Why do diets fail?
I want to discuss with you why diets fail and what happens when we "yo-yo" diet but before we discuss that let's get a background in nutrition in general.
To begin with there are 90 essential nutrients that our bodies need for optimal health. There are 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 amino acids, and 3 fatty acids. A deficiency in any one of these will eventually lead to one or more of many different nutritional deficiency diseases. If you would like to learn more about the different nutritional deficiency diseases in detail please visit my websitehttp://TheRx4Health.com and click on the link to Dr. Wallach's "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" audio.
Mineral deficiencies cause many different diseases as Dr Wallach discusses on the aforementioned audio so lets take a more specific look at their role in weight management.
Mineral Deficiencies Cause Cravings
Let's consider a horse on a farm. When a horse starts chewing on the door to his stall, the fence post, a wooden wagon, etc. what the horse is going after is the minerals deposited on those items from the hands of the farmer. Every time the farmer touches the door of the stall, fence post, etc his sweaty palm leaves a mineral deposit. Since the farmer repeats this process many times a day, day after day, week after week, there tends to be an accumulation of these minerals. The mineral deficient animal then tastes the salty deposit and begins to chew on that spot in order to relieve his mineral cravings. That is why a good farmer puts a salt block in the field. Through years of veterinary research these salt blocks contain a variety of minerals such as potassium, sodium, selenium. Magnesium, calcium, etc. The farm animal licks these mineral "salts" getting the essential minerals they need thus quenching their craving.
Here in
Why do we have mineral deficiencies?
We have extreme mineral deficiencies. US Senate Document 264 stated that "Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our system than upon calories or vitamins, or upon precise proportions of starch, protein, or carbohydrates we consume." The document continues to state "…most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance."
How does mineral depleted soils affect our food?
Let's start by looking at the plants. Plants cannot make minerals. Plants use the minerals in the soils from which they are grown to produce vitamins and the many phytonutrients that they contain. They absorb the elemental mineral from the soils and convert them into plant derived colloidal minerals. An animal (like us) then comes along and eats these plants thereby consuming the minerals the plants have absorbed along with the many compounds the plants produced using those minerals.
In the early days the most prosperous farmers owned the farm land near rivers. The reason why these were so prosperous is every spring the mountain snows would melt bringing with it the mineral deposits found in the mountains and deposit those minerals on the farmland along with the spring floods. These soils were rich in minerals and the produce and grains grown there were therefore rich in these minerals and thrived.
Now the farmers that could not afford this valuable land would build their farms on the prairies. When they first started plowing the fields their crops flourished but after a few years the yields would begin to fall. That is because it takes on average 7 years to deplete the soils of their mineral deposits and if the soils are not amended with silt from the spring floods or wood ashes which are mineral rich then the crops begin to fail. These farmers would then pack up and move to another location and start the process all over again.
Eventually the botanist, plant scientist discovered that plants in general only need 3 nutrients to survive. Two are the minerals potassium and phosphate and the third is nitrogen. Once this was discovered and NPK fertilizers were developed the farms flourished and we became the bread basket of the world.
There is a problem with this scenario. Plants only need the two minerals; animals and humans require many more. Humans in particular need sixty different minerals to thrive and this is to what the Senate document was referring.
The document continues by saying "The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us – no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them."
As a result of this mineral deficiency we do just like the horse does, we eat anything we can to satisfy our "thirst" for these minerals. The snack and convenience food industry understand this craving and that is why they design their foods to "feed" these cravings with useless calories so we continue to consume more and more leading to the obesity epidemic we are facing.
This Senate document came from the 74thCongress 2nd Session which was 1936 and to this day the farm soils in this country are still only being supplemented with the three basic nutrients the plants need without any regard to the nutrients we need.
This has led to the
"Yo-Yo" dieting makes this situation even worse
Back around the turn of the century some researchers where looking at diets of laboratory rats. On average the typical lab rat lived about six months. The purpose of the experiments was to find a way to get the rats to live longer which increases the research value of the rats. One researcher decided to try cutting the carbohydrates that the rat consumed but the researcher kept the nutrients, the vitamins, minerals, amino acids the same. By cutting the carbs in half the researcher in reality double the amount of nutrition in each pellet. This concentrated pellet actually doubled the life expectancy of the subject rats. This lead them to cut the carbs in half again and the life expectancy of the rats doubled again. What they also discovered was as long as the essential nutrients stayed the same cutting the carbohydrates had a very positive effect on the animal.
When we diet in the already mineral deficient states that we are in we actually make the problem worse and this has given us the billion dollar weight loss industry. When we diet we don't supplement to keep the nutrient value the same, we cut the calories and cut the nutrients at the same time. With this lack of nutrients our bodies think we are in state of famine. When we go off the diet our bodies are designed to store as much fat as possible to make it through the next famine. Repeat this process over and over and the body trains it self to store more and more fat to make it through the next famine.
Supplementation is the key to successful dieting.
Lack of supplementation during dieting is the reason that diets fail. Coupling this with the bodies tendency to "prepare for the next famine" by rebuilding the fat stores it is easy to see why most people never succeed. Before dieting can succeed we must address the mineral deficiencies that were reported in the Senate document all the way back in 1936. Since the cost to add these minerals to the farmland would be too great the only way we can address the issue is by consuming plant derived minerals. Despite what modern medicine says every man, woman and child must increase their consumption of these essential nutrients. If we continue to eat as we do today with the mindset that we can get all the nutrients we need form the basic food groups we will either die of starvation or one of the many mineral deficiency diseases; or we will gorge ourselves on so much food in an attempt to get the proper nutrients that we eventually die from the complications of obesity.
Dr Atkins with the Atkins diet tried to address this issue by encouraging supplementation with his line of vitamins. By following his protocols there was limited success but even this diet plan did not address the lack of the 60 essential minerals. Because of the lack of these essential minerals many people on high protein low carbohydrate diets like his suffer from higher incidents of mineral deficiency maladies such as kidney stones.
Einstein once said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The key then is to supplement with these essential nutrients. Specifically the diet must include all 60 essential minerals in addition to the other nutrients. Once the goal weight is achieved, to insure maintenance of that weight one must continue to maintain supplementation of all 90 essential nutrients including the minerals. If supplementation one or both of two results will occur. Either weight gain will occur, or mineral deficiency diseases will result.
Keith Abell, RPh CIP MI
