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It all begins with how our food is grown. Contrary to popular myth...all apples do not contain X amount of vitamins, minerals and calories. How that apple started out life, how and where it grew and how large it grew, determines it's nutritional and caloric content. Then we pick it before it is ripe, weeks before it will be eaten and lessen it's nutritional quality again. Then perhaps we peel off the skin which contains most of the vitamins and minerals, cook it for hours and destroy what little is left, stick it in a can with to much sugar and additives and let it sit on a shelf for a year or two...and eat it thinking we have fulfilled our daily requirement for "fruit".

Then we have to actually choose to eat this poor excuse for an apple to gain what little nutritional value it may have. Oh well...let's go to McDonald's and get a burger!

Supplements are necessary in our modern world. We have depleted the soil of it's natural capacity to provide the building blocks of life, we have poisoned the soil with chemical fertilizers that may give us higher yields, but less nutrition. We feed our animals antibiotics, growth hormones and stress them out in crowded feed lots or buildings where they never see the light of day and expect to be nourished when we consume them, but only after adding preservatives and salt and coloring to their flesh in processing. Face it...our food supply is less than adequate. We are so used to this that when we actually eat something fresh and wholesome...we wonder why it tastes so funny.

The rise in heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other degenerative diseases is astronomical. Our great grandparents died from lack of knowledge or access to modern miracles like antibiotics. We are dying from excess and lack of control over what we eat. People just do not get adequate nutrition from supermarket fare. Add to that, poor food choices and you will get a severely shortened life span.

Supplementation with high quality vitamins and minerals and other nutrients by those who do not have access to nature's bounty can prevent or at least hinder the degenerative diseases that plague our modern world. Our bodies were made to thrive on food that is fresh, whole and free from processing. We may be able to subsist on food that has been raped of its wholesomeness...but we will pay the price in a host of degenerative diseases, compromised immune systems, and shorter more painful lives. By supplementing our diets with the nutrients we've taken out of the food supply we can at least have the assurance that we are giving our bodies a fighting chance in the modern world.

Learn more about this author, Debra K. Carey.
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