Going back in time to American life in the 1950's, families began purchasing their own dream homes and along with this there sometimes came the need for more than one paycheck and with this less time could be spent for the children which decreased the chance that the wife would have time to prepare a full course family meal after returning home from a part or full-time job. There was also the growth in the food processing industry which had begun during that time with the purpose of feeding more people, which also required that food would have to last for longer periods on the store shelves, along with the fact that the food processors would also increase their profits. With all this change happening in such a short period of time to the American household, something began to suffer and that was proper nutrition of the general population.
So, Americans Started Popping Pills
Some people at the time began feeling tired or just generally weak and needed a boost to carry them through the day. At the time, vitamins and minerals had just started to become available in pill form and because of the need, they grew pretty quickly in their availability. They have been growing to this day, which has become a multi-billion dollar business. It has been generally agreed by many expert nutritionists that the average American does not get even their minimum suggested daily requirements of vitamins and minerals from the food they eat. We are told that the prime reason being that much of our food receives a high level of processing and also has already lost many minerals from poor soils because of the artificial fertilizers used in the growing process. Much nutrition is also lost in the canning process of vegetables and fruits, sometimes as much as 80 % of some key vitamins. In the U.S., as well as in many other parts of the world irradiation has been implemented for the past few decades in order to rid bacteria from both imported and domestically grown vegetables and fruit. This process was incorporated not only to protect the consumer from becoming ill from possible bacterial contamination, but also was put in place to protect the manufacturer from possible lawsuit.
Should We Just Take Any Nutritional Supplement ?
First, not everyone can take vitamin/mineral supplements. It is probably a wise approach to take a simple multi-vitamin pill each day, just to make sure that you don't develop a deficiency. In all cases, you should check with your doctor before you decide to embark on taking any vitamin/mineral supplement. It is too bad that so much of the foods either are not nourished properly during the growing period and later the few nutrients that they do contain are mostly removed through cooking for canning and also had been previously irradiated to kill bacteria, that there is not much left to effectively feed us humans. At one time, we could consume vegetables and fruit in their raw state to get the most nutrients. This is basically no longer possible with the process of irradiation being applied to most of our foods these days. Supplements are becoming the daily trends, not only by us Americans, but also throughout most of the rest of the world.
