Table of Contents
The 5 most important facts you should know about nutrition!
Without doubt, nutrition is the most conflicting, confusing, and contradictory subjects propagated by myths, memes, lore, institutions and associations.
You can’t help but to be confused about nutrition.
So, in our confusing world of nutrition, maybe we should revisit some commonsense fundamentals!
1. Nutrition is the third fundamental for life!
Fact: Nutrition is the third fundamental required to sustain life (only preceded by air and water)!
Yet, nutrition remains the most underestimated, underrated, and ignored fundamental required for a healthy life. As you know air, water, foods, and shelter, respectively, are the four fundamentals required to sustain life.
The quality of each of these fundamentals are directly associated with health and disease — the quality of your life.
As a fundamental, the primary purpose of nutrition is to provide a dynamic balance of essential nutrients for optimal health. Essential nutrients such as minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids must be consumed in the diet because they cannot be manufactured or synthesized by the body.
By maintaining a dynamic balance of essential nutrients, you have the greatest potential for a long and healthy life.
Nutrition is not an “alternative” therapy. Nutrition IS the third fundamental required to sustain life!
As gasoline (or diesel) is fuel for your car, nutrition is fuel for your mind and body. Without fuel, it is impossible to produce energy.
2. Your nutritional needs are unique!
Fact: You are a unique individual, with diverse nutritional needs!
The late Dr. Roger J. Williams, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas, and a long list of collaborators spent many years investigating and documenting the variability and individuality at the physiological and biochemical levels. Dr. Williams revealed this research in his excellent book Biochemical Individuality, 1956, available through Keats Publishing, Inc.
In summary, Dr. Williams’ research revealed each family member living in the same household and environment has their own unique nutritional needs.
As you will discover throughout this website, numerous factors collectively contribute to your diverse nutritional needs (e.g., stress, medications, environmental exposures, diet, disease processes, drugs, neurological activity, endocrine activity, immune function, genetics, and improper food and supplement choices, toxic elements, and even your thoughts and emotions).
In essence, everything in your life places specific demands on your nutritional biochemistry that creates your unique biochemical individuality resulting in nutrient excesses and deficiencies that are unique to you.
So, stop buying into “canned” or “one size fits all” nutritional advice!
Would you put diesel in your tank when your car requires gasoline (or vice versa)? All fuels (including gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and others) are “chemically individual” to produce optimal energy. You, too, are subject to chemical individuality to produce optimal energy.
3. Nutrient Interrelationships are KEY to nutrition!
Fact: Nutrient interrelationships are the KEY to achieve optimal nutrition!
“Minerals have interrelationships with every other nutrient. Without optimum mineral levels in the body, the other nutrients are not effectively utilized.” Diet And Disease, (1968) ~Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin (author / coauthor of over 700 publications in international science journals and 25 books)
You are familiar with the well-publicized “synergistic” relationship between calcium and vitamin D. However, no one mentions calcium also has a dynamic relationship with magnesium, phosphorous, copper, sodium, potassium, selenium, vitamins K, A, C, E, and many other nutrients.
As you can see, all nutrients possess dynamic interrelationships. Interrelationships are especially important between essential nutrients to maintain complete nutritional balance.
Nutrient interrelationships include any combination of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids. For example, mineral interrelationships include mineral/mineral, mineral/vitamin, mineral/amino acids, and mineral/vitamin/amino acids/fatty acids.
Combinations also include vitamin/vitamin, amino acid/amino acid, and fatty acid/fatty acid. In addition, many nutrients compete for intestinal absorption and cellular utilization.
“There are at least eighteen barriers to mineral absorption, which means that the minerals we consume do not necessarily wind up in our bodies.” Chelated Mineral Nutrition in Plants, Animals And Man, (1982) ~DeWayne Ashmead
When all nutrients are in a dynamic balance, they are synergistic with each other throughout all metabolic pathways in the mind and body. However, when nutrient excesses or deficiencies exist, they become antagonistic toward each other and disrupt metabolic pathways.
Your car requires a complex formula and blend of chemistry (interrelationships) to produce optimal energy. Octane (for gasoline) and cetane (for diesel) is a measurement for the production of optimal energy.
4. Toxins can disrupt your nutritional balance!
Fact: Toxins, including heavy metals, chemical toxins, and metabolic toxins interfere with and deplete essential nutrients!
Thanks to technological advancements (progress), you now live in the most toxic environment ever. With over 80,000 manmade chemicals and the intentional use of heavy metals throughout society, you are constantly exposed too myriad toxins.
It is not possible to avoid exposures!
However, all toxins interfere with many essential nutrients and without sufficient essential nutrients, it is difficult to properly detox the body.
Currently, a laboratory analyses that can determine how many or how much of any toxin remains in your body does not exist. The best that current technology can do is monitor exposure and elimination of toxic elements.
Like your car, any element that does not belong in the fuel such as water, dirt, improper chemicals, improper additives, or any other “toxin”, your car will not perform optimally and without removing all toxins, will produce constant problems (symptoms) and shorten its useful life (disease)!
5. Maintain a proper perspective about nutrition.
Fact: Nutrition is NOT the “cure-all” or “prevent-all” for human health!
Without doubt, nutrition is the ultimate fuel for optimal health. Unfortunately, most people turn to nutrition when the medical system fails in an attempt to improve their health. However, it is important to realize that nutrition may not be a “cure-all” nor a “prevent-all.” Myriad factors completely out of your control such as genetics and epigenetics play important roles for your health throughout every stage of your life. You can thank your parents, grandparents, and great grandparents for this!
As such, optimizing your nutrition by consuming healthy foods specific to your needs may circumvent certain metabolic disorders (symptoms or manifestations) that would potentially result from a state of subclinical malnutrition. This is easily seen with vitamin C and scurvy, vitamin D and rickets, and so on.
However, the point is simple and our only guarantee is this: Optimal nutrition, by means of targeted nutrition, provides your mind and body their best potential to heal!
Like your car, if you neglected regular oil changes and only burned poor quality fuels, you have already accelerated wear on numerous parts and components. You don’t get this wear back by starting to adhere to strict maintenance and fuel quality. However, you may increase the useful life from that point forward. Remember, even with the best maintenance program and only the best of fuel, your car will develop certain problems at some point in time and it will eventually come to the end of its useful life.
Convenient foods are not healthy – healthy foods are not convenient!
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REFERENCES
“The combination of biochemical individuality and known functional utilities of allelic variants should converge to create a situation in which nutritional optima can be specified as part of comprehensive lifestyle prescriptions tailored to the needs of each person.”
Robert B. Eckhardt, Genetic Research and Nutritional Individuality, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 131, Issue 2, February 2001, Pages 336S–339S, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/131.2.336S
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Eckhardt RB. J Nutr. 2001 Feb;131(2):336S-9S. Genetic research and nutritional individuality. Source: Department of Kinesiology, College of Health and Human Development, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
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