Autumnal reruns: Apartment Therapy makes my head hurt
This post ran originally on 29 August 2009 and I'm running it again to keep up the educational tone of my reruns this weekend. I can't repeat it often enough, science is your friend. There is no other method to understand the world.
It's Saturday and I'm feelin' the want to hold forth.
Against my better judgement, I logged onto that doggone Apartment Therapy the alternative day. I haven't any excuse other than I changed into seeking to read some thing inane, and what better place for a fix of inanity than AT?
I determined this:
Over the weekend we read approximately some recent studies displaying that plant crucial oils from not unusual herbs?Especially rosemary, thyme, clove, and mint?Can be powerful as herbal pesticides. Apparently only a few drops of the plant oils combined with water can repel or kill unfavorable aphids and mites. This looks like notable information for the ones looking to develop greens and fruit at domestic with out the use of dangerous chemical substances...
Uhhhhhh, the plant extracts referred to here; rosemary, thyme, clove and mint, are most certainly dangerous chemicals. If they weren't harmful chemicals, they would not kill aphids and mites.
All flowers are engaged in an fingers race with the creatures that devour them. Plants shield themselves the best manner they are able to, they evolve chemical defenses. Some of these defenses are geared toward a specific predator and a few defenses are more extensive spectrum. Human beings aren't generally the intended target on this hands race, and as a species we achieve some truely tasty rewards. So even though I appear to like the taste of rosemary, thyme, cloves and mint (to keep the subject matter of the AT pablum I quoted above), I in no way overlook that the flavor I'm so interested in in those plant life is largely a pesticide. I'm no longer the meant goal, but if I consume enough rosemary it will make me as sick as a single chew of rosemary does a katydid or an aphid. Rosemary's flavor comes from a chemical made by means of the plant to act as a pesticide, and rosemary's virtually no longer on my own on this. These foods and flavors are not horrific and I'm not saying that you should not consume cilantro or mustard vegetables any greater. Toxicity is a matter of dose. Period. A toxic dose of cyanide is distinctly small. A poisonous dose of water is considerably better, but it's still a toxic dose.
The following is an excerpt from a lecture given via Richard A. Muller, a professor on the University of California at Berkley. He makes some brilliant, although counterintuitve factors about this entire natural/ unnatural division. I LOVE this sort of stuff.
Life is rarely, if ever, an either/or proposition. Divisions between natural and unnatural are arbitrarily drawn. Natural is a meaningless label applied by marketing departments. The current vogue for "organic" foods may have standards behind that label (for the time being at least), but it too is an arbitrary line in the sand.
Have you ever noticed that the worm spray Raid smells like chrysanthemums? It does because its lively component is pyrethrin. That's chrysanthemum extract. So what's the difference between spraying Raid on a tomato plant and growing a chrysanthemum subsequent to the same plant? One may also make you experience higher but on the stop of the day, there may be no actual difference.
I say it all of the time, science is your friend parents.
