Listen to your mom, take your vitamins!
A little piece here from the Cheerful Oncologist that vitamin D reduces the risk of cancer. I think the bigger question isn’t why is this so, but why do we need to? I remember reading somewhere that today’s fruits and vegetables are not as full of vitamins and minerals as they used to be. The soil that they are grown in is so very from a natural state, growth boosted by artificial fertilizers, that plants just aren’t as nutritious as they used to be. I think it’s pretty sad that most North American adults should take a multivitamin just because we aren’t getting what we need from the food we eat.
I’ve done a fair bit of organic gardening. I’m not suggesting that this is the cure-all to this issue, but it is interesting to note that commercial fertilizer production didn’t really kick into high gear until after WWII. Why? Because the Allies had all these left-over bombs that the needed to do something with. Know what the major component of bombs of that era where? Nitrogen. Yep. Take the explosives, re-render the stuff back into a nitrogen fertilizer and sell to farmers.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Tags: nutrition
1 Comment
[...] I might be a little late to the party on the news that packaged spinach grown in the States is contaminated with e. coli. Yes, I know not all spinach, and I know that the problematic spinach has been tracked to a few farms and the problem is being contained. I haven’t been following the story too closely, but I have to wonder how we might have made our own problem with the factory farms that feed us. [...]