Excerpts from U.S. Senate Document 264
74th Congress, 2nd Session, 1936

“Laboratory tests prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, and even milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago”, (which doubtless explains why our forefathers thrived on a selection of foods that would starve us).

“The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables, and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us—no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn’t big enough to hole them”.

“The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them aren’t worth eating as food. Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume.”

“We know vitamins are complex chemical substances which are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them is of importance for normal function of some special structure in the body. Disorder and disease result from any vitamin deficiency. It is not commonly realized, however, that vitamins control the body’s appropriation of minerals, and in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless.”

“This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions of science to the problem of human health.”

Written by Rex Beach in 1936 and submitted as part of a Congressional investigation into our farming practices because of concerns about the quality of our farm and range soils