Hemp for Health by Chris Conrad

Author:Chris Conrad [Conrad, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health/Current Affairs
ISBN: 9781620550274
Publisher: Inner Traditions Bear & Company
Published: 1997-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

OTHER ECO-CONSIDERATIONS

The way that we eat can change the world, and the American diet has changed radically in recent decades. By 1985 Americans ate only half as much grains and potatoes as in 1909. Consumption of beef soared by almost half. Poultry consumption nearly tripled. This had an important effect on seemingly unrelated areas of the economy and environment. Livestock consume grain and other food items, and require additional equipment and health care. The cumulative energy value used to produce one calorie of beef protein is 78 calories of fuel, while one calorie of soybean protein takes only two calories of fuel.29 If Americans reduced their intake of meat by just 10 percent, an estimated 100 million people could be adequately nourished using the land, water, and energy freed from growing livestock feed.30 Nutritious hempseed serves as food, as vegetable oil and, if necessary, as fuel oil. Properly processed, even the hemp stalk offers a plentiful source of dietary fiber.

There’s another good reason to consider changing livestock production patterns, too. In 1960, 13 percent of staphylococci infections were penicillin-resistant; in 1988 it was 91 percent. Why are germs becoming increasingly immune to drugs? Many people think it is simply due to overuse. About 55 percent of antibiotics used in the U.S. are fed routinely to livestock, with or without signs of illness.31 United States meat and pharmaceutical industries support this practice. The European Community bans it because they suspect it acts as a natural selection process, killing off the weaker germs while allowing drug-resistant germs to multiply, flourish, and dominate the gene pool. In other words, survival of the fittest germs, which is bad news for the rest of us. Feeding our livestock hempseed is a way to support their immune systems and bolster the animals’ overall health without using antibiotics until their use is necessary and justifiable. Animals fed hempseed could prove to be healthier and more disease-resistant, but since the mechanism is nutritional rather than antibiotic, bacteria would not become resistant.

Hemp’s role as a restorative resource is evident in its horticultural uses. Growing hemp can extract heavy metal contaminants from the chemically degraded soil in damaged farm lands, so the lands can again be used for growing food crops. Researchers in Poland experimenting with this process are having good results. This does not eliminate the toxins, it merely draws them from the soil and fixes them into the fiber of the hemp plants, which are then used to make non-edible items. This is safer than having them in the food supply, but the toxins still end up at disposal sites when the end product is finally discarded. The researchers are looking for a way to extract the toxins from the fiber to solve this dilemma and dispose of them properly. The net effect could be to create a supply of recycled heavy metals for industrial applications.32

While important industrial crops like the loblolly pine, used for paper, and the soybean, used for food, face a potential 30 to 50

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