I am really looking forward to this month's blog party hosted by Kiva. We'll be delving into sweet herbal preservations. To see all of the participating blogs just visit the link above to Kiva's fabulous blog.
This spring I attended the East West Seminar, the school of Michael and Lesley Tierra. At the closing ceremony Lesley led us all in several visualizations. During one visualization for a plant ally, chamomile strongly came to my mind. “Chamomile?!” I thought. “Simple plain old chamomile?!”
This past month at Herbmentor our herb of the month was chamomile. Yep, plain old chamomile and I just had a fabulous time studying the many uses of this plant. I tried drinking a small cup of tea before dinner to help promote digestion and I read with interest about Kimberly Gallagher using it for a wound.
In fact I became truly intrigued with this happy little Asteraceae plant that seemed to do so much. Chamomile’s gentle but profound affinity for the nervous system proves to us that herbs can be subtle yet still powerful and effective. From babies to elders and from teething to anxiety chamomile can soothe us throughout our entire lives.
In the Herbmentor forums one person shared that he and his wife have used chamomile almost exclusively for their baby from teething to colic to diaper rash.
After a month of exploring chamomile I will certainly never look at it as simple and plain again!
One new thing I learned about chamomile is that the fresh plant preparations seem to have more of an affinity for the nervous system while the dried plant has more of a bitter flavor that lends itself more to the digestive system. I don’t feel like I have enough experience with both the fresh and dried to weigh in on this, but it is an interesting concept.
With questions about fresh preparations running through my head I made two lovely sweet concoctions with fresh chamomile that I received from Ancestree Herbals.
The first was a simple chamomile honey. I filled a jar half full with freshly picked chamomile and then filled it the rest of the way with honey. I then stirred this well to mix it in. Each day for about a week I turned the honey upside down to give it another mixing. The result was a delicately flavored chamomile honey. I didn’t bother to strain the flowers – I just ate them along with the honey. I could see chamomile honey being a great way to flavor teas.
I also tinctured a lot of the fresh chamomile. I used 100 proof vodka and almost instantly the mixture turned a beautiful golden yellow. After a month I strained the tincture. The result was a sweet, slightly bitter dark yellow tincture.
I had been recently inspired by Kiva Rose’s fascination with elixirs so I thought I would try something a little different with some of my chamomile tincture. In a 4 oz amber bottle I added enough chamomile tincture to fill it halfway. I then added an equal amount of agave syrup. (I actually prefer honey to agave syrup, but for whatever reason this is what I had on hand.) The result was beautifully sweet chamomile elixir.
A friend of mine has a daughter who I think could become good friends with chamomile. The alcohol taste of the elixir seemed a little too harsh for an adolescent, so I tried a teaspoon of the chamomile in a cup of tap water. The result was a fantastic instant “tea”. I immediately bottled some up and am awaiting a report from my friend and her daughter.
I don’t normally consume sugar myself, but elixirs can be a fun way to share herbal delights with friends who will probably come back begging for more.
I am attending two weddings this month and will be giving both friends a bottle of rose elixir which I made in the same way as described above for chamomile.
Happy Sweet Summer!
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Persistence Hunting
This morning while over at Tim Ferris's blog on Vibram Five Fingers shoes I found in his entry a link to the video below (also at the top of this page's sidebar), showing how !Kung men hunt wild game, running it to exhaustion such that it practically speaking surrenders. I felt very deeply moved by the film, seeing the deep relationship between hunter and hunted, and the courage of the hunter, and particularly watching how the hunter honors the hunted at the end.
Vegetarians often claim humans are not suited to hunting because we don't have teeth and claws like big cats. The film very clearly shows how man's natural weapons consist of his bipedalism, unique sweat glands, language ability, intelligence, imagination, tool-making, lopsided brain, handedness, persistence, endurance, and ability to throw an object (spear) with accuracy. These all enable a man to track, outwit, and run down a larger, faster animal at a time of day when the lack of similar sweat glands makes the prey extremely vulnerable.
Notice also that the chase takes 8 hours, on an empty stomach.
Vegetarians often claim humans are not suited to hunting because we don't have teeth and claws like big cats. The film very clearly shows how man's natural weapons consist of his bipedalism, unique sweat glands, language ability, intelligence, imagination, tool-making, lopsided brain, handedness, persistence, endurance, and ability to throw an object (spear) with accuracy. These all enable a man to track, outwit, and run down a larger, faster animal at a time of day when the lack of similar sweat glands makes the prey extremely vulnerable.
Notice also that the chase takes 8 hours, on an empty stomach.
Top Ten Problems With Applying The Paleolithic Diet Principles: Number 2, part 2
To clarify a point, when I say that humans are specifically adapted to a primarily carnivorous diet, I mean this:
In evolution, speciation results from to specialization in exploitation of a particular ecological niche.
Our closest primate relatives, the chimps and gorillas, chose to exploit specific ecological niches which exerted natural selection pressures that resulted in modern chimps and gorillas having bodies specialized for eating largely vegetarian diets, in ways that make each a unique species.
Human ancestors chose to exploit a very different ecological niche which exerted natural selection pressures that resulted in modern humans having bodies specialized for a largely carnivorous diet. Basically, they chose a habitat in which plant foods were scarce and animal foods – starting with insects, worms, etc. – were more abundant.
I don’t deny that we have the ability to consume plant foods. I only emphasize that whereas other primates have specialized in eating vegetation, humans have specialized in eating meat. We have specialized to the extent that we can live on meat alone, and doing so can improve our health.
Adventures in Diet
In the November 1935 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, in his first installment of a series of three articles entitled Adventures in Diet, Vihljalmur Stefansson wrote
Stefansson continued:
“Not so long ago”? These beliefs still hold sway today, not only among physicians, dietitians, and nutritionists, but also among anthropologists seeking to explain human evolution. The assumption that human ancestors were vegetarians, and could not have lived on meat alone now gets supported by citing the brain’s supposed requirement for glucose, the existence of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, and the production of amylase, the starch-digesting enzyme.
In 1918, after living with the Eskimos as an Eskimo for eleven years, Vihljalmur Stefansson returned to the U.S. and began giving lectures in which he reported that the Eskimo diet contained no vegetal foods, consisted only of meat and fat, most of the year; and that he and members of his expeditions, including Caucasians, Cape Verde Islanders with a strain of Negro blood, and South Sea Islanders, had lived on meat and water for years at a time.
Proponents of vegetarian diets, particularly John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., called Stefansson a liar, saying that humans can’t live without eating vegetal foods.
To prove his claim, Stefansson and consented to subject himself to scrutiny of a team of physicians while they ate a diet consisting entirely of meat and fat for one year straight. Karsten Anderson, a Danish man who had accompanied Stefansson on his third Arctic expedition, also consented to the study.
Anderson had several characteristics making him a suitable subject for the study. First, he had experience with the meat-and-water diet, so he would not suffer from the handicapping beliefs in the inadequacy of a meat-only diet, which can easily generate psychosomatic illness – a factor that plays a major role in many anecdotal reports of feeling unwell on diets restricting or lacking vegetal foods. Second, Anderson had at one point suffered from scurvy while on a mixed diet, and recovered from it on a meat-only diet.
Third, Anderson had for several years lived in Florida, working on his own, spending most days outdoors in sunlight, and eating a diet rich in vegetal foods. On this sunshine-supplemented mixed diet, Anderson suffered from frequent head colds, thinning hair, and, as Stefansson described it, “intestinal toxemia such as would ordinarily cause a doctor to look serious and pronounce: ‘You must go light on meat.’ or ‘I am afraid you'll have to cut out meat entirely.’"
During the year on the meat diet, Stefansson ate his meat well-done, and Anderson medium. They ate such foods as “steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short-ribs, chicken, fish, liver and bacon.” According to Stefannson, Eskimos typically only ate the heads, briskets, ribs, pelvis and the marrow from the bones, and gave the organs, entrails, hams, shoulders, and tenderloin to their dogs. The men followed the Eskimo habit of eating fish bones and chewing rib ends.
After the year passed, the physicians subjected the men to a battery of tests to ascertain the “damage” done by going one full year without vegetal foods. They found ….. no damage at all. In fact, on the meat diet, Andersen had fewer colds, less hair loss, and a remission of symptoms of the intestinal microbial toxemia, and Stefansson lost ten pounds of fat. Stefansson felt optimistic and had an abundance of energy. Exercise tests showed that the men had an increase of physical stamina as the experiment progressed.
Chemists determined that the meat diet was very “low” in calcium, but no test performed on the men revealed any calcium deficiency, and the men looked healthier and felt better than they had on their previous mixed diets. The researchers hypothesized that though this lack of calcium had no effect over short one-year duration of the experiment, it might have severe effects over 10 or 20 years. To test this hypothesis, a secondary study was performed by Dr. Earnest A. Hooton, Professor of Physical Anthropology. Hooton examined the Peabody Museum collection of bones of Eskimos known to have died before European contact. Hooton found no evidence of calcium deficiency in those skeletons; on the contrary, those bones indicated that the Eskimos had adequate if not liberal calcium in their diet.
This study proved that man can live, even thrive, on a meat diet, for a lifetime. You know that neither chimp nor gorilla would survive in the niche exploited by Eskimos.
All these findings suggest that their previous mixed diet contained some factor(s) which caused illness. Removing plant foods removed the factor(s) and allowed these men to achieve a more natural condition, known as health. Perhaps they did not need to go so far, but again they proved a point: humans can maintain or even improve health without eating any plant food.
Meat your teeth
One of the most important issues in nutrition consists of its effects on dentition. So long as Eskimos lived on exclusively meat diets, they had no tooth decay. All meat-eating tribes maintain complete immunity to dental decay. In contrast, all tribes on mixed diets have some tooth decay, and the incidence of tooth decay increases in direct relationship to the amount of fermentable carbohydrate in the diet, a dose-response manner.
In the absence of dentistry and oral hygiene, in any species, reproductive success absolutely depends on a very high if not complete resistance to oral infections and dental decay. Chronic oral infection or significant tooth decay causes feeding disability, nutritional deficiency, metabolic disease, and reproductive failure.
In fact, we have good evidence that oral infection either causes infertility, or that oral infection and infertility have the same cause.
Bieniek and Riedel reported that among patients with subfertility and bacteriospermia, “It could be demonstrated that the bacterial spectrum of the intraoral samples was almost identical with the spermiograms.” [Bacterial foci in the teeth, oral cavity, and jaw--secondary effects (remote action) of bacterial colonies with respect to bacteriospermia and subfertility in males.]
Khader et al found that women with periodontal disease had a 4.28 times greater risk of preterm birth, only manageable with modern medical care. [Periodontal diseases and the risk of preterm birth and low birth weight: a meta-analysis.]
Xiong et al reviewed 25 studies of periodontal disease and pregnancy outcomes, and found that 18 of them found an association between periodontal disease and increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcome, including preterm low birthweight, low birthweight, preterm birth, birthweight by gestational age, miscarriage or pregnancy loss, and pre-eclampsia, with the highest odds ratio of 20. [Periodontal disease and adverse pregnancy outcomes: a systematic review.]
This evidence indicates that diets that promote tooth decay significantly impair fertility. This further drives home the point that oral infections and dental decay are maladaptive, as are any diets that promote oral infections and dental decay.
Hence, if certain level of intake of a class of foods promotes tooth decay in a given species, we can conclude that the species has not adapted to consumption of that class of foods beyond the level that clearly increases the occurrence of tooth decay.
Let me put it another way.
If human ancestors ate a diet rich in fermentable carbohydrates, which in modern humans promotes dental/oral infections or inflammation, those who had a high resistance to oral infections and caries produced by acidogenic bacteria while eating a diet high in fermentable carbohydrates would have had more children than those who had a low resistance. Those people who succumbed to tooth decay and oral infections would have had fewer offspring, and those who had high resistance to caries despite consumption of fermentable carbohydrate would have had more offspring. Over the millennia, given a situation in which people had no choice but to eat large volumes of fermentable carbohydrate (tubers, grains, etc.), the oral disease and resultant suboptimal fertility imposed by such diets would have by natural selection eliminated from the species all or virtually all humans having high susceptibility to dental decay when fed fermentable carbohydrate.
If this had happened, modern humans would maintain excellent dental health on a diet high in fermentable carbohydrates.
Since this is exactly the opposite of our current situation, we can conclude that our ancestors did not eat much of foods containing fermentable carbohydrates. The fact that we have no adequate defense against the tooth decay produced by diets high in fermentable carbohydrates tells us that our ancestors’ diets most likely contained little or no sugar or starch most of the time. Yes, they may have eaten honey or tubers on occasion, but these most likely were not put in the mouth very often or in very large amounts relative to non-fermentable foods.
In evolution, speciation results from to specialization in exploitation of a particular ecological niche.
Our closest primate relatives, the chimps and gorillas, chose to exploit specific ecological niches which exerted natural selection pressures that resulted in modern chimps and gorillas having bodies specialized for eating largely vegetarian diets, in ways that make each a unique species.
Human ancestors chose to exploit a very different ecological niche which exerted natural selection pressures that resulted in modern humans having bodies specialized for a largely carnivorous diet. Basically, they chose a habitat in which plant foods were scarce and animal foods – starting with insects, worms, etc. – were more abundant.
I don’t deny that we have the ability to consume plant foods. I only emphasize that whereas other primates have specialized in eating vegetation, humans have specialized in eating meat. We have specialized to the extent that we can live on meat alone, and doing so can improve our health.
Adventures in Diet
In the November 1935 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, in his first installment of a series of three articles entitled Adventures in Diet, Vihljalmur Stefansson wrote
“Not so long ago the following dietetic beliefs were common: To be healthy you need a varied diet, composed of elements from both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. You got tired of and eventually felt a revulsion against things if you had to eat them often. This latter belief was supported by stories of people who through force of circumstances had been compelled, for instance, to live for two weeks on sardines and crackers and who, according to the stories, had sworn that so long as they lived they never would touch sardines again. The Southerners had it that nobody can eat a quail a day for thirty days.
There were subsidiary dietetic views. It was desirable to eat fruits and vegetables, including nuts and coarse grains. The less meat you ate the better for you. If you ate a good deal of it, you would develop rheumatism, hardening of the arteries, and high blood pressure, with a tendency to breakdown of the kidneys—in short, premature old age. An extreme variant had it that you would live more healthy, happily, and longer if you became a vegetarian.
Specifically it was believed, when our field studies began, that without vegetables in your diet you would develop scurvy. It was a"known fact" that sailors, miners, and explorers frequently died of scurvy ‘because they did not have vegetables and fruits.’ This was long before Vitamin C was publicized.”
Stefansson continued:
“A belief I was destined to find crucial in my Arctic work, making the difference between success and failure, life and death, was the view that man cannot live on meat alone. The few doctors and dietitians who thought you could were considered unorthodox if not charlatans. The arguments ranged from metaphysics to chemistry: Man was not intended to be carnivorous—you knew that from examining his teeth, his stomach, and the account of him in the Bible. As mentioned, he would get scurvy if he had no vegetables. The kidneys would be ruined by overwork. There would be protein poisoning and, in general hell to pay.”
“Not so long ago”? These beliefs still hold sway today, not only among physicians, dietitians, and nutritionists, but also among anthropologists seeking to explain human evolution. The assumption that human ancestors were vegetarians, and could not have lived on meat alone now gets supported by citing the brain’s supposed requirement for glucose, the existence of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, and the production of amylase, the starch-digesting enzyme.
In 1918, after living with the Eskimos as an Eskimo for eleven years, Vihljalmur Stefansson returned to the U.S. and began giving lectures in which he reported that the Eskimo diet contained no vegetal foods, consisted only of meat and fat, most of the year; and that he and members of his expeditions, including Caucasians, Cape Verde Islanders with a strain of Negro blood, and South Sea Islanders, had lived on meat and water for years at a time.
Proponents of vegetarian diets, particularly John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., called Stefansson a liar, saying that humans can’t live without eating vegetal foods.
To prove his claim, Stefansson and consented to subject himself to scrutiny of a team of physicians while they ate a diet consisting entirely of meat and fat for one year straight. Karsten Anderson, a Danish man who had accompanied Stefansson on his third Arctic expedition, also consented to the study.
Anderson had several characteristics making him a suitable subject for the study. First, he had experience with the meat-and-water diet, so he would not suffer from the handicapping beliefs in the inadequacy of a meat-only diet, which can easily generate psychosomatic illness – a factor that plays a major role in many anecdotal reports of feeling unwell on diets restricting or lacking vegetal foods. Second, Anderson had at one point suffered from scurvy while on a mixed diet, and recovered from it on a meat-only diet.
Third, Anderson had for several years lived in Florida, working on his own, spending most days outdoors in sunlight, and eating a diet rich in vegetal foods. On this sunshine-supplemented mixed diet, Anderson suffered from frequent head colds, thinning hair, and, as Stefansson described it, “intestinal toxemia such as would ordinarily cause a doctor to look serious and pronounce: ‘You must go light on meat.’ or ‘I am afraid you'll have to cut out meat entirely.’"
During the year on the meat diet, Stefansson ate his meat well-done, and Anderson medium. They ate such foods as “steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short-ribs, chicken, fish, liver and bacon.” According to Stefannson, Eskimos typically only ate the heads, briskets, ribs, pelvis and the marrow from the bones, and gave the organs, entrails, hams, shoulders, and tenderloin to their dogs. The men followed the Eskimo habit of eating fish bones and chewing rib ends.
After the year passed, the physicians subjected the men to a battery of tests to ascertain the “damage” done by going one full year without vegetal foods. They found ….. no damage at all. In fact, on the meat diet, Andersen had fewer colds, less hair loss, and a remission of symptoms of the intestinal microbial toxemia, and Stefansson lost ten pounds of fat. Stefansson felt optimistic and had an abundance of energy. Exercise tests showed that the men had an increase of physical stamina as the experiment progressed.
Chemists determined that the meat diet was very “low” in calcium, but no test performed on the men revealed any calcium deficiency, and the men looked healthier and felt better than they had on their previous mixed diets. The researchers hypothesized that though this lack of calcium had no effect over short one-year duration of the experiment, it might have severe effects over 10 or 20 years. To test this hypothesis, a secondary study was performed by Dr. Earnest A. Hooton, Professor of Physical Anthropology. Hooton examined the Peabody Museum collection of bones of Eskimos known to have died before European contact. Hooton found no evidence of calcium deficiency in those skeletons; on the contrary, those bones indicated that the Eskimos had adequate if not liberal calcium in their diet.
This study proved that man can live, even thrive, on a meat diet, for a lifetime. You know that neither chimp nor gorilla would survive in the niche exploited by Eskimos.
All these findings suggest that their previous mixed diet contained some factor(s) which caused illness. Removing plant foods removed the factor(s) and allowed these men to achieve a more natural condition, known as health. Perhaps they did not need to go so far, but again they proved a point: humans can maintain or even improve health without eating any plant food.
Meat your teeth
One of the most important issues in nutrition consists of its effects on dentition. So long as Eskimos lived on exclusively meat diets, they had no tooth decay. All meat-eating tribes maintain complete immunity to dental decay. In contrast, all tribes on mixed diets have some tooth decay, and the incidence of tooth decay increases in direct relationship to the amount of fermentable carbohydrate in the diet, a dose-response manner.
In the absence of dentistry and oral hygiene, in any species, reproductive success absolutely depends on a very high if not complete resistance to oral infections and dental decay. Chronic oral infection or significant tooth decay causes feeding disability, nutritional deficiency, metabolic disease, and reproductive failure.
In fact, we have good evidence that oral infection either causes infertility, or that oral infection and infertility have the same cause.
Bieniek and Riedel reported that among patients with subfertility and bacteriospermia, “It could be demonstrated that the bacterial spectrum of the intraoral samples was almost identical with the spermiograms.” [Bacterial foci in the teeth, oral cavity, and jaw--secondary effects (remote action) of bacterial colonies with respect to bacteriospermia and subfertility in males.]
Khader et al found that women with periodontal disease had a 4.28 times greater risk of preterm birth, only manageable with modern medical care. [Periodontal diseases and the risk of preterm birth and low birth weight: a meta-analysis.]
Xiong et al reviewed 25 studies of periodontal disease and pregnancy outcomes, and found that 18 of them found an association between periodontal disease and increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcome, including preterm low birthweight, low birthweight, preterm birth, birthweight by gestational age, miscarriage or pregnancy loss, and pre-eclampsia, with the highest odds ratio of 20. [Periodontal disease and adverse pregnancy outcomes: a systematic review.]
This evidence indicates that diets that promote tooth decay significantly impair fertility. This further drives home the point that oral infections and dental decay are maladaptive, as are any diets that promote oral infections and dental decay.
Hence, if certain level of intake of a class of foods promotes tooth decay in a given species, we can conclude that the species has not adapted to consumption of that class of foods beyond the level that clearly increases the occurrence of tooth decay.
Let me put it another way.
If human ancestors ate a diet rich in fermentable carbohydrates, which in modern humans promotes dental/oral infections or inflammation, those who had a high resistance to oral infections and caries produced by acidogenic bacteria while eating a diet high in fermentable carbohydrates would have had more children than those who had a low resistance. Those people who succumbed to tooth decay and oral infections would have had fewer offspring, and those who had high resistance to caries despite consumption of fermentable carbohydrate would have had more offspring. Over the millennia, given a situation in which people had no choice but to eat large volumes of fermentable carbohydrate (tubers, grains, etc.), the oral disease and resultant suboptimal fertility imposed by such diets would have by natural selection eliminated from the species all or virtually all humans having high susceptibility to dental decay when fed fermentable carbohydrate.
If this had happened, modern humans would maintain excellent dental health on a diet high in fermentable carbohydrates.
Since this is exactly the opposite of our current situation, we can conclude that our ancestors did not eat much of foods containing fermentable carbohydrates. The fact that we have no adequate defense against the tooth decay produced by diets high in fermentable carbohydrates tells us that our ancestors’ diets most likely contained little or no sugar or starch most of the time. Yes, they may have eaten honey or tubers on occasion, but these most likely were not put in the mouth very often or in very large amounts relative to non-fermentable foods.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Top Ten Problems With Applying The Paleolithic Diet Principles: Number 2, Part 1
Eating large amounts of vegetables for putative health benefits
When I wrote The Garden of Eating, I had not yet realized fully that modern hunter-gatherer diets do not represent Paleolithic human diets. Loren Cordain (The Paleo Diet) and Ray Audette (Neanderthin), the two individuals who had the strongest influence on my conception of Paleolithic diets, both presented the paleolithic diet as omnivorous and containing large amounts of fruits and vegetables.
Yet what little direct evidence we have of Paleolithic diets does not support an omnivorous diet as a matter of course. Archaeological digs find human remains on grasslands, where little edible vegetation grows at any time of the year. For at least two million years previous to the invention of agriculture, the earth remained in the grip of the ice ages, which limited the growth of edible plants.
Hence, the environments in which our stone age ancestors roamed and evolved favored the reproductive success of people who could live largely on relatively wild game meat and its associated fat. By looking at the bones of stone age humans living about 12,000 years ago in Britain, scientists have determined that they ate diets containing an amount of meat -- mostly bovines and elk -- similar to that consumed by the arctic fox—in other words, they ate only meat and fat!(1)
If vegetation had provided any significant portion of prehistoric human diets, modern humans should show adaptations to intake of raw vegetation similar to other primates or herbivores. Since the bulk of wild and cultivated vegetal foods consists of fiber, a type of carbohydrate, the key to evolutionary success as an herbivore lies in having a method for extracting energy from fiber.
Gorillas, chimps, and herbivores like sheep have guts specialized for fermentation of fiber with the aid of symbiotic protozoa and bacteria. This fermentation process occurs in the stomach in foregut fementers like sheep, or in the large intestine in hindgut fermenters like chimps and gorillas. Because fermentation of fiber to produce fats—primarily butyric acid, the signature fat in butter—generates most of the energy used by an herbivore, these animals can not live without the organ in which this process takes place.
Humans do not have any significant ability to digest and extract energy from fiber. Moreover, humans can live without a stomach or large intestine, unlike herbivorous animals that depend on one or the other. This clearly indicates that the human gut evolved to handle unrefined foods containing little or no fiber, i.e. animal foods. In other words, humans evolved on and are specifically adapted to a carnivorous diet.
When I mention this to students, they often can’t believe I said it. They have the idea that humans can not live without eating vegetables. If dietitians hear it, they start talking about the “dangers” of a no/low carb diet, which they believe include ketoacidosis, a lack of fiber and beneficial phytochemicals, and an increased risk of cancer.
Well, we can live without vegetables and all those “dangers” amount to a heap of myths. I will discuss them in future posts.
(1) Richards MP, Hedges REM, Jacobi R, Current, A, Stringer C. Focus: Gough’s Cave and Sun Hole Cave human stable isotope values indicate a high animal protein diet in the British Upper Palaeolithic. J Archaeol Sci 2000;27: 1–3.
Richards M P. A brief review of the archaeological evidence for Palaeolithic and Neolithic subsistence. Eur J Clin Nutr, December 2002, Volume 56, Number 12, Pages 1270-1278.
When I wrote The Garden of Eating, I had not yet realized fully that modern hunter-gatherer diets do not represent Paleolithic human diets. Loren Cordain (The Paleo Diet) and Ray Audette (Neanderthin), the two individuals who had the strongest influence on my conception of Paleolithic diets, both presented the paleolithic diet as omnivorous and containing large amounts of fruits and vegetables.
Yet what little direct evidence we have of Paleolithic diets does not support an omnivorous diet as a matter of course. Archaeological digs find human remains on grasslands, where little edible vegetation grows at any time of the year. For at least two million years previous to the invention of agriculture, the earth remained in the grip of the ice ages, which limited the growth of edible plants.
Hence, the environments in which our stone age ancestors roamed and evolved favored the reproductive success of people who could live largely on relatively wild game meat and its associated fat. By looking at the bones of stone age humans living about 12,000 years ago in Britain, scientists have determined that they ate diets containing an amount of meat -- mostly bovines and elk -- similar to that consumed by the arctic fox—in other words, they ate only meat and fat!(1)
If vegetation had provided any significant portion of prehistoric human diets, modern humans should show adaptations to intake of raw vegetation similar to other primates or herbivores. Since the bulk of wild and cultivated vegetal foods consists of fiber, a type of carbohydrate, the key to evolutionary success as an herbivore lies in having a method for extracting energy from fiber.
Gorillas, chimps, and herbivores like sheep have guts specialized for fermentation of fiber with the aid of symbiotic protozoa and bacteria. This fermentation process occurs in the stomach in foregut fementers like sheep, or in the large intestine in hindgut fermenters like chimps and gorillas. Because fermentation of fiber to produce fats—primarily butyric acid, the signature fat in butter—generates most of the energy used by an herbivore, these animals can not live without the organ in which this process takes place.
Humans do not have any significant ability to digest and extract energy from fiber. Moreover, humans can live without a stomach or large intestine, unlike herbivorous animals that depend on one or the other. This clearly indicates that the human gut evolved to handle unrefined foods containing little or no fiber, i.e. animal foods. In other words, humans evolved on and are specifically adapted to a carnivorous diet.
When I mention this to students, they often can’t believe I said it. They have the idea that humans can not live without eating vegetables. If dietitians hear it, they start talking about the “dangers” of a no/low carb diet, which they believe include ketoacidosis, a lack of fiber and beneficial phytochemicals, and an increased risk of cancer.
Well, we can live without vegetables and all those “dangers” amount to a heap of myths. I will discuss them in future posts.
(1) Richards MP, Hedges REM, Jacobi R, Current, A, Stringer C. Focus: Gough’s Cave and Sun Hole Cave human stable isotope values indicate a high animal protein diet in the British Upper Palaeolithic. J Archaeol Sci 2000;27: 1–3.
Richards M P. A brief review of the archaeological evidence for Palaeolithic and Neolithic subsistence. Eur J Clin Nutr, December 2002, Volume 56, Number 12, Pages 1270-1278.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Hungry Monkey Study
Science magazine just published a report of a 20 year study of caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys. Julie Steenhuysen wrote the Reuters report, which starts off thus:
Steenhuysen further reports:
Richard at Free the Animal has correctly pointed out that intermittent fasting without caloric restriction will very likely produce the same results. And Charles Washington at Zeroing In On Health pointed to what the scientists performing this study missed:
Charles goes on to remind us that
Yes. As Gary Taubes discussed in Good Calories Bad Calories, Ronald Kanhn and his collaborators at the Joslin Diabetes Center have already published results of their research with mice that they had genetically engineered to lack the insulin receptor on fat cells. Let me quote Gary:
This study proved that high calorie intake does not shorten life, if the calories consumed don’t stimulate insulin receptors on fat cells. Ah, that would mean that calories from sugar and starch shorten your life, but eating fat doesn’t make you fat or shorten your life because fat does not stimulate insulin or receptors. Unfortunately, the people doing hungry monkey studies appear to have missed that memo. As Taubes notes, not even Kahn can make the logical deduction, he hopes for a drug to block insulin receptors on fat cells!
Taubes also reports the research of Cynthia Kenyon and colleagues at UCSF, who found that mutations that reduced activity in the insulin-IGF pathway in worms prolonged the worms’ lifespan significantly. Knowing that glucose stimulates that pathway, Kenyon and colleagues “began a series of experiments based on a single question: what would happened if she fed worms glucose, in addition to their preferred diet of bacteria?” Keep in mind that bacteria consist primarily of protein and fat, so a worm’s natural diet is low-carbohydrate. The results?
Simple: High intake of glucose shortens life by 25 percent, via stimulating the insulin-IGF pathway. Solution? Reduce carbohydrate, not calories. Kenyon figured it couldn’t hurt to try it out herself – Taubes reports she decided to restrict her own carbohydrate intake to a bare minimum. She lost thirty pounds, and saw drops in blood pressure, triglycerides, and blood sugar, and an increase in her HDL. She’s on the way to a long life, hunger-free, while the monkeys go hungry.
This reminds me of a passage in the Histories, book 3, of Herodotus, to which Lutz refers in Life Without Bread. Herodotus (484 - c415 BCE) reported on an encounter between the king of Ethiopia and the king of Persia. The Persian king was showing the products of Persia to the Ethiopian, and:
According to Charles, “ The federal government is funding a small study to see if some healthy normal-weight people could sustain a 25 percent calorie cut for two years and if doing so signals some changes that might, over a long enough time, reduce some age-related disease.”
I don't like this. This means some bureaucrats have decided to spend money they stole from me on a project to find the answer to a question they could get answered simply by reading GCBC or the voluminous research on caloric restriction done already to date. [BTW the "government" does not exist, what we call government consists of a gang of goons stealing money from us (taxes) and wasting it as they see fit.]
Assuming the typical caloric requirement is about 2000 calories, a 25 percent reduction would result in a 1500 calorie diet. As Taubes points out in his chapter 15 entitled “Hunger,” in October 1917, Francis Benedict, director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Nutrition Laboratory “put twelve young men on diets of roughly fourteen hundred to twenty-one hundred calories a day with the intention of lowering their body weights by 10 percent in a month.”
Benedict hoped to find out whether humans could adapt to this level of caloric restriction and thrive. What happened? The men did lose weight, but they did not thrive. They complained of constant hunger, and of being constantly cold -- some found it almost impossible to stay warm regardless of amount of clothing worn. Their metabolic rates dropped by 30 percent, so that even their restricted diets now made them gain fat. They had drops in blood pressure and heart rate; they suffered from anemia, inability to concentrate, and “marked weakness” in physical activity. They had a decrease in sexual interest and expression, in some to “the point of obliteration.”
As Taubes points out in GCBC, these all are genetically conserved biologic responses to food restriction, occuring in all species so far studied, all minimizing energy output and maximizing energy retention under famine conditions, in order to extend life of the individual.
Sounds like a great way to extend life -- not. Actually, I'd call it torture. But the monkeys can't fight back.
After the experiment, the men “almost invariably over-ate.” They managed to regain all the lost weight and body fat in less than two weeks, and within another three weeks, they had gained, on average, eight pounds more. As a result, the men came out of this exercise heavier and fatter than they were when they started.
Yep, that's what happens when people restrict calories. They get fatter in the interim and the long run.
This 1917 experiment documented all the ill effects people experience from caloric restriction, and you can also find them all online by just checking out the Risks page of the Caloric Restriction Society.
So, for only $16.95 spent on Good Calories Bad Calories, or, by spending a few minutes online, or even by trying it yourself, you can find the answer to the question of whether people can sustain a 25 percent caloric restriction for two years in good health. But the goons will take millions of dollars stolen from us at gunpoint and throw it at this question to make it look like they are serving us. Bullshit.
So, the authors of this hungry monkey study appear ignorant of the research in their own field, which shows that the villain is excessive glucose, not excessive calories, and that we can get all the benefits of caloric restriction by reduction of glucose intake and insulin activity, which you can obtain without caloric restriction by two routes 1) reducing your carbohydrate intake, and 2) intermittent fasting.
So you don't have to suffer deprivation your entire life to get to "heaven," always depicted as a pleasant life without end.
You can enjoy yourself NOW. When else? You can't enjoy in the past, nor in the future, you can only enjoy NOW.
But if you did, that wouldn't work for priests and "government" authorities, including the enviro-nazis and veg-heads, who promise a future of eternal life and bliss if only you pay taxes and tithes, sacrifice your self and health, avoid meat, and obey them NOW.
If you follow your primal wisdom, they won't get a cut of your life, will they?
Addendum: More on the Hungry Monkey Study
Surprise, surprise! The "scientists" who published the hungry monkey study didn't tell the whole story. Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science did a lot more digging than I did and found that the media report didn't fit the facts.
Sandy reports:
1) "The lower mortality claimed among the monkeys on the calorie restricted diet were achieved only after eliminating 37% of the monkey deaths. They defined mortality as “age-associated deaths” and eliminated any cause of death they didn’t believe was associated with aging. As the supplemental data explains, 16 deaths from “non-age-associated causes were censored and their age of death used as the time variable in the regression.”"
She found in the New York Times report this nugget:
"If caloric restriction can delay aging, then there should have been significantly fewer deaths in the dieting group of monkeys than in the normally fed comparison group. But this is not the case. Though a smaller number of dieting monkeys have died, the difference is not statistically significant, the Wisconsin team reports."
No statistical difference in overall mortality between the hungry monkeys and the others.
Sandy goes on:
"The non-aging-related causes of death included monkeys who died while taking blood samples under anesthesia, from injuries or from infections, such as gastritis and endometriosis. These causes may not be aging-related as defined by the researchers, but they could realistically be adverse effects of prolonged calorie restrictions on the animals’ health, their immune system, ability to handle stress, physical agility, cognition or behavior."
2) Control monkeys were overfed by 20%. So this study compared underfed with overfed animals, not underfed with normal eating. The methods were discussed in Attenuation of Sarcopenia by Dietary Restriction in Rhesus Monkeys.
3) "Most interesting, calorie restriction doesn’t extend average lifespans in wild-derived mice, but only in certain laboratory mice bred to be adapted to specific conditions and which may not be representative of the species. “The inability of CR to extend lifespan of wild-derived mice, which were not adapted to laboratory conditions like typical laboratory mouse strains, may suggest that CR is in part an artifact of breeding animals specifically for laboratory studies,” said João Pedro de Magalhães at the Integrative Genomics of Ageing Group at the University of Liverpool."
4) The researchers have conflicts of interest.
For the full story, read Sandy's full post Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news.
A 20-year study of monkeys shows that a reduced-calorie diet pays off in less disease and longer life, U.S. researchers said on Thursday, a finding that could apply to humans.
They said rhesus monkeys on a strict, reduced-calorie diet were three times less likely to die from age-related diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes over the study period than monkeys that ate as they liked.
"We have been able to show that caloric restriction can slow the aging process in a primate species," Richard Weindruch of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, whose study appears in the journal Science, said in a statement.
"We observed that caloric restriction reduced the risk of developing an age-related disease by a factor of three and increased survival," Weindruch said.
Steenhuysen further reports:
The team found that half of the monkeys that were allowed to eat freely over the course of the 20-year study have survived, while 80 percent of the monkeys that ate 30 percent fewer calories over the same period are still alive.
While rhesus macaques have an average life span of about 27 years in captivity, the team said.
The animals that ate less had half the amount of heart disease and cancer, and there were no cases of diabetes in the low-calorie group.
Animals on a restricted diet also had more brain volume in some regions than the animals that ate freely, suggesting diet may affect brain health in aging as well.
Richard at Free the Animal has correctly pointed out that intermittent fasting without caloric restriction will very likely produce the same results. And Charles Washington at Zeroing In On Health pointed to what the scientists performing this study missed:
You’ll recall that aging is the work of advanced glycation end products, or AGE’s. AGEs can be thought of as aging accelerators. They are recognized as photosensitizers in the crystalline lens through crosslinking which has implications for cataract development. AGEs have been implicated in Alzheimer’s Disease, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. The mechanism by which AGEs induce damage is through a process called cross-linking that causes intracellular damage and apoptosis. Because AGEs are related to elevated blood sugar levels, a low calorie diet may reduce AGE body load.
Sharp readers of this blog will also recognize that if one can keep blood sugar low, this should also decrease aging. All of these maladies are included under the umbrella condition called “metabolic syndrome.” We can add obesity to that list as well. I argue that all of these conditions are merely symptoms of the metabolic disease of chronically-high insulin.
Charles goes on to remind us that
We all know that lowering calories has not been shown to reduce the symptom of obesity very well (beyond the short term), but at least in monkeys, some experts believe that lowering calories might work for that symptom, and indeed it seems to have in several species. But the astute observer will also recognize that when you lower calories, you automatically lower carbohydrates so any benefit to lowering calories may also be found with lowering carbohydrate consumption. And since low-carbohydrate diets consistently perform better in terms of obesity than low-fat, low-calorie diets, it’s safe to say that the same would be true in terms of longevity. The sad part of this is that the poor monkeys had to live their lives with less food when they could have eaten more fat and protein and just cut out the carbohydrates.[Emphasis added.]
Yes. As Gary Taubes discussed in Good Calories Bad Calories, Ronald Kanhn and his collaborators at the Joslin Diabetes Center have already published results of their research with mice that they had genetically engineered to lack the insulin receptor on fat cells. Let me quote Gary:
With their fat tissue immune to the effect of insulin, Kahn’s mice weighed 25 percent less than normal mice. These mice remained lean, even when forced to overeat. They were simply incapable of putting on fat. As Kahn later explained, this wasn’t surprising, since fat cells require insulin for fat synthesis. If they have no receptor to detect the insulin that’s present, then no fat can accumulate. The transgenic mice lived almost 20 percent longer than normal mice.[Emphasis Added.]
This study proved that high calorie intake does not shorten life, if the calories consumed don’t stimulate insulin receptors on fat cells. Ah, that would mean that calories from sugar and starch shorten your life, but eating fat doesn’t make you fat or shorten your life because fat does not stimulate insulin or receptors. Unfortunately, the people doing hungry monkey studies appear to have missed that memo. As Taubes notes, not even Kahn can make the logical deduction, he hopes for a drug to block insulin receptors on fat cells!
Taubes also reports the research of Cynthia Kenyon and colleagues at UCSF, who found that mutations that reduced activity in the insulin-IGF pathway in worms prolonged the worms’ lifespan significantly. Knowing that glucose stimulates that pathway, Kenyon and colleagues “began a series of experiments based on a single question: what would happened if she fed worms glucose, in addition to their preferred diet of bacteria?” Keep in mind that bacteria consist primarily of protein and fat, so a worm’s natural diet is low-carbohydrate. The results?
Kenyon added 2 percent glucose to the bacterial medium in which the worms lived, and the lifespan of the worms was reduced by a quarter.
Simple: High intake of glucose shortens life by 25 percent, via stimulating the insulin-IGF pathway. Solution? Reduce carbohydrate, not calories. Kenyon figured it couldn’t hurt to try it out herself – Taubes reports she decided to restrict her own carbohydrate intake to a bare minimum. She lost thirty pounds, and saw drops in blood pressure, triglycerides, and blood sugar, and an increase in her HDL. She’s on the way to a long life, hunger-free, while the monkeys go hungry.
This reminds me of a passage in the Histories, book 3, of Herodotus, to which Lutz refers in Life Without Bread. Herodotus (484 - c415 BCE) reported on an encounter between the king of Ethiopia and the king of Persia. The Persian king was showing the products of Persia to the Ethiopian, and:
“Finally he [the Ethiopian] came to the wine, and, having learnt the process of its manufacture, drank some and found it delicious; then, for a last question, he asked what the Persian king ate and what was the greatest age that Persians could attain. Getting in reply an account to the nature and cultivation of wheat, and hearing that the Persian king ate bread, and that people in Persia did not commonly live beyond eighty, he said he was not surprised that anyone who ate dung should die so soon, adding that Persians would doubtless die younger still, if they did not keep themselves going with that drink – and here he pointed to the wine, the one thing in which he admitted the superiority of the Persians.
“The Fish-Eaters, in their turn, asked the [Ethiopian] king how long the Ethiopians lived and what they ate, and were told that most of them lived to be a hundred and twenty, and some even more, and that they ate boiled meat and drank milk.”
[Herodotus, The Histories, book 3, trans by Aubrey De Sélincourt (New York, Penguin Books, 2003), pp 181-182.]
According to Charles, “ The federal government is funding a small study to see if some healthy normal-weight people could sustain a 25 percent calorie cut for two years and if doing so signals some changes that might, over a long enough time, reduce some age-related disease.”
I don't like this. This means some bureaucrats have decided to spend money they stole from me on a project to find the answer to a question they could get answered simply by reading GCBC or the voluminous research on caloric restriction done already to date. [BTW the "government" does not exist, what we call government consists of a gang of goons stealing money from us (taxes) and wasting it as they see fit.]
Assuming the typical caloric requirement is about 2000 calories, a 25 percent reduction would result in a 1500 calorie diet. As Taubes points out in his chapter 15 entitled “Hunger,” in October 1917, Francis Benedict, director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Nutrition Laboratory “put twelve young men on diets of roughly fourteen hundred to twenty-one hundred calories a day with the intention of lowering their body weights by 10 percent in a month.”
Benedict hoped to find out whether humans could adapt to this level of caloric restriction and thrive. What happened? The men did lose weight, but they did not thrive. They complained of constant hunger, and of being constantly cold -- some found it almost impossible to stay warm regardless of amount of clothing worn. Their metabolic rates dropped by 30 percent, so that even their restricted diets now made them gain fat. They had drops in blood pressure and heart rate; they suffered from anemia, inability to concentrate, and “marked weakness” in physical activity. They had a decrease in sexual interest and expression, in some to “the point of obliteration.”
As Taubes points out in GCBC, these all are genetically conserved biologic responses to food restriction, occuring in all species so far studied, all minimizing energy output and maximizing energy retention under famine conditions, in order to extend life of the individual.
Sounds like a great way to extend life -- not. Actually, I'd call it torture. But the monkeys can't fight back.
After the experiment, the men “almost invariably over-ate.” They managed to regain all the lost weight and body fat in less than two weeks, and within another three weeks, they had gained, on average, eight pounds more. As a result, the men came out of this exercise heavier and fatter than they were when they started.
Yep, that's what happens when people restrict calories. They get fatter in the interim and the long run.
This 1917 experiment documented all the ill effects people experience from caloric restriction, and you can also find them all online by just checking out the Risks page of the Caloric Restriction Society.
So, for only $16.95 spent on Good Calories Bad Calories, or, by spending a few minutes online, or even by trying it yourself, you can find the answer to the question of whether people can sustain a 25 percent caloric restriction for two years in good health. But the goons will take millions of dollars stolen from us at gunpoint and throw it at this question to make it look like they are serving us. Bullshit.
So, the authors of this hungry monkey study appear ignorant of the research in their own field, which shows that the villain is excessive glucose, not excessive calories, and that we can get all the benefits of caloric restriction by reduction of glucose intake and insulin activity, which you can obtain without caloric restriction by two routes 1) reducing your carbohydrate intake, and 2) intermittent fasting.
So you don't have to suffer deprivation your entire life to get to "heaven," always depicted as a pleasant life without end.
You can enjoy yourself NOW. When else? You can't enjoy in the past, nor in the future, you can only enjoy NOW.
But if you did, that wouldn't work for priests and "government" authorities, including the enviro-nazis and veg-heads, who promise a future of eternal life and bliss if only you pay taxes and tithes, sacrifice your self and health, avoid meat, and obey them NOW.
If you follow your primal wisdom, they won't get a cut of your life, will they?
Addendum: More on the Hungry Monkey Study
Surprise, surprise! The "scientists" who published the hungry monkey study didn't tell the whole story. Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science did a lot more digging than I did and found that the media report didn't fit the facts.
Sandy reports:
1) "The lower mortality claimed among the monkeys on the calorie restricted diet were achieved only after eliminating 37% of the monkey deaths. They defined mortality as “age-associated deaths” and eliminated any cause of death they didn’t believe was associated with aging. As the supplemental data explains, 16 deaths from “non-age-associated causes were censored and their age of death used as the time variable in the regression.”"
She found in the New York Times report this nugget:
"If caloric restriction can delay aging, then there should have been significantly fewer deaths in the dieting group of monkeys than in the normally fed comparison group. But this is not the case. Though a smaller number of dieting monkeys have died, the difference is not statistically significant, the Wisconsin team reports."
No statistical difference in overall mortality between the hungry monkeys and the others.
Sandy goes on:
"The non-aging-related causes of death included monkeys who died while taking blood samples under anesthesia, from injuries or from infections, such as gastritis and endometriosis. These causes may not be aging-related as defined by the researchers, but they could realistically be adverse effects of prolonged calorie restrictions on the animals’ health, their immune system, ability to handle stress, physical agility, cognition or behavior."
2) Control monkeys were overfed by 20%. So this study compared underfed with overfed animals, not underfed with normal eating. The methods were discussed in Attenuation of Sarcopenia by Dietary Restriction in Rhesus Monkeys.
3) "Most interesting, calorie restriction doesn’t extend average lifespans in wild-derived mice, but only in certain laboratory mice bred to be adapted to specific conditions and which may not be representative of the species. “The inability of CR to extend lifespan of wild-derived mice, which were not adapted to laboratory conditions like typical laboratory mouse strains, may suggest that CR is in part an artifact of breeding animals specifically for laboratory studies,” said João Pedro de Magalhães at the Integrative Genomics of Ageing Group at the University of Liverpool."
4) The researchers have conflicts of interest.
For the full story, read Sandy's full post Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news.
Monday, July 6, 2009
A walk in the forest finding herbs with an affinity for the urinary system
We had a fabulous hike in the woods today and I saw so many beautiful flowers that just happen to be medicinal as well.
After getting home and reviewing the photos I was amazed of how many plants I saw that are commonly used for the urinary system. And so a theme (and motivation) for a blog post was born: A look at the forest’s offering of herbs commonly used for the urinary system.
First up is Pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata) in the heath family. (I just love the heath family with their beautiful earn-shaped flowers.)
Pipsissewa is astringent, anti-septic and a diuretic making it useful in cases of u
rinary tract infections and cystitis. Like all of the plants we are exploring today it has cooling and drying tendencies.I took a lot of photos of Pipsissewa because it was so alluring.
I was surprised to find this flowering patch of Cleavers (Galium aparine) in the deep forest.
We had reached an area closer to a creek that was moist – just the way cleavers likes it.
Like most herbs used for the urinary system, cleavers is cooling and drying. It is a relaxing diuretic, supports lymph flow and is also quite nutritious. Sharol Tilgner says that cleavers has been shown to reduce stones and fibrocystic tissue.
I like using cleavers when they are fresh rather than as a dried herb. I was recently shown a great way of "juicing" cleavers by adding a large amount to a blender along with a little water and then blending on high. After straining off the plant material you are left with a deep green juice that is so fresh and cooling.
A few weeks ago while cooling off by a steam I bumped into American Speedwell or Veronica americana. This is a close relative, Alpine Speedwell which may or may not have been used in the same manner. (Anyone know how about different Veronica spp.?)
I couldn't find any specific listings of Veronica spp. being used for the urinary system, however because they are both astringent and diuretic it could be a possible choice for urinary tract infections.
What would a listing of plants for the urinary system be without Uva Ursi (Arctosta
phylos uva ursi)? Uva ursi is hands-down my first choice for urinary tract infections.Uva ursi is quite astringent (try popping a leaf in your mouth and record how quickly you no longer have saliva) and is also a diuretic.
It's not for everyone however. It can upset stomachs and is no longer recommended during pregnancy. Whenever I use uva ursi I like to blend it with more soothing and mucilagenous herbs like marshmallow root.
I harvest the leathery leaves in the fall which is when the leaves are said to have the highest levels of arbutin. Whether or not you are into fancy chemical constituents you can easily observe this yourself by comparing how the spring leaves compare to the fall leaves, or even the new growth to the old growth.
This certainly isn't an all encompassing look at materia medica for the urinary system, but it was so fascinating to me to find such a grouping in one area. I didn't take photos, but yarrow, is another abundant plant I saw on the walk that I also use extensively for UTIs. I recently did an anatomy and physiology article of the urinary system, so I will post that soon along with a longer piece I've been working on for UTIs.
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