MINERALS IN CHEMISTRY OF BODY-MINDTV ads tell us calcium supplements are the cat's whiskers. Hopefully you know it's a lie. Your experience is that balanced bones, balanced bodies, come only from balanced foods!
Did you know:
-- no group of enzymes will lift a finger without their mineral buddies;
-- we need minerals in balance and in proportion to each other;
-- when we swallow too much of a mineral, or eat a food that robs us of minerals, we end up with both an excess and a deficiency of the same mineral at the same time;
-- home-dried foods from a Dehydrator give us the widest variety of organic minerals (and juicing of course);
-- the 9-tray Excalibur Dehydrator will make more mineral-rich snacks at one time than any other dehydrator in the world today.
MINERALS AND ENZYMES
You can eat all the enzymes in the world, but if the right minerals aren't there, those enzymes won't work -- not that they're dysfunctional, they're simply mineral-challenged!
Enzymes are our worker proteins, but in fact ALL proteins will NOT work without their minerals. You know this, you know a structural protein like collagen in bone is useless without its interlocking minerals such as calcium and phosphorus.
A transport protein like hemoglobin in blood must have its core of iron, to carry oxygen along. Messenger proteins (neurotransmitters) depend entirely on sodium and potassium to flick the nerve signal their way.
Uniquely, minerals are the only part of our diet that can't be created by any living being. With everything else -- proteins, vitamins, fats, sugars -- some little cell somewhere will string carbon, hydrogen and oxygen together to make the needed chemical. If a plant does the job, we call it a phytochemical.
Not even a cow can make calcium. Wide-eyed beauty that she is, a cow must still eat her calcium from a field of grass.
Minerals are little rocks, naked to the human eye (or to be 100% exact, they're the main constituent of rocks). Water pushing itself up through rocks and soil, leaches out their minerals and washes them into the ocean -- which is why sea vegetables are the richest source of minerals.
The late Dr. Ann Wigmore advised us to eat two tablespoons of sea vegetables a day unless you're allergic to iodine. Begin with raw kelp, dulse and nori.
MINERALS AND LIFE
Plants excrete fulvic acid to bind the soil minerals and absorb them as a complex into the plant root. It's this acid that begins the process of turning inorganic rocks into organic minerals, delicately weaved into living tissue.
If you need a mineral supplement short-term, look for one with fulvic acid to help with its absorption. Fulvic acid will also chelate heavy metals out of your body.
Some say that minerals are the life-carriers, others say it's the
enzymes. Others again, like myself, say it's neither -- Life is a
separate power, motionless yet the source of all movement, untouched by anything in this world.
Joe Alexander in "Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda!" expresses it: "those raw foodists who are shy about sticking their necks out ... can go on talking about enzymes, but I am convinced myself that it is the corruption of the life-force in cooked foods that is the foremost reason why cooked food is bad for us."
In my experience, Life is surrendering me to It. Little me isn't doing the surrendering. All I can do is make myself fully available, so I'll experience the Wonder. It reminds me of a poster I once saw, of sunlight shining through the trees, and underneath the words: "Don't run, go slowly, you've only as far as yourself to go."
At that point, when we've stopped running away, we're ready for service. Main thing is to take the right steps every day, and ignore all the "wrong" you do. For me, that means eating and drinking living greens daily to keep my body-mind in balance, and quietly relaxing for an hour a day and focusing inside (http://www.tprf.org).
Anyway, some folks say minerals are the life-spark, so I thought you should know that. It indicates what a high value they place on minerals. There's nothing higher on this earth than LIFE.
Dr. Bernard Jensen writes in his introduction to Gillian Martlew's book, "Electrolytes the Spark of Life": "The point when minerals become alive is when electrolytes split. All cellular structures become alive through electrolytic activity. Life begins with electrolytes. Trace minerals carry the life force in our bodies more than any other substance."
Powerful stuff! Martlew defines electrolytes as "trace minerals in
solution in water, combined in such a way that they conduct electricity."
In "The Biochemic Handbook", medical doctors Chapman and Perry write: "The inorganic constituents of the cell .. these cell salts ... are the vital portions of the body, the workers, the builders; the water and organic substances [proteins, fats, vitamins, carbs, etc] forming the remainder of the organism are simply inert matter used by these salts in building the cells of the body."
So you see, an entire school of thought out there is saying it's
minerals that build the cells of life! And minerals that carry the spark of life. So you better eat your minerals...:)
MINERALS AND BALANCE
Raw-foodists Just Say No to supplements, except wholefood concentrates like raw juice powders, e.g. grass juice cold-dried not freeze-dried -- freezing destroys enzymes the same way heat does.
Balance is the key to all our systems purring along optimally. It's not what you take in, it's how balanced it is. When we eat or drink anything unbalanced, like a calcium tablet, we upset the balance and synergy every cell is striving for.
We turn a house made over by Oprah (the interior decorator is Mother Nature's wisdom) into a house made over by an earthquake -- all the parts are there, but the Beauty's gone.
Only living foods are fully balanced -- food still growing when you eat it. Then raw foods and rawfood concentrates are pretty well balanced.
Minerals are the most sensitive of all to Balance. They will work only in proportion to each other. Nancy Appleton in "Lick the Sugar Habit" reports that dentist Dr. Melvin Page found if he could get his patient's calcium/phosphorus ratio to be 10 to 4 -- that's 2.5 times more calcium than phosphorus -- their tooth decay and bone loss would stop.
Sugar causes phosphorus to plummet. Say there's 4 molecules of phosphorus and 10 of calcium in your blood. Then you eat sugar, and a poor osteoblast (bone-cell) can get only 2 phosphorus to build bone, because the other 2 were conscripted into the GI tract to digest the sugar (GI = gastro-intestinal).
Now your bone-cell can use only 5 of calcium, with its 2 phosphorus. So 5 molecules of calcium are left useless in the blood, while your bones cry out in desperate need of more calcium. There you have it -- an excess and deficiency of the same mineral at the same time!
Excess is another word for toxic. Now what happens to this toxic calcium? Our body plops it down into knobbly arthritic joints, bone spurs, brittle arteries, kidney stones and cataracts.
This is how a person can have joints swollen hard with calcium, and osteoporosis at the same time. She's not eating her minerals in balance, e.g. eating yogurt or cheese (excess calcium with no magnesium). And she's eating foods that unbalance the minerals even further, like sugar.
Excess calcium in a cell leads to fatigue too. Enzymes needed for the Krebs energy cycle have to leave their job and rush to bail out some of the calcium, like too much water in a canoe (when they should be busy rowing the canoe). I read that in "Molecular Biology of the Cell" by ruce Alberts et al. Please don't drink animal milk. Drink SEED milks!
THREE TYPES OF MINERALS
On offer at the food buffet are minerals in three forms:
(1) metallic minerals derived from oyster shell, calcium carbonate, limestone, dolomite, clay, ground-up rocks and soil, crystals, sea salts and salt lakes; this class includes the laboratory-made chelated minerals, where protein is wrapped around the metallic minerals to help the body absorb them;
(2) dead plant minerals derived from prehistoric plant deposits or humic shale;
(3) living plant minerals in raw and living foods.
The colloidal and crystalloid liquids and gels are made from (1) or (2) -- metallic minerals or dead humus.
Do you want dead rock, dead plant, or living plant in you? The more raw foods in your diet, the more quickly you evolve into choosing LIFE. The colloids and caplets fall away.
Ann Wigmore wrote that mineral supplements are okay short-term (for three months) to correct an obvious imbalance. In the late 90's I took MSM and the dents in my nails went away. Today I get sulfur from cabbage juice in my daily green drink, and bean sprouts, no MSM.
The difference between living plant minerals and colloidal minerals is huge. A plant mineral is anywhere from several thousand to a million times smaller than the smallest metallic mineral. The average plant mineral is less than 0.00001 micron in size (a micron is a millionth of a meter or yard). Ten thousand plant minerals fit into one red blood cell, and three million red blood cells are in a single drop of blood.
One red blood cell contains more than 200 million molecules of
hemoglobin, each of which need one atom of iron. Our bone marrow produces about 100 billion red blood cells every hour. Iron is in so many raw foods -- leafy greens, beets, sprouted grains and beans, nuts and seeds, dried fruit with pips, and seaweeds, that I've never yet met an anemic raw foodist! Indeed we have dynamite energy.
The small size of plant minerals gives them a huge surface area, so you get billions of tiny electrically-charged minerals when you eat one raw fig bar.
Plant minerals are water-soluble and negatively charged, which makes for easy absorption through the intestinal membrane.
Metallic minerals are hydrophobic (water-insoluble) with a positive charge. If you drink 2 grains of free iodine, it will kill you. But in its plant form in sea vegetables, iodine is essential for a purr-along metabolic rate.
Plant minerals are in fact so different from metal elements that it's about time science gave them a different name.
MINERALS IN DEHYDRATED FOODS
Dried food is the most exciting way to get minerals IN BALANCE. Exciting because it tastes good and it's great to share with friends.
Nothing turns a friend on more than raw fig bars, cashew-date leather, or home-dried apple or banana -- well at least turns them on to raw foods!
You get MORE minerals in dried foods because all the water's gone, which is 70% of the cells. So you get both QUANTITY and BALANCE.
Dehydrating gives you more nutrients for less digestive work, just like juicing. It's so easy to snack on a few fig bars made from living plants in your very own Dehydrator. Compare that to gorging on all those plants if they were still plumped up with water, especially the sprouted grain. It would take forever to chew on the grains, nuts, seeds and figs in a fig bar.
To me, it's not possible to get enough minerals if you don't include dehydrated foods and juices in your life. Double Noble Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling said: "One could trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral deficiency" (quoted in "The Power of Plant Derived Minerals" by Elmer Heinrich).
Heinrich also writes: "I have witnessed thousands of people lose weight naturally, and I mean lots of weight, after they began to consume a full spectrum of 70 or more minerals on a daily basis."
When you get the right kitchen equipment -- a Dehydrator, a Sprouter and a Juicer -- and choose ORGANIC plant foods, you will enjoy every mineral you need, more than 70, in perfect harmony.
There's over three thousand known minerals, and who knows how many we need? Only plants hide that secret. Buy your veggies, fruits and Sprouter seeds from mineral-rich organic soils.
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