John Heinemann, Ph.D.
Foreword by Lendon Smith, M.D.

Approximately half-a-century ago, a certain woman living in a large, crowded city contracted tuberculosis. Doctors did what they could for her without any avail. They gave her a morbid prognosis of inevitable death and she was consigned to a gloomy existence without any hope or reason to live. 

Deciding that she would at least die in more pleasant surroundings, she moved from the big city to a humble log cabin in a pine forest somewhere in the State of Maine. For an entire Winter she stayed there, busying herself with things that kept her mind happy and occupied. 

By next Spring she noticed a peculiar thing about her respiratory state of health. Virtually all of her symptoms of her former disease had abated. Going to several medical doctors and a local hospital for various checkups, she was pronounced free of TB. Her recovery was later chronicled in a national best-seller entitled, I Lived in the Woods.

It wasn't anything in her diet that promoted such a remarkable turnaround in her incurable disorder. Rather it was what she breathed every few seconds that accomplished the most good for her.

In a past issue of Soviet Life magazine (April 1969, p. 43), a leading Russian biologist, Nikolai Kholodkovsky made the following highly interesting observations: "The air we breathe in the woods or in gardens contains vitamins given off by plants." His studies had shown that in each cubic meter of air there are several milligrams of volatile substances, including vitamins.

Two of the nutrients emitted from the tree bark and needles of fragrant pine odor, he discovered, were vitamin C and a form of bioflavonoid called proanthocyanidins. Because bioflavonoids and ascorbic acid often appear in combination with each other in plants, they form powerful antioxidant effects.

The woman who previously suffered from TB obviously benefited from the forest air charged with vitamin C, which the research of twice Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling has shown to be outstanding for fighting viral infections of any kind. But the bioflavonoid with it, the proanthycyanidins, also deserves considerable merit for the prevention and treatment of many infectious diseases. This vital nutrient is better known by its trademark name of Pycnogenol, based on the clinical research of Dr. Jack Masquelier of the University of Bordeaux in France, who discovered it in the bark of the French maritime pine tree which grows in the Les Landes pine forest along the Atlantic coast of southern France.

Both of the powerful antioxidants, which Kholodkovsky first reported on over two decades ago, are extremely useful for controlling the deadly activity of a group of compounds within the body called free radicals. These scavenger molecules are lacking an electron and roam through the body at random, robbing normal molecules of their electrons. In doing so, free radicals create a great deal of havoc and mischief with the body's delicately structured biochemistry. What antioxidants do is to curb or check this destructive action.

Thus, it was that this woman's particular health condition, which the doctors had completely given up hope of ever curing, was unwittingly reversed by her geographical relocation into another environment totally charged with nutrients in the air. It was, in a very real sense, these "vitamins of the air," which had healed her lungs of this ravaging disease.

All too often we're inclined to thick of vitamins as only coming from food or health food supplements. But the very definition of the word "vitamin" suggests otherwise. "Vitamin" is really a composite of two separate words with different meanings to them: but when linked together surely do present a compelling argument for considering the air we breathe in a nutritional light.

Now "vita" comes from the Latin word for "life". And an "amine" is defined by dictionary experts as "any of various compounds derived from ammonia by replacement of hydrogen by one or more univalent hydrocarbon radicals." Which is a fancy way of saying in cruder terminology that a vitamin is essentially a "life gas" or for our purposes here, "life air". Thus, it would be linguistically correct to assert that a vitamin is, indeed, an "air nutrient" as given by the formula definition above.

II. INHALING MINERALS FOR HEALTH
A very popular self-help manual by James F. Balch, M.D. and his wife Phyllis has become a favorite of the health food industry within the last several years because of its total emphasis on food supplement consumption as a ready Prescription for Nutritional Healing (the title of their book). On page 17 they identify macro (bulk) and micro (trace) minerals as coming from soil, plant foods, meat, and, of course, mineral supplements in tablet, capsule, liquid, and powder forms. But nothing is ever said by them or any other nutritionists concerning minerals from the air!

You don't need a college education to figure out that if we aren't supplied with hydrogen and oxygen in sufficient quantities, we're going to die within a matter of minutes. These two trace elements are considered to be micro minerals without which the body could not function and would readily perish in no time at all.

Beyond them, however, are other minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, and zinc, which the body depends upon for the normal maintenance of good health. Because of massive advertising by the health food industry and the single-mindedness of scientific opinion, consumers are led to believe that the best source for minerals is food and food supplements. Very little is ever said about water, let alone air, as being potential contributors of minerals.

This realization first dawned upon me in the early summer of 1979 when I accompanied a delegation of scientists and lay people to the Soviet Union for several weeks. Our trip was arranged for by the Citizen Exchange Corps out of New York City and Boston and the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. A colleague and friend of mine who accompanied me on this historic trip was the late Professor Emeritus Walter McCain of the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Because he could speak Russian fluently, I had opportunities available to me that many of the others in our group didn't have to do some investigative research in health institutes we visited along the way.

Dr. McCain and I spent an afternoon on Monday, June 4th by ourselves touring the "Central Scientific Research Institute of Health Resorts and Physical Therapy" located on Kalinin Avenue in Moscow. Dr McCain knew the directors in the institute from a previous visit - - Drs, Victor G. Yasnogorodsky and Dr, Vasily M. Bogoljubov.

While giving us a personal tour of this large facility, we became very intrigued by a room with a sign on the door reading "Climate Therapy" in Russian. Inside we were shown rather curiously engineered devices designed to mimic different types of air quality for specific ailments. For instance, tuberculosis sufferers were recommended a machine simulating "mountain air"; asthma sufferers were prescribed a machine generating warm, dry, desert like air; while emphysema patients and those experiencing chronic lung inflammation were put on a machine yielding an air reminiscent of a sea coast.

They told us that the success of these machines and the airs they simulated from different environments in nature, was due largely to the mineral ions found in each of them. I, of course, had always been familiar with air ions in general, and knew from published scientific research that positive ions (poison) could make a person feel crummy and sick, while negative ions (negions) stimulated vibrant health and left you with an exhilarated feeling. But this was the first time I had ever heard them referred to as "mineral" ions.

My introduction to this radically different concept of air minerals was something of a new experience for me. And, just like the Wonderland into which Alice tumbled behind the Looking Glass, I became more "cruiser and curious" as our trip continued.

The real clincher, though for vitamins and minerals from the air. came to a head in the oil producing city of Baku beside the Caspian Sea, in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaidjan (now a newly self-declared nation of its own). There we had ample opportunity to learn a great deal more about the benefits of nutritional air at the Zone Z'drovia, or Zone of Health.

On Friday morning, June 9th, our group visited this remarkable medical clinic situated just inside an ancient stone wall surrounding the oldest part of the city. Here we discovered to our utter delight and astonishment, a wide range of natural therapies available for a host of illnesses. Some of those therapies, as I look back on that time through the pages of my well-kept journals, were a little on the exotic side.

Take phytotherapy, in which young and old alike with problems ranging from hypertension and chronic bronchitis to fatigue disorders and heart disease spent an average of ten minutes or so sniffing the fragrances of laurel, geranium, or rosemary (the fragrance of the geranium, we were told, is especially good for "acute headache, neuroses, high blood pressure and insomnia"). And, if that sounds a little bizarre, consider this: those plants were being "fertilized" with mineral water, glucose and even drugs -- including common aspirin!

This course of treatment, I learned, differs from the popular European and American aromatherapy in one important respect. The former utilizes the whole living plant, while the latter uses just the natural aromatic essence extracted from it. The concept is basically the same as whether you derive your essential nutrients from food or from food supplements. Common sense dictates that the first is always better for you than the second, because the nutrition you're ingesting is complete and alive!

We were informed by Dr. Abdul Kuschev, the clinic's Director of Medical Science, that the ultimate benefit to their version of phytotherapy lay in the fact that the patient obtained his or her necessary minerals from the invisible air ions emitted from different garden herbs. These, he stated through an interpreter, were what made patients feel better by solving their problems nutritionally - - through nutrition from the air!

These things brought me full circle a couple of years later while watching the "Tom Snyder Show" on television in my home on December 9th, 1981 at 12:25 a.m. His guest was an exceedingly thin fellow named Wiley Brooks (then age 48) from Boulder, Colorado. Mr. Brooks was exceptionally unusual in that he claimed to obtain all of his nourishment from just two things -- namely air and water! He styled himself a "breathairian" who lived by breathing his "food" instead of eating it in the conventional way the rest of us do.

He said that the key to understanding his off-the-wall philosophy was found in Genesis 2:7, which he quoted from memory: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

When asked what the difference was between those in self-imposed starvation and himself, he continued: "The difference between me and hunger strikers [imprisoned members of the terrorist organization the Irish Republican Army] in Belfast is that they quit eating to die, while I quit eating to live better!"

He added: "I've discovered by breathing pure mountain air in the high Colorado Rockies that I'm able to obtain just about all of the nutrients my body could ever want; the water I drink to keep myself from dehydrating, supplies the rest." He joked by saying that the hardest problem he now faced with this new change of healthful lifestyle was when his old friends and acquaintances invited him out to dinner. "I'll usually tell them, 'you go ahead and eat and I'll just step outside for my snack – a few breaths of fresh air!"

However ridiculous or extreme this may seem to some readers, it does underscore a significant truth: air contains many of the vitamins and minerals our bodies need in trace amounts in the form of very minute, beneficially charged molecules known as negions. This is the food we inhale from air near the ocean, in the tops of the mountains, by a waterfall, after a good rain and thunderstorm, and in our bathroom showers. This is the nourishment which will help us to retain youthful vitality and enjoy longer life. It is the type of air the Antediluvians breathed before the Great Flood.

III PREHISTORIC AIR QUALITY
Something in the Bible used to puzzle me for years until my research into negions was the great discrepancy in age differences between pre-Flood and post-Flood man. Genesis informs us that the Antediluvians enjoyed astonishing longevity rates reaching into many centuries and, in some cases, almost climaxing a complete millennium before their expirations. Whereas, we find the age of men in Abraham's time diminishing considerably to the point that a few who managed to live beyond 150 were considered to be very old.

But part of the solution to this vexing problem for scholars may be found in the words of the great.