Nutrition is a Double Edged Sword

Nutrition is a double edged sword. Adequate nutrition is certainly integral to thriving health but food is toxic to varying degrees depending on the dose. People who feed livestock as a ration (not a diet) know this.  They depend on healthy animals to make a profit.

Human Nutrition

The field of human nutrition has been so full of bad information that it is difficult to say the phrase nutritional science with a straight face.  A sneer or smirk is more appropriate.

Indeed the word science has been appropriated by all sorts of people to imply that their beliefs are based in reality and can properly be justified as “science.”

“Physics is the only real science,” as Ernest Rutherford famously opined.  Chemistry is the part of physics that works. Biology is an attempt to explain life based on physics and chemistry.

Sequencing the human genome has has finally opened up a way to study the vast differences between people. There are many honest scientists studying human physiology who now have the tools to explain human diversity. Their cultivated skepticism will help them avoid dishonesty and blunders of the past that led to silly conclusions like Ancel Keys Seven Countries Study.

The lesson to be learned from the Ancel Keys debacle is that when the government gets in bed with industries they regulate and pay for research about the products they are selling, you will be hard pressed separating truth from fiction. Instead of condemning excess sugar as complicit in certain disease states, fat and “cholesterol” became the boogeymen in human illness. Then industry AND government foisted low fat products on naive citizens who blindly believed that the tasty high carbohydrate/simple sugar products they were consuming with their yummy polyunsaturated fat component actually contribute to good health.

Ask yourself why there is a healthcare facility or doctors’ office on every corner in American cities. Why is 18.3 percent of America’s Gross Domestic Product spent on healthcare?

Malnutrition

Everybody is malnourished. Some of them are starving; many in the so-called rich countries eat to excess, largely for entertainment . Malnutrition is overfeeding  as well as under-nutrition. Even people who fastidiously avoid overeating will encounter deficiencies because it is almost impossible to know what might be missing in food grown on poor soil, or even if it is known that the soil is deficient. Too many unknowns.

Overfeeding contributes to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, liver disease, kidney disease…  You name it.  Whatever the metabolic disorder, overfeeding initiates it, perpetuates it, or potentiates it. Inevitably overfeeding results in deficiencies because critical nutrients are excluded or not absorbed.

An effective strategy might be to eat to excess, let the body extract what is necessary, and excrete the rest.  The problem with that is the body doesn’t do a good job of getting rid of what’s unnecessary.  An obvious example is excess sucrose where the fructose portion of sucrose goes to the liver to make non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).  That’s malnutrition.

Studies of people eating excess protein have shown can increased risk of diabetes as well as renal and cardiovascular disease. Yet body builders blindly consume massive amounts of whey protein concentrate.

There are hints in the literature that excessive doses of vitamin D3 from supplements might predispose men to a higher incidence of prostate cancer.

There are so many questions and answers are conflicting.  Fortunately science marches on under the not so constant eye of peer review. Unfortunately many of us will be dead before the answers are confirmed, and even then there will be more questions.

Food Groups

We are told that a balanced diet consists of eating suitable proportions of foods from all the food groups.

Is the concept of “balanced” even valid?  The myth of a balanced diet is a worthy objective if anybody really knew what it pretends to be.

And how many food groups? Four?  Seven?  Or just the official five found on government web sites?  Forget about the food group deception. Each group represents an industry sector that is trying to sell you, the consumer, a product that may or may not be good for you. You alone can decide what to stuff into your mouth in the frequently mistaken notion that it will help you thrive as a living organism among the many that inhabit the earth.

https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/food-group-gallery    (USDA)

https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/food-essentials/five-food-groups   (AUSTRALIA)

An Emerging Strategy

Admittedly it is difficult to get good nutrition if one blindly relies on the offerings of the modern industrial food industry. Food that automatically tastes good to an American teenager may be the food to avoid. Consider that too much of the wrong food is toxic. Wrong foods include sugar and seed oils.

Correct foods include almost all kinds of vegetables.  Potatoes are not a vegetable and what questionable nutrition they have from being grown on depleted soil heavily fertilized with nitrogen is destroyed by making them into french fries.

The rest of what foods are good or bad is constantly subject to the low fat, high fat, keto, vegan controversy.  Here are a few suggestions that seem to help a lot of people with widely varying metabolic and nutritional issues:

• Avoid sugar
• Limit fat from seed oils: they are not vegetable oils.
• Stay well hydrated.
• Forget the 3 square meals per day paradigm.  Eat an appropriate amount a few hours after waking up and a second 4 or 5 hours before sleeping
• Discover what you can eat to keep your blood glucose levels normal. A1C is a blood test to measure glucose over time. It should be below 5.7%.
• Supplements are OK if you know what you are doing, otherwise they ar easy to use to excess. Vitamin  D3, K2, zinc and magnesium are important for immune function. People who look at their blue screens all day and don’t go into sunlight might be deficient.

Read about epigenetics and  the controversy about Neu5Gc to help you decide about eating meat and how much.

Otherwise stop obsessing about food.  Realistically food has become entertainment and comfort for most Americans. Pay attention to other aspects of the reality of human existence on a planet most of us take for granted.