You are what you don’t excrete

The ancients had remarkable intuitive insights into the relationship between food, health, and disease.

They recognised that the human body is built, fuelled, and affected by food. In fact, they believed the body was food.

The ancients exclaimed, ‘We are what we eat.' They recognised that the lungs exist to breathe in air to sustain life. They knew that the skin exists primarily to protect us from our environment, although it absorbs many materials applied to it. Most importantly, they understood the role of the bowel in health and disease. They seemed to understand that the bowel is the primary interface between the body’s internal systems and the external environment. All other organs exist and function to facilitate the conversion of food into energy necessary for life.'Diseases are rooted in the bowel,' they proclaimed, in more ways than one.

The ancients had much intuitive wisdom, which we have since disregarded. Rarely do we understand what we eat. Rarely do we pay attention to what happens to our food in the bowel or how the bowel responds to the food we consume. Rarely do we recognise the relationship between what we eat and how we feel. When we fall ill, rarely do we attempt to link food with illness.

WE ARE WHAT WE ABSORB

We may also say that we are what we absorb when we consider the many threats to proper digestion and absorption of food today. Our bowel ecology is under attack. With each meal, we ingest pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, and antibiotics. Toxic chemicals and heavy metals invade our biology daily. Our digestive enzymes are inactivated, and essential minerals, which support digestive enzymes, are often deficient. The local bowel immune system weakens. The gut becomes leaky, allowing undigested food, undesirable macromolecules, viruses, bacteria, yeast, and parasites into the bloodstream. The problems of digestion and absorption are interconnected and exacerbate one another.

WE ARE WHAT OUR PLASMA MEMBRANES ARE

Following this reasoning, we might also say that we are what our plasma membranes are. After all, more important than absorption is how food molecules are utilised by plasma membranes. These membranes control all molecular events within cells and cellular organelles (the tiny structures inside cells).

WE ARE WHAT OUR MOLECULAR BIOAVAILABILITY IS

Continuing this line of thought, we could say that molecules only matter when they are functional. Essentially, molecular function depends on their availability in metabolic pathways.

But this reasoning diminishes the intuitive wisdom of the ancients. Few things characterise our age more than the disconnection between what we think we eat and how we believe our bodies respond to it. The problem of our time is that we have ceased to observe. We lack the ability to perceive the essential relationship between our food and ourselves, between what we eat and how we feel, between our patterns of eating and patterns of illness. The ancients did not face the many biological assaults we confront today. Had their external environment been as devastated as ours, had their internal environment been as stressed and polluted, and had they been as allergic to foods and as sensitive to chemicals as we are, they would undoubtedly have proclaimed, ‘We are what we observe.'

THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSERVATION

The ancients made two basic observations about human metabolism, which our modern nutrition and dieting experts seem to disregard. I suspect this is because these insights run counter to the profitability goals of today’s experts.

First, the ancients knew that metabolism could be slowed by fasting (the ancient equivalent of modern dieting). They understood the importance of fasting during periods of reflection, meditation, prayer, and silence.

Second, they knew that metabolism could be accelerated by eating and physical activity. Food fuels the furnace of human metabolism, and exercise stokes its fire. Both truths are self-evident, and we need only to observe the changes they produce.

Now consider the advice given by modern dieting experts. They recommend dieting practices that down-regulate catabolic enzymes (slowing the metabolic furnace), or they encourage us to rely on their packaged foods. They advise us to ignore nature’s diversity of foods, limiting ourselves to one or two at their whim. These experts rarely ask us to observe the effects of their diets on our overall health throughout our lifetime.

Editor's note: Please also read these articles Ten Healing Foods To Buy Organic and Food as Medicine.