The Importance of Raising Part of Your Food
(Page 2 of 3)
March/April 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
Are You Growing Old Too Fast?
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My doctor friend stimulated our interest. He opened our eyes to the vast amount of evidence appearing day-by-day on the subject of being healthy by eating properly.
For example, Army doctors found in their young patients symptoms that looked like those of old age. In the early New Guinea campaign young soldiers suffered from dejected appetites, physical and mental fatigue, reduced resistance to infection. Analyses of tinned food showed only slight deficiencies, but when supply ships came with fresh vegetables, fruit and meat, these minor symptoms of old age disappeared.
And what about the major degenerative diseases of old age? Of middle age, rather-high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, wearing out the heart, the kidneys, the brain?
Dr. N. Philip Norman, in a Friends of the Land Food Conference in Ohio, pointed out the harm that has been done and is being done to the health of our people by commercial food processing and by our food habits.
He told how all this stuff about vitamin pills had grown as a parasite on the nutrition-for-war-and-defense program - from a little over a million dollars in advertising to two hundred fifty million dollars a year in just four years shows what modern advertising can do with part of the truth. How much good has been done by this? Dr. Norman believes that had we eaten whole-grain cereals in our bread and breakfast food, unprocessed, untouched by the kiln drying, unexploded and not devitalized grain, forage fresh from the vine, tree, and garden - and if we had eaten the meat of animals that had been fed on whole cereals, forage rich with nutrients, especially the internal organs of these animals, and if we had drunk plenty of milk that has been not too badly abused, we would avoid most of these degenerative diseases. There is much evidence to back up Dr. Norman.
3 Ways Food Goes Wrong
Evidence is beginning to appear showing that soil and freshness all effect the mineral and vitamin content of the food we eat. Carrots raised in a mineral-rich soil are more healthful than those raised in poor soil. Hothouse tomatoes, the kind you buy in the store, have but half the Vitamin C content of tomatoes fresh from the garden. Steam-table restaurant fare has a fraction of the value of properly home-cooked foods.
