USANA Founder Dr. Myron Wass is "The King of Supplements"
Dr. Myron Wass is an internationally renowned expert in microbiology and immunology, and is a pioneering scientist in the use of human cell cultures to detect infectious viruses. Dr. Warth received his B.S. in Biology from North Central University, his M.S. in Microbiology from the University of North Dakota in Naperville, Illinois, and his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Utah.
After completing his education, Dr. Wass became involved with the Pathology Research Group in Peoria, Illinois as an infectious disease testing specialist and directed the microbiology and immunology laboratory. After gaining three years of clinical experience, he saw an opportunity to make a greater contribution to medicine by developing more urgently needed assays for viral diseases.
Dr. Wass pioneered the Golub Laboratory in 1974 as his personal laboratory studio. By June 1977, he had developed several viral diagnostic assays that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for distribution to hospitals and clinical laboratories throughout the world. He developed the first commercially available Epstein-Barr virus reagent.
In 1992, Dr. Wass ceded a controlling interest in Colgate Laboratories and formed USANA Health Sciences, a cutting-edge manufacturer of nutritional supplements, foods, and personal care products.
Even though his business is very successful today, Dr. Walsh has always considered himself a scientist, not a businessman. Nonetheless, Dr. Wentz's excellence in business philosophy was recognized when he was appointed by the President to serve as a consultant to the U.S. Small Business Administration and was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Utah in 2003.
In addition to pioneering Clorox Laboratories and USANA Health Sciences, Dr. Wentz also built Sanoviv Medical Center, a fully accredited, full-service medical facility in Baja, California. In recent years, Dr. Walsh's commitment to charity and helping the less fortunate has led him to establish the Walsh Medical Center and Laboratories in Uganda, Africa, and another Walsh Medical Center in Cambodia to help orphans and children in impoverished areas devastated by diseases such as malaria and HIV. Dr. Walsh's selfless work as a medical missionary around the world earned him the Children's Hunger Foundation's Child Advocate Award in 2006, and in 2007, Dr. Walsh was honored with the Albert Einstein Award for excellence in the life sciences. The Children's Hunger Foundation's Malawi Medical Center opened in 2009 and is named in honor of USANA's founder, and in 2011, Dr. Wass was honored with a Five Star Industry Award from the Multi-Level Marketing International Awards (MLMIA), as well as two accolades for his work as the ****same author of the national bestseller, "Healthy Homes".
Despite his lifelong dedication to health and disease prevention research, Dr. Wass also has a personal love of music, and because of his generosity and dedication, he has decided to give back to his alma mater and the community by building the Wass Center for the Arts and Concert Hall at North Central University in Naperville, Illinois.
Words from Dr. Myron Wass
We have forgotten that people used to be able to live to a ripe old age. Now, many people are passing away from man-made diseases that could and should be preventable. Statistics show that one in three Americans die of cancer; one in three die prematurely of heart disease; and the rest die either of another disease or in accidents. Very few will age naturally for 100 years.
It is unfortunate that the vast majority of people die prematurely and waste too many years in pain and suffering. Chronic degenerative diseases are ravaging the world. Both of my parents died prematurely. My father died of a heart attack when I was 17, and my mother died of cancer a few years ago. When my father died, I remember my mother telling me that she wished there was something I could do to help him.
We now know that optimal nutrition is the key to long-term health. Unfortunately, the typical modern diet makes it difficult for us to consume the high levels of nutrients necessary to maintain good health. Moreover, the nutritional supplement industry is filled with imperfect and unbalanced products. This discovery led me to found USANA Health Sciences in 1992 in order to develop powerful nutritional formulas and manufacture quality nutritional supplements. Today, I believe that USANA Health Sciences products can help people live longer, healthier lives, and I'm excited to share the good news with you.
USANA customers can rest assured that their body's cells are getting the right type and amount of nutrients. At the same time, the USANA family's unique ability to help people adopt healthy lifestyles supported by USANA products has become a global force. I dream of a world without suffering, a world without disease. The USANA family will be the healthiest family in the world. May you share my beliefs, and may you love life, live a healthy and happy life, and make every moment of your life a wonderful and abundant one.
The Foundation of a Fulfilling Life
Dr. Wentz, Founder and Chairman of USANA, recalls, "I was only 17 years old when my father passed away. It was the most traumatic event of my life. I wanted my father's approval so much that I still want to make up for his death today. I was like any other teenager at the time, and I never had time for him. By the time he was gone, of course, it was too late. I think that really left an indelible mark on me for the rest of my life - having lost my father when I was very young."
Although he lost his father early in high school, Dr. Wirth had a very happy childhood.
"I had a very warm family," he said. His parents deliberately planned the birth years of their three sons so that they could take care of them during their important formative years. "Marvin is 14 years older than me and Charles is seven or eight years older than me. They were like raising three 'only children'. I had a happy childhood. My parents loved each of us very much."
Dr. Wass was born in 1940 in Napoleon, North Dakota. It was a small rural village of only about 1,000 people. In those days, Dr. Wass's father, like almost all North Dakotans, was a farmer. But unlike most of his contemporaries, Adam Wass was also a businessman. His son explains, "Farming alone didn't satisfy him, so he teamed up with his brother to start a small business. They partnered in a hardware store, a furniture store, and bought the John Deere farm implement store and the Ford dealership."
As a result of these businesses, the Wass family moved from the isolated farm to the town, and then about six years later, Myron was born. They were known as 'roadside farmers' because they lived in Napoleon but farmed out in the countryside. The family was relatively modest, with no running water or indoor sanitation, like many other families in the small community at the time.
McLennworth's childhood was a happy one, albeit not a privileged one. He was energetic and active as an officer, the distinguishing characteristics of his later years, which were evident in his youth. His older brother, Marvin, said, "He was a serious kid who took things seriously, but also knew how to enjoy life. He wasn't a sports star, but loved sports and won the school's outstanding athlete award. He always had a passion for music and was in the school band and choir. He was a member of the school band as well as the choir, and he was quite a singer! He didn't excel in elementary school, but he excelled in high school and was a class officer every year. By the time he graduated from college, he was seriously considering a career."
Dr. Worth's mother, Bertha Worth, was a very devout believer and insisted that her son attend church and other church services every Sunday. In fact, she wanted Myron to become a pastor. The family was members of an evangelical church in the district. Myron attends the church's evangelical camp every summer and is an active scout leader.
He has a warm, cozy home and good role models to follow. "People thought of my father as a generous, loving man," says Wass. "Even years later, I remember when I was coming home from a school duck hunt or something, I would pass some farm or store and all I had to do was say that I was Adam Wass's son and they would treat me royally. It seemed that everyone in that area had been generously helped by my father, or that they admired and respected him greatly."
"This only makes it harder for me to cope with the loss of my father, who died of a heart attack at the age of 57. But I remember that he suffered from heart disease at a very early age and had to go to the hospital and have long term treatment.
Dr. Wass has seen chronic degenerative diseases claim the lives of family members. With few exceptions, he has watched many elders in his two-parent family die of cancer and heart disease. Even his mother had to deal with the disease. In her 60s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which required her to undergo surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. She was a valiant fighter, a true victor, and she would not easily let cancer and cancer treatments take her life prematurely," Dr. Wass said." Cancer continued to ravage his family, and his older brother, Charles, also died of cancer at the age of 66. "Chronic degenerative diseases are a real problem in this family."
Confrontation head-on
Different people have different ways of dealing with it. Some adopt a policy of surrender. Some people deny the problem or run away from it. Others vow to face the battle head on
, determined to win in the end. Dr. McLennox was one of the latter. His life's work has been to defeat chronic degenerative diseases, and he will do everything in his power to do so.
He attended North Central University in Naperville, Illinois, graduating with a B.S. in biology in 1963 and completing a pre-medical program.
He recalls, "All of my classmates seemed to go to medical school as a matter of course after completing the pre-med program. That was the trend at the time, but I wasn't one to go with the flow. I decided I wanted to do something more meaningful. I didn't want to do a medical degree and then practice medicine; I wanted to create scientific solutions - provide tools for medicine, not just practice medicine."
After deciding not to enroll in medical school, he spent a year planning his best path to achieve his goal. By then, he had become a microbiologist and was determined to pursue infectious disease research. "So I went to graduate school at the University of North Dakota and worked half-time as a bacteriologist while pursuing a master's degree in microbiology."
The young scientist, who by then was married to his college sweetheart, Jaeger, has since focused on his PhD in the microbiology department at Utah State University in Salt Lake City. He chose that school because he wanted to study immunology, for which the department was nationally recognized. And, there, he could conduct his research under the guidance of a world-renowned authority on immunology.
After earning his PhD in microbiology, and with his expertise in immunology (his dissertation was titled Tumor Immunology), he joined a pathology group in Peoria, Illinois. He recalls, "Although I had taken all the medical courses, it was very rare for an M.D. student to join a medical school medical group." He became the group's epidemiologist, directing the microbiology and immunology work in the laboratories of three Peoria-area hospitals.
An Inevitable Shift
After three years on the panel, Dr. Wass saw an opportunity to make a major contribution to medicine. At the time, there were only two viruses that could be tested in the laboratory - hepatitis and rubella. So he decided to investigate the possibility of testing a variety of other infectious viruses. He wanted to be able to do these tests and get the results into the hands of clinicians far more quickly than with the standard tests of the past.
He left the pathology group in Peoria and returned to Salt Lake City, Utah, to work in a well-equipped laboratory, except that it didn't have the equipment to grow cells. I sold everything I had and borrowed $40,000 from the Small Business Administration to get the equipment I needed to test the virus," he says. I knew that a lot of big pharmaceutical companies had been trying to do what I was trying to do for years, but they had failed for one reason or another. I decided that I would develop all the viruses that were important for human diagnosis and design test systems for those viruses. I eventually succeeded."
Dr. Wass founded Golub Laboratories in September 1974 as his personal laboratory studio. By the first June of 1977, in just two and a half years, several of his virus tests had been approved by the FDA and were ready to be marketed.
He decided to concentrate on the rash virus first, developing multiple tests simultaneously. That was the first product on the market, but the one that stands out is the Epstein-Barr virus reagent," he explains. The whole world was looking forward to it, especially in Europe, and it was the company's first major victory. I've developed more than 30 viral reagents, but it was the Epstein-Barr virus reagent that made me famous in medical diagnostics. It was a test that people couldn't duplicate, and it's still the gold standard for viral testing to this day.
USANA was born
A few years later, Dr. Wass realized he needed to fight chronic degenerative diseases with all his might. Back in the early 1900s, the top five deadliest diseases were all infectious," says Dr. Wass, "and chronic degenerative diseases have continued to spread throughout the last century, right up to the present day." Indeed, his own health seemed to be deteriorating under the stress of his work, which reinforced his determination to conquer disease.
In 1992, Dr. Wass used his unique expertise in cell culture and his unwavering belief in cellular nutrition to found USANA.
Why did Dr. Wass choose nutrition as his weapon in the battle against cancer, heart disease, and other chronic degenerative diseases, among the many pharmaceutical and surgical options available? "I believe that the only effective way to prevent chronic degenerative diseases is to provide our bodies with proper nutrition," he explains.
Many people come to the same conclusion with different levels of knowledge. But Dr. Wass's insights into nutrition come from a very basic level: the needs of a single cell in the body.
He said, "In order to develop the best viral reagents for the Colgate lab, I had to grow the best viral antigens. But viruses can't reproduce unless they have a host cell. If you can't grow healthy, active cells, you can't grow good viruses. I have found that by providing the right nutrients to the body's cells, you can keep them healthy forever without degeneration or disease. I can keep cells in optimal health by providing the right nutrients."
Dr. Wass needed to do everything he could to keep the cells in his lab healthy, and to that end, he developed a comprehensive nutritional system, convinced that "good nutrition is a universal principle. If we are able to provide our bodies with the full range of nutrients every day: in the right form, in the right amounts, and in the right, balanced proportions, we can maintain long-term health and effectively avoid chronic degenerative diseases. After all, a healthy body must start with healthy cells."
Never has the importance of optimal nutrition been more realized than now. In fact, the toxins we've created in this century (synthetic chemicals, drugs, pollutants, stress, etc.) are generating huge amounts of free radicals, derived from diets and antioxidants produced by our bodies that can't cope," he says. Our body's antioxidant system just can't defend itself against the massive chain of free radical activity day in and day out."
"So we need better nutrition than our grandparents had. We need to consume far more natural antioxidants in our diets than the government's recommended daily allowance. We need to take supplements because we're not getting enough of what our bodies need from food. When I launched USANA Nutrition, other medical and nutritional experts thought my ideas were too radical; they felt that the large amount of nutrients in the formulas might be toxic. Years later, when they saw the results, they were in favor of my idea."
USANA's success has been remarkable and our family has grown rapidly, with members agreeing that the products have changed their lives and testifying to Dr. Wentz's philosophy and the nutritional products he has brought to the world.
Moving Forward
Dr. Wentz's dream of helping people live longer, healthier lives is what drives him. Such a rapid pace is attributed to his abundant energy. But Dr. Wass attributes it to one thing: the urgency of his mission. He says, "I always feel like there's too little time, life is too short, and there's too much to do. I was too late to do something for my parents. But I think what I'm doing now is helping people live healthier lives. I think I'm helping people to live their lives without having their lives interrupted by premature death or illness."
Whenever the sun sets, Dr. Wass puts down his work, walks outside, and faces the sun in contemplation. It's his personal ritual. He says, "I never think much about why I do it. I use this time to meditate and reflect. I want to evaluate what I've accomplished that day and think about whether I like what I've done. Ask myself if I did my best. I want to think about what I could have done better."
Dr. McLennworth, Published Papers
During his long and distinguished career in biomedical sciences, Dr. McLennworth has independently conducted important research and led teams of researchers in many other investigations. His impressive record of accomplishments includes papers published in many of the leading scholarly journals, posters exhibited at scientific congresses and symposia, and other general published works. In addition, you can find less technical works authored by Dr. Wass in past issues of USANA Health Sciences.
Books:
Wentz M., Wentz D., and Wallace D. The Healthy Home New York, New York:VanguardPress;2011.
Wentz M. A mouthfull of A mouthfull of poison Rosarito Beach, Baja California:Medicis, S.C.;2004.
Wentz M. Invisible miracles Rosarito Beach, Baja California. Rosarito Beach, Baja California:Medicis, S.C.;2002.
Wentz M.