In this book on magnesium we are more or less of a compiler,
but we are proud of what we have compiled There is no value in a
bunch of researches done in various parts of the world, and
reported in dozens of medical journals, lying dormant, moldering
in the archives so to speak, and not being used by practicing
physicians. Our function is to find everything pertinent to
magnesium and publish it in one place--in one book--so that
doctors can see at one glance what a wonderful weapon they have
in this mineral.
The foremost pioneer in this field was Pierre Delbet, M.D., who sent many communications on
his experiences with magnesium to the French Academy of Medicine. One of them dealing with
body odors was dated June 5, 1928. Here is a translation of a
portion of it.
"The surgeon must endeavor to bring his patients to the
operating table with the maximum resistance of which each is
capable: resistance to the nervous upset of emotion, resistance
to the toxicity of anesthetics, resistance to hemorrhage,
resistance to infection. It is a gigantic program whose
solution will demand the full play not only of what one knows
about biology, but also of what one doesn't know about it.
"I have touched only two small points.
"I give my patients who are to be operated on some magnesium
chloride while they receive the preoperative vaccination. Each
day they take 100 grams of the solution . . . (containing 1,020
mg. anhydrous magnesium chloride), a solution which I
determined in 1915 acts on the white corpuscles (an action that
I have called cytophylactic).
"During this period, thirteen years ago, I began to
administer this solution, either by the digestive or
subcutaneous route, to infected individuals.
"After a few days, they experienced a sensation of euphoria
and energy which they called to my attention. At first, I
wondered if it weren't a case of those illusions which are so
frequent in sick persons who have been prescribed a new
medication. Then, when the constancy of the effect had forced
itself on my attention, I recalled the relative richness in
magnesium of the grey matter of the brain in comparison with
all organs of highly differentiated functions, and I wondered
if humanity, a great consumer of an elevated order of energy,
didn't have a magnesium deficiency. Then I took it myself as a
chloride, and had several members of my entourage take it, and
during thirteen years, I've made a great number of observations
and experiments.
"Today, I will speak only of the preparation of sick persons
for the operation.
"At a dose of I gram 20 mg. magnesium chloride can be
considered only as a purgative, but it regularizes salts as a
matter of course. Taken continuously, it brings them out in
many persons who are chronically constipated, and reduces them
in many who are diarrhetic. In a few days, if their diets
contain nothing particularly toxic, it deodorizes them. It is a
very striking phenomenon: their fecal matter loses all of its
disagreeable odor. That can be due only to a modification of
the intestinal flora, but I haven't succeeded in noting what
the modification consists of. Even though it seems a little
puerile to establish a relationship between fetidity and
toxicity, we do it instinctively; so this deodorization seems
advantageous, particularly in patients who won't evacuate
stercoral matter for two or three days after the operation.
"Magnesium chloride stimulates the biliary system. Perhaps
this is the mechanism by which it regularizes salts.
"The head of my clinic, M.
de Vadder, who makes duodenal tubage in my service, has
observed at my request that the injection of magnesium chloride
into the duodenum brings out a wave of vesical bile."
A Personal Note by J. I. Rodale
In the first paragraph of this chapter, I admitted to being a
compiler, but on the subject of magnesium's effect on body odor,
I went a step further. I made myself a guinea pig. Here are some,
of my experiences:
For eight or nine months I took magnesium in the form of
dolomite tablets. I wanted to see its
effects on me before I recommended it to others. Within a few
clays, exactly as Delbet had said, I noticed that it deodorized
my stool.
But may I say that this deodorization process began with me
many years ago, after a few years of being on the Prevention system, cutting out bread, salt, sugar, and milk and taking
the many vitamins and minerals, exercising, etc. But with the
addition of dolomite the process of deodorization was made almost
complete--let us say 99.4 percent complete.
But when I started to take dolomite tablets, I was not
prepared for another change it produced, something that took
about six months. This was an almost complete disappearance of
underarm odor! Unbelievable, you might say! But perhaps the
unbelievable is about to come true. Wouldn't that be
something--something as basic as the purification of the inner
body, by a simple little tablet?
Delbet in the above quotation says that magnesium's effect on
body odor is no doubt due to a modification of the intestinal
flora, the beneficial intestinal bacteria that take part in the
process of breaking down the food. I came to this conclusion
independently owing to several experiences I had with
magnesium.
Normally when I ate cooked beets, my stool would be red the
next morning. There was not complete digestion, with reference
especially to the red coloring matter. But when I ate raw beets,
there was no red in the stool the next morning.
It is a known fact that ordinary cooking temperatures kill all
the enzymes in foods. But when you eat raw beets, with all their
enzymes available to aid in their complete digestion, everything
is absorbed and used up in the body.
Now here is an astonishing fact: when I began to take dolomite
tablets and would eat cooked beets, with their enzymes destroyed,
my stool was not red the next morning. Evidently magnesium either
has the property of acting in the place of enzymes, or increases
the intestinal flora to such an extent that they could do the job
of digestion completely by themselves. The ideal situation would
be to eat raw beets and take dolomite tablets. I often eat raw
beets in thin slices and find them very palatable.
I had a similar experience with asparagus. Many persons have
found that when they eat asparagus, it gives their urine a
characteristic odor. I always found this to be so when I ate
cooked asparagus, but not when I ate raw asparagus. But after
being on dolomite for a while, I could consume this vegetable
cooked or raw with no odor resulting in the urine.
In the matter of the effect of magnesium on body odor, while
the latter is important, the question of what is behind this,
that is, what happens in the body that neutralizes odor-producing
chemicals, is more important! And science should start
experiments to learn exactly what goes on in the digestive
process when magnesium is introduced.
In this book we have shown how effective magnesium is in
curing certain diseases. Could this be because of the fact that
magnesium increases the intestinal flora and enables the body to
absorb more nutrients from the food, and thus improve the
nutrition to a particular organ that is sick or in a process that
is defective?
We found a clue next in a study that was subsequently made of
chlorophyll as a deodorizer. For many years there have been
conflicting reports about the "green blood" of plants, and
utterly contradictory laboratory results arising from tests of
the deodorant properties of chlorophyll.
Yet there had been enough confirmation that chlorophyll is
a deodorizer, so that we felt it deserved further
investigation. We even found one research man, Dr. J. C. Munch,
who headed a research laboratory in Mexico City, who found in
relation to a study of the effect of water-soluble chlorophyll on
Mexican boys and girls "direct application to the armpits has
confirmed its properties as a deodorant." And many other doctors
writing in various medical journals either confirmed or accepted
as a matter of course the deodorant properties of chlorophyllin.
Yet the highly respected Dr. F. C. Lu of
the Food and Drug Laboratories of the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare
tested chlorophyllin on both dogs and human beings and found no
appreciable change in odors. Moreover, there were other research
scientists who felt the same as Dr. Lu.
Finally, by close reading of the research reports, we were
able to isolate what we consider the significant difference.
Chlorophyllin is defined by the
Merck Index as sodium magnesium chlorophyllin. But the
chlorophyllin used by Dr. Lu and others who got negative results
was a special form in which the magnesium had been removed. This
is done on the assumption, made by many, that any deodorizing
effect of chlorophyll is due -to its tendency to absorb carbon
dioxide and convert it to free oxygen. Such conversion is
performed quite as well by chlorophyllin without magnesium as it
is by chlorophyllin with magnesium. The researchers assumed that
the commercially refined product would have just the same
deodorant effect, if any, as the natural product.
But it did not have the same effect, and the difference, of
course, was magnesium. This study left us convinced that
chlorophyll is a good natural deodorizer, but only in the
magnesium-containing form and only because of the magnesium. In
other words, for the deodorizing effect you might as well use the
magnesium without the sodium and the green pigment.
Lately we have gotten another clue.
There is now much reason to believe that magnesium in large
quantities is essential to the healthy functioning of the
pituitary gland. This gland, in turn, regulates the functions of
all the other glands. And, when there is a noticeable unpleasant
odor about anyone's body that cannot be traced to a specific
disease condition, it is most often a malfunction of a particular
set of glands -the apocrine glands-that gets the blame.
Is it possible that, by regulating and improving the function
of the pituitary, magnesium acts through the pituitary to
regulate the apocrine glands so that they will no longer release
enough of their secretions to form unpleasant odors?
We do not know yet, though we feel we are coming closer to the
answer. What we do know is that, for reasons not yet established,
magnesium consumed in sufficient quantity to avert any possible
deficiency does definitely seem to reduce or altogether eliminate
any tendency an otherwise healthy person might have to unpleasant
body odors.
Thirty years ago, when I was not on any health system, I had
my share of stool and underarm odor. At various times they were
unusually offensive, if you will excuse me. But gradually as I
stopped taking drugs and began following a good nutritional
program, they became less offensive. Formerly on the average my
stool was a very dark color, but gradually as I became healthier,
it assumed a bland light brown appearance, which is as it should
be.
There can be no question that what we eat can affect the odor
of our stool and our bodies generally. The seven-month-old infant
of a friend of mine, who was being breast fed, was placed on a
bottle formula. Immediately his stool began to smell!
I have often read that Orientals claim that Westerners have an
offensive smell. When I mentioned this to an artist friend, he
confirmed it. Years ago, in Japan, he was married to a Japanese
girl who claimed he smelled bad!
The odor of Westerners' might come from wheat (the Oriental
eats rice); it might also come from dairy products. Until very recently the Orientals had
no dairy industry. It may also come from toxic additives in
Western food, and from patent medicines. Possibly, also, the
Oriental's diet may contain more magnesium than ours.
You will recall from Delbet's quotation that he could not
deodorize the body of a person with magnesium unless his diet did
not contain anything that was toxic. I imagine that the stools of
people who take certain medicines must smell badly, unless
sledgehammered with deodorant products.
In this respect the taking of antibiotics is a sure way to
start the "body-smell" process, because the antibiotic is a
bacteria killer, killing indiscriminately, the good with the bad,
seriously reducing the population of intestinal flora. In other
words, the more antibiotics people take the more they will smell;
that is, under the cloak of the chemical deodorant.
That magnesium acts to improve
the digestion was discussed in The Medical Tribune
of June 3, 1964. It was a case described by Dr. Maurice E. Shils of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research--a 74-
year-old man who developed gastrointestinal symptoms after the
fifty-third day of a magnesium-deficient diet. His symptoms
cleared up in four days after magnesium was added to his
diet.
Note that it took 53 days of getting very little magnesium to
show an ill effect. This might be because it took that long to
reduce the population of intestinal flora. I found this to be the
case once when I purposely stopped taking the dolomite tablets.
The advantages held for quite a while. But the buildup process,
starting low, is much faster.
I did a little experimental work, eating certain forbidden
foods to observe their effect on my stool, but the results were
confusing because I did not stop taking dolomite. But when I ate
some thin-walled chocolate Easter eggs that we brought from
Italy, there was an odor the next morning. Evidently a certain
chemical or emulsifier must have been used in the chocolate to
enable the thin wall to withstand breakage. I noted that it took
quite an effort to break it.
Science must launch a longtime study on the effects on the
body odor of eating various kinds of foods and the taking of
various kinds of drugs, exercise, etc. I am sure that many drugs
are so toxic that they kill intestinal flora. Thus the doctor is
substituting one form of illness for another, the remedy in many
cases worse than the disease.
In my premagnesium era I discovered that, when I walked for
two hours a day (at two sessions of one hour each), my foot odor
vanished completely. But one hour of this exercise a day did not
do it. Today without any walking at all (during the winter), my
dolomite tablets keep my feet completely free of odor. How about
athlete's foot? I don't know. I haven't had it for many years. I
was cured of it about seven or eight years ago by the
Prevention system. But perhaps the taking of dolomite
might cure it.
As I have said, I take nine tablets of dolomite a day. At the
beginning, I had a few days of light diarrhea, but soon
everything set itself in the proper order. Delbet says the same
thing in his communication to the French Academy of Medicine,
July 10, 1928: "In persons who have normally active bowels, it
brings on a diarrhea in the first days, but it does not
last."
It would seem, therefore, that with dolomite, good nutrition,
and sufficient exercise, and without certain organic disease
conditions, most underarm, stool, and foot odor could be
eliminated. I believe there is another factor, namely, the
emotions, which must be considered. In emergencies and under
tensions there might be a temporary return of b.o.
Delbet put himself on record on this subject in 1928, or 40
years ago, and his work has been completely ignored ever since.
No regular medical checking tests a person's status in regard to
blood magnesium. It is time this is changed.
It is not merely a matter of body odor, but if what is behind
it means a better digestion, a better absorption of vitamins and
minerals from our food, a better feeding of the glands and organs
of the body, then it would be an important part of the process of
preventing disease in general-from a toothache to cancer.
Here is a new field for medical research-a place where some of
the government's three billion research dollars can be invested
to great advantage. Medical science must be alerted! Breathtaking
accomplishments might come of it! What medical organization will
be the first to test Pierre Delbet's claims?
PREVIOUS CHAPTER:
Chapter 16. Kidney
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Chapter 18. Some
Letters
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