Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
Interesting point, obviously the plants have no idea what chemicals they produce contributes to human wellness nor do they care
and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever on mainly a corn syrup diet
...but I wanted songbird to do the work.
That said, I knew about the Euroworms in North America but hadn't thought about their takeover affecting native species.
It stands to reason that they would, and that that they would be a problem.
Consider your source. The chemicals that organic farming increases (more accurately: that factory farming depresses) are flavonoids
Plant toxins are usually alkaloids that taste bitter, and are normally avoided because they are repugnant.
Tomato leaves are poisonous, as are rhubarb, however most poisonous plants aren't found in the vegetable garden (surprise, surprise), they are found among the ornamentals that are not likely to be eaten.
Make that in spite of corn syrup. Obese, type 2, diabetic children aren't going to increase the life expectancy average.
It's not a matter of native species. Apparently, northern forests have adapted to piles of un-decomposed leaves. The invasive earthworms do just what all gardeners want them to do, they decompose the leaf litter, thereby changing the forest environment. It is my understanding that this changed environment "may" threaten some species of trees, and plants, but has not done so, so far. Probably need a forester to answer this question.
Sorry, native species of plant life.
The word "may" is probably playing it too safe.
Now that I've had a bit of a think and before I go out to lay down mulch and encourage euroworm migration into a sandy area most recently occupied by forsythia, it would seem a reasonable bet that some plant species have been lost to Euroworm's penchant for survival in the colder northern climates and appetite for leaf litter.
Gotta fly...
you can't make the assumption that because a plant is not poisonous, it is 100% good for you
facts are facts, facts can be stubborn things
I suspect having cheap calories to eat overrides everything else, IMO
In article , phorbin wrote: I don't have time to supply cites but the truth is out there.
Life isn't 100% good for us but look at how hard we hang onto it.=20
There are a lot of assumptions you can't make about plants.
It's not cheap calories so much as it is the type of calories and the=20 combinations they come in.=20
If by "everything else", you mean reasonable eating habits and common=20 sense, I agree.
I suggest that having sugars, starches, fats and salt in certain=20 combinations acts on the brain in much the way that drugs do.
I don't have time to supply cites but the truth is out there.
Try sugar salt fat acts brain drug study
Interesting point, obviously the plants have no idea what chemicals they produce contributes to human wellness nor do they care
and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever on mainly a corn syrup diet ____________________________________ "Living" longer might be worth examining more closely.
Note to self: read all of thread before responding - someone may have already made the point you're about to.
facts are facts, facts can be stubborn things
I suspect having cheap calories to eat overrides everything else, IMO _____________________________________________________ The world has too many people IMO.
And you can't make the assumption that organic farming is making a traditional food more toxic.
Not if the cheap calories that are causing life shortening illnesses; metabolic syndrome includes obesity, hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol. One of the reasons that grain was processed was because pests avoided it in favor of whole grains.
phorbin wrote: ...
this is a fact, also the removing of the leaf cover opens up the forest to more deer grazing and digging which is very destructive and challenges the previously less exposed species further. it's a keystone change.
and now here in Michigan we have wild pigs getting established. you think deer/raccoons cause garden troubles...
songbird
Billy wrote: ...
we were talking about feeding the world using organic methods vs. current agri-chem-oil.
asides and tangents happen in usenet.
songbird (for most bird species the male sings
includes just about anything that involves any degree of processing!
you can't assume that traditional foods are less toxic to begin with.
i didn't even know until a few weeks ago that rhubarb can be troublesome if you eat it shortly after a frost.
one of many reasons. shelf life/storage concerns, uniformity of texture/moisture levels, avoiding rancidity (removing the germ/oils), residual fungal toxins, and of course getting rid of the impurities to a greater extent. as one person said "no rat/mice feces is the acceptable level in flour used to bake my bread!" or at least they feel psychologically better if the word "bleach" is used for the remains. i don't, i like whole grain multi-grain breads and if there's a rat dropping in it i probably won't notice because of the toasted sesame seeds anyways. :)
the stuff about too much sugar is probably true, yet the fault of cheap calories is not the companies producing but the consumers who are buying and feeding their kids this stuff repeatedly (not in moderation as a treat) and then letting them sit around all day and play video games.
songbird
not directly as they don't "mentate" (there is rumor most people don't either :) ), but if they kill off all of their seed dispersers then they will eventually be outdone by the other plants that are "nicer".
it's an interesting dance that they must do, protect their green stuff from predation, but make their fruits yummy so that they get their seeds moved. Mr. Pollan in _the Botany of Desire_ is very good at observing this dance in several forms.
we can credit medical science for most of this change (not diet). if diet were a major contributor to health i know many children who should be dead. they live off a very restricted diet of primarily heavily processed nutritionally poor foods, but somehow they manage to grow taller than me, they graduate from high school with honors, play sports at a high level, etc.
medical science might even be going fast enough to keep these people healthy and functioning long past what they would be otherwise blowing out kidneys and hearts due to long term poor diet. i believe it's a race at the moment and junk food is winning.
why it is winning is simple, the brain loves sugar, salts and lipids and makes sure to get those. it's very hard to avoid junk food.
songbird
That is problem #1, if it is not dealt with every other problem will become worse. The trick is to deal with it before nature takes its course and solves the problem for us - that will not be pretty.
David
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:50:20 "actually, what i am wondering more and more about is while i'm sure that some of the things that plants make are ok for us, many other substances are either going to be somewhat toxic or neutral and the end result is that the liver is the primary sorting ground. so any nutritional studies which do not analyze long term liver function/toxicity are basically crap.
all these chemicals that plants make to defend themselves from predators (including herbivores/ omnivores i.e. us) at some level will be doing some damage and perhaps organic gardening which increases certain chemicals may be increasing the burden on the liver. we really are not very far along in this sort of "entire system" analysis when it comes to all the chemicals the body can ingest and the waste products and how they are transported and etc... some things are stored in fats and thus in the fatty cells in the body. some things come out of the fats given certain diets and such, etc. all of this is not really completely understood either.
take it all in combination and we are many years from "knowledge" in the sense of completeness, but at least we are on the way if we don't manage to do ourselves in first. it's a race IMO. considering what we knew a hundred years ago we've made a lot of progress, but much of what we know now is still likely to be flat out wrong. i trust science to figure it out eventually, i do not trust "organic religion" any more than i trusted "atkins diet religion" when that became a craze." (quotation marks are mine, lack of punctuation, and capitals, is all songbird's)
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So that is what we were talking about, this crazy organic gardening thing. You know, the way in which all food was grown before 1945.
So now you propose that eating the way we did before 1945, and reaping the benefit of flavonoids as we did before 1945 is some kind of "organic religion".
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