MINERALS AND ENZYMES
You can eat all the enzymes in the world, but if the right minerals aren't there, those enzymes won't work - not that they're dysfunctional, they're simply mineral-challenged!
Enzymes are our worker proteins, but in fact ALL proteins will NOT work without their minerals. You know this, you know a structural protein like collagen in bone is useless without its interlocking minerals such as calcium and phosphorus.
A transport protein like hemoglobin in blood must have its core of iron, to carry oxygen along. Messenger proteins (neurotransmitters) depend entirely on sodium and potassium to flick the nerve signal their way.
Uniquely, minerals are the only part of our diet that can't be created by any living being. With everything else - proteins, vitamins, fats, sugars - some little cell somewhere will string carbon, hydrogen and oxygen together to make the needed chemical. If a plant does the job, we call it a phytochemical.
Not even a cow can make calcium. Wide-eyed beauty that she is, a cow must still eat her calcium from a field of grass.
Minerals are little rocks, naked to the human eye (or to be 100% exact, they're the main constituent of rocks). Water pushing itself up through rocks and soil, leaches out their minerals and washes them into the ocean.
Dr. Bernard Jensen writes in his introduction to Gillian Martlew's book, "Electrolytes the Spark of Life": "The point when minerals become alive is when electrolytes split. All cellular structures become alive through electrolytic activity. Life begins with electrolytes. Trace minerals carry the life force in our bodies more than any other substance."
Minerals are the most sensitive of all to Balance. They will work only in proportion to each other. Nancy Appleton in "Lick the Sugar Habit" reports that dentist Dr. Melvin Page found if he could get his patient's calcium/phosphorus ratio to be 10 to 4, that's 2.5 times more calcium than phosphorus - their tooth decay and bone loss would stop.
Sugar causes phosphorus to plummet. Say there's 4 molecules of phosphorus and 10 of calcium in your blood. Then you eat sugar, and a poor osteoblast (bone-cell) can get only 2 phosphorus to build bone, because the other 2 were conscripted into the GI tract to digest the sugar (GI = gastro-intestinal).
Now your bone-cell can use only 5 of calcium, with its 2 phosphorus. So 5 molecules of calcium are left useless in the blood, while your bones cry out in desperate need of more calcium. There you have it, an excess and deficiency of the same mineral at the same time!
Excess is another word for toxic. Now what happens to this toxic calcium? Our body plops it down into knobbly arthritic joints, bone spurs, brittle arteries, kidney stones and cataracts.
This is how a person can have joints swollen hard with calcium, and osteoporosis at the same time. She's not eating her minerals in balance, e.g. eating yogurt or cheese (excess calcium with no magnesium). And she's eating foods that unbalance the minerals even further, like sugar.
Excess calcium in a cell leads to fatigue too. Enzymes needed for the Krebs energy cycle have to leave their job and rush to bail out some of the calcium, like too much water in a canoe (when they should be busy rowing the canoe).