Superfoods For Optimum Health: Chlorella and Spirulina
by Mike Adams, the Consumer Wellness Research Center - page 8 of 39

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I've already mentioned many of the vitamins found in these micro-algae: all of the B vitamins, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, provitamin A, and so on. But what's important about these vitamins isn't just that they are present: it's the fact that they are found in their natural forms in these micro-algae.

In other words, if you take "bulk" vitamin supplements, you are often taking synthetic vitamins that have been manufactured in a chemical plant from ingredients that you'd never normally eat. These synthetic vitamins may be molecularly similar to the vitamins found in plants, but clinical trial show that they aren't the same in effect. There's something almost magical about vitamins found in plants: they're simply more healthful, more absorbable, and more effective at getting the job done.

That's why I never recommend people take isolated vitamins in pill form. There's simply no need to. The best way to take vitamins is to eat vitamin-rich superfoods like chlorella and spirulina. In this way, you get all the vitamins you need, in the proper natural form that the human body was meant to digest.

And you don't have to worry about dosages, either. If you take both chlorella and spirulina, you automatically get near-perfect ratios of the most important vitamins and nutrients your body needs. That's one reason why these superfoods are called "perfect foods." In fact, you can eat these in large quantities without any worry of overdosing on individual vitamins.

Whatever vitamin you need: C, E, B, A, and so on, chances are that it's found in either chlorella or spirulina.

Minerals

Virtually all Americans are deficient in certain minerals like magnesium and zinc. That's because all refined foods have had their mineral content stripped. When a food processing plant refines wheat berries to make white flour, it removes as much as 98% of some minerals. The resulting powdery substance -- white flour -- is technically unfit for human consumption because it is nutritionally deficient and simply cannot sustain human life. That's why they have to "enrich" these flours: by law, certain vitamins have to be put back in just to prevent the more obvious nutritional deficiency diseases like beriberi and ricketts!

By eating these processed foods, and by not getting enough "natural" foods like chlorella and spirulina, most Americans simply don't get enough magnesium and zinc in their diets, not to mention trace minerals and other macrominerals. Worse, yet, virtually all low-carb dieters are calcium deficient due to the high acidity of their diets and their near-complete lack of dietary magnesium thanks to eating animal meats and dairy products. Although they are technically eating moderate amounts of calcium found in meats and dairy products, their bodies can't use it because they don't have the magnesium and Vitamin D necessary to turn calcium into strong bones.

What all these people have in common is a serious need for mineral balance in their bodies. They need more magnesium, more zinc, more trace minerals, and better sources of potassium and calcium, just to name a few. Truly, this need is present across the board. Hardly a person can be found who isn't deficient in one or more of these minerals.

With chlorella and spirulina, however, you can reverse your mineral deficiencies because these superfoods are rich in minerals! An ounce of chlorella, for example, contains far more calcium than an ounce of milk. So much for the "milk builds strong bones" hype: chlorella's calcium and magnesium content far surpasses milk in building strong bones.

Many people, in trying to deal with calcium deficiencies, take calcium supplements containing calcium carbonate. That's made primarily from ground up seashells, and this brings up a question: do people really need to be eating ground up seashells? Of course not. The idea of eating seashells is absurd, yet that's exactly what people are doing when they take common calcium supplements. Sure, you're "taking" the calcium, but are you absorbing it? Probably not.

Similarly, many people take coral calcium supplements, which are made from ground up coral reefs instead of ground up seashells. Once again, it's probably better than taking nothing at all, but were human beings really meant to eat coral reefs? Of course not! Scuba divers like to observe coral reefs, but you never find them chewing on reefs. This is not a food source intended for human beings. In fact, no animal on planet Earth eats coral reefs!

Plants, on the other hand, are fully intended for human consumption. The human digestive system reveals this truth in rather obvious ways, such as the need for dietary fiber in order to support healthy bowel movements, not to mention the existence of certain vegetable-grinding instruments found in the mouths of every human being: they're known as "molar teeth." Clearly, our bodies were designed to chew vegetables, not seashells or coral reefs. Not surprisingly, then, it's plants that offer the healthiest sources of the vitamins and minerals our bodies really need -- in the form we need. Put simply, the minerals in micro-algae are easily absorbable by the human body. If you experienced some health benefits from taking coral calcium, you'll be stunned at the much stronger benefits from consuming micro-algae.

The plants richest in chlorophyll—the micro-algae and cereal grasses—were cited earlier as good sources of magnesium. Green plants also have the greatest concentration of calcium of any food; because of their magnesium, chlorophyll, and other calcium cofactors, increasing the consumption of green plants often is a simple solution to calcium problems.

- Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford

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