Tag Archive for: Health

Eating From Trees

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There was a time when lots of our vegetables came from trees in our backyard or that of the neighbours. May be it is time we revisited those days

Author: Sreedevi Lakshmi Kutty | Published: April 27, 2017

Imagine if we got our veggies from trees just like we do our fruits. This thought has been at the back of my mind through this summer while working with organic vegetable farmers during this unprecedented drought.

I realised that almost all the vegetables we want come from cultivated one-season crops that require a considerable amount of water and care and are vulnerable to pests, diseases and climate variations.

We expect these seasonal plants to provide vegetables consistently the year around: be it potatoes, tomatoes, okra, beans, gourds or cool seasonal veggies. Maybe it’s time to think differently.

We, in the south of India, are fortunate to have many trees with edible fruits. In fact, during my childhood in Kerala, the role of tree-based vegetables was significant. We consumed drumsticks, drumstick leaves and flowers in various forms; we made delicious poriyal, erisherri, kootu and other preparations with raw papaya. Summer food at my paternal grandparents’ home revolved around jackfruits, mangoes, grapefruit and breadfruit — raw, cooked, roasted, preserved or fried!

Jackfruit and jackfruit seeds played a stellar role with the whole family involved in cleaning the raw fruit, skinning the seed and sharing it with neighbours, so that the cut fruit is not wasted. Jackfruits converted beautifully into aviyal, kootu, and puzhukku (in which the raw fruit and seed are cooked together along with coconut). The seed was made into a delicious poriyal with drumstick; it was combined with roasted coconut into theeyal. The chakka puzhukku was also eaten as a rice replacement.

How can we forget the crisp jackfruit chips and the rich chakka varatti(jackfruit jam), which was preserved to be eaten for the next few months and used for making chakka prathaman.

Raw mangoes went into everything — the sour ones into pickles chutneys, sambar, aviyal, fish curry and mango rice or were salted away for rainy days. Apart from eating the ripe ones, we got pachadi and pulisheeri.

We also consumed the sour bilimbi (supposed to reduce cholesterol) that was made into an aviyal with small onions, added in fish curry, made into pickles and used in almost every curry that requires a souring agent.

KEEP READING ON THE HINDU

A Recipe to End Hunger: Food Policies that Adapt to Climate Change

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New Online Course by UNDP, FAO and UNITAR provides tools on how countries can better prepare climate-resilient food systems

Author: Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca | Published: September 27, 2017

In our age of conspicuous consumption and excess, it frightens us to know that one out of nine people ­– or 815 million children, women and men – remain chronically undernourished.

And according to recent reports, the issue has been getting worse, with the number of undernourished people worldwide increasing from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016.

So how do we build a recipe to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030, making sure all people have access to sufficient and nutritious food year-round?

It’s not going to be easy. Climate change is altering age-old farming traditions, affecting livelihoods in local communities, and small producers who bring healthy food to our tables. It is also triggering massive droughts and floods that put our global goal of zero hunger at risk.

Even a 2°C global temperate increase will be devastating for farmers and the 2 billion extra mouths we will need to feed by 2050. The cost of corn – the backbone of much of the world’s diet – could jump by 50 percent, and crop production could decline by as much as 22 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Droughts, floods and other large-scale climate disasters would put more lives at risk of malnutrition, starvation and uncertain futures.

As chefs who are also working with the SDG Fund as UNDP Goodwill Ambassadors, we know that food is the essential ingredient of life. It nourishes young minds, builds strong bones and fuels our economies. On small farms across the globe, food and agriculture are the primary drivers of development and poverty reduction. Without more climate-resilient food systems, we risk even greater calamites and the unravelling of progress we’ve made in reducing hunger, protecting our planet and supporting developing economies to reach their full potential.

Major climate disrupters, such as the recent floods across Asia, landslides in Sierra Leone, and hurricanes across the Caribbean and the United States, take away lives, destroy productive assets and shatter entire communities. This cycle of destruction will only get worse as temperatures and sea levels rise. It also puts farming at risk, especially for poor, small-scale farmers who largely depend on rain-fed agriculture.

KEEP READING ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

World Hunger Is Increasing Thanks to Wars and Climate Change

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Author: Leah Samberg, The Conversation | Published: October 22, 2017

Around the globe, about 815 million people — 11 percent of the world’s population — went hungry in 2016, according to the latest data from the United Nations. This was the first increase in more than 15 years.

Between 1990 and 2015, due largely to a set of sweeping initiatives by the global community, the proportion of undernourished people in the world was cut in half. In 2015, UN member countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which doubled down on this success by setting out to end hunger entirely by 2030. But a recent UN report shows that, after years of decline, hunger is on the rise again.

As evidenced by nonstop news coverage of floods, fires, refugees and violence, our planet has become a more unstable and less predictable place over the past few years. As these disasters compete for our attention, they make it harder for people in poor, marginalized and war-torn regions to access adequate food.

I study decisions that smallholder farmers and pastoralists, or livestock herders, make about their crops, animals and land. These choices are limited by lack of access to services, markets or credit; by poor governance or inappropriate policies; and by ethnic, gender and educational barriers. As a result, there is often little they can do to maintain secure or sustainable food production in the face of crises.

The new UN report shows that to reduce and ultimately eliminate hunger, simply making agriculture more productive will not be enough. It also is essential to increase the options available to rural populations in an uncertain world.

Conflict and Climate Change Threaten Rural Livelihoods

Around the world, social and political instability are on the rise. Since 2010, state-based conflict has increased by 60 percent and armed conflict within countries has increased by 125 percent. More than half of the food-insecure people identified in the UN report (489 million out of 815 million) live in countries with ongoing violence. More than three-quarters of the world’s chronically malnourished children (122 million of 155 million) live in conflict-affected regions.

At the same time, these regions are experiencing increasingly powerful storms, more frequent and persistent drought and more variable rainfall associated with global climate change. These trends are not unrelated. Conflict-torn communities are more vulnerable to climate-related disasters, and crop or livestock failure due to climate can contribute to social unrest.

War hits farmers especially hard. Conflict can evict them from their land, destroy crops and livestock, prevent them from acquiring seed and fertilizer or selling their produce, restrict their access to water and forage, and disrupt planting or harvest cycles. Many conflicts play out in rural areas characterized by smallholder agriculture or pastoralism. These small-scale farmers are some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Supporting them is one of the UN’s key strategies for reaching its food security targets.

KEEP READING ON TRUTHOUT

An Epic Success Story

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Katie Forrest and Taylor Collins hit it big with their meaty protein bars. Now they’re determined to improve the lives of farm animals and the lands they graze

Author: Kimya Kavehkar | Published: October 10, 2017

One July morning, blessedly before the excruciating heat of summer descends, I’m hiking the Barton Creek Greenbelt with a couple of fit thirtysomethings and Lakota, their 8-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever. A thin haze drapes the sun, and the bone-dry creek bed we cross—in more verdant times a spot where people wade through rushing waters with beer cans in hand—is mostly dust.

Katie Forrest, a mountain biker and Ironman triathlete, and Taylor Collins, also a triathlete and a marathon runner, gracefully navigate slippery rocks and fallen branches along the trail with impressive speed. My short legs and not-at-all-athletic frame make it a struggle to keep up, as I try not to pant too heavily, even though I’m asking a lot of questions. The only other sounds are the jangling of Lakota’s collar, as she leads our pack confidently, and the crunching of the forest detritus beneath our feet.

The conversation turns to Forrest and Collins’ infant daughter, Scout.

“I think about the way she eats versus the way that I was raised to eat, and it’s so fundamentally different,” Forrest says, a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. “Last night she had a grass-fed ribeye. She was just sucking the fatty part. I think her first solid food was pastured egg yolk, and the second was bone marrow. My first food was rice cereal and then mashed peas.”

Maybe Scout’s next solid meal will be the bison-bacon-cranberry bars her parents sell through their line of gourmet, grain-free, soy-free, dairy-free, gluten-free jerky products, Epic Provisions.

A few hours later I’m at Epic’s South Congress Avenue headquarters. Forrest and Collins had invited me to a lunchtime potluck during which they’re showing their staff a PowerPoint presentation about regenerative farming. The design of their offices can best be described as Anthropologie-meets-your-uncle’s-ranch-cabin. I head to the basement where about 20 employees are filling their plates in the kitchen and cracking open icy Topo Chicos before settling into their seats. I notice that one person is barefoot.

Forrest, 31, and Collins, 34, are at the front of the room fidgeting with the projector remote and a stack of notes in nearly the same outfits that they’d gone hiking in that morning; Collins has switched out his tennis shoes for flip-flops.

Epic looks, feels, and acts every bit an Austin born-and-bred company. The lack of pretention of its husband-and-wife founders is matched by their quiet determination to succeed and devotion to their mission to build much more than merely a thriving business.

Ever since Epic was purchased by packaged food titan General Mills in January 2016, Forrest and Collins have been able to step away from the day-to-day slog of running a profitable company and put themselves in the position of thought leaders hell-bent on altering the prevailing relationship between farm animals and grazing lands. Terms of the General Mills deal were not disclosed, but with Epic boasting annual revenue of about $20 million, one source told financial news site TheStreet that the purchase price was about $100 million.

That’s why they’ve gathered their staff here, to view slides depicting grasslands in various states of growth and to learn what words like “ruminants” mean. (The term refers to animals like goats and cows that must regurgitate their partially digested food to be chewed more than once.) “Once people start to learn about regenerative agriculture, it starts to change everything for them,” Collins says.

Long before they became evangelists for rotational grazing, they were students who first crossed paths in an Austin High School hallway in 2001. “It was the most intense emotional experience of my life, like earth-shaking,” Collins remembers of seeing Forrest for the first time. She felt much the same, but because they were a few years apart in age they had few opportunities to interact during that single year they overlapped at AHS.

They didn’t reconnect until three years later as students at Texas State University. They kept seeing each other when they walked through the same park every day to get to class. Then Forrest, a women’s studies major, called Collins, a physical therapy student, and asked if they could carpool. For their first date, they went to a modern dance performance as extra credit for one of her classes and grabbed a bite afterward at Magnolia Cafe. After dating for just three months, they moved in together, much to the chagrin of her parents.

Among the things that bonded them was their competitive spirits and shared pleasure in pushing their bodies to their physical limits. They didn’t fit the lazy college kid stereotype. For fun they’d take 10-hour bike rides together and participated in marathons and triathlons.

“Anything that gives us a little resistance that we can push into that helps us work towards accomplishing something is very, very rewarding in our lives,” Collins says.

KEEP READING ON AUSTIN MONTHLY

How Natural Textile Dyes May Protect Health and Promote Environmental Sustainability

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: October 1, 2017

Most people never give a thought to how a piece of clothing was given its color. Unfortunately, if you don’t, you could unknowingly expose yourself to hazardous chemicals on a daily basis. Fabric dyes are also a significant environmental concern, contributing to pollution — oftentimes in poorer countries with lax regulations on toxic chemicals to begin with.

Rebecca Burgess, author of “Harvesting Color: How to Find Plants and Make Natural Dyes,” has 15 years’ worth of experience in this area and is the executive director of Fibershed — a word she coined — which is a resource for creating safe, organic textile dyes.

“I started this work when I was taught to train young children in how to use dyes when I was in college,” Burgess says. “It was a textile art summer program [and] I was in charge of direct instruction for [a group of] 9-year-olds. It was a summer job. It exposed me to the arts and crafts side of textile dyeing … I was helping them use these compounds to color t-shirts.

We had to wear gloves. I had to wear a mask. People had to wear aprons. We couldn’t let the powder get in the air. We were so careful once we opened these jars of powder to not get it in our lungs or on our skin. The ingredients list wasn’t very clear.

The molecular breakdown of what was in the material wasn’t clear, but the producers of the dyes were asking anyone who uses them to be very careful with inhalation and exposure, especially skin exposure … A light bulb went off. ‘Why am I having children use a material that they have to wear masks and gloves [to use]?’ While we’re making the dye, we’re suited up.

And then we take the T-shirt out of the bucket. We rinse it a little, and then we put the T-shirt on our bodies. Somehow it’s OK to wear the stuff on your skin, but it’s not OK to touch the powder? There was a chasm between what seems like solid logic in what we were willing to expose ourselves to and why we were doing what we were doing.”

Plant-Based Versus Synthetic Dyes  

At that time, 21 years ago, Burgess used the search engine of the time (Ask Jeeves) to inquire about alternative dyes and discovered you could use things like onion skins, cabbage and beets. Armed with onion skins, cabbages, beets and hand-harvested blackberries and dandelion leaves, Burgess set to work learning how to create natural dyes.

“I just started bringing food-based products into our textile program. The kids started cutting up vegetables and putting it in pots of water, heating it up and making tie-dye T-shirts, but with cabbage, collard, onion, beets, blackberries and dandelion. And then we can take that fluid, cool it down, and then pour it back out on the lawn. It was tea essentially.”

Over time, Burgess discovered industrial dyes contain a number of fossil carbon-based chemicals known to be endocrine disruptors. A master’s thesis circulating around the UC Davis campus at the time pointed out that it took 400 pounds of coal tar to make a single ounce of blue dye. Interestingly, the first synthetic dye actually came about by accident.

“William Perkins was looking for a cure for malaria and was using coal tar. He had an explosion in his lab in 1856. All this purple goo landed on the walls. He realized that could actually be [used as] a textile dye … All of the dyes, ever since then … are fossil-carbon derived and heavy metal combined. That, in itself, was how we started our industrial dye process.

Of course, things have evolved. There are processes that take the heavy metals out of the dyes. Those are called acid dyes. But at the end of the day, all of the dyes have endocrine disruptors … [Hormones are] messenger chemicals. If those are scrambled, you can create a lot of subsequent health issues, from cancer to autoimmune diseases, to learning disabilities.

Some people say there are multiple generation impacts … intergenerational DNA damage … The peer-reviewed science on endocrine disruption is very clear. We don’t know enough about how many parts per trillion, parts per billion or parts per million of these endocrine disruptors are in the textiles when we put them on our skin, because it’s just an unknown body of research.

Who’s going to pay for that? Not the industry. We have an unknown, but we know we have risks. We have enough science to know there are risks. That’s why I’m a proponent of using plant-based dyes.”

Can Dyed Clothing Really Affect Your Health?

Today, all cellulosic protein and synthetic fibers such as nylons and polyesters use synthetic azo dyes. Even organic cotton T-shirts will use synthetic dyes to obtain the colors pink, green and blue. According to Burgess, up to 70 percent of the global use of dyes right now are azo, which are among the most hazardous. They contain heavy metals and are very difficult to clean up.

It’s rare to find Global Organic Trade Standard (GOTS) certified items. GOTS, which also certifies dyes, is the gold standard certification of organic. It’s really the best, most robust certification you can get. While they allow some synthetic materials, including some dyes, they are very strictly regulated. Now, the fact that synthetic azo dyes are toxic in and of themselves is noncontroversial, but can they actually affect your health when worn on your body, especially after a piece of clothing has been washed a few times?

“That question is something I’ve been asking for over a decade,” Burgess says. “The science I have found is very dated. I found some research about children who supposedly died from cloth diapers stamped with an ink. The ink penetrated the kidney area of the infant. This science was done in the 1920s. After that, I couldn’t find any modern science that showed skin absorption had any toxic effects on the wearer from a synthetic dye …

The question is how big are the molecules of the dye? Can they get into the skin after washing the clothing? We’re washing off what we would call the unbonded molecular components of the dye. The stuff that is bonded to the clothing, does that pose a risk? Can it get into the skin if it’s molecularly bonded? These are all questions [that are still] on the table.”

In other words, no one is really examining this issue to assess the actual risks. Burgess, who is doing research for a future book on fabric dyes has been posing questions to reproductive health doctors at Mount Sinai and University of California San Francisco (UCSF) who focus much of their attention on chemical influences. According to these experts, chemicals such as those found in dyes do appear to affect pregnant mothers and fetuses in utero.

The impacts can be seen, and the chemicals are known to be in dyes, but questions still remain as to if and how they may enter the body if you wear a dyed garment. Burgess cites an interesting German study showing that even when all known sources of endocrine disrupting chemicals were eliminated, women still continued to excrete metabolites of endocrine disrupting chemicals. So, somehow, they were still being exposed to them. Could it be their clothing?

“In the paper, they say, ‘One of the exposures we haven’t looked at is textiles in clothing and what women are wearing. This is an area for further research.’ Who’s doing it? We would really like to know, because it’s an important thing,” Burgess says.

KEEP READING ON MERCOLA

Why Supporting Regenerative Agriculture Is the Most Powerful Thing You Can Do for Your Health

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Healthy soil equals healthy people.

Author: Adrian White | Published: September 18, 2017

When we talk about sustainable farming practices, we tend to focus on its importance for the environment, for our food security, and our desire to put food on the table that’s not contaminated with pesticides. But there’s an important topic doesn’t get talked about often enough: how food sustainability is inextricably tied to our health.

Over the past decade, physicians have increasingly recognized the importance of good nutrition to human health. An article published last week in The Journal of the American College Of Nutrition noted that the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease is linked to long-term poor nutrition. Good nutrition, on the other hand, is one of the most powerful (and least expensive) forms of preventative healthcare you have at your disposal. A good diet can help prevent heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune and digestive disorders, and several types of cancers.

(Brag your love of gardening with the Organic Life 2018 Calendar, featuring gorgeous photographs, cooking tips and recipes, plus how to eat more—and waste less!—of what’s in season.)

And it turns out that the best food for you–the most nutritious food–is food that comes from a sustainable food system.

The foundation of a healthy diet is whole fruits and vegetables, which contain vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, and phytochemicals—and compounds only found in plants, like lycopene, that are essential to our health.

Many of the compounds essential to human health are destroyed when whole fruits, vegetables, and grains are processed into shelf-stable foods. To make for their lack of nutrition (especially vitamins), synthetic nutrients are added to processed foods. However, studies show that certain synthetic nutrients pale in comparison to natural ones—even those found in synthetic supplements (particularly vitamin E and vitamin D).

KEEP READING ON RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE

There Could Be Tiny Bits of Plastic in Your Sea Salt

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Some environmentalists warn the plastic pollution threat now “rivals climate change.”

Author: Jessica Glenza, The Guardian | Published: September 12, 2017

Sea salt around the world has been contaminated by plastic pollution, adding to experts’ fears that microplastics are becoming ubiquitous in the environment and finding their way into the food chain via the salt in our diets.

Following recent revelations in the Guardian about levels of plastic contamination in tap water, new studies have shown that tiny particles have been found in sea salt in the UK, France and Spain, as well as China and now the U.S.

Researchers believe the majority of the contamination comes from microfibers and single-use plastics such as water bottles, items that comprise the majority of plastic waste. Up to 12.7m metric tons of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, equivalent to dumping one garbage truck of plastic per minute into the world’s oceans, according to the United Nations.

“Not only are plastics pervasive in our society in terms of daily use, but they are pervasive in the environment,” said Sherri Mason, a professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, who led the latest research into plastic contamination in salt. Plastics are “ubiquitous, in the air, water, the seafood we eat, the beer we drink, the salt we use—plastics are just everywhere”.

Mason collaborated with researchers at the University of Minnesota to examine microplastics in salt, beer and drinking water. Her research looked at 12 different kinds of salt (including 10 sea salts) bought from US grocery stores around the world. The Guardian received an exclusive look at the forthcoming study.

Mason found Americans could be ingesting upwards of 660 particles of plastic each year, if they follow health officials’ advice to eat 2.3 grammes of salt per day. However, most Americans could be ingesting far more, as health officials believe 90 percent of Americans eat too much salt.

The health impact of ingesting plastic is not known. Scientists have struggled to research the impact of plastic on the human body, because they cannot find a control group of humans who have not been exposed.

KEEP READING ON ALTERNET

The Great Nutrient Collapse

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The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.

Author: Helene Bottemiller Evich | Published: September 13, 2017

Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.

Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?

Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.

Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.

“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.

In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?

What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

READ MORE ON POLITICO

Top Soil: A Catalyst for Better Health and Nutrition

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Author: Tobias Roberts | Published: August 23, 2017

WHERE WE STAND WITHOUT SOIL

Everything begins and ends with the soil. Unfortunately, close to 70% of it has been lost since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. Since the onset of the Green Revolution only half a decade ago, we´re getting rid of it faster than ever. Besides the ecocide that the loss of topsoil entails, it also is a major threat to our health. Most foods grown by industrial agricultural methods on depleted soil are nothing more than empty food carcasses filled with chemically supplied nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

Without healthy soil that includes dozens of other micronutrients as a result of the functioning soil food web, we´re simply not getting the nutrition we need, no matter how cosmetic our food supposedly looks.

THE LOSS OF OUR PLANET´S FERTILITY

It can be easy to be tricked into believing that we live in a world of abundance. Seeing the sheer magnitude of the corn harvest in Iowa, to name just one example, can make us feel like our food security is well provided for by combines, GPS-controlled tractors, and the thousands of other technologies of industrial agriculture. But below that seemingly abundant harvest, a serious problem is emerging. The Great Plains of the United States have been considered one of the most fertile areas of our earth. In some places, top soil reaches over 15 feet into the earth. But that apparently endless fertility has all but disappeared in recent years.

In 2014 alone, Iowa lost over 15 million tons of topsoil, mostly due to unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. That soil, along with the millions of pounds of chemical fertilizers and pesticides eventually make their way down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. The excess nitrates and pollution from this runoff has led to a hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico which is basically a dead area where no marine life can survive.

ECOLOGICAL DANGERS OF TOP SOIL LOSS

When the soil is gone, we as a species will be completely dependent on petroleum for creating chemical fertilizers give the plants we eat the nutrients they need to grow. The problem, of course, is that oil isn’t going to be around forever either. Peak oil is a moment in time when the maximum extraction of oil is reached, and some studies believe that we´re already reached that bleak milestone.

Our dependence on petroleum based agricultural inputs for fertility purposes, then, is simply unsustainable. Furthermore, without top soil to provide naturally occurring fertility, the use of chemical inputs is creating a host of ecological damages. Chemical fertilizers are almost all salt based leading to increased soil salinity. Though plants will grow with increased vigor initially, chemical fertilizers disrupt the natural soil cycle leading to eventual barrenness.

Top soil loss doesn’t only cause a serious challenge to our long term food security, but it also causes other serious ecological catastrophes. The run off of top soil increases pollution and sedimentation in our waterways causing serious population declines in certain species of fish. Also, lands without top soil are more prone to serious flooding and increased desertification. Already 10-20% of our planet´s drylands face desertification, and needless today, plants don´t grow well in deserts.

KEEP READING ON PERMACULTURE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Grass Fed Beef: The Right Type of Beef That Will Bolster Your Health

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola 

Purchasing meat typically involves an initial check of its price, but not everyone is inquisitive when it comes to its nutritional content and freshness. Fortunately, the movement towards grass fed beef is continuously gaining momentum, because more and more people are realizing about the benefits this type of beef offers to human health and the environment.

Continue reading to learn what grass fed beef is, how it stacks up against typical beef and where you can find the best sources of high-quality meats in your area.

Why You Should Consider Grass Fed Beef

Grass fed beef comes from cows that are allowed to graze on pasture and consume their natural diet of grass. This situation is different from cows raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are fed a processed diet containing grains and even growth-promoting drugs.1

Organic grass fed beef production requires more effort and attention to detail, as ranchers have to follow strict guidelines that’ll ensure the meat’s freshness and quality.

Because grass fed cows are grown in more humane conditions, the meat’s quality is superior to conventional beef. The meat also tends to be loaded with more nutrients, without the risks attributed to harmful pathogens that are found in conventional beef (more on this later).

Positive long-term effects of grass fed beef production on the environment must be emphasized too. A study published in the journal Nature Plants sought to discover the benefits of organic versus conventional farming under four key sustainability metrics: productivity, environmental impact, economic viability and social well-being.

Researchers analyzed data that emerged in the past 40 years, and the results highlighted these positive effects connected to organic farms:2,3

  • More profitable and can earn farmers anywhere from 22 to 35 percent more compared to their conventional counterparts
  • More environmentally friendly
  • Able to produce equally or more nutritious foods with fewer or no pesticide residues
  • Can provide unique benefits to the ecosystem
  • Can deliver social benefits

Health Benefits of Grass Fed Beef

Beef in general already contains certain nutrients that are good for your body. However, grass fed beef goes above and beyond because it is simply more nutritious, possessing these important components:4

Lower amounts of total fat Higher levels of beta-carotene Higher in vitamins B1 (thiamin), B2 (riboflavin) and E
Higher amounts of minerals like calcium, magnesium and potassium, alongside other minerals like iron, zinc, sodium and phosphorus Higher portions of total omega-3 fatty acids Higher amounts of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA or cis-9 trans-11), a potential cancer fighter
Higher amounts of vaccenic acid that can be transformed into CLA A healthier ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids

‘Meat’ Your Match: Grass Fed Beef Versus Grain Fed Beef

Grass fed beef’s benefits do not end with its high nutritional content. If you’re still not convinced why beef from grass fed cows is better, take note of these key points:

•Humane growing methods: Grass fed cows consume their natural diet of grass, since they have been allowed to graze on grasslands during their lifetime. A grass-rich diet consequently boosts the cow’s health and the quality of meat.

Meanwhile, cows in profit-hungry CAFOs are fattened for slaughter by being fed artificial diets that contained grains, corn, soy,5 growth-promoting drugs and antibiotics. Eventually, this diet altered the bacterial balance and composition in the animal’s gut, resulting in meat that’s tainted with potentially health-damaging bacteria.

•Greater fatty acid composition: As mentioned earlier, grass fed beef contains higher ratios of healthy fats like vaccenic acid, conjugated linoleic acid and omega-3 fatty acids, compared to grain fed cows.

•Fewer amounts of bacteria: Overcrowding of cows in CAFOs is a very common situation that may lead to increased bacterial contamination. Samples of CAFO-grown beef revealed traces of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that may have contributed to the increasing number of antibiotic-resistant disease cases being reported.

Consumer Reports examined 300 samples of conventionally raised and sustainably produced (including grass fed) ground beef to see if there were traces of five types of disease-causing bacteria: Clostridium perfringens, Salmonella, Enterococcus, Staphylococcus aureus and E.coli (including O157 and six other toxin-producing strains).

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