Bush Nutrition and Health
The white-coat clergy and their animal sacrifices will never compete with the grace of autonomy and the simple care of biodiversity and evolution.
I don't take vitamin supplements or medication of any sort at any time, but I am very picky, work hard, and sacrifice much for the quality of what I eat.
Plant vitamins are a powerful, if not essential, source of motivating energy, so make sure you replenish often. I am of the position that all common tree and plant species play a role in maintaining optimal human health. Plants like spruce, poplar, and birch, which can be found globally at the right latitudes. These plants have been part of the human evolutionary environment for so long that small amounts must be beneficial if not critical.
Greens are full of many different types of vitamins; they will clean your liver, reduce the craving for other food, and provide a means for your body to better unlock energy from calorie-dense foods.
In my experience, nearly all green plants and berries at ground level are nutritious and provide the much-needed and vital vitamin C, among other vitamins, minerals, and innumerable phytonutrients. Flower blossoms have a variety of bioflavonoids and antioxidants. All parts of the dandelion are edible and nutritious and generally more palatable.
Burdock is a safe, palatable wild plant of note. The stem is edible raw in the midsummer but better diced and boiled in a broth. While raw, it's similar to a strong celery stalk. The leaves can be mashed raw for a huge magnesium and chlorophyll boost, but again, they are better diced and briefly boiled in a stock.
The body needs a constant supply of antioxidants to deal with the stresses of the outdoors.
You should really chew the plant to extract the most from the fibrous walls; this also requires you to consume far less plant for the vitamins.
It is well documented that the natives smashed their dried meat to powder before eating. I'll bring a mortar and pestle or find some stones if I won't be moving from a camp and always try to smash my dried meat before eating. If hunting, I find it wise to keep dried meat in your vehicle if it is near camp.
Acquiring two stones to smash vegetative matter and especially dried meat will aid in assimilating the nutrients of the foodstuff; doing this is critical; it also helps to prevent food from getting pushed between the teeth. In addition, grinding or pulverizing meat is essential, as dried chunks can easily be expelled without digestion, and the punishment may be and has been broken teeth, particularly if your teeth are already ravaged by fillings and cavities.
I believe the hallmark of the Homo sapiens evolution and advancement is credited to the use of stones to process food to extract nutrients, which, without, was more of a physiological challenge to assimilate.
Calories and other necessary nutrients must be had from other sources; plants alone do not provide the required calories for prolonged survival in North America.
Live vitamins, which are heat sensitive and oxidation prone, such as vitamin C, can be heavily drained on a diet of old/poorly stored dried meat and especially cooked food, so searching for these fresh greens and foliage is a critical endeavor.
The raw green tops of the cattail friord, found in watery areas, I have found tasty to ea—likee a cucumber.
The fresh, immature spruce buds found at the tips of the branches at the end of spring can be eaten for vitamin C. During the winter, spruce needles may be harvested by clipping the fresh, same-year ends, cutting away the needles and small buds, chewing, and swallowing. Smashing the tips in a mortar and pestle helps, or you can steep it all mashed in hot water; these provide chlorophyll, some bioflavonoids, and vitamin C—all essential for life. You can also look around the spruce tree, as sometimes after a windy day the end shoots with the plumpest needles may be found fresh on the floor. Know that spruce makes you sweat more and does contain other plant toxins—so using this only is neither tasty nor optimal at very high doses for a prolonged period. Don't bother eating the needles after the fresh tips; these are dark mature needles with little health benefit.
Spruce (and/or poplar bud) tea and is also a source of some vitamin C, antioxidants, and other phytonutrients, but it won't alone adequately supply plant vitamins like C, so you need to eat vegetables and roughage in winter and make the tea with care. To make these local shrub teas, do so by putting snow in the pot first, then briefly pulverizing the vegetative material, and throwing it on top with a focus on using young buds and bright plump ends. It's better to take the time to smash a few buds pretty well than many not at all. Allow the water to get just too hot to touch and take it off to steep. Don't let the water boil. Simmer, sit, and drink. If the spruce branches have discolored to brown, you have allowed it to get too hot.
Any fresh bramble may be used and is nutritious to make tea, but great care must be given to not overheat the steep water. Allow the tea to steep off the heat for a minute or two before drinking.
Though spruce has vitamin C, in my vast experience, you cannot eat enough to replace the vitamin C from colorful berries—high bush cranberries, rose hips, wild blueberries, wild raspberries, and the like, &c.
As a rule, dark berries are good for the brain, and red berries are better for vitamin C.
A sure and early sign of low antioxidants—assuming your other nutrient profile is in order (proteins, fats, minerals)—is low energy, coupled with SORE JOINTS AND LIGAMENTS. The sore joints are a sure sign; this is due to the necessity of vitamin C in the formation of collagen.
Eating the inner bark of trees may be bitter, but it harbors many phytonutrients for the winter months or other months when the fruit is not yet available.
Pine is another good source of antioxidants during the winter months when there are no other plants available, particularly vitamin C. I have found, however, that I develop cracks in the sides of my mouth if I eat the needles for too long.
Of the pine or spruce, the latter seems to be the best.
Familiarize yourself with the few plants that are harmful, like the water hemlock. Avoid white berries.
Many mushrooms are ok to eat well cooked. I am not a mushroom expert! But if it's big, brown, and has succumbed to some form of predation (like bugs or nibbles), likely it is edible. Polypores, that is, mushrooms that don't have gills but pores under the cap, are nearly always edible. Familiarize yourself with local poisonous mushrooms.
Yet another source of antioxidants, B vitamins, and other medicinal properties are the woody, tough shelf mushrooms you can find on most trees, dead and alive. These mushrooms are not the seasonal ones that bloom and die in a few days but live for years, growing larger and larger by the year. You will find them hard to chew, but if you need the antioxidants, they may be the only thing available (along with spruce needles—that's everywhere, all year). Consuming these makes me think clearer; they can also be a source of non-bitter fiber in the winter. Chew them and swallow or steep some cuts in a tea; on that note, teas have never made much sense to me; heat always destroys vitamins, and eating some of whatever it is raw is more potent than far more of the substance heated.
I can say from experience that shelf mushrooms are fantastic—the literature is certainly out there with regard to their medicinal properties. There is something in these mushrooms that I think is integral to optimal human existence. Don't gorge on them, though.
If you eat much meat in the bush, bring dried bones and eat them with the meat of small game for the proper mineral supplementation. Chew the soft ones with a meal. I'm not sure if it's the calcium, another mineral, or their combined effect, but the calcium tends to slow my thinking down, calm me, give me a stronger feeling of control, and stay hunger. I feel I learn or have more ideas somehow; this may make sense, as calcium helps growth of the body, and it may somehow help growth of the mind. (Calcium and other minerals need fat-soluble nutrients to be used optimally in the body—otherwise they tend to deposit in non-optimal locations, like the arteries).
Dried meat has few structural minerals—because it lacks bone—which are also things most diets, even the healthiest ones, today, I feel, may lack; these minerals can be drained when stressful work is done afield.
It is documented that tribes would remove and grind the bones of rabbits and mix them with the meat. Somehow this made them feel full from eating the lean rabbit meat and thus, healed of "rabbit starvation"; I have found this to be the case in some measure.
The white ash in a clean fire is also a good source of minerals, as it holds all the minerals of the tree or plant that was burnt. Plants are a source of minerals on their own; however, because the minerals are bound to indigestible fiber and other plant anti-nutrients, much of their mineral content can be expelled before it has the chance to be absorbed. The ash of the plant (or animal bone) is a guaranteed method of accessing all the minerals (but none of the healthy plant phytonutrients). Don't eat too much wood ash.
On that note, charcoal helps remove plant toxins from the stomach along with food poisoning toxins if consumed soon enough; it also helps to remove environmental toxins in the stomach, and I think it may aid in the removal of parasitic infection.
I eat dried meat when afield, but because the tendon does not get digested when left uncooked, I save the leftover sinew and stew it for the collagen (glue for the minerals that make bone, cartilage, sinew, skin, ligaments, lungs, eyeballs, and other non-red proteins), which repairs many bodily systems that get taxed. Collagen comprises 35% of our total body protein—all these get a boost in repair when the broth is consumed.
Like dried beans, meat, or any other dried food, this sinew will not fully cook unless it is fully reconstituted. Macerate it in your mouth, or find a safe way of soaking it without getting food poisoning from leaving it for days in water.
Dried meat must be carefully stored while afield (and not). Vacuum seal is best, but a closed jar or airtight container is good. Store in a cool, dry place. You don't want sun or rain reaching your meat after it is dry. While not a field, a fridge is the best spot.
During the winter months, Labrador tea can be had for chlorophyll and antioxidants. Just pick raw and chew. Spruce and pine stands usually harbor their growth in abundance. Rose hips are also a seedy but excellent source of vitamin C in winter.
“Old hags hair” can be found dangling from pine and spruce. While this isn’t particularly tasty, apparently it’s nutritious.
Other greens may be had by moving snow away to reveal the forest floor.
Sugar is a plant poison. A plant produces a fruit with seed(s), and it would be evolutionarily disadvantageous for it to allow an animal to indulge in too many of its fruit all at once. In the short term, too much sugar, from fruit (even wild) or any other source, causes irritability, irrational anger, anxiety, and deficiency in all other vital nutrients like vitamins, minerals (particularly calcium), proteins, and anything else non-sugar. In the long run, chronically high sugar levels damage your organs, like your kidneys, causing diabetes and your skeletal system. When in season, however, indulge in wild fruit, which is saturated with antioxidants and other phytonutrients. The key, however, is to eat greens with the sugar. Something in the greens slows the digestion of the sugars and helps the body to use the sugars of fruit. You end up craving the fruit less; I speculate it is the mineral magnesium, abundant in chlorophyll, that is responsible for this.
When selecting plant nutrients, get a variety: lower-order plants (flowers, small herbs, berries (vitamin C), and dandelions), fungus (mushrooms and shelf mushrooms), lichens (hag's hair), bark teas, and higher-order plants (spruce tips and poplar buds) for their far more potent antioxidants than the previously mentioned lower-order plants.
Nourishing teas with antioxidants can be made from most plants in the wild—spruce, pine, rose, &c. Add some to a boiling pot to easily glean some precious antioxidants.
Clean water will clean the body and stave off hunger. Oftentimes it's not that you need more food; you simply need to be hydrated. Drink plenty of water and then some. It helps to heat the water first, as cold water will chill the body and cause discouragement.
Avoid the smoke from your fire to maintain your lung health. I have also mentioned in another article nose breathing, in and out, at all times, coupled with deep, diaphragm, gut-relaxed breathing, facilitated by keeping your tongue plastered to your upper palate.
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