The Simplicity of Nutrition

This is either a long story or a short book.

A famous self-help guru wanted to help with health issues. He said he read thirty health books in as many days and declared, “I’m now totally confused!” He probably came to the conclusion I reached. The experts are often guessing or regurgitating someone else’s mistakes. Considering the average American’s state of health, they guess poorly. There are so many obese, and/or unhealthy that a wise plan would be to find out what everybody is doing and do the exact opposite.

You can’t blame the experts for everything. Most folks won’t do what they’re told is good for them even if the data is accurate. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Junk food is made to appeal to the taste buds and our addiction to sugar, vinegar and salt. Junk food is cheaper than healthy food, if you can find any healthy food at all. A pound of honey is $5.95. A pound of sugar is fifty cents. Fruit is picked before it ripens in the sun, so the vitamin content is diminished. Any fruit or vegg product that is pasteurized has the vitamins cooked out of it to make it safer. If you analyze the total nutritional deficiencies of the average man, it’s a miracle we’re even alive. It must be all the preservatives.

Ignorance seems to be as old as dirt. I remember commercials on black and white television suggesting a light lunch of cottage cheese and canned peaches. So, we’ve made some progress, but we’ve also gotten sillier. I knew we’d gone beyond the twist when I saw sitting on the grocery shelf… Richard Simmons’… Fat Free… Caramel Corn. Just how much fat is there in corn and cane sugar anyway? It’s 99% carbohydrates. Every fad food was touted as fat-free for decades after scientists knew that fat doesn’t produce body fat because the words Fat Free increased sales. Carbohydrates create fat. Carbs include, of course, corn and sugar. One thing should have tipped you off. Richard Simmons is a fatty. He even gives exercise a bad rep. Cereal is another carbohydrate that quietly un-healthies us while we think we’re healthy having that hearty breakfast. Quaker Oats hired Wilford Brimley to campaign for a warm, heaping bowl of carbs for breakfast. What were they thinking? Wilford is a pickle barrel with legs. Remember the plan to do the exact opposite of the popular thing? Well, guess what’s the worst plan for starting your day? Yup. A hearty breakfast.

You just woke up from a fine rest. You shouldn’t need fuel first thing in the morning. Motivation, yes. Fuel, no. Are the four bowls of Coco Puffs or biscuits and gravy supposed to keep you going strong all morning long? Then why are you slapping yourself and guzzling coffee at 10am to make it to lunch break without getting fired? I know — motivation deficiency. Ever feel sleepy after a heavy meal? Thanksgiving dinner ring a bell? It wasn’t just the Detroit Lions who put you to sleep all afternoon; it was the traditional feast of nine different carbs, the roast beast and the token vegg that nobody touched. It takes energy to digest heavy food (carbs and protein). High water content food (fruits and veggies) take little energy to digest and give you the most energy in return. Fruit for breakfast will get you to lunch, since you’d be fine with no breakfast at all. Fruit is also a carb so it won’t help slim you down, but it may keep you from crashing your face into a keyboard.

Then lunch could be your heavy hitter since your body is geared toward digestion on the afternoon shift. The night shift is needed to assimilate the new building material into the new you (I hope the new you isn’t a bag of Simmons’ Caramel Corn). A light supper, not too close to bedtime is recommended. A heavy meal at night will put the digestion crew back to work and the assimilation crew will be laid off. All these principles are laid out in the hit series Fit For Life, where it is also suggested that heavy breakfasts interfere with your natural housekeeping systems. If digestion becomes the morning priority, purging of toxins is diminished and the poisons begin to accumulate. When toxic levels are life threatening, you’re amazing body wraps the poisons in cellulite and stores them like barrels of nuclear waste. That “cottage cheese” on your hip…. might be from cottage cheese. I’m sorry. Did you think dairy food was healthy? Who told you that, the American Dairy Association?

I’m not going to list all of the common foods which could be classified as toxic. It’s long and depressing. I do think one item should have been obvious. Milk. You’ve been hypnotized by the people who need to sell this stuff for a living. You think drinking a cold glass of moo juice is as natural as a glass of orange juice. That’s because it’s in a glass. Imagine, instead, drinking the milk in its natural state. Go out into a pasture, crawl under Elsie and drink directly from the teat. Not so normal now, eh? And did you miss the fact that Elmer the bull got his ingredients for his glue from Elsie? Casein is a substance extracted from bovine milk to make a French painting medium by the same name and is the constituent of common school glue. But don’t I need the calcium? Elsie doesn’t drink milk for calcium, but she can deliver eight gallons of milk every day for her hungry 400 lb. boy. We should get our calcium from the same place Elsie does — grain and green vegetables. In fact, the calcium in bovine milk is not easily assimilated by humans. Human milk doesn’t contain Elmer’s Glue and nature intended for humans to give up drinking it about the time teeth appear. The consumption of dairy products has increased in the last three generations, and so has osteoporosis. How can that be? If you coat your intestines with Elmer’s Glue and then eat something that has appropriate calcium, like broccoli or spinach, it’s going to have a harder time getting through the membrane so, the presence of milk will actually rob you of calcium. That shouldn’t concern you, though. You don’t eat broccoli or spinach.

Having said that, I am from Wisconsin and I wouldn’t give up cheese if I learned it was carcinogenic. Maybe the glue in cheese is coagulated and causes no problems. It’s unsubstantiated, but it’s all I’ve got. In any case, I counted the cost, and it’s worth the risk. Whenever I eat something unhealthy, I at least counter it with an antidote. If I eat potato chips, I wash them down with carrots. If I drink milk, I fast for three days taking only water and several enemas. Just kidding. I never drink milk. Milk is only for baking and getting cereal wet, which I sometimes have for lunch or dinner. I eat the cereal and dump the milk. One final note: Seniors beware. I was reading the fine print on a popular meal substitute drink for your age group. These people are exploiting those who have a sluggish appetite and poor eyesight. The main ingredient of this concoction was calcium caseinate. Casein — ate? You don’t think that’s…? They wouldn’t! Elmer?

And now for some Uncommon Sense

How do we simplify nutrition? C’mon! An animal can do it! The way I see it, eating is the process of re-creating your body parts with duplicates of the parts that wore out. So if you know what your body is originally made of, you can just replenish your cells with the same materials. It’s not that these foods are healthy. These commodities are you. The body is made of carrots, lettuce, apples, a bit of grain, seeds and lots of water. So when you eat or drink those, you’re replacing the old with the new and that should maintain a youthful vigor. You are not made of refined sugar, disodium guanylate, cow’s milk and aspartame. These are recent developments and as far as the body is concerned, they are hostile invaders. We have a long history of eating whole grain, but not in the quantities that the average man consumes flour. The three main allergens are milk, sugar and flour. You know those people who are lactose intolerant? Well, they’re normal. We should all have allergic reactions to milk intended for cattle. Somehow, most of us have built up a tolerance for it. With flour products and sugar, it’s a simple case of overdose. The body is 75% water, so your diet should be also. Fruits and veggies are mostly water, and water is mostly water. Starches and protein are mostly “stuff”, so they should make up a quarter of your diet. I should clarify here that when I say “diet” I don’t mean as in “on a diet”. I mean in the Greek definition of the word, which is, “way of life”. Food for thought (I hope you weren’t very hungry).

The more water and high-water-content foods you consume, the more easily the toxins are carried on the river out of your body through your pores and through…. you know. If we’re low on fluids, a muddy stream is not going to function efficiently and the backup is going to lead to excess baggage. What you assume is fat might be toxins in storage. So let’s say you’re interested in reducing concentrated food intake to around 25% of your total diet. How do you divide that up between carbs and protein? When Arnold was training for Mr. Universe competitions and, apparently, teaching, he wrote that his diet was a mere 1% protein. That doesn’t seem right, but the truth is you don’t need to eat protein at all. Proteins are made from a combination of amino acids and those are in everything. Produce is loaded with them as is grain. There are seven needed to form the protein molecule and only four of those have to come from food. To have a protein deficiency, you’d have to eat nothing but bricks. The amount of carbs you consume is up to you and your particulars. How active are you? How susceptible are you to weight gain? Carbs are fuel and usually heavy in calories. As long as the entire intake is burned up, there shouldn’t be any penalties. If you’re obsessed with Simmons’ Caramel Corn, fine. Just counter it with aerobic exercise and hydration. If you have a problem with water retention, eliminate flour, sugar and milk completely. Check the results after a few weeks. If you’ve lost excess water, reintroduce one of the unholy trinity at a time and see if you can deduce which are the culprits. I bet they all are.

Can we simplify even further? Of course we can. We want to replenish what the body is originally made of, yes? It can only be made of three things, because there are only three things available. Go ahead, guess. You’ll never guess. The only three building materials here are earth, wind and fire. “You’re a shinin’ star. No matter who you are….” No, not the band Earth Wind and Fire. The only material available is sunlight, the earth and the atmosphere. The air and the oceans are combinations of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen gases. These building blocks of the universe are essential to life, as we know it. Some organisms can live without air, but none can live without H2O. What we get from the earth we classify as minerals while what we know as vitamins are stored solar energy. Is that not cool? That is so cool.

Nutrition doesn’t come any more basic than that. Replenish yourself with plenty of pure water, and the minerals and solar energy stored neatly in plants. The more time a fruit or vegetable spends ripening in the sun, the better it tastes and the deeper its color. For exhibit A, taste a hydroponically grown tomato (recognized by its anemic pink skin), and eat a red tomato grown to maturity in the sun. A word of caution — you may never bring yourself to eat a store bought, sun-starved tomato ever again, so if you can’t frequent the local farmers stand or grow your own, you may want to take my word for it. Nature lures us to the vitamin content via the taste, smell and color of the fruit. Let that be your guide.

When you analyze the overall nutritional value of the basic fare provided by local vendors, you conclude that you may as well eat for filler, and get your nutrition from vitamin/mineral supplements. If you do, however, it’s only effective if the supplements are in liquid or powdered form so you can mix them in a jug of water or juice and take a swig every few hours, which is as long as vitamins remain in the body before they’re flushed out. The once-a-day pill routine is a total waste of money.

How old are you?

While we’re not doing ourselves any favors with our unhealthy lifestyles, we still obsess over staying young and vibrant. Old age is the wolf at the door that keeps us in a constant state of anxiety. Just as thinking about how tired you are makes you more tired, thinking about how old you are speeds up the inevitable. I have great news… you’re not getting old. I also have bad news… you’re wearing out. I have some explaining to do on the good news. If you’re asked how old you are and you say, “I’m 40.” I want you to know that you can’t be that old. It only means you were born about forty years ago. At that time you weighed 7 lbs. 4 oz. and had fluffy pink skin. Do you still have that body? Obviously not. So, why are you counting from there? Think about that thoroughly. I’m your new best friend, right? Certainly, as you were maturing, you gradually replaced your body for a new, larger model. Should you start the clock when you were fully grown? Subtract 18 years and claim to be 22? Guess again. The mature you is continuously replaced with newborn cells at such a rate that you are actually between zero and three years old. We are actually being born and dying at the same time. New bone cells appear out of the marrow in the bone while old cells on the outside dry up and are carried off and disposed of or recycled. Protein based cells can be dismantled, the amino acids removed and used in new cells. So, the next time you’re tempted to talk about “these tired old bones” remind yourself that they’re barely old enough to go to school.

So why do ‘old’ people look old? Here comes the bad news. The body can wear out for a number of reasons. Lack of antioxidants, too much sun, and toxic substances are a few of the physical causes. There are others that aren’t as tangible. Stress doesn’t just make you feel tired, it accelerates deterioration. The worry you have about wrinkles helps create them. In a TV show, a con man posing as a physician studied his victim’s face with a look of concern. “Tell me, are you tired when you wake up in the morning? Do you have a loss of appetite after eating? Let me take your temperature.” In minutes the healthy mark is hyperventilating, feverish and nauseated. In real life, this joke is not funny. Patients told they have cancer or heart problems usually take a nose dive after hearing the diagnosis. How does knowing about it make you sicker? It happens because your body is listening, not to what you’re thinking as much as what you’re feeling. When you’re happier, you’re healthier, regardless of how good or how grim your present state is. So instead of spiraling downward, you can laugh your way to ever increasing health. It works just as well for keeping yourself young. It’s so powerful that your rate of decline has slowed down ever since you heard that you’re not more than three years old. Just knowing a principle makes it work in you. That’s how ‘aging’ got to you. Hell, everybody around you was getting old. You thought you had no choice but to join them.

Sadly for me, I didn’t learn this until I thought I was 42. Some damage had already been done. But honestly, I lost more hair in my thirties than I did in my forties. Hair loss isn’t really bad health anyway, it’s genetics. I come from a long line of defective people. There’s also the possibility that bald guys are just further evolved from the other primates. I have another theory about the effect of wearing hats. Women have been going bald on their bodies for about a million years and are ahead of the men in this regard. That’s because since ancient times, they stayed around the fire and in the cave taking care of the cubs while men were still out in the cold hunting. It’s because of clothing that our bodies are going bald. We started losing our own fur when we put on the fur of other critters. We can change the things that have to do with functional health. If you say you’ve tried positive thinking and it didn’t work, I’ll tell you why it didn’t. What you call positive thinking is just a frosting of positive on top of a huge steaming pile of negative thinking. My report is: I feel about half my ‘age’. It’s an awesome thing to be 60 years old, technically, but you feel and act like a 30 year old. Immaturity actually helps keep you physically young. Come to think of it, I’ve always acted about half my age. It didn’t work as well when I was 16 as it does now, but it explains a lot. I preferred hanging out with my high school buddies while girls…..scared the hell out of me. Later on I discovered what a good instinct that was.

Somewhere in southern Russia there’s a secluded valley where the inhabitants run a tea plantation. Cut off from the world, they aren’t influenced by our nonsense about aging. They don’t keep track of the years and they’re just as physically able to work after age 100 as we do in our prime. They also highly honor the experienced tea masters, so instead of fearing the autumn of their life, they look forward to it. When the community was discovered, biological tests were done to determine their age, since no birth records were kept. Some of the tea farmers were upwards of 140 years old. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I gotta get me some of that tea!

Another report documented the lifestyle of a 110 year old woman who kept active as if her years were not catching up to her. She smiled a lot, her diet was nothing remarkable and she loved oil painting. In this televised news story the question, “Is there a longevity gene” was asked. What if there was? Would we seek to identify it and plant it in others so they could also live to 110? Surely they’ll research it, somehow costing us millions of dollars and the answer will remain an enigma like the cure for cancer. I’ve done my research and I offer it to you for just $19.95. There is more longevity inherent in her smile and her love of oil painting than in her DNA. Living happy and content is a cure for premature death whether it comes by natural causes, cancer or heart failure. He who laughs, lasts. Make sure you have a fun, relaxing hobby too. You’ve chosen the right diversion if time flies while you’re into it. So we can’t catch a break. We’ll live longer, but it won’t seem like it.

While I’m writing this, one of the top three concerns in the U.S. is health care. Everyone is clamoring, “Why can’t I have affordable health care?” I have a better question? Why is everybody sick? I can understand having insurance for emergencies, but Americans want a plan that allows them regular visits to a physician and a pharmacy. Something’s wrong if we need to be repaired all the time. When you have a vehicle that’s in the shop constantly, you get rid of it. We can’t do that with our human vehicle. We have to maintain it. Our approach to medicine and treatment can be illustrated by the tale of a crowd of people on the shore of a river. Suddenly there’s a cry for help and someone is seen floundering by in the swift waters. There’s a doctor on shore who jumps in and rescues the man. While he’s doing CPR he hears the scream of another drowning victim and jumps in again. Before he can revive the second victim, two more wash down the river crying for help, so he jumps in again. He is so busy trying to save these people he has no time to go upstream and find out who’s throwing them in!

Most of medical school studies focus on fixing sick people. Much less is invested in teaching, or coaching healthy habits so that fewer people will need to be fixed. An auto mechanic would not wish for cars that never need repair. They’d be out of business. Since most of the nonsense of human life is tied to self-promotional corruption and the root of all evil, why not doctors too? Teaching preventative maintenance would not keep them busy fixing people. If doctors had to depend on people like me, they would need a second job. Following the simple plan at the front of this chapter, I manage quite well without ever seeing a doctor, except when I’m forced to get a physical for some reason. He usually asks me why I don’t come in regularly, since that’s the perfectly natural thing to do. I never miss the opportunity to ask them why the average life expectancy of an MD is 55 years. Do I have it in for doctors? Not at all. When you need them, you really need them. I do have it in for those keeping the problems alive and just masking symptoms. I’m not into conspiracy theories about deadly disease research, but how many billions are spent on lab research with so few cures? What do you expect when the system funds the research only until a cure is found? If you fail, you continue to be funded. Alas, it’s sometimes a real challenge to feel happy.

That’s all I have to say about that. I highly recommend you put your quality of life in the hands of someone who truly cares about your wellness. You.