Imagine eating vegetables, fruits, whole grains daily. You think you're eating well. And yet you're tired, prone to infection, and lacking motivation. Your doctor finds nothing serious. Your blood values 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. And 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 — of whom 2 billion have a severe deficiency resulting in anemia. Around 30 percent of the world's population suffers from zinc deficiency, and just as many from iodine deficiency.
This is not a poverty issue. Iron deficiency, zinc deficiency, selenium deficiency — these deficits affect people in rich industrial countries as much as in developing countries. Because the problem is not a lack of access to food. The problem is what is still in that food — or what is no longer there.
The health consequences of mineral and trace element deficiencies range from immune weakness and chronic inflammation to fatigue and obesity, depression, and cognitive impairments. The situation is particularly dramatic for children: if deficiencies exist during early development, it can lead to permanent impairments in intellectual development.
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 that 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 decreased by up to 46 percent, magnesium by almost 25 percent, copper by more than 75 percent.
This is not a minor footnote in nutritional science. This is a documented decline over five decades — during a time when harvest yields simultaneously increased dramatically.
And for those who now think: then I'll just buy organic — a 2009 analysis of 55 studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition provides a sobering conclusion. Dangour and colleagues, after systematically reviewing the available literature, concluded: There is no statistically significant difference between the mineral and trace element content of conventionally and organically produced 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 in increasing yields 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 also calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese, zinc, boron, copper, molybdenum, nickel — and about sixty other elements in tiny quantities, which we call trace elements.
If eighty elements are extracted year after year and only three of them are returned — the balance must eventually tip into the negative. This is not a 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 arable soils is continuously decreasing — 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 — i.e., vital for the plant — since 1939. This list has hardly changed since then, with the only exception of nickel, which was added in 1987.
The problem is: Essential means vital. Not healthy. Not optimal. Just: necessary for survival.
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 the supply of these elements to humans 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 human 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 was consequently poorly supplied with selenium.
The solution was as simple as it was consistent: Since 1984, selenium has been added to agricultural fertilizers in Finland by law. 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 increased significantly. The average daily selenium intake of the Finnish population doubled. The population's selenium status measurably improved in parallel.
Finland today produces the most selenium-rich grain in all of Europe.
And 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 the issue of soil health and human health.
Lithium — the trace element that changes societies
Perhaps the most surprising example of the link between soil minerals and human health comes from criminology.
Gerhard Schrauzer and Krishna Shrestha analyzed data from 27 Texas counties over a ten-year period in a study published in the journal Biological Trace Element Research in 1990.
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 content in drinking water. Drug offenses related to opium and cocaine also showed a clear inverse correlation with lithium content.
This study was repeated by other research groups in various countries — in Japan, England, Austria, and other states. The results were strikingly consistent: More lithium in drinking water is associated with fewer suicides and less violence.
Lithium has been used in psychiatry for decades to treat depression, mania, and bipolar disorder. That a deficiency of this element can impair mental health is biochemically well explainable.
And yet, lithium is officially considered non-essential.
You don't necessarily have to be mentally healthy to survive. But I would like to be, for example.
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 sewers, into sewage treatment plants, and from there mostly via rivers into the sea.
Minerals travel from the field to the plant, from the plant to the plate, from the plate to the human, from the human 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 returned in sufficient form — the impoverishment of the soil 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 each other's 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 contamination through antagonistic action. Selenium increases the excretion of mercury.
This means: It is not enough to supply a single trace element. What matters is the balance of the entire mineral spectrum. This is exactly what healthy, mineral-rich soil provides — and this is exactly what is missing in leached, one-sidedly fertilized soils.
What this means for us as consumers
The good news is: The problem is directly addressable 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. Through its paramagnetic properties, it simultaneously activates soil life, which makes these minerals available to plants.
Zeolite holds minerals in the root zone and prevents their leaching — it closes the short cycle between soil and plant root.
Active microorganisms — like AM+PLUS — make minerals accessible to the plant that would otherwise remain bound in the soil without biological activity.
And Grünkraft Calcium supplies the plant directly via the leaf with the mineral calcium, which acts as a key for all other minerals — the opener for the plant's entire mineral balance.
The goal is a plant that is 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 measuring instrument 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 depletion 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
