The Best Way to Eat

Modern-day scientific and processing advances have made food more available and possibly cheaper, but the human intestinal tract has not changed from what it was when our ancestors ate raw foods. It is still waiting for the food it was designed to digest.

Certain digestive enzymes are necessary to digest and absorb the foods we swallow and they in turn require certain vitamins and minerals to function optimally. Somehow God and Mother Nature figured this all out and put the required amounts of vitamins and minerals into the foods we are supposed to eat. But food processing and soil depletion, cooking and storage have reduced these ingredients to a level that makes human digestion difficult. You have seen the ads for most commercial cereals. The manufacturers cheerfully indicate how thoughtful and generous they are because they have added 9 vitamins and minerals. Big deal. They forgot to mention that they removed 29 important vitamins and minerals during the processing. The commercial dessert cupcakes many of you pack in your lunches are so “pure” (pure sugar and refined flour and hydrogenated fat) they will last years on the shelf.

The rule is: Eat foods that can rot, but eat them before they do rot.

Did you ever wonder why you perfect to eat fruits that have just ripened? They are sweet, that’s why. And the taste is connected with the pleasure center of the brain. I would propose that we are encouraged to eat sweet fruit because Mother Nature wants us to eat the fruit when the vitamin C is most abundant.

If we would imitate our distant relatives who followed animal migrations millions of years ago, we would be eating meat and vegetables. Paleontologists tell us, however, that the meat they ate was very low in fat—just under 4 percent. Remember, those were wild animals our ancestors were chasing. They were lean. The animals we eat today are steers and pigs that have been standing around in feedlots staring into space. Many of them are still getting hormones to increase the fat content of the meat, which is 30 percent after the visible fat has been removed!

I don’t know how they figured it out, but the type of fat our ancestors ate was high in omega-3 fats (gamma linoleic and linolenic) which tend to encourage the production of prostaglandin E-1, an anti-inflammatory substance. Meat eaters today get arachidonic acid, which leads to prostaglandin E-2, an inflammatory substance. Nathan Pritikin, an advocate of a low-fat, low-sugar diet, was able to clear his own and most of his clients’ blood vessels of atherosclerotic sludge because he followed a regimen of exercise and low-fat, mostly vegetable diet. It works. Our bodies were not designed to eat modern “food.”

We need calories, and adolescents usually need a lot of calories for growth and energy. All the nutritional research indicates that we do better if we eat as little fat and sugar as possible. Most of us do better if we get our vitamins, minerals, energy and roughage from vegetables sources.

What about fruit? It is a little better than sugar out of the sugar bowl. Research has found that if fruits (or sugar) are eaten with protein, the body’s ability to digest the protein is impaired. Bacterial action putrefies the protein and the victim has a lot of smelly gas. Bad on a date. Eat it alone or leave it alone.