Position of the American Dietetic Association: We can conserve natural resources and support sustainability.
New natural anti-oxidant source
The seed extract of the South American Sapindaceae berry guarana (Paullinia cupana) has been found to have high levels of anti-oxidant activity.
Farmers know best?
A comment on a recent post suggested that one should “start with the assumption that farmers know what is in their best interest.” No doubt that is as true of Indian farmers as the rest of us, but unfortunately in many cases there are other pressures out there that mean that you can’t act on your perceived long-term self-interest, or indeed the information on which you can make that determination is not available or turns out to be faulty. As with the sweetleaf item that started this, we don’t know the full story, so we should be careful not to jump to conclusions, but an article in today’s Hindu newspaper describes a decision by farmers that seems to have gone wrong. Agricultural biodiversity, and its associated knowledge, is an important reason – maybe the most important reason – why unfortunate decisions don’t always result in catastrophe.
Training materials for sustainable agriculture
The Centre for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz has some “instructional resources” on sustainable agriculture online. That’s mainly a course outline and references. There is stuff on agricultural biodiversity in the course outline, but somehow you don’t get the idea – or at least I didn’t – that this is something that is central to sustainability. More of an added benefit, or a fortuitous side-effect. See if you get the same impression.
Another silver bullet?
The discovery of an enzyme which sits at a crucial step on the metabolic journey from glucose to that important anti-oxidant, vitamin C, opens the way for the kind of silver bullet thinking we have previously been somewhat critical of on this blog. Or it may not. We’ll see.
One of the researchers says:
We now have two strategies to provide enhanced protection against oxidative damage: Stimulate the endogenous activity of the identified enzyme or engineer transgenic plants which overexpress the gene that encodes the enzyme.
But I wonder whether this discovery will also allow the rapid evaluation of cultivars for vitamin C content?