Update: 21 November 2024

Nutrient-rich Gardening

Homegrown is just about the only way to get truly nutritious food. Beyond food security, balancing soil minerals lets you grow abundant nutrient-rich food.

If you wish to be happy for a few hours, drink wine until your head spins pleasantly; If you wish to be happy for a few days, get married and hide away; If you wish to be happy for a week, roast a pig and have a feast; If you wish to be happy all your life, become a gardener. Ancient Chinese Proverb
Contents
  1. Beyond Food Security
  2. Bionutrient Density
  3. Homegrown
  4. Gardening with Nature
  5. Nutrition Facts, or Fictions?
  6. Paleolithic Nutrition
  7. Informational Fields from Mineral Complexes
  8. Conclusion
  9. Gardening Resources
  10. Food Resources
  11. Recommended Product
  12. References
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Beyond Food Security

More than 1 in 8 Americans are food insecure. Each day, food insecurity impacts 40 million Americans – including more than 12 million children.1

The USDA defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Poverty and food insecurity are closely related, but people living above the poverty line can experience food insecurity too. Reduced wages and increases in critical household expenses (such as caring for an ill child or parent) reduce the money available for food. Due to growing economic disparity, intensifying pressures on natural resources and fallout from climate disruption — mankind's future ability to feed itself is threatened.

For current leaders and policy enforcers, food insecurity is only about the quantity of food available, quality nutrition is not really part of the equation. Still, the purpose of eating food is to get nutrition, no? Nutrition should be a concern also, because even most well-fed people are undernourished today.

Home Gardening Can Reverse Food Insecurity

The focus of evolution is survival and survival depends on food. For most of humankind's time on earth, we spent most of our time acquiring our food (as all living things do). Modern dietary trends have severed this fundamental, intimate connection with food. Besides the denaturing of the soil and reduction of our food's nutritive value, today's industrialized food system is responsible for a kind of genetic trauma that we all experience due to the loss of a primal connection.

Food played an important role in the evolution of human community. As recently as 1946 the average distance food travelled in America was less than 100 miles. The first supermarket was developed in the mid-1940s. We used to grow most of our food in backyard gardens and at local farms. Now only 5% of the food consumed in a bioregion is actually grown there and we have over 35 million acres of lawn. Folks, This Ain't Normal - Joel Salatin

Community, it seems, is one more casualty of modern existence. Traumatized populations are being feed toxic, nutrient-devoid fruits and vegetables, and industrially processed food-like substances (with heaven-knows-what proprietary additives). This modern debacle is directly responsible for the current epidemic of physical and psychological illnesses. Contemporary culture is not unlike a CAFO.

Resist

Civilizations come and go, yet human-powered gardening persists! You say you want a revolution? Well, grow a food garden. Taking back control of something as primary as our food supply has a powerful personal and social impact.

Viva la Revolución

Just a short time ago, hoeing, pulling weeds, planting vegetables, and then canning, freezing, dehydrating, and fermenting accounted for a significant amount of time that families (and communities) spent together — working toward a common good.

Corporate industrialization has poisoned the food we eat, the air we breath and the water we drink. Its media has infected our minds. Consolidated corporate powers and their monopolies have co-opted most everything they could get their hands on, including social institutions (e.g., education, government, etc.). Worldwide industrialization has been destructive to all life. We can replace this violent devastation with cultivation. Food can be a potent transformative force to restore human health, and reinvent the healthcare paradigm — ‘let food be our medicine.’

The industrial food system is an attempt to dominate life on Earth for the enrichment and domination of a small elite. Peasant Agroecology is a model of life. It is built collectively by people and communities that still understand the language of nature and are able to live in harmony with it. Afrika Kontakt and La Via Campesina
Gardening Benefits
  1. Nutrition. Using a mass-spectrometer to analyze the nutritive value of fruits and vegetables grown with ‘nutrient-rich’ methods reveals dramatically better quality compared with commercially produced, store-bought counterparts. Not to mention the flavor. Children are generally honest and quite intelligent. Kids who say that they, "hate vegetables" likely have never tasted a truly nutritious one. Human's sense of taste evolved to respond to nutritious food as, delicious! It's a basic safety feature to prevent us from eating something harmful. Industry relies on additive tricks to make bad food taste better, they even add addictive substances such as sugar and excitotoxins to ensure repeat business. Restaurants promote their flavorful sauces to cover up blandness and bad taste. Nutritious, homegrown food doesn't need trickery.
  2. Food Security. Growing your food is more about using your energy to create, rather than spending your money. Yes, it takes some effort and some money too, but you are in control of your food. Amazing food that money cannot buy at any price because food grown for profit inevitably co-opts quality. Human beings are natural-born gardeners, and we have a built-in genetic capability to be great ones. There is an interesting one-to-one ratio too, where an individual seems to have the ability to grow just the right amount of food for themselves, a kind of matched set (a co-evolution perk).
  3. Contentment. There are a lot of zen-like gardening experiences. When chickens are involved there are even more. They can warm your heart and be hilarious too (occasionally confounding expectations). Gardening may be the best exercise for body and mind — very educational. There is creativity, challenge and accomplishment. A sense of abiding happiness and goodness. You learn patience. Gardening is life-affirming. It's miraculous actually. You plant a seed in Earth, nurture it and watch it grow, harvest the produce and enjoy it's life sustaining deliciousness. Gardeners are natural optimists, they have hope.
Happiness is neither virture or pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. John Butler Yeats (1909).

The nutritional value of the food we eat depends on soil health and growing methods. Unfortunately, the nutritional value of our food has been in decline for decades (due primarily to soil depletion). Produce is grown for its shipability and appearance, in other words – profitability.

The consequences have been disastrous. Look around you. Every kind of health problem has become an epidemic. Alzheimer's, obesity, heart disease, cancer — you name it. In fact, the children we test are in even worse shape than many adults (mercifully, they rebound more quickly too).

veggies

We are often misled to believe that our health problems are the result of some random misfortune. That somehow, we are just unlucky. The truth is, the majority of illnesses are the unsurprising consequence of environmental toxicity, emotional distress, sedentary lifestyles, and from eating industrially produced and processed ‘food-like products.’

Tips for Better Nutrition

When you replace toxic food with nutrient-rich food, health improves.

  1. Take time out to enjoy preparing and eating good food.
    • Invest in nutritionally rich foods. You save money in the long-run through better health.
    • Spend quality-time preparing and enjoying your food, it's fun and rewarding!
  2. Eliminate ALL industrially produced "food" products.
  3. Eliminate simple carbohydrates (e.g., sugar, anything with corn syrup, etc.).
  4. Do not drink calories (e.g., soda pop, "energy" or sports drinks, frappuccino, etc.).
  5. Drink adequate amounts of pure water (as pure as possible).
  6. Join a local buying club and buy in bulk.
  7. Shop at a farmer's market, join a CSA.
  8. Grow a nutrient-rich garden in healthy, balanced mineralized soil.
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Bionutrient Density

If we hope to reverse the growing deterioration and dysfunction we are experiencing in human health, we need to accept the fact that human health begins in the soil.

There is a distinction between nutrient-dense and nutrient-rich. Nutrient-dense refers to the overall value of nutrition when compared with a different food. For example, broccoli is more dense nutritionally than zucchini squash. In contrast, nutrient-rich means that one broccoli plant has a higher level of nutrients than another. If we analyze two carrots for vitamin and mineral content, the one grown with nutrient promoting methods will have greater nutrition (nutrient-rich). Most of the fruits, vegetables and meat in our markets are not only very low in nutrients, many contain poisonous pesticides and other harmful chemicals.

It's no secret that growing methods affect food quality. The data could not be more clear. Agribusiness, with its large-scale extraction and petrochemical farming methods, has had a negative impact on food quality.

The USDA has been tracking the nutrient content of 43 crops for 60 years. The data shows a progressive, and alarming rate of decline in nutrition. The evidence for nutrient declines began to accumulate in the 1940s with observations of (environmental) dilution effects on minerals in many foods and diverse other plants. Recent studies of historical nutrient content data for fruits and vegetables spanning 50 to 70 years show apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in minerals, vitamins, and protein in groups of foods, especially in vegetables. Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the seriousness of the problem.

Yet even among sincere organic growers there are distinctions in farming methods that impact the nutritional value of their crop. The ground-breaking news in agriculture is Nutrient Dense Crop production (NDC). Leading-edge farmers are beginning to use new production methods to produce nutrient-rich food. These super-healthy plants have increased resistance to insect infestation and disease, so they do not require the toxic petroleum-based chemical inputs that conventional agriculture has become addicted to. Nutrient-rich crops are so much healthier and lush, they have remarkably superior flavor and longer shelf life. All of these beneficial characteristics are made possible with remineralization.

Remineralization is a soil fertility management practice that promotes the regeneration of soils by restoring depleted mineral nutrients and beneficial fungi and microbes.

If there is any one most useful lesson to learn from our species' rich and complex evolutionary history, it is that culture does not allow us to transcend our biology. Human evolution never was a triumph of brains over brawn, and we should be skeptical of the science fiction that the future will be any different. Clever as we are, we cannot alter the bodies we inherited in more than superficial ways, and it is dangerously arrogant to think we can engineer feet, liver cells, brains, or other body parts any better than nature already does. Like it or not, we are slightly fat, furless, bipedal primates who crave sugar, salt, fat, and starch, but we are still adapted to eating a diverse diet of fibrous fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, tubers, and lean meat.

We enjoy rest and relaxation, but our bodies are still those of endurance athletes evolved to walk many miles a day and often run, as well as dig, climb, and carry. We love many comforts, but we are not well adapted to spend our days indoors in chairs, wearing supportive shoes, staring at books or screens for hours on end. As a result, billions of people suffer from diseases of affluence, novelty, and disuse that used to be rare or unknown. We then treat the symptoms of these diseases because it is easier, more profitable, and more urgent than treating their causes, many of which we don't understand anyway. In doing so, we perpetuate a pernicious feedback loop - dysevolution - between culture and biology.

Daniel Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body
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Homegrown

The very best way get the very best nutrition is to grow your own nutrient-rich food in a healthy soil ecosystem. Gardening is a richly rewarding experience in many ways. You will be truly amazed with the delicious flavor and robust health of your vegetables. Nothing can compare.

julie in the garden

Julie is a life-long gardener who uses nutrient-rich growing methods. Including properly testing the soil, remineralizing and balancing the soil (based on test results), improving soil consistancy with organic additives, probiotic spraying, nutrient drenches, compost tea (and more).

The link between human health and food is well established. What is less appreciated is the profound variation which exists between the low-quality produce most people have access to, and nutrient-rich produce. Low-quality produce is nutritionally deficient because it has low total dissolved sugars, meaning the plant has low cellular energy. This results in poor nutrient density and poor flavor (probably the reason why so many people hate vegetables). Unhealthy low-energy plants broadcast an electromagnetic frequency that is in a range which attracts destructive insects. They also do not have the cellular energy to resist disease.

In contrast, healthy, nutrient-rich produce has a high level of total dissolved sugars, excellent nutritional value, and tastes delicious. Healthy plants emit a different frequency that does not attract damaging insects. If an insect happens to eat the sweeter produce, the sugars will convert to alcohol in their digestive tract, and in the absence of a liver, will cause the insect to experience intestinal distress and death. We are the opposite of insects, nutrient-poor produce will cause digestive distress for us. We are attracted to, and enjoy eating nutrient rich vegetables because they are beautiful and delicious. Many people don't like to eat vegetables because most that are available taste bad, have little nutrition, and may cause upset stomach.

Sugar energy is vitally involved in the natural digestive processes, because it is the most important substance for supplying the heat energy that many digestive enzymes need to function properly. Yes, sugar supplies heat through a natural fermentation process that manufactures small amounts of alcohol required to ideally regulate our body's core temperature. Without the proper heat from mineral rich natural sugars, natural body alcohols will be deficient, impairing the heat activated digestive enzymes produced by the liver, resulting in indigestion. Dr A.F. Beddoe

We can't increase the health benefits of our produce if we don't know which nutrients it contains. Industrial agriculture is literally breeding the nutrition out of our food. If you can't grow your own garden, it is increasingly important to find good sources for your food. Source your food from growers who incorporate a bionutrient-rich soil protocol. Because excellent nutrition is the most effective path towards attaining robust health, strength and beauty.

garden

Important considerations for nutrient-rich gardening include; providing adequate water; controlling weeds which compete for moisture and sunlight; light mulching, adding humus or humic acids, tillage or working the soil; ensuring adequate sunlight for all plants, light is their elemental energy source; green manures and a production/rest rotation schedule with enough area divisions to provide 1 year of rest and fertility building every 5 years per division. (Julie's garden pictured.)

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Gardening with Nature (an excerpt)

10 Steps To Gardening With Nature Carole Rollins PhD, Elaine Ingham PhD

Organic growing is different from using chemicals for several reasons. First, we need to have most of the nutrients present in the soil in non-leachable forms most of the time. We need to have the mechanisms in that soil to convert those not-available-to-plant nutrients into plant-available nutrients in the Root Zone, for the most part, not away from the roots. The mechanisms to do this conversion process are beneficial microbes — bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and microarthropods. The beneficial species of these organisms are naturally found in healthy growing systems, not the diseased species.

Simply putting down the highest quality, most expensive organic nutrients in your garden is not likely to result in great plant growth, unless the correct microbes are present. Beneficial bacteria and fungi are needed first to degrade any residual toxic chemicals in your growing environment. Then bacteria and fungi are needed to tie-up nutrients so those nutrients are not leachable, and thus are not lost when water moves through the soil. Finally, bacteria and fungi need to be eaten by protozoa and nematodes to release tied-up nutrients in a plant available form. If any of the species that do this processing in your soil are missing, then you need to get them back. If life is missing in your soil, you need to give Mother Nature a jump-start to help her reestablish the normal set of organisms, and thus, reestablish normal nutrient cycling.

Feed the World

Report published by The American Academy of Microbiology explains how plant microbe interactions can be used to boost agricultural productivity in an environmentally and economically responsible way.

Clearly this process involves more than simply laying down a set of mineral nutrients. We need to educate people to understand that plants can, indeed, take care of themselves without people getting in the way. No need to have complex feeding schedules and mind-boggling mathematical calculations on rates of adding nutrients or adjusting pH. In the gardening with nature approach, we provide nutrients and a diversity of microbes to transform those nutrients, and the plants do the rest. Microbes, then, hold on to nutrients and they no longer leach from the soil, so you can use far fewer nutrients. Microbes also restructure the soil by creating air passageways and cavities that enable water and air to be retained within the soil, so you use considerably less water. You save money, time, and energy, and the health of your plants improve. Plants contain more nutrients and have built up their immune systems to become resistant to problem pests and diseases, leading to higher yields and plants that grow bigger and faster.

There are some complications that can arise when gardening with nature. Most significantly, complications arise because our gardens are not isolated. Though we have added microbes and organic nutrients, we still may have problems from environmental disturbances beyond our control — pesticide drift from a neighboring yard, acid rain, freezing weather, scorching heat, chlorine and chloramine in our watering systems, or too many salts. We must continue to tend our gardens and be watchful. We must continue to add microbes and nutrients. However, less maintenance will be required each year, as our soils increase in organic matter and microbe populations. Maintaining a healthy population of 70 percent of beneficial microbes in soils and on plant surfaces will nurture a protective type of environment that will thwart any disease-causing organisms that may come along, simply by out competing them for food and space.

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Nutrition Facts, or Fictions?

tomato label

Industrial food companies put "Nutrition Facts" labels on their packaged products. But how do we know the nutritional value of the tomato we buy at the farmer's market? It's not labeled. Packaged frozen organic vegetables are required to have Nutrition Facts labels, yet these labels do not provide much useful information, especially with respect to nutrient minerals or chemicals applied to the growing plant. The unspoken truth is that Nutritional Facts labels do not provide the information we need to evaluate the nutritional content of our food. Especially when it comes to fresh produce. To accurately analyze the nutritional value of the food we eat would be prohibitively expensive, perhaps impossible. Scientists do not yet fully understand the microbiology of healthy soil, or the synergistic vitamin and mineral interrelationships. Comprehensive nutritional analysis of food is simply too complex. And if your digestion is not working properly, you won't metabolize the nutrition from your food anyway.

What we really have to understand is that all life really is about microbiology. If you take care of the microbiology in your gut, they take care of you. The same principle holds true in the soil. If we take care of that probiotic population in the soil, it will then take care of us. Because fundamentally, if we study microbiology and then subsequently biochemistry, what we understand is that those microbes are the ones that are really sequestering nutrients for us, digesting food for us, and then making those things available for our sustenance. Dr Arden Andersen, author of Science in Agriculture, and The Anatomy of Life and Energy in Agriculture
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Paleolithic Nutrition

In the book Clinical Nutrition of the Essential Trace Elements and Minerals: The Guide for Health Professionals, chapter 3; Consumption of Trace Elements and Minerals by Preagricultural Humans, the authors compare preagricultural and modern nutrition. They explain that it was the Pleistocene era, (the 2.5 million years preceding agriculture) during which the defining characteristics of contemporary humans were selected: our resting metabolic rate, body proportions, sexual dimorphism, daily foraging range (which became more like that of carnivores and less primate-like) and brain size. From the standpoint of our genes, all humans living in the present are still Stone Agers - well over 99% identical, genetically, to our ancestors of 15,000 years ago. Our biochemistry and physiology remain adapted for the lifestyle which existed then, not that of the present. In contrast, the extraordinary dietary changes of the twentieth century have further distanced human nutrition from what it was during the evolution of our species.

To an astonishing degree, risk factors for chronic degenerative illnesses, established by clinical and epidemiological investigations, restate differences between ancestral human experiences and those of current humans. Furthermore, preventive recommendations tend to recapitulate major features of the Paleolithic lifestyle. These observations underlie the discordance hypothesis: human biology has been selected for the biobehavioral circumstances of life in the Stone Age, and deviations from that paradigm promote the chronic degenerative diseases, sometimes referred to as "afflictions of affluence."

Based on archeological data concerning the eating patterns of humans during the Paleolithic, wild plant foods and game animals provided the overwhelming majority of daily subsistence. Since they had no domesticated animals, there were no dairy products of any sort for humans after they were weaned, typically at about age three.

Maximum and minimum estimates for daily intakes of selected minerals for which data on unacculturated plant and wild game nutrient content are available was studied. In all cases (except for sodium) Paleolithic intake would have exceeded that in the present, usually by 200% or more. These estimates for mineral consumption parallel those for vitamins, whose preagricultural intake also ranged from 2 to 8 times higher than that of present day Westerners. This means we would have to eat 2 to 8 times more mineral and vitamin containing foods than we do currently to get the nutrition we are genetically designed to need. Three factors contribute to the striking nutritional disparity between present day and preagricultural humans.

  1. Ancestral humans consumed no "empty" calories (energy intake without associated nutrients). The closest parallel, wild honey, has higher nutrient content (including minerals) than do sugars and other sweeteners.
  2. Uncultivated plants and wild game have more nutrients per unit of energy than do commercial foods available today. For example, the average iron content of 85 wild game species is 5.57 mg/100 kcal compared to common meat items (T-bone steak, hamburger, frankfurter, pork sausage) which average of only 0.615 mg/100 kcal. (So you would have to eat ten times as much modern agricultural meat to get the same amount of iron present in wild game.)
  3. Stone Agers generally consumed more energy per day than do most current humans. This would have affected only the total nutrient intake per day, not nutrient intake per 1000 kca1, but nevertheless contributes to significant differences. Demand for essential nutrients increases with physical activity.

Paleolithic nutrition was vastly superior to that of modern man, primarily because pre-agricultural soil was rich with minerals and nutrients. Today's soils are toxic and depleted. If we truly want to reverse the trend of deterioration and dysfunction, we need to embrace the fact that human health starts in the soil.

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Informational Fields from Mineral Complexes

Scientists have studied how minerals interact with each other for a long time. They understand, for example, the ratio of calcium to magnesium that is most effective (Ca/Mg). They know that 92 of the 108 elements in the Periodic Table of Elements are utilized in the human body, most in trace amounts.

Mineral Interrelationships

While the physical mineral is important, there are equally vital functions that are nonphysical. Minerals store and transfer electromagnetic energy. Minerals also produce a frequency which works to create a field of information around them. The purity of the mineral determines the qualities of each mineral's frequency and its contribution to the building of the information field. In a mineral complex, the energies can be constructed to provide the maximum information that generates the full expression of each cell. The endless number of potential interactions produces a symphony of frequencies and information fields. It is as if the minerals are speaking with one another! This information is processed through a single hairlike fiber, the cilium, found on each cell of our body. Cilia serve as a type of antenna, sensing chemical signals and relaying them into the cell through proteins. These signals are processed in the cell nucleus, where they influence cell expression, growth and functional development.

When a gene product is needed, it is a signal from its environment (not an emergent property of the gene itself) that activates the expression of that gene. H.F. Nijhout, Duke University - Developmental Physiology and Evolution

Because cells interact and react appropriately to their environment, the fields of electromagnetic information and energy have profound implications for biochemistry. Biochemical processes and information fields drive the human body (and plants and all living things). Both the information fields, and the physical minerals themselves, are important for life function. Practitioners of Chinese medicine understand this vital relationship. The science of acupuncture is founded on an understanding of energetic pathways (meridians) within the body, with centuries of data to support the theory.

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Conclusion

Commercially grown food (even organically grown) is motivated by profit. To make money, most farmers must be very efficient and control input costs. And because the appearance and shipability of a vegetable matters most for profitability, nutrition suffers. In fact, most modern crops have been hybridized for appearance, shipping durability and long shelf life — not to improve their nutrition. But you cannot be healthy eating nutrient deficient food, no matter how nice it looks. If you want to be healthy, nutrition is what matters most.

There is a solution! You can grow your own food using soil re-mineralizing and nutrient promoting methods. If you can't garden, you can improve your diet with the best food available and supplement with the nutrient minerals necessary to balance your biochemistry.

hTMA - How to determine if your nutrition is adequate

hTMA is a multipurpose medical test that can identify whether your diet is meeting your individual nutritional requirements to support optimum health. While hTMA can provide information about your nutritional status, somehow you must get all of the nutrition needed to properly support your cellular growth and energy needs.

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Gardening Resources

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Food Resource

General Information
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Recommended Product

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References
  1. Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew P. Rabbitt, Christian A. Gregory, and Anita Singh. 2018. Household Food Security in the United States in 2017, ERR-256, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service