8 Things You Need to Know About Food

“Chemical fertilizers undercut the work of soil fungi and bacteria, compromising their delivery of micronutrients critical for plant nutrition and thus the health of crops and livestock and people. He intuited that mycorrhizal fungi partnered with plant roots in some way, although he and others at the time didn't fully understand how.” 

“Plowing is a natural disaster for earthworms. The effects can be dramatic, with tillage depressing worm abundance even more than chemical fertilizers or pesticides. For example, a 20-year comparison of soil quality under conventional and notill farming in New Zealand found conventionally farmed fields had virtually no worms, while no-till fields had almost as many worms as permanently unplowed pasture, which also had two to three times more microbes.” 

“Tillage also is hard on mycorrhizal fungi. It slices through their extensive network of root-like hyphae, cutting off deliveries of everything flowing through them-minerals, water, and other compounds that benefit their plant partners.” 

“Monsanto's second patent on glyphosate was for use as an antibiotic (U.S. Patent 7,771,736). With a flood of research and evidence showing how critical microbiomes are to their plant or human host and how antibiotics alter microbiomes, troubling implications come to mind.”

“Their… experiment involved feeding two groups of rats identical, vitamin B-deficient diet for 18 days and then adding seeds grown on manured soils to the diet of one group and chemically fertilized seeds to the diet of the other group. After a week on the vitamin B-deficient diet both groups began to lose weight. The group that then received manured seeds recovered rapidly and began to grow normally. The group that received the artificially manured seeds kept declining. By the twenty-first day they were wasting away and covered with unsightly bald patches. With death looking imminent for these unfortunate rodents, Rowlands and Wilkinson switched their diet to manured seeds. Within a day, the rats revived and began growing normally again. Apparently, the pig manure passed vitamin B to the soil, and the crops absorbed it and passed it on to the rats.”

“Pigeons fed a white rice-only diet developed beriberi-like symptoms and rapidly progressed toward death. Yet they fully recovered within hours if simply fed the bran and germ that had been removed from the white rice they'd been eating. McCarrison's pigeon experiments demonstrated the nutritional inferiority of white rice. He considered it no accident that areas of India where people consumed brown rice reported ten times fewer beriberi cases than those where people ate polished white rice.”

“Eating white rice five or more times a week increased the risk of diabetes by almost 20 percent compared to eating white rice less than once a month. Eating brown rice at least two times a week decreased the risk of diabetes by about 10 percent compared to eating it less than once a month.”

“A 2010 study of over a thousand children representative of the general U.S. population found that those with higher-than-average exposure to organophosphate pesticides had roughly twice the odds of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).”

“Moreover, pesticide residues have been associated with a wide range of gastrointestinal, neurological, respiratory, and reproductive effects and may contribute to the development of various types of cancer beyond non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as Parkinson's disease and endocrine-related disorders. A 2013 review concluded that abundant evidence supported considering typical pesticide exposure a risk factor for certain chronic diseases. A paper in the journal Science even reported that exposing female rats to high levels of fungicide resulted in three generations of male offspring with low sperm counts and thus reduced fertility.”

“It's a complete protein source, meaning it contains the nine amino acids our bodies must have but cannot synthesize. Milk also contains a significant amount of water-soluble B vitamins, as well as fat-soluble vitamins A and E. As for bodybuilding minerals, milk tends to have a lot of calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus, as well as some zinc and selenium.”

“…And just as for grains and vegetables, the vitamins and minerals in milk vary, reflecting soil health and farming practices used on the pastures and crops cows eat. And the fat and phytochemical content of both milk and meat reflect what the cow ate.”

“Most American dairy cows eat total mixed rations, or TMRs, the ruminant version of an MRE-the "meal, ready-to-eat" developed for the U.S. Armed Forces. There is an important distinction though. The engineered mixtures of protein, carbohydrate, fat, minerals, and vitamins in bovine TMRs often include appetite stimulators, antibiotics, and growth hormones.”

“Those with the highest rates of heart attacks and fat consumption-the United States, Canada, and Australia-also consumed the most sugar and omega-6-rich seed oils. The two countries with the lowest fat consumption and rates of heart attack were Japan and Italy. Diets in these countries were low in omega-6s but high in other fats. The fish-centric Japanese diet delivered a lot of omega-3s, and Italians ate impressive amounts of olive oil rich in unsaturated omega-9s.”

“The grass and legume-finished and organic-certified, grass-fed steaks had ratios of omega-6 to omega-3 of between 2:1 and 4:1, whereas the grain-finished steaks from the research facility had values of almost 6:1. At over 15:1, the feedlot-finished USDA Choice steaks from the big-box store had the highest levels of omega-6s.”

“It seems that today you'd have to eat twice as much farmed salmon to get the same amount of long-chain omega-3s as a few decades ago.”