Dr. Joel Wallach, BS, DVM, ND

Dr. Joel Wallach, B.S., D.V.M., N.D., is the author of numerous scientific articles, several books, and the audio cassette, "Dead Doctors Don't Lie." He is regularly featured on radio and television, and gives lectures across the country. Wallach was the recipient of the 1988 Wooster Beach Gold Medal Award for breakthroughs in understanding the cause of Cystic Fibrosis, and was a 1991 Nobel Prize Nominee in Medicine

QUESTION: Your background is as a veterinarian. How did you become a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine?

DR. WALLACH: From the time I was in Veterinarian school until 17 years later, I worked for either a grant for the National Health Institute (NIH) or the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. I also had a couple of years of field experience in Africa. My job was to do autopsies of animals that died in the big zoos around the United States.

In the mid-60's, I was supposed to find a species of animals that was ultra-sensitive to pollution. We were concerned about ecology and the environment, and were looking at animals to be the early warning system, much like the canaries in the coal mines.

After 12 plus years, we had done some 17,500 autopsies on over 454 species of animals, plus 3,000 human beings for comparison. I worked for various universities, continued to network, and wrote 75 scientific papers on nutritional diseases, pharmaceuticals, and immobilizing drugs.

The fascinating thing to me, even though I lectured all over the country to professional groups, contributed chapters to eight mini-authored textbooks and wrote my own, was that I couldn't get people who were in a position of authority, either in medical research or government, to get excited about preventing diseases with human beings the way we did with animals.

The reason we use nutritional formulas with animals is that we don't have insurance to pay for animal care. If we were to use a human health care system for animals, there would be sticker shock, because every hamburger would cost you $275 and ounce, just to pay for health care.

I was frustrated enough to go back to school and became a Naturopathic physician. I was then able to use everything I learned in veterinarian nutrition on my human patients. Because I couldn't get the research community to get excited about the transition, I made the transition myself.

People from all over the world came to see me because word got out that 'Dr. Wallach was a veterinarian and a physician, ...and will treat you like a dog, but you will get better.' Using veterinarian nutrition and more conservative approaches such as acupuncture and herbs, I built up quite a following.

I wrote several best selling books for the lay public. The first was "Let's Play Doctor" which teaches people how to use vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals for over 400 diseases. "Rare Earth Forbidden Cures" is an extremely complete mineral deficiency book. Most books talk about vitamins; this is one that deals exclusively with mineral deficiency.

The tape "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" is the most listened to nutritional lecture in the history of the world. We've sold 60 million of those tapes. It's 90 minutes of my observations on why we spend more time making sure animal diseases are prevented with nutrition than human diseases.

I've been vindicated in this view. A current news release in the Associated Press shows that the war on cancer that was started in 1971 by Nixon was a flop. They spent 30 million dollars in government money and medical research trying to find vaccines and cures for cancer.

They actually thought in the 1970's that most cancer was due to a virus, which is quite false. They haven't made an inch of progress in curing cancer or treating cancer. The rate of cancers has gone up 15 to 25%. Cancer death rates have gone up 6% since 1971. So they're now saying that this effort should be turned to prevention. Well, we've know this since the 1950's in the animal industry! With my patients, we've been doing things like giving large doses of the trace mineral, Selenium, which has proven to be able to reduce your risk of cancer from anywhere from 60-80%.

QUESTION: When you were working with the NIH, you discovered that you could reproduce cystic fibrosis in monkeys because it was a nutritional deficiency. When you made this public, you were fired. Why was that so difficult for the medical community to accept?

DR. WALLACH: Well, I was the darling of the veterinary research in those days. I was on committees for both NIH and the National Science Foundation. I was in veterinarian and human nutritional and pathology research at the international level.

I came across a serendipitous discovery on the first animal diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and confirmed by the world experts on cystic fibrosis. Because it was a laboratory animal that came from what was supposed to be normal breeding colony from NASA, we had all kinds of weekly blood samples frozen. We were able to go back and discover what had happened--why 6 little monkeys wound up with cystic fibrosis. I found I could reproduce this condition at will.

At that time--and still today--standard medical research believes falsely that cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. It's a congenital defect that babies can be born with when mother's have a Selenium deficiency during pregnancy. Selenium is required for the health and development of the pancreas, liver, heart, and other tissues. Almost always when a cystic fibrosis child is born, their lungs are normal. Years later, it's usually the advancing lung disease that causes problems. They're not born with lung disease, it only comes on because of chronic nutritional deficiencies.

By using medical computers, I was able to find thousands of articles in the veterinary literature to piece together the puzzle. This probably sounds egotistical, but you have to remember that the government spent 7.5 million dollars training me how to figure these things out. So when I figured out cystic fibrosis, the medical community, being arrogant, said 'how can this guy come along and figure this out in one year's time when we've been working on this for 25 years?'

The facility I was working for was trying to get a multi-million dollar grant to study genetics. They were afraid that if I showed cystic fibrosis was not genetic they wouldn't get the grant. So they pulled the plug. That's what drove me to Naturopathic College.

QUESTION: The point here is that you were able to see the solution to the disease because you had a different viewpoint.

DR. WALLACH: That's right. I had been trained to take accumulated information and piece the puzzle together and come up with a whole thought. Most people doing basic research work on one little piece, and 25 years later haven't really advanced much. My job was to take these little studies and put them together in a holistic concept.

QUESTION: What have you found with other cultures living to be very old--the basis of Rare Earths Forbidden Cures?

DR. WALLACH: Longevity is a real fascination for me. The human being has the genetic capacity to live healthily to be 120, 140. People do it all the time. A woman from France was documented by the Guinness Book of World Records to be 122. The National Geographic Society documented a man who lived to be 167. There are thousands of people around the world who are well over 100 year old. It's unfortunate with all the high-tech medicine in the United States, we rank 17th in longevity, according to the World Health Organization. We don't come close to the healthiest or most long lived people, yet we have the most technologically advanced health care system in the world.

For heart transplants, liver transplants, CAT scans and so on, we are on top of the advanced medical community. However, when it comes to dispensing basic information to the general public, we don't do it very well.

Using techniques that the government trained me to do, I accumulated all known information and put together what helps these people to be 120 or 140. It has nothing to do with having a better gene pool. In every case, these people live in third world countries, in very arid places, and out of necessity live next to glaciers as a permanent source of water.

The water that come out from underneath glaciers is not clear or mineral free. If you boil away a quart of this glacial milk (it's called milk because it looks more like milk than water due to the suspended minerals), you get about 2 inches of minerals. Not only do these people drink this stuff (only 3 to 5% is absorbed since it's just ground up rocks), but more importantly, for 2500 to 5000 years, depending on the culture, they irrigated crops with this glacial milk and have returned literally tens of thousands of tons of minerals back into the farm land each year. As a result, their grains, vegetables, fruits and nuts are highly mineralized.

Because they have lots of Chromium and Vanadium in their foods, they don't get diabetes. We've known since the 50's that Chromium and Vanadium deficiencies cause adult-onset diabetes (which makes up 85% of the diabetic population).

Selenium reduces the risk of cancer from 50 to 80%, depending on the type of cancer, and these people have a lot of Selenium in their glacial milk, return it to the soil and therefore the foods. As a result, they have a very low rate of cancer. They don't have heart disease, hypertension, or strokes like we do. They don't have arthritis, osteoporosis, and don't fall over and die of fracture complications.

As a result, they live longer. Not because they have high-tech medicine, but because they're getting the raw materials for the body to manage and maintain itself.

We learned this in veterinarian medicine. Back when I was a kid, if a dog lived to be 3-5 years of age, it was doing great. Today dogs live to be 18 years of age because of all the nutrition we're putting into their commercially produced diet. It has nothing to do with better veterinary care; it has to do with a more consistent nutrition--instead of table scraps and cornmeal, they're getting food that has been technologically put together nutritionally. It gives dogs a very long life. The same principle holds true for people.

QUESTION: What is the story behind "Dead Doctor's Don't Lie"?

DR. WALLACH: If doctors practiced health and longevity, and really knew the secrets to it, they should live longer than the average American. Well the average American lives to be 75.5 years, and, depending on whose research you look at, doctors live to be somewhere between 58 and 70. Nobody has shown that doctors live to be an average of 75.5 years like everybody else.

People might think they have a lot of stress, but it has nothing to do with stress! Look at hospital journals and medical journals, look at the advertisements for Coca-Cola as part of a healthy diet--in a hospital journal, which allows those kinds of ads! Doctors see that all the time. They don't get 30 seconds worth of clinical nutrition in 14 years of medical school. Both Naturopaths and Veterinarians get 4 years of clinical nutrition. When someone who is trained in nutrition speaks to a medical doctor, it's like speaking a foreign language--it just doesn't compute. They might figure 'if we didn't learn it in medical school, it probably doesn't have any value.'

QUESTION: Surely this isn't just the arrogance of the medical profession.. Certainly big business plays a role here. Don't you think failure to educate the public about nutrition is more a combination of this?

DR. WALLACH Yes. I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a combination of the medical profession's arrogance, their lack of interest in nutrition, and the money in pharmaceuticals and procedures, like the transplants and so forth. You get an arrogant doctor who is making $750,000 for a heart transplant--you know he has a wife and three ex-wives and is driving expensive cars; he's got a mortgage of $30,000 a month on a huge house and a second house in the Bahamas. He's not going to change his life style to start telling people to begin using nutrition and go down to making $50,000 a year. This is twisted up, somehow. It is unfortunate that these types of things hold back the truth from the general public.

QUESTION: What do you recommend for daily supplements?

DR. WALLACH: People should consciously supplement with all 90 known essential nutrients---that's 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 essential amino acids, and 3 essential fatty acids. I've helped put together something called Dr. Wallach's Pig Arthritis Formula. (A kind of cutesy name because it was designed to cure arthritis in pigs) I use it for humans because it contains 87 of the 90 essential nutrients.

Plants can manufacture some vitamins like folic acid, beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin B, but plants cannot manufacture minerals, and minerals make up 2/3 of the essential nutrients.

Almost all of the degenerative diseases--arthritis, osteoporosis, dental problems, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, bone spurs, kidney stones, muscular dystrophy, carpal tunnel syndrome, cataracts, Alzheimer's disease, and the list could go on--are either directly or indirectly related to mineral deficiencies. Our plants cannot manufacture minerals, our soils never had all 60 minerals in them, and soils that were enriched with minerals are now depleted from intensive farming. So, if you really want to live healthily, to be 100, you have to consciously supplement.

There's really no way to do it by eating the four food groups. In fact, the biggest lie ever told health wise is that you can get everything you need from the four basic food groups. That little sentence has killed more Americans than all the foreign armies put together in the 200 year history of our country.

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Dr. Wallach has been involved in biomedical research and clinical medicine for 30 years. He received his B.S. Degree from the University of Missouri with a major in animal husbandry (nutrition) and field crops; a D.V.M. (veterinarian) from the University of Missouri; a three year post doctoral fellowship from the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Washington University; and an N.D. from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine,Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Wallach's research has resulted in the publication of more than 70 peer review reference articles in the field of nutrition and pharmaceutical research; co-authored 8 textbooks and is the author of a text/reference book on the subject of comparative medicine (W.B. Saunders Publishing Co., 1983).

Dr. Wallach's research in comparative medicine is based on more than 13,700 cases from the University of Missouri, Iowa State University, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Washington University; the St. Louis Zoological Gardens; the Chicago Zoological Gardens; the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia;the Nation College of Naturopathic Medicine, Portland, Oregon and Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Hei Long Jiang, Peoples Republic of China. He was a member of NIH site visit teams for four years and was a member of the 1968 NSF ad hoc committee that authored the 1968 Animal Welfare Act(humane housing and care of laboratory and captive exotic species); and Consulting Professor of Medicine, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, HeiLong Jiang, Peoples Republic of China.

Dr. Wallach is an associate editor of Quantum Medicine, The Journal of the Association of Eclectic Physicians, and was the recipient of the 1988 Wooster Beach Gold Medal Award for a significant breakthrough in the basic understanding of the cause and pathophysiology of Cystic Fibrosis by the Association of Eclectic Physicians.

He was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1991 by the Association of Eclectic Physicians, a national association of doctors using eclectic (def. - choosing what appears to be the best from diverse sources) approaches to research and health care. Dr. Wallach was nominated for his work with trace minerals in the treatment of catastrophic diseases in children: cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and diabetes.(quote) "It's an honor when your peers nominate you for the Nobel prize" say's Dr. Wallach. "It was a great surprise to me. It's a reflection of the importance people attach to this research."Once the Nobel co-sponsorship requirements are met the Nobel SelectionCommittee will formally accept Dr. Wallach's nomination.

Dr. Wallach's research has resulted in the publication of more than 70 peer review reference articles in the field of nutrition and pharmaceutical research; co-authored 8 textbooks and is the author of a text/reference book on the subject of comparative medicine (W.B. Saunders Publishing Co., 1983).

1962 Bachelor of Science in Agriculture
Major in Animal Husbandry (Nutrition)
Minor in Field crops and Soil
University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.

1964 Doctor of Veterinary Medicine
University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.

1966-68 Post-doctoral fellowship
The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems
Washington University, Barnes Hospital
St. Louis Zoological Gardens, Missouri
Shaw's Botanical gardens, Missouri

1982 Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine
The National college of Naturopathic Medicine - Portland, Oregon

1988 Recipient of the 1988 Wooster Beach Gold Medal Award
for significant breakthrough in the basic understanding of the cause and pathophysiology of Cystic Fibrosis awarded by the Association of Eclectic Physicians.

1991 Nobel Prize Nominee - Medicine
for his stunning discoveries in the use of trace minerals to prevent catastrophic diseases in the newborn. Nomination by the Association of Eclectic Physicians (Chartered 1823).

Dr. Wallach has consulted with, worked for and performed autopsies at The National Science Foundation (in assistance to creation of the 1968 Animal Welfare Act), the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The University of Chicago, The University of Missouri, The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Washington University, The University of Tennessee, and Iowa State University.

The following city zoos and aquariums have also drawn on Dr. Wallach's expertise in employing him to perform clinical work and animal autopsies: San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago (Lincoln Park, Brookfield and The John G Shedd Aquarium), New York, Washington D.C. (National), Detroit, Memphis, (Overton Park), St. Louis, Jacksonville, Fl; and The Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Wallach worked on rhino and elephant capture and marking conservation programs for the government of Zimbabwe and South Africa, also performing autopsies on culled and poached animals.

A NIH training grant for $7.5 million was provided in 1965 to Marlin Perkins of the St. Louis Zoo and Barry Commoner of Washington University and Shaws Botanical Gardens who joined to form the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems.

Dr. Wallach does not now or has he ever in the past claimed he is a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.). He is a certified and licensed Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine (N.D.) Oregon License No. 533. Dr. Wallach was awarded this four year doctorate in 1982 by the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon.