If I eat three health meals a day why should I even think of using supplements? This seems logical. Eat well and you will get everything you need from your diet and will stay healthy.
Sadly it is no longer correct. For our parents that may have worked, but things have changed. Once upon a time vegetables were grown in your garden and animals grew up in fields. I say “once upon a time” but it is only 40 or 50 years ago that this was basically true.
Now we find that vegetables are grown in depleted and often contaminated soils. They are nurtured with chemicals to get best production but the trace elements that are so important to our long term health are not in the soils to begin with and son the plants cannot put them into the vegetables and fruit that we buy.
Next we pick fruit before it is ripe. This is so that it will store and so that it will transport well. For example, apples are picked green. The nice red apples we buy in supermarkets need to looked at a little carefully. If they are red on one side and green on the other then they may have come straight off a tree but if they are red all around then they have been picked green, stored, and then put into a carbon dioxide chamber to force them to go red so that they will look good on the shelf!
A friend of mine bought a cucumber hothouse operation but when she was looking at businesses she considered an orchard. In the disclosure information she noticed that part of the price was for stock and there were apples that had been in store for nearly 4 years. She said that they were obviously no good and she would not pay for them but the owners insisted that they were fine and when the market was right they would come out of storage, go through the CO2 chambers and go into the shops.
This is scary because we know that in that case the apples will have the nutritional value of cardboard. In fact with the higher roughage in it the cardboard may be more healthy for you!
This sounds a little extreme, but think about it. You eat apples for the vitamin and minerals and the antioxidants. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. If you take an apple from the supermarket though and cut it into quarters and the phone rings so you go to answer it then when you come back 10 or 15 min later the apple is often starting to brown already. If you have an apple straight from the garden and you cut it in half and put it in the fridge while you go to work then when you come back in the evening there will be some discoloring but it will still be basically good.
