Fitness

All unrefined foods grown on good soil contain minerals necessary to the normal life processes of animals and humans and to the plants themselves. Besides the minerals already discussed, there are sodium, chlorine, potassium, and a group spoken of as trace minerals.

There is no trick, of course, in getting sodium and chlorine, which are supplied by ordinary table salt, or sodium chloride. It is usually assumed that the other minerals are generously supplied in a “well-balanced diet”-whatever that means mostly because many of them are needed in such small amounts. The small-amount argument, in my opinion, is what we used to call on our Indiana farm “so much hogwash.”

Cobalt is a trace mineral needed only in small amounts.

It forms part of vitamin B12; as little as three micrograms of vitamin B12 daily can cure pernicious anemia. The fact that the amount needed was small did not keep thousands of people from suffering from fatigue which tortured every cell in their bodies; it did not prevent a crippling paralysis from dooming them to a stumbling and falling existence and finally a bedridden living death during the years before Drs. George R. Minot and William P. Murphy found that raw liver could control the disease. Thousands of cattle, sheep, and other animals, grazed on land deficient in cobalt, especially in Florida and Australia, sickened and died from a crippling anemia. Such deaths could be prevented if a few pounds of cobalt were added to each acre of land. Pernicious anemia, however, was never confined to Florida or Australia. Studies conducted at the University of Florida Agricultural Experiment Station showed that 81 per cent of the children living in the area suffered from anemia, just as did the animals; 50 per cent showed definite anemia, whereas 31 per cent were borderline cases. When the land is deficient, the plants grown on that land are deficient; the animals which eat the plants are deficient; the people who eat the animals and the plants are deficient. It cannot be otherwise.

I believe that the various minerals are far more important to health than anyone realizes; I believe that our diets are far more deficient in them than anyone realizes. One reason for my belief is that in any agricultural library you can obtain books 1 with beautiful colored pictures of deficiency symptoms of vegetables, fruits, and other plants which we and animals use as food. You can see those same deficiency symptoms in the food in every market: the split stalks of celery; the cracked cores of cabbage and cauliflower; the uneven ripening of the apricots and tomatoes; the yellow margins on the spinach; the rusty streaks of the lettuce; those signs and dozens more. Such symptoms occur only when the plant is deficient in one mineral or another.

Potassium is said to be widely found in foods, particularly in small green leaves. The three nutrients, potassium, sodium, and chlorine, are important in keeping the body fluids near neutrality; they determine the amount of water held in the tissues, and they attract nutrients from the intestines into the blood and from the blood into the cells by means of maintaining what is known as osmotic pressure. These minerals are essential parts of the glandular secretions. Potassium helps in sending messages through the nervous system. Chlorine is used in forming hydrochloric acid in the stomach. These three minerals are excreted daily in the urine, the amount being equal to that ingested by a healthy person.

A partial deficiency of potassium in animals causes slow growth, constipation, gas formation, and a nervousness typified by extreme alertness and insomnia. The hearts of potassium-deficient animals beat slowly and irregularly, the heart muscles are damaged, the kidneys become enlarged, and the bones fragile. The symptoms produced in animals are so similar to the nervousness, constipation, and digestive disturbances endured by millions of Americans that a study was made of human subjects maintained on a diet low in potassium. All developed constipation, indigestion, insomnia, and nervousness. Potassium is largely lost when foods are refined or when vegetable-cooking water is discarded. Our high consumption of refined foods and our sloppy cooking methods, to say nothing of the condition of our soil, could easily allow unrecognized potassium deficiency to be widespread.