What are minerals anyway?
Minerals are nothing more than elements—the very same elements that grace the periodic table inside a high school chemistry textbook like chromium, magnesium, iron, zinc, and so on. They are the elements that comprise the entire universe, this earth, and everything on it, including you.
Your body is truly a masterpiece formed from these same elements. As such, it is important to constantly replenish your body with the elements it expends daily.
Chemical and electrical processes are occurring within your body at every moment. These processes can only function correctly if the proper balance of minerals is continually being supplied to your system. Iron for your blood, sulfur for your muscles, calcium for your bones, and an aggregation of many other elements in balanced trace amounts help to ensure the proper function of your body.
What Are Ions?
An ion is a mineral or element that has a positive or negative charge. On the molecular level, that means the element has either too many or too few electrons. This unstable ionic state allows the element to bond readily with water, making it possible for the body to absorb it. In this state, an element has specific positive or negative electrical signatures that cause a dynamic equilibrium to take place. The body can then facilitate changes to move nutrients to the areas that need them.
What Are Trace Minerals?
You may collect silver coins, wear a platinum ring, or have a gold filling. You’ve likely sipped tea poured from a copper kettle, eaten a cookie from a fancy tin container, or traveled on an airplane made of titanium. But did you know that these elements and many others—in very small, balanced trace amounts—are critical to your health? Although trace minerals are no longer as plentiful in the foods you eat, they exist plentifully in their proper proportions in the mineral-rich waters of the earth’s oceans and seas.
The Stripping of Mother Earth
Traditionally, eating fresh grains, fruits, and vegetables grown in nutrient-rich soil has been the primary supply for a full spectrum of ionic minerals.
Unfortunately, in today’s world, naturally occurring, nutrient-rich soil is becoming increasingly rare. Eons of vegetation growth and aggressive modern farming techniques have brought many of the earth’s minerals to the surface where they have been washed away.
Synthesized fertilizers are routinely applied to farms and fields where minerals have been depleted. But man-made fertilizers provide only enough mineral substance to support basic plant life. Numerous trace minerals essential to human life don’t get replenished.
Where Have All the Minerals Gone?
Many of the trace elements once abundant in soil have been washed into the oceans. In the oceans they are found in their proper proportions—the same basic proportions that are found in healthy human bodies.
In a few surviving inland seas such as the Great Salt Lake of western North America, these essential elements exist in highly concentrated, salubrious proportions. This healthy, intricately balanced proportion of minerals and trace elements found in sea water is beneficial to the human body.
Today, these life-sustaining sea waters contain all the minerals and elements necessary to support human life. Most importantly, these minerals and elements are ionic and in perfect balance—prime for being absorbed into the cells of your body.
The Importance of Ionic Minerals
Every second of every day your body relies on ionic minerals and trace minerals to conduct and generate billions of tiny electrical impulses. Without these impulses, not a single muscle, including your heart, would be able to function. Your brain would not function, and the cells would not be able to use osmosis to balance your water pressure and absorb nutrients. To ensure you are getting the ionic minerals and electrolytes your body needs, only choose ionic mineral supplements or supplements that contain ionic minerals.
“Experts estimate 90 percent of Americans suffer from mineral imbalance and deficiency.”
A Disturbing Trend: Mineral Imbalance
Because your body requires nearly two thirds of all the elements currently known to man in order to maintain health, keeping these minerals in balance is a complex, yet incredibly vital task. The events of everyday living demand a continual ingestion of minerals.
There are 92 known elements, 22 hypothesized others, and hundreds of isotopic variations. It’s no wonder that scientists are only now beginning to discover the effects and interrelationships of minerals in our human systems, such as how minerals help maintain a healthy balance, and what adverse effects are created by a mineral imbalance. Experts estimate that 90 percent of Americans suffer from mineral imbalance and deficiency.
If you are one of them—whether because of frequent exercise, stress, or a diet of overly refined, nutrient-poor foods—your body will attempt to correct the situation in futility, usually resulting in food cravings, muscle cramps, and general fatigue.
The Key Role of Absorption
The absorption of minerals primarily takes place within the small intestines. As food matter passes through the intestines, minerals transfer into the blood stream through the walls of the intestines by way of the villi (see Figure 3). This can only happen if the minerals are in an ionic form. Although stomach acid helps ionize the minerals in foods, a mineral supplement should contain already naturally ionized minerals to be fully absorbed.
The Secret of Life in a Dead Inland Sea
Western North America’s Great Salt Lake is the world’s oldest inland sea. A remnant of the last great Ice Age, the Great Salt Lake in Utah has been collecting and concentrating the minerals and trace elements of the surrounding Rocky Mountains for tens of thousands of years. The result is nutrient rich waters which contain over 72 ionic minerals and trace elements that are eight to ten times more concentrated than regular seawater—in precisely the same proportion as healthy human fluids. It is from this source that Trace Minerals Research harvests the elements and trace minerals that go into every product.