4 
MODERN MIRACLE MEN 
feeding. They can be made quarrelsome and belligerent; they can 
even be turned into cannibals and be made to devour each other. 
A cageful of normal rats will live in amity. Restrict their calcium, 
and they will become irritable and draw apart from one another. 
Then they will begin to fight. Restore their calcium balance and they 
will grow more friendly; in time they will begin to sleep in a pile as 
before. 
Many backward children are “stupid” merely because they are 
deficient in magnesia. We punish them for our failure to feed them 
properly. 
Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon 
the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins 
or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein, or carbohydrates 
we consume. 
It is now agreed that at least 16 mineral elements are indispensable 
jor normal nutrition , and several more are always found in small 
amounts in the body, although their precise physiological role has 
not been determined. Of the 11 indispensable salts, calcium, phos¬ 
phorus, and iron are perhaps the most important. 
Calcium is the dominant nerve controller; it powerfully affects the 
cell formation of all living things and regulates nerve action. It 
governs contractility of the muscles and the rhythmic beat of the 
heart. It also coordinates the other mineral elements and corrects 
disturbances made by them. It works only in sunlight. Vitamin ID 
is its buddy. 
Dr. Sherman of Columbia asserts that 50 percent of the American 
people are starving for calcium. A recent article in the Journal of the 
American Medical Association stated that out of 4,000 cases in New 
York Hospital, only 2 were not suffering from a lack of calcium. 
What does such a deficiency mean? How would it affect your 
health or mine? So many morbid conditions and actual diseases may 
result that it is almost hopeless to catalog them. Included in the 
list are rickets, bony deformities, bad teeth, nervous disorders, re¬ 
duced resistance to other diseases, fatigability, and behavior distrub- 
ances such as incorrigibility, assaultiveness, nonadaptability. 
Here’s one specific example: The soil around a certain Midwest 
city is poor in calcium. Three hundred children of this community 
were examined and nearly 90 percent had bad teeth, 69 percent showed 
affections of the nose and throat, swollen glands, enlarged or diseased 
tonsils, More than one-third had defective vision, round shoulders, 
bow legs, and anemia. 
Calcium and phosphorus appear to pull in double harness. A child 
requires as much per day as two grown men, but studies indicate a 
common deficiency of both in our food. Researches on farm animals 
point to a deficiency of one or the other as the cause of serious losses 
to the farmers, and when the soil is poor in phosphorus these animals 
become bone-chewers. Dr. McCollum says that when there are 
enough phosphates in the blood there can be no dental decay. 
Iron is an essential constituent of the oxygen-carrying pigment of 
the blood: iron starvation results in anemia, and yet iron cannot be 
assimilated unless some copper is contained in the diet. In Florida 
many cattle die from an obscure disease called “salt sickness.” It 
has been found to arise from a lack of iron and copper in the soil and 
hence in the grass. A man may starve for want of these elements 
just as a beef “critter” starves. 
