On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 12:00 -0700, allen dick wrote:
Have you ever looked at the ingredient list and nutrient profiles of
these imitation foods?

I have heard modern food called "hollow food". I have often wondered
about the effect of mineral depletion in soils on the mineral content of
honey from agricultural crops. Minerals seem to be more important than
we thought. Has there been any research on this over the years?

Here is an extract from a 1936 submission to the US Congress (note as
long ago as 1936)

                      The Quality of Today's Food



       FARM LAND MINERAL DEPLETION AND SENATE DOCUMENT #264 1936
These are Verbatim Unabridged Extracts from the 74th Congress 2nd
Session:

Senate Document No. 264, 1936

"The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them
aren't worth eating as food. . . Our physical well-being is more
directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon
calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein
or carbohydrates we consume."

"Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous
diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from
which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance?"

"The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now
being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough
of certain minerals, are starving us - no matter how much of them we
eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his
system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his
stomach isn't big enough to hold them."

"This talk about minerals is novel and quite startling. In fact, a
realisation of the importance of minerals in food is so new that the
text books on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it.
Nevertheless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further
we delve into it the more startling it becomes." (N.B. Don't forget this
was written in 1934!) 

"You'd think, wouldn't you, that a carrot is a carrot - that one is
about as good as another as far as nourishment is concerned? But it
isn't; one carrot may look and taste like another and yet be lacking in
the particular mineral element which our system requires and which
carrots are supposed to contain."

"Laboratory tests prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the
eggs, and even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a
few generations ago (which doubtless explains why our forefathers
thrived on a selection of foods that would starve us!)"

"No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his stomach
with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health, because his
stomach isn't big enough to hold them! And we are turning into big
stomachs."

"No longer does a balanced and fully nourishing diet consist merely of
so many calories or certain vitamins or fixed proportion of starches,
proteins and carbohydrates. We know that our diets must contain in
addition something like a score of mineral salts."

"It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99% of the
American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked
deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in
disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack of one or
another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we
sicken, suffer, shorten our lives."

"We know that vitamins are complex chemical substances which are
indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them is of importance for
normal function of some special structure in the body. Disorder and
disease result from any vitamin deficiency. It is not commonly realised,
however, that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and
in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. Lacking
vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking
minerals, vitamins are useless."

"Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the
minerals we take into our system than upon calories or vitamins or upon
the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions of
science to the problem of human health."

Here are some URl's for those interested. Anyway a search for articles
on mineral depletion in soils will turn these and many others up.
http://cancer-info.com/colloidal.htm
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=32375
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1481443,00.html
http://www.organicgarden.org.uk/remineralisation/index.htm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=10587

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