Getting nutrients from food
“We are what we eat—or are we?”
Although supplements make up a large part of the modern fitness enthusiast’s diet, especially among those who compete, everyday food still forms the foundation. In principle, it is simple: protein from chicken, carbohydrates from rice and fat from oil. Add a little broccoli on the side and that is all there is to it. Even these staple foods have changed radically over the past twenty or so years, and our knowledge of food has grown considerably. Yet the fundamentals rarely come up for discussion.
The first major factor is the quality of the staple foods themselves, and the second is the micronutrients and phytonutrients they contain. When discussing food, we cannot avoid neurological problems: flu, infections and, of course, recovery and faster progress.
To use the familiar car analogy, protein is the sheet metal from which the car is built, fat is the oil and carbohydrates are the gasoline. These, too, come in many forms: different oils, different metal alloys and, of course, different types of gasoline. Vitamins could be compared to the spark plug, which plays a crucial role, because however good the other parts are, the car will not start without it. You can, of course, decide how sophisticated, durable and functional you want the parts you use to build your own car to be.
Nutrition and science
As early as the beginning of the 1800s, the English physician and chemist Prout identified three nutrients: carbohydrates, proteins and fats. The German scientist Liebig added three minerals to the list: potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus. He announced that plants needed only these three minerals to grow. Plants grow with their help, animals eat the plants, and we eat both animals and plants. This marked the beginning of nutritional science, as the focus shifted from studying food to studying nutrients. As in all modern sciences, nutritional science breaks things down into their components for further study.
Later, it was observed that babies fed the breast milk substitute developed by Liebig were unwell, while sailors who received carbohydrates, proteins, fats and minerals developed scurvy.
Chemists continued their work and discovered vitamins. The story continues today, with thousands of new substances being discovered in food every year. Even if science and its methods do not interest you, it has radically influenced the food available in our shops. When food was reduced to a collection of nutrients, certain things were overlooked, and the consequences have been interesting. This gave rise to an entirely new approach to cultivation—the foundation of all food.
Nutrient synergy
University of Minnesota epidemiologists Jacobs and Steffen conducted a comparative study showing that eating whole-grain bread reduced mortality, while adding its individual components to food did not. It is generally assumed that the nutrients in bread are responsible for its health benefits. Yet the study demonstrated that these nutrients apparently work together synergistically to produce a beneficial effect. What does this mean? In brief, adding specific nutrients to food does not have the same effect as eating them in their original, natural form. The food industry is not enthusiastic about this finding, given the so-called soft drinks on the market in which calcium or magnesium is added to fizzy water and sugar, turning them into healthy drinks.
Many supplement formulations contain nutrients that support one another, demonstrating nutrient synergy. Yet the study in question undermines this approach too, because all the nutrients in whole-grain bread, taken separately, did not produce the same result.
The role of soil in nutrient content
After Liebig had identified the three major minerals, Frits Haber worked out how to produce synthetic fertilizer from fossil fuel. Farmers began using it to fertilize their fields.
The soil then receives only these three minerals and nothing else. The plants grow, but they are not entirely healthy. They grow quickly so they have time to develop roots and draw other nutrients from the soil. If fertilization continues for years, the soil becomes depleted of all other nutrients. Plants grown this way cannot produce phytonutrients as plants grown in organic soil can. One sign of this is their inability to protect themselves against pests. This, in turn, led to the use of insecticides. Their use was considered normal, even though they could be dangerous. This led to ongoing soil depletion, meaning a decline in nutrients, which in turn led to more insecticides being applied. The effects were visible in the plants we ate. Statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture show that the vitamin content of plants has fallen by 20-50% over fifty years. This means that you would need to consume more calories to get enough nutrients.
Could this have something to do with the fact that fewer people are at a normal weight? The industry’s goal is to provide food as cheaply as possible. In some ways, this is good, but the problem is that people are either overfed or undernourished. This does not just affect people who are overweight: those who control their food intake and keep themselves in good shape can also be undernourished. For example, we now treat catching a cold as normal. Increasingly, the same is true of allergies and other autoimmune diseases, intestinal problems and so on. Perhaps our diets lack variety, but even if we ate a varied diet with plenty of root vegetables, the quality and nutritional content of our food have still deteriorated as the soil has changed.
How farming affects animal products
“You are what you eat” applies not just to people but to animals too. When salmon live in the sea and eat their natural diet, for example, they develop omega-3 fatty acids, which appear to benefit human health. Our bodies need a balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. So what happens when salmon are raised in tanks and given feed high in omega-6 fatty acids? How would those salmon develop omega-3 fatty acids? These originate in marine algae at the base of the food chain. According to Barry Sears, farmed salmon contain more of the omega-6 fatty acid AA than the omega-3 fatty acid EPA. In other words, their effect on the body is negative. Yet we are told to eat fish three times a week to get our omega-3 fatty acids (if you take them in capsules, you can be sure of the quality).
The same principle applies to livestock raised for meat, poultry and dairy cattle. When cattle eat mainly AIV silage, this supplies only micronutrients to their meat. Cattle raised on fast food are also often ill and receive a hefty dose of antibiotics over their lifetime (although their use is, of course, monitored). These days, linseed oil is often added to chicken feed to improve the omega fatty acid content of eggs. This could be a good idea. Still, feeding animals foods that are unnatural for them has led to so-called mad cow disease. Research into dairy products has examined how animal feed affects milk: the differences in vitamin A and vitamin D levels are clear, and those levels have declined. Salmonella levels are also high in chickens that do not get fresh grass, as are, of course, the amounts of antibiotics and pesticides.
Effects on your body and what you can do
Although these things may seem minor, their impact is considerable, especially in the coming decades. If we continue along the same path, the shift in the balance of our food and the addition of chemicals to our everyday diet will become increasingly pronounced. Chemicals are evolving: one company, for example, replaced monosodium glutamate with a yeast product and now advertises the product’s flavor as authentic. Remember that a convenience food is still a convenience food: its chemical composition has been altered.
The average Finn currently consumes 6-7 kg of pesticides a year. I cannot say whether that is a lot or a little, but I find it horrifying. So what can you do? First, choose the healthiest foods you can.
Michael Pollan offers two useful guidelines on how to eat. If the packaging mentions anything unhealthy, leave it on the shelf. Science can find one potentially healthy nutrient in any food, and that makes a good selling point. Secondly, something can be added to virtually any product, even soft drinks, so that it can be called healthy. This is, of course, written with tongue in cheek: not everything is bad, but this approach saves a lot of trouble. It is hard to write “with added omega-3” on a rutabaga. Some bread products containing 8% dietary fiber advertise themselves as high in fiber, while bread with twice as much dietary fiber does not.
Another approach is to ask whether your grandmother would have considered it food. If she would not have, then it would not qualify as real food either. This pile of processed nutrients has been flavored with chemicals, even though it looks like ordinary food. The next step is to think about where the food comes from: how it was grown and where it was brought from. Food grown using natural methods does not need as many preservatives, and natural products are also grown without artificial fertilizers. Of course, there are plenty of studies arguing both for and against this. Sometimes two studies appear in the same week, one stating that growing natural products is no different from conventional farming, and the other claiming that the difference can be 10.000-fold.
Several factors affect this, starting with how far the products being studied have traveled. You can judge for yourself how much the researchers and whoever pays for the study influence the results.
The solution really is so simple that people will refuse to believe it. Eat as much food in its original form as possible. These things are worth thinking about.
If you are interested in this subject, I warmly recommend Michael Pollan’s book on real food, which is the main basis for this article.
BODY-lehti
Author: Kertu Koronen (translation)
Source: WHO – healthy eating.
Come and train! ArtGym
