Where Have all the Minerals Gone?
Published on February 6, 2017
Eric Cole
Director – Executive Chairman at Simply Naturals Ltd
Thanks to Eric Cole, a minerals colleague who also loves www.HeavensMinerals.com
Are You Eating a Diet of Weak Poisons?
Those carrots in your refrigerator, are there any minerals in them?
Today, scientist have learned through decades-long studies that we have lost 60-90% of the health-giving minerals in our fruits and vegetables over the past 70 years.
In 2004, for example, Donald Davis, a researcher for the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas, analysed 43 fruits and vegetables from 1950 to 1999 and reported shocking reductions in vitamins, minerals, and protein in all of them. For example, he found that while broccoli had 130 mg of calcium in 1950, by 2004 it had only 43 mgs. Even more alarming, 96% of the iron had been lost from apples. These are, of course, frightening declines in the minerals we need to sustain our bodies. (1)
The problem is that our soil has no minerals left to be absorbed by our produce. As researchers at the Rio Earth Summit noted, “Recent studies that compared the mineral content of soils today with soils 100 years ago, found that agricultural soils in the United States have been depleted of eighty-five percent of their minerals.” (2)
Mineral Dilution: We Have Reached the “Fission” State
What has happened is called “nutrient dilution” (3) in our food. This nutrient decline is not limited to produce either. Our beef, chicken, and other meats have lost literally half the iron they used to have in 1950, and this is because we are feeding our cattle nutrient-empty, genetically engineered grains.
Just look at this table detailing the nutrient decline in one apple between 1914 and 1992.
Eighty Year Decline in Mineral Content of 1 Apple (Medium)
Calcium 1914 = 13.5mg 1992 = 7.0mg -48.15 % Decline
Phosphorus 1914 = 45.2mg 1992 = 7.0gm -84.15 % Decline
Iron 1914 = 4.6mg 1992 = 0.18mg -96.09 % Decline
Potassium 1914 = 117.0mg 1992 = 115.0mg -1.71 % Decline
Magnesium 1914 = 28.9mg 1992 = 5.0mg -82.70 % Decline
http://www.nutritionsecurity.org/
The Consequences of Mineral Dilution in Food
These nutritional deficiencies are causing major diseases of all kinds that we are just now recognising are caused by malnutrition. “Mal” means “bad,” and malnutrition really means, “bad nutrition,” and that’s the only kind of nutrition we have left today in our food supply, unfortunately.
Nutritional deficiencies are what scientists believe may be behind the epic increase in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and gut problems of all kinds.
As Waller and Marlen note,
More and more nutritional studies have linked many of today’s most prevalent, life threatening chronic diseases – diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, high blood pressure, macular degeneration, bone loss, dementia to nutritional deficiencies. Research is finding simple nutrition may eradicate many of these common conditions as it has with scurvy, pellagra, beriberi and others. The simple truth may be that susceptibility to disease is linked to either toxicity or nutritional deficiency. (4)
Plug “nutritional deficiencies and disease” or “magnesium deficiency and disease” into PubMed, for example, and you’ll see a multitude of recent studies confirming what we’re learning about the link between mineral deficiencies and disease.
Potassium deficiency = kidney disease, kidney stones, and will eventually lead to dialysis and death. Period.
Magnesium deficiency = hypocalcaemia, hypokalaemia and cardiac and neurological diseases. Chronic low magnesium leads to diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, and osteoporosis.
Unless we begin getting these nutritional deficiencies remedied, we will all become sick, fat, exhausted, inflamed, and prone to diseases of all kinds. One cannot live on cardboard (today’s wheat) and polluted water containing metallic lead and arsenic.
In fact, grains today do about the same things for the gut as eating a foreign object would. They create a perforated, leaky gut full of holes, and that’s because they’ve become so genetically engineered to withstand pesticides that they’re hardly “food” anymore.
Nutrient Deficiency May Be at the Heart of the Obesity Epidemic
Today, researchers are making major strides in obesity research as they’ve finally begun to look to the problem of mineral deficiencies in our diets and how they cause cravings and overeating.
Part of the reason so many people are overweight today is because of the mineral decline in the food we eat. Our body wants minerals, so it creates cravings that signal us to eat more to get the amount of minerals it needs, because one serving of potatoes just doesn’t cut it anymore. As one researcher notes,
Despite excessive dietary consumption, obese individuals have high rates of micronutrient deficiencies. Deficiencies of specific vitamins and minerals that play important roles in glucose metabolism and insulin signaling pathways may contribute to the development of diabetes in the obese population. (5)
Nutritional deficiencies also create vicious food cravings . . . cravings for salty things, sweet things, starchy things, cold things. This is your body telling you, “I need more minerals—major minerals, trace minerals, minerals!”
This is why pregnant women often crave dirt, corn starch, and other strange compounds like these. Their body is telling them they need more major and trace minerals in the body to grow a healthy baby. Unfortunately, even dirt might not satisfy these craving as much as it would have 50 years ago, when our soil still had minerals in it.
Same thing with food cravings. Your body is telling you it needs something very crucial for your body right now . . . something healthy, with minerals in it. You keep eating and eating yet nutritionally you are still starving.
Will Buying Organic Help?
Organic and local foods are free of pesticides and dangerous chemicals, yes.
They have not lost nutrition through transport and mishandling, true.
They are fresher, more nutritious, and healthier than conventional produce in the sense that they haven’t lost minerals through transport, sitting in trucks, getting bruised and rotting, these kinds of issues, yes.
But… although local and organic vegetables are the epitome of “clean eating” they still come from nutrient depleted soils, and that, organic cannot fix.
Why is Our Soil So Depleted?
There are about 5 reasons why the nutrition is going out of our soil and, consequently, out of our food.
First, our soil is eroding. We’re losing all of our fertile topsoil due to erosion. Soil erosion is caused by the bulldozing, burning, and cultivation of the plant material that was used to nourish the soil and the removal of the kind of plant cover fertile topsoil needs to thrive. All of these factors are causing the top three, fertile layers of our soil to erode away. (6)
Second, our mineral-rich topsoil has been so ravaged by over-farming that there is not enough fertile, mineral-containing soil left.
Third, farmers are breeding high yield varieties of plants with weak root systems that cannot absorb the few nutrients that are left in the soil.
Fourth, the use of pesticides negatively impacts the nutritional quality of food greatly.
Lastly, the use of NPK fertilizers, which do not replace the soil with necessary organic matter that produces nutrients. (7)
Not to mention the genetic breeding of less nutritious, hardier, higher yielding plant varieties that provide huge quantities of food but not nutrient-dense, high quality food. All of these factors have resulted in what is called “mineral dilution” or “nutrient dilution” of our food.
If we cannot get our nutrients from our food anymore, we’re going to have to put them back into our bodies and soil again. That’s the only solution. Think on it all you might, it is the only solution. We cannot force industrial farmers to replace the minerals in our soil . . . yet.
The Solution: Plant Based Minerals
There is a solution to mineral loss.
First, we can look to plant based minerals, the only kind of minerals that are completely absorbed by the body.
Second, we can grow our own vegetables in plant based re-mineralised soil that guarantees a mineral-rich yield of produce.
Third, we can begin creating awareness about the dangerous lack of nutrients in our food supply.
But, while we work on re-mineralising our soil, we need to re-mineralise our bodies.
Why Plant Based Minerals Work
The advantage of organic, plant-based minerals as opposed to metallic minerals is that they are easily and completely absorbed by the body. We only absorb 4-6% of metallic minerals and 40% of chelated minerals (which are also close to metallic form). These are the kind of minerals sold at stores and all over the web.
But plant based minerals, which are harder to find (but well worth it), are absorbed by the body and soil at a rate of 100%.
Plant-based minerals are the products of photosynthesis, in which plants digest metallic minerals and convert them into hydrophilic (water soluble) minerals through their root system. During photosynthesis the plant digests the mineral creating a tiny, atom-sized mineral the size of one one millionth of a micron that can be immediately absorbed by the human body. (8)
Plant minerals are much like those obtained from tomatoes, broccoli, potatoes, oranges or any other food grown from the earth. They are also enzymatically alive. They have been predigested by the plant allowing humans to absorb them at the cellular level, where they can immediately go to work, refueling our body with precious nutrients and minerals like potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, copper, zinc, and manganese.
Conclusion
If we want to reverse the epic increase in disease today, we must correct the nutrient decline in our foods to do so. We can start at home, taking plant based minerals and growing gardens with re-mineralised soil. We can re-nourish ourselves, our families, and reach out to friends and neighbors to share what we have learned.
But soon, we must begin clamouring for change. We need industrial farmers to start re-mineralising their soil at a global level and for government officials to treat this problem as the world crisis it truly is.
We do not have to settle for a diet of weak poisons. We can put the nutrition back in. If supplementing make sure your mineral supplements are plant derived ‘food state’ from a good quality supplier.
Sources
(1) Davis, D.R., Epp, M.D., Riordan, H.D. (2004) Changes in USDA food composition data for 43 garden crops, 1950 to 1999. Journal of the American College of Nutrition. 23:669–682.
(2) Marler, J. B. and Jeanne R. Wallin. Human Health, the Nutritional Quality of Harvested Food and Sustainable Farming Systems. Nutrition Security Institute. http://www.nutritionsecurity.org/PDF/NSI_White%20Paper_Web.pdf
(3) Jarrell, W.M. and R.B. Beverly. 1981. The dilution effect in plant nutrition studies, p. 197– 224. In: Brady, N.C. (ed.). Adv. Agron. Vol. 34. Academic Press, New York, NY.
(4) Marler, J. B. and Jeanne R. Wallin. Human Health, the Nutritional Quality of Harvested Food and Sustainable Farming Systems. Nutrition Security Institute. http://www.nutritionsecurity.org/PDF/NSI_White%20Paper_Web.pdf
(5) Via, M. The malnutrition of obesity: Micronutrient deficiencies that promote diabetes [online publication] ISRN Endocrinology. 2012; 2012: 103472. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313629/
(6) WWF. Soil erosion and degradation. http://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/soil-erosion-and- degradation
(7) Our Disappearing Minerals and Their Vital Health Role (Part1). Natural News. http://www.naturalnews.com/023237_minerals_health_soil.html
(8) Heinrich, E. (2010) The Untold Truth: Where Has All the Nutrition Gone? [Kindle]
I buy from www.HeavensMinerals.com every month on auto shipping to keep me going!
