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When a human being is placed for several days on a completely defined diet, consisting almost entirely of small molecules that are absorbed from the stomach into the blood, intestinal flora disappear because of lack of nutrition. By this technique, the composition of body fluids can be made constant (standard deviation about 10%) after a few days, permitting significant quantitative analyses to be performed. A method of temperature-programmed gas-liquid partition chromatography has been developed for this purpose. It permits the quantitative determination of about 250 substances in a sample of breath, and of about 280 substances in a sample of urine vapor. The technique should be useful in the application of the principles of orthomolecular medicine.
Pauling et al. (1971) studied this question.