“Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.”

— Hippocrates circa 400 BC

My ongoing educational journey in food, nutrition, and farming

Growing up we always planted a garden in the spring, tilled food plots, and planted rye. At Samford University I studied Biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, botany, ecology, physiology, and anatomy. I went to the Amazon with a PhD botanist. But, the only nutritional component of my undergraduate education was in a requisite physical education course and it was brief. Think food pyramid. Then I met my amazing wife and she was enrolled in organic farming at the University of Georgia. I helped her study for the class and it was awesome. This was the first spark of my interest in agriculture. We then had children and she was adamant that we feed our kids “organic” food. I was broke but this was important so we made the monthly donation to Whole Foods for the health our children.

I attended medical school and we did have a very good nutrition course. My medical school, The University of Alabama, was at the time one of the few medical schools with a clinical nutrition program. It was led by none other than Dr. Heimburger (great name of a nutrition expert !! who also authored the book Handbook of Clinical Nutrition). The lectures where very good: Here is the transcript from Day 1 of the lecture. The rest of the course was more detailed, had great lecturers, was not purely focused on the “modern” medical establishment, and best of all… the test were open book. My kind of class! Then came the real world of medicine!

My clinical rotations through the various medical specialties had a scattering of nutritional/lifestyle advice. These ranged from (1) Your “fat and need to lose some weight” (2) we need to work on getting you closer to your ideal body weight (3) bariatric surgery or some medication. But I never heard a single physician in any rotation make an actual dietary recommendation. Residency was the same. My attendings were very good clinicians and were quite conservative (ie they didn’t operate on every person they saw in clinic). But the extent of conservative medical management consisted of:

Physical therapy
Regular exercise and conditioning
Weight loss
Anti-inflammatories

But we all eat about 70,000 pounds of food in our lifetime so I did always think it was weird that we never recommended a specific “diet”…

During residency and while I was thinking out the link between food and human health I came across Kinsey’s Hands-on Agronomy. I decided to read this book to start trying to make the connection between Soil —> Food —> Human health (specifically neurocognitive and musculoskeletal/spine health). This was my first exposure to soil agronomy and much to my surprise soil chemistry was very similar to human chemistry. Makes sense. We come from the soil and to the soil we shall return. Calcium, Magnesium, N, P, K. It was all there and the values/inter-relationships were not terribly different. Having trouble with a patient’s or your soil’s calcium levels? Probably a Magnesium problem. Iron, Sulfur, Boron, manganese. The overlap is amazing and that is just for conventional soil agronomy! Not to mention the fascinating correlation between human/soil health and the microbiome.

Modern agriculture is like modern medicine. I love the agricultural term, “moron” approach. The answer is almost always More On. Moron. The same attitude is often held for many medical practitioners. Problems X, Y, Z. Needs medications X,Y,Z even if the the root cause is F{ood}. Polypharmacy (the medical equivalent of the “moron” approach) is the direct result of there not being significant infrastructure in place to address the root cause of many modern ailments. Obesity, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease. The list goes on and on.

How do we fix these problems. In my humble opinion it begins with the Soil.

The Soil Article

While this site is in it’s infancy here are some great resources: