6. Understanding Food

The majority of people now progress into bad health as a result of poor nutrition.
Here are 14 topics you need to know.

1. Why are you addicted to Food?

Food; it's delicious! 

That's because you have between 5,000 and 10,000 taste buds in your tongue that are constantly assessing what you are eating. These buds are directly connected with your brains database of flavours and textures of food and they can have a direct influence on your happiness or disappointment.

The buds are designed to detect five basic flavours:

1. Salty
2. Sour
3. Bitter
4. Sweet
5. Savoury

As you get older, past 45, your taste buds detection rate may start to diminish. 

Hence to get a kick out of food, you may require a heavier dose of the flavour and/or an increased volume of food to feel happy. Yes happy because the detection of flavours and satiation (the feeling of being full) are connected with the production of dopamine, your body’s natural happiness drug. This drug is produced in the brain to reward you for your brain’s definition of success.

Fact number one: You are addicted to food and flavours.

If you don’t satisfy this addition you will be tormented by hunger pangs and in many cases, depression. Your digestion system is basically a child that only understands a few concepts and it will use a variety of simple tactics to get what it wants, irrespective of the consequences. It doesn’t care if you put on weight, feel sick, or even gain a health problem.

If you don’t feed it, it will throw a tantrum! This addiction has been going on since you were born and it has trained you from the very first day you arrived on the planet, just ask your mum!

Without a solid tactic, you are a victim of your reptilian digestive system.

This is the first concept you need to understand if you want to get in control of your eating habits. This addiction is a cultural obsession. As you grew up you have become accustomed to eating certain foods and as you got older, you needed more flavour and more of it to be satisfied. The good news is that you can change this. Like any addiction, you have to go through a period of re-education, withdraw, and introduction to better habits.

2. The Basic Nutrients

There are three basic nutrients that your body needs to maintain your organic structure:

1. Protein
2. Carbohydrates
3. Fats 

Depending on your activity level, you need a specific balance of these nutrients.

I won’t talk too much about this yet because it’s a big subject and you need to understand a lot more before we cover the topic.

3. Why do you have to eat?

Your body is made up of organic cells. An educated guess is that you have between 30 to 40 trillion individual cells. (30 > 40,000,000,000,000). Each of those cells* contains between 1 and 2,000 mitochondria. Think of mitochondria as an engine and they all need fuel. However they are very efficient and so a little bit of fuel goes a long way. The only problem is the mitochondria produce waste and many people’s eating habits create more waste and does not allow this waste to be removed very easily.

Basically you are eating to fuel cells and the process produces waste.

* Red blood cells do not have mitochondria because they are there to transport oxygen and carbon dioxide via the blood flow and do not have a need for energy to do this.

4. Vitamins, Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids

Your body needs over 90 essential minerals and vitamins every day to maintain all of the features and functions of its original build. Although your body can produce some of the vitamins it needs, it produces no Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids. If you do not get these essential components, your body will degrade, run out of energy, and cause a wide variety of ailments including poor health, mental impairment, and even death.

Fact Two: The majority of people’s diet is short of all the vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids required to maintain the body’s functions.

5. Nutritional Opportunity

Each time you eat, you have an opportunity to deliver to your digestive system, all the nutrients it requires. However the driving force behind you feeding your body is either:

1. A planned nutritional program
2. Driven by hunger and food availability

If driven by hunger, you lose nutritional opportunities to feed your body what it actually requires.

For example,

Aroha has a planned nutritional program. She has shopped for specific foods that she will eat during planned meal breaks. As a consequence she has energy and mental clarity throughout the day and is able to maintain her body composition.

Where as Rawiri gets hungry and grabs a steak pie and a coke for lunch. Then for dinner, some pizza, chips and a few beers. Rawiri is going to have a great deal of difficulty maintaining his body composition.

I have been dramatic here to try to make a point. The only way you can have a long term nutritional plan is to:

a)       Learn what foods are good for your particular circumstances

b)      Buy them before you need them

c)       Eat them before you get hungry

Rawiri gets hungry and is driven by the need to get rid of the hunger pains.

Aroha has researched what she needs and has planned to fulfil her nutritional requirements.

Long term Aroha’s plan wins. It is that simple.

6. The Benefit of Fasting

I mentioned before that cells contain waste but that some eating habits do not allow for this waste to be cleared. This is because people eat constantly. For example:

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6:00 am            
2 toast with jam and a cup of coffee with two sugars

10:00 am
Pie and a coke

12:00 pm
Filled role and a cup of coffee with two sugars

3:00 pm
Chocolate bar and an energy drink (crash food) 

6:00 pm
Mashed potatoes, sausages, eggs, and gravy

8:00 pm
Chocolate biscuits and a cup of tea with two sugars

10:00 pm
Cup of Milo with two sugars

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It takes at least 3 hours for your digestive system to process your last food intake (yes the Milo is food) so at about 1:00 am, your digestive system is finally at rest.

At 6.00 am it all starts again when you break the fast of the night with breakfast.

In this meal plan there were 5 hours of fasting, 1 am to 6 am.
I won’t mention the number of calories yet but I will so make a note of the situation.

Fasting is the body’s opportunity to scavenge its nutritional requirements from your body’s cell structures and the longer you can fast, the better things are going to be.

Let’s take a look at another meal plan:

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6:00 am
Water + black, fresh ground, filtered coffee + cinnamon

11:00 pm
Fruit + natural yoghurt with zero sugar and chia seeds

12:00 pm
Fish salad with 200 gms boiled red potatoes and a protein plus water drink

3:00 pm
Vegetable smoothie + multi vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids

5:00 pm
Quinoa, dark green salad, walnuts, avocado, beetroot, and boiled broccoli

8:00 pm
Small glass of water and fresh lemon juice

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The first meal is 11:00 pm and the last meal is 5:00 pm because the lemon drink does not count as a meal. That is a six hour eating window plus 3 hours for the last meal to digest so a total of 9 hours digesting and 15 hours fasting.

There is absolutely no comparison between the two meal plans.

One completely fails and causes you to be constantly hungry, lacking energy, and gaining weight. The other brings you under control, gives you abundant energy, even if you are a construction worked or athlete, and satisfies your body’s nutritional requirements.

The difference is; one is an educated plan, the other is your child like digestive system controlling your life.

Fact 4: You need to plan your meals

7. Calories Count

There are three basic rules about calories:

a)       To lose weight you must be in a caloric deficit. Meaning if you eat less calories than your body burns for energy, you will lose weight

b)      To gain weight you must be in a caloric surplus.

c)       Your calorie requirements vary depending on your activity level

BUT

Fact 5:  You need to understand Insulin and how it affects fat storage

because calories or not; Insulin is what lays down fat.

8. Insulin, the Vehicle of Fat Storage

Insulin is activated in your bloodstream every time you eat a carbohydrate or sugar and it's Insulin that delivers fat to your cells.

When insulin is activated, your body cells will be offered fuel. If the cell does not need the fuel, fat cells will take up the fuel and store it as fat.

It does not matter what the source of sugar is. Excluding special substitute sugars which you should avoid anyway, all sugars activate insulin. This includes fructose in fruit (but not lemon), honey, brown raw sugar, and white sugar.

Carbohydrates are found in bread, sourdough, grains, cereal, and fruits (dried or fresh).

Vegetables are also carbohydrate BUT they are a special exception.

They are low carb and have a very slow digestion rate (GI) and almost come under the insulin radar.

As an example of why fruit is bad for losing weight, a large banana (often thought as a health food) contains 17 grams of sugar and 27 grams of carbs. It will spike your insulin levels for about 3 hours and use the nutrients in the banana as fat cell stuffers.

If you want to lose weight, forget bananas and fruit. However if you are not losing weight, then use fruit to maintain some body fat is beneficial.

9. Drinks and losing weight

One of the first places to look at reducing weight is what you drink.

Fact 6: Don’t drink your calories

Drinking sugar and or carbohydrates is the first food you should look at resolving if you want to loose and maintain your weight. It is a complete nutritional waste of time and will only cause you to gain weight.

Those energy drinks are actually energy sapping drinks because they will spike your insulin level. Within 30 minutes you will crash as a result of drinking them. Plus they are seriously fattening and a complete waste of your hard earned dollars.

Coke does not refresh you. The few minutes that coke dances across your tongue seem like it holds promise but it’s a sugar and as we just learned, It will spike your insulin levels for a few minutes, and then drive you under the crash line unless you are able to use the energy at that moment.

Water is by far the best drink to satisfy thirst. The trick is to not get thirsty by drinking a small glass of water on a regular basis. You can make water more desirable by adding a slice of lemon and I do have a preference for mineral water because most tap water contains chemicals of chlorine and fluoride, both poisons to your system. Filtered water is technically dead where as mineral water should be alkaline and alive teaming with those minerals your body needs.

10. Foods that actually make you hungry

There are three foods that keep you locked into the hunger games. They are:

a)       Bead

b)      Rice

c)       Sugar

Like cigarettes have nicotine as the addictive substance, food addictions, and hunger, are activated by these three components.

Fact 7: Avoid hunger by NOT eating Bread, Rice, or Sugar

11. Inflammation

Foods are either healing or inflammatory. For example, seeds have one goal and that is to germinate when they are in soil and watered. To do this effectively, Mother Nature has protected seeds with a chemical called Lectin. It is washed off the seed with rain and allows the seed to germinate. However, when you eat seeds that have not had the lectin washed off, that chemical can dramatically affect you gut.

This is where ‘activated seeds’ are a healthier choice.

It is also worthwhile to introduce healthy probiotics on a daily basis to further improve the guts ability to digest foods and extract the most amount of nutrients.

Fact 8: Look after your gut

12. Cooking and the reduction of Nutritional Content

Each type of food requires different cooking techniques.

Some foods do require heat for the nutrients to become easily digestible.

Whereas others lose their nutritional content the more you cook them.

Fact 9: The more nutrients retained in food, the less you need to eat

Microwave cooking is a no no simply because you cannot control the cooking function. Basically the food is going to be overcooked and the nutrient content reduced.

Where as a reheat on the stove top is more controllable.

Don’t reheat + reheat food. Only heat the amount you need by the amount of heat required to retain the nutrient content.

There are lots of ways of cooking food where the nutrient content is maintained and of course, some foods don’t need cooking. These are some of the best foods.

13. Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load

This is the rate at which our digestive system will digest the food and affect our blood sugar level. This is an absolutely essential study regarding the foods your diet plan involves.

Basically vegetables will be fine. Anything else, research their GI and GL values.

14. In Summary

So there it is. A foundation of knowledge about eating and nutrition.
It is by no means everything but within these few topics is the essence of what you need to know to approach your diet and eating regime. There is still a lot to learn but if you grasp these fundamental topics, the design of your future nutritional plan will have meaning.

Forget the word diet. You are after a complete cultural change. Up to now you have probably simply expanded your diet based on what your parents taught you, what you have seen on TV, and what you have found as being convenient. When you understand your actual digestion mechanisms you will realise that what we have been taught historically, simply leads to bad health and functional decline.

To live beyond the limits of your diet, you are going to need to reinvent your nutritional plan.

In the next dietary topics I will be giving you some ideas.

Take a Photograph

Take a photo of your fridge and food cupboard now.

As you progress you can use these to compare what you used to have on hand, to what you eventually end up with.