The Dirt on Dirt Or Where This Country Went Wrong From The Ground Up.
Did you know that Soil is alive? One teaspoon of non chemically treated soil has more living organisms than people on the planet. Good top soil is about 45% minerals. If we accept the fact that the vast majority of disease is due to nutritional deficiency's then we start to appreciate the critical relationship between our survival and the condition of the soil our food comes from. Consider this; no civilization has ever lived beyond the health of its soil.
When we see a symptom on the plant, it will always correlate to a poison or a deficiency in the soil; when we see a disease in the human, it will relate to a poison or a deficiency in the food. The ability of nutritional deficiency's to affect genetics via soil depletion, over-processed foods, over consumption of sugar and bad fats, and starvation was first recognized in the 1930's. In 1939, Weston Price, D.D.S., published«Nutrition and Physical Degeneration«. As soon as parents of aboriginal tribes began to eat what Dr. Price called «the foods of commerce,«they passed along inferior genetic traits to the very next generation of offspring. (You can google his name and see the pictures he took of parents and siblings and see the stark contrast of dental disease and facial malformation.)
A plant has an immune system just as we do. They grow in soil rich in bacteria. The overwhelming majority of bacteria are good, healthy and friendly. So how a plant thrives in this environment is due to the mycorrhiza that grow along the plants root system. These are tiny hair like fungus that secrete toxic secretions which are antibiotic.Think Penicillin! This keeps the plant from being consumed by the bacteria. They also help the plant chelate, which is how they absorb the right amount and type of minerals. When they loose there mycorrhiza they tend to get inundated by the minerals in abundance and start to show some type of deformity or deficiency.
So, where do we go wrong?
Due to modern day agriculture we over utilize the soil from constant turnover and poor soil management. This robs the soil of vital minerals plants need to stay healthy. Nature has a way of only allowing the healthiest of species to survive. So if a plant is weak or unhealthy the mycorrhiza will actually turn on the plant as a self destruct mechanism. The plant starts to grow a fungus up the plant. The farmer sees this and rushes to the chemical supply store where he purchases barrels of stuff that have skull and cross bones on it and says things like «avoid contact with skin and use only in well ventilated areas.« He then goes out and sprays that on our food! Which also kills the mycorrhiza. So now the plant develops a bacterial infection. Just like we do if the bacterial count gets too high. So now the plants not absorbing minerals properly. So the farmer goes back and gets a new drug usually sprayed on with the anti fungus stuff. So now mother nature says okay that didn't work, no junk. You've destroyed my first line of defense in the soil so now I'll send in the mutant bugs. Mutant because bugs are notorious for being able to mutate to a stressful environment because they don't care about being ugly ( and man are they getting ugly, people are seeing bugs in their areas they've never seen before) they just do what bugs do.....survive and eat. Soooo, back to Ag. store for guess what, yup, stronger more potent more toxic insecticides sprayed on the plant and into the soil which now goes up the root system inside the plant. Try washing that off! Does all this work? According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures, crop loss due to insect damage has doubled since World War 2, from 7% to 14%. Insecticide use is up over ten times in that same time period. The World Health Organization has stated that malaria carrying mosquitos are now resistant to DDT, one of the most toxic insecticides ever produced. On Oct. 11, 1998, the EPA weakened restrictions on cancer causing pesticides in foods. This means the existing weak standards on the 2.7 billion pounds of pesticides used in the U.S. each year have been made even weaker.
What can you do? Again, my constant mantra is vote with your dollars. Eat Organic! Seriously consider doing a de-tox program twice a year. Your life literally depends on it.