Re: probiotic puzzles/Re: bacteria now!

[Guest guest]

Here's something that might interest you on how far the nutrient value of

some soils have depleted

Doctor " by Isabelle A. Moser. In it she argues that: " Homo Sapiens clearly

can posses extreme health while eating very different dietary regimens.

There is no one right diet for humans. " She was observing the same thing

your Dr. Price observed and came up with a different interpretation; the

soil.

" Prior to the Second World War there were several dozen sizable groups of

extraordinarily healthy humans remaining on Earth. Today, their descendants

are still in the same remote places, are speaking the same languages and

possess more or less the same cultures. Only today they're watching

satellite TV. wearing jeans, drinking colas–and their superior health has

evaporated.

During the early part of this century, at the same era vitamins and

other basic aspects of nutrition were being discovered, a few farsighted

medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places with their

legendarily healthy peoples to see what caused the legendary well-being

they'd heard of. Enough evidence was collected and analyzed to derive some

very valid principles.

First lets dismiss some apparently logical but incorrect explanations

for the unusually good health of these isolated peoples. It wasn't racial,

genetic superiority. There were extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns,

Orientals, Amarinds, Caucasians. It wasn't living at high altitude; some

lived at sea level. It wasn't temperate climates, some lived in the tropics,

some in the tropics at sea level, a type of location generally thought to be

quite unhealthful. It wasn't a small collection of genetically superior

individuals, because when these peoples left their isolated locale and moved

to the city, they rapidly began to lose their health. And it wasn't genetics

because when a young couple from the isolated healthy village moved to town,

their children born in town were as unhealthy as all the other kids.

And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote village

or a mountain valley or a far island settlement very difficult to get to,

where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten thousand people. Rarely fewer,

rarely more. Among that small population there were no medical doctors and

no dentists, no drugs, no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the

isolation carried with it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness

of modern science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And

this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these unprotected, undoctored,

unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from bacterial infections; and

the women did not have to give birth to 13 children to get 2.4 to survive to

breeding age–almost all the children made it through the gauntlet of

childhood diseases. There was also virtually no degenerative disease like

heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There

were few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any aspirin

in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little mortality during

childbirth, as little or less than we have today with all our hospitals. And

the people uniformly had virtually perfect teeth and kept them all till

death, but did not have toothbrushes nor any notion of dental hygiene. Nor

did they have dentists or physicians. (Price, 1970)

And in those fortunate places the most common causes of death were

accident (trauma) and old age. The typical life span was long into the 70s

and in some places quite a bit longer. One fabled place, Hunza, was renowned

for having an extraordinarily high percentage of vigorous and active people

over 100 years old.

I hope I've made you curious. " How could this be? " you're asking. Well,

here's why. First, everyone of those groups lived in places so entirely

remote, so inaccessible that they were of necessity, virtually

self-sufficient. They hardly traded at all with the outside world, and

certainly they did not trade for bulky, hard-to-transport bulk foodstuffs.

Virtually everything they ate was produced by themselves. If they were an

agricultural people, naturally, everything they ate was natural: organic,

whole, unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local materials seemed to

produce enhanced plant growth. And, if they were agricultural, they lived on

a soil body that possessed highly superior natural fertility. If not an

agricultural people they lived by the sea and made a large portion of their

diets sea foods. If their soil had not been extraordinarily fertile, these

groups would not have enjoyed superior health and would have conformed to

the currently widely-believed notion that before the modern era, people's

lives were brutish, unhealthful, and short.

What is common between meat-eating Eskimos, isolated highland Swiss

living on rye bread, milk and cheese; isolated ish island Celts with a

dietary of oat porridge, kale and sea foods; highland central Africans

(Malawi) eating sorghum, millet tropical root crops and all sorts of garden

vegetables, plus a little meat and dairy; Fijians living on small islands in

the humid tropics at sea level eating sea foods and garden vegetables. What

they had in common was that their foods were all were at the extreme

positive end of the Health = Nutrition / Calories scale. The agriculturists

were on very fertile soil that grew extraordinarily nutrient-rich food, the

sea food gatherers were obtaining their tucker from the place where all the

fertility that ever was in the soil had washed out of the land had been

transported–sea foods are also extraordinarily nutrient rich.

The group with the very best soil and consequently, the best health of

all were, by lucky accident, the Hunza. I say " lucky " and " accident " because

the Hunza and their resource base unknowingly developed an agricultural

system that produced the most nutritious food that is possible to grow. The

Hunza lived on what has been called super food. There are a lot of

interesting books about the Hunza, some deserving of careful study. (Wrench,

1938; Rodale, 1949)

Finding Your Ideal Dietary

Anyone that is genuinely interested in having the best possible health

should make their own study of the titles listed in the bibliography in the

back of this book. After you do, award yourself a BS nutrition. I draw

certain conclusions from this body of data. I think they help a person sort

out the massive confusion that exists today about proper diet.

First principle: Homo Sapiens clearly can posses extreme health while

eating very different dietary regimens. There is no one right diet for

humans.

Before the industrial era almost everyone on Earth ate what was produced

locally. Their dietary choices were pretty much restricted to those foods

that were well adapted and productive in their region. Some places grew rye,

others wheat, others millet, others rice. Some places supported cows, others

goats, others had few on no domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot

of fruits and vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary,

during thousands of years of eating that dietary natural selection

prevailed; most babies that were allergic to or not able to thrive on the

available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhood bacterial infections.

The result of this weeding out process was a population closely adapted to

the available dietary of a particular locale.

This has interesting implications for Americans, most of whose ancestors

immigrated from somewhere else; many of our ancestors also " hybridized " or

crossed with immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to discover what dietary

substances your particular genetic endowment is adapted to can be difficult

and confusing. If both your parents were Italian and they were more or less

pure Italian going way back, you might start out trying to eat wheat,

olives, garlic, fava beans, grapes, figs, cow dairy. If pure German, try rye

bread, cow dairy, apples, cabbage family vegetables. If ish, try oats,

mutton, fish, sheep dairy and cabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat

dairy, wheat, olives and citrus. And certainly all the above ethnic

derivations will thrive on many kinds of vegetables. Afro-Americans,

especially dark-complexioned ones little mixed with Europeans, might do well

to avoid wheat and instead, try sorghum, millet or tropical root crops like

sweet potatoes, yams and taro.

Making it even more difficult for an individual to discover their

optimum diet is the existence of genetic-based allergies and worse,

developed allergies. Later in this chapter I will explain how a body can

develop an allergy to a food that is probably irreversible. A weakened organ

can also prevent digestion of a food or food group.

One more thing about adaptation to dietaries. Pre-industrial humans

could only be extraordinarily healthy on the dietary they were adapted to if

and only if that dietary also was extraordinarily high in nutrients. Few

places on earth have naturally rich soil. Food grown on poor soil is poor in

nutrition; that grown on rich soil is high in nutrition. People do not

realize that the charts and tables in the backs of health books like Adelle

's Lets Cook It Right, are not really true. They are statistics. It is

vital to keep in mind the old saying, " there are lies, there are damned

lies, and then there are statistics. The best way to lie is with

statistics. "

averaging numerous samples of food from various soils and regions. These

tables basically lie because they do not show the range of possibility

between the different samples. A chart may state authoritatively that 100

grams of broccoli contains so many milligrams of calcium. What it does not

say is that some broccoli samples contain only half that amount or even

less, while other broccoli contains two or three times that amount. Since

calcium is a vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible form, the high

calcium broccoli is far better food than the low calcium sample. But both

samples of broccoli appear and taste more or less alike. Both could even be

organically grown. Yet one sample has a very positive ratio of nutrition to

calories, the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965) Here's another example I

hope will really dent the certainties the ites. Potatoes can

range in protein from eight to eleven percent, depending on the soil that

produced them and if they were or were not irrigated. Grown dry (very low

yielding) on semiarid soils, potatoes can be a high-protein staff of life.

Heavily irrigated and fertilized so as to produce bulk yield instead of

nutrition, they'll produce two or three times the tonnage, but at 8 percent

protein instead of 11 percent. Not only does the protein content drop just

as much as yield is boosted, the amino acid ratios change markedly, the

content of scarce nutritional minerals drops massively, and the caloric

content increases. In short, subsisting on irrigated commercially-grown

potatoes, or on those grown on relatively infertile soils receiving abundant

rainfall will make you fat and sick. They're a lot like manioc.

Here's another. Wheat can range from 7 to 19 percent protein. Before the

industrial era ruined most wheat by turning it into white flour,

wheat-eating peoples from regions where the cereal naturally contains

abundant protein tended to be tall, healthy and long-lived. Wheat-eating

humans from regions that produce low protein grain tended to be small,

sickly and short-lived. (McCarrison, 1921, 1936, 1982; Albrecht, 1975)

Even cows have to pay attention to where their grass is coming from.

Some green grass is over 15 percent protein and contains lots of calcium,

phosphorus and magnesium to build strong bodies. Other equally or even

better looking green grass contains only six or seven percent protein and

contains little calcium, phosphorus or magnesium. Cows forced to eat only

this poor type of grass can literally starve to death with full bellies. And

they have a hard time breeding successfully. The reason for the difference:

different soil fertility profiles. (Albrecht, 1975)

When people ate local, those living on fertile soils or getting a

significant portion of their diet from the sea and who because of physical

isolation from industrial foods did not make a practice of eating empty

calories tended to live a long time and be very healthy. But those

unfortunates on poor soils or with unwise cultural life-styles tended to be

short-lived, diseased, small, weak, have bad teeth, and etc. The lesson here

is that Homo Sapiens can adapt to many different dietaries, but like any

other animal, the one thing we can't adapt to is a dietary deficient in

nutrition.

So here's another " statistic " to reconsider. Most people believe that

due to modern medical wonders, we live longer than we used to. Actually,

that depends. Compared to badly nourished populations of a century ago, yes!

We do. Chemical medicine keeps sickly, poorly nourished people going a lot

longer (though one wonders about the quality of their dreary existences.) I

hypothesize that before the time most farmers purchased and baked with white

flour and sold their whole, unground wheat, many rural Americans (the ones

on good soil, not all parts of North America have rich soil) eating from

their own self-sufficient farms, lived as long or even longer than we do

today. You also have to wonder who benefits from promulgating this mistaken

belief about longevity. Who gets rich when we are sick? And what huge

economic interests are getting rich helping make us sick? "

The entire chapter can be found at:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020102moser/020102Moser05ch5.h

tml

Read an enjoy

Steve

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>From: " quagmire1836 " <sereneanddave@...>

>Reply-

>

>Subject: probiotic puzzles/Re: bacteria now!

>Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 18:48:25 -0000

>

>,

>

>Perhaps, like what Jordan Rubin says, it was the soil itself that

>provided numerous beneficial bacteria. The soil would be inhaled

>and also consumed on the foods that our cave brethren ate.

>The soil of the last 100 years may be quite different than the more

>freshly remineralized soil of thousands of years ago. If you

>combine that with the fact that pesticides are now in use, we clean

>our foods more carefully, and we spend more time indoors

>inhaling dust rather than soil, it's no wonder we may be deficient

>in certain organisms that you won't find in dairy, cabbage, etc.

>

>-Dave

>

>

>

>

> > Realizing that fermented foods are very traditional, but actually

> > very recent in human evolution (fermented cabbages, dairy, etc

> > apparently only emerging in the past few thousand years), I have

> > often wondered what the true probiotics of human food traditions

> > are. It is one of those difficult conundrums of 2 million

> > year " traditions " (like eating meat) vs " since the last ice

> > age " " traditions " (like fermented dairy, any grain-food

> > traditions). I don't have any confident knowledge about this

> > probiotic puzzle, but one of my theories is that commonly eating raw

> > meat and would've kept a supply of bacteria in the diet. Maybe there

> > is a decent supply of LAB in raw meat? Another possibility is that

> > people got enough bacteria from incidental sources like air or water,

> > or maybe on the surface of fruits of veggies, eaten raw and

> > unwashed? Another possibility is that it might take very little

> > externally supplied good bacteria to have good digestive health, and

> > that the more concentrated probiotic foods of recent human history

> > are compensations for departures from optimal diets resulting from

> > the adaptation of new ingredients and methods of processing. So

> > maybe people during most of human history simply didn't need much

> > probiotic help? Of course, it's also possible they commonly

> > suffered from awful digestive problems and died young, etc. We

> > probably just don't know. I'm just articulating possibilities here;

> > I have little basis for believing any of them. If anyone is more

> > knowledgeable on this topic, please share, because it has been

> > nagging at me for a long time! The history of probiotics and

> > instestinal health over the full course of our species' existence

> > would make a great research topic for a phd student in some

> > appropriate field like medicine, anthropology, nutrition, etc. If

> > there was a good book on this topic I'd read it tomorrow.

> >

> > Mike

> > SE Pennsylvania

> >

> > The best way to predict the future is to invent it. --Alan Kay

>

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[Guest guest]

> RE: probiotic puzzles/Re: bacteria now!

>

>

>Here's something that might interest you on how far the nutrient value of

>some soils have depleted

>Doctor " by Isabelle A. Moser. In it she argues that: " Homo Sapiens clearly

>can posses extreme health while eating very different dietary regimens.

>There is no one right diet for humans. " She was observing the same thing

>your Dr. Price observed and came up with a different interpretation; the

>soil.

This is NOT different than Price's interpretation - HE made the case for

soil fertility being the root of good health. It sounds like Moser got that

notion from Price's work (she's clearly read NAPD in which Price discusses

this issue).

Suze Fisher

Lapdog Design, Inc.

Web Design & Development

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3shjg

Weston A. Price Foundation Chapter Leader, Mid Coast Maine

http://www.westonaprice.org

----------------------------

“The diet-heart idea (the idea that saturated fats and cholesterol cause

heart disease) is the greatest scientific deception of our times.” --

Mann, MD, former Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt

University, Tennessee; heart disease researcher.

The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics

<http://www.thincs.org>

----------------------------

>

[Guest guest]

> spend more time

>indoors> > inhaling dust rather than soil, it's no wonder we may be

>deficient > > in certain organisms that you won't find in dairy,

>cabbage, etc.

The health dept. was out here talking about our well, because we are

doing some building and they need to test the water. He pointed

out that if you don't have the top 20 feet or so of the well " sealed "

then bacteria from the soil will leak into the well water.

Well, it turns out ours IS sealed so it's not getting soil organisms in

it. Much. But I hadn't thought about pre-modern humans, you know they

didn't have nice bentonite sealers on their wells, IF they had a well

and weren't drinking from some muddy lake. And they sure

didn't have ozonators and chlorine. So even if they DID wash their

produce it would be full of soil organisms!

-- Heidi Jean