What if it is not about the food?
Claire - Thursday, July 11, 2013
The 7 most commonly overlooked aspects to nutritional advice.
When you are struggling with a health
issue and looking for answers inevitably food is one of the first things you
would look at. Deficiencies in essential vitamins, minerals and fatty acids are
the cause of many Neolithic diseases. As are excessive toxicities such as MSG,
aspartame and even naturally occurring substances like gluten, casein and
sugar. Getting the balance of what you need and eliminating those things that
are toxic can be a minefield. Not only that it can be emotionally
draining, confusing and sometimes just too damn hard but the bombardment of
different philosophies can lead you down the wrong path and into an even worse
situation. It can feel like to more you try the worse it gets.
I have put together a list of the 7 most commonly overlooked aspects of nutritional advice that actually aren't
about the food.
1. Different starting points.
When looking at a stock-standard
eating protocol that someone has developed, whether it is something like GAPS,
WAPF, whole30, various juice fasts, raw vegan or even commercial diets such as
weight watchers there is an assumption by the diet developer that your starting
point is the same as the next person. Now where I am in my health is different
even to that of my husband, even though we would have eaten at least 70% of the
same thing every day for the last 16 1/2 years. We have different starting
points and some of our non-food related health aspects are different. Getting a
thorough pathological work up, including bloods (thyroid and liver function,
HS-CRP, hormone levels including insulin, minerals etc) stool samples etc. Can
give you the big picture of where you actually are starting.
2. Your timing is off.
This is honestly one of the single most over
looked aspects of health. Most people are night/winter deficient, their
circadian rhythms are completely shot and it is doing terrible damage to your
health. This in itself is a blog post or 10, but let me break it down to a few
points. The first is the skin-gut-brain triad. When there is a mismatch
of the information being collected by these 3 areas if the body or no changes
that would naturally occur with different times of the day or seasons in the
year. It is then that the cells start to do some funky things because they are
totally confused. An example of this is : When the eyes (really an extension of
the brain) register blue light, it tells the body it is morning time, time to
get up and ready to go. This increases cortisol and initiates one form of
metabolism. Fluro lights, computer and TV screens are all high in blue light
and how often are we using these at night, especially in winter. Normal in the
dark our cells begin to metabolise differently, they go from working in an
oxidative way during times of high light levels (this causes the sort of damage
that we use antioxidants to repair) to functioning in a reductive way (think of
this as the healing way to spend energy). In summer or regions that are hot and
have long days and short nights the foods that are found are high in
antioxidants to combat the longer periods of oxidation in cells. This is a bit
like constantly playing catch up. The best way to increase your
antioxidants is to decrease your need for them. Longer dark and cold times, in
other words experiencing night and winter and eating what is grown locally as
they occur can save you from needing that $80 superfood imported from South
America.
3. Being overly enthusiastic.
Juice fasting is a perfect example of
over enthusiasm. It becomes so easy to consume large doses of phytonutrients by
downing a few juices every day for a week or so. This sounds like a great
thing, but in reality it often does more harm than good in the long run. For
example, juicing large amounts of brassicas, such as kale puts your thyroid
into hyperdrive. If you already have a Leptin issue, this type of stress on
your thyroid will push it over the edge. So when you stop, you metabolism slows
dramatically, your Leptin resistance increases and you find you health worse
off than before. Another example of this can be consuming something every
single day because it is "good for you". As we have already mentioned
eating and drinking to suit the seasons has incredible benefits and there is
really only a couple of foods that are available all year round and these are
meat and fish. But, the diet of the meat and fish you consume would vary over
the year, meaning the nutritional value would also change.
4. You hate this.
Your emotions and feelings around food have a
massive impact on how your body receives the nutrients. There are 2 areas
of science that look at exactly this, one is behavioural epigenetics and the
second is psychoneuroendocrinology. But the basic premise is if eating is not
pleasurable, but stressful or even mechanical you will not get any health
benefit out of it.
5. You can't believe it.
Like number 4, if you are eating something
and your mind is on a path of skepticism about it, you are very unlikely to see
any significant change. This is like the anti-placebo effect.
6. Too much.
Sometimes we just plain old eat too much, too
frequently. It stresses our digestive system, our hormonal system and our
nervous system, particularly the brain. On occasions a good old fashion fast is
much more healing than throwing everything at it.
7. It really isn't the food.
Chiropractors talk about a thing
called the subluxation complex. It is when the small bones in the spine
shift out of their normal position and get stuck there. This puts pressure on
both the spinal cord as it travels through the spinal column and the individual
nerves as they exit the spine. Now you are probably aware that the brain
and nervous system controls every function in your body, so if there is
pressure on these nerves it can impede the communication between your brain and
the organs that nerve supplies. For example the nerve from T5 goes to the
liver, if there is a subluxation at this point then the brain will have
difficulty communicating with the liver so liver function would be impaired.
You can do as many liver cleanses as you want, but until the pressure is off
that nerve and communication is restored, your liver can not function properly.
This is not about ditching good nutritional
advice, but being able to identify why changes in eating may not be working for
you.
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