Nutritional castration and other modern maladies

Nutritional Castration and Other Modern Maladies

Over the coming weeks I will share some things I learned, re-learned, or realized during my recent travels. I will mix them in with the usual informative writing, so keep an eye on these posts.

In Las Vegas, I re-learned an important fact. America leads the way. Unfortunately, it leads the way in a way we do not want. The average mineral content of our farmed soils has dropped roughly 75 percent over the last several decades. Said another way: the average head of romaine has about 33 percent less vitamin and mineral content than it did 50 years ago. Why the difference in percentages (75 percent soil depletion versus 33 percent in the lettuce)?

Allow me to use a human analogy. Late in 1944 and early in 1945, the Nazis were pulling out of Holland during their long and bloody retreat. To punish the Dutch for their increased resistance, they took most of the food and medical supplies they could find and shipped them back to Germany. As fate would have it, it was a particularly cold winter, so many Dutch citizens starved or froze.

The Dutch medical authorities tried to help their people, especially pregnant women, who were given a slightly larger ration. Effectively, these women were starving, because in addition to their own needs they had to eat for the baby. They just starved more slowly.

The result was called the Dutch Hunger Winter, and the children born during that period are sometimes called the Dutch Hunger Babies. A funny thing happened to those children, and it appears to be happening to their grandchildren as well. They seem to have switched on what researchers call a thrifty phenotype, and they are able to store more calories from their food, seemingly independent of their measured metabolic rate. We now know this is epigenetics at work. Same food in, more storage out.

What does this have to do with romaine lettuce? Think of the nutrient-poor soil as the equivalent of the Dutch winter, and you will see why 75 percent less nutrient in the soil only yields 33 percent less in the food. The lettuce has switched on its thrifty phenotype.

As we march down the garden path of ever-more chemical fertilizers and ever-more aggressive use of the soil to produce more crops from less land, the end result can only be nutritional castration. You have probably read that the average sperm count of a male today has dropped 20 to 40 percent below that of their grandfathers. There are many drivers, but nutritional density of the food supply is one we do not talk about enough.

Fortunately, there is more soil husbandry going on now than there used to be, no pun intended. But it is not enough to reverse the trend.

So what do you do? You think hard about a daily multivitamin and mineral formulation, you load the plate with the densest fresh produce you can source, and you cover your omega 3 status because the modern food supply is short on EPA and DHA. Get the foundations right, and you can stop worrying about whether your lettuce was as nutrient-dense as your grandmother’s.

Doc

Any nutritional or supplement program works best alongside other lifestyle modifications: appropriate sleep, exercise, and food choices.

— Doc