The Birth Of Life

Three and a half billion years ago, our Earth was a barren, uninhabitable wasteland; our atmosphere was void of life-giving oxygen and rich in "greenhouse gases" that have become so infamous today-methane, carbon dioxide, sulfurous gases and others.

Then, a miracle occurred, perhaps the most dramatic natural event in our planet's history. Simple, one-celled forms of life appeared, which we now call procaryotes (bacteria); one family of procaryotes was the first to perform the miracle of photosynthesis . This means that these sun-eating pioneers were able to absorb the sun's energy and use it to digest water and CO2, releasing the precious atmospheric oxygen that later would allow the entire food chain to sprout and flourish in all its rich diversity. These life-breathing organisms were the cyanobacteria : blue-green algae . The miracle continues to this day.

Algae Today

Algae flourish today in thousands of varieties. They exist wherever there is water, or even moisture: in the ocean (where they are a major constituent of plankton), lakes, rivers streams, hot springs with a high mineral content, ponds-even rain puddles. They may be found living on the ground or beneath the earth's surfaces, on the bark of trees, on rocks-and even within the bodies of higher plants and animals.

Some algae grow in colonies resembling plants. Best known of these are the sea kelps, which can attain lengths of several hundred feet. However, algae such as these differ from true plants, in not having root, circulatory, and other complex transport systems.

In all algae, whether macroalgae like the giant kelps or microalgae such as aphanizomenon flos-aquae ( Blue Green Algae), each cell is self-sufficient. If you break a piece of sea kelp off, it will retain its viability.

All our modern green plants have since duplicated algae's historic feat of photosynthesis-but algae still reign supreme among them. Even today, they are the most highly efficient photosynthesizers on the planet, utilizing light energy, carbon dioxide from the air, and hydrogen and oxygen from the water to synthesize a high-energy combination of proteins, carbohydrates (starches and sugars), lipids (fats), nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), vitamins, chlorophyll and other pigments.

At the very foundation of the food chain and directly responsible for about 80 percent of the world's oxygen, algae are found in every drop of water and every inch of fertile soil, transforming the minerals, gases and sunlight of our environment into viable foods for all other species of life.

They are in every sense the true biological foundation of life on Earth.

Blue-Green Algae

Algae are classified by color, which is an indication of their nutrient spectrum and their capacity to absorb different spectra of light waves-in other words, their color shows their particular "sunshine diet." These families include blue-green, green, red, brown, golden and other algae. Blue-green algae are the most ancient of the many thousands of species of ocean and fresh water algae.

Among all the algae families, blue-green algae are the most efficient in photosynthesis, making them particularly critical to maintaining a balanced and life-sustaining food chain and atmosphere. Their photosynthetic prowess also makes them one of the most chlorophyll-rich organisms on the planet.

Blue green algae also are unique among algae in that they possess the characteristics of all three kingdoms of life-plant, animal and bacteria.

• They share with the plant kingdom the capacity to photosynthesize and produce chlorophyll - yet they predate the plants' development of indigestible cellulose cell walls .

They truly belong in a family by themselves: a kingdom among kingdoms.

Algae and the Human Family

Algae have been used as vital staple foods in human dietary traditions throughout the world. Most well known are the many ocean algae, commonly called "seaweed" or "sea vegetables" (though they are neither weeds or vegetables) traditionally eaten by coastal peoples of both the East and West.

Freshwater algae also formed an important part of many culinary traditions, such as in parts of Africa and Central America. The Kanembu natives of the Lake Chad region in Africa have traditionally harvested and eaten blue-green algae, using a processing method similar to that used by the Aztec civilizations to remove Spirulina from Lake Texcoco.

The algae is gathered from the lake in porous cloth bags and allowed to drain. It is then formed into large flat cakes on the sand and dried in the sun. As the blue-green algae gels, it is smoothed by hand and marked off into squares. When most of the water has evaporated or seeped into the sand, the squares are pulled up, dried further on mats and cut into brittle cakes.

The Kanembu then eat the algae, which is called dihe, after it is cooked in a sauce of tomatoes, chili peppers and various spices; the algae sauce is then poured over millet. Unfortunately, much of the chlorophyll and other factors are lost by the hot sun, sand drying and cooking.

Seaweeds have been used in modern food processing and as a natural food staple for many decades; yet it has been only since the 1970s that the extraordinary health and dietary value of freshwater algae has been "rediscovered", first with Chlorella (a green microalgae) in the early 1970s and with Spirulina (a blue-green microalgae) in the later 1970s.

However, unlike the case with seaweed, by the time we had stumbled upon this most ancient miracle, all of the viable natural sources for harvesting freshwater algae were either too polluted or too ravaged by drought to serve any purpose. Thus, freshwater algae consumption on any major scale required man-made cultivation.

Then, in the early 1980s, a single researcher discovered one overlooked, solitary source for one of the most remarkable blue-green algae of all, Aphanizomenon flos-aquae and he found it growing organically and abundantly in the wild, within the United States, in an environment that is one of the richest biomass producers on the planet.

The environment was Upper Klamath Lake; the researcher, Daryl J. Kollman, who founded a company called Cell Tech and started harvesting the algae.

A Mountain Garden of Eden

In his science fiction classic, The Lost World , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented an isolated terrain high on a mountain plateau, which acted as a biological time machine to preserve prehistoric plants and dinosaurs (just waiting for Doyle's heroes to discover).

The geological reality of the Klamath Lake terrain is more extraordinary than Doyle's fantasy-and it is the key reason for the extraordinary nutritional qualities of this Blue Green Algae .

Nestled within the Cascade Mountains in the center of Southern Oregon (with the legendary Mount Shasta in full view), Upper Klamath Lake is fed by a mix of streams and creeks, natural springs and two major snow-fed rivers, the Wood River and Williamson River. With mountainous terrain to the west and north and the town of Klamath Falls lying downstream to the south.

Despite the Lake's massive size, it has never yielded to commercial development-boating or other recreational activities are made virtually impossible on any large scale by the thick growth of blue-green algae. It is as if Nature had carefully designed the perfect environment to keep the hand of Man from despoiling this natural treasure!

The surrounding volcanic geology pours a rich legacy of minerals into the Lake each year. The result? In this age of rapidly acidifying lakes and streams, this Oregon "Lost World" environment not only shelters the lake, it also allows it to maintain a richly alkaline pH level.

A Treasure Trove on Minerals

Where do these minerals come from? For the past 10,000 years, since the last retreat of West Coast glaciers, the Lake has served as a "nutrient trap" for a rich supply of minerals, volcanic silt, organic nitrogenous matter and other nutrients washed in from some 4,000 square miles of land surface, much of it mountainous. The minerals were a gift of Mt. Mazama when 7,000 years ago the entire top 5,000 feet of the mountain blew off in an explosion 300 times the size of Mt. St. Helens'.

In this environment of abundant minerals, natural nitrogen, fresh water and sunlight, Blue Green Algae has for a hundred centuries had the perfect opportunity to flourish to its full potential.

And flourish it does! Each year the Lake's 594,000 acre-feet of water produce in excess of 200 million pounds of its unique strain of aphanizomenon flos-aquae . Properly managed, enough Blue Green Algae could be produced to feed one or two grams per day to every person on the planet.

Just how rich is this sediment? The top one inch contains enough nutrients to support the massive annual bloom of Algae for 60 years - even without any new nutrients coming into the Lake!

The Modern Diet: Shadow Of Its Former Self

To appreciate just how valuable this unique food is, compare its growing environment with the environments and processes that grow the rest of our food.

10,000 years ago, the United States was covered with mineral rich topsoil. Over the millennia, the natural process of weathering and erosion-the same process that washes minerals into Upper Klamath Lake-has washed them out of our farmlands. Over the past few centuries, and especially in the past 50 years, some modern farming methods have accelerated that erosion process, along with intensive irrigation, over cultivation, and chemical intensive farming-leaving some of our farmland barren ruins. Pollution of air, water and ground water has also aggravated the problem.

Our great-grandparents' diets probably contained most or all the minerals, protiens and other essential nutrients needed for building and maintaining a healthy life. Today, the common household diet has deteriorated to such an extent that many of our leading degenerative diseases have been speculated to be connected with the lack of a balanced, wholesome daily diet. U.S. Senate Document #264 confirms that 99% of all Americans are deficient in minerals. To get the same iron content as one bowl of 1948 spinach you would have to eat 75 bowls of spinach today. When you consider Blue Green Algae's mineral-rich growing environment, it is no surprise that it is power-packed with nutrients.

Organic Foods: A Partial Solution to Optimum Health

The increasing acceptance and practice of organic, pesticide free farming is a great victory for our environment and a boon to our health, yet it can't replace the mineral legacy in our soil that took thousands of years to create and a fraction of that time to wash away. It's going to take generations to rebuild it. However, right now we can enjoy the tremendous benefits of a food that's been grown in a natural, mineral-rich environment: Blue Green Algae. By adding the algae to a diet abundant in fresh and organically grown foods, we can enjoy the most sensible diet for optimum health today.

Blue Green Algae vs. Spirulina & Chlorella - No Contest

There's only one Blue Green Algae because no other environment on earth duplicates the wild and fertile ecology of Klamath Lake. By comparison, commerial freshwater Spirulina and Chlorella must be grown in man-made ponds, under artificially controlled conditions. In these ponds the algae receives a smaller quantity of minerals and, more important, a far fewer range of nonorganic minerals.