Calories and Nutrients

I wrote a few days ago about supplements and something I've been reading in "The Third Plate" has given me pause for contemplation.

Back in the 1930's a gentleman called  Albrecht worked out that "cows grazing from well-mineralized soils ate balanced diets. But when kept in a barn and fed a predetermined grain ration, they never stopped eating, overindulging in a vain attempt to make up with sheer volume for what they weren't getting in their food." He also thought that humans would do the same thing. "starved of micronutrients, he said, we will keep eating in the hope of attaining them."

Basically that all means that if we eat food that has no nutritional value, even though we may be eating the correct amount of calories, we will be starving ourselves and our health will suffer. I've never been a fan of calorie counting, but I know a lot of people still do it. Hopefully they just do it for fun and not to influence what they eat!

Doesn't this make you mad that they worked it out in the 1930's but we still moved on to doing exactly what they did with those cows and we now have obesity as a leading cause of death and disease in the western world.

Weston A Price was also around in that time and he was ignored too! Well until now that is. As an aside, I've actually considered starting a chapter in Central Qld. So if you are interested, please let me know.

Another interesting snippet - Joan Gussow who was a former chairwoman of nutrition education at Columbia University, believes that soil minerals are the building blocks of human nutrition. A sentiment that I couldn't agree with more! We don't really know how much of each nutrient we all need because we are all different, so we need different things at different times. I personally think that we need to listen to our bodies and eat a balanced diet that our bodies agree with and we should be healthy and well. When I say balanced, I mean lots of whole foods (opposed to packaged) of different persuasions - be they grains, dairy, meats, vegetables, fats.  We just need to know that the soil used to grow those foods also have a good balanced nutrition!