Chapter 7: Starved and Poisoned: The Dual Crisis of Missing Minerals and Rising Metals

What happens when the building blocks of life vanish — and their toxic counterparts take their place?

The Real World Health Consequences Of Trace Mineral Deficiencies

Research continues to uncover the links between deficiencies of trace minerals and a wide range of chronic illnesses, immune dysfunction, and increased susceptibility to infections.

A 2022 comprehensive review of nutritional deficiencies, emphasized that micronutrients are crucial for sustaining life. The inadequacy of any component of the metabolic system directly affects both individuals and societies, manifesting as poorer health, reduced work capacity, decreased educational accomplishment, and lower earning potential.

Scope of the Problem

In both industrialized and developing countries, micronutrient deficiencies (as currently known and measured) affect more than 2 billion people of all ages, particularly pregnant women and children under five. Micronutrient deficiencies have been linked with almost 10% of child deaths.

Iron, folate, zinc, iodine, and vitamin A rank among the most commonly occurring micronutrient deficiencies worldwide (again, I argue these are repeatedly mentioned largely because we routinely look for and measure their presence or absence).

Studies show that these deficiencies contribute to intellectual impairment, poor growth, perinatal complications, and higher morbidity and mortality. In addition, research associates micronutrient deficiencies with accelerated mitochondrial decay (a big one here) and degenerative diseases of aging..

What We Don’t Measure

Although the above should be unsettling, I maintain it is not unsettling enough. Nearly every scientific paper I have read on this topic focuses on a couple of handfuls of minerals—iron, folate, zinc, iodine, sometimes selenium, copper, and boron.

But again, as above, what about molybdenum, vanadium, manganese, lithium, silver, sulfur, cadmium, chromium, and dozens of others? What happens when we are deficient in any one—or several—of those? Very little is known. And what happens if we are deficient in the even broader array of trace minerals that exist and whose names you have never heard of? I maintain these have been “forgotten” or “ignored,” or what I think is more likely, “unmeasured”

Now you know why I am calling the under-recognition of and lack of research into trace and rare minerals one of the biggest “black holes” in the biomedical sciences, something that, as in a prior chapter, AI now recognizes?

Enter The Growing Scourge of Heavy Metal Excess In Our Soils