I have a feeling that this topic is going to take several posts to finish in whole, but as for a start, I want to start talking about why people aren't necessarily getting the vitamins and minerals that they expect that they are from their daily vitamins.
Without further ado, let's get started.
The Vitamin and Nothing But The Vitamin
If you have ever gone into a store before to pick up some vitamin c, you may have noticed that a great majority of the bottles will have a single ingredient in them called "asorbic acid." This seems all well and good at first until you learn one little fact; vitamin isn't absorbic acid. .. it's actually a complex of multiple things that create what is true vitamin c. Now, for any of you out there who don't believe that the other components are anything more than just co-factors and so forth, consider this: Regardless to how you identify it, if it is required for the break down and absorption of the particle, whether it's directly linked with or indirectly linked with it, is irrelevant. The most important thing to consider when taking something is not in the minutia of what role it plays in the supplement, but that it, in fact does. You only can benefit from what you can absorb and absorbic acid doesn't cut it on it's own.
Now think back to those little adorable one a day chewables that you can get at the store. Somewhere, someone got the notion that they were going to take studies that were based around the effects of vitamins and minerals in nature and try to apply them to their magic pill. How do you think they up did in their journey of taking elements from nature and placing them in a convenient jar that is sold by the bundle in a Walmart... Well, it depends on the company, but lets just say that a store like Walmart is known for it's low prices and when it comes to vitamins, you get what you pay for.
The bio-availability of something is really the only thing to ever consider when looking to buy a supplement. It doesn't matter how much the dose is if you only pass it through your urine or bowl. With that said, understand that any supplement that you can get a discount price is almost in every case complete garbage. How can I say this? Simple, if the supplement doesn't cost at least forty or more dollars for a month supply, that company is't doing anything significant to their product to make it worthwhile. Appropriate bioavailible vitamins can only be created by chelation, and that can only happen through multiple processes that will add expense to the product. This isn't even taking into consideration to the fact that you are going to want to make sure the raw materials are higher quality. But instead of getting into vitamins in particular, lets start with the simplistic minerals of the earth.
Anatomy of the Soil
The earth is made of many layers, but the most important are what is immediate beneath us. Right one top you will see the top soil where all of the plants are growing. Below that you will find the humas, where all of the decaying materials of animals and plant life are. They are mainly already decomposed, but their spongy structure gives the soil most of it's life. Below that layer are where inorganic materials are where plants can get their nutrients from.
Before we continue, check out this video I found that you might find interesting...
Essentially, the soil comes in different mixtures of sand, silt, and clay which, for the most part, carry a negative charge. This means that particles which are positively charged are going to be attracted to them. through adsorption (not absorption!) nutrients lightly attach to the surface of that combination of dirt below. From there, plants convert those nutrients into a organic compound through photosynthesis.
Depending on what nutrients are in the soil will determine what goes into the plants. As we harvest more crops in that area, those nutrients will over time dissipate. If they are not replaced, so long as the plants have plenty of phosphorus, nitrogen, and oxygen, they will look normal. The animal that consumes them, however will be sufficiently deficient, and what sucks, is that without testing, it's not obvious if the plant is rich or poor in nutrition.
So, why is this important? Well, for starters, to compensate, scientists started adding things like iron, copper, zinc, and other such things into fortified breads and cereals. The only problem with this though was that they were adding the wrong kind of those ingredients.
It's a fun for experiment purposes, but other than that, the kind of iron and such that they put into breakfast cereals, are useless. They are metallic minerals that are the same as what you would find in the earth, but they are not bio-available.
See, unlike plants, human beings cannot directly absorb those minerals straight from the ground... They need to first go through the natural process of being reduced into a usable form which can only happen through our plant friends.
Now, going back to the idea of our one a days, are you aware that a great majority of them are using non-absorb able variations of the minerals and lab-created vitamin replicas? What do you suppose the results are? Not too great to say the least. I'm going to cut it there for now because this will take awhile, but just understand that today's lesson is that not every supplement is equal. For a supplement to be worth the price of it, it needs to be in a bio-available form and in a relevant ratio with other co-factors and vitamins.
Take care for now!
All very true. I've wasted plenty of cash on crappy vitamins in my day.
I like how you brought up the stuff about the soil as well. While the science of how the nutrients work is vital to growing in certain areas, I am still very wholeheartedly against all this mono-culture for our crops. It's incredibly wasteful that we even need to manually input nutrients. We've studied how efficient amazonian farms were where the cycle of crops made it so one crop dying could replenish the soil with nutrients that the next crop will need. This type of science seems more sustainable to me, but doesn't benefit the capitalists.
Yeah, without good crop rotation, it's difficult to cultivate anything much more than a nutritionally void plant-looking thing. I'm doing a lot of research right now on plant absorbtion and I'm going to work my way into the body. I want to have a good enough understanding about the whole system that I can explain what I know to be true.
Very cool. I want to use posts as a reason to learn fun/interesting things as well. Inspiring, I could say, as I think I stake most value in your posts out of the few I am following so far here on steemit. So thanks! Are you doing this for actual income at all? Where do you get the time to put such quality effort in? I'll keep upvoting you everyday, I support you!
Cheers,
Mike
I really appreciate that. Honestly, I try to plan my nights out so that I can have something nice to put up before bed. I recently wrote a book, so if I really need to, I can take snippets out of there and add pictures or I can write about similar things when I'm in a pinch. If I have time, I always try to create something new and something that I wouldn't mind re-researching. I'm going to write a book on health next, so I need to have a convincing argument starting at the soil and ending up in the human cells, if I want people to understand.
I don't make an income from Steemit really right now, because there isn't much money in it currently. I suppose that if I manage to grow, that over time, it will be profitable, but I've got quiet a long journey ahead of me.
Thank you for the interaction! I wish you the best.
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