One thing about going to a theme park is that we tend to eat all that good snack food — chips, burgers, cotton candy, fried Twinkies. How we crave our junk food! When we think of cravings, pregnant women come right to mind. They want to eat the strangest foods at the strangest times. One young lady might crave pickles and ice cream while another might be found outside eating dirt. Years ago I heard the story of The Hawaiian King Kamahameha’s mother, Queen Kekuiapoiwa. While she was pregnant she developed cravings for eyeballs. To us, this sounds pretty strange, but who are we to argue with a queen? She specifically wanted the chief’s eyes; thankfully she was given the salty eyes of sharks to eat. The chief was relieved I’m sure.
These cravings are caused by a deficiency in essential minerals. When a woman is pregnant the baby will take all the required nutrition from her body it needs. If she is low in her essential minerals she can develop a mineral deficient disease such as pica cravings or even diabetes (due to the lack of trace minerals like chromium and vanadium).
Pregnant or not, our bodies are dependent upon macro and trace minerals to maintain our structures and ultimately our health. The processes of our bodies – our life functions – are dependant upon enzymes for their action. Enzymes require minerals. How do we know which minerals our bodies require? Scientists have studied our tissues to discover just that. When plant or animal tissue is burned, the nitrogen, sulfur, hydrogen and carbon that make up the fats, carbohydrates and protein go off as gases, and the minerals alone remain as ash. The minerals that will be found through such a process are primarily sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium. But there are also a number of other minerals found in very tiny or trace amounts such as zinc, iodine, manganese, copper and even arsenic. These trace minerals are the key ingredients in enzyme function. The metabolic processes of the body depend on the action enzymes. Therefore, without adequate trace minerals our metabolic function fails.
Our bodies are a complex structure of billions of specialized parts and electrochemical processes. These are constantly moving, flowing and changing; you could say that life is a state of dynamic equilibrium. Take the average red blood cell. It has a lifespan of 120 days. When it dies, it is replaced by new blood cells — provided we supply the body with the biochemical nutrients it needs. The various organs and tissues given proper nutrition and essential minerals can rejuvenate themselves indefinitely.
The American diet causes many people to crave snack foods, salt, and sugar. Indeed, the Standard American Diet which is a SAD diet usually lacks quality nutrition. We live on packaged foods and microwave dinners. The snack food and fast food industries capitalize on our cravings for minerals by liberally salting or sweetening their products producing high and sugar binges or salt hunger. The more we eat the more we want. “I bet you can’t eat just one”, they boast knowing that we are so lacking in essential minerals we will devour the whole bag trying to get them. When we taste the sugar or salt our brains think it has found nutritious minerals. After our disappointing indulgment, we find ourselves in greater deficiency because the junk food not only did not provide nutrition it robed it from us. We have only increased greater cravings because we did not give our body the essential nutrition it was looking for.
The average American eats 120 pounds of sugar in a year trying to satisfy his cravings. Stated another way, the majority of people eat their weight in sugar each year. This is more than a teaspoonful every hour, day and night. The major ingredient in most poor quality foods is sugar and fat. Because we have neglected the intake of essential minerals, we find a society failing in its health and addicted to snack foods.
As a naturopath, I use energetic and other test to determine a person’s deficiencies and then provide whole food supplements to correct these deficiencies. Sometimes there is such energetic chaos that a needed mineral is present, but the body lacks the energetic information to process that mineral. Balance is restored through the use of Infoceuticals, homeopathic, isopathic and other energetic remedies.
The very cultivation of our food depletes nutrition to gain greater yields. Our modern technological society has altered the natural state of our food to increase production, shelf life, or its aesthetics. This has caused a gross lack of needed nutrients in our food supply. No wonder we crave junk foods. Nature provided all needed nutrients in natural whole foods, but we devitalize them through refining, over cooking, wrong cultivation, radiating, etc. Eating such altered foods only adds to our energetic confusion and nutritional deficiencies. The easiest and best change someone can make to improve their health is to stop eating artificial, packaged food filled with inorganic compounds and move to consuming real organic food.