© Flickr / Katja Schulz
“In nature, mushrooms break down all kinds of substances, and we’re just beginning to look at this more closely in the lab and in field studies,” says Theresa Halula, who teaches mushroom cultivation at Merritt College in Oakland, California
When wildfires burned across Northern California in October 2017, they
killed at least 43 people and displaced another 100,000. The human toll alone was dire, but the fires also left behind a
toxic mess. It wasn't just the record-breaking levels of
air pollution. The blazes generated an untold amount of potentially dangerous ash, the remains of incinerated hazardous household waste and building materials. The charred detritus of paint, pesticides, cleaning products, electronics, pressure-treated wood, and propane tanks left a range of pollutants in the soil-including arsenic, asbestos, copper, hexavalent chromium, lead, and zinc.
Officials feared runoff from the toxic ash could pollute local creeks once the rainy season hit, potentially tainting the drinking water supply for the region's 700,000 residents.
Comment: Interesting theory, but it obviously needs to be teased out more. It may be a conditional situation that makes vitamin A more of a burden than a nutrient (an imbalance of other fat-soluble vitamins, for instance). However, vitamin A has been somewhat controversial for some time now, with some studies pointing to a possible connection with cancer. Clearly, more research needs to be done.
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