Nutrition

 Ok lets define our terms:

Nutrition consists of fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

   Good fat is avocado, olive oil, fish oil, coconut oil and a few others.

   Protein is usually considered animal flesh or complete protein. And here comes the debate, because we break down protein in the digestive process and recombine the constituent amino acids to form our own proteins. It is argued by vegans and vegetarians that we can build our own proteins from vegetable sources. And that’s true. But don’t forget to take B12. I respect the choice of the individual whether you choose to be vegan or eat a bloody steak. I usually encourage adjusting the balance in the ratio of protein carbohydrate and fat to help eliminate the causes for the problems that my patients complain of.  These complaints many times can be the result of eating too much protein and starch.  According to a great book on the subject called “The China Study” animal fat consumption is directly related to our heart disease and cancer rates, which by the way are respectively the two biggest causes of death in this country.  I cut my protein intake and half after reading that book, and I encourage you to read it too.

   Next are carbohydrates which are roughly defined in digestive terms as sugars or things we make sugars out of. The body runs of sugar, so this is a broad category.  There are three kinds. Simple carbohydrates are fruits and candies, regular carbohydrates are vegetables and complex carbohydrates are rice, potatoes and grains like bread, pasta.

   The ratios of fat, protein and carbohydrate make the difference between a diet that is balanced in your favor or not.  I usually recommend an ounce or two of fat, 10 to 14 ounces of cooked vegetables, 2 to 4 ounces of protein, and two to four ounces of complex carbohydrates. 

 These are guidelines to work from so you can tailor your combination so that it burns well for your body.  For example, depending on how much you wanted to change your body to lose weight or gain muscle mass, you could adjust the ratios to accomplish that. For example, if you wanted to drop pounds you could decrease the amount of complex carbohydrates. But different ratios work differently for different people, because not everyone’s metabolism rate is the same.  Some people need more starch, while others can’t handle very much of it. And speaking of starches, beans, legumes, starchy squashes, and some root vegetables can blur the area between complex carbohydrates and protein. Beans fall into the area between starches and proteins. But just in terms of how much work our digest if tract has to do, protein and complex carbohydrates are the hardest things to digest. They consequently require lots of hydrochloric acid to break them down.  But here’s the tricky part, all this acid has to be neutralized in the intestines, and it’s done with calcium.  And where is the biggest storehouse of calcium in the body?  Yes, the bones.  The possible consequence of a diet predominantly comprised of protein and complex carbohydrates is osteoporosis.  Most little old ladies with osteoporosis have yogurt for breakfast and cottage cheese in the afternoon and cheese at dinner to get their calcium, and they usually take calcium supplements as well. This is a high acid diet. It can make it harder for them to maintain the calcium in their bones because they’re losing it neutralizing all the hydrochloric acid that they had to secrete to digest those foods and the first place. That’s why I recommend such a high ratio of vegetables to protein and complex carbohydrates, because it makes the meal alkaline.  And vegetables are where the vitamins are.  We don’t make vitamins.  We only get them in natural ratios when we eat vegetables.  Not pills.  The ratios in pills are just as likely to create an imbalance as to fix one because those ratios may have nothing to do with a natural amount. The amount can be so large that it can cause a problem. Like calcium supplementation increasing your risk of heart attack. Plants have been making vitamins longer. Plants make vitamins to protect themselves from the errant properties of photosynthesis.  Photosynthesis is an imperfect nuclear reaction that sometimes results in free radical formation.  The plants create antioxidants (A, C, D, & E) to protect itself from free radical damage, it stores these vitamins and others in vegetables.  I recommend an alkaline diet consisting of balanced meals.

One of the first topics in my nutrition discussion with any patient that comes into my office is about dairy products.  It can be an extremely hard sell, or a preaching to the converted situation with plenty of leeway in between.  But because I’ve seen dairy products exacerbate more complaints from my patients than any other food they regularly consume, I try to share my perspective of how complicit they can be to motivate my patients to change.

 Just some of the examples of this are as follows:

   Under the ear, nose and throat heading the most frequent complaints would include; Headaches, chronic sinusitis, asthma, and chronic respiratory infections.  I would be remiss in my duties to my patients that have these complaints if I didn’t point out the connection between phlegm production, mucus production and Dairy consumption. Dairy products are a mucus forming food.  The sinus cavities in your head are mucus membranes, when you eat dairy they can sometimes swell and produce mucus.  This can give you a headache, or turn a headache into a migraine.  It can also be gasoline on the fire of allergies or chronic sinusitis.  The post nasal drip that it can cause is swallowed during the day, but at night when you’re sleeping you don’t swallow as often because your unconscious. And it can slowly drip into your lungs causing or exacerbating respiratory problems.  Those are the cause and effect possibilities that I try to point out to my patients that have these complaints and can’t imagine not eating pizza.  But they’re taking an antihistamine or going for allergy shots or want acupuncture to clear their allergies.

   The next category of complaints are not as related to the sinus cavities, these conditions seem to arise from too much circulating animal fat.  Dairy products are not the only guilty party, but are usually complicit in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, fibroid tumors, breast tumors, and acne.  This can be true whether the condition is caused by too high of a consumption of, or not processing it appropriately. Or, for some other reason, like the fact that cow’s milk is designed for cow’s stomach which is much larger than ours.  Our stomach is very different, it’s much smaller.  The point I’m making is that first off, we don’t have the equipment designed to process this stuff because it’s designed for another species of animal.  And we get it processed so that it’s even harder to digest.  If that poorly digested calcium protein fatty substance floats into the blood stream, it makes sense that it would deposit on the bones. When you see arthritis in an ex ray you see calcium deposits on the outsides of the bones. And if that happened to a great enough extent in the articulations of the joints you have a perfect scenario for inflammation because it would act like sandpaper.  Arthritis anyone? Another article that I recommend on the topic, because it was written by a medical doctor, (and that matters to some people), is called the milk letter. Click on this…  http://www.notmilk.com/kradjian.html

There’s a lot of information out there about how nasty dairy products and animal fat can be to you, between “the China study” and ” the milk letter” there’s enough information to justify the sacrifice of changing your diet.