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These days the popular mantra is: "Eat your vegetables and get all of your vitamins".

This is excellent advice but this statement is not entirely true and could be actually dangerous to our health.

How can this be?

At the end of World War II; the drug and chemical conglomerates had enormous stockpiles of nitrates and phosphates which had been used to manufacture munitions during the war. Earlier experiments had shown that these minerals made very effective fertilizer. The conglomerates then started to market these N (nitrogen) P (phosphorus) K (potassium) fertilizers to farmers at extremely attractive prices. This made the traditional methods of farming extremely uneconomical, so that by the sixties, almost all of American farmers had become dependent upon NPK products.

This system of farming was so wildly successful, creating lush and abundant crops, that the United States had the ability to feed the world, but the soil and the consumers have been paying a very steep price ever since.

NPK products grow wonderful looking vegetables, but we are not vegetables. We require 59 nutrients on a daily basis including 13 vitamins and 22 minerals. NPK products do not contain these essential minerals because they were never designed for human nutrition. All these items are vitally essential for our health and well-being.

As each successive crop was grown on soil enriched with NKP products, the earth slowly became depleted, thus our vegetables are now mineral and vitamin bankrupt; as an example in 1948: a bowl of spinach contained 150 mg of iron, now that same bowl contains 2 mg.

Then, as if that is not enough, all these vegetables get processed before marketing. Processing removes a huge percentage of these vital minerals and nutrients. Removing grain husk, blanching, boiling, baking, steaming, bleaching and freezing all have the potential to remove nutritious aspects of our food.

The latest insult to our food system is a proposal to irradiate all of our food products including produce. This is a rather poorly thought-out plan by the USDA to sterilize our food supply. They do not seem to care or realize that the few people affected by food bacteria will pale in contrast to the millions of sick people who will have been deprived of the natural medicines (phytonutrients, digestive enzymes and life force properties) found in fresh, raw, living vegetables.

The FDA and USDA have ignored the evidence of cancer and genetic risks involved in irradiated food even though their own experts have warned of the dangers. Irradiation can also be used to clean up food unfit for human consumption by killing the odoriferous bacteria in spoiled food.

The focus of the food industry and the FDA seems to be upon the lucrative clean up of contaminated food stuff, rather than prevention at the source. Such basic procedures as monitoring cattle feed lots for over crowding and contaminated water run-off into neighboring irrigation systems would drastically decrease both E.coli 0157 and salmonella contamination which can be lethal. The cost of prevention would be trivial compared to a pandemic of an extremely sick populace.

As a side note, one of the most effective methods of irradiation is the use of cobalt pellets as the fuel in radioactive radiation. Cobalt is what is used in dirty bombs. I just thought you would like to know.

For more information on this subject, I would like to suggest the Organic Consumers Association at http://www.organicconsumers.org

In conclusion, I would suggest:

That you use vitamin and mineral supplements, but try to purchase the best available. That you grow your own organic produce as much as possible.