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Foreword to Potential Within

Updated: Oct 16, 2023

Foreword by Dr. Michael Colgan Ph.D C.C.N

Original post: September 14, 2010



Foreword to Potential Within

It is a pleasure to be invited to write a foreword to Potential Within. This book is a tour de force on the correct way to approach health and performance. The whole book underscores how unnecessary it is to allow your body to deteriorate to the extent that you have to resort to the unnatural, man-made chemicals that form the panoply of pharmaceutical drug medicine today.


Franco Cavaleri shows us in no uncertain terms, punctuated with abundant evidence from peer reviewed research, how we can use the signals from natural chemicals to achieve optimum health and performance. These are the chemicals that have been present on


Earth throughout our evolution. These are the chemicals that our DNA code grew from to create every protein and lipid that constitutes the human body. These are the chemicals that today we call “nutrients”, each one of whom stimulates expression of genes to make every, membrane, muscle, bone, organ, and brain cell that makes and remakes you every living day. As Franco shows, neglect them at your peril.


I am especially impressed by Franco’s understanding and forward thinking about the insulin system and its tight and far-reaching control over the function of organs, glands and brain.


Against considerable opposition, for example, for more than a decade, Franco has advocated the use of the mineral vanadium, and the amino acid taurine, as essential to optimum insulin function. Recent strong, controlled research in 2008, showing recovery of insulin control in adult-onset diabetes by use of these nutrients, vindicates his advocacy.


Since Professor David Jenkins first drew attention to the control of insulin by nutrition, with his creation of the Glycemic Index in the 1970s, the decline of the insulin system when exposed to the usual American and Canadian diet has been linked to an ever increasing list of diseases. Heart disease, adult-onset diabetes, arteriosclerosis, stroke, obesity, some forms of cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease are all now firmly linked to the decline into progressive insulin resistance caused by faulty nutrition. Because of food processing and pollution, most of the population of North America is now at serious risk. Potential Within offers a program that reduces this risk to near zero.



Foreword to Potential Within

Some of BNHR philosophies and findings presented in book with 650 references


Franco is one of the few nutrition experts that can specify an accurate and direct path back to health, by the use of the right food and the right nutrient supplements, in the right ratios and amounts to create the synergy required to properly stimulate your DNA code. When he and I first discussed this science in 2002, we did not have the brilliant information provided by the Human Genome Project, which was not initially completed until 2003. Now, in 2009, human genomics is a burgeoning science that has confirmed many of our beliefs about the natural biochemical foundations of human health. This science also emphasizes how precise our use of foods and supplements has to be in order to achieve optimum performance and inhibition of aging. Potential Within offers you an exact and comprehensive guide to health through the maze of vague theories and misinformation that now litter the marketplace.


Modern genomics has also shown us, that resorting to man-made pharmaceutical drugs to control one symptom or another, is not only ineffective, but also leaves you prey to secondary diseases caused by the drugs themselves. Most people we ask, however, have been persuaded that these drugs are safe. Before the Human Genome Project showed us, at the molecular level, the paths through which drugs cause genes to express toxic combinations of proteins, it was the general belief in medicine that most drugs were safe. Now we know that they cannot ever be safe. Why? Because they never existed on earth before the 20th century. Over millions of years, our DNA code developed without exposure to them, thus had no way to develop mechanisms to control them. It is no wonder than more than 300 pages of the 2009 Physicians Desk Reference are replete with contraindications and warnings of side-effects of prescription drugs, almost all of which were developed in the last century, ignorant of genomics.


But medicine is changing fast. As we learn more and more how nutrients control the expression of precise gene sequences, which provide the codes for the more than 100,000 different proteins and lipids that constitute our bodies, medicine is turning humbly to Nature for the makings of human health. You are fortunate to have this book in your hands, for it contains these makings in abundance.


Michael Colgan

20 February 2009

Dr. Michael Colgan Ph.D C.C.N

Michael Colgan, PhD, CCN, is one of the world’s most popular scientific experts in nutrition. He is a best selling author and travels the world lecturing on anti-aging, sports nutrition and hormonal health. His professional memberships include, the American College of Sports Medicine, the New York Academy of Sciences and the British Society for Nutritional Medicine. He is on the Council of the International and American Association of Clinical Nutritionists, the certifying authority for nutrition, and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Nutrition. Dr. Colgan has also been a consultant to the US National Institute on Aging and the New Zealand Government.


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