Why you can't get all the vitamins & minerals
you need from food

“Eat a healthy diet rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, and organic meats and you’ll be healthy,” they say.   That advice sounds good, and it was true 100 years ago.  But not today.

Sadly, almost every acre of commercial farmland in the US has been so overused and heavily overfertilized—not to mention polluted with toxins—that the soils have become depleted.

This could have been avoided by careful crop rotation, which includes letting fields lie fallow in certain seasons and years, but it’s much more cost-effective to just fertilize heavily, so that is what commercial farmers have done.

And believe it or not, one culprit is the building of dams and levees to prevent flooding.

From early historical records of farming, researchers have found that if farm land does not get flooded from time to time, the land “plays out” in only five to ten years. 

Most of the America west was populated to a large degree by families packing up and moving west to new still “virgin” or untilled soils as their farms produced food that was lacking in good nutrition. 

This problem got so bad in the 1920’s and 30’s that the over-tilled and under replenished American farms finally culminated in a total ecological collapse that produced the great “dust bowls” in the 1930’s.

In fact, Senate Document 264 issued in 1936 indicated that the mineral content of farm and range land soils had decreased dramatically…and it’s gotten worse since then.  The most recent Earth Summit one in 2002 have estimated North American soil depletion at 85%.

As a result, most fruits and vegetables grown in the US only provide about 15% of the vitamins and minerals that they would have provided had they been grown 100 years ago.

Gerry Morton, CEO of EnergyFirst, has these suggestions for getting all the vitamins and minerals you need:

1. Go for organic fruits and vegetables, which do contain more vitamins and minerals than conventional fruits and veggies, although still not enough.
2. Add a good one-a-day vitamin such as EnergyFirst Mega Plus ACE to your diet.
3. On days when you don’t eat fish, supplement with Energy First Omega 3 Fish Oil in addition to your one-a-day vitamin.
4. If you work out a lot, are over 40, or are outdoors a lot, take Energy First Antioxidant Complex.
5. If you’re stressed out, take EnergyFirst Ultimate B-Complex.

Gerry Morton, CEO of EnergyFirst, is an experienced athlete who has competed in 30+ marathons and 4 Ironman triathlons. Gerry is an excellent source of information on nutrition, supplementation and exercise. Since 1997, he has been educating and motivating others on how to attain peak performance.