"The Missing Link To Optimum Health” Includes Herbs

 Jo Robinson’s fascinating new book, Eating on the Wild Side, does indeed provide “The Missing Link to Optimum Health” by finally giving us the information we need for “a radical new way to select and prepare foods to reclaim the nutrients and flavor we’ve lost”. She does this by using scientific and historical analysis to explain what sorts of phytonutrients (phyto means plants) have been lost from our ancestors’ ancient wild foraging days and compares them to what is available in the produce section of grocery stores of today.  Get ready to cringe, but take heart, she also has plenty of suggestions that food shoppers, gardeners and even botanists will like, and she even includes recipes.

This book sounds the wake up alarm and school bell, finally giving consumers necessary education they can take to their grocers, gardens and seed catalogues to begin making better choices in the food they choose with the goal in mind of bringing not just better nutrition, but more complex phytochemicals into their diets. These are important compounds like antioxidants, flavonoids, catechins, carotenoids, polyphenols (the list is estimated to be more than 4,000) that help to neutralize free radicals, protect cells, reduce cholesterol, inhibit tumor growth, etc. and have been bred out of our fruits and veggies for the sake of taste, appearance, shelf life and marketability.

Robinson carefully explains that once people started cultivating their own food, they began breeding for what tasted best and produced the most and tried to get the unpleasant flavors of sour, bitter, and astringent out of everything we ate. Those very same flavor constituents that create those “nasty” flavors have the most cancer fighting power and contribute to the plant’s ability to resist pests and disease, and when we consume them naturally, the plant passes that benefit on to us humans. We can pile our plates high with a rainbow of produce from the grocery store, but Robinson’s message is that we are not getting the very important health protective benefits from food because it has been so severely, nutritionally degraded. As a matter of fact, when food gets genetically altered for the sake of salability, nutritional analysis in not even considered as part of the evaluation.

There is one glaring omission in this book, HERBS! There is not even a listing for them in the index. Herbs should never be an afterthought in the diet. True, she writes a great chapter on onion and garlic chives, both native to the Old and New World. Many people are familiar seeing them pop up in abundance in meadows of different bioregions in the early spring. She explains their very significant antioxidant and medicinal value and even cites a study that shows they act as aphrodisiac in rats. Other than this, however, she does not take on the nutritional and antioxidant value of herbs more broadly. I believe they deserve much more praise and attention for many reasons.

Allow me to offer an example of just how powerful they are. Many herbs are antimicrobial and antifungal and if you want to pest proof your garden from either insects or the four legged kind, plant herbs. Just the essential oils in herbs discourage them from munching their leaves and roots. These critters do not eat lavender, sage, oregano, chives, mint, rosemary, salad burnet, calendula, St. John’s Wort, Echinacea, the list goes on and on. You can even pest proof your drawers with lavender and your cupboards with bay leaves. According to the author, when ingested, the defense system of plants often translates similarly in our bodies to ward off foreign attack from outside and within that can cause illness.

As for the nutritional value of herbs, just one cup of fresh parsley is superior and much less expensive than a head of any kind of lettuce. (nutritiondata.self.com) The really good news is that herbs have not been genetically altered to the extent that our food has.

I can only hope Jo Robinson with her wealth of scientific research and knowledge has a sequel to this book called HERBS: Additional Essentials for Optimal Health.