The Dangers of a Fortified Diet

For many years now people have been supposedly starting their mornings right, with a fortified breakfast, or at least that's what the large food manufacturers with the help of the FDA have wanted you to believe...

There is just one problem with that, everything!

Cereals, along with breads and pastas, are among the top offenders when it comes to overly processed concoctions that once resembled food, and unfortunately thanks to this processing what's left is a tasteless, colorless, nutrientless impostor full of refined flowers grains and sugars.

So how then does a government feed a hungry nation without ultimately depriving its people of nutrients, synthetic fortified vitamins and minerals. Simple enough right?

The problem is there is nothing simple about nature. Humans are not simple organism, in fact we're quite complex. Wikipedia describes us as "Complex systems of chemical compounds which, through interaction with each other and the environment, play a wide variety of roles... In multicellular life the word organism usually describes the whole hierarchical assemblage of systems (for example circulatory, digestive or reproductive) themselves collections of organs; these are, in turn, collections of tissues, which are themselves made of cells."

Where am I going with all this, and how does it relate to the fortified nutrients in that bowl of cereal you ask? I don't think it's a far leap to infer that a complex organism requires complex foods to sustain life, and food by nature, in it's raw organic natural state, is complex; Fresh Organic Fruits and Vegetables, Natural Whole Grains and Legumes, Unrefined Sea Salt, Unrefined (or minimally refined) Sugar. What makes these foods complex is that they are all packed with a precise amount of vitamins minerals amino acids antioxidants and other crucial nutrients and anutrients, all of which are lost during processing. Simple carbs and simple sugars and simple salts do nothing but create holes in an otherwise complete food, leaving in its wake refined white flower or rice (lacking B-complex vitamins among others) or white refined sugar (lacking phosphorus and other mineral), or refined salt (lacking basically all trace minerals).

The resent headline Is your breakfast giving you cancer? is a good example of what happens when man tries to compensate for his meddling in what mother nature does so well. When the FDA realized, that this country's food supply was lacking nutrients, or got so much flack finally decided to take some sort of action, they began to fortify these foods with synthetic vitamins and minerals, but only those they felt were lacking without any basic understanding of the complex make-up of food.

Because vitamins and minerals work together one can infer that nutrients themselves are complex, so when only a select few are added back into food that has been depleted of nearly all, you get a simple food leaving you, well, simply malnourished.

Do yourself a favor and embrace the complexity that is the human body and don't deprive it of what it needs, instead reap the beautiful and COMPLEX "fruits" nature has to bear.