Many Thanks To The Sun
Photo©Ulkas/123rf.com
Have you ever stopped to think that we are strung together with sun energy? Sun energy is what we use for all of the things we do, such as breathing, thinking, moving, reading this article, writing, texting, blowing our noses, canoeing, loving. All is accomplished with sun energy.
Plants, with their green chlorophyll, do quite an amazing feat. They take water from the ground through their roots, and carbon dioxide from the air (a simple waste product that we breathe out) and bring them together with sun energy — shazam, bam! — to make sugar.
The equation is: 6 carbon dioxide plus 6 water yields 1 glucose plus 6 oxygen.
By adding in a few minerals from the dirt they are rooted in, plants make their entire bodies from the glucose they have synthesized with sun energy. Animals eat the plants, and/or they eat other animals which have eaten plants, and make their entire bodies from those plants, as do we human animals.
So, our bodies are made up of carbon dioxide, water and a few minerals, plus the sun. Our energy to do anything comes from extracting the sun energy back out of the glucose molecules (or fat and amino acids made from glucose) from the cells of our own bodies.
As if that isn’t enough of a miracle, plants produce the oxygen we need to breathe as a byproduct of making glucose. The only place on the planet where we get that oxygen is from plants making glucose (photosynthesis). And we can’t survive for more than a few minutes without oxygen.
Hopefully we will start to think about that before we destroy more trees and shrubs and forests and rain forests, which produce about 50% of the oxygen on the planet, with oceanic algae producing the other 50% of Earth’s oxygen.
Let’s take a moment to thank the sun and green plants upon which the whole edifice of our living, breathing existence is built.
Dr. Lynda J. Wells has a Ph.D. from Boston University, and did postdoctoral research in neurobiology. She became a Nationally Certified Nutrition Specialist, CNS, and licensed nutritionist, LDN. She has recently been nominated to Marquis Who’s Who in America.
