Food for Health Part 1 Quality

 A couple of weeks ago there was a question on JMG’s covid open post about how to address bird flu using herbs and alternative health practices. My response was: “The best way to address any infective agent is to strengthen the immune system. If you are already eating good food, drinking clean water, getting enough sunshine, fresh air, sleep, and exercise, the best thing to do is reduce your stressors (especially those that cause relentless anxiety), and build up your muscle mass (immune cells start there).” 

 

What I have in mind here is a series of posts that goes into more depth on each of these things. To be clear these will be summaries of my thoughts and ideas. If anything catches your attention or sparks your curiosity you must do your own research. Questions and comments are welcome and if you can contribute better information or a clearer understanding please chime in. Enjoy.

 

It is impossible to over-stress the importance of each of the things I listed above. It is just as impossible to say which is the most important. That's like asking whether your heart or your lungs are more important. That said, we must start somewhere and food is as good a starting point as any. Arguably, learning to cook whole foods from scratch with is one of the best things you can do for your long term health. (Humans are uniquely evolved to eating cooked food. In his book Catching Fire: how cooking made us human, primatologist Richard Wrangham, makes a compelling case that it was learning to cook that allowed us to develop as modern humans. As modern humans we are “obligate” cooks. We can survive on raw food but women on a long term raw food diet lose too much body fat to maintain fertility.)

 

Throughout most of human history getting enough food, quantity, has been the biggest challenge. For most of us in industrial nations today the problem isn’t quantity it’s quality. The Standard American Diet (SAD) typically provides has an over-abundance of calories but it is nutritionally weak. Getting enough of the micronutrients to support a high functioning immune system is very difficult when your food is SAD. Fortunately, decisions about what to eat must be made everyday and every meal is a opportunity to make a better choices.

 

I’m not going to advocate a particular diet program or regime. Working in natural food stores for as long as I did I saw too may diet fads come and go and met too many people with “holier than thou” attitudes to those who didn’t follow their particular dietary choices. What I would like to do instead is work from first principles and try to establish a set of guidelines that can help us get more good food into our diets. Please note: “good” and “bad” are not moral judgements in this context. “Good” food is delicious, nutrient dense, satisfying. “Bad” food is not.

 

Diet fads have a habit of demonizing particular foods or food groups. Although the details have changed the approach seems to be fairly persistent. Fats, meat, carbohydrates, and even cooked food have all been targeted.  That approach is not only unhelpful it can actually cause health problems. To be very clear all the macronutrients, carbohydrates, fats, and protein, are all essential to a healthy diet. 

 

You may have noticed that I haven’t included fibre on this list. That’s because fibre is a carbohydrate. Fibre is important; it’s considered an “essential” carbohydrate.  Nutrients are deemed to be “essential” if the body has to have them and cannot produce them itself. Polysaccharides are another kind of carbohydrate. They are also essential and they have a specific impact on immune health. (More on that later.)

 

My point here is that it is the quality of the nutrients that matters. Any food can be good (delicious, nutrient dense, satisfying) or bad ( damaged, chemically laden, and devoid of nutritional value). As I noted above most of the foods that make up the SAD are poor quality nutritionally deficient and usually rely on too much sugar, fat, salt, or MSG to give it flavour. The Standard American Diet cannot support good health and strong immunity. 

The two things that determine food quality are freshness and the amount of processing that has been done. The process of deterioration starts as soon as the food is harvested. How it is handled (processing) once it has been picked or killed  and how long it takes to get from the point of harvest to your plate (freshness) will have the greatest impact on the concentration of nutrients it provides and it can also have an impact of the amount of nutritional stress it causes. 

Nutritional stress is the  cost to your body of digesting and absorbing the nutrients and processing and eliminating the wastes. If your food has a high toxic load from agricultural chemicals or environmental contaminates the costs go up and nutritional stress increases. If your food has not been properly handled or processed it may contain “anti-nutrients” that cause nutritional stress. People around the world have consumed many “foods” that are toxic, even deadly, if not processed properly. Think of green coffee beans. 

Another example is dried beans. Most varieties of beans and lentils contain a substance called phytic acid. This is a chemical that reduces the digestibility and helps to reduce predation on these protein rich seeds. Without proper preparation, which can include soaking with many changes of water, sprouting, fermentation, and long cooking with a variety of additives depending on the cuisine involved (kombu, epazote, fennel, etc) beans can cause digestive problems ranging from mild discomfort to agony.

 

Processing food, whether it’s cooking or preserving (with one notable exception) alway involves some loss of nutrients. The advantages of cooking fresh whole foods far out weigh the loss of nutrients. Cooking has made a whole range of foods that are otherwise indigestible accessible to us. However, the more a food is processed the more nutrients are lost; the more a food is refined the more it is denatured. It becomes tasteless, added sugar, salt, fat and other flavour enhancements are needed in order to make it edible. These things all make more demands on your body’s ability to process and eliminate excess. They become anti-nutrients that  contribute to nutritional stress. They are also unsatisfying. They don’t give us the nutrition we need. They fill us up without assuaging our hunger. Craving real nutrition we overeat. 

 

This has gone longer than I had planned. I was hoping to move on to water next but that will have to wait. The next post will continue with food. I would like to share some general ideas about a good diet for human health and immunity.