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  CFPPA-HYERES Spirulina Training Program
Proposals:
SPIRULINA for reducing MALNUTRITION
AS FOOD FOR EMERGENCY, FOOD SHORTAGES, HUMANITARIAN URGENCIES
"spirulina WORLD program"

CFPPA , 32 chemin St Lazare 83400 Hyéres - France
  1 - Historic of the World -
Life Origin on the earth Our story begins about 3 1/2 billion years ago when, to make the story simple, apparently something important happened to an Archibacterium - the first replicating life form on Earth for which we have found any evidence - and which already had been around in the primeval soup of the oceans for over three hundred million years!

A pale sunlight was having difficulty penetrating a yellowish atmosphere of methane, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Perhaps a group of ultraviolet photons after having avoided serious collisions with this army of gas molecules, as well as surface layers of water, crashed into just the right area of our bacterium's genetic material - and like hitting the jack pot on the slot machine, there was a great commotion.

The newly-altered nucleic acid commanded the cell to grow by using light and the hydrogen and oxygen of the water and the carbon from the carbon dioxide-filled atmosphere.

The excess of oxygen atoms produced in this way were herded by twos like the animals entering Noah's Ark but this time they were pushed outdoors through the cell wall where they gathered into small bubbles and amused the new bacterium as they rose and reached the water's surface with a tiny "plop" and a sparkle of reflected sunlight.

Kanem Spirulina We are eternally grateful to this micro-organism and its cyanobacteria grandchildren who invented photosynthesis and with it began to give us an oxygen atmosphere to breathe. This went on for 2 billion years before nucleated cells and green plants appeared! Within the last 200 million years the dinosaurs came and went (except for certain birds and reptiles), while we have been here for perhaps one million years.
2 - Historic of SPIRULINA uses
for Nutrition and Health -
tecuitlat
Somewhere around a thousand years ago the Olmec ancestors of the Aztecs of Mexico discovered that they could fish these microscopic cyanobacteria out of the water of the great lake of Mexico with fine-meshed cloth, dry it in the sunshine, and eat it in combination with maize.
They called it Techuitlatl.
When Hemando Cortez arrived in lhe Valley of Mexico in 1519, he found the Aztec 1ndians eating Spirulina (Paniaga-Michel, E. et al 1993 ; Farrar, W.V. 1966; Motolinia. F-T. 1541).
It is eaten by the Kanembou people of Chad (Dangeard, P- 1940 ; Brandily, M. Y. 1959)
and is used by modern athletes to improve their endurance (Henrikson. R. 1997; Fox, R.D. 1996).
At about the same time the Kanembou people living near the northeast corner of Lake Chad in Africa discovered the same microorganism; and collected and processed it the same way. This time adding it to millet, they called it Dihé.
Kanem-woman harvesting spirulina
Spirulina subsalsa About one hundred and fifty years ago modern scientists discovered it when examining water samples under their microscopes. They named this coiled filament Spirulina and decided it belonged in the classification of the Blue-Green Algae. About 50 years later it was noted that there were big Spirulina and little Spirulina. In the large-diameter spirals one could see crosswalls that showed the filament to be multicellular; while cross walls were not visible in the smaller species. So they called the big Spirulina "Arthrospira".
Around 1960 Roger Stanier pointed out that Blue-Green Algae are structurally much more like bacteria than the other algae and green plants; and fossil evidence began to show that the Blue-Green Algae had been around much, much longer than had the Green, the Red, the Brown and other Algae. So, Stanier called them Cyanobacteria; and today we call them Cyanoprokaryotes. Finally, because Spirulina is a more tuneful word, this wonderful Cyanoprokaryote now is known the world over by those wishing to benefit from it as "Spirulina".

an average of 65% proteins of quality
Early in the nineteen sixties the scientific community awakened to the fact that Spirulina can be eaten and that it contains large amounts of the most important nutrients for human health: an average of 65% proteins of quality comparable to egg protein and the FAO standard protein.