So why is it so easy to get sick today in America? You see it every day. Friends come down with or develop some nasty disease way too often. We love our friends and sometimes we feel so helpless. I am not a doctor and you probably aren’t either. But today even doctors are discouraged by how much disease there is and how little their work of doctoring actually helps people get well or avoid getting sick. The World Health Organization who compares the general level of health of all countries in the world rate us as spending more for our healthcare system than all the other countries put together. But where do we rate in quality of our actual health? We are number 72 behind Mexico Sri Lanka and even several third world countries.This would indicate to me that too much of our health expenditures are misdirected or perhaps wasted because something is horribly wrong.Well drugs are good and they have their uses, but they should always be temporary. They do nothing to keep us healthy on a daily basis. Even doctors will tell you that the thing that determines how well someone responds when they need a drug is their general level of health. Doctors prefer to do their work when the body HELPS! If your body is not in a good enough level of health then it cannot respond in a favorable way when a doctor tries to get you well.So how do we build our own wellness so that when we do need a doctor he or she can actually help us?Drugs don’t cause the body to build good health. There is only one thing that does build the body and that is food.So what is wrong with our food today that it is NOT keeping us healthy? Do you want a list? Well it all boils down to one thing and that is THE main problem with our health in 2010, the reason we are number 72 in our level of health in the world-Missing Nutrients. In Grandma’s day she and many of her friends grew their own food. She used organic fertilizer swept from the barnyard floor. They picked their dinner fresh from the plant at the peak of ripeness and freshness. When the tomato bugs moved in, she picked them off or used other plants to make them leave. What she planted often helped control other garden pests. Grandma grew what we now call organic vegetables. In those days the government measured the nutrients in the produce and set Required Daily Amount levels.But they never expected those levels to change over the years. Today we don’t farm like Grandma did. We use heavy duty pesticides and herbicides to protect the crop and those get into the plant and cause- missing nutrients. The soil is not enriched by barnyard soil, it has synthetic chemicals to fertilize the crops-missing nutrients. Pretty is more important than nutrient levels to the big agra companies that now own 99% of all farms these days. Nutrients that may be missing in action are not even thought about. Then the veggies are picked green and shipped to the store thousands of miles away where they are gassed with ethylene to make them look pretty and ripe without actually BEING ripe-more missing nutrients. Today the big chemical companies now grow seeds genetically modified so the plants contain their own powerful pesticides. Some are designed to protect the plant from herbicides. While the animal studies on GMO have shown severe organ and reproductive damage caused by their eating those GMO foods, the GMO producers don’t seem to think there will be any human damage from our eating them so we eat them almost every day without even knowing.All this combines to make the perfect storm of missing nutrients. Since the government measured the nutrition in our veggies in the late 40′s and early 50′s the measurable levels have drastically changed with one main result-missing nutrients:Vitamin C level-Then = 1 orange / Today = 10 oranges to get the same now missing nutrientsVitamin A level –Then = 2 peaches / Today = 53 peaches to get the same now missing nutrientsIron level–Then = 1 cup of spinach / Today = 65 cups of spinach for the same missing nutrientsLets face it with the food we have in a modern grocery store, we need to eat enough food for an army to get enough of the missing nutrients to keep a body healthy.So what do we do? How do we fight back for our good health? Well learning to grow a garden is a good start, even if it is in your sunny kitchen window. Also, in order to not have to eat enough for 10 people every day of our lives, we MUST supplement our diets or we could die, quite literally, from malnutrition. It won’t look like the starving children on TV but when our body can no longer keep us well or protect us from what pathogens are going around, it is caused by malnutrition or simply-missing nutrients. Even extreme overweight is caused by malnutrition and that problem is epidemic these days.But I warn you. Don’t go out and buy a bunch of vitamin pills at Walmart and think you are supplementing. If your supplement is not 100% food sourced then it is synthetic chemicals and chemicals are not food…If you have a problem with missing nutrients you need REAL FOOD. In another article we will talk about how to get that without eating for 10 every day.