Adequate supplies of neutralizing minerals are essential to keeping our internal environments in tip-top shape. We get a variety of minerals and other nutrients when we eat a variety of foods. Virtually all foods have minerals and other nutrients – even acid ash foods. The question is: Why are vegetable and fruit minerals better than red meat, poultry, fish, and cheese minerals?

Here’s why: Plants that live in rich soil take nutrients and minerals from the ground through their roots – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen, calcium, iron, magnesium, and small amounts of other elements. These minerals are essentially inorganic – they occur independently of living things in nature. Inorganic minerals are of little use to your body, because the molecules of the minerals as they come from the ground are held together too tightly for our bodies to break apart and use. Our bodies can’t use most minerals as they come from the soil, but plants can.

Fruits and vegetables are like the “first responders.” Plants “eat” the minerals in the soil. In the plant, the minerals are processed, or restructured. Then we – and cows, chickens, pigs, deer, turkeys and sheep – eat parts of the plants and get the reconstructed minerals. When you eat the cow or other animal that has consumed the plant, you get the neutralizing plant minerals remaining in the tissue of the meat.

Consider this: your lunch hamburger has 9 mg of calcium. That sounds pretty good until you compare it with a carrot that has 19 mg of calcium. And the hamburger also has acidifying elements characteristic of high-protein animal tissue, such as 134 mg of acidifying phosphorus. The carrot wins again here. It has only 32 mg of phosphorus.

When we eat plants, the minerals are ready for our bodies to use. Minerals we get from meat, and other flesh foods are at least one step further removed from their origin. Animals or fish get minerals from the plants they eat. But that doesn’t mean the minerals are suitable for our bodies. By the time you eat the meat, the alkalizing plant minerals – sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, and iron – have already been processed through another body. In addition, the meat brings along with it whole bunches of acidifying minerals – phosphorus, chlorine, sulfur, and nitrogen. The acidifying minerals “outweigh” the neutralizing minerals.

And even cheese (which is admittedly a delicious by-product of the animal kingdom) is processed several times before you eat it.

On the other hand, fruits and vegetables work with the raw materials of minerals from the ground, and we reap the benefit of their labor.