Nitrogen is the basic element of life – is the basis of both proteins in plants and in our bodies. If there is more nitrogen in the soil, farmers can grow more crops in the same soil, but greater use of the land is devoid of minerals, unless farmers to replace them.Minerals are simple inorganic chemicals required by agencies alive. They act as catalysts of life processes. Plants usually obtain their mineral salts and minerals, trace elements of soil, while animals obtain their food. For example, magnesium plants need for photosynthesis, while magnesium and zinc to produce human hormones and maintaining adequate levels of resistance. There are many minerals that we know are important to human nutrition, but do not know how.Minerals struck me many years ago when I received an audio tape in the mail a complete marketing network. I had tried to take vitamins, but had not noticed any difference except in my urine turned a different color, so he had the idea of nutritional supplementation.The cassette including the famous conference rejected Kill "Doctors Do not Lie" Joel Wallach. His point is that we all suffer from a shortage of minerals and the medical profession that the benefits of our malnutrition. This is an extreme view of the medical profession who have an interest in the population suffer from malnutrition. You are not subscribed to this view that our food is the shortage of minerals. It is flawed because the food is industrialized. Michael Pollan, in his excellent book "A tale of four meals," gives a brief history helps us understand why the loss of minerals in the nitrogen.Before attempt to harvest the invention of nitrogen fixation in the nitrogen supply Land is very limited, although 80% of the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen. Until then, the only way to capture nitrogen and put it on the ground ( "set") so that plants can feed themselves, and ultimately in our bodies, pulses were in the fields. The amount of grain that farmers could grow was severely limited by the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Farmers rotate crops were corn could be grown only once every two years, alternating with years of legumes put back nitrogen and other nutrients. Also cattle grazing and the spread of cattle manure in the fields of new more nutrients.In 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber invented a process to determine the nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into ammonia, which can be used for ammonium nitrate. He developed this technology for the purpose of manufacturing nitrates, explosives for the German war effort in WWI. He also developed toxic gases like ammonia, chlorine and Zyklon B, which was used in the concentration camps of Hitler. Only later, his invention find use in a agriculture.Michael Pollan mentions 1947 as the year in the era of industrialization of food began. A munitions factory in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, that the Haber-Bosch process (Bosch commercialized the process used) nitrogen-fixing trial was a large surplus of ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient in the manufacture of explosives. To use this surplus is changed to make fertilizer. The Ministry of Agriculture decided to ammonium nitrate as fertilizer in farmland.The old methods of crop rotation and use depends on grazing animals and vegetables with nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil was not necessary to restore fertility after farmers could buy stock in the form of ammonium fertilizer.If Haber had not found this form of artificial addition of nitrogen in land use was the population explosion in relation to industrial expansion is not done. Pollan refers to a book by Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth, estimated that two in five people living today could not live without the invention of Haber. The rates of the invention of the determination of nitrogen as the most important session century.The end of the rotation and the relentless, intensive use of land for the production of one or two crops (mainly corn and soybeans) that are enabled ammonium nitrate fertilizer means that the minerals are extracted from the soil and if they turn away, only to return artificial and inconsistent by farmers. Generally, apart from the nitrogen in ammonium nitrate, which only started up again a few minerals, potassium and phosphorus are the most important. They can also make calcium, sulfur, magnesium and some boron, manganese,