We interrupt the regular content of Treasuring Home to bring you a few special editions.
Many of you have probably seen me posting on social media about the “new” vitamin. I’m sure you may have wondered, “Why is she promoting this?”or “What is this?” or “Is Jennifer Hall selling some kind of a product?” Or, maybe you haven’t wondered. Maybe you’ve just seen my posts about the vitamin and thought, “That’s weird,” and moved on up the newsfeed.
Either way, I suppose it’s time that a little more explanation is in order.
First, no, I am not selling a product. Second, please know that I am probably among the least likely people in your newsfeed to be trying to promote something to you. I have always been uncomfortable doing that kind of thing, and I still am. But, in this very unusual case, it seems like the only right thing to do.
So, here goes a little explanation. I am so excited and privileged to be among the very first to tell this remarkable story.
The “new” vitamin was discovered by my father, Dr. Gerald Aardsma. I put “new” in quotation marks, because it’s not actually a new vitamin at all. It is a very ancient vitamin, lost from the human diet after Noah’s Flood. This vitamin is precisely why, for example, Noah lived to be 950 years old, and today hardly anyone makes it to 100 years old.
I have known Dad a long time. Forty-two years to be exact; I entered the world as Mom and Dad’s firstborn child, on a snowy November morning in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Ever since I was a little girl, I remember Dad asking intriguing questions and solving difficult problems. He is a scientist, after all. I remember riding the subway in Toronto to visit the lab at the university where Dad was a grad student. I remember hearing words like “apparatus” and phrases like “accelerator mass spectrometry” as a child. I remember the day Dad got his doctorate degree in Nuclear Physics with a specialty in radiocarbon dating, from the University of Toronto, when I was seven years old.
Dad was a loving father, a godly Christian, and always super great at solving problems. Whether it be a high level math problem, a physics problem, an engine problem, a plumbing problem, or a furnace problem, just to name a few, Dad would work on it, and he would eventually solve it. I called him once from college, when I was trying to do a sewing project, and the sewing machine wasn’t working right. I couldn’t work on the project because the machine was messed up. I was dating Steve at the time and I remember him seeming a little skeptical that I was going to call my dad to see if he could help me fix the sewing machine over the phone. Sure enough, he did. It was actually a simple fix, as I recall. Dad nailed it within about 15 minutes on the phone.
I remember having pet gerbils (similar to a hamster) when I was a little girl. There were two in particular that I named “Charlie Brown” and “Gremlin.” This was during the time when Dad was a grad student at the U of T. I was pretty shocked, years later, when I found out that they really weren’t “pets” at all! To me they were pets, but to Dad they were research subjects! He was attempting to raise them with a certain diet, in accordance with his early thoughts and studies about aging.
One advantage to having a scientist for a father is that he would sometimes do “science experiments” at our birthday parties when we were kids. I mean, how cool is that?
I remember visiting a nursing home on Sunday afternoons with my father. Even then, I realized that Dad’s wheels were turning. While ministering to these elderly folks, singing hymns and sharing God’s Word, Dad was studying and observing the disease of aging. Even then Dad was grappling mentally with the question: “If the Bible is accurate in recording people living to almost 1,000 years old, what in the world happened? What changed? Why are we dying so YOUNG today?”
Another thing I should tell you about Dad is that he is a truth seeker; a truth lover. He has never seemed to hesitate at breaking with the status quo in order to stand for truth, or pursue the truth.
After he finished his doctorate degree, Dad interviewed for some lucrative positions, including one involving the Star Wars program initiated by President Reagan. Our phone would ring extremely early in the morning when Dad got calls from a group in Australia that was thinking about hiring him. But his heart wasn’t in these possibilities. He wanted to use his training to further God’s kingdom. I remember Dad seeking God’s will and getting advice from his father. Finally, he made the decision to go work as a professor in the Astro/Geophysics department of a small Christian graduate school in San Diego, CA.
We moved to San Diego from Canada, lived there for eight years, and then moved to IL so Dad could pursue his quest full time. (A few months after moving to IL, I left home and headed to college.)
Dad’s quest was to solve the mystery of aging. Many other brilliant minds in the world have worked on this problem, and are still working on it today. Dad, however, was coming at it from a unique perspective. He believed the Bible. He trusted it as God’s Word. That being said, he wasn’t particularly tied to anyone’s paradigm or particular interpretation of it. He was willing to break with tradition if that meant understanding the Bible properly. He was willing to ask the hard questions. Like I said, he was after the truth.
The Bible is an excellent place to start when attempting to discover the cause of aging, because of the long life spans recorded in the book of Genesis. Those life spans dropped off significantly after Noah’s Flood. Likely no secular scientist is going to start from that point, since the Bible is commonly held to be myth among academia today. Modern scientists start with the assumption that aging, as we know it today, is the normal experience of mankind. Dad started with the assumption that it is not normal at all according to the early chapters of Genesis. He also started with a set of data points unlike any other in the known history of the world, with the key knowledge that the data points began dropping off after Noah’s Flood.
So, Dad’s first stop on the way to solving the aging mystery was to understand some hard questions about the Bible. He basically had to “work his way back” if you will. You can read these three books, to understand how he worked his way back until he was able to tackle the aging mystery head-on.
A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel
Throughout the writing of these books (solving some serious chronology problems between the Bible and secular data), Dad continued to work on understanding aging. When he eventually arrived at the conclusion that aging is actually a vitamin deficiency, he named the unknown vitamin “Vitamin X.”
After the writing of Dad’s first book, Steve and I got married. Life was very busy for us as we began raising our family. We were always interested to hear about Dad’s work during our rare visits to IL. We would usually visit the lab where Grandpa (Dad) was raising mice and fruit flies (test subjects for any Vitamin X candidates). When I say “lab” I am not talking about a high-dollar laboratory in a university setting. Try to picture a lab in a mobile home on a one-acre homestead. Picture research going on under a tightwad budget, while Dad and Mom raised their family in the home next door. Dad didn’t have any funding from anywhere. He was on his own. Their income came from a few folks willing to invest in his work, and the cottage-type businesses that the family was able to start up over the years.
Although the laboratory was in a humble setting, the science being conducted was top-notch. Dad would always be the first to falsify any theory that he worked on, if it could be falsified. He published his findings in his newsletter “The Biblical Chronologist” for over ten years. Much, if not all, of that information is now available on his website.
The pursuit of the aging mystery turned into many long, hard years for Dad and Mom. Only they (and God) will ever know all the sacrifices they made to follow God’s calling on their lives.
Steve and I both remember one conversation that we had, around 2005, when I expressed to Steve some fears I had regarding the possible future discovery of Vitamin X. He replied, “Oh honey, who knows if it will ever actually be discovered…” I gazed at him in all seriousness, and I said, “Just you wait…. Dad will find it. You will see.” Just the confidence of a little girl in her Daddy, I guess. (Except by that point I was a big girl.) I did have confidence; based on knowing that he methodically worked his way toward the solution on any problem, he operated in integrity, and he sacrificed for truth.
I expressed that same confidence to Dad during one of our visits to his lab/office a few years later, as we were discussing some of the recent developments that had happened in his quest. He looked back at me, shrugged a little, and said, “All I can say right now is, I’ve got the dragon in a corner. We shall see.'”♥
Treasuring Home 
4 thoughts on “What’s All This about a New Vitamin? Part One.”