Real Food*
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Until the 1940s, most farmers returned essential minerals to the soil by mulching, manuring, and crop rotation. These methods have been used to maintain soil quality since agriculture began. Then, at the end of the Second World War, drug conglomerates making nitrates and phosphates for explosives, were suddenly left with few buyers for their stockpiles of chemicals. Frantic for new markets, they began selling nitrate/phosphate/potassium (NPK) fertilizers at fire sale prices that made traditional farming methods uneconomic.

By the 1960s, 97% of American farms had become totally dependent on NPK fertilizers to make a living. Mixtures of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium will grow fine-looking produce. But as each succeeding crop soaked up the other minerals in the soil, and only N,P, and K were replaced, soil quality was decimated. Many essential minerals declined virtually to zero. The latest RDA handbook, for example, reviews studies indicating a direct correlation between the growth of NPK fertilization and declining magnesium levels in our food supply.

Human bodies are not vegetables. They cannot grow on NPK alone. Bodies also require selenium, chromium, calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, iodine, molybdenum, zinc, cobalt, boron, and vanadium. Bodies cannot make minerals. If they are not in the soil, they are not in the produce, and they are not in you. Without consuming every one of the essential minerals in adequate amounts, no athlete can expect top performance. From the soils we have today and the produce and food animals that grow on them, that is an impossible task.

Nutrient Losses in Processing

Soil degradation is only the first problem with our food. Further nutrients are lost in ripening, storing, drying, cooking, freezing, blanching, pasteurization, hydrogenation, ultrafiltration, and multiple other practices of modern food processing. The RDA handbook reviews hundreds of studies, showing that the already degraded crops of today, may lose even their meager supply of nutrients between harvesting and your table.

The handbook states, "the tocopherol [vitamin E] content of foods varies greatly depending on processing, storage, and preparation procedures during which large losses may occur" (p.101). Vitamin C can be "considerably lower because of destruction by heat and oxygen" (p.117). Vitamin B6: 50-70% is lost in processing meats, and 50-90% is lost in milling cereals (p.144). Folic acid: "as much as 50%...may be destroyed during household preparation, food processing, and storage" (p.150).

For magnesium, the mineral essential for all cell growth and replacement, the RDA handbook states, "more than 80% is lost by removal of the germ and outer layers of cereal grains" (p.189). Next time you eat a slice of bread, remember that the germ and outer layers of grains are removed in the making of all white and so-called "enriched" flours.

These facts don't come from some scare-mongering media report. They are from the handbook of the Recommended Dietary Allowances published in November, 1989 by the US National Academy of Sciences. They are the official word on American nutrition.

There are numerous other authoritative sources indicating the degradation of our food. Dr Robert Harris, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at MIT, documents enormous destruction of nutrients in vegetables in modern cold storage. Every time you eat an apple and see the flesh turn brown within a few minutes, remember that is a sign that the apple has oxidized in storage, and has lost most of its vitamins. Dr Theodore Labuza, Professor of Food Technology at the University of Minnesota3 reports up to 90% losses of thiamin in the drying of meats.

Professor Darryl Lund of the Department of Food Science of the University of Wisconsin, shows that blanching of vegetables and fish, can destroy one-third to one-half of their thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, pyridoxine, and vitamin C. Similar large losses of Bvitamins and vitamin C occur in the pasteurization and ultrafiltration of milk.5 Dr Henry Schroeder, foremost American authority on nutrient content of foods, reports that freezing of meats can destroy up to 50% of the thiamin and riboflavin, and 70% of the pantothenic acid.

If you add up the nutrient losses that have accrued to our food since the late 1940s, there is not a great deal left. First came degradation of the soils by use of nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium fertilizers, that do not contain the minerals essential to human health. Then came development of modern food processing that has stripped our food of many of its vitamins.

Now we have also irradiated foods that do not rot, and may be years old and devoid of vitamins by the time you eat them. And 1992 is the first year of the bioengineered foods, the genetic alteration of which changes their nutrient content in yet unknown ways. Tomatoes that don't freeze and die in a sudden frost because they contain genes from the arctic flounder may be great for farmers, but they leave human bodies out in the cold. No athlete can develop top performance from such poor raw materials.

The only way to obtain decent vegetables and fruits is, avoid all processed produce and buy fresh, outside the mainstream of the produce industry:

1. Buy your produce close to the ground that it came from.

2. Buy only organic vegetables and fruits, if possible, straight from the farm.

3. Buy at local farm outlets.

4. Buy only certified organic produce, preferably from health food stores and local markets.

*from Micheal Colgan's "Optimum Sports Nutrition", ISBN 0-9624840-5-9, Advanced Research Press, New York, 1993