Category: Health/Wellness

From New Dawn 101 (Mar-Apr 2007)

If you eat too much cholesterol, or saturated fat, your blood cholesterol will rise to dangerous levels. Excess cholesterol will then seep through your artery walls causing thickenings (plaques), which will eventually block blood flow in vital arteries, resulting in heart attacks and strokes….

Scientific hypotheses don’t get much simpler than this: the cholesterol, or diet-heart, hypothesis, has broken free from the ivory towers of academia to impact with massive force on society.

It has driven a widespread change in the type of food we are told to eat, and consequently the food that lines the supermarket shelves. Many people view bacon and eggs as a dangerous killer, butter is shunned, and a multi-billion dollar industry has sprung up providing ‘healthy’ low-fat alternatives.

At the same time, millions of people are prescribed statins to lower cholesterol levels, and each new set of guidelines suggests that ever-more lowering of cholesterol is needed. When it comes to explaining what causes heart disease, the cholesterol hypothesis reigns supreme.

But as the US editor and critic H.L. Mencken put it, “For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong.” This is how we might view the diet-heart hypothesis: just because it is dominant does not mean it is right, and just because it looks simple does not mean that it actually is.

The Development of the Cholesterol Hypothesis

Landmark developments:

1850s

Rudolf Virchow notes the presence of cholesterol in atherosclerotic plaques, and suggests that excess cholesterol in the bloodstream may be the cause.

Early 1900s

Ashoff feeds rabbits on fat and cholesterol, and notes the development of atheroma.

1912

First heart attack described by Herrick.

1940s

Epidemic of heart disease hits the USA, and interest in the area explodes. Many researchers blame the high fat/cholesterol diet.

1948

The Framingham study on heart disease begins. It is still running today.

1954

Ancel Key’s seminal Seven Countries Study is published, demonstrating clear links between saturated fat intake and heart disease.

1961

Framingham confirms the link between raised cholesterol levels and heart disease.

1960s

The first cholesterol-lowering drugs are developed.

1970s

Brown and Goldstein find the gene leading to extremely high cholesterol levels (Familial Hypercholesterolaemia) and premature heart disease.

1980s

Statins are launched.

1985

The Nobel Prize is awarded to Brown and Goldstein.

1990s

Statins trials demonstrate that cholesterol lowering protects against heart disease.

Presented in this way, it’s not difficult to see how the cholesterol hypothesis became the dominant hypothesis, effortlessly swatting alternative ideas. Indeed, to question this theory is to risk being placed on the same shelf as flat-earthers and creationists.

However, all is not what it seems. The cholesterol hypothesis can be likened to a cathedral built on a bog. Rather than admit they made a horrible mistake and let it sink, the builders decided to try and keep the cathedral afloat at all costs. Each time a crack appeared, a new buttress was built. Then further buttresses were built to support the original buttresses.

Although direct contradictions to the cholesterol hypothesis repeatedly appear, nobody dares to say ‘okay, this isn’t working, time to build again from scratch’. That decision has become just too painful, especially now that massive industries, Nobel prizes, and glittering scientific careers, have grown on the back of the cholesterol hypothesis. The statin market alone is worth more than US$14 billion each year.

In reality, cracks in the hypothesis appeared right from the very start. The first of these was the stark observation by Prof. Ancel Keys that cholesterol in the diet has no effect on cholesterol levels in the bloodstream: “There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.”¹

A bit of a blow to a cholesterol hypothesis, you might think, to find that dietary cholesterol has no effect on blood cholesterol levels. However, as everyone was by then fully convinced that something rich and ‘fatty’ in the diet was the primary cause of heart disease, nobody was willing to let go.

So the hypothesis quietly altered, from cholesterol in the diet to saturated fat in the diet – or a bit of both. As if cholesterol and saturated fat are similar things. In reality, this could hardly be further from the truth. Saturated fat and cholesterol have completely different functions in the body, and they have very different chemical structures.

As chemist Joseph Black warned over 200 years ago: “A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination, but does not advance our knowledge.”²

Unfortunately, this adaptation did not work. It is true that Ancel Keys appeared to have proven the link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease, but when it came to the major interventional trials, confirmation proved elusive.

The MR-FIT trial in the USA was the most determined effort to prove the case. This was a massive study in which over 350,000 men at high risk of heart disease were recruited. In one set of participants, cholesterol consumption was cut by 42 percent, saturated fat consumption by 28 percent and total calories by 21 percent. This should have made a noticeable dent in heart disease rates.

But nothing happened. The originators of the MR-FIT trials refer to the results as “disappointing,” and say in their conclusions: “The overall results do not show a beneficial effect on Coronary Heart Disease or total mortality from this multifactor intervention.”

In fact, no clinical trial on reducing saturated fat intake has ever shown a reduction in heart disease. Some have shown the exact opposite:

“As multiple interventions against risk factors for coronary heart disease in middle aged men at only moderate risk seem to have failed to reduce both morbidity and mortality such interventions become increasingly difficult to justify. This runs counter to the recommendations of many national and international advisory bodies which must now take the recent findings from Finland into consideration. Not to do so may be ethically unacceptable.”³

This quote followed a disturbing trial involving Finnish businessmen. In a 10-year follow-up to the original five-year trial, it was found that those men who continued to follow a low saturated fat diet were twice as likely to die of heart disease as those who didn’t.

It is not as if this was one negative to set against a whole series of positive trials. In 1998, the Danish doctor Uffe Ravnskov looked at a broader selection of trials: “The crucial test is the controlled, randomised trial. Eight such trials using diet as the only treatment has been performed but neither the number of fatal or non-fatal heart attacks was reduced.” As Ravnskov makes clear, no trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat. At this point most people might think it was time to pull the plug.

Far from it. In 1988, the surgeon general’s office in the USA decided to silence the nay sayers by putting together the definitive report proving a causal link. Eleven years later the project was abandoned. In a circulated letter, it was stated that the office “did not anticipate fully the magnitude of the additional external expertise and staff resources that would be needed.”

Bill Harlan, a member of the oversight committee and associate director of the Office of Disease Prevention at the US National Institute of Health, says: “The report was initiated with a preconceived opinion of the conclusions, but the science behind those opinions was not holding up. Clearly the thoughts of yesterday were not going to serve us very well.”

The sound of a sinking cathedral fills the air with a great sucking slurpy noise. But still nobody let go. Instead, more buttresses were desperately thrown at a rapidly disappearing pile of rocks.

Variations on a theme emerged. It is not saturated fat per se that causes heart disease. It’s the ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated fat that is critical. Or is it the consumption of monounsaturated fats, or a lack of omega-3 fatty acids, or an excess of omega-6? Take your pick. These, and a host of other add-on hypotheses, have their proponents.

As of today nobody can – or will – tell you which type of fat, in what proportions, added to what type of anti-oxidant, vegetable, monounsaturated fat or omega-3 is the true culprit. Hugely complicated explanations are formulated, but they all fall apart under scrutiny.

This may all seem incredible, such has been the level of anti-fat propaganda, but it is true. With the exception of the Ancel Keys’ flawed Seven Countries Study (he pre-selected the seven countries for his study in order to prove his hypothesis), there is not one scrap of direct evidence.

But, of course, there are two parts to the cholesterol hypothesis. The diet part, and the raised cholesterol level part. Leaving diet behind, surely it has been proven beyond doubt that a raised cholesterol level is the most important cause of heart disease?

Cholesterol Levels and Overall Mortality

Before looking at the connection between blood cholesterol levels and heart disease, it is worth highlighting a critically important – remarkably unheralded – fact: After the age of 50, the lower your cholesterol level is, the lower your life expectancy.

Perhaps even more important than this is the fact that a falling cholesterol level sharply increases the risk of dying of anything, including heart disease.

The dangers of a low cholesterol level were highlighted by a major long-term study of men living in Honolulu: “Our data accord with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol, and show that long-term persistence of low cholesterol concentration actually increases the risk of death.”

Somewhat ironically, the danger of a falling cholesterol level was first discovered in the Framingham study: “There is a direct association between falling cholesterol levels over the first 14 years [of the study] and mortality over the following 18 years.”

It seems almost unbelievable that warnings about the dangers of a high cholesterol level rain down every day, when the reality is that a low cholesterol level is much more dangerous than a high level. Given this, why would anyone want to lower the cholesterol level? On the face of it, it would make more sense to take cholesterol-raising drugs. Especially after the age of 50.

Cholesterol Levels and Heart Disease

The reason why everyone is so keen to lower cholesterol levels is that supporters of the hypothesis have decreed the following:

– A high level of cholesterol causes premature heart disease.

– A low level of cholesterol is caused by an underlying disease. It is the underlying disease that kills you, not the low cholesterol.

Ergo, if you lower the blood cholesterol level, you will reduce the risk of heart disease, and you will not increase the risk of dying of any other disease. This could be true, but it is worth reviewing some of the evidence that linked raised cholesterol levels to heart disease in the first place. Let’s begin with women.

Perhaps the largest single analysis of cholesterol levels, and death from cardiovascular disease (and other diseases), was published in 1992. This review included over 100,000 women, aggregated from a number of different studies and countries.

To quote from the study: “The pooled estimated risk for total cardiovascular death in women showed no trend across TC (total cholesterol) levels.” In short, for more than 50 percent of the world’s population – women – raised cholesterol is not a risk factor for heart disease.

Moving to men, it is true that under the age of 50 there does seem to be an association between raised cholesterol levels and heart disease. But after the age of 50, when more than 90 percent of heart attacks happen, the association disappears.

In addition, those populations in the world with the highest rates of heart disease in younger men, including emigrant Asian Indians, Eastern Europeans, Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals, tend to have significantly lower cholesterol levels than the surrounding populations/countries.

Perhaps the single most directly contradictory fact is that, in young Japanese men, the average cholesterol level has risen over the past 20 years, yet the rate of heart disease has fallen. But as with many facts in this area, if they don’t fit the cholesterol hypothesis, they are dismissed.

Lowering Cholesterol Levels with Drugs

Surely, despite everything written up to this point, all previous arguments are refuted by the knowledge that lowering cholesterol levels with statins protects against heart disease? As all good scientists know, ‘reversibility of effect’ provides the most powerful supportive evidence for a hypothesis.

However, the flipside to this argument is as follows. How can lowering cholesterol levels prevent heart disease in people who do not have a high level? The most often quoted clinical trial in the past few years is the UK-based Heart Protection Study (HPS): a veritable triumph for statins, demonstrating protection in almost every group studied.

What is most intriguing, however, is that protection was apparent if the starting cholesterol level was high, average or low. How can this be explained?

At this point we enter Alice in Wonderland territory. A rational person would accept that a normal cholesterol level cannot be a risk factor for heart disease (or anything else for that matter). Therefore, people with normal cholesterol levels can gain no benefit from having their levels lowered. Therefore, if statins do protect those with normal, or low, cholesterol levels – which they clearly do – they must be doing this through some other mechanism of action, unrelated to cholesterol lowering.

In fact, there is a growing body of evidence to support the idea that statins have a whole series of different protective actions. However, accepting that statins work ‘in another way’ would demolish the final buttress keeping the cholesterol hypothesis afloat. And so the latest argument is that nobody in modern society has a normal cholesterol level.

An article in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology best sums up this line of thinking. Under the heading ‘Why average is not normal’, O’Keefe, the lead author, makes the claim that: “Atherosclerosis is endemic in our population, in part because the average LDL (‘bad’ cholesterol) level is approximately twice the normal physiologic level.” In short, according to O’Keefe, our cholesterol level should be about 2.5mmol/l, not 5.2mmol/l.

This argument, if true, does neatly demolish the question, ‘How can people with normal, or low, cholesterol levels be protected against heart disease?’ O’Keefe and others would argue that we all have a high cholesterol level. Everyone is ill, and all shall have statins.

One regularly quoted fact, which superficially seems supportive of O’Keefe’s hypothesis, is that peasant farmers in China have very low cholesterol levels and a very low rate of heart disease (although their average cholesterol levels are actually about four, not two-and-a-half).

But when you study the figures with more care, they reveal something else. As usual, those with low cholesterol levels have by far the highest mortality rates. Liver failure and liver cancer are common causes of death. However, there is a simple explanation for this association. Many Chinese peasant farmers have chronic hepatitis, which creates low cholesterol levels, and also leads to liver failure and liver cancer. This is why people with low cholesterol levels die young.

Does this mean that a low cholesterol level protects against heart disease? No: what the Chinese data tell us is that those with higher cholesterol levels are not chronic hepatitis carriers, so they live longer and have more chance of developing heart disease in old age. On the other hand, those with low cholesterol levels cannot die of heart disease, because they are already dead.

Without chasing too many mad arguments around, the simple fact is that everyone in the West does not have a raised cholesterol level. Repeated studies have shown that a perfectly normal, or healthy, cholesterol level lies between about four and six, and lowering it cannot protect against heart disease, otherwise we will have introduced a new concept into medical science: normal is unhealthy and must be treated.

People are grasping at straws in their attempts to explain why statins protect against heart disease in those with normal cholesterol levels, and in women and the elderly – where a raised cholesterol level is not even a risk factor. The only possible explanation for the results of the statin trials is that statins do not work by lowering cholesterol levels.

The Cholesterol Hypothesis is a Complicated Mess

The cholesterol hypothesis has always exuded the siren song of simplicity. However, once you start to examine it in any detail, the simplicity rapidly mutates into complexity.

Even at the very start, people should have known that cholesterol in the diet was never capable of appearing, unchanged, in the bloodstream. Cholesterol is not soluble in water (thus blood) which means that after absorption, cells lining the gut pack cholesterol into a small protein/lipid sphere, known as a lipoprotein, before releasing it into the bloodstream.

Thus, you do not have any cholesterol floating about in the blood – it is all contained within lipoproteins. You do not actually have a cholesterol level. Instead, you have a level of different lipoproteins, with the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or ‘bad’ cholesterol being the so-called dangerous one.

Next question, what raises the LDL level? Eating too much fat, or cholesterol? The first problem here is that the cells lining the gut do not make, or release, LDL – they make other forms of lipoprotein. So, no matter what you eat, it can have no direct effect on LDL levels.

So where does LDL come from? LDL is, effectively, the shrunken form of a very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL). VLDLs are made in the liver and used to transport fat and cholesterol from the liver to other cells around the body. As VLDLs lose fat they shrink, transforming into LDL.

Therefore, in order to find out what makes LDL levels rise, we must surely find out, firstly, what makes VLDL levels go up; and what makes VLDL levels go up, primarily, is eating excess carbohydrates. What makes them go down is eating fat!

Recognising this, and a host of other problems, the supporters of the cholesterol hypothesis have twisted and turned. As of today (and this will certainly change), the original – dietary – cholesterol hypothesis has become the following: If you eat too much saturated fat, the body will reduce the number of LDL receptors (things that remove LDL from the bloodstream), forcing the LDL up. A more tenuous, and unproven, link could hardly be imagined, but that is what is left of the originally super-simple cholesterol hypothesis. The diet part anyway.

But the difficulties of trying to establish a dietary link to heart disease actually pale into insignificance when you start trying to work out how the raised LDL level itself may cause heart disease. If it were simply a case of excess LDL seeping through the artery wall when the level gets too high, then why doesn’t this happen in all artery walls, everywhere? If I lie too long in the sun I expect to get sunburned on every bit of skin exposed. I do not expect to get discrete patches of sunburn. Yet we do see little ‘patches’ of atherosclerosis. Some people die of heart disease and are found to have perfectly clean arteries, apart from a single killer plaque (thickening). So why did the LDL seep through at only one place? What protected the rest of the arterial system?

And why do veins never develop atherosclerotic plaques? They are exposed to exactly the same LDL level as the arteries. They are thinner than arteries, but their general structure is identical. I should add that if you use a vein as a coronary artery bypass graft (effectively turning it into an artery), it will develop atherosclerosis.

These questions represent only the tip of a huge iceberg. In an attempt to answer some of them, the cholesterol hypothesis has turned itself into the following, complicated mess:

– LDL, when it is oxidised, travels through the lining of the artery wall (endothelium) into the middle part of the artery. (How oxidised LDL passes straight through an endothelial cell into the artery wall behind is unexplained.)

– In this oxidised state it attracts white blood cells from the bloodstream. They, in turn, migrate into the artery wall and start to ‘digest’ the oxidised LDL in order to remove it. (This bit is plausible.)

– However, white blood cells, once they have started to digest oxidised LDL cannot stop. They get bigger and bigger until they burst. This, in turn, attracts more white blood cells to the area which then burst. (White blood cells that just burst? This makes no sense whatsoever. Why on earth would the body develop a scavenger system that automatically self-destructs?)

– The burst white blood cells, in turn, release substances that trigger a whole cascade of inflammatory reactions in the arterial wall. After a period of time you have a mass of dead white blood cells, cholesterol, oxidised LDL remnants, and a whole series of other inflammatory agents all focused in one area, trapped in the artery wall. (Well, this is what is found in a plaque, among many other things.)

This is allegedly how a plaque starts and grows. I have kept that explanation as simple as humanly possible, but it seems absurdly unlikely. Oxidised LDL – what happened to normal LDL? Well, there’s no way anyone can see of getting that through an arterial wall. Exploding white blood cells…. Another buttress?

In truth, the current ideas on plaque formation used to keep the cholesterol hypothesis afloat are complex nonsense. But the entire area is now protected by a ring-fence of scientific jargon that frightens off all but the most dedicated seeker after truth.

To those who have studied the hypothesis with a critical eye, it seems unbelievable that it can possibly still be standing. Dr. George Mann pronounced it dead in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1977, referring to it as the “Greatest scam in the history of medicine.” Yet this hypothesis has never had more followers than today.

Time, I think, that it was consigned to the dustbin of history. It is not simple, direct, or understandable – the only certain thing about it is that it is wrong.

Dr. Kendrick’s book, The Great Cholesterol Con, is available from www.amazon.com.

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Footnotes

1. Ancel Keys PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, 1997.
2.  J. Black, Lectures of the Elements of Chemistry, 1803
3.  Professor Michael Oliver, British Medical Journal, 1991

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author. For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 112 (Jan-Feb 2009)

My first introduction to a biodynamic farm was over 35 years ago, yet it made such an indelible impression upon me that I can still vividly recreate the mem­ory. Nestling in the soft East Sussex hills, Busses Farm, run by Jimmy and Pauline Anderson, was a clear demonstration of a living example of biodynam­ics. 

Walking through the kitchen garden was like being in a Monet painting. The French intensive biodynamic method was being practised, with raised beds and an exuberant riot of herbs, flowers and vegetables. Patches of marigolds, tagetes and nasturtiums tangled with bright blue borage, lavender, rosemary, courgettes, cucumbers and firm-hearted lettuce. Runner beans busily twined up poles and tomatoes grew warm, sweet and ripe.

If you managed to glimpse the soil through this cornucopia it was black and crumbly, the kind that produces happy plants. Bees provided the background hum as they gratefully progressed from flower to flower, spoilt for choice between gardens and orchards. This was the first time I remember hearing about companion planting.

Out in the fields was a herd of horned Sussex cows, most with their calves, for breeding as well as some milk cows; a few fluffy sheep that looked like an advertisement for washing powder, 300 pecking and excitable hens, and a wonderful workhorse that was used for transporting heavy loads.

All of these animated the landscape with their variety of shapes, colours, sounds and behaviours. In addition to this huge quantity of mouths and beaks to feed there was usually a group of very hard-working and very hungry apprentices who would come to train for 3-6 month blocks. Their healthy appetites meant that Pauline’s four-oven Aga was always on the go, full of marvellous dishes. And, as if this was not enough, the indefatigable Andersons pioneered a veg­etable and wholefood shop in the village of Forest Row, which has continued to go from strength to strength.

So many people were enthusiastic about getting biodynamic produce that a number came forward with their various talents, and the next enterprise was a restaurant run by a team of good cooks – some days the queues would stretch round the block The salads fairly jumped off the plates with vitality and we all felt that this was an ‘idea whose time had certainly come’.

On the farm were study groups looking at the theoretical side of biodynamics, and regular celebrations of festivals with music, singing and dancing. It was very hard work to be sure, but it made the profound statement of Manfred Klett (former head of biodynamic work in Germany) that “the farm is the university of the future,” a living ideal to be realised eventually on a much wider scale.

When it honours the particular piece of land that forms it, in all its true depth of potentiality, the farm is a world of symbiotic relationships and processes. Then the farm becomes the most excellent, cheap and efficient place to study botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, water, soil, chemistry, nutrition, cooking, animal husbandry, crafts, climatology, astronomy and true economy (the Greek oikos, meaning house + nomia, meaning management; to manage nature’s household properly we will need to develop a new and qualitatively different understand­ing of economic principles).

To bring us back to today, my local biodynamic farmer Richard Smith takes up the theme:

“Walking around a biodynamic garden, or as in my case, over the fields of a biodynamic farm, one soon begins to realise that there is something different going on here. It is usually an impression of vibrancy in the plants, warmth in the soil and a health and con­tentment amongst the animals. When we look at some of the sur­rounding conventional farms, the fact that they have become highly specialised will be evident. There will be a small selection of crops spread out over huge fields or there will perhaps be animals, usually cattle or sheep. We rarely see poultry or pigs, because they tend to be kept in barns or feedlots where they stay summer and winter. It is hard to think of the deprivations that they endure. Whereas on a biodynamic farm we will usually see a wide diversity of crops and animals outside in smaller groups, smaller machines (e.g. lighter tractors) and generally a closer connection between human beings and nature.”

One of the biodynamic farmer’s main goals is to create a balance between plants, animals and humans, and the needs of that particular soil. The aim is as far as possible to grow food for the animals entirely on the farm. No artificial fertilisers are brought in since the fertility of the soil will be derived exclusively from composted plant waste mixed with the different animal manures. If there are so many animals that it is necessary to buy feed in, or the plants do not thrive because there is insufficient compost, then somehow a more realistic and secure ratio of plants and animals has to be achieved. With experience, most biodynamic farmers usually find this to be possible. It is a principle at the heart of biodynamic farming; it is also one of the ways biodynamics may differ from organic farming (where the main aim for some farmers is to be able to grow food without chemicals).

Sometimes, of course, there are difficulties to be faced, such as extremes of weather, which seem to be occurring with greater frequency. A farmer who has a wide spread of plants and animals usually observes that not all are affected with equal severity. Failures are neither total nor ruinous, and there is a meas­ure of security in such an approach. (No biodynamic cattle succumbed to the foot and mouth epidemic. The only cull of biodynamic cattle was in Scotland where the farm was contiguous with an infected farm.) Such security came from diversity, which used to be true of traditional farms before the last World War, but is not the lot of the current conventional farmer who has sacrificed a wide spread of farm products to concentrate on mono-crops or only dairy cows and has to cope with the unpredictable and fluctuating prices of different com­modities. This is short-term, high-risk farming because specialisation also exhausts the soil, limits the habitat of insects and birds and can open the door to disease.

A biodynamic farmer trying to ‘orchestrate’ the number and type of animals required to create the ideal and appropriate balance on the farm will need to consider the different types of manures produced by the various animals, and this in a qualitative way. In animal dung there is something of the essence of the animal and its whole relationship with the earth. Each group of animals has a different attribute or gift, and a good farmer will understand how to direct cer­tain animals to specific parts of the farm where they can improve and enliven the soil. Here are some thoughts on various farm animals.

The Pig is a very intelligent creature. It spends a great deal of time rooting in the soil and is inexhaustibly curious, heaving up the soil and disturbing it where it is compact and damp, letting in the air. As an omnivore it is partial to whatever is rich in flavour, especially the taproots of pernicious weeds. With only a sparse coat of hair it likes to grow fat to keep itself warm and it seems to extract all the potential for warmth from its feed, so that its dung tends to be much more earthly and cold (compared to that of the cow). But this type of manure works well on the cold root crops.

Sheep, clothed in the ‘Golden Fleece’ and famous as the ‘Golden Hoof’, improve the land wherever they tread. They nibble close to the ground thus allowing light to penetrate the pasture, which responds by the production of a rich clover. Their silica-rich manure encourages the growth of strong stems that help the plant reach up into the air and light. Although the sheep is a ruminant animal with a complex digestion, involving four stomach chambers and a circu­lar process of regurgitation into the mouth for further chewing, its digestion is not as advanced as that of the cow.

The Cow, a ruminant, has a digestive system that has reached a state of perfection. The reach of the cow’s senses out into the world, however, is limited; she chews the cud in a state between dreaming and waking. She seems to inwardly experi­ence all the plants of the meadow as she chews and re-chews them in a wonder­ful reverie. It is not difficult to appreciate why this animal is so venerated by the Hindus as a model of meditative peace. The dung that derives from a digestive tract 22 times the length of the animal is so transformed from the original plant state that cattle are not repulsed by it, as other animals are by theirs. Cow dung has been so well assimilated that it is provides the most nutritionally available dung for maturing plants on the farm or in the garden, when composted. Its effect is strongest on the soil surface; it nourishes leaves – the watery part of the plant – ­and so balances the earthly and watery realms. The cow is indeed quite central to the proper workings of a biodynamic farm.

So farm animals are connected with the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. If only there were still horses on farms, then the aspect of ‘warmth’ would be more completely fulfilled. (Horse manure has always been prized by flower growers.) The dung of the pig specially fertilises root crops and sheep’s dung the stems and flowers. Much that we have been describing could be observed on a well-run organic farm, so what is different about biodynamics?

Origins of the Biodynamic Movement

The biodynamic movement grew out of the deep concerns of a group of farm­ers in central Europe back in the 1920s. They had noticed an increasing degen­eration in seed strains, in many cultivated plants, and in their livestock. They approached scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924 seeking some insights and practical ideas to offset this decline. (How much has happened to exacerbate this trend since then!) Steiner envisaged what might happen if mineral fertilisers should be used extensively in farming rather than the natural fertility of animal manures and good compost. He said:

“The materialistic farmer who thinks about these matters can cal­culate how many decades it will be in this century before agricul­tural products have degenerated so far that they can no longer nourish the human being adequately. With the materialistic world conception, agriculture has come the furthest away from rational principles.” (Agriculture)

He went on to predict how farm products would become so denatured that people would endeavour to make mineral blueprints of them, and here we are reminded of the growth of the mineral and vitamin supplement industry over past decades. Steiner pointed out that not only was the earth already middle­ aged, but it would become increasingly sclerotic (declining in vitality) as a result of the developing materialistic view of the earth as a resource for human beings to exploit. When he was persuaded to offer his insights into agriculture, his aim was to try and correct a largely one-sided, mechanistic view of nature, entrenched as early as the 1920s.

Steiner’s approach offered a view of life that reconnected the earth and the cosmos, physical life with its origins, in a spiri­tual worldview – a vision that takes account of the powerful forces that pour down from the cosmos to work within the soil and plant. These forces stimu­late the processes vital to agriculture, but in order for these beneficent influ­ences to be fully active, the soil needs to be sufficiently sensitive. This in turn requires the use of natural organic fertilising materials, to keep it alive. Coupled with this, special potentised ‘medicines’ (usually known as ‘preparations’) would be required for the compost heap and for spraying on the land, as well as a renewed understanding of planetary and zodiacal influences, to be creatively harnessed by the sensitive farmer.

The Moon and Its Relation to the Zodiac

The forces that come from the zodiac (Greek zodiakos means circle of animals) have always been recognised as being connected with the enlivening forces of the four elements, for the earth is indeed a living organism, deriving energy, warmth and light from the sun. The processes of rain, evaporation, day and night, summer and winter all depend on our relationship to the sun. The earth’s satellite, the moon, particularly influences the move­ment of the waters on the surface of the earth, waters that are in con­stant ebb and flow according to the phases of the moon.

As the moon circles the earth it is able to focus the particular aspect of each con­stellation rather like a lens, accord­ing to its passage in front of that sign. So that when the moon is in front of the constellation of Pisces, Cancer or Scorpio (all water signs), it magnifies their influence on the watery part of the plant – the leaves. The earth element (partic­ularly favourable for root vegetables) can be stimulated by the arrangement of planting, hoeing or any work that disturbs the soil, at a time when the moon is in Capricorn, Taurus or Virgo (earth signs).

Some biodynamic gardeners arrange their garden rotations so that each year a different plant activity is accentuated on each plot. Flowers should be grown under air signs (Gemini, Aquarius and Libra) and cereal and seed crops under the fire signs (Leo, Sagittarius and Aries).

The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, examined the influ­ences of the moon’s phases on vegetal and animal life. He observed that if one wanted juicy and good-looking fruits and vegetables for sale or for consump­tion, the optimal time to pick them was at full moon, just when ants were busiest in their hills, even at night, and marine animals such as oysters were in their period of burgeoning growth. At new moon the ants were seen to be list­less and the growth of sea creatures slack. “Fruit,” said Pliny, “is much less sus­ceptible to rotting at new moon and can be easily and efficiently dried.”

Virgil, born just after the death of Pliny, told in a discourse on agriculture how hus­bandmen took cues from the heavenly spheres and constellations to tell them when to sow their crops, certain seeds being best put into the ground when “glit­tering Taurus opens the year with his gold­en horns.” Paracelsus – a healer and one of the last of the true alchemists – made much of the connections in astronomy and astrology for perceiving the ‘signa­tures’ of plants and to use remedies much more effectively, as did Nicholas Culpeper who saw that each planet was linked to a particular plant species, in turn connected to a particular organ of the body. From the seventeenth century onwards people following such traditional wisdom have been systematically marginalised, so we have lost the link to the cosmos.

Biodynamic farmer Alan Brockman adds:

“Each planet has its own force field; thus each planet can, at some time or other, be seen in every part of the zodiac. The earth can be pictured as being surrounded by seven spheres of force, of which each physically visible planet is marking out its own particular boundary. These spheres were known as ‘crystal spheres’ (a description attributed to Ptolemy). Steiner indicated that the var­ious leaf spirals and their positioning around the stem, or ‘phyl­lotaxis’, indicates which particular force field the plant is reacting to. So clearly plants and planets have correspondences, as healers such as Paracelsus and Culpeper knew.”

Part two of this article appears in New Dawn 113 and explains how biodynamic preparations are made and their effectiveness compared to modern chemical fertilisers.

Reprinted with permission from The Biodynamic Food & Cookbook: Real Nutrition that Doesn’t Cost the Earth by Wendy E. Cook, ISBN: 1905570015, published by Clairview Books.

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