SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS: VITAMIN AND MINERAL SUPPLEMENTS

Twenty-two years of taking care of sick people has convinced me of the need to supplement our diet with a complete multi-vitamin and mineral formula. Vitamin and mineral supplements form an integral part of the Metabolism-Balancing Program and the Anti-Candida/Anti-Allergy Program. Without them I find the programs get only mediocre results at best.

Quite simply the food we eat today is not as rich in vitamins and minerals as it used to be. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Vitamin content is lost from our fresh foods during transportation from the grower and during storage at the market. For instance, lettuce stored at room temperature loses 50 per cent of its vitamin C in twenty-four hours after picking and also the same amount over three days if refrigerated. The same goes for asparagus, broccoli and green beans.

• Over-cooking, especially the boiling of, fresh vegetables destroys another 25 per cent of the vitamin C, up to 70 per cent of vitamin B1 and 50 per cent of vitamin B2. And these are what we call ‘fresh’ vegetables.

• Poor soils. Because fruit and vegetables are usually grown on over-cultivated and exhausted soils that have been fertilised with phosphate and nitrogen fertilisers rather than trace element and mineral fertilisers (which are a lot more expensive) their vitamin and mineral content is low to start with. These days crop rotation is not practised, land is not left fallow to allow it time to regenerate. Plants grow profusely on modern day fertilisers but lack nutrient content and are usually picked before they are ripe. This limits the time they have to draw from the soil what little minerals and trace elements are in it.

Chemical fertilisers actually create deficiencies in the plants they are supposed to be sustaining. Plants absorb nitrates from nitrogen fertilisers and the nitrates, in turn, destroy vitamin A in these plants.

• Processing of foods. For this reason canned foods arc kept to a minimum on the Metabolism-Balancing, Anti-Candida or combined Anti-Candida/Anti-Allergy Programs. The foremost American authority on the nutrient content of food, Dr Henry Schroeder analysed 730 common foods. He discovered that the canning of green vegetables destroys more than 50 per cent of vitamin B5 and B6. Canning of green peas and beans destroys 75 per cent of the same vitamins. Canned carrots lose 70 per cent of their calcium, canned tomatoes 80 per cent of their zinc and canned spinach 80 per cent of its iron.

Freezing of meats and vegetables destroys the same amount of B vitamins. These are accurate measures not rough estimates. Frozen foods, although they look fresh and nutritious are very deficient in minerals as they are treated with a chelating chemical called EDTA. EDTA strips off 80 per cent of the mineral content. If this mineral content isn’t stripped off frozen vegetables, they appear dull in color after cooking. With the minerals stripped off they cook and look brightly colored—certainly more of an inducement to buy. In the gut EDTA latches onto as many minerals as possible preventing their absorption.

The space required to describe the metabolic role of each vitamin and mineral is too great for inclusion in this text. Any good nutritional almanac will provide you with this information.

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