Overfed and Undernourished & Vitamin D

With all of the talk about starving people all over the world this title may seem incorrect but it’s not. The vast majority of people who do have access to food on a regular basis are overfed and undernourished. Look around you the next time you are out and you will see bulging waistlines and double and triple chins everywhere. These problems in appearance are not the worst of it. With the increase in weight the increased incidence in heart disease, cancer and diabetes is destroying national economies world-wide. Diseases like the above mentioned are so harmful because they not only incapacitate the individual but they are usually chronic long-term problems which also hurt the family and the community that has to provide for the sufferer.

These problems are not from a lack of food but surprisingly enough from an overabundance of food. Never in history have we had access to this amount of food. Neither are stores and consumers limited to foods that are in season. Foods are shipped from all over the world to your local supermarket, and therein lies the problem. To do this and get the food on the store shelf and into your home before it spoils it has to be picked long before it is ripe. Another way of thinking about this is long before it is ready. Remember, the minute you pick something off of the tree or out of the ground it starts losing nutrition, dying, and to ship it to another country means it has to be picked before it has all of the nutrition it would have if it came from your garden. This means it is not as good as it should be and it has been dying for quite awhile.

But, with all of that said it is still better to eat the fruits, vegetables, and meats than it is to eat the food from the box. That boxed, bagged and over-processed food can almost last forever and that is because there is nothing alive in it. The relationship between food and the health of your body is more important now than ever before. The studies are showing that the more food you eat from a bag or a box the sooner you will end up in a box.

This is why we are going to give you a list of vitamins and minerals, the body systems they help and their whole food source. We will include vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B12, C, E, Essential Fatty Acids and vitamin K. The minerals we will include are Calcium, Chromium, Choline, Folic Acid (Folate), Iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Phosphorus, Potassium, Selenium, Zinc. Avery important note to remember is: when you get your vitamins and minerals from food you don’t usually need the megadoses that you find in the man-made versions on the store shelves.

We will start with vitamin D since it has been in the news lately:

System support and Benefits:

Vitamin D helps support the Cardiovascular, endocrine (hormone producing glands), immune, integumentary (skin), nervous, and respiratory systems. D helps develop bones and teeth, promotes healthy bone density, supports healthy muscle tissue and thyroid gland function, and maintains a healthy heart and healthy immune system function.

Food sources:

Formed in the skin when exposed to sunlight, approximately 20 minutes a day of direct exposure. Also found in eggs, fatty fish like mackerel, salmon, sardines, tuna, trout, etc., liver, and real milk.

The vitamin and mineral information for this article and the following related articles is collected from Standard Process.