Nutrition and Health

What is nutrition and why is it important?

Nutrition is the biochemical and physiological process by which an organism uses food to support life. Nutrition provides organisms with essential and non-essential nutrients, which can be metabolised to create energy and physical components, and to perform vital processes. Nutrients include macronutrients—protein, fats, and carbohydrates—and micronutrients—vitamins, minerals, cofactors, and phytochemicals and other beneficial compounds. Failure to obtain the required amount of essential nutrients for your body can cause malnutrition and this may lead to the development of ill health down the track.

How does malnutrition affect us?

You might not notice that you’re not getting enough nutrition on a daily basis, not straight away at least. It might appear that you just “have dry skin and that’s the way it is” or you “have a tendency to get more frequent ills and chills.” You might blame your genetics for everything, and, yes, genetics have a role to play, but we are now more aware of how much our genetic expression is affected by our diet and environment, even in childhood.

The work of Dr Weston A. Price

Nearly 100 years ago, a Canadian/American dentist called Weston Andrew Price decided that he wanted to find out why so many of his patients had bad teeth and ill health, especially the children. His adult clients had rampant decay, joint stiffness, softening bones, metabolic dysfunction, digestive upsets, and ongoing weakness and tiredness. In children, he observed growth problems and shortened stature and that crowded, crooked teeth were becoming more and more common, along with overbites, narrowed faces, underdevelopment of the nose, lack of well-defined cheekbones, and pinched nostrils. Their mothers told of childhood complaints that we find very familiar in modern life: too frequent immune insults, allergies, breathing problems, poor vision, lack of coordination, malaise, and behavioural problems.

Study of healthy, primitive humans

Rather than studying unhealthy people, he embarked on a 10-year journey around the world to study healthy, long-lived groups of people. These groups were largely primitive, most living as they had for many thousands of years, but they all had several things in common, including an emphasis on nutrient-dense animal foods, no refined or denatured foods (sugar, refined flours, popped and flaked breakfast cereals, pasteurised milk, and industrial seed/vegetable oils), the proper preparation (fermentation, cooking) of smaller amounts of seasonal plant foods, and they emphasised certain foods at certain life stages, e.g., animal fats, organ meats, eggs, and/or shellfish during childhood and for fertility. They used plenty of unrefined salt, which is essential in a natural diet. They regularly ate bone/tendon (collagen) broths for the health of their connective tissue and joints and to balance the amino acids in meats. Their diets were much higher in bioavailable minerals, including zinc, potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, and iodine, and the fat-soluble vitamins A, D3, K2, and E, than modern diets, and these nutrients, mainly found in highly prized animal foods and fats, ensured support for healthy pregnancies and babies, and childhood growth and development.

Photographic records

Of course, there are more things to health than diet. These were people that worked mostly outside in natural light, were very active, and had strong social and familial bonds; however, Dr Price and his wife, Florence, took hundreds and hundreds of photographs showing the effects of solely a change in diet on people’s faces and bodies. He documented many accounts of family members that had moved to modernised areas with a modern diet, who had produced offspring with significantly worse physical outcomes, including skeletal and dental deformities and dysfunction that we see as common today. There were photographic accounts of siblings, some raised on their traditional diet and some on a modern diet, who had markedly different facial and dental development and health.

Children need bioavailable protein, minerals, and fat-soluble vitamins to support the growth of the skeleton and tissue, with teeth free of cavities, and strong, well-functioning bodies. Wide faces allow room for the wisdom teeth and for healthy breathing patterns. It’s not too late if you’re an adult, either. We can all make sure we’re getting the vitamins and minerals we need to support us to be as healthy as we can into older age. You can read Dr Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (available from MightyApe NZ), an account of an epic, 10-year, global study demonstrating the importance of whole food nutrition, and the degeneration and destruction that comes from a diet of modern, processed foods.

Thanks Weston and Florence! So, now what do we do?

Switch over

Without obtaining a degree in nutrition, there’s a lot you can do to support your family’s health. A great start would be to switch to eating nutrient-dense, whole foods and avoid nutrient-poor, highly refined, pseudo foods. These ultra-processed, convenience foods contain additives and refined sweeteners and oils that use up nutrients and leave the body wanting more and more. Then, when you’re used to cooking with foods in their natural forms, you can learn how to ferment vegetables, fruits, and milks to make delicious and microbiome-supporting sauerkrauts and kimchis, raw kefirs, yoghurts, and soft cheeses, and fruit ferments. Fermenting makes the micronutrients, including phytochemicals like polyphenols, more available and effective.

Organ meats—nature’s “multi”

If you can insert organ meats into your family’s diet, that would be a huge step towards nutritional sufficiency. Organs are nature’s multivitamin and mineral, and the younger you introduce them to your children, the easier it will be to get them to eat them. Adults are the worst when organ meats are suggested: “Yuck!” they will say. But they really are the best foods to support human health. Then if you tolerate shellfish, add in these nutrient-dense, “organs of the sea.” Because cooking depletes some of the nutrients and cofactors in animal foods, you might wish to learn how traditional humans ate a portion of their animal foods raw. Conversely, they generally ate plant foods, especially grains, beans, nuts, seeds, and tubers, and even many fruits, only after soaking/fermenting and cooking them to detoxify the anti-nutrients in the plants and free up the minerals.

What about fat?

The most surprising recommendation is to eat animal fats. Children require around 50% of their daily energy from fat. Without healthy animal fats we are not able to fully utilise the minerals we ingest or support healthy brain development. Additionally, fat-soluble vitamins are only found in their most bioavailable forms in animal fats. Vitamins A and D3 are essential to support growth, healthy bone structure, proper development of the brain and nervous systems, and sexual development. Adults need the fat-soluble vitamins and the fatty acids found in animal fats to support immune function, healthy aging, smooth skin, supple joints, cardiovascular health, brain function, and hormone balance. Eating healthy fats can even put an end to refined sugar cravings! See https://goodhealth.co.nz/fats-are-either-saturated-or-unsaturated-know-the-difference/ for the skinny on fats and why you might want to keep vegetable oils to a minimum.

Protein

Traditional diets varied with their fat-to-carb, and animal-to-plant ratios; however, they were relatively consistent with their protein amount—around 20% of total daily energy intake, coming from meat, organs, fish, eggs, and shellfish. Obviously, if you’re building muscle, you would increase the amount of protein you eat! Animal proteins contain all 9, essential amino acids in optimum amounts. They also contain amino acids (AA), like taurine, carnitine, anserine, and creatine, that are not present in plants. We do make these AA in our bodies but not generally enough for the health of the brain, heart, muscle, immune and nervous systems, and for healthy aging. The healthy groups Dr Price studied did not consume “lean meats”—they ate the fat with the meat, and many sought the fattiest meats they could.

Circling back to bio-individuality

Regarding bio-individuality, there are a number of factors to consider. Your age, sex, and activity levels play the biggest roles, but so will your fertility requirements, your ancestry, where you live, and your microbiome. While there is conflicting information on the net about diet, it is probably because most nutritional science is based on observational studies and not interventional trials. And, of course, a 120 kg male bodybuilder is going to have different nutritional requirements than a 50 kg, 15-year-old female. This is even though we all need the same nutrients. Some people do very well on a high-fat, highly carnivorous diet, with very little plant food, while others do well with higher carbohydrates.

At its most basic level, nutrition supports the human body to grow and develop and then to remain healthy into older age. Consider creating a diet that focuses on the daily consumption of a diverse range of nutrient-dense animal foods along with local and seasonal plant foods that you enjoy, and that you have prepared (detoxified) according to traditional principles. The beauty of eating a whole food diet is that it is hard to go wrong, especially if you listen to your body. If you’re not eating food that is nutritionally poor your body will let you know what it needs.

If you are concerned about an aspect of your family’s nutrition, please call the Good Health Naturopath Advice Line, 0800 44 66 34, and chat to one of our friendly naturopaths.