eliminate 99% of all medication with permaculture polyculture?

I would love to know what conclusions have been made since then.
I grow in rows, with one foot in permiclture and one foot in traditional homestead gardening

Hi Paul and everyone,   I have a question and I'm not sure this is the right thread to ask it on, if not please redirect me to the correct one. I recently purchased the book The lost herbs. It does a great job of describing the herbs, what they look like and how to use them. However, I obviously can't grow every one of them, so what is best to grow to cover my basic medical needs? I have plenty of space but I don't have the ability to tend,harvest, and process 1000 different plants. Thank you for all your help and for everything you do

Growing food in a food forest, for starters, can include growing carrots in a garden bed together.  If carrots growing side by side is a monoculture, we should re-evaluate all sorts of ecosystems where colonies of plants occur.  If growing carrots in a garden bed organically within an ecosystem-designed food forest such as I do using the Permabed System can provide higher total yield from any given acre in both edible goods and other critical ecosystem services to our society and the immediate farm and community- all the better.  

Does the organic carrot have more nutrition as single carrot surrounded only be dissimilar species in a very wild looking food system then a row of carrots in a well-designed food ecosystem with organized diversified plant management?  No i dont believe that carrot is more nutritious, but both of those carrots are likely more nutritious than carrot grown in many multi-acres monocultures because those have a big void of diversity.  They lack perennials, they can lack soil life diversity, etc.

I will add also, that nutritious food is of little use if the system of the food forest is so disorganized no one can efficiently harvest and distribute the food economically- which is why a model of ecosystem design is so important.


Hope that helps
Zach
The Edible Ecosystem Solution

For more go to
www.ecosystemsolutioninstitute.com

Hey I know these posts were from a long time ago, but, There is some really good evidence to show that "reductionist" thinking about nutrition is not going to work! there is a book called "Whole" by Dr T Colin Campbell that critiques the scientific community for thinking that "a" causes 'b', and that we can find it, bottle it, and be everybody will be cured. Nope. We need to eat the food as nature intended. Eat more plants!

I agree, was just wondering which plants.   I know we  need a variety. But what I was looking for was which herbs were best to grow as a kind of first aid garden. Thanks

I've found the videos and articles for NutritionFacts.org (Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/NutritionfactsOrgMD/videos ) really informative. It's a non-profit, research driven site that focuses on the latest, sound research on nutrition and improving health. There are multiple studies showing people with chronic illness like MS and diabetes, who after years of suffering, were switched to a plant based diet and symptoms were mostly or entirely eliminated, and many other diseases which were improved to a greater extent with diet than with drugs. Dr. Gregor also has a video going through the top 15 causes of mortality in the USA and many are diet based, llifestyle (as in we choose to be sick) diseases. Even genetic links are far weaker than just the diet of the pregnant mom when it comes to infant and child health outcomes. Different countries/cultures have massively different rates of disease and there are causal links to diet. The focus is specifically on what the research says, and also teasing out who funds research when there's obvious conflicts of interest.

My personal stance (based on what I've read to date) is that for sure, many medications given today (sometimes over-prescribed) could instead be dealt with via diet, and eliminate all the side effects those drugs have. Here's a longer video where Dr. Gregor specifically addresses "food as medicine":

And here's his talk about about his book 'How Not to Die', which goes over the major causes of death and how diet can address many of them:

This discussion started many years ago, and the subject is still very relevant these days.

Does anyone know of any studies that may have been conducted in this area of improving health with a polyculture diet?

This paper: https://www.ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/article/download/721/411 only analyzes macronutrients which isn't really the key, I think, but it's the kind of research that's easier to conduct:

The Three Sisters yields more energy (12.25 x 106 kcal/ha) and more protein (349 kg/ha) than any of the crop
monocultures or mixtures of monocultures planted to the same area. The Three Sisters supplies 13.42 people/ha/yr. with
energy and 15.86 people/ha/yr. with protein.

This study is rolling up several techniques, including polyculture, into "organic farming" and finds that sometimes the vitamins and minerals are higher: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9857782/

I'm not seeing much better -- I hope someone with more access comes along with cooler findings!

Thank you, Christopher, those look good!


Anyone else know of any studies?