The vital role of minerals in obesity and good health

I am working on a story for Natural News that should be completed soon about the depletion of minerals in our soils, and thus in our foods, including vital but often overlooked trace minerals.  Here is a bit of a preview:

Dating back to the begining of last century our mineral depletion has been horrendous - and it has gotten much worse in recent decades, as we strip the top eight feet of soil throughout the world of the vital major minerals and up to 80 trace minerals that man has adapted to for thousands of years and which are needed for optimum health.'

The way nature works in a more or less "natural" state is that tree roots go deep in the soil and bring up vital minerals that are replaced as the trees die and decompose.  In addition, animals who eat and contain the minerals themselves die and decompose and are returned to the soil.  Similarly, animal and human waste matter are returned to the soil.

In modern times, we have disrupted the natural cycle of mineral replenishment by clear-cutting the forests and trees to make crop land, removing most of the waste and dead animals, and we have over-farmed virtually all of our soil while returning to the soil only the three petro-chemicals in fertilizers which produce lush growth (bulk and weight) but nutrient-poor plants.  The end result is that a bowl of spinach most of us eat today contains perhaps 1/8th the nutrition of the bowl our grandparents and great grandparents ate.

The role of minerals and human health is immense, yet seldom recognized.  Two time nobel prize winner Linus Pauling went so far as to describe the lack of minerals as "the root of all disease", and I do not think it was much of an overstatement, because minerals are the most basic of building blocks for proper nutrition and health.  Quite simply, without minerals, nothing else works.  Amino acids and enzymes don't work and so vitamins and other nutrients don't get broken down and absorbed properly and we end up with major deficiencies in both vitamins and minerals. The end result is a chain reaction of poor health where nothing works as it should. 

Besides poor health and immune system support, another major area where mineral deficiency manifest itself is obesity - the topic of this thread.  Similar to the cats and dogs one sees eating grass when they instinctively know they are either deficient in vitamins and minerals or need extra ones to combat an illness or infection, I believe that the human body also sends such instinctive signals at times that it is missing vital nutrients, but we no longer recognize what it is our bodies are telling us and where to find what we need to silence the signals.

Such confused signals often lead to cravings oftentimes, and so we eat and eat to try to satisfy them, but what we really crave is missing nutrition.  Instead of turning to a nutritious diet or other healthy way to furnish minerals (such as the plant derived minerals from the prehistoric clays in Utah available from CZ sponsor Utopia Silver), we turn to the SADS diet, fastfood, nuked meals, sweets, junkfood, etc. often to no avail. Perhaps many of us can relate to that familiar quandry of eating and eating to the point of being gorged, and yet still feeling hungry for "something".  That something very often is likely minerals!

Much more on this subject later.

DQ