Without blood that is kept young—that is, rich with red coloring matter—along with the rest of your physical and mental organism, your efforts to remain a radiantly healthy, young-looking person are doomed to failure almost at the outset. For the blood is your body's "carrier system." In order to dispatch renewed youthfulness to all other parts of your body, you first must make certain that your carrier system is in A-i working order. Otherwise, your supply line is bound to break down at crucial times and in critical places.

Since the degree of your natural attractiveness is likewise determined to an important extent by what goes on "behind the skin curtain" covering your body, it would be extremely unwise to slight the bloodstream in your campaign of eating to look younger.

The cosmetic effect of healthy blood has never been fully appreciated. Many books, including my earlier ones, have dealt at length with the mechanics of the bloodstream—a technical subject, although a fascinating one. But few indeed are the authors who have emphasized the importance of a healthy bloodstream as a cosmetic agent. It's only when the blood is youthfully red and healthy that it can impart to your body—the outer you—all the desirable appearances of a prolonged youth: fresh complexion, naturally red lips and naturally pink fingernails.

How do you keep your blood "youthfully red and healthy"? Mainly through a planned diet—a diet that either cures anemia or prevents your developing it. For anyone may be come anemic, at any age; and anemia is the foe of a youthful bloodstream.

In simple language, this is what happens when you are anemic: The salty, straw-colored liquid called blood plasma in which float both red and white blood corpuscles either (1) does not have enough red blood cells, or (2) the red blood cells the plasma does have do not contain enough hemo­globin, the red coloring matter that gives blood its rich, red hue.

Hemoglobin is very important in your bloodstream. Some folks think it's the red blood cell itself that is so important, whereas actually it's what the red blood cell contains—the hemoglobin, or oxygen-carrying substance in your blood— that causes all the fuss when not present in full force.

And, if we are to "tell all" about the red blood cell, we might as well admit that he is merely a "container"—that is, he exists merely to carry the very important hemoglobin. (You might be interested to know that the red blood cell is shaped roughly like a doughnut with the hole depressed instead of being punched out; and it's within the spongy, outer rim around the depressed middle that the hemoglobin is carried.) Without his full quota of hemoglobin, the red blood cell is a pale, colorless, washed-out-looking fellow— about as pallid as the anemic person who does not have enough hemoglobin-filled red blood cells in his arteries.

And this red blood cell is not a very long-lived fellow, either. His average life span is only about thirty days. So your body is continually demanding red blood cell replacements.

Why do we classify hemoglobin as very important? Because this red coloring matter has the top priority job of absorbing oxygen from the lungs, and then distributing it throughout the body to all the cells, picking up carbon dioxide (a waste product from the burning of oxygen in the cells) and carry­ing this waste gas on the return trip to the lungs where it's expelled from the body in the outgoing breath. Not exactly an idle fellow, is he, this hemoglobin you must be sure to have "enough of"?

When you become anemic, that is, when your body doesn't have enough hemoglobin on the job in your bloodstream, this never-ceasing business of furnishing oxygen to the cells and carrying off their waste products is certain to bog down, much as the food-distribution and garbage-disposal systems of a large city are disrupted when the truck drivers go on a strike.

Very well, if hemoglobin and his container, the red blood cell, are so important to a healthy body, let's feed them their favorite foods.

What are the "favorite foods" of hemoglobin and the red blood cell? Several of the same food elements that also feed your eyes, skin, heart, glands, brain cells—protein, the min­erals iron, copper and iodine, and the B-vitamins, especially thiamin, niacin, pyridoxine, biotin, folic acid and the lately discovered B-12.

Protein is just as important to the richness of your blood as iron, since the hemoglobin is largely made up of both protein and iron. The red blood cell "containers" that carry the hemoglobin are themselves made of protein. Even a mild deficiency of high proteins in the diet can result in too few of these hemoglobin-carrying cells, as well as too little hemoglobin in the red corpuscles that do exist.

Iron is widely advertised as the mineral responsible for the redness of your blood, and this is true. Yet iron is not the only mineral needed to combat anemia. Copper, too, is neces­sary before the iron can go to work. Although copper is not a known ingredient of hemoglobin, it has a catalytic effect on iron, that is, copper stimulates and accelerates the work of iron. Iodine is still another mineral concerned with keep­ing your blood up to its normal richness. When too little iodine is obtained through your meals, the bone marrow (the red blood cell factory) cannot produce enough red corpuscles, even though both iron and copper are plentiful in the diet. So we add iodine to the list of minerals essential for "feeding" the blood.

With protein and the three minerals, this might look like a pretty good menu for your life stream; and up until quite recently, medical research accepted the fact that these food elements were sufficient to avoid anemia. But every day we are learning more and more about the close relationship between the proteins, minerals and vitamins. Recent experi­ments have disclosed that anemia cannot be cured when the body shows even a partial lack of any of these B-vitamins: thiamin, niacin, pyridoxine, biotin, folic acid and B-12. In short, we have learned that the "menu" of food elements necessary for healthy blood must be as balanced as the diet that feeds your entire body—high proteins, the minerals iron, copper and iodine, and the B-vitamins.

Although men can become anemic the same as women for lack of these food elements in their diets, women are far more susceptible to anemia than men. Medical authorities esti- mate that go per cent of all women in America are anemic. This means that among women anemia is the rule rather than the exception. The reason for this is largely attributable to their periodic loss of blood throughout many years of men­struation, without care being taken to restore the valuable supplies of body iron lost each month (pregnancy and the menopause also make heavy drains on body iron). Because of these special procreative functions, women require three to four times more Aron than men during their lifetime.

For a woman who is constantly losing iron in the menstrual flow to further deplete her body reserves of iron (and to deny her body the protein, B-vitamins, and minerals it needs to remain young-looking) by subsisting on a diet largely made up of finger sandwiches, salads and coffee in a misguided effort to be "slim" is nothing short of cosmetic suicide.

Again the problem of digestion enters the picture, espe­cially for the person past forty. Since iron dissolves only in acid (the same as protein and calcium can only be digested by acid), it is important to make sure that the hydrochloric acid in your stomach juices is strong enough to handle the iron in the foods you eat. Numerous cases of anemia clear up almost immediately after the gastric secretions are made more acid, proving that it was not so much a case of getting enough iron and protein for the blood, as of assimilating a maximum quantity of these two nutrients. Any foods con­taining acids, such as buttermilk, sour milk, yogurt, cottage cheese made from soured milk, citrus fruits, apples and other tart fruits, aid the body in absorbing iron. Include these in your menus, and you'll promote the increase of iron in your blood.

Regardless of what you've heard for years—that "spinach is full of iron"—this is one vegetable I never recommend. Not only does spinach have a high percentage of oxalic acid (the chemical that combines with calcium in the body to form those excruciatingly painful kidney and bladder stones), but oxalic acid also prevents the iron in spinach from being used by the body since it teams up with the iron to form insoluble compounds. So you may forget all about eating your spinach as far as I'm concerned. Whoever said that the best way to eat spinach was to feed it to the cow, then eat the cow, was 100 per cent correct. Kale is a much better source of food iron than spinach, so if you enjoy cooked greens, you might make a note of this.

The four foods, in order, that produce for you the most hemoglobin are liver, kidney, apricots and egg yolk.

Even though a food may contain a large percentage of iron, what's more important to you and your blood is how much of that iron is actually available for use in your body. Al­though milk is ordinarily not rated as containing a large percentage of iron, the fact is too frequently overlooked that all the iron in milk and milk products is usable by the body.

The same is true of fruits which are not generally recog­nized as being rich in iron. Yet all the iron in apricots, apples, bananas, peaches, pears and cherries reaches your blood­stream. In fact, as mentioned in Chapter 9, apricots make a valuable tonic for overcoming, or preventing, anemia. The iron from peanuts, carrots and celery is also 100 per cent usable. The seed cereals, sunflower seeds and millet, are other excellent sources of available iron, in addition to pro­viding valuable amounts of the B-vitamins needed to avoid anemia.

Meat contains lots of iron, yet not all of it is available for use in the body. For instance, your body can absorb no more than 50 per cent of the iron contained in muscle meats such as lean beef and lamb; 70 per cent of the iron in liver (in spite of the fact that liver produces more hemoglobin than any other known food); and 80 per cent from heart. This does not mean that meats are not excellent sources of iron, for they most certainly are. What it does mean is that you cannot count on assimilating all the iron listed in a chart as contained in meats.

The average woman needs a minimum of 15 milligrams of iron a day to assure her body of an abundance of healthy red blood—more than this if her menstrual flow is heavy. And the average man needs at least 12 milligrams. Since any excess amount of iron in the diet is excreted and can do no harm, the best and safest policy is to obtain too much iron in the daily diet rather than too little.

The menus for your Eat-and-Grow-Younger program, given in Part II, were designed to provide ample quantities of the food elements needed to build and maintain healthy blood. But if your blood has been seriously anemic for a long period, then you may need to take supplemental measures to build it up to normal again. The apricot tonic given in Chapter 9 may be all that's needed to create a maximum of hemoglobin in your blood, or you may still require supple­mental doses of a good mineral concentrate containing iron.

Remember to take care of your red blood cells and the precious red hemoglobin contained in them, and they, in turn, will take care of the radiant appearance associated with youth. Healthy blood, teeming with hemoglobin-laden red corpuscles, is one cosmetic you cannot buy at a counter.

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