Food: Use, Misuse, and Abuse
Food is medicine, it affects your well-being. The quality, quantity, and type of nutrients in a food determine how well that food supports you. Food is poison, it can impair, injure, and kill (ask anyone with gluten intolerance or a peanut allergy). Food changes the structure and function of our bodies and can be used to prevent, mitigate, and treat disease. Food, like any other drug, can be used, misused, and abused.
You are what you eat. Food is anything you eat or drink that contains nutrients. Nutrients are essential building blocks your body needs to generate energy, repair, and grow. Examples of nutrients include proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. Bioavailable nutrients are nutrients in concentrations and forms that your body easily recognizes, digests, and can use appropriately.
Until very recently, what we consumed as food was minimally-processed plants and animals that evolved with us, what we now call whole foods. Your body knows how to digest whole foods. In whole foods, nutrients are bundled together so that they stabilize and support each other, making them more available for you to use (as long as you have a working digestive system). This is particularly true of animal foods, such as meat, fish, milk, and eggs, which provide nutrients that you cannot make and cannot get from plants. For example, to be properly digested, fat-soluble vitamins (vitamin A, D, E, and K) need to be eaten with fat. Meat, especially red meat, like beef, contains some amount of fat along with all four vitamins in forms and concentrations that are easy to digest. To get the same amount of nutrition from plants as you get out of a grass-fed burger patty, you’d have to eat a lot more plants and your body has to work much harder to release the nutrients from those plants. While there are benefits to eating plants, there are many benefits to eating animals that should not be forgotten as we seek solutions to climate change.
In the last hundred years, what we consume as food has evolved much faster than we have, with dire consequences to our health. We no longer only consume minimally processed animals and plants. We also consume heavily and ultra-processed foods, including chemical-ladened concoctions that attempt to mimic what nature readily provides. These foods are are less supportive and more taxing to your body than whole foods, because your body has to use resources to deal with the chemicals.
Processed foods are often cheaper and more convenient than whole foods; their hidden cost is that they provide fewer nutrients per dollar and drain your body’s resources. While processing food, bioavailable nutrients are changed or lost. To compensate, synthetic nutrients and other chemicals are added, and that also adds chemical stress to your body. Macaroni and cheese made with fresh pasta and real cheese supports you more than a microwaved bowl of Kraft Mac & Cheese, which supports you more than a bowl of Cheetos Mac n’ Cheese. That’s because actual macaroni and cheese is the least chemical-laden and most nutrient-dense of the three.
The more processed a food is, the more likely that it’s been intentionally formulated to keep you coming back for more. Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to break your addiction to snack foods like Cheetos? The food industry has developed ways to process whole foods and engineer new foods that disrupt your biology, keep you craving and coming back for more, and, most importantly, don’t meet your nutritional needs. The end result is a lack of support for and dysregulation of your biology that shorten your health-span (the number of years you stay healthy) and life.
So, what are healthy food habits? Because everyone is different, it depends. Food is nuanced and moderation is key. Guidelines are simply that, guidelines. Take the lists of “must-eat anti-inflammatory foods” and “super foods” and all the recommendations with which you’re bombarded with a grain of salt. Recognize that they may not work for you. One person’s food is another person’s poison.
Eating healthy means taking ownership of You and eating foods containing components that support Your health and well-being. Start by assessing your health and what deficiencies you may have. Learn what the “experts” say you should be doing and understand why they say you should be doing that. Then, pay attention to the signals your body gives you, such as what you crave and when you crave eating it. This clues you in to what specific nutrients you need. For example, I suffered from frequent breakouts of hives, skin rashes, and allergies with no identifiable triggers. I found myself craving and eating tons of apples and raw onions during this time, which reduced the frequency and intensity of the breakouts. When I researched the nutrient content of apples and onions I discovered they’re both high in quercetin, a compound that stabilizes mast cells, the cells most likely responsible for my hives and allergic reactions. Getting enough quercetin in my diet helps me be less sensitive to my environment and reduces the number of allergic and anaphylactic events I’ve had. Now this is where you might think adding a daily quercetin supplement would stabilize me even further. Yes it did, for a while. But I do not regularly take quercetin supplements because too much quercetin can damage your liver and I didn’t want to constantly have to monitor my liver for damage.
The beauty of eating whole foods rather than taking supplements is that you are rarely able to damage your organs by overdosing on a specific nutrient. I’d have to eat several pounds of apples and onions to get the same dose of quercetin as is found in a pill, but a pill is artificial, processed, and easy to overuse. Beyond being natural and bioavailable, apples and onions contain fiber that acts as a natural feedback mechanism and makes me stop eating because I get full well before I can overdose on quercetin.
When used appropriately, food sustains instead of drains you, because you’re providing building blocks that support your body rather than taxing it. If you live with a serious, systemic autoimmune disease, such as Sjogren’s disease, which causes fatigue that is debilitating, you become acutely aware of all the things in life that are draining, because they increase your allostatic load (“Health Is Wealth”, March 11, 2023). Chemical stress, such as that imposed by a diet rich in synthetic nutrients and chemicals and skincare loaded with the same, cause inflammation, which is energetically taxing. Eating anti-inflammatory whole foods and using skincare products made from whole foods reduces the stress load on your body and frees up energy for healing.
A version of this blog post is published in my local newspaper, The Davis Enterprise.