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Daily Health Principles: Foraging for Xenohormesis
900 sats \ 15 comments \ @Undisciplined 11 Apr HealthAndFitness
Our yard has a ton of wild onions, so I've been eating lots of fresh green onions with my food and sometimes just chewing on one while I walk around the yard. Other than some mulberries in the fall, our neighborhood doesn't have much other foraging opportunity, but I was reminded of how much I enjoy it.
Other than providing free and fresh snacks, foraging may provide some interesting health benefits, because of xenohormesis.
Xenohormesis is an awesome word that refers to the health benefits of the compounds plants produce when they're subjected to environmental stressors. You may recall my first post in this series about hormesis, which is the health benefits of being subjected to stressors. "Xeno" means "alien" or "foreign", so it's the health benefits derived from other organisms being stressed.
Many compounds like curcumin and resveratrol are the result of xenohormesis, but you don't need to forage to get those benefits. Foraging may provide a distinctly local form of xenohormesis, where our bodies can learn about how to adapt to local environmental stressors from the compounds local plants have produced to deal with those stressors. The idea seems sort of similar to how our immune systems learn from vaccines. Our immune systems observe the adaptive compounds from local plants and learn from them how to deal with those stressors when we encounter them.
I'm sure there was a cool discussion of this on The Darkhorse Podcast, but I couldn't find it.
What are stackers' favorite foods to forage?
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29 sats \ 3 replies \ @unschooled 12 Apr
Chaga mushroom. If you can find them!
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11 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 19h
Interesting. I had no idea what Chaga looks like.
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22 sats \ 1 reply \ @unschooled 16h
You reminded me of it when you mentioned xenohormesis. I'd first thought that this was the process by which it extracts the medcinal, anti-cancer/anti-viral nutrients from the silver birch, but after a bit more consideration and a quick chat with grok, I don't think it is the same.
Anyway, when the tree gets inhabited by the chaga fungus, all of its great medicinal properties get concentrated in the fungus' 'conk,' which, made into tea, tastes amazing.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 16h
neat
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35 sats \ 3 replies \ @Signal312 12 Apr
Mostly blackberries, at my previous locations, and occasionally some chanterelle mushrooms.
Even though I'm carnivore, foraging is one area where I will make an exception occasionally. But where I'm at now, there's not much opportunity to forage. There's tons of prickly pear cactus fruit, but though they look beautiful, they're just not very flavorful at all. And it's a massive pain to get the thorns off.
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34 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Apr
I’ve tried foraging prickly pears too and I know how poorly that can go. Have you gotten thorns in your mouth yet?
I haven’t learned the local mushrooms here yet, but it’s on my to do list.
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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 12 Apr
No, not yet on the thorns (and honestly, I'm kind of done with them, the payoff was too low).
My method was to pick them with tongs, then dump them in the sink and, wearing rubber gloves, scrub them with a brush to get the micro-spines off. That seemed pretty fool-proof.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Apr
Yeah, we found some during a camping trip and didn’t take nearly enough precautions.
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30 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 12 Apr
I have a few books to help with foraging: The Forager’s Harvest and Backyard Foraging. I go after a lot of salad greens and berries. Dandelions, plantains and something I call a shamrock all go into my summer salads. We also get walnuts, hazelnuts, acorns and butternuts all over the neighborhood.
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Apr
I forgot about dandelions. I do toss dandelion greens into salads or onto sandwiches.
We have black walnuts, but from everything I've heard they aren't worth the effort.
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24 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 12 Apr
Well, they take a lot of effort to get the meat, but they are tastier than the English walnuts. Butternuts are better for ease of cracking but not as tasty.
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29 sats \ 1 reply \ @Coinsreporter 12 Apr
We have Jujube Berries along the banks of the river Ganga everywhere. I've listened they are pretty good for Xenohormesis. I've been eating them ever since I was a little kid. As a fun fact men eat them for it's believed they help produce more sperms.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 19h
Most of the places I've lived have had lots of berries around. We might have cranberries around here, but I need to make sure that's what they are. Also, I don't like cranberries.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 12 Apr
Does getting fruits and vegetables from our neighbour who has a family farm count as foraging?
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40 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Apr
No, but you'd get some xenohormesis benefits from that. From what I understand, there are benefits that accrue over generations of adaptation, so wild foods will have more than farmed. Farmed foods will have some adaptations to the local environment, though.
My onions are somewhere in-between, since I think they probably just date back to when this neighborhood was a dairy farm.
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