The Importance of Mineral Balancing

Most systemic illnesses including cancer, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, obesity, and so on, are directly related to the mineral balance in our bodies.

Why is Mineral Balance Important?

There are many minerals that play an important role in human physiology and these MUST be obtained in the nutrition, as our body does not manufacture them.

The 4 primary minerals, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium need to be balanced appropriately for the brain and central nervous system, made of the sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomous nervous systems, to operate properly. The autonomous central nervous system in particular is responsible for the regulation of most of our major organs and an imbalance here usually results, in the long run, in a malfunction of one organ or another, sometimes even the brain can be affected.

Our body has a mineral composition that is surprisingly similar to that of unpolluted open sea water. Apart from the primary minerals, sea water contains some 80+ additional elements in trace quantities. Although it had not been fully recognized in the past, it now appears that that these trace elements are ALL used by our physiology in various ways, to build strong cells and to foster an effective cellular repair mechanism as we live our lives.

For example, plants that are fed only sodium chloride (common table salt) soon wilt and die. But plants that are fertilized with diluted sea water only, will thrive and grow strong. Our physiology is much more complex than that of plants, but our body does have an important vegetative component and the use of diluted sea water to flavor our food and to drink can often result in wonderful healings. Without proper balance of primary and trace minerals it is not possible to obtain smooth functioning of our physiology.

How Does Mineral Imbalance Affect My Health?

We can count as many as 10 different metabolic imbalances in human physiology and in each of these, a mineral imbalance usually plays a role, be it direct or indirect. A brief description of these imbalances is given at http://www.royalrife.com/hbal.html and many tests are discussed to detect these imbalances.

One famous such test would be to find out what is the pH of the lymph. Unfortunately, the lymph is not easily sampled and so most diagnostics have relied on indirect means such as measuring the pH of the saliva upon first rising in the morning and the pH of the urine through the day.

All 10 of the metabolic imbalances eventually have a profound impact on the health and can result in chronic and ultimately deadly conditions.

In that sense, mineral imbalance is a component of practically every disease condition known to man. Of course, it can take as much as 7 years, under ideal conditions, to completely replace all the cells in the body by new ones. So, it would be na?ve to claim that overnight mineral balance will result in overnight healing of all our diseases. But eliminating mineral imbalances is now feasible in relatively short order and should therefore be an integral part of any health regimen, as important as finding clean air and clean water.

What Are The General Signs of Mineral Imbalance?

The most general signs of mineral imbalance relate to problems in the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. Calcium activates the sympathetic system and magnesium inhibits it. Our nutrition is generally devoid of magnesium because it has been leached from the soil and it is not present in dairy products. Since we get plenty of calcium from dairy products, our sympathetic nervous system is generally over stimulated and we often become irritable and excessively prone to fight or flight reactions. Magnesium generally resides in the muscles and once they become depleted of magnesium, while being stimulated by calcium, we often experience muscle twitches that become more noticeable at night when we are trying to rest.

Sodium inhibits the parasympathetic nervous system and potassium stimulates it. One of the functions of this system is to regulate rest and digestion. Our average nutrition supplies a lot of sodium, sometimes 10 times more than necessary and too little potassium, because we eat fewer and fewer vegetables, the main source of potassium. One result of this imbalance is that our society tends to have difficulty with digestion and sleep. This problem is so common that it is now considered ?normal? to experience tiredness, sleepiness and fatigue to the extent we do.

Another general sign of mineral imbalances relates to skin tone and skin health. Many skin afflictions simply go away once the primary and trace minerals are brought into balance.

What Specific Conditions Arise From Mineral Imbalance?

Conditions caused by mineral imbalances include osteoporosis, a prevalent condition that leads people to have weak and brittle bones as they age. In this condition, calcium is leached from the bones in order to maintain the pH of the blood between 7.35 and 7.45. Many studies have shown that this is not healed by simply giving calcium supplements alone. Magnesium and other minerals are needed to properly utilize calcium inside the body and deposit it in the bones.

There are other long term conditions that are believed to ultimately depend on mineral imbalances. One of those is candida overgrowth. Candida is believed to be related to a general lowering of the pH of the lymph system which in turn is accelerated when the alkaline forming minerals, calcium and magnesium are improperly absorbed in the digestive tract.

There are other conditions that occur only in certain individuals as a response to mineral imbalances in the primary and the trace minerals. One of these is psoriasis that responds well when a sufficient quantity of primary and trace minerals is absorbed.

The pH of a newborn baby?s lymph is 7.4, the same as the blood pH. During life, the blood pH is accurately maintained at 7.4, and if not, we die within days. Emergency medicine has developed a number of technologies for balancing the blood pH. These methods can be very useful in emergency situations. Because we consume too many proteins with too little fat, and because our nutrition is unbalanced in minerals, the pH of our lymph gradually decreases as we age.

The national average lymph pH is 6.2, indicating that 94% of the oxygen we had at pH of 7.4 is gone from our lymph. All of our organs are bathed in our lymph and are increasingly stressed as the lymph becomes more acid. Eventually something breaks and we come down with a degenerative disease that is often fatal. For example, dying cancer patients often exhibit a lymph pH around 4.4, indicating that 99.9% of the oxygen is now gone from the lymph. Of course, a decreased lymph pH is not the immediate cause of cancer, itself a very complex disease; but a low lymph pH can make it a lot easier for the cancer to develop and grow in such a low oxygen environment.

Is It Possible to Maintain
Sufficient Mineral Levels
Without Supplementation?

In past civilizations, the answer would have been yes. There, the soil was rich in dolomite, an abundant source of calcium and magnesium and occasional flooding with sea water would raise the overall mineral levels. Thus vegetables and fruits would contain the minerals that we need, as the roots of the plants would extract them and process them for us.

There are only few places left on Earth where such soil is still available. Our large population has resulted in constant food production on our soils that have become depleted of the minerals they used to contain. Now it has become a practical necessity to supplement our diet with balanced minerals.

Why is eating of uncooked enzyme-rich foods important?

This question ultimately is attached to mineral balance as follows: the main pathway for mineral absorption in our body is through the absorption of a very large number (in the hundreds!) of amino acid chelated minerals. These can occur in uncooked vegetables, but failing that, our body can use the large number of enzymes present in uncooked plant foods to construct such amino acid chelated minerals from the foods that we eat. Unfortunately, cooking destroys most of the plant enzymes. Thus we conclude that there is great value to making sure that each meal has some component that is of uncooked vegetable origin. Now we turn to the description of MMP regimen.

There are 4 stages to the program and they may be implemented gradually so that, as more of the stages are activated, faster progress will be made in restoring the body's natural mineral balance.

The first stage consists in simply adding our Green Ionic Minerals to the diet at the rate of one teaspoon, three times a day, with each meal.

The second stage builds on the first one. It involves adding additional mineral supplements to the Green Ionic Minerals.

The third stage involves a broader view of the whole diet and consists mainly in moving the diet in the direction of low carbohydrates and adding other dietary supplements including vitamins and enzymes, in addition to the components of stage II.

Stage Four recognizes that living foods (organic preferred!) contain a great many more enzymes than can be supplied by current nutritional supplements. The additional enzymes in living foods can be of major benefits in accelerating the mineral balancing processes of the body.

Before we describe the 4 stages of the MMP regimen in more detail, we recall certain facts about minerals in human physiology.

Minerals in Human Physiology

A major component of our physiology is our digestive system whose components constitute a major part of the organs and their functions in our body. The digestive system and the other organs are extremely complex and this complexity is managed in detail by the central nervous system, made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

The sympathetic system manages issues of fight or flight, associated with our animal components. The parasympathetic system manages aspects of rest and digestion, associated with our vegetative nature. These two systems are controlled by the 4 primary minerals, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium, as well as a 5th category consisting of over 80 trace minerals, in incredibly complex chemical formations, as found in whole sea water. Sea minerals are proving to be extremely complex in their elemental structure and in their chemistry.

Because of mineral deficiencies over several generations now, coming mainly from soil depletion, these 5 categories of minerals are often highly unbalanced in many people. This usually has deleterious consequences over a lifetime and these imbalances are a major contribution to mortality in our modern world.

By far the most common mineral is calcium as it is involved in the skeletal mass. Therefore, imbalances in calcium nutrition usually show up first, although imbalances in the other 4 classes are also very serious. We now review some elements of calcium chemistry, in order to understand better the effects of unbalances in this mineral.

Calcium chemistry:

Bare elemental calcium does not occur readily in nature and is found in chemical compounds with other elements, in such a way that the resulting compound is stable and not harmful when ingested. Thus, the following compounds, calcium carbonate, calcium citrate, calcium-magnesium phytate, along with many other chelated amino-acid calcium compounds, are all useful in human nutrition.

The last two of the examples above are interesting in that they are formed as a result of a protein chain folding itself and wrapping around the calcium ion that is attached to the chain. This protects it from unwanted reactions. They are called amino-acid chelated calcium compounds because of this caging effect of the long protein chain. Hundreds such mineral compounds are needed to help our metabolism function properly.

Calcium in nutrition:

The element calcium is contained in the food chain in various concentrations and as various chemical compounds. Dairy products supply calcium lactate, a chelated calcium compound and no magnesium. Green leafy vegetables have the ability to manufacture hundreds of distinct chelated calcium and magnesium compounds, when the components, calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate as well as trace minerals are included in the soil. However, modern agriculture has depleted the soil from these basic minerals. Thus, the great majority of green leafy vegetables no longer contain the chelates or the carbonates of the two elements calcium and magnesium.

The absence of magnesium in dairy products is very critical as it is needed in order to properly use the calcium in the physiology. Thus the calcium lactate in dairy products tends to leach whatever magnesium is still present in the body, causing further magnesium (and ultimately calcium) deficiencies.

There has been an attempt to supply one of the chelated calcium compounds, calcium citrate, as a common nutritional supplement. The value of this is temporary, because the body needs several hundred different chelated calcium and magnesium compounds to operate properly and to reverse osteoporosis and other signs of premature aging.

Thus the natural calcium physiology consists in eating green leafy vegetables that are high in chelated amino-acids of calcium and magnesium, as well as potassium and sodium and other trace elements. These vegetables were also intended to be high in calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, two alkaline components that we supposed to react with the hydrochloric acid produced in a healthy stomach to form ionic calcium and magnesium that would react with the other nutritional components to generate and deliver to the cells, the full spectrum of amino-acid chelated minerals. All this was intended to be under the (sub-conscious) control of the central nervous system.

Once that natural function is restored, these hundreds of chelated mineral compounds will be distributed to the hundreds of different cellular reactions that are needed to repair and maintain a healthy body. Over time, many of the symptoms of aging will disappear as the body learns to repair the cells accurately.

There are additional components that greatly facilitate the processing of the 5 classes of minerals in the body. These additional supplements are flax seeds, coconut oil and concentrated vegetable greens. The reasons for the importance of these components are explained below.

Why should we consume fats at a MMP meal?

First we say that a MMP meal in one which fully implements the Miracle Mineral Power that is possible in that meal. As explained earlier, such a meal can generate hundreds of amino acid chelated calcium and magnesium compounds that need to be directed to the various cells that will use them to do cellular repairs and duplications.

Now, cells can use three kinds of food, carbohydrates, proteins and fats. The use of fats and carbohydrates as cellular fuel is a clean burning process that produces CO2 and water. But the use of proteins as fuel produces ashes that are very large molecules and are acid.

Because of their large size, these ashes can not easily be eliminated by the kidneys and some of them will find their way into the lymph, the fluid between the cells of our body. On a diet that uses proteins as fuel, as is often the case in the western diet, there will be an accumulation of acid protein residues in the lymph that will result in acid lymph over time. Initially, the pH of the lymph in healthy babies is 7.4, the same as the pH of the blood. As we age, the blood remains very close to pH 7.4, but the lymph will gradually loose its oxygen and become acid, because it accumulates the acid protein ashes from the cellular burning of proteins. The national average for the lymph pH is 6.2. This value means that 94% of the oxygen in the lymph is gone. In such an acidic/anaerobic environment, fungi and bacteria will thrive and the immune system is overloaded.

As we explained earlier, we need chelated calcium proteins to repair cellular damage and accurately reproduce our cells when needed. If, however, these chelated calcium proteins are used for cellular fuel, the calcium ion will be discarded and the cellular repair function will fail. Nature has provided an excellent mechanism for preserving the protein-chelated minerals. In nature, most proteins occur with fat. Animal proteins generally occur with long chain fatty acid, whereas vegetable proteins usually involve medium chain fats. Since medium chain fats are more easily processed by our metabolism, there is advantage to using vegetable proteins. When fat and proteins are eaten together, the fat will be used by the cellular furnace first and the proteins will be spared to be used for cellular repairs. This has the consequence that much less acid protein residue is dumped into the lymph, while more of the chelated minerals will be available to repair our cells. This is a most desirable outcome that can add substantially to our longevity. And of course, the fat is used for energy and is NOT stored in the fat cells of our bodies.

Here we note that although fat is an organic acid when consumed, what matters is the residue after burning in the cellular furnace and the residue of fat burning is CO2 which is eliminated in the lungs and other components eliminated by the kidneys. Of course there are many low- fat cuts of meat that are burned as protein fuel and therefore produce excess acid protein residues. So it matters what kind of fats we consume then. For example, flax seeds and coconut meat have a very healthy fat/protein ratio.

What kinds of fats should we consume at a MMP meal?

Nutritional fats and oils can be distinguished as being saturated or unsaturated and by being either long chain or medium chain. The most stable and useful fats are medium chain saturated fatty acids, such as coconut oil and butter. A second choice is extra-virgin olive oil. However, hydrogenated and unsaturated fats should be avoided for this purpose of supplying sacrificial fuel to preserve amino-acid chelated minerals. The reason for this avoidance is that these fats are not very stable and they can accumulate in the tissues and cause tissue damage in the long term. In addition to preserving the amino-acid chelated minerals, coconut oil or butter can serve another important function, that of preserving some of the Essential Fatty Acids (EFA) that are needed to repair the body. These EFAs can not be manufactured in the body and must come from the diet in order to repair the tissues.

For example, when freshly ground flax seeds are consumed with coconut oil, the coconut oil will be consumed as fuel first and the more delicate EFAs in the flax seeds will have a better chance of surviving to be incorporated in the epitalial tissues of the body where they are needed.

Why add freshly ground flax seeds to a MMP meal?

We have seen above that a MMP meal should include green leafy vegetables and some medium chain fats, such as coconut oil or butter. However, the body needs EFAs to function optimally and repairs the tissues. One of the most important such is omega3.

Flax seed is high in omega3 and the seed covering preserves this EFA well, but the digestive system is not able to break this seed covering, so it is necessary to grind the seed or sprout it before consuming it. Once the seed is ground or sprouted, it should be kept in the dark and refrigerated until consumed, to preserve the delicate EFAs. In addition to being almost 1/3 fat, flax seed is also about 1/3 complex proteins. These can react in the digestive system to produce more of the amino-acid chelated minerals that our bodies have been deprived almost since birth. This then adds considerably to the effectiveness of the MMP remineralization program. Lastly, flax seed is almost 1/3 soluble fiber. This is a carbohydrate that is not metabolized as it goes through the digestive system, but serves as a chelating agent for unwanted heavy elements. Thus over time, these soluble fibers will help to detoxify the body from past contamination with damaging heavy elements, such as mercury, lead and others.

Thus we see that flax seed is almost 100% utilized by the body, without introducing the empty carbohydrates that our bodies have been overdosing on since birth. As such they are extremely valuable in the MMP regimen.

What are the components of a well balanced MMP meal?

The first component of this meal contains an appropriate supply of the 4 primary minerals, as well as trace minerals with vitamin D. An additional multivitamin will add further to the effectiveness of the program.

In addition, the well balanced MMP meal should be high in complex carbohydrates and low in simple carbs, such as sugar, white flour, and other refined carbs. The complex carbs should come in part from green leafy vegetables, preferably raw, but when not possible, as capsules or powder containing concentrates of these vegetables. Some of them can also come from freshly ground flax seeds.

Another component of the well-balanced MMP meal is healthy fats, such as coconut oil, butter and if these are not available, extra virgin olive oil. Another essential component is the omega3 fatty acid from the ground flax seeds, or from fish oils. Other unsaturated fats and oil and hydrogenated fats are often unstable and are not recommended.

A fourth component is complex proteins, such as the proteins in flax seeds and certain vegetables, such as Brussels sprouts and many green leafy vegetables. Another source of these complex proteins is dairy products (provided that a magnesium supplement is present) and organ meats from fish and animals.

In addition, it is wise to make sure, as early as possible, to ensure that uncooked, enzyme-bearing vegetables are included as much as possible in the diet.

After this discussion, we are now ready to explain the 4 stages of the MMP regimen.

Monitor Your pH Level