Sources of Soil Contamination
What you grow your veggies in is just as important as the soil you use. Summer garden conditions—like heat, UV rays, and slightly acidic soil—can actually cause certain planters to leach unwanted compounds right into your food’s root zone!
Here’s a quick guide to keeping your container garden safe and healthy. Containers to Skip for Food Crops:
• Old Tires: They might seem like a clever upcycling hack, but rubber can leach heavy metals like zinc and cadmium, along with petroleum-based compounds, especially when baking in the summer sun.
• Pre-2004 Treated Lumber: Older treated wood was often preserved with CCA (chromated copper arsenate). While modern post-2004 treated lumber uses safer chemistry, untreated naturally rot-resistant wood remains the ultimate worry-free choice.
• Mystery Glazed Pottery: Older pieces or uncertified imported ceramics can sometimes hide lead in their beautiful glazes. Keep these for your ornamental houseplants and flowers!
• Galvanized Steel: These rustic buckets look great, but they can leach excess zinc into highly acidic soils. While plants need a little zinc, too much can stunt your veggies.
• Styrofoam & PVC: Constant sunlight and high temperatures cause these materials to degrade and become brittle over time, shedding microplastics and other chemical compounds into your soil.
Safe Bets for a Healthy Harvest:
• Food-Grade Plastics: Flip that container over and look for recycling codes #2 (HDPE) or #5 (PP). These stable plastics are exactly what’s used for food storage and are completely safe for growing edibles!
• Untreated Cedar: The gold standard for wooden raised beds. It’s naturally rot-resistant, beautifully rustic, and 100% chemical-free.
• Unglazed Terracotta: Classic for a reason! It’s simply baked earth—free of additives, highly breathable, and perfectly safe for your food crops.
• Fabric Grow Bags: A veggie gardener’s best friend! They’re food-safe, drain beautifully, and naturally “air-prune” your plants’ roots to keep them from circling. They are hands-down one of the best choices for growing robust tomatoes and peppers!
What are your favorite containers for growing veggies? Let us know below!
They Call It “Alternative.” It Was Always the Original.
From the 1899 Merck Manual to a 1932 pharmacist’s map, the historical record is unambiguous: natural medicine was displaced not because it failed, but because it couldn’t be owned.
Let’s begin with a question that should unsettle anyone who has ever been told that natural medicine is “alternative”: alternative to what, exactly?
Not to the medicine of 1899. Not to the medicine of 1932. Not, in fact, to any era of medicine prior to the mid-twentieth century, when a legal and commercial infrastructure was deliberately built to ensure that the only substances recognized as “drugs” would be those that could be patented, manufactured at scale, and sold for profit.
Before that infrastructure existed, the original medicine was plant medicine. And the documentation proving it is hiding in plain sight.
THE 1899 MERCK MANUAL: WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
The Merck Manual is the oldest continuously published English-language medical textbook and, by most measures, the best-selling medical textbook in the world. Its first edition, published in New York in 1899 by George Merck — founder of what would become a $43 billion pharmaceutical empire — was not a catalog of synthetic drugs. It was a compendium of natural ones.
The manual drew from the Materia Medica tradition: the full body of accumulated knowledge about the therapeutic properties of substances used for healing. In 1899, that tradition was still largely intact. The remedies it recommended included arnica, papain, cod liver oil, valerian, camphor, myrrh, and beef tea. It recommended dried ovaries of cow for hormonal conditions. It recommended papaya enzyme for digestion. And it recommended Cannabis Indica, extensively, for a striking range of conditions.
Keep reading: https://sayerji.substack.com/p/they-called-it-alternative-it-was?
Heart Health Tips
Don’t You DARE Try To Cure The Sick With Food!
Max’s daughter, Charlotte Gerson, carries on his tradition of healing with vegetable juices. Cheryl Reid has a book, ‘The Healing Power of Food’ that details how she used the Gerson Therapy to cure her husband of stage IV lymphoma.
Meat Erased Alzheimer’s Gene Risk
Robert Lufkin MD writes:
As a medical school professor, I teach about APOE4 — the gene that makes you 2.5x more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. We’ve told patients there’s nothing they can do about it.
A new JAMA Network Open study of 2,157 adults just proved us wrong.
Higher meat consumption completely abolished the APOE4 dementia risk.
The data:
-> APOE4 carriers with highest meat intake: 55% lower dementia risk
-> Their typical 2.5x excess Alzheimer’s risk? Gone entirely
-> Cognitive decline reversed: +0.32 standard deviations over 10 years
-> Unprocessed meat was protective; processed meat was harmful regardless of genotype
Researchers propose APOE4 is an evolutionary adaptation to meat-rich diets. The gene isn’t a defect — we just stopped feeding it correctly.
This is personalized metabolic medicine. Your genes load the gun, but your diet pulls the trigger — or puts the safety back on.
Pollution and Alzheimer’s – The Link
- A nationwide study of 27.8 million older Americans found long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution (PM2.5) is linked to a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, showing that everyday air quality directly influences brain aging
- Each increase in long-term pollution exposure corresponded with about an 8.5% higher risk, highlighting how cumulative daily exposure shapes future cognitive health
- Researchers found most of the Alzheimer’s risk from pollution occurs through direct effects on the brain — including inflammation, oxidative stress, and blood vessel damage — rather than being explained primarily by other diseases
- People with a history of stroke showed greater vulnerability to pollution-related Alzheimer’s risk, indicating underlying vascular injury amplifies the neurological impact of environmental exposure
- Long-term exposure patterns — not short pollution spikes — drove the strongest associations, meaning consistent reductions in daily pollution exposure represent a practical strategy to protect brain health over time
Never Add Up What You Spend On Pets or Plants Humour and truth in one post!
Humour and truth in one post!
How To Detox Microplastics
Detoxing Foods: Citrus Pectin, Seaweeds (Wakame), Chlorella, Bone Broth or Red Cabbage Juice (L-Glutamine), Tart Cherries (Polyphenols), Green PlaintainsInulin, Raw Garlic.
Cross check that list against the ingredients in my Greens Plus: https://www.healthelicious.com.au/Nutri-Blast-Greens-Plus.html.
Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOSNGqjvxo
Ari Whitten Interviews Dr Ritamarie Loscalzo
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, has 30+ years of clinical experience and sees imbalanced blood sugar and disordered insulin regulation as the underlying cause of so many people’s problems. Her bottom line is that to get fuel into your mitochondria, good insulin and blood sugar control is a non-negotiable.
Stress, lack of good sleep, inadequate movement, toxin exposure, poor diet lead to insulin resistance.