Never Be Sick Again (16 page)

Because of reduced activity and appetite, older people require fewer calories (fuel), but they retain the same need for nutrients; in fact, nutritional needs may actually increase with aging (not to mention that digestion of food and assimilation of nutrients is often impaired in older people). Unfortunately, elderly people often are less able to buy and prepare fresh foods, and they often subsist on packaged, processed or frozen foods, thus consuming fewer nutrients. This diet makes a bad situation worse, contributing to widespread disease and disability among our older population.

Almost certainly, you have, for at least a few nutrients, unique needs that are substantially higher than average. More than a quarter century ago, medical pioneers like Dr. Carl Pfeiffer were able to use this concept to cure many cases of “incurable” schizophrenia by giving patients extra vitamins and minerals (above and beyond what was available through a regular diet). With their nutritional needs being met, Pfeiffer's schizophrenic patients were able to return to a completely normal life. Such nutrient deficiencies are a major cause of the many mental and behavioral problems in our society.

Arbitrary Standards

Although science has proved that we have individual nutritional needs, at present we have no way of measuring each person's needs. The Recommended Daily Allowances (or RDAs) that are listed on foods and vitamin supplements are arbitrary. They do not provide accurate information about what you need in order to stay healthy. These standards are a measurement only of the minimum dosage necessary to prevent a diagnosable deficiency disease, such as scurvy (a vitamin C deficiency disease common to sailors who went too long without fresh fruits and vegetables). You can easily meet RDA standards and still lack the nutrients necessary to prevent other diseases not specifically known as “deficiency diseases.” In fact, optimal health usually requires at least several times the RDA values.

In reality, however, most people do not meet even these minimum standards. A study by Professor Suzanne Murphy at the University of California, Berkeley, published in the November 1992 issue of the
Journal of the American Dietetic
Association,
measured the diets of 5,884 people for fifteen essential nutrients. The average person consistently measured below two-thirds of the RDAs for three to six essential nutrients. A separate study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, examined ten essential nutrients in the diets of 21,500 people. In that study, not a single person was obtaining 100 percent of the RDAs for all ten nutrients on a daily basis—not one person out of 21,500!

Virtually all Americans are chronically deficient in at least one and usually several nutrients, even when measured against the artificially low RDA standards. When we consider that good health requires several times the RDA, the true magnitude of the problem becomes apparent. That problem is compounded by the fact that nutrients must act as a team in order to keep you healthy.

Of the more than fifty known essential nutrients, each must be available to the body on a daily basis and in the correct amounts and ratios to each other. Rather than acting by themselves, nutrients act in combination with each other; a shortage of even one starts a chain of events that can result in extensive nutritional deficiencies and body system malfunctions.

In
The Kellogg Report,
Dr. Joseph Beasley examines how one specific nutrient deficiency (vitamin B
₃
) has far-reaching ramifications: A vitamin B
₃
deficiency impairs absorption of vitamin C, which impairs absorption of iron, which causes excessive copper absorption, which inhibits nickel metabolism, which in turn adversely affects iron metabolism, and on and on.

If all those can occur from a deficiency of just one nutrient (vitamin B
₃
in this case), just imagine what happens in the bodies of most Americans, who are chronically deficient in several nutrients.

The most common deficiencies are calcium; zinc; magnesium; chromium; vitamins A, E, C and B
₆
; and folic acid. What you must recognize is that you cannot miss even one member of the nutrition package and hope to be healthy. The way to assure you are getting what you need is to eat a wide range of real foods that are rich in nutrition, keep the Big Four and other “make-believe” foods out of your diet, and take high-quality nutritional supplements.

A Diet That Really Works

As a child growing up in a Boston suburb, I remember food shopping with my mother at several farms in our town. The farmers maintained the mineral content of their soils with traditional methods of crop rotation, mulch and manure. All through the summer and even into the fall, those farms supplied our town with freshly harvested, organically grown, fully ripened fruits and vegetables. Everybody in town could share in the nutrition those small local farms provided. By the late 1950s, all the farms had been sold for housing developments, as happened to many small farms across the United States. From a real estate standpoint, subdivisions may be the best use of the land, but from a health standpoint, development is a disaster. Lost with those local farms was the superior nutrition contained within fresh, organically produced foods. What has replaced them are commercially produced, toxic, nutritionally deficient supermarket foods.

Our biological ancestors ate living food directly as nature provided—often with no alternative. If you were hungry and found a berry bush, fresh berries were what you ate. Likewise, a hunter might eat an animal right after the kill, its flesh still containing living cells filled with vital nutrients. Nature works that way. Within these hunting and gathering parameters we evolved biologically; even today our nutritional needs are best served with living foods that are as unchanged as possible from the way nature provides them. Instead, we often settle for food in very different forms: cooked, dehydrated, ground, canned, frozen, hydrolyzed, hydrogenated, irradiated or otherwise modified. By eating a diet that consists primarily of these “altered” foods, we run the risk of being deficient in fundamental nutrients that are contained only within the whole, intact, living cells of other organisms.

Your body needs to burn calories every day to provide energy. Although Americans are seldom deficient in calories, almost always they are deficient in nutrients.
We must learn to
count nutrients, not calories.
Your body builds more than ten million new cells every second. If the foods you eat do not contain sufficient nutrients needed to build and maintain those cells, an “eat more” message is sent to the brain. This happens regardless of how many calories are in your diet. A body that is starving for nutrients seeks out more food, and weight gain likely results. Eating just one hundred calories more than you burn, on a daily basis, translates to roughly twelve pounds of added fat per year. Try that ten years in a row!

Many Americans are both malnourished and overweight. Obesity is a major health problem in America today, regardless of age or economic status. According to recent government statistics, 63 percent of American adults are overweight. When you eat real, nutritious foods (typically lower in calories), your body obtains the nutrients it needs and you likely do not have intense food cravings. If a large part of your diet is made up of real foods, becoming overweight is difficult.

Unfortunately, overweight people (or those wishing to avoid becoming overweight) often cut down on their overall food (calories) intake, without making changes in what types of foods they eat. This results in more malnourishment and stronger food cravings. Consuming 2,000 calories yet obtaining little or no nutrition is frightfully easy: a small candy bar (280 calories and almost no nutrition), two soft drinks (600 calories and no nutrition), and a hamburger/fries/shake meal (1,180 calories and only a little nutrition). This intake totals 2,060 calories yet offers a serious case of malnutrition. That diet provides some protein, carbohydrate and fat that the body can use—but is seriously lacking in vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, enzymes, fiber, essential fatty acids and other nutrients necessary to construct healthy cells and maintain good health. Lacking these nutrients, the body must deplete its nutrient reserves in order to keep functioning. When the reserves run out, cells suffer from deficiency, and they cease to self-regulate and self-repair. Disease follows. Meanwhile, you are still hungry and adding more weight because your body is short of nutrients.

Magic Capsules

How do real foods support the health and function of your cells whereas processed foods do not? Here's one example: Whole grains (such as wheat, oats, millet and quinoa) are seeds that contain all the ingredients necessary to create a new plant—to create a new life. They are like magic capsules. The nutrients in these capsules that are necessary to create life are also necessary to sustain your life. However, as soon as this life-creating capsule has been opened (due to cutting, mashing or grinding), oxygen reacts with the chemicals inside, causing the nutrients to deteriorate. At this point, the seed can no longer produce a new life, nor can it sustain yours as well as before. Our ancestors did not have such nutrient losses in their grains, which were eaten whole or coarsely ground, rather than processed into nutritionally worthless white flour. Remember the Hunzas? They coarsely ground grains and immediately made nutritious flat breads, minimizing nutrient loss.

Foods that are nutritious but nontoxic come from the following categories:

•
Organic foods
produced naturally without any man-made chemicals, such as pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, preservatives, antibiotics, hormones, processed animal feed, etc. These foods are generally higher in nutrients and lower in toxins than nonorganic (commercially produced) foods of the same type.

•
Fresh foods
harvested at their peak of nutrition (ripeness) and consumed shortly thereafter. Food that is harvested does not gain any more nutrition (even though it may continue to ripen), and in fact, nutrition begins to decline. Some foods deteriorate more quickly than others, but the point is that you want to eat your food as soon after harvesting as possible. The more the food sits around (during harvesting, storage, transportation and distribution), the more nutrition it will lose.

•
Unprocessed foods,
minimally altered from the way that nature provides. Avoid foods that are cooked, peeled, cut, ground, dehydrated, frozen, canned, etc. Unprocessed foods are whole, complete foods, rather than just part of a food (whole grains instead of flour made from grains, for example, or potatoes with the peel still on).

Because we cannot all revert to hunting, gathering, growing our own food and eating it fresh and raw, we must learn to evaluate the foods that are available to us and make choices that are both healthy and realistic. We must take the “black and white” nutritional knowledge outlined above and apply it to our lives in the best shade of gray that we can.

Poisoned in the Nursery

Much of the nutrition trouble we face begins before food leaves commercial farms. Modern agricultural practices and chemicals (such as chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides) produce ever-increasing quantities of food, but the chemicals reduce the nutritional quality of the food and deplete the soil of nutrients needed to produce future quality crops.

Chemical fertilizers, which are supposed to put nutrients into the soil, actually end up causing nutrients to be removed from the soil. The most common chemical fertilizers, which support high food production, add three major nutrients to the soil: nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. But the plants require many other nutrients absorbed from the soil, such as zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, germanium, chromium, manganese, nickel and molybdenum. Chemical fertilizers do not supply these nutrients. By not replacing these nutrients and by growing more food on the same land year after year after year, critical nutrients continually are lost from the soil, leading to nutrient-deficient soil, nutrient-deficient crops, nutrient-deficient farm animals and nutrient-deficient human beings.

In her 1976 book
The Living Soil,
Lady Eve Balfour describes an eighteen-year experiment on three farms with similar soil profiles. One of the farms was managed organically, one chemically, and the third, a mixture of the two. During this eighteen-year study, the soil on the organic farm was found to have the highest mineral content. Not coincidentally, the dairy herd on that farm was healthier, produced more milk and had higher reproductive capacity.

The use of chemical fertilizers triggers a series of problems as plants struggle to cope with deficient soils and toxic attacks. Plants grown in nutrient-deficient soils are less healthy and more vulnerable to insects, molds, fungi, viruses, bacteria and weeds. The susceptibility leads to the use of other agricultural chemicals, such as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, to protect sick plants. These toxic chemicals create “dead soils,” killing not only the undesirable organisms but also the helpful organisms (earthworms, insects, bacteria and fungi) that are responsible for taking minerals out of the soil and converting them into forms that plants can use. When these bacteria and fungi are killed, the plants no longer receive adequate nutrition.

Insecticides, fungicides and herbicides accumulate in the soil to a level where they inhibit plant growth. These poor growing conditions have spurred the development of new kinds of plants, such as hybrid and genetically modified crops.

In creating genetically modified plants, which humankind has never eaten before, we may have (unknowingly) altered the nutritional value of the plants, as well as made them more toxic or allergenic. More and more genetically modified foods are contaminating the food supply with novel and unnatural varieties of organisms. (See chapter 9 for more information.)