The Fundamental Principle

Categories: Diet and Nutrition
Sources: How And When To Be Your Own Doctor

If you are a true believer in any of the above food religions, I

expect that you will find my views unsettling. But what I consider

"good diet" results from my clinical work with thousands of cases.

It is what has worked with those cases. My eclectic views

incorporate bits and pieces of all the above. In my own case, I

started out by following the Organic school, and I was once a raw

food vegetarian who ate nothing but raw food for six years. I also

ate Macrobiotic for about one year until I became violently allergic

to rice.



I have arrived at a point where I understand that each person's

biochemistry is unique and each must work out their own diet to suit

their life goals, life style, genetic predisposition and current

state of health. There is no single, one, all-encompassing, correct

diet. But, there is a single, basic, underlying Principle of

Nutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified form, the

basic equation of human health goes: Health = Nutrition / Calories.

The equation falls far short of explaining the origin of each

individuals diseases or how to cure diseases but Health = Nutrition

/ Calories does show the general path toward healthful eating and

proper medicine.



All animals have the exact same dietary problem: finding enough

nutrition to build and maintain their bodies within the limits of

their digestive capacity. Rarely in nature (except for predatory

carnivores) is there any significant restriction on the number of

calories or serious limitation of the amount of low-nutrition foods

available to eat. There's rarely any shortage of natural junk food

on Earth. Except for domesticated house pets, animals are sensible

enough to prefer the most nutritional fare available and tend to

shun empty calories unless they are starving.



But humans are perverse, not sensible. Deciding on the basis of

artificially-created flavors, preferring incipid textures, we seem

to prefer junk food and become slaves to our food addictions. For

example, in tropical countries there is a widely grown root crop,

called in various places: tapioca, tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This

interesting plant produces the greatest tonnage of edible,

digestible, pleasant-tasting calories per acre compared to any other

food crop I know. Manioc might seem the answer to human starvation

because it will grow abundantly on tropical soils so infertile

and/or so droughty that no other food crop will succeed there.

Manioc will do this because it needs virtually nothing from the soil

to construct itself with. And consequently, manioc puts next to

nothing nourishing into its edible parts. The bland-tasting root is

virtually pure starch, a simple carbohydrate not much different than

pure corn starch. Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide gas

obtained the air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no

shortage ever of carbon from CO2 in the air and rarely a shortage of

hydrogen from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is

chewed, digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar.

Nutritionally there is virtually no difference between eating manioc

and eating white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.



If you made a scale from ideal to worst regarding the ratio of

nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc and most fats are at the

extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't know which single food

might lie at the extreme positive end of the scale. Close to perfect

might be certain leafy green vegetables that can be eaten raw. When

they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop 20 or

more percent completely digestible balanced protein with ideal

ratios of all the essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of

minerals, all sorts of enzymes and other nutritional elements--and

very few calories. You could continually fill your stomach to

bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard time sustaining

your body weight if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailorman

was right about eating spinach.



For the moment, lets ignore individual genetic inabilities to digest

specific foods and also ignore the effects stress and enervation can

have on our ability to extract nutrition out of the food we are

eating. Without those factors to consider, it is correct to say

that, to the extent one's diet contains the maximum potential amount

of nutrition relative to the number of calories you are eating, to

that extent a person will be healthy. To the extent the diet is

degraded from that ideal, to that extent, disease will develop.

Think about it!