Are We Challenged by Nutrient Deficient Ingredients?

Let's assume some of the ingredients in the foods we eat are nutrient deficient. Then how do you respond?

The Education of Eating

We ask general questions here: Has eduction not failed us on learning what to eat and what not to eat? Does education not continue to fail us on how to get basic nutrition for life? Should education educate us on what to eat and what not to eat? Why has education failed us on what to eat and what not to eat? How ignorant has education made us of what to eat and what not to eat? What will be the outcome of your life, my life if we let our current educational practices to fail us on what to eat and what not to eat?

Is being fat and unhealthy a demonstration of the failure of education to educate us on what to eat and what not to eat?

Have we not evolved to a point where common sense cannot suffice and education is absolutely essential on what to eat and what not to eat--as it had for nearly all the past history of human life?

The Potassium-Sodium Baseline in Nutrition

In what has to be one of the clearest articles I have read on the nutrition of the acid/alkaline balance, Jack Challem, the author, makes an interesting point on the evolution of the human acid-alkaline baseline: our evolutionary diets were potassium dependent and our current diets potassium depleted. This inbalance, he says, is causing wide-spread nutritionally related diseases.

From the work of the Paleo Diet scientist Loren Cordain, Ph.D., a professor and researcher in the department of health and exercise science at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, we are told that we have evolved a biological baseline of 10:1 in regards to potassium in ratio to sodium. Over the course of modern times that balance has drastically inverted to a 3:1 ratio with sodium way out front of a fast disappearing potassium.

Since "the human genome has changed only minimally since behaviorally modern humans appeared in East Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago", according to research done by S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University in Atlanta, Cordain's statement on our evolutionary dependence on potassium could be pointing to a source of wide-spread imbalance of the acid/alkaline balance in our diet.

A Simple Goal: Can You Eat Your Way To Health?

The Chinese say we can eat our way to health. Who said it and when, exactly, I do not know. But it sounds good. The fellow in the link above is quite prescriptive of this simple goal and has some good this and bad things to say about the achievement of health through eating. There are many like him and he is cited because of the seeming limitless ways prescribed to eat one's way to health.

Even so, the results of following this simply stated goal would be obvious: either you are healthy because of what you eat or not. No if and or buts. Immediate.

Can you imagine?

So simple a goal. So simply defined the results. So elegantly prescribed the duties of the farmer, the processors, the grocers, the cooks; let alone the scientists and the politicians. Everyone would know what to do. There would be no weasel room because if what you did along the course of achieving this simple goal--it would not matter what part you play--if the results were not health you'd be out.

Either what you do leads to health or its out. Simple. Done deal. Transparent.

Just what kind of baseline is this simple goal? Of course it would be a prime policy baseline in that it argues the question "What should we do?" Answering this question is at the heart of any policy making process and no one would be an expert because we all would have a stake in seeking an answer to the question. And the results would always be the same: health.

But wait you say. Just what defines health? And the answer is, of course, what you eat.

More Than The Removal of A Link

As of today I have removed an original link posted on this blog at its inception: Quack Watch.

It has been removed not because it contains some valuable information not otherwise available on actual quacks involved in food issues, but because the founder himself has become embroiled in a widening mess of legal controversy that centers himself on the definition quackery itself. Here is a link, out of many, that addresses this issue http://www.quackpotwatch.org/ There is also information on Quakwatch itself, http://www.quackwatch.com/

The legal mess at Quack Watch has thrown a cloud of concern over the credibility of watching quacks.

Yet, the problem remains for all who seek a balanced and credible assessment of Controversial Food Issues: what's for real (and can be trusted, perhaps, with your life) and what's fake and must be discarded (before it submerges you in illusion and, perhaps, kills you).

Bear Baseline: A Contribution on the Nutrient Levels in Foods

Sometimes finding a solid scientific baseline of the nutrient content of American foods is all too obvious. Take for example the much celebrated report by Firman E. Bear of Rutgers University, a fine scientist with a PhD in biochemistry and bacteriology, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Soils at Rutgers.


This particular report of Bear is often misquoted and misrepresented. Even so, the original purpose of the report and its findings remain true and useful: to compare the mineral composition of vegetables grown in soils over a wide geographical area in the United States.


Over a half century ago Bear set out to study variations of mineral content in 5 vegetables grown in numerous soil types. From his paper Bear writes, "Samples of cabbage, lettuce, snap beans, spinach, and tomatoes were obtained from commercial fields of these crops in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York (Long Island), Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Colorado. The total number of samples examined was 204". His results demonstrated wide differences of mineral content of the vegetables he tested. He linked those results to soils, climate and fertilizer factors from which his vegetable samples grew.


This celebrated study, published in 1948, was documented with hundreds of samples collected from numerous soils types stretching from states in the north to the south and from east to as far west as Colorado.


The findings constitute one of the earliest baselines on the variation of nutrient content of vegetables in soils growing American foods. These variations were determined by one to one mineral content analysis of the soils from which the vegetables grew and the vegetables so produced: the mineral content of the soil reflected the mineral content of the vegetable.


We can easily say the results were widely different and be persuaded that the seeming truthiness of different soils growing different crops of varying nutrient content is actually true and verifiable. It is because of this study a solid baseline has been established from which we can scientifically measure changes in our foods over time.


From this contribution we now have the Bear Baseline of 1948 on the Variation of Mineral Composition in Vegetables.

Update on the Spinach Fiasco

I don't want to say I told you so, but there is this news story going out, one of the first from the Charleston daily, dated 23 April 2007 , and stating "Documents show FDA aware of problems at peanut butter plant, spinach farms...". This YEARS before the e-coli infections emerged as a full blown disaster of food contamination.

Click the link above and read for yourself. I had hunched this would be the case when I first blogged about the spinach fiasco and food safety, logged below--in fact, how could they have not known: they are the experts who see with expert eyes these complicated issues of food contamination and on the farms and factories in question even someone with no eyes, we all know now, but only a nose, could tell there was something rotten in Denmark.