Why is nutrition a health issue?

A large number of mental & physical health complaints & leading causes of mortality have been found to have a strong nutritional association. These complaints are virtually non-existent in cultures adhering to wholefood, traditional diets. 

Our modern diet suffers from:

- Processing of foods which removes fibre, vitamins and minerals which are essential for health.

- The addition of preservatives, flavour enhancers, colourings, many of which have detrimental effects on health.

- Soil depletion of essential minerals, due to intensive farming - minerals are essential for many body processes.

- Use of agrochemicals on plant crops can result in lower levels of certain nutrients and the ingestion of toxic chemicals in foods.

- Modern rearing techniques of livestock have resulted in a huge increase in saturated fats which are implicated in heart disease, obesity and diabetes.  Livestock are given hormones (to promote growth) and antibiotics (to fight infections)  which pass through the food chain and affect our health.  

- Accompanying this is a relative decrease in essential fatty acids in our diets—so called because they are essential for the production of all the cells in the body, including immune cells and hormones.

It is not easy to get all your nutrients from a so called “balanced diet”.  Surveys have shown that the majority of people are deficient in many vitamins and minerals.

RDAs or Recommended Daily Amounts of nutrients are set at levels to prevent diseases such as beriberi or scurvy, not to achieve optimum health.  Many people do not consume even the RDA of most nutrients.