by Max Hammonds, MD –

“Everyone knows that our soils are more and more depleted.”

“The food that we grow is no longer nutritious. Either we must build up our soils or we must add supplements to our diet to make up for this nutritional deficiency.”

Is this true? How can we tell?

The fruits and vegetables, the grains and nuts and seeds that we eat every day are the source of our nutrition. They contain all of the vital elements that we need to make the cell walls, the hormones, the blood cells, the mitochondrial energy factories, the messenger and operational proteins, the DNA and RNA sequencing and replication functions that happen by the millions in our bodies every day.

Vitamins (water and fat soluble), minerals, and phytochemicals (over 30,000 identified) are essential to body health. Our bodies are not able to manufacture some fats and some amino acids. These also must be obtained from the plant-based diet that God designed for our health.

Are these no longer available from our fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds? Are the soils of our land not feeding the plants sufficiently for them to manufacture and concentrate these vital elements for us?

News flash! Guess what the plants need in order to be healthy? What makes the apple so firm and juicy? What makes the string bean pods green, firm-skinned, and fill out fully? What makes the tomato smooth and brightly colored and firmly filled out? What makes the wheat stand up tall and its head fill out fully?

The plants need the nutrients they are producing – for their own health. A tomato is not a bag of nutrients for our consumption. In order to be healthy, the tomato itself needs the Vitamin A (beta-carotene and lutein zeaxanthin), niacin, vitamin C, vitamin K, magnesium, manganese, potassium, lycopene, and other phytochemicals that it produces and concentrates for human and animal consumption. If the tomato were not making and concentrating these in appropriate quantity, the tomato itself would look sickly and wasted and deformed.

You can tell how well the soil is providing the appropriate nutrients by how healthy the plants look that are growing in the soils. Do soils get worn out? Yes, they do when the same crop is grown in them season after season. That’s why crop rotation is recommended. Different crops use different soil resources. And some crops actually put back in the soil the nutrients that future crops need. That’s also why fertilizer, mulch, compost, and manure are mixed into soils.

Do not obsess over the nutritive value of food. Do not think that you need a special measuring device to test your food. The food itself contains its own testing laboratory. If the food looks sickly and deformed, the plant is not getting the nutrients that it needs to live healthfully. And the resultant foods will not have sufficient nutrients for humans. But if the plant is healthy and the produce is thriving, the nutrients are there. The plant itself guarantees it.