by Casual Writer

Created on: February 12, 2007   Last Updated: April 18, 2007

Given the typical American diet consists of canned and fast foods, soda, cereals and other highly processed foods, vitamin and mineral supplementation is absolutely necessary. All those packaged foods that claim to be good for you, those foods that are "fortified with vitamins", can be classified as junk food. Look around you and you'll see the increase of just about every disease as people increase their consumption of these so-called healthy foods.

Even people who eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables may not be getting the necessary nutrients:

"A declining soil fertility, due to a lack of organic material, major elements, and trace minerals, is responsible for poor crops and in turn for pathological conditions in animals fed deficient foods from such soils, and that mankind is no exception."

This is a statement made by Dr. William A. Albrecht, Chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri. He goes on to say that putting back only nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) into the soil,

"as legislated and enforced by State Departments of Agriculture, mean malnutrition, attack by insects, bacteria and fungi, weed takeover, crop loss in dry weather, and general loss of mental acuity in the population, leading to degenerative metabolic disease and early death."

Unless your diet consists of nothing but organic fruits and vegetables, grown in unadulterated naturally fertilized soil, and your meats are raised hormone and antibiotic free, you are most likely not getting all the vitamins and minerals your body needs to maintain good health and to ward off disease. Another challenge is that we can never be 100 percent certain that foods labeled as organic are what they claim to be. We don't have to do too much digging to find examples of big business making false claims to sell more of their products to us.

Eating on the go in today's hectic pace is often a necessity. This usually means eating processed or fast foods. Finding healthy alternatives is a challenge worth taking. Once the damage is done by a poor diet, we can't just pop a pill to reverse the damage done by our diets.

Your future health is really is in your hands. Eating a whole food diet that consists of organically grown fruits, vegetables and grains will greatly increase your chances of being healthy in your old age. But if you find it a challenge to eat whole, organically grown foods, taking a high quality, bio-available vitamin will insure that you are getting the necessary vitamins and minerals your body needs.

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