I had an order from a person not in my database so, as I usually do, I asked from where she had heard of Healthelicious. As she was from a country town in Victoria, I surmised it may have been at the Mind Body Spirit in Melbourne. This was her response:
Hey Tom, I wanted to email you last night but ran out of time, to answer your question… yes we did meet in Melbourne, I had your bars over the last week at work and I must say I was feeling amazing, so I ordered more and want my family to try them, the bars I had I loved and I can’t wait to try the rest of them. I’m a pretty healthy eater but I realise now that I needed more nutrition and a wider range of foods, was great to meet you and looking forward to reading your newsletter,
Regards A
So, my nutrition can make a pretty healthy eater feel “amazing”, and lead to a realisation that all is not well with the food supply, even for someone trying to eat well.
Two things, one, if you’d like to know one of many reasons why this is the case, read the ten paragraphs which follow.
Two, if you’d like to spend more time feeling “amazing”, road test my bars or a tub of my NutriBlast for 6 weeks. www.healthelicious.com.au
Findings released at the 1992 RIO Earth Summit confirm that mineral depletion of our global topsoil reserve is rampant. At the time, U.S. and Canadian agricultural soils had lost 85% of their mineral content. Asian and South American soils were down 76% while throughout Africa, Europe and Australia, soils were depleted by 74%, 72% and 55% respectively.1
Tragically, there has been precious little done to forestall the inevitable exhaustion of these precious mineral stores.
“Nations endure only as long as their topsoil.” ~ Henry Cantwell Wallace
The calculus is simple: plants can’t make minerals, and without minerals, vitamins don’t work.
We are made of the stuff of the earth. Consequently, if the minerals are not in the soil, they are not in the plants grown in the soil; and if they are not in the plants grown in the soil, they are not in our bodies. As such, it is not surprising that any depletion in the mineral and nutrient content of our soils reflects an increase in nutritionally related diseases in both animal and human populations.
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 needed nutrients, are starving us no matter how much we eat of them. ~ U.S. Senate Document 264
The remarkable thing about the preceding declaration is that it was issued in 1936 over 73 years ago. Since that time, the United States and other industrialized nations have been losing arable land at an unprecedented rate. Today in the U.S., topsoil is eroding at a rate ten times faster than the rate of replenishment, not bad considering that countries such as Africa, India and China are experiencing erosion rates 30 to 40 times the replenishment rate.
Today, estimates place the chronological reserves of our global topsoil at less than 50 years and as the topsoil goes, so go the nutrients.1
http://www.myhealthyhome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/NutrientDepletionofourFoods.pdf
A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.
“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,” reported Davis, “but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.
The Organic Consumers Association cites several other studies with similar findings: A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal, found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent, iron 22 percent, and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/
Toms Blog on Life and Livingness