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Sunday, March 29, 2015

A Few More Ideas re: Nutrition

Quick heads up of research I ran across today:  They found that one out of three college athletes have low Vitamin D levels making them more prone to injury and more pain.

Pregnant women with low Vitamin D levels have more painful labors.  Get your Vitamin D level checked.  Sweet spot according to the best info I can find is 50-70.

You’ve ‘heard’ me talk about nutrition for a while now.  If nutrition is perfect, health and vigor is perfect.  That’s the premise I support.  Otherwise we’d not be a successful species.  The following article link is a parallel demonstration of that idea from the plant world.  Below is just an excerpt from that article.  By the way, the premise is not about blame or trying to induce guilt, but rather gaining knowledge and getting back to real food, supplementing where it is advisable and losing the toxic components we’ve been brainwashed into accepting as nutrition.

The Amish Farmers Reinventing Organic Agriculture

By studying the immune systems of plants, they've developed a technique that eliminates the need for chemicals.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-amish-farmer-replacing-pesticides-with-nutrition/380825/

Kempf is the unlikely founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a consulting firm established in 2006 to promote science-intensive organic agriculture. The entrepreneur’s story is almost identical to Zook’s (the farmer in this story).  A series of crop failures on his own farm drove the 8th grade-educated Kempf to school himself in the sciences.  For two years, he pored over research in biology, chemistry, and agronomy in pursuit of a way to save his fields.

The breakthrough came from the study of plant immune systems which, in healthy plants, produce an array of compounds that are toxic to intruders.  “The immune response in plants is dependent on well-balanced nutrition,” Kempf concluded, “in much the same way as our own immune system.”  Modern agriculture uses fertilizer specifically to increase yields, he added, with little awareness of the nutritional needs of other organic functions.  Through plant sap analysis, Kempf has been able to discover deficiencies in important trace minerals which he can then introduce into the soil. With plants able to defend themselves, pesticides can be avoided, allowing the natural predators of pests to flourish.

"Instead of trying to grow crops that are healthy with fungicides and pesticides, I started to grow crops that are healthy with nutrition."  (Zook)

And one more point to ponder today.  In Great Britain the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN),  is in the process of updating the Government’s recommendations for carbohydrate consumption.  Of the 40 scientists in the SCAN group, all but 13 have received funding from sugar and related industries. 

Lest we Americans get big heads about England’s level of corruption, our own is just as bad or worse.  What’s wrong with having the sugar industry (or wheat farmers or corn farmers) dictate government nutrition recommendations? 

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