What's Happened to Your Mineral Intake?

Minerals – vitally important for health

Here are some examples of why we need minerals and how our bodies use them.

• We need calcium for construction and maintenance of bones and teeth as well as assisting in blood coagulation and acting as an electrolyte (helping nerves send signals and muscles contract). 
• Magnesium is involved in the uptake of calcium and potasium, in regulating muscle and nerve function, making protein, building bone and tooth enamel, synthesizing DNA, metabolizing carbohydrates, and regulating blood sugar levels and the acid-alkaline balance in the body.
• Phosphorus is essential, among other things, for bone and tooth formation.
• Red blood cells can’t function properly without iron, and iron is also important for cellular respiration.
• Magnesium, copper, selenium, zinc, iron, manganese and molybdenum are important co-factors in the structure of enzymes and are needed in numerous cellular functions.
• We need iodine to make thyroid hormones, which control metabolism, influence the cardiovascular system and the immune system, and help maintain calcium homeostasis (balance).
• Sodium, potassium and chlorine are important in the maintenance of the balance between cells and the fluid that surrounds them.

I don’t know about you, but reading up on this kind of thing makes me very motivated to pay attention to what I’m eating, in an effort to give my body what it needs. 

Giving our bodies what they need can be done in two ways that I know of: via the food we eat, and via supplements. 

Since the former is what we’ve evolved with and the latter is a relatively new experiment, I like to go with the food option as much as possible.  

But in the world we live in today, that brings up some challenges.

Minerals are becoming less available in the soils that grow our foods 

Soil health directly impacts availability of nutrients, and as farmers, gardeners, and permaculture practitioners know, soil health is declining alarmingly around the world.  


Natural aging of soils
Australian soils in particular are some of the oldest in the world. They’ve been sitting around for a very, very long time , and in all that time there has been water washing over and through them, dissolving and removing nutrients like phosphorous, calcium and potassium¹. 

There are natural processes by which leached minerals can be returned to the soil, but soils can only benefit from these natural processes if they’re managed regeneratively.  


Ploughing, absence of soil cover, and use of chemical fertilizers
The complex interactions between the roots of living plants and the microorganisms in the soil are the means by which minerals and other nutrients are made available to plants (and to those who eat the plants). Without a dense covering layer made up of a complex community of living plants, decomposes (think earth worms) and decaying plant matter, and teeming microorganisms, soil health suffers and nutrition plummets².

Ploughing destroys plant roots, loosens organic matter so that it washes away more readily, and rapidly destroys invertebrate de-composers and soil microorganisms. This loss of soil life means that even if minerals are present, they’re unavailable to the plants and to those who eat the plants. 

And then there are chemical fertilizers.

What I take that saying to mean is that the first time you use chemical fertilizers to boost crop yields, everything looks wonderful. But progressively, synthetic fertilizers undermine soil health and an addiction is set up: more and more chemical fertilizers are needed to sustain the same harvests, because the soil is becoming more depleted with each passing season³.

Food selection and preparation choices effect mineral absorption

A number of things can limit our uptake of minerals even when they’re available in our food.

The presence of good quality fats in our diet, adequate digestive acids, and the ways we prepare plant foods before eating them all have a big impact on how much of the minerals that are in our food are available to us for digestion and assimilation.

We need adequate good quality fats in our diet

Although fat is not needed for mineral absorption, it's important in so many other ways that I've included this brief section about it here. 

Good quality fat (not from polyunsaturated vegetable oils⁴) is needed for absorption of fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K).  Fat is also essential for cell construction, nerve function, digestion, and for the formation of the hormones that regulate everything from metabolism to circulation.  

The membranes of our cells are composed of fat molecules, and the quality of the fats we eat affects our cells’ ability to allow the right things to pass through their walls and to block other things. Our brains are composed of more than 60% fat and cholesterol⁵. 

The glandular system that regulates the messages sent to the intestinal mucosa require fat-soluble vitamins to work properly. The intestinal mucosa also needs fat-soluble vitamins and adequate dietary cholesterol to maintain its ability to give passes to only those substances we need, while at the same time keeping out the things we don’t need⁶.

All of which is to say that although fat is not needed for absorbing and assimilating minerals, it is essential to health

(This article explains why we need fats and explains which kinds of fats, and this one helps bring balance and sanity to the discussion of how much and which kinds particularly in terms of saturated fats.)

We need adequate digestive acids

Low hydrochloric acid in the stomach or an over-alkaline environment in the upper intestine means poor digestion and poor absorption of minerals.

Digestive acids tend to decline with age and also with the various digestive upsets we experience as a result of poor eating, and which pharmaceutical medicine addresses with antacids.

We need to prepare our plant foods appropriately to access the nutrients inside the plant cell wall, and to neutralize anti-nutrients 

The human digestion system lacks the features that would enable us to digest plant foods easily without preparing them in some way first, for two main reasons.

The first reason is that plant cell walls are tough, and the human digestive tract is unable to break through them without help. I go into detail on this in the article that follows on from this one.)

The second reason why plant foods can be difficult for humans to digest and get the full benefit from has to do with something called "anti-nutrients." Anti-nutrients are substances produced by plants as a form of protection against being eaten and digested. They can interfere with our ability to make use of the minerals and other nutrients in our food, and can contribute significantly to nutritional deficiencies. 

Here are some examples:

• Plants in the Cruciferous family (like cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts and kale), when raw, contain goitrogens that may interfere with thyroid hormone production, which has ramifications for metabolism along with many other functions . 
• Some leafy green plants contain oxalic acid, which directly blocks calcium and iron absorption.
• Grains, legumes, nuts (any form of seed from which a new plant will grow) contain phytic acid and other protective substances, which prevent digestion and enable the seed to sprout after it has passed through a digestive tract. Some of these substances block digestive enzymes and others combine in the intestinal tract with calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc to form insoluble phytates that are then passed through the body without being digested.
• Tannins (found in tea, wine, chocolate, some fruits, nuts, legumes, grains) may bind with ionized minerals in the digestive tract and prevent them from being absorbed.
  

In case you're now thinking "maybe I should just stop eating plant foods," all is not lost. We just need to
process or cook our plant foods in some way before eating them⁷. I go into that in the next post, "Easy, Natural Ways to Increase the Available Minerals in Your Diet."

Diets high in sugars and refined carbs = mineral deficiencies

Diets high in refined carbohydrates can lead to mineral deficiencies. The obvious reason for this is that such a diet lacks minerals in the first place but on top of that, metabolizing these sugars and keeping blood sugar levels stable after we eat them also uses up minerals, particularly magnesium.

This article explains how a diet high in sugar can seriously deplete or reduce the absorption of specific vitamins and minerals, resulting in deficiencies even when our overall intake might otherwise be adequate. 

What are we to do? That's coming up next

So those are all the reasons (or at least, the ones I know of) why it can be nearly impossible to get enough minerals if you eat a conventional, modern diet. 

So what are we to do? Use supplements?

At the time I wrote this post I had been playing with some health issues that led me to the temporary use of mineral supplements, but that isn't an approach I'm comfortable with in the long term. So I was motivated to make use of techniques for increasing my mineral intake naturally, which led me to write the next post in this series. And you can find the previous article here.