Dr Wallach – After graduating veterinarian school, I went to Africa for a couple of years and got to work with Marlin Perkins–the host from the old Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom TV show. I used a tranquilizer gun, tromp all over central and south Africa. After a couple of years Marlin sent me a telegram and invited me back to the state; he’d gotten a 7.5 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant was to study pollution, ecology and the environment. My job as the Wild Life veterinarian on the project was to do autopsies of animals that died of natural causes in big zoos around the United States. I was supposed to identify or find a species of animals that was ultra-sensitive to pollution. WE were going to use that animal; much like the coal miners used canaries. They’d take the canary down into the mine, and if Methane gas or Carbon Monoxide were to leak into the mine the canaries were more sensitive to these gases than the men and they would drop off the perch and die, long before the men were in danger of suffocating or blowing up. After twelve plus years of working on this project, I had don 17,500 autopsies on over 454 species of animals, plus 3000 human beings for comparison, and what I learned was that every animal and human being who dies of natural causes, dies of a nutritional deficiency disease. I got kind of excited about nutrition again and I wrote 75 scientific papers on the subject; wrote chapter for eight multi authored textbooks, and contributed a textbook myself; 1000 pages, 2000 illustrations. I worked through news releases at the big universities–20/20 did a segment on my research and it was published in 1700 newspapers around the world through the UPI and AP news wire services. With all that publicity and scientific exposure, I couldn’t get people who were in a position of authority, either in medical research or in politics, too concerned or interested in preventing and curing diseases in human beings with nutrition, just like we did in animals. Well, I got frustrated, so I went back to school in Portland, OR and became a physician and practiced there for twelve years as a general family practitioner. I sewed up chainsaw wounds, delivered babies, and actually used everything I had learned in veterinary nutrition on my human patients.
