Supplements

Do you take supplements? I was listening to a podcast  of an interview with Terry Wahls (listen to it here ) about supplements. She had some major health issues and was trying to correct it with vitamin supplements, but it wasn't until she started to find the foods that had the vitamins and minerals that she needed, that her health started to improve. I think this is interesting and I've always preferred the idea of getting our nutritional requirements from our food rather than topping up with the vitamin/mineral etc in a tablet form. I do take two supplements and I'll discuss that in a bit.

One of the problems is that our mainstream food is not healthy. This blog is all about healthy food and the connection with healthy farms - the practices on the farms growing our food must be right. If the nutrients and minerals are in the soil, the roots will be able to take them into the plant with the assistance of the soil biology. If the nutrients and minerals aren't in the soil the roots can access them. One of the problems with conventional farming methods, is that there is too much reliance on herbicides and pesticides and these kill the soil biology.

The nutrients are in the soil and it's the biology that sucks it all up and converts them into a usable form for the roots to access. There are many other people better equipped to discuss this than me, I just understand the basic principles. If you want to read more, have a look at.Elaine Ingham,  Christine Jones and Maarten Stapper.

The Soil Food Web - a term used to explain the life under the ground.

If we had healthy soils and they haven't been destroyed by the herbicides or pesticides and you've got herbivores eating the healthy grass or our food grown in that soil, then there will be an enormous amount of life in the soil and this will create a food bank for the plants. These plants will be highly nutritious with all the minerals and vitamins that the plant should have. How do you tell that the food that you buy is healthy? Well, it helps if you can talk to the farmer, which is the true value in buying from a farmers market, you can ask the person that grew the food what he/she does. It doesn't necessarily need to be labelled "organic" but at least if it is, you know that it hasn't had chemicals on it. A word of caution, just because something is organic, doesn't mean it's good for you! But it is a good indication it will be better for you than conventional grown food. You've probably seen this story about a family eating organic food and they saw improvements in their health after only two weeks.If you are growing plants even in a broad acre sense, you still need to consider it like a vegetable garden and put back into it. It's called regenerative farming. It's not good to just grow, grow, grow as every time you take that plant away, you take away nutrients. Putting back, can be as simple as grazing cattle over a paddock to allow their manure to fertilise the soil.

I try to eat organic when I can, I try to grow some of my own food and I try to avoid processed food. This way I should be eating food that has as much nutrition as possible. In saying all that, there are two vital minerals that Australian soils are lacking - selenium and iodine. I take a couple of drops of both of these most nights. The rest of my nutrition I hope I get out of the food I eat.