Eating To Get Skinny

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Everybody had a garden when I was a kid. They had to have something to eat. There weren't many grocery stores for people to buy food at. The stores that were around were like the convenience stores today, but they had no electricity or refrigeration. There was no electricity or refrigeration in people's homes either. Home canning and smoke houses were the only way to preserve food longer than it naturally take to spoil. That's a little worrisome these days. People in general don't have a clue how to garden, and if they do they don't know how to preserve the food in order for them to have something to eat during the winter.

That's a big deal, you know, having something to eat in the winter. In my opinion it's not going to be there soon. There's not much food in the spring either. It takes a long time for vegetables to grow and produce the garden crops we take for granted. Even then, humans have to compete with the other animals. They gotta have food too. If you think rabbits are not gonna eat your garden to keep you from starving you're just wrong.

True, if there isn't any vegetables to eat, then people will kill the animals to feed their families, and so there won't be any animals to kill and eat either. After a while enough people will die off and the chance of getting some food to eat will be better, but people don't die so easy, and the ones that don't will still be out looking for food to feed the ones who can't go out looking.

I'm writing this because of a trip to the grocery store yesterday. The prices have gone way up, and the quality of the groceries have gone way down. Typical. You're paying more for less. You've been doing that for a long time. Longer than since electricity and refrigeration came along. Why? Because the nutrients in the soil the food grows in has been used up. That's probably what happened to Rome. People have been growing food around the Italian peninsula for thousands of years.

One of the minerals that has been used up on lots of farms is magnesium. Animals don't need lots of magnesium as a percentage of what they eat, but if they don't get what they need they die. Life ain't worth living without magnesium. The paradox is that there is an overabundance of magnesium on earth. The oceans are full of it. There are dead seas deep in the earth that are practically all magnesium and it's hauled out by the truck load.

The problem is that when the land where magnesium is not plentiful is farmed, what little it possesses naturally to support the plants that are grown on it year after year gets used up by those plants, and eventually there is no magnesium in the plants that grow there by the time they are put in the pot for cooking.

My father raised cows both for food and pleasure. Sometimes one of his cows would lay down and die for no apparent reason at all. He knew what caused it. A lack of magnesium in their diet. He just could predict it when the cows were in the pasture grazing. He put out salt blocks that had the magnesium the cows weren't getting in the grasses they were eating. Once a cow laid down from magnesium deficiency it was too late. They never got up again. It happened to young cows as well as old ones.

That's the reason so many people are fat today. They're eating plenty of food, but the food they eat don't have the nutrients they need to live well-rounded lives, and so they just eat some more, and keep on eating. Why would they not? They're starving for something like magnesium. None of the cows my father lost to magnesium deficiency were skinny cows.

Just because the nutritional numbers on the side of a box claims that this sort of food has this amount of nutrition in it doesn't mean it's there. If it was grown in a field that's been farmed for a thousand years in a row, probably not. Even if it's never been farmed at all the field may not have the needed nutrients. You gotta buy supplements. You gotta know to buy supplements. It doesn't do any good to inform people who are happy not knowing. They pay the asking price? Then, it oughta be there.

This makes me think of how just a hundred years ago the life expectancy of human adults was around thirty to fifty years old. The fact that food couldn't be stored very well over the winter meant that lots of people were not going to get the nutrition they needed to live long, happy lives during half the year. I can't imagine that not adding up over the years.

Pellagra is a disease that runs rampant all over the world. It was especially prevalent in the Old South or the southeastern United States. For the longest time people didn't know what caused it. It will definitely kill you, and it will make you look like a horrible monster before it does. There were kids who came to school hungry all the time when I was that age. The school lunch program came into being here with the same wave of concern that made North Carolina hire agriculture teachers from all over the United States to have one in every high school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra

You can read about pellagra on Wikipedia. I thought I knew what caused it by remembering what I heard about why my school mates got it. I was wrong. I thought it was from a main diet of bleached wheat flour. It's not. Its corn poisoning. Corn is poisonous. Amazing! I never heard of it. The Wikipedia article explains it.

The native indians of the Americas knew it was poisonous and off-set it by treating it with lime before they ate it. Now, due to the work of this one American doctor who used prisoners to experiment with it was discovered that it could be cured with niacin or vitamin B3. This reads a lot like how the sailor's disease called "scurvy" was cured by eating fruits that have a lotta vitamin C or "night blindness" is cured by vitamin A.

In my opinion, the biggest reason people are getting older and older is because of better nutrition and refrigeration and transportation. They get nutritious food all year long. At least, they get food that has at least some nutrition in it all year long whether there is enough of the right kind to keep the process going more consistently.

I stopped taking most of the arthritis medicine. I'm taking just one kind now that was not made for arthritis, but rather for malaria. Quinine? Remember quinine that was the first drug used for malaria. We had a local doctor who treated everybody as if they had malaria. People thought he was a quack because of it, but he was thought of as weird anyway because he was a Seven Day Adventist who grew fruit trees and gardens in his front yard. In those days of calculated country cooking nobody believed his philosophy of nutrition. They do now.

The reason I'm taking a malaria drug is that it reduces inflammation as well as about anything except steroids. It was reducing inflammation in all that quack doctor's patients too. Inflammation is one of the biggest reasons any disease hurts, and so his acting like everybody had malaria was one of the ways he was able to help so many people.

These people included my father who was a regular patient until he became financially secure. Then, of course, he was too hoity toity for quacks. He only lived to be 88 years old. Of course, the quack eventually got old and died too. His house was sold and all the fruit trees were removed. They both did okay.

Both of these men came here from some place else to challenge the status quo here that was very primitive. There were and are still reasons why it became that way. The Reconstruction period and the Civil War being mostly to blame. The coastal plains all up and down the Atlantic seaboard always had problems economically because of their location.

It's the same deal in coastal areas that are separated by big rivers and accompanying swamps the world over. Here, for instance, roads couldn't be built across these rivers and swamps until the technology came along to make it possible. The rivers here run in a southeasterly direction, and so the only roads in the coastal plains ran the same way. For all practical purposes there were no north and south roads. Just east and west ones.

The roads would start in the piedmont and run down the ridges between the rivers and swamps, and you had to come back out the same way. You couldn't travel any long distances on these roads although they might be hundreds of miles long. You used them to go into the towns along the road, and maybe even to the ocean, but you had to come back out along the same road. There were towns ten miles apart as the crow flies, but because there was no bridges the residents of these towns might have to travel a hundred miles to get up to a place they could cross the river.
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