The only thing that should be "fortified" nowadays is your bomb shelter… We've all know about "fortified" foods -- and the claims in ads for white bread and sugar-laden breakfast cereals that claim they're actually good for you -- because they've been "fortified" with vitamins and iron… Let's get realistic here. It doesn't take much to figure out that "fortified" refers to the lame attempt to put back into foods what the refining and preservation processes take out -- which is typically anything about it that may have actually been GOOD for you. Just open your breadbox and take a look at the label on the loaf of bread in there. If you see the word "enriched" anywhere, your bread has been made from nutrition-free refined flour, then sprayed, injected, or otherwise feebly treated with a useless chemical version of valuable vitamins and nutrients you really do need. In other words: Fortified. Here's a funny one: Salt is "fortified" by adding iodine. What they do is take perfectly good, natural salt -- which actually offers some amazing health benefits -- then they refine and process all the vital nutrients out of it before finally treating it with iodide. Iodine is an essential nutrient, not a dessicator. Sillicates (sand) are added to prevent clotting of the salt. Sea salt, of course, is naturally iodized and needs no fortification. I've written about this before, in the May 2002 issue of Real Health. If you're a subscriber, you can find it on the website, wwww.realhealthnews.com. But they call it "fortified," so it must be good for you, right? So who's behind all this nonsense? The government, initially. Since around WWII, they've been mandating that the various branches of our military buy and use only fortified flours, breads, and other such gruel. Why? Because even they knew that our fighting men needed an influx of nutrients in their rations, not just the empty calories in refined foods…
What I can't figure out is this: If they KNOW that we really need the vital nutrients in raw, unprocessed, preservative-free foods, why don't they simply ban the processing methods that strip these nutrients from flour, milk, and other foods in the first place? So what if milk or bread no longer lasted a month or more? Wouldn't the gains in health and nutrition be worth it? Obviously not, because instead of meaningful regulation, our government just keeps accepting the word of the processed food industry -- that "fortified" foods are a real, beneficial solution…
And not just another part of the carb-heavy "Food Pyramid" that's been fattening us like cattle for the last 30 years…. Taking it all with a grain of (good) salt,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
