The Bigger Picture: Many of us don't have time for vegetables in our lives. All the washing and chopping is too time and labour intensive to be welcome when we are preparing a meal. Most of us have just minutes to get a meal together among pangs of hunger and exhaustion.
Nevertheless, we are really missing out. Vegetables have water, vitamins and minerals. They are crunchy and sweet. The value they give us on a daily - even per meal - basis is significant.
We get most of our energy from bulk nutrients - carbohydrates, proteins and some fats. However, we need other minerals and vitamins to enable all the very subtle processes of our bodies to work properly.
We will only function well if our cells are functioning well.
Thus, health really comes down to chemistry, and for every chemical reaction that takes place in our bodies, we need a catalyst - a chemical without which the reaction cannot take place. The trace minerals perform this functions for us.
It is important to consider where we get our minerals from; after all, we cannot just go eat a rock! Nevertheless, all the minerals we need do actually come from rocks and dirt.
We get plants to take up the minerals from the soil for us, and convert them to a form we can eat. And so, we need to eat plants, and vegetables in particular. The dark green leafy ones are like gold dust.
Different plants will pick up different minerals, and so variety is important. Furthermore, the distribution of a mineral is not the same throughout a plant, so whole foods are important.
You may have a more richness of minerals in the skin, as with potatoes for example, than in the fleshy part of their bodies. The dark green leaves of cauliflower are abundant in minerals.
When we peel our potatoes and rescue the cauliflower from its leaves, we are simply cutting off and throwing away the most valuable parts of the plants.
In the same way, mechanical harvesting and processing lose us valuable minerals. "Quick oats" have the essentially important germ and bran removed to make it quicker and easier to cook the grain, all the while losing the minerals we need.
Wheat, however, has got to be the best example. By milling grain down to only the part that makes white flour, we not only lose excellent sources of zinc and magnesium, but also vital enzymes contained in the plant that make it easier to digest.
The widespread health problems and difficulties showing up in relation to wheat are no doubt linked to how much more difficult the convenience product is to process in our bodies.
As plants store minerals, so do our bodies. Bones are the obvious example. Although we often think of bones as dead poles to lean upon - similar to the beams of our house - they are in fact composed of living tissues in which certain minerals are stored (that is, calcium in combination with phosphate).
Anyone close to someone suffering from osteoporosis will scarcely deny the importance of calcium to our health. However, calcium has far more important functions than simply structure strength.
Without calcium, we would not be able to make our muscles contract and our nerve impulses would cease to function properly. In addition to providing strength, the calcium we store in our bones serves as a vital reserve to ensure that we maintain correct balances of calcium in our blood and tissues.
Furthermore, you may think I have provided a bad example in calcium, as I began speaking of vegetables and we tend to associate calcium intake with milk and dairy products. In fact, we consume enormous amounts of milk because we've been told it's a good source of calcium. Yet, as a society that drinks more milk than any other, it is startling how we lead the world in calcium deficiency related illnesses.
Milk actually inhibits our ability to absorb calcium requiring us to take in up to three times as much calcium in our diet to deliver some decent level of the mineral!
It might be time we noticed that better sources of calcium might come from elsewhere. Getting calcium from our vegetables makes much more sense.
Although a great supply of minerals is readily available to us simply by incorporating vegetables into our diet, we continue to turn away from these foods due to a lack of desire and motivation.
As a result, we deplete our supplies. Given how well our bodies store minerals, we can go on for some time depleting them.
We don't notice the difference the lack of minerals is making, and it's hard to conceive of how devastating the effects will be. (Even our medics often fail to realise how far-reaching the effects of subtle malnutrition over time can be.)
However, 40 years of depleting our mineral reserves eventually lead to stiffness, muscular and joint pain, and the development of complex illnesses. It all comes down to what you eat!
Shalini Sinha works as a life coach and counsellor and presents the intercultural programme, Mono, on RTÉ Television.