Hidden Hunger (otherwise known as The Nutrition Gap)
Hidden hunger is unlike the hunger that comes from a lack of food.
It is a chronic lack of vitamins and minerals that often has no visible warning signs, so that sufferers may not even be aware of it.
Its consequences are nevertheless disastrous: Hidden hunger can lead to mental impairment, poor health and productivity, or even death.
This is a global problem, but even in the affluent UK population, 1 in 3 people are affected.
In 2009 exhaustive work by The Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) identified a number of deficiencies in key nutrients in every group of the population.
Yet there is still a widely held belief that we can get all we need from a balanced diet.
What is the truth?
Let us examine the facts:
Good nutrition is fundamental to good health. To maintain good health, the human body requires a daily intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from food.
Many people are short of essential nutrients. Suboptimal intake of essential nutrients is linked to many of the prevailing degenerative diseases of our generation.
Deficiencies may not always be obvious, as frequently these people are overweight.
Nutrients from food – or in the same form as those in food – are the only ones that can effectively meet our metabolic needs and satisfy our “hunger” in total.
Background and Overview
We were designed to live 120 years.
Most of us live for just over half this time and die from the effects of ‘civilisation’, rather than the natural causes of ageing.
The reasons for this are multifactorial, but the most significant predisposing factor is the dramatic change which has occurred over the past 70 years to our nutritional status.
We used to die from infection or trauma. 20th Century medicine has scored significant victories against these causes.
Today, most illnesses are caused by lifestyle factors such as poor nutrition, lack of exercise and smoking.
To effectively address the first of these causes, we need to improve our nutritional status. But first, we need to understand what is going wrong
The nutritional status of our bodies is dependent on 5 things:
- -Our food choices;
- -Food growing, processing and preparation methods;
- • The nutrient content of the food we eat;
- • The ability of our bodies to assimilate these nutrients;
- • Lifestyle factors, such as smoking or alcohol intake, which give rise to extra nutrient needs.
The 1930s and before were a time of eco balance and symbiosis. Man evolved with the components he needed for good health:
Water – natural source and pure
Air – fresh and unpolluted
Light – sunshine filtered by ozone
Food – nutrient-rich whole food
a) Food Choices
Diets in the 1930s consisted of fresh, free-range meat and locally grown seasonal fruit and vegetables.
Mothers were at home and took the time to prepare and cook fresh meals, and these habits were passed on to their children.
Processed food and fast-food options were not available.
The focus of life in those days was the family, and the mother’s role was one of nurturing and caring for the children and her husband
b) The Nutritional State of the Food
Rotational farming – fodder crops rotated with nitrogen-fixing crops and grazing animals – ensured mineral-rich fruit and vegetables, grown in mineral-rich soil.
Crops remove minerals from the soil. Nitrogen-fixing crops and animal waste return them.
This is sustainable agriculture. Chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides were not used in agriculture before 1930.
All these substances upset the mycorrhizal (probiotic bacterial) balance of the soil and reduce the availability of its minerals.
Most produce was consumed locally and its waste returned to local soil, thus nourishing the ground.
The result was an eco-balance of healthy, mineral-rich soil, maintained by waste and natural colonies of soil bacteria.
Seasonally produced plants grew rich in minerals and provided humans and animals with the minerals and phytonutrients they needed for health.
Meat was high in omega 3 essential fatty acids. Grazing (free range) animals produced meat higher in omega 3 than that from grain-fed animals.
c) Food Preparation methods
The Victorians knew more about the preparation of healthy food than we do.
Even the good old Sunday roast, with prime meat and healthy vegetables, was better in those days.
Why? Because the Victorians knew how to use herbs like rosemary to absorb and remove noxious substances like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that form in foods during roasting at high temperatures.
They also used slower cooking processes at lower temperatures, which helped to maintain the integrity of the nutrients in the food.
There was less wastage too. For instance, water used for boiling meat and vegetables, which contained the water-soluble vitamins and phytonutrients, was saved for use in soups and gravies.
d) Ability of our bodies to assimilate nutrients
In the 1930s, our bodies were relatively unpolluted. There were fewer drugs, chemicals, insecticides, pesticides and preservatives.
Few environmental influences adversely affected our ability to assimilate nutrients.
Mealtimes were a big part of family life – they lasted longer, and people were more relaxed and chewed their food for longer.
Relaxation and adequate chewing of food is important for good digestion and the optimal assimilation of nutrients.
The “Not-So-Good” New Days – 1930 and beyond Earth Summit Report found that mineral depletion of the soil is over 76% in Europe and 80% in the USA. “You can trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral deficiency” Two times Nobel Prize Winner Dr.Linus Pauling.
Food Choices
As more women started to go out to work and lifestyles became more pressurised, so food choices changed to accommodate this.
The carefully prepared, fresh daily meals were replaced by convenience and processed foods.
Today’s children are so accustomed to fast foods that in one school survey, 7 out of 10 thought that potatoes grew on trees!
Most people do not eat food with the thought of it giving them the nourishment they need for health.
They see it more as a source of energy and something to satisfy hunger.
Most processed foods are purchased for colour, taste, texture, calorie content and ease of preparation – not for nutritional value.
SACN’s 2009 Report
The Nutritional Wellbeing of the British Population, identified the following: Fruit and vegetable intake is suboptimal in all groups of the population.
It is widely recognised that fruit and vegetables reduce the risk of cancers, cardiovascular disease and many other chronic disease conditions, but the 5-a-Day message is not working.
You should be consuming as much as 8 or more portions of fruit and veg a day, and make sure that you choose Organic or your wasting your time.
The mean intake across all ages is 2.8 portions per day, which includes some people in the younger age groups who are not eating any fruit and veg on a daily basis.
This shortfall gives rise to a population who are depleted in the active phytonutrients from fruit and vegetables – primarily flavonoids and carotenoids – whose action is protective, antioxidant and reparative.
Vitamin and mineral intake is suboptimal in all groups, with evidence of very low status of individual nutrients in some groups.
These widespread shortfalls are a significant factor in the declining health of the British people
The State of The Food
In June 2002, The American Medical Association recommended that everyone should take a multivitamin & mineral supplement to help prevent chronic diseases resulting from a diet of nutrient depleted foods. The food throughout Europe is similarly depleted. Why?
Intensive farming
Fewer minerals are returned to the soil than are taken out.
Growing plants can use 60 minerals and trace minerals, but man returns only 3 to the soil in the form of Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). The reason for this NPK mixture is that scientists found that these were the three minerals which encouraged plants to grow quickly, and yield is considered more important than nutritional content.
But with many minerals taken out and only 3 put back, this inevitably gives rise to deficiencies of the rest.
There is evidence to show that on average the same food was 45-125% more nutritionally rich 60 years ago.
Pesticides/insecticides
Mycorrhiza are probiotic bacteria, essential for the transformation of organic minerals to organic forms that can be metabolised by plants, without which the inorganic minerals stay bound in the soil and unavailable to plant life.
Less probiotic bacteria = less minerals available to plants = less nutrients in the foods we and our livestock eat.
Plants that are grown with herbicides and pesticides have no need to produce protective compounds themselves.
These flavonoids and carotenoids not only protect the plant from disease, UV light and other damage, but have the same beneficial action in our bodies when we eat them.
Not only do we eat less of these protective plants, but the plants themselves have a lower content of protective nutrients.
Organic plants, grown without pesticides and herbicides, do need to protect themselves, and therefore produce higher levels of flavonoids and carotenoids.
This is one area where organic is most definitely best.
The desire for all-year-round (out of season) fruit is met by early picking, cold storage and rapid ripening in ethylene gas.
Such fruit does not have a fully-developed nutrient potential, and storage depletes the vitamin content.
Further contributing factors for nutritional depletion in food
• Additives, such as chemical colourings and flavourings, compound the problem. At worst, these are mild poisons; at best, they are chemicals that the body does not see as food. Some act as anti-nutrients and inhibit the uptake of essential nutrients. The body needs to use nutrient resources to deal with these.
• Factory farming: when the movement of animals is restricted, this changes the essential fatty acid content of the meat from high omega 3 (in free range stock) to low omega 3 and high omega 6. Humans lose the benefits of omega 3 EFA nutrition.
• Organic food should be the answer. But although organic food has the benefit of being grown according to nature’s laws and being free from pesticide and herbicide residues, making it higher in flavonoids and carotenoids, there is no guarantee that it contains any more minerals than ordinary food. Organic farming uses chemical-free methods of fertilisation, but has not yet been able to reintroduce the minerals which have, for many years, been removed from the soil and not replaced.
The eco balance has changed and is no longer symbiotic. This imbalance is reflected in degenerative changes in both animals and humans.
An important study
In 1988, the Surgeon General in the USA concluded that 15 out of every 21 deaths involved nutritional deficiencies.
If most of our population is now deficient in one or more essential nutrients, this figure is likely to be much higher today in all countries. Indeed, there is a proliferation of research highlighting diseases linked to poor nutritional status.
As a result, there has been a dramatic turnaround in the opinion of medical experts. Dr Tom Saunders, Professor of Nutrition at Kings College, London, believes it is almost impossible to select a diet that supplies every nutrient needed for health [4].
Many scientists, who still state in public – as a result of peer pressure – that we don’t need supplements, acknowledge in private that we do, and indeed take supplements themselves [4].
This decision to take supplements is based on a substantial body of scientific evidence which has demonstrated the benefits.
Our daily lives are now affected
• Fast and processed foods are foods which have often lost most of their vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Food processing dramatically reduces the mineral content of food by 20-80%, depending on the processing method involved.
For example, the nutrient losses in flour refining are: Calcium 50%; Magnesium 84.7%; Chromium 40%; Manganese 86%; and Zinc 77%
In our time, the eco balance has been disturbed, and this has had significant repercussions on the nutrition of humans and animals.
1) Water – no longer pure and natural. It is treated with fluoride and other chemicals, many of which affect the way our bodies absorb vitamins and minerals. For instance, fluoride inhibits iodine absorption.
2) Air – no longer clean and fresh. It is full of pollution in the form of industrial waste and fuel fumes. There are more free radicals, which in turn pollute our bodies and increase our antioxidant requirements.
3) Light – marred by air pollution. Pure light is extremely important for cell growth and development in plants, animals and humans.
4) Nutrients and Food.