D. Raymond Schmidt

Raymond D. Schmidt, OCR played semi-professional baseball for several years and then entered a Trappist monastery, Order of Cistercian Reform. He developed an interest in nutrition during these 12 years, and after leaving the monastery, spent 11 years researching the effects of uncooked foods on human physiology. Part of this time he studied under his 120 year-old Hopi Indian adopted grandfather, a famous herbal medicine man in Arizona.

Ray was instrumental in ensuring the completeness of PPNF’s research collections. He lent his skill set to PPNF in many areas including transferring the original 18,000 negatives taken by Dr. Price onto safety film.

He was a member of a research team associated with determining an optimal diet for humans. For six years he researched bacterial studies of gut flora in man and gorillas and organized research on vitamin B-12 levels in patients on various diets. This work was done in conjunction with U.D. Register, PhD from Loma Linda University School of Health. For another five years he was involved with the first United States production of a rare form of blue green algae (A. Flos Aquae) with the biochemist and allergist, Victor H. Kellman, PhD. They supplied algae for research on biological applications and use in human health and published several papers on this.

Raymond Schmidt played an active role in shaping the health food and nutrition movement and was instrumental in bringing the first blue green algae products to market in the United States. Ray was a long time PPNF Advisory Board member. He was a great researcher of the medical literature, especially on the subject of lipids, phytates and activator x.