Month: August 2021
Is your terrain healthy?
The symmetry between my work in regenerative agriculture and studying human health never ceases to amaze me.
Our understanding of the function of the soil is accelerating at breakneck speed and yet leading soil ecologists admit we probably know less than 1% of what is really happening in the soil below our feet.
Early farmers better understood the importance of soil health even though they may not have had the science to explain what was really going on. Pre-war, mixed farming understood the need for rotation, composting of manure, and building humus through grazed grass fallows so our soil could feed our plants and abate disease.
The green revolution – led by the brightest and best reductionist scientists – focused on specialisation for production. The soil was considered a medium to hold up a plant rather than a living system; consequently, it was treated like dirt!
In these decades billions of pounds of research were poured into better understanding how to manage plants and animals to achieve high outputs. Nearly all of the current agricultural practices and recommendations were shaped and influenced by the research into what is required to make a plant grow.
Based on these findings we decided upon the most important nutrients to use for plant growth (N, P, K), we bred the species of plants that best responded to those nutrient applications, and we chose the breeds of livestock that fattened quickest on these specialised grasses and grains.
Unfortunately, with our eye pressed firmly to the microscope lens, we completely missed a fundamental factor; that a plant is in fact a holobiont.
A holobiont is an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit.
Unlike a human whose gut is enclosed within a physical body, a plant’s gut is made up of the living organisms in and around the root zone in healthy living soil. These organisms solubilise the minerals that plants can’t access and ‘feed’ the plants in exchange for sugars made in photosynthesis.
When studying a plant in a lab, the soils used for the experiments are sterilised and homogenized so scientists can ensure a consistent experiment. There are ZERO living organisms in that soil!
Without these organisms, a plant essentially has a stomach but no gut. The plant is only able to take up a tiny fraction of the nutrients floating in the soluble pool. It responds dramatically to additions of N, P, K because it STARVES otherwise!
This is the equivalent of studying how humans digest food by thinking of our stomach as a furnace that simply delivers calories of energy and our colon as simply as helpful waste plumbing!
Oh, wait!
Pasteur vs. Béchamp
At a critical juncture in the development of science in human health, there were two friends who had developed two very different theories for the cause of disease in humans.
Louis Pasteur with his germ theory and Antoine Béchamp with his terrain theory.
Germ theory proposed that microorganisms were the cause of many diseases; this paved the way for antibiotics and vaccines for which most of us are very grateful today.
Béchamp claimed to have discovered that the “molecular granulations” in biological fluids were actually the elementary units of life. He named them microzymas—that is, “tiny enzymes”—and credited them with producing both enzymes and cells while “evolving” amid favourable conditions into multicellular organisms.
Béchamp also denied that bacteria could invade a healthy animal and cause disease, claiming instead that unfavourable host and environmental conditions destabilise the host’s native microzymas and decompose host tissue by producing pathogenic bacteria.
Unlike the germ theory, the terrain theory explains why some people get sick while others, when exposed to the same pathogens, do not.
As with most things, there is truth within both of these theories. Unfortunately in the West we have adopted germ theory to the expulsion of almost every other theory of health. Our medical research, theories, practices and protocols are almost entirely through the tinted lens of germ theory.
What we have learned from studying ecology and applying it to our regenerative agriculture systems is that when an ecosystem is in an early stage of succession – such as after a volcanic eruption or fire or damaged by modern agriculture practices – the limited diversity and complexity of the ecology facilitates the boom and bust in populations of organisms. The sort of organisms that thrive here we often call ‘weeds, docks, thistles, willow herb for example.
However, in a natural system, an ecosystem will gradually increase in diversity and the connections between these organisms become highly interactive. Instead of a species of bird only having one species of insect to eat it has ten, in turn, those insects have thirty species of plant to thrive on instead of two and pollinators have hundreds of flowers to feed upon. The whole system thrives regardless of whether it’s a dry year or a wet year – there’s always some species doing well.
Similarly, in the soil the complexity of organisms increases in step with the above-ground ecology. Different plant species produce root exudates, each with a variety of different nutrients and chemical signals which then interact with a wide range of soil organisms, each with a specialism such as nitrogen fixation, phosphorus uptake or trace element scavenging.
In these complex systems, mycorrhizal fungi extend the reach of plants and connect plants together so they can share nutrients and protective plant chemicals. The whole system becomes more resilient and resistant to disease, drought and flood.
In regenerative systems, we encourage farmers to reframe ‘weeds’ and instead think of them as an indicator of a system out of balance. Organisms can only thrive when we create the perfect conditions for them to thrive.
When farmers use a herbicide to kill the ‘weeds’ it further reduces the complexity of the whole system leading to more weeds. As an alternative we can advance the system complexity beyond the conditions that suit the dominant organism. This can be done by adding more species into the sward and in a cropping rotation introducing diverse herbal leys.
Meanwhile, since the 1990’s we have been discovering that us humans also have a system of microorganisms that is a lot like a functional soil food web.
We, humans, are actually composed mostly of microbes. Estimates vary but probably in the region of 100 trillion of them. Microbes outnumber our human cells ten to one, weigh more than 2kg and the number of genes in one person’s microbiome is 200 times the number of genes in the human genome.
Most of our soil food web lives in our gut, particularly the large intestine. The microbiome is the genetic material of all the microbes – bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses – that live on and inside the human body.
Just like in the holobiont that makes up the plant and soil these organisms help and benefit us in far more ways than they cause us disease.
Many help us to digest food, support our immune system and produce important nutrients such as B vitamins B12, thiamine and riboflavin, and Vitamin K, which is needed for blood coagulation and so so much more.
A healthy microbiome has been shown to influence our ability to maintain a healthy weight and maintain a positive state of mind. It can even drive our behaviours, happiness and addictions.
Autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia are associated with dysfunction in the microbiome. Autoimmune diseases appear to be passed on in families not by DNA inheritance but by inheriting the family’s microbiome.
The field of epigenetics is exploding and I have no doubt that over time we will learn nearly every expression of a gene is influenced by our environmental conditions including the health of our internal ecosystem.
So equally when we disrupt our internal ecosystem then our gene expression and overall health suffers.
Interestingly what damages our complex and resilient soil food web in the soil too is highly damaging to our human microbiome.
Tillage, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, irrigation with toxic water, antibiotic use and additions of highly digestible nutrients leads to damage and destruction of the complex, diverse and health-supporting microbiome and facilitates creation of a simplified low successional environment that is more prone to population explosions of pathogenic organisms.
“Antibiotics kill or inhibit the reproduction of pathogenic bacteria and cause dramatic changes in normal human microbial communities… previously established colonies may be overtaken by colonies of different and potentially pathogenic species.”
In human health, a diet of refined foods laced with these farm chemicals is surely going to reduce the complexity of your own internal defence system. In addition, most people are not only exposed to the antibiotics fed to livestock but are taking multiple courses of these microbiome disrupting interventions over their lifetime along with an increasing number and variety of other pharmaceuticals.
The incredible advances in medicine have made it possible to kill the ‘weeds’ that cause us people so many issues but with every intervention, we are reducing our capacity for resilience.
At what point will we start to look at the root cause – our drastically simplified inner ecology. In our modern world – especially the West, we now have a population whose internal ecosystem is in the lowest stages of ecological succession. We make perfect hosts for invading pathogens.
Unless we want to stay on a treadmill of ‘weed killers’ with ever diminishing effectiveness and increasingly severe unintended consequences, we have to proactively rebuild our health and well being. It’s not in the interest of those selling the weed killers to encourage this – it’s up to us.
Just as in nature, we need to add diversity and build connections. We need to redesign the way we grow food towards life-enhancing systems and build a healthy, complex and robust microbiome.
Eat many different real whole foods grown in healthy soils, spend time in the sun, spend time in nature, drink lots of pure natural water, take functional and restorative exercise, get a good night’s sleep, manage your stress and build a strong sense of community.
We will continue to explore the pro-active and pro-nature ways of building resilience through our primal living series.
Farm Profile: Meet Northfield Farm
About the Farm
The farm, based at Wytham in Oxfordshire, has recently won awards from the Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group.
FAI Farms Oxford. Northfield Farm is a 1200 acre mixed livestock farm owned by Oxford University and managed by the team of FAI Farms Ltd.
The farm has been certified organic since 2002 and has recently decided to take things to a new level by transitioning to regenerative agriculture.
In my capacity as a regenerative agriculture consultant, I have been working with Clare Hill and the farm team for the last couple of years to train and support in their transition.
The farming system.
The farm rears 90 cattle which are a cross between Saler, Aberdeen Angus and Stabiliser. The farm is transitioning to an outwintering system where there are areas of the farm that rest in late summer and ‘bank’ deferred forage for the animals to eat in winter. This approach reduces the amount of hay that needs to be cut and therefore saves money and fossil fuels as well as helps to pump more carbon into the soil from increasing the photosynthesis happening in the fields throughout the year.
Outwintering allows cattle to behave more naturally and alleviates the potential disease and stress associated with housing cattle in a shed. The out wintering also saves the farm money in straw, the labour of feeding and mucking out and the environmental costs of storing and transporting manure.
Listen to a podcast of Clare and myself talking about the farm transition.
The breeding program is focusing on breeding a ‘type’ that is a perfect fit for their unique regenerative system rather than focusing on a specific breed. This approach to breeding helps the farm select animals that are least likely to get sick and need intervention and is an important part of the proactive approach we take on regenerative farms.
The farm also has a flock of three hundred crossbred breeding ewes once again selected for proactive health and management reasons to fit the new regenerative low input system.
The farm includes a large area of species-rich meadows including SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) floodplain meadows. Hay from these meadows is strategically used in the outwintering bale grazing plan to add carbon to the soil and naturally transplant the wildflowers and supportive soil microbes to the less diverse areas of the farm.
The farm is now PFLA approved and certified and the livestock have been on a 100% grass-fed diet for between 1-2 years. The products currently available from the farm can not yet be officially sold with the PFLA label as they are required to be born under the certification to do so.
Slow Cooking Meat – The Hidden Health Benefits Of Cheaper Cuts.
Could there be anything better than returning home to the smell of a rich and delicious shin beef casserole that has been slow cooking on the AGA into a gelatinous, rich, and sticky treat?
Yes.
Slowly cooking a brisket over an open fire on a camping holiday and serving it with pickled vegetables then eating it while watching the sun go down.
Slow cooking is not just for wintertime, it is a great way to include a range of important nutrients in our diets at any time in the year.
In our modern culture, we have on the whole left behind the culinary culture of slow-cooking meat – especially on the bone – and instead prefer to go for the easy and quick and lean meat such as steaks, chicken breasts, pork and lamb chops, and other pan-frying or grilling-friendly options – especially in summer.
This quick-cooking fits in with our fast lifestyles; many people don’t have a range cooker in their homes or a ‘wife’ at every stove. The ‘eat lean meat’ anti-fat propaganda runs deep too; many people opt for visibly ‘pretty’ and ‘clean’ cuts of meat because they consider them more healthy.
With this change of culture, we’ve lost the slow cooking skills which means we’re missing out on some of the most mouth-wateringly flavoursome parts of the animals available and missing out on incredibly important nutrients too.
Many of us who turn to eating an ancestral diet simply eat more and more meat. Not only does this raise many legitimate sustainability issues, it turns out that it’s actually really important to eat the full range of animal parts and not just the clean lean bits. This makes complete sense. Our genes have been moulded by our behaviours, and for hundreds of thousands of years we would have eaten the whole animal; our health depends on us continuing to honour our ‘hard wiring.’
In a diet that has a lot of ‘clean’, lean meat, a person will be ingesting large amounts of the amino acid methionine. It has been shown in studies that a diet high in methionine could cause a rise in plasma homocysteine. Homocysteine is used as an index of our susceptibility to disease. The great news is that if we eat enough glycine – found in offal, skin, and connective tissue – and get the ratios in better balance, this risk is negated.1
According to Catherine Shanahan, MD, quick cooked and overcooked muscle meat becomes ‘tough because the fat, protein, and sugar molecules have gotten tangled and fused together during a wild, heat-crazed chemical orgy. The result is a kind of tissue polymer that requires more work with a knife and more chewing as well as more time to digest. The worst part is so many of the nutrients are ruined.
In Denise Mingers’ wonderful and funny talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2012, she explains that other cultures celebrate the ‘weird bits’ as the best cuts of the animal, using them for feasts and special occasions.3
When we fry or grill muscle meat and especially when we BBQ meat in summer it tends to char and burn – we like the ‘browned’ effect; it’s tasty. This process causes amino acids like creatine to react and form harmful compounds called heterocyclic amines (HAs). If the juices are allowed to drip and cause the flames to flare around the meat this creates another harmful compound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs can result in DNA mutations after being metabolised by specific enzymes; when fed to animals these compounds have been shown to cause a range of cancers. This is very hard to study in people but is likely to translate to humans to some degree.4
When meat is cooked at lower temperatures, instead of a tangled mess of hard-to-digest amino acids, the long protein chains stay in orderly lines. The moisture in the meat allows the peptide bonds to be neatly ‘clipped’ into small peptide segments; this process is called hydrolytic cleavage. In a fantastic quirk of nature; these peptide segments fit neatly into our taste buds receptors, which are also tiny, and the food is perceived as ‘tastier’.
In fatty cuts of meat with connective tissue and skin, the water – maintained within slow cooking methods – gently teases out the family of molecules called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). GAGs are long molecules but the slow cooking process reduces them into delicious ‘taste bud-sized’ sugars that taste great. Slow cooking makes meat taste better and also happens to be good for you!The GAGs you may be familiar with are glucosamine, chondroitin sulphate, and hyaluronic acid. These GAGs have become well established in helping with arthritic pain and improving joint health, but it’s important to realise when we are shelling out for these supplements that it’s the natural source of these (the collagen that turns into gelatine after cooking) that has been shown in studies to be most effective in combating joint issues – the supplements in isolation seem to be missing something. This is yet another example of where nature is ten steps ahead of science.5
Our grandparents often ate the cheaper cuts such as neck, shin, knuckles, head, shanks, and trotters from traditional breeds of animals reared on rich grasslands. These slow cooking recipes and techniques are part of our heritage for very good reasons – they really do taste great and are completely essential for our good health.
There are four significant amino acids found in collagen-rich slow cooking cuts: proline, glycine, glutamine, and alanine. These all have an important part to play in our health, but glutamine, especially when cooked with salt for a long time, produces a flavour now generally called ‘umami’, the fifth flavour. This umami flavour is what top chefs try to incorporate into dishes to send their diners’ taste buds into an orgasmic state. Umami has been used throughout history in traditional cooking; in some ancient healing systems such as Ayurveda the inclusion of a range of flavours is suggested as a way of ensuring you are getting the nutrients our bodies need.6
Lamb, hogget and mutton shoulder on the bone can make a delicious meal at any time of the year.
I think we will continue to learn that our bodies have the inherent ability to ‘taste’ what we should and shouldn’t eat for both improving our health and protecting us from danger. The problem we have as humans living in a modern world is that science has produced foods – artificial flavourings, for example – that ‘trick’ our taste buds and override this innate talent; essentially making healthy foods seem less flavoursome by comparison. We have sadly allowed our food growers to reduce our ‘range’ of foods and breeds of animals and plants down to commercial varieties bred for size, efficiency, and profitability instead of flavour and nutrition. This is one of the reasons your food is cheap, but at what cost?
Our grandparents often ate the cheaper cuts such as the neck, shin, knuckles, head, shanks, and trotters from traditional breeds of animals reared on rich grasslands. These slow cooking recipes and techniques are part of our heritage for very good reasons – they really do taste great and are completely essential for our good health.
Wild water
We are 60-90% water so you would think that our understanding of water in relation to health was deep and wide wouldn’t you?
Water is the basis of all life and that includes your body.
Your muscles that move your body are 75% water; your blood that transports nutrients is 82% water; your lungs that provide you with oxygen are 90% water; your brain that is the control centre of your body is 76% water; even your bones are 25% water.
Yet in mainstream nutrition the extent of advice in relation to water rarely goes beyond the standard; “drink 2 litres a day to avoid dehydration”.
Dehydration is, of course, important as; water facilitates nearly every process in the body. Dehydration can limit physical performance, cause tiredness and impact gut health and so much more. But there’s a lot more to water than its obvious physical impact on our health.
In this piece we are going to start to uncover the many facets of the element of water. This river runs deep so there will be much more to come.
First it is worth looking at where most of us obtain our water. The tap. Here lies the first potential issue!
Highlighted in the compelling film ‘Dark Water’s’ was the issue of a common group of toxins informally known as ‘forever chemicals’ due to their ability to persist in the environment long term without breaking down. Thousands – approximately 4700 in total – of these different grease proof chemicals are used in everything from cookware, clothes, furniture and car washes and are known collectively as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances).
When these chemicals enter the environment they accumulate in the soil, water, livestock, wildlife and of course us humans! Following a landmark legal case involving a huge epidemiological study that linked PFAS to high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer and pregnancy-induced hypertension.
According to this recent article in the Guardian, the UK government is not testing drinking water for these chemicals all while in the rest of the world people are falling sick and suing water companies for hundreds of millions of dollars for the toxic and harmful substances in their tap water.
There are many other concerns with tap water too. How concerned we should be is still up for debate but it is certainly true that trace amounts of medications including hormones and antidepressants and recreational drugs are finding their way into our water supplies.
In the UK over a billion prescriptions are dispensed every year and ultimately these medications end up in our waste systems and water courses. This is undoubtedly having an impact on our health and it is certainly having a negative effect on wildlife.
At Brunel University, Prof Sumpter has been studying the effects of pharmaceuticals in our waterways ever since intersex fish – male fish exhibiting female traits such as egg production – were first spotted in UK rivers in the 1990s.
Our medications aren’t just fiddling with the sexual orientation of our fish either. In one study researchers found prozac was turning guppies into ‘zombies’ unable to fully function. Apparently unsuspecting starlings are getting a mood boost from their foraged insects in sewage treatment works and crayfish in rivers with water from treatment plants are behaving boldly leaving themselves vulnerable to predation! Yikes.
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/15/crayfish-behave-more-boldly-after-exposure-to-antidepressants-study
- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/prozac-turns-guppies-zombies
The possibility of our water impacting fertility and health is turning many towards collecting water from springs and has seen the sales of water filters boom in recent years.
Just as we have a growing ‘raw’ milk movement we too have a surge of interest in seeking ‘raw’ water; unfiltered, untreated and unsterilised.
So of course many many ‘wild’ water sources are contaminated nowadays. It is advised to have a spring tested if you find a reliable source.
My own personal rule for taking wild water is that I only take water where I know for sure there’s no houses, buildings or livestock gathering areas above it. I have the good fortune of working in wilderness areas (on our Wilderculture projects) and have felt first hand the benefits of drinking water straight from a crystal clear mountain burn or a limestone spring.
Spring water is also abundant in healthy minerals such as silica, magnesium and calcium and contains healthy microbes and probiotics – something we will talk about in our next article introducing the gut microbiome.
When we visit the Wilder Carna project on Isle of Carna to check on our livestock we always drink from the streams. Within one day the probiotic effects of the water kick in improving sluggish digestion – it’s like a tonic.
But there’s more to wild water than just good bugs and a taste better than the finest claret.
Another benefit of spring water is that it comes up from the earth structure which means the molecules are arranged in cohesive hexagonal form.
You can dive deep into the science by watching the video below but in short it seems that there is in fact a ‘fourth’ phase of water that is physically and chemically distinct from the solid, liquid and vapour phases that we are familiar with. This fourth phase offers an answer to some problems that science hasn’t yet explained such as how does the water get from the tree roots to the leaves without a pump, how on earth do red blood cells that are twice the size of a capillary successfully feed our tissues, and how on earth do clouds stay together?
Who knew! I had just assumed that clever scientists had worked this stuff out years ago – apparently not.
Proponents of structured water believe it offers many health benefits to humans.
1. Cell recovery
Restructured water can increase cell recovery through the net energy savings on cellular level. Our cells don’t have to process unstructured water for their use when it is already fully available in its resonant hexagonal structure. This can feel like an endurance and energy increase.
2. Increased detoxification
Water on a regular basis can help to dissipate harmful chemicals from the body and also dissonant frequencies which might create further disease. This way structured water workshelps as a preventative health care measure and supports our bodies to balance and remain in a healthy harmonic state.
3. Balancing of metabolism and stress response
Energized water can help to balance your cellular stress response. Increased organ activity and improved resilience can be some of the results. You may find yourself going to the bathroom a bit more frequently than before having structured water in your life.
4. Increased bioavailability
Water is most resonant in its hexagonal and structured state. This increases the efficacy of solved minerals due to enhanced vibrational and chemical transmissions. Less of everything is necessary to create the same results. Deep intracellular hydration and optimized mineral uptake can be the outcome.
The medicine laced, treated water that travels through long artificial pipelines and chemical processes loses its structure along with the many benefits of our wilder water.
Although still widely debated in the human health world, it has been well established in the scientific literature that livestock benefit greatly from having access to ‘wild’ or structured water. Proven benefits include increased rate of growth, reduced markers of oxidative stress, improved glycemic and insulinemic responses in diabetics, improved blood lipid profile, improved semen and spermatozoa quality, and increased tissue conductivity as measured using bioelectrical impedance analysis.
- https://www.healthline.com/health/structured-water
- https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/99/5/skab063/6152506
In my regenerative agriculture training the water cycle is one of the most important ecosystem processes to help farmers understand. All productivity and land health is tied to how effective their rainfall is captured and retained in the soil. In a soil that has lost its structure, is capped, bare and hard, the rainfall will run off and any moisture that is retained will quickly evaporate. This is the start of desertification.
In a healthy water cycle the rainfall hits tall vegetation and a mulch protects the surface of the soil preventing evaporation. Through capillary action the water seeps down the long roots into deep layers within the soil. The plants have an unlimited supply of moisture to grow throughout the year leading to higher yields and the continued sequestration of carbon into the soil. Every 1% increase in soil carbon allows the soil to hold an additional two buckets of water per square metre, further improving a farm’s resilience to drought and flood.
A healthy small water cycle compounds into creating a functional big water cycle that can even improve our climate. In her book ‘Water in plain sight’ Judith Shwartz beautifully explains the many mechanisms that contribute to desertification. And this is important because an area half the size of the European union is desertifying under our conventional management annually.
One such example is where large areas of arable land are left bare fallow in an attempt to preserve water and prevent weeds. The problem is that bare soil gets extremely hot which causes huge heat islands of high pressure that actually drive away the rain clouds!
We are causing our own droughts.
The negative impacts of bare soil don’t stop there either, the scorching temperatures kill the soil organisms leaving farmers more reliant on chemical inputs. The soil damage caused by high temperatures leads to an increasingly ineffective small water cycle and further loss of carbon into the atmosphere!
Through the adoption of regenerative agriculture we can reverse the trends of desertification and water cycle dysfunction creating resilient food production systems that sequester carbon and restore the cooling functions of the planet.