Maintain Your Body’s Nutrient Reservoirs

Health Habit # 4s is to maintain the nutrient levels in your body.

Cars need fuel, oil, air and replacement parts for the parts that will wear out.

Likewise, your body needs fuel, lubricants, catalysts and thousands of nutrients from foods. Nutrients are like replacement parts.

Note, this discussion is not primarily about fuel, (which is an extremely important topic by itself), but is about the nutrients your body needs in order to maintain itself.

The nutrients your body needs come in this order of importance:

1. minerals
2. enzymes
3. vitamins
4. protein
5. all other nutrients

Nutrients are needed as spare parts for repair of cellular tissues and as catalysts or enablers of cellular operations.

When your nutrient levels are low for a particular nutrient that your body needs, it starts to misfunction in that  cellular repair can’t be done right, certain processes in the body no longer occur just right and free radicals can’t be neutralized. As more and more things go wrong, cellular deterioration escalates... and although it takes many years to irreparably damage the trillions of cells in your body... eventually you will stop running — because your body’s cells are incapable of carrying on life.

There are two important concepts to remember in regard to nourishing your body. These concepts are:

1. Variety of Food
2. Nutrient Denseness of Food

Variety of Food

No single food contains all the nutrients the body needs. Hence, if a person gets in a habit of eating only a few foods that he or she likes, it is virtually guaranteed that this person will run low in the nutrients that are missing (or low) in those particular foods. So, mix up your diet, try new foods, and do a winter, spring, summer and fall  rotation in the foods you eat by EATING WHAT IS IN SEASON.

Nutrient-Dense Food

We should eat only foods that contribute to our health and happiness. We should have the discipline to not eat foods that undermine our health and don’t add to our happiness.

Nutrient-empty foods aren’t worth eating unless they taste so good to you that your happiness is very positively affected... and even then, unless you really are willing to throw away many of your tomorrows for the pleasures these foods bring to the moment, you ought to save these celebration foods for “rare occasions”. The really smart thing is to “train your brain” to enjoy the most nutritious foods. Tastes are acquired both by outside influences and by inside your own brain decisions.

Toxic foods are discussed elsewhere and are never worth eating. All other foods can be categorized into:

1. Celebration Foods
2. Fuel for Physical Labor
3. Nutrient Dense Foods.

These are Celebration Foods and should not be eaten frequently, but should be reserved for parties and celebrations:

• Processed grain products, white flour products (cakes, pastries, noodles), white-rice, etc.
• Sugary foods such as ice cream, soda pop, syrups, etc.
• Skinned vegetables such as skinned carrots, skinned potatoes, etc.

These are Fuel for Physical Labor Foods. They are nutritious, but provide more calories for the amount of nutrients provided than is healthy for sedentary people, and are therefore to be enjoyed only by those who are burning up a lot of calories through physical activity each day:

• Most Fruits
• Grains (whole grain bread, whole grain rice, etc.)

These are your Nutrient Dense Foods and should be eaten daily by everyone:

• Vegetables
• Nuts
• Fish
• Good fat foods such as Avocados and Olives
• Uncooked oil extracts of all the foregoing
• Organ meats
• Eggs

We Are What We Eat

Hippocrates, who is considered to be the founder of modern medicine, said fifteen hundred years ago, “Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.  Only nature heals, provided it is given the opportunity.”

Dr. William R. Kellas, nutritional biochemist and cofounder of the Center for Advanced Medicine, recently said, “It wasn’t until I focused on food that my health began to improve!”

Nutrient Gain/Loss Principle:

Processing foods into energy and nutrient tools destroys some of your existing nutrients and mitochondrial structure and takes energy from the body. So, if a food provides less value in what it gives you than the value of what it destroys, then that food is ‘rapidly lowering your nutrient reserves and your life force.

Especially, the conversion of the fuel portion of food into useable energy takes a toll nutrient wise.

So, if, for example, the process of digesting and assimilating a food destroys 10 units of nutrients while supplying only 5 units of nutrients, then that food has caused a net loss of nutrients (-10 + 5 = -5).

Sugar and Carbohydrates are Damaging to Health and Longevity

The most valuable foods one can eat then are those that are rich in nutrients and light in calories (fuel). At the bottom of the list of nutrient foods versus calorie foods are:

• Table Sugar
• Alcohol

At the top of the nutrient-dense food list are:

• Fish
• Sprouts
• Seeds

Vacuum Foods

Nutritionally empty or extremely calorie rich foods are vacuum foods. We call them vacuum foods because they suck the nutrients out of whomever eats such foods. They do this because it takes more expenditure of stored body nutrients to digest, assimilate and convert foods into energy and cellular repair nutrient tools than the foods provide.

Tipping the nutrient balance in your favor with key supplements:

Seven Essentials, RiSoTriene, Kona Minerals, Fruit and Veggie Caps, Small Molecule Protein, etc. are especially worth eating because they furnish a mother lode of nutrients with very little calories.