Trust Mother Nature

One of my favorite political pundits tweeted recently about how mainstream messaging pummels us morning, noon, and night with stupidity until we collapse from exhaustion. “Then you wake up tomorrow and it’s more turbo stupidity until the next day.”

While the tweet was related to world events, you could just as easily apply this sentiment to nutrition.

Mother nature had everything figured out, then mainstream nutrition went off the rails. It’s nonstop nonsense. For example:

1. The recommendation to avoid fish with high mercury content, like tuna, is bogus. It turns out the high levels of selenium found in fish binds to mercury, canceling out any impact from the heavy metal. Every fish has a net selenium surplus vs. mercury except for shark (swordfish is a tie). You have to marvel at the perfect balance — the fish that are less threatening are perfectly healthy to eat, while fish that are more dangerous are less fit for consumption. Nature comes with its own instruction manual.

2. Intermittent fasting has gained acceptance recently for its medicinal and healing effects. Not surprisingly, a long interval between meals was also the normal state of affairs for two million years of human evolution. It turns out that when you use your body the way it was designed, you get health benefits.

Competitive bodybuilders, striving to retain every fiber of metabolically expensive muscle, might be excused for eating several meals a day. But for the rest of us, consuming more than one or two meals a day is a ridiculous amount of food. Multiple meals also force your body to produce additional rounds of insulin, which is far in excess to specifications.

3. I had a panic attack recently reading about phytic acid. This plant-based chemical is found in a bunch of foods I don’t eat — like grains — but also in foods I do eat, specifically nuts, and cocoa and coffee beans. Phytic acid blocks the body’s absorption of minerals (such as magnesium and zinc) which are foundational elements of my health program. Then I read more.

It turns out vitamin C neutralizes phytic acid. Not only do I enjoy guacamole with most meals, but I also get a significant amount of vitamin C from meat. Meat as a meaningful source of vitamin C never appears in mainstream messaging, probably due to the influence of Big Orange. Regardless, the history of sailors getting scurvy was not due to a lack of fruits and vegetables. They got scurvy because they lacked fresh meat.

So, let’s cut the B.S., let mother nature do her job … and maybe we can all be less fatigued at the end of the day.