I’m always amazed by how much kids morph and grow over the two short months of summer. They all seem to sprout longer legs and arms and they all look tanned, relaxed and healthy. There’s probably a good reason for it, because just like a healthy plant in a well looked after garden, they get plenty of sunlight, fresh nutrients and lots of water, which allows them to thrive and grow and brim with good health.
Their bodies are like “living soil,” and if they have sufficient minerals and trace elements to work with, they’re able to nurture them and produce everything they need to live and grow. These essential materials, however, can easily become depleted when they do not get enough of them from the food we eat. Centuries of constant use of the same agricultural fields have led to foods that are highly nutrient-deficient. The situation worsened with the onset of chemical fertilizers, which force crops to grow more rapidly. When minerals and trace elements run low in the body, important functions can no longer be sustained or they become subdued and disease is generally accompanied by a lack of one or more of these important substances. In a nutshell, weak food plants create weak animals and humans.
The health of any plant is totally dependent on the overall environmental health and nutrient diversity of the soil in which it grows. Before the depletion of soils, plant foods were our ideal mineral provider. When a plant grows in a healthy soil environment, it absorbs existing colloidal minerals and changes them into ionic, water-soluble form, which is then absorbed readily by body cells. Some of the common forms of nutrients in the soil are nitrogen, potassium, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese, zinc, boron, copper, sodium and cobalt, just to name a few.
We have a number of devices available to us that can measure and evaluate nutrient levels and quality in our foods that we grow and the most common of these tools is called a Brix, which is a mini telescope-like gizmo with a refractometer that can instantly interpret these levels for you. Brix values are commonly used for grape and other fruit production to determine the sugar content of fruit (and thus fruit quality and harvest times) but also for minerals, proteins, amino acids, flavonoids, antioxidants, essential oils and more. In one of our class sessions, we compared the values of store-bought veggies and fruits to organically grown ones, and it was readily apparent the differences in nutrient values. We also watched through the meter how quickly the plant lost its nutrient value after picking it, which completely supported the wise words of health experts to eat foods as fresh and quickly as possible.
It was our instructor’s firm belief that when fruits and vegetables are judged at the fair, a Brix reading should be part of the equation. After all, all these foods may look perfect, but do they taste great and are they loaded with important nutrients to support wellness. After seeing what I did, I’d have to agree.
Growing healthy kids is literally growing them from the ground up. Like they say, the secret’s in the soil.
