 I've tried to make nutrient synergy a very important point, almost the main focus of my channel. Not simply nutrient density, getting a ton of vitamins, minerals and fatty acids, more is not always better. It's about balance. Yes, most people are deficient in nutrients, but they also tend to have excesses and imbalances. For example, you can't just suck down a dozen eggs a day to try to get your omega 3s when eggs tend to have high amounts of omega 6 due to the chickens being fed corn and soy. You can't eat half a pound of liver per day if you think you're copper and B12 deficient because then you're going to get too much iron and vitamin A. This leads us to understanding that it's so incredibly difficult to balance nutrition using supplements, so natural foods tend to be better. There are a lot of easily identifiable deficiencies that can be remedied with the supplement, but ideally in the long term you reduce supplement usage as much as possible sticking to natural foods. And if you're doubting this at all, the mineral wheel will change your mind. The mineral wheel illustrates interactions between certain mineral nutrient elements in soil and in the digestive and metabolic systems of both plant and animal life. This mineral wheel I drew today doesn't have all of them. We have about a dozen here when there's well over two dozen different minerals our body needs. If a mineral has an arrow pointing to another mineral, it means a deficiency of that mineral or interference with its metabolism may be caused by excess of the mineral from whence the arrow originates. So iron and copper are both pointing at each other, which means excess copper can cause iron deficiency, excess iron can cause copper deficiency, and they interfere with each other's metabolism. Most people are familiar with the interaction between sodium and potassium. They're both antagonistic and synergistic. They are pointing at each other, you know, working against and with. But then potassium branches off to manganese and iron and those to branch off to just about everything else. A glance at this wheel suggests frustrating complexity with no realistic way of ever bringing all the minerals into an optimally balanced relationship. It's pretty simple to understand. If you mess with sodium, you're now altering potassium status, and then you're altering iron and manganese status. Iron works with copper, manganese, potassium, phosphorus, and cobalt. Manganese works with calcium, iron, phosphorus, and potassium. So just by messing with sodium, you mess with everything. The point is you mess with one single mineral, it throws everything off. It's wide throughout the history of my YouTube channel. I've never really recommended electrolytes. I've pointed people in the direction of natural sources of minerals and, you know, you have all of these keto clowns shoving electrolyte powders like sodium and potassium down people's throats as opposed to addressing diet and lifestyle problems that are incorrect. You know, sometimes padding your diet with sodium and potassium works temporarily, but it's highly unlikely, I would say impossible, that it will be a long-term solution. It's going to eventually lead to imbalances and deficiencies in many minerals, the most evident one being magnesium, possibly calcium, and then longer-term zinc and copper. Usually those electrolyte minerals, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium are the ones that are thrown off easily and fixed easily. The others take longer to alter, but also longer to fix. That doesn't mean you shouldn't salt your food. You know, I did a video titled, Stop Worrying About Potassium, where I explained that the sodium to potassium ratio in your body is supposed to be roughly one-to-one, and since meat has approximately 1,400 milligrams of potassium and 250 milligrams of sodium, you definitely want to add some salt to your meat. Many people think that just by consuming high-quality animal and plant foods, they're able to achieve all the minerals they need, but that's not always the case. You have soil minerals, depletion, and foods that are high enough in copper and magnesium are really hard to come by. I do like seaweed, which is an excellent source of the electrolyte minerals, potassium, magnesium, even calcium, and it's loaded with iodine. There is a pollution concern with seaweed, so some people do want to stay away, and it is much harder to address each of those electrolytes on an individual basis as opposed to eating seaweed, but it can be done. And this means that the complexity of the mineral wheel can be disregarded, because from a food perspective, the soil mineral content is what we're worried about. The animal or plant can be a filter in a way for balancing minerals, but if there are extreme excesses or deficiencies of minerals in the soil, then whatever was growing or grazing on that land will have the corresponding imbalances and deficiencies. That's why most people are magnesium deficient. That's why most people are copper deficient. The soil simply does not have enough of either mineral. Oysters are a really interesting example of this, and I might do a video on oysters specifically because the mineral content of an oyster can vary tenfold depending on what ocean, what sea it's from. And we can't really expect every farmer and rancher to test their soil for mineral balance, although when I have a farm, I'll do that. And there are plenty of farmers and ranchers out there using mineral supplements for their cattle. But whether it's laziness, not caring, probably mostly not understanding, the vast majority of food requires us to find an alternative solution. I've gotten several hair mineral analysis done, and the actual way I originally found out about the mineral wheel was a book titled Trace Elements, Hair and Mineral Analysis. There's a lot of companies online that offer testing for around $100. Hopefully I can get it for you guys from myself in the future. You just send in a sample of your hair, and they'll analyze the mineral content. This tells you balance, are you deficient, or do you have an excess of a certain mineral? And even more importantly, if you have toxic levels of certain things like aluminum, lead, arsenic, or mercury. Bear in mind, supplementing at the time of the hair mineral analysis can't throw things off somewhat, like if you took a ton of zinc and then cut your hair, it could alter the tests. And the worst part about this is mainstream nutrition ignores most minerals. And mineral imbalance destroyed my health in the form of iron overload. And there's other common issues like hypercalcemia causing insomnia. When people have massive stores of calcium from their past diets, they don't have enough phosphorus, they don't have enough magnesium, they're not getting enough vitamin D, and things get very, very difficult to fix when you've had lifelong imbalances of certain minerals. So hopefully you can use this information to optimize your mineral status in your personal diet. If you guys could please like the video, drop me a comment down below. And above all, share the video on social media if you can. If you do want to support me further, you know how to do so down in the description below. Thanks for joining me today, guys, and enjoy the rest of your day.