Metabolic Man...fascinating read

[Guest guest]

(apologies for duplicate post for those on both lists)

Hi all,

this is one of the most fascinating books i have read. it was mentioned by

pat connolley (price-pottenger foundation archive curator) on the recent

laura lee interview. the full name of the book is:

Metabolic Man: Ten Thousand Years From Eden

The Long Search for a Personal Nutrition from Our Forest Origins to the

Supermarkets of Today

author: Heizer Wharton, Ph.D.

i'm going to share some points of interest as time allows. i've got a

gazillion post-its with notes in the book already and i'm only on page 127.

first, my impression of wharton and his writing - this is NOT an

impassionate scientific treatise. wharton is clearly passionate about

sustainable agriculture among other things. as far as accuracy, i suspect

much of it's accurate (at least what i've read so far) but *some* of the

details may not be. he cites both primary and secondary sources, among them:

price, pottenger, fallon and enig, albrecht, cohen (Health and the Rise of

Civilization), Byrnes, Sears, Steffanson, Beiler, D'Amado, Atkins, Eaton and

many others. He also has travelled and studied primitive/traditional groups

himself. He discusses many of the same things we talk about on

and beyondprice (except recipes!)

It was clear when i first started reading the book that the man has a

strong bias toward sustainable farming/agriculture and traditional foods.

this is of course, my personal bias as well, but i think it's good to know

an author's bias when reading their work. In fact he even writes that the

book was written in honor of sustainable agriculture. and he details some

fascinating innovative methods of sustainable agriculture from different

time periods around the world - really cool stuff!

i am still in part I: " An Ecologist Looks at Human Nutrition, " so have no

idea if part II (The Search for a Personal Nutrition) will capture my

interest as strongly as part I has. i have to get off the computer soon, so

let me share some notes/excerpts.

The first section takes the reader chronologically through man's

evolutionary nutritional history from early primates through the dawn of

agriculture to modern supermarkets.

<snip>

in discussing ancient diets from various regions of the world, wharton

writes:

" Each Mongol warior, the quintessential nomad, would drive eighteen head of

horses on a campaign of conquest. He could live on horse blood, withdrawing

one-half pint from each of his eighteen horses on rotation, each horse being

bled every ten days. Along with dried milk invented by the nomads, such

ration enabled the armies of the great Kahans to dominate most of Asia. " (p.

60)

he mentions that the nomads of the asiatic steppes also lived primarily on

the meat and milk of horse, cattle, camel, sheep, goat or yak. similar to

the masai, although the masai are not nomadic in the standard sense of the

term. wharton himself spent time with the masai and writes:

" And then there were the flies. It was one of the most vivid memories of my

visits with the Masai, those dozens of flies ringed around each child's eyes

like they were drinking from a trough. Everything was cattle. The huts were

plastered with cown dung. The Masai drink milk and eat some blood and meat.

Rather than being nomads following herds, they don't move all that often,

but do move their herds about. Each night, the cattle have to be driven

behind a thorny fence to protect them from lions. And yet I have never met a

healthier looking people with beautiful white teeth, standing tall and

fiercely proud, never stooping to ride a bicycle or adopt any custom from

the outside. As you gaze out across the ten-mile wide crater of Ngororngoro,

you don't see the villages of the Masai, nor can you see the lions,

wildebeest or rhinos. Humans there are just anotehr unobtrusive member of

the ecosystem. " (p.50)

<snip>

in discussing phytate in bread, wharton writes,

" Because whole-grain bread was such a basic food throughout history, it

might be helpful to consider some fundamentals about the use of grain. We

eat bread for the energy value of the starchy endosperm, but also (ideally)

for the vitamins and minerals in the outer layer (bran) and in the embryo

(germ). Theere are also drawbacks: all grains and many seeds such as beans

contain phytic acid which, for the plant's advantage, ties up nutrient

minerals as an insoluble phytate molecule. Seeds did not evolve for our

benefit, so our intestinal tracts lack the enzyme (phytase) to release the

minerals from the phytate of grains and legumes. The good news is that seeds

also contain the enzyme to unlock the minerals that are mostly found in the

outside covering of the grain. All it takes is water. You can either soak

the grains and germinate them and then grind up the sprouts and make bread

or you can grind the grains to flour first and add water to make a dough. It

is a matter of time. In ordinary dough 75 percent of the phytate is broken

up within 10 hours. Yeast speeds up the action because it also has the

phytase enzyme, but the longer the bread-making process, the more phytate

can be broken down. " (pp.74-76)

<snip>

In the chapter called " Traditional Sustainable Agriculture " wharton writes:

" There is an new fascinating, sustainable rice paddy agricultre called the

" Aigamo method, " developed ten year ago in Japan, by the Furuno family. It

is rapidly spreading throughout Southeast Asia, increasing the income of

Third World farmers from 20 to 50 percent. It might be called the " one Bird

Revolution " since ducks are the keys. Twenty ducklings released per tenth of

a hectare eat insect pests, golden snails and weed seeds and save 240 hours

per hectare of manual weeding. Ducks remain on the paddy twenty-four hours a

day until the rice forms ears of grain. Then they are penned.

Nitrogen-fixing Azolla fern and duckweed cover the water surface, feeding

the ducks and providing cover for edible fish (roach) which feed on duck

feces and organisms fertilized by the ducks. The only external input is a

little waste grain fed the penned ducks. The output is a nutritious harvest

of organic rice, duck and fish. The productivity is remarkable -- 1.4

hectares yields seven tons of rice, 300 ducks, 4,000 ducklings and an

adjacent 0.6 hectares supplies organic vegetables for 100 people. It was

calculated that, by using the Aigamo method, no more than 2 percent of

Japanese farmers could feed the nation and make it self-sufficient. (Ho,

1999). " (pp.74-75)

<snip>

i don't have time now to write the details on the nutrient compositon of

produce that was collected from different states (hence, different soils),

but the nutrient level differences were astounding - an example: the iron

content of tomatoes and spinach varied from 19 to 1,584.0!! (unit used is

per 100 grams, i believe).

there is a map diagram of the U.S. on p. 115 that has the dental carie

incidence of WW I inductees superimposed on the areas of fertile soil (where

grasses were abundant) and there's a striking correlation, with the lowest

incidence of cavities corresponding to the area of most fertile soil.

Unfortunately for those of us who live in New England, our area had the

highest incidence of dental caries, and we apparently have the worst soil,

having been stripped of the nutritious topsoil by early settlers and having

too much rainfalll. wharton writes:

" The acid podzol soils of New England afford the poorest nutrient base.

Inductees there had 75% more cavities than those from Texas. Interestingly,

the mineral-rich, chenozem prairie soils along the 98th meridian are the

finest ares for livestock growth, as they were for the bison before them.

(After Albrecht, 1975.) " (p.115)

he also discusses which specific minerals are low in which areas of the

country - apparently eastern soils are richer in sodium and manganese than

western soils, but as you travel west, the calcium, magnesium, potassium,

boron, iron, molybdenum, copper, and cobalt increases.

gotta run now - will share more later as time allows.

(btw, i got this from amazon for $18)

Suze Fisher

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