Why you should get your selenium and zinc from foods, not synthetic vitamins

Friday, February 18, 2011 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: MegaFood, zinc, health news

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(NaturalNews) I first met the MegaFood company at a natural products expo two years ago. We sat down and had a conversation about "food-based nutrients" versus isolated or synthetic nutrients, and it turned into a fascinating hour that left me thinking we should be doing something with the MegaFood company at some point. They really impressed me as a company that knew what they were doing with food-based nutritional supplements.

Fast forward two years: Today virtually everyone in the natural health community recognizes that synthetic vitamins are all but useless, which is why conventional medical researchers always choose them to run their bogus clinical trials. That's how they come up with those whopper headlines like "Vitamin E might kill you!" Sure it will if you're using the synthetic, chemically-produced form that you find in many of the conventional name-brand multivitamins (which are mostly made by pharmaceutical companies anyway).

Synthetic vitamins are a scam. They don't work, and in fact, there's evidence that they may harm you.

Food-based nutrients, on the other hand, can be lifesaving!

That's why people get such amazing results from a raw food diet, which is an extremely powerful cleansing and disease reversing diet.

People now get it: Nutrients should come from food, not from a synthetic chemical laboratory. And ideally, we would get all our nutrients from food. But that's where things have gone wrong in our modern system of agriculture...

Why your food is nutrient deficient

Trace minerals like zinc and selenium are absolutely crucial to the proper functioning of your body. And yet, nearly all trace minerals are widely depleted in the soils that grow our food.

That's because conventional agriculture extracts these minerals from the soils, year after year, while replenishing none of them. Conventional fertilizers contain virtually no trace minerals, so after just one decade of growing crops through conventional methods, the soils are depleted of crucial trace minerals that your body needs to function. Conventional agriculture, it turns out, is almost like a strip mining operation that pulls valuable minerals out of the soil and carries them away in the food, ultimately leaving the soils depleted.

Most of the carrots, cabbage, zucchini, celery and even the fresh fruits you buy in grocery stores today are but pale shadows of real food because they lacks the micronutrient nutrition that real food used to have when it was grown in natural soil.

Organic agriculture is much better because trace minerals are often put back into the soils. But even then, they're often still not present in the densities necessary to replenish the missing trace minerals in the bodies of most consumers.

The very best soil to grow food in, it turns out, is soil that was recently flooded. When rivers flood, they bring fresh nutrients to the surrounding farmlands, resulting in a burst of plant growth and nutrition. The very best food you can ever eat is wildcrafted food that was grown on soils that flooded last year.

But in its shortsightedness and nutritional ignorance, modern man has dammed up the rivers to "prevent flooding." So farmlands don't flood anymore, and nutrients are never replenished. The fields become more and more nutrient depleted, year after year, until they reach the point of chemical subsistence where they are barely scratching out a poor crop yield grown with chemicals: Pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers and GMO seeds.

That's what most people are eating these days: Death crops grown in dead soils that lack virtually all trace minerals. And so people are dying of cancer, and strokes, and diabetes and heart disease, all while remaining clueless that the food they're eating each day isn't really food at all. That corn on your plate is just the illusion of corn. From the point of view of nutrition, it might as well be just "candy corn."

Getting real nutrients from food

Getting real nutrition requires growing your food in the presence of trace minerals. If you can find a local organic farmer who grows food organically -- while adding trace minerals back into the soil -- then you have a shot at lasting health. Minerals can be put back into the soils through the use of seaweed extracts or even ocean water concentrates!

In fact, it was the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that resulted in record crop production the following year. All that ocean water replenished the soils, causing crops to grow back with such strength and vitality that many didn't even need pesticides to ward off insects. When plants have their own inner vitality, they automatically resists pests and disease and need no chemical applications whatsoever. (How do you think plants survive in the wild, outside the farms?)

Unfortunately, finding trace minerals like selenium and zinc at high levels in real food is virtually impossible today. You almost have to grow your own food and feed your soil selenium and zinc in order to accomplish this.

But who has time to grow all their own food?

MegaFood grows real food with selenium and zinc

MegaFood has done this work for you. They grow large batches of nutritional yeast (which, by itself, is a favorite superfood of raw food vegans) and then feed it key trace minerals such as selenium and zinc. (Nutritional yeast, by the way, is non-Candida yeast. It's actually a superfood. I blend it into my smoothies on a daily basis. Raw foodies use it in salads and other foods.)

This mineral-rich superfood is then dried and packaged for consumption in a plant-based tablet base. The result is a high-selenium superfood matrix that delivers bioavailable selenium to your body the way nature intended.

Now, due to FDA regulations, we can't talk about the health benefits of selenium without risking the wrath of armed FDA agents showing up at our doors. So you'll have to search Google or NaturalNews yourself to learn more about selenium. But it's one of the most important trace mineral nutrients of all for those who want to maintain healthy cellular function.

Zinc is widely known to be a necessary nutrient for healthy immune function. Its many roles throughout the human body make it one of the most important trace minerals of all. But much like selenium, zinc is widely depleted in the soils that grow our food, too, leaving consumers depleted.

The MegaFood company has solved this dilemma with a unique food-based supplement solution: They offer 100% whole food, soy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian dietary supplements that deliver zinc, selenium and other nutrients through real foods, not inorganic minerals.

The base of these supplements is a blend of nutritional yeast, organic broccoli, organic spinach, organic ginger root, organic turmeric root and other organic ingredients. But the most important part is that the living nutritional yeast is fed the trace minerals selenium or zinc, and the living yeast incorporates those minerals and alters them into a "food format" that your body recognizes as immediately bioavailable.

Starting today, we now carry MegaFood Selenium and MegaFood Zinc at the NaturalNews Store. Once again, the very large size of the NaturalNews reader base has allowed us to acquire a one-time shipment of these MegaFood supplements at an extraordinary price that you absolutely will not find anywhere else on the 'net.

Click here to see the special discount pricing for NaturalNews readers.

Ingredients in MegaFood Selenium

Selenium: 50 mcg

Immune Health Blend; S. cerevisiae (source of naturally occurring beta glucans & glutathione), Organic Broccoli (natural source of sulforaphane): 121 mg

Nourishing Whole Food Blend: Organic Spinach, Organic Ginger Root, Organic Tumeric Root, Organic Rosemary Leaf, Organic Oregano Leaf, Organic Parsley Leaf, Organic Rice Bran, Organic Carrot, Organic Beet Root

Other Ingredients: Plant Cellulose, Vegetable Lubricant

Ingredients for MegaFood Zinc

Zinc: 22.5 mg

Immune Health Blend: S. cerevisiae (source of naturally occurring beta glucans & glutathione), Organic Broccoli (natural source of sulforaphane) 21 mg

Nourishing Whole Food Blend: Organic Spinach, Organic Beet Root, Organic Parsley, Organic Carrot, Organic Rice Bran 26 mg

Other Ingredients: Plant Cellulose, Vegetable Lubricant

Both of these MegaFood formulas are available at an incredible discount at the NaturalNews Store.

For the record: Food versus supplements

For the record, I'll repeat what I've always said here on NaturalNews: Food is always the best source for your nutrition, and supplements are second.

So if you can get zinc-rich food, or selenium-rich food from your own back yard, or from a local grower, get your trace minerals through those foods first!

But if you're eating food from the grocery stores or restaurants, then there's little question that it's deficient food and it almost certainly lacks the trace minerals your body craves. That's where supplements come in.

MegaFood is a unique solution because it provides nutrients in a food form, so it's probably the closest you can get to a food source while still being available in a bottle. There are a couple of other food-based mineral tablets on the market, and I know of at least one other brand that's also really good, but it's also quite a bit more expensive than MegaFood. Perhaps we'll review some of those other food-based nutrients in a future article here on NaturalNews.

My only real complaint about MegaFood is that the bottles are much larger than they need to be in order to hold the number of food tablets they contain. The bottle could be half its current size and still hold all 60 tablets. (The bottle is glass, not plastic, which is good for protecting the quality of the tablets.) I'll be mentioning this to the MegaFood company in the hope that they might reconsider either shrinking the bottle or increasing the number of tablets contained in each bottle.

In the mean time, please enjoy our truly remarkable NaturalNews discount on their selenium and zinc formulas. We have these in stock right now and the prices are good while this supply lasts at the NaturalNews Store.

And don't forget to buy organic produce, too, in order to regularly get more trace minerals through your food!