eats maize gets pellagra. Pellagra was found to be caused by food poisoning through spoiled maize. The
poison involved has been identified as T2-toxine and is known to disturb niacin metabolism, thus
producing pellagra. Besides the great importance given to taking extra niacin today, this substance, just
like vitamin D, is not really a vitamin at all since it can be produced by the body.
Nobody Knows How Much You Need...
Governments and international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO)
frequently release figures that propose a Daily Ratio of Allowance (DRA) for every vitamin that you
supposedly need to stay healthy. The nutritional experts in different countries however, have different
opinions about how much of each vitamin your body must have. An American, for example, is supposed
to take at least 60mg of vitamin C, whereas a British citizen is considered better off taking only 30mg. A
Frenchman will only remain healthy if he consumes 80mg of this vitamin, whereas Italians are told they
need 45mg. These figures are “adjusted” every few years, although our bodies’ basic nutritional
requirements have not changed over the past several thousand years.
Nobody really knows how many vitamins are good for us because the requirement, physical
constitution and absorption rate for vitamins differ from person to person. Vitamins need to be digested
before they can be made available to the cells and tissues. If a person’s digestive ability (AGNI) has
diminished due to congestion of liver bile ducts with intrahepatic stones (see my book The Amazing Liver
and Gallbladder Cleanse), for example, foods and also vitamins can no longer be digested properly.
When scientists calculate our vitamin requirements, they usually add a 50 percent “safety factor” to the
original ratios of allowance to make certain that we eat enough of them. And because vitamin extraction
from food during the digestive process is so much less than 100 percent, these figures are increased one
more time. The official methods of analyzing the amount of vitamins we require are inadequate because
we simply do not know how much of each vitamin the human body needs. The thin, hyper-metabolic Vata
body type, for example, may have a far greater need for vitamin B-6 than the heavier-set, hypo-metabolic
Kapha type who can never really run out of it.
It is also not known how much of each vitamin is contained in a banana, an apple or a piece of
cauliflower. Vitamin contents fluctuate greatly with the size of the fruits, their maturity, the condition of
the soil, country of origin, time of harvesting, and the use of pesticides. How many of the vitamins
contained in these foods actually end up in our blood depends on our digestive ability and body type. In
other words, the amount of any vitamin you take is not necessarily the amount that your body ends up
absorbing and ultimately putting to use. Complicating the absorption issue is the fact that your body's
ability to absorb nutrients is not necessarily the same from one day to the next. All this makes official
nutritional figures highly unreliable and speculative.
The vitamin theories originate in the assumption that the human physiology has stores of vitamins that
must always be full in order to saturate the tissues of the body. This assumption, however, has never been
proven by scientific research. While calculating human vitamin requirements, nutritional science assumes
that the body’s metabolic processes occur at a top speed, which would require plenty of vitamins. Our
bodies, however, are not machines that run at top capacity day and night. Most of us are not marathon
runners, and even they don’t run for 24 hours day after day, month after month, and year after year.
It is very questionable whether the saturation of our body tissues with vitamins is even desirable. We
need a certain amount of fatty tissue in our body, but this does not mean we should all be excessively
filled with fat. Oxygen, too, is considered vital for all our body’s functioning, yet if its concentration in
the air is too high it can cause serious bodily harm. Why should vitamins be an exception? And anyway,
vitamin deficiency is...