What You Need To Know About Food

What Is Food and Why Do We Need It?

What is food and why is it so necessary for human existence? In addition to enjoying food because it tastes good, human beings require food for three purposes:

1. Energy. Fuel (calories) necessary to perform external work and to simply allow the heart, lungs, and other organs to function.

2. Building Blocks. Raw materials (e.g. proteins, most minerals) used to manufacture blood, skin, bones, hair, and internal organs; the human body is constantly replacing and renewing every cell on a daily to monthly basis.

3. Catalysts. Chemical compounds (e.g. vitamins, enzymes, and some minerals) necessary to facilitate the chemical reactions that convert food into energy and into bodily organs.

Our bodies require food for energy every few hours and require specific foods that function as building blocks and catalysts on a daily or semi-daily basis. Our bodies are biologically programmed to immediately sense when energy is needed—we experience hunger pain. Unfortunately, we usually become aware of missing building blocks or catalysts only when our bodies become ill from these deficiencies.

Our bodies are also biologically programmed to seek out foods containing the highest amounts of energy. Foods containing the highest amounts of energy (e.g., sugar, fat) taste the best.

The successful exploitation of our biological programming by the food industry is the major cause of obesity and ill health in the world, especially the United States.

U.S. citizens are the most obese and spend three times the amount of money on medical care than do European and Asian Nations. This massive difference, not just in the cost of medical care but also in the unhappiness caused by poor health, is the result of our having a terrible diet.

The Two Major Problems With Our Food Supply

There are two major problems with the diet of most people in the United States:

1. Overeating. Fully 61 percent of our citizens are overweight.

2. Poor Nutrition. Most of us are not getting the minimum amounts of building blocks and/or catalysts that our bodies need.

To understand how these two problems of overeating and poor nutrition were created, it is first necessary to understand how our bodies process food into energy and living matter.

How Our Bodies Process Food Into Energy and Living Matter

All food consists of one or more of the six nutrient categories:
1. Water
2. Carbohydrates (contained in sugars, breads, etc.)
3. Lipids (contained in fats, oils, etc.)
4. Proteins (contained in meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, etc.)
5. Vitamins (contained in fruits, vegetables, etc.)
6. Minerals (contained in fruits, vegetables, etc.)

Digestion begins when food enters your mouth and starts being broken down by your teeth and the enzymes in your saliva. Then chemicals in your stomach go to work digesting the food into its six nutrient categories.

The Importance of Water

The human body is composed of about 60 percent water and requires a minimum of two quarts of fresh water per day. It is estimated that 75 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated and that 37 percent mistake thirst for hunger. A mere 2 percent drop in body water can trigger fatigue and mental dysfunction.

As a preventative measure, drinking five glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45 percent, the risk of breast cancer by 79 percent, and the risk of bladder cancer by 50 percent.

If possible, and if it will not interfere with getting your minimum daily water requirement, you should try to avoid drinking this water during mealtimes. The chemicals in your stomach become less effective when diluted, and this can cause valuable nutrients to wash through versus being absorbed by your body.

How We Obtain and Burn Calories

The energy contained in specific portions of food and the energy needs of the body are both measured in units called calories. Burning the weighed portion of the food and measuring the amount of heat produced can measure the number of calories in a particular food. It is also possible to measure the number of calories burned by a particular physical activity, from sleeping to jogging up a steep hill.

Of the six nutrient categories, only carbohydrates (4 calories per gram), lipids or fats (9 calories per gram), and proteins (4 calories per gram) provide energy.

The human body requires approximately 2,200 calories of energy per day for a woman and 2,900 calories per day for a man. A person doing daily athletic exercise requires more calories per day than a sedentary person. At any level of activity, the human body uses about 65 percent of its energy for basal metabolic functions like breathing and pumping blood.

When your daily intake of calories exceeds your daily bodily requirements, the body converts these excess calories into fat, which is then stored throughout the body. A normal amount of fat, typically between 15 and 25 percent of body mass, is important for hundreds of bodily functions. These function range from maintaining temperature to absorbing fat-soluble vitamins to cushioning vital organs. If you have too little fat in your system, the body will begin destructively breaking down muscles and internal organs to meet its requirements for energy.

However, when you consume more calories than the body uses over a period of time, your body starts to store excess fat in visible places. This excess fat often first appears in the stomach on a man and in the thighs on a woman. Excess fat is associated with fatigue, heart disease, cancer, and hundreds of other life-threatening diseases.

Four Reasons It’s Difficult To Lose Fat

Excess stored fat should be converted back into calories when the body next requires more energy. This does not typically occur today for four main reasons:

1. We consume available carbohydrate calories before fat calories
2. Our bodies tell us to look for more food before using stored reserves
3. Readily available food causes our metabolism to stabilize at the higher fat level
4. The type of food we eat today is different than it was when our biological formula for energy storage was developed.

First, just as a hungry person consumes the most readily available source of food, the human body always consumes the most easily convertible source of energy. Of the nutrients containing calories, molecules of carbohydrates are the simplest in form and thus are easiest for the body to quickly convert into energy. This is why people crave carbohydrates when they haven’t eaten for a while or immediately after performing strenuous exercise.

In contrast, molecules of fat are more complex and require additional energy and additional time to be converted into energy (or burned). The body always looks to available carbohydrates first for energy before it begins to break down ingested and then stored molecules of fat.

Second, when a person needs energy, he or she experiences hunger (typically for more carbohydrates) long before the body turns to its stores of excess fat. This biological programming served us well in prehistoric times, telling prehistoric humans to keep eating (and eating and eating) when food was plentiful before drawing on his stored reserves.

We are biologically programmed to eat each meal as a though it were the last one we are going to get for a long time, and in many cases it was, before humankind learned how to preserve foods, to farm, and to domesticate animals.

The ability to make conscious choices contrary to our biological programming is what separates us from most of the animal kingdom. Humans and animals have virtually the same biologically driven appetites and desires, which yield pleasure when satisfied, with one all-important difference: Humans have a mind and a soul that is superior to and can control their biological desires. Unfortunately, this seems to true for most people today in every area except their dinning habits.

Some animals have learned how to supersede their biological programming in our world of abundant food. Many people with pets today use dried food and leave it out to be consumed on a leisurely basis rather than waiting until their pet begs for its next meal. Veterinarians and pet owners have learned that if you feed your pet only when it gets hungry, it will eat the full amount given even if its body no longer requires it. However, if food is continuously available, most pets will adjust their appetites and ear only what they need for optimum health. Sadly, this is a lesson most doctors and U.S. citizens have yet to learn for themselves and their own children.

We also eat much faster today than our parents did—when people often sat around the table for long time periods to share conversation.

It typically takes 10 to 15 minutes from the time we ingest food until our hunger becomes sated—this is why you are sometimes no longer hunger at a restaurant when an entrée arrives late.

When you take the time between courses or bites to digest your food, your hunger becomes satisfied with only the amount of calories you require. But when you eat quickly at your desk between appointments or at fast-food restaurants, you often think you are hungry and keep eating even though you have already ingested more than enough calories.

Third, when people put on additional fat, say 15 pounds of weight during a vacation with lavish meals, their daily basal metabolic requirement for calories increases. Where their hunger used to be sated with 2500 calories per day, these people now require approximately 3000 calories in order not to feel hungry—their body and appetite have reached a new equilibrium at the heavier 15-pound level. As long as food is readily available and people listen to their stomachs (hunger) regarding how much to eat, their increased amount of weight will remain.

Once a person puts on excess weight he or she will most likely have to take proactive measures (e.g., diet, exercise) to lose it.

And fourth, the main reason that this stored excess fat may not be converted into energy calories is because our food today is very different than food was when our biological program for storing energy was developed—it contains much more fat. When our biological programming for food was developed, our ancestors ate mostly a low-fat vegetarian diet, with some game meats. And even those foods that contained fat had much less fat than they do today—game meats contain about 5 percent fat by weight versus 30 percent fat by weight contained today in commercially produced and hormonally treated domesticated animals.

Back then, fat was so rare and so useful that our taste buds evolved to crave it and the parts of the animals that contained most of it. Today, unfortunately, our food suppliers have exploited this sensory craving. Like the first victim in a movie Seven, which is about the monastic seven deadly sins, we are literally eating ourselves to death.

In the past century we have almost doubled the percent of fat in our diets—from 20 percent of our calories in 1910 to about 35 percent today.

This 35 percent average number belies the fact that our nation is divided when it comes to health: Millions of upscale Americans eat diets that have 20 percent or less of their calories from fat, and millions more eat diets that have 50 percent or more of their calories from life-threatening fat. Most experts agree that our bodies are biologically programmed for a diet requiring about 20 percent of our calories from fat.

The Critical Importance Of Proteins, Vitamins, and Minerals

The second major problem with the diet of most U.S. Citizens is that they are not getting the minimum amounts of building blocks and/or catalysts that their bodies require.

Although most adults think of their bodies as fully-grown, the individual cells that comprise their organs actually replace themselves on a daily to monthly schedule.

Our bodies manufacture 200 billion red blood cells each day, replacing all the blood in our body every 120 days. Skin is completely replaced every 1 to 3 months. It takes 90 days for old bone to be broken down and replaced by new bone.

The cells that comprise these replacement organs contain over 100,000 different proteins made up of 20 different amino acids. Food supplies us with plant and animal proteins containing the amino acids that our bodies require as the building blocks of this living tissue.

Without a daily supply of proteins, vitamins, and minerals, no matter how much energy we get in the form of calories, our bodies and minds deteriorate because we are not able to fully replace the dying cells in our internal and external organs.

Food also supplies us with certain minerals we require as building blocks to repair and regenerate our living matter. There are 14 essential minerals, some of which are required as catalysts rather than as building blocks. Seven of these are major minerals, defined as those of which we need more than 100 milligrams per day—calcium, chloride, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, sodium, and sulfur. The remaining seven are called trace minerals, such as iron and zinc.

In addition to supplying proteins and minerals as building blocks, food contains the 13 essential vitamins our bodies require as catalysts to convert food into energy and to convert amino acids into bodily tissue. A catalyst is a substance that must be present, typically in a very small quantity, for a specific chemical reaction to occur. For example, without vitamin B3, which is contained in green leafy vegetables and unprocessed grains, our bodies cannot break down plant and animal proteins into basic amino acids. It doesn’t matter how much protein you eat if your body can’t convert it into the building blocks of your living tissue.

When we don’t get enough protein, vitamins, and minerals, our initial symptoms include mood swings, fatigue, nervousness, headaches, confusion, and muscle weakness. Over the longer term, such poor nutrition can cause cancer, hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease, and many other diseases that we used to just accept as part of our aging process.

Modern medicine typically treats these problems with drugs that focus on each symptom rather than on the underlying problem, which is what we eat, or more correctly in the case of poor nutrition, what we don’t eat.
Before you become alarmed that you are never going to get enough of all these critical nutrients, here is some good news. Our bodies require only a small amount of protein and a minuscule amount of minerals and vitamins on a daily basis.

The human body required approximately 46 grams (1.6 ounces) of protein per day for women and 58 grams (2.0 ounces) of protein per day for men. This is less than most people believe they need, thanks to successful but misleading advertising campaigns by the beef and cattle industry. Ironically, meat and milk products are actually a poor source of protein because they contain high amounts of harmful fats compared to other protein sources such as fish, nuts, breads, and vegetables.

The human body requires 13 essential vitamins in dosages ranging from 60 milligrams per day for vitamin C to 200 micrograms per day for vitamin B8 (folic acid). These quantities are naturally abundant in commonly available fresh foods.

Similarly, the 14 minerals we require are contained in fresh food in more than adequate quantities—100 milligrams is only one 3/1000 of an ounce.

Now, here’s the bad news.

Despite the relatively small amounts of proteins, vitamins, and minerals we require on a daily basis, and despite their abundance in natural food, our biological programmed need for these substances is not being met by our modern food supply.

How The Green Revolution Changed The Economic Opportunity Within Food Production

When out ancestors were hunter-gatherers they subsisted on a plant-rich diet of nuts, fruits, beans, grains, and roots, with some game meat. Because no single food was found in abundance, while they searched primarily for calories they automatically consumed the variety of food containing the different proteins, vitamins, and minerals that their bodies required. (Conversely, their bodies adapted to the nutrients in the variety of foods they consumed.)

Over time, these hunger-gatherers became farmers. Using human ingenuity and the economic abundance that results from specialization, they learned how to efficiently produce large quantities of specific foods that they could then trade for other foods. They learned how to produce the foods that naturally tasted the best and could last the longest—foods rich in fat like dried meats and aged cheeses. World population rose steadily from around 200 million at the time of Jesus Christ to about 1 billion by the end of the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century, rising agricultural technology finally eliminated the age-old problem of food scarcity—with a vengeance. Thanks to the green revolution, India and China went from starvation economies to net exporters of food. World population rose from 1 billion to almost 6 billion. Thanks to advances in agrarian technology led by the United States, between 1930 and 1980 the United States went from 30 million farmers, barely producing enough food for a domestic population of 100 million people, to 3 million farmers producing more than enough food for 300 million people. Farm production became more and more efficient, with no end in sight.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was originally created to safeguard the economic interests of farmers, particularly in times of drought and famine. During this period of rising agricultural efficiency, the USDA budget was shifted to government “farm income stabilization” programs that paid farmers billions of dollars each year not to grow more food, thus keeping food prices higher, thus safeguarding the farmers’ economic interests. Today, in addition to forcing consumers to pay higher prices for food, these subsidies keep many farmers from learning how to use new technology and from switching to crops that consumers really want. Worst of all, this subsidy encourages many young people to become farmers even though our economy no longer needs more farmers.

Yet despite efforts to the contrary by the USDA, the relative prices for farm produce fell steadily throughout the second half of the twentieth century as supply far exceeded demand.

As the price farmers received for basic food feel, the profit opportunity in agriculture shifted from producing raw foodstuffs (e.g., wheat, milk, fruit, cattle) to manufacturing these foodstuffs into name-brand foods with long shelf lives (e.g., cereals condiments, processed cheeses, canned foods, frozen foods, and junk or snack foods).

It became particularly profitable to make junk or snack foods, products that initially consumers didn’t know they wanted, but which they developed a seemingly unlimited propensity to consume.

Additionally, in the postwar U.S. economy, the supply and demand for a new type food arose—a food type defined not by its taste, price, or availability, but by its long shelf life and speed of service: fast food.

How Food Economics Created The Wellness Food Opportunity

During this period of great technological advances in our food supply, knowledge of basic nutrition was just evolving. Many of our food scientists and engineers, let alone the consuming public, didn’t know enough about the need for proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Each food company concentrated on making each product taste better than that of the competition, last longer, and be safe from contamination by microorganisms.

Looking back, they did an admirable job, in fulfilling their mission. Processed and fast foods effectively didn’t exist for most Americans at the end of World War II. By the end of the twentieth century, processed and fast food sales had risen to dominate the U.S. $1 trillion food industry.

Despite making basic calories affordable for everyone, our food industry unwittingly injured the health of much of the nation.

The added fat to make their products taste better. The better it tasted, the more customers ate their products. The more customers ate their products, the fatter they became. The fatter customers became, the more food products they were able to consume on a daily basis—and son on, and so on, and so on.

In order to make their products safe from contamination, they pasteurized and/or heated them. Today, all canned foods and virtually all milk and juices are pasteurized. Unfortunately, the application of heat to food, as well as its storage over time in cans and other airtight containers destroys many of the vitamins and some of the minerals. In general, canning and most other types of food processing do not affect proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

In order to increase the shelf life of their products (as well as to add to their safety), food producers added preservatives ranging from enormous amounts of sodium to a dizzying array of chemical compounds in supposedly “safe” amounts. While a typical adult requires about 500 milligrams a day of sodium, which is found naturally in common foods, salt is so widely added to most processed foods that the typical U.S. adult consumes 10 to 14 times this amount per day.

In addition to desensitizing our taste buds so that natural, unprocessed foods no longer taste good, salt is the primary cause of high blood pressure, which leads to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, and kidney failure.

In order to get people to consume more of their product, producers chemically altered the flavorings so that people would continually crave more and more of their single product rather than naturally seeking the variety in foods that their bodies require.

Empty Calories: The Core of the Food Supply Problem

The end result is that today the U.S. food supply is dominated by what nutritional experts call empty calories—food containing high amounts of caloric energy but low (or empty) in essential vitamins, and minerals, and proteins.

The human body can consume only 2,200 to 2,900 calories per day for energy without becoming obese, but it must get the required amounts of protein, vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats along with these calories. Just a quick glance at the nutritional facts printed on any processed food label shows us what we are not getting along with our calories.

A typical can of soda contains 140 empty calories (38 milligrams of sugar, 70 milligrams of sodium, added caffeine, various preservatives, and 0 milligrams of proteins, vitamins, and minerals). A typical fast-food meal contains an incredible 1,000 calories or more with few essential vitamins or minerals. One 1-ounce serving of Lay’s potato chips (“Betcha Can’t Eat Just One) contains 230 empty calories (plus 270 milligrams of sodium).

But these foods are even worse for what they do contain than for what they are missing: Most empty calorie-calorie foods have incredibly high levels of fat, which is added to make them taste better. A healthy food should yield about 20 percent of its calories from fat (each gram of fat contains 9 calories) and the rest from carbohydrates and proteins. Just one deluxe McDonald’s burger contains 810 calories, with an incredible 490 calories (55 grams, or 61 percent) from fat. Even without the medium-sized French fries (containing 450 additional calories and 22 grams of additional fat), 55 grams of fat is the full amount you should consume in an entire day, not the amount you should consume from a single item of food. The typical American now eats three hamburgers and four orders of french each week.

In contrast, foods in their natural (unprocessed) state are packed with caloric energy, vitamins, minerals, and low levels of fat.

Fruits are high in carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals and contain virtually no fat. A banana contains 103 calories of energy with 0 grams of fat. Fresh vegetables contain enormous quantities of vitamins, protein, and almost no fat. A single stalk of broccoli contains 5 grams of protein with no fat, and a single medium-sized potato containing 100 calories has 6 grams of protein and no fat. Moreover, when eating a natural food, people typically tire of its taste and automatically seek out different natural foods—containing the different vitamins and minerals that their bodies require on a daily basis.

Fish, beef, and chicken are loaded with protein, vitamins, minerals, no carbohydrates, and widely varying amounts of fats. A 6-ounce serving of fish (halibut) contains 35 grams of protein with 2 grams of fat. A 6-ounce steak (rib eye) contains about the same amount of protein (39 grams) of protein—but an incredible 55 grams of fat as well. A 6-ounce serving of chicken (light and dark meat) contains 46 grams of protein with 25 grams of fat.

Unfortunately, we no longer eat as out ancestors did, or even as our parents did. Meals used to be prepared at home primarily using fresh foods and without adding much fat, salt, or chemical preservative.

Today, most of us are too busy to prepare foods from fresh ingredients, so we purchase foods that are partially, or fully ready to serve—foods processed with much added fat, sugar, sodium, and chemical additives.

The percentage of meals eaten or prepared away from home (restaurants, take-out) has increased more than 50 percent since 1970. Meals prepared outside the home are much higher in fat and sodium and lower in vitamins and minerals than meals prepared at home—even when compared to meals at home made from highly processed foods. Ironically, as we will see in a moment, being biologically programmed to like the taste of fat—a trait that as responsible for our very survival in prehistoric times—has now become the cause of our worst medical problem.

As insidious as the manipulation of our food supply may seem in hindsight, none of it was done with evil intent.

Entrepreneurs and business people added fat to our food to make it taste better, not to create a nation of overweight and obese individuals. Entrepreneurs and business people canned and processed our food to increase its shelf life, not to reduce the amount of vitamins and minerals and decrease wellness. They used hydrogenated oils to make foods look better and last longer in the supermarket, not to turn good fats into bad fats and increase heart disease. Unfortunately, compounded by laws of economics that led thousands to imitate their behavior, the effect on our food supply is the same as if this manipulation had been carried out for the worst of insidious purposes.

These actions were taken in response to often misguided or uninformed consumer demand. However, today there is a growing consumer demand for wellness from well-guided and informed consumers and today’s entrepreneurs and business people are working to fix the problems created by their predecessors. The same economic demand that compounded these existing problems will now be applied to fix them and virtually every food supply chain will be forced to embrace the wellness industry or get out of the way for those who do.

As consumers become more informed and educated about the problems with our food supply, they will naturally seek out ways to switch to healthier foods and dietary supplements to maintain their health and wellness.

Source: "The Wellness Revolution: How To Make A Fortune In The Next Trillion Dollar Industry" Paul Zane Pilzer