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“Catalyn” – A Real High Potency Vitamin Product
Published in Vitamin News, June 1949.
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“High Potency” is a much abused term. Vitamin and other food supplements are often loaded with low cost ingredients in quantities far greater than any physiological requirement; the high cost, more rare, components which may be much more important are ignored and the product promoted as a high potency–supposedly highly effective–agent.
Agnes Fay Morgan, the celebrated nutritional authority, once made a test of the high potency vitamins used to “enrich” foods like white flour. Her findings are attached. The test animals on the “high potency enriched diet” did not live as long as those on the same low vitamin diet without the “enrichment.”
This is proof that a high potency in milligrams cannot be compared to a high potency in clinical test. Why not? Simply because the nutritional requirement for humans or test animals includes too many factors to be easily thrown together from a few sources of single vitamin, mineral, or amino acids, selected because of commercial availability.
A real high potency product will contain the vitamins with their natural synergists as found in unrefined foods.
For example, “natural forms of vitamin E (as alpha tocopherol) lose up to ninety-nine percent of their potency when separated from their natural synergists, (tannins, fatty acids and phospholipids).”1 We interpret this to mean that tocopherol without synergists ceases to be vitamin E, if it means anything. It means exactly what Dr. Morgan discovered, that fractions of vitamin complexes were not vitamins in effect, that such fractions cannot act as the whole any more than the case and face of your watch can keep time.
How, then, can the potency of a food concentrate be determined?
Simply by the clinical performance! Here is what a celebrated, internationally known physician says about Catalyn–”It will interest you to know that I rechecked a patient yesterday who had undergone a complete physical and mental breakdown as a result of a rapidly fulminating senescent process. He has been treated for the last eighteen months and he is now normal in mind and, for his age (63 yrs.), in his body. Examinations of his retina show a complete disappearance of the arteriosclerotic process, with a return of the silver streak in the arteries. He was treated through dietary measures, colonic irrigations and eight Catalyn tablets per day. This sort of improvement is dramatic and is proof that pathological senescence is fundamentally a matter of improper nutrition–not alone a matter of food deficiencies, but also a matter of excesses of processed foods.”
This patient had the good fortune to meet a physician who knew how to use physiological remedies. A physician who knew that improving the elimination and correcting the nutritional deficiencies was the first principle of restoring health.
“High Potency” vitamins may actually reverse in their effects, and perform the opposite of what the physician prescribing them may want to accomplish. Bicknell & Prescott in their new book, The Vitamins in Medicine (Grune & Stratton, New York, $12.00) page 735, tell how bone decalcification, a reaction to vitamin E deficiency, can also be caused by large doses of alpha tocopherol. They recommend no greater concentration of alpha tocopherol than is found in wheat germ oil for any therapeutic use. “High Potencies” defeat their purpose here, just as in Dr. Morgan’s tests.
We believe that the first and commonest symptom of deficiency requiring “Catalyn” is fatigue. Truly, we consider Catalyn as “fine food for fatigue.” Often one or two tablets will afford a great relief in fifteen or twenty minutes. Two or three tablets a day often mean the difference between enjoying one’s work, or finding it unbearable drudgery.
Why? Simply because it contains such a variety of scarce nutrients, not a high content of a few. It contains practically every trace mineral needed in nutrition, according to spectrographic tests. They are not added by us. They are normally present as an integral part of the food concentrates, in organic combination, and inseparable from the vitamins and enzyme factors of which they are activators.
How can we tell you what the potency of such a product may be? It Is something you or your patient must experience. The factors that you may need may be as yet unknown to Science or medical arts. We kept ourselves alive with Wheat Germ and Rice Polish before they were discovered as essential (the hard way, by observation of victims dying of starvation for years before anyone had wit enough to decide that maybe the meddling with rice and wheat had something to do with the situation). One authority in tracing the history of polio discovered that the first cases reported were in Vienna in 1840. He stated that it was no probable coincidence that the first roller for making white flour was set up in Vienna in 1839.2 Polio has many of the earmarks of beri-beri, even down to the virus accompanying it, which was also found in beri-beri by Dr. McCarrison, as related by him in his book, Studies in Deficiency Disease, (now available from us at $3.00 net.)
We believe that in terms of clinically demonstrable potency it is the lowest cost nutritional supplement on the market. It was engineered to produce results, not to exhibit a “high potency” label.
When you have to lose sleep, try it as a fatigue dispeller. Its effect is physiological, the benefits are not borrowed from the future.
Trace mineral deficiency is today becoming recognized as the cause of undulant fever; trace mineral feeding is the first successful treatment for the disease whether it appears in cattle or human victims.3 This is another example of how unknown factors work for us, being unsuspected until we blunder into their field of action. Undulant fever becomes now a deficiency disease. (Raw milk is cleared of suspicion, as it should have been long ago when statistical studies showed that there was more undulant fever where pasteurization was required by law than where it was not. Raw milk users get more vitamin C, and thereby have a higher resistance to all infections. We see now that the real cause of these infectious diseases is low resistance due to malnutrition.
References Cited:
- Annual Rev. Biochemistry, 1943, p. 381.
- W. J. McCormick, M.D., “Observations on the 1941 Outbreak of Poliomyelitis and Encephalitis in the Midwest,” Medical Record, Feb. 4, 1942.
- “What About Trace Minerals,” Ed. Rupp, Missouri Ruralist, April 9, 1949.