Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
Discover the benefits of a plant-based diet.
Today, health care is synonymous with medical care, and eating healthily has become a science of taking supplements and purchasing packaged foods containing the necessary elements. However, this attitude to health has had severe ramifications for individuals, our environment, and even the political landscape.
So, let us examine the problems in our modern understanding of health. We'll look at different ways of thinking about healthy lifestyles and recommend a whole-food, plant-based diet that could improve everyone's health and longevity.
In this brief, you will learn.
Why medical health care isn't the answer to excellent health.
How Protein is Bad for You;
eating an apple a day may keep the doctor away.
1. A change in nutrition is a more effective way to achieve healthy living than relying on the healthcare system.
The term "healthcare system" is somewhat deceptive in the United States. Rather than caring for healthy people and finding ways to prevent sickness, the system spends most of its time caring for the sick. So, a more fitting name could be the "disease-care system."
Care itself is a significant contributor to the problem. Medical care is the nation's third leading cause of death, trailing only heart disease and cancer.
Every year, over 100,000 individuals are killed by prescription medications intended to treat ailments, and that figure does not include accidental overdoses. Other common medical-related deaths include failed high-risk procedures, contracting pneumonia in hospitals, and patient-care errors.
If all of this is new to you, don't be surprised. Because the medical sector is so lucrative, the government makes every effort to conceal these truths. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not even include "medical care" as a cause of death.
Yes, this is all a little concerning. Therefore, eating a nutritious diet is the best way to avoid needing care. What you consume can both prevent and treat disease.
The food we eat significantly impacts our overall health more than our genes or environment.
The appropriate diet can help us prevent diabetes, strokes, erectile dysfunction, and arthritis. It can even stop and treat the top two killers, heart disease and cancer.
This conclusion was reached after decades of research, and the findings can be found in the author's book, The China Study. The findings demonstrated that a dietary adjustment could reverse severe heart disease and have a more rapid and significant impact on illnesses than any surgery or prescription drug.
What kind of diet can accomplish all this? It is based on plants and whole foods, such as fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and beans, consumed in their original form with no added salt, oils, or sweets.
This diet excludes all animal products and processed meals and comprises 80% carbs, 10% fat, and 10% protein. It's that simple.
2. A plant-based diet can help combat the detrimental oxidative effects of animal protein.
You've probably observed how quickly a sliced apple will turn brown if left on the table. This discoloration is caused by a chemical process known as oxidation. But did you realize that an identical response can occur within your body?
Oxidation is a standard and vital process but can be fatal when used excessively.
It occurs when molecules and atoms clash, and electrons are given away. Even though oxidation aids in transmitting energy and eliminating pollutants, excessive oxidation can produce free radicals, which can promote cancer, heart attacks, and other disorders.
And what causes excessive oxidation? Your diet contains too much protein.
Despite popular belief, you don't need a lot of protein in your diet, especially animal protein.
Researchers in India employed rats to investigate the effects of animal protein ingestion. After exposing the rats to high doses of a known carcinogen, scientists fed one group a meal high in animal protein. In contrast, the other group received a diet low in animal protein.
To their amazement, no rodents on the low-protein diet got cancer. However, every rat on the high-protein diet did.
Decisive outcomes like this are uncommon in clinical trials, but comparable findings were later discovered in a trial with human volunteers.
Plants create antioxidants to protect themselves from oxidation, which we can use.
Plants convert the sun's rays into energy during photosynthesis, which generates free radicals that are equally toxic to plants and humans. Conversely, plants defend themselves by creating antioxidants, which you may absorb when you consume them and keep your body healthy and cancer-free.
3. Modern science is blinded by reductionism, which ignores the big picture.
Our cosmos is vast and full of mysteries, but when we delegate solving these mysteries to experts in various scientific and medical sectors, we risk missing the overall picture. It's like people wearing blindfolds attempting to identify an elephant: one feels the tail and thinks it's a piece of rope, while another touches the trunk and believes it's a branch.
This type of reductionism is currently expected in modern science, but there are other methods of looking at things.
Of course, reductionism is an advantageous technique. We narrow our focus on a specific subject to make it easier to understand, removing distracting material. The human brain operates similarly, with different filters for sight and sound to allow us to effectively comprehend our surroundings.
Reductionism is also the underlying principle of a microscope. By isolating and magnifying a subject, we can better understand its behavior.
However, we get into problems when we need to remember that these tools and procedures are only filters, not the entire picture.
However, this occurs precisely when our scientific and medical professionals spend all their time isolated from one another: reductionists forget the filter exists and believe that understanding one aspect means comprehending the total.
This leads to errors and misjudgments, so we need to adopt a Wholism mindset that values the entire system, which is larger than the sum of its parts.
Reductionists believe that if you understand how each clock component works, you'll understand how everything works. This may be true for simple systems, but this concept falls apart when things become more complicated, such as human beings.
Knowing how the brain's neurons and enzymes work will not help you understand how someone will feel emotionally when they hear their favorite music or see a sunset.
The same is true for how nutrition and diet affect our bodies; you must see the big picture to truly appreciate what is happening.
4. Our bodies digest nourishment more sophisticatedly than nutritional labels indicate.
If you don't bother checking how many micrograms of niacin, often known as vitamin B3, your meal contains before purchasing it, here's some good news: that level of precision could be more useful in the first place.
To begin with, if you want them to follow a healthy diet, you must do more than simply mention ingredients and nutritional information.
Informing people about their eating is beneficial, but providing too much detail can backfire.
People prefer to dismiss information that is as small as current labels. These labels imply that the nutrients listed are more important for your health than those not included.
Furthermore, all the numbers and percentages make it appear that a healthy diet is nothing more than a mathematical equation, even though it is far more complex.
It's pointless to strive to receive precisely 100% of your recommended daily allotment of nutrients because different meals and nutrients are broken down and absorbed differently by our digestive system.
This is partially related to bioavailability, the proportion of a chemical absorbed by the body. Suppose you consume 200 grams of vitamin C. You need to find out how much of it your body will use or how. But don't worry; it's a good thing. Your body will use what it needs at the appropriate time.
Furthermore, the amount of nutrients in our meals varies significantly.
Even if two peaches look similar, one may contain up to 40 times more beta-carotene than the other. There are different causes for this, including the quality of the soil in which they were produced, the amount of sunlight they received, and even the season in which they grew.
So, researching labels is pointless. The easiest method to get all of the nutrients you require is to eat a diverse whole-food diet that includes some of the more unusual fruits and vegetables you may have overlooked in the past.
5. Taking supplements is less beneficial than eating whole foods.
The vitamin supplement industry is relatively robust in the United States. Over half of the population regularly consumes vitamin supplements, generating $30 billion in revenue for the supplement business alone in 2007.
However, many buyers must know that most of these supplements are a good use of money.
There have been countless studies on the benefits of supplements, but after combining the findings, there is no conclusive proof that they provide long-term health benefits.
Some people, such as those who are iron or iodine-deficient, may benefit significantly from a supplement. However, persons in genuine need account for only a tiny portion of the market, and even in these cases, the supplement will be ineffective compared to eating something closer to the nutrient's original chemical state, such as the natural iodine found in dried kelp.
Finally, the multibillion-dollar vitamin sector stands to benefit the most from supplements.
Supplements are often ineffective because they need more than hundreds of thousands of additional nutrients in entire foods, such as fruits and vegetables.
We don't know much about these additional chemical nutrients, but we do know they play a vital part in how the body processes the necessary vitamins and nutrients. This is why eating an apple is significantly more nutritionally beneficial than taking a supplement that claims to provide the same elements.
A study that compared vitamin C supplements to apples discovered that just two apple slices had the antioxidant potency of three vitamin C doses or 1,500 milligrams of the vitamin. However, examination revealed that the apple contained fewer than six milligrams of vitamin C.
As a result, it had to be the hundreds of other chemical components in the apple that either have a similar antioxidant effect or make the modest amount of vitamin C more effective. In any case, the apple is clearly more nutritious.
6. Switching to a plant-based diet could help to solve many of the world's issues.
A whole-food, plant-based diet is not only healthier for humans, but it is also better for the environment.
To prevent global warming, we need to minimize harmful emissions like CO2 and methane, and reducing the number of animals would be a practical step towards that aim.
According to conservative estimates, the livestock business is responsible for 20% of global warming, whereas the World Bank puts the figure closer to 51%.
Methane emissions from cows and cattle contribute to the problem since they are 25% more potent than CO2 at absorbing heat in our atmosphere. Methane is an even more significant issue than CO2 since it degrades in the atmosphere much faster. Reducing this hazard today would have a direct and immediate impact.
If our environment isn't cause enough, consider the terrible methods of modern factory farming.
Animal suffering has escalated as factory farms have become more efficient.
This is especially true for US farms classified as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). On such farms, overcrowding and cruel mutilation are widespread.
Animals are pumped full of hormones to speed up their growth, and high doses of antibiotics are administered to prevent infection in their densely packed enclosures. However, if an infection develops, the animal is usually amputated before it worsens.
The most excellent way to oppose these practices is to stop purchasing factory-farmed meat and dairy.
This industry's tactics are not only unsustainable but also lead to global poverty, malnutrition, and death.
The livestock on these farms consume significantly more food yearly than the entire global population. Despite this, millions of people die from malnutrition each year.
To make matters worse, factory farm
Businesses are purchasing property worldwide, chopping down trees, eroding the soil, and poisoning it with fertilizers.
7. Corporate profits influence the food and medical industries more than health.
You may wonder why the advancement of nutritional knowledge has not resulted in a healthier population.
To work this out, we need to look at the medical and food businesses vested in the government's food and health policy.
The medical and pharmaceutical industries are primarily companies. Thus profits take precedence over a healthy nation. So, it's no surprise that these firms and the insurance industry are among the top ten contributors to US politicians.
These industries spend tens of millions of dollars yearly to support pro-industry candidates. These candidates advocate for measures to benefit the industry and help unseat legislators who oppose such policies. In this way, big firms significantly impact the nation's health policies.
Money is also crucial to American health care. For years, the debate has been around who will pay for the healthcare system and how much when the focus should be on nutrition.
Corporate influence extends to charities and foundations, which rely on business funds and thus allow corporations to influence the direction of their research.
Here's when reductionism comes back in. Foundations are frequently established to combat the symptoms of a single disease, such as cancer or Multiple Sclerosis, rather than the underlying causes.
The companies that control the mainstream media must also take greater responsibility. There should be more stories on food and science, as the media heavily influences public opinion on these crucial matters.
As it stands, the media is merely promoting the reductionist viewpoint by focusing on the newest miracle cure, whether it's a fruit that claims to heal cancer or a plant that combats despair.
A huge step forward would be for the media to practice scientifically accurate and unbiased journalism.
Final Summary
Our assumptions about health are entirely incorrect. We should prioritize disease prevention above disease treatment. And the way to accomplish this is to adopt a whole-food, plant-based diet. Health and nutrition are complicated issues, and our present governments and healthcare systems do not adequately address them.
Actionable advice: Change your diet to help influence national and international policy.
Change from above is extremely tough to achieve. Only some people have access to institutions with that type of influence. So, the most effective thing individuals can do to help catalyze change is to make little but significant effort. Switching to a whole-food, plant-based diet may not change the system overnight. But it's definitely a start in the right direction.