Taming the symptoms with wild foods

BY JACKIE MCMILLAN

Photo above: Rose hips       

Last fall, after attending a wild-food workshop that I taught with Natalie Krueger at Everdale Farm and Environmental Learning Centre, Edible Toronto editor Gail Gordon Oliver asked me to write about the personal experiences that had led me towards wild foods. Although I started reading medical journals back in high school, completed two years of pre-med studies, and then got a degree in environmental studies (which included a few plant identification courses), my wild-food story requires a bit of context.

My mother was a wilderness buff, so my siblings and I were outside a lot as youngsters. For my mother, foraging was just another delightful part of spending time outdoors. I loved picking wild berries, and adored climbing trees, but it wasn’t until my eleventh year that my wild-food interest gained some urgency. That was the year that my parents sent us kids to a non-profit wilderness canoe-tripping camp for a month.

Now, you’ll need another part of my history before that camp experience makes sense. Although I hadn’t been diagnosed with anything then, I rocked, I droned, I sometimes banged my head, and I chewed everything in sight (up to and including eating my dolls, the vinyl piping off the car seats, and chewing gum I picked off the sidewalk, to my parents’ horror).

On the plus side, I was verbal (pronunciation challenges didn’t stand a chance, with a mother and grandmother who were teachers and an older sibling who was a drill sergeant), I was musical (lyrics and jingles helped me express things it was too difficult to find my own words for), and for about one morning out of every ten days, I could think clearly enough and learn easily enough that I could somewhat fake it the rest of the time.

Some of you may be putting these things together into a picture of an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which includes the diagnoses of autism, pervasive developmental disorder - not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and Asperger’s syndrome. And, indeed, it was only fairly recently that I decided I was okay being “outed” and received an Asperger’s diagnosis.

So, back to the camp. It was a fly-in camp with a kitchen garden behind the dining hall, wild blueberries, raspberries and strawberries ripening in every open area, and numerous other berries growing in the forest. The woman running the food program was a nutritionist. We ate what amounted to a high fibre, whole-food rotation diet with few processed foods and lots of variety. We drank clean water, we breathed clean air, we sang, we danced, and I got to rock back and forth for a good portion of each day in a fully sanctioned way – paddling. Since there were no showers, we swam every day and had occasional saunas.

By the end of that month, my muscles hardly ached at all, my joints hurt less, I had better coordination, I was making friends, I could learn things most days, my emotions weren’t dragging me around like a wild animal, my skull didn’t feel like it was four sizes too small for my brain and, best of all, it didn’t hurt to digest food. I had no prior clue that digestion didn’t have to hurt! When I returned to my normal environment, I was back in the old pain, the emotional turmoil, and “brain fog” within two days.

Though I didn’t have words for it for years, I knew that I’d been hit over the head with something really important. Things in my environment could help me, or hurt me, and I had to figure out what those things were, and why they made a difference in my ability to be comfortable, happy, and included (versus shunned, shamed, or bullied). So began a determined process of mostly silent and isolated trial, error, observation and study, which still continues. Why silent and isolated? Because environmental medicine fell into the realm of “witch doctors” until very recently in Canada, and I didn’t need more people telling me I was crazy!

In essence, I discovered that man-made chemicals in the air, on my skin, in my beverages, in my medicines (non-food-sourced supplements and pharmaceuticals), and in my foods would make things worse. And on the bright side, that green spaces, clean air, regular repetitive movement, music, dance, positive social interactions, spiritual or energetic awareness, non-toxic personal care products, natural and complementary medicines, filtered water, saunas (and other detoxification supports), organic foods and, especially, wild foods, would make things better.

In addition, when a green, clean and peaceful environment helped my internal stressors to drop, all of the external stressors (the “ugliness” and chaos of scent, sound, sight, touch, taste, communication and emotions in our current culture) also became more manageable.

Why do wild foods help? Here’s what I’ve learned. All autistics who have been tested have impaired detoxification capacity, which means they have a higher body load of man-made poisons and heavy metals. If all of humanity were in canoes, my canoe would have so many toxins in it that any passing wave would easily sink me while the people around me would be bobbing merrily. Those waves are stressors.

Wild foods are so dense in nutrients and high in medicinal properties that they support detoxing (an energy- and nutrient-demanding process), and they support a much greater number of metabolic (food and waste processing), endocrine (hormones and other mechanisms that maintain balance in body functioning) and neural (brain and nerve network health) processes.

For me, bad-toxin headaches and body aches would recede in the face of wild strawberries, wild grapes, haws, rose hips, wild raspberries, wild blueberries and other wild fruits. Different wild herb teas (dandelion, dock, burdock, etc.) or wild greens (wild lettuce, violas, lambs quarter, grape leaves, etc.) would help my joints, my liver, my skin, and many other organs and systems. I am still discovering benefits from eating wild foods, and the greatest pity of it is the lack of information about them. What we do know is this:

1.   Organic foods are, on average, 25 percent more nourishing than conventionally grown foods.(Go to www.organic-center.org for current research summaries.)

2.   Biodynamically grown foods are purported to have more nutrients than organic, as well as higher immune-boosting properties because of the attention given to soil health. (If anyone has sourced collated research on biodynamics, please send me the links.)

3.   Wild foods can have up to ten times or more of the nutrients found in conventional foods, and their immune-boosting properties are the highest known; they have to be strong to compete in nature without any human assistance.

The body usually uses between 75 and 95 percent of the energy gained from foods to merely digest those foods. If you could increase the energy you gain from eating from 5 percent up to 25 percent, you’d have up to five times more energy for other things. If we were cars, we’d substantially increase our mileage by using better fuel. (Unfortunately, cars are only fractionally as responsive to good fuel as bodies are.)

Some foods cost the body more energy and nutrients to digest (or detoxify and excrete) than those foods actually contain. For example, unlimited puffed wheat (which is found in many cold cereals) plus a normal balance of vitamins and water will kill rats in two weeks. The temperatures and pressures used to puff the wheat change the structures of wheat’s components into poisons, which significantly raises the demand for specific nutrients to heal or protect the body (see Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions, and a sidebar about Paul Stitt’s “Fighting the Food Fight”). When the nutrients eaten aren’t sufficient to support the body’s detoxifying needs, detoxifying strips the necessary nutrients from bones (calcium), muscles (energy), fluids (electrolytes) and the rest of the body, decreasing or eventually shutting down its ability to function.

We’re advised to eat a wide variety of foods for two main reasons: First, all known foods have at least some components that are toxic; and second, no food has a perfect balance of what the body requires. All bodies are different, and day-to-day variations in actions and health create different demands for nutrients. The easiest way to increase our available energy is to eat many different foods that are high in nutrients and low in toxins, preparing them in ways that make them more easily digested, and noticing what feels “good” and when.

Wild foods are so high in nutrients that it’s good to introduce them into our diets in small quantities, so that we don’t prompt a healing crisis (when the body shuts down so it can put all its energy into repairs, such as during the flu). And because many wild foods are also medicines, we need to be aware of their potency and particular actions so they don’t interfere with pharmaceuticals or upset homeostasis (the balance maintained by all of our internal systems working together in a healthy way).

This is also a time of decreasing climate stability, which is beginning to affect our agricultural food production. Many of our most common city weeds are invasives from other countries that were originally imported as foods, and reproduce so rapidly and vigorously that they are difficult to eradicate on even a local scale. Making these prolific foods common knowledge would contribute significantly, at the very least, to food security (and I’ve found that most children are eager and fast learners). Regular wild food consumption would also mean more bodies were receiving the materials they need for maintenance and repair.

But what I really dream about is someone researching the benefits of wild snacking for learning disabilities...

When not teaching workshops or using her therapeutic skills, Jackie McMillan can usually be found either learning things or gathering wild foods. Visit her at www.ThriveWithAutism.ca.