CONNECTIONS to HEALTH

BASIC NUTRITION Are You Getting Enough? There are approximately ninety nutrients the body needs on a daily basis: up to sixty minerals, sixteen vitamins, twelve amino acids and three fatty acids. There are other things that the body would like but at a push it can make them from the other ninety. Now the body can only repair itself from the raw materials you provide for it, so if you have any doubts about being able to provide those ninety nutrients on a daily basis you may want to consider taking a good nutritional supplement, at least in the short term until you recover. So does your diet provide those ninety nutrients on a daily basis? Well, if you ate a fresh, local, organic diet of which 75% was raw you would need to eat about thirty two different foodstuffs a day to provide those ninety nutrients. Not many people’s diets are that broad. The easiest answer is to support your diet by taking good nutritional supplements, but what constitutes a good supplement? NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS So why would anyone need a nutritional supplement if they were eating a balanced diet? Can’t we get everything we need from our food? In an ideal world we would, however, we don’t live in an ideal world. There are three main reasons why we don’t get what we need from our food. The first is that most people’s diets are not broad enough. The second is that most of the food we buy has been treated in some way to prolong shelf-life and/or storage times, which removes nutritional factors. And the third is that our soils have been over farmed so there is little in the way of minerals left in the soil. Unlike vitamins and amino acids, plants can not make minerals. If they are not in the soil then they are not in the plants that grow in them. Most people in this culture need supplements. So how can you tell if a supplement is any good or not? The form that the supplement is in is often a good clue. For instance if they are solid tablets the absorption rate is often poor, as low as 4% in the case of some metallic minerals. That means 96% is excreted! Chelated minerals are a bit better in that about 40% are absorbed, but that still leaves about 60% of them to be excreted. By far the best absorption rates come from ionised sub-colloidal minerals, up to 98%, and these are only available in liquid form. Also its is more effective to take small amounts of broad spectrum nutritional components at the correct ratio to each other than it is to take large amounts of them not at the correct ratio. These ratios can often be quite tricky to work out from the label information. The audio presentation this month is called Phenominal Fulvates, and is about why this type of supplement is so effective. If you want to save this file directly to your hard drive the right-click the link and select Save Target As... We have this type of supplement available at the Ishta Centre.  Ask Allyn or Sue for more details.

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