Fulvic Minerals: The Quiet Treasures Hidden in the Earth, and Why Our Bodies Have Forgotten Them

A Word Before We Begin

There exists, beneath the meadows and the forest floors, beneath the roots of the ancient pines that cling to the slopes above the valley, a substance so old and so small that the human eye cannot grasp it, yet without which no green thing would grow and no living creature would draw proper nourishment from its food. I speak here of the fulvic minerals, and I wish to set down, in a careful and unhurried manner, what I have come to understand about them over many years of walking the land and reading what the soil scientists and the old farmers have written. It is not a fashionable subject in our time, and perhaps that is precisely why it deserves our attention now, in this hour when so many people feel that something essential is missing from their daily bread, quite literally.

What the Earth Has Prepared Over Millennia

One must first understand that the fulvic minerals are not something which was invented in a workshop or mixed together in some bright laboratory. They are the end result of a process so long and so patient that it makes our human lifetimes appear as nothing more than the blinking of an eye. When plants die, when leaves fall in autumn and sink into the dark ground, when roots wither and bark crumbles, there begins a slow transformation carried out by countless small living beings in the soil. Over hundreds and thousands of years, this old plant matter is broken apart, reformed, pressed, warmed by the earth itself, and from it emerges a dark, rich substance which the soil researchers call humus. And within this humus, as a kind of golden thread running through the whole fabric, one finds the fulvic portion. It is a family of very small molecules, carrying within their structure a great many mineral elements in a form which living things can actually take up and use. Without this carrier, many of the minerals in the ground would simply sit there, locked in stone, unreachable by root or by gut.

The Question of Why They Matter to the Human Body

Now, the reader may ask, and rightly so, why should a substance from the deep soil concern a person sitting at a kitchen table in Bern or Zürich, eating their morning meal? The answer lies in a simple truth which our grandparents knew without needing to read about it in any book: the food which grows in rich, living soil carries within it the full measure of what the body needs. The fulvic minerals act as a kind of small vessel, a transport means, which takes the iron, the magnesium, the zinc, the copper, the trace elements, and brings them in a gentle, dissolved form into the cells of the plant. When we eat that plant, or the meat of the animal which ate that plant, we receive those minerals in a state which our belly and our inner passages can recognise and welcome. It is not a forceful taking, not a chemical imposition, but rather a quiet handing-over, as one neighbour passes a tool to another across a garden fence. The fulvic part makes the minerals water-soluble, small enough to pass through the walls of the gut, and it does so without any harsh alteration of their nature.

What Has Changed in Our Fields and Pastures

I must here speak of a sorrow which many who work the land in our country have observed with their own eyes over the last fifty or sixty years. The soils have grown tired. Where once a farmer could count upon the dark richness of his field to feed his family and his village with strong grain and sturdy vegetables, today the same field, worked with heavy machines and fed only with three or four isolated substances from a factory sack, produces plants which look full but carry within them a diminished store of the deeper minerals. The fulvic content of the soil has fallen in many places, because the slow, patient building of humus has been interrupted, replaced by a quick feeding which gives the plant its sugar and its size but not its inner completeness. The old alpine meadows, where the cows still graze upon a hundred different grasses and herbs, still hold more of this living wealth than the flat, monoculture fields below. This is not nostalgia speaking. This is what the soil measurements show, year after year.

Where One May Still Find the Fulvic Richness

There remain, thank the good earth, places and means by which a person can still bring these small treasures into their daily life. The ancient deposits, called by the researchers shilajit in the eastern lands or sometimes humic shale in our own language, contain concentrated fulvic material formed over geological ages. Certain waters, drawn from deep springs where the rock has been in long conversation with ancient organic matter, carry a measure of these dissolved minerals. And there exist, in our time, preparations which are drawn carefully from such deposits, cleaned, and offered in a form which a person may take alongside their meals. I shall speak of one such matter further below, but first let me set down a small overview for the reader who wishes to see the picture at a glance.

A Thoughtful Pause Regarding the Inner Workings of Nourishment

I wish to say here, with all the care which the subject demands, that the taking of minerals is not a matter of swallowing a powder and believing the work is done. The inner passages of our body, the long winding way from the mouth to the deepest reaches of the gut, must be in a state of readiness to receive what we offer them. If the natural juices which break apart our food are too few, if the gentle rhythm of the belly is disturbed by haste, by cold food eaten standing, by too little chewing, then even the finest mineral preparation will pass through without giving its full gift. This is a matter of rhythm, of warmth, of sitting down and allowing the body to do its ancient work in peace. And it is also, in some cases, a matter of giving the inner processes a small and sensible support.

On the Matter of Enzimlex and the Support of the Digestive Work

In this connection I wish to mention a preparation which I have encountered in my reading and which has been spoken of to me by persons whose judgement in matters of natural nourishment I trust. It bears the name Enzimlex, and it is offered as a support for the digestive work, that is to say, it aims to help the inner passages do their task of breaking apart and drawing out the goodness from what we have eaten, so that the minerals and the other small treasures in our food, including the fulvic elements, may actually reach the places in the body where they are needed. I do not write of this lightly, and I do not wish to make grand claims which I cannot verify with my own two hands. What I can say is that the preparation is designed to stand alongside one’s daily meals as a quiet helper, and that it is to be obtained solely through the official place of distribution, which is found at the address enzimlex.biz I note this because I have seen, in our age of scattered and careless commerce, that genuine things are often surrounded by imitations, and the reader who wishes to try such a support should go to the one true source and not to some uncertain middleman.

The Small List of Everyday Practices Which Help the Minerals Reach Us

Since I have spoken much of what the earth provides, let me also set down a few plain practices, learned from my mother and from old country doctors of the kind we once had in every valley, which help the body to take up what the soil has given:

• Eat the vegetables and grains which grow in your own region and season, for they carry the mineral signature of the ground you walk upon, and your body knows this ground.
• Chew each mouthful slowly and thoroughly, until the food is warm and soft before it passes downward, for this first work in the mouth spares the deeper passages much labour.
• Take your meals in quiet, seated, without the distraction of glowing screens, so that the body can gather its juices and its strength toward the single task of turning food into life.
• Include, where possible, a small portion of naturally fermented foods, the old sauerkraut or the aged cheese of the alpine hut, for these carry living helpers which keep the inner environment in good order.

A Second Look at the Forms and Their Meaning

Let me offer the reader one further table, for I find that when the eye can rest upon a clear arrangement of words, the mind grasps the matter more firmly than through flowing text alone. Here I wish to show how the fulvic minerals differ from their larger cousins, the humic substances, so that no confusion remains.

The Alpine Perspective and a Personal Word

Here in our mountains, where the streams run cold and clear over granite and limestone, where the soil on the high pastures is thin but intensely alive with root and worm and fungal thread, one learns a different relationship to the ground beneath one’s feet. I have walked these paths since I was a boy, and I remember my grandfather telling me that the dark soil was the true wealth of the farmer, more precious than any coin. He did not know the word “fulvic,” and he would have laughed at the thought of buying minerals in a small bottle. But he knew, in his hands and in his taste, that bread baked from grain grown in living earth fed a person differently, more deeply, than bread from tired ground. I believe we are only now, with our instruments and our measurements, arriving at the place where we can name what he already felt. And I believe that in our haste, in our cities of glass and steel, we have forgotten to feed the soil, and in forgetting the soil we have begun to forget ourselves.

Closing Thoughts for the Reader Who Has Stayed Until Here

I do not wish to end upon a note of lamentation, for there is much that can be done, in the small circle of one’s own garden, one’s own kitchen, one’s own daily choices. To seek out the vegetables of a farmer who composts, to drink the water of a good spring when one can find it, to sit down and eat slowly and with gratitude, to perhaps, in certain seasons, give the body a measured support such as I have described above in the matter of Enzimlex and the careful work of digestion: these are no grand gestures, but they are the gestures of a person who remembers that they are made of earth, fed by earth, and return, in the end, to the same patient, dark, and generous ground. The fulvic minerals are small. They are invisible. They ask nothing of us but that we allow them to be present, that we do not poison the soil which makes them, and that we give our bodies the calm and the readiness to receive what is offered. In this, as in so many things, the old ways and the new understanding walk together, and we need only the willingness to follow.