Welcome to another edition of Common Ground Online. Here's what's in this week's edition:
In recent studies, researchers reported that the symptoms of bipolar disorder went away when people took EMPowerplus.1,2,3 The lesson? Bipolar disorder could be a nutritional deficiency syndrome! But how can simple nutritional deficiency have such a huge effect on health?
Organization of the Human Body
 To answer this question, let’s begin at the beginning. Our bodies are made up of several layers of structure and function. Each of these levels interacts and supports the next level of structure. This is a key concept, that the level below supports the structure and function above. It is similar to the way that a footing supports the foundation of a house, and the foundation supports the framing, and so on. However, unlike a house, your body’s ‘footing’ requires constant reinforcement or nourishment through the diet.
A healthy diet satisfies three needs: it provides fuel to power the body’s functions, it supplies raw materials that the body needs to make its own molecules, and it supplies essential nutrients that the body cannot make for itself from any raw material.
The lowest level of organization in the human body is the chemical level. This level includes individual atoms, compounds (simple combinations of atoms like water), and substances essential for maintaining life, like the ingredients of EMPowerplus. The foods that we eat must be broken down to these levels before they can be utilized. The body then uses these chemicals to build molecules. Molecules are larger and more complex structures such as proteins, enzymes, fats, and sugars. The body uses some of these to make even larger molecules like DNA.
Chemicals and molecules are organized into the living units that we call cells. Cells are the smallest functioning unit in the living organism. There are more than 200 different types of cells in your body. Among the many kinds of cells in your body you’ll find muscle cells, nerve cells, and blood cells, to name just three.
The next higher level of organization is the tissue level. Tissues are a mixture of cell types and are grouped together to perform a more specific function. Examples of tissues in your body are muscle tissue, connective tissue, and nerve tissue.
Tissues are joined together to form the next level of organization: the organ level. Organs are structures that are composed of two or more different tissues. They have more specialized and specific functions, and usually have identifiable shapes. Examples of organs are the heart, liver, lungs, and the brain.
The system level is the next level of organization in the body. A system is composed of several organs that share a common function. An example of a system is the digestive system, which functions to break foods down to the molecular and chemical level and then absorb it. This system is composed of the mouth, saliva producing glands, called salivary glands, pharynx (throat), esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, rectum, liver, gallbladder, and pancreas. Another example of a system is the central nervous system, which includes the brain.
The highest level is the whole organism. All the systems and parts of the body, functioning with one another, constitute the complete organism – one living individual.4
When you are fully grown, your body will have about 50-60 trillion cells. That’s about 600 times more cells than there are stars in the Milky-way galaxy. Now think for just a minute, every single cell has about one quadrillion molecules, that’s about 10,000 times the number of stars in the Milky-way. Now realize that every single cell needs to be nourished every single day. That’s an incredible amount of chemical nutrients that your body will need just to maintain itself! If you are still growing, you may need even more.
So what causes deficiencies in the brain?
Deficiencies are caused by malnutrition, which is a diet missing one or more essential nutrients. These deficiencies develop in stages over a period of time. The first stage occurs when the essential nutrients don’t get into the body’s cells.
There are three basic ways that this happens. First, we don’t get enough vitamins and minerals in our diet. We often eat on the run, making poor diet choices. There is also some evidence that our good foods don’t have as many nutrients as they used to. Second, sometimes our bodies don’t absorb nutrients very well. The lining of the intestines can become irritated, which reduces how well they can absorb nutrients. Conditions like this are known as irritable bowel syndrome or IBS. Third, some conditions can cause nutrient loss. Women, especially, experience nutrient loss during their period, but pregnancy is the most significant condition that takes nutrients away from the mother’s body for the developing baby.
When one or more of these things happen, the levels of chemical nutrients are lowered in the cells. Cell functions that are based on a given nutrient are decreased. Certain enzymes will have fewer molecules to act on. Some enzymes cannot function at all because they will be missing vital components.
When enzymes don’t function properly, the cells aren’t able to perform their role. Whole tissues now have impaired function. The normal operation of structure and function, messages and signals, is impaired. This can lead to observable or measurable symptoms.5 This pattern can happen in all parts of the body, including the brain.
Evidence of Deficiencies
The largest factor contributing to deficiencies is poor diet choices. The US Department of Agriculture has documented the percentage of people who don’t meet even the minimum intakes for important nutrients.6
A second factor contributing to deficiency is that foods contain fewer vitamins and minerals today than they used to. Evidence from several sources shows that nutrient density has dropped in foods in the last 30-50 years.7,8,9
Health conditions that reduce the body’s ability to absorb  nutrients, such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS have a huge overlap of mental illness symptoms. 10,11,12
Additional evidence indicates that individuals who suffer from mental illnesses have significantly lower levels of micro and macro elements in hair, plasma, cell, urine, and tissue.13,14,15,16
Getting Enough Nutrients
We mentioned earlier that one purpose of the diet was to supply essential nutrients that the body is not able to make for itself from any raw material. If these essential components are missing or are too low in the diet, many cellular functions slow down or don’t work right, including those in brain cells. Even if we made better diet choices, there is evidence that our foods have less of these essential nutrients than they once did. This makes the need for a nutritional supplement obvious. And, like recent studies have established, supplementing can reverse the symptoms of deficiency syndromes and improve the function of the human body, including the brain.
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1 Kaplan, B. J., Simpson, J. S. A., Ferre, R. C., Gorman, C., McMullen, D., & Crawford, S. G. (2001). Effective mood stabilization in bipolar disorder with a chelated mineral supplement. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 62, 936-944.
2 Popper, C. W. (2001). Do vitamins or minerals (apart from lithium) have mood-stabilizing effects? [Commentary]. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 62, 933-935.
3 Simmons, M. (2002).Nutritional Approach to Bipolar Disorder. Letter to the Editor. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 64, 338.
4 Tortora G. J., Anagnostakos N.P. Principles of Anatomy and Physiology. 6th Edition. Harper & Row, New York. 1990.
Alberts B., Bray D., Lewis J., Raff M., Roberts K., Watson J.D. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 3rd Edition. Garland Publishing, Inc. New York. 1994.
Campbell N.A. Biology. 2nd Edition. Benjamin/ Cummings Publishing company, Inc. Redwood City, California. 1990.
5 Modified from Olson RE: "Pharmacology of nutrients and nutritional disease," in Principles of Pharmacology, edited by PL Munson. New York, Munson, Chapman, and Hall, 1995.
6 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Community Nutrition Mapping Project. http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=10709
7 Mayer, A B. Historical Changes in the Mineral Content of Fruit and Vegetables. British Food Journal 99(6). 1997. 207- 211.
8 Lyne, J.W. and Barak, P., Are Depleted Soils Causing a Reduction in the Mineral Content of Food Crops? University of Wisconsin – Madison. 2000. http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~jwlyne/poster/SSSA_2000_poster.html
9 Davis DR, Epp MD, Riordan HD. Changes in USDA food composition data for 43 garden crops, 1950 to 1999. J Am Coll Nutr. 2004 Dec;23(6):669-82.
10 Bass C., Frequent Digestion Complaints May Point to Psychiatric Disorders. General hospital Psychiatry Jan 1999.
11 Lydiard RB, Fossey MD, Marsh W, Ballenger JC (1993). Prevalence of psychiatric disorders in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Psychosomatics 34, 229-34.
12 Garakani A, Win T, Virk S, Gupta S, Kaplan D, Masand PS. Comorbidity of irritable bowel syndrome in psychiatric patients: a review. Am J Ther 2003 Jan-Feb;10(1):61-7.
13 Kozielec T, Starobrat-Hermelin B, Kotkowiak L. Deficiency of certain trace elements in children with hyperactivity. Psychiatr Pol. 1994 May-Jun;28(3):345-53.
14 Zhai ST. 23 hair trace elements measurement in patients with schizophrenia. Zhonghua Shen Jing Jing Shen Ke Za Zhi. 1990 Dec;23(6):332-8, 383.
15 Maes M, D'Haese PC, Scharpe S, D'Hondt P, Cosyns P, De Broe ME. Hypozincemia in depression. J Affect Disord. 1994 Jun;31(2):135-40.
16 Subhash MN, Padmashree TS, Srinivas KN, Subbakrishna DK, Shankar SK. Calcium and phosphorus levels in serum and CSF in dementia. Neurobiol Aging. 1991 Jul-Aug;12(4):267-9.
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