What Is Quality in Nutrition?
It’s all about diversity…
There is an incredible amount of confusion around nutritional science.
Thanks to the influence of governments, Influential food and agricultural companies, politics, personal biases and so many more variables this field is certainly well studied but not well understood.
A Search for the perfect human diet has failed, Bio-individuality comes out on top. Different Humans have different needs, who would have thought?
Standardized diets and fast foods have made humanity the sickest it has ever been with more than a quarter of humanity being overweight.
Disease and Autoimmune issues are at an all-time high.
Profit-driven Megacorporations are exporting these principles around the world. Every nation that begins to adopt these modern ways of eating follows the same trajectory.
Our relentless approach to optimize agricultural growth has devastated soil health and brought many species to extinction.
The food we eat is intimately connected to our health and the health of our planet.
So where does that leave me? What gives Food these healing properties that are not contained in a can of soda?
And How can I identify which one is going to help me?
At the end of the day, it comes down to one thing: QUALITY.
The quality of the food you eat will be the greatest determinator of your health and Weight.
Quality arises from Diversity.
The more diverse the environment from the source of your food, the higher the quality. The higher the quality, the better off you and the environment will be.
Let me explain:
There are different perspectives we can take to look at our nutrition.
The first and grossest perspective is a macro point of view:
Foods can be separated into Proteins, Fats, and Carbohydrates.
Proteins can be disassembled into amino acids which serve as building blocks for hormones, neurotransmitters, parts of the cell membrane, enzymes, and much more. They are what enable our body to communicate and build.
Fats can be used as building material to embed these proteins into so complex structures as the brain can arise. It can also be used as a fuel and is a precursor for a lot of hormones.
And Carbohydrates can be used for energy production at this layer.
None of these macronutrients are good or bad. They are simply like words in a song.
Words can be great
Or they can teach hate
Or even worse they can degrade
Either way, they are necessary but some of these essential building blocks just allow for a better foundation.
Not all protein, fats, or carbohydrates are equal
Let’s take this one step further to better understand.
The next common perspective in Nutrition is the world of micronutrients:
These include mainly Minerals and Vitamins.
And suddenly there are A LOT more variables to look at.
They are used like a currency to keep all the different functions in the human body running.
Deficiencies can lead to serious malfunctioning and issues down the line.
Nutrients and Vitamins are also called „Co-factors“ because they
“co-operate” with gene activity. Without them, our cells are not able to replicate or produce new proteins.
There are TONS of different forms of these and they are all interconnected.
The study of minerals for example shows this pretty well.
Being deficient in one mineral will lead to deficiencies in other minerals if the root cause is not fixed.
Let’s take this another step further. I think you will begin to understand where I am going with this:
Because we can not only look at smaller parts but also their interactions.
One example of this is one of the most promising emerging fields of study. The Human Biome.
A complex Web of microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, viruses, and yeasts we find on every complex organism.
This takes a whole other leap in complexity Mapping the different strains of organisms is near impossible, especially because they do not function as a separate unit but as a connected whole.
To give you an idea.
- Some gut bacteria can ferment certain carbohydrates and produces short-chain fatty acids which can be used by certain cells in the gut to keep the lining intact.
- They can also produce Neurotransmitters like Serotonin.
- They take over the majority of functions of our immune system.
- Only bacterial DNA outnumbers our human DNA
- Things like mRNA von plants have been shown to change the genetic expression of these bacteria.
This becomes especially interesting because the same diversity we can find in our gut can be found on our skin or in healthy soil or on a fresh piece of carrot. And that is a good thing.
The more diverse the biome, the more resilient it becomes to stressors like a pathological virus.
The more diverse life on your food is, the more resilient and healthy will that food be, and the better off you will be eating that food because it increases the diversity of the organism that you call you.
Just to complete this journey I want to take it one last step further:
Because all of this can also be viewed at from a quantum or energetic perspective.
That literally adds another quantum leap in complexity to it.It shows how every particle is influenced by every other particle anywhere at any time.
The interesting part about this is, that we can see all of this in every food we have, just to different degrees.
But every food contains proteins, fats, and carbohydrates
And every food contains minerals and vitamins
And every food is built from even smaller parts that are at a certain point indistinguishable from the environment.
We eat the environment and all the diversity it inhabits from every bite of food we eat.
The higher the degree of that diversity, the higher the quality of our food.
So why am I telling you all this?
I wanted to make an example of how infinitely complex just food can be.
Every reductionist approach to unravel this complexity has failed.
It is the diversity itself that balances itself out.
The more we begin to remove variables the easier it becomes to balance out. Undesirable change happens more quickly.
An example of that is the use of pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics on commodity crops like wheat or corn.It kills the diversity of all of the microorganisms that make that crop and its environment stable.That, in turn, makes the crop more and more reliable on the use of fertilizers and even more poisons while in turn losing the complexity of vitamins and minerals as well as proteins and fats.
After some processing, we are left with only sugar and some harmful proteins. an infinite web of complexity stripped away that would have balanced this out.
A long story short:
If you want to increase the quality of your food, ask yourself what the source of that food is.
Where did it come from?
And how diverse was the environment of that?
Is that a piece of meat from a factory, with an animal that was fed with wheat and soy and antibiotics?
Wheat and soy that was grown in a monoculture? sprayed with pesticides and herbicides?
Genetically modified, designed in a sterile lab.
Where is the diversity in that?
or was that piece of meat from an animal that spent its entire life outside, in the sun. Eating grass and other wild herbs that just happen to grow in that environment. With Access to sunlight, fresh air, water, and community?
Every and every single one of these parts having a near-infinite complexity in itself.
Which one has more diversity?
Which one is of higher quality?
Which one is better for the environment?
Which one is better for your health?
This should not even be a question we have to ask ourselves.
If you want to eat healthier. Don’t follow any diet, don’t go low carb or vegan or whatever. Try to improve the Quality of whatever it is you are eating first.
Start from the bottom, then you can work yourself up to the grossest point of view. The modification of macronutrients.
Of course, at the end of the day, this also has to overlap with your range of compatible foods.
But the higher the quality of the food you have, the higher the probability of compatibility.
The best thing we can do to assure the quality of our food is to ask one simple question:
Where did that come from?
