Re: Who is your favourite nutrition guru?

Carl Pfeiffer.

When I knew him, he was the founder and chief poobah of the Brain Bio Center, in Princeton (actually Skillman), NJ, where he'd set up an incredible laboratory of very state-of-the-art equipment, with which he made major contributions to biochemistry, and wrote _Mental and Elemental Nutrients_, _Zinc and Other Trace Elements_, and many, more specialized, books and articles on the brain and how various environmental conditions (including, but not limited to, diet) affected it and caused or cured problems, such as the dozen-or-more kinds of headaches, the half-dozen biochemical profiles of schizophrenia, previously unknown effects of trace elements and their interactions, unknown blood constituents, and so on.

He was often regarded as connected with the "orthomolecular" school, though at its cutting edge: doing his own thing, rather than following the others. He admired their early leaders.

He had two doctorates and had been the chief research pharmacologist of the U.S. Navy for twenty or thirty years. His wife, too, had a doctorate (in pharmacology, I think), and worked together with him.

He did me a special favor. Knowing I wanted the full battery of tests his lab could run (mass spectroscopy, electrophoresis, etc.: things now much less exotic than they were then) on my hair, blood, feces, urine; but that I was strapped for cash, he invited me to come over on a quiet weekend to help him paint a wall of the building! While we worked, we discussed the "Krebs cycle" and "Embden-Meyerhoff pathway", and he told me (to my surprise) that though many people studied them, few mastered them, yet they were the "keys to everything" (whatever that meant!). I'm still learning, bit by bit (30 years later), what he had in mind. In fact, it was only recently that I discovered there was more (much more!) to metabolism.

But I've never found anything he was wrong about, except _maybe_ (I emphasize maybe) what the ideal dietary sodium/potassium ratio ought to be. He was very pro-potassium, perhaps too much. On the other hand, it might just have been me. I eliminated as much sodium as I could from my diet, including not only added salt and meats, but even onions, celery, etc. Then one hot day in New Orleans, I took a bit of salt on a hunch and discovered I felt much better within seconds. Hyponatremia! And I thought it couldn't happen....


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Marshall Price of Miami
Known to Yahoo as d021317c
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