A road map to Agriculture, Nutrition and Health

Man is crippled in Evolution. Human Genome Project has revealed that he has only 19 thousand genes. Plants have over 50 thousand genes1. They can synthesize all vitamins and amino acids and the two omega fatty acids that we can’t. Therefore, the dependency. Plants fix carbon dioxide synthesize our food, using solar energy, evolve oxygen. We breath oxygen to live and inevitably produce free radicals, responsible for disease and death. Vegetarian food, depleted of oxygen, rich in antioxidants are healthier2. Man lived as hunter gatherer for nearly 10 lakh years and only recently, 10 thousand years ago shifted to agriculture. His genes have been conditioned for hunter-gatherer’s life style for very long time. and in last 200 years he has further added processed food in his lifestyle3. Today we have very clear knowledge of the limitation of our dynamic body and its finite needs of bulk food, carbohydrate, protein, fat. and essential micronutrients, vitamins, amino acids, omega fatty acids. But the tragedy is that we irrationally grow crops and feed our population with very high carbohydrate rich, protein poor agriculture-produce to feed our masses. The most telling effect on our health has been because of excessive intake of omega-6 fat and the paucity of omega-3 fat in our diet3. Man as hunter gatherer consumed less fat and equal amount of omega-6 and omega-3 fat for very long and today suddenly started consuming more fat that too lots of omega 6 fat and very little omega-3 fat. Omega-6 is inflammatory and omega-3 is anti-inflammatory. This disease prone dominance of inflated inflammation in human body is largely responsible for the recent rise in several noncommunicable disease4 (Figure 1).

Author(s): Mahabaleshwar Hegde

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