Of the 11 indispensable salts, calcium, phosphorus, and iron are perhaps the most important. More than one-third had defective vision, round shoulders, bow legs, and anemia. So it goes, down through the list each mineral element playing a definite role in nutrition. A characteristic set of symptoms, just as specific as any vitamin-deficiency disease, follows a deficiency in any one of them. It is alarming, therefore, to face the fact that we are starving for these precious, health-giving substances.
Sick soils mean sick plants, sick animals, and sick people.
Physical, mental, and moral fitness depends largely upon an ample supply and a proper proportion of the minerals in our foods. Nerve function, nerve stability, nerve cell-building likewise depends thereon. A famous nutrition authority recently said, One sure way to end the American people s susceptibility to infection is to supply through food a balance ration of iron, copper, and other metals. An organism supplied with a diet adequate to, or preferable in excess of, all mineral requirements may so utilize these elements as to produce immunity from infection quite beyond anything we are able to produce artificially by our present method of immunization. You can t make up the deficiency by using patent medicine.