‘Out of the box and off the wall’

Posted on Fri, Mar. 26, 2004
By MARK WRIGHT
News-Mirror Writer

PUBLISHED MARCH 25: One of the first things that Dr. Reg McDaniel tries to make clear is that he is not trying to push a product or tout a miracle cure. He’ll say that right before he shows you a desk drawer full of dramatic before and after photos of the people he says he’s helped.

No, he would tell you, he didn’t devote the last 19 years to researching a radical alternative to conventional medicine just to pitch the newest snake-oil remedy. In other words, McDaniel, who is the medical director for MannaRelief Ministries, an Arlington-based nonprofit company, doesn’t intend to sound like he’s making a sales pitch when espousing what he believes are the amazing and groundbreaking benefits of taking supplements that contain certain glyconutrients. It’s just that McDaniel, 68, who lives in Mansfield, can’t contain his excitement when reciting the seemingly phonebook-sized list of patients who he claims his nutritional approach to health care has allowed to overcome debilitating disorders or even return from the brink of death to lead normal lives.



“Their malignancies faded away,” McDaniel said, describing some patients that his early research focused on.

Among those who have made dramatic turnarounds are elementary schoolchildren in Dallas who went from flunking fourth grade to acing standardized tests and patients in advanced stages of AIDS who went from being bed-ridden with unrelenting symptoms to again being productive members of the work force.



Of course, there’s also the story of the Las Vegas casino manager who was in the grips of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome and whose family was getting a head start on arranging his funeral. He took a heavy dose of glyconutrients and is now fine.

If you have enough time to listen, McDaniel could list a hundred or perhaps a thousand other people who were suffering from a variety of ailments and are apparently now better because of taking products containing certain plant sugars and other micronutrients that are missing from the modern diet.



“I’m here to tell you we haven’t recovered or sobered up from all the benefits that adding this to the diet caused,” McDaniel said.



Out of the box

A businessman and a researcher came to McDaniel’s office at Dallas Medical Center in August 1985, asking him to conduct research on eight AIDS patients whose symptoms had dramatically subsided. McDaniel, who about that time became a consultant for Carrington Labs in Irving, said he and his team of researchers learned that the patients had been drinking a beverage that contained aloe vera leaf gel. What the doctors eventually concluded was that a sugar extracted from the leaves was helping to rebuild the patients’ immune systems. He said that the aloe vera sugars were used in cellular synthesis. In other words, the sugar is basically a raw material used by the body in the “general defense and repair” of cells, McDaniel said.



The addition of the aloe vera sugars helped the cells of the body more effectively to perform their functions. And, by performing better, the cells of the immune system could more strongly combat infection and disease, McDaniel said. McDaniel said he tried to get Food and Drug Administration approval for products containing micronutrients extracted from aloe vera leaves, vine-ripened tomatoes and other sources.

“We identified brakes and clutches missing from the modern diet,” said McDaniel, who compares the nutrients that most people lack from their diets to certain car parts being absent from a General Motors assembly line. But the FDA did not approve the proposed medicines. McDaniel said it was because the products showed no toxicity at even high doses and their benefits were not being pitched as having just a few specific remedies for only one condition. Instead, McDaniel’s research team was touting having multiple therapeutic effects for many different medical conditions. “That’s out of the box and off the wall,” McDaniel said.



No inhaler necessary

Stephen Mackel of Manchester, England, is a proponent of McDaniel’s approach. The avid runner, who says he used to suffer from severe asthma, brags that he recently ran the London Marathon and that he no longer has to rely on inhalers with heavy doses of medication to control his condition. He credits the glyconutrient supplements he began taking more than three years ago with his improved health. The products have names that sound like they came straight off a chemist’s Periodic Table of Elements: Ambrotose and Phytaloe. The products are expensive dietary supplements sold by Coppell-based Mannatech, a company for which McDaniel spent eight years as medical director.



“The products do not and cannot be acclaimed to heal or cure any disease or condition, they simply give the body what it needs to run itself what God [intended] to have our bodies coming in as fuel in the first place,” Mackel said Tuesday in an e-mail. But a microbiology professor at Tarrant County College Northeast Campus said she does not advocate the use of nutritional supplements, which don’t require FDA approval in order to be sold over the counter, to treat diseases or medical conditions. Many distributors of supplements, she said, are purely trying to make a buck.



“I think people have to be very careful when they use any of these products,” said assistant professor Debbie Scheiwe.

However, McDaniel claims that he isn’t trying to cure medical conditions — at least not through the direct intervention against symptoms that traditional medicines take. Instead, he said, the glyconutrients don’t fight the bugs themselves but rather bolster the body’s ability to fight disease and maintain health. And in some cases, he said, the supplements could allow many drugs to have a stronger effect at lower doses.

“When we get sick, our medicines treat symptoms, but our body gets us over the flu,” said McDaniel, whose MannaRelief Ministries works to provide glyconutrient products to financially disadvantaged children.



In the February 2003 edition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review, glycomics — research aimed at using glyconutrients in medicines — was detailed in an article titled “10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World.” McDaniel said his research was once frowned upon as medical heresy but that he is enjoying the wider acceptance that his work is starting to receive.

“I kind of like it, if you know what I mean,” McDaniel said. “It’s fun to be right.”