Dec 07, 2009
Chemistry 101
I never had a chemistry kit when I was a kid. It was my least favorite subject in school and killed my grade point average. I doubt that I retained a single chemistry fact or principle five minutes beyond final exams.
Yet when it comes to the care and feeding of my own body, I have become something of a chemistry expert.
Brief background: I was born with digestive problems that persisted chronically throughout childhood. I was constantly sick growing up, with two or three bad colds a year. I missed most of 5th grade with mono. I was hospitalized when I was 14 with ulcerative colitis so severe that the doctors told my parents that nothing could be done and they should prepare for my death.
Two weeks of hospital food and removal from the stresses of my life and I improved enough to be released from the hospital. I had learned two important lessons: first, the doctors didn’t know why I was sick or why I improved; second, my condition changed from day to day depending for the most part on diet.
Even while I was struggling in chemistry class, I had begun a long-range chemistry experiment with the simplest of protocols: pay attention to what I was eating and drinking each day and then, starting with the next morning’s trip to the bathroom, pay attention to my results, including the condition of my hair and skin. If the results were less than ideal, I would consider changing something in my diet.
Or: input chemicals; observe outputs; reassess and make adjustments to inputs. Repeat daily.
This was in the 60s. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had just begun to alert us to the dangers of synthetic chemicals in the environment. The natural food movement was only getting started. Advertisements still featured doctors recommending certain cigarettes for the health benefits. No one was talking about nutrition or “good” and “bad” foods.
So my experiment started slow. Coca cola, the beverage of choice in our family, was the first to go. Then alcohol. In both cases, what I came to think of as the “morning reports” could not have been clearer. Avoiding each had immediate benefits, while sporadic attempts to “just have a little” never went well.
And so it has gone for more than forty years. The process has not always been fast — I had such deep attachment to some foods, especially wheat, that I continued eating them for years despite evidence that they were a problem for me. We have an amazing ability to deny the obvious in order to sustain the status quo.
In Search of the One True Diet
American medicine long ignored the obvious fact that diet and nutrition play a major role in human health. But even as doctors and medical researchers have come to accept that diet does matter, they have viewed nutrition through a reductionist lens that badly skews their findings and conclusions.
They begin by reducing every food to its nutritional constituents: a bowl of cereal has this much protein, this much fiber, this much Vitamin A and so on. At the same time, they reduce our nutritional needs to a list of Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA): every day we need to eat this much protein, this much fiber and so on. A healthy diet then becomes a matter of choosing enough of the right foods to meet your RDAs.
Sounds simple enough, but problems arise. Almost daily a new study is announced that calls into question the previously presumed effects (from earlier studies) of a given nutrient. Likewise, we see a never-ending parade of diet books and nutritional experts explaining why their regimen is the answer for everybody, the one true diet.
Been there, done that, and here’s what I know:
- no single nutrient can be completely understood apart from the food in which it’s found. That’s the point of “whole foods”: nutrients are interactive and the nutritional impact of a specific nutrient changes when studied in isolation.
- no one diet will work for everybody.
- individually, our nutritional needs are ever in flux, depending on season, age, state of physical, mental, and emotional health, daily stressors, and other unseen factors.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the studies, or read the books, or listen to people when they talk about what works or doesn’t work for them. Any information that can help us to better understand our bodies is welcome, but everything must ultimately be run through the “morning report” to confirm whether it holds true for the individual or not.
Physician, Feed Thyself
The CDC recently estimated that some two-thirds of American illness is caused by a combination of poor diet and sedentary lifestyles. In the past they’ve made similar statements about the role of stress in illness.
Yet despite the fact that most of what goes wrong with us is within our direct power to change, we remain a pharmaceutical-gulping, scary-disease-obsessed culture. We go to great lengths and expense to avoid this or that disease while neglecting our individual responsibilities as human body-minds.
What should be fantastic news — there are time-tested ways to achieve and maintain good health without spending a lot of time and money in doctors’ offices — is taken as some sort of offense, like cursing in church.
Rather than health insurance, which sets aside money so that you can see a doctor when something goes wrong, we need to practice health assurance, taking steps now to assure that doctors are rarely needed.
It all begins with Chemistry 101. Do the experiments. Become an expert.
Michael Sky | CommonHealth
Great, thoughtful approach.
You may be one of the only cases in which hospital food was therapeutic
But yes, whole foods are the way to go, and teaching cooking skills and creating time-efficient ways to create those meals (and listen to your body) are some of what health care needs to do.
Keep up the good work.
JL
Thanks for the feedback. Hospital-wise, I think it was more what I stopped eating while I was there.
Interesting item that didn’t fit in that piece: my colon was so ulcerated that there was not enough healthy tissue to perform a colostomy, which is what they wanted to do to ‘save my life’.
Eight years later my father got colon cancer — colostomy, chemo, radiation and dead in 10 months