This "Weed" Growing in Your Yard Has More Omega-3 Than Salmon (Don't Throw This)

There is a common weed with reddish stems crawling through the cracks in your driveway right now that carries more of the omega-3 fatty acids than a fillet of salmon, not per pound, per leaf. It has fed human beings for 4,000 years. It has outlived the empires that tried to tax it. And in the year 2022, a team of scientists at Yale University discovered that it does something no other plant on earth can do, something they themselves called, in print, a biological impossibility. I am going to tell you exactly what that impossibility is before the end of this video, because it is the part that could genuinely change the way you look at the ground beneath your feet. And the whole time I am talking, an entire industry is spending billions of dollars a year making very sure you never learn this plant's name. For most of your life, you have been told this plant is a nuisance, a weed, something to be sprayed on sight and yanked out of the border before it spreads. I am here to tell you that very nearly everything you have been told about it is upside down and back to front. It was not always a weed. For most of human history, it was food, deliberate, cultivated, treasured food, and the knowledge of it was common in ordinary kitchens on four separate continents. We did not lose that knowledge by accident. It was quietly taken, poisoned out of the fields, and out of the memory of ordinary people, and replaced with something a company could put a price on. My name is Malcolm Ashby, and for 50 years now I have been growing things and gathering things, and in all that time I have never come across a plant so badly and so deliberately misjudged as this one. Stay with me right to the end, because the discovery those scientists made in 2022 ought by rights to have been on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and instead it was tucked away in a journal that almost nobody outside a laboratory will ever read. Let me say one thing, and then I will not bring it up again. Every plant, I know its look-alike, and what it is worth in dollars, I have put into one book. On page 31, there is a weed that grows in most backyards that people spray on sight, and that replaces the $5 tea they have been buying for years. It is at thebackyardgoldmine.com, and the link is under this video. If you want it, it is there. That is all. Right then, let us get into it. The plant is called purslane, and before we go a single step further, here is the one caution that matters. It has a poisonous look-alike called spurge, so never put a scrap of it in your mouth until you have snapped a stem and seen clear, watery sap rather than a milky white one. Now, purslane's story does not begin in a garden centre. It begins in a sealed clay pot in northern Greece some 3,000 years ago, where a handful of tiny black seeds, each barely the width of a pinhead, were stored away and When archaeologists finally opened that pot, the seeds inside were the very same plant now growing between the paving stones outside your back door. By the 4th century BC, the great Greek writer Theophrastus was giving farmers instructions on how to sow it, telling them to plant it in April alongside their most important crops. This was not a weed to those people. This was a staple. Rome cultivated it across three continents. When a scholar in Milan sat down in the year 1288 to list everything his city ate, purslane made the list, not as some curiosity but as ordinary daily food, and it stayed on the table for a very long time. All through medieval Europe, purslane was eaten at nearly every meal. It grew in the monastery gardens and the cottage plots. It filled the pages of the old herbals as a proper salad vegetable, prized for cooling the blood in the heat of summer. For century upon century, it was simply understood to be food, good food, the sort a grandmother would send a child out to gather before supper. Only in the last hundred years or so did it quietly fall out of fashion, get shoved to the bottom of the garden, and finally be demoted, in our minds, from a vegetable to a weed. And here is where it becomes genuinely strange. When European settlers first wrote purslane down in Massachusetts in the 1600s, they naturally assumed they had carried it across with them. They had not. When the archaeologists dug, they found that purslane had already been growing here, and more than that, being deliberately cultivated here for thousands of years. Seeds turned up in Kentucky, dating back 800 years before Christ. Native peoples had been growing it on purpose, right alongside their sunflowers and their squash, as part of a genuine farming tradition the history books rarely bother to mention. So here are two great branches of humanity, separated by an entire ocean, neither one knowing the other so much as existed, and both of them looked at this single plant and decided it was worth keeping. Two peoples, one conclusion. What on earth did they both know that we have been so carefully persuaded to forget? The answer began to surface in 1960, when a physiologist named Anshul Keys set out to understand why some peoples almost never died of heart disease, while others were dropping like flies. He followed nearly 13,000 men across seven countries for the better part of 50 years, and the results broke every rule anyone thought they knew. The farmers of Crete ate one of the fattest diets in the whole study, and by every theory of the day, they ought to have been dying of heart attacks in droves. Instead, they had the lowest rate of heart death that Keys had ever measured anywhere on earth. Lower than Japan, lower than anywhere at all. For 20 years, the credit went to olive oil, to the so-called Mediterranean magic. Then, in the 1980s, a new team went back to the frozen blood samples from that original study, and this time they were not hunting for cholesterol. They were looking for Omega-3, and the men of Crete had three times the Omega-3 in their blood as the men of Northern Europe. But here is the thing. They were not eating three times the fish. They were eating purslane every single day, in their salads, in their stews, cooked in their olive oil, and fed by the handful to their chickens and their goats, so that even the eggs and the meat carried it through. The whole island's food ran quietly on a plant that grew wild in every field. In 1992, a scientist called Artemis Simopoulos finally put purslane under proper analysis, and the numbers she got back looked, at first, like a mistake. Leaf for leaf, purslane held five to seven times more of this Omega-3 than spinach, and something like 15 times more than an iceberg lettuce. It was, and it remains to this day, the richest source of Omega-3 of any leafy green vegetable ever measured on Earth. It carried seven times more vitamin E than spinach, six times more beta-carotene than a carrot, and a wealth of magnesium, potassium, and calcium besides. Other scientists were so certain she must have contaminated her samples that they went back and checked. She had not. The little weed really was that good. And there was something stranger still. There is a particular kind of Omega-3, the sort you are always told to eat oily fish to get, that land plants simply do not make. It belongs to the sea, to fish, and to algae, not to anything growing in your border, and yet purslane makes it. Only a trace, mind you, but it makes it. When Simopoulos reported that finding, some of her fellow scientists flatly refused to believe her, and insisted, again, that the samples must have They were not. This ordinary little weed was quietly doing a thing that, by the whole rulebook of botany, it had no business doing at all. Then they set out to test whether it could actually save a life. In a study in the city of Lyon, 605 people, who had already survived one heart attack, were divided into two groups. Half were put on the standard, sensible, low-fat diet a doctor would have handed you at the time. The other half were put on a Mediterranean diet, rich in purslane and its Omega-3. After a few short years, the purslane group had 70% fewer deaths, not 70% fewer heart attacks, 70% fewer deaths from all causes. The study had to be stopped early, because leaving the other group on the old diet had come to seem, to the very people running it, simply unethical. So let me ask you the obvious question. If this plant is all of that, why is it not in every shop in the land? Why does nearly everyone you know call it a weed and reach for the poison? To answer that, we have to come at last to the discovery I promised you at the very beginning, the one those scientists at Yale called an impossibility. Now, every green plant has to turn sunlight into food, and there are, broadly, a few different ways of doing it. Most plants use the simple, thirsty way, which works beautifully as long as there is plenty of water. A few tough customers, like corn, use a faster way, built for heat. And the desert plants, the cacti and their kind, use a third way entirely. They hold their breath through the burning day and only open up at night, which saves their water but makes them grow desperately slowly. For all of history, these were understood to be separate paths. A plant picked one. Purslane, it turned out, was quietly using two of them at once, and nobody could work out how. When the Yale team, led by Dr Erica Edwards, finally mapped what was happening inside purslane cells in 2022, they found both systems running at the very same time, in the very same cell. The daytime engine for fast growth and the night-time engine for surviving drought, not kept apart in different corners of the leaf, as everyone had assumed, but wired directly into one another, the one feeding the other. No other plant on the planet is known to do it. Edwards described it, quite simply, as a kind of super plant. It is as though you lifted the bonnet of a car and found an engine burning petrol and running on electricity in the very same cylinder, at the very same instant, and not merely switching between the two. That was the impossibility. A weed in your driveway had solved a problem the cleverest plant scientists on earth did not even know could be solved. And that is precisely why you cannot kill it. Purslane survives on a fifth of the water that corn demands. It grows in soil so salty it would finish off most crops in a matter of days. A single plant throws out as many as 200,000 seeds and each one of those seeds can sit patiently in the soil for up to 40 years, waiting. Break off a fragment and leave it lying on the ground and it simply roots itself and carries on. One university study on baking weeds to death under sheets of plastic concluded, more or less, that if purslane finally dies then everything that could possibly have gone right did. So the big chemical houses have declared open war on it. They sell products formulated specifically to kill purslane in your lawn, your garden, and the farmer's field. And one of the weapons they reach for is a chemical first cooked up in the second world war and then, in 1947, marketed cheerfully to American families to spray on their own back lawns. Homeowners associations forbid it, agricultural offices publish careful guides on how to wipe it out. The entire machinery of modern gardening treats this ancient food as an enemy to be destroyed and not because it does the slightest harm to anyone or anything but for one reason and one reason only because it cannot be controlled. Now you begin to understand the real problem. The global market for weed killer was worth some 40 billion dollars in 2024 and a great deal of it is aimed squarely at this one plant. And here is the part they would very much rather you did not join up for yourself. You cannot patent purslane. You cannot engineer its seed to be sterile so that a farmer has to come back and buy it fresh again next spring. It has been reproducing freely for 4 000 years and it will go on doing exactly that whatever anyone does. Every other source of omega-3 you see is a business. The wild fish are being emptied out of the seas, farmed salmon needs a fortune in machinery, flax oil turns rancid on the shelf, a bottle of fish oil capsules will cost you 20 dollars and purslane grows for nothing in the cracks of your drive asking only for a little sun and the odd drop of rain. And it is not only the weed killer trade. The very supplement the chemist sells you in a little bottle, the fish oil, the omega-3 capsules, is trying at great expense to copy the one thing this plant hands out for nothing. There is no fortune to be made from a plant that every family could grow in a pot or gather from the pavement and pass over the fence to a neighbor. There is a great deal of money to be made from the weed and the bottle became the medicine and almost nobody stopped to ask how on earth that could be the right way round and think for a moment about where all of this is heading. When the experts draw up their maps of where our crops will fail first they point to the dry and the half dry places the fields where the rain is already thin and getting thinner. Corn and wheat need 20 or 30 inches of rain in a year. Purslane will run its whole life on six. When the heat climbs high enough to shut a field of soybeans down purslane does not wilt, it speeds up. The very plant we have spent a fortune teaching ourselves to destroy is the one built for exactly the world that is coming. The answer, as is so very often the case, was already lying quietly at our feet the whole time and you know half the world never forgot. In India they still eat it and call it kulfa. In Greece it is glistrida. In Mexico it is verdalagas cooked up with garlic and a little chili. In China it has been grown on purpose for thousands of years without a single break. Across Turkey and Iran and the whole of the Middle East it turns up in the summer salads as a matter of course. Half of humanity kept the old knowledge alive at their own kitchen tables. The other half of us were quietly taught to pour poison on it. So here is how to know it when you see it and you will start seeing it everywhere now, which is rather the curse of learning any of this. Look for the thick reddish stems lying flat along the ground, smooth and never hairy, and snap one to be sure of that clear watery sap. Look for the small fat paddle-shaped leaves and the tiny yellow flowers tucked in among them. Harvest it young in the first few weeks while the leaves are still tender. Eat it raw in a salad for a fresh lemony faintly salty crunch or wilt it in a pan exactly as you would spinach. You can pickle it, stew it, drop a handful into a soup or dry it for the winter and let just one plant go to seed at the end of the season because it will hand you hundreds of thousands of seeds more than enough to feed yourself and every neighbor you have for free for the rest of your days and when you have learnt it teach it to somebody else. Every single person who learns to recognize this one plant is one more person who stops believing that food is a thing that can only ever come from a shop and one more person who understands that some of the most nourishing plants on the whole earth are the very ones we were carefully taught to poison. And purslane is not alone in this. Again and again all through history the plants that once fed and healed ordinary people for free the ones that nobody could own were quietly pushed aside renamed as weeds and poisoned out of the fields while something you had to buy was set up in their place. It is a pattern as old as commerce itself. The wonder is not that it happened to purslane at all. The wonder is that after every bit of it the plant is still here, still growing in the cracks, still waiting patiently for anyone with the eyes to know it once again. So the next time you find yourself standing over that little red stemmed plant in the crack of your driveway with a bottle of weed killer in your hand I want you to stop because the super plant that clever people in their laboratories are trying so hard to engineer from scratch is already here. It already exists. It has carried people through the fall of empires and the ruin of harvests and it was handed down hand to hand for four thousand years until somebody decided there was more money in the bottle than there was in the plant. That is old wisdom and it was very nearly erased. But it was never quite lost and now it is yours again growing for nothing exactly where you were about to spray it. Now I would genuinely love to hear from you. Drop me a comment down below and tell me just two things. Had you any idea that this common weed was once treasured food and is it growing somewhere near you right now this very week? I read as many of them as I possibly can and the stories that come back never once cease to amaze me. Thank you for spending this time with me today and do have a look for that book if it interests you because next time I am going to show you a plant you can put in the ground one single time and then harvest from for the rest of your life. A crop so stubborn and so generous that two world wars could not stamp it out and yet almost nobody under the age of 70 has ever heard its name. Until then, go and have a proper look in that garden. You never know. See you next time.