Why we need to Supplement
You often hear doctors say that there’s no need to supplement if you eat a balanced diet. If only that were true. Unfortunately, the food we eat today is not the same as the food we ate 50-100 years ago. We have to compensate for the loss of “value” in our food.
- It takes 80 cups of today’s supermarket spinach to give you the same iron you’d get from jus one cup of spinach grown 50 years ago.
- According to a Rutgers University study, it now takes 19 ears of corn to equal the nutritional value of just one ear of corn grown in 1940.
- There is less then half the protein in today’s wheat as in the wheat our grandparents ate.
- Much of our soil is so depleted that our farm crops depend entirely on the chemical fertilizers they are fed to grow. That means that most of the food we eat is devoid of virtually all the trace minerals we need to survive.
- And on and on.
When you think about it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s happened. We’ve exchanged quality for quantity. You can’t keep increasing your yield per acre, at the same time steadily depleting you soil year after year, and not expect to lose something in the process. And what’s been lost is the quality of our food.
Organic vs Non-Organic
As we’ve just seen, most of the food sold in our supermarkets is nutritionally compromised. Part of the solution lies in organic foods, which hearken back to the more nutritionally beneficial foods of 50 years ago. Consider the following comparisons between organic and conventionally grown food.
- Organic snap beans have 30 times the manganese, 22 times the iron, and 23 times the copper on the conventionally grown variety.
- Organic cabbage has four times the calcium and four times the potassium of the cabbage you buy in the supermarket.
- Organic lettuce is five times higher in calcium, 50 times higher in iron, and 170 times higher in manganese.
- Organic tomatoes are 12 times higher in magnesium, 68 times higher in manganese, and almost 2000 times higher in iron.
Conventional farms use no composite at all in the growing of their crops. Instead, they rely on chemical fertilizers that have a limited range of nutrients-just what the plant requires to grow, which is why they are so deficient in the nutrients that people need.
The average organic farm uses 3-5 tons of organic matter/compost per acre per year.
The average super organic farm will use upwards of 100 tons of organic matter per acre per year.