Category: Health
Market Garden POD is rising. This is a weekly cooperative basket program that will provide produce and products from Microbe Rich soils. We suspect this POD will be offered to the public the first of the new year. Our baskets will be freshly harvested produce from our certified Microbe Rich gardens. The COOP Pod is connected to the Market Garden POD. It is all connected and that is our business values structure…the value of our intentions.So, this is a preliminary announcement for locals interested in being a member of this POD. Please send me your email if so! (info@livingground.art We will start slow and gentle at first and grow as the gardens do.
This POD is about providing a weekly basket of Microbe Rich Grown Food and gourmet products. We will have baskets for singles, couples and families. We are creating and designing this as we go..this will be an experiment in how to service you and nourish the soils at the same time.
A lot of what we are doing is moving with the microbes. Our mission is to change the path of war to raising the “little good guys” in mass. Whether that be the little good guys of the soils or little good guy humans (souls). When you work and love a garden, you have to create. For me, that is most precious experience. Been doing this for decades now. All that learning, discovering and enjoying. It honestly is my most favourite action of my day….garden to my tummy. I love to alchemize the garden for enjoyment of the senses.
These skills of experience are a part of the Living Ground. Everything is connected. In the last 2 years I have discovered the microbes and learned how to harness and make them happy. They work with the plants to ensure bounty. I harvest the plant with joy. I make food and medicine. I am apart of the microbes and they are a part of me. It is really quite simple.
Living Ground will offer gourmet, nutrient dense, taste bud delight foods. We made Basil Infused Sun Dried Tomatoes, started a wine of basil vinegar (watermelon homemade wine) that is florescent green, buttered up a turmeric pepper horseradish sauce. There is plenty and more than plenty if you try! Last night, we had a meal that literally knocked our taste and digestion into healthy gear.
This is what this about! Diversity. Growing! Alchemizing! Healing! Loving! Deliciousness! It is all connected.
And, as it is connected, this is a part of the Cooperative POD ..the weekly basket program. It is beyond organic and always alchemized.
We’re in trouble. Our over-reliance on fossil fuels and our taste for foods with a high carbon footprint is causing disruptive climate change. Our throwaway society has flooded the land and seas with plastic pollution. And we face a growing public health crisis triggered by the rise of disease-causing microbes that we cannot kill with antibiotics.
Now for the good news. Living Ground is entering the busy-ness of selling food…but our primary intention to provide a system where people can have ready and affordable access to gut food – that is food grown in microbe rich soils.
Our guts are a real brain. They form part of an intelligent control system which manages our bodies, particularly our appetite and so decides how much and what food we want to eat and how much and where we store fat. Our guts are also home to the bulk of our immune system. Poor guts health is at the source of modern chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and its related heart attacks, dementia etc. A health gut is really important.
But to have a healthy gut means we need the right biology in the first place and we need to feed it the right sort of food. When people find out how gut food is grown the whole idea puts most people off, which is why you can’t buy gut food from the supermarket or in a bottle from the chemist.
Healthy gut biology starts in the guts of creatures that live in the soil. Read that again! This microbe biology passes from the guts of the microbes and into the plants where if we eat them soon after they are harvested they will enter out guts and the plants will provide them with food so they will flourish.
We, and all animals, have been doing this for millions of years but the whole idea is totally at odds with our modern antiseptic society so eating gut food will always be for a minority group. And, humans will diminish! We can not duplicate Nature as much as science and technology tries.
We know how to grow gut food, you have to have soil which is full of creature of the soil. To feed the creatures, the soils must be full of organic matter. We don’t have to be concerned with minerals..there is plenty of that!
And we have to avoid chemicals which will harm the beneficial biology – modern chemicals may not hurt us but they can be a disaster for micro-biology. And, I will add that Natural insecticides also are harmful.
And we have to eat the plants shortly after they are harvested before the beneficial biology dies.
All this is a more expensive process than modern chemical industrial farming and supermarket system and to many people quite revolting, which is why we don’t see gut food products on super market shelves.
Good and nourishing food is really about growing food to feed our brain. To do that we have to feed the microbes that already are living in our gut – that’s a pre-biotic.
But we also have to breed new microbes in the soil, which will go into the plants that we will eat and hence from part of our gut brain – that’s a pro-biotic.
To breed these microbes we have to feed and water them – for that we need plants that take the energy from the sun and covert it into microbe food. The plant will exchange this food for the food it needs. So, the microbes go get the plants food. Now the snag is that there are good bugs which will make us strong and healthy and bad bugs which at best just want to use as a comfy home to breed in – but unfortunately they often get it wrong and kill us.
To breed the good bugs – without the bad bugs taking over – we have to manage the conditions, which means food and water. The good bugs like oxygen and a little water….but not too wet (aerobic) while the bad bugs breed when it is wetter and no oxygen (anaerobic). How is oxygen transported in the human and what does it need to transport oxygen? Iron. But parasites love stored iron. Is this a rabbit hole or what?
Let’s get to the nitty gritty of true health! That means a paradigm shift. It is a 360 on our beliefs about health and microbes. Well, remember, Douglas Adams wrote : “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.” We probably only know 5% or less of how Nature works..but we do have some good information to change our ways NOW. And, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT!!!
Will you be apart of this soil revolution?
Mainstream alternative health and television news outlets have really highlighted hormone D (vitamin D) the past few years. As always, the goal is to inject more confusion into people’s minds about natural health.
I have always been concerned about people popping vitamins for health. I don’t think we know enough about nutrition to be able to isolate and make a pill. Nature always provides the whole picture unknown to our sciences at this point. Vitamin D is one I am learning about and it is called the “sunshine” vitamin for a reason. The phrase “vitamin D” is smurf language. It means nothing! Vitamin D is a psy-op term to confuse you. Are we talking about D3 (cholecalciferol), 25(OH)D (calcidiol), or 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol (calcitriol)?
Biology of the sunshine vitamin
“Vitamin D is unique because it can be made in the skin from exposure to sunlight.[3,8–10] Vitamin D exists in two forms. Vitamin D2 is obtained from the UV irradiation of the yeast sterol ergosterol and is found naturally in sun-exposed mushrooms. UVB light from the sun strikes the skin, and humans synthesize vitamin D3, so it is the most “natural” form. Human beings do not make vitamin D2, and most oil-rich fish such as salmon, mackerel, and herring contain vitamin D3. Vitamin D (D represents D2, or D3, or both) that is ingested is incorporated into chylomicrons, which are absorbed into the lymphatic system and enter the venous blood. Vitamin D that comes from the skin or diet is biologically inert and requires its first hydroxylation in the liver by the vitamin D-25-hydroxylase (25-OHase) to 25(OH)D.[3,11] However, 25(OH)D requires a further hydroxylation in the kidneys by the 25(OH)D-1-OHase (CYP27B1) to form the biologically active form of vitamin D 1,25(OH)2D.[3,11] 1,25(OH)2D stimulates intestinal calcium absorption.[12] Without vitamin D, only 10–15% of dietary calcium and about 60% of phosphorus are absorbed. Vitamin D sufficiency enhances calcium and phosphorus absorption by 30–40% and 80%, respectively.[3,13]”
We are still in kindergarten understanding Vitamin D language. There are over 14 different kinds of 25Ds and three different pathways that it follows: hydroxylation, lactonization and epimerization. We only ever hear smurf language from influencers and “health experts”. We never hear secosteroid hormone D talked about in these terms.
The most important thing to note is that D3 supplements will raise 25D (the one they measure) which will then raise your 1,25D (the one they rarely measure). Saying that D3 supplements won’t raise your 1,25D is like saying giving bakers more flour to bake with (25D) isn’t going to make more bread (1,25D). Its a completely nonsensical statement. D3 is a SUBSTRATE to make the other molecules and guess what? You don’t choose what your body makes. It makes what it needs based upon your pathogen load. Even before this situation everyone has been dealing with chronic infections.
When 1,25D gets too high you get an increase in metallothionein production which binds up copper 1000x stronger than zinc (Karasawa et al, 1987). Excess 1,25D from supplementing “Vitamin D” decreases energy production in your kidneys and opens them up to iron-induced damage (Zager et al, 1999). 25D and 1,25D in excess both suppress hepcidin and ferritin synthesis which increases iron storage in the cell (Barcchetta et al, 2014).
With Smurf “Vitamin D” language we also never hear of Lumisterol, Tachysterol or Suprasterol, three compounds that you make when ultraviolet light (sunshine) hits the 7 dehydrocholesterol in your skin. Choose UV light over oral or topical D3 supplements.
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind-healthprofessional/
This article was written by Tim Spector from King’s College London and was originally published by The Conversation.
Everyone loves D, the sunshine vitamin. Doctors, patients and the media have been enamoured with vitamin D supplements for decades. As well as their clear benefit in curing severe vitamin D deficiencies, endless headlines hail their magical ability to reduce a vast range of conditions from dementia to cancer.
Medical specialists such as myself have been promoting supplements to our patients with osteoporosis and other bone problems for decades. Many food products contain artificially added vitamin D with the aim of preventing fractures and falls and improving muscle strength although the vitamin also has been claimed to boost the immune system and reduce ageing. I used to sometimes take vitamin D myself and recommended it to my family to survive sun-starved winters.
However, a new paper on the risks that vitamin D may pose finally has convinced me that I was wrong. My view on vitamin supplements and the multi-billion dollar industry behind them altered radically after I began researching my book, The Diet Myth, in 2013. The industry and its PR is supported by celebrities who reportedly have high-dose vitamins drip fed into their veins, and around 50 percent of Americans and Britons take them regularly. But surprisingly, there is a lack of evidence to support the health benefit claims of virtually all vitamin supplements on the market.
One study based on the large SELECT trial suggested that supplements such as vitamin E and selenium actually increased prostate cancer in some men. And last year massive analyses combining 27 studies on half a million people concluded that taking vitamin and mineral supplements regularly failed to prevent cancer or heart disease. Not only are they a waste of money for the majority of us – but if taken in excessive quantities they can actually hasten an early death, increasing your risk of heart disease and cancer.
Virtually no vitamins or supplements have actually been shown to have any benefit in proper randomised trials in normal people without severe deficiencies. Rare exceptions have been lutein nutrients for macular degeneration, a common cause of blindness – and vitamin D, the golden boy of vitamins.
Since the 1980s, researchers (including myself) have written thousands of papers, associating a lack of our favourite vitamin with over 137 diseases. A 2014 BMJ report, however, found these links mainly to be spurious.
Won’t do you any harm?
Our genetic makeup influences vitamin D levels. We can use this information to tell if naturally low vitamin D levels might actually increase the risk of disease (rather than be a consequence of it). The evidence so far suggests (with the possible exception of multiple sclerosis and some cancers) that low vitamin D levels are either irrelevant or merely a marker of the disease.
Until now we haven’t worried about giving people extra vitamin D because we thought “it might help anyway and of course (as it’s a vitamin) doesn’t do you any harm”. With our increasing knowledge, we should now know better. Recent studies in the last five years have suggested that even calcium supplements as well as being ineffective in preventing fracture can increase the risk of heart disease.
While several studies in normal people failed to find any protective effects from vitamin D, others have been more worrying. One 2015 randomised study of 409 elderly people in Finland suggested that vitamin D failed to offer any benefits compared to placebo or exercise – and that fracture rates were, in fact, slightly higher.
The usual prescribed dose in most countries is 800 to 1,000 units per day (so 24,000-30,000 units per month). However, two randomised trials found that at around 40,000 to 60,000 units per month Vitamin D effectively became a dangerous substance.
One study involving over 2,000 elderly Australians, which was largely ignored at the time, and the one just published found that patients given high doses of vitamin D or those on lower doses that increased vitamin D blood levels within the optimal range (as defined by bone specialists) had a 20-30% increased rate of fractures and falls compared to those on low doses or who failed to reach “optimal blood levels”.
Explaining exactly why vitamin D supplements are often harmful is harder. Some people who don’t take supplements have naturally high blood levels which may be due to them spending large amounts of time outdoors in the sun or eating oily fish regularly – and there is no evidence that this is harmful. Higher than average levels can also be due to genes which on average influence about 50 percent of the differences between people. So our obsession with trying to bring everyone up to a standard normal target blood level is seriously flawed, in a similar way to our one-size-fits-all approach to diet.
Until now we have believed that taking vitamin supplements is “natural” and my patients would often take these while refusing conventional “non-natural” drugs. Our body may not view supplements in the same misguided way. Vitamin D mainly comes from UV sunlight converted slowly in our skin to increase blood levels or is slowly metabolised from our food.
In contrast, taking a large amount of the chemical by mouth or as an injection could cause a very different and unpredictable metabolic reaction. For example, our gut microbes are responsible for producing around a quarter of our vitamins and a third of our blood metabolites and also respond to changes in vitamin levels picked up by receptors in our gut lining. Any artificial addition of large amounts of chemicals will upset some sensitive immune processes.
The news that even my favourite vitamin can be dangerous is a wake-up call. We should be taking our worldwide abuse of these chemicals much more seriously rather than routinely adding them to foods. The billions we waste on these products, assisted by the poorly regulated but rich and powerful vitamin industry should be spent on proper healthcare – and people should be educated to go in the sunshine and eat a diverse range of real food instead. For 99 percent of people, this will provide all the healthy vitamins they will ever need.
Tim Spector is a professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London.
This article was originally published by The Conversation. Read the original article.
English
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Spanish