Our health is directly linked to the health of our soils. If we deplete the earth of minerals without returning them, the loss within the food chain results in an inevitable decline in our own diets. We are what we eat. How can we not be?

We do not commonly recognise how closely linked our behaviour, endeavours and health are linked to the underlying fertility of the soil. Distribution of wild and domestic animals and plants follow patterns of inherent fertility; predisposition to a particular disease of stock is often linked to lack of a certain mineral. So much so that farmers use salt licks or other mineral supplements to ensure good health.

Animal instinct often leads them to the right plant for the nutritional or healing benefits, and many instances of cows leaping the fence to get into a biodynamic or organic property have been recorded, and chimps at London Zoo refused bananas that weren't organic! There have been many trials using animals as they have nothing but instinct to guide their decisions.

Soil security is national security. We have tried to make agriculture like an assembly line, without taking into account the natural cycles and rhythms of nature. Albrecht's research highlighted how rapidly the fertility of an animal - starting with rabbits - became sterile when fed on food not grown on fertile soil. Surveys of conscripts into the US army during wartime showed that good teeth were directly related to fertile soils in the area where the person grew up.

With increased transport, food is moved around the planet and such statistics would no longer hold true - financial status is more likely to indicate ones health or other wise. In recent years the human race has started to show signs of decreasing fertility. Men are no longer reaching the average sperm count, and it has had to be reduced. Couples around the world rely on in-vitro fertilisation to conceive. We do not need to worry about green house effects or ice ages killing us off, our powers of reproduction have already taken a heavy toll on us as a species .

Medical science and the pharmaceutical industry have divorced us further from the true meaning of health, and made it big business. The spiralling numbers of health foods and alternative health practitioners is an indictment of modern medicine. Disease has not been beaten, it just comes in other forms these days. In Zimbabwe the average number of people killed each week by AIDS is 2500. In America 1900 people are killed each week by prescription drugs! They don't make much of that in the media. And where do all those bodies go? Some people die after many weeks, months or even years on toxic cocktails of drugs. Little research has been done on the effects of these drugs on the wider environment, but it is becoming an issue, especially in heavily populated areas.

To see "health" as something apart from ourselves, and not as an intrinsic part of the whole is folly. Too often we have come to acceptance of our true situation by disaster rather than deduction!