait. Beginning in 1991, Wallach provided the full spectrum of 90 essential nutrients and added selenium to children afflicted with the disease who are under the care of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia. The results were remarkable. The nutritional intervention prescribed by Dr. Wallach, when applied, caused a substantial number of the patients to go into remission. All experienced improvements in their quality of life, and none so treated experienced the extraordinary pain associated with sickle cell “attacks” that otherwise afflicted them. In short,

/

Wallach’s experiment proved sickle cell anemia not hopeless but treatable and perhaps ultimately provably preventable with nutritional intervention. After the year 2000, Wallach proposed that sickle cell anemia is an inborn error of metabolism. When the hemoglobin forming mechanism was being constructed in the fetal bone marrow, the mother was deficient in nutrients resulting in a defective bone marrow forming system. Epigenetics Versus Genetics Joel Wallach rejects the conventionally accepted notion that genes themselves rather than environmental factors, like nutritional deficiencies, are responsible for chronic or life threatening disease manifested most often in defects apparent at birth or in adolescence. Rather, he holds to the view that nutritional deficiencies influence genetic expression in ways that trigger disease states. Once those nutritional deficiencies are rectified, the disease states either go away altogether or become clinically manageable. Sometimes the deficiency is in the mother and affects the newborn child, as in the case of Downs Syndrome, cerebal palsy, heart defects, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and neural tube defects. Sometimes the deficiency affects all who are similarly situated, such as in the case of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. The conventional wisdom undergirds the notion that diseases fall into two general categories, those caused by the environment (nature) and those caused by one’s genes (nurture). This divide between nature and nurture was the focus of research at the end of the Nineteenth Century, when Charles Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term. Galton sought to apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to humans. He believed that desired traits could be achieved through selective breeding, i.e., through hereditary means. In 1883 Galton named his new science of selective breeding to achieve better hereditary traits “eugenics,” expounding upon the concept in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Eugenics, the belief that improvements in human traits are achievable through selective breeding of the population, led to widespread international acceptance of the notion that there were certain human traits that were “desirable” and certain that were “undesirable” and that public policy could rightly discourage the undesirable traits by coercing or compelling people to be sterilized. In this way those said to have undesirable traits, such as the disabled, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and others, were either encouraged to undergo sterilization or compelled to undergo it. The origins of the concept of selective breeding to achieve preferred traits dates back to antiquity, to Plato. Plato thought it possible to create a guardian class by selective breeding. In the mid to late 1800s gynecologist William Goodell advocated castrating and spaying the mentally ill, accepting the theory of eugenics as scientific dogma.

During the first three decades of the Twentieth Century eugenic policies of forced sterilization were adopted for categories of “undesirables” by governments in the United States, France,

/

Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and Sweden. The Nazi Ernst Rudin became a celebrated author of Nazi eugenic policies in the 1930s. At root, eugenics contradicts the fundamental premise of America’s founding charter, the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. Eugenics proceeds from a racist root, presuming that we may ascribe characteristics of people to their genes and deem certain of them undesirable, deserving of discrimination, including denial of the fundamental right of procreation. In this way, the Nazis aimed to eliminate through selective breeding, forced sterilization, and genocide all races except those possessed of blond hair, blue eyes, white skin, and certain other racially desired characteristics. Adolph Hitler intended to make the XI Olympiad of 1936, the summer Olympics, a global demonstration of the ability of eugenics to produce a master race. Nazi policies ensured exclusion from the games of all Germans who did not meet the Aryan profile. Hitler expected his Aryan athletes would win most, if not all, events in proof of the validity of his racist policies. African American Jesse Owens had other plans, however. As Hitler watched, Owens destroyed the myth of eugenics and the Aryan race by besting Hitler’s athletes in event after event and doing so in a single day of competition. Owens was the most successful athlete of the games. He won gold medals in the 220 yard dash, the 220 yard hurdles, the broad jump, and the 4 x 100 meter relay. After World War II, the concepts of selective human breeding and racial cleansing fell into disfavor as the world recoiled in horror at the sight of the Nazi death camps wherein Jews and all others deemed “undesirable” by the fascist regime had been warehoused, subjected to inhumane treatment and experimentation, and variously exterminated. Largely accepting that eugenics was neither scientifically valid nor socially acceptable, Western governments defined eugenics as the crime of genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and, later in the Twentieth Century, in the Charter of Fundamental Rights for the European Union. Among those who questioned eugenics early on was the geneticist and biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan. Based on redundant breeding experiments with red eyed fruit flies, Morgan was able to call eugenics into question with hard science. Although selectively bred red eyed fruit flies would be expected to beget only red eyed flies, Morgan found that in one instance they begat a white eyed fly. He challenged the notion that characteristics of intelligence and proclivity to commit crime were tied to genes and speculated that genes could not account for many human characteristics. Within the last decade, the scientific community has again become intoxicated with the notion that human characteristics can be altered through genetic engineering in ways that will yield “desirable” traits. The mapping of the human genome is based on the supposition that we may be able to eradicate all disease in the world if only we learn how to tinker with specific links in the DNA chain. This notion carries with it grave dangers of a revival of new concepts of a master race, where subjective judgment as to which traits are “desired” and which are not lead

/

to public policies that manipulate procreation. As Virologist Nessa Carey astutely observes in The Epigenetics Revolution: There’s no doubt that the DNA blueprint is a starting point. A very important starting point and absolutely necessary, without a doubt. But it isn’t a sufficient explanation for all the sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, complexity of life. If the DNA sequence was all that mattered, identical twins would always be absolutely identical in every way. Babies born to malnourished mothers would gain weight as easily as other babies who had a healthier start in life. . . [W]e would all look like amorphous blobs, because all the cells in our bodies would be completely identical. **** [But instead] [s]cientists in both the academic and commercial sectors are . . . waking up to the enormous impact that epigenetics has on human health. It’s implicated in diseases from schizophrenia to rheumatoid arthritis, and from cancer to chronic pain . . . . Gene research is now all the rage, as molecular biologists race to determine which genes are associated with which characteristics. In 2003, the Human Genome Project declared that it had completed the mapping of the human genome. Gene manipulation research is occurring around the world, with new varieties of disease resistant crops, modified cows, and even a limited amount of human gene manipulation. A new class of gene focused drugs is on the horizon, where patented formulas that alter genes either in utero or in the grown human will be marketed as means to transform man into a super human free of various diseases. In Epigenetics, Wallach stands against the tide, recalling the horrible racial and ethnic cleansing that occurred the last time politics and science united in the view that manipulating the gene pool to produce “desired” characteristics was a noble objective. Wallach explains that the genetic theory of disease is yet another folly, an enterprise which has absorbed billions in public and private funds but is in many respects a fool’s errand. “The genetic theory of disease transmission is based on manipulation of observations, lack of complete information, isolated facts, descriptions of events and dogma,” Wallach writes. Moreover, Wallach emphasizes that the Human Genome Project discovered a truth about the individual genome that confounds any ultimate utility of the entire endeavor to link genes to disease states. No two genomes are alike, except in identical twins, but even in twins genetic expression differs based on the environment. That fact makes the notion of a one size fits all solution impossible, confounding attempts to use gene manipulation stimulated by either a drug or medical device, as a general disease cure. Wallach believes the hype (concerning how gene manipulation will one day cure all disease and the notion that disease can somehow be traceable to gene defects and curable once those defects are eliminated) depends on an enormous and dangerous misunderstanding of the genome. He sees the budding seeds of racism in this. Once again scientists are presuming to declare certain traits desirable and hope to manipulate the gene pool to achieve the end of a people free of undesirable traits. He finds that scientifically naïve, because it ignores the more

/

profound impact on life and health that comes from the environment, and politically dangerous because it threatens to give new life to one of the greatest threats to freedom and progress the world has ever known: Racism that is made the policy of government and industry under the guise of bettering nature by manipulating genes. Rather than DNA serving as an interchangeable mold into which we are all poured, Wallach conceives of DNA as an inherently malleable surface through which different kinds of human expressions are possible, depending on one’s environment. In other words, DNA is not a God mold that confines man and must be hammered apart and rebuilt to effect a change in man’s fate. Instead, DNA is inextricably intertwined with the environment comprised within and without us to the extent that the environment interacts with us. In this regard, Wallach draws from an intellectual mentor, Dr. Nessa Carey, whose 2012 book The Epigenetics Revolution greatly impressed him and helped guide his conception of epigenetics. Wallach complements the work of Carey, who well defines the limits of gene theory. Wallach adds his unique understanding derived from a wealth of animal and human autopsies and independent scientific research. Beyond Carey, Wallach explains that genes are affected by the presence or absence of key nutrients. If those nutrients are present in the right amounts, the genes affected express themselves in ways that differ from how they express themselves otherwise. So, for example, an adequate selenium quotient in the mother guards against cystic fibrosis in the child. An adequate 90 essential nutrient quotient plus added selenium in the mother guards against sickle cell anemia in the child. That same intervention combined with a gluten free diet ameliorates symptoms of muscular dystrophy. Wallach’s mapping of the nutrient-disease associations covers a wide range of diseases said by conventional medicine to be inherited and largely impervious to treatment. In the end, Wallach’s concept of nutritional influences on gene expression has behind it a wealth of scientific proof and clinical experience which the new science of genomic medical research lacks. His insights into the role of the genome and the environmental influences upon it has far more logical credence, and scientific weight, than the self-admittedly flawed concept that the genome, unique to each person, is somehow the source of replicable treatments with one treatment suitable for all. It should not surprise us at all that the human genome is as unique to each person as each person is outwardly unique to the world. No two of us is precisely alike, but all of us depend on the healthy absorption of the same universe of nutrients to maintain proper functions from the cell to every organ in the body. The Importance of Bioavailability Dr. Wallach is a stickler for quality. Ensuring that the right forms of ingredients and right sources are used has always been a priority for him. Nutrient quality varies in the marketplace and, so, attention to sources known for high quality and to testing to ensure it becomes imperative. Once ingredients are properly sourced so as to obtain the purest and highest quality, the

/

science of designing effective nutritional products is not over. Indeed, it has just begun. The attention must then turn to the delivery method. These is no one size fits all approach to choosing the best delivery method for a dietary supplement. Each kind of ingredient invites a multi-factor assessment of its bioavailability. The goal is to ensure that the nutrient when ingested is available for absorption. There are many aspects of digestion which interfere with absorption. Oral absorption is notoriously inefficient when compared with direct to vein or intravenous administration. Nevertheless with food items and elements derived from foods, we all prefer oral ingestion over carrying an IV bag attached to us. Dr. Wallach applies a scientific approach to determining how best to deliver each particular nutrient to the body. He often favors liquid supplementation, as he has for minerals, deeming the liquid medium a better approach, in that instance, to a solid form. He chooses solid forms for a range of vitamins, variously preferring gel caps to solid pill forms. In each case, he determines which mode of delivery is best suited to maximize bioavailability. Ordinarily, in the case of dietary supplements, bioavailability is defined as the proportion of nutrient capable of being absorbed and available for use by the body. It is a fallacy to say that a dietary supplement is 100% absorbed by the body if by absorption is meant absorbed by cells. Cells absorb based on need dependent on homeostasis. Homeostasis at the cellular level involves the cell’s regulation of uptake of available nutrients from the blood stream. The mere fact that a nutrient is present in the blood stream does not mean that a cell will absorb it; rather a cell will absorb it if it is available in the right form to the extent that the cell is deficient in the nutrient. Cells do not “overconsume” absent a disease state. They maintain within a normal range what uptake of nutrients they require to function properly. Organs, comprised of cells, function in the same manner. It is therefore a falsehood to state that a dietary supplement ensures 100% absorption. Rather, the aim in this inexact science is to ensure that the forms of the nutrients are absorbable and the method of delivery can overcome stomach acids and digestion processes to be rendered available for cellular uptake by absorption into the blood stream. Aware that bioavailability differs from person to person, Wallach is quick to focus on common ailments that can interfere with absorption, such as digestive maladies and, in particular gluten intolerances and hypochlorhydria, too little hydrochloric acid. Wallach believes that a very large percentage of the population suffers from gluten intolerance, which interferes with absorption. He finds that those who suffer from gluten intolerance have inefficient absorption of vital nutrients. Essentially, their adverse reaction to gluten, an inflammatory reaction (contact enteritis) in the digestive tract often characterized by abdominal pain, bloating, constipation and diarrhea, limits the effectiveness of absorption and thereby denies the body access to nutrients it needs. You are what you absorb!

/

Many disease conditions interfere with the efficiency of nutrient absorption. Other common ailments that interfere with absorption are among those gluten intolerance variations are categorized as auto-immune disorders by the medical system (i.e.- celiac disease, colitis, ulcerative colitis, IBS, Crohns Disease, etc.) Wallach is therefore quick to focus on eliminating conditions that interfere with absorption as a key first step to ensure that his nutritional interventions reach intended internal targets and have maximum effectiveness. Dr. Ma Lan, Wallach’s Accomplished Partner Dr. Joel Wallach’s wife, Dr. Ma Lan Wallach, is, like Wallach, highly accomplished, courageous, very passionate about saving human life, and brilliant. Ma Lan obtained her collegiate degrees and residency experience principally in the 1960’s but not without overcoming enormous obstacles placed in her way. She chose one of the most difficult and demanding areas of speciality, transplant immunology. She became expert in the highly specialized field of microsurgery. Dr. Ma Lan’s indefatigable will to overcome obstacles and ambition to succeed for the betterment of others mirrors that of her spouse and forms a common and powerful bond between them. She, like Wallach, proceeds from science and logic. When solutions present themselves that conflict with conventional medical wisdom, she, like Wallach, is unafraid to embrace those solutions, make them known, and apply them in patient practice. Dr. Ma Lan obtained her medical degree from Beijing Medical University, did her residency at the Peoples Hospital in Beijing and was a staff surgeon at the Canton Air Force Hospitals in Canton, China. She obtained a Masters of Science Degree (a rare degree bestowed on those with a particular medical expertise) from the Zhong-Shan Medical University in Canton, China in transplant immunology. Dr. Ma Lan is a microsurgeon, noted for her exceptional talent in restoration of severed limbs, a kind of surgery that requires exacting and highly technical reconnections of severed arteries, nerves, ligaments, muscles, and tissues. As is true of all physicians trained in the Peoples Republic of China, Dr. Ma Lan has extensive education and experience in traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, herbal tinctures, aroma therapy, chiropractic, massage therapy, and hydrotherapy. From 1966 until 1976, Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party of China, initiated a brutal campaign of arrests, demotions, relocations, and executions under the rubric, “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Ostensibly designed to re-impose Maoist ideology in favor of worker control and redistribution of income and power, the Cultural Revolution became a means for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Red Army, and Mao to attack political enemies and to force from positions of accomplishment leading figures in industry, education, the professions, the communist party and the military. In effect, the Cultural Revolution enabled Mao to consolidate power and compel loyalty by removing all potential threats to his control

/

under the guise of purifying the nation of elements at odds with his proletarian revolution. It also gave the Red Army a domestic mission directly under the leadership of Mao, enabling him to gain even greater political and operational control over the military, leap frogging past his generals. Ma Lan was among those charged in the Cultural Revolution and punished by relocation from the city to the countryside. She was denied the opportunity to pursue her chosen profession. She was compelled to engage in three years of agricultural labor. Her “crime” was that of being an “educated person” who was “potentially dangerous to the revolution.” Although punished with hard labor, Ma Lan was allowed to use “rest periods” to engage in general medical practice. She treated local villagers in Northern China, which was one of the few bright moments in an otherwise very difficult period of trial in her life. Following her release, Mao’s death, the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the arrest of the so-called Gang of Four in 1976, Ma Lan eventually re-established herself in medical practice and academic circles. She emigrated to the United States and became a highly accomplished medical researcher and author in the fields of transplant immunology and microsurgery with over ten peer reviewed scientific publications. An exceptional scholar in China, she became an exchange scholar at Harvard School of Medicine in laser microsurgery. Recognized for her talent in the demanding field of microsurgery, she was invited to teach residents at Harvard School of Medicine on the best techniques for performing laser microsurgery. She also served as a research fellow in laser microsurgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Houston; the Department of Orthopedic Microsurgery at the Medical College of Women in Milwaukee; and the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California in San Diego. Together with her husband, Dr. Ma Lan has been instrumental in resurrection of epigenetics as a science studying the impact of nutritional deficiency on gestational and childhood diseases. Through her extensive contacts in the professional medical community in North East China, including Heilongjiang Provence, Dr. Wallach was able to perform thousands of autopsies that establish the existence of cystic fibrosis occurred in Asians and that it occurred in the children of selenium deficient mothers (which propositions conflict with the conventional medical position that cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease found in those of Northern European ancestry). Wallach Defeats FDA Censorship Wallach is a patriot. He loves his country and the American Constitution. When he first discovered that the Food and Drug Administration routinely censors nutrient-disease information, even when the statements are demonstrably true, he was livid. He could not believe that over two hundred years after the Founding Fathers put the First Amendment in the Constitution as a way to end prior restraints on speech forever, agencies of the federal government were still involved in the business of censorship.

/

But it all made sense to him. The big pharmaceutical companies and all of conventional medicine had a lot to lose if people suddenly came to the realization that inexpensive nutrients could prevent or eliminate health concerns that they had been treating with costly drugs that often carried significant adverse side effects, not least of which is death. Throughout his professional career, and increasingly as he interacted with leading figures in medical institutions, Wallach came to appreciate that modern medicine was essentially an appendage of pharmaceutical companies that had achieved monopoly status due to laws enacted by the federal government. Protected by the FDA, drug companies have been able to maintain a monopoly over therapeutic claims to the exclusion of all non-patented and natural therapies. For example, while FDA regularly approves drugs as treatments for disease even when its own medical reviewers object because the drugs are too toxic, the FDA forbids any statement from entering the market concerning the treatment effects of nurtients and foods. That legal creation of a monopoly on therapeutic claims for the drug industry has led most physicians and most people to regard illness and not treatable except upon getting a prescription from a doctor for a drug. Since World War II, America has become the largest pill popping nation on earth and yet chronic illness still plagues the nation. Indeed, despite paying more for health care than people in any other country on earth, Americans lag behind almost all industrialized nations in longevity. The FDA imposes a prior restraint against the communication of any therapeutic claim concerning the effect of a food or dietary supplement on disease when made in association with the sale of that food or supplement. FDA imposes that speech ban even when the claims are demonstrably true. So, for example, if a company that sold prune juice were to represent that the prune juice was a treatment for chronic constipation, the company’s executives would violate federal law, the prune juice could be enjoined from sale and ordered destroyed, and the prune juice would be reclassified by operation of law into an unapproved new drug. For the love of his country and to further his life’s mission, Wallach wanted to do whatever he could to end the censorship of life saving information concerning foods and supplements. The FDA has in place a health claims review process. Those interested in communicating nutrient-disease relationship claims can petition FDA for allowance of the claim. If the claim concerns the treatment of disease, FDA prohibits it outright. If, however, the claim concerns the effect of the food or dietary supplement on reducing the risk of or preventing disease, FDA will assess the science and determine whether it thinks the science sufficient to support the claim. Appalled by the reality that the federal government would act against those who informed the public truthfully of the disease treatment and risk reducing effects of nutrients, Wallach poured tens of thousands of dollars into legal efforts to overturn the FDA’s speech ban and associated himself with others of like mind.

/

Working with famed health freedom lobbyist Clinton Miller, Wallach generated thousands of petitions to Congress demanding an end to FDA censorship and calling for passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. The DSHEA finally passed Congress in 1994 and was backed by more letters of popular support than any other. Thanks to the overwhelming weight of court victories against FDA on speech grounds, FDA now has in place a qualified health claims review process. Although FDA continues to censor nutrient-disease information, and Wallach’s battle against speech suppression continues, there is now a clear way to get claims reviewed by FDA and challenged in federal courts under the First Amendment when the agencies refused to permit them despite credible supporting evidence. Due to his unceasing efforts to end FDA censorship of truthful and non-misleading nutrient-disease relationship claims, the constitutional and administrative law firm Emord & Associates, P.C. awarded Dr. Wallach its “First Amendment Hall of Fame Award” in 2014. Wallach also sued the FDA in cases that produced precedent victories over the agency, among them: Whitaker v. Thompson (2002); Alliance for Natural Health US v. Sebelius (2011); and Alliance for Natural Health US v. Sebelius II (2012). He also filed suit as an intervenor in Center for Science in the Public Interest v. FDA (2010) to protect qualified health claims from a decision CSPI sought which would have re-established suppression of them as the order of the day. Wallach won that suit as well. Those cases secured from FDA censorship claims that antioxidant vitamins reduced the risk of certain kinds of cancers; that selenium reduced the risk of certain cancers; and that omega-3 fatty acids reduced the risk of coronary heart disease. Those decisions forced FDA to allow nutrient-disease claims into the market by compelling FDA to avoid censorship in favor of claim qualification. They also made FDA use succinct and accurate qualifications free of value laden bias. Wallach’s War on Conventional Medicine Because over 100,000 people die each year from properly prescribed drugs, because FDA approved drugs not infrequently produce side effects worse than the diseases for which they are indicated, and because modern medical practice shuns use of nutritional medicine in favor of the pharmaceutical model, Wallach has effectively declared war on conventional medicine. In recent years as a train of FDA medical reviewers, including the FDA’s Associate Director of the Office of Drug Safety, Dr. David Graham, have testified repeatedly that FDA is a hand maiden of the drug industry. In particular, they have consistently testified that FDA has approved drugs to market over the objections of the agency’s own medical reviewers, who have complained variously that the drugs approved were unsafe (meaning that they carried with them side effects that were worse than the underlying conditions). They have said that FDA does the bidding of the drug industry and, to quote Dr. David Graham, leave the American people largely

/

“defenseless” against dangerous drugs. Among the drugs cited by these medical reviewers as dangerously unsafe and associated with significant adverse effects are Vioxx, Zoloft, Paxil, Avandia, Serevent, Lipitor, Boniva, Trasylol, and Ketek, to name just a few. In Let’s Play Doctor, Wallach puts it this way: The United States government (FDA, NIH, legislation), the pharmaceutical industry (drug companies) and the AMA have formed a “ménage a trois” or triangle that we choose to call the “Bermuda Triangle,” “a black hole,” a vortex out of control that sucks us all ever closer to destruction. The “orthodox” medical system is an artificial system that depends on our government to survive. If it were left to the people, they will always choose a less formidable and less complex health care system. Under the protective and loving wing of the government, “orthodox” medicine has flourished as a house of cards. Today the medical-pharmaceutical complex costs Americans more money each year than does all the military and Pentagon spending combined . .. Across the country in lecture after lecture, Wallach reveals the ugly truths of this “medical-pharmaceutical complex.” He explains how conventional practitioners shun safe, inexpensive, and effective nutritional interventions in favor of patented synthetic drugs that often carry with them lethal side effects. He explains that more times than not drugs approved by the FDA mask symptoms but do not treat underlying disease conditions which depend on nutritional support for cure. Indeed, he explains that commonly prescribed treatments often worsen the patient’s condition or even aggravate the underlying disease. He explains the irony of modern medicine—how doctors professing adherence to the healing arts are incapable of not only extending the lives of most patients who suffer chronic disease but are also incapable of extending their own lives. Relying on evidence of physician mortality, he shows that repeatedly physicians die at an average age of 58, long before ever reaching the status of octogenarians. Having a direct window into medical atrocities committed in the name of conventional medicine, Wallach has been highly critical of the medical profession and of the pharmaceutical industry, causing conventional practitioners to condemn him in public or write scathing articles contradicting his work. A plain spoken Missourian, Wallach reveals in his lectures instances from across the world which document physician abuses and the prescription of dangerous drugs. Convinced by sound science and logic of his positions, he is never driven from his course by public or private pressure. Indeed, to every lecture he carries with him reams of articles, citations, and evidence in support of each position, well aware that he will likely be challenged by a proponent of conventional medicine. Aware of nutrient based ways to treat and cure disease that do not involve placing the patient at enormous risk, Wallach is unwilling to condone the acts of those who employ other methods that do place patients at enormous risk.

/

For Wallach the practice of medicine is not about capitalizing on the dire health of others but about finding the most effective ways to eliminate disease without placing patients in jeopardy. There are many examples of Dr. Wallach’s criticisms of modern medicine articulated in his best seller, Dead Doctors Don’t Lie, but a few here will suffice to prove the point. Wallach’s research establishes that the nutrient glucosamine is an effective treatment for osteoarthritis because it repairs torn cartilage, the very source of the condition. He finds it criminal that the approved drugs for osteoarthritis are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Those drugs increase the risk of internal bleeding and only mask the pain associated with osteoarthritis; they do not treat the loss of cartilage. Consequently, those who follow their doctor’s advice and take NSAIDs instead of glucosamine are simply tricking themselves into thinking because the pain is not there, they can continue to grind away at their lacerated cartilage until it is gone and bone on bone eburnation sets in. Wallach knows better and, therefore, condemns the accepted practice of doling out NSAIDs to those with osteoarthritis. From Wallach’s lectures, people often come away with the stark realization that their very own medical nightmares are not unique but are shared by many others. Those who have been living with a poor quality of life while dependent upon multiple drugs daily find Wallach’s lectures revealing because they provide alternatives to drugs with serious side effects and a chance for a better quality of life and greater longevity. Explaining to the public these truths (the horror of conventional medicine serving up drugs that carry with them lethal and debilitating side effects as well as the simple and affordable alternative of nutritional therapy) has cost Wallach dearly. An unwritten rule pervades the medical profession and is reinforced by the drug companies in their dealings with physicians: Never speak ill of another physician and never call into question the drugs that form the armamentarium of modern medical practice. Physicians have communicated personal attacks against Wallach that they would never direct to any other colleague. His lectures hit home because when educated of the truth, patients frequently abandon the conventions they have lived by and try new alternatives. Wallach’s research establishes that omega-3 fatty acids are anti-thrombotic, anti-coagulant, and anti-arrhythmic agents that improve circulation and heart health. He knows that daily ingestion of omega-3 fatty acids will reduce the risk of a heart attack and stroke by as much as forty percent. He also knows that drugs like heparin, warfarin, and Coumadin imperil the lives of patients in need of therapies to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke because they can cause bleeding to proceed uncontrollably and cause damage to organs and organ systems. Wallach’s research establishes that a combination of calcium, strontium, boron, magnesium, and several other minerals and trace minerals are the most effective means to prevent or lessen the progression of osteoporosis. He is appalled by the conventional medical community’s reliance on bisphosphonate drugs as the first line of treatment for those conditions. The bisphosphonates cause bone mineralization to occur on the surface of the bone but do not build the bone matrix. Over time, these drugs make bones brittle, precisely the condition they are

/

supposed to prevent. Rather than reduce the risk of fracture, over time these drugs increase the risk of fracture. Wallach’s research establishes that cholesterol performs critical metabolic functions in the body, is present in every cell of the body, and without adequate amounts of cholesterol we cannot live. The never ending quest of the National Cholesterol Program to reduce LDL cholesterol to lower and lower levels is fraught with danger. Also, the statin drugs block the endogenous production of not only cholesterol but also an essential co-enzyme for the production of ATP in the body (necessary for energy production by all muscles of the body, including the heart). By doing so, statins increase the risk of myopathy (muscle weakness and degeneration), including cardiomyopathy (heart muscle death). Wallach dismisses the notion that cholesterol is, in and of itself, an appropriate basis for concern, preferring to look at all aspects of cardiovascular function and to rely principally on nutritional interventions and lifestyle modifications to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Wallach’s attacks on the dangers of FDA approved drugs and on conventional medical practice dependent upon those drug regimens have received powerful support of late from an unanticipated quarter, the FDA itself. Beginning with the bombshell announcement by FDA Associate Director of Drug Safety, David Graham, that the public was “virtually defenseless” against FDA’s routine approval of unsafe drugs, and a steady stream of like-minded FDA medical reviewers appearing before Congress condemning corruption with the drug industry and the FDA and the approval over medical reviewers’ objections of a wide range of unsafe drugs, there have been dozens of high profile drug recalls and changes in label warnings, all confirming Wallach’s decades long quest to alert the public to these dangers to be well founded. Because of Wallach’s firm commitment to the Hippocratic Oath and to non-toxic nutritional interventions proven to alleviate disease, he is regularly attacked by conventional medical practitioners and the industries that support them. Rather than be dissuaded from his mission by the critics, Wallach is emboldened by them and, true to form, takes them on at every turn. Wallach’s Global Army Wallach’s indefatigable nature, his seemingly endless store of energy and his unremitting drive and focus have enabled him to hold meetings almost daily 360 days a year at locations around the world and to be interviewed by mass media, bringing his message of health transformation and longevity to millions. To date, over 250,000 people have enlisted as distributors in Youngevity. Each distributor is educated in Wallach’s concept of “90 for Life,” the 90 nutrients Wallach has identified as essential for optimal health and wellness. They, in turn, are reaching millions daily. The company grows by increasingly larger numbers year after year, and there appears to be no end in sight. The Youngevity distributors are valued by Wallach far beyond their economic benefit to the company. He views them as his emissaries, essential proponents of his 90 for Life philosophy

/

to the entire world. He knows that they form an ever expanding army that will bring to every tongue and people critical information that will alter their lives for the better. Because the products sell themselves, those who become distributors who have health issues become fiercely loyal to Dr. Wallach. He reciprocates by devoting his time to help them build their Youngevity businesses. Key leaders in the company follow Wallach closely and broadcast his message far and wide. Those who become distributors are embraced, respected, and uplifted physically and mentally by company leaders in a pattern that Wallach established from the start. Those distributors who master Wallach’s philosophy, echo his message, and pursue contacts with zeal often experience great financial success, enabling them to benefit from a residual income not only for the remainder of their lives but, through descendancy, for the benefit of their children and children’s children. As more come to reap the benefits of Dr. Wallach’s nutritional formulations, even those who choose not to become a part of the Wallach army become outspoken converts to his philosophy and to his products. As the remaining chapters make clear, the positive effects on people’s lives exceed ordinary comfort and involve life changing experiences that are never forgotten. But for individuals with health challenges, the movement from poor to optimal nutrition involves far reaching improvements to the functioning of every organ in the body, to the effectiveness of the immune system, to improvement in mental function, to increased energy levels, and to normal circulatory and digestive functions. For those who have long endured systemic complications, the changes are extraordinary, oftentimes moving them from a state of helplessness to a sense of physical well-being and individual empowerment. Wallach’s criticisms of conventional medicine resonate well with those who have tried for years to overcome illness with drug regimes that tax their health, render them physically incapacitated and debilitated, or give them addictions to pain medication. For them, the road back to health is not an option, it is a necessity for survival. Over time, the magnitude of Wallach’s discoveries will continue to elevate the condition of mankind. He is an early and profound critic of the latest medical craze, manipulating the human genome to rectify “genetic” diseases. Wallach agrees that the genetic code can be affected by nutritional deficiencies, but he does not subscribe to the view that all manner of chronic disease is addressable and correctable by manipulating genes. Rather, he sees what ordinarily passes for inheritable disease to be the byproduct of nutritional deficiencies. Wallach believes that if each person receives the 90 essential nutrients most conditions said to be inheritable will reveal themselves not to be. If mothers maintain nutrient stores in their bodies, the full complement of healthy cells will be given to their children, yielding healthy children. He has established solid evidence of his theory in the case of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anemia, to name a few.

/

As the truth comes to light, medicine will catch up to Wallach and, when it does, many theories that undergird reliance on drug therapies and that promise cures to all manner of diseases through manipulation of human genes will be discarded. Wallach is confident of that. Wallach’s view is in many ways an affirmation of the basics. He affirms that the human body has a remarkable ability to heal and sustain itself if only properly nourished. Before the explosive growth of pharmacology after World War II, physicians regularly depended upon supplying patients substances derived from foods and the earth directly. Colloidal silver was used to treat infections. Niacin was used to treat elevated cholesterol levels. Fish oil was used to treat thrombotic vascular heart disease. When antibiotics proved effective in actually killing harmful bacteria, such as streptococcus, big pharma arrived, creating an orthodoxy in conventional medicine that all manner of ills could be treated by the creation of synthetic substances that would interfere with disease progression. Despite over seven decades of effort, hundreds of billions of dollars expended, and billions more bequeathed by the federal government to bolster the effort, reliance on synthetic drugs has proven largely incapable of arresting anything beyond symptoms of disease. Moreover, the adverse side effects have been of epidemic proportions with over 100,000 people dying annually from adverse reactions to properly prescribed drugs. The government has enshrined the pharmaceutical industry, making state sponsored monopolies of it, and driving out of existence any who would claim foods and dietary supplements to have therapeutic effects. Although enjoying monopoly status, patented drugs with patent durations longer than any other patented inventions, and even federal government policing and prosecution of drug patent violators, the pharmaceutical industry has had few real breakthroughs in treatment over the last sixty years. The war on cancer, declared by President Richard Nixon on December 23, 1971, and resulting in passage of the National Cancer Act, has not changed life expectancy for cancer patients beyond what it was then—that despite the expenditure of $1.4 billion in cancer research by the federal government in 1972 and billions more since. An adult diagnosed with cancer today, with few exceptions, will die within the same period of time as one diagnosed with cancer in 1971. The treatments approved by the FDA are horrific, involving agents that fail to cure but do sacrifice quality of life, produce monstrous side effects, and often result in either secondary cancers or the death of the patient. Radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery for cancer patients are oftentimes acts of desperation performed by oncologists who have rarely, if ever, seen success in treatment, and yet tens of thousands beaten down by disease and death sentences in the doctor’s office, follow like sheep to the slaughter year after year. Wallach has long been sickened by this macabre spectacle. He has discovered a better way, and he hopes for the day when his army of adherents will be populated by the entire world’s

/

population. He will not rest until that day, and if he does not live to see it, he can rest in the knowledge that he has generated an army of over 250,000 strong who will carry on his mission. Transformations We depend upon evidence of conquest over disease to judge the abilities of physicians. By that measure, Dr. Wallach has been enormously successful. The following is a small subset of those whose health has been dramatically improved by Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations. Marisa Magistro. Since childhood, Marisa suffered from panic attacks. In her mid-20’s Marisa was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, an autoimmune thyroid condition. She was prescribed Armour Thyroid. The alterations in her thyroid function caused her to experience intense cravings for sweet and salty foods and resulting weight gain. She also developed large painful fatty deposits in her wrists, diagnosed as ganglion cysts. Marisa’s sister introduced her to Dr. Wallach and his nutrition recommendations. She followed those recommendations and experienced an amelioration of her symptoms. “3 years on I am still seeing improvements,” explains Marisa. “I’ve lost a total of 55 pounds. I have better focus and am not suffering from my crippling panic attacks anymore. I don’t have cravings and can make better food choices. My Hashimoto’s Disease is gone as well as my ganglion cysts.” Michael Magistro. In 2009, Michael suffered from severe abdominal pain and digestive health issues. He also suffered from lactose intolerance. Michael discovered Dr. Wallach and followed his nutritional recommendations. Within a short period of time, his symptoms began to subside. Now, two years following the start of his change in diet and his reliance on nutrition, Michael reports “because of this nutrition my body has been brought back into balance” and his health has been restored. Paul Larsen. Paul suffered a severe heart attack and had triple by-pass surgery with several grafts. A short time thereafter, he had several stints implanted. “I was told I had a limited life expectancy,” he recalls. In addition to his cardiovascular health problems, Paul suffered from sleep apnea, Bells Palsy, a detached retina with floaters in both eyes, Type II diabetes, peripheral neuropathy, vertigo, depression, insomnia, high and low blood pressure, back pain, nervousness, panic attacks, prolonged clotting time, cravings, anxiety, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, fainting, fatigue, night sweats, weight issues, digestive issues, stomach and intestinal pain, tinnitus, and eczema. He was prescribed some twenty-two to twenty-eight medications a day that he was required to take for survival, costing him about $2,385 per month, excluding monthly charges for diabetes medication, lancets, and strips. After a move to Salt Lake City, Paul found that he had to be admitted to the emergency room some six times over the course of a few months because of severe angina pain. Each time he was admitted for a few days and given morphine. Paul had had it. He explains: After several such visits lying in my hospital bed the head doctor of the cardio unit came to me to see how I was doing. I asked, “What can you do for me?” “I’m not interested in becoming addicted to morphine. Fix me please.” After a long silence, the doctor told me, “I am sorry. There is nothing we can do for you, except try to manage the angina pain when it comes.”

/

Paul was fed up with the routine and lack of help. He told the doctor, “disconnect me from the monitors and release me. I am going home.” Larsen then discovered Dr. Wallach. He followed a very detailed and extensive nutritional intervention program prescribed by Dr. Wallach. He explains the results: Within 3 weeks my Type II Diabetes glucose levels turned into the normal range. I was shocked, and it seemed daily I noticed a change somewhere else in my body. My energy level increased, I was sleeping better, my stress level started to decrease. Blood pressure fell into the normal range. No longer needed the sleep apnea machine. Issue after issue daily seemed to improve. Within 6 weeks I came off all pharmaceuticals. At the highest point I was on 28 different prescriptions. That number would change from visit to visit depending on the newest trend in drugs. The good news now I only take an 81 mg aspirin a day and my nutrients. Mylissa Graham. When Mylissa Graham first married her husband Dan, she had difficulty conceiving and so she and Dan sought Dr. Wallach’s advice. Dr. Wallach determined that Mylissa’s failure to have a regular menstrual cycle arose because of a lack of a balanced nutritional profile. He recommended one nutritional intervention tailored to Mylissa’s specific condition. Mylissa explains that after following Dr. Wallach’s recommendations “within a couple of months my cycle had become normal. A few months later, I became pregnant with our son Zac who is now 13 and our son Josh came later.” Daryl Sturdivant. Daryl was diagnosed with osteoarthritis, including bone on bone eburnation. He had served in the military and was on the police force. His attending physicians recommended that he have a double hip replacement. He had one hip replaced and was about to undergo the operation a second time when he came across Dr. Wallach. He followed Dr. Wallach’s recommendations and experienced a restoration of cartilage in his hip. He never underwent the second hip replacement. Kim Borba-Galati. Kim had lower back pain since she was 19. She was diagnosed with bluging discs. She was also diagnosed with bone spurs, sciatic nerve, leg cramps, poor circulation, and vertigo. Based on her doctors’ recommendations, she consumed various medications for the ailments and pain killers up to 5 times a day. She suffered severe reactions from the pain medications and was taken off of them. “At times when my back would go completely out my husband would take me to the doctor in a van as I would have to be lying flat.” She was in constant pain. She then turned to Dr. Wallach and followed his recommended nutrition interventions. Now, three years after adhering to Wallach’s recommendations for three consecutive years, she reported, “I [am] feeling amazingly better.” Ted Anderson. Ted had knee pain in his left knee and was considering arthroscopic surgery and possibly a knee replacement. He also suffered from acid reflux and an elevated triglyceride level (368). For the reflux, he was taking Prilosec every day. Dissatisfied with the medical advice he received, Ted turned to Dr. Wallach. He followed Dr. Wallach’s specific nutritional

/

recommendations for each condition. After about two and a half months, his knee pain went away. Because every time he discontinued use of the Prilosec he experienced very uncomfortable acid reflux, he kept taking the Prilosec until Pharmacist Ben Fuchs told him of health complications that could arise and recommended he depend on the nutritional program he was on to achieve an elimination of the acid reflux. Ted then stopped using the Prilosec and, despite a fear of recurrence, has experienced no acid reflux since. After months on the Wallach protocol, Ted had blood work performed that revealed his triglyceride level to have returned to within the normal range at 164. In addition, he lost 35 pounds. Valerie Nelson. Valerie’s husband has Type II diabetes. Valerie wanted her husband to follow Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations for diabetes but it was not until he met with Dr. Wallach in person that he became willing to try it. By following those recommendations, her husband lost 60 pounds and no longer had a need for any of his medications except insulin which she says “we were able to almost eliminate.” Jason Macomber. In 2007, Jason was diagnosed with several auto immune diseases. He was diagnosed with erythema nodosum, an inflammatory condition of the fatty part of the skin. He was diagnosed with crohn’s disease and with sarcoidosis. He would regurgitate after eating almost anything. He had a sensation that he was being smothered most of the day, having considerable difficulty breathing. His lips would turn blue and he would cough all day every day. He had difficulty sleeping and spent most nights shivering and sweating, unable to sleep because of the pain and fever. Jason put it this way: “I never really fell asleep. It was more like I passed out from exhaustion, only to be awakened by sweats and chills. I rested on a bed of towels. I would pass out, wake up ten minutes later drenched in my own sweat and shaking uncontrollably from cold. I would then throw off a layer of towels [from my] bed and begin again.” His ankles, knees, hips, elbows, and wrists were so inflamed that he could barely move them. He had a large wound on his leg that would not heal. “My doctors told me it was a brown recluse spider bite. My doctors were silly people,” he recalls. In June of 2006, he weighed 270 pounds but by January of 2007 he weighed 125 pounds. Jason is 6’ 3”. Jason became incredibly frustrated as his attending physicians continued to experiment upon him, unable to determine what was wrong. He explains: My doctors all wanted to dope me up on pain medication and mutilate me. Each one of them was intent on cutting off some body part, or some organ. They all insisted that these were simple procedures. The consensus was that I would be dead in 5 or 6 years, but only if I let them butcher me along the way. If they didn’t get to chop me up and poison me I had only a year of living hell to enjoy, then death. One doctor told me I would be dead in five years then he winked and smiled at me. I truly and deeply wanted to punch him in the face. I was too weak to do so. I asked him, “Is there anything I can do?” He said, “no.” I asked him, “why is this happening?” He said, “you are unlucky.” So my doctor smirked at me, sentenced me to death, had his nurses come and gawk at the wound on my leg, and sent me home. He invited me back for intravenous steroids, intravenous antibiotics, intravenous nutrition, and of course many many surgeries.

/

In 2013, Jason discovered Dr. Wallach. He followed Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations. Within one month, he experienced significant improvements in his energy levels. Within five months, the wound on his leg which had been present since he was six years old fully healed. As time passed, he kept with the nutritional recommendations and as he did each of his symptoms began to disappear. He explains, “I am still amazed at the feeling of being able to move my body without pain. I can walk, run, play with my nieces and nephews and enjoy life without pain. Today I do yoga, lift weights and run, and I still have energy. I feel fantastic. I am a lean 185 pounds. I am about to turn 40, and I feel like a 20 year old. I am healthy and free. Dr. Wallach gave me back my life.” Ivan Ledbetter. Ivan weighed 400 pounds and had arthritis in his knees and hips, lower back pain, and heart disease. He suffered from high blood pressure since the age of 16. Before discovering Dr. Wallach, Ivan had three heart attacks. By following Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations for thirty days, Ivan lost 60 pounds. After ninety days, he lost another 145 pounds and was able to discontinue taking 13 medications. More recently, Ivan began to experience severe difficulty breathing. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He again relied on Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations and has witnessed a 25% ejection fraction increase to 75%. Brenda Wright. Since childhood Brenda suffered from a profound lethargy that robbed her of the energy she needed to perform basic tasks. She was never able to do any physical labor or work beyond a short period of time. She was diagnosed with abnormally low levels of iron in her blood and was placed on a regimen of iron IVs. After a short period of increase in her energy levels, soon she was back to feeling tired all the time and remained unable to perform basic tasks. The iron IVs had failed. Worse still, her physicians explained that she was not absorbing other key nutrients and that she likely had only six months to live. Brenda discovered Dr. Wallach and explained her condition. She was stunned when in response he replied, “this is easy.” She then followed his nutritional recommendations. After just five days, her iron levels tested normal. As the weeks passed, she could arise in the morning without laboring and without pain. One month after following Dr. Wallach’s recommendations religiously, she was able to work in an office. A month after that, she was able to work full time. Brenda spent a total of 50 years in a state of near total disability. She had children but was unable to enjoy time with them to its fullest. “It’s been such an amazing thing,” she says, “I can play with my grandchildren. I could not play with my own children.” Sheryl Morley. When Sheryl was 25 years old, she was an assistant manager at a Taco Bell in Gilbert, Arizona. Because Taco Bell allowed its employees to eat company food at meal breaks, she depended on the meals to avoid spending the little money she earned. The consequence was significant. She became overweight, having gained 30 pounds. In addition, she suffered from severe pain in both knees. She went to a physician who diagnosed her with osteoarthritis in both knees. He told her that she would have to take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs the rest of her life to help manage the pain and would eventually need double knee replacement surgery. Fearful, she asked her mother what to do. Her mother recommended that she follow

/

Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations. Reluctantly, she agreed. She lost the 30 pounds and her knee pain went away, all within the span of 60 days. Thereafter, she became a fitness competitor, a regular runner, and a snow boarder. Years later, and despite daily rigorous exercise, she still has no knee pain. Rosemary Austin. At the age of 33, while pregnant, Rosemary suffered a disabling stroke. Having grown up in a household that appreciated the benefits of organic foods, and having consumed wholesome farm fresh foods her entire life, Rosemary was baffled by the notion that something was remiss in her daily routine that would make her susceptible to a stroke. While recovering from the effects of the stroke, she was able to secure employment answering phones. It was at her place of employment that she first heard of Dr. Wallach. She experienced an epiphany when she heard Dr. Wallach say that our foods are nutritionally deficient. Her own father, who was an organic food advocate, had told her that he would rather go to a veterinarian for treatment of disease than a human physician. When she heard that Dr. Wallach was a veterinarian, she remembered those words and felt comforted. She wanted to avoid a second stroke and make as near a complete recovery as possible and she decided to follow Dr. Wallach’s nutritional recommendations. “I can go and do,” she says, “and I owe that to Dr. Wallach.” Rosemary credits her recovery and her stroke free existence to the nutritional recommendations of Dr. Wallach, which she adheres to religiously. Wallach’s Unrelenting Drive, Vision, and Legacy From his formative years as a farm boy in West St. Louis County to his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Missouri to his career as a comparative pathologist and then a physician, Dr. Joel D. Wallach has striven to make a difference in the world and has made that difference. Lives have been saved. The quality of human life has been improved. And the hope of mankind that it may one day find a way to conquer disease and live to the limits of the human lifespan with a quality of life worth living have been advanced greatly by his contributions. The fruits of his efforts are evidenced in the thousands of those who have been transformed from physical affliction, including those near death, and returned to good health. They stand as living monuments to Wallach’s medical genius. He has never given up on a vexing case; in fact, his patients are ordinarily those failed by conventional medicine. His vision of a world liberated from disease and empowered to live better longer through the self-help mechanism of quality and complete nutrition has been largely realized through an army of over 250,000 distributors, but Wallach has never been one to dream modest dreams. He envisions a world in which every person understands the importance of “90 for Life.” The life of Joel Wallach from his earliest days has been one of constant service and self-sacrifice. He has not taken the easy road because he has taken upon him the physical hardships of others. He has made the betterment of mankind his responsibility. The weight of that burden would tax most people to death but Wallach is invigorated by the struggle.

/

Wallach dreams of a day when the ugly truths underlying modern medicine are universally appreciated. When a patient visits a doctor, Wallach wants that patient armed with knowledge not only concerning the benefits of complete nutrition but also concerning the precise deficiencies that beget their disease states and the treatments that will best bring about a cure. He wants an end to the era of patients going like sheep to the slaughter and the creation of a new era where physicians are truly made to account for the prescriptions they give. He dreams of a day when all appreciate the critical role of complete nutrition in the maintenance of health. He wants each of us to understand how the 90 essential nutrients variously work within our bodies to maintain healthy metabolic function, avert disease, and, when ill, hasten return to normal health. He dreams of a day when the myth that genes determine a whole host of diseases that elude modern medicine is put to rest, and when people come to understand that epigenetics, the effect of nutrient deficiency on gene expression, becomes universally understood. On that day diseases like cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, and sickle cell anemia will be known to be preventable through complete nutrition in the same way that neural tube defect births are now known to be preventable through folic acid supplementation. He dreams of a day when the governments of the world finally abandon censorship and allow into the market the enormous body of evidence concerning the disease prevention and treatment effects of nutrients. Wallach longs for the day when people forewarned and forearmed with 90 essential nutrients each day so effectively defeat disease that the average lifespan extends well beyond 100 years and the quality of life of centenarians is equal to those in today’s industrialized societies who are half their age. Although 75 years young, Wallach has more vitality, quickness of mind, and passion than most men half his age and he attributes that good health to his own reliance on the very formulations he recommends to others. He will likely live a very long life and will not discontinue his mission until his last breath. His legacy is now secure, but it will continue to grow in the years to come. With an exceptional management team, the institution he founded, Youngevity, will ultimately bring to the entire world Wallach’s message of better health and longevity through high quality and complete nutrition. Wallach’s passion has been contagious thus far and will likely continue to be for generations to come.

/