Where
Do We Get Our Vitamins From?
By
Don Bennett,
DAS
Many
health enthusiasts know that the minerals we need in our diet
come from the fruits and vegetables we eat, and ultimately from
the soil... or at least they are supposed to come from
the soil; if it's agri-industry soil, its mineral content is often
insufficient to meet our body's needs for optimal health. But
where do the vitamins that we need come from? Certain ones,
like D and B12 are not considered "food-provided nutrients"
(and technically those two are not really "vitamins"
but we call them that for convenience), D
being meant to come from strong enough sunshine, and B12
from our body's manufacturing of it. But what about the food-provided
vitamins? Where do they come from?
Let's
take a survey...
Where do
vitamins ultimately come from?
A) The soil
B) A plant's
seed
C) The plant
If
you assumed that vitamins come from the same place as minerals,
and answered 'A', the soil, it would be a reasonable guess, but
it would be incorrect. Same for 'B'. The vitamins that we need
are made by the plant. But what does the plant use to make those
vitamins? Well, what does it have available to make the vitamins?
Air,
sunshine, and water.
So,
what would these items provide? Air has CO2, water has Oxygen
and Hydrogen, and sunlight only provide photons so we'll not count
this towards providing the matter needed to make vitamins (although
sunlight is required for the process). So the question becomes:
Can plants make all the different vitamins they make just from
CO2, Oxygen, and Hydrogen? Doesn't seem like they could, so there
must be another ingredient. And there is...
Minerals
from the soil. Yep, like us, plants require minerals, and they
require them to make the various vitamins the plant is supposed
to provide. I say "is supposed to provide" because,
as you might have already guessed, if the soil is low in minerals,
the plant will be low in vitamins. And many agri-industry soils
are low in minerals... even the soils that are home to trees with
deep roots.
If
you're feeling a bit queasy at this revelation, take heart; all
is not lost. You can still get enough of all the minerals and
vitamins your body needs for optimal health; you just have to
shed certain preconceived notions based on misinformation that
is abundant in the health improvement community.
How
Do We Know Soils are Inadequate to Provide for Optimal Health?
As
you might imagine, I get a lot of pushback, and even some bashing
from folks who are under the impression that we don't have to
be concerned about nutrition if we're eating a raw vegan diet
that contain lots of fruits and greens. And why do they believe
this? Well, when a popular raw food educator says, "Once
you start eating enough fruits and vegetables you don't have to
worry about nutrition" many people feel that they
can take that to the bank... that they can rely on this information
as if it were the Gospel truth. But reality has a funny way of
having the final say. Realizing this, I make dang sure to think
outside-the-box when researching even the outside-the-box health
related issues, and as any proper researcher should, I employ
the ethos of science in my investigations: open questioning, no
authorities, no biases or personal preferences, honesty, transparency,
and reliance on evidence. And when you do this, you discover that
some of the things that are being taught have no basis in reality,
and are often assumptions that were made when there was no way
to know otherwise. But raw food diets have been around long enough
now to provide empirical evidence that challenges some closely
held beliefs. And it is a wise person who keeps an open mind instead
of blindly following and parroting the popularly accepted notions.
I
should mention another meme that is floating around; this one
courtesy of a raw food educator whom I firmly believe is running
a "profits-before-people" business. And even though
that's the business model of 99% of businesses in general, when
you promote yourself as a health educator, you're dealing with
people's most valuable commodity: their health. So if you spout
advice that benefits your business first-and-foremost, and in
so doing, you profit at the expense of people's future health,
in my opinion you're no better than the meat, dairy, and pharmaceutical
industries. But I digress.
See
if you can recognize the flaw in this raw vegan health educator's
statement:
"The
simple fact is that an optimal diet can indeed provide every
species with everything that it needs, including humans. ...
Like every other species on the planet, humans can get their
nutritional needs met by simply eating an optimal diet. ...
We can easily meet the body's needs for every nutrient by simply
consuming whole foods... just like every
other species."
Unlike
most every other species on Earth today, humans are no longer
living in their biological "eco-niche" and are no longer
eating the quality of food they once did, even when eating the
foods of their biological adaptation. For the body to function
optimally it requires enough of all the nutrients it needs to
achieve this most worthy goal. And just because someone is eating
a diet of the foods they are biologically adapted to, this is
not a guarantee that they will get enough of all the nutrients
their body requires for optimal health, even if they are active
enough to warrant eating an appropriate volume of food.
With
certain exceptions, humans are the only animal species that is
no longer getting their food from where we were designed to get
our food from, and this little factoid can account for nutrient
insufficiencies that can become deficiencies over time. And when
you combine this fact with any increased nutritional needs because
of environmental burdens on the body, this explains very nicely
why many of us need nutritional complements to our diet if we
want optimal health. So even though the above educator's rhetoric
sounds like it makes sense, it is not borne out by the empirical
evidence. Again, it's a lovely notion, and I'd love to believe
it, but I can't because it doesn't square with reality... which
is where my body lives.
To
obtain and maintain optimal health, we need to face facts, and
soil mineral depletion is not a hypothesis, it's a fact. Not surprisingly
it isn't one we hear a lot about on the evening news, but you'd
think those in the health improvement community would hear about
it in almost every lecture and book on the subject, being that
we're trying to improve our health and/or be as healthy as our
genetics will allow. But since our bodies have no "low selenium
warning light" and lights for all the other essential nutrients,
we often gauge our nutritional sufficiency by how we feel, or
by how we've improved, or by what Cron-O-Meter says we're getting.
But these are not reliable metrics to judge if we indeed have
whole body tissue sufficiency of a particular nutrient
or nutrients in general.
So
it's not a stretch of the imagination to think that if the foods
we're buying that come from agri-industry who grow for
yield, appearance, size, profit, pest-resistance, shelf-life,
growth-rate, and sugar-content, but not for nutritional content
are foods that are not as minerally sufficient as they
should be, it would make sense that they would also not be as
packed with vitamins as the nutritional charts would have us believe,
since sufficient minerals are required by the plant to manufacture
sufficient amounts of vitamins.
For
example, if the soil is minerally deficient in zinc, the plant
can have less than normal amounts of vitamin C. And since we're
meant to eat our foods directly from the tree/bush/vine or soon
after the food has fallen, and not after weeks of transport and/or
months of storage, and since the food's uptake of nutrients obviously
stops when it is disconnected from the tree/bush/vine, and since
most of the fruits and veggies we eat are harvested early so they
can make it to your kitchen counter before spoiling, and since
the plant only starts making some nutrients when it starts to
ripen so it never gets to make all that it can when picked early,
you can begin to see why the foods you're eating that comprise
the healthiest diet may not be the healthiest versions of those
foods, and may not provide us modern humans, living in our modern
stress-filled, toxin-filled environment with enough of all the
nutrients our bodies require for optimal health and optimal future
health.
Those
two health educators above, who, in my opinion, have no respect
for rational and honest discussion, no desire to peer-to-peer,
no ability to change their position when the evidence merits it,
no problem with distortion and misrepresentation, and an inability
to apply a skeptical interrogation of accepted notions for the
benefit of those they teach and counsel, if what those two health
educators said were true, then why do some of those people who've
been diligently eating the diet that humans are best suited to
eat, and doing it "by the book", develop health issues
over time (not related to D or B12 or a lack of fasting). And
why do these same individuals improve their health when they add
some worthwhile nutritional adjuncts to their diet; ones made
from foods that have been grown in rich soil? (Abd I'm
not talking about synthetic supplements with poor bioavailability.)
Bottom
line: If you want enough of all the vitamins your body requires,
your food must be grown in soil that has enough minerals. And
most fruits and greens most people are buying aren't. So while
raw vegans will fare far better than those eating the Typical
Western Diet, if you want to thrive and not merely survive better
than the gen pop, if you accept that you're not living where you
evolved to live, and that Supply & Demand factors affect
your nutritional needs, and you apply the ethos of science to
your thinking, you will have a good shot at living to your health
and longevity potentials.
Don
Bennett is an insightful, reality-based author, and health creation
counselor who uses the tools in his toolbox logic, common
sense, critical thinking, and independent thought to figure
out how to live so you can be optimally healthy. More about Don's
books, which have more delicious food for thought, at health101.org/books
Related
articles:
The
Need for Nutritional Supplementation
Why
We Shouldn't Rely on Cron-O-Meter and
Fitday.com to Assess Our Nutrient Needs
With
Nutrition, Enough is NOT Enough
How
Healthy Do You Want to Be?
The
Ethos of Science
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