Mast Year

Plantwatch: Rich pickings for foragers

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/27/plantwatch-beech-mast-nuts-berries-foraging-pannage

Re-Wild Your Plate!

An edible gardening project is looking to ancestral plants of modern vegetables for qualities of disease resistance, yield and flavour:

• By domesticating wild plants to create our familiar crops we have selected desirable traits like disease resistance, yield and flavour. The Really Wild Veg project has been examining how significant these changes have been by growing trial plots of three familiar crop plants alongside their wild relatives. The project has focussed on three crop species – cabbage, beet and radish – as all three are native Scottish coastal plants. For more information about the species and varieties grown in the trial and the participating community gardens see the 11th June blog update.
  
  The Crop Wild Relatives are important because they hold genes that may be valuable in breeding new improved varieties. One area where the wild plants may show particular promise is in their nutritional qualities. A varied group of chemicals found in plants that are particularly important for human health are called bioactive phytochemicals. This group includes antioxidants and anthocyanins among many others and can help prevent cancer, heart disease and diabetes. In order to investigate this interesting area further the Really Wild Veg project has teamed up with the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health. The Rowett’s lab in Aberdeen will analyse the samples supplied from across all five gardens that have participated in the trials. This will provide a picture of how the phytochemicals have changed their makeup and concentration as a result of domestication.

 It nice to see the middle-ground between commerical veg-growing and foraging being explored.

If It Fits Your Macros...

http://suppversity.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1 via DuckDuckGo for Android

Feeding People is Easy

We're big fans here at Natural Messiah of the work of Colin Tudge.  Tudge puts a lot of thought in to agriculture; from the culture, science, biology and ecology that underpins it, to the commercial and health/nutritional drivers that so influences the form of what is harvested out in the fields by the time it ends up on our plate. 

In Feeding People is Easy, Tudge launches a polemic at the current state of world agriculture and makes a case for 'New Agrarianism'.

Biodiversity: Ecological Security and Food Security

Industrial agriculture is destroying our source of food - something discussed on BBC Radio 4's Shared Planet. One of the contributers makes the case that biodiversity produces more nutritional output than industrial agriculture (which is usually monocultural):

• "Agricultural Crops and Wildlife Duration: 28 minutes First broadcast: Tuesday 03 September 2013 Monty Don presents Shared Planet, the series that looks at the crunch point between human population and the natural world. In this week's programme we have a field report from England with Simon Potts, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services at Reading University. Simon Potts's research looks specifically at how effective bees and other pollinators are and their abundance in agricultural landscapes - a crucial link in food security. Monty Don explores some of the issues with Vandana Shiva in Delhi, a board member of the International Forum on Globalisation and an author of over 20 books about biodiversity, food and economies."

Discordant Lifestyle

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/22/dieting-disaster-evolution-daniel-lieberman?CMP=twt_fd

The Guardian on Fasted Training

Fasted training: should you eat before exercise?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2013/sep/19/fasted-training-eat-before-exercise

Uniting Diet Haters

Why Vegans and Paleos Should Stop Hating Each Other

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-frazier/vegan-paleo-diets_b_3934305.html

Psychics Exposed

http://www.cracked.com/article_20566_the-6-most-humiliating-public-failures-by-celebrity-psychics.html

The Economist on Gut Flora

Check out @TheEconomist's Tweet: https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/379107617265950720

6 Health Lessons From The Paleo Diet

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/healthy-paleo-diet-tips_n_3900690.html

Snake Oil

An interesting graphic from Wiley.

Sitting is the New Smoking

From Runner's World:

• "Up until very recently, if you exercised for 60 minutes or more a day, you were considered physically active, case closed," says Travis Saunders, a Ph.D. student and certified exercise physiologist at the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. "Now a consistent body of emerging research suggests it is entirely possible to meet current physical activity guidelines while still being incredibly sedentary, and that sitting increases your risk of death and disease, even if you are getting plenty of physical activity. It's a bit like smoking. Smoking is bad for you even if you get lots of exercise. So is sitting too much."

Baby Food

Low in nutrition and high in sugar, this is a good example of the processed food I would seek to avoid as a parent.  

The story is likely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ready-made foods whether you buy baby or adult food.

If you want to know what isn't 'paleo', here it is.

http://www.theguardian.com/p/3tj66/tf

Play & Evolutionary Fitness

Play is an important component in the palei model. I look forward to paleocritics making the argument that paleo folk didn't have gym equipment nor did they play ball sports!

Play your way to evolutionary fitness.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929330.800-play-your-way-to-evolutionary-fitness.html#.Ui3xjdK-pH8?utm_source=NSNS%26utm_medium=SOC%26utm_campaign=twitter%26cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL-twitter

Live Longer

Some interesting ideas and themes, many of which we've seen in the paleosphere over the past five years.

http://www.theguardian.com/p/3tf6m/tw via DuckDuckGo for Android

Seasonal Numbers

Cold Weather Linked With Heart Risk Factors, Heart Attack, In New Studies

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/07/cold-weather-heart-attack-risk-factors_n_3861519.html

Junk Food: Know It When You See It

Smoothies and fruit juices are a new risk to health, US scientists warn

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/07/smoothies-fruit-juices-new-health-risk

Sugar Intake Must Come Down

Sugar intake must come down, says WHO – but UK likely to resist

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/sep/07/sugar-diet-who-uk-experts