07 Jul You Can Eat Perfectly Clean and Still Be Mineral Deficient – Here’s Why with Caroline Alan
Have you ever looked down at a plate full of vegetables, clean protein, and all the “right” foods, and still felt exhausted, foggy, and bloated by 2pm? Have you ever wondered why your legs cramp in the middle of the night, why your hair is suddenly showing up in the shower drain, or why you can fall asleep but can’t seem to stay asleep no matter what you try?
If any of that sounds familiar, you are not broken, and you are not doing it wrong. I have asked myself those same questions more times than I can count, and over the years I have learned that the answer is almost never just one thing. It is rarely “just your hormones” or “just your thyroid,” even though those are the easy answers we get handed the most.
A few years ago I stumbled onto a piece of the puzzle that I had completely overlooked, even though I thought I understood nutrition pretty well. That piece is minerals. Not the vague “take your vitamins and minerals” kind of minerals we all grew up hearing about, but actual trace minerals, the foundational building blocks our bodies cannot make on their own. I started using Beam Minerals long before I ever met the company’s founder, and long before any kind of partnership existed. I just noticed I felt different. Not a jolt, not a buzz, just a quiet sense that my body had been missing something it desperately needed.
That is what led me to bring Caroline Alan back on the show. Caroline is the founder of Beam Minerals and the author of a brand new book called The Mineral Reset, published by Hay House. If you are a midlife woman who feels like you are doing everything right and still coming up short on energy, sleep, and resilience, this conversation is for you.
Level up your health with BEAM Minerals HERE https://midlifeconversations.com/beam and use code NATALIEJILL to save!
Why Minerals Are the Foundation, Not a Footnote
We tend to lump vitamins and minerals together in our heads, but they are not the same thing at all. Vitamins are nutrients your body uses. Minerals are elements, the actual structural and functional building blocks that make up everything in the physical world, including every cell in your body. There are roughly 18 to 22 minerals your body specifically relies on, ranging from the macro minerals you have probably heard of, like magnesium, potassium, sodium, and calcium, to lesser known micronutrients like selenium, chromium, copper, and even molybdenum.
Here is the part that surprised me most. Your body can survive without certain vitamins for quite a while. It cannot survive without minerals. They are involved in literally every biosynthesis process happening inside you right now, including how your hormones get produced and used, how your thyroid functions, how your adrenal system manages cortisol, and how your cells generate energy in the first place.
Your Body Works Like a Forest, Not a Car
One of the most useful reframes from this conversation is the idea that we tend to think of our bodies like cars. Something breaks, we take it to the mechanic, they hand us a part, we install it, done. But your body does not actually work that way. It works more like a forest, a living, breathing ecosystem made up of trillions of cells that need a steady, gentle, balanced supply of nutrients over time.
This explains why dumping a huge concentrated dose of a single mineral, like a 1,000 milligram calcium tablet, into your system does not solve a deficiency the way you would expect. A forest does not thrive because someone dumped a wheelbarrow of fertilizer on one patch of ground. It thrives because of small, consistent, balanced inputs delivered in proportion to what the ecosystem actually needs. Trace minerals work the same way, delivered in tiny amounts, measured in parts per million rather than milligrams, and in balanced ratios your cells can actually use.
This single shift in thinking, treating your body like an ecosystem instead of a machine, changes how you think about supplementation altogether. More is not always better. In fact, research has shown that the more concentrated a calcium dose is, the less of it your body actually absorbs, because your system recognizes the overload and works to eliminate the excess rather than use it.
Why Eating Clean Isn’t Enough Anymore
If you eat well and still feel mineral deficient, it is not a personal failure. It is a soil problem. The produce available today, even organic, even from your local farmer’s market, simply does not carry the nutrient density it did a few generations ago. Some estimates suggest you would need to eat several apples today to get the same micronutrients your grandparents got from one.
The reason traces back to how plants grow. A plant pulls minerals out of the soil to build its structure and fuel its growth. In a natural cycle, that plant eventually dies, decomposes, and returns those minerals to the soil for the next generation of plants. Modern agriculture interrupts that cycle. We harvest, transport, and consume food far from where it grew, and the minerals never make their way back into the ground. This has been a documented concern since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, and decades of synthetic fertilizer and glyphosate use have made it worse, since glyphosate doesn’t just affect plants, it disrupts the microbial life in soil that would otherwise help regenerate mineral content.
In plain terms, this means you genuinely cannot eat your way to mineral sufficiency anymore, no matter how clean your diet is.
The Hidden Mineral Trap: Filtered and Distilled Water
Here is one that catches a lot of health conscious people off guard. If you are drinking reverse osmosis, distilled, or heavily filtered water because you believe it is the cleanest option, you may actually be depleting your mineral stores rather than protecting them. Water with no mineral content does not just fail to help, it actively pulls minerals out of your body as it passes through, rather than delivering anything useful.
This does not mean filtered water is bad. It means it needs to be remineralized. Adding a small amount of balanced trace minerals back into your water is a simple way to make sure you are not unintentionally working against yourself.
What Mineral Deficiency Actually Feels Like
So what does this look like day to day, especially heading into perimenopause and menopause? Cramping is one of the clearest signals, since a muscle cramp is essentially your cells running out of the energy needed to release a contraction. Hair thinning and shedding is another. Your body deprioritizes hair, nails, and skin the moment it senses it does not have enough energy for more essential functions, which is also why hair loss tends to show up alongside other low grade, chronic symptoms rather than on its own.
Brain fog, restless sleep, and stalled energy in the afternoon all point in the same direction. As estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone shift during perimenopause, your body needs minerals to actually produce and use those hormones, even if you are on hormone replacement therapy. Without the mineral foundation underneath, your body’s ability to utilize those hormones drops significantly. On top of that, mitochondrial function naturally declines with age, meaning your cells need more fuel just to keep up with what they used to do automatically.
Fulvic and Humic Minerals, Explained Simply
If you have heard the term “trace minerals” but didn’t fully understand what made them different from a typical multivitamin, here is the simplest way to think about it. Fulvic compounds are tiny, ionic molecules small enough to deliver a full spectrum of minerals directly into your cells almost immediately, whether taken internally or applied topically. Humic compounds are larger and act more like a binder, traveling through your gut and bloodstream picking up toxins, heavy metals, and cellular waste, and carrying them out of your body through normal elimination pathways.
What makes humic particularly interesting is that it appears to be a smart binder. Rather than indiscriminately grabbing everything in its path the way some detox binders do, it seems to bind to excess minerals only up to the point of balance, then stop, which is part of why it does not need to be separated from other supplements or medications the way many binders do.
A Gentler Way to Approach Supplementation
If your supplement cabinet has grown out of control over the years, you are not alone, and this conversation offers a refreshingly different lens. Instead of adding more inputs to force a result, the more sustainable approach is supporting your body’s foundation first. Once that foundation is in place, many women find they actually need fewer supplements, not more, because their bodies are finally able to use what they are already taking. This mirrors a broader idea worth sitting with: the difference between upstream interventions that ramp the body up and downstream support that helps the body regulate, detoxify, and rebuild on its own terms.
The Takeaway
You are not lacking willpower, and you are not imagining your symptoms. If you are eating well, exercising, addressing your hormones, and still feel like something is missing, minerals may be the layer underneath everything else that has been overlooked. Small, consistent, balanced support, rather than another extreme intervention, may be exactly what your body has been asking for.
If you want to go deeper, Caroline Alan’s new book, The Mineral Reset, breaks all of this down in a way that is approachable rather than overwhelming. You can find it, along with some helpful bonus material, at www.mineralresetbook.com
Level up your health with BEAM Minerals HERE https://midlifeconversations.com/beam and use code NATALIEJILL to save!
The contents of the Midlife Conversations podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider. Some episodes of Midlife Conversations may be sponsored by products or services discussed during the show. The host may receive compensation for such advertisements or if you purchase products through affiliate links mentioned on this podcast.
