Monday, January 29, 2018

ECOLOGICAL NUTRITION

ECOLOGICAL NUTRITION - PART OF MAN’S EVOLUTION
Copyright © Klaus Veltjens 2018
(references are numbers in brackets)

SUMMARY
An overview of man’s biological development over nearly 3.6 billion years and the changing environment over the last 8,000 years, and how man’s evolution was and still is part of the ecolo-gy that developed simultaneously with us.
The emphasis in this essay is on nutrition and health.
A suggestion for changing what went wrong by supporting a healthy outcome.

MAN’S EVOLUTION
Our origin goes back to the beginning of cellular life on Earth about 3.6 billion years ago, when our first ancestor was a prokaryote cell.
Around 2.5 billion years ago, one prokaryote cell swallowed a cyanobacterium cell without digesting it. That cell was able to do photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide plus water with light as “catalyst” into sugar as source of energy (6CO2+6H2O=C6H12O6); so it co-opted it to use this capacity.
That process then released O2 as waste, which started filling the atmosphere with oxygen, The result of this endosymbiosis (1) became ultimately co-opted into every plant.
Another incredible event was the endosymbiosis of the eukaryotic cell, a merger of one cell with most of its DNA in its nucleus with another cell, the mitochondrion, with its own DNA nearly two billion years ago (2).
This cell was the ancestor of almost all animals on Earth.(3). That is the cell we are made of with about 250 variants that have different numbers of mitochondria in them. Around 80% of our own energy comes from the ATP (Adenosine triphosphate (C10H16N5O13P3)) produced by the mi-tochondria in each of our cells. By hydrolysis of ATP it releases between 30.5 and 45.6 kJ/mol (4).
The mitochondrion in this combined cell produced energy for its survival plus some energy to spare, and this was the cause for Darwin's order of the survival of the fittest, and all creatures be-came competitive predators: Everyone is eating everyone else, and plants, having the last laugh, absorb the remains of all of them when they die.
The microbiome in our gut is a community of microbiota that joined the evolution of animals around 500 million years ago. At that time, what could be our ancestor living in water, the hydra was no more than a floating digestive tract. A tube a few millimeters long with a mouth at one end, a digestive system filled with microbes along its length, and an adhesive disk at the other end to anchor the animal to a rock or plant. These creatures can still be found in freshwater to-day.(5)

ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITY
Our evolution took place interactively with all the plants, animals, and microorganisms in an ecological community together. This means we were, and are still, symbiotically relating to each other; our life and immune system are in tune with it as a source of nutrition and protection against disease. We depend on it from the moment of conception and throughout life.
The hunter-gatherers ate what was seasonally available in their local ecology. They moved barefoot through their territory, perfectly grounded (earthed) to mother Earth (6), to hunt and gather their food. The only toxins were of natural origin, and our body could detox them. Plants provided the ammunition our immune system required, such as vitamins, trace metals, and special molecules like cancer-cell-eating Anthocyanin in the dark pigment in fruits and leaves, and other antioxidants. The first Australian and American peoples were healthy before the European diet was introduced. Bush tucker was the food the First Australians gathered from their land; the Pa-lawa people of Trowunna collected rich supplies of roots, fungi, lagoon leeks, yakka bread, seeds, orchid bulbs and plant shoots that were harvested throughout the seasons (7).

ADAPTIVE MUTATIONS
The original immune system of the peoples who migrated out of central Africa were blood type O, suitable for a hunter gatherer environment, and this is still the blood group of the first peoples of Australia and America as they became isolated as a result of rising sea levels after the ice ages. However, around 8,000 years ago in the Levant, agriculture facilitated specialisation and urban life with resulting sanitary problems and unfamiliar food, and this, over a few thou-sand years, caused a mutation to the blood type A, which introduced an immune system able to protect us better from those new threats (8).
After a further 4,000 thousand years man took to the savannas, taking their livestock with them; milk was a dietary problem, so over time another mutation took place: blood type B. When Type A and Type B societies started to intermingle, type AB started to appear between 500 BC and 900 AD.

100 TRILLION CELLS
The development of the human body via a pathway of many animal species over the last near-ly 1 billion years was a continuous evolution into an increasingly complex yet integrated commu-nity of cells (9). By now, each human body is a cooperative ecological community of 100,000,000,000,000 (100 Trillion) eukaryotic cells, together with a further separate 1014 to 1015 microorganisms that are living symbiotically in our gut and elsewhere weighing 2.5 kg or more (10. This microbiome therefore represents the same number or perhaps even 10 times the number cells in the gut compared to cells in our entire body (11). Combined, these 200 Trillion cells rep-resent nearly 29,000 times as many cells in each of us compared with the total number of humans on earth, yet those cells are more cooperative than human peoples.
This community of specialised symbiotic cells is able to coordinate all bodily functions, such as sensing the external and internal environments, communicating with the brain via the gut-brain axis (12), adapting heart rates to demand, sorting the food into useful products, recyclable waste, and poisonous substances, expelling the latter, storing surplus food for future use, achieving en-ergy production for extended periods while sending warnings when muscles reach dangerous acidity, and killing and removing bacterial or viral attackers from the body. The microbiota in our digestive system (from the mouth to the end of the colon) play an important part in the commu-nication between the brain, the gut, and all the other organs(13). The brain receives data from each part of the body including the microbiome every millisecond, acts upon and records the in-formation most likely in the insular cortex; some of this information we can call upon years later in “gut-feelings”(14) and metacognition (15). The communication between cells by electro-chemical messages and hormonal messengers is so fast that your hand on the hotplate of the stove will automatically be removed from the heat before you feel the pain.
When our nutrition is inadequate, the body will still always find the best process for our sur-vival, even if it has to take material from elsewhere in the body to produce what is needed to solve the problem (16).
The bacteria in our colon have a symbiotic relationship with our immune system. They guard the colon wall, where many of them live, against the passage of unwanted living or chemical in-truders into the bloodstream. They, in particular various lactobacilli and bifidobacteria, live by eating the fibre our digestive system cannot digest. In this balanced external and internal ecologi-cal environment, which developed simultaneously with us over billions of years, we survived and multiplied.
These important microbes are part of a diverse and balanced gut flora, a symbiosis, but when falling out of this balanced state, called dysbiosis, they get overwhelmed by other somewhat self-ish bacteria, pathobionts, that live off processed sugars and flour. Then the “good” bacteria, starved of their essential fibre as food, may no longer be able to protect us, and unwanted prod-ucts will enter our bloodstream through a “leaky gut”. That initiates a counterattack by the im-mune system, generally by inflammatory action, which in turn can be identified as a large number of diseases throughout the body and even in the brain (17)(18).

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
What changed?
All this worked well until progressively with urbanisation and the industrial revolution we moved away from our local ecology to cities. Our food was no longer similar to what we “gath-ered” in our ecological surroundings before that.
When the people left the farms and villages and moved to the cities, poverty followed, the country-diet was forgotten, and new pollutants multiplied. It took the world’s populations fur-ther away from the ecological sources of food, and encouraged the industrialisation of agriculture and food production, which in turn caused a dramatic reduction in its nutritional value. Our eco-logical nutrition has been compromised.
The first major change occurred around 8,000 years ago; with urbanisation.
250 years ago, with the beginning of the industrial revolution, our excellent immune system was overwhelmed by the poisonous by-products and deprivation caused by industrialisation.
In addition to that, during the last 70 years by industrialised farming, when fertilisation by dung and liquid manure was replaced by artificial fertilisers, nutrition was taken out of the equa-tion.
Shoes with plastic soles became electrical insulators that disconnected us from being grounded to the electron feed from earth, interfering with the gut-brain axis information transfer. By con-necting the body to the Earth enables free electrons from the Earth’s surface to spread over and into the body, where they can have antioxidant effects. Grounding produces measurable differ-ences in the concentrations of white blood cells, cytokines, and other molecules involved in the inflammatory response. (19)
There has been no time to mutate again to adapt to these rapid changes.

WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE
THE PROBLEM
What should the essential issues relating to high quality productive agriculture be to return to the ecological nutrition our bodies’ ecosystem need?
With agricultural fertilisation and its emphasis on just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate; the minerals required by our body’s healthy metabolism and by a fully functioning immune system are not only missing, but if they were in the soil, as a result of increasing acidity, they could not be absorbed by the plants we and our livestock eat.
The biodiversity of the world’s plant and animal life is said to have decreased by an estimated 30% since the 1970s. It is of concern, perhaps by corollary, that the biodiversity of the western Microbiome has also decreased by a similar amount by comparison to that of the world’s primal communities.
We have been separated from our ecological environment, and the foods produced with cur-rent large scale farming techniques are lacking what our bodies had available during our evolution and on which our body depends, i.e. the food provided in our local ecosystem. The current use of artificial fertilisers repress the plants’ ability to absorb the essential nutrients, i.e. vitamins, miner-als and trace elements, including selenium, copper, magnesium, zinc, iodine, molybdenum, plus others, and EFAs (essential fatty acids) such as omega-3 and omega-6.
All of these are essential for our physical and neurological development and our immune sys-tems to function properly, and all of them have to be in a delicate balance with each other (20). Without essential vitamins, minerals, and fibre:
• Our body cannot develop properly in utero,
• cannot develop in childhood,
• cannot sustain itself,
• cannot defend itself against diseases, and
• cannot develop a child’s brain properly,
If freshness is important, then distance is a disadvantage of obtaining food from thousands of kilometres away, quite apart from the fuel and energy requirements to transport it. Therefore we must encourage the consumption of seasonal local products.

A BALANCED GUT FLORA (MICROBIOME)
The body’s gut flora, the microbiome, must be balanced in favour of the good bacteria in or-der to assist in maintaining the body’s homeostasis and prevent diseases linked to neuropsycho-logical, metabolic, and gastrointestinal disorders. Due to the widespread consumption of highly processed foods, where fibre has been removed and sugar introduced, the gut flora has become dominated by the bad bacteria such as Clostridium difficili, and that has compromised the im-mune system.
The number of species in the microbiota of rural agrarians and hunter-gatherers have capabili-ties that many people in urban environments have simply lost. In particular the bacterium rumino-cocccus bromii, which predigests resistant fibre which then enables other bacteria to ferment re-sistant starch into short-chain fatty acids (21). Resistant starch is contained in plant food such as bananas, potatoes, seeds, legumes, and unprocessed grains.
The result of a dysfunctional microbiome is the endemic spread of diseases linked it. (22)
• Arthritis 3.5 million people (15.3%)
• Asthma 2.5 million people (10.8%)
• Cancer 370,100 people (1.6%)
• High cholesterol 1.6 million people (7.1%)
• Diabetes 1.2 million people (5.1%)
• Heart disease 1.2 million people (5.2%)
• Hypertension 2.6 million people (11.3%)
• Kidney disease 203,400 people (0.9%)
• Mental and behavioural conditions 4.0 million people (17.5%)
• Osteoporosis 801,800 people (3.5%)
Neurological diseases (23)
• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD),
• Multiple sclerosis (MS),
• Depression,
• Dementia,
• Alzheimer’s,
• Parkinson’s.

In other words, a nutritional imbalance can cause catastrophic and epidemic diseases.

ARICULTURAL RENEWAL FOR NUTRITION
Food is not merely fuel measured in Calories or Kilojoules provided by carbohydrates. The es-sential minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and EFAs are missing, and need to be returned to our foods. Adding them into the food is best done at its source: in the crop fields and the livestock paddocks.
This means that:
• The soil has to contain the ingredients our immune system needs,
• The vegetables, grains, and livestock must supply us with them,
• They must provide us with what our ancient ecology provided, and
• The produce must reach us fresh from the farms.

CHANGE TO ORGANIC AGRICULTURE
Change is possible by avoiding artificial fertilisers. What is needed is a farmers’ stewardship (24) towards the production of organic-only and even biodynamic food, where produce can be traced from the farmer to the retailer. It should include the use of recycled irrigation water now of Class A drinking water quality, and fertilise with the minerals of the sea, where our first ecol-ogy was.
Seaweed still has all the ingredients of our original ecological food sources. The average com-position of seaweed (Ascophyllum nodosum), the predominant seaweed in agriculture used today, typically contains over 60 minerals, 12 vitamins, 21 amino acids, simple and complex carbohy-drates plus several plant growth hormones.
Seaweed collection and processing as fertiliser as well as food will provide all of the essential trace and micro elements our nutrition must include. This is already being done in Asia and Nor-way.

TESTING OF SOIL AND PRODUCTS
Products need to be tested to show content of all essential minerals, micro elements, vitamins, EFAs (essential fatty acids), and fibre. For a consistent result, soils need to be tested regularly for Ph-neutral soil and Mineral content.
Restrict refining of food products.

EDUCATION
To succeed with this project, an intensive process of education and marketing would need to accompany it, starting with:
• Government
• The farmers, including existing research groups such as:
• Slow Foods,
• PPS (Perennial Pasture Systems),
• Biodynamic Agriculture Australia Ltd,
• Organic Dairy Farmers,
• Australian Pig Farmers, etc
• Children in primary and secondary schools, and
• Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.

ARABLE LAND
Man’s life depends on food, and most of it comes from the land.
Arable land is reducing at a rapid rate. Of this planet’s 148 million square kilometres of land, approximately 31 million is arable, and this land is being lost at the rate of over 100,000 km² per year as a result of urban sprawl and drought.
That means:
0.51 ha per person in the year 2000,
0.39 ha per person in 2015,
0.28 ha per person in 2050, and
even less with rising sea levels and salinity.
Expanding cities use up arable land

PHYSICAL EXERCISE and FRESH AIR OUTDOOR FACILITIES
Cities can and do provide facilities for physical exercise as this is a vital part of healthy living and wellbeing:
 Walking tracks,
 Cycling tracks,
 Gym equipment in parks,
 Swimming pools,
 Beach access,
 Gyms, and
 Health spas.

VIEWPOINTS of OUTCOMES
From a farmer’s viewpoint it would:
 Create living soil,
 Reduce predation,
 Reduce erosion,
 Improve productivity,
 Improve drought-proofing,
 Reduce salinity and acidity problems,
 Supply a growing world market, and
 Achieve better products with better prices at little (if any) extra cost.

From a government’s viewpoint at all levels it would:
 Lower the health budget per person,
 Utilise water waste for production,
 Reduce infrastructure costs,
 Reduce aggressive crimes, and
 Protect the natural environment.

From the population’s viewpoint it would:
 Bring enjoyment of better health and fitness,
 Reduce medical expenses,
 Reduce lost work time,
 Reduce stress and associated sickness, and
 Improve child raising.


REFERENCES
1 Virtual Fossil Museum http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Evolution/Endosymbiosis.htm
2 Brian Cox Human Universe
3 Brian Cox Human Universe
4 Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate#DNA_and_RNA_synthesis
5 Emeran Mayer, MD The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health – page 91
6 Oschman J, Chevalier G, Brown R https://www.dovepress.com/the-effects-of-grounding-earthing-on-inflammation-the-immune-response--peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-JIR
7 University of Tasmania http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/A/Aboriginal%20life%20pre-invasion.htm
8 Dr Peter J,D’Adamo Eat Right for Your Type 1996
9 Bruce H. Lipton, PhD The Biology of Belief 2009
10 Emeran Mayer, MD The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health
11 Linghong Zhou & Jane A Foster Psychobiotics and gut-brain axis: in the pursuit of happiness
12 Linghong Zhou & Jane A Foster Psychobiotics and gut-brain axis: in the pursuit of happiness
13 Emeran Mayer, MD The Mind-Gut Connection; How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health
14 Emeran Mayer, MD The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health
15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
16 Dr. M. Ted Morter, Jr. Your Health Your Choice 1990
17 Dr David Perlmutter Brain Maker: The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain for Life 2015
18 Emeran Mayer, MD The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health
19 Oschman J, Chevalier G, Brown R https://www.dovepress.com/the-effects-of-grounding-earthing-on-inflammation-the-immune-response--peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-JIR
20 Dr. Carole Hungerford Good Health in the 21st
21 Emeran Mayer, MD The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health – page 215
22 Australian Bureau of Statistics
23 Dr David Perlmutter Brain Maker: The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain for Life 2015
24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewardship