Thoughts about Human Nutrition
Let’s talk about the role of food. Most people think about food as a source of fuel, calories. It is true that food is fuel, but it is so much more. Billions of years ago a single cell version of mitochondria was free living. These mitochondria were ‘eaten’ or engulfed by single cell bacteria. Eventually a pair survived together and began working cooperatively. The bacterium, now officially a “eukaryotic” cell, was in charge of finding the food, and the internalized mitochondria was in charge of producing the energy from the food. This combination is more effective that one cell doing everything and this eukaryote evolved into every living thing we see today that has more than one cell! Yet the mitochondria still need information about the environment. Should it produce energy or go to sleep? Is food plentiful or is starvation happening? Is there danger close by? Being inside the larger cell it has no direct contact with the outside world anymore. So how does it communicate? With food! That’s right, food is also a messenger, a type of language. The food we eat tells our internal system about the external world. The food we eat is turned into metabolic messenger molecules, not just energy.
Enter the microbiome. Inside our intestinal tract are somewhere around 100 trillion microorganisms. All kinds of creepy crawly things like bacteria, fungi, virus and who knows what else. The microbiome is so immense we have barely begun to explore it. It is an entire universe inside of us. These organisms process whatever we send them to the best of their ability. They are responsible for breaking down whatever we eat and converting it into usable molecules. Some of these molecules are their food! This is why the calorie method of thinking fails. Not everything we eat is converted into human energy. Some of the products are food for other microorganisms further down the intestine. Some of the products are messenger molecules that literally influence how we think and behave. Ever have a craving for a food? That is not your brain creating the craving. That is some population in your gut that is sending a message to your brain to get what they want. Depression, anxiety? Yep, the microbiome is in command making you feel a certain way so that you will eat a certain food type. Read Dr. Christopher Palmer’s Brain Energy book. But we do have control of what we send them and if we stop sending the bad stuff and start sending the good stuff then those organisms will call out for more good stuff! You can literally decide to change what you like and what you don’t like to eat! It takes a couple weeks but if you start eating sardines for example, you will eventually like and even love to eat sardines. I did this experiment on myself just to prove it. My first can of sardines was rough but now I am a sardine fan.
The reality is that there is no “Food Police.” You can eat whatever you want, or can you? My analogy is that of a high performance car. Most performance cars specify 91 octane gas. They are designed to run on 91 octane gas. It is more expensive but provides the engine with the correct formula. What if you decided not to use 91 octane? There is no “pump police” watching over your selection. You could put in the less costly 87 octane and the car would likely run. Over time bad things would happen and there would be an expensive breakdown, and no warranty coverage. Your body is the same, you can feed it anything you wish. If you feed it high quality nutritious, low inflammatory food as in Dr. Dan’s suggestions then you will spend a little more money on food, and a lot less on medicine, doctors visits, surgery and hospitals. If you choose pizza and other non-nutritious choices then your body will do the best it can but will eventually break down. Physical, mental decline and chronic illness is in your future with bottles of medications and doctor visits as a social life. The choice is yours, eat whatever you want and become sick, or feed your body the food it needs to provide you with your best health.