Bad Nutrition
Fake Food and Weak Food
I commonly hear people (and doctors) say, “So long as you eat a balanced diet your body has everything that it needs to be healthy. At one time this was true. It no longer is. Nutritional shortage is not always obvious. There is plenty to eat in America. No one I know seems to have a shortage of food. The problem is not the quantity of food, it’s the quality of food. In America we have a lot of fake food and weak food.
It used to be that food was grown locally. Everyone would go to the corner market and purchase their food. Some few individuals at some point realized that if they sold to a larger and larger area they would make more and more money. The problem was that the perishable nature of food made it self limiting. Shipping food farther and farther away required more time and the food would spoil. Therefore, fresh food was only obtained locally. One of the ways that large food companies got around this was simply to remove the part that spoiled or perished. They refined it. So we ended up with our refined flour, sugar and other grains. Because of the bleaching, coloring and deodorizing it also had the added advantage of being able to mask inferior quality foods, a wonderful competitive advantage. The problem with the refined foods, is that the part of the food that perishes or spoils is the part that has the best nutrition, the vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Another way that the large companies dealt with the problem was to add preservatives. Food dyes also help give the appearance of fresher foods. Then to top it off artificial flavors are added in case the taste needs help. These chemicals are an additional stress on the body as they have to be detoxified and eliminated – which requires extra good nutrition – vitamins, minerals and enzymes.
Did you know at one point in time white bread was illegal? It was declared that to advertise it as food was fraud. This was back at the inception of the Food and Drug Administration at a time when it’s purposes were clearer. What we have now are essentially non foods (very little actual nutrition) disguised as real foods. A good food is taken, stripped of it’s vitality, doctored up with preservatives, food coloring and artificial flavoring and sold as food to the public.
Not only do we have fake food we have weak food. This is quite unfair in that it affects those who make a concerted effort to eat well. They eat their fruits and vegetables and fresh foods. This is not about good things being removed from the foods or things added to the foods. This is about the nutrients not being in the foods in the first place. Our soils are missing the vital nutrients and minerals that they once had. Some small part of this is due to the use of flood control measures. Floods always revitalized the soil with fresh minerals. A much larger part is due to the use of artificial fertilizers. Our bodies require approximately 60 minerals, 20 amino acids and 3 essential fatty acids to function. When artificial fertilizers are used, the plants take out 60 minerals and the artificial fertilizer only put back about 5 or 6 of the minerals, the ones that make the plant look good. After a while the soil becomes exhausted except for those 5 or 6 minerals. In order for you to get the same amount of nutrients, vitamins and minerals now that you received from the same food in the first half of the century, you would have to consume inordinate, impractical and even impossible amounts of food. For example, for the amount of manganese that you used to get in 10 green beans, you would have to eat 300. You’d have to eat 11 bowls of spinach to receive the same amount of copper that you used to get from one bowl. To receive the same amount of iron in one tomato prior to 1945, you now would have to eat 1,398 tomatoes. Carrots used to have 18,000 IU’s of Beta Carotene. Now you may find that they have less than 70 IU’s. Wheat used to be 40% protein, now it is 8-10%. Even those that are health conscious and try to eat right often are nutrient deficient today. In fact, the 74th congressional record cites that 99% of Americans are deficient in minerals.
Let me pose a question. If you hired someone to build a bridge which was supposed to last for 50 years and it only lasted 10 years, what would you suspect the reason was? You would suspect that either not enough of the correct materials were used to build it or inferior materials were used. Most of the health conditions listed earlier fall into the classification of degenerative diseases. This means that the body is breaking down prematurely. If your body is breaking down early, a logical place to look is towards the raw materials put into it, nutrition.
People who don’t eat right are weaker. Their structure is weaker, their function is weaker and their resistance to the stresses of life is weaker. We have taken what used to be the normal for our culture and turned it into the exception. Those who receive everything from their diet that is needed in order for their bodies to be healthy are few and far between. Those that do, make special efforts to do so. Even those who now eat well with a diet of nutrient dense, fresh organic foods may require some extra help to catch up from past deficiencies or they may require extra amounts of a specific nutrition to handle certain “unnatural” toxins that they have been exposed to. Ridding the body of specific toxins and chemicals requires a lot of very specific nutrition to support the extra work that is necessary for the detoxification and elimination pathways that exist in the body. Likewise with the healing of old injuries.
In order for a solution to work and make the body healthier it would have to work in the direction of removing environmental stresses from the body and/or nourishing and strengthening the body.
What is developing here is a picture of increasing amounts of materials and activities which place extra stress on the body coupled with decreasing amounts of materials and activities which defend, strengthen and build the body. Breakdown is becoming greater than buildup and structure and function are degenerating. Hence we have degenerative diseases like weak heart and blood vessels, progressive nervous system disorders, joint disease, digestive system and immune system deterioration, weak genetic expression and so on.
The modern health care system is sorely lacking as a solution to this problem. It is failing on several fronts and it is failing for good reason. The fixation on symptoms and the classification of symptoms does little to provide a solution that can be used to correct these conditions. Using chemical toxins in the form of drugs as the therapy of choice for degenerative conditions makes as much sense as fixing a flat tire by pounding another nail in it. But the foremost reason that it is failing is because the modern health care system is lacking the most important component of healing, the intention to heal.
Dr. Murdock
