I bet you’ve heard about organic foods as an alternative to conventional produce that is supposed to be loaded with pesticides, herbicides and other artificial chemicals and worse still the produce itself is grown from genertically engineered seeds/tubers/cuttings. We almost accept the idea at face value that the battle is between the use of dangerous pesticides and not using them. Don’t get me wrong, I am an advocate for organic and better yet bio-dynamic farming. But should it be the only focus and measure of the quality of food we eat?
Lets begin by first understanding what methods are used to improve the viability and hence quality (by marketing standards) of produce:
- Genertic Engineering / Interbreeding / Cross-breeding
- Use of Pesticides
- Chemical treatments post harvest
To qualify something, organic food does not exclude any of the methods above (except Genetic Engineering). Organic farming just uses ‘approved’ chemicals instead, which are derived from natural sources. Conventional farming uses or advocates the use of one of more of the methods.
In all of this is the presumption that healthy looking equals good health for us. Compound all this and you have the state we have currently:
Healthy looking food is equatable to healthy consumers and therefore is paramount to saleability and forms the basis for the majority of research pursuits and end goals.
So you might ask, so whats the problem with all this? Good quality produce = good health for us right? Makes sense right?
Well, to answer that, lets first examine what leads to the use of the methods above in the first place. The top 4 reasons are:
- Plant Diseases
- Insect attack
- Yield (undersize issues)
- Viability
So then it is settled that these 4 reasons alone justify the use of the 3 methods.
I hope you have noticed by now that there is little or no real focus on nutrition apart from the basic tenet that good looking produce = healthy for us.
The general method of improving nutrition in produce is for farmers to use fertilisers and soil conditioners. The general focus is on NPK (which is short for the elements Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. Fertilisers are usually marked by the ratio of NPK (eg 3-1-1). These 3 elements have the following effects/benefits:
- Nitrogen is an essential building block of amino and nucleic acids, essential to life on Earth.
- Phosphorus is a key element in all known forms of life. Inorganic phosphorus in the form of the phosphate PO43 plays a major role in biological molecules such as DNA and RNA where it forms part of the structural framework of these molecules. Living cells also use phosphate to transport cellular energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Nearly every cellular process that uses energy obtains it in the form of ATP. ATP is also important for phosphorylation, a key regulatory event in cells. Phospholipids are the main structural components of all cellular membranes.
- Potassium is an essential component of plant nutrition and is found in most soil types. Potassium content of most plants typically ranges from 1/2 to 2 percent of the harvested weight of crops. Modern high yield agriculture removes potassium from soils at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.
So what about the other elements like Calcium, Magnesium etc? How about trace elements?
It seems, mainstream medicine does little or nothing to acknowledge the importance of trace elements to human health. A little research will show you that the Nervous system contains the following elements and are CRITICAL to optimal operation:
- Calcium
- Cadmium
- Cobalt
- Chromium
- Caesium
- Copper
- Iron
- Rubidium
- Selenium
- Zinc
- Manganese
- Rhodium
- Iridium
- Gold
David Hudson, the researcher who re-discovered ORMEs in basalt rock in the Arizona desert, indicates that as much as 5% of the dry matter weight of our nervous system could consist of ORM Elements (in particular: Ormus rhodium and Ormus iridium) based on Ormus extractions he conducted on calf and pig brains.
Signalling pathways in the CNS are the means by which the cells communicate with each other to have overall optimal health. Can you imagine the scenarios when the signalling goes wrong due to a less than optimal functioning nervous system? Studies indeed show that these trace elements ensure that optimal signaling occurs and an imbalance of these elements results in signaling issues which can result in disease or the formation of tumours.
As modern agriculture continues to deplete the soils of these trace elements while only returning the basic NPK elements, we will continue to see the increase in nervous system disorders and hence general signaling related sources of disease. This starts to explain why produce has never looked better but disease is on the rise.
Farmers need to focus on the mineral balance of their soils to ensure that the produce we are getting has these elements in it. The use of sea water agriculture as advocated by Dr Maynard Murray is definitely a viable option for many farmers as sea water contains all of the elements required by us in the concentrations that we seek.
There are numerous examples of the use of sea water minerals in agriculture which results in the following benefits (WITHOUT the use of artificial fertlisers, pesticides or herbicides):
- Increased soil micro flora
- Increased nitrogen fixing bacteria in soil
- Increased resistance to insects and disease and hence reduced need for pesticides
- More drought tolerant
- More transplant tolerant
- Yield increase: Fruit is larger and better tasting
- Increase in shelf-life
- Mineral and vitamin content increased
- Faster crop cycles
- More resistant to frost
- Less fertiliser required (after soil mineral analysis)
So as simple as it is, a diluted application of sea minerals to watering cycles will result in the return of these trace elements into the soil resulting in optimal health for us.
So next time you have to make the choice between organic or conventional produce, or between organic suppliers, consider first instead the nutritional benefits of the product itself, as it evidently has greater importance. To state an obvious correlation, it is logical that food that is nutritionally superior is a lot less likely to be sprayed with pesticides and/or herbicides as the plant it came from would have been healthier than its counterparts.
So using organic produce as a basic level choice, one must ask the following questions:
- What if anything is the grower of this produce doing to address the trace mineral requirements of the produce?
- Were sea minerals used in the growing of the produce?
- What is the grower doing to ensure that their produce is consistent in its trace mineral content?
Its about time you got some answers to these questions from your growers…
Sources:
- Wikipedia.org (NPK Rating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPK_rating)
- Trace elements in the human central nervous system studied with neutron activation analysis. [Biological Trace Element Research Volume 13, Number 1, 69-75, DOI: 10.1007/BF02796622] L. O. Plantin, Ulla Lying-Tunell and K. Kristensson
- Central Nervous System Nutrient Signaling: The Regulation of Energy Balance and the Future of Dietary Therapies. [Annual Review of Nutrition Vol. 30: 219-235 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.nutr.012809.104723] M.A. Stefater and R.J. Seeley