LifeHakx - Earth, Wind &Fire
By Eva Wisenbeck 14/11/2021
Earth Intro
Listen to the audio here.
Watch the video here.
Soil health and lack thereof
“If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy,” says soil advocate, Holly Arbuckle… “
”In order to have nutrient dense food, and healthy people, we need healthy soil.”
Given that 95 per cent of per capita calorie consumption worldwide comes from crops that grow directly in the soil or from food sources that indirectly rely on it, the symbolic maternal relationship between fertile soil and human life is profound.
Healthy soil requires living mixtures of minerals, microbes, air, water and around 4 per cent organic matter, such as carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen in order to sustain plant growth, but due to industrial farming methods such as mono-cropping, intensive tilling, lack of cover crops, and the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers, approximately one third of the world’s productive topsoil has been depleted, leaving it with just half a percent of organic matter— eight times less than it needs.
Overfed and undernourished
Is the nutrient content in our food (vegetables, fruit, meat and fish) lower now than it was years ago?
Yes! By how much though is up for scientific debate and it of course also depends on if say your carrot is intensively grown with gmo seeds and high levels of pesticides, compared with grown by your local organic farmer using heirloom varieties.
That’s before we even start to talk about processing our food into “junk food”.
As Doctor Aseem Malhotra says - if it’s got more than 5 ingredients put it back on the shelf!
When food is ultra-processed it loses its ability to communicate with our genes meaning all the messages to turn on or off gene expressions, epigenetic, can’t happen or happen mainly in a negative way driving further disease.
Mark Hyman and his book “Food Fix”
Right, so how can we learn more and help ensure a safe and sustainable food future for us and for our children and grandchildren, and for earth?
Dr Mark Hyman’s latest book “Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet – One Bite at a Time” is a great place to start.
He describes Food Fix as “a hard-hitting manifesto that will change the way you think about — and eat — food forever, and will provide solutions for citizens, businesses, and policymakers to create a healthier world, society, and planet.”
Dr. Mark Hyman is a family physician and a leader in the field of Functional Medicine (preventative and root cause medicine). He’s the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, the Head of Strategy and Innovation of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. Dr. Hyman also hosts the podcast The Doctor’s Farmacy, do check that out for many great and thought provoking interviews.
You can read the first chapter of “Food Fix” here:
Stay tuned for the Wind and Fire introductions!
Sources:
Forbes - Earth’s Rapidly Degrading Soil Is Bad News For Human Health
American Scientific - Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?
Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence? https://journals.ashs.org/configurable/content/journals$002fhortsci$002f44$002f1$002farticle-p15.xml
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