Soil and Gut Connections

This is a hypothesis as to how the mechanisms in the soil and gut are similar and what I can learn from each.

As a gardener for over 30 years, I have seen the shift from gardeners taming their dirt and garden with the use of tillers, fertilizers, mono-culture, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. The philosophy used to be, “I have to manage the dirt to get a good crop. ”

There is a shift today to a more natural way of gardening. If you go into a forest or natural area, no people are needed to manage the land. Mother Nature is in charge and seems to do a fine job without any need for human intervention. She creates her own nutrients from the soil, fungi, bacteria and other living creatures. One tsp of soil contains 100 million to 1 billion bacteria. The soil contains an army ready and willing to work for you and bring the plants the nutrients it needs.

As a result, there are a number of proponents of No Till, Cover Crops, Plant Diversity and No artificial fertilizers. Gabe Brown, Ray Archuleta, Charles Dowding, Scott Woodbury and Dave Brandt are all experts in this area with lots of YouTube videos.

The gut of every human seems similar to this soil model. It contains millions of bacteria and the particular type of microbiome is complex and somewhat different from person to person.

Just as you could feed your soil with fertilizers, you could also feed your gut with tilled up refined foods and then add in vitamins to try and stay healthy.

Another option is to only feed your gut with a whole food plant based diet and let your microbiome extract the needed nutrients for your body. That’s what I’m going to try and do. I’m hoping that my body will tell me what I need to eat and I can get all the nutrients I need by eating a diverse WFPB diet.

While I have taken many vitamin and supplement pills in the past, I am cutting back to just two – B12 and Vitamin D3.

Time will tell.

Advertisement