As Dr Phil Warman, an agronomist and professor of agricultural sciences at Nova Scotia Agricultural College points out, "crops are bred to produce higher yields, to be resistant to disease and to produce more visually attractive fruits or vegetables, but little or no emphasis is placed on their vitamin and mineral content."

Unfortunately the situation is getting worse as more Corporations become more vertically integrated and control the entire food process from supplying the seeds through all the production stages, and distribution.

Because of these controls some farmers have become little more than modern day serfs with almost no options left to them other than contract to these major conglomerates and conform to their 'corporate' farming methods.

Add to this the increasing foothold of GM engineered crops where nutritional value is way down on the priority list and this problem is going to become much, much more serious.

This will flow on to an elevation of health problems such as cancer and brain disease which may well reach epidemic proportions over the next couple of decades unless the public wake up to what is happening.

Absolutely!  This is a major factor in the current epidemic of obesity. If you are lacking in essential nutrients it will have a serious flow-on effect in your body.

First of all you will never really feel 'well', you will lack energy which means you exercise less, and you will have a tendency to seek out 'comfort' foods which generally contain sugars and thus the cycle continues and it gets worse and worse and ultimately ends up in obesity and ill health.

What can be done about this problem?

Eat organic fruit and vegetables wherever possible.

Avoid processed foods! If you think the loss of nutrient value in fresh fruit and vegetables is bad enough, that it is nothing compared to the nutritional emptiness of processed foods... and to add insult to injury they are full of transfats due to the hydrogenated processing methods that are used.

Take a QUALITY multi NUTRIENT supplement. A multi vitamin/mineral tablet is not adequate for a number of reasons. The prime one is that most 'multi vitamin' supplements use synthetic ingredients with both questionable efficacy and bio-availability and they lack other important nutrients. Unfortunately this is an area in which many consumers are being mislead.

It was interesting to see that even some mainstream physicians are beginning to recognise this problem as evidenced by a recent article in JAMA which advocated people take quality supplements for preventative measures.

  Are You DOING YOURSELF IN…One Mouthful at a Time?