What if soil is the key to a healthy diet and longer life? In his new book, “The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food,” author Steve Solomon explains that re-mineralization, or soil testing for nutrient deficiencies, may enhance our diet, which is light in nutrients.
Pesticides and agro-tech contribute to our current problem and explain why nutrients are disappearing from our soil, but re-cultivating land without replenishing it is also to blame.
As the New York Times’ Joe Robinson explains, “Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk off our of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.”
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