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Sunday, August 21, 2016

The coconut water conundrum?

The coconut water conundrum?

Any technological or scientific modification in any aspect of agricultural process introduced to enhance production, to fulfill the excessive demands of consumption due to ever growing population, especially at cultivation stage may have at least some side effects and may also alter certain metabolic structures but it is wise to adopt, among the many options, those technological or scientific processes which enhance with minimum negative impact in terms of side effects.

Of late I came to know through some villagers that they get big tender coconut with lot of coconut water in it and that too they are able to harvest it within 30 to 35 days.

There is a practice almost for more than 3 decades wherein insecticides for coconut trees are injected through the roots along with many other minerals and vitamins because it is more effective and through osmosis it ensures that all parts of the tree are protected because spraying insecticides especially for coconut tree leaves is difficult.

So, this process is adopted more in areas where the leaves become dry and vulnerable to insects which make many holes in leaves and render all leaves almost dry, brownish and with multiple holes and rendering chlorophyll depletion.

But according to reliable sources that there were gadgets some years ago which studied the presence or absence of toxic insecticide present in tender coconut water of such trees and it was advised to farmers that they must preferably harvest them only after 50 days to ensure that the toxicity levels are either low or nil.

However, to my knowledge there has not been any study done on how these externally injected pesticides metabolize inside and what compounds they create? Because I suspect consuming tender coconut water as a very good thing for kidney due to the presence of some things like excess of Celica and some similar compounds may end up causing kidney stones.

Some villagers have a very interesting habit, out of some rural wisdom and may not be scientifically proven, of gulping down a cup of diluted lime juice or a few tea spoons of raw lime juice after consuming tender coconut water to neutralize the side effects of such chemical compounds!!! I really do not know much less understand the wisdom of this practice.

I would like the scientific community to enlighten on this as in present day while there is one section which is totally careless about their health and become sponsors of health care industry and another section who are health and fitness freaks who consume whatever is labeled as good for health, mostly in large quantities too. When people consume tender coconut water in good faith and end up with kidney stones it really hurts, instead they would have been better off drinking beer.


Are Auxin, Cytokinins, Gibberellins injected and if so has any scientific study conducted about how they metabolize inside the coconut water and ultimately what further metabolism takes place inside the human body.  

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