To Your Health
January, 2007 (Vol. 01, Issue 01) |
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Farmers are paid by the weight of a crop, not by the amount of nutrients. Dr. Davis calls this the "dilution effect" - as fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. become larger and more plentiful, they provide fewer essential vitamins and life-giving minerals.
It's a simple inverse relationship: The higher the yield, the lower the nutrients. Slower-growing crops have more time to absorb nutrients from the sun and the soil. When carbon-bound, organically complexed nutrients, including minerals and trace minerals, in our plants are lacking, everyone's health suffers.
Jeff Cronin, at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, concluded that scientists and the USDA often overlook farming practices: "Breeding plants to improve crop yield at the expense of all other things seems to be the problem, as well as depleting the soil and not rotating crops properly." Researchers have discovered that since the mid-1930s, our soils have become progressively depleted of critical organic complexes, polysaccharides and muco-polysaccharides, and other naturally occurring microbes and soil-based organisms. Moreover, the steady addition of toxic chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, etc., has triggered long-term soil imbalances, leading to an inability to neutralize the toxic chemicals and re-create new organic complexes and other critical minerals and nutrients. Thus, our foods have become interlaced with inorganic, toxic chemicals in place of naturally occurring, organically complexed minerals and nutrients. Again, who suffers? We all do.
For example, research clearly shows that the larger the yield of wheat, the lower the nutrients. According to Cronin, "Even though amounts of nutrients have declined, fruits and vegetables are still the richest source of protective nutrients, much better than eating highly refined foods such as white flour, sugars, and fatty foods."
So, we need to supplement. What's wrong with an off-the-shelf vitamin?
We have been eating junk foods and highly processed produce that is grossly deficient in organically complexed nutrients, especially organic minerals. It's no wonder we are a nation of overweight, sick people with the highest health costs on the planet. While we spend more than any nation on earth on health care, we are among the least healthy people among modern nations. Why? It's not for lack of spending money on our health care.
In her book Tired or Toxic?, Sherry A. Rogers, MD, states: "So food processing has a seriously silent and epidemic effect on our lives. For example, vitamin E has been removed from most grocery store oils and flours. Exposures to various pesticides and chemicals can cause brain symptoms, which actually mimic Alzheimer's. The brain is more vulnerable to attack by these when vitamin E is not standing guard at the cell membrane. Vitamin E is necessary to prevent Alzheimer's."
