-Part of the “Foundational Diet questions” Series
- Why does soil in the 21st century contain less nutrients, and how does this affect the human body?
You can put soil depletion down to three main things, depending on your country of origin.
World War II, Intensive farming practices, and government handouts (subsidies) to farmers.
During a war, importing fruit and veg becomes troublesome, and so rationing was commonplace.
Farmers were encouraged to up their production to meet demand.
The most obvious way to increase yield, would be to use every available acre to grow crops, continuously.
Normally, after a harvest, fields are left ‘fallow’, so with nothing growing on them, and all manner of creatures shitting everywhere, the soil would regain its mineral content, which would then find its way into the next crop, along with nutrients coming from the bottom up, or the rocks in other words.
Way before anyone knew about vitamins and minerals in medieval Europe, it was common practice to operate a ‘two field rotation’ system.
Half a farmer’s land would produce crops for this season, while the other half rested, and this process would then be reversed.
I’m guessing that they observed their crop yields getting smaller, or the produce not looking as healthy when they hammered the land year after year, and the soil lost its fertility.
Jewish farmers were commanded to follow this practice in the Torah, and the Bible commanded a ‘Sabbath for the soil’ every seventh year, while middle eastern farmers have been doing this since 6000 BC!
So, it’s pretty damn important.
In Europe, human waste would be collected, and taken by horse and cart to be spread on the fields, meanwhile in China, soy was grown as a ‘green manure’ to put nutrients back into their soil.
The shit from a thousand-different species of animals and insects would be washed into the soil by the rain, and this would also put goodness back into it from the top down, while the soil drags minerals upwards from the bedrock below, as mentioned.
You and I can’t absorb those minerals from rocks, but soil can, and plants can then draw in those nutrients in a form that most humans can absorb fairly well, but not as well as people imagine.
The farmer would still plough the empty fields, as well as spread animal waste for the same reason.
But there was a problem.
The Chinese defiantly got it right with the soy, because as populations grew, and all settled in the same areas, farming just couldn’t keep up with demand. They literally couldn’t collect enough shit, to cover enough land, to grow enough crops, to feed enough people!
Fortunately for the human race, science stepped up to the plate at just the right time.
Intensive farming practices as it’s called, involves dumping tons of nitrogen based, man-made fertilizer on the land, to ensure they can re-use the land, time after time.
Problem is that fertilizer, in heavy use since the 1950, only contains Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium, the three things most lacking in overworked soil.
Just enough of this new shit goes onto the soil to grow big, healthy LOOKING produce, and fuck all else.
The fact that the soil is supposed to contain 60 or more other minerals, all classed as essential to human life, seems to be irrelevant to these bastards, whose only concern is maximum growth, yield and money, at minimum cost.
Believe it or not, it’s possible to grow a vegetable that’s as big or bigger than 100 years ago, but with less than a quarter (25%) of the goodness nature intended.
For ten years after the war, there were still food shortages here and there, and so some genius fuckwitt at the European Union, came up with the idea of subsidising farmers to produce as much yield as possible, whether it got sold or rotted in a barn, just so that the situation of possible shortages wouldn’t happen again, and also to protect farmers from far cheaper third world imports.
Imagine you’re a farmer in a developed nation. You have to charge say $100 per ton of produce, to say a supermarket or other distributor, because you have overheads to meet, plus a bit on top for yourself.
Except that the same supermarket or distributor, can have the same ton of product imported from a third world country, including shipping, for only $50!
‘Fuck, what if our farmers go bust’, someone thought?
‘I know, lets pay (subsidise) them to the tune of $50 per ton, and that way they can charge their customers the same as they’d pay for the imported product ($50), so it’s no skin off the supermarkets nose to buy home grown produce. In fact, it would become a selling point!
And we’ll take that subsidy from tax payers money, without fucking asking them’.
Farmers, big agricultural and chemical companies, all have some serious clout in government you see, and the more farmers were encouraged to grow, the more fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides they’d need to buy.
This idea may well have started out of food shortage concerns, but by the 1970’s farmers were already abusing it, leading to ‘grain mountains’ and ‘wine lakes’ of ruined, wasted food.
In response to the outrage from the taxpayers, governments then decided to pay farmers for under producing!
Yep, they actually paid farmers for ‘set aside’ land, without the farmers growing fuck all on it.
But it was there if we needed it!
So, in a nutshell, depending on where you live, your countries soil IS MISSING 60% to 80% of its nutrition content.
It’s all fur coat and no knickers in other words, and the bollocks of eating 5 portions a day for good health, is simple marketing hype.
You can eat 5 wheelbarrows full, and still not get the nutrient density you’d get from 4 scrambled eggs in the morning, liver and bacon for lunch, and fish and chips for supper.
According to the world’s leading toxicologist and biologist, Dr Bruce Ames, of all the toxins we ingest that might give us cancer, 99.9% of them aren’t from chemicals the farmer sprays on crops.
No, 99.9% of the dodgy pesticide chemicals in your body right now, were actually made by the fucking plants and fruits you’ve eaten!
Hard to believe I know, but how else do you think plants protect themselves, did you ever think about that?
They can’t run away or fight, they have no teeth or claws, so what’s left?
Chemical warfare.
That’s the only way the plant kingdom protects itself against animals, insects, fungi and so on.
Of the thousands of plant toxins in your body right now, only 57 have ever been tested, and half of them (27) are carcinogenic in rodents.
We only test on rodents, because what fucks them up tends to bugger us as well.
So, am I saying your ‘5 a day’ is causing the increase in cancer?
I dare not, what with all the sugar, cigarettes and EMF’s out there, that could be equally responsible.
But here’s my Blunt Coach theory you may like to consider;
Let’s just suppose there was a god, or a mother nature for a minute.
And she made vegetation long before us, but with a view to us, and other animals, eating that veg at some point.
She gave the vegetation the ability to defend itself against predators by using poison, and just enough to allow the veg to reach maturity or ripeness.
In and of itself, those chemical weapons might be lethal to any animals consuming them over decades, and none live much longer than us humans, do they?
So, God, or Mother Nature, sees to it that each plant has a generous amount of 60 to 80 essential and trace minerals, plus various vitamins, all of which offset the dangerous carcinogenic defence chemicals.
The great shit cancels out the bad shit, ok?
God/Mamma Nature, being all wise, probably would have made the good shit twice as potent as the bad shit, just to be on the safe side, since all vegetation starts to lose its nutrients from the minute it’s picked.
So, were all good then?
Erm, not if there’s only 20 to 40% of the fucking vitamins and minerals that’s supposed to be in the food. No, not good at all in fact.
Because that food often spends days before we ever eat it, plus, as mentioned earlier and contrary to popular belief, humans don’t absorb those nutrients at all well.
Especially children (plus the sick and elderly), which should help explain why kids hate their fucking vegetables.
The kids can hear every adult shouting ‘eat your greens’ and may even grow up with some cartoon bullshit like ‘Popeye’ as I did, to validate how great greens are.
But the child’s intuition is tuned into god or mamma nature, that’s saying ‘yeah, fuck the veg kid, it’s not that good for you yet’
But whenever you, your kids, or your grandparents do eat veg, the one thing you can be sure you are all getting, are the carcinogenic compounds, just as nature intended them.
Remember. Man has been responsible for the removal of all the good nutrients, but not smart enough to take care of the bad stuff at the same time, and hence Dr Bruce Ames, the world’s leading toxicologist remember, and his statement that 99.9% of the toxicity in human tissue comes from plants.
Maybe, if the nutrients were balanced as nature intended, then our detoxification pathways would be way more efficient, leading to far less cancer.
And no, organically grown doesn’t mean shit, and governments have warned producers not to make any health claims for any of them, since after reviewing 150 clinical studies, it was revealed that organic foods, offer zero nutritional benefits over the other shit.
So now you know 100% more than your doctor, nutritionist, dietician or next door neighbour know it all knows, about soil depletion levels.
Check online for the state of your own country, but you’ll be dead lucky if it’s anything like half of what nature intended.
Be well.
Blunt Coach Andy
