Nutritional Facts of Life

Taken from an Article Posted on the Selene River Press

Confused by the many mixed messages of nutrition? Don’t be. The original nutrition researchers found the keys to good health and optimal weight to be very simple. Just remember:

1. Food is Holistic in Nature
2. Processed Foods Are the Main Cause of Degenerative Disease
3. Fat is Not the Problem!
4. Organic Whole Foods Are Crucial for Good Health
5. Whole-Food Concentrates Can Help the Body Restore Balance Naturally

1. Food is Holistic in Nature. The nutrition pioneers understood that vitamins and minerals as they appear in nature are not single substances but are groups of substances that work together in a unique way to support the body. This isn’t some metaphysical whim but a biochemical fact.

Vitamin C, for example, is not just ascorbic acid, which is how it is defined today; it is a complex of compounds that includes—in addition to ascorbic acid—bioflavonoids, rutin, the all-important enzyme tyrosinase, and doubtless additional compounds we’ve yet to identify.

Vitamin C always exists this way in food, and isolating a single compound from the C complex, such as ascorbic acid, and then taking it in mega doses is like loading up on a drug. You may feel good at first, but eventually it’s going to cause an imbalance. Simply put, human beings cannot approximate nature.

2. Processed Foods Are the Main Cause of Disease Today. In the 1930s, Dr. Weston A. Price traveled the world to study various isolated “primitive” peoples who had yet to succumb to the “diseases of modernity”—heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, etc.

From the blubber-loving Eskimos of Alaska to the agricultural tribes of Central Africa, Price found that those who stuck to their traditional diets were virtually free of degenerative disease, while those in the groups who had begun to eat processed foods developed the same killer diseases that plague the Western world to this day.

The biggest culprits among the processed foods, Price observed, were always white sugar and white flour. This is not particularly surprising, since neither of these fractionated products resembles anything our bodies have historically metabolized. For instance, today Americans eat about 160 pounds of refined sugar in a year. The healthy primitives in Price’s study? Zero.

3. Fat is Not the Problem! Or rather, natural fat is not the problem. Whereas artificial trans fats—a synthetic, processed food—have been shown to be a significant contributor to heart disease and other degenerative conditions, natural saturated fat has not.

Nor does eating natural fat lead to weight gain. This claim has never been shown scientifically, and in fact a much stronger argument can be made for refined carbohydrates such as white sugar and white flour being the true culprits behind America’s mind-boggling weight gain over the past three decades.

The graphs below show how the obesity rate has changed as we’ve switched to a diet with more carbohydrates and less fat.

You can see on the left that as the obesity rate (blue line) has climbed, the percent of calories that men and women eat as fat has decreased. The percent they eat as carbohydrates, as shown on the right, has increased right along with obesity. Fat is not the problem!

4. Organic Whole Foods Are Crucial for Good Health. The natural human diet was built on foods grown in soil that is rich in minerals and bacteria, both of which are tragically depleted in land that is conventionally farmed.

Moreover, artificial pesticides and fertilizers contribute to toxicity and imbalance in both the human body and the ecosystem. By eating organically raised plants and animals, you supply pure, “full-strength” nourishment to your body and help restore the land to nourish others.

But keep in mind that organic foods can still be processed. Even if what we start with is organic, we cannot fractionate food, cook it to death through pasteurization or refining, throw a few isolated vitamin fragments in it, and expect it to nourish us. This is like smashing a watch and gluing a few of the pieces on your wrist to tell the time.

Nutrition’s early researchers greatly stressed the importance of eating foods that are as close to their natural state as possible, that is, minimally processed and raw or lightly cooked.

5. Whole-Food Concentrates Help the Body to Restore Balance Naturally. Americans get two thirds of their calories from processed foods. Un-coincidentally, we are an extremely sick nation. Years of consuming processed foods has put our health square behind the eight ball.

To right this imbalance, many people reach for prescription drugs or synthetic vitamin fragments. But these artificial antidotes are foreign to the body, and they create more problems than they solve. Just as processed foods are the chief cause of degenerative disease, whole foods are the chief cause of health.

Eating better is often not enough, however. When a person’s biochemistry is out of whack to the level that is common today, concentrated raw-food supplements provide a needed jump start to return the person to balance. Combined with a real-food diet, whole-food concentrates supply the body the nourishment it was designed on, so that it can heal itself.

By learning the true principles of nutrition—by preparing real whole foods and working with healthcare practitioners schooled in the use of whole-food supplements—Americans can achieve a state of health few people realize is natural.