| Subclinical manifestations of dietary deficiency |
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Raising livestock in the nowadays ‘fast and effective’ ways lacks respect for the animal as a living being with sensitivities, feelings and an ability to feel pain. We reduce them to - as the word indicates - live stock, in every sense of the word. Animals are ‘stock items’, and treated as such. We pump the them full of hormones, squeeze pigs in little stalls where they cannot even turn, the floors are concrete, no straw is on the ground, not even for littering. The same applies for the raising and fattening of cows. Hormones, lack of space and stuffing them with feed creates a fast turn-around. Milk cows have also turned into live milk production robots whose single goals should be to produce abnormal amounts of milk.
Animals may live up to a year before they end up being slaughtered in the probably most inhumane way in history. Cows see their fellows being stunned, slit, ripped apart, dragged up by chains. As a result, the stress hormone adrenaline flushes the system and stays in the meat. No chemical process can reverse this. The hormones reside in the meat and are consumed by all of us non-vegetarians. This simply cannot be healthy. Studies have shown excessive meat-eating to be related to hypertension, anxiety and other stress related diseases.
On another note – can it be healthy to eat eggs from chickens that never were allowed to follow their natural instinct to sand bathe, scratch dirt and roam the fields looking for worms. Chickens are restricted to a tiny cage made out of steel, without straw, lights are turned off and on to substitute for daylight, chickens have no feathers anymore, average life span is under a year. These poor birds are mistaken for production machines of eggs and we seem to have forgotten that they feel pain and suffer tremendously from this abusive livestock husbandry.
Companies then process these unhealthy, flavorless foods and add preservatives, flavorings, colors, emulgators, stabilizers etc. to it to make it more tasty. These newly introduced substances are unknown to our digestive systems and bodies and can create substantial dietary deficiencies. Most forms of deficiencies are in subclinical form and can range from e.g. a ‘normal’ B12 deficiency in a vegetarian who has not supplemented the vitamin or added additional protein to the diet, to a vast range of insufficiencies such as impaired collagen formation, delayed healing of wounds or bleeding gums or gingivitis from a lack of vitamin C.
As we are all biochemically different, dietary deficiencies affect us all in unique and dissimilar fashion. Our natural resistance, strengths, immune system response, genetics, constitution, climate we live in, stress, all play a role in how we react to a shortage of essential nutrients. It is frankly unfeasible to classify signs and symptoms in the same manner.
An individual must be thoroughly examined and tested before an accurate diagnosis can be made. However, sometimes clear indications for deficiency exist, such as burning hands and feet in a person deficient in pantothenic acid or halitosis in a scurvy patient (yet this is a clinical manifestation).
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