Originally published November 29 2007
The Many Benefits and Uses of Sea Minerals
by Mike Donkers
(NaturalNews) We humans are designed to take in trace elements. How does it work? Plants feed�off of�minerals�in the soil. They will take up only those minerals they need for their growth and development. The plants digest these minerals by adding a carbon atom. When we consume these plants we eat whatever mineral traces they still contain (trace elements) plus the carbon atom. The minerals find their way into our system and we breathe out the carbon. Plants in turn use carbon as oxygen. This is simple carbon chemistry and it's how we form a natural cycle with nature and plants.����
While the full dose of minerals may be good for the plant it's not good for human consumption because carbon chemistry is not part of our digestive process. Though sea salt contains no less than 84 elements it's nevertheless a bad idea to put sea salt directly in or over your food. Instead, it's better to eat plants that contain lots of trace elements. Doctors who put people on a salt-free diet never tell their patients not to eat a celery stick. Yet a celery stick contains roughly the same amount of salt you would normally put in your food. This is because the celery uses carbon chemistry to predigest the various salts. Besides sodium chloride (table salt) there are other mineral salts, among which contain magnesium, calcium and potassium. These are all completely harmless for human consumption provided they have been predigested by plants, not when taken directly in the form of sea salt.���
I can't think of a better argument for growing plants in mineral-rich soils. Modern agriculture is based on the NPK method, referring to Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). Commercially grown vegetables and fruits available in supermarkets may look nice from the outside but they are grown with only three elements. What's worse, these elements are also synthetic, i.e. scientific approximations of the real thing. Compare that to the natural, organic and mineral-rich compost used in organic or, better still, bio-dynamic farming and you'll see why crops grown in this way are favorable. Though recognizing the superior flavors people are not always willing to pay for them. But which would you rather pay with, your wallet or your health? Besides, you save a lot of cash if you buy these products directly from local farms or farmers markets.� ����
One way of taking in trace elements in animal form is by consuming meat and dairy from ruminants (cows, sheep, goats) that graze on mineral-rich pastures lush with grass and clover. Once again this means organic or bio-dynamic meat. I don't suppose I have to tell you about the miserable and unhealthy circumstances in which animals are kept in the intensive farming industry. Don't forget all that pain, stress and suffering, as well as hormones, antibiotics and pesticides will be on your plate when you choose to buy the cheaper meats. Once again the question arises, would you rather pay with your wallet or your health? Healthy animals eat omega-3 and mineral-rich grass and not grain pellets and hay. Contrary to humans, ruminants are in fact able to eat sea salt directly and digest it with their four stomachs. A little bit of sea salt through their feed won't harm them, in fact it's good for them. By consuming grass-fed meat and dairy we can also get trace elements in this way.�� ��
To summarize, people are better off not taking minerals in their full dose. It is often believed that sea salt is healthy to use in meals and table salt isn't. This is a half-truth. It should be blatantly obvious that isolating only one of 84 elements in sea salt to make table salt is as mad as making white flour from the starch in grains and not using the germ and bran. Nature works with synergy and complex, organic wholes. Refining is the stuff of scientists stuck in mechanistic and reductionist thought � it may seem intelligent but in reality it's short-sighted. What is more refined, the total package as offered by nature or playing God by using just one compound? �
In that sense, unrefined sea salt is certainly healthier than table salt, because it contains all the minerals and trace elements. However, sodium chloride is toxic and drives up our blood pressure. It's part of sea salt in its natural form and doesn't cease to be toxic just because it's in sea salt. The bacteria in our digestive system are able to handle small amounts of sea salt but that's not to say sea salt doesn't affect our blood pressure. It's better to consume mineral salts through the products of plants and animals that use these salts as food. In its original state sea salt is inorganic. Only when it literally passes through an organism does it become organic and truly fit for human consumption. �
Sea minerals and cereal grasses
Grass is a great crop. Just look at the muscular build of grazers such as horses, cows, sheep and goats. Grass is truly unique in that it takes up 100% of all minerals in the soil. Grass is able to grow on next to nothing and on everything. Sea water contains 92 elements, sea salt contains 84. Give your grass these elements and minerals and they will happily take them.
Upon germination most grains form a fast-growing grass. Cereal grasses such as wheat grass, rye grass, barley grass and oat grass are the healthiest. They can be easily and quickly grown. They grow even faster on sea minerals. Because of the salts they also use water more efficiently and therefore need less water to grow. Cereal grasses can be grown both indoors and outdoors, with soil or without it.�
Cereal grasses have a large content of important vitamins, such as pro-vitamin A (beta carotene), vitamin B complex (including B17), vitamin C, vitamin E, and vitamin K. These vitamins are all in organic form. Name any other food that has this combination of vitamins and minerals! Cereal grasses contain huge quantities of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the blood of the plant and is therefore instantly recognized and processed by our blood, thus (re)vitalizing it.�
Cereal grasses are rich in healthy omega-3 fatty acids. This is why grains are much healthier in their vegetative state. Once grains get past the grass stage the omega-3 fatty acids change into omega-6 fatty acids, the complex sugars turn into simple sugars (starch), and proteins called gluten form. Young cereal grasses have much more life energy than the adult plant.
Omega-3 fatty acids reduce inflammation and are sadly lacking in our bread and grain culture. Through massive consumption of cheaply available polyunsaturated fats such as sunflower oil and corn oil instead of healthier monounsaturated fats and saturated fats like olive oil, coconut oil and grass-fed butter, we get way too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3. By consuming grass-fed meat and dairy or by directly consuming juiced cereal grasses we can restore this balance and maintain our health.��
And not just our health, this goes for the grazers' health too. Weston Price was a dentist from Cleveland who traveled around the world looking for indigenous populations who lived in perfect harmony with nature and ate no western foods such as white bread, white rice, sugar, jam, canned foods, etc. He noticed these people not only sported fantastic teeth and jaws (without brushing their teeth!) but their overall physical and mental constitution was unsurpassed.
He took the lessons he learned from the natives to the U.S. and wrote Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in 1939. In this book he speaks highly of young and fast-growing cereal grasses. He describes experiments done with farm animals and concluded that cereal grasses led to unlimited health for the animals and with it their meat and dairy. Price ranks wheat and rye grass among the top cereal grasses. He also mentioned the minerals in cereal grasses as a key factor and identified vitamins and chlorophyll as important ingredients. We now know that enzymes and amino acids are also part of the picture. ��
Like minerals, enzymes and amino acids are activators. They are necessary for the absorption of vitamins and proteins. Enzymes are sensitive to heating, however. Because cereal grasses are offered raw to animals and, as a juice, to people, both man and animal can benefit from the richness of enzymes and amino acids contained in cereal grasses.
Cereal grass is concentrated nutrition and should therefore be regarded as a superfood. Some health benefits of this grass: cleanses the liver and intestines, purifies the blood, stabilizes blood sugar levels, chelates heavy metals, stimulates hair growth, boosts the immune system and self-healing. The great thing is, you don't need much of it. A few glasses of juice a day will make your feeling of hunger go away. The grass helps you lose weight with whole nutrition and you can last longer on it than vegetable or fruit juices when fasting.
But you don't need to fast to reap the benefits of cereal grasses. Just take 4 ounces of ocean-grown wheat grass juice a day as a food supplement. If you want to grow cereal grasses either in soil or hydroponically and you have a TDS meter and concentrated ocean water, use a dilution of 2000 ppm (parts per million). If you don't have a TDS meter but you do have unrefined, good quality sea salt simply dissolve a level teaspoon of sea salt or Himalaya salt into a quart of water. That's how little you need.
Sea minerals and agriculture
The idea of using diluted sea water as fertilizer for soil and plants came from a doctor named Maynard Murray. He describes the method in his book Sea Energy Agriculture (1976), which details 40 years of research into ocean farming. You can get this book through acresusa.com:
http://www.acresusa.com/books/closeup.asp?prodid=768&catid=27&pcid=2
Read also Acres USA founder Charles Walters' book on this subject:
http://www.acresusa.com/books/closeup.asp?prodid=1317&catid=27&pcid=2
As a young doctor Murray developed an interest in life in the sea. He wondered why plant and animal life was free from disease in the sea and why land life, including humans, was not. He also found that life in a healthy sea environment did not have cell degeneration in the form of aging and that sea life reached twice the size and age of life on land. He soon discovered that it must be the minerals in the sea. All of the earth's minerals are concentrated in sea water.
Murray had some connections with the Navy and had samples taken from all of the world's seas. Analyses showed that all sea water contains the exact same minerals in the exact same proportions. 92 of them have been identified so far by science (there's more) and sea water contains all of them in the proper balance. Murray figured that if sea water contains all of the planet's minerals and covers 70% of the earth's surface it should be possible to recycle sea water on the 30% land mass we live on and fertilize land crops and soils with it.
His theory was that the minerals in the sea originally came from land and were washed into the sea through rainfall and snow. Underwater volcano eruptions are also responsible for minerals in the sea. By using sea minerals as a fertilizer you're using the natural balance of minerals in sea water and performing agriculture in perfect harmony with nature. The sea contains an infinite source of minerals and rainfall and snow eventually cause them to wash back out to the sea. You are therefore not depleting the oceans while at the same time preserving land soil for depletion. Think also of the life energy and information you are giving to the soil. Maynard Murray's book isn't called Sea Energy Agriculture for nothing.
He had the Navy ship sea water inland in large tank trucks. Friendly farmers willing to partake in his experiments donated entire acres of land. After fertilization with diluted sea water the crops showed tremendous growth, they could be harvested sooner, they were of exceptional quality and disease-free. Pesticides weren't necessary as the job of insects is to clean up only the weaker crops � which is saying something about modern commercial NPK methods which only deplete soils of minerals and trace elements.
Though encouraged by these successes Murray realized that the heavy sea-water shipments weren't economically viable for farmers unless they were based near the coast. Thus Murray set off to find basins where the sea had naturally dried up. Sea solids (sea salt) were considerably cheaper to transport but of course they had to yield similar results. He experimented with diluting sea solids in water and did in fact get similar spectacular results. Experiments with animals that ate the crops grown by Murray also produced bigger, stronger and perfectly healthy animals. You can just imagine the effect this must have on humans who eat these plants and animals.
How come this isn't being used on a worldwide scale, you may wonder. The answer is, of course, that this would ruin the artificial fertilizer industry, the pharmaceutical industry and intensive farming industry, to name but a few. Maybe that's why Murray's experiments stopped with animals. He eventually bought a farm in Florida and successfully grew crops using seaponics.
A year before Murray died in 1983 a fellow named Don Jansen purchased Murray's farm. Jansen has continued Murray's methods and is traveling around the country to tell people about it. Don Jansen cured his dad of cancer and his dog of hernia using ocean-grown wheat grass.
In the 1950's an Aussie farmer of Dutch descent named Gerry Amena decided to become an organic farmer using sea solids. His first crops were tomatoes and pretty soon his tomatoes looked stronger, bigger and healthier than he had ever seen, just begging to be eaten. Amena was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis at the time and he healed himself within a year eating his own tomatoes. Amena had a background in herbal medicine because as a soldier fighting in Indonesia he had befriended an old medicine man. Today Amena makes ocean mineral supplements with herbs which he says can cure pretty much any disease on the planet. This is because he believes all disease is a result of mineral deficiency, from a harmless cold all the way to cancer.
Read more about Maynard Murray here:
http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/seaenergy_nov01.pdf
About Don Jansen:
http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Jan02_SeponicFarm.pdf
Interviews with Don Jansen:
http://www.aglife.net/DonJanesInterview.htm
http://www.patricktimpone.com/listen.asp (radio interview)
More about Gerry Amena:
http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Mar06_Amena.pdf
Video of a project in Eritrea:
http://www.seawaterfoundation.org/video-eritrea.htm
About the author
Mike Donkers is an English teacher from the Netherlands who started taking care of his own health in October 2006 because doctors couldn't help him. His interest in the connection between food and health has led to more in-depth research, particularly in the role sea minerals can have in the regeneration of cells. He is also a self-taught guitarist and singer. He is the songwriter and frontman of his own band, The Mellotones (www.nubluz.com).
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