Food

The Dangers Of Eating Plants

My research started when I saw a post of a fellow Homoeopath seeking advice about one of her patients who suffered from too many kidney stones at a very young age. Following some of the links to You Tube I learnt that "5 a day" is apparently a myth. Humans don't seem to need to eat five 80 gram portions of fruit and vegetables a day to stay healthy. The speaker mentioned the Inuit and the Masai as an example of people who don't eat any vegetation but live on meat and blood instead. In fact it almost seems that eating plants is dangerous.

Actually plants don't want to be eaten, who wants to be eaten anyway, and I was quite sure of that, but I didn't know how they actually defend themselves from predators. They have quite clever defence mechanisms in place which effects everybody and everything up to a certain degree. You don't want to know what they can do to caterpillars. I won't even attempt to repeat the names of the chemicals that plants use as defence weapons upon us all, it is not as simple like a shell or a thorn. 

I'm not talking about plants which are obviously poisonous like monkshood or henbane, nobody would eat the them anyway, not nowadays. I'm talking about tomatoes, carrots and celery. I'm talking about potatoes containing solanum, cherries, apples and apricts containing cyanide and spinach containing oxalic acid. My mother would have never reheated spinach because of that. Did you know that carrots and celery contain a substance which makes you sensitive to sunlight? And that chocolate could kill a dog, because their liver is not able to detoxify the theobromine in the cocoa? Luckily human livers can. Most of the harmful substances in plants can be detoxified by the liver unless you are very sensitive or on specific medication. 

It actually left me wondering and more confused about what to eat. Maybe I should go with "Eat what you can kill". I know I can happily murder a carrot and I'm happy to eat that. I can murder a slug but I wouldn't like to eat that. I couldn't murder a chicken, sheep, cow or rabbit, maybe I should go vegetarian, I have to think about it.

And, of course, we Homoeopaths know of the potential of plants because we use them in our medicine. The clever thing about Homoeopathy is, that it only uses tiny amounts because the substance is highly diluted. So there is no danger of celery making you sensitive to sunlight, but I don't actually know if there is a homoeopathic medicine made out of celery. The same is true for St.John's Wort which is used as a herbal tincture but if you use it as the homoeopathic medicine Hypericum there is no danger of becoming sensitive to sunlight. Homoeopathy is such a great way of getting your health back so if you have any health problems give it a go. Give me a call on 07813 195468 if you want to know a bit more about Homoeopathy and how it can help you.

The victims.