Pauling how to live longer and feel better pdf

Topics linus pauling , how to live longer and feel better pdf Collection opensource Language English. Description: Details a simple and inexpensive way to extend life by twenty to thirty vital years through proper nutrition, the use of vitamins, and other methods. Google Books. There are no reviews yet. And, with all that, he still finds time to clearly summarize as he goes, and to include some personal thoughts on attaining world peace.

This is perhaps the strongest presentation ever written on the need for supplemental vitamins. The new edition benefits from added notes, an introduction outlining Pauling's career, and the welcome inclusion of cartoon illustrations previously dropped from the mass-market edition. There are many good reasons why a one-second Google search for Linus Pauling will bring up nearly a million responses. How to Live Longer and Feel Better is definitely one of the best. Andrew W. Any form of self-treatment or alternative health program necessarily must involve an individual's acceptance of some risk, and no one should assume otherwise.

Persons needing medical care should obtain it from a physician. Consult your doctor before making any health decision. This partnership brings together resources from the Corvallis School District, the Benton County Health Department, and about a dozen local farms. Focusing nutrition education around cancer prevention, the program encourages consumption of fresh produce.

Each week, selected families participate in a farm stand event located at their school garden where they choose fruit and vegetables for their Harvest Box. Here they also receive nutrition education materials that explain the health benefits of the foods they have chosen and have the option to have a nurse from the Linus Pauling Institute take weight and blood pressure measurements. Ten high school interns serve as the backbone of the project. They provide the support necessary to make farm stand events more than a place to pick up groceries.

Therefore, the Harvest Box Project serves a second purpose: to provide a work-and-learn experiential internship for high school students. Harvest Box containing peppers, tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, potatoes, salad greens, grapes and garlic. At the farm stand, high school interns are running the show. Some of the students wash, prepare and set up baskets of produce. Others take to cooking and serving samples of the recipe of the week in an outdoor kitchen.

Additionally, interns engage children attending in educational activities, giving parents the time to select their weekly produce with fewer distractions.

Through these weekly farm stand events, the high school students learn about sustainable farming, food systems, and community nutrition. In addition to acting as a source of nutrition information, Russo administers the program surveys to parents to gather feedback. Preliminary results from the surveys indicate that changes are happening. Families are trying Harvest Boxes recipes at home.

Stare was listed at this time as editor of Nutrition Reviews. Like the Cowan, Diehl, and Baker study, they showed a difference between the sub- jects given vitamin C and the control subjects in accor- dance with my argument for vitamin C, the difference tending to increase with the size of the dose of the vi- tamin administered.

We may ask why the physicians and authorities on nutrition have remained so lacking in enthusiasm about a substance that was reported four decades ago to de- crease the amount of illness with colds by 31 percent, when taken regularly in rather small daily amounts. I surmise that several factors have contributed to this lack of enthusiasm. In the search for a drug to combat a dis- ease the effort is usually made to find one that is percent effective.

I must say that I do not understand, however, why Cowan, Diehl, and Baker did not repeat their study with use of larger amounts of vitamin C per day. Also, there seems to have existed a feeling that the intake of vitamin C should be kept as small as possible, even though this vitamin is known to have extremely low toxicity.

This attitude is, of course, proper for drugs, substances not normally present in the human body and almost always rather highly toxic, but it does not apply to vitamin C. Another factor has probably been the lack of interest on the part of the drug companies in a natural substance that is available at a low price and cannot be patented.

This is a pity; for here is a substance that holds the possibility of eliminating the common cold from hu- man experience. An old friend of mine, Rend Dubos, pointed out in one of books that it is not the viruses and bacteria his we are exposed to that kill us something else kills us.

The Old Nutrition and the New When there is an epidemic, some people die and other people do not die. What is the difference between them?

It is this difference that kills. I believe that often it is too little vitamin C that permits some people to succumb.

The common cold, and influenza as well, are infec- tions by viruses that circulate, sometimes in epidemics, throughout the world. They rapidly die out, however, in a small, isolated population. If the incidence of colds and influenza could be decreased enough throughout the world as it might be by the use of vitamin C for pre- vention and therapy these diseases would disappear.

I foresee achievement of this goal, perhaps within a dec- ade or two, in some parts of the world. Some period of quarantine of travelers might be needed, so long as a major part of the world's people are poverty-stricken and especially subject to infectious diseases because of mal- nutrition, including lack of ascorbic acid in the proper amount.

To achieve this goal a change in the attitude of the public and of patients may be required. A person with a cold or the flu should feel that he or she should go into isolation in order not to spread the virus to other people, and social pressure should operate to help him or her to way as not to harm others.

A similar change in feeling about the "right" of people to spread their viruses and infect oth- ers, so long as they themselves are able to stagger about, would benefit the world.

After twenty years of research and public education in the new nutrition, I believe that I can detect some prog- ress in the attitudeof the medical profession toward the new and recommendations. Despite nutrition's findings the intransigence of official opinion, I see the attitude of practicing physicians toward ascorbic acid and the other vitamins undergoing significant change. It is being more widely recognized that the intake of vitamins, and of some nonessential nutritional factors as well, can be var- ied in such a way as to produce a significant improve- ment in general health and a decrease in the incidence and severity of disease.

Ultimately, it will be common knowledge that the op- timum daily intakes of vitamins are far larger than what can be had in food, even by selecting foods for their high vitamin content. The major reason argued for eating fruits and vegetables is to obtain vitamins.

The availability of vitamins does not mean that you should not include fruits and vegetables in your diet. It is true that for more than eighty years science-fiction writers have been writing about a world of the future in which people would not eat ordinary food but instead would swallow a tablet or two each day.

We have now gone part-way toward this goal in that the need to eat large amounts of fruits and vegetables in order to have enough vitamins to keep us alive has been eliminated. By taking a few vitamin tablets we can obtain not only the minimum requirement that may be furnished by the natural foods eaten in sufficient quantity but the optimum intake that puts and keeps us in the best of health.

We may ask how much further modern nutritional science and molecular biology might take us. The answer is that our nutritional needs can never be met by a few tablets per day. A rather large amount of fuel is required to pros ide the energy to keep us warm and to run the bio- chemical processes in our bodies that permit us to func- tion uid to work. Thai requirement comes to about Q kilocaiones ot food energy per day. To obtain this much food energy, about pound, dry weight, of starch or the 1.

A diet of this sort is available, as will be discussed in the next chapter, and it consists of much more than a few tablets. Proteins, Fats, Carbohydrates, and Water. Living organisms require daily intake of nutrients, sub- stances from outside the body that, ingested and assim- ilated in the tissues, permit growth and preserve good health, provide energy, and replace loss. Certain sub- stances are required in large amounts. These are the macronutrients; they are four in number: proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and water.

Other substances, the micro- nutrients, are required in small amounts: certain min- erals, the vitamins, and the essential fats and essential amino acids building blocks of protein. The latter are called essential because the organism does not manufac- ture them, although it manufactures other fats and amino acids. In this chapter, in a book otherwise concerned with one class of micronutrients, we consider the macronu- trients, taking them in the order in which they are listed above.

The human body contains tens of thousands of differ- ent proteins, which serve different purposes. Hair and fingernails of fibers of a protein called keratin; muscle is composed of fibers of myosin and actin.

An- other fibrous protein, collagen, strengthens the skin, blood vessels, bones, teeth, and the intercellular cement that holds the cells in various organs and tissues together. Certain proteins serve other special func- tions. Hemoglobin, for example, the red protein in the. Proteins are long chains of amino-acid residues. There are more than twenty different amino acids. The nature of the protein is determined by the sequence of these different amino acids in the chain.

Amino acids are rather small molecules, consisting of between ten and twenty- six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and one of the atoms is nitrogen. The molecule of adult hemoglobin contains four chains, two with residues and two with residues each. As might be expected for structural molecules, proteins are characterized by the arrangement of their component amino acids in the three dimensions of space as well as by the sequence of the residues in the chain.

The simplest, natural three-dimensional structure as- sumed by a chain of identical asymmetrical amino acids, bonded head to toe at the same angle, is the so-called alpha helix.

In hair, the keratin chains are coiled in the alpha helix, like a spring. In a globular protein such as hemoglobin or the digestive enzyme trypsin, there are straight segments, alpha-helix coils, but the chain folds back on itself to become nearly spherical. In silk, as another example, the chains are stretched out to nearly their maximum length. The amino-acid sequence for the same proteins in dif- ferent animals is different. All mammals have hemoglo- bin in the red cells of their blood, but the hemoglobin molecules are different in their amino-acid sequence.

Be- cause of the difference in the blood proteins and also the blood carbohydrates of different animalswe cannot safely transfuse blood from another species of animal into a human being. As Dr. When the food that we eat is digested in the stomach and intestines the protein molecules are broken down by the digestive enzymes into their component amino acids.

The protein molecules in the food from meat, fish, veg- etables, grains, cheese, and milk are so large that they cannot pass through the intestinal walls into the blood- stream, but the small molecules of the amino acids and of glucose from the breakdown of the long carbohydrate chains of starch can pass through.

The blood carries these small molecules to the tissues throughout the body. They enter the cells, and the amino acids are then reassembled into long chains with the sequences that are characteristic of human proteins, under the guidance of the molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid DNA in the nuclei of our tissue cells that determine our nature.

Our bodies are continually wearing out and being re- newed. For example, our red cells live only about one month. They are then broken down, and the hemoglobin molecules are split into amino acids. Some of the amino acids are used to make new protein molecules, but some are oxidized to water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen-con- taining urea, which is excreted in the urine.

Because some of the amino acids are used as fuel in this way, our bodies can keep in amino-acid balance usually called nitrogen balance only by adding some amino acids; that is, b eating some protein. These diseases cause many deaths in the over- populated and underdeveloped countries and some in the affluent countries. The amount of protein required for amino-acid balance for an adult is proportional to body weight. It is about. The Food and Nutrition Board recommends 30 percent larger amounts, 0.

Infants need about 1. Most adult Americans ingest two or three times the recommended amount of proteins. The excess not re- new protein molecules is burned, quired for building for energy, along with the fats and carbohydrates, and prob- ably no harm is done by the excess intake to people in reasonably good health. A high intake of protein means amount of urea must be excreted in the urine.

People with impaired kidney function, such as those with only one kidney or who have suffered damage from nephritis, can avert further kidney damage by lim- iting protein to the amino-acid-balance level. Care must be taken not to go below this level. Although all of the amino acids are present in the proteins in the human body, not all of them need to be pr in the food because most of them are manufactured by e body.

Those that must be obtained in the food, the "J essential amino acids, are histidine, leucine, isoleucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, trypto- phan, and valine. The amounts required for an adult young man range from 0.

These amounts are provided by a mixed diet in- cluding animal protein meat, fish, eggs but not by a veg- etarian diet, which may be especially low in lysine and methionine. It has a greasy feel, is insoluble in water, and is an important constituent of foods and of the human body.

Its chemical nature was discovered. I assume that he was not or he would not have lived so long. The fat,. Roman author Pliny the Elder mentions in his book on natural history that the Germans were making a soap solution by boiling fat with the ashes of plants potash. In the Swedish chemist K. Scheele discovered that a detergent solution contained not only soap, the potassium salt of a fatty acid, but also an oily, sweet- tasting, water-soluble liquid that we now call glycerine or glycerol.

Chevneul discovered that ordinary fats consist of glyc- erol with three molecules of a fatty acid attached. A representative fat is glyceryl tripalmitate; its atomic com- position is diagrammed this way:. Other saturated fats have a smaller or larger number of CH 2 groups in the hydro- carbon side chains. Unsaturated fats have fewer hydro- gen atoms; that is, they are not saturated with hydrogen. There are more unsaturated side chains in liquid fats oils than in solid fats.

The amount of triglycerides is nothing other than the amount of fat in the blood plasma. Fat is an important constituent of the diet as a source of metabolic energy. It also has value in helping to move the fat-soluble vitamins across the intestinal wall into the bloodstream.

In it was discovered that young rats show slow growth, kidney deterioration, and infertility on a diet containing only saturated fats. Between and different investigators discovered seven unsaturated fatty acids that are necessary, essential, in small amounts for normal growth and life for rats and other animals.

Pre- sumably human beings also require intake of these es- sential fatty acids. Only a few observations have been made on human beings on a very low fat diet; they showed an abnormal basal metabolism rate, increased incidence of infections, and a tendency to dermatitis. It is believed that a diet containing the usual amount of fat provides sufficient amounts of the essential fatty acids.

There is some evidence, however, that an increased in- take of two of them, linoleic acid and gamma-linolenic acid, may have protective value against atherosclerosis and cancer. In fact, there are no water molecules in these substances; instead, there are carbon atoms and one or two hydrogen atoms attached to them along with the oxygen atoms and hydroxyl groups OH.

Starch is the principal carbohydrate food. It is round and vegetables. An intake of g would in all fruits provide 50 percent of an average daily requirement of energy. Many fruits and some vege- tables also contain significant amounts of the simple sug- ars glucose and fructose, as well as the disaccharide sucrose, ordinary sugar, which contains both glucose and fructose.

When starch is digested by the enzymes in the saliva and gastric juice, it combines with water and breaks down to form the small molecules of glucose, which pass through the walls of the intestines into the bloodstream and are transported to the cells all over the body. There they are burned to provide the energy that we need to operate our biochemical mechanisms, to do work, and to keep warm. The glucose that is present in foods also enters the bloodstream and is handled in the same way.

Human beings and their predecessors have been accus- tomed to metabolizing about g of glucose mostly from starchy foods every day for millions of years. The situation with fructose is different from that with glucose.

Human beings have always ingested some fruc- tose, in the fruits and honey that were part of their diet. Until about two hundred years ago the average daily intake of fructose was quite small, only about 8 g. Then, as ordinary sugar sucrose from sugar beets and sugar- cane began to be generally available the daily intake of fructose rose tenfold, to about 75 g per day. The reason for this great increase in the intake of fruc- tose is that when sucrose is ingested it reacts with water.

Each g of sucrose gives 53 g of glucose and 53 g of fructose; that is why it is referred to as a disaccharide. In the United States we eat about 1 K pounds of sugar sucrose per year.

There is little doubt that this great intake of fructose, to which human beings have been subjected only during the last century, is the cause of many of our ills, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. Water is the fourth major nutrient.

It is required for life in the amount of about one liter 1 per day, partially. A larger intake of water, pref- erably about 31 more than 3 quarts per day, is needed for the best of health. A good habit is to drink a glass. Soft drinks provide water, but they are undesirable because of the sugar or the sugar substi- tutes that they contain.

Carbonated water, orange juice, and other fruit juices are good sources of water, as is. One reason for a high intake of water is that it leads to a high volume of urine; this reduces the burden on the kidneys, which excrete a dilute urine with less work than they do a concentrated urine.

That is especially im- portant for persons with impaired kidney function. Another reason is that with a high intake of water there is less chance that crystals of one kind or another will. Gout results from the for- mation of crystals of sodium urate in the joints and ten- dons, and pseudo-gout from the similar crystallization of calcium pyrophosphate dihydrate. Urinary calculi kid- ney stones involve the formation of masses of crystals held in a protein matrix. The crystals are calcium and magnesium phosphates and urates or, less commonly, cystine.

About 1 percent of people have a tendency to form these stones. The formation can be averted by keep- ing the water intake high, never allowing the urine vol- ume to drop. The amounts of these important constitu- ents are different in different foods, and wise to have it is a varied diet, one that appeals to you, and supplement to it with the important vitamins and minerals in order to get them in the optimum amounts.

The servings of meat and fish must be kept small in order to keep the total protein intake down to the rec- ommended amount, 0. Ovolactovegetarians, who accept eggs and milk but not meat and fish, can keep in good health by taking supplementary vitamins and minerals.

Strict vegetarians need to select their vegetable foods with care To insure that theyhave the proper intake of those vegetables that provide the essential amino acids that are present in only small amounts in most vegetable foods.

The intake of fat should be limited, but enough should be eaten to provide the essential fats. Fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts should be eaten in a satisfying variety and amount. Fruits and vegetables provide some protein and fat, large amounts of carbo- hydrates, and also vitamins, minerals, and other micro- nutrients. A high intake was needed in past centuries in order to provide the minimum amounts of these micro- nutrients, as well as carbohydrate for energy.

In the new era of modern nutrition the optimum intakes of vitamins, more than can conveniently be provided by fruits and vegetables, are available in supplements, as discussed throughout this book.

It is wise, nonetheless, to supple- ment the vitamin supplements with a good intake of fruits and vegetables Seeds and nuts are low in vitamins and hiyh in protein and fat as well as carbohydrate and total energy. A similar snack of peanuts provides kcal of energy, 7 g of protein, 14 g of fat, and 5 g of carbohydrate.

The amount of carbohydrate eaten should be kept down to the amount that permits the ingested fat to be burned rather than deposited in the body. You may have to limit your consumption of alcohol and of nuts and other snacks, as well as the size of your meals.

The intake of sucrose white sugar, brown sugar, raw sugar, honey, candy, sweet desserts should be kept low. Corn syrup consists of glucose, and it is an acceptable sweetener unless sucrose has been added to make it sweetercheck the label.

The obesity and atherosclerosis, the two most common nutritional afflictions arising from bad habits with respect to the macronutrients, that follow upon vi- olation of these simple rules are discussed in Chapter 6. Foods as the Source of Heat and Energy.

One of the characteristics of human beings is that they are able to do work. They also are able to keep warm in a cold environment. A source of energy is required for doing work and keeping warm. Many of the substances in our food that enter the bloodstream the fats and the amino acids as well as the carbohydrates are burned in the cells of our tissues and organs to provide the energy for various biochemical reactions, including those in our muscles that permit us to do physical work and those that generate the heat energy to keep us warm.

This process of burning is the enzyme-catalyzed combination of the fuel molecules with oxygen molecules that are distributed through the body by the blood. The hydrogen atoms burn to water, H 2 0, and the carbon atoms to carbon dioxide, C0 2 which is ,.

The nitrogen atoms form urea, H 4 N 2 CO, which is excreted in the urine. The average amount of food energy required by men XX to kilocalories kcal per day and for women lo M to 24 H. Young people require more and old people loss The quantity kcal is the average daily amount.

With these calculations in mind, we can understand that we need more food in the winter than in the summer, in cold climates than in warm climates, and that heavy physical work or strenuous exercise increases the need for food. The concept of food energy was discovered in by a young German physician, Julius Robert Mayer He was the ship's surgeon on a Dutch ship sailing to Java when he wondered why the sailors, who were doing just as much work every day, ate much less food in the Indian Ocean than in the North Sea, and why the hard-working sailors ate more than the officers.

He concluded that the food a person ingests provides a cer- tain amount of energy, which can be used either for heat or for work. At the same time the English physicist James Prescott Joule was making experiments reported in to determine the relation between work and heat.

These two thoughtful persons discovered the very important physical law called the conservation of energy. The energy values of a food can be determined by burning a weighed amount of the food and measuring the amount of heat given off.

It is convenient to give the values for a standard amount, grams g, or Vh ounces of the food. The energy values are kcal per g of fat, kcal per g of starch, and about kcal per g of protein. The values for the sugars are a little smaller than for starch: kcal per g for sucrose, lactose milk sugar , and maltose malt sugar, a di saccharide made from starch by action of an en- zyme , and kcal per g for glucose and fructose.

In the table on page 44 there are given values of the fractions of the energy provided by fat, protein, and car- bohydrate in several dietsthe average American diet, the diet recommended by the U. The third diet contains more fat and less carbohydrate than that of the Senate Committee. Present Dietary Intermediate 1. Senate Select Needs. To tein and giving kcal requires 58 g of that keep the protein intake down to this level requires the intake of meat and fish be limited.

Half a pound of allowing beefsteak provides more than 58 g of protein, for no other protein foods. One egg provides 6 g; one glass of milk 8 one slice of bread 3 g; one serving of g; baked beans 8 g; one serving of potatoes, green beans, cereal or other vegetable 2 to 6 g; a serving of breakfast percent 4 to 8 g.

Lamb, pork, and fish contain 15 to 20 protein, beef about 30 percent. The intake of meat and fish should be kept to about a quarter of a pound per by the day. Probably the greatest benefit of all offered recommended diet comes from decreasing the intake of. Much of meat in the diet WM interest in the value. After graduating from the University of Iowa, studying anthropology for three years at Harvard, and making two archaeological trips to Iceland, he began his Arctic research in He lived with the Eskimos for a year, learning their language and culture, and he con- cluded that it was possible to remain in reasonably good health on the Eskimo diet of meat alone, eaten as the Eskimos eat it.

By he had lived a total of nine years on a meat- 1. The longest period that he ate no food other than meat was nine months. He died at the age of eighty-two. Because of Stefansson's claim that it was possible to be healthy on a diet of meat only, a carefully planned experiment was carried out with Stefansson and another Arctic explorer, beginning in For one year the two men ate nothing but meat beef, lamb, veal, pork, chicken, both and lean portions, and also at times fat liver, kidney, brain, bacon, and bone marrow.

Stefans- son also ate some eggs, butter, and fish, when he had trouble obtaining meat while traveling. They drank no milk. They were in a hospital under ob- servation for the first six months and then resumed their usual activities but adhered to their diet. They reported that they had no craving for other foods.

They com- plained, however, that the boiled mutton was not so good as the musk ox, caribou, or mountain sheep described in Stefansson' s autobiography, Discover The diet contained about g of fat, g of protein, and only 5 to 10 g of carbohydrate per day. The high intake of animal fat did not seem to harm them Torrey and Montu, Their tolerance for glucose was low at the end of the year but became normal within two weeks on a mixed diet. Itremarkable that they did not develop vitamin- is.

Presum- ably fresh meat contains a minimum supply of vitamin C and other vitamins. Stefansson reported that three of the seventeenmembers of the Canadian Arctic 6- Expedition became scorbutic during the winter of These three had been eating some foods in a cache thathad been left by an earlier expedition.

They devel- oped scurvy, whereas the others, who ate only fresh meat, did not. I do not conclude that a meat diet is the best, even though fresh meat may alone provide the minimum amounts of all nutrients, with the fat providing most of the energy.

Vitamin supplements and a mixed diet, with a limited intake of sugar, lead to the best health. Stefansson' s experience has its relevance to public anxiety about fat in the diet. That anxiety was awakened in , when President Dwight David Eisenhower suf- fered a coronary occlusion.

Stefansson was moved to.