About a year ago, Dr. Mackenzie Walser, a nephrologist at The Johns Hopkins University, asked me to help him. Dr. Walser had just finished a study in which he believed he had made one of the greatest advances of his career. He had shown that he could delay dialysis by one to four years by giving his patients an essential amino acid supplement in conjunction with a low protein diet. However, due to the horrible taste of the essential amino acid, his patients were taking them as a large number of big tablets. The patients in the trial would not take these tablets. His comment was, "They would rather die than eat these things."

    My colleague, Dr. Louis Wood and I began work immediately and finally came up with a way to mask the flavor of the amino acids using a natural food ingredient. This was a significant advance as the amino acids have been available for nearly 50 years and most of them have tasted so bad no one would eat them.

    We then developed a large number of flavors to make it easier for Dr. Walser's patients to take the essential amino acids. We also found that we could make them into a good tasting candy, custard or drink.

    The result of this effort is the products we now have available for you so that you can delay dialysis, and you can maintain your health if you are already on dialysis.

    We are convinced that many other disease states can be helped by our available products. Proper nutrition is especially important in cancer, and even for AIDS patients. We continue our research because we know that folks with food allergies, inborn errors of metabolism like phenylketonuria or gyrate atrophy also need special diets including an amino acid mixture. And they need them to taste good!

    Our purpose in forming Calwood Nutritionals was to make it easier for you to follow your physician's and dietitian's recommendations on nutrition. By improving your diet you can improve your health.

Dr. Gary Calton, President