Proper nutrition requires a vast array of vitamins and minerals

Vitamins and minerals, we all know the drill. But many of us neglect to include them in our daily eating and suffer as a result. But we do not realize that nutritional deficiencies are causing our suffering. If we did, would we so irresponsibly neglect such an important element of our daily nutrient intake?

In an ideal world you wouldn't need to take vitamins and minerals as a supplement. You would get all you need in the food that you eat. But in this modern society that is simply not the case. Agriculture is not sustainable if it is to be competitive. It simply would be too expensive to allow sufficient time for the land to recover after a harvest and to apply the wide range of micronutrients that are important to human health in the fertilizers.

Modern agriculture just doesn’t make this happen. The fertilizers that are used consider the healthy growth of plants, not people. A growing plant can do very well with just a few minerals in the fertilizer. Basically plants need nitrogen to support new growth, phosphorous to promote root development and potassium for their general state of plant health. Many fertilizers contain minerals such as calcium, magnesium and sulfur—all important for plant health— and some even contain trace elements of other minerals the plant needs to flourish. But even the best fertilizers in the world do not even come close to containing the vast array of minerals that human health requires.

So it is difficult to achieve good micronutrient nutrition today without dietary supplements unless you have your own farm and take great care to maintain sustainable micronutrient profiles in the earth. This would require that you plant only a small fraction of the acreage each year and relocate the harvested regions from year to year. It also would require careful planning in the use of fertilizers to ensure that enough minerals are included to meet the needs of people, not plants.

The situation with vitamins is considerably more complex. It is not so straightforward to understand the impacts of modern agriculture on the vitamin content of our food. In fact, many of the vitamins we need can be found in a healthy diet. If we rely solely on our food as our source of vitamins it is difficult to be sure exactly what vitamins we are getting. It is likely that our food is missing certain important vitamins (e.g. vitamin K) and it would be virtually impossible to get sufficient quantities of the anti-oxidant vitamins C and E.

It is important to keep in mind that there are a wide variety of potent anti-oxidants derived from various fruits and herbs. Many of these might be completely missing from one's diet—or occurring in insignificant quantities—but can be found in a good nutritional supplement.

Just like with minerals, we need a great variety of vitamins and anti-oxidants for optimum health. These are the micronutrients.

Micronutrient nutrition is completely different from macronutrient nutrition. While your body can extract the benefits of the macronutrients relatively quickly, in order to utilize the micronutrients it needs consistent access to those compounds all of the time. So it is better to take one tablet two times per day than two tablets once a day. The important thing is to take the supplement every day. After several months of such continual use, the body will have assimilated the micronutrients it needed. Thus the body can rebuild itself provided the required constituents are available in the diet.

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