By David Mellor
With each spoonful of today’s food, we are unknowingly slowly killing ourselves. I am not talking about potential toxins, antibiotics, or preservatives that they may or may not contain; I am talking about what our modern food does NOT contain. What do you ask? How can something that is not in our food be slowly killing us?
You see, we are not the first society to unknowingly destroy its food supply. The Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world that declined had chemical-free tilled fields, so organic vs. inorganic or GMO was not the issue. Soil depletion is a common issue time after time in these ancient societies.
How is soil depleted? The soil is like your checkbook. Unless you put enough in to cover the checks you are writing, eventually, your account will be overdrawn. The soil is constantly being depleted by a number of factors. 1) Water dissolves minerals in soils and gravity leaches (pulls) those minerals below the root zone making them unavailable to plants. 2) Wind and water erosion can blow or carry away soil minerals. 3) Crops grown will chemically “mine” whatever minerals are present in the soil.
After constant cropping, the trace minerals are gone. But we add fertilizer, don’t we? Conventional farming methods add three macro minerals (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) back into the soil and maybe a few trace minerals if the farmer can afford it. Another issue that has developed since 1994 is that we are on purpose, chemically chelating (making minerals unavailable by chemically surrounding them) certain minerals as a form of weed control. All these factors are contributing to the sad fact that we are producing food that has very little mineral density and we are producing “empty calories.” Farmers are paid in tons and bushels, NOT in mineral content.
So how did the ancient societies deal with this problem? The Romans conquered Egypt for their wheat. They knew that Egyptian wheat enabled their army to march further and fight harder than wheat is grown anywhere in the Mediterranean. What was the difference? The Nile River flooded every spring and renewed the soils with silt (minerals eroded and carried from melting snow on mountains in Africa). Egyptian wheat was very mineral dense.
In a National Geographic article, archeologists have proven that some societies in equatorial regions with high soil mineral depletion like Central America, the Pacific, and Africa, resorted to cannibalism by conquering neighboring tribes. They would sacrifice them to their deities, then cook their flesh in every fashion as a food source. Then, they took the boiled and de-fleshed bones (used for bone broth) and stored them in huts and caves until planting season.
When planting season came around they would use the bones in ritual ceremonies to promote a good harvest. Finally, they would grind up the sacred bones, use them in food as a culinary spice and use them as fertilizer for their crops. Thus enemy tribes competing for soil resources were consumed in every sense of the word to get their minerals. This gives us a whole new perspective of Jack & The Beanstalk’s, “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum; I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
In the American West, homesteaders would establish small farms and after several years their crops would become stunted, cattle would be stillborn and children would start to be born with physical or mental birth defects. They would simply pick up and move further west and repeat the cycle. The soils had been depleted. They pushed the Native Americans off the virgin soils into reservations at gunpoint until we got to the Pacific.
Our federal government has officially known about “death by depletion” since 1936 as evidenced by Senate Document 264. In 1992 at the Earth Summit, it was reported that North American soils were 85% mineral depleted. It is too expensive to economically fix our soils on a huge scale because farmers are only paid on yield, NOT mineral content. Rather than fix the soils, farmers resorted to giving their animals vitamin and mineral supplements in their feed to deal with the problem. William A. Albrecht, a soils professor at the University of Missouri during the 1940s-1950s, experimented with putting trace minerals back into the soil and got dramatic results in improving the quality of crops and the animals that ate them.
Dr. Joel Wallach DVM, ND, took Albrecht’s research to the next level by necropsying over 17,000 animals and autopsying over 4,000 humans for comparison which led to his discovery that all humans require 90 essential nutrients to achieve and maintain optimal health. Of the 90, two-thirds of the ninety are minerals. “Essential” means the body cannot manufacture them. They must be consumed every day to replace what is lost through sweat and bodily elimination. He discovered animals and humans that died of the same diseases actually died of the same nutrient deficiencies. Wallach also discovered in his research, that each of the 90 Essential Nutrients was linked to at least 10 diseases. Thus, if you are depleted of 60 of the Essentials, you may be susceptible to 600 diseases.
In conclusion: 1) We are producing foods that are “empty calories” practically devoid of vitamins and minerals. Because of modern transportation, food comes from all over the world and there is no guarantee of what soils they were grown in and what mineral density they have. 2) Not everyone has enough land to produce their own food and put trace minerals into their garden. The solution to “death by depletion” is simple. We must follow the farmer’s lead they practice with their livestock by supplementing ourselves with the 90 Essential Nutrients to obtain what is NOT in our food. Thus the cry, 90 for Life!
For simplicity, plants have the ability to manufacture:
· Sugars/Carbohydrates
· Fats/Lipids
· Amino Acids/Proteins/Enzymes/Vitamins
· Nucleic Acids/DNA/RNA
Plants, however, do not have the ability to synthesize (manufacture) minerals. Plants can only absorb what nutrients are present in the air, soil, or media they are grown in. This is the conundrum of “Death by Depletion.” You see, all soils are not created equal, and minerals are present in the soil just like the ripples in chocolate ripple ice cream. So, fruits, vegetables, and crops are grown in one part of town may have 65 minerals in them, where on your property they may only have 17.
There is no one checking for mineral content when sold because the farmer only gets paid based on bushels/weight, moisture content, and lack of weed seeds/contaminants. This creates the problem that there is no financial incentive to ensure that there are the 60 essential minerals in plants and animals that are needed for all animal and human health, as discovered by Dr. Wallach’s research.
The problem is further magnified by our modern refrigeration, storage, and transportation systems. Fruits, vegetables, and animals are imported from all over the country and the globe. Consumers in most cases have no clue about Country of Origin (COO) because that labeling was struck down because of trade agreements.
“The reason that we put the vitamins, amino acids, minerals and trace minerals into animal feeds is because we don’t have health insurance policies for livestock,” states Dr. Wallach. If we used the human health care system for livestock, our hamburger would cost $275 a pound and a dozen eggs would cost $50, to pay for the healthcare. Agricultural/Veterinary colleges discovered that we could prevent and cure diseases in a whole herd or flock of animals with nutritional supplements.
The FDA and the AAFP (American Association of Family Practitioners) state that if you are a vegan or are following a vegetarian diet you are one of the groups most susceptible to nutritional deficiencies, and they recommend taking supplements. (FDA Consumer Update: Fortify Your Knowledge About Vitamins) Why? Because you don’t know what the mineral or vitamin content is of the plants you are consuming.
So, what are the 90+ Essential Nutrients you must consume every day, discovered by Dr. Joel Wallach’s research?
· 13 Essential Vitamins
· 16 Essential Amino Acids
· 2 Essential Fatty Acids
· 60 Essential Minerals
Please note that 2/3 of the 90+ Essentials are minerals.. Minerals are best absorbed by the body in plant-derived form. Why? Because in plant form they have a negative charge and our gut has a positive charge. Opposites attract. Minerals mined as inorganic rock or extracted from seawater do not have the 98% absorbability that plant-derived minerals have, according to Wallach’s research.
Also based on his research he concluded that “When an animal or human dies of natural causes, they die of a nutritional deficiency disease.” By now you must be wondering how you can get the minerals or the 90+ Essentials. You could go to your local holistic health practitioner or health food store and buy a bottle of each vitamin, each amino acid, each mineral, and each fatty acid. That would cost you over $300 a month. Been there, done that, and did not get the results. Who wants to swallow 90+ pills a day? How many would you take of each to make sure you had enough for your weight or did not develop a toxic level of one or more? How would you take them in the right ratios so they could work as co-factors together?
Dr. Wallach solved these problems by formulating, Beyond Tangy Tangerine 2.0 Citrus Peach Fusion. (See the ad in this month’s Body Mind Spirit Guide) It is a nutricrystal powder that is mixed with water. Nutricrystals are never heated to dry them in order to maintain maximum potency. The only thing missing of the 90+ Essentials is the EFAs (Essential Fatty Acids) that must be consumed separately as an Omega 3 capsule. So, instead of taking 90 different pills you just take BTT 2.0 and EFA capsules. This is much simpler, in the correct ratios, and much more affordable.
David Mellor has taught Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources for over 25 years. He was named Michigan’s Outstanding Ag. Educator by MSU in 2017, served as a Farm to Table teacher trainer for FDA-FSAN, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Youngevity International. Visit: www.ultimatehealthworks.com Text/call 734-216-6677
