Did you know that several years ago our government did the most extensive research project ever done on the American diet? The U.S. Department of Agriculture studied the diets of a cross section of over 21,000 men and women and the findings were appalling!

They found that not one single person was getting all of the minimum daily requirements of the RDA’s (Recommended Daily Allowance) from the food they ate. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the RDA’s were considered to be only “adequate,” by the people who set them up. They’re the bare bones minimum amounts required to prevent deficiency diseases like scurvy, beriberi and rickets.

Take Vitamin C for instance. The RDA for Vitamin C is only 60 milligrams. Whereas recent research has set the ODA (Optimum Daily Allowance) for Vitamin C at 500 – 5000 milligrams a day! The ODA not only protects you from scurvy, but it helps ward off colds, influenzas and many other diseases. So remember, the RDA’s are not the optimum level of micronutrients necessary to create buoyant, vibrant health. And yet no one in the study, not one single person, was getting even “adequate” nutrition.

How could it be that difficult to get “adequate” nutrition? Actually, it’s really easy to see why. Let’s consider Vitamin E. The RDA for Vitamin E is 30 International Units (IU). Two good sources of Vitamin E are peanuts and brown rice. In order to get the RDA for Vitamin E from these foods you would need to eat 10 oz. of peanuts at 1050 calories or 2 ¼ pounds of brown rice at 1575 calories. No way, right?

Now let’s look at the ODA for Vitamin E. Research shows that in order to take advantage of the many health protective benefits of Vitamin E, you should be getting between 200 and 400 IU daily. How much food would you have to eat to get the ODA for Vitamin E? I hope you’re hungry, because you’ll have to eat 40 cups of peanuts for 33,600 calories or 130 cups of brown rice for 91,000 calories!

And, to make matters worse, commercial industry uses artificial fertilizers to grow our food. Of the 26 nutrients essential to human beings, only 16 are necessary for plant growth. So artificial fertilizers, designed to create higher plant yields, overlook the human requirements for these 10 other essential nutrients. This produces nutritionally depleted food.

For example, our food has plenty of phosphorus because plants need it. However, plants do not need chromium or selenium to thrive. Therefore, artificial fertilizers do not contain these important minerals. So our food is, for the most part, deficient in chromium and selenium, which are vitally important to help protect you against cancer, diabetes and premature aging.

So what do you think? Fact or Fiction? Can you get everything you need from the food you eat? Maybe in the textbook sense or in the pristine environment of a laboratory, assuming people are eating exactly what they are supposed to. But in the real world, I don’t think so. And, I’m definitely not going to rely on the modern food chain to help protect me from degenerative diseases like cancer, heart disease, arthritis and diabetes.