In the Nov./Dec. 2008 Edition of Archeology Today Magazine (http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html),
there is an article on the health and diet of Roman Gladiators. From burial sites and forensics, they determined that the gladiators were fed a vegetarian diet. This was not to get them "healthy", but rather to get them fat! Why? Because they could be cut with swords or tridents and bleed and still keep on fighting. The blood made a better show, more people attended; and therefore, the events became more profitable.
The gladiators were called "hordearii" which literally means "barley men" because they were fed lots of barley. Just like now, a high grain (high carbohydrate) diet causes not only weight gain, but also osteoporosis. Therefore, the gladiators were fed a nutritional supplement of mineral-rich drinks. These contained bone ash or charred wood. Eating these made the calcium levels of the gladiators "exorbitant" compared to the general population.
If you burn bone or cook it in water overnight to make bone broth, the food you end up with is the best way to prevent osteoporosis (along with avoiding a high grain diet). Eating bone ash or broth gives you all the building blocks for you to make new bone, not just calcium. We carry these kinds of bone supplements. they are called Biost, Bio-dent, Calcifood, or Ostrophin. Many of our patients upgrade from a plain calcium supplement to a complete bone supplement. Any other osteoporosis treatment, especially the drugs, is a marketing scam. There is only one way to build bone and that is to eat it or the charred wood described next.
Wood ash, also known as potash, is the ash of burned wood. Potash is the ash that comes from under the pot in the campfire. It is also known as "white ash". The ash on the perimeter of the campfire is black or gray and did not get to the searing hot temperatures that occurred directly underneath the pot, hence the name "potash". This is the tree wood with all of the carbon burned off. Minerals are left. This was eaten as a nutritional supplement even by Neanderthals 10,000 years ago! Some people say we can get all of our nutrition from food, but history doesn't support that. It was sprinkled onto food by Native North and Central Americans and added to salt in a 90% ash to 10% salt mixture in Japan. If it wasn't eaten, it was spread onto the fields as fertilizer. Farmers paid good money for it and there was a whole industry around it.
Colonial farmers in the united States burned trees for farmland, gathered the ash and sold it as food or fertilizer. Their biggest market was England because at the time, that island had cut down all their trees, leaving them with only coal for heating, but no wood ash. (By the way, the buning of coal led to the Industrial Revolution.) American Colonial farmers were wealthiest when they sold their wood ash and poorest when they only grew crops. Each farmer tended to keep one third of his land as woods. He would burn trees and sell the ash for money when he needed some extra cash. Growing up in the heavily farmed area of Northwest Ohio, I always wondered why so many farms had a patch of woods still standing. This explains it.
To summarize: The best nutritional research is observation of what food does to large groups of people like the gladiators of Rome or the mummies of Egypt. This is better than looking at what specific nutrients or chemicals do in a test tube when mixed together or whatever labs do to prove the validity of the latest nutritional fad. Look for these large observational studies for guidance in your food choices. Beware of studies that only tell you about nutrient content, antioxidant levels or biochemical identities. Right now, Harvard School of Public Health is doing several studies that include tens of thousands of people for decades. The Framingham Study followed a whole town - Framingham Massachusetts for many years. The lessons learned here are valuable to us. Most studies reported on the news do not pass this litmus test.
The greatest health-related observational study was done by Dr. Weston A. Price. He travelled the world in the 1930's and studied 134 indigenous tribes. He compared their diet and health with members of the same tribe who started eating "foods of modern commerce." This field study is known as "evolutionary medicine." The foods that we ate 20,000 years ago are the same foods that will keep us healthy now. Our DNA is set up for it because it evolved that way. It has not and will not evolve to assimilate pop or french fries.
www.wapf.org
Sincerely,
Darren Schmidt, D.C.
