Physical Health Foundations: Minerals
Sara Childers (00:01.314)
Welcome back to Metabolic Wisdom podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Childers, Holistic Registered Dietitian. And today we are talking all things minerals and how minerals are actually foundational for our physical health in our bodies. And in these last few episodes that I've had in season one of this podcast, I've been talking about the physical foundations for our health. And if you haven't noticed yet, I haven't even gotten to food and nutrition. And today we're dipping our toe into it by talking about minerals. And the next episode is going to be all about
actual nutrition. But I wanted to talk about minerals first because they are probably the most overlooked part of our health, but they are one of the most important components of our health, if not maybe even the most important part of our health. And when I talk about minerals, you know, a lot of people don't know what I mean. And let me explain. So, so many buzzwords around health.
revolve around vitamins and minerals, vitamins and minerals and supplements and all of that. And I'm not actually talking about supplements when I talk about minerals and I'm not really talking about vitamins either. So in the realm of nutrition, vitamins are really like vitamin A, D, E and K. Those are your fat soluble vitamins. And then you have your other vitamins like B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, all of the other vitamins, well actually vitamin Ds.
fat-soluble, but you get my point. Like they usually have vitamin in front of them. When I talk about elements or minerals, I am talking about things that you could probably find on a elements chart. Something like calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, lithium, and even heavy metals. Those are really the things I'm talking about. When we have vitamins,
A lot of people don't realize this, but vitamins are usually a conglomeration of different elements. And a lot of minerals actually help to make different vitamins. So it's like we're going on a micro micro level. Like what elements can you find on the periodic table that are essential for your body to function? If you ever had a biology class or especially if you were an A and P or any sort of biology in college, you probably learned about certain cycles like
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the Krebs cycle or the cycle that your body goes through in order to make ATP, so cellular energy, different cycles that happen in the body, specifically in the cells. When we look at cellular function on a cellular level, we actually see that things cannot even get into the cells to be used by the body and different processes that the cells go through can't even happen.
without certain minerals. So the reason minerals are so important is because your body is made up of organs. Those organs are made up of tissue. Those tissues are made up of cells. So literally every fiber of your being is made up of cells and those cells run off of minerals. And when we're deficient in minerals, we see huge complications with that. And when we have imbalances with minerals, that could be the difference between us actually meeting our health goals.
having energy, less brain fog, able to lose weight, a good metabolism. That could be the difference between that and us being chronically fatigued, having really poor digestion, having a body that just does not run like a well-oiled machine. So that is why I want to talk about minerals. I'm going to talk a little bit about what minerals are, and then I'm going to go into a little bit about which minerals influence our body the most.
talk a little bit about the ratios. I'm gonna try to make this episode not overwhelming and super easy and digestible if you want to bear with me.
Sara Childers (04:08.408)
So starting things out, how I even learned about minerals was actually after I had started working with women in my practice and I had heard a lot of other functional practitioners talk about the HTMA test or the hair tissue mineral analysis test. And this is basically where you take a piece of your hair, you take the pieces of your hair closest to your scalp and you get a small sample of it and then you send it off to this laboratory and the lab evaluates.
what your mineral status is. And you basically learn and are trained to interpret this hair test in order to see what somebody's metabolism is doing because certain hair, our hair test shows what our cells are actually looking like. So the reason I was interested in this test is because blood tests don't really give us a full picture of what's happening inside the cells. It doesn't tell us what stores of nutrients our cells have. Blood is super
It fluctuates daily, hourly even, and when we look at hair tissue, when we look at soft tissue of the body, we're actually able to get a more accurate description of what actually is happening in your cells, which is where things matter, because that is where everything happens, and that is where your body does most of its functions, is in the cells. So, I heard of this hair test, and I knew I wanted to do it because the hair test shows not only your foundational minerals, but it also shows
potential for heavy metals and how well you're detoxing heavy metals. It shows your metabolism and what diet or macro breakdown would work best for you. It also shows potential for different vitamin deficiencies and it actually has different ratios. So different minerals in the body work with one another. For example, sodium and potassium work together
to balance blood pressure and interstitial fluid and they help with digestion and also your nervous system and also getting cells or getting nutrients and hormones inside the cells to be used by the body. But they balance one another out. So sometimes when we have too much sodium, our potassium can be low, sometimes vice versa, but we want them to both be balanced together. And there's a lot of different ratios like that in the body that have different functions that regulate different organs and organ systems.
Sara Childers (06:30.797)
And that's something I wanted to learn about. So I went through this program where I was trained to interpret these hair tests and I basically became an HTML professional. So I'm able to interpret hair tests in order to help someone heal their metabolism. So that is where the interest sparked out of. But once I opened this can of worms, honestly, the resources and the just effects of minerals on the body and
were endless. Like there's so much to minerals, there's so many minerals, so many things in the body that are so, so, so, so important that diet culture and media doesn't even talk about. Nobody even knows what it is. So super interesting getting into this hair test because it showed me how important minerals are in the body because we learn when you're a hair test practitioner,
you learn that the body actually works off of minerals and digestion, hormone balance, weight loss, metabolism, none of those things can change until you balance your minerals first. Your minerals are what cause all of those different things to actually work well. Think of minerals as the spark plugs of your body. You need the spark plugs to spark together in order
for your machine to even run in the first place. So that is really what minerals are, is they're little spark plugs for the body. They cause different reactions to occur in order for us to have a functioning body. So when we're looking at minerals, there are a few that are more important than others. Your big four minerals are your most important minerals and nothing can change in the body until you balance these out. None of the deep work.
anyways. And also you cannot detox heavy metals very well until you balance these four minerals out and any other mineral imbalances you may have are not easily changed until you level these minerals out. So your four major minerals are calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. These are your most abundant minerals in the body. They all have
Sara Childers (08:47.879)
so many different functions. We would be here all day if I was telling you every function that calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium had in the body. But just know these four minerals are what need to be balanced. And so many times when I have a hair test, since I've done so many in the last year or two, is me doing the hair test, I've actually been able to see how deficient we are in these minerals. It's crazy. So many of us are walking around
nutrient deficient, malnourished from not having enough minerals in our body and we wonder why we don't feel good. So for example, the most common thing that I see on a woman's hair test is that she has low magnesium, sodium and potassium and yes, all three. So common. Magnesium and sodium are usually lost when someone is stressed. Potassium
can also be lost when someone is stressed. find that most women are so chronically stressed that they are deficient in sodium, magnesium, and potassium. And a lot of women, even when they start to supplement with these and they don't change their lifestyle at all, they're still really stressed. They're still putting a lot of pressure on themselves. They're still overworking. They're still consuming way too much media. Their screen time is way too high. They sign up for everything. They're just dysregulated. Their habits are dysregulating their nervous system. Oftentimes when these women still
supplement with these minerals but they haven't changed their lifestyle, the minerals are still going out faster than they're coming in and they can still be deficient in them. This is something that I actually experienced with my own hair test. I did the hair test. I made my own supplement with extreme amounts of potassium and magnesium and sodium but when I did my hair test six months later because I was still overworking because I was still
looking at all these podcasts and websites and I was consuming so much information for my business at the time, my minerals were still extremely low. Like they only moved a hair on my hair test from one hair test to six months later at the other. So that's something to take into consideration is yes, your minerals may be low and yes, we do walk around being super deficient in minerals because
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our diets are a little bit subpar and we're not focusing on nutrient rich, mineral rich diets, but also our lifestyle has a huge contributing factor to our minerals. And before I get done talking about the HTMA test, I think it's so interesting to also add that this HTMA test is not only used by dieticians, nutritionists and doctors, certain functional doctors, but also this hair test is used for psychologists as well. A lot of holistic psychologists
will do this hair test because when you do an HTMA test, you can also see somebody's stress and psychological patterns. So when we have certain emotions, when we have certain emotions in our body, our body feels those emotions and it uses up certain minerals in order to deal with those emotions. And so a lot of times when we evaluate a hair test, we're able to see a pattern and it can somewhat tell us
what you've been dealing with for the past three months as far as like emotions are concerned. One of my most common patterns I see is a bowl pattern. So this is where calcium is high, magnesium is lower, sodium is lower than potassium is high. So magnesium and sodium are a bit low compared to the other two. This is a bowl pattern. And when we see that it's associated with someone being a little defensive.
with somebody feeling as though they're stuck in life, as though they're beating their head against a wall, so to speak. And I find it so interesting because with every one of my clients, I tell them to take this with a grain of salt, because I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a counselor, I'm just a dietician, so they can either pay attention to the psychological and stress patterns or they don't have to. But I find that when somebody has a ball pattern or when they have some other sort of pattern, I'm able to talk to them and really rationalize.
why that pattern might be happening. for example, sticking with the bold pattern scenario, I've had so many clients who have been in this scenario and I've talked to them like, okay, what do you, do you have anything in your life that you feel really stuck in? And I've had people feeling like they're stuck in singleness or maybe they're stuck in a relationship and they can't get out or maybe they're stuck in a career or maybe they're just stuck in a season of life that they don't necessarily want to be in and they're trying to rationalize and move forward. But that's been hard.
Sara Childers (13:29.857)
that can be associated with that mineral pattern. So these minerals really tell a lot and they're highly tied to our food, which I'm going to talk about, but they're also highly, highly, highly tied to our emotions and our state of consciousness and the stress that we feel in our own bodies. Because when we are stressed, our body doesn't know the difference between us being stressed about work or being stressed about family and running away from a bear. So.
Either way, when it feels stress, it's going to prepare your body by using up certain minerals in order to deal with that stress.
Sara Childers (14:08.791)
So some lifestyle things other than just stress that deplete minerals can be things like over consumption, kind of like I mentioned earlier with myself, that's something that I struggled with is watching too many videos, like YouTube videos, being an over consumer as far as like learning is concerned. So having like too many inputs, like if you wake up, put on an educational podcast, then you might look.
watch a little YouTube videos and go to work and do your work and consume things that way. And then when you get home, you're consuming more. That can be another thing. People pleasing can also be another issue when someone is spreading themselves way too thin and not having their own boundaries that can actually deplete their minerals.
Sara Childers (14:53.761)
Blue light exposure, so having too much exposure to blue light can actually cause your cortisol to rise. And when you make cortisol, your body uses up lot of magnesium, sodium, and potassium. So that can often cause your minerals to be depleted. And other things, not necessarily food related, but still intake related can be things like tap water. Tap water having a lot of minerals that we don't need.
in it and lot of heavy metals and contaminants in it, at the same time being really low in the minerals that we do need. So having a lot of what we don't, not having enough of what we do need, and inhibiting the absorption of good minerals is something that tap water can actually do. I have an entire video on water quality that you can go and watch. If you're interested, it's the last episode of this podcast.
Sara Childers (16:01.015)
kind of sticking to the theme of emotions and lifestyle, what a lot of people don't realize when they have abnormal mineral levels is that not only do your emotions affect your minerals, but your minerals can affect your emotions. So for example, when someone's stressed, their body uses up magnesium, sodium, and potassium, and that can actually be depleted because of the emotions that you're having. But,
On the flip side, your body can also be influenced by your lack of minerals and that can cause different psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, or just feeling kind of aggressive sometimes.
Things like zinc and iron deficiencies can be associated with anxiety. And a lot of times when we're able to replenish that, we're able to put our body into a good homeostasis and we no longer feel as anxious. Another big thing I see is women having high amounts of copper in their system and copper is a mineral as well that's tested on the HTMA test. So many times when we've been on
birth control or a non-hormonal IUD that's made out of copper or when we've had unfiltered water from the tap, maybe we have copper pipes, when we've been exposed to what I call bio-unavailable copper, that can often trigger us and make us have a lot of different issues with depression and anxiety. That's actually an effect of things like birth control is you have a large accumulation of un-
bound copper in the body and that accumulates and causes estrogen to bind to that copper and estrogen stays in the body and it accumulates and it causes you to not only have PMS type symptoms but it can also cause different issues such as feeling very anxious or feeling honestly having a bit of psychosis like having depressive episodes or just feeling
Sara Childers (18:11.583)
really enraged, especially at certain times of the month when your estrogen is already rising, when it gets even higher than it should be, and you just feel like you're having this PMS rage, oftentimes that's because you might have an accumulation of copper, unbound copper, in your system. When we eat copper, say we ate some, like a yogurt bowl with bee pollen, because bee pollen has copper in it. It has
bound copper in it. has bioavailable copper in it. Say we eat some of that healthy good copper, it's bound to a protein called cerebroplasmin and that bound copper is able to be utilized by the body. But when we are exposed to these more synthetic coppers that aren't bound to that protein, that gives way for it to bind to estrogen and then accumulate in the liver.
So that's just a few examples of how minerals can actually affect your emotions.
Sara Childers (19:13.197)
That's another reason why so many psychologists use the HTMA test when they work with clients.
Sara Childers (19:27.445)
And sometimes it can be a chicken or the egg situation. like, you know, am I having these mineral deficiencies because of my emotions or did my emotions cause these mineral deficiencies? It's really hard to say, but I will say when we're intentional about adding minerals back into the diet, things tend to go a lot better. We're able to use the restroom more regularly and get rid of any bound copper or unbound copper that might be in the body.
when we're able to have a better working nervous system, we see things a bit clearer, we're able to rationalize things a bit better, and we find that the more we work on our minerals in our diet, the better we feel on a daily basis, and it kind of stops that cycle of, okay, I'm stressed, now my minerals are low, my minerals are low, and now I'm stressed. It kind of turns that on its head.
Sara Childers (20:30.175)
And even beyond sodium and potassium, there are lot of different mineral ratios in the body that do a lot for our entire body in general.
So let me go through the different mineral ratios with you real quick and just show you what all they do.
Sara Childers (20:55.061)
So your calcium to phosphorus ratio actually tells you if you're in a parasympathetic state or a sympathetic state, which basically means is your body stressed and overworking or is it past the point of burnout and it's in rest and digest and everything is being sluggish.
Sara Childers (21:13.013)
Your sodium to potassium ratio kind of tells you whether you're in like chronic stress or are you acutely stressed or is it balanced?
Sara Childers (21:25.611)
your calcium to potassium ratio really tells if your thyroid is underactive or overactive.
Sara Childers (21:38.997)
your zinc to copper ratio shows if you are having copper imbalance or if you have balance. So the thing about zinc and copper is copper attaches to estrogen in the body when it's not bound. Zinc.
actually competes for absorption in the body to copper, so they kind of like are competing to be absorbed in the body. And zinc actually helps to make testosterone. So zinc is a really good representation of testosterone, while copper is a good representation of estrogen in the body. So we look at those ratios to see which is higher and which one you're more prone to have.
Sara Childers (22:23.617)
Your sodium to magnesium ratio really tells if your adrenals are being sluggish or not, or if they're overworking. And that's because your adrenals use magnesium and sodium when they make cortisol and adrenaline and all those other wonderful hormones.
Sara Childers (22:42.541)
Calcium to magnesium actually shows us what your blood sugar is doing. If you have a low blood sugar or a high blood sugar, if your calcium to magnesium is imbalanced, you are likely to have some issues with that.
Sara Childers (23:04.833)
And then your copper to iron ratio actually tells us if you are having, if it's too high, it'll be more bacterial like infections, or if it's too low, it will be more prone towards viral infections. minerals in the body tell us a lot. And what I think is so interesting is when we think about our hormones and when we think about wanting to change our hormone or our thyroid health or our gut health, we look at those certain hormones.
and the symptoms we have from those hormones first. And we don't really think about the why. And what I like to do with my clients is we ask why until we can't ask why anymore. So for example, if you feel like you're having horrible PMS symptoms, if your digestion's slow, if you have fatigue, chronic fatigue, yes, we can check your hormones and you might see that your estrogen's a bit high, maybe testosterone's low, progesterone's low, and you're having less than one bowel movement a day. When we keep asking,
When we keep asking why until we can't ask why anymore, it usually leads us to minerals. What you need to know is that hormones and symptoms from hormones and hormonal imbalances, that is the last stop on the train. What actually happened first to get all of this off track is that you were deficient in minerals or you were using up minerals faster than they were coming in and that causes you to have fatigue.
It also can cause you, especially if you're low in potassium and magnesium, it can cause your digestion to slow down and therefore your liver gets compromised because you're not detoxing and getting rid of things that need to be gotten rid of in the body via stool. And so your toxic load builds up because you're not pooping regularly and you start to have hormonal imbalances because you have maybe accumulation of estrogen or something like that and it causes your hormones to suffer.
or you are very stressed and you're using up minerals way faster than they're coming in. So not only does your digestion slow down and that cause hormonal disruptions in and of itself, but it can also cause adrenal fatigue and your adrenal glands to become exhausted. And that causes that chronic fatigue that you might feel on a daily basis. And as time goes on, it also ends up suppressing the thyroid. So you end up having a slowed down thyroid and you might
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end up having even issues with underactive thyroid that ends up being hypothyroidism and you don't have a lot of energy, your metabolism is slow because your thyroid is your metabolism organ and you don't burn a lot of calories at rest because your body is depleted of the minerals that it needs. So as you can see, this has a cascading effect on the body but it all started with your minerals being too low. So I want to go over some really tangible and easy ways
to add minerals into your diet. I already talked a little bit about what depletes you of minerals and I think that's the first thing you actually need to look at is am I stressed all the time? Do I not sleep good? Am I over consuming information? Am I having too much blue light exposure? And do I spread myself too thin? Those are things that you need to think about but once you have thought about those things, once you've rationalized those things and made a plan to balance your life,
Then let's look at your food and here is how we can increase your minerals via food.
Sara Childers (26:45.293)
First let's talk about nutrient density. So this is important that you know before we even talk about food because this gives us some back story or some groundwork to work with. So nutrient density is what we want to look for when we are putting foods into our diet. And what I mean by nutrient density is that a food will have high vitamins and minerals in it and it can still have high calories and protein and fat.
But we want to include foods in our diet that maybe per kilogram or per gram, they have a lot of vitamins and minerals in them. And when I was in dietician school, they actually taught us that nutrient density meant that something had a lot of vitamins and minerals in it, but it had really low calories. And that's not right, that's not correct, and that only gives you vegetables. And you need much more than vegetables to survive and thrive. So in any other functional medicine, functional nutrition therapy setting,
we will actually identify really good healthy foods as foods that are nutrient dense, that have a lot of minerals in them and vitamins in them, even if they are not necessarily low calorie.
Sara Childers (28:02.817)
Some easy things that I love that have a lot of minerals in them are gonna be things that first focus on your major four minerals that I talked about earlier. So things that have calcium in them, things that have sodium or magnesium or potassium in them. Especially those three minerals, magnesium, sodium and potassium that we are usually deficient in. This is something that I always recommend to clients. Like I can work with a client and not even do a hair test on them anymore because...
which we still do it because it's great to see and there's a lot of nuances and stuff in there. But I know right off the bat before we even get a hair test that I want people to eat things that are mineral rich, especially rich in things like sodium, potassium and magnesium.
Sara Childers (28:49.505)
things like bone broth. Bone broth has a lot of good calcium in it, but also a lot of good sodium in it as well. High quality salts are gonna be super important. So going way better than just table salt, doing things like Redmond's real salt. Some people like the Celtic salt. You could do that Baja gold salt that David Brekka loves.
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that Gary Breca loves.
Lemon juice. So lemon juice actually doesn't really have that many minerals in it, but it really helps with clearing the liver and making room for more minerals in the body. I personally love fermented foods. Fermented foods have a lot of minerals in them. And what a lot of people don't realize is the way that you prepare your foods matters. And when we have fermented foods, the minerals and vitamins in those fermented foods are more readily available than they would be if that food wasn't fermented. So for example,
When we talk about fermentation, usually the first thing you think about is yogurt or sauerkraut or kimchi. Those are all really, except for the yogurt, the kimchi and the sauerkraut are really high fiber foods. And when we ferment those foods, we're actually releasing a lot of minerals in a good way. We're making those minerals more bioavailable so they're more absorbable in the body. The next thing that
we look at when we are helping with our minerals and how much bioavailable minerals are in a food is sprouting. So soaking and sprouting. If you are someone who likes beans or peas or lentils or chickpeas or even even things like oatmeal, soaking your beans, peas or oatmeal or grains actually helps.
make the minerals in that food more bioavailable. So really good option if we're thinking of, you know, I already eat a lot of these foods. I just want to make them even healthier. Like if in the fall you eat a lot of beans, you do a lot of soups, a lot of chilies, make sure you're just soaking your beans overnight. And that releases a lot of, or it releases a lot of phyto.
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estrogens that could build up in the body so that does not get in your food, but it also helps with making the minerals more bioavailable as well.
Sara Childers (31:26.335)
Animal based foods will always have lot of either calcium, sometimes sodium and magnesium in them. Things like turkey, chicken, fish, those have tons of magnesium in them and help the body to relax and restore.
Fruits and coconut water are a way that I like to get in lot of potassium in my diet. That's why so many times when I talk about diet with my clients and we get to the subject of carbs, I don't like to cut out carbs because you need to have some room for carbs in your diet in order to get in some really potassium rich fruits and vegetables that help with replenishing those stores. So most vegetables I eat are root vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, things that have a good bit of potassium in them.
or I'll reach for a fruit that has a lot of potassium in it, and that really helps me to keep my nutrient stores up without having to constantly supplement.
aloe vera juice and herbs also have a lot of potassium in them as well as sometimes sodium if you're adding in a really good salt to them and I'll do that sometimes I'll add salt to my teas and stuff but they also have a lot of like micronutrients in them so like micro minerals that you don't pay a lot of attention to. Animal based foods will have a lot of good minerals in them like boron and choline whereas other herbs will have
minerals in them such as zinc.
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Zinc is also found in lot of animal foods, even more so than plant foods.
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Of course, filtered water so you're not getting all those contaminants from tap water.
I think this is why liver was or is so popular is because liver is like taking a multivitamin. It's super mineral rich. Now you have to be careful of where you get the liver because you don't want it to be contaminated. You don't want it to have a lot of heavy metals in it because that will transfer to you. And a lot of times our liver, when it's healthy, it's really healthy, but when it's not healthy, it's really not healthy. And it has a lot of things in it that we don't need.
But liver, when it's healthy, when it comes from a healthy cow or healthy animal, it doesn't have to be a cow, it can be a chicken or whatnot, but when it comes from a healthy animal, it's much more likely to be really nutrient dense and also not have a lot of toxins in it. But that is one of the biggest reasons why liver has become so popular in the crunchy culture in the late years.
But it's also a really ancestral food. People have been eating liver for thousands of years in order to get all the nutrients they need. But I think it is important to take into consideration that, you know, in ancient times when people were eating a lot of liver, they did not have all the contaminants and all the synthetics and all of the heavy metal exposure that we have now. So now we just have to be more careful with our actual source.
And then another mineral that a lot of people, or it's not a mineral, another supplement that has become very popular in recent years is Shilajit. And this is a supplement, I'm pretty sure it might be derived from like lava rock, but I could be wrong. Shilajit.
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is found in supplement form and it has a lot of minerals in it that are bioavailable, but it also has fulvic acid or humic acid, I'm pretty sure, maybe both of them. It has a binder in it, so something that actually binds to heavy metals, that's supernatural, and it draws it out of the body so that there's more room for good minerals and not the bad. So less heavy metals, more good minerals that you need. I've gotten a few people on catalyzed,
SheLaGite and it's worked really well. I'll try to add what SheLaGite I like in my email newsletter this week. I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but I'll put that in there if you want to sign up in the link below for my email list.
Sara Childers (36:12.503)
So really when we're thinking about a mineral rich diet, we want things that are animal based mostly for our protein, but going beyond just the muscle meats, maybe getting into the bone broths and livers. Those are all really mineral rich. And when they come from an animal, they're super bioavailable, more bioavailable than if it were from a plant. So the body actually recognizes that version of that nutrient and it absorbs it and uses it even more efficiently than if it were from a plant.
but I think it's important to still have a balanced diet. So we're having our animal proteins, we're having our animal derived nutrient dense foods like liver or bone broth, but we're also having some healthy carbs in our diet that are essential things like citrus, fruits, roots, vegetables of any sort, whether that's beets, potatoes, carrots, whatnot, turnips, parsnips, whatever you can dream up of, roots are going to be really mineral rich.
And then if you do things like beans or lentils or oats or any grain based foods or legume based foods, you'll want to soak those, soak or sprout those so that the minerals in them are more available and more absorbable in the body. And then beyond that, we do of course love the vegetables. We want to have some vegetables in our diet, but I will say there are some fats that you can include like of course olive oil,
animal-based fats that you might cook with, coconut oil, those are really mineral rich. And notice I'm not mentioning anything like gluten or wheat. I would have to say like the biggest thing that you get from this podcast episode is that your food counts and what you put in your body counts. And you should always take into consideration when you're making a meal that you don't just want to make this a meal that tastes good. You actually want it to be mineral rich.
so that it serves you really well. And when you're eating a diet that serves you really well, you're just, you're not going to have enough room for things like wheat-based foods with a lot of gluten, because those things are mineral depleted, but calorie dense. So the exact opposite of what you want. And there's not a lot of room for processed foods because once you start eating mineral rich foods,
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you stay fuller longer, also your blood sugar's better. Things are getting inside the cells to be used by the body more efficiently because that's what minerals do. It takes hormones and nutrients that aren't inside the cells, takes them into the cells, and is able to perform its cellular processes a lot better once it's had those minerals. So when we're eating a diet, we want it to be mineral rich. That's the first thing we're looking at. In our next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more about
blood sugar and protein breakdown in macros, but I really want people to focus on nutrient density before they even look at their macros, before they even look at the amount of calories that they're eating, because if you are eating a diet that is nutrient depleted, you're not gonna move the needle with your health, even if you do follow a certain amount of calories or try to get in a certain amount of protein. It matters your source.
You can't expect to have like synthetic protein powder and protein bars and meet your calorie and protein goals and also be healthy if you're constantly eating things that are synthetic and not rich in minerals. So that is the biggest part of this episode. If you found this helpful, let me know. Leave a comment below, rate and review on YouTube or if you're on the podcast platforms of Apple or Spotify, please leave with me a rating.
and tell me what you think about the podcast and also tell me what you want to learn. I feel like minerals are very comprehensive. I could do deep dives into any mineral that you would want to do. I'm gonna talk a lot in the future about PCOS and thyroid health and hormones in relation to your minerals, but I feel like this episode is a really good overview of like, are minerals, where are minerals found, what do the different mineral ratios do in the body, what depletes your body of minerals.
So yeah, tell me what you think.
Sara Childers (40:29.643)
And if you're interested in getting a hair test done and seeing if you have all the minerals you need or if you have any toxicities of heavy metals or any signs of toxicity of heavy metals, go to my website below and purchase an HTMA test. You can find it on the work with me page or on my homepage. What you do is you order a test. I send it to you along with instructions.
Then we meet in about two weeks later and go over your results and I give you a protocol and it's super comprehensive and a great way to just see what your body is doing at a 3000 foot view. When we look at your minerals, we're able to see what direction should we go from here because a lot of times minerals are just the starting point. But when we actually test them and we're able to see what they're doing, we're able to also see like, okay, what needs to change?
What should we be doing different? And also, I think this is interesting to add, but I've had this happen before and it happens to a lot of other clients. If you have mineral tests done and you're doing all the things to actually replenish your minerals, but your minerals don't go up at all, and you're also supporting your lifestyle and you've slowed down, you're not consuming as much, you're working on the foundations of your lifestyle, if they're still low,
That is a sign that you might have a parasite or mold. And in that case, you do need to do a protocol for it. But that is another episode for another day. That episode is to come. Please subscribe and I'll see y'all in the next one.
