Adelle Davis Vitamin C
'Let's Get Adel le Davis Right'
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May 20, 1973
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LOS ANGELES. You can't eat well and keep fit if you don't shop well. Adelle Davis, therefore, is very serious shopper; and shopping with her is an excellent way to find out what she thinks of what we eat. At this particular moment, however, in tiny grocery store south of Los Angeles, holding against the morning sun a thin, tubular instrument used to measure sugar levels, she looked more like a navigator than a nutritionist. "See this!" she exclaimed, as though she had ust sighted a new world. "The organic orange is 15 per cent sugar, while those"—pointing to a pile of nonorganic oranges—"are a vile 8 per cent. The greater the natural sugar, the more the Vitamin C." She insisted I take a slice of organic orange, and then eyed me intently, although she assuredly knew would like. it. "If it tastes a million times better than other oranges, you don't need an instrument it's real!"
Adelle Davis first teamed about vitamins in 1924; she talked about them so incessantly that fellow students at Purdue University in Indiana took to calling her Vitamin Davis. Today she is the spokesperson and chief showwoman for health foods, $1‐billion‐a‐year business catering through healthfood stores and supermarkets to a rapidly growing "organic nation" of health‐food devotees—which is one of the results of the awakening ecological consciousness. Her four "classic" books with their positive‐thinking titles—"Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit," "Let's Cook It Right," "Let's Get Well" and "Let's Have Healthy Children"—have sold more than 2.5 million copies in hard‐cover and almost seven million in paperback. New American Library recently paid $1‐million just for the paperback rights to "Let's Get Well."
Like Elijah, the Passover prophet, she is an unseen presence at the dinner table, advising us and admonishing us on every morsel we swallow. Readers worriedly examine their tongues for signs of "beefy" quality, "strawberry red" color or "mushroom button" taste buds—any of which conditions, according to Miss Davis, points to dangerous deficiencies in various vitamin B's. Then they rush out to buy wheat germ and beef liver because Miss Davis tells them to.
As a celebrity she is almost as much a regular on television talk shows as Johnny Carson. A crunchy granola breakfast cereal bearing her signature on the package is the fastest‐moving item in many health‐food stores — outselling even the fabled vitamin E. Thirty other such products are soon to follow—with personal profits, she says, going into a foundation for nutritional research. Her respectability is such that banks give away the books as promotional come‐ons. She's highly regarded in the highest circles; Julie Nixon Eisenhower confided to Dinah Shore on the latter's talk show last year, "I'm on an Adelle Davis diet. I think she's very good."
As her popularity has skyrocketed, criticism has also mounted from the medical‐scientific fraternity. Its members raise disturbing questions about her interpretations of the research she reports in her books. They worry that her followers will overdose themselves with vitamins and suggest that there is a strong element of superstition in her doctrine of "supernutrition." Yet one of her academic critics conceded: "She's really brought it to the attention of the American people that nutrition exists and that what we eat is of significance."
Like the late cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein and muscle‐maker Charles Atlas, Adelle Davis is an advertisement for what she recommends. She is sturdy, vigorous, even feisty woman of 69, with quick movements and a commanding voice, like that of a veteran stage actress. She's convincing, as an insurance man is convincing, and after all, she is selling a form of health insurance. She also slightly plump and highly opinionated. Her face is not without its lines, especially around her mouth, but her eyes are a bright, sky blue. "I used to have gray‐green eyes; they changed color during my psychoanalysis. But nobody will believe that."
As she settled in the car and rolled up the window to keep out a draft, she said she wanted stewing chicken to make a meal for her neighbors, all five of them ill with the flu. "But I don't want just any chicken. I want a chicken that was fed on the ground and doesn't taste of all those terrible chemicals."
I asked her if it could be said that she loves food. "Oh, definitely, definitely! I'm orally oriented, no question whatsoever!"
First stop was a tiny grocery which she favors because, over the years, she has found the "best fruits and vegetables" there. The owner, an elderly Japanese, did not have any stewing chickens but he offered Miss Davis a fryer. She shook her head. "Not enough flavor." However, she did buy organic cucumbers, lettuce, celery, celery roots and, course, organic oranges. At another store, also out of stewing chickens, she bought several varieties of nuts, as well as fertilized eggs. Then we continued our search at a supermarket, which Miss Davis entered with a determined step and sniff. "What percentage of the store's merchandise do you think is garbage and junk—by that, I mean, just isn't health‐building?" tefdre I could guess, she was already on her way to the meat counter. "We're selling fryers for stewing," said the butcher. Miss Davis did not even bother to explain her objections this
As we walked down the aisles, she passed judgments—"horrible," "no good at all," "vile"—on such diverse products as soft drinks, processed cheese and prepared baby foods. Ignoring a white bread, an all‐too‐obvious villain, she seized a rye. "No grain in the world is that color." Again the label: "'Caramel coloring.' That means dyed." The 'happy boxes of breakfast cereal made her mad: "If you really don't like your kids, feed them that stuff." The dairy products made her nostalgic and sad: "Yogurt was a wonderful food once, but they ruined it putting in sugar." Her over‐all judgment as we left the store: "Fifty per cent junk. At least."
"If you go into a school cafeteria," she continued in the car, "you have to have a strong heart to keep from having a heart attack." She recalled eating a school cafeteria near her home where the only bread was white bread, the vegetables were overcooked, the potatoes "processed, frozen, dried, who knows what. It was absolutely vile, just vile." Of course, she had sought out the man in charge. "He told me they couldn't even afford whole‐wheat flour, but you know what they had? Nine desserts! He said that's what the students want. Nobody cares, that's the problem, and parents don't know how bad the situation is. There are millions of kids today who have never tasted good food—fresh raw milk, eggs laid by hens raised on the ground and eating fresh food, fruits and vegetables grown soils high in humus and minerals, breads made from fresh whole grain. Those things taste many, many times better than what have in stores."
The last stop was a "ma and pa" health‐food store. Of health‐food stores in general, she said: "I don't approve of everything they do—some supplements may not be so well‐proportioned, some items may be a bit overpriced, but that's nothing compared to what the processed‐food and drug industries get away with. Health‐food store owners are, for the most part, fine, sincere people, who are making more of a contribution than doctors or medical schools or the food industry or anybody else I know of to helping prevent illness in the United States." The admiration was obviously mutual in this store. Seven copies of her books, left by other patrons, awaited her signature. She autographed them quickly.
She also answered a question about a food supplement, which reminded her of a joke: "What happens when you cross a jar of peanut butter with a donkey?" No one knew. "You either get a peanut butter with long ears or a jackass stuck to the roof of your mouth." The little group around her chuckled, but no one matched her own throaty laugh.
"By the way," she said, "you don't happen to have a stewing chicken?"
"Why, yes," replied the proprietor.
"Well, for crying out loud, I'll take two."
HEALTH‐FOOD stores are the meeting place for those two archetypes of South California, the little old lady in tennis shoes and the young, barefoot, bearded ex‐radical. They share diverge emotions. The first is fear: fear of disease and death, of pollution, of chemicals that have turned the family farm into a vast outdoor factory, of the 3,000 possible additives and the many processes that intervene between farm and supermarket. They have taken to heart the warning of Bruce McDuffie, the chemistry professor who made the original findings about mercury‐tainted fish: "It is hazardous to live in an industrialized society and be at the apex of the food chain." They are also suspicious of what they consider corporate greed and the medical profession's self‐righteousness. The young are motivated in their elaborate dietary rituals by a vision of natural "wholesomeness"; the old hope to find in vitamin pills a fountain of youth. For both an additional incentive suggested by Dr. Leo Lutwak, professor of medicine at U.C.L.A. and chief of endocrinology and nutrition for the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles: "We're living in a very tightly controlled society. People have few genuine options, and food one place where you have at least the illusion that environment."
Miss Davis captures these hopes and fears better than anyone else. She feels that we live in a culinary nightmare, in which disaster lurks in every bite. "Nutritional research," she has written, "like a modern star of Bethlehem, brings hope that sickness need not be a part of life." But it is supernutrition, not nutritional research, that she urges on her readers. Everything, not just ill health, rides on nutrition. Where the diet is good, she has declared, there is no crime; in a recent lecture she pointed out that the murderous Manson family clan of Southern California subsisted mainly on candy bars. And not only is Individual wellbeing affected, entire civilizations rise and fall on their diets. She has suggested that Germany defeated France in World War II because German black bread and beer were nutritionally superior to French white bread and wine. Ominously, she warns that the Russians eat much less of the illness‐breeding refined foods than do Americans.
"This nutrition consciousness had better grow or we're going under," she said, back in the dining room of her home in Palos Verdes, a wellto‐do community, with palmlined bridle paths, set on a promontory overlooking the Pacific. "We're watching the fall of Rome right now, very definitely, because Americans are getting more than half their calories from food with no nutrients. People are exhausted."
Adelle Davis herself rarely shows signs of exhaustion. On the road, she maintains a lecture schedule that reads like a Presidential campaign. At home, she plays tennis five times a week, for fun, not.to win. Every day that she's home, except in the brief winter, she swims nude ("Do you take a bath with your clothes one) in the untiled pool that divides the two wings of her sprawling modern house. On the day I visited her, she had already been up for five hours—since 5 A.M.—answering the piled remains of the mail that had rolled in during the previous day. She keeps up her energy by doing what she says we must all do, day in and day out: "Build health by meeting the body require
"It's been known for years and years that a person, preferably every day, must have a certain amount of protein, preferably on the liberal side, some essential unsaturated fatty acids, some 15 or more vitamins and 20 or 30 minerals. These must be had if health is to be maintained." And what is a food faddist? "Anyone who recommends a diet which does not meet all the body requirements — a fast, or something like the Stillman diet, where you'll drink loads of water, which washes nutrients out of the body, or the rice diet for high blood pressure. There's no faddy diet worse than that, and it was dreamed up by doctors."
This particular day she had begun with organic grapefruit,, two eggs, decaffeinated coffee and her famous "pepup" (composed of egg yolks, lecithin, vegetable oil, calcium lactate, yogurt or acidophilus culture, milk, yeast fortified with calcium and magnesium, soy flour, kelp, vanilla or cinnamon or nutmeg, frozen undiluted orange juice, magnesium oxide — all whipped, of course).
Both she and her husband eat plenty of eggs, a source of cholesterol, but she said "Our cholesterol levels are down around 170; doctors don't start getting worried until it gets up around 250—and that happens only when the diet is inadequate and refined." For lunch, she planned a salad and yogurt. For an 'afternoon snack, yogurt or milk or fruit. Avoiding heavy evening meals, she keeps dinners "skimpy" perhaps only milk, soup or cottage cheese with yet another salad, fruit and homemade bread. This particular evening, it was going to be a stew. In general, she cooks meats at relatively low temperatures "to keep the juices
But that's not all. Miss Davis takes at least nine vitamins and mineral supplements a day. She keeps the tablets handy, all separated in a setup that looks like a plastic fish‐tackle box. These supplethents provide her with vitamin A (25,000 units), various B's, C, D, E, iodine, calcium, potassium chloride, magnesium and other trace elements. Under stress, she increases her intake of pantothenic acid (a B vitamin) and pops extra vitamin C.
Why, I asked, are so many other people so willing to follow her example and do what she says. "People are sick of being sick," she replied. "Also, young people who have hurt themselves with drugs are swinging away from drugs as an impure, unwholesome thing, back to the wholesomeness of whole food."
Adelle Davis's starting premise is the memory of the food on the family farm in Indiana —the day began with "high protein breakfasts" of hot cereals, steaks, ham and eggs, huge platters of sausage or fried chicken with country gravy, a large pitcher of milk. "I learned to cook before I could read," she said. "I carried around a cookbook, begging people to read the recipes to me."
She was the last of five girls. Her mother died when she was 17 months old. "You could say my interest in nutrition began when I was 10 days old. I was taken away from my mother, who had had a stroke and paralysis, and wasn't fed for several days, for the simple reason that there was a blizzard and bottles weren't sold in our small town." Miss Davis feels she has some understanding of her unconscious motivations after several painful years of Freudian, Jungian and Reichian therapy in the nineteenfifties. "The best value I ever got for my money," she declared. "Before, my interest in nutrition was neurotic. Every patient was me, and was mother, trying to get him healthy. I spent all my time making up for the mother didn't have. Now my interest in nutrition is realistic—people need to have nutrition in
HER own search for nutrition information began at Purdue, the University of Wisconsin and Berkeley, where she majored in dietetics. Then she became a dietitian at Bellevue Hospital in New York,. supervised nutrition in the Yonkers, N. Y., public schools and in 1931 became a consulting nutritionist, working for three New York City obstetricians. She wrote a pamphlet for a product called "Vitamilk" and then two little books, "Optimum Health" and "You Can Stay Well." She also wrote a nutrition textbook for Macmillan. Later in the thirties, she moved to California, married (and was subsequently divorced) and obtained a master's degree in biochemistry at the University of Southern California. Apparently, it was in the rich humus of Southern California that her ideas began to grow. Mrs. Gladys Lindberg, for instance, who with her husband owns eight booming health‐food supermarkets in Southern California, recalls that when they first met in the late nineteenthirties, Miss Davis was skeptical of such later dogma as the superiority of raw, certified milk over pasteurized milk and of organic gardening. But experiments with cats, conducted by a local doctor, convinced Miss Davis of the value of the former, grazing preferences helped convince her of the latter.
The first of her best‐sellers, the cookbook "Let's Cook It Right," appeared in 1947. The other books followed over the next 20 years, with revisions along the way. Miss Davis is quick to point out that she is an "interpreter," not a researcher. "I think of myself as a newspaper reporter, who goes out to libraries and gathers information from hundreds of journals, which most people can't understand, and I write it so that people can understand. I don't make the news, so I don't get credit for it." She consults the scientific literature in the biochemical libraries at U.C.L.A., sometimes reading only the abstracts, or summaries, of the articles. Her references for "Let's Get Well" totaled almost 2,500, and she is upset that Harcourt Brace eliminated the 2,000 references from the 1972 revision of "Let's Have Healthy Chil
To drive home her points, Miss Davis prefers testimonials and anecdotes to scientific analyses, employing a style that must owe something to her enrollment in the nowdefunct New York School of Creative Writing in the late nineteen‐twenties:
"You would scarcely have held back tears had you listened to a mother telling me about her only son, a handsome college athlete with the highest scholastic rating in his class. After grueling examinations and inhuman stress, he lay in a stupor, seemingly unable to hear or talk, tearing off his clothes, and urinating and defecating where he lay." After the youth took massive doses of niacinamide, a therapy developed by a highly controversial Canadian physician for schizophrenia, his health, Miss Davis wrote, was restored and he was soon "launched on a successful ca
Some people I encountered in researching this article gave personal testimony in similar tones. One woman said her doctor had given her only two weeks to live because she had an enlarged heart, but that she had not only gone on living but had bloomed on an Adelle Davis diet. Other testimonials were less dramatic. A woman who had suffered from diarrhea for two years as a result, she said, of heavy antibiotic treatment had been cured only when she followed Miss Davis's recommendation and ate yogurt. A Harvard professor who kept closely to Miss Davis's regimen for six months said: "The only real physiological change I noticed was that my skin and tongue became smoother."
Despite such relentless emphasis on nutrition, Adelle is resentful "that a lot of people think I'm nothing but nutrition." Actually, she has plenty of hobbies—from singing in a church choral group, to candle ‐making, plastic ‐molding and what could be called "organic painting," a kind of decoration on glass using gelatin and food coloring. In the nineteen‐fifties she even took LSD several times, an experiment which she recalls as being "a marvelous deeply religious experience," but she insists that it was part of a medical study, that a doctor was present every moment and that it took place a relatively long time ago "in the days when it was very, very legal." She would not repeat the experiment ("at the time, no one thought about chromosome damage") and she disapproves of the LSD mania of the past decade: "The last thing that should have ever happened was that
MISS Davis has two adopted children from her first.marriage — George, 26, who is studying photography in San Francisco, and Barbara, 22, who works in a ski shop in Sun Valley, Idaho. In 1960, she was married a second time, to Frank Sieglinger, an affable, ruddy‐complexioned retired accountant who originally consulted her as a patient and now goes along amiably with his wife's ideas on food, though he sometimes nips out for a "health‐building doughnut."
He and Miss Davis designed their present home, which stands on a site where Miss Davis once maintained a large fruit and vegetable garden. (The old house, next door, has been sold off.) "I was so proud of the compost heaps," she said. "They looked like plates of spaghetti when you dug into them, there were so many worms crisscrossing each other." Obviously nostalgic, she is having her front lawn ripped up and humus imported from a nearby mushroom farm in order to get back to gardening.
Adelle Davis has an odd relationship with doctors and scientists. At times, she is almost worshipful. "Let's Get Well" is "dedicated to the hundreds of wonderful doctors whose research made this book possible." But criticism from just such people has recently escalated sharply. In protesting a speech she gave and an award she received at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Alumni Association at the University of California at Berkeley recently, several dozen faculty members signed a petition calling her appearance "a catastrophe" and claiming that the apparent official stamp of approval Would make the university "the laughingstock of the scientific community."
It is true that many leading nutritionists share Miss Davis's views about a number of things.. They are worried, for example, about poor nutrition and bad eating habits in this country—Prof. George Briggs of the University of California at Berkeley suggests that in this country more than a third of all chronic illnesses—which account for 83 per cent of adult male deaths—are dietrelated.
Many nutritionists also believe with her that obstetricians have kept women's weights too low during pregnancy, that old‐fashioned babyformulas are the best and thatmany medical‐school curriculums have ignored nutrition.They are also alarmed by themajor role sugar plays in our diets and by the widespreaduse of pesticides, chemicals and preservatives. "We've gone far too far in that regard," said Dr. Edward Rynearson, professor emeritus of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, who is, nevertheless, one of Miss Davis's strongest critics. As a group, nutritionists are also divided on such crucial questions as the connection between dietary cholesterol and the cholestorol found in the bloodstream and linked to heart attacks.
Yet all that does not prevent many of the experts from viewing Adelle's work with dismay. Although she has raised many valid questions about what and how we eat, the emphasis of her message is on. supernutrition, which makes it prescriptive, rather than descriptive — and that, her critics feel, is its weakness.
"The only deficiencies that can be cured by taking vitamins are those caused by vitamin deficiencies," says Dr. Roslyn Alfin‐Slater, professor of nutrition at U.C.L.A. "But people want miracles. Some people think if you follow supernutrition, you can be cured for the rest of your life of all ailments and live to a very old age. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that heart attacks can be prevented by excess vitamins. Life just isn't that simple."
"We have so many areas of agreement," mused Dr. Rynearson, who is writing a book, partly about Miss Davis and tentatively entitled "Americans Prefer Nonsense to Sense." "If only we could get Adelle and some of these other writers to quit overemphasizing the nonsense," he said. "A fair amount of what she writes, especially in her earlier work, is quite correct. If you marry a woman who will grind whole wheat and bake bread out of it, it will be a wonderful thing. But for the millions who don't, then the enrichment of white bread has been important."
I asked Miss Davis about a nutrition meeting last year at which she became the target of questioning so hostile as to suggest that some members of the medical establishment might feel unkindly toward an "outsider" who has successfully invaded their professional territory. "I'm a mother figure," she replied, as though it would be perfectly obvious to anybody, "and many people hate their mothers as much as they love them. So I get it." Is that the only reason? "You have to remember that I'm bucking a multibillion ‐dollar food‐processing industry. It's impossible not to be criticized if you're trying to practice humanitarian nutrition. The first question you have to ask is who is paying for the research of these people who
A bona fide member of the medical establishment is Dr. Frederick Stare, chairman of the department of nutrition at Harvard's School of Public Health. (About the only ground he shares with Miss Davis is the tennis court; he too plays five times a week.) "Come by for a peanut‐butter sandwich and a glass of milk," he said on the phone. "You know that combination is an excellent source of nutrition."
The sandwich he offered me the next week was on—white bread. "I myself prefer dark breads," he said, "like dark ryes, for taste and texture, but this is what my wife bought this week. As to your health or mine, it doesn't make a bit of difference. Bread is a minor part of our diets. It's a convenient handle to use for eating meats, and you couldn't very well spread peanut ' butter on your fingers." He scoffed at the idea that there are widespread vitamin deficiencies in this country. "The most prevalent sign of malnutrition is tooth decay. Obesity is the second major form and one that is a strong component in coronary heart disease."
And what of the organic nation's favorite foods — yogurt, wheat germ, brewer's yeast? "All very good foods. Eat them if you like them. But Americans are pretty well fed. They'd be better fed if they ate less and exercised more." Organic foods? He went into another office and returned with a copy of testimony he had delivered in New York City: "We know of no further research that has demonstrated any such slight nutritional advantage of organically fertilized food over food grown with chemical fertilizers. Inorganic compounds of nitrates, phosphates and potassium are what principally fertilize plants, and these compounds are identical whether they in chemical fertilizers or are formed by the action of bacteria in composts or manures."
Because of the position he has taken in many public statements, Dr. Stare is more closely, identified with the processed‐food industry than many of the other nutritionists. More "consumer‐oriented," for example, is Berkeley's Professor Briggs, who says, "I know older people who eat better because of Adelle Davis, and that's a very good thing. There are a lot of good quotes in her books, but also a lot of misquotes and they are not sound nutrition literature; her recommendations for supernutrition are just not scientifically established."
MEANWHILE, critics of supernutrition doctrine point out, the taking of vitamin supplements in heavy dosages is an expensive practice not unlike a drug habit, since it can delude people into thinking they are "beating" an ailment which in fact demands specific, and perhaps more expensive, medical care. "I think most physicians have seen at least one or two patients in the last couple of years who have gotten into difficulties with overdosages," said U.C.L.A.'s Leo Lutwak. He pulled several bottles of vitamin pills from his desk. "These are some of the vitamins that I got from a woman who came to see me last spring." The patient, he said, a vigorous woman in her mid60's, had started reading Adelle Davis when she became afraid of growing old. She came to Dr. Lutwak complaining of pains in her bones and loss of hair. "I watched with amazement as she pulled one bottle after another—more than 30 altogether—out of her shopping bag." The woman, in Dr. Lutwak's opinion, was suffering from vitamin toxicity: too much A had caused the hair loss, and the bone pains were symptoms of D overdose, which causes demineralization of the bones, in turn increasing the danger
Today, however, it is vitamin C that is at the top of the sales charts. C, Miss Davis suggests, cures not only the common cold but "every form of injury," as well as anxiety. According to Dr. Lutwak, vitamin C "may or may not do something for the cold. There's no real proof that it does. We do know that it has lots of side effects—diuretic to the kidneys, it can form crystals in the urine, and it also causes diarrhea, especially in chil dren." He considers many of the testimonials about vitamin "cures" suspect: "The human is a very varied animal genetically and a very psychosomatic animal. Miraculous cures can be effected when nothing at all is done."
Doctors object strenuously to Miss Davis's strong pitch for raw certified milk and her claims that pasteurization destroys "hormones, enzymes and steroids." (Certified milk, which can be pasteurized or raw, is produced in dairies operating under the regulations of an authorized medical milk commission.) Both scientists and doctors argue that the nutritional loss in pasteurization is minimal, while its advantages in preventing the spread of tuberculosis or undulant fever are great. "I wouldn't drink any raw milk unless I knew the cow personally," said U.C.L.A.'s Dr. Min
There is also doubt about Miss Davis's interpretations of her impressive scientific sources. "Any physician or dietician," Dr. Rynearson maintained, "will find 'Let's Get Well' loaded with inaccuracies, misquotations and unsubstantiated statements."
Dr.‐Russell Randall, professor of medicine and chief of the division of renal diseases at the Medical College of Virginia, states flatly that Adelle's chapter on the kidney in "Let's Get Well" (in which he is cited) is "fraught with errors and inaccurate statements that are extremely dangerous and even potentially lethal, such as the suggestion that patients with nephrosis take potassium chloride." Rona Karney, a doctoral student in biochemistry at U.C.L.A., who has reviewed the sources for two other chapters in the same book, considers Miss Davis's interpretations often careless. and highly questionable. Extreme alcoholics in one study, Miss Karney reports, become "social drinkers" in the Davis text; similarly, two elderly cancer patients become "human volunteers " A study showing that the removal of a certain nutrient from the diet of rats can turn their fur gray is interpreted by Miss Davis, according to Miss Karney, as indicating that humans worried by graying hair should stuff themselves with the nutrient—without so much as a word about genetic factors in
Then there is what must be known as the Great Fertile Egg Controversy. Miss Davis recommends the purchase of fertilized eggs, which contain tiny chicken embryos (and which might cost 50 cents a dozen more than unfertilized eggs) because they are "rich in hormones which commercial eggs lack." In a panel discussion in Glamour magazine in 1971, she elaborated: "The organic eggs are supposed to have more vitamin B‐12 and to have quite different hormonal make‐ups." At this, Dr. Lutwak, a fellow panelist, exploded: "Chicken hormones! What kind of hormones do chickens produce that the mammals require? Chicken hormones are probably treated as toxic substances in the human body." More recently, George Briggs has suggested that any slight nutritional superiority the fertile eggs might enjoy is not worth the extra
When I inquired about this, Miss Davis answered that a couple of studies had been made, but added: "It's true that there hasn't been enough research done in this area—at all. But I do remember that once read an article in Reader's Digest by a professor at Yale, writing on something entirely different from nutrition, who made that point about the nutritional superiority of fertile eggs."
IASKED her if she was still as excited about vitamins as she was 50 years ago when she became Vitamin Davis. "I'm excited about the possibilities of really building good health," she replied promptly. "The answers are there."
Miss Davis herself insisted on pointing out one of the major limitations of supernutrition. As we drove along a bluff overlooking the Pacific, we were talking about a nutritionist who had died in his mid‐70's.
"You know," she said, "people in nutrition do get the idea that they are going to live to‐be 150. And they never do." That reminded her of J. I. Rodale, the popularizer of organic gardening, who died in 1971. "I had the craziest letter," she said, "from some man saying that Rodale had ruined the entire healthfood movement by dying." She laughed. "I don't know what Fm supposed to do about it if he did."
"People are probably depending upon you to live forever," I said.
She laughed again. There was an awkward moment. Then she said, with real conviction, "Well, I sure as hell trust I won't die of pneumonia!"
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/20/archives/supernutritionist-lets-get-adelle-davis-right-adelle-davis.html
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