Healthy soil, healthy people — the connection science has long proven

Imagine eating vegetables, fruits, and whole grains daily. You believe you're eating well. Yet, you're tired, prone to infection, and lack drive. Your doctor finds nothing serious. Blood tests are "within the normal range."
What if the problem isn't on your plate — but in the soil your food comes from?
This question has occupied a growing number of scientists worldwide for decades. And the answers they've found are inconvenient — but at the same time solvable.

The Silent Pandemic of Malnutrition

We live in a time of abundance. Never before in human history have so many people had so much to eat. Yet, according to a study by White and Broadley in the journal Trends in Plant Science, an estimated 3.7 billion people suffer from iron deficiency — 2 billion of whom have severe deficiency resulting in anemia. Around 30 percent of the global population suffers from zinc deficiency, and an equal number from iodine deficiency.
This is not a poverty issue. Iron deficiency, zinc deficiency, selenium deficiency — these deficits affect people in wealthy industrialized countries just as much as in developing countries. Because the problem isn't a lack of access to food. The problem is what's still in that food — or what's no longer in it.
The health consequences of mineral and trace element deficiencies range from immune weakness and chronic inflammation to fatigue, obesity, depression, and cognitive impairments. The situation is particularly dramatic for children: if deficiencies exist during early development, it can lead to permanent cognitive impairments.

What Science Knows About Our Food

In one of the most comprehensive long-term studies ever conducted on this topic, the British government compared the mineral content of foods from 1940 with those from 1991 — the so-called McCance and Widdowson study. The result was clear: vegetables and fruits in 1991 contained drastically fewer minerals than 50 years earlier. Calcium dropped by up to 46 percent, magnesium by almost 25 percent, and copper by more than 75 percent.
This is not a nutritional science footnote. This is a documented decline over five decades — at a time when crop yields dramatically increased.
And for anyone thinking: I'll just buy organic — a 2009 analysis of 55 studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition provides a sobering reality check. After a systematic review of the available literature, Dangour and colleagues concluded: There is no statistically significant difference between the mineral and trace element content of conventionally and organically grown foods.
That sounds discouraging. But it makes sense when you understand why.

The Equation That Doesn't Add Up — NPK and the 80 Elements

Modern agriculture primarily fertilizes with NPK — nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. These three elements are very effective at increasing yield in the short term. The problem: with each harvest, the plant extracts not three elements from the soil — but about eighty.
Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are among them. But so are calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese, zinc, boron, copper, molybdenum, nickel — and about sixty other elements in tiny quantities that we call trace elements.
If eighty elements are removed year after year and only three are returned — eventually the balance must tip into the negative. This is not theory. This is mathematics.
According to an audit report by the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Panel, we lost one-third of all fertile soils worldwide between 1950 and 1990. The erosion of soil structure continues to increase, the humus content in agricultural soils continuously decreases — and with it, the soil's ability to bind nutrients and make them available to plants.
What is missing in the soil cannot be absorbed by the plant. What the plant does not absorb is missing on your plate. The chain is simple and inexorable.

Essential or Non-Essential — The Wrong Question

In plant science, a list of 14 elements has been considered essential — meaning vital for the plant — since 1939. This list has hardly changed since then, with the sole exception of nickel, which was added in 1987.
The problem with this: Essential means vital for survival. Not healthy. Not optimal. Just: necessary for life.
There is a growing number of elements for which scientific studies have shown positive effects on plant health — but which are officially considered non-essential and therefore receive little attention in fertilization.
And then there are elements that are considered essential for humans and animals — but not for plants. Selenium, iodine, and chromium, for example. How can human supply with these elements be ensured if they play no role in plant fertilization?
That is the real question. Do we want to fertilize so that the plant is viable — or so that it is healthy? And do we want to fertilize so that the person who eats it is viable — or truly healthy?

Finland Has the Answer — And No Other Country Follows

In the early 1980s, Finland discovered that its soils were naturally very low in selenium — and that the Finnish population consequently had a poor selenium supply.
The solution was as simple as it was consistent: Since 1984, by law, selenium has been added to agricultural fertilizers in Finland. The result was documented by Alfthan and colleagues in a comprehensive study in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology: The selenium concentration in Finnish foods significantly increased. The average daily selenium intake of the Finnish population doubled. The population's selenium status measurably improved in parallel.
Today, Finland produces the most selenium-rich grain in all of Europe.
Yet, Finland remains the only EU country with legally mandated selenium fertilization to this day. Not a single other country has adopted this simple and scientifically proven measure.
This says a lot about how we as a society deal with soil health and human health.

Lithium — The Trace Element That Changes Societies

Perhaps the most surprising example of the connection between soil minerals and human health comes from criminology.
In a study published in Biological Trace Element Research in 1990, Gerhard Schrauzer and Krishna Shrestha analyzed data from 27 Texas counties over a ten-year period. 
Their finding: In counties whose drinking water contained little or no lithium, suicide, murder, and rape rates were statistically significantly higher than in counties with higher lithium levels in drinking water. Drug offenses related to opium and cocaine also showed a clear inverse correlation with lithium content.
This study was replicated by other research groups in various countries — in Japan, England, Austria, and other states. The results were astonishingly consistent: More lithium in drinking water correlates with fewer suicides and less violence.
Lithium has been used in psychiatry for decades to treat depression, mania, and bipolar disorder. The fact that a deficiency of this element can impair mental health is well explainable biochemically.
And yet, lithium is officially considered non-essential.
You don't necessarily have to be mentally healthy to survive. But I, for one, would like to be.

There's another factor almost entirely missing from public discussion: What happens to minerals after we eat them?
Humans absorb minerals through food. What the body cannot utilize, it excretes — through the wastewater system, into the sewage, into wastewater treatment plants, and from there mostly via rivers into the sea.
The minerals travel from the field to the plant, from the plant to the plate, from the plate to the person, from the person to the sea. A one-way street.
As long as this cycle is not closed — as long as the minerals extracted from the soil are not sufficiently returned — the depletion of soils will continue.
This makes the short-term remineralization of soils one of the most important agricultural tasks of our time.

Synergism and Antagonism — Why Balance Is More Important Than Quantity

Minerals and trace elements do not act in isolation. They influence each other — some enhance their mutual absorption, others block it.
A well-documented example: lead and zinc act antagonistically. A zinc deficiency increases lead absorption in the body. According to a 2020 UNICEF report, one in three children worldwide is chronically poisoned with lead today — a situation exacerbated by widespread zinc deficiency.
Another example: silicon protects against aluminum exposure through antagonistic action. Selenium increases the excretion of mercury.
This means: It's not enough to supply a single trace element. What matters is the balance of the entire mineral spectrum. That's exactly what healthy, mineral-rich soil provides — and that's precisely what's missing in depleted, unilaterally fertilized soils.

What This Means for Us as Consumers

The good news is: The problem can be directly addressed at an individual level.
Buy regional and seasonal — short transport routes and field-ripened products deliver more minerals than imported goods cooled for weeks.
Buy from farmers who prioritize soil health — regenerative agriculture, remineralization with basalt and zeolite, living soils with active microorganisms. These are the practices that make the difference.
Measure the Brix value — a simple refractometer shows in seconds whether a food is truly nutrient-dense. A carrot with 12 °Brix and deep orange flesh has more beta-carotene and more minerals than a pale one with 4 °Brix.
Grow your own — those who work with remineralized soils in their own garden or raised bed have the most complete control over the mineral supply of their food.

What This Means for Agriculture

The solution is not more NPK. It lies in returning to the full spectrum of minerals that the plant needs — and that the human who eats it needs.
Basalt provides the broadest natural trace element spectrum available in agriculture — silicon, iron, manganese, copper, zinc, cobalt, molybdenum, and many others. Its paramagnetic properties simultaneously activate soil life, which makes these minerals available to plants.
Zeolite retains minerals in the root zone and prevents their leaching — it closes the short cycle between soil and plant roots.
Active microorganisms — like AM+PLUS — make minerals accessible to the plant that would otherwise remain bound in the soil without biological activity.
And Greenpower Calcium supplies the plant directly through the leaf with the mineral calcium, which acts as a key for all other minerals — the door opener for the plant's entire mineral balance.
The goal is a plant so mineral-rich that two carrots truly meet the daily requirement of beta-carotene. That a tomato really tastes like a tomato. That a red onion truly provides the quercetin the body needs for its defense.
This is not a utopia. It is the result of good soil work. And it is measurable — in Brix value, in color, in taste.

You can find more about the Brix value as a measurement tool for nutrient density — and how you can measure it yourself — in our article on Brix measurements and refractometers.
How zeolite, paramagnetic basalt, and AM+PLUS work together to build truly mineral-rich soil — we explain this in our Agriculture Collection.
You can find all products for the garden in our Garden Collection.

Read more:

Measuring Brix — the fuel gauge of plant health and how to read it correctly
Growing Tomatoes with Real Lycopene — step-by-step to fruits that truly taste like tomatoes
Growing Carrots with High Nutrient Content — how beta-carotene, Brix value, and soil health are connected
Understanding Zeolite in Soil: How Studies Show Plants Absorb Nutrients Better

Sources:

McCance & Widdowson, Mineral Decline in British Foods 1940–1991, RSC/MAFF 2000 | Dangour et al., Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2009 | Alfthan et al., Effects of nationwide addition of selenium to fertilizers on foods and human health in Finland, Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology 2015 | Schrauzer & Shrestha, Lithium in drinking water and the incidences of crimes, suicides, and arrests related to drug addictions, Biological Trace Element Research 1990 | White & Broadley, Biofortifying crops with essential mineral elements, Trends in Plant Science 2005 | UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Panel 2005