Looks like the Pot-o-gold is right in my garden - taken during a sunny rainstorm.
Some call them trace minerals or nutrients, but they are on the periodic chart of elements - over 100 of them. Weather you know them as elements, minerals or nutrients they are vitally important to our health. We previously knew that calcium was essential for our bones. Recently we have learned that Zinc is essential to our immune system and Chromium, Selenium, Potassium and Copper are, to name a few that we are currently aware of, essential to our heart function. Some believe that sixteen minerals are required to support human biochemical processes. Those may indeed be essential for life but not necessarily sufficient for optimum health, furthermore, today’s understanding reveals much of what we took for granted a few years ago was not the end of the story; the importance of macro elements, and trace elements is growing. Then too, there is now an awareness that too much of a nutrient or vitamin can cause deficiencies of others. The challenge we face results from taking a simple solution to a complex process and making it a complex solution.
Since humans were on earth they consumed plants grown on generally nutrient-rich soil and the animals that consumed those nutrient rich plants. Humans survived directly or indirectly on the nutrient rich plants for thousands of years, until modern food processing began to remove many vitamins and minerals; to compensate for that vitamin and mineral supplements were developed. The problem with that is we don’t know precisely how much of what our bodies really need. However, if we would eat as nourishing food our ancestors did a few thousand years ago we wouldn’t need supplements at all.
Our dilemma is to find a way to obtain food with high nutritional value in a commercial world that doesn’t recognize food's valuable relationship to one’s health. To be nutrient healthy a person must either obtain their food directly from the wild or consciously seek out food grown in nutrient rich soil.
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