(This is Part 7 of a series. Go back to Part 6.)
The third criteria:
Is this food as nature presented it?
A food as nature presents it is, in the first place, whole. It is not refined, it is not fragmented or fractionated, it is not adulterated with other things, it is not made in a factory.
An example of a whole food is a fresh, ripe, raw apple. An example of a non-whole food is an apple pie. The apple has then been adulterated with starches, fats and refined sugars and cooked at high heat. Nutritionally, it bears no resemblance to the food that nature presented.
Even juicing the apple takes it a step away from nature. Juicing it removes most of the fiber and concentrates the sugars and calories, turning it into a different kind of food. Anytime we concentrate something we change its quality, almost always for the worse. Cocaine is a much different substance than coca leaf.
Even dehydration is a form of concentration and thus a step away from nature. The body needs the water anyway, so we're going to have to add the water back by drinking it. What's the point? Why not eat the original food?
The idea prevalent nowadays is that if a certain amount of something is good for us, then more of that thing must be even better. And turning apples into apple juice, say, does allow us to consume far greater amounts of some nutrients than we ever could by eating the original apples. But that doesn't mean it's better for us.
Juicing and dehydration, of course, are the least of it. Far more insidious forms of concentration are the refining of foods into various sugars, oils, chips, jams, etc., and the fractionation of foods to produce the current vast array of supplements.
However, the body is a fantastically complex organism, and too much of anything—even something good—creates as much of a problem for the body as too little. It's a fact that even too much water is fatal to the body. And recent research demonstrates that even large amounts of "good" supplements are deleterious.
All the various nutrients—vitamins, minerals, proteins, fatty acids, sugars, enzymes, antioxidants, etc.—work together inside the body in a harmony that can only be called divine. The body's ten trillion cells each produce tens of thousands of proteins every day that interact in millions of different chemical pathways.
The idea that we can bump up a few dozen substances
in the midst of such complexity and improve the result
is simply fallacious, in my opinion—as if nature forgot something. It did not forget anything; we are perfectly adapted to our natural foods.
But we fractionate or concentrate varous foods, and/or manufacture various substances out of petroleum, and then imagine that we can mix and match these substances to create a better result than the natural foods of nature. That's hubris.
The results can be seen everywhere: the whole litany of degenerative diseases so predominant today. The fact that these diseases have increased at astronomical rates over the last century is not an accident. It parallels the rise of greatly increased amounts of animal protein, fats, refined sugars and starches, salt, pesticides, etc. in our diets.
In my opinion, it's a fallacy that we can eat an inadequate, denatured diet, then "supplement" it with pills, powders, potions and/or "superfoods"—and expect robust health. The body does the best it can under such circumstances, but it's working uphill.
It's a big step when we go from an animal-centered diet to a plant-based one, sometimes called a starch-centered diet
or a peasant's diet, such as the corn, beans and vegetables of native Mexico or the rice, tofu and vegetables of native China. To adopt such a diet is big for the environment, for animals, and not least, for ourselves.
It's an even bigger step, in my opinion, when we adopt our natural diet which emphasizes fresh, ripe, raw fruits. Fruits have all the nutrients we require in just the right proportions—a few percent protein, a few percent fat,
and the rest in simple carbohydrates that the body finds supremely easy to digest.
It's sometimes thought that fruit contributes to diabetes or candida because of excess sugar. But recent work shows that these are actually diseases of excess fat. How so? It turns out that excess fat severely impairs the efficiency of insulin (whose function is to convey sugar from the blood into the cells). So a diet containing excess fat eventually tends to cause derangements of sugar metabolism such as the diseases mentioned above.
Moreover, fruit is a far better use of increasingly scarce arable land. Consider: A field of grain can feed 20 times as many people as the same land growing food to feed to animals to produce meat. However, an orchard of fruit on that same land can feed 2 1/2 times as many people as the land growing grain for humans. And the orchard attracts rain, prevents erosion of the soil, and provides a home for a whole ecosystem of plants and animals.
Finally, let's ask this: Why does a natural fruitarian diet give us so much energy? Because our energy supply is
all about the chemistry of digestion.
The digestion and metabolism of food requires far more energy than any other function in the body, and this in turn has to do with the intensity of the chemistry needed. Animal foods, high-protein foods and high-fat foods, for example, all require very intense chemistry to be digested. This demands lots of energy, which leaves the body with less energy available for other activities.
High-complex-carb foods—starches such as grains and root vegetables—don't need as much complex chemistry as the foods mentioned above, but they still require a lot. Also contributing to intense chemistry—and thus lower available energy—is overeating and/or eating a variety
of foods at one meal.
Refined sugar in such foods as candy, cakes, pies, sodas, etc. also lowers available energy, not only because of "empty calories", but because little or no fiber is present to slow the absorption of the sugar. And that in turn puts our blood sugar on a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs.
In contrast, the sugar in fruits is surrounded by natural soluble fiber which creates a slow but steady absorption of the sugar. In addition, the sugar in fruit is surrounded by thousands of natural phytonutrients. Thus the sugar in natural raw fruit has far different effects on the body than the refined sugars found in sweets and other foods.
Lastly, fruit requires far less digestive energy by the body than any other food. Because of this, the body has much more energy available for its other functions. Indeed, one of the most pleasant surprises of the fruitarian diet is the remarkable energy supply which it makes available.
—jim sloman, 1.6.06
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