Food for Health 2 Food Choices/Macronutrients and Micronutrients

This is the second in a series of posts on a natural approaches to strengthening immunity. Next week will be the third and final post on food.  

 

Much of the conventional advice on eating well defaults to the facile “eat a balanced diet.” The idea is that if we eat a mix of grains, meat, veggies and fruit all will be well. At first glance many traditional diets contain a balance of plant and animal foods: combinations of proteins, carbohydrates and fats. If we look closer it becomes clear that all cuisines, all around the world, make choices about how to “balance” these macronutrients. 

 

Weston Price’s monumental survey of food-ways around the world showed traditional diets that ranged from mainly meat with very little plant foods, to mainly fish with a few vegetables and no grains, to mainly vegetables and rice with very little meat/fish.  The only commonalities were that the food was fresh, local, and seasonal.

 

The people surveyed had been eating the same things all their lives and for many generations. All of them were healthy. Their diets were determined by what was available and were shaped by the demands of making a living in their environment. Degeneration didn’t set in until they started switching to modern industrial food.  

 

It’s worth taking some time to contemplate the journey of our modern industrial food from it’s source to our plates. As Scotlyn mentioned in her comment on my first post, this is a “spiritual and etheric journey” as well as a physical one. The food on our plates is an accumulation of the energies from the place it was grown or raised; the handling and processing it has received; and of the people who grew and processed it.

 

Scotlyn also pointed out the relationship between between the eater and the eaten and between the eater and the environment. These relationships are weakened by the long links of connection and damaged by the harms done in industrial production. Our relationships to the places we call home are strengthened by eating what is locally produced and seasonally available.

 

The value of a food can never be reduced to a single component or a single parameter. Food and eating has social and emotional elements as well. Even focussing on the physical aspects of food, as we are here, reveals many complexities. 

 

Whole foods always contain combinations of macronutrients. Animal products are high fat proteins; legumes are high protein carbs. Oil rich nuts and seed are a mix of fat, protein, and carbs. Vegetables foods tend to be mainly carbs (including both soluble and insoluble fibre), but also have more or less protein and fat. All of them also contain specific  micronutrients that have specific roles in maintaining health and immunity.

 

As I mentioned last time the focus throughout human history has been on getting enough food; calories not nutrients was what mattered. The modern world contains unique nutritional challenges. We live in toxic soup. Our bodies need vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, and other specific micronutrients in sufficient quantities to to cope with the load. The micronutrients are the key to maintaining strong immune systems in our toxic world. And yet this is where our industrial food systems and the confusion of mis-information about nutrition really fails us. 

 

“Fresh” vegetables lose vitality in the long journey from field to plate. Oranges picked green to facilitate handling ripen en route and arrive at the market without any detectable Vitamin C. Depleted soils fortified with chemical fertilizers don’t provide the trace minerals needed for healthy plants or people. Water soluble vitamins are lost during food processing. Animals in feedlots don’t get the nutrients they need to be healthy or produce high quality fats and proteins.

 

Nutritional fads and diet “wisdom” also take a toll. Animal fats, demonized as unhealthy for many years, are an important source of the fat soluble vitamins A and D.  Butter and body fat from grass-fed dairy and beef cattle contain Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) converted from omega 6 oils in the grass. CLA is beneficial for weight management and is thought to be protect the heart and have anti-cancer properties.

 

Animals, pastured in areas unsuitable to field crops, or as part of a field crop rotation, convert grass and other non-edible plant matter into high quality humanly usable food which provide micronutrients that have already been converted into forms our bodies can use. (Animal products are currently being demonized as contributors to climate change and I could go on at length about the fallacies involved there, but that’s a whole different topic.)

 

The chemicals that give fruits and vegetables their colours are specific micronutrients. Each colour group has its own unique role in promoting health and strengthening immunity.  Beta carotene, for example, the orange in carrots and squash, is a water soluble precursor to Vitamin A. It is used for one of a series of steps that breaks down toxins and neutralizes them so they can be eliminated. Other vitamins, particularly C and  E,  and the minerals, selenium and zinc, are needed to make sure this process doesn’t stall out while the toxins are not yet fully neutralized. All of the colours in fruits and vegetables enhance immunity. Each different colour group has different  benefits. 

 

Other plant foods have other micronutrients that work in other ways. Nuts and seed, rich in Omega 6 oils  produce sterols and sterolins that are immune modulators. Omega 6 oils are the most recent addition to the list of nutritional “evils” but as part of whole food, complete with the anti-oxidants that prevent them from becoming damaged, they also contribute to healthy immunity. 

 

Edible mushrooms are another source of immune supportive micronutrients. Mushrooms and other fungi are a unique life forms, more closely related to animals than either fungi or animals are to plants. (Technically “mushrooms” are the fruiting body of a massive underground creature called “mycelium”. The mushroom is the apple; the mycelium is the tree.) They produce a class of complex carbohydrates called “polysaccharides.” These ultra long chain sugars tune up our immune systems and improve immune function. They also produce many other  complex chemicals with a range of benefits to human health.

 

In the next (and, I hope, final) post on food and health I will go into specific foods for immunity and the micronutrients they offer. Fair warning though, my list bears only a slight resemblance to the lists of exotic foods usually classed as “superfood.”