营养与健康

什么是营养？

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.

营养不良对我们有什么影响？

你可能不会注意到自己每天摄入的营养不够，至少不会马上注意到。你可能觉得自己只是 "皮肤干燥，就是这样"，或者 "经常生病发冷"。你可能会把一切都归咎于你的基因，是的，基因确实起了一定的作用，但我们现在更清楚地认识到，我们的基因表达受饮食和环境的影响有多大，即使在童年时期也是如此。

威斯顿-A-普莱斯博士的作品

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.

研究健康的原始人

他没有研究不健康的人，而是开始了为期 10 年的环球旅行，研究健康、长寿的人群。这些群体大多是原始人群，他们大多过着数千年来的生活。他们都有几个共同点，包括：

• 重点是来自陆地和/或海洋的营养丰富的动物食品。
• 不吃精制或变性食品（糖、精制面粉、爆米花和片状早餐谷物、巴氏杀菌奶、工业用种子油/植物油等）。
• The proper preparation (soaking, fermentation, and cooking) of various types of 应景 植物性食物，通常只吃少量。
• 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.
• 他们使用大量未经提炼的盐，这在自然饮食中是必不可少的。唯一不这样做的是马赛人，他们饮用富含矿物质和钠的牛血。
• 他们经常食用骨头/肌腱（胶原蛋白）汤，以保持结缔组织、关节和新陈代谢的健康，并平衡肉类中的氨基酸。

与现代饮食相比，他们的饮食中生物可利用的矿物质（包括锌、钾、钠、钙、镁和碘）以及脂溶性维生素 A、D3、K2 和 E 的含量要高得多，这些营养物质主要存在于珍贵的动物食品和脂肪中，确保了孕妇、婴儿和儿童的健康成长和发育。

照片记录

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, 营养与身体退化，原始饮食与现代饮食及其影响的比较 (新西兰 MightyApe 有售），该书介绍了这项历时 10 年的史诗般的全球研究，展示了全食物营养的重要性，以及现代加工食品造成的退化和破坏。

谢谢韦斯顿和佛罗伦萨！现在我们该怎么办？

切换

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…)!

器官肉--大自然的 "多面手"

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.

脂肪呢？

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/ 了解有关脂肪的知识，以及为什么要避免使用植物油。

蛋白质

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.

回归生物个体性

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.

如果您对家庭营养的某个方面感到担忧，请拨打 "好健康自然疗法咨询热线"（0800 44 66 34），与我们友好的自然疗法师交谈。