Nitrogen is the building block of life - it is the basis of
protein both in plants and in our bodies. If there is more
nitrogen in the soil, farmers can grow more crops in the
same soil but greater use of the same soil makes it poorer
in minerals unless farmers replace them.
Minerals are simple inorganic chemicals required by living
organisms. They act as catalysts for vital processes.
Plants usually obtain their mineral salts and trace
minerals from the soil while animals obtain theirs from
food. For example, plants need magnesium for
photosynthesis while humans need magnesium and zinc for the
production of hormones and maintaining strength levels.
There are many trace minerals which we know are important
to human nutrition but do not know exactly how.
Minerals came to my attention many years ago when I
received an audio cassette in the mail from somebody
network-marketing supplements. I had tried taking vitamins
but had not noticed any difference except my urine turned a
different color, so had dismissed the idea of nutritional
supplementation.
The cassette contained the famous lecture 'Dead Doctors
Don't Lie' by Joel Wallach. Its premise is that we all
suffer from a deficiency of minerals and that the medical
profession profits from our malnutrition. This is an
extreme view of the medical profession; that it has an
interest in the population remaining malnourished. You do
not have to subscribe to this viewpoint to agree that our
diet is deficient in minerals. It is deficient because our
food production is industrialized. Michael Pollan, in his
excellent book 'A History Of Four Meals', gives us a short
history that helps us understand why minerals lost out in
the effort to harvest nitrogen.
Before the invention of nitrogen-fixing, the supply of
nitrogen on Earth was severely limited even though 80% of
the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen. Until then, the only
way to capture nitrogen and put it in the soil ('fix' it)
so it could feed plants, and therefore end up in our
bodies, was to plant legumes in the fields. The amount of
grains that farmers could grow was severely limited by the
amount of nitrogen available in the soil. Farmers had to
rotate crops so that corn could only be grown every other
year, interspersed with years of growing legumes to put
back nitrogen and other nutrients. They would also graze
farm animals and spread manure from livestock in the fields
to put back more nutrients.
In 1909, a German chemist called Fritz Haber invented a
process to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it
into ammonia which could then be used to make ammonium
nitrate. He developed this technology for the purpose of
manufacturing nitrates for explosives for the German war
effort in the First World War. He also developed poison
gases such as ammonia, chlorine and Zyklon B which was used
in Hitler' concentration camps. Only later did his
invention find a use in agriculture.
Michael Pollan identifies 1947 as the year when the era of
the industrialization of food production began. A munitions
factory at Muscle Shoals, Alabama which used the
Haber-Bosch (Bosch commercialized the process)
nitrogen-fixing process had a huge surplus of ammonium
nitrate, the main ingredient in making explosives. In order
to use up this surplus, it switched over to making chemical
fertilizer. The Department of Agriculture decided to use
the ammonium nitrate as fertilizer on farmland.
The old methods of crop rotation and depending on
vegetables and grazing animals to restore nitrogen and
other nutrients to the soil became unnecessary once farmers
could purchase fertility in the form of bags of ammonium
nitrate fertilizer.
If Haber had not found this way of artificially
supplementing the nitrogen in farm soil, the population
explosion associated with industrial expansion could not
have happened. Pollan refers to a book by Vaclav Smil,
Enriching The Earth, that estimates that two out of every
five humans alive today would not be alive without Haber's
invention. He rates the invention of fixing nitrogen as the
most important of the twentieth century.
The end of crop rotation and the relentless, intensive use
of farmland for producing one or two crops (usually corn
and soybeans) which have been enabled by ammonium nitrate
fertilizer mean that minerals are taken out of the soil
and, if they are put back, are only put back artificially
and inconsistently by farmers. Typically, apart from the
nitrogen in ammonium nitrate, they only put back a few
minerals, the main ones being potassium and phosphorus.
They may also put calcium, sulfur, magnesium and sometimes
boron, manganese, iron, zinc, copper and molybdenum. They
certainly do not put back all the minerals that the human
body requires.
Therefore, what we have gained in the availability of
nitrogen and the quantity of food that we can grow, we have
lost in nutritional value from essential minerals. We
cannot rely on industrial food to provide the minerals we
need.
----------------------------------------------------
I work in information technology supporting the health care
program of a pension system, so am familiar with the issues
of our health care system.
I believe that your health and fitness is a statement - how
you perceive yourself and how you want others to perceive
you. And you can have both at the age of fifty. My site
exists to collect together my reading and experience and
summarize what I have learned:
http://www.healthatfifty.com
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