The reason more Americans may be prone to allergies

by DanO

In recent years, there has been a huge jump in the number and severity of people who are suffering from allergies of all manner and sorts. Even young children are now becoming more susceptible. The reason for some of the suffering may be due to increased levels of stress or other environmental factors, but I feel there may be more to this puzzle then meets the eye. Consider the following statement by Michael Jacobson, executive director of CSPI, who said at a Washington press conference, "Sugar consumption has been going through the roof. It has increased by 28 percent since 1983, fueling soaring obesity rates and other health problems. It's vital that the FDA require labels that would enable consumers to monitor—and reduce—their sugar intake." Marion Nestle, chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University also added that "Because sugary foods often replace more healthful foods, diets high in sugar are almost certainly contributing to osteoporosis, cancer, and heart disease. It's high time that the food label informed consumers of a food's contribution to a recommended limit for added sugars." Nestle was managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Diet and Health.

I would add one more item to that list; allergies.

Let me build my case in this manner. The last one hundred years has seen a paradigm shift in the foods that Americans prepare and eat. Back in the early 1900’s, while there were soda pops and some canned goods, the vast majority of food we ate was fresh off the farm. Following are menus extracted from Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes Revised, Bureau of Home Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture [Government Printing Office: Washington] 1931

"Dinner menus for February
Scalloped oysters, five-minute cabbage, pickled beets, jellied fruit; Lima beans in tomato sauce with crisp bacon, mashed rutabaga turnip, lettuce with tart dressing, fruit, chocolate drop cookies, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, scalloped parsnips, turnip greens, pickled cherries, Washington pie..

"Dinner menus for April

Cheese soufflé, spring onions on toast, browned parsnips, olives and radishes, rhubarb Betty, pork chops, savory cooked lettuce, parley potatoes, chili sauce, jelly roll; fresh beef tongue, wilted dandelion greens, fried potato cakes, banana pudding...

"Dinner menus for July

Cold sliced meat, potato salad, rolls, peaches and cream, iced coffee, tea, or chocolate; fried or broiled chicken, new potatoes, peas, currant jelly, strawberry ice cream, vanilla wafers; broiled ground beef on toast, lima beans, fried tomatoes, Spanish cream...

"Dinner menus for October

Scalloped onions and peanuts, spinach, hot biscuits, catsup, lemon pie; cold boiled ham, succotash, carrots, cold slaw, green tomato pie; cream of vegetable soup, oven-toasted bread, grated cheese and lettuce salad, apple sauce, hot gingerbread; roast chicken, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts or some other green vegetable, crabapple jelly, peanut-brittle ice cream, sand tarts..."

As you can see, if when you dined out back then there were a lot of vegetables, a little meat and almost no processed sugar. Today, the average Americans diet has changed 180 degrees. Most of us eat nothing but processed foods that come in cans, boxes or though the window of a drive-thru. How are these foods different from back then? Well, they have had all the enzymes that were active in the natural food killed and they often have some form of processed sugar added to them. (I’ll leave out the horrendous levels of salt for another time).

So, in short, I believe the real cause of so many people becoming sensitive to outside irritants like pollen is really connected with a growing intolerance for sugar in our society. Let me explain this in very simple terms. The human body is an engine that is designed for one thing; to eat food. Everything else it does is of a secondary nature from a biological perspective. It was also designed this way over millions of years and is adapted to a basic agrarian diet consisting of natural foods found in nature. This is pretty much the status quo even up into early 1900’s when most Americans were raised in rural settings and ate locally grown produce. There were no large grocery stores that carried twenty thousand different processed items. It was pretty much a meat and potatoes existence if you get my meaning. The important point being that the amount of processed sugar (as opposed to natural sugars) in the average person’s diet was very low. Then, almost overnight geologically speaking, we began to consume almost exclusively, foods that were not ‘natural’. Foods that required our organs of digestion like the liver and pancreas to take up the slack in the form of increased enzyme secretions that were needed to break down the food into substances that the body could assimilate. A young healthy body can should this burden without problem, but as we age it does become a problem and the process of breaking down what we put in our mouths gets harder and harder to do well. Add to this a greatly increased consumption of processed sugars and what you have is a digestive system that becomes increasingly dysfunctional. So much so, that there are undigested fragments of sugar and food particles (toxins) getting past the intestinal wall and so on into the blood system every time we eat. Once there, the immune system is forced into overtime to deal with it. It’s as though each time we eat the processed food that so many of us do, we poison our bodies a little and stress the immune system. Over time, the immune system itself begins to get a little ‘flaky’ and starts to overreact. It even reacts to stimulus that it did not react to before. In this case we are talking about a heightened immunologic response that causes up to feel just like we have a cold. Only it’s not a cold at all, it’s our immune system crying out for help!

Carrots have been a real surprise for me!

Carrots have proven to a real surprise to me this last year. I’d never planted them before because I’d heard the tiny seeds were finicky and difficult to germinate. I also figured the soil had to be super soft and free of rocks for the roots to grow into straight and true carrots. Well, that turned out to be a load of bunk. Now true, I planted a variety called Short and Sweet which is a variety that is meant for heavier soils and also true, I did not always get the honkers you see in the grocery store. But, so what! I have been overjoyed with two facts. One, they are super easy to grow. And, once they do germinate they are a breeze to car for. (More like weeds than anything else). In order to beat the germination deal, I simply waited for a week in the spring when I knew it was forecast to be overcast and rainy. I then planted the seeds being careful to give them good spacing. I then covered the soil where they were shallowly planted with a bit of damp newspaper. Voila, I was done! A week later when I peeked under the paper, here are all these little dudes poking up out of the soil. From that point on, I just made sure to keep them watered and before I knew it, that fall I had more carrots than I could eat! Oh, and number two! I found that carrots over winter very nice in the soil as you can see in the pictures. They taste fantastic and they are a nice surprise when nothing else is growing yet.

Nutrition: In order below is the description, grams weight, ounces, raw calories, calories from fat, sodium, cholesterol and carbohydrates from the serving you see pictured.


Carrots 123 4.3 50.4 2.0 84.7 0.0 11.7

The Advantages of Growing and Eating Beans

For some time now, I’ve made beans (both the green variety and dried) a part of my regular diet. I’ve grown Kentucky Pole Beans every year for the past twenty years in my home garden. They’re and easy plant and raise and since the pole version can go vertical they don’t take up a lot of space in my small garden. The dried versions like the Great Northern Bean are cheap to buy and store for just about forever. I love to eat them in recipes like Bean and Ham Soup.

Other than the taste, which I love, beans have a lot going for them. They belong to the Fabaceae family which are legumes and have had a very long history of human consumption. As far back as six thousand years ago they were grown regularly and eaten when meat was in short supply. When you combine beans with rice you are getting all the essential amino acids (see my article on this) that are needed to sustain life. The protein is considered a great substitute for meat.

Beans also supply a large dose of dietary fiber. A cup of cooked navy beans provides 46.6% of the recommended daily intake for fiber. Soluble fiber forms a gel-like substance in the digestive tract that combines with bile (which contains cholesterol) and ferries it out of the body. Beans are also able to help moderate blood glucose levels which can be important for anyone with this concern.

In a very interesting study that examined food intake patterns and risk of death from coronary heart disease, researchers followed more than 16,000 middle-aged men in the U.S., Finland, The Netherlands, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece and Japan for 25 years. Typical food patterns were: higher consumption of dairy products in Northern Europe; higher consumption of meat in the U.S.; higher consumption of vegetables, legumes, fish, and wine in Southern Europe; and higher consumption of cereals, soy products, and fish in Japan. When researchers analyzed this data in relation to the risk of death from heart disease, they found that higher legume consumption was associated with a whopping 82% reduction in heart attack risk!

This year I will be planting Great Northern Beans for the first time in my garden as part of an experiment to see just how productive they are. I plan to include them in my book concerning Survival Gardens that will be coming out next year. This book will be dedicated to things the average person can do to grow their own food and survive in times of global collapse.

Just How Big a Garden Do I Need?

One question that arises from time to time concerns the amount of space needed for a garden to be considered productive or self supportive. While I’m not sure what the answer is to that question, I can possibly shed some light on what you can expect a given plot of ground to produce. From there I’ll try and relate this to what it would take for an average adult to live ‘off the land’ as it were.

For starters I’m only going to consider standard row gardens. While you can get great production out of a raised bed garden, you’re still limited to some extent by material costs, custom soil blends, etc. A row garden is something most people can construct with only modest expense. For our example we will take a look at a garden plot that is 104 feet square or a quarter of an acre in size. I’ve attempted to draw a diagram that is to scale and show an average sized ranch style home with a quarter acre plot out back. As you can see, it is a substantial area for a garden.

From information I have gleamed on the internet plus data that I collected from my own efforts last year in my garden (I have raw data if anyone wants it), I’m confident that a harvest of about half a pound of produce per square foot can be realized. (Maybe a little less or a little more depending on the nature of what is planted and on how the season turns out). That would translate out to about seven pounds (7.3 to be exact) of produce from a quarter acre per day assuming that you were able to can, freeze or store all of what you grew and then parceled it out over the course of the year.Note a quarter acre plot would be about 104 feet square.

Now if we accept this fact and next focus on the caloric content of the produce, we would find that some vegetables are low, some medium and some high in the number of calories you get from them on a per pound basis. At the high end would be potatoes that can approach a calorie per gram or 453 calories per pound. At the low end, say lettuce for example, you are getting hardly any calories. Maybe ten to twenty per pound grown.

So, if you happen to be an average sized adult and your daily caloric requirement is 1800 calories per day, that would translate out to a yearly need of (1800 cal x 7 days per week x 52 weeks per year) or about 374,400 calories that you would need to eat each year. Now, assuming an average of 7.3 pounds is produced per day in a quarter acre plot at an overall average of 200 calories per pound, you would get (7.3 x 200 x 356) or 512, 640 calories. That’s more than enough to live on even assuming some spoilage and loss to critters.

March 2010 Garden update

Here it is still the middle of March (the 18^th) and my raised beds are in full swing. (Do you think I’m trying to rush things a bit)? But, I’m not really. The soil in my beds which is now over eight years old is in very good tilth as they say. Even though there is moisture present, I can still pretty much work it with my bare hands. Even the earthworms are up and about! Like them, I got my hands dirty running them through the loose friable loam that is guaranteed to perk up even the stodgiest old cougher like myself. The last week has been very overcast, cool and damp (read as depressing) which was just perfect for the lettuce and radish seeds that were planted out earlier but not so good on the emotions index. When I checked them early today they were gamely poking up out of the soil raring to go. The sun, which was out in full force today, didn’t hurt either. So, seed packets in hand, I went ahead an planted four square feet with bush beans each spaced about 5 inches apart. Sown in between were radish seeds that will act as markers (and reminders) that something is planted in that spot. The radish seed of choice for me is Cherry Belle. It’s available in a packet for under a dollar at Garden Centers like Home Depot in Branson Missouri. The bush beans were from last season and my feeling is if they succumb to a late frost then I’ll just replant. Sometimes I get lucky. What can I say?

After managing to get some bean seeds into the dirt, I went ahead and repaired a section of lumber that had rotted over the course of a few seasons. I’m using boards I’ve found after a recent flood rather than going out to purchase new. They’re free and I’m recycling after a fashion. I replaced about six linear feet this time and still need to replace a four foot section on the end. During one of my hikes in the woods by the rivers edge, I’ll keep an eye out for something that will work. It just kills me to use fresh lumber what with the cost they run these days and all. If I run out of used wood, I’m thinking of switch to rocks and stones which are plentiful along the river down here in southwest Missouri. It’ll be hard work, but since when is that a bad thing? (One of the benefits of a raised bed that has stone walls is the ability of the sun to heat the stone during the early days of spring and then, once the sun has gone down, keep the soil warm for a good period of the evening hours).

So, right now I have the following plants either seeded or growing actively out back; romaine lettuce, potatoes, chives, parsley, bush beans, onions and carrots (from last season). That’s a pretty durn good start for the year by my way of thinking. Inside, I have a tray of peppers and lettuce that was just seeded along with a small plastic pot that will contain early basil. In the front mini-cold frames, I have lettuce both that is growing and lettuce that is being harvested. Earlier this morning, I dug up some carrots from the bed and they will be steamed this evening as part of my dinner. That, my friends, has gone a long way towards making me feel better. Now, for tomorrow, I hope to get the lawn mower in shape for the season of grass cutting that lies ahead. Not as much fun as playing in the dirt, but you have to take the good with the bad, I guess.

Soil Structure and Its Effect on Plant Growth

One of the major tenants of garden lore that is mentioned but rarely talked about in detail is the need to pay attention to garden soil structure. Too often a beginning gardener becomes disappointed with their early efforts, not because of anything they did, but rather due to some shortcoming in the soil they planted in.

Plants require certain type of soil to grow well in. Plain dirt dug up in the back yard may or may not cover all the bases, so let’s take a look at some of the key characteristics to look for in a good as opposed a poor soil. Let’s start by taking a look at what makes a soil suitable for growing crops. Soil that is of the right overall composition or mix is termed soil that has good tilth. Let’s explore some characteristics of tilth.


Basic Soil Composition

In the most general of terms, a soil can be broken down into two components: solids and spaces. The solids would be composed of things like minerals, sand and organics while the spaces would contain air and water. Now, about ninety percent of the solids could be further broken down into three classes or types; sand silt and clay which are really just rocky minerals divided up according to their size. The remaining ten percent is composed of organic material and it is this material that is vitally important to the future health of your plants. It’s also the one thing about soil that you can easily do something about! Included in the organic part are latterly billions of soil microbes that directly participate in the breakdown or decomposition of organics and then often aid in the transport of nutrients to the plant roots. We call decomposed organic material humus and it is the health of the tiny microbes that are what really matter. Good microbe populations equal healthy plants. The presence of humus in a soil is what gives it that great smell.

Air spaces constitute or make up about 50% of the volume of a healthy soil so they are very important also. In the spaces you will find both air and water. Yes, roots require air to breath and if the spaces become compacted such as is seen from over tillage, you will get terrible results. The plants will latterly die for lack of air and water. The moral of this story is that once you get your soil in good condition, please don’t ever walk on it or do anything to compact it!

A Closer Look

Now that we see that soil is both spaces and solids, lets take a little closer look at how the solid part can be put together. Remember when I used the word tilth? Well, good tilth depends on the overall mix of soil texture, structure (or aggregation), density, drainage and water holding ability. This is influenced greatly by the exact proportion of clay, sand and silt that make it up. To the right is a chart of how different soils are made from varying the composition of these three basic ingredients. When you first look at it, you might be a little confused. So, what’s the best soil? Well, the answer is not to think so much as what is best as it is to think in terms of avoiding any extremes. So, if your soil is somewhere in the middle of the chart that’s good. If it’s tending towards one of the corners, then you might want to consider some soil management techniques that could apply depending on your circumstance. If you have small raised beds like I do, then you can always buy bags of different kinds of soil to alter the structure. If, on the other hand, you have a large backyard garden, this might not be a viable alternative. The good news is that almost any soil can be improved by the addition of compost. That will be subject of a future blog.

Lettuce seed germination research!

Here is a piece of information concerning lettuce seed germination I came across some time ago.

In related research, plant physiologists wondered why people have trouble with seed germination of lettuce in their vegetable gardens. They knew that seed germination was very high in Petri dishes in the laboratory.

It turns out that in lettuce seeds, unlike barley, a critical step in triggering seed germination is photo-activation. The seeds need to be exposed to light in order to germinate. I hope you are wondering, immediately, how germination responds to photon flux and wavelength of light!

Lettuce responds well to very low photon fluxes...it is not a photosynthetic process!

The wavelength of light is critical. The seeds germinate well in white light, but also to single "colors"...particularly red light (660 nm). On the other hand, far-red light (730 nm) strongly reduces lettuce germination.

It took a long time to identify, isolate, and characterize the photoreceptor. It is called phytochrome. Phytochrome exists in two different chemical forms: Pr and Pfr. Phytochrome in its Pr form absorbs light maximally in red wavelengths...hence Pr. Phytochrome in its Pfr form absorbs light maximally in far-red wavelengths...hence Pfr. The name of the form of phytochrome is determined by the color of light it absorbs maximally. What made characterizing phytochrome difficult was the fact that the two forms interconvert. As Pfr absorbs far-red light, it changes chemically into Pr! Similarly, Pr absorbs red light and changes chemically into Pfr.

If you think about how you might analyze a pigment (as you have done several times in lab!), you generally put an extract into a spectrophotometer and measure absorbance of a wavelength at which the pigment maximally absorbs light. With phytochrome, this is almost impossible...the light you would use to measure it, causes it to change to the other form! It is elusive!

Back to the lettuce, obviously the garden problem is planting the seeds too deep (in the dark!). Without light to photo-activate seed germination, the seeds fail to germinate to their potential. In the dark, the ratio of Pfr to Pr determines whether each seed will germinate. If exposed to red light, the phytochrome is all converted into Pfr and the seeds germinate. When the seeds are exposed to far-red light, the phytochrome is all converted into Pr and the seeds fail to germinate. Obviously the active form of phytochrome is Pfr.