The environment has received a good deal of attention from sociologists, psychologists, clinical ecologists and environmentalists in general. But how many really know that one of the most important environments is the chemical environment that flows through our digestive tracts? This environment, which is external to the body even though it runs through it, is as important to us as is the sea water in which unicellular organisms grow. It is the medium from which we obtain all our essential nutrients, except oxygen, and is the place were we deposit most of our wastes. If, therefore, the chemicals within that environment are wrong for the individual; if the system is not able to absorb or use them properly; and if waste products are not properly eliminated, it is impossible for that individual to be well. The health of the individual depends upon the integrity and functional capacity of the digestive tract. It can never be given too much attention.

This valuable book describes in five parts what a healthy digestive tract should do, what can happen to it, and how to correct problems that are present. In Part 2 we are taken on a voyage through the digestive tract where we meet some of the billions of inhabitants, the bacteria, yeast, and others. We travel through good as well as bad districts, and are even told what happens when the walls of the gut become leaky, when they are not able to keep out what normally should not penetrate into the blood stream. Part 4 is an account of the remedies needed to achieve wellness, starting with detoxification and proper diet, and the last part consists of a number of natural therapies. The entire gastrointestinal tract is examined: halitosis, gingivitis, canker sores, heartburn and hiatus hernia, gastritis, intestinal gas, constipation and some of its consequences. This is a good book, easy to read, and will be very helpful to everyone except those aleady blessed with good health. It is a good companion to the texts used by medical students and gastroenterologists.

Mental Health: The Nutrition Connection by Patrick Holford. ION Press, 34 Wadham Road, London, SW15 2LR. 278 pages. Paperback,1996. $7.95

This volume consists of two smaller volumes back to back. The first is Carl Pfeiffer’s book, “How to Beat Depression, Anxiety and Schizophrenia,” 205 pages, the second is “How to Enhance Your Mental Performance and Emotional Well Being,” by Patrick Holford, 73 pages.

After a fifty year hiatus, nutritional medicine is enjoying a reawakening. It was lulled to sleep by the false promises of the wonder drugs of the 1950s the corticosteroid hormones and the antibiotics. Nutrition disappeared from the curricula of medical schools, and shifted to departments of biochemistry and nutrition or dietetics, departments which had no direct contact with or relevance to people. Nutrition became just a subject, and appeared to have no part to play in the well-being of people.

Of course, veterinary schools had the entirely opposite view. They considered nutrition of vast importance, I suppose because the health of animals has great economic value.

The vitamin paradigm was firmly entrenched (tiny vitamin doses to prevent and to treat a few classical diseases such as scurvy and pellagra). This paradigm was powerfully supported by a vast medical-nutritional-government establishment. It provided the cover needed to maintain the system which allowed one of the most monstrous human experiments in history to establish itself and grow at an accelerating pace. This was the gradual conversion of the major food supplies from foods to which we have been adapted by evolution, to our present food supply which is about 85% processed. The policy has been change it, promote it, distribute it, and think afterwards, so now 20 to 40 years later, society is becoming aware that what was done has been very harmful and will have to be undone, but against the opposition of the industry which allowed the corruption of our food supply to take place.

Pioneers like Carl Pfeiffer, and books like this one, are the agents by which society is becoming aware of what has been done, how it been harmful, and the methods one can use to repair the damage and to restore a measure of health, both mental and physical. For this reason I was very pleased when Patrick Holford asked me to prepare the Foreword, and I am even more pleased to bring this book to the attention of the readers of this Journal.

Pfeiffer established a scientific nomenclature, a diagnosis which is causal, not merely descriptive. In psychiatry, the modern trend has been to make diagnosis more and more descriptive, and less and less etiological. The best example is the DSM of the American Psychiatric Association, which with each revision becomes less useful and scientific. For the fifty diagnoses used to describe children, the only treatment still remains stimulant drugs such as ritalin, and there is less and less reference to real causes such as allergies, vitamin deficiencies and vitamin dependencies. Dr. Pfeiffer’s method for dividing the schizophrenias into three important sub groups is described in his book. Patrick Holford enlarges the value of nutritional treatment by discussing conditions such as sugar blues (depression caused by too much sugar in the diet), the role played by stress and by allergies.

I am delighted that Patrick Holford has brought Dr. Pfeiffer’s work to the fore. Too often, in these days of computers who do all our thinking and abstracting, there is a tendency to believe that what was done many years ago no longer exists, especially if the work did not enter mainstream medicine and remained excluded from the world’s government-run abstracting services.