Nutrition Madness

For decades the battle has raged – butter versus margarine and the inherent evils or benefits of both. Vegetable-oil-based margarines surged in popularity as doctors began to understand the dangers of the evil saturated fat. But the debate was not so simple. Some margarines have unhealthy trans fats. And, of course, butter is an "all-natural" choice. This dispute swung back and forth in public forum. For years it was butter, then it was margarine you would hear about touted in the press as the new saviour of mankind, then butter again.

It became very symbolic for me, highlighting the idiot nature of the human creature and the convictions we stand on.

The Earth is flat; the Earth is round.

Are we sure this time?

Because we experience a perceptual shift, more evidence becomes apparent and suddenly everything changes.

So it is with nutrition and these days you only have to pop in Facebook once a day to see which way the tide is flowing on whatever new nutritional trend.

On the butter/margarine matter... at this point in evolution, the American Heart Association suggests buying soft, trans-fat-free spreads instead of regular butter or margarine, just so you know what's hip these days.

So what about Raw Foods which have been all the rage this past decade?

Raw Foods are unprocessed so you don’t get the inherent nutrient losses that come with cooking. But the assertion by raw food advocates that eating raw foods boosts your digestion by preserving “vital” plant enzymes, does not hold up to scrutiny. Apparently those enzymes are produced for the survival of the plants and are not essential for human health; their contribution to digestion is at best minimal. Science tells us (if we can believe science at this point) that the human body is actually very efficient at producing the necessary enzymes and it will continue to do so as long as we live.

There are some amazing raw food recipes and it's refreshing to eat uncooked sometimes, but that's as much as I'm going to say on the matter. It's an option.

Here's another long-standing myth for you: If you eat food late at night it will turn to fat. I've been hearing people say it since I was a young knee-high whipper-snapper.

Dr John Foreyt, the director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine says this on the subject - “Calories are calories are calories, and it doesn’t matter what time you eat them. What matters are the total calories you take in.”

Another prevailing weight theory is that you will put on extra fat due to eating foods your body can't process like wheat or dairy. But the body's inability to process these foods would mean that those foods would not be metabolized and therefore not turned into calories. Simple chemistry, that one.

Then there's multi-vitamins and pro-biotics.

It seems obvious, right? The body requires all these vitamins and minerals and healthy bacteria to maintain itself and we are told that more and more these days the food we eat is lacking in these things, therefore we need to boost our systems with these extremely expensive pills. But the actual evidence that they improve health for most people is weak and inconsistent. It's been proven that they may even cause harm in some cases. And out of the few tests that did turn up positive results, guess who funded those specific tests?

There is one school of thought that proposes that the body cannot fully assimilate these vitamins from such a source, that other elements from the plant are required to assist the body in metabolizing, which would make vitamin tables utterly redundant – if it's true. Also multivitamins contain large amounts of pretty much everything under the sun, most of which you probably don’t need. If you believe you have a nutrient deficiency, then it would be a whole lot smarter to supplement with only that specific nutrient you are in need of.

It's the same with pro-biotics. I'm not going to go into the deep science of it because it's boring. You probably already know that the intestinal tract is host to several strains of healthy bacteria, most of which are required for a happy digestive system. Biotic means life.

Those bacteria, they are alive in there. You might want to consider the intelligence of buying apparently live bacteria in pill form, kept in a jar, in a fridge for years on end.

Just saying.

If you feel you are lacking in biotics for some reason, fermented foods will give you a much greater variety and complexity of beneficial bacteria than probiotic supplements ever could.

Real Food is Always Best.

I remember years ago reading a book by Deepak Chopra and he was discussing this experiment that had been done on one hundred men, all over fifty years of age, all with terrible dietary habits that ran decades deep. They took fifty of those gentlemen and they forced them into a healthy diet of salads and fruit and fish and no more cigars or whiskey or red wine or whatever it was they where into before, also they took on strict exercise regimes. The other fifty were the control group; they got to continue on as they were. The experiment basically just observed these guys over the next ten years and watched as all those gentlemen who adopted the new healthier lifestyles died of heart attacks. There were a portion of those maintaining the bad habits who died of such problems but the higher percentage was in the group who had shifted to a more conscious lifestyle.

I'm not sure what it tells us, this experiment; perhaps that sometimes it's just too late for change? Let's hope not. But maybe it just tells us that we don't know as much as we think we do about anything.

I would suggest that the best possible solution would be to ignore all the bullshit and theories and proposed cure-all solutions and just listen to your own body. It has been suggested that we are drawn to foods because of deficiencies we may have. I know this has been true for me for instance with liver (which I dislike but now and then get strong urges to eat – one would assume because of some iron deficiency), but on top of that is the emotional craving we all experience with food. Because I also crave chocolate. Often. Is that craving born from some deficiency of nutrients which chocolate has? Probably not. Or I crave bread or pasta because it gives me a very grounded feeling inside but I'm not at all convinced that this grounded feeling is a good thing. It's an addiction. I feel safer with a large lump of undigested crap in my stomach. It's just a feeling I got used to.

So even if we are to listen to our own bodies, we need to learn to discern which part we are listening to.

This is the same as with everything in reality though, right? Which voice do we listen to? The one run by fear or greed or guilt or the quieter one that urges you to stop or go left without rhyme or reason.

This seems like the only sure way to eat right, by trusting in our own deeper instincts. Because it has to be clear by now, that those big corporations, they own most of the scientists; there is agenda running thick there. And even if that weren't the case, is it not apparent that the scientists, with all their absolute conviction are constantly getting it wrong... that the goal posts keep shifting?