It originally started in our understanding that disease was caused by something that was ‘wrong’ with our bodies and not because of something that we withheld from our bodies. It was then found that if we did not get vitamin C that scurvy would develop. Later it was found that we could go blind if we did not get enough vitamin A, beriberi from lack of thiamin (B1) and so on.
If we think about deficiencies and what is the order of importance then I would think that we would consider air or oxygen first in the hierarchy. It only takes minutes to be without oxygen that our bodies start to die. Next would be water. It usually takes about 3 to 4 days without water to die. With food, depending on how much stores the person has, we typically can go from 12 to 40 days.
So given that we get most of our required nutrients in our diet; it is difficult to tell which vitamin or mineral would cause us death if withheld in this hierarchy of nutrient need. I suspect that it would be minerals and most likely either calcium or magnesium or potassium or salt. Of course not getting enough vitamin D would be slow painful suffering. Imagine people in solitary confinement how painful it would be for them if they were never allowed to be exposed to the sun or other UV source and only were given bread and water. They would either go crazy or die from some deficiency disease or both.
So what are the things that we unknowingly deprive ourselves from that leads to disease and death. In general if we eat our vegetables and meats and fats we should get enough of most things so that we do not have to take any supplements. But let’s examine for a moment things that medical research is saying that we do not get enough.
Certainly items that are required for fortification by law are vitamin D and iodine. We have talked extensively about vitamin D in the blog and will continue to do so. Iodine will need more review as I have only mentioned it in passing a couple of times. The others are magnesium which results in suddenly death even in young people and one estimate puts these sudden deaths due to magnesium deficiency at 8 million in the US from 1940 through 1994 or about forty thousand per year. http://www.mgwater.com/calcs.shtml This is a small number compared to the estimated deaths of 350,000 per year cause by vitamin D deficiency and this may be a conservative number. http://www.sunarc.org/GrantGrassrootsHealth.pdf
Thinking about all of the people on thyroid meds, I will stop here and tell you a short ‘survivor story’ about a lady that was iodine deficient as related by Joyce Meyers on one of her ministry programs. It seems that a lady had a baby and was having a difficult time in recovering her emotional control. Several different doctors had diagnosed her with postpartum depression. She was treated accordingly without any success. She went to a doctor that was also trained in nutritional arts and during the challenge test for iodine her problems immediately went away. I can imagine that cases of postpartum depression are related to nutritional deficiencies caused by the stress of pregnancy on depletion of nutrient stores.
Our salts are inversed as we typically get about 7 to 10 grams of sodium salt and about 1.5 grams of potassium salt. These should be reversed for good health. We need about 3 to 4 times as much potassium as we do sodium.
The other thing that we do not get enough of is vitamin C. Primates and guinea pigs are the only animals that do not make their own vitamin C. If we take goats or dogs and consider the amount of vitamin C that they make each day then the average human (whatever that is) would need to have about 8 to 16 grams per day to have a similar amount for body processes.
So what we will do is look at each one of these and try to help you determine what the needs are. Certainly one of the things that has confounded scientific understanding over the years as recent research has shown is that all test and practice of modern medicine has been on a population of vitamin D deficient people. This has been particularly true of all med