So here’s one of the views on nutrition I’ve been studying.
I love getting different views on things. I certainly have my own bias and
beliefs and view the world through those lenses but it is good to hear a
multitude of perspectives. This doesn’t mean I wholeheartedly accept every
belief from any particular author I present but I certainly can learn from
them.
As in all my posts and life in general, I don’t hold tightly
to a lot of my opinions for several reasons: 1. they change J I fully acknowledge
that the more I learn and experience, the more I change as a person, including
my beliefs; 2. I fully believe that we are all created as a beautiful, unique,
and special person and what is true for me is just that; true for me. I never
present anything here as a passing judgement or a broad recommendation but
rather a chance for you to evaluate something, if you care to, and then compare that to what you're doing and see how that is working for you.
All of my
posts are informational and/or educational only. As so many of you have
supported me in the last few years and asked me to keep you up to date with my
journey, this is my effort to do so. Hope you enjoy reading about my journey as
much as I am enjoying the journey itself!
Much peace a love J
Mary
Book: Deep Nutrition,
Why your genes need traditional food – Part 1
(Part 2 will just be notes from her Four Pillars as
described below)
Author: Dr. Catherine
Shanahan & Luke Shanahan
There’s a plethora of information out there on nutrition
(most of it diametrically opposed to itself) and certainly all coming from the
author’s bias. I encourage you to remember that no one knows your body like you
do!
This is not a book review but just a compilation of some of
her writing that made me pause and think. I have not given my opinion either
way on what I’ve read. You’re intelligent and can use your own judgement J
Her main premise: “To identify the most nutritious foods,
Luke and I have studied traditions from all over the world. The goal was not to
identify the “best” traditions, but to understand what all traditions have in
common. We identified four universal elements, each of which represents a
distinct set of ingredients along with the cooking (or other preparation
technique), that maximize the nutrition delivered to our cells. For the bulk of
human history, these techniques and materials have proved indispensable. The
reason that so many of us have health problems today is that we no longer eat
in accordance with any culinary tradition. In the worse cases of recurring illnesses
and chronic diseases that I see, more often than not, the victim’s parents and
grandparents haven’t either. This means that most Americans are carrying around
very sick genes. But by returning to the same four categories of nourishing
foods our ancestors ate – the “Four Pillars” – our personal genetic health will
be regained.” –page 15-16
Her 4 pillars are: 1. Meat cooked on the bone; 2. Organs and
offal; 3. Fresh (raw) plant and animal products; and 4. Fermented and sprouted
– page 20; I will cover her thoughts on this in Part 2 of this post
“Fifty years of removing foods containing these nutrients
from our diets – foods like eggs, fresh cream, and liver – to replace them with
low-fat or outright artificial chemicals – liked trans-rich margarine – would
have starved our genes of the chemical information on which they’ve come to
depend. Simply by cutting eggs and sausage (originally made with lactic acid starter culture instead
of nitrates, and containing chunks of white cartilage) from our breakfasts to
replace them with cold cereals would mean that generations of children have
been fed fewer fats, B vitamins, and collagenous proteins than required for
optimal growth. Here’s why. The yolk of an egg is full of brain-building fats,
including lecithin, phospholipids, and (only if from free-range chickens)
essential fatty acids and vitamins A and D. Meanwhile, low-fat diets have been
shown to reduce intelligence in animals. B vitamins play key roles in the
development of every organ system, and women with vitamin B deficiencies give
birth to children prone to developing weak bones, diabetes, and more. Chunks of
cartilage supply us with collagen and glycosaminoglycans, factors that help
facilitate the growth of robust connective tissues, which would help to prevent
later-life tendon and ligament problems – including shin splints!” – page 14
“The health of your genes represents a kind of inheritance.
Two ways of thinking about this inheritance, genetic wealth and genetic
momentum, help explain why some people can abuse this inheritance and, for a
time, get away with it. Just as a lazy student born into a prominent family can
be assured he’ll get into Yale no matter his grades, healthy genes don’t have
to be attended to very diligently in order for their owner’s bodies to look
beautiful. The next generation, however, will pay the price. We’ve all seen the
twenty-year-old supermodel who abuses her body with cigarettes and Twinkies.
For years, her beautiful skeletal architecture will still shine through. Beneath
the surface, poor nutrition will deprive those bones of what they need,
thinning them prematurely. The connective tissue supporting her skin will begin
to break down, stealing way her beauty. Most importantly, deep inside her
ovaries, inside each egg, her genes will be affected. Those deleterious genetic
alterations mean that her child will have lost genetic momentum and will not
have the same potential for health or beauty as she did. He or she may benefit
from mom’s sizable financial portfolio – a la Danielynn Nichole Smith – but
junior’s genetic wealth will, unfortunately, have been drawn down.” - page 16
“My own father grew up drinking powdered milk and ate
margarine on Wonderbread every day at lunch. My mother spent much of her
childhood in postwar Europe, where dairy products were scarce. Because they had
inherited genetic wealth from their parents, my parents never had significant
soft tissue problems in spite of these shortcomings. But those suboptimal diets
did take a toll on their genes. Much of the genetic wealth of my family line
had been squandered by the time I was born. Unlike my parents and grandparents,
I had to struggle to keep my joints from falling apart. Fortunately for me, my
story is not over – and neither is yours. Thanks to the plasticity of genetic
response we can all improve the health of our genes and rebuild our genetic
wealth.” – page 17
“Every cell of your body contains a nucleus, floating within
the cytoplasm like the yolk inside an egg. The nucleus holds your chromosomes, 46
super-coiled molecules, and each one of those contains up to 300 million pairs
of genetic letters, called nucleic acids. These colorless, gelatinous chemicals
(visible to the naked eye only when billions of copies are reproduced
artificially in the lab) constitute the genetic materials that make you who you
are. If you stretched out the DNA in one of your cells, its 2.8 billion base
pairs would end up totaling two to three meters long. The DNA from all your
cells strung end to end would reach to the moon and back at least 5000 times.
That’s a lot of chemical information. But your genes take up only two percent
of it. The rest of the sequence – the other 98 percent – is what scientists
used to call “junk.” Not that they thought this remaining DNA was useless; they
just didn’t know what any of it was for. In the last two decades, scientists
have discovered this material has some amazing abilities. Epigenetic
researchers exploring this expansive genetic territory are finding a hidden
world of ornate complexity. Unlike genes, which function as a relatively static
repository of encoded data, the so-called “Junk DNA” seems designed for change,
both over the short term – within our lifetimes – and over periods of several
generations, and longer. It appears that Junk DNA assists biology in making key
decisions, like turning one stem cell into part of an eye, and another stem
cell with identical DNA into, say, part of your liver. These decisions seem to
be made based on environmental influences.” – page 23-24
“In a sense, our lifestyles teach our genes how to behave.
In choosing between healthy or unhealthy foods and habits, we are programming
our genes for either good or bad conduct.” – page 26
“What fascinates me most is the intelligence of the system.
It seems our genes have found ways to take notes, to remind themselves what to
do with the various nutrients they are fed. Here’s how. Let’s say a gene for
building bone is tagged with two epigenetic markers, one that binds to vitamin
D and another that binds to calcium. And let’s say that when vitamin D and
calcium are both bound to their respective markers at the same time, the gene
uncoils and can be expressed. If there is no calcium and no vitamin D, then the
gene remains dormant and less bone is built. The epigenetic regulatory tags are
effectively serving as a kind of Post-it note: When there’s lots of vitamin D and calcium around, make a bunch of the
protein encoded for right here. When they do, voila! You’re building bone!
It’s truly an elegant design.” – page 27
“What helps regulate all these cellular events? Food,
mostly. After all, food is the primary way we interact with our environment.
But here’s what’s really remarkable: Those tags that get placed on the genes to
control how they work and help drive the course of evolution are made out of
simple nutrients, like minerals, vitamins, and fatty acids, or are influenced
by the presence of these nutrients. In other words, there’s essentially no
middleman between the food you eat and what your genes are being told to do,
enacting changes that can ultimately become permanent and inheritable. If food
can alter genetic information in the space of a single generation, then this
powerful and immediate relationship between diet and DNA should place
nutritional shifts at the front of the stage in the continuing drama of human
evolution.” – page 31
“Our genes are not written in stone. They are exquisitely
sensitive to how we treat them.” – page 35
“Even today, outside of the field of medicine, many
life-science professionals apply their ability to judge physical attractiveness
without hesitation. When a farmer or a racehorse breeder or a rare orchid
grower sees obvious disruptions in healthy growth, they naturally consider the
nutritional context in which the specimen was raised. If a prize-winning mare
gives birth to a foal with abnormally bowed legs, the veterinarian recognizes
that something went wrong and, often, asks the logical question, What was the mother eating? But
physicians rarely do that, even when life-threatening problems show up right at
birth. And we continue to neglect the nutrition-development equation when our
patients develop scoliosis, joint malformations, aneurysm, autism, schizophrenia,
and so on later in life. If doctors and nutritionists were as willing to use
their basic senses as other professionals, every child would have a better
chance to grow up healthy.” – page 37
“Beautiful people exist not because of luck, but because all
DNA is naturally driven to create dynamically symmetric geometry as its
generating tissue growth. I believe the same mathematic principles that give
order to the universe also govern the growth of every part of every living
thing. A new discipline, called biomathematics, is all about answering that
question. Biomathematicians are confirming that phi and the Fibonacci sequence
are encoded not just in the human face, but in living matter everywhere.
Biomathematics offers us a fundamentally new perspective of the universe and
the living world. It is allowing us to recognize that recurring patterns seen
throughout our living landscape are more than just coincidences. They seem to
reflect the elemental structure and order of the universe itself. This organizing
force, which helps sculpt a beautiful face, also functions during development
of the organ with which you recognize beauty: your brain. Within the jelly-like
matrix inside our skulls, neurons in the human brain form bifurcating tendrils,
called dendrites (meaning branches). We call them dendrites because the
earliest scientist who peering at neurons under a microscope were reminded of
stately, graceful tress. For us to think and learn, these trees must be
properly proportioned. This enchanted forest is the hidden landscape where
beautiful minds are born.” – page 45-47