A common sense approach to nutrition that demonstrates how complex issues such as health, life and wellness can be reduced to simple, easily understood, practical ideas and applications. This test proves how certain principles of the life of plants and the soil applies as well to humans and health. The urine/saliva screening helps one determine the cause of the loss of energy (we do not live off the food we eat, but we live off the energy from the food we eat) and which foods and/or supplements should be added to an individuals diet to fit their exact body chemistry, each being unique.

A small number of "nutritionists" and other fringe practitioners use this Urine/Saliva test as the basis for evaluating a person's health and prescribing dietary supplements to fix it. The most visible modern proponent of this test has been Gary Martin, who, during the 1980s, operated the American College of Nutripathy, a nonaccredited correspondence school that granted "degrees" in nutrition. One of the school's brochures described nutripathy as "the condensation of most all natural healing and counseling techniques available today . . . . the basics 'boiled' from literally hundreds of different therapies and techniques."

Martin claimed that nutripathic tests could detect "imbalances which, if left to mature, must ultimately manifest as some form of disease process." and "discover the root cause of the disease while it is still in the prediagnosable stage."

The most notable of these tests was the Urine/Saliva test developed about fifty years ago by Carey Reams, who had a Phd. in Biophysics and Biochenistry, having been prosecuted during the 1970s for practicing medicine without a license. Reams, who also claimed to be guided by God, devised "a mathematical formula for perfect health, based on the biophysical frequencies of living matter." The formula, which Martin called "your Nutripathic Portrait," looks like this: