Unfortunately most people today live busy and stressful lifestyles in polluted environments. Pharmaceutical drugs and life's pressures deplete the availability of many important nutrients in our body. Our diet should help replenish the lost nutrients but we have unhealthy diets. The limited amount of fresh foods we do eat is often grown under modern farming techniques in aging soils using chemical fertilizers and hormones that only help grow the vegetables and cattle faster. So we lack the necessary vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and other required substances to remain healthy.

According to U.S. Senate Document 264 written in 1936 on the effects of long-term heavy cropping on depletion of minerals from the soil: “It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99 percent of the American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack of one or another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we sicken, suffer, and shorten our lives."

Things have not improved any since 1936. According to a 2004 report by the Food And Agriculture Organization of The United Nations on the subject of continuous cropping: “the ‘mining’ of soil nutrients is severe, and yields have fallen as nutrients removed by the crops are not replaced.”