Ugly crop keeps celebs slim

Don Curlee

August 7, 2016

Some of the beautiful people in Hollywood and elsewhere are boosting one of California’s ugliest crops because it helps them stay slim, glamorous and photogenic. Farmers who grow the crop are enjoying the recognition and brisk sales.

In the fat-burner world the safflower seed extract CLA is among the latest, most talked about and perhaps most effective, but in the sun-baked fields of the southern San Joaquin Valley its safflower source is not only ugly as it awaits harvest, but is painfully vicious to those who trespass the fields where it grows. Razor-like spikes and flowers of this four-foot-high thistle-like plant of the sunflower family make entering a maturing safflower field a dangerous adventure.

If it’s important to you, CLA stands for conjugated linoleic acid. Soft gels containing it seem to be the most popular form offered. Promotional material insists that it not only promotes weight control, but specifically attacks that fatty roll that has enfolded some of us, often described as belly fat.

Extracting the fat-devouring essence of the safflower seed requires a battery of squeezing, pressing and filtering equipment, making the whole process somewhat exotic. But cottonseed oil was produced in huge volumes from that crop’s tiny seed when cotton was a dominant crop in California, much of it grown in the same fields where safflower grows today.

The dominant production area is the Tulare Lake Basin in Kings, Kern and Tulare Counties, but smaller concentrations can be found in counties as far north as Butte, Tehama and Colusa. While California produces 50 percent or more of the country’s volume on about 50,000 acres, safflower is also grown in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North and South Dakota and Minnesota. A native of Asia, it is produced in China, India, Pakistan and several Middle Eastern countries.

For those of us concerned more about the state’s water supply and the way it is distributed than a few pounds of flab around our midsections, safflower has great promise as well. Tap roots of the plant reach excessively deep for water, as far as 15 feet. While that attracts soil moisture away from other crops it opens the soil to allow winter rains and runoff to penetrate and find their way to replenishing that ever important groundwater basin.

Drilled into rain-moistened fields in February, the crop is minimally attended until harvest in May or early summer. Soil opened by safflower roots is more tillable for crops planted in rotation such as rice, processing tomatoes, cotton, alfalfa, wheat or dry beans, all popular choices in the areas where safflower flourishes.

Oil from harvested safflower seed is extracted mainly by two California companies, although one of the major producers in the Tulare Lake Basin is said to have its own facility for extraction and refinement. Safflower oil has been a popular staple in the country’s kitchens for 30 years or more. Promoters emphasize its health and weight control benefits.

No doubt, some of the promotions of its CLA content for fat reduction reach further than conservative health enthusiasts want to go, and some have been identified as scams. Nevertheless, vitamin and health stores stock the pills as staples, and customers extend far beyond the rich and famous

One aspect of safflower production that does not extend beyond its growers and their neighbors is insect control. The crop is attractive and susceptible to lygus bugs primarily, stinkbugs and some thrips. Because it begins to dry out early in the summer any bug buildup tends to move on to neighboring greener fields.

Safflower growers and their neighbors emphasize a program of integrated pest management, and rely on special use opportunities for a limited number of pesticides.

Nobody familiar with the crop denies its ugliness in the fields, but as long as one of its components contributes to keeping people pretty by reducing their waistlines its popularity can’t help expanding.

http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/local/2016/08/07/ugly-crop-keeps-celebs-slim/88374444/