A nutritionist invited into the Structural Integration classroom
In the summer of 1974, in the Open Universe class series in Los Angeles, Ida Rolf invited a string of outside experts to speak alongside her teaching of the ten-session work. Valerie Hunt came in to present her electromyography findings. Julian Silverman discussed energy and thermodynamics. Bob Haas, the writer and publisher who had introduced Swami Vishnu Devananda to America, spoke about the relationship between Structural Integration and the wider spiritual traditions he had studied. And on one afternoon Bob's wife Tomi was brought to the front of the room to talk about food. Ida liked having spouses introduce each other, and Bob's introduction of Tomi is one of the more unusual moments in the archive — affectionate, slightly chaotic, and biographically rich. Tomi herself had not wanted to do it. She was, as Bob told the class, afraid she would not get past her first three sentences before this audience of Structural Integration practitioners turned critical.
"Sort of. I got my bachelor's in Skidmore and my master's in science. Alright. It's splitting hairs, but let's let her do it right. The the BA was in Food and nutrition. Food and nutrition. The MA was in Was in food and nutrition. There was no such thing. In food and nutrition. There was no such thing as public health then. So we might as well get this straight. See, it's very important. Now she worked as a nutritionist, am I right, in the Foresight Foresight Dental Clinic in Boston. If you keep doing this, I'll never know. Okay. And she works now in public health and as a public health nutritionist for West District in the city of Los Angeles. There may be some surprises in here, Tomi, for you, but it's alright. Now I'll try to tell you a little bit about what I know she does. She does some of the training of nutrition students for UCLA. She does community lectures for all kinds of groups, senior citizens, young people, just off drugs, all kind of groups. She is, particularly interested in working with health teams on the contributions that nutrition can make both to individual patients and to community health generally."
Bob walks the class through Tomi's training, her clinical work in Los Angeles public health, and her unusual sensitivity to adolescent food culture.
The remark about adolescent cookie diets is the most revealing piece of the introduction. Tomi's clinical practice was not in laboratory research or in dietetic theory; it was in meeting people inside the food beliefs they had already adopted and finding workable ways to supplement what was missing. This is the same posture Ida had toward the body — work with what the person brought rather than legislate from outside. It is also the reason Ida wanted her in the room. The early 1970s in California were saturated with food enthusiasms: megavitamins, raw-food diets, vitamin E as a panacea, Linus Pauling's vitamin C campaign, fad protein regimens. Ida wanted a working public-health nutritionist, not a polemicist, to draw a line between what human studies actually supported and what the supplement market had inflated.
Order at the cellular level
Tomi opens her own talk by quoting Ida's framing of the series and then translating it from the organism scale to the cellular scale. Ida had spoken about putting order into the body of an individual; Tomi names the cellular process that order has to ride on. This is the moment in the lecture where the connection to Structural Integration is made explicit. The order Ida is trying to evoke in the myofascial system is the same order that, at the cellular level, expresses itself as metabolism — the continuous balanced exchange of nutrients in and byproducts out. Without that balance, no amount of structural work changes anything at the level of cells.
"Very basic in this expressed desire of order within the body of an individual is to provide the creative balance between input and output of the necessary elements to carry through the flow of activity, a constant dynamic movement which is the essence of life itself. This never ending life upholding process, night, day, minutes, hours, seconds, goes on never ceasing and is called cell metabolism. It is the constant change within the cell, the taking in of nutrients, the giving off of byproducts and waste, the ongoing process which creates change for better, for worse, or just for maintaining ourselves in our everyday life."
She names cellular metabolism as the literal substrate of the order Ida has been describing all series.
The phrase open system matters here. Tomi is not a reductionist; she is not telling the practitioners that nutrition is the whole story or that food chemistry will explain Structural Integration. She is making the inverse point. The body responds to social context, physical context, and psychological context simultaneously. What a person eats reflects what their mother fed them, what their group approves of, what they can afford, what they have eaten before. She walks the class through this in some detail — the migration of food customs, the way taboos travel and outlive their original conditions, the fear of starvation that has driven every culture's restrictions. The lecture is anthropological as much as it is biochemical, and this anthropological cast is part of why Ida wanted her, not a laboratory chemist, in the room.
"cell metabolism. It is the constant change within the cell, the taking in of nutrients, the giving off of byproducts and waste, the ongoing process which creates change for better, for worse, or just for maintaining ourselves in our everyday life. What we eat, what we do, how we do it, and it all has its effect. The body is an open system, responsive to all facets of the environment, social, physical, and psychological. I eat when I am hungry. I eat what my mother gives me to eat. I eat what I have eaten before. I eat what I see my close associates eating. I eat what I can afford to buy. I don't eat what my group tells me is bad. I don't eat what I don't know. By adhering to a group's values, we are safe, but it also may develop restrictive attitudes and self imposed limitations. Historically, fear of a starvation has made man forage for food, differentiate between the edible and the inedible. In spite of his fear of starvation in every culture that has developed special restrictions and or taboos in regard to food consumption. Myths developed, some are valid and others invalidated with time and the migration of peoples. What one group didn't dare to do, other groups did. Man is the only animal to use fire to cook his food and invite others of his kind to share it."
She lays out the social and historical determinants of eating before turning to biochemistry.
Calories, protein, and the cost of imbalance
Tomi then walks the class through the major nutrient categories in turn. She begins with calories — the energy currency of the cell — and is firm that the body needs a baseline of carbohydrate to function. One hundred grams a day, she tells the class, is the lowest safe amount; below fifty grams is dangerous. The reason is mechanical. Without sufficient carbohydrate, the body breaks down its own fat stores first and then its own muscle tissue, and the breakdown of protein for energy puts heavy waste-disposal demands on the kidneys. The American Medical Association's opposition to high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, she notes, is not arbitrary; the AMA considers such regimens precursors to cardiovascular disease. This is Tomi pushing back, quietly, against the fad protein diets that were already circulating in 1974.
"I don't include alcohol in this group because it is not a nutrient in the sense that gives anything more than the seven calories of heat. The most important source is carbohydrate, which can easily be converted to glucose, the form in which the cells use energy. 100 grams is considered the lowest safe amount in any diet, When we plan out diabetic diets even as low as 1,000 calories, we always include a 100 grams of carbohydrate. 50 grams are too low and anything lower is dangerous. Protein and fat breakdown is costly to the body mechanism and its waste products create excessive strain on the kidneys, besides the greater economic and ecological waste and cost. The American Medical Association puts forth a preventive medical reason for their position on this issue."
She defines the minimum carbohydrate threshold and the metabolic cost of relying on protein for energy.
Her treatment of protein follows the same logic. Eight of the twenty amino acids are essential — meaning the body cannot synthesize them and must take them in from food. Animal proteins contain all eight; plant proteins individually do not, but combinations of plant proteins can supply the full set. Tomi is careful, in the question-and-answer period later, to make clear that vegetarian diets are workable. She mentions the Seventh-day Adventists, who have eaten this way for years and show no harm. What she will not accept is the conflation of restrictive eating with health. The kashrakor she describes — the protein-calorie malnutrition visible on television sets in Bangladesh and Biafra — is what happens when protein and calories both run out, and the swollen bellies of starving children are not from too much food but from edema produced when the body burns its own tissue for fuel.
"They are against the high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diet because they have a very strong feeling of it being a precursor to cardiovascular disease. Two. Protein. It is the primary content of every cell. Protein is made of a chain of amino acids, eight of which are essential. Since man cannot manufacture these eight amino acids, they must come from food sources. Amino acids are reconstructed to produce specific protein for specialized function, such as bone, heart muscle, enzymes, hormones, etc. During starvation, when we consume our own body tissue, we reach a state of mental disorientation, and many other symptoms are also shown. When we see protein calorie malnutrition in young children, we call this kashrakor. I think we have become all too familiar with this disease because through our TV sets, we see this kind of condition in the people of Bangladesh and earlier in the children of Biafra. Their body tissues are used as protein, then converted to glucose to provide the energy to carry the vital body functions. Use of protein without other calorie source results in edema. That is why you see the swollen bellies while the rest of the body is so emaciated. These people, children especially, succumb to the even slightest infection since their immune responses no longer function. You know that in order to have immune response, protein is essential. The essentiality of these two nutrients, protein and caries, cannot be in doubt and all of you should realize their importance."
She explains protein's role as the structural material of every cell and what happens when it is absent.
There is a thread running through these passages that connects Tomi's work to Ida's. Both women are insisting that the body is a system whose order depends on relationships, not on the accumulation of any single component in isolation. Ida says it about the myofascial system: balance the fascial sheaths around the vertical line, and the gravitational field becomes supportive instead of destructive. Tomi says it about cellular metabolism: balance the input and output, eat from many categories, and the cell does its work; pull out whole categories and damage follows. The structural analogy is exact.
Recommended dietary allowances and the limits of human evidence
Tomi spends a substantial portion of the lecture explaining the Recommended Dietary Allowances published by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences. The point is partly procedural — she wants the practitioners to know how the standards are constructed, what the levels actually mean, and how to read the new food labels that would soon carry the RDA — and partly polemical. She is establishing the standard against which the supplement claims of the day would be measured. The RDA, she emphasizes, is not a minimum. It already includes a generous margin for individual variation and adjusts every five years as the literature develops. The board adds new nutrients to its list only when human studies, not animal studies, support adding them.
"This gives you what they are, what all these important key nutrients are, where they are found in their function. On the next sheet that I have given you is called the Recommended Dietary Allowances. This is a developed scientific standard based on studies of the Food and Nutrition Board, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. It is a group of leading research scientists, doctors, food chemists, and nutritionists. This board meets every five years to review the research on each nutrient and publishes the recommended dietary allowances, sometimes called the RDA. The RDA is going to become more and more important because when you the food labeling law regulates that we use the RDA now rather than the minimum daily requirements. So when you read your labels on your foods, the RDA will be down. The RDA levels of nutrients intake will prevent deficiency, provide a generous margin for individual variations in need, allow for cooking and storage losses, avoid dangers of excessive intake. It is not likely that high intake will be useful to the individual. Much high intakes of bodily stored nutrients, such as the fat soluble vitamins A and D, are potentially harmful. The same nutrients are required by all individuals, and the only difference is, of course, in age and sex, and according to their activities. Allowances are set only if scientific evidence supports them. Requirement and allowance levels have been suggested for the other nutrients but are not yet established."
She introduces the Recommended Dietary Allowances and the institutional process behind them.
The human-evidence standard is what governs everything that follows. When Tomi turns to the major vitamins and minerals, she is going to evaluate each one not on theoretical mechanism, not on what worked in rats, but on whether human studies have established a level of need and a level of harm. This is the methodological point she will use, in the very next stretch of the lecture, to confront vitamin E and vitamin C — the two supplement enthusiasms of the early 1970s — head on.
The vitamin E case
The vitamin E section of the lecture is the longest and the most emphatic. Tomi treats it as a case study in how public pressure can move a scientific standard. In 1968 the Food and Nutrition Board added a column for vitamin E to the RDA at thirty international units — not because human studies had established the need, but, as she puts it bluntly, because the council bowed to public pressure. Subsequent literature review found that people had been eating between five and fifteen international units for three decades with no adverse symptoms and consistent blood serum levels. The 1973 RDA accordingly dropped the recommended allowance to fifteen international units. The popular vitamin-E enthusiasm of the early 1970s, in other words, was running ahead of the science by a factor of two.
"Vitamin e is a popular vitamin for food fattest, sensationalized due to some of the reports on animal studies, none of which have been proved on human beings. We cannot extrapolate from animal studies what happens to humans. They only point to the direction for investigation."
She names directly what is wrong with the fad: animal studies have been treated as if they translated to humans.
Having stated the principle, she then names the specific claims the fad rested on. The list is worth attending to because it captures the entire mid-1970s supplement marketing landscape — vitamin E as a heart medicine, vitamin E for sexual potency, vitamin E for anti-aging, vitamin E for muscular dystrophy. None of these, she insists, are supported by human studies. The market had outrun the evidence by a wide margin.
"There is no truth to the fact that a lot of people say that it helps heart, it helps your sexuality, that it keeps you from aging, it it stops you from having muscular dystrophy. There has been no such human studies that have shown this."
She enumerates the popular claims for vitamin E and dismisses them.
But Tomi is not anti-vitamin-E. The lecture is more careful than that. She takes the time to explain what vitamin E actually does at the cellular level, which is to function as an antioxidant — to spare polyunsaturated fats from oxidative deterioration and to protect cell membranes from free radical damage. This is the same chemistry, she notes, that BHA and BHT perform in keeping potato-chip oils from going rancid. The function is real; the dose is the question. And because Americans had been consuming more polyunsaturates in their diets through the post-war shift to vegetable oils, the population's vitamin E need had genuinely increased — which is part of why the Board's 1973 revision settled at fifteen IU rather than lower.
"Both are essential to cellular metabolism. Vitamin E spares polyunsaturates from oxidative deterioration and protects cells from free radical damage. This is the same function that BHA, BHT play in keeping oils and oily foods like potato chips from go from becoming rancid. In conjunction with vitamin a, vitamin e protects the cell membranes."
She gives the actual cellular function of vitamin E — antioxidant protection of membranes and polyunsaturates.
The dietary trend matters. As polyunsaturated fats became more prominent in the American diet — corn oil, safflower oil, the various vegetable oils that displaced butter and lard in the post-war kitchen — the body's vitamin E requirement genuinely did increase. Tomi makes this connection explicitly, and it is the place where she allows that the popular interest in vitamin E was not entirely wrong, only inflated. There is a real metabolic relationship; what was wrong was the dose and the claims.
"As we increase the polyunsaturates in our diet, our need for vitamin E will increase. This is where I see the need for vitamin E increased, above what is said to be the international units for at the 1973 standards."
She names the genuine reason vitamin E needs have risen — the polyunsaturate shift in American diets.
Tomi then names a second legitimate case — premature infants on certain formulas. Breastfed infants do not need supplementation because breast milk already contains more vitamin E than cow's milk. But infants on proprietary formulas made from polyunsaturates may genuinely need a supplementary source. The passage is small but methodologically important: it shows that Tomi's resistance to fad supplementation does not blind her to the genuine clinical cases where supplementation is indicated. Hemolytic anemia in premature infants is one of those cases, and the recommendation follows from human evidence, not from animal extrapolation.
"Premature and some very young infants are prone to hemolytic anemia. If they are breastfed, it is not necessary to add vitamin e because there is increased amount of vitamin e in breast milk as above regular cow's milk. But if they are on a proprietary formula, these are formulas that are set up for infant feeding, as Similac and Enfamil, etcetera, made of polyunsaturates, they may well need a supplementary source of vitamin E."
She names the specific clinical case — premature infants on polyunsaturate-based formulas — where vitamin E supplementation is warranted.
Vitamin C, Linus Pauling, and addictive dosing
Tomi then turns to the second great supplement enthusiasm of the early 1970s — Linus Pauling's vitamin C campaign. Pauling, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, had begun advocating very high doses of vitamin C for the common cold and other conditions, and his prestige had pulled megadose vitamin C into broad public visibility. Tomi treats him with the same combination of biochemical respect and clinical skepticism she had brought to vitamin E. Ten grams of vitamin C, she notes, was enough to prevent scurvy among British sailors. Thirty grams is the WHO level of need. The RDA, again set above average need, is forty-five milligrams — not grams. Pauling's recommendations were on the order of a thousand to four thousand milligrams, well above any level human studies had established as beneficial.
But the more important clinical point is what Tomi calls addictive dosing. People who consume megadoses of vitamin C for long periods, she explains, develop an adapted higher level of need. When they then drop back to a normal intake, they show symptoms of scurvy — not because the normal intake is inadequate, but because their adapted physiology now requires the higher level to maintain its baseline. She describes kidney malfunction and increased kidney-stone formation as further documented consequences. The reasoning generalizes beyond vitamin C: all chemicals can be harmful, she insists; it is a question of how much, and the level can only be set after careful investigation by people of competence.
Eating widely versus eating restrictively
The closing argument of Tomi's lecture is the one Ida had most clearly wanted her to make. The mid-1970s, in the cultural orbit around Esalen and the early Structural Integration community, was full of restrictive eating regimens — macrobiotic protocols, raw-food diets, fruitarianism, strict vegetarianism applied to small children. Tomi's position is plain. The way the body's nutritional needs get met is by eating from many categories of food, not by adhering to a narrow protocol. The reason is that nutrition science still does not know everything the body uses. Eating widely supplies what is known to be needed and what is not yet known but is needed anyway. Restrictive eating closes off categories before science has finished mapping them.
"There are many patterns of eating. As long as we include foods from many categories, we will provide our bodies with the necessary nutrients, known and unknown. This is why I always advocate food sources and food sources alone."
She lays down the closing argument of the lecture.
She is severe on one specific case: the pregnant woman or young mother on a restrictive regimen. Damage from protein insufficiency in the last months of pregnancy and through the first two years of life, she warns, is largely irreversible — affecting brain development at a stage when the cell divisions cannot be redone later. The category of harm she is most worried about is not the adult choosing an enthusiastic diet for themselves. It is the parent imposing a restrictive regimen on a developing infant. This is also where Tomi's social-work background shows. She is not theorizing; she is reporting clinic observations.
"As our choices become more limited, the greater our expert knowledge need to be. And by eliminating whole categories of food, we harm ourselves. And we do create instead of a of a open universe, a closed one. Thank you. Let just stay right here. Now if there are some questions, I think we have ten minutes to do this, ten or fifteen minutes to do this. So why don't you just now press tell me on any items that you have in mind about what? Do stick to what she said. Are you saying that it's necessary to eat flesh? No. Repeat the question. The question was, is it necessary to eat flesh? I say that you need to have protein. I did not say you had to have animal protein. There are, I think, lot of you realize what we call complete and incomplete proteins. The incomplete proteins do not have all the amino acids. The complete proteins, the animal proteins, have all the amino acids. But we know today, because we know much more about these things, that we can balance our amino acid input through the use of different vegetable proteins. And one should do this, and the Seventh day Adventists have done this for years. Actually, I would say, take a little exception. You said flesh. You know, the Seventh day Adventists do drink milk and eat eggs. They're lacto ovo vegetarians. There is no harm coming to them. With those who drink milk and eat eggs and have a normal diet in every way will not, lack protein. Another. Please. I would judge."
In the Q&A she explains that vegetarianism is workable but requires careful protein combining.
The vegetarian answer captures Tomi's clinical style. She does not argue against vegetarianism. She makes clear what it requires — amino-acid combining across plant sources — and notes a community, the Seventh-day Adventists, who have practiced it successfully for generations. She is correcting the audience's likely caricature of her position, not legislating against their diet. The same posture appears in her answer about white sugar and honey, where she allows that honey contains trace minerals the refining process strips from sugar, but refuses to inflate the difference into a moral category. Both are carbohydrate; the body uses them the same way; the trace difference is small.
Calcium, iron, and the population deficiencies
Tomi spends part of the lecture on the specific deficiencies that the first National Nutrition Survey, conducted in 1969 and 1970, had documented in the American population. Two stand out. Iron deficiency, producing nutritional anemia, was widespread — particularly in women of childbearing years and in adolescents of both sexes. She tells the class that in her clinic work, the prenatal patients she sees usually run hemoglobin levels at twelve or below, and the infants of those mothers become anemic by four to six months unless properly fed. The 1973 RDA had accordingly raised the iron requirement to eighteen milligrams for women and ten for men — levels she notes are nearly impossible to reach through natural food sources alone.
Calcium is the other major case. Tomi describes osteoporosis as a population-scale risk that has grown as Americans live longer and consume more phosphates through meat and soft drinks. Many people stop drinking milk after infancy while the body's need for calcium continues — for brain function, for nerve and muscle irritability, for blood clotting. Without dietary calcium, the body draws calcium out of the bones, and the bones become porous and fragile. The clinical picture she paints — older people fracturing ribs from minor bumps — is the consequence at the visible scale of a deficit at the cellular scale. The lecture's pattern repeats here: cell-level chemistry expresses itself at the organism level as visible structural failure. This is exactly Ida's argument, transposed into a different organ system.
Why Ida wanted this voice in the room
Reading the Open Universe transcripts now, it is striking how carefully Ida assembled the supporting voices around her teaching. Bob Haas spoke about spirituality and the integration of the microcosm with the cosmos. Valerie Hunt spoke about electromyography and the energy fields. Julian Silverman spoke about thermodynamics and the second law. And Tomi Haas spoke about cellular metabolism and nutritional standards. Each of them was offering a different scale at which the order Ida was evoking in her hands-on work had to be expressed for the work to last. Structural alignment at the myofascial scale; balanced energy expenditure at the neuromuscular scale; balanced thermodynamic flow at the systems scale; balanced nutrient exchange at the cellular scale. Tomi's lecture was the cellular floor of this stack.
What Ida did not invite was a polemicist. She did not bring in a vitamin-E enthusiast or a megadose advocate or a macrobiotic teacher. She brought a working public-health nutritionist who would teach the practitioners how to evaluate nutritional claims by the standard of human evidence and how to meet patients inside their existing food beliefs rather than legislating against them. This is the same posture Ida herself maintained toward the body's resistance to change — work with what is there, supplement what is missing, do not impose a doctrine the system cannot integrate.
See also: See also: Tomi Haas, UNI_081 (1974 Open Universe), the opening of her lecture on calories and the historical context of food taboos — for readers interested in the anthropological frame she put around the biochemistry. UNI_081 ▸
See also: See also: Tomi Haas, UNI_082 (1974 Open Universe), the closing Q&A on cholesterol, white bread, vegetarianism, and the National Nutrition Survey — material that did not fit the article's central thread but extends her clinical voice. UNI_082 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB3 public tape (RolfB3Side1) — Julian Silverman's thermodynamic framing of Structural Integration as a problem of energy ordering, the systems-scale companion to Tomi's cellular-scale lecture. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB2 public tape (RolfB2Side2) — Ida's discussion of how the work on superficial fascia in the first hour may also balance the autonomic nervous system, an organ-system parallel to Tomi's argument that order at one scale rides on order at another. RolfB2Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA1 public tape (RolfA1Side1) — Ida on the connective-tissue basis of aging and the relationship between structural disorder and physiological failure, the structural counterpart to Tomi's claim that cellular metabolism is the substrate of visible health. RolfA1Side1 ▸
Coda: the cellular floor of structural work
Tomi Haas closes her lecture with a remark that does as much editorial work as anything in the talk. Worthless drugs and worthless diets are expensive in time and money, she says, and confusing — and the cost is borne most heavily by the people who can least afford to misallocate their resources on regimens that do not work. The line is characteristic. It comes from a public-health nutritionist who has spent her clinical life in West Los Angeles working with immigrant communities, senior citizens, prenatal patients, adolescents coming off drugs. Her resistance to the supplement enthusiasms of the mid-1970s is not the resistance of the laboratory chemist who finds the claims aesthetically displeasing. It is the resistance of the clinician who has watched patients harm themselves on diets they could not afford and that did not give them what they needed.
Whether Ida adopted any of Tomi's specific dietary recommendations into her own teaching is not something the transcripts settle. What the transcripts do show is that Ida wanted this voice — careful, clinical, anti-polemical, human-evidence based — placed in front of her practitioners as part of their education. The order that Structural Integration evokes at the level of the myofascial system rests on a cellular metabolism that order must ride. If the cellular substrate is malnourished, restrictive-dieted, or running on supplement enthusiasms without evidence, the structural work has less to work with. Tomi's lecture was the floor under the building.