Nutrition in a Nutshell

Everything you really need to know about Nutrition and healthy eating, but didn’t know who to ask!

When you look into the field of health and nutrition, you are overwhelmed with information. Every time you pick up a magazine, you will see an article telling you how important it is to take this herb, or that vitamin, or some new substance recently discovered by scientists. Numerous authors publish books extolling how effective various therapies are for treating various health issues (reflexology, accupuncture, liver-cleansing, fasting, colonics, homeopathy, etc.). It all seems very complicated and confusing.

This article is designed to clear up and simplify the basic issues of health and nutrition. Much of the information in this article has been collected from a man named Dr. Carey Reams, who developed and pioneered the urine/saliva analysis method that I call Metabolic Bioanalysis. Metabolic Bioanalysis is the system of performing urine/saliva testing using specific laboratory equipment for the purpose of determining biochemical imbalances in the human body. The concept is that, if the human body is kept in balance and given the nutrients it needs, it will produce and maintain good health.

To understand the big picture of health and nutrition, the bottom line is this: We are made of minerals. (1) We are not made of vitamins or enzymes or hormones or herbs, we are made of minerals. I think that nearly everyone knows that our bodies are made up of 80% water. I weigh 175 lbs., so if all the water in my body was removed, there would be about 35 lbs. of powder left. What would this powder consist of? Minerals. Of those minerals, 70% of them would be calciums. (2) (Dr. Reams used the word calciums because of our need for a variety of calciums, and the importance of determining which type our bodies were deficient in.) So you are basically made of calciums and water. I compare the body to a brick wall. The wall is composed of bricks and the mortar that holds the bricks together. In this case, the bricks represent calciums (and other macrominerals), and the mortar is all the rest of the minerals. Obviously, if the bricks in a wall are cracked and crumbling, the wall won’t be very strong. But equally obvious is that, if the mortar is dissolving from between the bricks, the wall won’t last long, either.

I think nearly everyone also knows that the foods we buy in the store don’t have much nutrition in them, because of what has been done to the soil by commercial farming. U.S. Senate Report #264 declares the mineral-poor soil condition in North America to have reached a serious, even disastrous level. This report is even more significant when you consider that it was published in 1936! If you buy a nice, green head of broccoli from your local grocer, it will have six, maybe eight minerals in it in significant enough quantities to benefit your body. But your body needs at least 65 major and trace minerals. So, by merely eating “good” foods (as they are commercially grown today), you not only cannot replace the minerals your body is lacking, you cannot even maintain pre-existing good health, even if you already had it.

Every day our bodies use up a certain amount of minerals just to function, yet we are not fully replacing those minerals with the commercially-grown foods we eat. It’s a bit like a checking account I once had where, if I wrote a check for more money than was in the checking account, it would automatically dip into the money in my savings account. They called it Overdraft Protection. But we have all been doing this same thing all our lives with our Metabolic Bank Accounts. Every day that you deposit less into your body’s account than the “checks” your body writes that day, you dip into your savings account. When I do not give my body the minerals it needs that day, my body steals the minerals it needs from throughout my body. So, if my chemistry has become unbalanced in one particular way, my body will steal minerals from my joints, bones and cartilage and I will end up with arthritis, bursitis, fibromyalgia, osteoporosis, etc. Or, if my body has a chemistry imbalance of another kind, it will leach minerals from the linings of my arteries, and I will develop heart disease.

As we grow older, our metabolic savings account gets so low that there is not enough for our bodies to use to respond to emergencies. Then we end up with statistics like this: Of people over 65 years of age who fall down and break an arm or leg, 70% don’t live 90 days more. (3) They don’t have enough in their body’s reserves to cope with the trauma of a broken bone. And everybody’s heard of the senior citizen who was in an auto accident, had no obvious injuries, but died a short time later anyway. They didn’t have enough in their reserve to cope with the trauma of even a bad scare. (My 94-year old, overweight grandmother stumbled and sat down hard on the cement porch steps. She didn’t break anything, didn’t hit her head, wasn’t unconscious. She was dead within six weeks.) So we need to be making deposits into our Metabolic Bank accounts which are not only enough to cover our days’ checks, but provide extra to rebuild our low reserves.

I believe in the importance and efficacy of all the therapeutic protocols mentioned at the beginning of this article, but they are all just that: Therapeutic Protocols. A therapy is something that causes your body to kick into a different and more efficient healing gear, something that causes the body to heal itself more effectively. But therapies don’t address the problem of an empty Metabolic Bank account. Therapies don’t refill our mineral reserves. I know that many of the therapeutic substances which are recommended to combat various health issues also contain valuable nutrients, and many of them address specific deficiencies (like vitamin C or selenium does). But we are made of the whole range of minerals, and our bodies use the whole range of vitamins, enzymes, etc., to best utilize those minerals. Dr. Reams generally opposed taking individual nutrients (B1, B6, etc.), because he said that vitamins and minerals occurred in nature in groups, or complexes, and also were utilized in our bodies most efficiently in those complexes. In fact, taking therapeutic substances that trigger our bodies to heal more efficiently can actually increase our need for those brick-and-mortar nutrients of which we are made. Remineralization is essential before trying to initiate significant healing (although during remineralization, the body usually begins self-healing efforts using the minerals you are providing it).

So the need for supplementation is essential. The next question is: Where do I find high-quality supplements that will cover all my days’ checks and build up my reserve account? Obviously, every supplement company claims their product is the best. What standard do we use to determine high-quality from less-than-high-quality?

Well, I think most holistic or naturalistic-oriented practitioners would agree on this next point: If you were deficient in iron, you wouldn’t expect that sucking on an iron nail all day would help, would you? The reason for this, of course, is because the iron nail won’t dissolve in your mouth (or be assimilated inside your body). How about if you ground the nail up into powder and put it in capsules? Again, this would not help because you would, in effect, only have thousands of tiny iron nails in your stomach, which still would not dissolve or be assimilated in your body. The reason for this is because the iron nail is made of metallic iron, just like digging a chunk of iron ore out of the ground. But I once read a letter-to-the-editor in Mother Earth magazine in which a man discussed the iron-poor soil in his garden. To resolve this, he pounded iron nails into the ground all over his garden. By the next year, the nails had all rusted and dissolved into the ground, and his vegetables tested high in iron! The plants had taken the metallic iron from the ground and converted it to organic iron, meaning a form of iron usable by an organism.

Dr. Reams insisted that organic, plant-source minerals were what the body needed, that the assimilation rate for metallic, non-organic minerals was so much lower as to make them nearly worthless. (4) Dr. Reams taught that we all needed to remineralize our bodies (cover our checks and refill our savings account), and that we needed organic, plant-source minerals to do this. Dr. Reams maintained that all disease is the eventual result of demineralization.

Dr. Reams and his wife raised six children to adulthood, and none of them ever had a cavity, ever had a cold or missed a day of school in their lives. (5) During WW2, Reams drove over a land mine and was severely injured (including his liver and kidneys) and was not expected to live more than a few days, but by constantly adjusting his chemistry and giving his body all that it needed, he lived until his late 80’s.

So we recognize that the best source for minerals is a plant source. But then we have the already-mentioned problem of the plants in North America being mineral-poor. Where can we find a source of nutrient-rich plants that are grown in mineral-rich soil?

As it happens, the richest source of high-nutrient edible plants are grown in the biggest garden in the world, are easily accessible and free for the taking! I am talking, of course, about the ocean. The streams and rivers on every continent continually pour a steady flow of mineral-rich soil and organic material into the oceans of the world, which provide generous amounts of nutrients for the ocean vegetables that grow there. In recent years, science has begun to discover just how nutritional and important this sea-food really is. Because the amounts and proportions of the minerals found in sea plants and sea water are nearly identical to the amounts and proportions of minerals found in healthy human blood, it is increasingly believed that we have found a food source equal to what our farmlands contained 100+ years ago.

One unique, accessible and especially rich source of organic minerals is found in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This body of water has the distinction of having water flow in, but no water flowing out. After centuries of this, the water is so rich and “thick” with minerals that, were you to wade out into it, you would only sink up to your waste! Every known mineral used by the human body is found in this water.

26 gallons of this “mineral-thick” water is taken, filtered, most of the sodium is removed, and it is distilled down to one gallon. The resulting concentrated mineral supplement (called “Concentrace”) supplies the full spectrum of minerals and trace minerals, and the recommended dosage is measured in drops. Contact your local Health Food store or me about this amazing and powerful mineral supplement.

References:

1., 2., 4., 5.  Dr. Carey Reams, “Health Guide for Survival” by Salem Kirban, 1976

3. Dr. Joel Wallach, “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie.”