Random Thoughts

So lately I’ve started to wonder how necessary it is to get your RDA of all the vitamins and minerals every day. Or how necessary it is to get those vitamins and minerals mostly from plants. Or how important it is to get protein, fat, and carbs at every meal. Or how important it is that you always eat breakfast. Or that you don’t snack at bedtime.

Here’s my thinking on this. The body would obviously need to be able to adapt to surpluses and shortages of most nutrients, as well as daily variations in macro-nutrient intake. Maybe calcium is abundant in the summer. Maybe beta-carotene is abundant in the fall. The body obviously has storehouses. It packs excess glucose in the liver, excess calcium in the bones, and so forth. As one item becomes abundant or deficient, your taste preferences change to guide you towards what the body needs next.

So often these guidelines are based on a reductionist understanding of some hormone or chemical pathway. This is what some call Nutritionism and it is next to worthless for making statements with any certainty for a complex, dynamic system like the human body. Sometimes, there may be an epidemiological study… but often, certain questions still aren’t asked. For example, studies show correlation between skipping breakfast and long term weight gain, so what’s the cause? Are those skipping breakfast doing so because they are on a diet and the diet is the reason for the weight gain? Or are they eating in an unrestrained manner, listening to their body, yet somehow some aspect of skipping breakfast is causing weight gain? The question I have, if breakfast is so necessary, what were the hunter-gatherers chowing down on before they went out to go hunt and gather? Learn the eating patterns of actual non-industrialized groups and you’ll find the breakfast/lunch/dinner eating pattern isn’t that common.

As for eating lots of vegetables, I’ve never understood this. Isn’t the point of the human species to maximize our resource usage? So why go through all the effort of assimilating all these vegetables into our diet (which often requires a lot of preparation) when other animals have done this already? Just eat the animals… which is precisely the point of eating organ meats. They’re also more bio-available. Liver knocks the charts off any plant for any of the nutrients it provides, which is probably why some people do well getting it only once a week. And again, there’s that concept of getting nutrients over time rather than every day.

We act like phytonutrients are so super-great, but it just means nutrients from plants. And then we say get a variety of colors. Well, it’s polyphenols that are responsible largely for color, but polyphenols are often defensive compounds (what, you didn’t think plants evolved defensive strategies?). So my question is, why would you ingest something designed to interact with your body in a way to give you a selective disadvantage? Wouldn’t that imply negative health consequences? Animal defenses are more about tooth and claw than chemical compounds, which would seem to imply, ingesting nutrients from animal sources would be the optimal strategy.

None of that’s to say plants are for sure bad for you. Doing so based on an argument like the above would just be Nutritionism again. Personally, I find they add flavor, color, and texture. Plus I don’t like eating a lot of meat. I argue for the sake of argument. But things like color, flavor, and texture (assuming you are eating non-industrialized, non-processed foods) are your drivers to maximum nutrition.

Personally, what this comes down to are things I don’t think it’s healthy to worry about:
• Eating too many meals a day
• Eating too few meals a day
• Eating at the wrong time of day
• Anything else that isn’t following your own internal hunger/satiety cues.
• Eating an incorrect ratio of fats/protein/carbs
• Eating too few vegetables
• Eating too many vegetables
• Eating too much animal fat
• Eating too little animal fat
• Eating too much animal protein
• Eating too many refined (non-nutritive) calories in an otherwise nutritionally dense diet
• Anything else that isn’t following your current preferences at the moment you are eating