Dinh dưỡng và sức khỏe

Dinh dưỡng là gì và tại sao nó lại quan trọng?

Nutrition is the biochemical and physiological process by which an organism uses food to support life. Nutrition encompasses how food 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 essential macronutrients—protein, fats, and carbohydrates—and essential and non-essential 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 (poor nutrition) and this may lead to the development of ill health down the track.

Suy dinh dưỡng ảnh hưởng đến chúng ta như thế nào?

Bạn có thể không nhận ra rằng bạn không nhận đủ dinh dưỡng hàng ngày, ít nhất là không phải ngay lập tức. Có thể bạn chỉ "có làn da khô và đó là bản chất của nó" hoặc bạn "có xu hướng bị ốm và ớn lạnh thường xuyên hơn". Bạn có thể đổ lỗi cho di truyền của mình về mọi thứ, và đúng là di truyền có vai trò nhất định, nhưng giờ đây chúng ta đã nhận thức rõ hơn về mức độ biểu hiện di truyền của chúng ta bị ảnh hưởng bởi chế độ ăn uống và môi trường, ngay cả khi còn nhỏ.

Công trình của Tiến sĩ 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. Both his adult and child clients had rampant tooth decay, but the adults also had joint stiffness, softening of the bones, metabolic dysfunction, digestive upsets, and ongoing weakness and tiredness. But in children, who technically should not be suffering from chronic health concerns, he observed a host of problems, including shortened stature, crowded, crooked teeth, overbites, narrowed faces, underdevelopment of the nose, lack of well-defined cheekbones, and pinched nostrils. Further to that, their mothers told of complaints that we now find all too familiar in modern children’s lives: too frequent and serious viral illnesses, allergies, breathing problems, poor vision, lack of coordination, malaise, and behavioural problems.

Nghiên cứu về con người nguyên thủy khỏe mạnh

Thay vì nghiên cứu những người không khỏe mạnh, ông đã bắt đầu một cuộc hành trình kéo dài 10 năm vòng quanh thế giới để nghiên cứu những nhóm người khỏe mạnh, sống lâu. Những nhóm này phần lớn là những người nguyên thủy, hầu hết vẫn sống như họ đã sống trong nhiều ngàn năm. Tất cả họ đều có một số điểm chung, bao gồm:

• Tập trung vào các loại thực phẩm động vật giàu dinh dưỡng từ đất liền và/hoặc biển.
• Không ăn thực phẩm tinh chế hoặc biến tính (đường, bột tinh chế, ngũ cốc ăn sáng dạng bột và dạng mảnh, sữa tiệt trùng, dầu hạt/thực vật công nghiệp, v.v.).
• The proper preparation (soaking, fermentation, and cooking) of various types of theo mùa thực phẩm từ thực vật, thường chỉ với số lượng nhỏ.
• The emphasis on an increase in the eating of a certain type of food at important life stages, e.g., during childhood and for fertility. This included more animal fats, organ meats, eggs from land and sea (fish roe), and/or shellfish.
• Họ sử dụng nhiều muối thô, một thành phần thiết yếu trong chế độ ăn tự nhiên. Nhóm duy nhất không sử dụng là người Maasai, những người uống máu bò giàu khoáng chất và natri.
• Họ thường xuyên ăn nước dùng xương/gân (collagen) để tăng cường sức khỏe cho mô liên kết, khớp và quá trình trao đổi chất, đồng thời cân bằng các axit amin trong thịt.

Chế độ ăn của họ có nhiều khoáng chất có khả dụng sinh học hơn, bao gồm kẽm, kali, natri, canxi, magiê và iốt, cũng như các vitamin tan trong chất béo A, D3, K2 và E so với chế độ ăn hiện đại. Các chất dinh dưỡng này, chủ yếu có trong thực phẩm động vật và chất béo được đánh giá cao, đảm bảo hỗ trợ cho thai kỳ khỏe mạnh, trẻ sơ sinh và sự tăng trưởng và phát triển của trẻ nhỏ.

Hồ sơ ảnh

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 physiological outcomes, including skeletal and dental deformities and physical dysfunction that we see as common today—these malformations and dysfunctions were simply nonexistent in the purely traditional and primitive groups. 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 teeth to be free of cavities; the growth of the skeleton and tissue; and strong, well-functioning bodies. Wide faces allow room for the healthy eruption of permanent wisdom teeth in adulthood 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, Dinh dưỡng và sự thoái hóa thể chất, so sánh chế độ ăn nguyên thủy và hiện đại và tác động của chúng (có sẵn trên MightyApe NZ), báo cáo về nghiên cứu toàn cầu kéo dài 10 năm này chứng minh tầm quan trọng của dinh dưỡng thực phẩm toàn phần và sự thoái hóa và hủy diệt xuất phát từ chế độ ăn uống gồm nhiều thực phẩm chế biến hiện đại.

Cảm ơn Weston và Florence! Vậy bây giờ chúng ta phải làm gì?

Chuyển đổi qua

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, convenience foods. These ultra-processed, “pseudo” foods contain additives and refined sweeteners and oils that require more nutrients to process and therefore leave the body wanting to eat 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, kimchis, and other fermented veggies, raw kefirs, yoghurts, and soft cheeses, and fruit ferments. Fermenting makes the micronutrients, including phytochemicals like polyphenols, more available and effective. Incidentally, fermented foods have been shown to support microbiome balance more than plant fibre; however, if you’re eating a whole food diet, you should be getting all the fibre you need…and you don’t need a lot (some need more fibre than others, and it can depend on the balance of your microbiome…)!

Thịt nội tạng—“đa dạng” của thiên nhiên

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, especially liver, 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. Well-cooked heart and some chicken liver pâtés are good to start with. 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.

Còn chất béo thì sao?

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, K2, and D3 (D3, of course, also available via the reaction of ultra-violet B light and cholesterol in the skin) are essential to support growth, healthy bone structure, proper development of the brain and nervous systems, and sexual development. Vitamin E (also found in plant foods like avocado) is an essential antioxidant. Adults also 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 into old age. 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/ để biết thêm thông tin về chất béo và lý do tại sao bạn nên tránh dùng dầu thực vật.

Chất đạm

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 mostly from meat, organs, fish, eggs, and shellfish. Obviously, if you’re building muscle or a baby human, 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 protein from animal foods is much more bioavailable than the proteins in plant foods. 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—and, interestingly, none were vegetarian.

Quay trở lại với cá tính sinh học

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. Even your thought patterns affect your physiology, digestion, and absorption. additionally, there is a lot of conflicting information on the internet about diet, but it is probably because most nutritional science is based on food frequency questionnaires from observational studies (weak data) and not long-term interventional trials. Even then, what works for you won’t work for a hundred others. 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. Further to that, some people do very well on a high-fat, highly carnivorous diet, with very little plant food, while others do well with much higher carbohydrates. Some of us can seemingly eat whatever we want.

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.

Nếu bạn lo lắng về khía cạnh dinh dưỡng của gia đình mình, vui lòng gọi đến Đường dây tư vấn của Good Health Naturopath theo số 0800 44 66 34 và trò chuyện với một trong những chuyên gia trị liệu thiên nhiên thân thiện của chúng tôi.