The following is an excerpt from The United States Senate Document Number 264, which explains the importance of minerals in our diet: “Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which our foods come are brought into proper mineral balance? The alarming fact is that foods — fruits, vegetables and grains — are being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain necessary minerals. These foods are starving us — no matter how much of them we eat! No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to take in enough mineral salts required for perfect health, because his stomach isn’t big enough to hold them!”
The amazing thing about this statement is that it was made more than 60 years ago, in 1936. If our soils were depleted then, with deficiencies leading to disease, imagine what they’re like now! Improper farming methods, erosion and weather have contributed to a loss of 2⁄3 of our topsoil. And what’s left of the soil is mineral deficient, resulting in plants that vitamin and mineral deficient, and thus weaker and more susceptible to disease.
Thousands of years ago, much of the earth’s soil contained most, if not all, of the more than 100 minerals present on Earth. After years of farming, today’s average soil contains 17 to 22 minerals. As a result, carrots have a beta carotene content as low as 70 IUs, when the count should be some 18,500 IUs. A Rutgers University study compared organic produce to conventional (non-organic) produce, finding that on average, non-organic produce was 87 percent deficient in mineral and trace mineral content. The mineral content difference was sometimes staggering; for instance, organic spinach had 86 percent more iron than non-organic spinach. So, to get as much iron out of the non-organic spinach as you would out of the organic, you’d have to eat twice as many servings!
Much of our soil’s mineral deficiency has come in recent years. You’d have to eat 75 servings of spinach today to get the same amount of iron you would have received from one serving of spinach 50 years ago. That’s why Senate Document 264 says we can’t eat enough to get the required minerals in our body.
According to Gary Price Todd, M.D., the human body requires at least 50 minerals for optimal health — to go along with the 12 essential amino acids, 16 vitamins and 3 essential fatty acids. The problem is obvious: We need 50 minerals, but today’s soil has only 22. And most of today’s mineral supplements contain no more than 15 minerals — and they come from ground-up rock, clay or sea beds.
I liken this problem to the building of a toy structure. We’ve got plenty of the yellow building blocks, but we’re missing the purple connector pieces. So we can’t finish the building. It’s the same with your heath. If you repeatedly don’t get enough of the enzymes, minerals, vitamins, amino acids, essential fatty acids and complex carbohydrates into your body, the living miracle machine will start to break down. You’ll regress from vibrant health to apparent health, to subclinical symptoms, to clinical symptoms, to diseases.
You need all 90-plus types of pieces to build and maintain this structure. So getting only a maximum of 22 minerals from a conventional (nonorganic) vegetarian diet is not enough. We need to eat organic produce or sprouts; the Rutgers Study shows that organic soil tends to be much richer in minerals than commercial chemically-treated soil.
Another problem is non-uniformity of soil. The mineral selenium is high in the soils in South Dakota, but low in the Midwestern and Southern states.