Photo by Robert Burroughs

“I would describe this fellow as a typical example of the new vitamin huckster.”

Surely one of the grimmest visions of the future is that which sees us all eventually no longer eating food, but instead consuming capsules that will supply us with the precise amount of necessary nutrients. Those members of the gourmet ice cream generation who scoff that it'll never happen obviously haven't heard of Michael Colgan and his Carlsbad nutritional research institute, where a pill-popping future is taking shape today.

Colgan hasn’t actually journeyed all the way to some dietary brave new world. He still cats. But he doesn’t really trust what he eats to supply most of his body’s needs — thus he also ingests twenty to forty pills daily, and he thinks virtually everyone who wants to live a long and healthy life must follow his example. He’s willing to help them (for a fee) by supplying them with a combination of megavitamins and minerals and various other nutritional substances specifically tailored to each client. Colgan’s fee, by the way, is $1200 for ordinary mortals, $1600 for athletes.

Michael Colgan looks more like a sports coach than a scientific researcher.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

Despite the high price and the low appeal of what Colgan gives his clients for that money (i.e., buckets full of pills they must consume with monastic discipline), the institute seems to be thriving. Colgan estimates he and his staff are overseeing some 600 clients who primarily come from three strata of society: athletes, show business entertainers, and business executives. At the moment, Colgan’s Institute of Nutritional Science is housed within a brand-new office building across the road from Palomar Airport in Carlsbad. However, Colgan is about to open a branch office in the Beverly Sunset Medical Building in Los Angeles, and he claims he’s discussing plans for still other such centers in New York City, London, and Tulsa (the home of some of his financial backers). He says all these branches will free up his San Diego County center for its primary mission: further research on nutrition, which Colgan hopes will refine even more precisely what his daily pills should contain.

Colgan looks more like a sports coach than a scientific researcher. He’s forty-five but he could easily pass for younger; his head of thick dark hair subtracts some of the years, and his body belies more of them. It’s the hard, muscled body of one who spends a lot of time weightlifting or long-distance running, both activities to which Colgan only turned after reaching the age of forty. Today he still seems tickled to find himself a middle-aged former engineer with a physique most twenty-year-olds would admire. He’s not averse to strutting through his offices in little more than running shorts and a sheen of silvery sweat.

Dr. Evelyn Whitlock: “I’ve proved to myself through the practice of nutrition that it’s valuable.”

Photo by Robert Burroughs

His engineering background is the other odd note in Colgan’s personal history. Born and raised in Britain, Colgan moved to New Zealand at an early age, got a degree as a structural engineer, and soon found himself building bridges for the New Zealand Ministry of Works. His supervisors there encouraged him to get his doctorate, but Colgan says when he returned to the University of Auckland he found himself posing such questions as, “Why do people want to build bridges? Why do they want to go from one place to another? I came to agree with Ivan Illich that roads only create distances,” he says. Those sorts of reflections kindled his interest in human motivation and psychology, and Colgan continues. ‘‘Then I realized that this organism [the body], this thing we’ve got as a vehicle which carries human consciousness, is the most superbly designed piece of engineering in the universe. And I wanted to know a lot more about how it worked, how to maintain and how to repair it.” He finally obtained his Fh.D. in the field of physiological psychology, writing his dissertation on the heart’s control mechanism.

The doctorate led him to a position as an administrator of a clinic run by the university’s psychology department. This clinic welcomed not only people with psychological and behavioral problems, but also physiological ones as well, and it was here that Colgan first turned his attention to the study of nutrition, a subject in which he had previously shown little interest. (‘‘I used to think if I hadn’t had twelve ounces of red meat a day that I was starved.”) But he says one of the bright young medical interns on the clinic staff mentioned one day that the trouble with most of the clinic’s patients was that they were malnourished — that is, they manifested subtle symptoms such as recurrent diarrhea or tongue and skin changes, which, pieced together, hinted at nutritional deficiencies. This remark tantalized Colgan, and he says his first impulse was to try to improve the patient's diets. But he says he and his colleagues discovered that most of the patients already were eating “the mythical good mixed diet.’’ Colgan then resolved to take a closer look at foods that are cornerstones of that diet — and what he found revolutionized his thinking.

Colgan himself designed all the office furnishings for the Carlsbad center.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

To check the nutritional content of raw, fresh foods, Colgan says he and his assistants purchased almost 200 different types of foods from a variety of suppliers, then analyzed their vitamin and mineral contents in one of the university’s laboratories. Colgan says that to his astonishment he discovered those contents often diverged widely from what they should have been, according to standardized nutrition tables. One-hundred-gram samples of raw carrots, for example, contained from seventy “international units’’ (IUs) up to 18,500 IUs of vitamin A. Since the U.S. government’s recommended daily allowance for vitamin A is 5000 IUs, Colgan points out this means someone eating a carrot or two could get either more than enough or far too little vitamin A — depending on the carrots.

Colgan says his team at the clinic found similar variation in almost every other food they checked. Standard amounts of calf liver contained from 470 to 41,200 IUs of vitamin A. Certain samples of stone-ground whole wheat flour contained more than ten times as much vitamin E as other samples. When Colgan purchased from a local supermarket oranges that “looked, smelled, and tasted perfectly normal,” he say he found those oranges nonetheless contained no vitamin C at all — probably as a result of being stored for a long time. (In contrast, Colgan says other oranges tested on the day of being picked contained 180 milligrams of vitamin C per orange, three times the recommended allowance for adults.)

He learned that the mineral content of most foods varies even more dramatically. Colgan says this is because some soils around the world lack certain minerals naturally, while others have been depleted of them through cultivation. Yet Colgan says farmers by and large only replace those few minerals (such as phosphorus, potassium, and nitrates) crucial to crop growth; other minerals vital to human health are ignored. As an example, he cites selenium. Only recently have medical authorities recognized that selenium deficiency can cause a form of human heart disease. However, the selemium content in soils around the United States varies by a factor of 200, with the result being that a kilogram of ordinary wheat can contain anything from fifty micrograms to 800 micrograms of the mineral. (The National Academy of Sciences suggests that most people consume from fifty to 200 micrograms of selenium daily.)

So how are we to rely upon our comestibles to give us our daily nutritional requirements? Colgan’s worry over this question increased in light of the fact most people don’t just eat raw, fresh foods, but processed ones that are far more likely to suffer nutritional depletion. He cites, for example, the work of researcher Henry Schroeder, whose study of 730 common foods was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1971. That study found that canning of peas and beans destroys more than three-quarters of their vitamin B* and B6. Canning of tomatoes takes out eighty percent of the zinc naturally present in the tomatoes. While freezing is a slightly better preservative process, it still destroys seventy percent of the vitamin Bs in meat.

All these indications led Colgan to reject the nutritional establishment’s reassuring message that all we have to do is eat every day from the four food groups. Even if our foods all contained exactly what the textbooks say they do, Colgan questions how many Americans in fact eat balanced diets, defined by the nutritional establishment as two to four daily servings of dairy products (such as a glass of milk), four servings of grains or grain products, two servings of protein, and four servings of fruits and vegetables. The U.S. government itself has documented widespread nutritional deficiencies in Americans regardless of income level, Colgan points out. In one three-year study concluded in 1974, for example, nine women out of every ten lacked sufficient iron in their diets, and half of the women were deficient in calcium. In another government survey, one in three Southern Californians were found to be deficient in vitamin B2 (found in natural form in milk and eggs).

Confronted with this kind of information and his own findings about the nutritional content of food, Colgan began providing nutritional supplements to the clients of the clinic in New Zealand. From the beginning, he supplied them with more than the conservative doses traditionally recommended by nutritionists. In fact Colgan sneers at the U.S. government’s official recommended daily allowance guidelines as being a joke. Any such blanket recommendation assumes that everyone’s nutritional needs are fairly similar, but Colgan claims that his own research and hundreds of other studies indicate just the opposite.

To take just one example, he says when he measured the urine of patients and athletes who were receiving supplemental vitamin C, he discovered that although some people did excrete a fraction of the supplementary amount, others could take 5000 milligrams of the vitamin (almost a hundred times the recommended daily allowance) and excrete almost none at all. A person’s needs for other vitamins, minerals, and amino acids depends, Colgan believes, largely upon the person’s unique biochemical makeup — a conclusion he says is based on hundreds of research papers.

Furthermore, he adds that the differences in each of our nutritional requirements are exacerbated by factors outside simple heredity — factors such as diet, smoking, pollution, exercise, age, and other variables. Here he also cites numerous studies done by other researchers. For instance he refers to one study which showed that anyone eating diets high in saturated fats may increase their need for vitamin Bb as much as fivefold — because the body uses B6 to maintain normal fat metabolism. To consider one other example, Colgan cites a 1970 study which showed that smoking tobacco destroys vitamin C, which is required by the body’s white cells to fight against disease. That same study indicated that vitamin C supplementation restores the immune-systems function. Given these sorts of findings, and given the levels of toxic pollutants in our food and environment, Colgan has concluded that the nutritional needs of an American today “no longer bear any relation to the standards of nutrients required in a benign environment, or nutrients required simply to prevent certain deficiency diseases.”

And yet the government’s recommended daily allowance is based on the notion of preventing deficiency diseases, a notion with which Colgan would quarrel even if he didn’t believe that environment and lifestyle can increase one’s nutritional requirements. He thinks there’s a difference between, say, getting the bare minimum of vitamin C necessary to avoid scurvy and getting the amount necessary to promote optimum health. In the field of animal nutrition (which Colgan says is far more advanced than human nutrition), he says one often finds that the difference between the two requirements — avoiding disease and getting optimum performance — is often as high as fortyfold.

Colgan maintains that the major m reason vitamin supplementation has been controversial is that many people who have studied various supplements have looked at one nutrient only, whereas Colgan says the evidence now indicates that every single nutrient necessarily works in conjunction with at least one other nutrient. “Vitamin C to stop colds, for example, depends as much on other nutrients in the diet as on the supplemental vitamin C,” Colgan has written. ‘ ‘If the diet is deficient in nutrients which interact with vitamin C in promoting resistance to colds, it is impossible for the body to use the C supplement. The minimum of supplementary nutrients required are adequate Bb (pyridoxine), B12 (cobalamin), zinc, folic acid, and choline.” (For this information, Colgan cites a 1981 collection of scientific papers entitled Diet and Resistance to Disease. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology published by the Plenum Press in New York.)

Once Colgan had worked out a detailed and complete supplementation program for clients at the New Zealand clinic, he grew interested in seeing whether he could objectively document any benefits resulting from supplementation, such as improved athletic performance. He devised three separate experiments.

In the first one, Colgan worked with four experienced marathon runners. Over a six-month period, each man consumed a packet of pills every day. However, two of the four sets of pills were real supplements that had been tailored to the recipient’s nutritional needs, while the other two were placebos. After three of the six months, the two runners who had been getting the placebos began receiving the supplements, and vice versa. The experiment was a “double blind,” meaning that at no time did either Colgan and his assistants or the runners themselves know which pills were which.

The four men ran both marathons and twenty-mile test runs throughout the course of the experiment. And when the times were analyzed at the conclusion of the half-year period, Colgan found that both of the two runners who got real supplements during the first three months improved rapidly during that period, but their performances fell off when they were switched to placebos. In contrast, the runners who got the real supplements during the second three months overtook the two who received the substitute placebos during that period.

Later Colgan undertook a larger study involving ten experienced male marathon runners divided into two groups of five. This time one group received real supplements for an entire six-month period, and the other received placebos throughout that time; again neither they nor Colgan knew which was which. And again, Colgan’s results showed that the supplemented runners far surpassed the unsupplemented ones. As one might expect from any training program, both groups improved their marathon times — but the supplemented runners showed a mean improvement of seventeen minutes and forty-four seconds, compared to the unsupplemented group’s overall improvement of only six minutes and forty-three seconds. Finally, Colgan also devised a similar study comparing two supplemented weightlifters against two unsupplemented ones that showed a clear correlation between the nutrients and an increase in strength.

Colgan has never published the results of these three studies in any scientific journal. He claims he’s been asked to present his findings in “two reputable journals,” but he refrained because he felt the number of runners included in even the larger marathon study was too small to satisfy opponents of nutritional supplementation. And although the scientific community is still awaiting official notice of Colgan’s results, he says word of those results soon reached the world athletic community. By the mid-1970s veteran New Zealand Olympic coach Arthur Lydiard had heard about Colgan’s program and informed a number of both American and German athletes, who journeyed to New Zealand in order to have Colgan devise individualized programs for them.

Some of the athletes in turn spread the word to several Hollywood entertainers trying to escape the effects of aging. Today Colgan counts about twelve to fifteen “extremely well known” stars among his clients. He mentions Sylvester Stallone and MASH star Mike Farrell as being among them, though he declines to specify others. “These people pay a lot of money and they expect confidentiality,” Colgan says archly. At any rate, by the end of the 1970s Colgan was counseling both his celebrity and unknown clients with the aid of a complex computer program he devised to weigh the hundreds of variables involved in any nutritional assessment. When he flew to America in 1981 for an eighteen-month sabbatical at New York’s Rockefeller University, Colgan maintained a telephonic tie to that computer program in New Zealand.

Colgan didn’t go to Rockefeller University to study nutrition; he was planning to research questions relating to visceral learning and biofeedback, working within the laboratory of one of the university’s physiological psychologists. (Colgan drew his salary from his New Zealand university.) However, while in New York, he soon obtained a contract from the publishers William Morrow and Company to write a book on vitamins. At that point most of Colgan’s attention shifted to researching and writing the book (a project from which Rockefeller University took pains to disassociate itself)- On the side, he also continued to do private nutritional consultations, and he began to plan an expanded two-year study of supplemented versus unsupplemented marathon runners, one “with forty marathoners, which would have been the definitive study to have confirmed the smaller one.” However, when he failed to procure the $63,000 per year to fund that research within the university setting, and when he also was approached by several parties who were interested in helping him to set up some private research institute, he chose the latter path.

Colgan says several factors led him to set up his private institute in Carlsbad, including that city’s relative lack of pollution near a major urban center, and its proximity to Hollywood and his clients there. He also was attracted by the nearby presence of the Salk Institute; Colgan says that Jonas Salk himself has provided firm encouragement. (Mysteriously, Salk’s office declined to offer any comment at all about Colgan’s work.)

Also somewhat mysterious is Colgan’s present source of funding. He says the money generated by the nutritional assessments isn’t sufficient to cover all the research institute’s costs. Supplementing this income, he says, is money from several foundation and corporate sources, including MSI Corporation, a communications firm. Although he declines to identify his other backers, he insists that none of them have any ties to the health-food or nutritional-supplement industries. Whatever the source, the quarters into which Colgan moved last winter create the impression that here, money is plentiful.

Colgan himself designed all the office furnishings, which are modernistic, modular pieces done in high-gloss finishes and deep shades such as maroon, mauve, dark blue. The colors contrast strikingly with thick gray carpeting and velvety gray wallpaper; lots of glass and mirrors and brass also contribute to the look of monied technocracy. Enshrined in the center of it all is the laboratory, separated from the rest of the suite only by a giant glass wall and lit up almost as brightly as movie sound stage. Impressive as it looks, no new research is taking place in the lab yet. At the moment, the instruments are still being calibrated and standardized as Colgan seeks additional funding for the experiments he would like to pursue immediately: a continuation of the large study of marathon runners and another study of vitamin C’s impact on the immune system.

But the main activity in these offices at present is the costly nutritional assessments, now being performed at the rate of five or six per week. Colgan’s wife Lesley, who helps to administer the institute during her husband’s frequent travels, explains that each assessment involves the following: Colgan’s staff nurse first takes blood, urine, and hair samples, blood pressure and resting pulse rate, plus very basic information such as height, weight, and frame size. Then the client steps into the office of the physician who joined Colgan’s full-time staff this summer. Dr. Evelyn Whitlock. She spends up to two hours with the client, questioning him or her about everything from medical history to dietary patterns to emotional moods. All the information is then fed into a computer, and a few weeks later the client receives a six- to eight-page report, plus the first three-month installment of his or her supplemental nutrients. Colgan’s fee includes a six-month supply of the pills plus a follow-up visit after six months. After that, every additional six-month pill supply and subsequent checkup costs $480.

For those who can’t afford such prices, Colgan does offer an alternative in the book released last fall by Morrow’s Quill Books division. Entitled Your Personal Vitamin Profile, the book outlines Colgan’s basic case for nutritional supplementation, and buttresses that case with no fewer than 613 citations drawn from ninety different journals, including the likes of the Annals of the New York Academy of Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Amid all the controversy surrounding supplementation, Colgan also appends a discussion of how conflicting nutritional claims should be evaluated. All anecdotal and “testimonial” claims should be ignored, he recommends emphatically, as should any books on nutrition that fail to refer to specific scientific studies where the details can be examined. The most acceptable type of such study, he argues, is the double-blind controlled trial where no one can manipulate the results.

Theory aside, the core of Colgan’s book is a do-it-yourself segment including fifty-five questions about the reader’s “individual biochemical equation.” Based on the answers to those questions, Colgan then advises the reader how to adjust a standard supplemental formula to produce a personal prescription for vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional elements. For example, if you’re troubled by “recurrent heart palpitations and no physical cause can be found,” you’re supposed to increase the “basic formula” by 1000 IUs of vitamin A; 500 milligrams of vitamin C; fifty milligrams of bioflavonoids; one hundred IUs of vitamin D; one hundred milligrams of magnesium; one hundred milligrams of phosphorus; ten milligrams of iron; and five milligrams of manganese. If you smoke five to fifteen cigarettes daily, you augment the formula by a certain amount; two-pack-a-day smokers increase the dosages by more.

If all these calculations sound complicated, they turn out to be the easy part of assembling one’s personal vitamin package. Once you know how many micrograms of biotin, how many milligrams of inositol, what dosages of twenty-five other substances Colgan thinks you should be swallowing daily, you can’t simply stroll to the local drug store and find them on the shelf. Even if some items are readily available — vitamin C, for example — Colgan doesn’t possess much confidence in the quality of most commercial vitamins; he charges that many vitamin manufacturers load their products with worthless ingredients and even toxic elements such as coloring and preservatives. Although Colgan makes no specific recommendations for a vitamin supplier in his book, his wife Lesley discloses that the institute obtains most of its vitamins from Bronson Pharmaceuticals, a large La Canada firm; these are repackaged for Colgan’s own clients in a small operations center located down the road from the Carlsbad institute.

In the course of researching Colgan’s work, I spent at least forty-five minutes working out my personal formula with the aid of Colgan’s book. Then I turned to one of the vitamin company’s catalogues, only to discover — not surprisingly — that it didn’t include any of the nutrients in precisely the amounts my formula dictated. I then spent at least another two hours trying to calculate which combinations of the existing Bronson supplements might roughly approximate my formula. Finally, I wound up with a prescription for seventeen different pills plus a vitamin/ calcium powder. Ordering from Bronson, this would cost me $146.80 for a 250-day supply, which breaks down to fifty-nine cents per day.

That cost probably wouldn’t deter someone who believed in Colgan’s basic theory of supplementation, but there are other arguments from critics of nutritional supplements that might give pause to skeptics. One source for such arguments is a book entitled Vitamins and “Health” Foods: The Great American Hustle written by two East Coast physicians, each with weighty credentials. That book doesn't single out Colgan specifically, but denounces as charlatans the multitude of people like him who recommend nutritional supplements. The authors state that no one who eats a reasonably healthy diet need take any vitamins or nutrients whatsoever; doing so at best only wastes money and produces “expensive urine,” they proclaim. At worst, the megadose consumer of certain substances like vitamins A and D may become seriously ill. (Colgan does warn his readers of overdose dangers, but also claims that his recommendations fall well within the limits of safety.)

Reached by telephone, one of those co-authors, Dr. Stephen Barrett, fulminated that even without having read Colgan's book, he “would be willing to bet my life that a trained nutritionist could go through the book” and find serious errors. Barrett referred me to the president of the California Council Against Health Fraud, a Ph.D. “health education specialist” at Loma Linda University named William Jarvis.

Although Jarvis had not read Colgan’s book, he had seen an article about Colgan published in Omni magazine last April, and on the basis of that. Jarvis said. “I would describe this fellow as a typical example of the new vitamin huckster.” While Jarvis acknowledged that samples of ordinary foods do vary in nutritional content, he countered that these variations average out so that they’re no reason for concern. “Otherwise, you can reach a point where you’re in a Catch-22 type situation where you say you can never know the nutritional value of every single thing you eat because you’ve already eaten it. If you were to pile up the amount of food you eat in a month, it’d be quite a pile — and it’d be nutritious.”

Jarvis also excoriated Colgan’s special prescriptions for athletes. “The last people in the world who need to supplement are athletes because they usually eat enough.” Although Colgan says little research had been done on athletes prior to his marathon runner and weightlifter studies, Jarvis scoffed that "an enormous amount of data . . . enough to fill several telephone books” had been collected, with the resounding conclusion being that “food supplements for athletes is just a total waste of money.”

How does one make sense of such conflicting statements? The question — namely, are nutritional supplements beneficial? — may be simple, but how is any person to answer it when researchers with respectable credentials are faced off against each other and calling each other liars, in some cases drawing totally opposite conclusions from the very same studies? Evelyn Whitlock empathized readily with the frustration generated by such contradictions.

Whitlock is the young doctor who joined Colgan’s staff this past June. She attended Indiana University’s medical school, where her interest in nutrition quickened, although not as a result of any classroom stimulus (“In fact, I felt like the only person who had any interest in nutrition,” she says) but because of her suspicion that improved diets could be an important tool in preventing the development and reoccurrence of disease. After receiving her medical degree, she established a practice in Portland, Oregon in which she specialized in “intervening in people’s lifestyles with nutrition as the main tool.” She first heard about Colgan last fall when a few of her patients mentioned his newly released book. Coincidentally. about the same time, Whitlock received a request for a resume from Colgan himself (who was then searching for a medical doctor with a nutritional practice). Whitlock says she was intrigued by Colgan’s development of computer technology to aid with the overwhelming task of prescribing individualized supplements for people, given the burgeoning body of information about nutrition. So she applied for the post and accepted when Colgan offered her the job.

Whitlock communicates a lot of excitement over the institute’s work, yet unlike Colgan she doesn’t convey the smoldering, almost intolerant fervor of the true believer. She recounted the experience of once hearing some of most respected representatives of both the pro- and anti-supplement forces debate each other. Whitlock recalls marveling at how the debate structure utterly failed to resolve the question; both sides sounded so equally credible. Nonetheless, she thinks the evidence will continue to accumulate on the pro-supplement side of the case. As indicators of this. Whitlock says she now knows two fellow medical doctors (one in Washington and one in Baltimore) who have collected more than 17,000 major medical journal articles reporting on both basic and clinical research related to the prevention and treatment of disease with diet and nutrition; Whitlock also mentions how the eminent British medical journal Lancet now includes a regular feature on nutrition.

Supporting these sorts of developments, she says, “I’ve proved to myself through the practice of nutrition that it’s valuable.” In her medical practice she saw serious, acute medical problems disappear with supplementation; and something else that impressed her as strongly was the beneficial effect of improved nutrition on all those patients who felt a malaise for which no specific disease was apparent. ‘‘These were people who weren’t really, really sick,” Whitlock says. ‘‘They just didn't feel well,” suffering such symptoms as fatigue, lack of motivation, headaches, joint aches, and depression — symptoms which simply went away after treatment with supplements. In Whitlock’s own life she found nutritional supplements relieved her of the premenstrual tension syndrome. Even more dramatically, Whitlock tells of having a schizophrenic relative who has been living a normal life since starting a program nine months ago in which she’s being treated for food allergies and taking supplements. “Before that, she was raving,” Whitlock says quietly. “She was a very sick girl.”

Although Colgan may discount such anecdotal evidence, it does carry a powerful emotional impact. In addition to Whitlock, clients of Colgan testify to specific, concrete improvements in their lives since starting the vitamin supplements. One is the local triathlon star Julie Moss, who met Colgan socially about ten months ago and since then has begun training with him as a running and swimming partner. Several months ago Colgan submitted Moss’s name to his board of directors as a candidate for a free program to see her through the 1984 Olympics. The board approved and Moss began taking the recommended pills — twenty-one per day — about this past May. Since then Moss says taking the pills is “probably the most regimented thing in my life at this point other than brushing my teeth. . . . You just feel like you’re eating a second meal.’’ Although Colgan warns that it takes at least six months to assess the impact of supplementation, Moss says almost immediately she noticed one change, “a real burst of energy at the end of the day. ... I felt like I really had to work hard to get myself tired.” In addition, her hair and nails, which usually suffer heavy damage from all their exposure to water, have seemed extraordinarily healthy and fast-growing, she states.

Parker Janee is even heartier in her praise for Colgan. Janee works for the San Diego office of E.F. Hutton and has a home in La Jolla, but she spends ninety percent of her time out of town presenting sales and marketing seminars. She says she commonly finds herself giving a breakfast talk in one city, then going to the airport, flying to another city and delivering a luncheon presentation there, then jetting off to yet another destination for an evening program — then possibly catching still another plane to her next morning’s destination. After one such ten-week stint about a year ago, she says she found herself at thirty-one years of age literally walking into walls and convinced that “I had to try to do something to hold my body together.” About that time, she saw the article on Colgan in Omni and tracked him down for an assessment appointment. Like Moss, Janee was surprised by seeing some immediate changes. Most importantly, the “gnawing hunger” that had always sent her off on periodic sugar binges disappeared. In fact, her desire to both eat and drink under stress has diminished, Janee insists. Like Moss, she consumes her twenty-or-so pills after breakfast because “if I take ’em after dinner, I tend to stay awake later that night.” Janee says every time she has forgotten to take the pills for even a few days, “I can distinctly tell the difference in my system. It doesn't seem to be as smooth running.” Now, after using the supplements for a year, she says, ”I am immensely pleased with them. ... I expect to be on them permanently.” Colgan, of course, expects us all to be on them eventually. He thinks his own formulas will change over time. ”1 think that in a hundred years, people will look back upon all our theories and say how quaint and cumbrous they are.” He elaborates: “Fifteen years ago, chromium did not merit a mention in the volume that goes with the [U.S. government’s] recommended daily allowances. Tenyears ago, it merited one line saying, ‘Chromium may be necessary for animal nutrition.’ In the latest. 1980 version . it gets three pages and the suggestion that a chromium intake of fifty to 200 micrograms a day is tentatively recommended for adults.” Other such changes will come.

When they do, when we human beings finally refine our knowledge of how — precisely — we can optimally fuel our bodies, then at that point Colgan is convinced we’ll experience more than increased energy and healthier fingernails. We’ll also live longer—perhaps a whole lot longer than people do now, he thinks. Colgan acknowledges that this is still a hypothesis. But he cites mounting evidence that human cells do not carry some built-in “self-destruct” mechanism that dictates they must die after seventy or eighty years. Instead. Colgan has come to believe that disease. not mere old age. kills people.

He thinks that life for most people involves a progressive breakdown of the body’s natural defense against disease — the immune system. As the series of breakdowns builds, the defenses work less and less efficiently; Colgan estimates that by the age of seventy, the average immune system may have lost ninety percent of its fighting capacity, and finally one disease or another triumphs, and death occurs. But humans can intervene in this process and have done so already. Through vaccination, for example, modern medicine has augmented the human immune system's ability to protect itself against certain pernicious diseases such as polio — with resultant extensions of lifespan. Colgan believes the evidence is growing that various vitamins can strengthen the immune system further. If we can thus retard the grim breakdown, and if we can couple that strategy with avoiding accidents and environmental poisons, then the door on human immortality may possibly swing open.

In view of that possibility, Colgan’s tolerance for the critics of nutritional supplementation is slim. His attitude is that the debate is already over, resolved in his favor. “This is the health care of the Twenty-first Century.” he declares flatly. “There’s simply no doubt about it.”