v Anthroposophical Views Dora Wagner

Into the biome

Dora Wagner

The mind is like the stomach, You should only ask as much as it can digest Sir Winston Churchill

The essential purpose of digestion is to convert that which is foreign to our body into its own, and that really is a challenging task. Everything unfamiliar must lose its strangeness and become part of ourselves; this is exactly what the term ‘metabolism’ means.

From the perspective of anthroposophical medicine, all primary impulses of the internal organs below the diaphragm, and those of the extremities, are subject to the ‘metabolic-limb system’ (see my November 2020 column for a more detailed explanation). Here, substances are absorbed, processed and transformed; the body is nourished and sustained by the substances supplied from outside; cell division and excretion take place. Everything is in motion and connected with transforming and dissolving forces— the so-called ‘sulphuric forces’. Digestion should lead an element or a compound into neutrality and thus make it available to metabolism and its formative (Girke, 2010). These processes of transformation and reinforcement are also attributed to the foundations of human will, including action. Thus ‘digestion’ primarily describes food intake, but also applies in general to everything affecting our organism from the outside. We are all familiar with situations where we ‘go with our guts’, we feel ‘butterflies in our stomach’, or we find something ‘stomach churning‘.

For several years now, the gut-brain axis has been intensively studied by scientists, so today the influence our digestive system has on our thinking, feeling, behaviour and wellbeing is becoming increasingly clear. Yet a century ago, Rudolf Steiner was giving lectures in which he emphasised the functional connections

between gut and brain, the importance of intestinal flora to the formation of human thought, and suggested the relationship between intestines and brain development should be studied phylogenetically (Steiner, 1920). Indeed, the gastrointestinal tract and the brain communicate with each other intensively and, above all, reciprocally: the intestine not only receives instructions from the brain, but also sends signals there. This is why the intestine is also referred to as ‘the second brain’ (Carabotti, 2015). Just as plants, animals, humans, and other living beings form ecosystems with complex interrelationships, our internal ecosystem is a large community of up to 1000 different species. Each of us shares food, water and shelter with tiny colonies of microorganisms that include bacteria and fungi. According to Eckburg and colleagues (2005), there are at least 500 different species of microbes in our intestines alone. The complete microbiota, including its genes, is also referred to as the intestinal microbiome (GAÄD, 2019). So, even though the unicellular organisms that colonise us are small, they outnumber our own body cells by a ratio of 10:1, and account for about 1.5-2.0 kg of our body weight. Whilst this may sound disturbing, this cohabitation is essential to human health; bacteria in our microbiome, for example, produce certain vitamins, help us break down nutrients, or teach our immune system to recognise dangerous invaders. Some microbes are indigenous or inherited over generations, others are passengers that visit for a while, some might settle depending on our nutrition and behaviour. Some make us sick; others are important for our health. Salmonella, and some types of coli bacteria are unpleasant and hopefully do not stay for long. Lactobacillus case, Lactobacillus reuters, or Bifidobacterium bifidum boost our immune system, enrich and invigorate us (Reuter, 2001). Most amazingly, no two microbiomes are the same. Even if two people eat exactly the same food for a while, their microbiomes will align but will not become identical. Microbiomes are as unique and individual as our fingerprints, but change throughout our lives (GAÄD, 2019).

The composition of our food plays a key role in the make-up of our microbiome. Drugs such as antibiotics, like unbalanced and unhealthy food, can make important co-inhabitants disappear forever. Just as in nature, a high level of diversity is beneficial in our food choices and thus in our internal ecosystem.

As I explained in this column back in November 2020, anthroposophic remedies employ buds, flowers, fruits and seeds to treat the digestivelimb system; Foeniculi fructus is an example of a seed drug. But with so many interdependencies, there are many opportunities for our digestive system and its organs to lose their balance. Nowadays, the main causes of metabolic disease stem from malnutrition and overeating. Four clinical pictures often present together: excess weight, metabolic fat disorder, elevated blood sugar or sugar metabolism disorder, and high blood pressure. In such cases, the internal ecosystem seems to have collapsed, and the first

therapeutic measure is always a change in diet (Edelhäuser et al., 2020). Food is highly valuable for medicine and health here but for healthy eating, it matters how our nutraceuticals— our vital resources —have been produced and processed. Dioxin in eggs, antibiotics in meat, pesticides in fruit and vegetables, softeners in cheese; reports of contaminants in our nourishment appear regularly in the media. No wonder, then, that in 2017 the WHO launched the ‘One Health’ project to underline the clear link between health, nutrition and agriculture.

One woman from a prominent Aberdeenshire family (Humphrys, 1986), convinced that agriculture, nutrition and health were inseparable, made particular efforts to produce healthy food. Lady Johanna Skene of Skene (1879-1966) is considered a mother of biodynamic agriculture. In the 1920s, she and her husband, Count Karl von Keyserlingk (1869-1928), were administrators of large agricultural estates in Silesia (now Poland). The Count and Countess were enthusiastic anthroposophists; Johanna, in particular, being involved in the development and realisation of various biodynamic projects throughout her life. She, more than anyone else, persuaded Rudolf Steiner to deliver agricultural courses, on her estate, over Whitsun in 1924 (Selg, 2010). Similar to organic or integrated farming, biodynamic agriculture considers each farm— with its unique flora and fauna —as a living organism, with its own individual characteristics. On biodynamic land, cattle husbandry, farm-grown seeds and fodder, fertilisation with composted or fermented preparations, and legume cultivation are the basis for a cycle of subsistence agriculture in which soil, plants, animals and people live in harmonious balance and combine to form a vital, overall organism (Waldin, 2015; BDA, 2020). At Witten Herdecke University, all students are required to attend courses of Studium Fundamentale to enable, for instance, students of art or economics to develop an interest in

agriculture, horticulture, herbalism and nutrition, and come together in crossdisciplinary initiatives (Holtermann, 2019; foodplanet, 2020). In the medicinal garden, our group is engaging with nutrition by raising seedlings of ancient vegetables on the windowsills of many shared flats. We not only want to harvest, prepare and eat the nutraceuticals, we also want to let the plants grow naturally, studying their life cycles as they breed or harvesting and using pure, heritage seeds ourselves. Vegetables that are not cultured for high yield only may grow more slowly— but they can produce many more nutrients. In addition, the old vegetables contain a wider range of secondary plant metabolites, often giving interesting colour and other protective qualities.

Our efforts may seem very small compared to the huge problems currently weighing on our humanity and our natural environment, but it is nevertheless satisfying to make a tiny contribution to the One Health initiative. I do believe it is exactly this feeling— being able to take something into your own hands, truly digesting and working through, following your own path through the process, accessing and trusting the outer world, acting, coping and getting in touch with your own creativity, while engaging in something that is meaningful and valuable —this feeling of being in tune, that is what makes us healthy people.

Images: Dora Wagner. Collages created by Dora Wagner from materials available through pixabay and Creative Commons licenses. Source materials from California Academy of Science, and Wellcome Trust.

References Biodynamic Association (2021): https://www.biodynamics.com (link accessed 1.2.2021) Carabotti, M.; Scirocco, A.; Maselli, M. A. & Severi, C. (2015) ‘The gut-brain axis: interactions between enteric microbiota, central and enteric nervous systems, ‘in Annals of Gastroenterology 28(2):203-209 Eckburg, P. B.; Bik, E. M.; Bernstein, C. N.; Purdom, E.; Dethlefsen, L.; Sargent, M.; Gill, S. R. Nelson, K. E., & Relman, D. A. (2005) ‘Diversity of the human intestinal microbial flora,’ in Science, 308 (5728): 1635–8 Edelhäuser, F. et al. (2020) ‘One Health— Agriculture, Nutrition, Health’, lecture series, University of Witten/Herdecke, available at www.uni-wh.de/zentrum-studiumfundamentale/oeffentliche-vortraege/stufumediathek/ food-planet (2020), blog, available (in German) at www.uniwh.de/detailseiten/news/ernaehrung-alstherapeutisches-mittel-8089/ GAÄD (2019) ‘Herbsttagung "Bauchgefühle" Reizdarmsyndrom und chronische Bauchschmerzen,’ in proceedings of the Autumn Conference of the Society of Anthroposophic Physicians of Germany Girke, M. (2010) Innere Medizin— Grundlagen und Konzepte der Anthroposophischen Medizin. Salumed-Verlag: Berlin Humphrys, M. (1986) genealogy project, available online at https://humphrysfamilytree.com/Skene/ Reuter, G. (2001) ‚The Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium microflora of the human intestine: composition and succession,‘ in Current Issues in Intestinal Microbiology 2(2):43-53 Selg, P. (2010) The Agriculture Course, Koberwitz, Whitsun 1924— Rudolf Steiner and the beginnings of biodynamics. Translated by Matthew Barton. Temple Lodge Publishing. Steiner, R. (1920) ‘Geisteswissenschaft und Medizin,’ available from the Rudolf Steiner Archive: http://anthroposophie.byu.edu/vortraege/312 .pdf, accessed 19.02.21 Waldin, M. (2015) Biodynamic Gardening, Dorling Kindersley: London World Health Organisation (2017) One-HealthProject; https://www.who.int/news-room/q-adetail/one-health (link accessed 5.2.2021)